Speaker 1: Hey, everybody, Robert Evans here, and I wanted to let
Speaker 1: you know this is a compilation episode. So every episode
Speaker 1: of the week that just happened is here in one
Speaker 1: convenient and with somewhat less ads package for you to
Speaker 1: listen to in a long stretch if you want. If
Speaker 1: you've been listening to the episodes every day this week,
Speaker 1: there's gonna be nothing new here for you, but you
Speaker 1: can make your own decisions. Uh, it could happen. Here
Speaker 1: is the podcast that you're listening to. I'm Robert Evans,
Speaker 1: the person that you're listening to, and one of the
Speaker 1: people who does this podcast. Boy, what a what a
Speaker 1: glorious introduction that was. Let me also introduce some human
Speaker 1: beings who you might know. First, we have Chris and
Speaker 1: and we have James. Are are our correspondence in the
Speaker 1: field joining us today. Also is James's Spanish Civil War
Speaker 1: era moson the gaunt YEP. That's right. Yeah, I'm very
Speaker 1: happy it's joining us. It's going to make contribution throughout
Speaker 1: the episode. Just gonna It's an antique bolt action rifle
Speaker 1: served in three world wars. That's right. Yeah, and it's
Speaker 1: about too, it's about to kick off. Yeah, this one
Speaker 1: now which it might it might be it might be
Speaker 1: two in the alcolumn for the most in the gun. Yeah,
Speaker 1: it's it's it's it's had a it's served a mixed bag.
Speaker 1: Um yea. Anyway, we're recording this the day of the elections,
Speaker 1: so everybody's having a horrible one. Um yeah, I'm having
Speaker 1: a firearm. Yeah, yeah, I did. I'm still hoping my
Speaker 1: my Tech nine comes in before Oregon votes on its
Speaker 1: next ballot measure. Anyway, Um, today I wanted to talk
Speaker 1: a little bit about something that I've been thinking about
Speaker 1: kind of constantly, which is, um it's called effective altruism.
Speaker 1: And it's the short end of this is that like
Speaker 1: it is a style of thinking about charitable giving that
Speaker 1: Elon Musk in particular has recently highlighted as like how
Speaker 1: he thinks about things. It's very popular with the billionaire set,
Speaker 1: who are who are deeply invested in getting people to
Speaker 1: think that they're saving the world, right, Um, the folks
Speaker 1: who want to be seen as like looking ahead and
Speaker 1: and and set protecting the future of mankind and saving
Speaker 1: the world, um, but not doing it through things like
Speaker 1: paying you know, more taxes and supporting you know less
Speaker 1: money being in politics and and all that kind of jazz,
Speaker 1: like not not anything that would would actually harm their
Speaker 1: their personal ability to exercise power. So it's gotten kind
Speaker 1: of attacked recently because it's associated with guys like Musk
Speaker 1: and but as he is markedly less popular now than
Speaker 1: he was let's say, ten years ago. Um, But I wanted, Yeah,
Speaker 1: I wanted to talk because effective altruism, which is an
Speaker 1: actual movement, there's like organizations that espouse this. There's hundreds
Speaker 1: of millions of dollars in charitable giving that gets handed
Speaker 1: out under the ages of effective altruism. And as it
Speaker 1: heads up, like most of it's fine, like most of
Speaker 1: its charities to like get let out of water and
Speaker 1: stuff like. It's not like effective altruism is not comprehensively
Speaker 1: some sort of like scam by the wealthy. It's more
Speaker 1: of a an honest theory about how charitable giving ought
Speaker 1: to work that has been adopted by the hyper wealthiest
Speaker 1: justification for fucked up ship and married to something called
Speaker 1: long term is um, which we will be talking about
Speaker 1: in a little bit. But I want to talk about
Speaker 1: where the concept of effective altruism comes from. If you
Speaker 1: read articles about this thing. Most people who study it
Speaker 1: will say that it kind of This got started as
Speaker 1: a modern movement in nineteen seventy one with an austra
Speaker 1: Ellian philosopher named Peter Singer, and Singer wrote an article
Speaker 1: titled Famine, Affluence and Morality. Um. I think it was
Speaker 1: actually published in nineteen seventy two. I don't know one
Speaker 1: of the two seventy one or seventy two, And and
Speaker 1: the essay basically argued that there's no difference morally between
Speaker 1: your obligation to help a person dying on the street
Speaker 1: in front of your house, Like the dude gets hit
Speaker 1: by a car in front of your house, you are
Speaker 1: not more morally obligated to help him than you are
Speaker 1: morally obligated to help people who are dying in Syria,
Speaker 1: you know. Um. And obviously, like there's a a version
Speaker 1: of truth to that, which is that we're all responsible
Speaker 1: for each other, and internationalism is the only actual path
Speaker 1: away from the nightmare. And when we do things like
Speaker 1: ignore authoritarians massacring their people, it inevitably comes back to
Speaker 1: affect us and like fuel the growth of an authoritarian nightmare. Domestically,
Speaker 1: that is very true, um, But also there's a fundamental
Speaker 1: silliness in it because one reason why there is a
Speaker 1: moral difference between helping a person dying in the street
Speaker 1: in front of you and somebody who's in danger in
Speaker 1: I don't know, southern China is that, like, you can
Speaker 1: immediately help the person in front of your house, right,
Speaker 1: like if somebody gets hit, but you have the ability
Speaker 1: to immediately render life saving eight, it's actually quite difficult
Speaker 1: to help somebody who is, for example, getting shot at
Speaker 1: by the government uh in Tibet, right Like, not that
Speaker 1: you don't don't have a moral responsibility to that person,
Speaker 1: but your moral responsibility to actually immediately take action when
Speaker 1: somebody is bleeding out is higher than your responsibility to
Speaker 1: try to figure out how to help people in distant
Speaker 1: parts of the globe. Um, this is more nuanced than
Speaker 1: I think a lot of especially like rich assholes like
Speaker 1: to It's more nuanced than like the the I shouldn't
Speaker 1: say rich assholes. What what's the problem with this is
Speaker 1: that it's the this is the kind of revelation like
Speaker 1: when you start talking this way that that feeds really
Speaker 1: well into a fucking ted talk. It it's a perfect
Speaker 1: fix for that morality. Whereas the reality is like a
Speaker 1: lot more nuanced where and number one, it's also like,
Speaker 1: well that the kind of help that you would render
Speaker 1: to somebody who's been hit by a car in front
Speaker 1: of your house is very different and requires really different
Speaker 1: resources than the kind of help you would give people
Speaker 1: in say, again like Syria, who are being murdered by
Speaker 1: their government. Right, if somebody gets hit by a car
Speaker 1: in front of your house, you run out with a
Speaker 1: fucking tourniquet and a bleed kit and you call nine
Speaker 1: one one, Right, those are the resources that you can
Speaker 1: immediately use. If Buthar al Assad is firing poison gas
Speaker 1: at protesters in you know, Aleppo, well your your stop.
Speaker 1: The bleed kit is not going to help with that,
Speaker 1: one way or the other. Right, a very different set
Speaker 1: of resources are necessary. Um, So it's it's foolish to
Speaker 1: compare them anyway. Singer did um and his essay was
Speaker 1: a big hit. It's often called like a sleeper hit
Speaker 1: for for young people who are kind of getting into
Speaker 1: the you know, the charity industrial complex, um or at
Speaker 1: least we're considering it. I found an interview with one
Speaker 1: named Julia Wise, who currently works at the Center for
Speaker 1: Effective altruism um, and she was a started out as
Speaker 1: a social work, like to give you an idea of
Speaker 1: the kind of people who got into this. When she
Speaker 1: read Weiss's article, Um, she was a social worker, she
Speaker 1: kind of fell in love with the concept. And when
Speaker 1: it started becoming a thing, and like the seventies and eighties,
Speaker 1: it was, as she described quote, a bunch of philosophers
Speaker 1: and their friends and nobody had a bunch of money.
Speaker 1: So it was also more when Singer put it out,
Speaker 1: kind of a a wave, like a way of people
Speaker 1: kind of debating how to think about charity, which is
Speaker 1: is fine. People should always be like exploring stuff like that.
Speaker 1: So it's it's not I don't want to be like
Speaker 1: going after Singer too well, I do a little bit
Speaker 1: um because Singer after kind of his movement has a
Speaker 1: couple of decades to grow, winds up doing a Ted
Speaker 1: talk Um, and the Ted talk winds up kind of
Speaker 1: electrifying a very specific chunk of the American techno set um.
Speaker 1: And you can see kind of in in some of
Speaker 1: the writing on this, like the way in which his
Speaker 1: talking about sort of the morality of charity has gotten
Speaker 1: flattened over the years quote which is the better thing
Speaker 1: to do to provide a guide dog to one blind
Speaker 1: American or cure two thousand people of blindness and developing
Speaker 1: countries um, which is like, I don't know both. There's
Speaker 1: resources to do both. Um. We Again, if you, for
Speaker 1: an example, in the United States, were to tacks the
Speaker 1: billionaire class and corporations a lot more, you could provide
Speaker 1: that blind person in the United States, uh with with
Speaker 1: free healthcare in a way that many countries do. Um.
Speaker 1: And we could also continue or even expand charitable giving,
Speaker 1: maybe if we were to do stuff like spend less
Speaker 1: money on our military. Again, it's like a false choice,
Speaker 1: like it's worth but but of course it's It's because
Speaker 1: the reason this choice is there is because they're thinking
Speaker 1: about they're thinking about helping people purely in the form
Speaker 1: of like nobless obliged charity. Right, They're they're thinking about
Speaker 1: periods like rich like things that get improved when rich
Speaker 1: people put money into them. Um. Yeah, so obviously we
Speaker 1: should help you know, one of these groups before the
Speaker 1: other because it's more effective and yeahda YadA YadA. Yeah. Yeah, Well,
Speaker 1: and I think I think that was one of the
Speaker 1: things that like the there there's there's a second way
Speaker 1: you can look at the original sort of problem of
Speaker 1: we have the same ethical responsibility someone who could sit
Speaker 1: by car or somebodys on the other side of the world.
Speaker 1: Is that Like the other way you can look at
Speaker 1: that is like I don't care about what's happening is
Speaker 1: some one of the other side of the world, so
Speaker 1: they don't have to care about this person who get
Speaker 1: hit by a car. And that seems like people are
Speaker 1: doing It's like, well, really have to care about this
Speaker 1: person here because there's some word over there. Yeah, I did,
Speaker 1: like I can see like how this lines out with
Speaker 1: some of these like like bigger like meta ethical kind
Speaker 1: of perspectives on what equality is and what like your
Speaker 1: ethical obligations are. But then yeah, it seems to just
Speaker 1: kind of be like a very clear, like very clear,
Speaker 1: slippery slope to making kind of mouth used and excuses
Speaker 1: for doing fun. Right, That's that's where the story is heading.
Speaker 1: So so good. Early two thousands, he does like a
Speaker 1: ted talk. You know, the momentum around this idea starts
Speaker 1: to build and it it really gets a shot in
Speaker 1: the arm. In two thousand thirteen, with the work of
Speaker 1: an author named Eric Friedman, Uh, Freedman's new book or
Speaker 1: Freedland's book at the time that was new was called
Speaker 1: Reinventing Philanthropy a Framework for more effective giving um and
Speaker 1: he kind of he kind of extends the arguments that
Speaker 1: singers making. One of the things that he does is
Speaker 1: he he contrasts what St. Jude's Children's Reach their hospitals
Speaker 1: are doing to like research children's medical or like like
Speaker 1: illnesses that that kids suffer and treatments for them, um
Speaker 1: with the Malagi Provincial Hospital in Angola. Um and he
Speaker 1: kind of contrasts to patients who are being served at
Speaker 1: the different hospitals for life threatening conditions and concludes, quote,
Speaker 1: I'd probably also be very angry at the donors who
Speaker 1: are continually funding St. Jude and leaving Melangi Provincial woefully
Speaker 1: under resourced. Why are the patients of St. Jude's so
Speaker 1: much more worthy of life? Like, Yeah, what a ridiculous
Speaker 1: way to think about it. Children, fucking asinine. And the
Speaker 1: fact that like many of the people who are doing
Speaker 1: these fucking ted talks and contributing to this like a
Speaker 1: global tech class are the same people who are making
Speaker 1: fucking millions of dollars off the pharmaceutical industry, which continues
Speaker 1: to neglect the diseases that people like in the colonial
Speaker 1: periphery suffer from because there's no profit in selling them drugs,
Speaker 1: and instead you're selling boldness cures to people in America, right, Like,
Speaker 1: yes we can, I mean, like you you could if
Speaker 1: we just if if every single person who had a
Speaker 1: who's gotten a TED talk had all of their wealth
Speaker 1: appropriated tomorrow, we could fund both of these hospitals exactly, Yes, yeah,
Speaker 1: it would be better. It's fundamentally a kind of obscenity
Speaker 1: to look at pharmaceutical company CEO is making hundreds of
Speaker 1: millions and billions of dollars, selling people often literal poison
Speaker 1: and jacking up the price of things like insulin. To
Speaker 1: look at these text CEO is accumulating tens of billions
Speaker 1: of dollars and to say, donations to this children's hospital
Speaker 1: are robbing an Angolic hospital, so I won't be paying
Speaker 1: my taxes. Yeah, why don't you go funk yourself? Yeah,
Speaker 1: and anyway, like but this is like you can see
Speaker 1: who this appeals to, righte If you like the kind
Speaker 1: of people who love the freakonomics books, which are bullshit
Speaker 1: regressive statistics story please. Yeah, Okay, So one of my
Speaker 1: professors at Chicago was a political science guy, um or
Speaker 1: I guess with public policy, and there's there's a thing,
Speaker 1: there's a thing the freakonomics guy wrote where he was
Speaker 1: trying to prove that money doesn't actually influence, like, doesn't
Speaker 1: actually influence left. Yeah, and and you know what my my, my,
Speaker 1: my professor wrote wrote a paper about that, which is
Speaker 1: that you know and again this is this is a
Speaker 1: perfect example of how done this guy is. That he
Speaker 1: doesn't This is how condis think, right, Like they when
Speaker 1: they when they go into a field, they go in
Speaker 1: thinking they already know everything and they can prove whatever
Speaker 1: they want because, ok, but the thing this guy doesn't understand, right,
Speaker 1: is that like and this is the thing most people
Speaker 1: in the US do not understand about how Congress works.
Speaker 1: Is that like all of the ship that's happening on
Speaker 1: the floor of Congress, all of those votes that is
Speaker 1: not that is not real congress, right, that that is
Speaker 1: fate Congress. Nothing nothing important to actually happens there. All
Speaker 1: of the important stuff in Congress happens in committees. And
Speaker 1: so you can't figure out whether money is doing anything
Speaker 1: by measuring its effects on like votes on the floor,
Speaker 1: because floor votes are bullshit. All of the important stuff
Speaker 1: has already by the top, by the tip of floor
Speaker 1: vote happens, all the important policing stuff has already happened.
Speaker 1: And so he did this, heard this whole thing where
Speaker 1: he was you know, he had this great I I.
Speaker 1: He had this great metric called like uh oh god,
Speaker 1: and it was it's called like like the the dairy
Speaker 1: cow coefficients, which is like measuring like how how someone
Speaker 1: should vote versus like how the dairy cows running. And
Speaker 1: it shows out, you know, if you look at what
Speaker 1: these people do in committee, no, yeah, hey, look it
Speaker 1: turns out a lotting money is unbelievably effective. But because
Speaker 1: this fucking guy had like and this is something that
Speaker 1: like like this sort of distinction between between Congress like
Speaker 1: on the floor and Congress and committee. Like there's a
Speaker 1: president whose name of forgetting, who has this famous line
Speaker 1: that like Congress and committee is Congress at work, Congress
Speaker 1: on the floors, Congress at play or something like that.
Speaker 1: Like it's it's like this is just like basic ship
Speaker 1: that if you know literally anything about how a field works,
Speaker 1: you cannot do if you wanna, if you wanna. If
Speaker 1: you want a good breakdown of why the free economics
Speaker 1: guy is full of shit? Michael Hobbs and Peter sham
Speaker 1: Shary I think is his last name, have a new
Speaker 1: podcast called If Books Could Kill and they break down
Speaker 1: with like citations and everything, like why everything in that
Speaker 1: book is horseship, but like the reason why it's the
Speaker 1: only thing I'll disagree with you one Chris is I
Speaker 1: don't think he's an idiot. I think he's very intelligent,
Speaker 1: and I think the thing that he's smart to do
Speaker 1: is he recognizes that there's a specific type of person
Speaker 1: and engineers and programmers are very likely to be this
Speaker 1: type of person who kind of fundamentally like their oppositional defiant.
Speaker 1: If somebody if something, if people say like well this
Speaker 1: is good or this is bad, um, they're going to
Speaker 1: take they want to take the opposite stance. And if
Speaker 1: you can provide the way to like feel like they're
Speaker 1: enlightened and smart and actually looking at the data by
Speaker 1: doing it, then they'll take the opposite stance on stuff
Speaker 1: like it's bad to let people buy elections or it's
Speaker 1: good to fund children's hospitals just because somebody has made
Speaker 1: them feel smart for being an asshole. Um, that's what
Speaker 1: the freakonomics guy does. Malcolm Gladwell does a subtler version
Speaker 1: of it as a general rule. Um, and that's what
Speaker 1: that's what the fucking Freedman is doing in this this book.
Speaker 1: In two thousand thirteen, I found a good review of
Speaker 1: it in the Stanford Social Innovation Review. Um. That is uh,
Speaker 1: pretty scathing, Like surprisingly scathing considering it's it's written by
Speaker 1: a bunch of like Stanford nerds. This approach amounts to
Speaker 1: a little more than charitable imperialist them, whereby my just
Speaker 1: causes just in yours to one degree or another, is
Speaker 1: a waste of precious resources. This approach is not informed
Speaker 1: giving UM and I think that that does a pretty
Speaker 1: good job of summarizing what I think is fucked up
Speaker 1: about it. There's another thing that's really messed up, which
Speaker 1: is that one of the conclusions that they gets come
Speaker 1: that they come to here is that, um, they don't
Speaker 1: recommend or there's an organization called gilve Well that kind
Speaker 1: of gets gets formed as a result of the book
Speaker 1: Freedman Rights, and they recommend not to deliver, like not
Speaker 1: to donate money to disaster assistance in the wake of
Speaker 1: the Japanese tsunami UM and opposed disaster relief donations in general.
Speaker 1: UM because quote and this is from Freedman, most of
Speaker 1: those killed by disasters could not have been saved by donations, UM,
Speaker 1: which is number one. Like that's the donations are about
Speaker 1: like rebuilding communities generally. It's not like about the saving lives.
Speaker 1: Usually it's about like, well, all of the infrastructure was
Speaker 1: destroyed and it must be rebuilt. Um. But okay, guy,
Speaker 1: Well it's annoying to you because it's like it's it's
Speaker 1: not like there's not good critiques of like pacifically always
Speaker 1: like the Red Cross. Oh, it's all fucked up. Every
Speaker 1: single yes critique is like the worst possible, like the
Speaker 1: critiques yea, every single large charitable organization is fucked up.
Speaker 1: And if you go and talk to people on the ground,
Speaker 1: they will bitch. Like if you go to fucking war zones,
Speaker 1: people bitch more about NGOs than the folks shooting at
Speaker 1: them half the time. Like yeah, they bitch about it
Speaker 1: being inefficient, about the stuff they're given being like bad
Speaker 1: quality or like um, like nonsense, like just being handed
Speaker 1: out to be handed out which is a thing that
Speaker 1: happens sometimes, and a bitch about well paid aid workers
Speaker 1: staying in hotels and showing up for a couple of
Speaker 1: hours to like do a photo op. Um. There's also
Speaker 1: more incisive, like you know, that's not to say none
Speaker 1: of it's useful. Like, for example, as many complaints as
Speaker 1: people have, everyone I've known who has been in a
Speaker 1: place where medicine sans Frontiers slash Doctors without Borders has operated,
Speaker 1: while they have complaints about doctors without borders are like,
Speaker 1: it's good that there's more doctors here. We fucking need them. Um.
Speaker 1: And you know, it's like U h c R. Plenty
Speaker 1: of things to complain about you and h c R.
Speaker 1: Every refugee camp I go to. Also, people have fucking
Speaker 1: water filters, intins and ship because of you and h
Speaker 1: c R, which isn't nothing. It's a damn site more
Speaker 1: than nothing, And it's a damn site more than any
Speaker 1: of these long term ass motherfucker's are doing for people
Speaker 1: who are I don't know, displaced by war. Yeah, and
Speaker 1: it's like some of the things that they're doing is
Speaker 1: like this is very strange kind of attempts to calculate
Speaker 1: and create markets for human life and human suffering, right,
Speaker 1: which you see a lot if you were like I've
Speaker 1: worked in nonprofit, I've worked in in disaster response, I've
Speaker 1: seen some of these things on the ground, and it
Speaker 1: it you see these bizarre fucking decisions being made by
Speaker 1: by someone in an office who is likely never being
Speaker 1: on the ground of these situations, and it inevitably results
Speaker 1: in it's within these big organizations at the Red Cross
Speaker 1: and MSF, but also on a governmental level, right, with
Speaker 1: people not having the autonomy to respond in a situation
Speaker 1: to reduce human suffering, and instead to be told to
Speaker 1: do something which is supposedly evidence based based on someone
Speaker 1: who's looked at the wrong criteria and come to the
Speaker 1: wrong conclusion hundreds of miles away. And it's right us,
Speaker 1: it's bureaucrats, right, And it's like we we've we've, we've
Speaker 1: we've we've somehow managed to create like the absolute worst
Speaker 1: possible and night mirror system of you have a bunch
Speaker 1: of government bureaucrats and then you also have a bunch
Speaker 1: of sort of privates that we have. We have like
Speaker 1: different we're watching a collision of different kinds of private
Speaker 1: sector bureaucrats, like you have, you have your sort of
Speaker 1: engeo bureaucrats you have, and then you know, and then
Speaker 1: you have these billionaires who are also just fucking bureaucrats,
Speaker 1: and all of them are just doing box ticking, and
Speaker 1: we get like just the absolute worst nightmare fusion of
Speaker 1: horrible bureaucracy and capitalism, which is a great way to
Speaker 1: run programs to have people not die. And so much
Speaker 1: of this comes from what that. The whole like free
Speaker 1: economics thing to me strikes me like we didn't, like
Speaker 1: you said, reading the Wikipedia active about subject and then
Speaker 1: applying trying to find out why you can apply a
Speaker 1: market to it, and then posting that solution. It's stuff
Speaker 1: we have. The episodes were dropping on Bastards well the
Speaker 1: week before this episode will air, are about like why
Speaker 1: the rent is so damn high? And one of the
Speaker 1: complaints I have is that there's a specific class of
Speaker 1: media people who the only answer they will accept is
Speaker 1: because there's not enough multi family zoning, which is just
Speaker 1: a part of why the rent is so damn high.
Speaker 1: And reducing it to just that ignores UM, the price
Speaker 1: fixing software that tens of millions of Americans, uh like
Speaker 1: landlords use UM. It ignores shit like airbnb. It ignores
Speaker 1: like the fucking problems in the construction industry, the lingering
Speaker 1: effects of the two thousand eight crash. It's very frustrating,
Speaker 1: and it's the these kind of like freakonomics guys like
Speaker 1: to do the same thing, like the fucking fre economics student.
Speaker 1: In particular, one of the things he got famous for
Speaker 1: is being like, uh, you know, the up and crime
Speaker 1: in the nineties, this unprecedented fallen crime was due to abortion,
Speaker 1: which zero I will say again zero people who are
Speaker 1: experts on the topic of crime in America agree with.
Speaker 1: What they will say is actually there's a shipload of
Speaker 1: different things that contributed to the declining crime, and there's
Speaker 1: a good chance that abortion had an impact. A bigger
Speaker 1: impact was probably getting the lead out of like reducing
Speaker 1: environmental let although that gets overstated too. There's all sorts
Speaker 1: of different ship including like air conditioning, just the fact
Speaker 1: that like, yeah, now more people have air conditioning, and
Speaker 1: guess when violence is highest in the summer, when people
Speaker 1: are stuck around each other outside and like all sorts
Speaker 1: of computer games. Don't people crimes because something else to do,
Speaker 1: but it's you want to if you're gonna be doing
Speaker 1: the kind of like if you're gonna be doing Ted
Speaker 1: talk fucking uh public works philosophy, then it helps to
Speaker 1: just be able to like make one big Malcolm glad
Speaker 1: while style fucking reveal. Anyway, that's how all these people
Speaker 1: exist and how all of their morality is informed. After
Speaker 1: two thousand thirteen, Friedman is kind of like followed up
Speaker 1: by this guy named William McCaskill, who was currently the
Speaker 1: he's a Scottish philosopher um, which god, it's easy to
Speaker 1: get called a philosopher these days, um. And he is
Speaker 1: he is a personal friend of Elon Musk. When must
Speaker 1: tests messages got released as part of that court filing,
Speaker 1: some of them were with McCaskill um, who was considering
Speaker 1: like putting a bunch of money into buying Twitter. They
Speaker 1: ultimately decided not to, I think because they just like
Speaker 1: it seems like McCaskill just didn't trust that Musk had
Speaker 1: any sort of planned So he is, I will say this,
Speaker 1: not an idiot, um, but he's wrong in ways that
Speaker 1: are are deeply fucked up. And he wrote a book
Speaker 1: that is currently a bestseller. It was published in August
Speaker 1: called What We Owe the Future and the gist of
Speaker 1: this is that, like it's merging this kind of effective
Speaker 1: altruism with what's called long term is um, which is
Speaker 1: this argument that morally we have to consider the impact
Speaker 1: of our actions as not just on people alive today
Speaker 1: but in future your people, which is fine. There's actually
Speaker 1: a lot to that idea, But the way it always
Speaker 1: works out is we can't pay attention to problems that
Speaker 1: people are suffering now. We have to we have to
Speaker 1: work on saving the world from these bigger problems. Um.
Speaker 1: And again it's almost it's almost exclusively used as an
Speaker 1: argument for guys like Musk to like, well, we shouldn't
Speaker 1: tax billionaires out of existence because I you know, I
Speaker 1: see this that with clarity the problems that we face,
Speaker 1: and the long term solution is for me to be
Speaker 1: able to push for these specific things that I think
Speaker 1: are the only way to save humanity. Right. I'm getting
Speaker 1: ahead of myself a little bit here. Let's talk about
Speaker 1: mccaskell again. Um, when he was at Oxford. He's an
Speaker 1: Oxford boy, James. Uh, look at it we've had in
Speaker 1: Bangus sure. Yeah. Uh. He started a group called Giving
Speaker 1: what we Can in two thousand nine. Uh, and members
Speaker 1: were supposed to give away ten percent of what they
Speaker 1: earned to the most cost effective charities possible, which is fine,
Speaker 1: there's nothing wrong with that idea basically, and it was
Speaker 1: like supposed to be basically a lifelong promise that like,
Speaker 1: you know, we're all because you assume Oxford people, a
Speaker 1: lot of them are going to wind up making very
Speaker 1: good money. You know, as we move into our careers,
Speaker 1: this will be a more and more influential kind of
Speaker 1: giving um. But yeah, dropped the board. If they'd had
Speaker 1: me there that, Yeah, those meetings might have gone a
Speaker 1: little bit different in Yeah, Over time though, he's kind
Speaker 1: of moved into he's merged this and and again the
Speaker 1: whole effective altruism movement. A lot of it does start
Speaker 1: reasonably with people being like, are these charities were donating
Speaker 1: to working? How can we make sure they're effective? Like
Speaker 1: what can we do to make giving um work better?
Speaker 1: Which is again perfectly fine, but very quickly gets married
Speaker 1: to this kind of long termist thinking um and they
Speaker 1: focus instead of stuff like, for example, funding hospitals, stuff
Speaker 1: like preventing an artificial intelligence from killing everybody, or like
Speaker 1: sending people to distant planets, which are like cool, and
Speaker 1: sci fi I and everything, but also deeply unrealistic. I'll
Speaker 1: say it right now. Our our threat is not that
Speaker 1: an AI kills us all. There's certainly a threat that
Speaker 1: different kind of artificial intelligences are used by authoritarians to
Speaker 1: make life worse for everybody. But by the way, Peter
Speaker 1: Teal is a big back or of effective altruism. He's
Speaker 1: one of the people building that fucking aim. This is
Speaker 1: the guy who wrote that thing about earning to give
Speaker 1: right like that. He was like, this is the guy
Speaker 1: who did that. Yeah, okay, I'm familiar. Promise to never
Speaker 1: take more than thirty one dollars or something and income
Speaker 1: over the course like of a year in his life
Speaker 1: and give charity. He gives all his book profits to charity.
Speaker 1: But he also runs an organization that is spending more
Speaker 1: and more on keeping its people comfortable because I guess
Speaker 1: he doesn't have the money personally to spend anyway. I
Speaker 1: think there's some sketchy ship there. Yeah, this whole idea,
Speaker 1: and I'm sure we're gonna get today right like like,
Speaker 1: it completely overlooks our obligation morally to agitate for structural change,
Speaker 1: right like. It says like if you can become a
Speaker 1: billionaire through whatever bullshit, evil, fucking exploitative grift you can,
Speaker 1: and then give nine of that away. You're still perpetuating
Speaker 1: a system in which one grift gets rich and thousands
Speaker 1: of people die without fucking clean water. But that's okay
Speaker 1: because you also donated some water filters or whatever like.
Speaker 1: And it's not okay, and it makes me very angry. Actually, yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: it makes me angry too. And it's one of those
Speaker 1: things if you look at, like, here's all the charities
Speaker 1: that mc caskell and his organization are putting hundreds of
Speaker 1: millions dollars of dollars into. They're not all bad. A
Speaker 1: lot of them are good, and I'm glad that money
Speaker 1: is going there, but there's always this strain of deeply
Speaker 1: unsettling logic running through it. Now, I want to quote
Speaker 1: from a Time article that I think kind of gets
Speaker 1: in a very subtle way, has this guy's number. When
Speaker 1: I start thinking in practice, if you've got if you've
Speaker 1: got some things that look robustly good in both the
Speaker 1: short and the long term, that definitely makes you feel
Speaker 1: a lot better about something that is only good from
Speaker 1: a very long term perspective. He says. This year, for example,
Speaker 1: he personally donated to the Let Exposure Elimination Project, which
Speaker 1: aims to in childhood let exposure, and the Atlas Fellowship,
Speaker 1: which supports talented high school students around the world to
Speaker 1: work on pressing problems. Not all issues are equally tractable,
Speaker 1: but McCaskill still cares about a range. When we met
Speaker 1: An Oxford, he expressed concern for the ongoing political crisis
Speaker 1: in Sri Lanka, though admitted he probably wouldn't tweet about it.
Speaker 1: The answer, he believes, is to be honest about it.
Speaker 1: In philanthropy, big donors typically choose causes based on their
Speaker 1: personal passions and ultra subjectivist approach. McCaskill says, where everything
Speaker 1: is seemingly justifiable on the basis of doing some good,
Speaker 1: he doesn't think that's tenable. If you can save someone
Speaker 1: from drowning or ten people from dying in a burning building,
Speaker 1: what should you do, he proposes, It is not a
Speaker 1: morally appropriate response to say, well, I'm particularly passionate about drowning,
Speaker 1: so I'm going to save one person from drowning rather
Speaker 1: than the ten people from burning. And that's exactly the
Speaker 1: situation we find ourselves in and like, no, it is not.
Speaker 1: That is nonsense because, among other things, if you're a
Speaker 1: random person, uh, and you have a choice between saving
Speaker 1: someone from drowning or ten people from dying in a
Speaker 1: burning building, well you actually probably don't because satan people
Speaker 1: from drowning is a really difficult technical skill, which is
Speaker 1: why people usually die when they try to rescue whether
Speaker 1: folks who were drowning. The guy the creator of Hugo
Speaker 1: died trying to from drowning. It's really hard and dangerous,
Speaker 1: and also so is rescuing people from a burning building,
Speaker 1: which is why we have firefighters. And guess what, a
Speaker 1: lot of firefighters may not be very good at saving
Speaker 1: people from drowning because they have not trained for that.
Speaker 1: There are different skills, and these are both problems, but
Speaker 1: they're different skills. But what have you instead spend that
Speaker 1: time buying some testlas dogs and then sold them and
Speaker 1: instead invested in Uh I know, I fink it's something
Speaker 1: that stops water from from drowning people. Like, none of
Speaker 1: the problems we have are are None of the problems
Speaker 1: I'm going to say right now, zero percent of the
Speaker 1: problems we have are the result of some sort of
Speaker 1: like lifeguard firefighter standing in between a burning building and
Speaker 1: like a yacht race gone wrong and going oh god, no,
Speaker 1: it's like the trade doing the troning problem. He's he's
Speaker 1: just he's trying to do Tony problem. It's funny that
Speaker 1: he's talked about Sri Lanka too, because it's like this
Speaker 1: is the perfect example. This is the perfect example of
Speaker 1: a political crisis that is like completely intractable to all
Speaker 1: of these like no, no, no, none of these people
Speaker 1: donating the charities can like do literally anything about that,
Speaker 1: because that's actually you know, like this like the crisis
Speaker 1: of Sri Lanka is a is a is a both
Speaker 1: both is it like it is, but it is both
Speaker 1: a sort of short term crisis of this like you know,
Speaker 1: like utterly horrific genocidal political elites, and then also a
Speaker 1: sort of long term crisis about like the sort of
Speaker 1: structural position of like specificcific countries and sort of the
Speaker 1: global colonial system. This is not something any of these
Speaker 1: people can solve. The only the only thing, the only
Speaker 1: way any of these people could solve this is if
Speaker 1: the people of Sri Lanka like just expropriated them. But
Speaker 1: you know, but he but because because because because these people,
Speaker 1: like because Sri Lankas do not have access to this
Speaker 1: guy and like six guns. Right, there's no there's no way,
Speaker 1: you know, he can just sort of sit there with
Speaker 1: his chair going, well, it's a crisis. I'm gonna tweet
Speaker 1: about it. I'm not gonna tweet about it. He's yeah,
Speaker 1: I was. I was simply talked to newspapers about it
Speaker 1: in tweeting. What what I would say is that, like,
Speaker 1: here's the actual solution to the stupid problem this guy
Speaker 1: came up with. Well, if we were to tax all
Speaker 1: of the billionaires to the point that they weren't billionaires
Speaker 1: and then put that into a massive new like works
Speaker 1: progress fund that instead of like just building national parks,
Speaker 1: provided like rental assistance to millions of Americans in exchange
Speaker 1: for them learning how to fight fires and getting basic
Speaker 1: life gave saving care and getting trained in things um
Speaker 1: like that, so that they could deal with the consequences
Speaker 1: of climate change and be able to protect their communities
Speaker 1: effectively and be incentivized to gain the actual technical skills
Speaker 1: that would allow them to protect people. Well, then you
Speaker 1: would have more people capable of saving someone from a
Speaker 1: burning building or from drowning. Um, but anyway, whatever, that's
Speaker 1: that's that's my that's my pie in the sky. Leftist
Speaker 1: solution to that is use funds taken from the rich
Speaker 1: in order to incentivize people to gain the skills that
Speaker 1: will allow them to protect their communities in the event
Speaker 1: of disasters. Um, anyway, whatever. Uh So, over the last decade,
Speaker 1: all of this thinking has increasingly given away from a
Speaker 1: wonky theory on charitable giving by bighearted, guilt ridden millennial kids.
Speaker 1: And that's that's how this guy has always framed in articles,
Speaker 1: McCaskill is. He's like, in fact, I'm gonna fucking I'm
Speaker 1: gonna scroll down here to my notes and I'm gonna
Speaker 1: find the section of the article to like show you
Speaker 1: the way he gets fucking talked about in all of
Speaker 1: these quote. Thirteen years ago, William McCaskill found himself standing
Speaker 1: in the aisle of a grocery store, agonizing over which
Speaker 1: breakfast cereal to buy. If he switched to a cheaper
Speaker 1: brand for a year, could he put aside enough money
Speaker 1: to save someone's life? Like that's the Yeah, that's sort
Speaker 1: of like that you have where your engagement with global
Speaker 1: poverty is in the fucking Cheerios aisle exactly exactly the
Speaker 1: yeah of weight Rose in Oxford. I'm sure like, no, funk, Sorry,
Speaker 1: I'm so fucking angry at this ship. And it's it's clearly,
Speaker 1: very clearly I can see that this is going towards
Speaker 1: an excuse for incredibly wealthy people paying funk all in
Speaker 1: taxes because they claim that that it's not an efficient
Speaker 1: way to do things, and they completely ignore all these
Speaker 1: structural things which have to exist for their effective altruism
Speaker 1: to occur in the first place. Right, Yeah, it's um anyway,
Speaker 1: this is effectively like over the years given away from
Speaker 1: this again kind of this wonky theory by guilty millennial
Speaker 1: kids to this pop philosophy for the fintech set, because
Speaker 1: that's how these guilt written millennial kids wound up making
Speaker 1: a bunch of money. Um. And yeah, that time article
Speaker 1: gives like I just want to read another quote from
Speaker 1: it about one of the other guys who's involved in
Speaker 1: putting a lot of money into McCaskill's organization quote Mr
Speaker 1: Mr Bankman Freed makes his donations through the ft X Foundation,
Speaker 1: which is given away a hundred and forty million, of
Speaker 1: which ninety million has gone through the group's future fund
Speaker 1: towards long term causes. Mr McCaskill and Mr Bankman Fried's
Speaker 1: relationship as an important piece and understanding the community's evolution
Speaker 1: in recent years. The two men first met in two
Speaker 1: thousand and twelve, when Mr Bankman Freed was a student
Speaker 1: at M I T with an interest in utilitarian philosophy.
Speaker 1: Over lunch, Mr Bankman Freed said that he was interested
Speaker 1: in working she related to animal welfare. Mr McCaskill suggested
Speaker 1: he might do more good by entering a high earning
Speaker 1: field and donating money to the cause and by working
Speaker 1: for directly. Mr Bankman Freed contacted the Humane League and
Speaker 1: other charities, asking if they would prefer his time or
Speaker 1: donations based on his expected earnings if he went to
Speaker 1: work in tech or finance. They opted for the money,
Speaker 1: and he embarked on a remunerative career, eventually founding the
Speaker 1: cryptocurrency Exchange nineteen. First off, that guy absolutely did not
Speaker 1: call any charities. Um, sorry, this was a four. This
Speaker 1: was from the Forbes article I used, not the Time article. Um.
Speaker 1: First off, I don't believe that he but if he did,
Speaker 1: it was something like, Hey, I don't have any skills
Speaker 1: or training. Do you want money or do you want
Speaker 1: me to volunteer? And they were like, who then is this? Kids, like,
Speaker 1: we don't we don't need another asshole wandering around here
Speaker 1: trying to touch the cats. Um, send us you a check. Yeah,
Speaker 1: And so instead of I don't know, getting trained as
Speaker 1: a vet tech or something where he would actually be
Speaker 1: able to help animals, he founded a cryptocurrency exchange and
Speaker 1: contributed to the burning of massive amounts of carbon that
Speaker 1: will contribute to mass deforestation in the deaths of animals
Speaker 1: around the world. That's good. I think that there's another
Speaker 1: aspect of this, which I think is sort of under explored,
Speaker 1: which is that utilitarianism is genuinely one of the greatest
Speaker 1: evil's humanity has ever created, every every bad decision anyone
Speaker 1: has ever made. If you look behind it, you can
Speaker 1: find your deilitarian is like it's a basis of the
Speaker 1: basis of all economics. It's horrible, haything bad in the world.
Speaker 1: It is an engine that allows rich people to feel
Speaker 1: good about hurting poor people. That's that's what it is.
Speaker 1: But and that's what I think this all makes clear.
Speaker 1: So the actual rhetoric from these people is always like it,
Speaker 1: especially if you're just kind of encountering it out in
Speaker 1: the wild. It's hard to argue with a lot of
Speaker 1: the time because they'll be like, well, look, we need
Speaker 1: look at what's going to help the most people, and
Speaker 1: that's why we're you know, setting up None of this
Speaker 1: matters if we don't deal with this problem or that problem.
Speaker 1: And it's it's Taylor made to sound profound and again
Speaker 1: and like a Ted talk or the website for the
Speaker 1: Charitable Giving organization aimed at getting you to like put
Speaker 1: ten percent of your income to long termist causes. But again,
Speaker 1: the funked up ship crusts kind of around the edges
Speaker 1: for the most part in lines like these from a
Speaker 1: time profile on the Castle. The first public protest against
Speaker 1: African American slavery was the six eighty eight Germantown Quaker petition.
Speaker 1: Slavery was only Yeah. Slavery was only abolished in the
Speaker 1: British Empire in eighteen thirty three decades later in the US,
Speaker 1: and not until nineteen sixty two in Saudi Arabia. History
Speaker 1: encourages mccaskell to favor gradual progress, so for revolution, abolition,
Speaker 1: he says, is maybe the single best moral change ever.
Speaker 1: It's certainly up there with feminism, and they're extremely incremental.
Speaker 1: They don't seem that way because we enormously shrink the past.
Speaker 1: But it's almost three hundred years we're talking about. Um.
Speaker 1: That wasn't the result of incremental change. It was the
Speaker 1: result against the people who enslaves, fighting viciously against any
Speaker 1: attempts to end slavery. Like it was a it was
Speaker 1: a battle. It was a series of in fact, a
Speaker 1: series of revolutions in a lot of cases including like
Speaker 1: the Haitian Revolution and guys like John Brown. There were
Speaker 1: a ship bleeding Kansas. There were a shipload of people
Speaker 1: died fighting in order to end slavery. Like yeah, it's
Speaker 1: a civil war, dude, what do you call that? That's
Speaker 1: not incremental. A million people shot each other to death,
Speaker 1: you know, And it's it's so far as we can
Speaker 1: talk about sort of income with the progress, it's stuff
Speaker 1: like okay, So the like the slaves in Haiti freed
Speaker 1: themselves by means of revolution and then sent a bunch
Speaker 1: of guns and weapons to people in Latin America so
Speaker 1: that their armies could march through Latin America and end slavery,
Speaker 1: Like many revolutions had to occur to end slavery because
Speaker 1: it was a powerful system at the center of global
Speaker 1: capital that a lot of entrenched and heavily armed interests
Speaker 1: were willing to die to maintain. Which also is fun
Speaker 1: because I I I bet, I bet if you look
Speaker 1: through these people supply chains, and this is almost certainly
Speaker 1: true of Elon must supply chains, like I mean, okay,
Speaker 1: must supply chains. In China. You can have some kind
Speaker 1: of debate as to whether the kinds of forced labor
Speaker 1: you're going to be encounting our slavery, Like I I
Speaker 1: bet if you look through night present the people who
Speaker 1: are affective aulters, you can find slavery in their supply chains,
Speaker 1: and their arguments will be like, well, I can't slavery
Speaker 1: and must supply chain because I guarantee it. They're all
Speaker 1: in the tech industry, and like nobody has a laptop
Speaker 1: or a smartphone without the use of rare earth minerals
Speaker 1: that are like acquired via slavery. It's it's the same
Speaker 1: thing if you're wearing clothes, you have something that slavery
Speaker 1: was involved in. Because the garment industry, slavery is literally
Speaker 1: inextricable from it. Like the company that has tried the
Speaker 1: hardest to remove slavery from their from their production line, Patagonia,
Speaker 1: UM still continually finds like, oh, no, they're smart. Yeah,
Speaker 1: they're pretty good. I'm going out, But yeah, they put
Speaker 1: a load of money into that ship and they still
Speaker 1: it is hard. Um. Anyway, UM, I'm going to read
Speaker 1: another fun quote from the Forbes article. Mr Bankman Freed
Speaker 1: said he expected to give away the bulk of his
Speaker 1: fortune in the next tender twenty years. If you're worried
Speaker 1: about existential risks of a really bad pandemic, you sort
Speaker 1: of can't stall on that. Mr Bankman Freed said in
Speaker 1: an interview. That is how his text messages popped up
Speaker 1: among hundreds of others sent to Mr Musk. Mr Bankman
Speaker 1: Freed ultimately did not join Mr Musk's bid. I don't
Speaker 1: know exactly what Elon's goals are going to be with Twitter.
Speaker 1: Mr Bankman Freed said in an interview there was a
Speaker 1: little bit of ambiguity there. He had his hands full
Speaker 1: in the month that followed his cryptocurrency prices crashed. The
Speaker 1: Twitter deal has been volatile in its own way, with
Speaker 1: Mr Musk trying to back out, before recently announcing his
Speaker 1: intention to follow through that after all. In August, Mr
Speaker 1: Musk retweeted Mr mccaskeell's book announcement to his hundred and
Speaker 1: eight million followers with the observation worth reading this is
Speaker 1: a close match to my philosophy. So that's that's kind
Speaker 1: of the surface of where we are now. Um. It
Speaker 1: is not. It doesn't quite get at all of the
Speaker 1: things that are deeply fucked up. And for that I
Speaker 1: wanted to quote from another article. UM. I found an
Speaker 1: a on a E O N. It's an essay by h.
Speaker 1: Got Let make it the author here because it's it's
Speaker 1: quite good about long term as. It's an essay called
Speaker 1: against long termism by Emil P. Torres, a phb candidate
Speaker 1: at a university in Hanover in Germany uh Leibnitz Universitat.
Speaker 1: I don't know. I feel silly every time I try
Speaker 1: to say Germans, so I'm not going to try that hard.
Speaker 1: But the article is very good, um, and it kind
Speaker 1: of gets at how this effective altruism movement has merged
Speaker 1: with long term is um in a way that specifically
Speaker 1: exists to buoy the interests of wealthy authoritarians around the
Speaker 1: world quote. This has roots in the work of Nick Bostrom,
Speaker 1: who founded the grandiosely named Future of Humanity Institute f
Speaker 1: HI in two thousand five, and Nick Bestead, a research
Speaker 1: associated FHI and a program officer at Open Philanthropy. It
Speaker 1: has been defended most publicly by the HI philosopher Toby Ord,
Speaker 1: author of the precipice Existential Risk in the Future of Humanity.
Speaker 1: Long Termism is the primary research focus of both the
Speaker 1: Global Priorities Institute and an f HI in linked organization
Speaker 1: directed by Hillary Greeves, and the Forethought Foundation run by
Speaker 1: William mccaskell, who also holds positions at f HI and
Speaker 1: g p I. Adding to the tangle of titles, names,
Speaker 1: institutes and acronyms, long termism is one of the main
Speaker 1: cause areas of the so called effective altruism movement, which
Speaker 1: was introduced by Ord in around two thousand even eleven
Speaker 1: and now boast of having a mind boggling forty six
Speaker 1: billion dollars in committed funding. It is difficult to overstate
Speaker 1: how influential long termism has become. Karl Marx in forty
Speaker 1: five declarded that the point of philosophy isn't merely to
Speaker 1: interpret the world, but change it, and this is exactly
Speaker 1: what long term USTs have been doing with extraordinary success.
Speaker 1: Consider that Elon Musk, who is cited and endorsed Bostroom's work,
Speaker 1: has donated one point five million dollars to FHI through
Speaker 1: its sister organization, even more grandiosely named Future of Life Institute.
Speaker 1: This was co founded by the multimillionaire tech entrepreneur Jan Talinn,
Speaker 1: who has a recently noted doesn't believe that climate change
Speaker 1: poses an existential threat to humanity because of his adherence
Speaker 1: to the long termist ideology. Meanwhile, the billionaire libertarian and
Speaker 1: Donald Trump supporter Peter Teal, who once gave the keynote
Speaker 1: address and an effective Altruism conference, has donated large sums
Speaker 1: of money to the Machine Intelligence Research Institute, whose mission
Speaker 1: is to save in humanity from super intelligent machines and
Speaker 1: is deeply intertwined with long termist values. Other organizations, such
Speaker 1: as g p I and the Foe Thought Foundation are
Speaker 1: funding essay contests and scholarships and an effort to draw
Speaker 1: young people into the community. Well, it's an open secret
Speaker 1: of the Washington d C. Base Center for Security and
Speaker 1: Emergence and Emerging Technologies c SET aims to place long
Speaker 1: termsts within high level US government positions to shape national apology.
Speaker 1: In fact, c SET was established by Jason Mathani, a
Speaker 1: former research assistant and f HI who is now the
Speaker 1: Deputy Assistant to US President Joe Biden for Technology and
Speaker 1: National Security. Or It himself, has, astonishingly for a philosopher,
Speaker 1: advised the World Health Organization, the World Bank, the World
Speaker 1: Economic Forum, the U S National Intelligence Council, the UK
Speaker 1: Prime Minister's Office, Cabinet, all US in Government Office for Science,
Speaker 1: and he recently contributed to a report from the Secretary
Speaker 1: General of the United Nations that specifically mentions long term
Speaker 1: is um. The short answer is that elevating the fulfillment
Speaker 1: of humanities supposed potential above all else could not trivially
Speaker 1: increase the probability that actual people those alive today in
Speaker 1: the near future suffer extreme harms even death. Consider As
Speaker 1: I noted elsewhere, the long termist ideology inclines its adherence
Speaker 1: to take an Insusian attitude towards climate change. Why because
Speaker 1: even if climate change causes island nations to disappear, triggers
Speaker 1: mass migrations and kills millions of people. It probably isn't
Speaker 1: going to compromise our long term potential over the coming
Speaker 1: trillions of years. If one takes a cosmic view of
Speaker 1: the situation, even a climate catastrophe that cuts the human
Speaker 1: population by se for the next two millennial will, in
Speaker 1: the grand scheme of things, be nothing more than a
Speaker 1: small blip, the equivalent of a nine year old man
Speaker 1: having stubbed his toe when he was two. So this
Speaker 1: is evil, right, Like, this is like, this is vicious
Speaker 1: and vile and cruel, and it's one of those things.
Speaker 1: There's a book that I've talked about on the show
Speaker 1: a couple of times UM that is quite popular called
Speaker 1: Ministry of the Future UM, And I think it's a
Speaker 1: very good book. And one of the attitude, like the
Speaker 1: basic premise of it is that climate change is addressed
Speaker 1: finally and the worst aspects of it are are dealt
Speaker 1: with and like begin to be repaired because of the
Speaker 1: establishment of an organization called the Ministry of the Futures.
Speaker 1: Its international organization that exists to like look out for
Speaker 1: the interests of unborn people and animals and plant species.
Speaker 1: And part of how they do this is by murdering
Speaker 1: billionaires in their beds uh and blowing up planes to
Speaker 1: in international air travel, which is so there's a version.
Speaker 1: Like again, the idea that like, we should be thinking
Speaker 1: about people and and living creatures who have not yet
Speaker 1: been born is reasonable, and the reasonable conclusion of that
Speaker 1: is and so we should deal with things like climate
Speaker 1: change and stop like thoughtlessly degrading our environment so that
Speaker 1: people in the future will be able to live a
Speaker 1: quality life. Um. The argument that these long terms are
Speaker 1: making is no, that's foolish, because in a true billion years,
Speaker 1: none of it will matter. And I intend to be
Speaker 1: alive in a trillion years because I will be an
Speaker 1: immortal machine man billionaire forever. You know, it's about these people,
Speaker 1: these people like you think about this. If you believe this,
Speaker 1: the only literally, the only thing that you should spend
Speaker 1: your time doing is trying to dismantle every single nuclear
Speaker 1: weapon on the planet. Like you, you you should be
Speaker 1: forming your own private armies to like storm military basis
Speaker 1: to destroy nukes. And none of them will ever fucking
Speaker 1: do this. All these people will back candidates who like
Speaker 1: want to have a nuclear weapons. All these people who
Speaker 1: will back candidates who like, like, you know, I I
Speaker 1: wonder how many these people personally supported dropping a nuke
Speaker 1: in the middle of a rock in two thousand four,
Speaker 1: Like god, yeah, anyway, this is probably that's probably enough.
Speaker 1: I wanted to At some point, I think we will
Speaker 1: be doing a more detailed look into some of these people,
Speaker 1: and a more detailed look into some Maybe maybe it's
Speaker 1: a Bastards episode, but this is just getting more relevant,
Speaker 1: and I wanted to give people I wanted to connect
Speaker 1: them with some like some some resources, particularly that article
Speaker 1: on a on about the dangers of long termism and
Speaker 1: uh yeah, anyway, be be advised. This is what the
Speaker 1: fucking assholes who have spent like think about how many
Speaker 1: cool things the tech industry has actually made in the
Speaker 1: last decade. It's it's not many, right, Like it's mostly
Speaker 1: been vaporware, like most of the different big apps and
Speaker 1: stuff have all are in the process of collapsing right now.
Speaker 1: That's why the industry is falling apart as we record
Speaker 1: this in the metaverse. Yeah, that's right, that's right. Legs
Speaker 1: like you're sitting right next to me, James, except for
Speaker 1: you have no laying legs in. Your mouth is opened
Speaker 1: in an endless, wordless scream. Um finally, anyway, that's what
Speaker 1: these assholes want to do, what they've done to the Internet,
Speaker 1: sucking the vibrancy and the life and like the freedom
Speaker 1: out of this this incredible creation and turning it into
Speaker 1: uh an engine for sucking your personal data out and
Speaker 1: marketing things to you and making you angry all the
Speaker 1: time as much as possible, and convincing your parents and
Speaker 1: grandparents that fucking Joe Biden has been replaced by a
Speaker 1: lizard man. Um. Like the people who did that, uh
Speaker 1: now think that we can't take care of people today
Speaker 1: because that would distract from our mission to take care
Speaker 1: of people who have never been born a trillion years
Speaker 1: from now. Um, anyway, fuck them. Everything's dead. Wait no sorry, Um,
Speaker 1: it's it could happen here a podcast about stuff falling
Speaker 1: apart and today about the fact that things fell less
Speaker 1: apart than people were worried they were going to fall apart,
Speaker 1: and in some ways got might get better. So that's
Speaker 1: kind of that's kind of nice. Sure, Yeah, on the whole,
Speaker 1: we're talking about the mid terms today and on the
Speaker 1: whole Okay, I feel okay, an excellent descripture. Yeah, it's
Speaker 1: the mid terms equivalent of getting like an ounce of
Speaker 1: of of like mid grade weed for like fifty bucks,
Speaker 1: but you find out later that like kind of in
Speaker 1: the middle of it was like half of a paper
Speaker 1: towel roll that they stuck in there to push up
Speaker 1: the weight. But it's like, well, at least I got weed.
Speaker 1: All right, I've introduced the podcast Who do We? Who
Speaker 1: do we have here? Today? Oh? You got me? I'm
Speaker 1: James Still that's right. H Yeah, I'm Garrison. I didn't vote.
Speaker 1: Look at you. Wow. Way to be a way to
Speaker 1: be an anarchist, Garrison or can Adien same deaf democracy? Yeah?
Speaker 1: I like committing voter fraud for the Democratic Party. Yeah yeah.
Speaker 1: I also decided to not vote for the people who
Speaker 1: are doing like the war on drugs in California. Right now, Garrison,
Speaker 1: you you continued your your years long tradition of submitting
Speaker 1: a crew drawing of the Premier of Canada um to
Speaker 1: to a ballot box ship. Let's Trudeau coming out of
Speaker 1: a cave. Who else do we have on with us?
Speaker 1: Right now? I'm here, Christopher Wong, and I absolutely despise elections.
Speaker 1: So I brought my friend who actually does like elections
Speaker 1: that's excellent token election in Jordan pretty much. Yes, Hi,
Speaker 1: I am Jack. I am Christopher's token friend, as mentioned um,
Speaker 1: and I'm here partly because of nepotism for knowing Christopher
Speaker 1: and partly because, as he reminded me, before we got started,
Speaker 1: I had a ninety three accurate prediction rating for all
Speaker 1: of the elections that I was paying attention to this year,
Speaker 1: so things, congratulations. I only made one prediction before this election,
Speaker 1: which was, well, he doesn't feel like dr oz is
Speaker 1: gonna win, which which means you did better than a
Speaker 1: lot of the people who are paid to do this. Like, Okay,
Speaker 1: that man, that man said the word crew didtay in
Speaker 1: an election in Pennsylvania, Like there was he was never good.
Speaker 1: The moment that d came out, he was going to lose.
Speaker 1: That's much more nuanced than my my political analysis, which
Speaker 1: was the fact that the other guy was much taller
Speaker 1: than him and also way hot. Like if they just
Speaker 1: settled it with a fistfight, Pat could have taken it. Yep,
Speaker 1: which that seems good. Uh, it was fun. It was
Speaker 1: a fun election. We all had a good time. I
Speaker 1: enjoy that. Fucking Marjorie Taylor Green and j d vance
Speaker 1: are going to be in Congress together. That's going to
Speaker 1: be fun for everybody. We're all gonna have a good time.
Speaker 1: But I suspect there's probably some stuff we haven't like.
Speaker 1: As you may have noticed listeners, we didn't do much
Speaker 1: in the way of pre mid term content because we
Speaker 1: all hate it. But but now now we're talking about it.
Speaker 1: So what what? What? What should we know about these
Speaker 1: mid terms? What? What? What kind of occurred to you
Speaker 1: as somebody who's like actually has spent a lot more
Speaker 1: time delving into the nitty gritty and thinking about what
Speaker 1: was likely to happen. Um. So I told Christopher I
Speaker 1: would say this, and in varness, I do genuinely believe it.
Speaker 1: I think the story of these mid terms, when historians
Speaker 1: look back at it, will be that the Dobbs Supreme
Speaker 1: Court decision had the same electoral impact in the United
Speaker 1: States as nine eleven did. I think that is going
Speaker 1: to be like how this plays out over time, um,
Speaker 1: because when you look at how things were going before
Speaker 1: Dabbs and then how things were going after Dabbs, obviously
Speaker 1: things got a lot worse on the policy front because
Speaker 1: abortion became illegal in a lot of states. Um. But
Speaker 1: the election essentially flipped overnight from what was going to
Speaker 1: be a Republican wave to the even split that we got.
Speaker 1: And that makes this one of three post World War
Speaker 1: two midterms where the incumbent party did well, and so
Speaker 1: this is definitely going to be aim in term that
Speaker 1: gets lectured about in policy one on one courses for
Speaker 1: the next hundred years. Also one of those, one of
Speaker 1: those other three was to push le because it was yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: actually really because obviously I was aware, just because there
Speaker 1: was so much coverage saying like, this is the best
Speaker 1: performance from an incumbent party in a mid term since
Speaker 1: two thousand two. So it was aware of that fact,
Speaker 1: but for some reason I hadn't put it together in
Speaker 1: my head that way that like, yeah, the this means that,
Speaker 1: like the Supreme Court's decision on Roevie Wade had kind
Speaker 1: of a comparable electoral impact to flying two planes into
Speaker 1: a pair of skyscrapers, said the Pentagon plates. I mean,
Speaker 1: to be fair whatever, to be fair, there Spreme Court
Speaker 1: have killed Like in terms of the immediate impact, the
Speaker 1: Screme Court will have killed more people than that by
Speaker 1: like Thursday or something. So yeah. The other one was
Speaker 1: was fdos fest made term right. Uh No, the other
Speaker 1: one so that so I said, post Woe War two.
Speaker 1: The other The other one was when the American electorate
Speaker 1: apparently got so mad at Republicans in p team Bill
Speaker 1: Clinton that they decided to vote for Democrats in a
Speaker 1: good term. Again. Well that's yeah, that's the other thing
Speaker 1: Biden can do if it, if it goes south. It's
Speaker 1: good to know their uptions. Yeah, but I think non
Speaker 1: zero chance that will happen any way. I mean, I
Speaker 1: guess we're still waiting. Who knows. Yeah, dog Brandon, I
Speaker 1: enjoyed from from an entertainment perspective, the like three months
Speaker 1: of lucidity that we got out of Joe Biden this year.
Speaker 1: We'll see how many more he has in him. Yeah,
Speaker 1: who knows? So yeah, like it. So you're you're suggesting
Speaker 1: that Dobbs has been like the really pivotal thing here
Speaker 1: in swinging a lot of these close races, right, absolutely, um,
Speaker 1: and Dobbs definitely being the number one factor. Um. Tragically,
Speaker 1: because it's very cringe and I wish this hadn't happened.
Speaker 1: The January six investigation does actually seem to have also
Speaker 1: swung several important races. That's I mean, I'm interested in
Speaker 1: your thoughts on this, but I actually I'm glad that
Speaker 1: it mattered that they tried to do a coup, and
Speaker 1: I'm glad that people cared about that. I'm glad it mattered.
Speaker 1: I just I just think it sucks that because the
Speaker 1: way they went about the investigation was so incredibly terrible. Yeah. Um,
Speaker 1: like Marrick Garland is going to go down as like
Speaker 1: one of the most cowardly attorney generals in American history.
Speaker 1: But um, yeah, it's it's pretty clear that in a
Speaker 1: lot of races like the the investigation made a difference.
Speaker 1: I think this is really clear if we're getting into
Speaker 1: like very kind of under the hood. Um, Democrats ran
Speaker 1: the table in competitive state level secretary of state races,
Speaker 1: and these are the officials that run elections. UM. And
Speaker 1: not only did Democrats run the table, pretty much every
Speaker 1: single one of those candidates outperformed the top of the ticket.
Speaker 1: So they outperformed governor and Senate candidates. UM. So there
Speaker 1: are a lot of people. This is another big story
Speaker 1: the midterms is that swing voter. Your swing voting is
Speaker 1: back not swing voting, I'm sorry, Split ticket voting is back. Um,
Speaker 1: there were quite a few there were quite a few
Speaker 1: millions of voters this year who voted for Republican in
Speaker 1: the Senate or Republican and for governor and then a
Speaker 1: Democrat to run their states actual elections. That's kind of good.
Speaker 1: It's so that's also like speaks promisingly of people's engagement
Speaker 1: with the political system and education about it and the
Speaker 1: awareness of what these different things do. Yes, um, but
Speaker 1: other like like that, other than that, but just overall
Speaker 1: high level Dobbs was the big one. Um. There is
Speaker 1: a person whose name I'm going to unfortunately mispronounce and
Speaker 1: that I should have looked up beforehand. So all right,
Speaker 1: this is a safe place for that, thank you. But
Speaker 1: there's a person there's a guy down in Louisiana named
Speaker 1: John uh cool Van I think is my best guests,
Speaker 1: And he is one of the people who makes money
Speaker 1: off of like looking at elections, um. And his big
Speaker 1: thing is that you can predict the outcome of elections
Speaker 1: just by looking at the nationwide composition of the primary electorate.
Speaker 1: So like, if Republicans turn out more voters in their
Speaker 1: primaries and Democrats to Republicans are going to win the
Speaker 1: election and vice versa. This has been true in pretty
Speaker 1: much every single election for the last thirty years or
Speaker 1: so UM, and he unfortunately got led astray um this
Speaker 1: year because nationwide at the end of the primary season,
Speaker 1: Republicans were up by about like five points, and so
Speaker 1: he was insisting the whole rest of the campaign that
Speaker 1: Republicans are going to win. That's obviously not really what happened.
Speaker 1: But if you look at pre Dbs versus post OBS,
Speaker 1: the primary elector at post OBS was Democrats plus like
Speaker 1: up by one point. That is the electorate that we
Speaker 1: got in the mid terms. So Dobbs set the tone
Speaker 1: of like what the mid terms were gonna be, Um,
Speaker 1: because we are not going to be legalizing abortion nationwide
Speaker 1: in the next two years, because we are going to
Speaker 1: have a Republican House almost certainly Dobbs is almost definitely
Speaker 1: going to be a huge factor in twenty four as well.
Speaker 1: I mean, and I guess that, like because the question
Speaker 1: I had, and I think a lot of people had
Speaker 1: running into this, especially people who are not election lovers,
Speaker 1: is like do things matter? Right? Like? It was Dobbs
Speaker 1: going to matter? And was the were the constant sort
Speaker 1: of Republican assaults on on the ability of people to vote.
Speaker 1: Was the fucking attacks on children's hospitals and on trans
Speaker 1: case and stuff like, was all of that going to work?
Speaker 1: Like do do things matter still? And uh, you know,
Speaker 1: we'll have to renswer that question. But it does kind
Speaker 1: of seem like that's the positive take out from this
Speaker 1: is not like, you know, it's it's probably probably too
Speaker 1: early to say are we seeing some sort of grand
Speaker 1: progressive swing or are people coming around on or Biden
Speaker 1: or whatever things politicos want to take. But it does
Speaker 1: kind of seem that, like on a on a very
Speaker 1: like ground floor level. Uh, it mattered that the Republicans
Speaker 1: were doing awful things, Yes, mattered. Um, I think Christopher
Speaker 1: and I have talked about how, in his words, Leah
Speaker 1: Thomas cost the Michigan Republican Party in the election. Uh,
Speaker 1: let's let's talk about that, because I think a lot
Speaker 1: of people, I mean, yeah, let's yeah, let's talk about Okay,
Speaker 1: I'll give the I'll give the meme version of it first.
Speaker 1: The meme version of it basically is that there was Okay,
Speaker 1: so there there there was a report released by the
Speaker 1: Republican Party in Michigan after the election when they sort
Speaker 1: of got hammered, and part of what they're talking about
Speaker 1: was like, okay, so inflation is like seven point seven
Speaker 1: percent right now, right, this is the freest election anyone
Speaker 1: has ever been handed, like in human history, Like a
Speaker 1: child could have won this election, and the Republicans managed
Speaker 1: to blow it. And one of these they talk about
Speaker 1: this they spent they spent like twenty five million olders,
Speaker 1: like specifically on ads about trans like trans kids in sports,
Speaker 1: and everybody missed it. Was just like what the yes,
Speaker 1: this really not just not just blew it, but blew
Speaker 1: it in a way that they haven't blown it in
Speaker 1: forty years. Because for the first time in forty years,
Speaker 1: Democrats will have complete control of the Michigan state government. Yeah. Yeah,
Speaker 1: And it's like it's like the other things. It wasn't
Speaker 1: just in Michigan where this happened, right like like quite possibly,
Speaker 1: like one of the ways they're going to lose the
Speaker 1: Senate is because like the Republicans like entire sort of
Speaker 1: apparatus and Nevada was running against the Equal Rights Amendments,
Speaker 1: which and specifically they were running against the equal Nevada
Speaker 1: passing University of the Equal Rights Amendment, like specifically on
Speaker 1: the grounds of transphobia, and the e ARRA passed by
Speaker 1: seventeen points. Uh, and Republicans are about to lose that Senate. See.
Speaker 1: And it's just like my main version of this is
Speaker 1: that the Republican Party ran a platform that is like
Speaker 1: a political equivalent of like a street preacher, right, like
Speaker 1: that that is the constituency for this. It is like
Speaker 1: they unbelievably hate trans people. They like an unbelievably hard
Speaker 1: line anti abortion position, which again like nobody actually likes.
Speaker 1: And you know, it turns out like if if if
Speaker 1: your constituency is street preachers, like the thing an average
Speaker 1: person does when they run into a street preacher is
Speaker 1: walked past them. And it turns out that's what happened
Speaker 1: to you, Like they got oh that's that's that's the
Speaker 1: mean version of it. Absolutely, I mean that's not just
Speaker 1: the mean version of it is essentially what happened, um
Speaker 1: in Michigan and Pennsylvania, in all of these states where
Speaker 1: hard line Christian nationalists won Republican primaries, like they went
Speaker 1: down hard um and so as Robert said, yeah, things
Speaker 1: actually mattered this election, and that's a good thing. Um.
Speaker 1: And I think I know for me, as like, I
Speaker 1: went into election night very nervous about my own predictions
Speaker 1: because when I put together my UM Google spreadsheet that
Speaker 1: will never be shown to any of you because of
Speaker 1: how insane it is UM. And I was picking, you know,
Speaker 1: I got more races wrong, by the way, by picking
Speaker 1: Republicans to win that Democrats actually one than the other
Speaker 1: way around, because I kept second guessing myself. It's like, no, no, no,
Speaker 1: I'm not I'm being too kind to Democrats and then
Speaker 1: I went too far. But when I was making those predictions, honestly,
Speaker 1: I just kept thinking about, like, so I'm adopted. My
Speaker 1: parents are both white, and my mom is this like
Speaker 1: white woman from Appalachian, Ohio, and she is UM in
Speaker 1: her upper sixties, so she grew up in a world
Speaker 1: before Roe V. Wade UM, and I had never seen
Speaker 1: my mom so angry about anything in politics, and like
Speaker 1: she was very very angry when Trump won UM. She
Speaker 1: has been very angry. She's been very angry about like
Speaker 1: January six. She's been angry about a lot of stuff
Speaker 1: the last several years, as is my dad UM because
Speaker 1: they're both very normally Democrats. But my mom has never
Speaker 1: been angrier as far as I've seen her than she
Speaker 1: was angrier about Dobbs. And it wasn't just like my mom.
Speaker 1: I was hearing from friends of mine from across the
Speaker 1: Midwest who also have like normy white suburban parents, and
Speaker 1: that was kind of the same thing that I was
Speaker 1: hearing from them too, is like, my mom is so
Speaker 1: upset about this, my grandmother is so upset about this.
Speaker 1: These women who remembered what it was like to grow
Speaker 1: up in a world where abortion was not something that
Speaker 1: they had access to if they needed it, um. And that, honestly,
Speaker 1: you know, it's it's obviously completely anecdotal. It's not databased
Speaker 1: or data driven in any way. But that was just
Speaker 1: what I kept thinking about as I was making predictions
Speaker 1: about how the mid term was gonna go, was you know,
Speaker 1: I think that these people are angry enough that they
Speaker 1: are not going to care about and Saan, They're not
Speaker 1: going to care about the fact that our economy is
Speaker 1: very clearly headed for recession, um, because this is going
Speaker 1: to matter more to them, um, And it did. I
Speaker 1: kind of want to move on to talking about what
Speaker 1: what we think this sets us up for because I
Speaker 1: think the clearest and we talked about this a little earlier,
Speaker 1: but sort of the clearest thing that's positive about this
Speaker 1: is that we have fewer state secretaries of state and
Speaker 1: state legislatures in the hands of the Republican Party, which
Speaker 1: means more of a chance that like what people actually
Speaker 1: vote for is going to matter. Um. Now, we're still
Speaker 1: dealing with the judiciary that is as fucked as it
Speaker 1: was prior to the mid terms and probably won't be
Speaker 1: less fucked in a way that is notable. Um and aggregate, Yeah,
Speaker 1: we can. We can always hope and pray. Yeah, they
Speaker 1: can to be a couple of very specific yeah, yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: yeah on that point. Actually, So there I know a
Speaker 1: bang on about about like how the United States deals
Speaker 1: with its Indigenous people a lot, but like they slated
Speaker 1: and we'll do an episode on it, but we're trying
Speaker 1: to do it properly. Like slated for this Supreme Court
Speaker 1: session is to look at AQUA right, the Indian Child
Speaker 1: Welfare Act, and like the challenge to it challenges a
Speaker 1: lot of the basis of other tribal law and in
Speaker 1: places like Arizona, right, like indigenous people are a large
Speaker 1: like often like they're supposed to be, like the swing
Speaker 1: electorate for like Blue Arizona. So they could have positive
Speaker 1: outcomes for for Democrats. It could. They could. I don't
Speaker 1: know how they could go out their way to do
Speaker 1: in French trans indigenous people, but they find you and
Speaker 1: exciting ways to do it all the fucking time, So
Speaker 1: like that will be interesting. And one thing I wanted
Speaker 1: to raise is like, so I live in California, which
Speaker 1: I think is seen as like the left coast and stuff,
Speaker 1: but we have an alarming amount of really chuddly people
Speaker 1: going to the House from California, And yeah, it's becoming
Speaker 1: increasingly a bit like well, like some of you live
Speaker 1: in Oregon, where you have a very dif the far
Speaker 1: right in California is larger than the population of like
Speaker 1: many United US states. Yeah, yes, and they're increasingly big
Speaker 1: mad about like small things. But yeah, like I'm just
Speaker 1: looking at the districts around the one I'm in, and
Speaker 1: a number of them have sent like anti reproductive rights
Speaker 1: house representatives back to the House. California is a state where, um,
Speaker 1: the Democratic Party likes to flop its way to victory.
Speaker 1: It's one of it's one of the most incompetent state
Speaker 1: Democratic parties in the country, which is really saying something
Speaker 1: because they're competing. They're competing with they're competing with Florida. Like,
Speaker 1: I mean, hey, Oregon's not didn't do great either, Like
Speaker 1: the state Democratic Party in Oregon had their most narrow
Speaker 1: governor's race in a long time, and also the Dems
Speaker 1: lost their their supermajority in the state Congress. They did
Speaker 1: lose their supermajority, but Democrats in Oregon do now have
Speaker 1: the ability to redistrict again so they can take back
Speaker 1: that seat that Republicans picked up because there was a
Speaker 1: constitutional amendment that got passed by the voters of Oregon
Speaker 1: that says that if Republicans do what they have done
Speaker 1: in the last few years in Oregon, which is walk
Speaker 1: out of the state House anytime that a lot might pass,
Speaker 1: they get banned for running for re election. But also,
Speaker 1: like without the supermajority, I don't know that there's as
Speaker 1: much of any I mean, we'll see what happens um,
Speaker 1: but yeah, it's there. As a general rule, it seems
Speaker 1: like when you've got there's no meaningful competition for what
Speaker 1: party is going to be in control of the state,
Speaker 1: it becomes a haven for like the political equivalent of grifters.
Speaker 1: To sucking huge salaries and do very little um and yeah,
Speaker 1: yeah like math or to do like star mare look
Speaker 1: at that. Also yeah, and she's up for re election
Speaker 1: in a few months. Then we can only hope that
Speaker 1: she that she loses. I can't imagine her winning. I mean,
Speaker 1: it could happen. If it could happen, it could happen.
Speaker 1: Here's here's an ad break. Good work, Garrison. Yeah, what
Speaker 1: a professional. Ah. We're back. And you know what talking
Speaker 1: about the midterm elections makes me feel like doing smoking
Speaker 1: a cigarette? Buy cigarettes, kids, They're is good for you
Speaker 1: as democracy. All right, we're back. In some other interesting news.
Speaker 1: This is so the this this pessimn terms had more
Speaker 1: lgbt Q candidates win office than ever before in a
Speaker 1: midterm election. There was a few notable winds, specifically with
Speaker 1: trans people in the Midwest actually, which has been probably
Speaker 1: a decent side. It's it's a good side. You know,
Speaker 1: heroes are doing good. Yeah. There's been a multiple multiple
Speaker 1: trans people and trans uh particularly quite a few trans
Speaker 1: women elected to state legislatives across across the Midwest, like
Speaker 1: in Montana and inside uh Midwestern that out yeah, well
Speaker 1: Mountain West. See, well, the thing is I grew up
Speaker 1: in Saskatchewan, which is like above Montana, and whenever you
Speaker 1: would drive down, we would always stay in the more
Speaker 1: midwest east sections, and everyone talks it felt very Midwest
Speaker 1: to me because of where I lived in Saskatchewan. So
Speaker 1: apology of apologies to people who are Montana mountaineers, I guess, apologies, No, No,
Speaker 1: we don't need to be so. Zoe Zephyr, who testified
Speaker 1: against anti trans legislation previously, is now able to vote
Speaker 1: against it. Um in Minnesota talked about that, like very briefly,
Speaker 1: which is that like, okay, there are a lot of
Speaker 1: queer communities in places that people just fucking ignore. Yeah,
Speaker 1: absolutely can you cannot discount these places. Yeah, It's like
Speaker 1: Missoula specifically has has a like like pretty substitutve queer community.
Speaker 1: They do good ship, they're out there like they're like
Speaker 1: there's there's this sort of tendency I think to like
Speaker 1: like look at like a state and go like, oh,
Speaker 1: it's a red state, Like there's whatever the commune which
Speaker 1: you were just fleeing, and it's like it's not true.
Speaker 1: Like there there are a lot of people who are
Speaker 1: like have for many years been building a community there
Speaker 1: and hanging auccenaciously and building it. And also in Missoula,
Speaker 1: people take notice. Also in Missoula, the first non binary
Speaker 1: candidate was elected in uh s J. Howell so to
Speaker 1: uh to trans people elected there in in uh in Missoula.
Speaker 1: But the way did did did did Missoula Missoula do this?
Speaker 1: People in Portland would fall probably, but Portland's Portland's like
Speaker 1: city councils like four people. Yeah that's true, Yeah, entirely. Yeah,
Speaker 1: and it was pretty conservative that this past election actually, um,
Speaker 1: but we also had in Minnesota lay a thing because
Speaker 1: the first trans person in state let us, let let
Speaker 1: us later. And in New Hampshire they elected the first
Speaker 1: transman to a US Statehouse. So yeah. And the other
Speaker 1: other good thing is um Arizona got a Democratic governor,
Speaker 1: which means a whole bunch of potential legislation will probably
Speaker 1: not get signed on because Arizona did have some pretty
Speaker 1: pretty pretty bad anti transport to come up in the
Speaker 1: past few years. I also want to talk about. So
Speaker 1: the Arizona election was critical, not just because it's amazing
Speaker 1: that fucking carry Lake's not going to be a governor,
Speaker 1: because she is an election denying Google. Um, but the
Speaker 1: nicest thing Blake Masters might be the scariest person who
Speaker 1: was running for election. He is he is the scariest
Speaker 1: he was for serial killer. Yeah yeah, yeah he was.
Speaker 1: He was scary until he was funny, is the thing,
Speaker 1: because like I you know, when they failed, they're always funny. Yeah.
Speaker 1: But Christopher and I were talking about this before the
Speaker 1: podcast and like during the during the final debate between
Speaker 1: Blake Masters and Mark Kelly, like and I want to
Speaker 1: swear on this podcast, like we're allowed to say whatever
Speaker 1: the hell we want, perfect um debate. In their final
Speaker 1: debate between Mark Kelly and Blake Masters, Mark Kelly's like
Speaker 1: final statement, his conclusion argument was essentially pointing at Blake
Speaker 1: Masters and going, look at this fucking freak. Yeah. Yeah,
Speaker 1: it was great. It was just the which is one
Speaker 1: of the most powerful things he could do in pols
Speaker 1: because he was he was just like, like the specific
Speaker 1: thing he did because his language was was I think
Speaker 1: a lot more nuanced than that, because what he was
Speaker 1: saying is Blake Masters, for those of you who don't
Speaker 1: don't know, like one of the most like famous moments
Speaker 1: of this campaign is he he put out a campaign
Speaker 1: ad that was just him parking in the desert with
Speaker 1: a silenced handgun mentioned which is a child gun first off,
Speaker 1: but anyway, mentioning twice that the gun was German and
Speaker 1: like Germans to arrested, and then firing it blindly at nothing,
Speaker 1: and then the ad he fired it across the lake. Yeah,
Speaker 1: we don't see him shoot at something. We don't see
Speaker 1: him hit a target. He is his stances dogs anyway.
Speaker 1: But it's just him taking a silence pistol out repeatedly
Speaker 1: mentioning that the gun is German, firing it, and then
Speaker 1: the ad ends that's the whole a seconds of him
Speaker 1: just fondling and badly shooting it. It's worth giving the
Speaker 1: context that the person he's running against is someone whose
Speaker 1: wife was shot in the head. Yes, yeah, yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: because d so that's but it's also just like, look,
Speaker 1: guns are a big part of American life. A lot
Speaker 1: of politicians have, including Democrats, have ads that involved guns,
Speaker 1: and usually it's like here is me hunting, you know,
Speaker 1: or even like here is me at the range with friends,
Speaker 1: engaging in a thing that many Americans do. Masters was
Speaker 1: just blindly shooting a twenty two caliber handgun after immediately
Speaker 1: mentioning that it's chairman. It was it was like someone
Speaker 1: showed an alien like a regular campaign ad of someone
Speaker 1: shooting a gun, and then yes, I mean, it's funny
Speaker 1: that that's the term that you use, because that was
Speaker 1: a term that was flying around like Arizona social media
Speaker 1: the entire campaign. It was like, Blake Bastards looks like
Speaker 1: an alien and you get red with Peter Teel money
Speaker 1: for so so he has this and he has a
Speaker 1: couple of others like he is, he is, he's a
Speaker 1: number one. He worked with Peter Teel for years. Um
Speaker 1: he's doing all sorts of fucking ghoule ship on Twitter,
Speaker 1: like really mask off fascist, unhinged shit. And Mark Kelly
Speaker 1: in the debate isn't just like look at this freak.
Speaker 1: He's like, hey, we all know guys like this to
Speaker 1: talk about how dangerous and how scary they are, but
Speaker 1: they they've never done anything. They're just like weirdos trying
Speaker 1: to scare you so that you'll think that they're they're powerful,
Speaker 1: and like, don't don't fall forward it And it was
Speaker 1: perfect and the good news is that Arizona voters did
Speaker 1: not fall for it, because you know, not only did
Speaker 1: Blake Masters lose by the best performing Republicans in Arizona
Speaker 1: where their House candidates, like the statewide House popular vote
Speaker 1: for the for U S Congress, not the Statehouse was
Speaker 1: I think Republicans want it or going to win it
Speaker 1: by like five. So Carli Lake already drastically underperformed that
Speaker 1: by six because she's gonna lose. And then to Blake
Speaker 1: Masters underperformed his House candidates by like ten or eleven. Unbelievable.
Speaker 1: It's it's I mean it. It really goes to show
Speaker 1: that whatever most Americans want, they don't want a fucking
Speaker 1: weirdo fascist freak threatening uh there an astronaut's wife with
Speaker 1: a gun. Yeah. Really briefly, like also like on this note,
Speaker 1: of all of the queer and trans candidates who one
Speaker 1: um I will point out this follows the pattern that
Speaker 1: has taken shape in the last decade, which is that
Speaker 1: these supposedly well not supposedly they are, but like these
Speaker 1: red and purple states in the South and the Midwest
Speaker 1: are sending queer and trans people into the halls of
Speaker 1: power a lot faster than deep blue states on the
Speaker 1: West coast and in the Northeast. The first non unfortunately
Speaker 1: forget their name, but the first non binary state legislator
Speaker 1: in the country was elected in Oklahoma. And they're not
Speaker 1: only non binary, they are black and Muslim non binary.
Speaker 1: UM so it's like you know, these um these communities
Speaker 1: as Christophers like a, these communities do matter, and we
Speaker 1: can't forget about them, we can't abandon them. But all
Speaker 1: so like not just they matter, but like as I
Speaker 1: will happily argue with any political operative from either coast,
Speaker 1: we are much more likely to see some kind of
Speaker 1: progressive or surgeon and resurgeons in this country led by
Speaker 1: candidates out of the South or Midwest than either Yeah.
Speaker 1: Well and like like look at like this is one
Speaker 1: of everythings that that you know, so I have a
Speaker 1: lot of friends in the like Michigan Teachers Union, right
Speaker 1: and you know, like right right now, what is happening
Speaker 1: in the Michigan Like in Michigan is that the teachers
Speaker 1: Union is literally sending lists of laws like to to
Speaker 1: the governor that are like you need to get rid
Speaker 1: of this. And you know, if you like if even
Speaker 1: if you look at like like almost every other democratic
Speaker 1: party like in the country is just constantly at word
Speaker 1: with their teachers unions and you know, and then you
Speaker 1: look at like you look at what's happening in Wisconsin
Speaker 1: and it's like it's like, what's happening in Michigan. Well,
Speaker 1: I also Wisconsin to with like they have a much
Speaker 1: more labor friendly like Democratic Party even like fucking a
Speaker 1: Francisco or like the ghouls in like like honestly the
Speaker 1: ghules in the Chicago machine, right Eric Adams office. Yeah, right,
Speaker 1: Like there's there's there's I don't know, they're like everybody
Speaker 1: doors the Midwest and we're here, damn it, we do
Speaker 1: good things. Well's it's a little bit like I mean,
Speaker 1: it's a little bit of what we were saying earlier
Speaker 1: that like when you've got these states where because of
Speaker 1: the population layout, the Democratic Party doesn't have to struggle
Speaker 1: to actually win for the most part, you're a hell
Speaker 1: of a lot. Number one, the party becomes effectively a cartel.
Speaker 1: So they're very good at stopping any like upstart young progressive,
Speaker 1: non binary, queer trans people from like getting a hold
Speaker 1: on in local politics. You know, we we just had
Speaker 1: the most progressive member of the Portland City Council ousted
Speaker 1: by corporate business interests um and you know it, which
Speaker 1: is very different from the trend that you're seeing in
Speaker 1: places like Montana, and its like Oklahoma with a lot
Speaker 1: of these very progressive, you know, young candidates. And it's
Speaker 1: because UM number one, maybe the state parties are a
Speaker 1: little more willing to throw a hail Mary. But also
Speaker 1: just like those individual people, the people running in the
Speaker 1: folks doing their campaign have had to be a lot
Speaker 1: harder and a lot smarter to survive surrounded by people
Speaker 1: who hate them. And I think also, like there's one
Speaker 1: of the ways that I was pretty sure that this
Speaker 1: wasn't going to be a read tsunami was so I
Speaker 1: have some friends. I have friends who go to Wheaton College,
Speaker 1: And for people who don't know who what Wheaton College is,
Speaker 1: it is like, we're sorry that we're about to inform you. Yeah,
Speaker 1: so Wheaton College is one of like I don't know,
Speaker 1: maybe the second behind like Graham Young, like most right
Speaker 1: wing evangelical college in the US, like they they famously
Speaker 1: it's not as bad as the Liberty Yeah, yeah, it's
Speaker 1: like number three, right, But like so it's this is
Speaker 1: this is like the the intellectual sense of UM, like
Speaker 1: of sort of evangelical politics. Like me, make sure I
Speaker 1: have this right, Yeah, like Billy Graham's family has funneled
Speaker 1: money into Wheaton College for decades in two days now
Speaker 1: and okay, so like Whetton is a like broadly beaking,
Speaker 1: like a fucking ferociously hostile place to be anything other
Speaker 1: than a like assist head white person, right, it is
Speaker 1: like unbelievably homophobic. It is really anti Semitic. And like
Speaker 1: a few months ago, I was walking like through Wheaton
Speaker 1: downtown to visit a front and in the middle of
Speaker 1: fucking Wheaton downtown, they're they're they're like there there was
Speaker 1: someone who on in their in their like fucking lawn
Speaker 1: had had like had a giant Pride flag and like
Speaker 1: it wasn't like it was like it was like the
Speaker 1: there was the like the brown Pride flag too, right,
Speaker 1: Like that was like even five years ago, that would
Speaker 1: have been unimaginable, Like you would have been like you
Speaker 1: would have been fucking chased out of town by m Bob.
Speaker 1: Like and it's it's just there now, and I don't know,
Speaker 1: like they haven't been run out. It's still there. No,
Speaker 1: it's literally yes, everything that Christopher just said, and you
Speaker 1: know these are people that Christopher, Christopher and I grew
Speaker 1: up with like we literally I was there was a
Speaker 1: granddaughter of Billy Graham in my high school class. UM.
Speaker 1: And I think you know, as much as you know,
Speaker 1: these people are not going to be socialists or progressive
Speaker 1: at anytime soon. They are very much like normy moderate
Speaker 1: Democrats now. But there were a lot of suburban white
Speaker 1: people who got very turned off by Trump for the
Speaker 1: Republican Party. And I think that this midterm is the
Speaker 1: confirmation that, barring you know, some kind of economic catastrophe
Speaker 1: that always always throws elections to the out of power party. Uh,
Speaker 1: these Norman white urban nights are not going back. Uh.
Speaker 1: And we you know when you look at trends across
Speaker 1: the country. Um, you know JB. Princker one do Page County,
Speaker 1: which is the county that Wheaton is in, which is
Speaker 1: like you know, this is yeah, like this used to
Speaker 1: be within Christopher and I's lifetimes. This used to be
Speaker 1: a county that Republicans banked on getting three hundred thousand
Speaker 1: votes out of on a statewide margin level. Um, and
Speaker 1: now it's being one up and down by Democrats. Like
Speaker 1: Democrats flipped the county executive office in du Page County
Speaker 1: this year. Um, So like Chicago suburbs are trending are
Speaker 1: continuing to trend left, Atlanta suburbs are continuing to trend left. Uh,
Speaker 1: the like Raleigh Durham area in North Carolina is trending left.
Speaker 1: The Texas urban areas are trending left. And this isn't
Speaker 1: just like in comparison to twenty six. This is in
Speaker 1: comparison to two years ago, which was a democratic environment.
Speaker 1: Um So, the fact that these counties are swinging left
Speaker 1: in a year where the country, even though the overall
Speaker 1: results were fine, the country definitely swung right. Like these
Speaker 1: people are not going back. And not just that these
Speaker 1: people are not going back, but the ones who are staying.
Speaker 1: Republicans aid, they're moving. They're leaving the suburbs and they're
Speaker 1: establishing their little new white flight outposts in other places.
Speaker 1: Um and the people who are replacing them are largely
Speaker 1: people of color. Like the suburbs today in America are
Speaker 1: sixty percent white as compared to in the year two
Speaker 1: thousand when they were something like seventy percent white. Um
Speaker 1: So this is I think this year was the confirmation
Speaker 1: we needed that this is a permanent trend that the
Speaker 1: suburbs from now on are either going to be a
Speaker 1: wash or even frankly just democratic places where Democrats will
Speaker 1: net votes. And this is all There still is a
Speaker 1: lot of fear, and there's still is reason to be
Speaker 1: very concerned about the ability of the GOP's power to
Speaker 1: push things in Revanteus direction in an anti democratic election,
Speaker 1: to remove the ability of people because that that is
Speaker 1: you know, we're seeing them talk right now. We're seeing
Speaker 1: guys like Matt Walsh Christopher Ruffo talk right now about
Speaker 1: the need to like stop young people from voting, to
Speaker 1: like crackdown on mail voting. Like this is not not
Speaker 1: to say like, all right, it's all done, um, but
Speaker 1: this is like, I guess the thing that's that's optimistic
Speaker 1: about this overall is that it is um. It's evidence
Speaker 1: that the there there was this kind of open question
Speaker 1: after Trump won in UM and if one thing you
Speaker 1: could look at, you could look at you could look
Speaker 1: at two and they're like, well, clearly the trend since
Speaker 1: then has been for the GOP to lose big in
Speaker 1: most of these elections. But that was also anything but clear,
Speaker 1: kind of as a result of of in the way
Speaker 1: COVID fuck things up. And this this does seem to
Speaker 1: like submit that that like, yeah, it may it may
Speaker 1: have the long run proved to be a major, major
Speaker 1: tactical failure to to have gone for this guy the
Speaker 1: way that they did. Oh yeah, I mean and we
Speaker 1: can only hope. Um. I mean, I personally, from an
Speaker 1: entertainment factor, cannot wait for the de Santas versus Trump primary. Um,
Speaker 1: I will be. I will be rooting for Trump because
Speaker 1: he is funnier online. Um. And also I don't think
Speaker 1: it would make a substance of difference uh in whether
Speaker 1: or not like who would be the nominee, because the
Speaker 1: Santis is just Trump without the charisma. Um. But I
Speaker 1: think yeah, hopefully, Like we saw the Republican Party pay
Speaker 1: a price this year for arguably the first time in
Speaker 1: a long time for their insanity. Um, and it's good
Speaker 1: to see that that happened. Hopefully it will happen again.
Speaker 1: And I will also note for anyone listening, who does
Speaker 1: you know you care about elections? You want to get
Speaker 1: involved somewhere. The next somewhere for you to get involved
Speaker 1: in is the state of Wisconsin, where the there is
Speaker 1: a state Supreme Court seat up for election in April.
Speaker 1: If Democrats win that seat, they will flip the Supreme
Speaker 1: Court in Wisconsin, and that means that the absolutely insane
Speaker 1: Republican gerrymanders in that state, which pretty much render the
Speaker 1: state of Wisconsin a non democracy, will likely get overcharged
Speaker 1: if Democrats are able to flip the Wisconsin Supreme Court,
Speaker 1: which would mean a lot of good things could happen
Speaker 1: for a lot of people who live in that state. Okay,
Speaker 1: there is one other thing that is like basically I'm religious,
Speaker 1: that I want to touch on before we close up,
Speaker 1: which is that the extent to which the Republicans have
Speaker 1: sort of entered chaos mode now a with with Trump
Speaker 1: just sort of like going off on the Santis and
Speaker 1: like the Republican Civil War happening. And then secondly, because
Speaker 1: they see it looks like they've gotten the chaos mode
Speaker 1: configuration of their House majority. Yes, um, any anyone who
Speaker 1: pays attention to Congress, I would encourage you to get very,
Speaker 1: very familiar with the term discharge petition, which is a
Speaker 1: mechanism by which, if you have a majority of the
Speaker 1: House is willing to sign a piece of paper that
Speaker 1: says we should put this bill on the floor no
Speaker 1: matter what it goes to the floor. No matter what, um, and,
Speaker 1: I think you're probably gonna see Democrats successfully put a
Speaker 1: lot of bills on the House floor in the next
Speaker 1: two years because they're going to get they're going to
Speaker 1: pick off the Republican moderates in the northeast to sign
Speaker 1: these these pieces of paper. We should I think we
Speaker 1: should explain what exactly the Republican position looks like, because
Speaker 1: it's oh sure, so um it's so, I should caveat
Speaker 1: this with the statement that there is still like I
Speaker 1: would say, a five percent chance that Democrats may manage
Speaker 1: to scrap, like scrape their way to a one seat majority. Um,
Speaker 1: it's not likely by any means, but like, it is
Speaker 1: still theoretically on the table, mostly because Lauren Bobert managed
Speaker 1: to put herself into position where she might actually lose UM.
Speaker 1: And but default modal outcome I would say is Republicans
Speaker 1: end up with a three or four House seat majority.
Speaker 1: Uh in. But what that means is that UHL, we
Speaker 1: get Calvin Ball for the next two years, essentially because
Speaker 1: Kevin McCarthy as a person, UM is well a he's
Speaker 1: like very unintelligent in general. And this is like a
Speaker 1: very common sentiment that you will run into uh. In
Speaker 1: people who pay attention to Congress, he is not personally
Speaker 1: capable of managing a House majority of four. This is
Speaker 1: so widely accepted that Nancy Pelosi was willing to go
Speaker 1: on the record in an interview the other day saying that, um,
Speaker 1: and so, who knows, Kevin McCarthy may not even end
Speaker 1: up being the speaker. We may not have a speaker
Speaker 1: until March because no one would get two and eighteen votes. Um.
Speaker 1: But whoever has that job, whatever Republican has that job,
Speaker 1: it is going to be the most thankless job of
Speaker 1: their life that they will suffer through the two years.
Speaker 1: Because you know, the the pundit class and political operatives
Speaker 1: love to talk about how ideologically diverse the Democratic Party
Speaker 1: is in the House. And it's true because like on
Speaker 1: the left wing end of the of the caucus you
Speaker 1: have people like Rashida Claib and Ellen Omar, and the
Speaker 1: right wing end you have people like Henry quay Are,
Speaker 1: who tragically survived his primary this year. Um. But I
Speaker 1: think it has gone under the radar that Republicans in
Speaker 1: the House are arguably more ideologically diverse than Democrats are
Speaker 1: because the moderates, the moderate Republicans in the House are
Speaker 1: like your very standard like socially liberal, fiscally conservative types
Speaker 1: that were very popular and like two thousand ten, um,
Speaker 1: like you have like some of these Northeastern Republicans who
Speaker 1: are were more than happy to vote for same sex marriage,
Speaker 1: though they would probably vote for uh like to quodify row,
Speaker 1: they would probably vote to codify birth control legal like reality.
Speaker 1: And on the other end you have Marjorie Taylor Green
Speaker 1: and like if MTG. Yeah, if if there is a
Speaker 1: person on this earth who is capable of managing that caucus, Um,
Speaker 1: I don't know who they are. I don't think anyone
Speaker 1: knows who they are. UM, And I think that the
Speaker 1: smartest thing that that person could do is um not
Speaker 1: take the job and let someone else take the fall
Speaker 1: for what is going to be two years of chaos
Speaker 1: that will most likely hurt the Republican brand a lot
Speaker 1: in the next two years. Yeah. That that's like one
Speaker 1: of the things that actually makes me like slightly optimistic
Speaker 1: is that like the Republican Party like is it is
Speaker 1: it like a first coalition and it had been being
Speaker 1: held together sort of like by Trump, And now Trump's
Speaker 1: on on Twitter anymore, and Twitter may not exist by
Speaker 1: like the time community speaker. Well, it's also I think
Speaker 1: I might add Chris, it's not just by Trump. And
Speaker 1: part of why Trump was able to get the position
Speaker 1: did is it's it's a mix of Trump and owning
Speaker 1: the Libs, right, Like, that's that's a huge part of
Speaker 1: why the most visible members of this caucus are where
Speaker 1: they are, Like, there's no there's no Marjorie Taylor Green
Speaker 1: right without the way that particular social reinforcement pattern works.
Speaker 1: And um, yeah, I I think that like that's not
Speaker 1: like number one, if Twitter goes away, which could have
Speaker 1: happened by the time you listen to this episode, that
Speaker 1: really gets gets in the way of their ability to
Speaker 1: own the Libs. But also so if they're just getting
Speaker 1: their asses kicked up and down the country, they're they're
Speaker 1: no longer owning the Libs. The Libs have not been owned, No,
Speaker 1: they have not. And I think the other you know,
Speaker 1: the other consideration here is that, um, we like to
Speaker 1: talk a lot in this country because it's true about
Speaker 1: neither party ever puts forth a substance of policy agenda. Um.
Speaker 1: And there are a lot of Republican political operatives who
Speaker 1: are running around right now complaining and saying that Republicans
Speaker 1: lost because they failed to offer a viable alternative. Except
Speaker 1: that's not true. Republicans did offer a policy agenda in
Speaker 1: this midterm, and that policy agenda was Christian nationalism, and
Speaker 1: American voters took one look at that and said, are
Speaker 1: you fucking for real? Yeah, yeah, like that that's the
Speaker 1: thing that like everyone like like people like all the
Speaker 1: fucking New York Times calumn this, Like people don't understand that.
Speaker 1: Like there's maybe thirty of the population who actually likes
Speaker 1: that ship, and everyone else in the country is like,
Speaker 1: what the fuck? And you know, and but but you know,
Speaker 1: like the like the the the actual sort of median
Speaker 1: person in the US is so much less like that
Speaker 1: than the median person that every pundit imagines that like
Speaker 1: the version of reality that exists in sort of like
Speaker 1: the minds of the media class. Like it's not yeah,
Speaker 1: they've they've they've cre they've created like incredible sand castles
Speaker 1: in their mind. Now the tides like washing them away.
Speaker 1: I don't know if the tide washing them away. I
Speaker 1: think we can we can only hope that The New
Speaker 1: York Times gets washed out to see. But I think,
Speaker 1: you know, I sorry, go for it, no, no, no please.
Speaker 1: I was just gonna say, like, you know, obviously the
Speaker 1: next two years are going to be the next two years, UM,
Speaker 1: and no one can predict the future. Anyone who anyone
Speaker 1: who tells you and literally the next eighteen months that
Speaker 1: they know how the two four elections are going to
Speaker 1: go is lying to you, and you should lock them
Speaker 1: and perhaps to report them to like whatever like non
Speaker 1: retributed forms of authority exists in your local area. But
Speaker 1: um my, you know, based on how this went, if
Speaker 1: the same trends play out for the next two years,
Speaker 1: which would be suburbs continue swinging left, Democrats continue to
Speaker 1: rack up problems with minority voters, but like not to
Speaker 1: the extent that we're gonna lose urban seats anytime soon. Um,
Speaker 1: and Republicans continue racking up margins in the states and
Speaker 1: like the seats that they're already winning by eighty points,
Speaker 1: which helps them on a statewide level, but does not
Speaker 1: help them in the U. S. House. My I would say, like,
Speaker 1: assuming the current trends continue the trends we've had since sixteen, UM,
Speaker 1: that would mean Democrats flip back the House in two
Speaker 1: thousand twenty four. H it would also mean that we
Speaker 1: are once again in like the fight of our lives
Speaker 1: for the Senate, as we likely will be for every
Speaker 1: single cycle for the next ten years. So you know,
Speaker 1: just kind of get used to the um while you
Speaker 1: can when you have the breather um. But yeah, like
Speaker 1: we had an okay in term that was literally a
Speaker 1: year ago looking like it was going to be possibly
Speaker 1: the worst in term wipe out, possibly the end of
Speaker 1: the Republic as literally literally, um, so you might be good.
Speaker 1: I think the responsible thing to do now is to
Speaker 1: close out by each giving one of our unhinged predictions
Speaker 1: for what we're going to see in and I'm going
Speaker 1: to start. I think we're gonna see Musk and McConaughey
Speaker 1: VI for the governor of Texas once Greg Abbott is
Speaker 1: forced out god from a sex scandal. Um, that's my
Speaker 1: that's my call. Proved to me, show show when when,
Speaker 1: when it happens? Everybody, everybody alowe me, Yeah, some some
Speaker 1: French fries, Oh god, it's gonna happen. Calling it now,
Speaker 1: Tom Brady, I reckon, Tom Brady is gonna Tom Brady
Speaker 1: is gonna take a swing at it at Texas. No
Speaker 1: one of those states up in where it's cold marines
Speaker 1: all the time. Oh yeah, yeah, yeah, one of those. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I assume he's from, broadly speaking, Illinois to Wisconsin. He is,
Speaker 1: he would be running in New England. Please do not
Speaker 1: pin that on us. Yeah yeah, yeah, yeah, bro, but
Speaker 1: not that kind of cold like yeah, just just gray,
Speaker 1: not like like miserable cold like you will have there. Yeah.
Speaker 1: Tom Brady running in a place where you can't grow
Speaker 1: tomatoes is Yeah, it's my prediction that feels good after
Speaker 1: his massive success selling the hit crypto platform f t X.
Speaker 1: What one can't Tom Brady do? Who knows? Don't, don't
Speaker 1: ask that, whyn't put that out there? Robert win games
Speaker 1: for the Bucketeers. Yeah, in Germany. Yeah, survive eating what
Speaker 1: any normal human being would eat on a given day. Garrison,
Speaker 1: I don't know, I don't. I don't care about this
Speaker 1: type of thing very much. The perfect reason to make
Speaker 1: unhinged prediction. I don't know. I think. One of the
Speaker 1: funniest things is that earlier this year there's this big
Speaker 1: bitcoin account who said that if things continue, bitcoin is
Speaker 1: going to be a major factor in the mid terms,
Speaker 1: which is so so I'm saying that what's the what's
Speaker 1: what's the even dumber cryptocurrency? Um I was thinking of?
Speaker 1: I was thinking of, does coin is gonna be a
Speaker 1: significant factor in election? Yeah? Uh? Mine is that? Mine
Speaker 1: is that? Okay, Pritzker is going to bring back like
Speaker 1: the old school democratic machine, and but by Biden is
Speaker 1: gonna fall out a window like Kamala Harris. He's going
Speaker 1: to sort of like turn up like that they're going
Speaker 1: to drain a damn in thirty years and find her
Speaker 1: body and going to run again. Yeah, yeah, he won't
Speaker 1: because he will have fallen out of a building then
Speaker 1: near the end of at the end of about three Christmas.
Speaker 1: That's your prediction that Joe Biden will fall out of
Speaker 1: a window the fourth comenetration of Prague. Like we we
Speaker 1: we all think that like the sort of like threat,
Speaker 1: like the threat to bourgeois democracy comes come comes from
Speaker 1: the Republicans. It's not. It's Pritzker. Prisker is gonna coup
Speaker 1: the fucking country and probably sixty percent of the population
Speaker 1: is going to be completely on board because he's going
Speaker 1: to be less insane than like everyone that's been like
Speaker 1: in charge of this country for the last fifty years.
Speaker 1: And you know, he's gonna save democracy then okay, yeah, okay,
Speaker 1: leaves me. What is my unhin prediction. I don't think
Speaker 1: I'm going to top christophers prediction about JP prinsker Um.
Speaker 1: You know, I think my unhin prediction will be that
Speaker 1: Taylor Swift runs for Senate in Tennessee. Oh god, oh
Speaker 1: she could do it. Yeah, yeah, I don't don't look
Speaker 1: if she if she brings on, if she brings on
Speaker 1: the head of her fan club who went to jail
Speaker 1: in Israel for refusing to serve the idea, I think
Speaker 1: that actually might get some progressive Yeah, that may have
Speaker 1: been untrue sadly, the oh the Swifty refuge, but maybe
Speaker 1: not really. Why why did you even introduce that? Why?
Speaker 1: Why would you? Why would you say that to me? Again?
Speaker 1: Because not all these beautiful things we believe it could
Speaker 1: be true, But Taylor Swift running for Tennessee, she would
Speaker 1: almost certainly be better than whoever is a Tennessee senator
Speaker 1: now right, Yeah, it's now Colonel Sanders or someone basically
Speaker 1: the same as Colonel Sanders, I imagine, can Hucky Yeah,
Speaker 1: come on, come on, Brittany James is Kentucky. It's called Kentucky.
Speaker 1: Fried chicken, James, that was that was basically a slur.
Speaker 1: I there is a type of guy epitomized by Colonel
Speaker 1: Sanders who also occupies all the Senate seats south to
Speaker 1: the Mason Dixon line. That's not true. That's that's my
Speaker 1: that's my stunts, and I'm sticking to it. I am
Speaker 1: pushing back on this. Well, I'm gonna watch a fog
Speaker 1: Horn Leghorn video because that's that's who I'm thinking of now, James,
Speaker 1: all right, everybody that's been the episode, mm go vote swift, Yeah,
Speaker 1: vote another couple of times. Just make sure, yeah, the
Speaker 1: old Chicago model. Vote early, vote often pay for pay
Speaker 1: for a few meals. Everyone go to Colorado and vote
Speaker 1: against Yes, literally seven of you or whatever conswing this
Speaker 1: move to color Right. We can't deal with that Sha anymore.
Speaker 1: Fund raise in order to purchase a huge number of
Speaker 1: drones and drop ballots over wherever it is in Colorado.
Speaker 1: They count votes. I assume Denver. Yeah, like at Denver
Speaker 1: in your ballots and stop listening to podcasts. Legal disclaimer Okay,
Speaker 1: it's actually me not the legal disclaim a guy from
Speaker 1: Medical aud but we just wanted to mention that both
Speaker 1: of Our guests today are members of you a W,
Speaker 1: but they do not speak on behalf of you a W. Okay,
Speaker 1: enjoy the podcast. Uh could happen here? It's it's it's
Speaker 1: this podcast. It's podcast. We're doing a podcast. It's a podcast,
Speaker 1: and today it's podcast with me. I'm James and I'm
Speaker 1: joined by Chris and I'm joined by a couple of
Speaker 1: grad students from you see San Diego. Today we're going
Speaker 1: to talk about grad students strikes. Are going to talk
Speaker 1: about the grad student strike Volte that's coming up at
Speaker 1: you see San Diego and some other grad students strikes
Speaker 1: that Chris and I have been part of back in
Speaker 1: the Middle Ages. Okay, so I'm joined today. But Alex, Alex,
Speaker 1: you're you're you're studying. I'm trying to get this correct.
Speaker 1: Cancer genomics a U C s D. Is that correct?
Speaker 1: That is correct? Thanks for having me. Yeah, you're welcome.
Speaker 1: And Tyler Bell as well. And Tyler you're a post
Speaker 1: doc and you're doing Altzheimer's research, so right, yes, and
Speaker 1: you're both members of U a W. Yes, that's correct.
Speaker 1: I've been a member for at least two years. But yeah,
Speaker 1: and I'm a member of the actual the subset of
Speaker 1: you aw that just formed representing student researchers in completing
Speaker 1: their PhDs. So we'll explain all the details of that
Speaker 1: of course going forward. Yeah, I think maybe we should
Speaker 1: start there and explain kind of the economic relationship of
Speaker 1: PhD and POSTDC students to the university, like what what
Speaker 1: work they do and the As we were talking about beforehand,
Speaker 1: people might not even be familiar with the fact that
Speaker 1: you get paid by the university in many of these positions, right,
Speaker 1: So can you explain like how that works? Yeah, definitely.
Speaker 1: So Yeah, as you mentioned, UM, we do uh in
Speaker 1: our various roles as graduate students, teachers, and post docs.
Speaker 1: We do a lot of work, majority of the work
Speaker 1: in fact, that is critical for the university to function
Speaker 1: as it does, UM, and we do that in a
Speaker 1: few different roles. Some of us are paid to teach
Speaker 1: or t a classes. We call those academic student employees
Speaker 1: who are represented by one of our unions you aw
Speaker 1: to eight six five. The ragnder of PhD students are
Speaker 1: actually paid directly to do their research, and this is
Speaker 1: usually funded up of grants or other money that the
Speaker 1: university has your march for research. So as we are
Speaker 1: progressing towards our degrees. We are doing work that is
Speaker 1: productive in our labs to get papers out, get grant
Speaker 1: funding coming in, and we receive a stipend to perform
Speaker 1: that work. Uh. Those students are known as graduate student
Speaker 1: researchers or gsrs, who are represented by a new union
Speaker 1: that just formed because it actually became recently legal to
Speaker 1: form such a union in the state of California. We
Speaker 1: are represented by s are you bargaining for our first contract?
Speaker 1: And then we have the post docs, which Tyler can
Speaker 1: probably talk more about. Who are students who have completed
Speaker 1: their I'm sorry I should We're really clarified. Are not
Speaker 1: students they are They are employees of the university who
Speaker 1: have completed their degrees so are no longer students and
Speaker 1: are doing research work in labs, usually driving their own
Speaker 1: projects forward under supervision of professors. So they are represented
Speaker 1: by a third union, and that's part of this sort
Speaker 1: of collective um organizing called you a w F A ten.
Speaker 1: Well you have postox unions. Yeah, well that's so cool.
Speaker 1: I think the one here you see is actually the
Speaker 1: biggest and one of the first ones that formed. I
Speaker 1: remember I was on a Wikipedia page, which I shouldn't
Speaker 1: use as an academic, but I totally there and I
Speaker 1: was likely made the game away. Yeah, yeah, And I
Speaker 1: think it's it's fascinating because if there are all these
Speaker 1: like memes that you'll see as a graduate student, and
Speaker 1: then it's like when you finish your pH d, where
Speaker 1: it's like you always think that you're going to get
Speaker 1: off the like the grind, right, Like you're like, oh,
Speaker 1: I'll do my m A and then I'll get off
Speaker 1: and then I'll do my pH d and then the
Speaker 1: people respect me and I'll be compensated for a massive
Speaker 1: amount of work I do. And then like I'll just
Speaker 1: finish this post doc and then you're like, oh, I'm
Speaker 1: fifty five, you know. Like it's all of those positions
Speaker 1: are heavily exploited by by universities that make a metric
Speaker 1: ship ton of money from these people, who, as you say,
Speaker 1: do most of the work that keeps a university running.
Speaker 1: So perhaps we could talk about the issues that are
Speaker 1: at stake that that are leading to this this strike
Speaker 1: authorization vote, and maybe if we go through a little
Speaker 1: bit of a timeline as well, that would be great. Yes,
Speaker 1: maybe Teller, maybe you could like explain the fifty ten
Speaker 1: timeline and I can talk a little bit about this,
Speaker 1: are you, and I guess kind of place a five
Speaker 1: point yeah. So chronologically the post talk we're up for
Speaker 1: their contract negotiation, which that's just to set our wages,
Speaker 1: benefits and workplace safety and other types of protections we
Speaker 1: want UM. And that actually came up I think in
Speaker 1: September of UM, and I could be wrong with the
Speaker 1: date specifically. So much has changed, but we initially back
Speaker 1: in UM started actually asking people what they wanted to
Speaker 1: see in their new contract, like our members, because the
Speaker 1: union isn't like like I if I didn't care about
Speaker 1: the union or no one else care to what exists
Speaker 1: like it's the post docs and we have to take
Speaker 1: out like a couple of hours a week to do
Speaker 1: this thing, and sometimes is twenty hours on top of
Speaker 1: our research which is forty hours. And so during that
Speaker 1: time we surveyed, everyone got the demands that people wanted,
Speaker 1: and the top two issues that people asked for that
Speaker 1: they want it changed was our wages and also the housing. UM.
Speaker 1: We wanted affordable housing because right now, UM, you know
Speaker 1: over of academic workers, including the post docs, who you
Speaker 1: would think you know, you have a PhD. This is
Speaker 1: the time you can finally have affordable housing and you
Speaker 1: don't have to worry about food scarcity and all these
Speaker 1: other things that you're worried about as a graduate student.
Speaker 1: So just take this in the context of like we're
Speaker 1: post docs. We're supposed to be like the most paid
Speaker 1: or at least a better off because we have our PhD.
Speaker 1: Think about like what that means for the graduate students
Speaker 1: and those that aren't yet at that stage yet. Um.
Speaker 1: And so when we went forward with our proposals, we
Speaker 1: um create a lot of other things that we thought
Speaker 1: were important, including things like transit UM bargaining demands to
Speaker 1: make public transit like affordable for post docs because currently
Speaker 1: we don't get any kind of like free paths for that.
Speaker 1: They don't even consider it um. In fact, you know,
Speaker 1: they probably think we all have cars, which isn't true
Speaker 1: because a lot of post docs are international scholars. We
Speaker 1: were also asking for child care support because currently, like
Speaker 1: a good bit of you know, our post docs have children. Um,
Speaker 1: which is normal because this is a normal like family
Speaker 1: creation time or whatever you wanna call it, but um,
Speaker 1: it can be one of the only times as an
Speaker 1: academic when it when it really sort of doesn't massively
Speaker 1: disadvantage your career to have stuff me right exactly. And
Speaker 1: like post docs, like the whole preposition of a post
Speaker 1: doc was, you know, there's not enough faculty spots for
Speaker 1: once you get a PhD. And post docs now can
Speaker 1: last five if not longer, like five years or longer.
Speaker 1: And there's a new position called an academic researcher, which
Speaker 1: is a type of like title that you get when
Speaker 1: you can no longer be a post doc. But it's
Speaker 1: also because there's just not enough faculty, so they put
Speaker 1: you into a different title to do research. And UM collectively,
Speaker 1: both US post docs and people that are academic researchers,
Speaker 1: we don't get any affordable childcare, we don't have affordable
Speaker 1: housing UM, and our wages are below the cost of living.
Speaker 1: And currently we went through the proposals back then and
Speaker 1: we over time a year and a half have not
Speaker 1: really made any leeway on these proposals that actually changed
Speaker 1: the material conditions for post docs. Like the university has
Speaker 1: been you know, bargaining in bad faith that we have
Speaker 1: multiple unfair UM labor practice lawsuits against from our public
Speaker 1: relations board for the employers UM and three of those
Speaker 1: have been UM. Sorry, let me get those numbers right.
Speaker 1: Multiple of those have actually been successfully have complaints filed
Speaker 1: against the university. Some of the things that the university
Speaker 1: has done in particularly while we've been bargaining is one
Speaker 1: not bringing the information to the table that we request,
Speaker 1: like denying our request for information. They have also refused
Speaker 1: to bring the people that can make the type of
Speaker 1: decisions that we need to the table. And they've all
Speaker 1: also been making unilateral changes to things like bullying policies
Speaker 1: and other workplace issues without even being at the bargaining table.
Speaker 1: And the last thing that they've been doing during this
Speaker 1: process is serving members of our union outside of like
Speaker 1: the bargaining process, Like we we don't know about it.
Speaker 1: I mean, we did find out about it, and then
Speaker 1: we followed the UM the the complaint and so right
Speaker 1: now we're at a point where we've gotten a lot
Speaker 1: of things, you know, kind of like moved on in
Speaker 1: terms of things that aren't compensation in terms of our
Speaker 1: bargaining UM, like things that we want such as bullying protections.
Speaker 1: That was something that we actually had to like have
Speaker 1: a big action for to actually get that on the table.
Speaker 1: To move. So currently we won protections against bullying, which
Speaker 1: is kind of like pretty enormous because in academia, university
Speaker 1: says we're against bullying and that they have all these
Speaker 1: resources for you, but through resources always end at we're right,
Speaker 1: you're wrong. And UM. Now we have something in our contracts,
Speaker 1: not just for that post docs and acondic researchers, but
Speaker 1: also for UM the other bargaining units to actually protect
Speaker 1: us UM in a process that like we could grieve
Speaker 1: it as you know, UNI represented workers UM. And so
Speaker 1: right now, the reason that we had to authorize the strike,
Speaker 1: especially for our group as post docs and economic researchers,
Speaker 1: because they started bargaining kind of like maybe UM further
Speaker 1: along in that year with us, but they are kind
Speaker 1: of at the same place of like not getting the
Speaker 1: same type of responses and UM. We just want them
Speaker 1: to actually come to the table, bring the people that
Speaker 1: can make the decisions so that we can have you know,
Speaker 1: affordable housing, fair wages to actually do the research that
Speaker 1: we do here. And I just want to say that
Speaker 1: we bring a lot of value to the university through
Speaker 1: grants in particular as post talks, so we do most
Speaker 1: of the writing of research papers, conducting the experiments. UM.
Speaker 1: People think that if people think that faculty sit there
Speaker 1: and run a wet lab and actually do the you know,
Speaker 1: the work of the wet labs. Um. You know, that
Speaker 1: would be an amazing faculty person, But they're really busy
Speaker 1: in terms of like having to write grants themselves. We
Speaker 1: do the bulk of the work and actually making the
Speaker 1: research happen. UM. We do a bulk of the training
Speaker 1: in terms of the graduate students and the undergrads that
Speaker 1: are in the lab, and so we provide an enormous
Speaker 1: value to the university. But at the same time, while
Speaker 1: we provide these values, UM, the university doesn't want to
Speaker 1: give us a fair living condition or affordable housing. And
Speaker 1: the last thing I'll say and then I'll let Alex
Speaker 1: talk about the other units, UM, is that you know,
Speaker 1: we bring a ton of value to the university because
Speaker 1: of these grants. And for every hundred dollars of that
Speaker 1: grant that is UM given to the university, the university
Speaker 1: charges things like the nih you know, um, you know,
Speaker 1: fifty eight dollars and indirects. So this is a ghost
Speaker 1: money that we don't know where it goes. Our pis
Speaker 1: don't get to have a say over, and that's money
Speaker 1: that usually goes to things that capital projects that could
Speaker 1: go back to keeping you know, um, the post docs
Speaker 1: actually living in uh An Okay living situation. We just
Speaker 1: in what capital projects are so counter projects or things
Speaker 1: like you know, um planning out building buildings that they
Speaker 1: want and other things things that aren't really like compensation
Speaker 1: based or employee based, you know, because the university, like
Speaker 1: you see as the biggest landowner and so they obviously
Speaker 1: we want more and more things that they can develop
Speaker 1: or lands that they can buy um, and that's kind
Speaker 1: of what they kind of focus many of these indirects on.
Speaker 1: And I really don't know the clear picture on indirects,
Speaker 1: and that's kind of the problem is that we don't
Speaker 1: know where all this money kind of goes. It's they
Speaker 1: if people. Obviously lots of our listeners are in San Diego.
Speaker 1: The scale of construction at UCSD is incredible. Like I've
Speaker 1: been here for fifteen years now, and I swear every
Speaker 1: time I go back there's a new building, like and
Speaker 1: they contend to student housing. It's really old student housing.
Speaker 1: I think that they've built. But yeah, and if I
Speaker 1: can jump in about one of those, which relates a
Speaker 1: lot to why graduate students have become more active on
Speaker 1: this campus. UM. Three or four of those extraordinarily large
Speaker 1: buildings you're talking about, we're actually intended to be built
Speaker 1: as subsidized graduate student housing, where you would be you know,
Speaker 1: you get on a waite list, you're guaranteed once you
Speaker 1: get off the way, which you can live there for
Speaker 1: two years and pay below market rent. UM. That lasted
Speaker 1: for a little bit of time, but the university just
Speaker 1: a couple of years ago or so almost doubled um
Speaker 1: the price for those units. They tried to hide it
Speaker 1: behind saying that their capacity increases, but um, what they're
Speaker 1: saying is for the same price as before, you can
Speaker 1: live with two people in a very small square footage
Speaker 1: studio apartment. UM. But really that studio is now just
Speaker 1: double UM. So that is one of the things, uh,
Speaker 1: certainly that we are concerned about is that, Yeah, money
Speaker 1: of what significant portion university's budget does go into these
Speaker 1: capital improvement projects which are nominally intended for student and
Speaker 1: UH and postdoc benefit UM, but which tend to come
Speaker 1: back and and not be quite as helpful in the
Speaker 1: long run. I mean, it seems like they're just doing
Speaker 1: real estate speculation and then doing rent extraction from it,
Speaker 1: which yeah, and this is something they've done, like they
Speaker 1: did this, this is a very very similar thing in
Speaker 1: what like two thousand nine. Like like again, like they
Speaker 1: built what I built into your building. It was affordable
Speaker 1: for a short a period of time, and then it
Speaker 1: suddenly became completely unaffordable, and like they've really consistently extracted
Speaker 1: rent from the people that they are under paying. Yeah,
Speaker 1: and those buildings were actually this this incident even got
Speaker 1: a lot of faculty on our side because those buildings
Speaker 1: were a major um draw for how we were able
Speaker 1: to recruit new people to come and do research with us.
Speaker 1: As we were saying, yeah, the costle living here is
Speaker 1: really high. You're not going to get a huge stipend
Speaker 1: er salary, but we do have the subsidised housing. And
Speaker 1: people had actually already committed to do their PhD here
Speaker 1: in labs of the university, and then the rent increase
Speaker 1: came out that April or May and people said well no,
Speaker 1: and then they a bunch of people decommitted from programs.
Speaker 1: So it was it was a significant issue here. But
Speaker 1: if not backed off of that, and the problem with
Speaker 1: like the university being one of the biggest landlords, is
Speaker 1: that when they increase the rents for these even grad housing,
Speaker 1: it affects everyone else. So like prices, like my current rent,
Speaker 1: I live maybe a mile away from campus. My rent
Speaker 1: was seventeen hundred, which was eating up most of my
Speaker 1: income anyway, and it went up to and you know,
Speaker 1: this is directly tied to like the university setting a
Speaker 1: higher market rate UM, which then allows them to hurt
Speaker 1: everyone else that lives you know, not just in around UCSD,
Speaker 1: but also in San Diego generally. Yeah. One of the
Speaker 1: big things about UM that we're trying to get the
Speaker 1: university to understand, and one of the reasons I'm proud
Speaker 1: of the demands that we're making UH in this round
Speaker 1: of bargaining is is the effect we have on the
Speaker 1: local economy and of people who aren't even affiliated with
Speaker 1: the university have their lives affected based on the rent
Speaker 1: and based on the cost of things because of the
Speaker 1: economic footprint that we have. And as how I mentioned,
Speaker 1: one of our demands is UM some more subsidized transit passes.
Speaker 1: The university already subsidizes It's a significant amount of transit,
Speaker 1: but it's not enough, and it's not enough to actually
Speaker 1: really make a difference in terms of emissions in our region.
Speaker 1: So we're trying to raise both our own working conditions
Speaker 1: as well as as make meaningful changes in the university's
Speaker 1: impact in the region. And in response to that, the
Speaker 1: university released in part a very funny statement the other
Speaker 1: day that accused us and used transit as an example,
Speaker 1: accused us of having a quote social justice agenda. So
Speaker 1: I wasn't quite sure if the university or um Ronda
Speaker 1: Santis wrote that particular sans release, but uh, it was.
Speaker 1: It was quite funny, you know, Okay, like that. The
Speaker 1: more thinking about this, right, this is a public university.
Speaker 1: Why are they even charging rent? They own the land, right,
Speaker 1: why are they even charging rent in the first place?
Speaker 1: Like what what is? Oh my god? Like, well, it's
Speaker 1: just the the housing example I brought up was funded
Speaker 1: through what they very proudly refer to as a public
Speaker 1: private partnership. So that's where the one is going. Oh great,
Speaker 1: it's going to investors. And recently, for the post docs,
Speaker 1: their solution to our housing crisis was they obtained some
Speaker 1: building in downtown San Diego, which is you know, twelve
Speaker 1: or more miles away from campus and the building starts
Speaker 1: at like rent of three thousand dollars or more. But
Speaker 1: like I said, this building, yeah, with the one with
Speaker 1: the creepy bed and the closet that comes out and
Speaker 1: kills your cat. But you know what it has like
Speaker 1: a closet that folds out o comes out. Is that
Speaker 1: their extended downtown. Yeah. I've been trying to p R
Speaker 1: A and a bunch of stuff about that building and
Speaker 1: they've been quite reticent to hand it over and toddly. So, Alex,
Speaker 1: is there any more contexts you wanted to add from
Speaker 1: your side about like is about sort of what is
Speaker 1: driving people to to ask for a strike authorization vote? Yeah, definitely.
Speaker 1: I mean, our concerns as graduate students are certainly very
Speaker 1: similar to a out of the concerns that postdoctoral students have,
Speaker 1: except that we make even less money than they do.
Speaker 1: So certainly UH urgent on the compensation side, our units
Speaker 1: are demanding a minimum UH graduate student stipend of fifty
Speaker 1: four thousand dollars a year UM, whereas UH none of
Speaker 1: us make more than thirty three or thirty four right now,
Speaker 1: and that's very deficient of the program and very dependent
Speaker 1: on your source of funding, so most make quite less
Speaker 1: than that. UM. We also have a number of other
Speaker 1: issues that have come up and cause problems for students
Speaker 1: that we want to be able to have a union
Speaker 1: in order to rectify. I mentioned that UM our Student
Speaker 1: Researchers United Union. It actually knew. We're bargaining for our
Speaker 1: first contract, and we think we're going to be able
Speaker 1: to get a lot of practical benefits out of that,
Speaker 1: not just UM you know, in terms of a contract,
Speaker 1: but actually something where we can have some parody and
Speaker 1: and some for some some some organization to come to
Speaker 1: back for us when the university creates issues. For example, Uh,
Speaker 1: the university has known this for a long time. But
Speaker 1: the payroll system that manages graduate students stipends and fellowships
Speaker 1: and and and and to stipend disperse mints is a
Speaker 1: bit unreliable for reasons that they can't explain. Boy, so
Speaker 1: I wasn't I wasn't a grad student, but I was
Speaker 1: an undergrad when our Chicago's grad students when a strike,
Speaker 1: and that was a big thing of like people like
Speaker 1: people would get paid in the university would sometimes they
Speaker 1: wouldn't get paid enough. The wouldn't get paid at all.
Speaker 1: There was another time where they accidentally get overpaid and
Speaker 1: the university wouldn't tell them and then they just take
Speaker 1: all the money out of their bank account and catastrophe. Yeah.
Speaker 1: Is it similar things here? Very much? So? Yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: there is at least My personal story with this is
Speaker 1: um uh pretty much ever since so, I applied for
Speaker 1: and received in in i H Individual Fellowship. For all
Speaker 1: the other nerds out there, I got it. It's a
Speaker 1: thirty one in i H Fellowship. But essentially what that
Speaker 1: says is the n i H likes my research proposal
Speaker 1: and they are going to fund a portion of the
Speaker 1: rest of my PhD. So in a sense, I've offset
Speaker 1: the cost of my labor by bringing an extra a
Speaker 1: few tens of thousands of dollars to the university. Um However,
Speaker 1: the processing for that has not been smooth, and there
Speaker 1: are months where I simply have to remind them to
Speaker 1: pay me. And when that paycheck doesn't come through, my
Speaker 1: very hard working program coordinator, it's not her fault, but
Speaker 1: she has been open support tickets. She has to go
Speaker 1: through ten different levels of bureaucracy to find out where
Speaker 1: the hold up is, and so What that results in
Speaker 1: is people often times not getting significant portions of their
Speaker 1: stipend and tell well into the beginning of the first
Speaker 1: or second week of the month. UM. I personally am
Speaker 1: been lucky enough to you know, build up some savings
Speaker 1: living here UM, but many students, especially our first year
Speaker 1: is coming right out of college, have not been able
Speaker 1: to do that. And a lot of times at the
Speaker 1: first of the month we have people, you know, people
Speaker 1: will come to me and say they just didn't they
Speaker 1: I don't know why my stipmens I didn't work. I
Speaker 1: can't pay rent, or I can't get groceries. And these
Speaker 1: issues have been going on. This have not been one
Speaker 1: time things or sporadic things. These are things that have
Speaker 1: been continuously going on for years. And what we're really
Speaker 1: hoping for is that with the creation of this Student
Speaker 1: Researchers Union, that we will be able to not just
Speaker 1: you know, send polite emails and say hi, can you
Speaker 1: pay me if you get a chance, We will actually
Speaker 1: have a literal international union that will be sending those
Speaker 1: emails and say, you know, you fix this, or by
Speaker 1: the terms of the contract, we get X, Y and
Speaker 1: Z damages UM. And we're hoping that that leads to
Speaker 1: improvements in the system as a as a whole, because
Speaker 1: it will get more expensive. So that issaraily. One of
Speaker 1: the reasons we formed s are you and are after
Speaker 1: a brief vote to strike for recognition because the university
Speaker 1: ignored the employee religious part of California, which resulted in
Speaker 1: some very spicy press releases from herbs which is great, um,
Speaker 1: but we did eventually get recognition and and now hopefully
Speaker 1: in a couple in a month or so, we'll have
Speaker 1: a contract. Yeah, to explain for people as well who
Speaker 1: aren't familiar. If you're teaching right, you may not have
Speaker 1: been paid over the summer in some positions like I
Speaker 1: know I wasn't in mind, so like a late payment
Speaker 1: in September or even wait until October, like is you're
Speaker 1: already at the bottom of your savings, like there were
Speaker 1: there were full quarters the headquarters at UCSD where like
Speaker 1: I lived in my car because it didn't make it
Speaker 1: all the way through the summer and the savings I had,
Speaker 1: you know, So it really is. And I'm sure there
Speaker 1: are a lot of still like and how it's graduate
Speaker 1: students at UCSD because of the cost of living in
Speaker 1: the the wags are so divergent. Yeah, hey, Chris, you
Speaker 1: you know what won't make you live in your car?
Speaker 1: Oh God, there's no way that's It's going to be
Speaker 1: the watches that Harry patrol again, Todd Gloria, Okay, yeah,
Speaker 1: this has brought to you by Landlords into The's adverts
Speaker 1: and we're back. And so what I wanted to talk
Speaker 1: about was some of the actions that have been taken
Speaker 1: by student organizations so far, and also some of the
Speaker 1: repercussions to come from those actions, because again, student organizing
Speaker 1: is a little different, and I want people to understand that.
Speaker 1: So maybe if it makes sense to start with this wildcats, right,
Speaker 1: we can start there. If you want to start further back,
Speaker 1: then we can start fither back to you. You know,
Speaker 1: is probably about the extent of my how far my
Speaker 1: experience goes back, Um, But I can tell kind of
Speaker 1: the story of that a little bit. Um. There was
Speaker 1: a movement that we referred to as COLA, which stands
Speaker 1: for a cost of living adjustment and convenient as very
Speaker 1: convenient acronym, which resulted in people coming to protest with
Speaker 1: empty bottles coke on a stick. And that was a
Speaker 1: really common science fantastic UM. But that was a movement
Speaker 1: that started at the University of California, Santa Cruz. One
Speaker 1: of the for people aren't familiar with. You see, it
Speaker 1: is really actually many campuses together in one system. In
Speaker 1: this particular one started at our campus in Santa Cruz,
Speaker 1: UM and it was what is called a wildcat strike,
Speaker 1: which is if you're not family with unions that is
Speaker 1: um UM, at least in America, there are very uh
Speaker 1: careful rules that you have to follow of when exactly
Speaker 1: you are allowed to call a legally protected strike, and
Speaker 1: that's often dependent on your contract or the label laws
Speaker 1: of your state. UM. But it is possible for workers
Speaker 1: to get together without the explicit approval of their union
Speaker 1: and UH take the added risk that involves to hold
Speaker 1: a labor stoppage so UM I'm not sure of the
Speaker 1: exact number, but somewhere between fifty and a hundred or
Speaker 1: two hundred or so t a s um SO teaching
Speaker 1: assistance at the Santa Cruz campus decided to withhold teaching
Speaker 1: and also final exam and UH semester or sorry quarter
Speaker 1: grades UH for a quarter uh in I believe this
Speaker 1: would have been fall or followed twenty team UM and
Speaker 1: they held UM. They held essentially daily pickets and protests
Speaker 1: UM at their central insrance of their campus, and this
Speaker 1: resulted in quite an extreme response from Santa Cruz administration,
Speaker 1: University of Santa Cruz administration. UH. They called in the
Speaker 1: California Highway Patrol. UM. Also there's will I've asked, I'll
Speaker 1: send this to christ and James put in the footnotes.
Speaker 1: But there is a Vice article where someone did a
Speaker 1: lot of public records request and found out that the
Speaker 1: FBI was also involved, or at least FBI provided technology
Speaker 1: was involved. UM. There may have been sort of counter
Speaker 1: terrorism UH units involved in the state in interesting ways UM.
Speaker 1: But essentially there was a highly militarized response to what
Speaker 1: was essentially a few grant students not doing grades. UM.
Speaker 1: So this response, the images that came out of this,
Speaker 1: people getting arrested UH for being in the street and
Speaker 1: such UM started to actually provoke sympathy actions across the
Speaker 1: rest of the campus and there was really a campus
Speaker 1: wide or system wide movement starting to build. And then
Speaker 1: March of happened and almost all of us are labs
Speaker 1: shut down, the campuses shut down, UH. Those of us
Speaker 1: who work from home could, UM. Those of us who
Speaker 1: couldn't often had you know, many other struggles to deal with,
Speaker 1: and that kind of killed the pandemic, essentially killed that movement.
Speaker 1: But at the same time, UM, you know these uhh
Speaker 1: u A W twets at five and you could get
Speaker 1: ten already existed. SRU was starting to get formed at
Speaker 1: this time. We actually managed to get car check recognition
Speaker 1: during the pandemic where no one could actually go to
Speaker 1: one central point in get cards. So I'm quite proud
Speaker 1: of that. And we sort of rebuilt off of kind
Speaker 1: of UM, sort of the ashes of that movement. And
Speaker 1: even though it was not UM and I personally supported,
Speaker 1: but even though it was not a university sort of
Speaker 1: excuse me, certainly not university supported, but union supported uh movement. UM,
Speaker 1: I think it really helped a kind of um plants
Speaker 1: needs for graduate students and post docx having some you know,
Speaker 1: some degree of labor consciousness. When I was doing walkers
Speaker 1: to get people signed up for the union, get people
Speaker 1: quote on the strike, they would say, you know, they
Speaker 1: haven't obviously been keeping track of all the barguing, but
Speaker 1: would say, oh, yeah, I remember, is this like in
Speaker 1: Santa Cruz, I remember what they did, and people would
Speaker 1: be and be ready, you know, to get involved. So um,
Speaker 1: it was a deferred kind of benefit given the pandemic,
Speaker 1: but I think it helped get a lot of the
Speaker 1: energy that we have today. Yeah, that's great to see actually,
Speaker 1: because iknew we really struggled with sort of political consciousness
Speaker 1: on the on the among the grab seeds in my
Speaker 1: time at E C. S D. And Yeah, I guess
Speaker 1: it makes us like that they were I remember, like
Speaker 1: I were talking to some people who were sort of
Speaker 1: involved with it, and like watching the videos coming out
Speaker 1: of here, like that was I think, like probably the
Speaker 1: most intensive military responsive I think I've ever seen to
Speaker 1: a strike at the US. It was wild. Like, Yeah,
Speaker 1: the university chancellor, chancellor of Santa Cruz at that time
Speaker 1: bragged or I don't know if it was Brad or
Speaker 1: complained that they were spending three hundred thousand dollars a
Speaker 1: day on that response. Yeah, they went incredibly hard. And
Speaker 1: I want to kind of get into why, like the
Speaker 1: university is really really strongly strongly dislike strikes and partly
Speaker 1: because they rely heavily on underpaid graduate student labor and
Speaker 1: increasingly relying heavily on underpaid adjunct labor as well to
Speaker 1: take the place of these expensive tenure track positions. So
Speaker 1: can we talk about a little bit about like what
Speaker 1: it means to strike as a grad student, because it's
Speaker 1: not the same strike as a grad student as it
Speaker 1: is to strike if you work on a production lineup right, Like,
Speaker 1: it really can make a serious impact on your whole career,
Speaker 1: and it can make it a serious impact on your
Speaker 1: relationship prets with your with your supervisor or advisor or mentor,
Speaker 1: and so can you can you one of you or
Speaker 1: both of you explained a little bit about the repercussions
Speaker 1: to come from striking as a graduate student. Yeah, I'm
Speaker 1: having to share my thoughts and then and then um Tyther,
Speaker 1: you can maybe talk about what uh what post docs
Speaker 1: are thinking? Um from the uh t A perspective, I
Speaker 1: think I don't want to. I'm not currently I'm currently
Speaker 1: a student researchers, so I'm not currently teaching, I think,
Speaker 1: and that since it makes there's a little more cut
Speaker 1: and dry. It's you're not going to teach your discussion section,
Speaker 1: You're not going to grade your exams. There's are very
Speaker 1: concrete things you can do that are sort of separate
Speaker 1: from your research work. For those of us paid to research,
Speaker 1: it's a little bit um harder to figure out where
Speaker 1: exactly you're sometimes you're labor for the university is and
Speaker 1: where you're um uh kind of research and and and
Speaker 1: not wanting to sort of harm yourself. Like I know
Speaker 1: people who have planned their advancements to candidacy during this time,
Speaker 1: and I think they're still going through with that because
Speaker 1: we can say, well, that's more academic, that's more your
Speaker 1: personal a kind of progress um in life, and and
Speaker 1: so those sort of things will continue, um. But but
Speaker 1: I think it's one of the things, um that that's
Speaker 1: sort of um important is is um sort of your
Speaker 1: day to day work in the lab and not necessarily
Speaker 1: saying your research project, but on just sort of maintaining things,
Speaker 1: answering questions, communicating with collaborators, sharing your results with people,
Speaker 1: helping undergraduates in the lab, helping um you know, prepare
Speaker 1: figures or prepare text for your advisor to submit grants,
Speaker 1: and all these other things that are not necessarily like
Speaker 1: I am doing this particular, you know, I think for
Speaker 1: my degree. UM. So I know a lot of people
Speaker 1: are worried about, especially because in the life sciences. We
Speaker 1: have situations where we have experiments that go on for
Speaker 1: months and they cost tens of thousands of dollars to run,
Speaker 1: and if you miss a time point on that we're
Speaker 1: throwing months of your life and out of the window,
Speaker 1: and that it hurts yourself really more than the university.
Speaker 1: So it's been a I think, especially because organizing grad
Speaker 1: student researchers is something new, at least in America. UM.
Speaker 1: I think it's something that in the coming years will
Speaker 1: be kind of considered more and people will kind of
Speaker 1: I think I hope. What I hope is people learn
Speaker 1: from our whatever our experience happens to be next week
Speaker 1: when we walk out and start to kind of calibrate,
Speaker 1: what does it look like? What is what is an
Speaker 1: effective work stoppage for a researcher look like? UM? And
Speaker 1: I think people are are We've had a lot of discussions,
Speaker 1: We've had programmed meetings, so a bunch of students from
Speaker 1: my program got together and talked about this UM and
Speaker 1: I think it might end up looking different for different people,
Speaker 1: But really what we're trying to communicate is is don't
Speaker 1: do something that's going to UM, you know, damage yourself. UM.
Speaker 1: But but but do what you can to disrupt normal operations.
Speaker 1: Show up at the picket, um uh, and and make
Speaker 1: sure you you communicate, you know, to everyone and around
Speaker 1: you why you're leaving, and and and you know, cause
Speaker 1: as much disruption as you can. That's kind of what
Speaker 1: our our thinking is at the moment. Yeah, and I
Speaker 1: thin guts you want to add t Yeah, so I
Speaker 1: want to add that. UM. So for this one, this strike,
Speaker 1: I mean, the reason that we're doing it is because
Speaker 1: they're not coming to the table in good faith. So
Speaker 1: I was going to correct my numbers. So we had
Speaker 1: twenty seven UM complaints that we fouled with the California
Speaker 1: Public Employment Relations Board, and six of those were actually
Speaker 1: official complaints to the University of California. And so this
Speaker 1: strike is a little different because it's you know, it's
Speaker 1: interesting to have to explain to other people why this
Speaker 1: is so important, especially in such a short time frame.
Speaker 1: And so for post docs, like on a day to
Speaker 1: day basis, we do so much research that every day matters,
Speaker 1: and our employment schedules aren't very long. So I say
Speaker 1: that post docs are generally in there for five years.
Speaker 1: But p I don't want to keep a post talk
Speaker 1: for a year or two or longer, especially like I've
Speaker 1: noticed a pattern here in academia in general that post docs.
Speaker 1: It's some people prefer to keep them a year and
Speaker 1: two years because by the time you ask for pay
Speaker 1: raises or the time you ask for curd development and
Speaker 1: to get to your next stage, you're not worth it
Speaker 1: to them anymore, and they change you out. So when
Speaker 1: I come in as a post doc, each position, I've
Speaker 1: come in everyday mattered and setting up my research experiment,
Speaker 1: setting up my papers, setting up what I was gonna
Speaker 1: do for the job search, because you don't have that
Speaker 1: much time. It takes you know, six to eight months
Speaker 1: to get get even an initial interview for a faculty
Speaker 1: job UM, and that's a rare thing that you would
Speaker 1: get anyway. I think about two percent of post talks
Speaker 1: become faculty at this point, and so we're giving up
Speaker 1: a lot of Yeah, it's really bleak, and so like
Speaker 1: right now, I think the fact that we authorize a
Speaker 1: strike based on the UM bad faith bargaining. We did
Speaker 1: that because like things are so important, but we know
Speaker 1: what we're gonna lose. So if you have to strike
Speaker 1: for weeks, that is lost experiments, that's lost time to
Speaker 1: do our publications be competitive for this competitive job field. UM.
Speaker 1: And also we're gonna let down a lot of people
Speaker 1: because we're kind of anchors in our lab for the
Speaker 1: undergraduates and the under and the graduate students and also
Speaker 1: the text in our lab. And so if we're gone,
Speaker 1: the lab just kind of die, especially if the grass
Speaker 1: roots walk out too. UM. But I think we know
Speaker 1: that the value that I would get personally for my career, UM,
Speaker 1: it isn't worth it if I see not only myself
Speaker 1: suffering each year, not being able to make my rent
Speaker 1: enable to feed myself, like eating one mill a day
Speaker 1: is um not really great, and being able to afford
Speaker 1: one UM wardrobe this entire two years of employment is
Speaker 1: not great either. UM. And I'm a post doc and
Speaker 1: I see the graduate students who I was a graduate
Speaker 1: student two years ago. There's not a real border there,
Speaker 1: UM and seeing them suffer. You know, most of us
Speaker 1: post talks don't want to see anyone else have to
Speaker 1: go through that. So it's worth the lost time, and
Speaker 1: it's kind of encalculable. But I could say what we
Speaker 1: would lose because grants are so up in the air.
Speaker 1: But you know, We're talking millions of dollars for a
Speaker 1: grant cycle being lost if a post doc can't you know,
Speaker 1: submit the application. We're talking you know, uh what Alex said,
Speaker 1: how expensive this equipment and experiments are in these big
Speaker 1: labs UM in biology and engineering. So it's really immeasurable.
Speaker 1: And I think it's on the u C to come
Speaker 1: to the table and good faith and say, hey, let's
Speaker 1: not do let's not's not ruin their research and their
Speaker 1: teaching UM, because that's the thing that we're here to
Speaker 1: support UM. And I just want to say that overall,
Speaker 1: we're only less than one percent of you see's total budgets.
Speaker 1: So what is it to give us a fair wage
Speaker 1: and a good housing so we can continue to not UM,
Speaker 1: to continue to continue to do our research and teaching
Speaker 1: and not have to go and strike and lose all
Speaker 1: of this. Yeah, yeah, I think it's very fair. You
Speaker 1: know what else, It only pays out one percent of
Speaker 1: their income to their employee, said the Washington to stay
Speaker 1: higher patrol notes not they pay Yeah. Yeah, Yeah, it's disappointing,
Speaker 1: isn't it. Yeah, We're we're back. Yeah. So I think
Speaker 1: you've done a really excellent job of explaining sort of
Speaker 1: what's at stake and what people can stand to lose.
Speaker 1: I know it can be very confusing. Also as a teacher,
Speaker 1: I will add, like what do you do when you're
Speaker 1: you're not supposed to communicate right like, so, like what
Speaker 1: what about when your students email you? That can be
Speaker 1: very difficult or especially if it comes towards the time
Speaker 1: when you're writing application letters or your writing letters of
Speaker 1: support for your your be a students who want to
Speaker 1: go into an m a. Or pH d program, like
Speaker 1: you don't want like many of us teach as much
Speaker 1: out of vocation as for the thirty ye old grand
Speaker 1: a year. We can make it a place where the
Speaker 1: cost of living is insane, and so like we want
Speaker 1: to help those people because we care about our students
Speaker 1: and and so it can be very hard for us
Speaker 1: to go on strike. I will say that we're very
Speaker 1: fortunate in the community college district here, which is a
Speaker 1: different system and for people who aren't aware it's an
Speaker 1: entirely different university system. We have a very strong union
Speaker 1: and as a result, our I junct faculty here are
Speaker 1: I believe some of the best paid in the country.
Speaker 1: The teacher the community college sometimes and it's exclusively thanks
Speaker 1: to a strong union and faculty being willing to back
Speaker 1: up that union, so like it does work, which is
Speaker 1: nice to see. But let's talk about some of the
Speaker 1: actions that have been taken already and understand it. Some
Speaker 1: folks occupied like a very busy intersection earlier this year
Speaker 1: in the spring, right you want to talk about that. Yeah,
Speaker 1: that was the action that we had um UM back
Speaker 1: in April UM to sort of raise awareness of the
Speaker 1: you know, issues of bargaining and some of the things
Speaker 1: that we're going out at that time UM and I
Speaker 1: was really impressive how well it went, actually UM in
Speaker 1: terms of the number of students who came out number
Speaker 1: we are actually willing to participate in that. But yeah,
Speaker 1: we gotta several hundred people altogether marched down to UM
Speaker 1: the intersection for our San Diego listeners. That's via La
Speaker 1: Joya and La Hoya Village Drive, just so you can
Speaker 1: get a picture of how important of an intersection this
Speaker 1: was those of you who know it. UM and did
Speaker 1: not allow any cars at the intersection for an entire
Speaker 1: rush hour, which was fantastic UM and the whole foods
Speaker 1: we did. Yeah, yeah, I took UH I hope that
Speaker 1: UM sic p D build UCSD for that because they
Speaker 1: had about fifty officers controlling traffic to helicopters. UM it
Speaker 1: was quite a response. I talked to an undercover cop
Speaker 1: on the bridge over the highway they had. He was
Speaker 1: upset that he was missing something, some baseball game or something.
Speaker 1: I don't know. I could have had a real job
Speaker 1: just left. Yeah, I'm actually staring at that intersection right now,
Speaker 1: And if I could tell you how busy it is,
Speaker 1: Like we were terrified of what, Like safety was the
Speaker 1: most important thing, and I think we did a good
Speaker 1: job being sure everyone was safe. But like it's busy,
Speaker 1: it's it is a heartline over your My first day
Speaker 1: in America, I was walking with another Grats to try
Speaker 1: and find some food and we tried to cross that road,
Speaker 1: goes stuck in the middle, got to jaywalking ticket and
Speaker 1: right I knew I had made a great choice in
Speaker 1: coming to California at that time. Yeah, that is that
Speaker 1: road takes like if you want to cross all three ways,
Speaker 1: because it's one of our one of stupid California roads,
Speaker 1: we can only cross the intersection on three sides, so
Speaker 1: we're gonna go all the way around. That's going to
Speaker 1: be like five six, seven minutes waitning at crosswalks. It's
Speaker 1: it's but that's that's for maybe a different podcast about
Speaker 1: nightmares here in San Diego. UM. I think there's one
Speaker 1: other action that we had that I would really want
Speaker 1: to highlight and and this was about, you know, related
Speaker 1: to a post dox. So maybe maybe Tyler can kind
Speaker 1: of film the details UM about the the action we
Speaker 1: had for UM for the UH postox redence. I can't.
Speaker 1: I can't. I'm blanking on her name, but made may
Speaker 1: be able to talk about There's been so many post
Speaker 1: docs and actions. So this is a really horrible case
Speaker 1: where someone who you know had brought up that there
Speaker 1: was data UH ethics issues in their lab, which obviously,
Speaker 1: as any post soccer graduate student telling your boss that
Speaker 1: they're doing something wrong never goes well. UM, but this
Speaker 1: person was bringing up this issue. This person also was
Speaker 1: UM was pregnant and UM at that point the person,
Speaker 1: once they found out that this person was pregnant, UM
Speaker 1: had decided, oh, well, you need to leave by the
Speaker 1: end of the year, UM, which would make the make
Speaker 1: it to where the person would get deported. Because this
Speaker 1: was an international scholar UM in their third trime. Master UM,
Speaker 1: you know, in in January, and so it was too
Speaker 1: more insurance during her third trimester. Yeah, and so Alex,
Speaker 1: if if you have a good memory of the action,
Speaker 1: I'll let you speak about it, because it was pretty awesome. Yeah,
Speaker 1: it was pretty great. We got a ton of people
Speaker 1: to rally in the health sciences area of campus. UM
Speaker 1: people essentially set up little mini pickets of the relevant
Speaker 1: buildings UM basically not blocking the insurance, but making sure
Speaker 1: everyone went in new exactly you know why we were
Speaker 1: there and what the issue was. And they were eventually
Speaker 1: towards the end of the day. I was I wasn't
Speaker 1: there at that point, but they were able to actually
Speaker 1: get up to UM where UM the chair of her
Speaker 1: department's office in lab were UM and I there nothing
Speaker 1: threatening that went on, but I do believe the cops
Speaker 1: were called nonetheless UM and and my understanding was this
Speaker 1: is just rumor. But he told someone that he really
Speaker 1: needed them to leave because he had to get to
Speaker 1: the bathroom and didn't want to talk to the students.
Speaker 1: So that was funny part of the story. UM. But
Speaker 1: they did get him on video because they eventually were
Speaker 1: able to talk to the chair of the department and
Speaker 1: got him on video saying I think this person deserves
Speaker 1: an extension of their contract. And that day or two
Speaker 1: later UCSD did actually award this post doc um and
Speaker 1: extension of her contract. But yeah, that this is an
Speaker 1: incident that you never would have seen the light of day,
Speaker 1: um unless this had been raised. Uh, unless we hadn't
Speaker 1: already had this kind of activists kind of consciousness going
Speaker 1: on because of the ongoing bargaining, and the union was
Speaker 1: able to post union was able to win kind of
Speaker 1: I think out of a really terrible situation, I think
Speaker 1: salvage probably one of the best outcome. She'll be able
Speaker 1: to have her child here um and look for new
Speaker 1: jobs in the meantime to um, you know whatever her
Speaker 1: family wants to do extended visa or or go back
Speaker 1: to their original country. But they essentially they have security, uh,
Speaker 1: some measure of security now, um, which wouldn't have happened
Speaker 1: about uh raising uh quite a disruption over it. And
Speaker 1: I also want to say that this was a post
Speaker 1: doc and the grad students came out to protect a
Speaker 1: post doc. So all these invisible lines at the university
Speaker 1: draws like obviously there were post docs there too. But
Speaker 1: if you think about the number of graduate students, like
Speaker 1: they are the immune system that has come out and
Speaker 1: saved a bunch of post docs through these actions. There
Speaker 1: was another action with someone that was being let go
Speaker 1: within four months of their employment, um in an inappropriate way.
Speaker 1: This person was kind of using their lab as that
Speaker 1: research mill I talked about only really hired women post
Speaker 1: docs and really did not treat them well, um despite
Speaker 1: doing research in women's health. And um, the grad students
Speaker 1: also came out for that, and we got to save
Speaker 1: that person from getting immediately fired and they're better off. Man. Hell, yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: it's great. I think that sort of diarity is super important,
Speaker 1: and yeah, is the only thing that stops university from
Speaker 1: just rapidly exploiting everyone apart from like a hundred and
Speaker 1: fifty people at the very top. Actually, on that note,
Speaker 1: can I ask have you been working with like I guess,
Speaker 1: what's the tactical name for them, like the like the
Speaker 1: like the the other non student unions on campus. Oh
Speaker 1: it's like a f tis yeah yeah, like yeah, yeah yeah.
Speaker 1: They Unfortunately most of the unions don't have sympathy strike
Speaker 1: or uh those sorts of things. In their contract if
Speaker 1: if they cannot do an official strike if they are
Speaker 1: under contract. But yeah, they've definitely been helping in terms
Speaker 1: of kind of raising consciousness and awareness. I know, the
Speaker 1: ones that have the ability to, um, you know, maybe
Speaker 1: cancel their classes or use class time to teach about
Speaker 1: the strike or you know, do things like that. UM
Speaker 1: have been um uh there there that they're planning to
Speaker 1: do that. UM. What's nice as well is that this
Speaker 1: isn't really a union, but there's kind of a non
Speaker 1: university affiliated sort of group of faculty who you know,
Speaker 1: advocate for for for changes across the entire campus, and
Speaker 1: they're organizing a very large petition and letter writing campaign
Speaker 1: from faculty members supporting our action, which I think is
Speaker 1: is really critical because the university won't listen to us,
Speaker 1: but they may listen to if you get to a
Speaker 1: critical massive of professors supporting what we're doing. UM. So
Speaker 1: there's been uh, you know, not universal certainly, but but
Speaker 1: there's been a great deal of solidarity, even coming from
Speaker 1: some of the people who who the university I think
Speaker 1: has relied on to be more on their side, which
Speaker 1: is the professors, like the Faculty Association. I think that's
Speaker 1: pretty awesome because you can imagine that you see doesn't
Speaker 1: want them to ever unionize, but they obviously see the
Speaker 1: leaky pipeline where grass students or you know, either not
Speaker 1: staying in their programs or post talks aren't coming. And
Speaker 1: you just you know, what you happen to have at
Speaker 1: the end of that is people that have generational wealth
Speaker 1: um at the end of it, who happened to stay
Speaker 1: in these programs. And I think that's what really motive
Speaker 1: the facony to come out and say something because like
Speaker 1: you see says, oh, we support equity university, but then
Speaker 1: they have seen constantly the university not do anything materially
Speaker 1: to change that. Yeah, yeah, it's good. It's good to
Speaker 1: see the fact that he's shooting up UM. And again
Speaker 1: that's it's sort of that's that's how we fix these things, right,
Speaker 1: is by staking together with sort of dearity, with organizing.
Speaker 1: So maybe to finish up, if we talk about what
Speaker 1: next week is going to look like, what next week
Speaker 1: might look like I guess or I guess it'll it'll
Speaker 1: be this week by the time this comes out, Yeah yeah, yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: So what can people look for and the on the
Speaker 1: timeline from U c s D from the university or
Speaker 1: from from from from the from the strike. Yeah, that's right. Yeah, Well,
Speaker 1: we'll have a number of pickets throughout campus, UM mostly
Speaker 1: kind of trying to keep them geographically oriented, so everyone
Speaker 1: from the surrounding buildings just go to you know, one
Speaker 1: one specific spot. We've we're doing you know, sign ups,
Speaker 1: organizing strike pay, all those sorts of typical things have
Speaker 1: been going on this week, UM, and the walkout begins
Speaker 1: November for across you know, not just UCSD but all
Speaker 1: the campuses. So that's our total um UM bargaining unit
Speaker 1: membership across the three unions is for people of those
Speaker 1: voted on our strikeout vote voted yes. So we're expecting
Speaker 1: a pretty significant turnout of that entire membership to be
Speaker 1: on the picket line. UM. So that will there will
Speaker 1: be UM, you know, those t as who are walking
Speaker 1: out will be that that will be the first disruption
Speaker 1: university feels before they feel a research disruption. They will
Speaker 1: very clearly see the teaching disruption and exams not taking place,
Speaker 1: grades not being entered, UH, sections not being taught across
Speaker 1: every single campus and UM and that will certainly be
Speaker 1: UM something that they will UM have to deal with
Speaker 1: the end and hopefully the size of the disruption in
Speaker 1: the first few days will convince them to come to
Speaker 1: the bargaining table in a reasonable way UM, and if not,
Speaker 1: we are prepared to continue until they do. And the
Speaker 1: other interesting part about what's gonna happen next week is
Speaker 1: that this is UM a picket line that is going
Speaker 1: to be not just including you know, researchers and instructors,
Speaker 1: but also people that support us. So there's a big
Speaker 1: conference downtown for a lot of neuroscientists and UM it's
Speaker 1: it's called sf N I can't remember what that stands for, UM,
Speaker 1: but a lot of them are actually coming to the
Speaker 1: picket line to support us. I didn't know about that.
Speaker 1: That's great, Yeah, yeah, it's I think that's pretty exciting.
Speaker 1: I didn't know it was in San Diego, but UM,
Speaker 1: they're gonna be here, and also, you know, vouch for
Speaker 1: us because you see does like we are the leading
Speaker 1: research group and we contribute to a lot of the
Speaker 1: research that are at these meetings. Anyway. UM, there's also
Speaker 1: going to be it's a child friendly picket line and
Speaker 1: for people with access needs, we're gonna have UM, you know,
Speaker 1: virtual picketing and you'll see what that looks like. Um,
Speaker 1: it's still being developed, but I think that's pretty exciting.
Speaker 1: As someone, you know, with a disability to myself, it's
Speaker 1: exciting that other people can contribute to that. Yeah, it's
Speaker 1: very cool to you guys to do that. It's very cool.
Speaker 1: How can people help? How can we support you? How
Speaker 1: can people find you? On the internet? Yeah, So, I
Speaker 1: think if you want to keep up with the strike news,
Speaker 1: there's three Twitter accounts, the s r U U a
Speaker 1: w u W and you a W two week six five.
Speaker 1: I think they kind of share a lot of sim
Speaker 1: content sometimes because we're all kind of doing this together.
Speaker 1: But that's a good place to keep track of the news.
Speaker 1: I know there is a link to UM. There's a
Speaker 1: they've set up a Hardship strike fund UM. I don't
Speaker 1: have that link off top of my head, but if
Speaker 1: you yeah to us later and if you go to
Speaker 1: fair you see now dot org it have all the
Speaker 1: information about what's happening, but also those type of links
Speaker 1: to UM. So if you want some contact, so it's
Speaker 1: pretty good. Yeah, and then how about YouTube personally? Would
Speaker 1: you like to share your personal Twitter so or do
Speaker 1: you just want to stick with the the organizational once. Um,
Speaker 1: I would love to. I promise, I'm not that fun,
Speaker 1: but minus Tyler Bell PhD. That's my dad. Yeah, and
Speaker 1: I'm Alex t Winzel on Twitter. I once this is over,
Speaker 1: I'll probably go back to tweeting entirely about my work
Speaker 1: and pictures of busses. Your Twitter, Alex, Yeah, is a
Speaker 1: high value follow. Thank you. Alex gives live updates about
Speaker 1: transit and it's exciting. You see a train, It's all good.
Speaker 1: It pretty like hits at like five year old child.
Speaker 1: We have pretty much of busses in San Diego. Now
Speaker 1: what can I say here? Yeah? All right, all right,
Speaker 1: thank you so much of your time, both of you.
Speaker 1: I really appreciate it. Best to luck next week. Maybe
Speaker 1: I'll come up and bring you, i know, sim super
Speaker 1: like like an oil can that we can start firing
Speaker 1: on campus or something. Yeah, let's do it. Have one here,
Speaker 1: let's do it. I'm down, all right, Yeah, best of
Speaker 1: black and we'll look forward to hearing what happens. Thank
Speaker 1: you so much for thanks so much for talking to us. Hello,
Speaker 1: podcast fans. I know you got to the end of
Speaker 1: the episode and you were thinking not enough James. Not
Speaker 1: enough strikes, not enough UCSD. So lucky you. I've been
Speaker 1: up to since you see San Diego today, and I've
Speaker 1: recorded with Tyler and Alex at the strike and we
Speaker 1: got some audio of the strike going on as well.
Speaker 1: It was really amazing, really incredible to see that many
Speaker 1: people out Never thought I see that UCSD. So without
Speaker 1: further Ado here his main view with them all right,
Speaker 1: So here with dying Alex again this time with more
Speaker 1: background noise. We're at the strike now. How many people
Speaker 1: are here? Roughly oh man somewhere, probably around at least
Speaker 1: a couple of thousand right right now. Definitely a couple
Speaker 1: of thousand people out here. It's really impressive. Like I
Speaker 1: read do U C s D if you haven't picked
Speaker 1: that up yet, And like we did not get too
Speaker 1: many people even when like people started hanging new seas
Speaker 1: around campus. I didn't. I didn't think I'm being so
Speaker 1: I did again. This is genuinely very impressive. And what's
Speaker 1: been what's been happening? UM? I think things have gone
Speaker 1: really well so far this since day two as we're
Speaker 1: recording this, that we've been on strike. UM, there has
Speaker 1: been some progress at the bargaining table that I've heard, um,
Speaker 1: but we do know that you see is going to
Speaker 1: try to drag this out. They think that they can
Speaker 1: outlast our momentum. But so far as you can really
Speaker 1: hear from the noise behind us and see all the
Speaker 1: different you know, uh, thousands of people converging from all
Speaker 1: the pict locations across campus that they've been at since
Speaker 1: eight in the morning, I think our energy is going strong.
Speaker 1: Where do you think, Tyler? Yeah, so I think the
Speaker 1: energy is really strong here today. Uh. The UC did
Speaker 1: not expect us to come on day two, which we
Speaker 1: know because at bargaining they canceled our meetings for today, um,
Speaker 1: because they didn't expect to show up. But somehow magically
Speaker 1: a meeting immerged around two o'clock today, and it maybe
Speaker 1: do to the fact that two thousand people are out here.
Speaker 1: Pretty piste, uh and one a fair contract. But yeah,
Speaker 1: I think the momentum it's pretty high. We actually did
Speaker 1: more disruption today, going directly talking to the deans and
Speaker 1: the faculty and screaming in their offices as they sat
Speaker 1: really comfy. But I'll say, yeah, first floor seminars didn't
Speaker 1: go well today. I'll put it that way, all right,
Speaker 1: there was something that I know the university about like
Speaker 1: intimidation and un friend lavorite practices, and you come too, Yeah,
Speaker 1: I can talk to generalities. UM there's uh well, the
Speaker 1: labor law that governs us is is is a little
Speaker 1: bit complicated because some of us also receive uh course
Speaker 1: credit for the work that we do that is protected
Speaker 1: under activity that protects our strike activity, which is a
Speaker 1: little bit of an anti labor practice in and of itself.
Speaker 1: There's no reason I have to sign up for twelve
Speaker 1: credits of just existing doing work. That doesn't make any
Speaker 1: particular sense, but it's the way the inversity run things. So, UM,
Speaker 1: there has been some emails that are sent out that
Speaker 1: are are questionable legal correctness as to whether um we
Speaker 1: can be hurt in terms of our academic standing for
Speaker 1: participating on the strike. That is definitely not true, UM
Speaker 1: is if we are if the is activity that's governed
Speaker 1: under the what our union is representing us for UM.
Speaker 1: So we know we've had some issues with that. Tyler,
Speaker 1: I guess you could talk about maybe some other examples
Speaker 1: that have come out. It's on the postox side. Right now,
Speaker 1: the university has released like an f a Q of
Speaker 1: sorts in an email where it says, oh, well, you'll
Speaker 1: have to tell the niage that your postox aren't doing
Speaker 1: research and that they are funding needs to get pulled.
Speaker 1: But that's kind of a joke. There's no like reporting
Speaker 1: mechanism for that. It's more like a stipend for a
Speaker 1: living um. So we're telling people just to stay strong
Speaker 1: and uh, people see you kind of pass like the
Speaker 1: threats that they're making, and a lot of faculty see
Speaker 1: through it too. Okay, we just intercepted you. When you're
Speaker 1: going somewhere else, you would you like to introduce yourself?
Speaker 1: All right? So them post doc um, I'm pretty new
Speaker 1: in your c s C. I joined in April, and
Speaker 1: I came here having already done another post doc and
Speaker 1: a PhD in Europe. I joined the union on this
Speaker 1: instantly when I came here, since i've I was basically horrified,
Speaker 1: for lack of a better way to put it, so,
Speaker 1: I studied in the EU for ten years and my
Speaker 1: experience of academia is what I experienced there, which was
Speaker 1: decent working conditions, being able to save money, not having
Speaker 1: to spend fifty of your salary on ransom. When I
Speaker 1: came here, and experienced post stock life. I couldn't believe it.
Speaker 1: So I believe. I met Tyler when I came here
Speaker 1: for the first time and we did this orientation that
Speaker 1: was awesome and awesome horrifying at the same time. Sorry,
Speaker 1: it was awesome to meet you because I realized it
Speaker 1: was then that I learned how a labor union worked.
Speaker 1: My knowledge of labor unions was minimal up until the
Speaker 1: point that I moved here, so minimal that I didn't
Speaker 1: even know what labor unions in the EU functioned like
Speaker 1: until I came here and realized, Oh my god, we
Speaker 1: are actually lucky to have a union that supports postdocs,
Speaker 1: and this is not the case in a lot of
Speaker 1: places in the US. Yeah, yeah, that's true. And so
Speaker 1: how has the strike action gone so far? Expect it's
Speaker 1: been crazy. We've been planning this for so long. It's
Speaker 1: a bit surreal to be part of it. I think
Speaker 1: it's been going great. It's been very energizing, and it's
Speaker 1: been intense. Yeah, it's hard, right, none of us really
Speaker 1: want to be out here and strike, and the fact
Speaker 1: that so many people are putting work on hold just
Speaker 1: speaks to the intensity and seriousness of the problem and
Speaker 1: what we're striking for. Ye yeah, yeah, I think that's
Speaker 1: very true. It's really impressive. How many people here I
Speaker 1: can't over Yeah some time. Yeah, very impressive. So let's see. Look,
Speaker 1: do you guys know how the bargaining has gone and
Speaker 1: what we can expect from here. Well, what we would
Speaker 1: like would be for the u SEE to meet us
Speaker 1: at the bargaining table and give us a fair contract.
Speaker 1: But um repeating that ad infinite um bobby with whole
Speaker 1: labors is the plan thus far. But what's actually been
Speaker 1: happening is um U SEE just hasn't been paying fair
Speaker 1: as you know. Yeah, it's it's been. It's been infuriating
Speaker 1: for me. It makes me very angry. It's very serree
Speaker 1: and especially I think if you're used to a sort
Speaker 1: of more sane labor context, to see them just make
Speaker 1: a gas lighting and righting and doing what I'm fraise
Speaker 1: for it is illegal stuff. It's disrespectful, is what I feel. Yeah,
Speaker 1: maybe illustrates sort of what they see post toxographs in
Speaker 1: economic gens. Yeah, as a workforce whose rights are not
Speaker 1: to be value to do a bulk of the work.
Speaker 1: It's it's very disrespectful, you know, I think it certainly
Speaker 1: speaks to uh. Like I said earlier, they're trying to
Speaker 1: outlast us, and they think that we will reach a
Speaker 1: certain point where we we no longer feel like we
Speaker 1: can avoid our work, that we can stay out here.
Speaker 1: And I think you would think that if that's their strategy,
Speaker 1: would realize that we are in a point of desperation,
Speaker 1: We are in a point of procarity, um, where we
Speaker 1: really need wages and compensation and and and workplace protections
Speaker 1: that meet the current economic situation that we live in,
Speaker 1: because right now that's not what we have, and currently
Speaker 1: at the bargaining table, they're kind of putting a lot
Speaker 1: of our labor reps and to like, uh, something that
Speaker 1: looks like like jaw like jig saw like type trap
Speaker 1: rooms where they have only for lesson hiding and no windows,
Speaker 1: and then them not knowing whether or not they have
Speaker 1: to get a flight back because they're not going to
Speaker 1: meet with them that day. UM, them saying that they
Speaker 1: haven't reserved rooms, even though that you know, they have
Speaker 1: so much power. Who's who's taking up a room from them?
Speaker 1: Um to meet with them and actually come up with
Speaker 1: some proposals. I got an update that admin wasn't bargaining
Speaker 1: because they couldn't reserve a room. What does that mean
Speaker 1: there's forty eight thousand people on strike, the entire system
Speaker 1: isn't working. We mean, it's your rooms also, you own
Speaker 1: the rooms. I'm I was, I bet that was a
Speaker 1: fascinating update. I'm sorry, I just had to mention something
Speaker 1: about that. So that's just all we have to know
Speaker 1: right now is that they keep canceling meetings adding meetings.
Speaker 1: They're kind of just waiting us out and see how
Speaker 1: long we'll actually be on strike and whether or not
Speaker 1: we actually care about our contracts, which I think you
Speaker 1: being here today, you see how many people are out
Speaker 1: and no one's going to lead EVE this picket line
Speaker 1: throughout the week. So yeah, yeah, I think that's basically it.
Speaker 1: People aren't going to leave the picket line, and the
Speaker 1: energy is awesome because people are fed up. People are
Speaker 1: fed up, people are fed up being poor and homeless,
Speaker 1: and this is not why we come to grad school, right.
Speaker 1: I mean, I was very fortunate to have a good
Speaker 1: grad school experience and that's why I'm still in academia.
Speaker 1: But the majority of the people who come to the
Speaker 1: university spending savings. I know people with student loans back
Speaker 1: from India who are here to do a master's and
Speaker 1: are teeing doing research, killing themselves because they had a dream.
Speaker 1: They literally moved across the world to come here following
Speaker 1: a dream and our ending up being broken. That's that's
Speaker 1: heartbreaking from a university as big as this. Nobody deserves
Speaker 1: to be treated this way, and I think everybody here
Speaker 1: is feeling it. If you go to fair you see
Speaker 1: now dot org there's a link to a strike fund
Speaker 1: right now, a hardship fund, and people can donate to
Speaker 1: that any amount they want to. And there's also we're
Speaker 1: taking donations to actually feed people out here. So people
Speaker 1: have questions about that, they can just email the links
Speaker 1: at that website. UM. Yeah, can people to like would
Speaker 1: you like? People? People are very very welcome to show
Speaker 1: up to the picket line to come help. All help
Speaker 1: is appreciated. You want to join us, you want to chant,
Speaker 1: you want to bring supplies, we'll be there. This is
Speaker 1: across all ten you see campuses, if you're near the
Speaker 1: picket line, if you want to show support and solidarity,
Speaker 1: come join us. Yeah, the virtual picketing is still happening,
Speaker 1: and what they've been actually doing is making sure people
Speaker 1: get here and nowhere to go, since the picketing is
Speaker 1: so transient, like we're literally moving building to building as
Speaker 1: it's needed, and they're doing the calls for us and
Speaker 1: directing us, so which is a wild thing. But also
Speaker 1: the other thing is just people retweeting everything that we post,
Speaker 1: making sure that no one can silence us, because that's
Speaker 1: what you see. Once. Thank you so much for coming,
Speaker 1: Thanks for giving us this platform. The awareness is really
Speaker 1: critical to make sure that you see can't ignore us.
Speaker 1: So thank you so much for coming. It's the podcast,
Speaker 1: it's it could happen here. It is about something that
Speaker 1: could happen here very specifically. Um, yeah, I'm I'm Christopher Wong.
Speaker 1: I'm here with James Stout and Garrison Davis. Hello, Hello,
Speaker 1: do you both hello? We all joined the SIMP call
Speaker 1: that that did happen here, and that did show everybody
Speaker 1: all right, Okay, so that's the thing that that did
Speaker 1: happen here, and now we're gonna talk abou something that
Speaker 1: could happen here, and that specific thing is uh a
Speaker 1: call by two Harvard academics to hire five hundred thousand
Speaker 1: more cops. Nope, so okay, they're like, I don't I
Speaker 1: don't know when this is going to go up. But
Speaker 1: sometime in the past that there was a piece that
Speaker 1: went viral by civil rights lawyer and anti prison activist
Speaker 1: turned media critic Alec karaka Tanis about a pair of
Speaker 1: Harvard academics who wrote this article calling for five thousand
Speaker 1: more cops. And this is okay, Like the fact that
Speaker 1: we have academics writing position papers basically that are calling
Speaker 1: for five thousand more cops is terrifying in and of itself.
Speaker 1: But but but crime is that a record high You're
Speaker 1: about to see ship. You're about to see You're about
Speaker 1: to see and hear ship that is going to make
Speaker 1: your fucking ears bleed because it's not ship. Like okay,
Speaker 1: normally these are Harvard academics, right, So you're assuming these
Speaker 1: are like right wing nats at Google's right or like
Speaker 1: their equivalent in in in the sort of like you
Speaker 1: know these are not. This was written by a socialist.
Speaker 1: And when I say a socialist right like, I don't
Speaker 1: mean a sort of like one of the sort of
Speaker 1: like terminally online desperate cranks trying to hold together like
Speaker 1: a maoist micro sect. I'm talking about people who are
Speaker 1: incredibly well connected inside the mainstream socialist left. So the
Speaker 1: authors of this call for five hundred thousand more cops
Speaker 1: are Christopher Lewis, who is a Harvard law professor who
Speaker 1: makes me embarrassed to have my own name, and more
Speaker 1: interestingly of a sociology professor, auditor usumy So who is
Speaker 1: auditor Usumi um. He is on the board. He's on
Speaker 1: the editorial board of Catalyst, which is a Marxist man. Okay,
Speaker 1: do you do you have you two know what Catalyst is? Yeah,
Speaker 1: besides the sequel to the Mirror original game and l
Speaker 1: I don't. Yeah, okay, so they're they're a a Marxist magazine.
Speaker 1: There supposed to be a more sort of theoretical Marxist
Speaker 1: like magazine founded by a guy named vi Vic Chibber,
Speaker 1: who's a pretty influential, sort of like soaked Marxist who
Speaker 1: could be found literally in any any of the last
Speaker 1: like five decades, you can find him yelling about the
Speaker 1: cultural turn in academia and calling for a return of
Speaker 1: political economy. Yes, yes, about this for decades longer. I
Speaker 1: think he's been yelling about this for longer than I've
Speaker 1: been alive. God, Like, that's how long has been going on.
Speaker 1: People have definitely been like fetching about the cultural turn
Speaker 1: for long than any of us have been alive. Yeah,
Speaker 1: and they've been wrong for that entire time. And him
Speaker 1: is like one of the guys who trained us to
Speaker 1: me in the first place. Now catalysts other major founder
Speaker 1: um is much more famous, and that's someone you probably
Speaker 1: have heard of, who is one bosh Car Sunkara, who
Speaker 1: is the current President of the Nation and also the
Speaker 1: founder of jocobin where and this is where it gets
Speaker 1: fun us to me also on the editorial board of Jocobin.
Speaker 1: This is the guy caring for five hundred that was
Speaker 1: in More Cops. Right. This isn't coming from the usable
Speaker 1: sort of like rabid reactionaries. This is coming from people
Speaker 1: who have serious credentials in the mainstream socialists left and Okay,
Speaker 1: so all right, I want to talk about what's actually
Speaker 1: in the paper. And the first thing I need everyone
Speaker 1: to understand about this from the get go is that
Speaker 1: this is maybe the worst paper I've ever read. Like
Speaker 1: if I had tried to turn this paper in to
Speaker 1: my like freshman under like into like an undergrad class,
Speaker 1: I would have failed, Like when when when I was
Speaker 1: in my freshman year in college, I had to read
Speaker 1: Biblical analysis written by a freshman Ted Cruise supporter who
Speaker 1: was arguing that there was a problem in the Bible
Speaker 1: where there was no way for God to talk to people.
Speaker 1: This is worse than that and the Koran. It's like,
Speaker 1: how is how how is that worth? Chris? Okay, so
Speaker 1: let's let's let's just start off right. I'm gonna I'm
Speaker 1: gonna start off with a random part in the middle,
Speaker 1: so you understand how just mind numbingly atrocious this is okay,
Speaker 1: So I'm gonna I'm gonna read this. This is an
Speaker 1: article called, and I'm not kidding about the title of
Speaker 1: this quote, the Injustice of under policing in America. Uh yeah,
Speaker 1: so we're starting we're turning off right, so yeah, so
Speaker 1: so so before we get into the actual main argument,
Speaker 1: I'm just gonna read this quote, which is right. Even
Speaker 1: if our answers prove unsound, we hope that the combination
Speaker 1: of empirical social science and analytic moral and political philosophy
Speaker 1: we can we contribute can help eliminate what alternative answers
Speaker 1: to those questions might have to look like. To be sound, which,
Speaker 1: first off, terrible scism. This is why I would prefer
Speaker 1: the immortal science of markis Latinism. This is awful, like said,
Speaker 1: is writing terrible? Said it back to an editor, give
Speaker 1: them a decade, they'll come back with it. Second off,
Speaker 1: I literally cannot imagine two disciplines I would like rather
Speaker 1: less apply to the problem of mass incarceration than those
Speaker 1: like these authors have dared ask the question, what if
Speaker 1: we combined the bone rattling stupidity of analytic philosophy with
Speaker 1: the sociologist complete inability to do statistics? And the answer
Speaker 1: is this? And what I say, complete inability to do statistics? Right,
Speaker 1: I need people to understand how bad this article is,
Speaker 1: right like I I like, I like viscerally needs you
Speaker 1: to understand. So here, here is here, Here is a quote.
Speaker 1: Here's another section of this article. But while firearm availability,
Speaker 1: no doubt has some impact on the level of violence,
Speaker 1: we think the effect is likely to be small. A
Speaker 1: large effect would be difficult to square with other patterns
Speaker 1: across place, persons, and time. Consider, for example, that while
Speaker 1: the United States has ten times as many guns as
Speaker 1: El Salvador, the homicide rate there is roughly ten times
Speaker 1: higher than it is here. Now stats, nowhere's think for
Speaker 1: a second about what they just compared. Right, The United
Speaker 1: States has ten times as many guns. The homicide rate
Speaker 1: in El Salvador as ten times higher. Right, Yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: I think, Okay, what what does the US have more
Speaker 1: of than El Salvador? No, no, we have more guns,
Speaker 1: but we also have fifty times the population. The million
Speaker 1: people of Salvador is six point five million people, which
Speaker 1: means again if if you're looking at this in terms
Speaker 1: of guns per capita, right, A salpits guns per capita
Speaker 1: is actually five times higher than ours. Wow, that's quite impressive. Yeah,
Speaker 1: and financial perspective, because we have a little guns. Yeah. Right,
Speaker 1: and you know, okay, again, if you're if you're gonna
Speaker 1: do basic statistics, right, you would think that these professors
Speaker 1: at Harvard University would know the difference between a rate
Speaker 1: of gun ownership and the pure owner of ship of guns.
Speaker 1: They do not. They do not, do they not? Have
Speaker 1: they decided that they're going to pretend they don't. I don't. Okay,
Speaker 1: here's the thing going into this, right, I assume this
Speaker 1: was just sort of pure hackshit, and I think a
Speaker 1: lot of it is. I think they also are genuinely
Speaker 1: this dumb like genuine I I it's it's really incredible,
Speaker 1: like I mean again, like the thing like like, the
Speaker 1: thing they've actually demonstrate with their own numbers is precisely
Speaker 1: the opposite of what they're arguing. The thing they've demonstrated
Speaker 1: with the numbers they have given us is that there
Speaker 1: is a correlation between gun ownership rates and the homicide rate, right,
Speaker 1: Like they're trying to there. This entire section is about
Speaker 1: proving that they're that they that the number of guns
Speaker 1: doesn't like that, this isn't even like this isn't me
Speaker 1: like like I don't like this is not like me
Speaker 1: yelling about gun control or whatever. Like this is just
Speaker 1: to get you to understand the level of statistics these
Speaker 1: people are on. And also I should point this album.
Speaker 1: I tracked down their citation because I wanted to make
Speaker 1: sure I didn't I wasn't misunderstanding their arguments, right, So
Speaker 1: I tracked down their citation on these numbers, and I
Speaker 1: went to the paper they cited, and the thing they
Speaker 1: cited does not have a gun ownership numbers for El Salvador.
Speaker 1: So I have no idea where they getting any of
Speaker 1: these numbers they apparently they quite possibly have pulled this
Speaker 1: out of their ass completely because apparently apparently nobody checked
Speaker 1: if their citations actually contain the things that they're supposed to.
Speaker 1: This is what I wanted to talk about. There is
Speaker 1: a thing that happens when you get tanya or you
Speaker 1: become professor at the very established university, and that thing
Speaker 1: is you just say shit and people trust you. Like
Speaker 1: we've seen this time and again in the academy, right that,
Speaker 1: like peer review is not serving its functioned because like
Speaker 1: the status hierarchy of people in academia is more important
Speaker 1: to both the peer reviewers and the people doing the
Speaker 1: writing than the actual process of peer review. Yeah, like
Speaker 1: their citations are this is an interesting Uh, this is
Speaker 1: I don't know that they they've made the capital letters larger.
Speaker 1: They used a small arms survey. I guess for that.
Speaker 1: Obviously it doesn't it doesn't. It does show it doesn't
Speaker 1: have those numbers. It's amazing. Okay, So you know we've
Speaker 1: we've we've established that these people are absolute hacks whose
Speaker 1: word would have gotten be failed out of an undergrad course.
Speaker 1: So to be fair, maybe it's actually it's it's technically
Speaker 1: possible the University of Chicago just holds its students to
Speaker 1: more riduous standards than Harvard or M I. T. Whose
Speaker 1: journal published this does their intellectuals. So you know, I,
Speaker 1: I we we never know. This is also I never
Speaker 1: used Jacobin as a source on the show because they
Speaker 1: pay fifty bucks per article and that ship way. Yeah,
Speaker 1: Jacobin not a cool publication, actually not mega based. Yeah,
Speaker 1: your workers, if you're pertaining to be socialised. Yeah, she's
Speaker 1: trying to be like a labor But Bosh Garconara is
Speaker 1: on the record talking about the quote, his quote petite
Speaker 1: bourgeois hustle, talking about how we made Jacobin. So you know, okay,
Speaker 1: well we'll we'll get back to the class aspect of
Speaker 1: all of this next episode. But okay, let's go back
Speaker 1: to this paper, and let's take a second just look
Speaker 1: at what they're actually arguing. And the first thing I
Speaker 1: need to used to understand about their argument is that
Speaker 1: their entire, the entire substantive argument of this paper hinges
Speaker 1: on an absolutely enormous lie. Um here, let me let
Speaker 1: let let me let me we quote this lie. Yet
Speaker 1: it also illustrate rate's the much less well known fact
Speaker 1: that America is not in all an outlier and it's
Speaker 1: rate of policing. The United States has around two hundred
Speaker 1: and twelve police officers for every hundred thousand total residents,
Speaker 1: which ranks it in the forty one percentile of today's
Speaker 1: developed world. Now, as Alec Carricatanas points out, they've deliberately
Speaker 1: picked the lowest number of cops they can find any like,
Speaker 1: the lowest reported number of cops in the US they
Speaker 1: can find anywhere. Um, and so they picked six hundred
Speaker 1: thousand from basically like it's it's they picked this number
Speaker 1: from an FBI reporting thing. But the FBI also says
Speaker 1: that they don't have all the cops there because it's
Speaker 1: it's like it's basically like a voluntary reporting thing. So
Speaker 1: there's a bunch of cops that aren't there. And then, um,
Speaker 1: here's from Karakatatas, who's a piece about this quote the professors.
Speaker 1: The professor then admitted privately over email that the US
Speaker 1: census count is actually one million, two hundred twenty seven thousand,
Speaker 1: seven eight police. That's seventies six percent higher for the
Speaker 1: number they chose the US article. What is the significance
Speaker 1: of this using this number? They admitted to me the
Speaker 1: United States truthfully has one point one times the media
Speaker 1: rated rich countries. So they've been over email that they have.
Speaker 1: This whole article is based on them lying how many
Speaker 1: cops there are in the US. And it's actually way
Speaker 1: worse than this because as as as he points out right,
Speaker 1: this number than to the number that they're using only
Speaker 1: tracks public police, so they doesn't count private police. And
Speaker 1: if you count private police, that number doubles. Again, not
Speaker 1: like there's private police, there's there's no FIV cops, right
Speaker 1: and and the other thing isn't this the other thing
Speaker 1: is doesn't count? Is this counts zero federal agencies? I
Speaker 1: just gonna say that it doesn't count. Federal agency doesn't
Speaker 1: count like state police even I think, I think, actually
Speaker 1: I don't know. You can't shareff Is that not police?
Speaker 1: Their deputies? They're different patrol. I mean, who's who's to say,
Speaker 1: who's spent more time on this if they have already yeah,
Speaker 1: right right, okay, like to to get it to to
Speaker 1: get it understanding of this, even if you exclude the
Speaker 1: Feds entirely right EXCLA. And again, and this is actually
Speaker 1: a bad idea because again we have like a fucking
Speaker 1: trillion federal agencies, for example, ice in the Border Patrol,
Speaker 1: who again run just another police state inside of the
Speaker 1: American police state. Right, we have that and obviously, okay,
Speaker 1: so he's comparing our our level of policing to policing
Speaker 1: in in uh in like European countries, right, and okay,
Speaker 1: I I don't want to minimize how many border cops
Speaker 1: European countries have, but the US has way fucking more
Speaker 1: border clan they do not like, they do horrible things.
Speaker 1: I will yell at the until the end of time
Speaker 1: about how every every friend text member needs to be
Speaker 1: like redacted, etcetera, etcetera parody. But like, no, great, even
Speaker 1: even even if you cut that out right, the actual
Speaker 1: number of cops in the US is three times higher
Speaker 1: than the number they've given us. Actually it might be yeah, yeah, okay,
Speaker 1: I feel like there's there's anything that we can agree
Speaker 1: on as a nation is that America kind of has
Speaker 1: a lot of police. That's like that's like what everyone
Speaker 1: kind of knows. That's like people like people the place
Speaker 1: with like the really like it's like really militarized and
Speaker 1: heavy policing. Yeah, like like a person who moved to America,
Speaker 1: it is shocking how many cops there are, how many
Speaker 1: different cops there are, and how there are cops everywhere
Speaker 1: all the time. It is the thing that it is
Speaker 1: very different about America. Oh god, okay, so statistic to
Speaker 1: get that number quite possibly like that ship. Yeah yeah,
Speaker 1: I would absolutely if one of my students in community.
Speaker 1: God days, we'd have a talk. Okay, okay, So do
Speaker 1: you know what else is based on the myth of
Speaker 1: under policing these adverts for private cops. Yes, Federal Protective
Speaker 1: Service gets them. All right, we're back, uh okay, So
Speaker 1: all right, we've established that this this is, this is
Speaker 1: This argument is built on a pile of lines. However,
Speaker 1: the actual content of the argument is also really funny
Speaker 1: and completely incomprehensible. So their argument is that somehow, if
Speaker 1: the US had more cops, right, and and and if
Speaker 1: if if if the ratio of cops to people like
Speaker 1: that the U S had was like in line with
Speaker 1: the European countries, that somehow and there they never have
Speaker 1: a mechanism for how this would happen, This would somehow
Speaker 1: lower the incarceration rate. I think the mechanism is line
Speaker 1: that's whatever one says is that we have more police
Speaker 1: that lowers incarceration rates. Yeah. Yeah. The entire argument here
Speaker 1: is what if the US was like Sweden, then there
Speaker 1: would be five thousand more cops, but somehow also less
Speaker 1: one also one point nine billion less uh prisoners. So well,
Speaker 1: anything that's different between US and Sweden is oh god, okay.
Speaker 1: So so what why are socialists pushing for this? And
Speaker 1: especially socialists and again as these are these are people
Speaker 1: who in their article admit that they think the best
Speaker 1: way to deal with with poverty and with crime is
Speaker 1: welfare programs, not mass incarceration. So okay, so why why
Speaker 1: why are they pushing for this? And the initial answer
Speaker 1: is that they think they can reduce crime, specifically homicides
Speaker 1: by increasing policing, and they think which should be fair
Speaker 1: is an opinion that I would say at this point
Speaker 1: probably the majority of Americans have maybe I don't know
Speaker 1: if I buy that. I don't know if that's I
Speaker 1: think you may be a little bit further out of
Speaker 1: the Overton window. The majority of Americans, I think, do
Speaker 1: do believe that if there's a few more cops, maybe
Speaker 1: we'll have a few less murders. I don't know. Well, well,
Speaker 1: well we'll see about that. But Okay. The other thing though,
Speaker 1: that's sort of like amazing about this right is that
Speaker 1: they think, okay, so they think they can cut the
Speaker 1: homicide rate by hiring more police. They also think that
Speaker 1: hiring more police i will solve the problem with policing
Speaker 1: because the problem with police is that the police don't
Speaker 1: do enough, and so we need more of them. And
Speaker 1: then and then also and then also this will make
Speaker 1: them less violent. I mean, this is something, This is
Speaker 1: even the this is even like the whole like Joe Biden, like,
Speaker 1: we have to we can't we can't defund the police.
Speaker 1: We have to fund the police, have to resources because
Speaker 1: if if they have less resources, then that means they'll
Speaker 1: have to use more violence. And it's that that style
Speaker 1: of arguments, it's it's talking point. Yeah. But what's interesting
Speaker 1: about this again is that these people nominally are socialists,
Speaker 1: and you know, in order to justify this right, they
Speaker 1: argue that while being in prison is bad, and then
Speaker 1: they list a bunch of consequences of being in prison,
Speaker 1: being in a neighborhood is with high crime is also
Speaker 1: as bad. For the same reason. They're literally arguing the
Speaker 1: being in a place with crime is basically the same
Speaker 1: as being in prison, big time Prinston understanding, like I look, okay,
Speaker 1: there are there are very few people I would ever
Speaker 1: say that, Garrison. Look, I hope these people gotta do
Speaker 1: withthnography of this one day, Like I I hope, I
Speaker 1: hope they get to go study what the inside of
Speaker 1: prison is like I think participant observation. Yeah, I hope
Speaker 1: they do this like you, like they're they're there. There
Speaker 1: are there are lines in this article like here here,
Speaker 1: here is a random line I've pulled from this article,
Speaker 1: and they say at one point, quote, in fact, black
Speaker 1: people seem to be underrepresented among those who report ever
Speaker 1: having been arrested in their lifetimes. What alright? That is
Speaker 1: a direct quote citation need. What they've done some absolutely insane.
Speaker 1: I'm not even I'm not I'm not actually going to
Speaker 1: dignify them by laying out the stats bullshit that they've
Speaker 1: they've they've attempt to justify this, like we have already
Speaker 1: seen what their stats look like, their stats are trying
Speaker 1: to compare a rate. Yeah, it's insane, it's completely nuts.
Speaker 1: Like that's the one thing that that's the one thing
Speaker 1: that even like racist like Republicans like no is like
Speaker 1: they'll be like, yeah, there's more because because I don't
Speaker 1: like black people, and you're like, that's not why, but whatever. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I'm between this paragraph now and it is actually it's bad.
Speaker 1: So okay, I think, okay, so we have established this
Speaker 1: is bullshit, right, I want to read a kind of
Speaker 1: long section that I think gives the game away as
Speaker 1: to why they're arguing this quote. We think, in the
Speaker 1: long run, a significant expansion of social policy we reduce
Speaker 1: crime by addressing its root causes, and in turn reduced
Speaker 1: the need demand for both policing and imprisonments. Okay, other work,
Speaker 1: this is true, I would say probably probably true. In
Speaker 1: other work, we argue that any coherent conception of distributive
Speaker 1: justice or economic efficiency entails that the United States should
Speaker 1: expand its social policy. But a significant expansion of social
Speaker 1: policy requires significant redistribution from rich to poor. Redistribution of
Speaker 1: this magnitude will require the poorer to wield some kind
Speaker 1: of leverage over the rich. Given the collapse of the
Speaker 1: American labor movement and the electoral fracturing of the American
Speaker 1: working class, we doubt we will see anything like this soon.
Speaker 1: Our aim in this essays to say something useful about
Speaker 1: what should be done in the non ideal world in
Speaker 1: which we live, not just in the ideal world in
Speaker 1: which we would like to live. Just to hold on, wait,
Speaker 1: let me let me, let me read this next sentence.
Speaker 1: It gets worse. Okay, to say something about that question.
Speaker 1: We limit ourselves two options that are revenue neutral. Ah,
Speaker 1: these are socialists, so bizarre. I think they may have
Speaker 1: walked outside. They've yeah, like like they've they've you know, okay,
Speaker 1: there's okay, So there's actually more of this that is
Speaker 1: also like like it keeps going, can never have a
Speaker 1: better world. And you know what that means is that
Speaker 1: we should have more police. Here here, here is there,
Speaker 1: Here is their defense ofness. But why consider only prisons
Speaker 1: and police. Why couldn't the government redistribute the existing pool
Speaker 1: of money from prisons and police to social programs, as
Speaker 1: many reformers have to ended, We would argue in and
Speaker 1: What's Wrong with Mass Incarceration? Which is a book that
Speaker 1: they're going to release that I hope nobody buys. This
Speaker 1: is because social policy is bedeviled by what we call
Speaker 1: the efficiency feasibility paradox. To address the root causes of
Speaker 1: crime would be meaningfully to change the opportunity structure for
Speaker 1: the most disadvantaged people in America. To do this by
Speaker 1: expanding untargeted universal social programs will require significant resources, since
Speaker 1: the vast majority of beneficiaries are not America's most disadvantaged people,
Speaker 1: because penal spending is hyper targeted in a way that
Speaker 1: social spending is not. It costs about three billion dollars
Speaker 1: a year to run the world's most extensive penal state,
Speaker 1: but something like three trillion dollars to run its most
Speaker 1: amnemic welfare state. We admit there are significant This is
Speaker 1: a slightly lated prograph. We admit there are significant obstacles
Speaker 1: to changing the balance that state and local government strike
Speaker 1: between the arms of law enforcements. There are, after all,
Speaker 1: reasons that the United States has involved its present day
Speaker 1: penal balance. But our view is that the first world balance,
Speaker 1: So the first world balances is that the thing they're
Speaker 1: talking about that like supposedly Norway has or some ship
Speaker 1: where they have bore cops, but like per capita but
Speaker 1: less people incarcerated. Um. But our view is at than
Speaker 1: first world balance is nonetheless substantially more feasible than any
Speaker 1: of the than the kinds of things that reformers tend
Speaker 1: to demand today. In the highly unequal aligarhic America in
Speaker 1: which we live at present, calls to calls to reallocate
Speaker 1: a fixed pool of revenue will meet with less powerful
Speaker 1: opposition than calls to tax the rich. That is why
Speaker 1: we assume it is infeasible to expect the United States
Speaker 1: to build a generous welfare state in the mold of
Speaker 1: the Scandinavian social democracies. Proposals to use hyper targeted social
Speaker 1: policy to adjust the root causes of crime are similarly infeasible.
Speaker 1: As we have argued, to be efficient, a social policy
Speaker 1: intervention must' meaning we transformed the opportunity structures of those
Speaker 1: most likely to commit crime. I mean, an intervention that
Speaker 1: transformed the structures of opportunity only in only those in
Speaker 1: this position will up end the effective in such a
Speaker 1: structure of unequal societies, thus coming up the economy and
Speaker 1: eliciting political opposition. I mean here's Here's the thing is that,
Speaker 1: in some ways I agree that the United States won't
Speaker 1: get better by making social policies within my lifetime. But
Speaker 1: my solution to this is a legalist lifestylist of not
Speaker 1: hiring workoffs. Well, don't worry, there is there is a
Speaker 1: significant section of this. Wheathery shipped on anarchism. Okay, okay,
Speaker 1: this is what fucking happens when all your friends are
Speaker 1: also Harvard professors. I mean it's also real fucking people,
Speaker 1: because you don't fucking talk to them and they're like, oh,
Speaker 1: the lever it's it's obviously written by somebody who's currently
Speaker 1: like well off. Like it's they're currently doing well. Which
Speaker 1: is why because they because they don't think the world's
Speaker 1: going to turn into socialist utopia, but they're personally doing Okay.
Speaker 1: The way to will make the world feel better for
Speaker 1: them is maybe more police will make me feel safer
Speaker 1: like that, that's what that's what they're doing is because
Speaker 1: they're already well off and they're like, well, social isn't coming.
Speaker 1: I want to live a happier life. Maybe police will
Speaker 1: keep the bad people away from me. Yeah, because they
Speaker 1: see poverty of an issue of poverty is upstream of crime,
Speaker 1: and crime is a fucking annoyance to them because someone
Speaker 1: might steal their fucking BMW again crime. Living in a
Speaker 1: place where crime is the same as being in prison
Speaker 1: because you cannot conceive because it's socialism without sucking empathy
Speaker 1: or experience of fucking poverty. Right, so you can make
Speaker 1: these ludicrous statements and all your friends in the smoking
Speaker 1: room a Harvard will agree with you. Go harm yes,
Speaker 1: and I mean, I mean this is the thing very frustrating,
Speaker 1: Like they they fundament sleep like when Bernie lost the election,
Speaker 1: these people gave up on politics. Like that's what's happening there.
Speaker 1: They're arguing that like not even is not even just
Speaker 1: like the class drug goes is unwinnable. They're arguing that
Speaker 1: basic liberal politics is impossible, right, like taxing the rich
Speaker 1: like is a thing that that that's not like a
Speaker 1: radical thing, that's like like the basic that's like a
Speaker 1: basic democratic party thing. And they're they're arguing that it's
Speaker 1: so impossible that anyone who has a plan to change
Speaker 1: anything has to pre means test it to be compliant
Speaker 1: with a non existent balanced budget amendment to get the
Speaker 1: right to support it, Like Liz trust here, shit like
Speaker 1: this is what this was written by? What of the
Speaker 1: people on the editorial board of Jocobin. Yeah, well that
Speaker 1: doesn't chock me. But it's very funny to look at
Speaker 1: their citations, which are like people being like this article
Speaker 1: is horse shit, and then like like cop publications, Yeah,
Speaker 1: ok yeah, let's go so okay, so so have having
Speaker 1: actually well okay, so before we do we should we
Speaker 1: should do another add thing. Do you know what? Who
Speaker 1: else has completely abandoned the idea that there's any possibility
Speaker 1: of social change in the world. The Conservative Party and
Speaker 1: Unions Party in quite written in Northern Island. Yeah do
Speaker 1: they do. I guess now we're going to take the
Speaker 1: money out there. Thank you, Richie sa and okay, we're back.
Speaker 1: So so, having abandoned politics in favor of complete capitulation
Speaker 1: to the forces of reaction, they turned towards a cost
Speaker 1: benefit analysis of having more cops. The benefit, they argue,
Speaker 1: is less crime. And this is bullshit. There is no
Speaker 1: staistical evidence to having more cops produces crime. I have done, like,
Speaker 1: there are other reasons why this is bullshit. I have done.
Speaker 1: I have done the entire series about there is a
Speaker 1: lot of writing on this topic and how discorely this
Speaker 1: correlation is not actually effective. Um, but yeah, and and
Speaker 1: and it's also like a very important thing here is
Speaker 1: this is this is this is the thing that's about
Speaker 1: what kind of crime you care about, right, Like I
Speaker 1: have written an entire series about why my about. You know,
Speaker 1: the times of my police department was literally being run
Speaker 1: by multiple drug gartels at the same time when they
Speaker 1: strapped used to fucking radiators and attacking the balls the
Speaker 1: car batteries. They shot children in the street, They disappeared
Speaker 1: people to be tortured in the fucking black sites, and
Speaker 1: then they went to fucking a rock and teach the
Speaker 1: CIA how to do it. Like like these people that
Speaker 1: the cops are they are rapists, they are kidnappers, they
Speaker 1: are extortionists, they are thieves, they are torturers, they are murders.
Speaker 1: A lot of them are in literal neo Nazi gangs
Speaker 1: who run their own serial killer competitions. Um, none of
Speaker 1: this apply, like appears in any of the analysis that
Speaker 1: these dipshits have compiled. And it's when the old cultural
Speaker 1: turn to get involved. Ye look at the material conditions here, yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: then the material conditions apparently are cop go up, crime
Speaker 1: go down, which it's also important, Like I think it's
Speaker 1: important to note there's a really good article, I think
Speaker 1: it was my amplist one called raise the Crime Rate
Speaker 1: from It's from like two thousand six. But they have
Speaker 1: that they have this point, which is that like the
Speaker 1: reductions in the crime way that we like see insofar
Speaker 1: as they happen, are not actually reductions into the amount
Speaker 1: of crime going on. Like what's happening is that, like
Speaker 1: we put people in prison and then the crime happens
Speaker 1: to them there. Right, Like, even even if you reduce
Speaker 1: the homicide rate outside of prison, there's still the homicide
Speaker 1: rate inside of prison, which nobody fucking gives a shit about.
Speaker 1: And you know because because again, this crime doesn't go away.
Speaker 1: All that happens is that it gets, it gets, you know,
Speaker 1: intensified and inflicted on a group of people the American
Speaker 1: public doesn't give a shit about. So, you know, all
Speaker 1: of the violence, all of the all of the rape,
Speaker 1: all the fucking murder, all of the theft, all of
Speaker 1: the ship we normally throw people in isn't for in theory,
Speaker 1: is just happening to people inside of prisons. It's just
Speaker 1: that academics can stop pretending to give a shit about
Speaker 1: it when they don't have to see it. Yeah, I
Speaker 1: like where I live, right, We just re elected a
Speaker 1: sheriff who was overseen like nineteen deaths in jail this
Speaker 1: year in San Diego. Right, but that is not seen
Speaker 1: as an issue of evidently to the people who voted
Speaker 1: for it, to the Democratic Party who endorsed her, and
Speaker 1: instead like they would much rather have that because there
Speaker 1: presumably worried that the person who ran against her in
Speaker 1: the primaries would be too soft d own crime and
Speaker 1: therefore you know, their teslas might get keyed. Yeah, so, okay,
Speaker 1: let's let's look at the supposed benefits. But less I
Speaker 1: guess those are the benefits. Let's look at let'sok at
Speaker 1: the costs. Finally consider, finally, consider the cost of policing.
Speaker 1: On the one hand, a world of more policing would
Speaker 1: perhaps unsurprisingly be a world of more arrests. Based on
Speaker 1: recent work by Chaplain our best guests at the First
Speaker 1: World Balanced would be a world of almost seven point
Speaker 1: eight million arrests. On the other hand, for some for okay,
Speaker 1: this is a direct quote. By the way, I need
Speaker 1: everyone to understand I am directly quoting them when I
Speaker 1: say this. On the other hand, for the somewhat speculative
Speaker 1: reasons we gave earlier, we guess that a world of
Speaker 1: more policing would be one of less police violence. About
Speaker 1: nine fewer people killed by the police based on what America.
Speaker 1: That's what that's that's how James americle occurs more cops
Speaker 1: than do less violence. Yep, yeah, this you know you
Speaker 1: could if you were, for example, a social scientist, right
Speaker 1: at all, you could look at all of the all
Speaker 1: of the other times the US has gotten more cops
Speaker 1: and tried to see if that like increased or decreased
Speaker 1: the amount of violence the police do. And you know
Speaker 1: the line, if you want the line, it's all good.
Speaker 1: I just I do want to your attention to figure
Speaker 1: one where they exactly one day to point and that
Speaker 1: they've just drawn a line to it, dissected a data
Speaker 1: point like blind oline. Like this whole thing is just
Speaker 1: sort of like like okay, So even if somehow, right
Speaker 1: by some miracle, this occurred and less people were killed
Speaker 1: by the police, we're killed by police violes because there
Speaker 1: was more cops. Which this is the kind of thing
Speaker 1: that for for for the purposes of this thought experiment, right,
Speaker 1: we are allowing people to believe this, like for the
Speaker 1: same reason that we allowed children to believe in the
Speaker 1: Easter Bunny. So kids don't believe in the Easter Buddy,
Speaker 1: I have I have met kids who believed in the
Speaker 1: Easter Bunny. I understand believing in Santa but people actually
Speaker 1: believe in the Easter Bunny. Not many, not many. But
Speaker 1: also also also most people don't believe the police will
Speaker 1: be more violent if if you have if it would
Speaker 1: be less violent if you have more of them. Yeah,
Speaker 1: let's let's let's let's let them believe this. Right, This
Speaker 1: entire argument hinges on the theory that incarceration and arrest
Speaker 1: are distinct outcomes of policing. Right, they're arguing that there's
Speaker 1: going to be more arrest but that's okay because there
Speaker 1: will be less people in prison. Now, there is one
Speaker 1: tidy problem here that you may have seen, which is
Speaker 1: that when you arrest people, it leads to people going
Speaker 1: to prison. Nowhere in this entire article have these two
Speaker 1: Harvard professors at any point considered the fact that when
Speaker 1: you arrest someone, they sometimes go to prison, and that
Speaker 1: arresting more people will mean more people go to prison,
Speaker 1: because that's what happens when you arrest someone. They've never
Speaker 1: considered this, and in fact, in fact, not only have
Speaker 1: they never considered this, they seem to believe that there
Speaker 1: is an inverse correlation between the number of people getting
Speaker 1: arrested and how many people go to prison. They think
Speaker 1: that seven million, eight hundred thousand more arrests will somehow
Speaker 1: lead to one point two million people less in prison.
Speaker 1: It's yeah, even the fucking what people in this country
Speaker 1: die in between arrest and they're hearing, right, like, in
Speaker 1: between arrested and having a fair trial, Like, yeah, to
Speaker 1: ignore that, it's it's not just like, it's not just wrong,
Speaker 1: it's callously cruel. Also, like they appeared to have not
Speaker 1: looked at any point at the opportunity cost of having
Speaker 1: all these cops. Right, we pay tops a metric ship
Speaker 1: ton of money because they're the only unions that apparently
Speaker 1: the state cares about, and like we could do something
Speaker 1: useful with that money, right, Like, well, the thing, the
Speaker 1: thing they claim they're doing is that they're going to
Speaker 1: fund less prisons and fund more cops, and this will
Speaker 1: lead to less people being in prison. Now, if this
Speaker 1: doesn't make any sense to you, that's because it doesn't
Speaker 1: make any sense at all. And and and again we
Speaker 1: have to come back to the question, what do you
Speaker 1: think happens a people who get arrested? Like do these
Speaker 1: people think they could send a vacation to Tahiti. Like
Speaker 1: I know none of these people, none of the people
Speaker 1: writing this have been arrested, but like you can't be
Speaker 1: the stupid, Like there's no way God. So okay, like
Speaker 1: we're I'm gonna close on some stuff here, which I'm
Speaker 1: gonna close on the sort of anarchist stuff that they
Speaker 1: they're ranting about. Um, I'm gonna'm gonna read another quote
Speaker 1: from this. Some civil libertarians might prefer radical decarceration without
Speaker 1: any increase or perhaps even some reduction in police force size,
Speaker 1: on the grounds that state imposed violence or harm is
Speaker 1: morally different from and worse than, interpersonal violence committed by
Speaker 1: private individuals. An extreme version of this position would hold
Speaker 1: that no amount of interpersonal violence could ever justify the
Speaker 1: use of commercive force by the state, but any state
Speaker 1: completely lacking and coercive power would be unable to enforce
Speaker 1: tax law and policy, and thus unable to collect revenue.
Speaker 1: Without revenue, the governor could not provide public goods to
Speaker 1: a social safety net. Which also, by the way, I
Speaker 1: want to stop here in like point out that like
Speaker 1: they like in any other context, none of these people
Speaker 1: believe this because like these. These people are all deal
Speaker 1: chart lists like that, they're all unempty people, and so
Speaker 1: they don't actually believe that money that they they in
Speaker 1: any other context except this one, they understand that money
Speaker 1: is something created by the state, except here when they
Speaker 1: have to justify police. Without revenue, governments cannot provide public
Speaker 1: goods or a social safety net. So this extreme version
Speaker 1: of libertarian civil libertarianisition is essentially a kind of political anarchism,
Speaker 1: and we doubt many are in fact committed to this
Speaker 1: brand of anarchism. So okay, well, let's unpack this second.
Speaker 1: When they say civil libertarianism here, what they say is
Speaker 1: that anyone who proposes to defund the police or reduce
Speaker 1: a number of people in prison. Right in the next paragraph,
Speaker 1: they argue that anyone who wants to do those things
Speaker 1: is actually in favor of increasing the homicide rate because
Speaker 1: when there's less when there's less cops than quote, serious
Speaker 1: crime runs unchecked in poor neighborhoods, which leaves you with
Speaker 1: two choices. Right, you can be an anarch quote unquote
Speaker 1: anarchist and let the crime happen because you supported decreasing
Speaker 1: the number of cops, or you can support having more cops. Yeah,
Speaker 1: it's yeah, it's just an absurd extrapolation of a position. Well,
Speaker 1: but it's it's not just that they've they've given. What
Speaker 1: they're doing here is they're giving their entire gameaway. Right.
Speaker 1: What they've admitted is that their ideal society requires and
Speaker 1: this is what they are saying about the state's need
Speaker 1: for coercive power, right with their own arguments. They the
Speaker 1: course of power they need is the police. And so
Speaker 1: what they're saying is that their politics requires an entire
Speaker 1: class of rapist, neo Nazi murderers to you know, like
Speaker 1: to enforce their vision of the welfare state. Like, in
Speaker 1: order for there to be a welfare state, who have
Speaker 1: to be a bunch of people who can fucking walk
Speaker 1: into your door and shoot you, Right, there have to
Speaker 1: be a group of people who can fucking stand there,
Speaker 1: grab your child, smash her head into a wall fifteen times,
Speaker 1: and then fucking grab you and throw you through a window. Right.
Speaker 1: This is what they are arguing, And and this plays
Speaker 1: the question, Okay, so why these people want more cops,
Speaker 1: And you know, the caricature they offer up is that
Speaker 1: without cops, everyone would just murder each other. And so
Speaker 1: we need neo Nazi desk wats to stop us often
Speaker 1: murdering each other. But okay, that's stupid, right, like self
Speaker 1: Evidently police police are only like police are not that old.
Speaker 1: They've only been around for like two hundred years, so
Speaker 1: we know that's not true. So why do they actually
Speaker 1: want more cops? And you know something, something that's very interesting,
Speaker 1: given that this is an article about the police that
Speaker 1: is written by people who are on the editorial board
Speaker 1: of socialist magazines, Nowhere in this article doesn't mention the
Speaker 1: fact that the cops exist to protect private property. Right.
Speaker 1: This is this is a huge part of what their existence. Right.
Speaker 1: Their job is to ensure if there is one class
Speaker 1: of people who owns the factories in the fields and
Speaker 1: the grocery stores and the fast food chains and the
Speaker 1: fucking card dealerships, and that there is another class who
Speaker 1: was forced to work for them and have their labor
Speaker 1: stolen every day of their lives. And of course these
Speaker 1: sort of like faux pro cop, the pro cop like fox.
Speaker 1: Social democrats will never mention it, right, but these people's
Speaker 1: version of quote unquote socialism is one in which all
Speaker 1: that ship, all the stuff that makes things like all
Speaker 1: of the businesses, all of the corporations, all of the
Speaker 1: all of that ship is owned by capitalists and not
Speaker 1: the working class. They need those cops specifically to protect
Speaker 1: the property of the ruling class from you, right like that.
Speaker 1: That that is ultimately what this is about, the specter
Speaker 1: of crime. And and this is true whether it's coming
Speaker 1: from socialists or whether it's coming from the most like
Speaker 1: unbelievably deranged Blue Lives Matter, cop freak. It is about
Speaker 1: stopping you from taking what is yours. And that that's
Speaker 1: the end of part one. In part two, we're gonna
Speaker 1: look at the whole sort of background ideology that's running
Speaker 1: all of this, and it also sucks. So yeah, come
Speaker 1: back tomorrow for more news. Love it? Yeah, podcasting, Oh
Speaker 1: I love it. I love when we're talking to microfilms
Speaker 1: and people listen. Yeah, good for them. It's gonna outlive
Speaker 1: microblogging apparently. Yeah, okay, who could who could have thought?
Speaker 1: We've won? Guys? We are the last medium standing. Well,
Speaker 1: to be fair, I do think the majority of people
Speaker 1: on this call got got this job small part because
Speaker 1: of like, yeah, yeah it's tree. Look at where our
Speaker 1: posts of bought us here to this moment. On the
Speaker 1: podcast it could Happen Here podcast where we don't explain
Speaker 1: what the podcast is. That's right, yea, And yeah, the
Speaker 1: podcast also contain me, Christopher Wong, contains Garrison Davis, it
Speaker 1: contains James Stout m and allegedly Rebert. However, Evans is
Speaker 1: I think he's legitimately actually busy right now. He is.
Speaker 1: He is like recording something else. There's yeah, he's doing
Speaker 1: a marath and think but if you look at the
Speaker 1: Ihart page, it's only Robert. We have. We have a
Speaker 1: lot of a lot of podcasts on Yeah, anyways, on
Speaker 1: the Cool Zone Media. Yeah, on the Cool Zone Media.
Speaker 1: That's right. So, speaking of podcasts we've done on the
Speaker 1: Cool Zone Media, we did one that came out the
Speaker 1: one before this one, and we'll see it about it
Speaker 1: was it was about how a bunch of socialists want
Speaker 1: more cops. Yeah, so okay, I asked myself the question
Speaker 1: when I read this, why why do they want this?
Speaker 1: How did we get here? Because they're rich and they're scared? Yes,
Speaker 1: this is true, it's there's there's also sort of there's
Speaker 1: also sort of deeper roots to what's happening here. And okay,
Speaker 1: so like it is true that there's been a whole
Speaker 1: wave of people who were sort of nominally progressive or
Speaker 1: like socialistity dozens six, ten or two and seventeen who
Speaker 1: turned right in the past few years, particularly over ratio
Speaker 1: issues like Leafing, Grant Greenwald like more recently the t
Speaker 1: y T people like bush Ar Sakara's were doing crime
Speaker 1: wave ship like kind of recently, which was actually really funny.
Speaker 1: He had this tweet about how like, oh, the crime
Speaker 1: race is not actually down. There's a specific neighborhoods where
Speaker 1: the crime where people are poor, where the crime is up,
Speaker 1: and then you look at the data and that's exactly
Speaker 1: the opposite of what's happening. But okay, so, but this
Speaker 1: entire push for sort of more police is part of
Speaker 1: a broader political project that Donna Roused me and his
Speaker 1: sort of allies in Jocoban and etcetera, etcetera, been pushing
Speaker 1: for years now. And this sort of like political project
Speaker 1: is the class side of what's called the class versus
Speaker 1: race or the race versus class debate. So for people
Speaker 1: who were either weren't here for this or have like
Speaker 1: blissfully forgotten this, the race class debate was basically an
Speaker 1: argument about sort of the role of race in leftist organizing. Um.
Speaker 1: The argument was basically like, Okay, should we understand race
Speaker 1: is like a structural force in in the US that
Speaker 1: requires its own specific organizing around racial justice and liberation movements,
Speaker 1: or should be attempt to put class first and attempt
Speaker 1: to solve racism by appealing to the interests of the
Speaker 1: entire working class and only doing class based organizing. Um,
Speaker 1: there are broadly like three types of class first people. Weirdly,
Speaker 1: we're gonna see two of them here. Um, there are
Speaker 1: a very small number of very committed and very radical
Speaker 1: Marxists and like a small number of anarchists who think
Speaker 1: that like well, race was a product of class anyways,
Speaker 1: and so if you end the class system and abolished
Speaker 1: private property, that's the sort of like actual central like
Speaker 1: mechanism of oppression society. And if you do that, like
Speaker 1: you know, race will sort of fall apart, and so
Speaker 1: you know you should um whatever consciousness anyway, Yeah, like
Speaker 1: these people are wrong. I think they're less dangerous and
Speaker 1: the other kind of two people. But we're also gonna
Speaker 1: see one of these guys later. So there there's the
Speaker 1: people like call the like class with like a k
Speaker 1: people who are just straight up like racists like they
Speaker 1: are they are class with a kkk yeah right like
Speaker 1: they you know, the groups of socialists I've compared them to,
Speaker 1: or like the socialist who came to the US after
Speaker 1: Etty and we're like, oh, ship who cares like slavery,
Speaker 1: Like we we don't care about slavery. The actual thing
Speaker 1: that like is good for the working classes, stealing more
Speaker 1: land for indigenous people, and this is how we're going
Speaker 1: to solve the labor question. Or also the sort of
Speaker 1: like like the the people who were in the Nights
Speaker 1: of Labor, like the eighteen eighties, who were like, all right,
Speaker 1: we need to we need to defend labor the way
Speaker 1: we're gonna defend labors by technically cleansing the entire West
Speaker 1: coast of Chinese people like these are basically these guys
Speaker 1: right there, they're just straight up racists to want unions
Speaker 1: and healthcare. Um. They used to be a real faction
Speaker 1: in the d s a UM formed around just like
Speaker 1: absolutely dogshit subreddit called stupid pole Um. They used to
Speaker 1: be a bunch of them in Philadelphia and these kind
Speaker 1: of people like they were like red scares initial base
Speaker 1: and so by you know, this is like the by
Speaker 1: now like two, these people are almost entirely deranged trade
Speaker 1: cats who spent literally their entire time deep throwing Peter
Speaker 1: Field's boot. So they're kind of mostly like they're they're
Speaker 1: just right wingers now like that that's what's happened to
Speaker 1: these people. Um, good riddance fuck um. I yeah. And
Speaker 1: then there are people like ordinary used to be in
Speaker 1: Bosh carcent Kara who don't really want to end capitalism
Speaker 1: and think that socialism is just sort of like welfare
Speaker 1: states and some unions. And also and they also and
Speaker 1: this is sort of critical, tend to think that racial
Speaker 1: justice organizing is a distraction from their main goal of
Speaker 1: achieving socialism. And by achieving socialism, I mean electoralism, and
Speaker 1: by electoralism, I mean getting these people elected to office.
Speaker 1: I hate these people. Their politics sucks. I've been fighting
Speaker 1: them from like since I became a leftist. I've been
Speaker 1: at war with these bowl and to to get a
Speaker 1: sense of how we got from, you know what, what
Speaker 1: was legitimately in a lot of cases, what was at
Speaker 1: least legitimately in arguing about how to deal with racism
Speaker 1: to a bunch of socialists going, we need more cops.
Speaker 1: I want to take a look at a piece r
Speaker 1: Adam or Usami wrote in Catalyst with David Zachariah called
Speaker 1: the class path the racial Liberation, And I want to
Speaker 1: take a quote from its opening to give it a
Speaker 1: sense of people of like how awful this politics is.
Speaker 1: This is like like one of the sort of like
Speaker 1: opening statements about what what the's why they're taking the
Speaker 1: class side in the debate. We argue that the class
Speaker 1: race debate should center on one principal domain, the distribution
Speaker 1: of material resources. Now, Okay, at first glance, this seems
Speaker 1: kind of reasonable enough, But there's another incredibly important aspect
Speaker 1: of any attempt to grapple with racing class that Usumi
Speaker 1: is just ignoring entirely. And that's violets, right. Race. Race
Speaker 1: is not just a measure of economic inequality. It's an
Speaker 1: index of violence. And you know, racialization increases your risk
Speaker 1: of interperson inter personal violence, and increases your risk of
Speaker 1: sexual violence, and increases your risk of mass communal violence
Speaker 1: on lynching or sort of ethnic cleansing campaigns, and maybe
Speaker 1: most importantly for this whole argument, like being racialized dramatically
Speaker 1: increases the risk of suffering state violence. And this is
Speaker 1: a real problem for the sort of class first people
Speaker 1: because you know, something sort of multiple like multi racial
Speaker 1: working class electoral project won't do ship to prevent people
Speaker 1: from experiencing state violence just because there's welfare programs, you know,
Speaker 1: which we talked about this what this looks like in
Speaker 1: our Brazil episodes. Right, you actually have like legitimately a
Speaker 1: you know, like a sort of united multi racial working
Speaker 1: class at election social democratic governments and they enact anti
Speaker 1: poverty before performs and increase the size of the welfare state.
Speaker 1: And while this is happening, they also increase incarceration the
Speaker 1: incarcerated population by six and created a rated police killing
Speaker 1: that as eleven times higher than it is an US right.
Speaker 1: And this is the thing these people really don't want
Speaker 1: anyone to think about, which is that race is actually
Speaker 1: more complicated than economic inequality, which this entire politics is
Speaker 1: is dedicated to not seeing because class first politics, like
Speaker 1: a lot of what it really is about, amounts to
Speaker 1: a theoretical framework that gives you a way to argue
Speaker 1: that race is not an explanatory framework for literally anything,
Speaker 1: so you don't have to talk about it and anyone
Speaker 1: who talks about it is dividing the working class or
Speaker 1: some ship, and it, yeah, it fucking sucks. And you know,
Speaker 1: like one of one of the big sort of political
Speaker 1: violence things is massacrceration. And one of sort of donna
Speaker 1: is like political projects is arguing that massacrcepiration isn't about
Speaker 1: race at all, but it's actually about class, which so
Speaker 1: we're going to see somewhere bullshit, um, he wrote. He
Speaker 1: wrote an article in Catalyst called the Economic Origin the
Speaker 1: mass Incarceration a longside New Chicago professor John Clegg, and
Speaker 1: I have like I have an enormous special contempt for
Speaker 1: John Clegg for two reasons here. One because you know,
Speaker 1: a Donner is like an irredeemable Jocobin like soaked them
Speaker 1: hack right. Clegg is nominally was was part of the
Speaker 1: sort of the anglophan Barxist like ultra left right, like
Speaker 1: he he was one of the contributors to the sort
Speaker 1: of to to the ultra left theory journal like ultra
Speaker 1: left Barxist Communization Journal end Notes, which you know, like
Speaker 1: that influenced me a lot when I was like a
Speaker 1: tiny baby leftist. And he I also have an incredible
Speaker 1: amount of contempt here because he's a Harper Schmidt fellow
Speaker 1: at the University of Chicago. And here's the thing. Okay,
Speaker 1: I don't know what Harvard is like, right, I've never
Speaker 1: been there. I don't know what their campus is like.
Speaker 1: I don't know what it's like to be be on
Speaker 1: campus at Harvard. I know what you Chicago. The Chicago
Speaker 1: campus is like. I know, but there's a cop on
Speaker 1: every fucking corner. I know that the surveillance campus literally everywhere.
Speaker 1: I know if that they locked down the entire fucking campus,
Speaker 1: will hundreds of heavily armed cops storm through every building
Speaker 1: in every courtyard in the area every single time that
Speaker 1: kids steal something from a gaming store and runs for
Speaker 1: it until they've hunted them the fun down. And I
Speaker 1: know that, you know, I I know that the cops
Speaker 1: almost fucking killed me while I was there during a
Speaker 1: police chase. I know that John Clegg was on fucking
Speaker 1: campus when the Chicago Police Department shot a kid who
Speaker 1: was having a mental health crisis. And to to watch
Speaker 1: this ship every single fucking day and to make this
Speaker 1: kind of argument is just fucking unforgivable. It is. It
Speaker 1: is fucking atrocious. I I guess I should. I should
Speaker 1: explain this a little bit for people who do don't
Speaker 1: understand this. So, the University of Chicago is like in
Speaker 1: the middle of the South side of Chicago. It's like
Speaker 1: the nigh like most neighborhoods around it are like black.
Speaker 1: And then there is just this fucking university they've planted
Speaker 1: in the middle of it. And this college has the
Speaker 1: world's largest private police force. There's the also the regular
Speaker 1: fucking cpds around there. There are like for like blocks
Speaker 1: and like like through other neighborhoods there were just Chicago
Speaker 1: police officers there. There are fucking CPD cops everywhere. It
Speaker 1: is a fucking bibilitorized hell hall. And yeah, and you know,
Speaker 1: like it is a place where like the way that
Speaker 1: race functions in the US is blindingly fucking obvious. You
Speaker 1: can you can immediately understand it by looking, Like you
Speaker 1: walk outside your fucking dorm, you look at the cop,
Speaker 1: and you look at how the cop treats people depending
Speaker 1: on what the race is. Right, it is so unbelievably obvious. However,
Speaker 1: Comma in this article Clagg, it is to me are
Speaker 1: going to argue that mass incarceration is actually a product
Speaker 1: of class policy resulting from a lack of social democracy
Speaker 1: and underdevelopment resulting from a transition from an agrarian economy
Speaker 1: to an industrial economy in the in the century, and
Speaker 1: the subsequent mass migration of black people north. Like what
Speaker 1: kind of a grarian economy? We have to watch economy?
Speaker 1: How much paid? It's like it's like the basic argument
Speaker 1: that they're gonna make is that, like, well, so there
Speaker 1: are a bunch of people who had been slaves and
Speaker 1: then they became not slaves, and then a bunch of
Speaker 1: them started migrating north. But because there was this mass migration,
Speaker 1: all these people showed up to the like showed up
Speaker 1: to these cities where there was no infrastructure, and then
Speaker 1: so there was a bunch of crime, and then because
Speaker 1: of the crime, there was mass incarceration, which is, okay,
Speaker 1: we're going to get some war into this. But before
Speaker 1: we go into served the reactionary part of this article, right,
Speaker 1: you have to understand that when these people say that
Speaker 1: this is a a like a class based policy, like
Speaker 1: class here does not mean the same thing that it
Speaker 1: means for like you know, a regular person who thinks
Speaker 1: about class, or like you know, a Marxist which again
Speaker 1: both these people nominally are. Um. Here's from the journal Specter,
Speaker 1: which a really good sort of critique of of this
Speaker 1: whole absolutely dogshit article. Quote Clegg and usums claim that
Speaker 1: class is essential to understanding mass incarceration amounts to a
Speaker 1: repackaging of a widely understood fact as revelatory insight. And
Speaker 1: while they titled their article quote the Economic Origins and
Speaker 1: mass Incarceration, they never delve further into class and a
Speaker 1: Marxist or even critical sense. Instead, they use educational attainment
Speaker 1: data as a proxy. They note that a large portrait
Speaker 1: of people who are imprisoned have low levels of educational entertainment.
Speaker 1: And I I'm glad to know that everyone on this
Speaker 1: call who does the exact same job as me, we're
Speaker 1: all from different classes. Congratulations, James, you are now the bourgeois.
Speaker 1: The congratulations Garrison, you're not proletariat, I might guess, the
Speaker 1: labor aristocracy. Why I'm here to expropriate the surplus value
Speaker 1: from your labor gyeah? Yeah, And if you get to prison,
Speaker 1: it's it's my fault. Yeah, Like I I just okay,
Speaker 1: So like what an asshole? What would ridiculous fucking claim? Yeah?
Speaker 1: And it's like like these okay, so like like it
Speaker 1: was some these like the Jocobin people do this all
Speaker 1: the time, right, Like they had this they made this
Speaker 1: famous study about the people who vote for Trump that
Speaker 1: was like, oh, it's people people who voted for Trump
Speaker 1: didn't like working class areas and the game woarding class
Speaker 1: was by education data. And then also they didn't go
Speaker 1: because it's up like this is actually true, right there
Speaker 1: there are a lot of people who vote with Trump
Speaker 1: for working class areas. It turns out who those people
Speaker 1: are are the small business owners who work class areas.
Speaker 1: They didn't fucking go grand your love, so that you
Speaker 1: know they do this ship all the time, right, and
Speaker 1: this is the kind of analysis that like like proxy
Speaker 1: for class. It's like it's a classic fallacious thing. Yeah,
Speaker 1: like like what's his name, Nicholas Christoff, but yeah he
Speaker 1: did this too, also like like this is this is
Speaker 1: this is We're we're getting fucking Christoff level analysis out
Speaker 1: of these supposed Marxists and like, okay, so all right.
Speaker 1: The curious thing here is that clag at least on
Speaker 1: an intellectual level, knows better than this, right, Like he
Speaker 1: votes he wrote for end notes and notes has a
Speaker 1: very sophisticated class analysis. But if you're actually interested in
Speaker 1: the sweeping arc of the history of the proletariat, you
Speaker 1: can't make the kinds of arguments that Clagg is making
Speaker 1: in this thing. And so, you know, because because he's
Speaker 1: trying to make this argument, users used to this like
Speaker 1: like just absolutely like like seventh rate like fucking New
Speaker 1: York Time is pundit level analysis. Yeah, it's like okay,
Speaker 1: you know, like there there, it's it's this is really
Speaker 1: sad because for actual Marxists and not sort of like
Speaker 1: liberal bourgeois hacks doing like fucking New York Times bullshit.
Speaker 1: You know, classes about ownership, right, It's about who owns
Speaker 1: the means of production and who's forced to work for them.
Speaker 1: And you know, okay, so you have this, you have
Speaker 1: the proletariat or like the working class, where the people
Speaker 1: who own nothing and are thus forced to sell their
Speaker 1: labor for people who do who do own stuff. Right.
Speaker 1: But this also presents a problem for this entire argument,
Speaker 1: because if you actually want to do class analysis, you
Speaker 1: have to understand that race plays a major roland who
Speaker 1: even gets to become part of the regular proletariat in
Speaker 1: the first place, because most there's a lot of people
Speaker 1: through the development of the course of capitalism who fucking
Speaker 1: never even got to become wage labors because they were enslaved,
Speaker 1: they were exterminated, they were turned to debt peons and
Speaker 1: oh wait, guess who fucking got that ship? Oh yeah,
Speaker 1: it wasn't white people. And you know, if if, if
Speaker 1: you're if you're gonna write and if you're gonna be
Speaker 1: writing arguments and like playing the rise of like a
Speaker 1: mass system of enslavement, you might want to think about this.
Speaker 1: But no, okay, So do you know what else is
Speaker 1: responsible for a mass serious a mass system of enslavement? Uh?
Speaker 1: The advertising and how they affect our brains. Yeah, that one.
Speaker 1: I was going to go with Stalin, but the same
Speaker 1: same day if honestly, yeah, Stalent first mass marketer so
Speaker 1: true famously Yeah it Stalin. I'll saying you're me okay,
Speaker 1: if you're asking, Okay, we're back, and we're back to
Speaker 1: talk about the other argument of the economic origin of
Speaker 1: massive carecederation, which is that the argument that massive carcederation
Speaker 1: happened because people were legitimately scared about crime, Like this
Speaker 1: is their argument. Their argument is that crime went up
Speaker 1: people demanded less crime, and then the government did it,
Speaker 1: Like wait did they did they give an outsis to
Speaker 1: the class of people. Okay, they make this fun argument
Speaker 1: that both black and white people were demanding the end
Speaker 1: of crime, which is sort of true. But you know,
Speaker 1: if you look at what like like yeah, like obviously,
Speaker 1: and this is the thing, right, Like, you can find
Speaker 1: people of any race who can who will take basically
Speaker 1: any political position, and so if if you go looking
Speaker 1: for like black people who are tough on crime, you
Speaker 1: can find it. Right, there are black politicians who are
Speaker 1: like tough on crime. Right, but that's also not the
Speaker 1: reason why massacretiation happened, Like I'm sorry, And also, like
Speaker 1: you know, if you and you know that there was
Speaker 1: there was also there are people who who like weren't
Speaker 1: tough on crime, people who were like talking about who
Speaker 1: were talking about trying to end like sort of like
Speaker 1: like violent spikes. But if you look at what they
Speaker 1: were saying, it was stuff like we want the police
Speaker 1: to like respect human rights instead of property rights, and uh,
Speaker 1: you know, okay, so I yeah, this is this is
Speaker 1: just sort of silly, right yeah, But but but the
Speaker 1: point of this is that this is basically This is
Speaker 1: their full on broadside against abolitionism as like a body
Speaker 1: of work, right, it's a sort of modern abolitionism. Um,
Speaker 1: it's directly criticizing Michelle Alexander's The New drym Crow mass
Speaker 1: incarceration in the Age of Color Blindness. And it's also
Speaker 1: like a volley basically against anyone who's trying to explain
Speaker 1: mass incarceration through race. And so what they argue is
Speaker 1: that crime increase because there wasn't a strong labor movement
Speaker 1: to solve the problem that like caused solve the problems
Speaker 1: that cause crime with economic like reistribution, So the state
Speaker 1: turned to like a cheaper option, which is prisons. And
Speaker 1: is it a cheap proprition? Well, okay, so they're they're
Speaker 1: they're not wrong in this, Like there is some truth here, right,
Speaker 1: which is that there is a reason that mass incarceration
Speaker 1: started spiking when capitalism went into crisis in the seventies
Speaker 1: and eighties. And it is actually it is actually genuinely
Speaker 1: cheaper for for for the boys where you need to
Speaker 1: run a prison state that it is to run a
Speaker 1: welfare state. But and and this is the important part, right,
Speaker 1: both the welfare state and the prison complex are different,
Speaker 1: are just different forms of kind of insurgency it used
Speaker 1: to be. Who is a social democrat is ideologically incapable
Speaker 1: of understanding this. His his entire ideology is that like
Speaker 1: is based on the fact that the welfare state is
Speaker 1: the end point of socialism. But this is completely backwards, right.
Speaker 1: The welfare state and and social democracy were first implemented
Speaker 1: by Bismarck, like specifically as a way to buy workers off,
Speaker 1: to stop them from carrying out a socialist revolution and
Speaker 1: actually seizing the pro like seizing the property of the
Speaker 1: ruling class and using the production for the benefit of
Speaker 1: mankind and not profit. That is why the ship the
Speaker 1: welfare state was invented. Like that in practice, if you
Speaker 1: go back to Edmund Burke right in the French Revolution,
Speaker 1: reform to preserve the idea that like, we have to
Speaker 1: give people these little these little slices here and there,
Speaker 1: give them a treat, and then then then then they
Speaker 1: will never come in and take the cake. And if
Speaker 1: you read these people, they're really explicit about this, Like
Speaker 1: they will just aquidly say we're buying off the working class.
Speaker 1: But these absolute clowns have like somehow convinced themselves that
Speaker 1: this is what socialism actually is. Social socialism is when
Speaker 1: socialism is when you confuse table scraps for treats, and
Speaker 1: you know, and and this this comes to sort of
Speaker 1: the other thing that that that these people can't understand,
Speaker 1: which is that social democracy was a class compromise. Right.
Speaker 1: There was a deal that the capitalist of the working
Speaker 1: class agree to. And when I when I say they
Speaker 1: agree to this, right, like, this isn't just sort of
Speaker 1: like an like it kind of is an abstract deal.
Speaker 1: But there are also very literal deals. Right. There's this
Speaker 1: thing called the Treaty of Detroit, which is this massive,
Speaker 1: basically set of negotiations. And then are like agreements that
Speaker 1: are made between the US government like like a huge
Speaker 1: portion of organized labor in the auto industry and the
Speaker 1: auto companies, right, which which basically like the substance of
Speaker 1: the Treaty of Detroit was like if you give us
Speaker 1: all of this welfare ship and benefits ship, right, we
Speaker 1: won't we will stop constantly going on strike. These are
Speaker 1: explicit deals. They're explicitly being negotiated between these massive trade
Speaker 1: unions and and like the capitalist who owned companies by
Speaker 1: the American government, and so they get this deal on
Speaker 1: the deal is you get unions and pension and a
Speaker 1: vacation and like health care, as long as you don't
Speaker 1: like seize control of factories and run them for themselves.
Speaker 1: And this held from sort of like the fifties through
Speaker 1: the seventies. But partially this held because also the US specifically,
Speaker 1: which is really really rich as economy was growing really fast.
Speaker 1: But you know, but by by the by the suddenly
Speaker 1: the rate of prophet is starting to collapse, and suddenly
Speaker 1: it does actually become possible to both pay for the
Speaker 1: welfare state and have capital turned into war capital at
Speaker 1: the same time. And you know what happens is full
Speaker 1: on class war over the course of seventies and the eighties,
Speaker 1: and you know, the capitalists win the class war. And
Speaker 1: the product of this, and this is true not just
Speaker 1: in the U s but in in like a lot
Speaker 1: of other neoliberal countries too, is that there is a
Speaker 1: massive military that this the state is sort of stripped
Speaker 1: down to nothing in tern of like providing services, but
Speaker 1: there's this massive build up of the military and police
Speaker 1: and also prisons. And so you know, this isn't some
Speaker 1: sense that like if you if you want a class
Speaker 1: based explanation of mass incarceration, like this is part of
Speaker 1: that's a big part of what's going on. It's also
Speaker 1: true that in the US, insofar as there was sort
Speaker 1: of a revolutionary force, it was black people doing like
Speaker 1: like doing the panthers, doing the like blanking on it,
Speaker 1: doing the Black Liberation Army, and this meant that sort
Speaker 1: of the sort of kind of revolution to this was
Speaker 1: specifically about deploying the sort of like like they're deploying
Speaker 1: the state against these people because yeah, like this movement
Speaker 1: is actively trying to destroy capitalism by destroying the races
Speaker 1: like police apparatus, and this I guess at the same
Speaker 1: time period like aim for instance. Yeah, and you know,
Speaker 1: so the ruling class sort of loses their minds and
Speaker 1: this is this is also this is also part of
Speaker 1: what's happening here. But the problem is the sort of
Speaker 1: Jocobin cop freaks like need the police for their like
Speaker 1: social democratic hell world that they want to build, and
Speaker 1: so they can't have any like it is it is
Speaker 1: incredibly structurally dangerous for them. For people to be arguing that,
Speaker 1: like the police are inherently a force of like systemic
Speaker 1: racial oppression because they want them around yeah, and so
Speaker 1: they do all this. Yeah, and you know, Clegg meanwhile,
Speaker 1: especially I can tell, just doesn't want to use race
Speaker 1: as like an explanation for ship Like they literally argue
Speaker 1: in this in this thing, like in this in this
Speaker 1: article that white flight was actually just capital flight and
Speaker 1: wasn't about racism. Good, And they just they're they're doing
Speaker 1: this entire thing about right this our political economy of
Speaker 1: the city, and they just they never mentioned they're so
Speaker 1: ruthlessly committed to their program of not talking about racism,
Speaker 1: but don't even mention redlining. It's like like they've managed
Speaker 1: to go to the right of like the Libertarian Party
Speaker 1: on race. It's like them to the right. So I'm
Speaker 1: gonna I'm gonna read more from the Spector article. That's
Speaker 1: like yelling at these people considering their investments in the
Speaker 1: category of violent crime. Clegg and used to be seemed
Speaker 1: curiously serene about the practices that upheld segregation. They would
Speaker 1: have us believe that such tactics are simply quote cast
Speaker 1: based remedies of exclusion, and that quote such strategies were rational,
Speaker 1: even if suboptimal in the long run, effectively rationalizing and
Speaker 1: apologizing for racism. So this is great. And then they
Speaker 1: capped this off with this giant, like swelling crescendo of
Speaker 1: an argument about how the left can't ignore crime. And
Speaker 1: you know, okay, so this is an argument with political consequences, right,
Speaker 1: And you can see those consequences in that in the
Speaker 1: cops article we were talking about yesterday. Um here, here,
Speaker 1: here's a quote from that article. This figure shows the
Speaker 1: same prisoner and police data as shown in figure one,
Speaker 1: but this time denominated by the level of homicide rather
Speaker 1: than the population amor because outlying incarceration look rate looks
Speaker 1: normal given the level of serious crime, and now the
Speaker 1: level of policing in the United States appears exceptionally low
Speaker 1: compared to other countries. So okay, you can see the
Speaker 1: line of argument here, right, It goes like mass incarceration
Speaker 1: isn't about race, it's actually about class, and actually it's
Speaker 1: really about crime. And then it goes from the crime
Speaker 1: to oh, well, this is about crime too. We need
Speaker 1: to actually do something about crime. And then that turns
Speaker 1: into the only thing we can do about crimes, have
Speaker 1: more cops, you know, and and and the other part
Speaker 1: of this, right, it goes back to the thing about like, okay,
Speaker 1: the thing about like that, you know, and this is
Speaker 1: something that Garrison was talking about yesterday, right like the
Speaker 1: way in which you can only think the level of
Speaker 1: policing in the US is exceptionally low, is is if
Speaker 1: you never interacted with a cop. And yes, this is
Speaker 1: a deliberate thing, right the sort of Dracobin cadre of
Speaker 1: like faux marx Is, like their entire political project was
Speaker 1: really originally was driving off the anarchists you found it Occupy,
Speaker 1: you know, drinking like and driving these people into the
Speaker 1: political wilderness. It is placed it with their sort of
Speaker 1: beer credit cops socialism. Right like what one of one
Speaker 1: of the first like big Jocobin articles was a giant
Speaker 1: thing about why this Zapatitis aren't model for the American
Speaker 1: left because right like this is that these people have
Speaker 1: been anti anarchists like to their core, and again because
Speaker 1: they need cops, they need to get rid of the
Speaker 1: people who hate the cops. Like again, the people who
Speaker 1: were actually on the street street Occupy, who have seen
Speaker 1: ship like for example, the bloody stains on the wall
Speaker 1: outside of police holding pens where the cops smashed the
Speaker 1: heads into of like every single person they arrested a
Speaker 1: thing that happened constantly drink occupy right, and these people
Speaker 1: who you know have seen the police shoot their friends
Speaker 1: eyes out, like, are incredibly inconvenient if you're trying to
Speaker 1: put yourself on top of a police state. And you
Speaker 1: know so of course our abolitionists, which means you also
Speaker 1: need a sideline them them and and these are this
Speaker 1: you know, this sort of strategy is an old entrenched
Speaker 1: like position of of of these people. Um in, Jeremy Gong,
Speaker 1: who was like the one time basically like the dictator
Speaker 1: of d. S. A. East Bay, was caught in in
Speaker 1: secret documents saying quote, we are not in caps, by
Speaker 1: the way, in his capital letters, not for abolition of prisons.
Speaker 1: I would go further of black people want more police
Speaker 1: in their neighborhoods. Really yeah, Jeremy Gong, by the way,
Speaker 1: Asian dude, not black. Fuck you eat ship. I hope
Speaker 1: you're having fun, Like, well, I don't have I don't
Speaker 1: hope you're having fun. I hope you're having a bad
Speaker 1: time losing another election by getting three percent of the
Speaker 1: vote or some ship like fuck you eat ship. Um yeah,
Speaker 1: and I should mention this also like it's a very
Speaker 1: obvious thing to say, but like it should be pointed
Speaker 1: out that like everyone who's making this argument like that,
Speaker 1: specifically these arguments about cops and about the stuffing about crime,
Speaker 1: these people are all either wider Asian, and I genuinely
Speaker 1: think that plays a pretty big role in why they're
Speaker 1: doing this. And it's just to breathtaking position to take
Speaker 1: as a white person, Like I'm looking at the anarchist
Speaker 1: Barring article which she wrote for news Week, great source
Speaker 1: of unbiased content on the left about how where we
Speaker 1: need to stop gas lighting progressives need to stop gas
Speaker 1: lighting people on crime too, as a white person, take
Speaker 1: the stand with the platform that has been given to you,
Speaker 1: with all the privileges that you have had, and and
Speaker 1: gas like black folks about the importance of race. It's
Speaker 1: just breathtakingly lacking in like context of self awareness or
Speaker 1: like have you not been fucking paying attention like at
Speaker 1: least for the last two years, if not for the
Speaker 1: last twenty years, you know, And I mean, like this
Speaker 1: is the whole thing where like they have this whole
Speaker 1: sort of political project that's like like makes talking about
Speaker 1: like their goal is to make talking about this ship
Speaker 1: sound cringe, because you know, they and they have to
Speaker 1: write this is this, this is this is also sort
Speaker 1: of class based revival strategy, right because like they these
Speaker 1: people couldn't fucking hack it as abolitionist scholars. They have
Speaker 1: no fucking idea what they're talking about. Right If they,
Speaker 1: if they, if they have to actually intellectually like be
Speaker 1: in the same sphere as like someone like Ruth Gilmore Wilson,
Speaker 1: they are going to get fucking blow. Like these people
Speaker 1: look like this is this is like a fucking battle
Speaker 1: cruiser going to war gets a speedboat, right, Like, they
Speaker 1: can't fucking hack it, And so they have to sort
Speaker 1: of like do all of this ship to convince people
Speaker 1: that like, no, no, no, it's actually really not about race. Uh,
Speaker 1: it's it's actually about class, this thing that I can
Speaker 1: very easily pretend to care about for academia in a
Speaker 1: way that I can't with you know, pretending to care
Speaker 1: about race, because like I, I can't even fucking fake it, right,
Speaker 1: And you know I would say this's like back in right,
Speaker 1: Like Jeremy Gong and his allies are very careful to
Speaker 1: frame their view in terms of like, wow, we want
Speaker 1: to end mass incarceration in police violence, but we have
Speaker 1: to be tactical about how we do it, and the
Speaker 1: tactical about how we do it is black people want
Speaker 1: more cops, right, But that that was their internal documents.
Speaker 1: Their external their external statements were like, well some police
Speaker 1: abolition is some stuff looks like more cops anyways, But
Speaker 1: but you know, internally they were always saying this. And
Speaker 1: now with the you know, these people think that there's
Speaker 1: a political right turn coming and they think that, you know,
Speaker 1: they can fucking take their mask off and just say
Speaker 1: what they really mean, which is five more fucking cops,
Speaker 1: and you know, and part of what's going on here, right,
Speaker 1: it is like, like the reason this is happening is
Speaker 1: because when the uprising happened, these people were just caught
Speaker 1: with their pants down because their entire political project for
Speaker 1: like fucking how how how many years were they doing this?
Speaker 1: Like seven years was elect Bernie Sanders, and then he
Speaker 1: lost back to back successively to like Hillary Clinton, who
Speaker 1: was maybe the least popular can the Democrats ever run ever?
Speaker 1: And Joe Biden, who is a fucking senile rapist who
Speaker 1: like again it was like, um, they they lost his
Speaker 1: election to a man who couldn't remember who who he
Speaker 1: had been vice president under and they couldn't beat him, right, like,
Speaker 1: so these people were completely discredited, and then you know,
Speaker 1: the uprising happens and people were caught with their pants
Speaker 1: down because they spent their entire fucking time or like
Speaker 1: arguing that there's no path liberation through race, like race,
Speaker 1: any kind of race politics at all, intersectionalities bullshit, like
Speaker 1: we just have to focus on class, just to focus
Speaker 1: on class, and they're fucking pure class. Electoral campaign failed
Speaker 1: in oh, hey, guess what it failed in the South,
Speaker 1: Like wow, damn, I wonder why this politics got swept
Speaker 1: by Joe Biden. Okay, And then you know, and then
Speaker 1: and then the up the uprising starts, and the uprising
Speaker 1: is you know, the uprising is about anti racism. It
Speaker 1: is about people looking at the at the violence like
Speaker 1: of the police against black people and going fuck this
Speaker 1: and they have nothing right, like the whole intellectual leadership here,
Speaker 1: like all these people are fucking calling for world crops.
Speaker 1: Bernie Sanders is arguing for Moore cops right like Rapo
Speaker 1: was fucking Trampa was literally making the same arguments that
Speaker 1: my fucking mayor made. Well, she was raising the fucking drawbridges.
Speaker 1: Is stop protesters from being able to get back into
Speaker 1: the middle of Chicago, which is that actually, like cops,
Speaker 1: becoming a cop is actually one of the few ways
Speaker 1: that non white people can join the middle class. Right.
Speaker 1: I was like, I think Amber made that argument, right, Um,
Speaker 1: so you know they have nothing right and you know, okay,
Speaker 1: and and and you know, and the uprise eventually gets supressed,
Speaker 1: which the best thing that ever happened to these people,
Speaker 1: because if the uprising has to see these people were
Speaker 1: done right. Like, but all of this has enormous consequences, right,
Speaker 1: which is the failure of the working class to appear
Speaker 1: at the ballot box. And like Paul Bernie Sanders over
Speaker 1: the line against Joe Biden revealed something that was like
Speaker 1: patently obvious to anyone who've been watching how the working
Speaker 1: class is moving worldwide for the past twenty years, which
Speaker 1: is that the only thing that can actually unify the
Speaker 1: if you care about class politics, the only thing that
Speaker 1: can unify the working class and pull it together as
Speaker 1: a coherent political force to do a thing is their
Speaker 1: hatred of the police. If if you look at if
Speaker 1: you look at what the work of working class politics
Speaker 1: in the century, the world, the working class finds his
Speaker 1: historical unity exactly and only on the barricade it appears undivided.
Speaker 1: Literally nowhere else it is impossible. You can't do it.
Speaker 1: The only thing that does it is fighting the police
Speaker 1: more broadly and like means of state violence. Right, Like
Speaker 1: if we look at the popular friend in its Spain,
Speaker 1: it don't you even get like cops who are installed
Speaker 1: by a socialist republican government joining the working class to
Speaker 1: fight the military. But yeah, instead we're going to be
Speaker 1: like the working class will be united in this op
Speaker 1: ed at news week dot com or and there's this
Speaker 1: smoking electoral thing, right, And it's like no, and I
Speaker 1: think that like this this is partially about this people
Speaker 1: not understanding the sort of broad arc of of the
Speaker 1: last decade a decade and a half, which is that,
Speaker 1: like this was the actual meaning behind the people want
Speaker 1: to fallow of the regime. Right this, this was what
Speaker 1: was going on in the last decade of uprising in
Speaker 1: the street movements across the world. Right, is that that
Speaker 1: was the thing that could unify the working class. But
Speaker 1: of course, and and this is the sort of secret
Speaker 1: of all of this, right, Like, these people don't want
Speaker 1: to unify the working class They only want to unify
Speaker 1: it if it's under their control. The erupt the eruption
Speaker 1: of you know, like actually the working class standing side
Speaker 1: by side together fighting the cops on barricades in twenty
Speaker 1: was the worst thing that could possibly happen to them,
Speaker 1: because you know, it pointed to another way of doing
Speaker 1: politics that they like in the in the street that
Speaker 1: they thought they'd you know, crushed after the feet of
Speaker 1: occupy and yeah, and you know, and they were, they were,
Speaker 1: they were incredibly scared by this. They were piste off
Speaker 1: by this. And you know, I I I mentioned last episode,
Speaker 1: I was going to talk about the sort of class
Speaker 1: politics that's at work here because you know, these demands
Speaker 1: for more cops, like they don't come from the working class, right, Like,
Speaker 1: in so far as there's ever been a referendum on
Speaker 1: the police as an institution, it was and you know,
Speaker 1: we know what that looked like, right, It was it
Speaker 1: was a bunch of working class kids went into the
Speaker 1: streets and you know and fought like lions against the
Speaker 1: fucking cops, and even the sort of liberal like the
Speaker 1: liberal middle and professional classes like eventually turned against them,
Speaker 1: you know, as as rolled on right, and you know,
Speaker 1: like those people still hung on for months and months
Speaker 1: and months, you know, like refusing to leave the streets
Speaker 1: even after the fucking federal marshal sort of literally assassinating
Speaker 1: people openly in the streets. Right, Like the whole demand
Speaker 1: from more cops for like a harsher crackdown on crime.
Speaker 1: All of this stuff comes from precisely the opposite direction. Right.
Speaker 1: It's entirely generated by the by the by by by
Speaker 1: basically the media class. Right. It's it's class based is
Speaker 1: a combination of these sort of like faux progressive like
Speaker 1: media outlets. And originally the starts with the New York
Speaker 1: Times and the Washington Post, and then moves left are
Speaker 1: nominally left right, and when it hits like the fucking
Speaker 1: T I T and all of their like bullshit right,
Speaker 1: and then you know, and and and then at that point,
Speaker 1: having having having went through the media people, right, it's
Speaker 1: it starts running through these pseudo ratical academics like Christopher
Speaker 1: Lewis and Autinario Sami and then the last group of
Speaker 1: people who are backing this this is a very weird one.
Speaker 1: But there's a collection of paid union staffers who like
Speaker 1: for their jobs because they're in the big union's work
Speaker 1: on police and prison guard contracts. Um, this this is
Speaker 1: actually this is this is this has been a huge
Speaker 1: problem the d s A in in In said one
Speaker 1: of the NC elections, they had um for the for
Speaker 1: the National Political Committee, which is the d s A
Speaker 1: is big major body, like governing body. Right. They they
Speaker 1: accident people accidentally elected a police union organizer because he
Speaker 1: was like they knew he was a union organized, but
Speaker 1: they didn't know that he organized police unions. And then
Speaker 1: he he fucking refeat like nothing, nothing was going to happen.
Speaker 1: And then basically what happened is everyone had left the
Speaker 1: organization bullied him out and so he resigned. But like, yeah,
Speaker 1: there's a lot of those people, right and those people's
Speaker 1: classes actives are incredibly obvious. Right, But didn't the a
Speaker 1: f l c I O even in like refused to
Speaker 1: reject police unions right there? But like, no, people, if
Speaker 1: I remember, if I remember, I think I think someone
Speaker 1: threw a malt off like into the headquarters the because
Speaker 1: of it, Like yeah, like this this this is the
Speaker 1: whole fucking thing, and you know, like this sucks. Cops
Speaker 1: are not fucking workers, Jesus Christ, Like they're they're just
Speaker 1: not if you if you look at what they actually do,
Speaker 1: they're they're they're like they're basically minor feudal lords in
Speaker 1: that they extract rent from everyone by fucking walking on
Speaker 1: people and robbing them. And then they also extract rent
Speaker 1: directly from us by staking, by stealing, just like enormous
Speaker 1: increasingly large amounts of city funds under basically the threat
Speaker 1: of extortion and violence. Yeah, little dames, Yeah, it's it's
Speaker 1: it's ship. I want to come back to the sort
Speaker 1: of left media outlets, right, because what we've been seeing
Speaker 1: here is that as as these lot of left media
Speaker 1: outlets get larger, right, they increasingly adopt like insane small
Speaker 1: business tyrant politics. Because that's that's the different coming right too.
Speaker 1: I t notoriously tried to bust its own union staff. Yeah,
Speaker 1: because it turns out as journalists become bosses and capitalists,
Speaker 1: they have they have their own classes just to look
Speaker 1: out for, right, Yeah, and they will continue producing this
Speaker 1: class discourse which serves as nothing other than like best
Speaker 1: like a safety sort of steam valve, right for people
Speaker 1: who are frustrated by the class situation they work in.
Speaker 1: If if not like an outright sort of disinformation campaign
Speaker 1: about what class is. Yeah, and you know, and and
Speaker 1: and there's I think there's another thing going on here too,
Speaker 1: which is that like, okay, if if you're like a
Speaker 1: sort of like media outlets and your things that you
Speaker 1: hate liberals and that you're on the left, right, there's
Speaker 1: there's kind of a cap to your audience base, and
Speaker 1: specifically as a cap that the kind of audience you
Speaker 1: can have that actually has money, because you know, you
Speaker 1: can you can get a broke base and sort of
Speaker 1: progressive workers, and you can get some college students, right,
Speaker 1: but at some point, like those those are not people
Speaker 1: that have a large amount of money. Yeah, And at
Speaker 1: some point the right offers a listener base that has
Speaker 1: a bunch of money, and this gives you a revenue
Speaker 1: base for sort of would be like media attack who's
Speaker 1: hitting the limits of their original base. And this is
Speaker 1: responsible for things like like Max Blue menhal and X
Speaker 1: like t I T Reporter Jimmy Door like descending it
Speaker 1: is just full on COVID nihilism and con I mean,
Speaker 1: you know, it's it's it's not like these people were
Speaker 1: like doing good before, but like, you know, full on
Speaker 1: right wing, like like Matt Max Bluementhal going from being
Speaker 1: the most pro CCP guy the world has ever seen
Speaker 1: to literally writing articles about how social credit is coming
Speaker 1: to the us UH in a form of commed restrictions
Speaker 1: like this kind of ship. And you know, so like
Speaker 1: that that's part of the class politics going on here.
Speaker 1: Like there's another thing, which is like, okay, there's the
Speaker 1: Harvard academics. I don't think we need to say anything
Speaker 1: complicated about their class loyalties except that, like, none of
Speaker 1: these dipships are ever be beaten half the death by
Speaker 1: a cop um. Yeah, I mean we talked about the
Speaker 1: union bureaucrats, right, Um, they're more complicated. But again, like
Speaker 1: in class terms, you get people who are either driven
Speaker 1: by purely by sort of the revenue that copying is
Speaker 1: bring in, and then you get people who are opposed
Speaker 1: to political organizations like the d s A taking firm
Speaker 1: stances against police union organizers because it would affect their
Speaker 1: own ability to win off like win elections inside the
Speaker 1: d s A, A thing that has happens so many times.
Speaker 1: It's great. It's it's very funny that they chose classes,
Speaker 1: and they chose like education level as their proxy for class.
Speaker 1: And we are discussing this in the same week that
Speaker 1: we release an episode about a grad student strike at
Speaker 1: the largest university in the country because grad students are
Speaker 1: unhoused because they can't afford to pay their rent and
Speaker 1: feed themselves. It is. It is a Trocias ship. Like, Okay,
Speaker 1: I need hate people. Um, yeah, So I want to
Speaker 1: close off by talking about something, which is that there's
Speaker 1: also a political angle to all of this. Right, these people,
Speaker 1: all of these people doing this fucking crime bullshit, all
Speaker 1: these people fucking going right, all of these people calculated
Speaker 1: that a right turn in American politics was coming. Right.
Speaker 1: That's why t Yet endorse a fucking literally a Republican
Speaker 1: in California who was also an insane, tough on crime guy.
Speaker 1: This is why. That's why they had no Noso Caruso.
Speaker 1: Yeaho was a Republican who changed his party affiliations. We
Speaker 1: could run the Democratic thing. Who fucking sucks, asked, That's
Speaker 1: why theyre that, That's why they had Matt quote alleged
Speaker 1: pedophile Gates on their show on election night, Larry Elder
Speaker 1: on this show as well, like election denialist Larry Elder. Yeah,
Speaker 1: like this this wasn't just a pure product of these
Speaker 1: people going insane watching videos of like people looting grocery
Speaker 1: stores and turn to get tough on crime. Reactionaries. This
Speaker 1: was the political calculation and stuff. But yeah, but but
Speaker 1: but they sucked up. Right, These people fundamentally don't understand
Speaker 1: what this country is. They're scared, they've given up. They
Speaker 1: saw a single homeless person on the street and turn
Speaker 1: into a fascist. And they think that the American people
Speaker 1: are just hopeless, the reactionary and the only thing that's
Speaker 1: left to do is solve the situation by selling out.
Speaker 1: And they're smart. They don't think. They don't credit people
Speaker 1: with having like compassion or empathy or intelligence either. Right,
Speaker 1: they think they would go the direction their stupid grift
Speaker 1: show points. Yeah, and and they're wrong. They're incredibly wrong.
Speaker 1: This is a country that, in the name of fighting
Speaker 1: racism and the police, in the name of solidarity with
Speaker 1: people who are not their fucking seals, people who they
Speaker 1: will literally never beat, put on a mass picked up
Speaker 1: a brick and waged war against the best funded police
Speaker 1: force in human history. And for like a week and
Speaker 1: a half, those same fucking Americans who the entire political
Speaker 1: spectrum had written office hopelessly beaten down and passive and
Speaker 1: right wing and like people people who will take any
Speaker 1: amount of abuse and never is anything back wrecked. The
Speaker 1: fucking wrecked. The cops shit so hard they lost control
Speaker 1: over the centers, have made multiple major American cities and
Speaker 1: had to call in the fucking National Guard, who in
Speaker 1: turn got their ship wrecked so hard that they had
Speaker 1: to rely on liberal civil society to call him the
Speaker 1: protest down. And even then, the President would have fucking
Speaker 1: deployed the army against them if he had actually been
Speaker 1: physically able to. And the old reason that these people
Speaker 1: weren't fighting the fucking army in the streets was that
Speaker 1: was that the fucking American generals refused to go along
Speaker 1: with it. Right like that, that is who the U
Speaker 1: s is that that that is whose generation is. This
Speaker 1: generation is forever the generation that burned the Third Precinct,
Speaker 1: and the fucking X left is running right. Just don't
Speaker 1: fucking get it right. They think the entire clock has
Speaker 1: been brown back. They think that like those that, like
Speaker 1: the of people who did that, I've already been destroyed.
Speaker 1: They don't matter. The only thing left, you know that
Speaker 1: you can do is join them right and mitigate the damage.
Speaker 1: And they're fucking wrong. They are wrong. They can't see it.
Speaker 1: They cannot see that there was no way to turn
Speaker 1: the clock back to before the uprising happened. They can't
Speaker 1: see that, like this entire country, that the that the
Speaker 1: American working class, that parts of the people who are
Speaker 1: not part of the American working class have been fundamentally changed.
Speaker 1: And yeah, they just they just can't see it. And
Speaker 1: because they can't see it, the only thing that they're
Speaker 1: ever going to feel is the way that there is.
Speaker 1: The only thing they can feel is the way of
Speaker 1: their ignorance. And the only thing they're going to feel
Speaker 1: on top of that is them getting fucking buried by
Speaker 1: the weight of the history that has left them behind.
Speaker 1: Because fun, these people, fuck the cops. Fun the people
Speaker 1: who support the cops. These people will be down, but
Speaker 1: will be fucking drowned by the tide of history they
Speaker 1: thought didn't fucking exist. Fuck them. Okay, this is what Yeah,
Speaker 1: you can probably tell I wrote this really really piste
Speaker 1: off at five in the fucking morning, because Jesus Christ,
Speaker 1: that's good. Yeah, yeah, I agree with you. Pick up
Speaker 1: a brick, put down the young Turks. Yeah, don't fucking
Speaker 1: support more cops. Every every everyone will hate you. Your
Speaker 1: coworkers will hate you, your friends will hit you, your
Speaker 1: family will hit you. The guy, the guy at the
Speaker 1: fucking quarter store will hate you. Yeah. And if you
Speaker 1: find your fucking left hero standing the people who murdered
Speaker 1: George Floyd or stood around and watch George Floyd being murdered,
Speaker 1: then they are not a leftist anymore. And it's okay
Speaker 1: to tell them to fuck off and die. Yeah, And
Speaker 1: I mean, like, and we can go back to this
Speaker 1: our first episode, right, Like, the reason these people are
Speaker 1: calling for five more cops is that they've given up entirely, right,
Speaker 1: They literally do not think it is possible for anything
Speaker 1: to ever improve in the US, And then well they
Speaker 1: are wrong. Yeah, And I think that they're okay with
Speaker 1: the way that our police behave and there if that
Speaker 1: makes him feel comfortable and safe, then they don't mind
Speaker 1: people die at the hands in the police. Cops protect
Speaker 1: rich people. These people have gotten wealthy enough to have
Speaker 1: the cops now benefit them. It's it's that simple, Like,
Speaker 1: that's that, that's it's it's it's I think that really
Speaker 1: is the yeah, trying motivator here. Yeah, And like I
Speaker 1: will say this to like, if we ever get to
Speaker 1: a point where we start sucking doing this, like take
Speaker 1: us down to this. This is this isn't just a
Speaker 1: sort of like we're trying to build our business whatever.
Speaker 1: I don't like, I don't fucking care. I would I
Speaker 1: would rather fucking go broke in the streets. I would
Speaker 1: rather fucking die than be a person whose job it
Speaker 1: is to say we need more cops. Fuck these people. God, yeah,
Speaker 1: m m. They've plumped me on Twitter, so I can't
Speaker 1: say get off to him podcast fans. God, we are
Speaker 1: not insigning harassment campaign instead nowhere other things. Yeah, I
Speaker 1: don't waste Yeah, I know seriousness. Don't waste your time
Speaker 1: doing this course with people who exist to create bullshit
Speaker 1: discourse said, just a distraction. Go and help someone needs
Speaker 1: your help. It's called it's wet, it's wintertime and everyone
Speaker 1: the house, people who are shivering on the streets. So
Speaker 1: don't funk with the young talk. Just ignore them. Point
Speaker 1: to say, go go, go, go out there and fucking
Speaker 1: build the socialism that these people think is impossible, because
Speaker 1: we can do it, and we will, and then we
Speaker 1: will laugh at them because we've done it and they
Speaker 1: are fucking bullshit. Yeah, that's that's the episode. Hey, we'll
Speaker 1: be back Monday, with more episodes every week from now
Speaker 1: until the heat death of the universe. It Could Happen
Speaker 1: Here is a production of cool Zone Media. For more
Speaker 1: podcasts from cool Zone Media, visit our website cool zone
Speaker 1: media dot com, or check us out on the I
Speaker 1: Heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts.
Speaker 1: You can find sources for It Could Happen Here, updated
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Speaker 1: for listening.