All Episodes

January 25, 2025 170 mins

All of this week's episodes of It Could Happen Here put together in one large file. 

  1. The Lost Post Office Union Episode

  2. The Age of Cowards and What Happens Next

  3. How to Evacuate Your Home

  4. A Firsthand Account of the Inauguration & Trump's First Days

  5. About That Nazi Salute

You can now listen to all Cool Zone Media shows, 100% ad-free through the Cooler Zone Media subscription, available exclusively on Apple Podcasts. So, open your Apple Podcasts app, search for “Cooler Zone Media” and subscribe today!

http://apple.co/coolerzone 

Sources/Links:

The Age of Cowards and What Happens Next

https://emilygorcenski.com/

How to Evacuate Your Home

https://www.fire.ca.gov/prepare/get-ready-to-go

https://www.liveliketheworldisdying.com/

About That Nazi Salute

https://apnews.com/article/jair-bolsonaro-politics-brasilia-united-states-government-florida-state-29fad1e6c79a5737641932c939021e62

https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1852/18th-brumaire/ch01.htm

https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/debord/society.htm

https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/the-invisible-committe-to-our-friends

 

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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Transcript

Episode Transcript

Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:01):
Col Zone Media. Hey everybody, Robert Evans here and I
wanted to let you know this is a compilation episode.
So every episode of the week that just happened is
here in one convenient and with somewhat less ads package
for you to listen to in a long stretch if
you want. If you've been listening to the episodes every
day this week, there's going to be nothing new here

(00:22):
for you, but you can make your own decisions.

Speaker 2 (00:26):
Either snow nor rain, nor heat nor darkness can stop
the Persian Courier Service. Welcome to take it out and
here a podcast about postal services. Who reasked the question
can the American capitalist class finally stop the American post Office?
I'm your host, Mio Wong, and with me to talk
about what is going on with the post office, what's

(00:47):
going on with the post office unions, and yeah, how
things are going downhill for the noble people who carry
your mail. Is Tommy Espinoza, who's a union steward for
the National Association of Letter Carriers. Tommy, welcome to the show.

Speaker 3 (01:02):
Thank you so much for having me. Thank you so
much for giving us the Mailcare dollars, the male carriers
a platform to stand on.

Speaker 2 (01:11):
Yeah, I'm really I'm really happy to you and I'm
really happy to get to talk to you about this.
So I think the place we should start is with
a bunch of very very weird stuff in how labor
law works. So, Okay, for like most people in the
United States, you have a fatally protected right to strike
if you have a union. That is not true for

(01:33):
federal employees. That is especially not true for members of
the Post Office, and that is a real issue because
the government has decided that, like, yeah, I know, all
these people who do a vital service are not allowed
to go on strike and it absolutely sucks. Yeah, So
I think this gets into sort of where I want

(01:56):
to start, which is with the sort of history of
the Nationalssociation Letters Carriers, a union that is not allowed
to strike, and how sort of weird that is. So Yeah,
I was wondering if you could talk a bit about
sort of the origins of the union and what effect
that has had on how organizing works or doesn't work.

Speaker 3 (02:16):
Yeah, the right to strike has been a rather divisive topic.
I'm sure you're familiar with unions and just generally people
on our side of our side of politics to be
infighting a lot. I shouldn't come to a surprise. So

(02:38):
in nineteen sixty nine, just over fifty years ago, the
salary for postal workers was under two dollars an hour.
People were working months straight with no days off, and
those were close to twelve hour days, and so these
postal workers at the time qualified for welfare and decided

(03:00):
in nineteen seventy to go on strike despite it being illegal.
This conversation is not new. It was illegal then, it's
illegal now. And I do want to be crystal clear here.
I am not advocating for a strike that would also
be against the law, and we don't advocate for anything
that's against the law. What I do want to advocate

(03:25):
for is the right to strike, because being quasi federal,
there's a lot of limitations in what the NAOC and
the general postal unions are able to do. In total,
there are nine bargaining agreements and seven unions within the
Post Office, some of which are the manager's unions, so

(03:48):
take that as it is. Yet, on top of not
being able to strike, none of our money that we
collect as union does can be used for lobbying purposes,
so they can't support a single candidate or any of
the parties involved. We have a separate fund for that
with the NAOC called the Letter Carrier's Political Fund, to

(04:11):
try and circumvent the restrictions that are put on there.
And as a result of that, it's like we're fighting
with our hands tied behind our back. We are unable
to organize effectively. Our union leadership seems to be afraid
of protests and picketing for fear that it'll be misconstrued

(04:35):
or labeled as a strike, and they're I think generally
afraid of public opinion.

Speaker 2 (04:41):
Yeah, that's a debilitating set of conditions because you've effectively
taken away sort of the two major tools that you know,
I mean, unions of basically across all political stripes used, right,
You've taken away the ability to strike. You've taken away
the ability to use your due's money to influence elections.
So this immediately means you've taken away the tool that

(05:04):
sort of Milton unions use, which strikes, and you've taken
away the tools that more conserative unions use, which is
buying attempting to buy politicians. And then also your leadership
is like, we can't strike, I mean, we can't protest
because someone might think it's a strike and the public
might commit us. And it's like that that doesn't seem
I don't know, it really seems like it's like it's
not only have you tied both hands behind your back,

(05:25):
you've like tied them behind your back to your legs
and you're now rolling around on the ground.

Speaker 3 (05:30):
Right, And to talk about what happens when we push
past all of these barriers and just do it anyways?
You know, in March nineteen seventy, two hundred and ten
thousand postal workers defied law, defied the general leadership of
the time, And it all started in New York where

(05:50):
people clocked in and at nine o'clock they just walked out. Soon,
let's see, it was Cleveland, Chicago, Los Angeles. The nation
joined very shortly after. Once it broke the news that
they were calling for a national strike. Nixon called in

(06:11):
the National Guard to try and deliver mail, and the
National Guard had no idea what they were doing. There's
an amazing video that I'll try and send you afterwards.
It's just the National Guard at our cases where we
sort the mail. An interviewer is asking him, do you

(06:32):
think that you're doing a good job. It's just like, no,
it's just some kid, you know. And don't get me wrong,
I'm just some guy. But you need the training, you
need to know what you're doing. And it's not something
that anyone can pick up in a day, but it's
a job that anyone can do. But yeah, for the

(06:52):
first time, the mail had stopped, and that won us
collective bargaining binding arbitration, which is the process that I
think most people within unions know what they mean, but
to explain it, arbitration is what happens when our parties
cannot agree on a settlement for a grievance, and eventually

(07:15):
we call in a third party, an arbitrator to decide
for us, and those are generally lawyers. On top of
binding arbitration, it gave us a new payscale and set
in motion. I think over it's got to be hundreds
of raises between the colas and the new pay table.

(07:36):
It used to be twenty one years for you to
reach the top pay scale, which is absolutely ridiculous, and
I think it's eight. Yeah, So the Post Office was
forced to reorganize, and so is the union. This is
where the American Postal Workers union was born, and from

(07:56):
this strike we were able to settle on the National Agreement.
So there's the National Agreement, which is our binding contract.
There's the JCAM, which is the Joint Contract Administration Manual,
which is what the Post Office and the union use
as the interpretation of the contract. That way, we are

(08:17):
not arguing and spending time about what the contract could mean.
We can just focus on whether or not someone broke
our agreement. So after this, one would imagine that a
quasi federal institution would honor the contract that was created,

(08:37):
argain in good faith, and treat their employees. Isn't that right?

Speaker 2 (08:42):
Yeah, I know it's spoken like someone who has never
watched a federal comd action.

Speaker 3 (08:49):
Yeah. Absolutely not. Before we get into issues that we
face today, I do want to say that one of
the main goals of our contract negotiations, or of this
episode really is to create public knowledge of how our
contract is not being adhered to. If there was one

(09:12):
main goal that I'd have in mind, is just to
have the Post Office honor what they signed and agreed
to do.

Speaker 4 (09:21):
Yeah, I mean, this is something that it's a part of.

Speaker 2 (09:25):
Being in a union that doesn't get talked about very much,
which is that the contract doesn't mean anything unless the
union enforces it, because the moment the contract happens, the
bosses will attempt to not abide by it.

Speaker 4 (09:37):
And this is what a lot.

Speaker 2 (09:38):
Of union militancy back in the sort of heyday of
miltancy was. I mean, like, you know, if you look
at like how the UAW worked in like the sixties, right,
they'd have a guy with a whistle standing on the line,
and if someone did a contract violation, he would blow
the whistle and everyone would just sit down and you'd
immediately have a strike right it, you know, And like

(09:58):
that level of militants. You don't need to be at
that level to enforce a contract, but you have to
actually be willing to do stuff and to fight management
over it. And if you're not willing to do that,
your contract is effectively meaningless. And that's a real issue
with a lot of unions.

Speaker 3 (10:17):
Which just kind of circles back to one of the
big issues that we face is that if we were
to do that, that would be a willingful delay of
mail and we could be charged for it just for
trying to enforce the contract.

Speaker 4 (10:31):
Yep.

Speaker 2 (10:34):
Yeah, which the thing I think is really interesting. Just
to circle back to the nineteen seventy strike, is that
so the strike was illegal, right, Nixon brings in the army,
in the National Guard to break it, and the strike
still wins. And not only does it you know, I
mean you could argue whether it achieved total victory, but
not a single person who walked off the line got arrested,

(10:56):
even though all of them technically committed a crime. And
that's something that like, you know, I think, let me okay,
the the enforcements of laws depends on sort of the
the depends on a set of of relative balance of

(11:16):
forces and whether people care about envoice in the law,
which is how like for example, like if you pirate
like seven movies and you get you get three copyright strike,
you go to prison. But you know, like the sam
Altman or whatever like AI company can literally steal everything
on the entire Internet and get.

Speaker 1 (11:36):
Money for it and no one will to prosecute him, right, And.

Speaker 2 (11:40):
So so you know, whether or not something is illegal
is to a large extent or or the difference between
something being illegal and you going to prison for it
largely has to do with a balance of forces involved.
And that's something that you should keep in mind when
and this is this is the thing, this is the
thing that that cuts the other way a lot too write.

(12:02):
Employers just do illegal actions literally all the time, and
it doesn't matter because the state doesn't care.

Speaker 3 (12:10):
Yeah, By and large, labor laws in America are set
up in favor of the businesses of the employers. If
you're familiar with workers comp or any of the systems
involved in the Federal Employees Compensation Act, it's not enforced.
We have cases that are pending arbitration where someone's been

(12:35):
run over by a worker has been run over by
a postal vehicle while they were working. The post office
effectively takes them off of payroll to increase the damage
done to the individual. Eventually, the Department of Labor says, yes,

(12:55):
we will pay this individual, and the post office is
liable to pay them. But now they are off the rolls,
which means there's a greater period of time before this
individual gets their money. And there's a certain form that
within the post office the managers need to fill out.
I believe it's an eighty one thirty or you know,

(13:16):
all these forms have some numbers associated with them that
they just refuse to fill out and there's no recourse,
there's no cheeze a path for us to take to
make them hurry or make them get this individual the
money that they're owed. And some people this doesn't ruin
their lives and they've already paid off their house or whatever.

(13:39):
But I imagine for many many working Americans that's that's their
livelihood immediately down the drain.

Speaker 2 (13:49):
Yeah, unfortunately, we need to go to ads for a
little bit because unfortunately my boss is boss's boss's livelihood
depends on these ads. Buying technically does too, but like
lord knows, I don't see that money.

Speaker 4 (14:03):
So ads we are back, And yeah, I guess that.

Speaker 2 (14:21):
Leads into you the next place you want to go to,
which is talking about what are the specific grievances today
that y'all are dealing with and the union is not
dealing with.

Speaker 3 (14:33):
Right, So, in terms of grievances within the union and
a negotiation, a lot of it does have to do
with the aforementioned workers' compensation. Employees are just simply not
getting paid. I think the biggest problem with the union
and the grievance procedure today is that management has figured

(14:56):
out this really effective strategy if they don't settle on
the lower levels and it gets pushed up to arbitration.
Then we have a massive backlog of cases appending arbitration,
which could be scheduled years out. I think if you

(15:16):
do the math for our current rate of handling these
cases and how many cases we have, it'll take around
fifteen years to get through the long.

Speaker 2 (15:27):
Christ not assuming there's no new ones.

Speaker 3 (15:30):
Yeah. Yeah, that's like you know when you go to
a restaurant and there's that little stanchion out there that
says it's a five hour wait from this point. That's
that point that we're at. Anything beyond today will be
further along Jesus Christ. And so I think that is

(15:51):
just a major problem for us clearly. Yeah, management just
not complying with any of this, and it makes it
so that our employees have to wait. Something I do
want to talk about that's outside of the grievance procedure
if we can, is just what's going on with the

(16:12):
post Office and the Postmaster General. Yeah, all right, So
I want to go at this from the customer perspective first,
because I think that's the best way to relate to people.
I think, by and large, people are losing faith in
the Post Office. Either you have no idea what's going on,
or you don't care, and that's fine, I'd say. Before

(16:33):
I joined, I didn't think of them at all, and
you know, they're just the guy that shows up at
my house every morning. A lot of people seem to
think that the post Office is going out of business,
and our customers are facing increasingly long lines, misdelivered or
lost mail, and an increase in postage for a service

(16:54):
that is getting worse. People are paying more for worse service,
and it's easy to point out those issues from the
outside and be rightfully upset at them. I do feel
like we're doing a disservice to our our customers, and
I'm not really not trying to attack them when I
say that they're uninformed or clueless to the inner workings

(17:16):
of the Post Office. I do directly want to attack
Congress and say that, yeah, when they post They had
pushed forward a bill called the Postal Accountability and Enhancement
Act in two thousand and six, which required the Post
Office to prefund one hundred percent of its retiree health
benefits and liabilities seventy five years into the future. What

(17:41):
so overnight the post Office was handed a five point
five billion dollar burden, and that's where the whole I
don't know if you remember. I certainly wasn't conscious of
it at the time, to save our post office stickers
that were being sold and trying to fund the post
Office office. And really that's where the rhetoric of the

(18:02):
post Office is going under comes from. The other thing
I want to point out is that we are a
quasi federal We actually accept nothing from tax payer monies.
It says it's a service, but really the post Office
has ran as a business. We don't even get subsidized
because they don't need to. My local union president loves

(18:24):
to remind us that the post Office is a business
that has a revenue of seventy eight point two billion dollars,
and he'll want me to stress that the point two
is extremely important because point two of a billion is
twenty million. They are not in jeopardy. We are not
going out of business. And the Postmaster General, Louis de Joy,

(18:47):
he's the second highest paid public servant in America, just
underneath the President of the United States.

Speaker 4 (18:54):
He's played Ward and Clarence Thomas.

Speaker 5 (18:56):
Wow.

Speaker 3 (18:57):
Yeah, I think it was like three hundred eighty thousand
a year or something like that. The Joy was appointed
by Donald Trump. I'm assuming this is kind of a
baseless assumption, So forgive me. I'm not doing my research here,
but I'm assuming that they're buddies because d Joy has
no idea.

Speaker 2 (19:16):
Yeah, wasn't Wasn't she the guy that Trump brought in,
like specifically to destroy the post office as part of
the campaign to steal the election.

Speaker 3 (19:25):
Yeah, so there's been a lot about the Joy defrauding
the election process. I wasn't part of the post office
to see the inner workings of it, so it's kind
of hard for me to say if it was hearsay
or not, but I believe it because the Joy has
no idea how to run a post office. He's never
been involved with this kind of business. He is, in

(19:46):
the same way that Trump is a businessman, a horrible businessman,
and is delivering for America. Plan could really be redefined
as consolidation efforts for a business. So what they're doing
is their consolidating infrastructure and the workforce, which means closing
post offices in order to save money and shoving three

(20:08):
installations into one building. That's why the lines are getting longer.
It also means that from dispatch the employees have to
drive an extra mile or two into their working zone,
which of course means that we're going to go into
overtime and this just throws a wrench in the mail

(20:28):
handling process. He has single handedly made the service a
lot more reliable, and I do think that you're right. Irreliable, yeah, sorry,
more unreliable, and I do think that you're right. He
wants to destroy the post office not only for the election,
but to the point where it makes more sense to

(20:50):
go private. Now is the time to point out that
the joy is a major shareholder in FedEx, which is
which is a subcontractor for the USPS, and he has
millions of dollars in equity involved. He's got skin in
the game.

Speaker 2 (21:09):
I love open corruption so great.

Speaker 3 (21:13):
And so on the local level on what's going on
in my office. I actually have one of the better
offices that I've seen or heard about. I have been
sent to other offices and I have experience firsthand the
bullying and harassment from management pushing us to go faster.

(21:33):
But even at one of the better offices, I work
sixty hour weeks. I don't have set days off, it's
not even a rotation. When I get home, I'm spent.
And my commute isn't that bad. I think I'm about
fifteen minutes each way, and I really can't imagine driving
two hours after an eleven hour shift just to eat

(21:56):
and come back and do it again.

Speaker 4 (21:59):
I mean, that's just on. That's safe, Like that's see.

Speaker 3 (22:03):
Oh yeah, it would be illegal, but since it's in
the contract, it's not illegal.

Speaker 4 (22:07):
Oh my god.

Speaker 3 (22:09):
So the sacrifice that you make when you're joining the
post office, well, I guess I should explain. When you
join as a letter carrier, the first ninety days, they
can fire you for any reason, and you're something called
either a CCA or a PTF, and that means part
time flexible or a city carrier assistant. You are only

(22:31):
guaranteed four hours for showing up for work. You're not
guaranteed to be scheduled. So if they don't like you,
they just will schedule schedule you once a week for
an unknown amount of time until you quit. And if
you're in a busy place, then that just means that
they're going to work you to death. So when you
join the workforce, immediately you lose time with your family.

(22:55):
You lose time with your loved ones and your friends.
And I myself am so fortunate that all my loved
ones have been beyond understanding. But every time I talk
about it that I get asked the same thing, why
don't you quit?

Speaker 1 (23:11):
Yeah?

Speaker 3 (23:12):
And the truth is this job is awesome. I love it,
I want to work it. I just want it to
make sense and be livable. And I'm not gonna give
up just because we haven't reached the point where it is.
You know, if you walk away now, it doesn't get better.
I'm sure someone would take my place. But it helps

(23:33):
to have people stick around.

Speaker 2 (23:45):
That's actually a pretty comedy. I mean, this is one
of the Amazon strategy right for their warehouses. They intentionally
want to cycle through people because the more the more
new people you have continuously cycling through, the less organized
and the less sort of like must knowledge, they have
less you have to pay them, et cetera, et cetera,
et cetera. And so if you can just cause high
turnover rates on purpose, that's that's the thing that a

(24:08):
lot of these sort of business goule like Nightmare or
factory people love in their workforces and makes everyone else's
life just a living hell. But you know they're getting
They're still getting paid.

Speaker 3 (24:25):
Right, And so I try and hold that in mind.
When I've been overworked and I'm at the end of
one of my major shifts because I had to carry
part of another route because someone else called out, I
really have to stop and think to myself that this
other person who called out is just as exhausted as

(24:46):
I am is probably going to get a letter of
warning for calling out. That's another issue. They don't want
you to use your leave.

Speaker 2 (24:55):
Jesus Christ.

Speaker 3 (24:57):
I'm going to file an unfair labor practice because they've
and doing that a lot at my office as well.
It reminds me a lot are issues of your recent episode.
I think it was you about the nurses union the
shift change episode. Their members are dealing with a lot
of the same things, where the unions are so big

(25:19):
that they become detached from the membership and we are
finding out afterwards what our bargaining agreements are, what our
strategy was. Everything's after the contract has been signed, and
that's just not how unions were meant to be. They're
meant to be from the bottom up, by the workers,

(25:40):
for the workers. But it really does feel like it's
like national is its own entity, and so I guess
that would bring us to talking about the union and
the future of the Union.

Speaker 2 (25:54):
Yeah, let's get into that.

Speaker 3 (25:56):
So I got to be careful here because Brian renfro Oh,
he's our national leader of the Union. He's been struggling
with problems in his personal life, and I don't feel
like I'm outsteeing him as its public knowledge, at least
within the Post office. It's public knowledge. He's dealing with
substance abuse, with alcoholism, and that's something that hits very

(26:18):
close to home within my family, and I really don't
want to demonize that he's struggling. But what I do
want to say is when you're going through something like
that and you've accepted a position on the national level
like this, you really need to either step down or
appoint someone to handle things in your place. As negotiations

(26:43):
started over a year ago, he kind of went missing
and it was later revealed that he was inpatient, which
is fine, get your help, but there was nothing left,
no notes left for us to strategize with, and our
membership is just in the dark. And beyond that, the

(27:06):
leadership has gone missing. It's it's very dark times for
the NLC.

Speaker 2 (27:14):
Well, and that that's also just sort of like an
organizational problem, right, like if if you're if your organization
is set up in such a way that a small
number of people being incapacitated means total paralysis and no
one has any idea what's going on. That's just a
bad way to run something. And especially it's a terrible
way to run a union because the union's you know,

(27:36):
power is supposed to be from from its organization and
from the collective power of a large, large, organized group
of people who can make decisions for themselves. And if
it's if that's not happening and you get to the
point where these decisions are being made by a very
small number of people who can just sort of vanish,
like that's that for whatever, and you know, literally whatever

(27:57):
reason that is, right, it could just be you get sick.
It could just be like what happens. That's just a
terrible way to organize things. And I guess it's also
like I want to make take it like like like
a little tiny tangent to be like, if you're doing
any organizing project, your goal is to organize yourself out
of a job. Like you're like, ideally, if you were
in an organization, it should be able to function without you.

(28:18):
There should Not having an indispensable person is a fiasco.

Speaker 4 (28:23):
Don't do that.

Speaker 2 (28:24):
This is true of both like your tiny local mutual
aid group as much as is true of your giant
national union. So that this this has been this has
been mea talking about the indispensable person don't have.

Speaker 3 (28:37):
Well, yeah, that's kind of the funny thing about joining
a union from an anarchist perspective. It gets a little
funky how hierarchical they typically are and the problems that
we know we are going to face when you have
a system that's built like a pyramid. Yeah, oh yeah.

(28:57):
And so I was saying, we're an dark times, but
there's such a bright future that I can see for
us Branch nine of the NALC, and namely this individual
Tyler Vasser, who when I had originally posted on Reddit
asking for attention, he's the one that I thought would

(29:20):
be great for this interview. His branch, Branch nine has
passed a resolution to form an open bargaining strategy for
contract negotiations, and I hope this sweeps the nation. We're
not allowed to strike as I've mentioned, and our leadership
is so shy when it when it comes to activism

(29:42):
or mobilization of the workforce. They don't want to touch
the topic. The closest thing we have to it is
a rally that is Enough is Enough that's being held
in Baltimore soon about the violence that's being done to
to postal workers. We're being robbed and we're being harassed,

(30:03):
but even then we're missing a large chunk of the
danger that is posed to postal workers, because yes, we're
being robbed on the streets, but we're also being bullied
and harassed inside of our work places by management, by
the people who are supposed to empower us to do
the job effectively. And so they don't want to touch

(30:29):
the topic of a strike, I think, for fear of retaliation.
But to me, pushing for the right to strike is
a I'm not sure how to word this. It is
such an important part of the nilc's identity, the postal
strike of nineteen seventy, that it seems silly to ignore

(30:51):
it today and pretend like it didn't happen. So for
the future, I think that activism is our key to success.
I think that the old heads that lead our union
come from a time where unions were frowned upon, where
activism was frowned upon. But I think that public opinion

(31:12):
will be largely in our favor, and that public opinion
can really put pressure on the legislative branch on Congress,
and if we are transparent about our union, what we're
asking for the issues that we're facing. I think that
the public would be on our side if the people

(31:35):
in America knew that management was falsifying time records or
training records and interfering with workers' comps, claim and back pay,
or that they're not paying the settlements that they've agreed
to pay, that they're not scheduling arbitration sessions big or small,
that they would care, and that they would join us

(31:58):
in the streets. And major thing that happened I think
it was last year in the summer, we had a
letter carrier. His name is Eugene Gates, who died in
the Texas heat Jesus because management told him not to
take as many breaks or he would face discipline. She's

(32:21):
pressures that we face when when you're threatened that you
will lose your job if you don't listen to us
you will push yourself to the point of exhaustion. And further, yeah,
I think that the post Office killed mister Gates and

(32:43):
there wasn't as much outcry or or anger behind the movement.
I often find myself thinking that while I don't have
the answers, I do know that we need to care more. Yeah,
and it's hard to care when when you're exhausted. I
acknowledge that.

Speaker 1 (33:03):
Yeah.

Speaker 2 (33:04):
Well, I think there's two things about that. One, I mean,
I don't and this is something I've gotten to with
a lot of the sort of interviews that I've done
on this show, is that I think a lot of
very very basic jobs have labor conditions that are unimaginably
appalling that people just don't know about. And I think

(33:25):
people are very sympathetic too, once they actually understand what's
happening in the kind of just horror show stuff that's
happening in these workplaces. And the second thing I think
that's sort of important in terms of getting people to
you know, like trying to actually do like mass mobilizations
even just to get people to understand what's going on,
is that I think a lot of people who are

(33:46):
facing these kinds of conditions, think that they're alone and
think that it's just something that happens to them, or
they've been in them for so long they think that
it's sort of normal. And having a bunch of people
go no, like a happens and be it shouldn't happen
is extraordinarily powerful because you know like that that feeling

(34:07):
of isolation is is the thing that all of that
you know, you're that your bosses depend on to make
sure that you know you you just keep going along
with these conditions even though they are just objectively horrific,
And I think any strategy that's not based on that
is just not going to go anywhere.

Speaker 3 (34:28):
Right And one of the strategies that I really want
to push forward as I grow within the union. And
don't get me wrong, I want to stay as steward.
I think that educating our members and uh being part
of the workforce is my place in the union. But
what I want to push is for union solidarity. I

(34:49):
want the NLC to hire organizers, specifically organizers to try
and get the public mobilized and as well as the
work so that we can put pressure on Congress so
that we can show our bargaining teams that we support
them and so that we can have clearly defined bargaining terms.

(35:11):
And yeah, I think that having solidarity between unions and
reaching out to the other movements in a time where
union support is higher than ever is such a clear
path that we are just ignoring for whatever reason because
people are afraid to speak out against the Post Office.

(35:35):
And so I'm really not sure what's going to happen
with our current contract, but I do know that the
fight never ends, and that while we stand on the
shoulders of giants, we have to pay respect to these
giants by not giving up now. And I'm a relatively
new employee and steward, but I'm really walking in the

(35:56):
footsteps of some warriors. The brand president I mentioned, Ken Lurch,
has given me so much support and education and has
done so much hard work over the years that I
don't have to reinvent the wheel, none of us do.
We just have to continue the struggle.

Speaker 2 (36:16):
Yeah, And I think I think that's a great place
to end. You unless you have anything else that you
want to make sure we get.

Speaker 3 (36:21):
To no, nothing, nothing on this topic.

Speaker 2 (36:27):
Yeah, So how can how can people support you and
postal workers just in general? If there's specific place you
want them to go.

Speaker 3 (36:35):
In general, there is on the na LC site, which
is just an AOC dot com, there is a section
where you put in your address and it it'll give
you the email addresses, the phone numbers for your representatives
so that you can make some noise. Again, we're amazingly

(36:59):
lim in what we can do, so there's not really
anything that you can donate to to help us, including
the letter carrier political fund. But yeah, just pay attention
to us. Maybe leave a bottle of water out in
your front door, says for the postal worker. You know,
there's nothing better that you can do than talking about it.

(37:23):
Word of mouth is the best advertisement.

Speaker 2 (37:26):
Well, yeah, we will, we will. We will put that
in the show notes. Help you all win. And I
don't I don't think I've ever said this genuinely in
my life, but thank you for your service.

Speaker 3 (37:36):
I appreciate that. Yeah. I never imagined myself to become
a federal employee, and it is just as bad as
I imagined. Yeah, so I do want to shout out
Actually it's a little meta, I guess, but I do
want to shout out some important episodes of it could

(37:56):
happen here. That hit me very closely if I can. Yeah, yeah,
go for it, because a lot of the people listening
will be postal workers that have been pointed in this direction.
Please look at the Mayan mar episodes, the Free Burmer,
the Burmese Revolution, and look at the work that me.

(38:19):
I believe you've done the same work as James with
border kindness. Those are two topics that I think y'all
hit really well and that really touched me as a person.
Sometimes I'll relisten to those episodes when I'm having a
hard day just to remind myself that it's all the same.

(38:39):
It's all the same fight.

Speaker 2 (38:43):
Yeah, it absolutely is, And I mean I think that's
that's sort of the beauty. I mean, it's both the
beauty and the horror of this world is that on
the one hand, all of us are being crushed by
the same sets of forces. But on the other hand,
it means that whatever fight that you're taking is also
a part of the larger fight forget all.

Speaker 4 (39:01):
Of us free.

Speaker 3 (39:03):
Yeah, exactly, So just fight the burnout and stay in
the fight.

Speaker 5 (39:08):
Yep.

Speaker 2 (39:10):
Yeah, this is been nicked up here. Go make trouble
for people who suck.

Speaker 1 (39:38):
Robert Evans here, and this is it could happen here,
and boy, it sure is now. I don't know where
we go from this point, and neither does anyone else.
On the moment before I wrote this, I woke up,
groggy from my chemically assisted sleep to a barrage of horror.
Donald Trump signing Anti Tran's legislation into law, Elon Musk

(40:00):
giving a double fascist salute, Donald Trump's saluting and dancing
with the village people, proud boys tramping through the streets
of our nation's capital, reveling in their newfound impunity. The
dark days have come again because they never really left.
All the battles and street fighting and organizing from twenty
seventeen to twenty twenty brought us four years of badly

(40:22):
negotiated peace while the rot continued unabated rot. It's a
term I see a lot these days. My colleague and
friend ed Zetron refers to the hell our tech oligarchs
continue to force upon us as the rot economy. Charlie Angus,
a member of the Canadian Parliament, used the term rage
rot to refer to now President Trump's Christmas Day message

(40:45):
suggesting Canada should become the fifty first State. Over the
last year, I've seen a slew of articles bemoaning democratic decay,
the rot plaguing democracy, and the deep rot at the
heart of our political system. One thing I have done
the last four years is learn how to efficiently process
the carcasses of wild animals. So I hunt to raise

(41:06):
and slaughter, but many are roadkill, harvested from the side
of the road. My family comes from rural Oklahoma, so
perhaps there's some epigenetic hillbilly memory that makes this so
satisfying to me. But it's also changed the way I
understand the word rot. Rot starts from the bone. If
you look at the back leg of an animal that's
been hit by a truck, you'll see it spreading a

(41:28):
deep black bruise from the ball and socket joint out.
If your goal is to preserve good meat, then the
key is to remove those limbs from the body and
then the meat from the bone sooner rather than later.
When I think of rot and how to arrest it,
I think of dismemberment. This seems to be the one
thing that almost every political person in the country agrees

(41:49):
with the United States as it is, must be dismembered, disassembled,
sliced from the rotten bone and changed into something more
palatable for whoever holds the knife. Joe Biden and the
Democratic Party failed primarily because they refuse to start cutting.
Their successors will not make the same mistake on the

(42:09):
opposing side of the isle. Today, I see a lot
of angry people arguing about what the knife ought to
be cutting, and how much better they'd use it if
it passed into their hands. That doesn't help any of
us right now. Migrants are dying of thirst while vigilantes
destroy water drops left by activists who themselves will likely
be criminalized in the near future. Homeless Americans trying not

(42:31):
to freeze to death at knight may soon find themselves arrested,
forced into camps where they'll be made to labor for pennies.
Neo Nazi's cheer as the billionaire behind the throne makes
fascist salutes from the White House with smirking impunity. The
knife is so far away from our hands, I find
myself distrusting anyone who wastes time bemoaning how it ought

(42:51):
to be used. Where does that leave us, though? Is
there anything to do in this deep winter besides listen
to the jackals? Howling outside our doors. I have an
answer to this question. Yes, now is the time to
try to test the boundaries of our collective cage. Now
is the time to experiment. Since the time of the

(43:13):
Founding Fathers, this country and its system have been referred
to as the American Experiment. One could see the very
terms narcissistic, yet another solipsistic gasp of American exceptionalism. But
I tend to think the appellation is one we've earned.
This country is and always has been a test tube
for new, often bad ideas about how a society ought

(43:34):
to run. American civilization's only core value is throw shit
at the wall and see what sticks. That also happens
to be the only real way to fight back against authoritarianism.
There's a scientific paper I bring up often, the evolution
of overconfidence, which set out to explain why people so
often badly overestimate their own abilities. The authors pondered quote

(44:00):
infidence also leads to faulty assessments, unrealistic expectations, and hazardous decisions.
So it remains a puzzle how such a false belief
could evolve or remain stable in a population of competing
strategies that include accurate unbiased beliefs now. The conclusion these
researchers came to was that when significant resources are contested

(44:21):
between two organisms, the organism most willing to try to
take said resources, even if it is not the strongest,
tends to succeed, often enough to make overconfidence evolutionarily beneficial.
This is the most basic explanation for how fascist movements
continue to arise and improbably take power. Put simply, they

(44:42):
always go for it. January sixth provides us with a
fine example. It was a ludicrous, idiotic, reckless burst of stupidity,
mocked for years by everyone except the perpetrators, who four
years later find themselves with ultimate power. They didn't win
because they were the strongest. They won because they kept trying,

(45:04):
and the people who should have stopped them feared bad press,
the pushback of looking unfair, and so stood back well.
The fascists made smaller grabs, gobbling up bits of the media,
local school boards, and narrative oxygen around issues like immigration
and now, well, we're here, and we'll continue to talk

(45:24):
about here after these ads we're back. The coming days
will be ugly. Yet I feel it's my job to
remind you that bad as this is We are not

(45:46):
ym our Germany, and this is not nineteen thirty three.
Trump and his lieutenants aren't battle hardened trench fighters. They're
elon musk and a coterie of half enthusiastic, half frightened
billionaires who got rich gambling on apps to let you
rate your classmates tits. Their foot soldiers are used car
salesmen from Encino, not Freikorps. The United States is not

(46:08):
starving to death crippled by war. It's irritated anxious because
it's working people have been robbed blind by the same
billionaires standing behind Trump now. The one thing we do
have in common with Weimar is that our fascists now
find themselves at the head of a state that capitulated
to them, not out of enthusiastic consent, but exhaustion, cowardice,

(46:30):
and above all, a feeling that it didn't really matter
that last one, the feeling that nothing matters. The system
as fucked, there's no point in engaging or organizing. That
is the most powerful weapon they have right now, because
that feeling stops you and everyone else from opposing them,
from interrupting as they reach out yet again to take

(46:50):
something you love or need. But there's a danger here too.
In moments of stress and anger, the desire to do something, anything,
can be intense, and when we're swept up in that mood,
the natural tendency is defaulting to the things we know best,
the things we've done before, the marches and chants and

(47:10):
poster boards we've been walking and shouting and carrying all
century long. Going back to those tactics without iteration or
acknowledgment of their limitations and failures is a road to
more failure. I've been to a lot of protests, starting
at Zuccati Park in twenty eleven an ending last year
in Chicago at the dn C. One of the most

(47:32):
dispeariting moments of my life was listening to young anti
genocide activistsbow to shut down the DNC to quote make
it great like sixty eight. This was a reference to
the nineteen sixty eight Democratic Convention. Mass protests were ignited
there when the favorite anti war candidate, Eugene McCarthy was
ratfucked by Democratic Party insiders in favor of Vice President

(47:54):
Hubert Humphrey. The protests were quashed violently with tear gas
and truncheons. Testers chanted the whole world is watching, and
it's been a chant ever since. The world may have
been watching then, but the war went on. Nixon won election,
then reelection, and then finally pulled US troops out of
Vietnam after dropping enough bombs on Southeast Asia to have

(48:17):
ended several Third reips. In twenty twenty four, a new
batch of anti war protesters chanted the whole world is watching,
and I can say unequivocally it was not. The Only
people watching were me, several other journalists, and of course
some people on Twitter. The police, as they kettled Maston
arrested members of the crowd barely seemed to care. The

(48:40):
DNC didn't shut down. Kamala Harris was made the nominee.
There wasn't even a real anti war candidate for party
insiders to rat fuck in her favor. Garrison Davis, my
colleague and friend, remarked to me afterwards that the DNC
had been somehow much more depressing than its Republican counterpart
a month earlier. He was right on the stage floor.

(49:02):
All the Democrats had to present were aging celebrities and
build goddamn Clinton, drooling out the same platitudes that led
us to the Trump era. In the first place, and
doing their best to ignore delegates who walked out and
slept in front of the convention center to protest the
genocide in Gaza. Meanwhile, in the streets, a lot of
very nice, earnest people alongside a handful of grifters did

(49:27):
the only thing they could think of doing after months
of imbibing footage of war crimes. They walked around and shouted.
The police, and the city largely let them because they
knew none of it was going to change a goddamn thing.
I'd felt tremendous optimism right after Joe Biden resigned, not
because I loved Kamala, but because it was something shocking,

(49:49):
an upset, an experiment, or at least it seemed that way.
At first. The DNC made it clear that Biden's advisors
and consiglieris, the powers behind the throne, still ran the
show and would not allow any real change. The rot
had spread too far, spoiling the meat, spoiling everything. It
was my accurate belief in twenty twenty that the Democratic Party,

(50:12):
broken as it was, had the numbers in the organizational
capacity to slow the spread of fascism for a short time.
It was my inaccurate belief in twenty twenty four that
this might still be the case. I had a hope
because I'd lost any sense of actual productive optimism. We
lean on hope when we have no ideas. To brace

(50:32):
ourselves against hope, as George Miller reminded, us, is a mistake.
If you don't fix what's broken, you'll go crazy. And
that's where we are now going crazy. Committed Democrats, the decent,
regular people who fill the party, not the soulless shogoths
of capital running things, are going crazy because we returned

(50:53):
to normal, decent politician to office. He kept the economy
humming along, and everyone still hated him. Us are crazy
for a different reason. In twenty twenty, this country saw
the largest sustained uprising of its modern history, and nothing
fundamentally changed in its aftermath. The oligarchs who control social
media set to tweaking, buying, or outright inverting their algorithms

(51:16):
to ensure no similar movement whatever gain that kind of
steam again. Their efforts have largely been successful, and yet
many organizers, be they progressive, social democrats, communists, anarchists, whatever,
they're all still stuck in the same loops behind each
march to nowhere, and tired chant is an equally tired hope.

(51:37):
The social Democrats dream of a giant, continent sized Denmark
with cyclists replacing Ford trucks, universal healthcare, good schools, and
a bevy of other lovely things. Both political parties will
fight tooth and nail to prevent. The communists dream of
a new October Revolution, but this one will work and
not just create a new kind of dictatorship that ages

(51:58):
and dies inside the space of a single human lifetime.
Anarchists tend to be very good at seeing the flaws
and the logic and futility of the hopes of the
two previous groups, but they are just as bereft of
ideas for how to stop what's coming. Some tendencies dream
of collapse, maybe even accelerationism, an end to industrial society,

(52:20):
and then either living in the woods eating berries, or
some kind of solar punk day dream wildflowers spouting from rubble.
I sympathize, but try offering either future to a single
mom who can't afford her five year old's insulin and
see how excited she gets. On the other side of
the anarchist coin, you've got the helpers the people who
cheerfully admit they don't know how to solve the big problem,

(52:43):
but they do know how to provide free eye exams
to homeless people once a month, or do water drops
down at the border so migrants don't die of dehydration,
or make it more expensive for the state to bulldoze
a forest and build a police training facility. If you
are where we all are right now, ideas staring down
the barrel of a nightmare, those are good folks to know.

(53:04):
Like everyone else, they're defaulting to what they've been doing,
but at least what they've been doing helps people. The
larger solutions to our common woes, if they ever arrive,
will be something new, something we haven't tried yet. I
feel very confident that they won't take the form of
another march, or involve everyone finally agreeing to be the

(53:25):
same kind of communist or anarchist or whatever. Sean Fain,
chief of the United Autoworkers' Union, has called for a
general strike in twenty twenty eight, and so far that
is the only clear plan I have heard from anyone
that feels like it has a ghost of a chance.
It is audacious, and I recommend reading what Sean's laid
out about it. But half of why I support the

(53:46):
idea is because it's audacious. The religious right got to
where they are right now in this country by being bold, as.

Speaker 4 (53:53):
I laid out earlier.

Speaker 1 (53:54):
Fascists win because they try, and this is something we
need to copy. Shit can be different, but not unless
you're willing to try different shit. Many pundits and columnists
were shocked and horrified by the mass of an instant
support for Luigim Mangioni when he assassinated the CEO of
United Healthcare. Both the tutting gatekeepers of traditional media and

(54:17):
the actually sweating oligarchs characterize this as evidence of bloodthirstiness.
Some leftists did the same and interpreted support for Luigi
as proof that the body politic did indeed have energy
for an uprising. I saw something a bit different, more
than the actual killing itself. I think people were excited
to see someone try something new. Luigi adopted a novel tactic.

(54:42):
He carried it out in a novel way, and in
doing so, he did more to punish one of the
oligarchs bleeding us dry than the entire occupy movement. Novelty
is the one thing that ties Donald Trump and Luigimanngioni together.
The enthusiastic public response to both men's actions and the
simultaneous revulsion of traditional elites are mirrors of themselves. In

(55:07):
twenty twenty four, Trump still had enough novelty to convince
people that he might upset the apple cart in a
way that benefited them. He rode a global anti incumbent
wave back to the White House. The consequence of this
is that he and his are now on their way
to becoming the new establishment. This is the downside of
the fact that most legacy media outlets have started moderating

(55:30):
their coverage of Trump, if not embracing him outright, he
is being normalized. His toadies, Musk chief among them, are
now our legitimate powers. What novelty remains will fade rapidly.
I suspect the same thing will be true of the
copycats who follow in Luigi Maggioni's footsteps. Most of his
plagiarists won't be good at what they do. At best,

(55:53):
newly heightened security will see these people dropped before they
get to pull a trigger. At worst, innocent folks will
be killed or aimed by bullets and bombs that fail
to hit their intended targets or do, but with a
lot of collateral damage. So I don't know what the
next new thing to actually work will be. But between
Trump and Luigi, there aren't many old norms left to shatter.

(56:16):
We are in a time of enormous potential. Many new
things are about to be tried, and as awful and
bloody as the fallout from some of them will be,
we all have no choice but to strap in and
roll some dice of our own. The present is ugly,
the future unwritten, but the only way we'll make it
a better one is if we embrace boldness, creativity, and

(56:38):
perhaps a little over confidence of our own. And this
is not the end of the episode. We've got something
else for you, folks. But first, here's another ad break. Okay, everybody,

(57:01):
we're back, And obviously what you just listened to is
an essay I wrote about my thoughts and feelings today,
the first day of the new Trump administration. I felt
like that wasn't quite enough. And the first thing I
actually came across this morning when I woke up, before
I started subjecting myself to a barrage of horrible news,
was a poem written by a friend of mine, Emily Gorzyinski.

(57:24):
It's called the Time of Cowards, and I think it's
a very useful thing for you to hear right now.
I think it's a good companion to what I wrote,
So I'm going to let Emily take it away before
I do that. If you want to read the poem
in text form or find her other work, you can
go to Emily Gorzynski g o r ce n ski

(57:46):
dot com. That's Emily g o r c e n
ski dot com.

Speaker 4 (57:51):
Here.

Speaker 1 (57:51):
It is the time of cowards.

Speaker 6 (57:58):
It is the time of the coward. Is the age
of the lyre and greed and avarice and lost boys
and a dopamine hit in fractals and velocity and velocity
and velocity, and go, go, go, don't stop. Don't stop
to realize the indecency, the disloyalty, the dishonor, the discreditability,
the parsimony, the hordes hoarded behind the gates, the gatekeepers keep.

(58:22):
This is the dawn of masculine energy, not the energy
your father taught you about measuring twice and cutting once,
about picking yourself up and how the sting of hydrogen
peroxide means it's working or your grandfather who spent the
days you spent smoking weed behind a seven to eleven,
serving on a torpedo boat, waiting for the sharks, who

(58:43):
never failed to stop to lend a hand to those
in need, or say grace before dinner, or to help
you with your math homework, or teach you not to
wear a necktie at a lathe. This is the year
of cutting once and never measuring. Pencil in the blueprints
with whatever comes out. It's faster that way. The season
of hypocrites, and not of confidence, but confidence men. The

(59:05):
masculine energy of the can, the scam, the bamboozle, the fraud,
the pulling of the rug and the begging of the question.
Now is the killing hour. The clockhands float over the
blood in the streets, and the rage, and the rage,
and the uncorked hatred overflows, the minutes of impotence, expanding overflowing, fizzling.
Deception gives way to more deception. Not a single promise

(59:29):
is kept. Rapaciousness and rape and abandonment and the cutting
of corners and KPIs A newborn died in the baby
box in Italy because the alarm censor didn't work. It
is an honorless time, a time of only one question,
not how or may or can or if or whether,
but when how soon? No legacy, no history, no reputation.

(59:54):
Build the factories, then abandon them. The soil keeps the memory,
and and scars, and the floodwaters, and the clear windshields
where the splatters of bugguts used to be, and the
images in the twenty year old magazine still in the rack,
and the guest bathrooms never used that showed how children
used to go sledding. And maybe the house is too big,
No one comes by. I shoveled the neighbor's walk in

(01:00:17):
the snow and salted it so he didn't slip on
the ice and could receive his mail. He's an old man,
one of the few black men left living in this
neighborhood that was theirs. Once he sent me a letter,
it went all the way to Richmond to come to
my door. He's the last man with dignity. In the letter,
he told me he has a new toy, a laptop,
which makes him happy because he's a big lover of

(01:00:38):
history and he can go online and read about it.
And I weep for this last dignified man who proudly
wears a cap honoring his service. Because this is the
era of synthesis and generation, and revision and content content, content,
and inverifiability and manipulation. This is the pseudo scene. I
bought a bottle of wine from a century's old ye

(01:01:00):
destroyed in a devastating flood, an unsellable bottle in the
retail market, fundraiser souvenir. I kept it as a memento
Mary of our changing world, a mud covered reminder of
how we all must work, little by little to give
the world forward. It broke when I tried to move
it home on my seventy second flight of the year.
It is the decade of hypocrisy. Even for those who

(01:01:22):
can see hypocrisy, they may be a vice president. And
with every title change, I move farther from God, a
God I never believed in. I was raised in New
England towns named for Biblical places by people who thought
working the rocky soil brought them closer to God. The
only holy Men left are those in the fields Basra

(01:01:42):
and Lebanon, and the Gilead and Hebron. The people who
named those towns committed a genocide to name them, and
four hundred years later in their namesakes the same. It
is the epoch of cadaverin. It is the knight of
bonfires and Feuershpusche, then highlight of stories that dared in
poems and albums. And I tried to sell a book,

(01:02:04):
and I learned that there's only interest in a book
when you put yourself into it to be consumed. Words
are calories, measured in the amount of heat they gave
a flame. I walked over the Westminster Bridge one night
with a journalist who told me that they can't publish
two good stories at a time because if one goes viral,
it punishes the other. The arcane footfalls of the algorithm dance.

(01:02:26):
It is the sunset of craft and skills handed down
in heritage, the waxing of a crass and pandering moon
of pantomime, a frictionless night, a night where nothing dared,
nothing gained, a night of shutters and locks. These are
the dark ages, ages of embarrassing the future. There's a
shame here that penance cannot satisfy. The sturdy empty shells,

(01:02:48):
the blue hyperlinks to nowhere, and a generation lost must
be lost because profit cannot be taken from an idea.
I think of the mimiograph machine stuck under the floorboards
of the Solidara Nosche house, and the punks and the
whores who copied radical zines in the public library, xerox machines,
and the Yugoslavian Galaxia, and the novels now considered some

(01:03:09):
of the greatest of all time, once banned for obscenity.
In Chochescu's house, the original TV remains. The revolutionaries didn't
bother to steal it because there were only thirty minutes
of broadcast TV each day. In the crepuscular light, birds
dare to sing, even though they know the cats hunt below.
In Vilnius, there is a tile in a square. They say,

(01:03:30):
if you make a wish and spin around it three times,
your wish will come true. At this tile a human
chain formed and spanned three countries, and they sang at
Hadra Kim. On the right day, the morning light filters
in over the lonesome island of Philfla and fills a
hole drilled in the sandstone five thousand years ago, and
has done so unfailingly over the millennia that have seen

(01:03:50):
countless empires rise and fall, and the solstice of retribution
will come again.

Speaker 4 (01:04:17):
Hi, if you want, and welcome to the podcast. I
was going to go for a really Robert Evans' intro there,
but I bottled it. I am a coward and I
couldn't do it. I hate all of you. It's Margaret Kiljoy,
everyone here to spread the good news. I was trying
to rap at Evans that, oh, okay, yeah, and it
doesn't he only hate a certain percentage of them, all right,

(01:04:37):
Statistically speaking, he likes some of you. Yeah, And because
I know some nice people listen there Robert likes. Maybe
it's you, maybe it's not. You'll never know. Today we're
not here to talk about who Robert Evans likes. But
we are here to talk about what to do if
your house is going to burn down or you have
to leave because they think it might burn down. This

(01:04:59):
is obviously a topic that is front of mind for
people in southern California currently, given the massive wildfires that
have engulfed whole neighborhoods of Los Angeles. There are fires
in venturin Oxtard as well. Now the whole of East
County San Diego is under a red flag warning. Fire
conditions continue because climate change continues, and we have decided

(01:05:22):
as a society not to do anything about that, and
so this shit is going to be the rest of
our lives.

Speaker 7 (01:05:31):
If you're on the East Coast or somewhere else and
you're like, oh, I'm fine, I'm not on the West coast,
bad news for you.

Speaker 4 (01:05:37):
You're not fine.

Speaker 7 (01:05:38):
Slowly, more and more the East Coast, including the northeast,
is being seen as a fire prone area, and we're
seeing an increase in fire out east as well.

Speaker 4 (01:05:48):
Yeah, the United Kingdom as wildfires now a thing did
not exist. Do you all even have wild over there?

Speaker 1 (01:05:56):
Yeah?

Speaker 4 (01:05:57):
We have like land owned by the monarch fires, we
have like parks and protected land. We don't really have.
We have commons to a degree, but not not like
public land out the US does. Like when I was
a kid, we used to burn the stubble in straw fields.
Like that's how how few fucks we gave about fires.
We just burn it in a plat back in and

(01:06:17):
air quality, I guess. Yeah, that is not a thing
that people engage in anymore. That's probably for the best.
Fire it's coming for you. It's happening everywhere. Hooray, hooray. Yeah,
lucky you the cleansing fire. I feel like there's a
John Betchaman poem I could go off with here, but
I'll spare you all right. So, if you are in
a place where you are very likely to have to

(01:06:39):
evacuate your home soonish for a fire, here are some
things that you may wish to consider doing. I've harvested
these from mutual a groups in LA and from the
Cowfire website, where they give you advice on what to
do if you're evacuating. The first thing that you want
to do is turn off your gas. For those of
you who are not familiar, this is a flammable substance,

(01:07:01):
and your gas pipe rupturing and then catching on fire
would be bad, would be sad. It's pretty easy to
do this. Normally, you should have a valve near the meter.
Some places we'll have what's called an earthquake shut off
or an earthquake valve, where you won't need a tool.
I'm not sure that. In fact, i'm pretty certain those
are not mandatory, even in California, because I've lived places
that don't have them. Then again, there are things that

(01:07:22):
are mandatory that landlords just aren't doing. I think we
all know that. Yeah, or like grandfathered into or whatever.
Mm hmm, yeah. Yeah, given that people outside California are
listening and the earthquakes are are fortunately not coming for
us all just yet, I would just suggest that you
try and find where your gas shut off is. Now.
It's often where the gas comes into the property, like
there's a gas meter, and normally you're going to need

(01:07:44):
some kind of tool to turn that. What I've used
normally is just like an adjustable spanner or wrench for
those of you in the United States, the people at
California that you're talking to. Yeah, yes, yeah, I follow Californians.
You can turn that valve so it's parallel with the
pipe that's kind of shut off the gas coming into
your house. Do you mean perpendicular to the pipe. I'm curious.

(01:08:07):
I think parallel is shut off.

Speaker 7 (01:08:09):
Interesting with water, you turn it off by moving it perpendicular.
I've never messed with a gas line. I've lived weird
and off grid instead.

Speaker 4 (01:08:16):
Yeah, let me have a look. I'm checking now. Yeah. Sorry,
it wants to be at ninety degrees to the pipe. Yeah,
so it should be in line with the pipe when
you start in ninety degrees to the pipe when you turn.

Speaker 7 (01:08:26):
It off, which you can just kind of imagine as
like when it's in line, you can imagine like, oh,
that's how the gas and water can flow through, and
then when it's to the side, it's like, oh, now
it's blocking it.

Speaker 4 (01:08:36):
That's how I remember that. That's much easier visually if
you imagine like the hole in the valve lining up
with the handle thing on there. Yeah, do you want
to turn that off? I've seen some suggestions that you
want to turn water off. Generally, the advice is not
to turn your water off, and to hook up your
outdoor hoses to your outdoor taps such that they can
be used if they need to be used. I have

(01:08:56):
seen some suggestions to turn water off because I guess
people's pipes are which is decreasing water pressure.

Speaker 7 (01:09:02):
And it seems like that's probably a like city versus
rural or like city to city kind of divide. You
should listen to your local authorities around this kind of thing, right,
Like in the case of California, you can go to
CalFire right and there will be evacuation advice on the
CalFire website.

Speaker 4 (01:09:19):
There might even be on your city website. Some of
it is useful. This is a useful thing if you
do need to turn off your water. Again, water shut
offs could be in a variety of places, so it
kind of depends. Especially if you're on a well, you're
probably row and if you're rollo, you're probably gonna be
leaving it on.

Speaker 7 (01:09:35):
Yeah, you're probably going to turning off your water. Yeah,
but if you do need to do it's just a
pipe going into your basement that you turn it on.

Speaker 4 (01:09:41):
You can sometimes be at the side of your house.
You might need to give this a little bit of
WD forty Sometimes on a little little plastic box as well,
And a little plastic box has a little hole and
you kind of have to shove a screwdriver in that
hole and pop it open. We're now talking about city
water again, right, municipal water, yes, yeah, that's city water.

Speaker 1 (01:09:58):
Yeah.

Speaker 4 (01:09:58):
Yeah, that's where if you have a water meeting box
it could and the shut offs in there. Familiarize yourself
with that stuff now so that you're not doing it
in a panic later, And that's kind of where a
lot of what we're talking about today is important. It's
if you do it now, you don't have to dash
about your house grabbing thinking is this important? Do I

(01:10:18):
need this? Do I need that? Right? Because like I've
evacuated for wildfires living in California a few times. I'd
like to think I have it pretty down now, But
definitely the first time I was, you know, freshly minted
European migrant. It was not familiar with this stuff, and
it definitely just ran around grabbing things. So it turned
out to be the wrong thing. It's like, cool, I've

(01:10:40):
got three bicycles here, let me let me go to
the shelter.

Speaker 7 (01:10:44):
And you can get something called a water key or
a silcock key. And I have a thing I have
not personally used it. I have a thing called an
eight way key. Sometimes they are called four way keys,
depends on how many little wrenches on them are on them.
And these are just cheap things that have like basically
all of the weird wrench style things that you would

(01:11:05):
never otherwise use, like all the weird like triangle things.
They can get you into like the boxes on a
subway car, and they can turn on and off water,
like I carry one in case you know you're in
the apocalypse and you need to turn on the water
at a rest area. You know that kind of thing.
I've first learned about these from squatters, so it would
just move into houses and then turn the water on.

(01:11:27):
And they they're built in specialized ways to try and
prevent squatter from doing exactly what I'm describing.

Speaker 4 (01:11:32):
Yeah, so you couldn't use your standard socket set or
what happens. So that's where you need these specialized keys. Yeah,
and they're not very expensive you can buy.

Speaker 7 (01:11:40):
They're also not very high quality. This isn't the kind
of thing you're going to want to use over and
over again. They're usually cast and like they break, it's
like pot metal. Yeah, exactly. Yeah, but there are right
as far as I can tell. Yeah, and any you
hope youre not going to need to use them very much.
Are the things that you should turn on or off.
Turn off your air conditioning.

Speaker 4 (01:11:58):
No one's in the house anyway, I would consider leaving
your exterior lights on. This is just going to help
firefighters see things and see your house in the event
that your house is still there. You can close your
windows and doors. It's amazing how much difference closed doors
even internally make it in fire spread that There are
plenty of videos you can watch about this online, but

(01:12:19):
like it's amazing how much difference it makes having those closed.
But you don't want to lock your front door like
you're going to see a lot of stuff about looting.
I will tell you right now that the people who
are looting from wildfare survivors are the landlords who are
charging one hundred and fifty percent of the rent that
they were a month ago for people to find a
flaceplace to live.

Speaker 7 (01:12:37):
Also, if my house is about to burn down and
you go steal all my stuff, good have it?

Speaker 4 (01:12:43):
Yeah yeah, lucky you like I hope you don't get burned,
like yeah, yeah, compared to if a firefighter needs to
enter that house to prevent it burning down. It takes
a meaningful amount of time to break down a door, yeah,
and you can save that time by leaving it open.
So yeah, that is something that I think you will
get the wrong impression of if you're watching too much

(01:13:05):
corporate news. If you can close metal shutters on your
windows but remove curtains, flammable things near windows generally not
a good idea, right, that makes sense. So if you've
got fabric curtains, I know they look nice, but take
them down. Or you could just live like me and
never purchase curtains and just I don't have to have
the sun your face. What is happening to me right now?

Speaker 1 (01:13:31):
Yeah?

Speaker 4 (01:13:32):
Yeah, we're going to.

Speaker 7 (01:13:33):
Start a whole interior design thing. And when I James
interior design, where you hang your curtains.

Speaker 4 (01:13:39):
Yeah, James is effectively squatting in a house that he
actually rents. You should also move flammable items into the
middle of the room again, right, that's where the fire
is not. And then before you go, choose an outfit
that covers your legs and arms. Right, and you want
to wear some sturdy shoes as well, something that's comfort,

(01:14:00):
something you could potentially sleep in and wear for a
few days and not be uncomfortable. Shoes that you could
walk in.

Speaker 6 (01:14:07):
Right.

Speaker 4 (01:14:07):
We saw a lot of people in La weren't able
to take their vehicles as far as they had expected
to be able to, and so having a pair of
shoes that you're comfortable in, your nice, comfy walking shoes
is definitely a useful thing to have something to think about.
I hope you're not listening to this dashing around your
house if you are, best of luck? Yeah, yeah, but
you know you can prepare all this stuff now for

(01:14:30):
the outside of your house. Flammable stuff that might catch
outside your house is best either bought inside inside your
shed if you have a shed or a garage or something,
or in a particularly California piece of advice, CalFire suggests
chucking your path to your furniture in the pool. So
that is the thing that you can do. That makes
some sense, it does. Have you seen the picture of

(01:14:52):
this lady in the nineties who put all her fine
china in her swimming pool before evacuating in a wildfire.
Oh that's amazing. Yeah, it's very like of the time,
like it was a time when people could afford swimming pools. Yeah,
and also people had china that they cared about, which
is something that our generation Germany does.

Speaker 7 (01:15:09):
Not unless they inherited it from their parents, and in
which case they still also yeah right they have like
one plate, yeah.

Speaker 4 (01:15:16):
Yes, yeah, yeah, yeah. Apparently it's a big issue with
people like inheriting china and not want to get in
and just dumping on good wills. Yeah I believe it. Yeah,
I can see that. So, yeah, you can put stuff
in your pool if you don't want it to burn.
If it is possible for you to do that, you
have something you mentioned Margaret about your fence right living
in a more rural setting.

Speaker 7 (01:15:34):
Yeah, can I actually just kind of like really quickly
run through some if you yes, fire protecting your house,
There's two things you're going to do. One is the oh,
I'm going to run away now version, and then there's
the ahead of time version. The really quick basic version
of the ahead of time is that and this is
more applicable rurally. But you want to have a defensible space.

(01:15:55):
You know, everyone's going to give you a different number,
but like one hundred feet from your house. You don't
want sleep packed trees, especially conifers, and you're gonna want
you know, the one tree is okay as long as
it's a little bit further from the other. You're gonna
want to clear out yard debris. Even leaving leaves on
the ground is overall good. You kind of want to
create this space where there's not a lot of leaf
litter and things like that directly under your house so

(01:16:17):
that the eaves don't catch. You want to make sure
that you don't keep a lot of flammable stuff there.
And if like if I was fleeing my house in
a hurry, I would be pulling all the stuff away
from under the eaves that I should have pulled away
from under the eaves months ago. If I were to
design my house better, there would be a basically a
three foot like gravel line around the edge of my

(01:16:37):
house right of landscaping. But the other things that you're
going to want to do is you're going to want
to look for how embers can get in through the
vents and stuff like in your roof area.

Speaker 4 (01:16:47):
Or under wherever.

Speaker 7 (01:16:49):
And you're gonna want to basically make sure and it
might already have that, but you want to make sure
that there's tighter than chicken wire. I think it's I
think you want quarter inch mesh covering those things.

Speaker 4 (01:17:00):
Yeah, like construction netting.

Speaker 7 (01:17:01):
Yeah, well metal, but yeah, it's metals.

Speaker 4 (01:17:05):
The name of it. Oh okay, it's what they put
into concrete. I think I use it to build chicken
Oh yeah, runs for similar reasons. Well, yeah, because raccoon
hands can't get through it, and raccoons they're bastards as
it turns out.

Speaker 7 (01:17:18):
Yeah, that makes sense. If your porch is wooden, you
have a porch, you don't want fire to get underneath it,
and so you can keep your wooden porch, but you
want to screen off underneath of it to keep flaming
debris from going under there. And then if you have
a wooden fence, consider having the like first ten feet
or so of the fence the brick or something like that.

(01:17:40):
I can't afford this, but imagine you can. Then you
would want the first chunk of it to be that way.
If you have gates, you open them. The deal with
fences and everything is that you don't want like a
wick that brings fire to your house. So if the
forest around you is burning, you don't want it to
catch your fence and have that go right up to
under the eaves catch eaves on fire.

Speaker 4 (01:18:00):
And now I you have a structure fire.

Speaker 7 (01:18:02):
So what you're gonna do is you open the gates
if you're leaving. And then, for example, my plan, because
I have wooden fence that goes all the way up
to my house, is that if I have more than
like five minutes to flee a fire, by a half
an hour to flee a fire, I am taking the
chainsaw and I am cutting down about ten feet of
that wooden fence before I leave, and that should dramatically

(01:18:23):
increase the chances that my house.

Speaker 4 (01:18:25):
Will survive a fire. Yeah, smart move.

Speaker 7 (01:18:27):
And then another thing with the pool thing, And I
think I've read about but I've never there's no version
of my life where I'm ever gonna have a pool
if you live in a fire prone area. They actually
make pumps that are designed to pump your pool water
into a fire hose and they have saved a lot
of rural areas and probably city areas too by having
that accessible to firefighters. Immediately, your pool can become a

(01:18:51):
resource for the people who are coming in to try
and keep your house intact.

Speaker 4 (01:18:56):
Yeah. Amusingly, we use one of those. When I was
a kid, we had a whole liked to get out,
and one day she got out. We all went looking
for Of course, there were some wealthy people who like well,
they didn't live in the village that we lived in.
They owned it because Britain has never moved on from
the Fugal era, and they had a pool and that
that was where our horse was. And so the fire

(01:19:17):
brigade came and they used one of those things, just
pumped out the water and just like host down the
surrounding garden. And then we came with the tractor and
we put some different strawbeeres of different sizes, made a
set of stairs and got her out.

Speaker 7 (01:19:35):
That's the least relatable story I've ever heard about England.
It's just like a rural people living the dream. Yeah
she was a good horse, misty. Yeah, we had a
lot of horses that, like, we had access to land
and not a great deal of finances, so we inherited
problematic horses. I think for people who had, like who
had the means to purchase, that.

Speaker 4 (01:19:55):
Is relatable to the Americans. Yeah, okay, yeah, yeah, yeah,
any people themselves in this situation, I'm sure. Yeah, horse
poor is a whole thing. Yeah it is. Yeah, yeah,
it's it's the rich people who buy fancy horses and
then like find that horse not to their liking and
can afford to discard a living thing that they spent
more than a car is worth on.

Speaker 7 (01:20:13):
Well then also, I mean, horse poor is you have
a horse, but you don't have any money, and you're like, yeah,
you're partly poor because you have the horse. Because horses
are incredibly expensive to ye maintain, Yes they are, that's
cost a lot. Yeah anyway, so yeah, make sure not
quite a horse relation. But if you are more of
a horseless carriage transport person. If you are, this is

(01:20:35):
a very American thing. In possession of an electric garage
door opener, it is a good idea to work out
how to open your garage without that. Yeah, because you
don't want to be in a situation where you.

Speaker 4 (01:20:45):
Can't use your vehicle because you can't open your garage,
or you don't want to be dashing around going where's
the bloody cord? Not the time, Yeah, so work out
how to do it now. Also, your front gate. Hopefully
you don't live in a gated community. It's not the
way to live. But if you do, for whatever reason,
you know no how to open the gates, or if
you have an electric front gate, you'r drive. I suppose
know how to open that, Margaret, Now will be a

(01:21:06):
good time for us to pause for ads. I wonder
if we will get an advert for electric garage.

Speaker 7 (01:21:10):
Doors or electric courses. Oh yeah, maybe do they dream
of electric care? We'll find out in its advertising break.

Speaker 4 (01:21:27):
All right, we are back, and now we're continuing on
the theme of animals because they are our little friends. Yeah,
so if you have animals inside your house, pets, Oh,
we have farm animals inside my house growing up, so
I guess it's not exclusive to pets. We used to
bring the lambs in when it was cold. Little off
the lambs. Again, this is turning into like James story.

(01:21:48):
That's okay, it's cute stories. People are in possession of
a range, like like a big cooking if you have
a very old house in the UK, or again if
you're rich, you have these like cold burning or oil
burning ovens, so they stay at a temperature and only
have a number of doors. The coldest one you can
put a lamb in there in the winter time and

(01:22:09):
you can keep it warm that way, like in a
live one. Yeah yeah, yeah, well, I mean any of them.
You can put a dead one and if you felt
the need, if you look, you're saying okay, yeah, yeaheah no, yeah,
yeah yeah. If you're looking to take care of your animal,
you put them in there and keep the More so,
if you have pets in your house, things to do
before you evacuate would be make sure they have a
collar on which has your name and your contact information.

Speaker 1 (01:22:32):
Yeah.

Speaker 4 (01:22:32):
I'm a big fan of the breakaway collars, especially for dogs.
We never had collars and a dog's wearing upcause the
dogs were always out in the fields and going through
hedges and stuff, and you don't want them to get
caught up. Yeah, and so I'm a big fan of those,
especially in a situation where your pet's going to be scared.
You know, God forbid that you'd lose your pet goes
running for a bit. You don't want them to get
caught up by that neck. Doesn't probably want to chip

(01:22:54):
your dog. Are you chip your pets?

Speaker 3 (01:22:56):
Yes?

Speaker 4 (01:22:56):
Yeah, I was going to say, now it's a good
time where you have the time to chip your pets.
To make sure you have a carrier, make sure you
have their vaccination records, all that.

Speaker 7 (01:23:04):
Stuff, and also particularly the particularly rabies vaccination is like
the thing that you need to make sure that you
have with you. There's a lot of places you can't
go with a pet, like Canada unless you have.

Speaker 4 (01:23:13):
Yeah. Yeah, hopefully you and your pet will be fine.
You'll come home in a few days. But keeping that
stuff is important. If you have a cat having a sort,
you can buy those little mobile litter boxes. If you're
in danger of having to evacuate, just buy one and
check in your vehicle.

Speaker 5 (01:23:26):
Now.

Speaker 4 (01:23:27):
Of course, any medications that your pet has right, you'll
want to have a supply of those and those who
want to be in your go back. It's also nice
to have some familiar toys and things that's not like home. Yeah,
so consider putting them in the carrier now and then
they'll just be there and you won't have to look
for them. They have advice if you have to leave
your pet, which would be a pretty heartbreaking situation, to
be honest.

Speaker 7 (01:23:49):
Yeah, I think that she was in to be in
charge of an animal's entire life is a pretty solemn vow.

Speaker 4 (01:23:56):
Yes, I would agree, And I don't think I would
leave them to burn. I think ye, But I.

Speaker 7 (01:24:01):
Guess there's probably I mean, you see, like for example,
I know we're gonna talk about livestock in a second,
but like you know, people have had to like let
loose some of their horses because they can only personally
escort so many horses or whatever.

Speaker 4 (01:24:14):
Right. Yeah, a few years ago, my friend and I
were in a situation where a stables had more horses
than it did vehicles. Yeah, and were able to go
in a vehicle with a towdruck and just help, like
they would load them up and just be like go
to the evacuation point with these horses. Yeah, and so
having a plan for that is good. But yeah, I
know I struggle becauceive of leaving pets. I grew up

(01:24:36):
with dogs and like they were part of my family.

Speaker 7 (01:24:39):
Yeah. I suppose there's some situation I am not imagining
where it is literally a necessity, but I struggle to Yeah.

Speaker 4 (01:24:47):
I heard about people in LA who were forced to
leave relatives who were not mobile, which is just fucking heartbreaking,
just you know, one of the worst things I could imagine.

Speaker 7 (01:24:56):
Happening, which is literally why I actually think that you're
a vacuate plans. Not trying to blame those people that
we're talking about, but I believe that your evacuation plans
need to include people with disabilities who are in your area,
not just where you not just in your house, but elsewhere. Like, yeah,
if you have someone who can only travel by a wheelchair,
then you should be considering for your only vehicle a

(01:25:18):
wheelchair accessible vehicle. Like this is the kind of thing
that I think that, like plans need to include people
who are at different levels of ability.

Speaker 4 (01:25:26):
Yeah, yeah, if you have older people in your neighborhood, Yeah,
people who might not have their cell phone on them
all the time. They might not get that like beat
beat buzz buzz. Yeah. If you have like older folks
who live alone in your neighborhood, you should know that,
you know. Yeah, yeah, a few years ago I helped
some older neighbors evacuate. Yeah. You live in a community
and you need to take responsibility and take care of

(01:25:48):
one another. If you have livestock again, like you know,
I grew up with livestock, I think you're taking responsibility
for the animal's life, and that includes situations where you
might have to help that animal escape in a way
that leg is not necessarily like lucrative for you. Right,
So that might just mean opening your fences, right, opening

(01:26:09):
your gates. If you're not able to evacuate that animal,
at least giving it a chance you can before. Just
to avoid having yourself in that situation, you need to
make transport arrangements. You should be able to look where
large animals refuges are, like in San Diego in the
big fires, maybe fifteen years ago, they have them on
Fiesta Island for a while. Little Island out in the

(01:26:31):
bay or del Mar Racecourse is often a place in
San Diego where you can take them. You should be
able to find that now, if you're in Los Angeles,
you can find that. Now. Again, you're going to want
to have your essential documentation. You are not going to
want nylon halters for your livestock. I've seen a lot
of people have, Like people have nyel on lead ropes
for horses. We had like more hempy ones when I
was younger, just because those a much left likely to melt, right,

(01:26:54):
So that's why we had them in the UK. But
we had them because we'd have them for a long time.
But plastic key things that can melt. You don't want
to put them around your horse's head or near your horse. Okay,
that makes some sense. Yeah, if you have chickens right now,
you're going to run into the issue of AV and flu.
Oh yeah, which is a further complication. So, like this
is a scenario of like a big chicken shelter where

(01:27:16):
you take them. It is not a good one for
AV you and flu reasons also for like chicken dynamics reasons.
So that means you should make a plan. Now, you
might have a friend who you're like, hey, I know
that you're not normally a paltry person, but would it
be cool in the event of us having to evacuate
for me and my chickens to come and stay at
your house. Making a plan now is going to avoid
you being in a very difficult situation of either driving

(01:27:36):
around with your birds in your in your truck being
like where the fuck can I go? Or like being
turned away from places. Right. Yeah, The last thing I
have here and then we're going to move on to
packing your go bag is insurance. My house flooded when
I was a kid, Like, it completely leveled the first
floor of the house.

Speaker 7 (01:27:53):
Everything was gone, which, since it's England, is actually the
second floor to Americans. Yeah, it's true, it was actually
the Yeah. I love to uh it's the ground It
the ground floor. You had to hide on the first thing.

Speaker 4 (01:28:04):
Yeah. Yeah. I love to go into a lift and
be confused in this country after sixteen years of living here,
go up and down, up and down, playing this stupid
game until I google what do American call the flaws?
And but you can't do it, so you're in the
lift and your phone doesn't work. It's one of my
favorite experiences.

Speaker 7 (01:28:20):
It's because you try to google what do American lifts do?
And they're like, what the fuck is the lift?

Speaker 4 (01:28:24):
Yeah, yeah, yeah, it's true. Yeah yeah, an elevator. Yeah,
it's not an elevating experience.

Speaker 7 (01:28:28):
Away my favorite thing to pick James, Yeah, it's true.

Speaker 4 (01:28:35):
Sure, I'm the only person who does it, I'm sure. Yeah,
it never happened to me. Yeah, it was never an
issue when I worked at a building with a lift
and would routinely miss my own floor so much so
that I just took the fire escape. So I remember
it taking months the time I was working in construction,
and what we were doing was for the most part, pulling
wet carpet out of people's homes that have flooded. Highly

(01:28:58):
recommend not doing that. There's a way to make a
living if you can. It's not good for the body,
not good for the soul, for the lungest. Probably cleaning
out restaurants. Like a month later the power had been
off for a month. Just going into the walk in,
Oh my god, I've never seen so many people vomit,
like one after the other being like no, I could

(01:29:19):
do it. I'm a builder straight, Like, yeah, pretty horrific.
So don't recommend. If you can go around your house
taking a video of your yeah, stuffs, it will just
make it easier, Like this happened to my family, and
like maybe you know the early two thousands, so it
wasn't possible. Well, I mean I could have got the
old like Sony handicam out I didn't. So now you

(01:29:43):
know you have a video camera in your pocket going
around your house taking a video especially of you know,
the things that are expensive and hard to move, you're
going to align insurance to replace.

Speaker 7 (01:29:54):
Yeah, and then this is actually a decent regular prepper
practice regardless. This isn't a like, oh I'm just about
to have to run out for a fire. This is
a like every six months or every year, or every
time you get a new, weird, expensive thing that you
put in your house, make this video so that it's
easier to prove.

Speaker 4 (01:30:11):
All of the stuff that you had that needs to
be replaced.

Speaker 7 (01:30:14):
Yeah, if you do that on a regular basis, there's
a little bit of like security of like where do
you put it?

Speaker 4 (01:30:18):
Do you really want?

Speaker 1 (01:30:19):
You know?

Speaker 7 (01:30:20):
But it's honestly for almost all people probably totally fine
to just have that.

Speaker 4 (01:30:24):
Yeah on the clouds. Yeah, yeah, I think I think it.
Don't put it on Facebook, but you can get to
direct the insurre. It's going to be your Instagram where
you post an interior video of your home every month.

Speaker 7 (01:30:33):
Yeah, that's that's your thing. I guess join us next
month for behind the podcasts.

Speaker 4 (01:30:38):
Yeah, podcasts, crips, it's just me in my shed. It's
me critiquing your interior sign you have. That would be
a weekly podcast for some time. Shame James, James, Shame
podcasts la things that I've heard people thinks that you
will need. If you have a nebulizer of a person

(01:31:00):
who uses a nebulizer to help them breathe, those are
in very high demands. You're probably not going to be
able to replace it, so bring that with you. If
you have medications, ideally grab the meds in the little
orange thing and take those with you. That where you've
got the RX number and you can easily go to
a pharmacy and be like, hey, this is my prescription
for me. It has my name and the RX number.

(01:31:22):
Can you issue me an emergency supply? And that's something
they should be able to do. And also if you
grab the whole bottle, then you've got you know, hopefully
a decent supply. Hopefully your insurance isn't annoying and only
lets you go three weeks at a time. Yeah, that's
that comes up for a lot of people. But I
will not name any companies because I think it is
against my contract to do that. I will say that

(01:31:47):
if you have like your important documents, right, you're potentially
your d to your house, if you're in on your car,
your passport, your birth certificate is a big one. Yeah,
you're right to be in this country. Yeah, any dream card, visa,
that kind of thing, especially those in the after Well,
this will come out in the era of Trump two

(01:32:09):
point zero. So those documents are going to be very
important for some people. Right, you're darker registration, Put those
in a file and grab the whole thing, bring it
with you. Do not rely on scan copies of those,
especially your immigration documents. If you're a person who has firearms,
records of the serial numbers of those are going to
be useful. And again I would just snap a picture.

(01:32:31):
It's not reasonable or sensible to be taking a lot
of firearms with you in a situation like this. You're
not going to need them, and there's gonna be a
lot of places that you won't want to bring them. Yes,
you know, I would suggest locking them up, and like
I say, documenting that you've done that, you may have
to prove at some point that firearm no longer exists,
and then that's probably the best way to do that.

(01:32:52):
And being prepared to travel on foot. Like I said,
another thing that people have been needing and not having
is P one hundred masks. So that's a particle filter
generally in the three M and I think the Honeywell
filters they're pink, so I'm talking about like a screw
in filter here.

Speaker 7 (01:33:08):
Although they do make P one hundred masks that are
more like they look more like COVID masks. Yeah, they're
just a little bit thicker and yeah.

Speaker 4 (01:33:15):
Yeah they're a little bit more sort of burdens than
those masks, but that is what you need if you're
in those situations. Yeah, so if you have one of those,
I have ones like when I'm when I'm apoxyting wood,
I have a little half face respirated I wear for that.
We will actually talk about masks, Margaret after some of
the products and services support the show have talked about themselves.

(01:33:37):
Would be pretty sick of a honey Well. Yeah, yeah,
they'd be pretty small.

Speaker 5 (01:33:40):
Yep.

Speaker 4 (01:33:40):
All right here we go. All right, we're back, thank you, honey.
Well yeah, keeping us safe here gas.

Speaker 7 (01:33:56):
Although I'm kind of a three M girl, I gotta admit,
oh controversial in case I know so. One of the
things that I did during twenty twenty was a lot
of testing of protest care. And if you want to see,
they've written up a whole bunch of pieces about exactly
everything about masks and body armour and blah blah blah
blah blah. But in general, when you think about masks,
there's sort of three levels that actually are matter useful.

(01:34:20):
There's the version that we kind of see as a
COVID mask. There's a version where it's like you you
wear it around your face and you make sure you
need to get a rated one and N ninety five
is better than nothing for smoke, but a P one
hundred is better. And then there is a half mask respirator.
Half mask respirators are great. They are probably the sweet
spot for this. They are less good for pandemics because
they do not filter the exhale. They are better for

(01:34:43):
your daily life because they don't filter the exhale. It's
much easier to breathe with a half mask respirator than
a fabric mask, and you can switch out the cartridges
and unfortunately almost all of them are various proprietary types
of filters. Yeah, the bayonet mount is the three M style.

(01:35:03):
There's a NATO version. If something looks more like a
gas mask, it's probably the NATO screw on kind. So
you can get a half mask respirator, or you can
get a fold face respirator, which is more or less
what looks like a gas mask, but those coming kind
of civilian styles that are using the same three M
brand or Honeywell or whatever cartridges, or you can get
the more military style that'll have the NATO style screw in.

(01:35:27):
The military style is kind of overkill in terms of
it'll position you oddly socially. Yes, set me a fire, Yeah,
I think that a thing that is worth everyone having.
Are these respirators a half mask respirator or depending on
your life, like if you use them a lot, or
you're going to be protesting, or I don't know, there's
a lot of different reasons you might want a full

(01:35:48):
face one. They make really cheap knockoff ones that you
can get imported. Although maybe if you're listening to this
in the future. You can't get it imported. But they
work fairly well, they're just not quite as good. I've
tested a whole bunch of them against various impacts and
things like that.

Speaker 4 (01:36:02):
I think that half masks are great.

Speaker 7 (01:36:04):
I keep a half mask in my truck literally for
wildfire smoke, because when I'm traveling, if I'm driving out west,
I've been around wildfire smoke while traveling before. Another thing,
just really quickly. They make these for dogs as well.
Oh cool, they're more like COVID mask style, and my
dog hates it.

Speaker 4 (01:36:19):
Yeah, you know, but you could train your dog into
not hating it. I just haven't.

Speaker 7 (01:36:23):
I just keep it around to be like, well, if
it really if we had to sleep in the vehicle
in a smoky area, my dog would hate it, and
he would put up with it, you know, and he
would survive.

Speaker 8 (01:36:33):
Yeah.

Speaker 4 (01:36:33):
Yeah, I like masks. Yes, they're great. Yeah, they are good.
The half face respirator is great. Yeah, that's what I used,
Like I say, when I'm at poxying, so I don't
get high because that would be bad. Yeah.

Speaker 7 (01:36:43):
Oh, and then really quickly about physical stuff like deeds
and all of that stuff. Yeah, I'm actually kind of
curious because it's like, I see why it matters the
most to have the physical originals m hm for most crises.
A lot of people talk about how safety deposit boxes
at banks are kind of the way to go for
stuff like that you don't need on a regular basis.
This wouldn't be your proof of documentation necessarily, but it

(01:37:04):
might be your like birth certificate, maybe like deeds and
titles and things at a safe deposit box, because then
if your house burns down, it's still fine.

Speaker 3 (01:37:13):
LA.

Speaker 7 (01:37:13):
Wildfire kind of disproves this a little bit, right, because
then you're like, well, what if your bank burns down?

Speaker 4 (01:37:18):
Yeah, yeah, yeah, And then.

Speaker 7 (01:37:20):
If it's not on your property, you can't grab it
and go. So it's a little bit complicated. I think overall,
I think that there's a real advantage to keeping stuff
in a safety deposit box off site. And then also,
I just want to shout out that fire proof safes
aren't fireproof.

Speaker 4 (01:37:35):
Yeah, not for the situation and we're talking about here, right.

Speaker 7 (01:37:39):
They are designed for like your kitchen catches fire or
your bed catches fire, and your safe is under your bed, yeah.

Speaker 4 (01:37:46):
And the firefighters come and they get out in fifteen minutes,
but some stuff gets charred.

Speaker 7 (01:37:50):
Right when there is a structure fire and a structure
is destroyed. Fireproof safes, like all other safes, are generally
not protecting their contents, and that's not the safe. Fault
of the fire safe is just they're not designed for that.

Speaker 4 (01:38:03):
Google the melting point of steel for this and many
other interesting Internet things that you can learn. Jet fuel
can't melt fireproof.

Speaker 7 (01:38:12):
Safe, yeah, which is why they build buildings out of it.
Oh and one more thing about documents really quick, while
the original matters, having copies is like better than nothing.
And also just like scanning and having them on encrypted
hard like encrypted USB stick, a little USB stick with
all of your stuff is a really pretty good thing
to have. It has some advantages too, right, because sometimes

(01:38:34):
you don't want the originals of your documents, Like, for example,
you probably want a list of all of your bank accounts,
the bank account numbers, your pins or your credit card numbers,
like all of that stuff that you really don't want
someone else to have, but if you lost you would
be really sad. You probably want digital encrypted copies.

Speaker 4 (01:38:52):
Of that available to you.

Speaker 6 (01:38:53):
Yeah.

Speaker 7 (01:38:54):
Yeah, also your like master passwords and all that terrible
horrible stuff that's scary to put onto a USB stick.

Speaker 4 (01:38:59):
Yeah, that's why you're putting it then on the internet. Yeah,
so really quickly, Margaret, it's going to be a long one.
I guess you and I talked about prepper stuff. It
went long. Yeah, shocking go bags. We've done our whole
episode on go bags. If you're new to the show, Hello, welcome.
You can go back and listen to Margaret and James
talking about go bags. We'll try and put a link
in the description here for you. But what is the

(01:39:24):
like super fast speed round version of what you want
to put in your go back?

Speaker 6 (01:39:29):
Oh?

Speaker 7 (01:39:29):
Lord, change of socks and underwear, your basic toiletries, like
the kind of like travel toiletries, because your go back
is like more like so it's not gonna be a
long tangent. Your go back is like more likely I
have to spend the night in my car than like
I'm starting a new life somewhere out in the planes.

Speaker 1 (01:39:44):
Yeah.

Speaker 7 (01:39:44):
And so the small little things like bring deodorant even
if you don't have deodorant in your daily life, because
you might be crammed into a place with lots of
other people.

Speaker 4 (01:39:52):
I've seen tons of requests for deodorant in the La
Mutual a chat almost every day.

Speaker 7 (01:39:56):
Yeah, no, it makes a lot of sense. So basic
toiletries and a little bit extra to share. I think
whether or not you menstrate, you should have tampons, for example,
in your go bag, and so I think that the
basic toiletries basic first days, last survival stuff, and then
like change of clothes, and also like at least one
or two morale items. I keep a Nintendo switch in
my go bag. It Skyrim is I need a Skyrim

(01:40:19):
box in order to fight anxiety sometimes.

Speaker 4 (01:40:20):
Yeah. Yeah, you can get those tiny little game boys
now which have like it looks like a game boys.

Speaker 7 (01:40:25):
Every game every game ever. Yeah yeah, I have one
of those in their two okay sick. Yeah, those would
be a perfect item for one of those that. Actually
I had like almost no electricity at the beginning of COVID,
and so the ability to play the Sega Genesis version
of Shadow Run from like the nineties was crucial to
me because I didn't have enough electricity to run a computer.

Speaker 4 (01:40:41):
Yeah, and look, that's fine, and it's probably going to
be more important to you than half the shit you
see people online putting in their go backs, like Yeah,
you don't need a gender affirming hatchet. You will. You
will have a lot more fun with your tiny game
boy things that you don't needther I see people. I
see people houlding a lot of food. Everyone who's evacuated
in NA having a miserable time. They are eating the

(01:41:02):
best they ever have. So many people want to help,
and food is a way that so many of us
express affection and careful one another. So many people are
getting fed right now thanks to the efforts of mutual
A groups really remarkably doesn't seem to be so much
by you'd think La, a city on a major fault line,
would would have some kind of supplies for an earthquake
that required feeding lots of people. Seems like it's it's
more vibes based for the city. But you know, surprise surprises,

(01:41:27):
mutual A groups who are feeding people, and they're doing
that really well. So you don't need to hold a
lot of food.

Speaker 7 (01:41:31):
Having a little bit of food, though a little bit
of shelf stable food. I really recommend bars you don't
like as the food that you put in your go bag,
because if you put in bars that you do like,
you're going to eat them when you're bored one day, yeah,
and you don't want to.

Speaker 4 (01:41:43):
Go to the store. I highly recommend. I say that.

Speaker 7 (01:41:45):
Literally all of the bars in all my bags have
been eating yeah the past week. But that's because there's
been like a winter storm, so I haven't been out
to the grocery store and I just have been like
sugarcrevy and so I eat even the gross barers.

Speaker 4 (01:41:55):
I live in San Diego. I have no hues so
to do it because I can't be bothered to leave
my offace and go to my kitchen sometimes.

Speaker 7 (01:41:59):
Yeah, So find the one that you don't like, put
it in your bag.

Speaker 4 (01:42:02):
Just have a couple.

Speaker 7 (01:42:03):
It's not to keep you sustained, it's to keep you
from being grouchy. Like, don't think of it as like
I need to put entire meals in my go bag.
Think of it as like I need enough sugar and
whatever to keep my headspace right.

Speaker 4 (01:42:15):
Yeah, I kind of like to lay them in between
things I do. Is what I'm camping too. I'll get
like those little peanut butter packets, yeah, and just like
just to throw a few in there, and then you're like, oh, yeah,
you know what, I am being cranky and that means
you just snuff this and I'm going to be dead
at Yeah, I do highly recommend peanut butter. I take
it when I travel a lot as well. It's like
a comfort food for me. It's filling, it's compact, it's

(01:42:39):
not that bad for you.

Speaker 7 (01:42:40):
When I lived out of a backpack, I kept a
plastic jar of peanut butter at the bottom of my
pack always because I knew, no matter what, I had
at least two days worth of calories in the bottom
of my bag.

Speaker 4 (01:42:48):
Yeah, yeah, it's a wonderful thing, peanut butter. So yeah,
put some of that in there. There are things that, like,
you probably don't need shelter, right, but it might be
nice to have a little compact blanket, right especial if
you're going to have to stay. One of those one
thing or comfort item that I always take, I've taken
this all over the world is an inflatable pillow. Like
there are a lot of hardships that I will endure.

(01:43:09):
I like to sleep on a pillow, and so I
take a little inflatable pillow. So it's something that, like,
you know, you will have comfort items like that that
are things for you. I'll put those in there. I
would avoid watching too much go bag content on YouTube
because you're going to get anxious about the fact that
you don't have like a folding short barreled rifle. And
that's because you don't need it. No, what do you need? Like, like,

(01:43:33):
I'm sitting next to my bullet proofst that I've used
before for work. I'm not taking it with me staying here.
I can spend a lot of money on the plate,
so I will be claiming those on inssurance. But you
don't need that stuff. People are taking care of one another,
and so pack with the things that will help you
be comfortable. And consider that you might be spending a

(01:43:54):
while in a hotel or a hostel or a refuge,
or staying with a friend or family memor Yeah, and
think what would make that more comfortable for you.

Speaker 7 (01:44:04):
I think that's the really good way to put it.
It's the get out of town for the weekend bag. Yes,
not the end of the world bag. I think that
if you are more rural, you might want some basic
camping stuff. Yeah, yep, definitely, but the average person probably doesn't.
I mostly have this at the like there's my go
bag and then there's the stuff that's kind of always
in my truck.

Speaker 4 (01:44:24):
Yeah, that's where I'm at too. I like to go camping,
so I have my camping stuff in my truck because
then it takes me less time to go camping.

Speaker 7 (01:44:30):
Yeah, and so like, I am almost certainly not bugging
out on foot from my house. And if I had to,
then I would have to bring a not my go bag,
I would have to bring a hiking bag, you know. Yeah,
most of the time, if you have access to a
car and roads, because you're escaping an emergency, you're getting
to somewhere with enough civilization that you have, you can
expect some level of shelter and food.

Speaker 4 (01:44:52):
Yeah, exactly, but I do. I will say, have some water.

Speaker 7 (01:44:55):
Don't go overboard, Like I think that having like a
little bit of like chemical water filtration and a water
bottle or a little water filter and a water bottle,
you know, the reason not.

Speaker 4 (01:45:06):
To Yeah, I will say specifically, like get a Soyer squeeze. Yeah,
tiny filtration is better than most other filters that are
that size. Get it, put it in your backpack, leave
it there. They're handy to have. And then yeah, get
a little uh I like to have again, this is
a little comfort thing. I like to have a stain
of steel now gene size bottle. It's not made by

(01:45:26):
analogy things made by clean canteen. I like it so
I could drink water out of it. I like it
because it's not plastic. And I like it because I
can use it to heat up water when it's really
cold and have it like a little hot water bottle
and snuggle with it. Yeah, so that's a nice thing. Yeah.

Speaker 7 (01:45:40):
I use also like a single wall steel canteen so
that you can heat water in it. If you get
the double wall ones, then you can't heat them over
the fire because they're you know, vacuum insulated or whatever.
But then other people I know are like, well they
want the ability to have like and their insulated deep bottles.

Speaker 4 (01:45:56):
Yeah, you know, you do you So, I.

Speaker 7 (01:46:00):
Will also say battery packs for phones is a big one. Again,
you're less likely to need to hunt squirrels with axes,
and you're more likely need to keep your phone charged
and other people's phones charged.

Speaker 4 (01:46:09):
One of those little hydra charging cables which breaks one.
That's what I was about to say too, Yeah, yeah, yeah,
get get one of those, get a little wall water
and keep it in there. So you can turn a
wall socket into a USB socket if you need that
to charge your stuff. Another thing that is surprisingly handy
and lots of situations is I like to run a lot,
and sometimes you're doing ultramarathon. When you get to the

(01:46:31):
aid station, they just have like big things of water, right,
and you fill up your little water bottles you're carrying
in your vest, and lots of people have these tiny
collapsible cups that are made of like a thin rubber.
They're made of the stuff that camel back bladders are
made of. And then they can fill up that cup
and they can drink from it, and they just keep
it attached to their vest, right, and then off they
go running along. Oh interesting. These are very useful and

(01:46:52):
I've started incorporating them in lots of my travel and like, yeah,
emergency supplies because if you're in a place where people
don't have cups, right that they have big things water,
Now you have a vessel from which to drink. So
those are surprisingly handy. Yeah. I also keep one of those.

Speaker 7 (01:47:06):
I don't know if it's the same one you're talking
about it, but it like collapses up almost like forty
and style.

Speaker 4 (01:47:10):
Yeah, it's like it's like the camping ones, but even
it's way lighter than those.

Speaker 7 (01:47:13):
Ah okay, I have the camping style one and I
keep it in there as a like emergency dog bowl.

Speaker 4 (01:47:18):
Yes I know. Yeah, those are great for that too,
and you can drink hot things out of them, which
is nice. Yeah.

Speaker 7 (01:47:24):
And another thing that I keep in my go bag
is I keep the meds that my dog is on,
and I keep some of the meds that I take
in there. And you know, it's like, my dog only
gets the meds once a month, So I go to
my bag and I pull out the meds and I
give them to my dog from my bag, because why not.
And if you have, you know, other people, whether they're
not fully grown yet or are that you also take

(01:47:47):
care of, you know, you need to make sure you
have a little bit of their stuff in there.

Speaker 4 (01:47:51):
Like like you keep a dog toy in your go bag.

Speaker 3 (01:47:53):
Yeah.

Speaker 4 (01:47:54):
Yeah, if you have a child, keep a child toy.
If you need to keep medicines cold, there's a product
called freo Io. They're not paying me. I've never got
one for free. But you dip it in water and
it uses evaporative cooling to keep your insulin cold. I
have used them. Oh, they are very handy. They don't
rely on electricity. It's very nice. So yeah, if that's

(01:48:14):
something that you need, then then then that is hopefully
something useful to you. My last thing would be a
little torch, a little pocket flashlight, or even better a
headlamp like a head torch, because lots of places in
La lost power, right, and if you're having to go
places at night, it's much easier if you can see
where you're going. Yeah, they're not expensive, they're great gifts.
Bring a few, give them to friends, make new friends.

(01:48:36):
Hopefully this has repared you. The last thing, of course,
Margaret is a gold bullion with Ronald Reagan's face on it.

Speaker 7 (01:48:42):
Oh, I forgot to mention that, Yeah, you need trade.
Rather than having a system of mutual aid, which we
naturally do. Instead, we should interject a complicated barter system,
ideally on the gold Standard, in.

Speaker 4 (01:48:55):
Which shiny metal replaces our naturally instinct to help one another. Yeah, yeah, exactly, Yeah,
that's how it's been. That's that's humans famously, notice species.
Just bring a copy of Debt by David Graeber and
your Yeah, yeah, bring at the shrugs and then as
you pass the fires. Just start ripping that shit off,
throwing it in there, let it burn.

Speaker 7 (01:49:18):
Having a paperback book if you like that, it's not
weight efficient, but you know what, like.

Speaker 4 (01:49:24):
That's how you like. Yeah, yeah, yeah, Bring the Dawn
of Everything by David Graeber. That'll that'll occupy you through
most natural disasters. It's a it's a thick book. It
is if you can't reach something very handy. Stand on that.
He really thought he did us one final solid RP.
David Graeber. Yeah, and and and on rip to David

(01:49:46):
Wengro is a lot. Yes, yeah, yeah, shout out to
David Wegro the other David, the less venerated David who
also wrote that book.

Speaker 7 (01:49:53):
I always feel bad when I just talk about Gramer
stuff and the I talk about Thought of Everything, and
then I don't talk about the other David.

Speaker 4 (01:49:57):
Yeah. Sometimes I'll just say the David's and then people
will look at me and yeah, totally the level. But
I know, yeah, yeah, when I'm pick to Margaret, I
can say that David's. She knows which David's. I mean,
that's why we're friends. Yeah.

Speaker 7 (01:50:10):
Well, anyway, yeah, it's gonna be okay, or it's not
but you know what, you weren't going to survive being
alive anyway. And keep your car half full of gas,
like when you're on your way home, and make sure
that you fill up if it's less than halfway full.

Speaker 4 (01:50:23):
Plug your electric car in. Don't don't skip plugging your
little electric car in at night. Yeah, because the night
that you do is you know that you need it,
So you do the little things. Take care of one another.

Speaker 8 (01:50:34):
Yeah.

Speaker 1 (01:50:55):
Oh, welcome back to It Could Happen Here, a show
where it's now happening here. A thing that we've said
in a joking way a number of times, but now
it just is. This is, you know, a podcast. We're
having a good time. I'm Robert Garrison Davis, my co
host colleague, and today we're talking about Trump's inauguration with

(01:51:17):
a good friend of ours who was present at the
thing itself, Bridget Todd. Bridget, welcome to the program.

Speaker 9 (01:51:24):
Thank you for having me. It's actually my first time
on It Can Happen Here. I'm like a little like nervous.

Speaker 5 (01:51:29):
I hope it goes well.

Speaker 1 (01:51:30):
Yeah, you're an og guest over on Bastard, so it's
about time we had you on here. How you feeling
bridget just in general before we get into the specifics,
how are you doing in the first full day of
this new era?

Speaker 2 (01:51:42):
Oh?

Speaker 5 (01:51:43):
Not great, Bob, not great?

Speaker 1 (01:51:45):
Not great? Not great?

Speaker 5 (01:51:46):
Yeah, bad.

Speaker 9 (01:51:47):
Like we were talking off Mike, like, I need to
figure out a self care plan, And part of this
is on me that I feel like I am one
of those people that has kind.

Speaker 5 (01:51:56):
Of checked out a little bit, and I'm like, ough,
who I am.

Speaker 9 (01:51:59):
I got a take a step back from this, and
now that I'm taking a step back in, I'm like,
I need a plan for how I'm going to pace
myself and not lose my fucking shit every fucking day.

Speaker 1 (01:52:09):
Yeah, it's probably not for the best that Like, right
at the same time as this has all happened, the
people who make gas station drugs have figured out how
to take the chemicals and kretom, which you know, in
leaf forms is generally safe drug, and hyper concentrate them
into basically fucking heroin. So I'm just working on staying
away from that shit too much of the news, you know,

(01:52:30):
that's the way you gotta do it.

Speaker 9 (01:52:32):
I'm also doing dry January and trying to eat healthy.

Speaker 4 (01:52:35):
That's tough.

Speaker 1 (01:52:36):
I'm not doing that.

Speaker 9 (01:52:37):
So I have no outlets. I can't drink, I don't
do drugs. I'm fucking eating lentil soup every night. I
got nothing. There's nothing I can.

Speaker 5 (01:52:45):
Do to cope.

Speaker 1 (01:52:46):
I'm keeping myself, okay, have by just eating venison every
single day.

Speaker 10 (01:52:51):
But yeah, I'm carrying on our Vegas tradition and I've
moved into gambling.

Speaker 6 (01:52:56):
Hie.

Speaker 1 (01:52:57):
Oh you're gambling now, huh.

Speaker 10 (01:52:59):
Not actually, but instead of doing something stupid for inauguration Day,
me and my friends got together and all played anarchist poker,
So that was that was fun. I lost about ten
dollars to my friends, So that's it.

Speaker 4 (01:53:12):
That's fair.

Speaker 1 (01:53:12):
How often did you say I hardly know it?

Speaker 4 (01:53:15):
Like about about four times.

Speaker 1 (01:53:17):
Yeah, that's that's the right amount of fact.

Speaker 10 (01:53:20):
But we also got quite drunk by the time we
started our second game. I was also dressed like Data
from the next generation, complete with silver face paint the
entire time and a poker visor. So that was that
was how I spent yesterday.

Speaker 1 (01:53:35):
I'm glad you got to experience the hell that that
actor experience. Bridget Let's talk about the inauguration. Let's do
it all right, So I kind of coming in firsthand,
when did you sort of lock down your plans to
actually be there.

Speaker 5 (01:53:48):
So initially my plan was to get out of town totally.
I'm going to go out town.

Speaker 1 (01:53:53):
Yeah, I'm gonna hide it on the mountains with a
rifle like that.

Speaker 9 (01:53:59):
You're joking, but like almost no, no, no, I'm not joking,
And I mean I was in So I live in
d C, the DC most of my life. I was
in DC in my apartment when January sixth happened, and
I remember being so scared. There was a curfew in DC,
like it just shit got really real really quickly. I
remember I was on an all staff like the beginning

(01:54:21):
of the year planning work call, and somebody just on
the zoom was like, hey, something's happening and everybody who
lives in DC should maybe check the TV, and then
the line went dead.

Speaker 5 (01:54:34):
That's what I remember the most.

Speaker 9 (01:54:35):
So I was planning on getting out of town, and
then I thought, fuck it, why should these people drive
me out of my own city.

Speaker 5 (01:54:42):
I want to be out on the streets. I want
to be out in my community.

Speaker 9 (01:54:45):
I want to be connected, and so yeah, I went
out to the People's March protest. I went out as
far as I could to inauguration downtown just to get
a sense of what the vibes were.

Speaker 1 (01:54:56):
Yeah, all right, well let's let's get into the vibes.
How were they?

Speaker 5 (01:55:00):
Weird as hell?

Speaker 9 (01:55:03):
This is something that I think people might not really
think about a lot. So like being from DC, living
her most of my life, people really obviously think of
it as like a seat of national power, and they
sometimes forget that there are over six hundred thousand DC
residents who just like live here, work here, have their
lives here, and so this stuff all plays out like
practically in our backyards. While arguably we have less electoral

(01:55:27):
political power and.

Speaker 5 (01:55:28):
Less agency in some ways because DC is not a state.

Speaker 9 (01:55:31):
Yeah yeah, yeah, Our congressional representative Eleanor Holmes Norton, she
can like vote in committees and introduce legislation and stuff
like that, but she can't vote, and so all of
this matters for It's dude, don't even get me started.
Like I could talk about statehood all day long.

Speaker 1 (01:55:48):
That's like such a funny, shitty compromise, Like you can.
You could be there and like talk, but you can't
do anything like you I'm sorry, that's just so fucked up.

Speaker 9 (01:56:00):
It is, and it's like, I mean, like, there are
so many reasons why it sucks that DC's not a state,
but ultimately.

Speaker 5 (01:56:06):
It's like, we deserve to have political power. We deserve
to have a say why Yoming?

Speaker 4 (01:56:12):
Have you ever fucking been to?

Speaker 3 (01:56:14):
Why?

Speaker 8 (01:56:14):
Good?

Speaker 1 (01:56:14):
God?

Speaker 4 (01:56:15):
Like?

Speaker 9 (01:56:17):
And I mean I could talk all day when Republican
lawmakers get on TV, and I remember they would shit
on DC by saying things like there's not even laggers
who live there, it's not even a real place, like
as if the only way to actually meaningfully exist in
the United States, it's like you have to have laggers
who live there, Like it's so infuriating.

Speaker 1 (01:56:36):
And none of those motherfuckers know a lagger I know.

Speaker 9 (01:56:43):
So all of this background really matters to Trump's kind
of tense relationship with DC, like the district. Trump, as
y'all might remember, spent quite a lot of time just
talking straight shit about the district and announcing these like
big plans to takeover DC. The background is a little
bit complicated, but the quick and dirty version is that

(01:57:04):
DC has what's called home rule. So that's like the
ability for DC to govern, like for our local government
and leaders to like make decisions about what happens to
the district, and on the campaign trail, Trump was saying
he wants to change this, that DC's home rule would
be revoked and that the federal government, basically him, would
dictate how DC is run as a city. Because DC

(01:57:25):
is not a state, technically, any president could have that
authority to interfere with how DC is run, so right, Yeah,
any president could like take over the police department and
take over the powers are mayor Muriel Bowser currently has
over the city.

Speaker 1 (01:57:39):
Yeah, So I guess, first off, like of your friends,
how many folks kind of made the same call, Like
what was the general decision? Because I'm looking at like
footage of proud boys marching through fucking d C again
for the first time in almost half a decade, and like, yeah,
where are the people you know on this kind of stuff?

Speaker 5 (01:57:57):
I mean this in the most literal sense, No, nobody zero.

Speaker 9 (01:58:01):
I was out there fly in solo and I had
multiple friends and be like, you're crazy to go down there,
like like everybody.

Speaker 5 (01:58:07):
Yeah, And I guess that's something else.

Speaker 9 (01:58:09):
That I wanted to talk a bit about, which is that,
you know, the first time around. During Trump's inauguration I
was like out on the streets. I was like it
sounds so silly now, but like, ugh, I mean almost
only want to get into it. But the idea of
like resist that had not yet become a cliche to me,
and in the you know, aftermath of Trump's first election,

(01:58:29):
I was really clinging to that for like whatever hope
or power. I didn't know it was going to turn
out to be like a bunch of grifters and like
people saying like hashtag resist and like meeting nothing yea,
at the time, I really clung to that. This time
around total night and day difference, like yeah, and I
think the mood on the street I think reflected that

(01:58:52):
I think that DC is exhausted. The people that generally
I know who are like radicals who would be out
on the street.

Speaker 5 (01:59:00):
One of those people were like, We're sitting this one out.

Speaker 1 (01:59:02):
Yep. Yeah.

Speaker 9 (01:59:03):
That was like a refrain I hear from a lot
of black and brown organizing folks here in DC, like
this is not our fight.

Speaker 5 (01:59:09):
We are sitting this one out.

Speaker 9 (01:59:10):
And I don't blame anybody, right, Like it's a lot,
We've all been through a lot.

Speaker 1 (01:59:14):
Yeah, And that's I guess if I could get across
something and people listen, it would be like, don't just
show up because they are right now. They have the cops,
they have the courts. If they want you to show
up in the street, the best thing to do. Sometimes
I'm not going to say this is going to be
consistently the case, but it is like, don't give them

(01:59:37):
what they want, don't be where they want you to be,
don't make it simple for them. You know. Again, I
keep trying to say and I'm not saying this, and
like I'm so smart, I know what everyone needs to
be doing. I don't. But it's like, not what we
did last time, because that that just didn't didn't do
it exactly, didn't do it all, didn't not get out
of the park.

Speaker 5 (01:59:58):
Was the home run last time Trump was in office.

Speaker 9 (02:00:01):
Y'all remember like the Women's March and pussy hats and
all of that. I actually staffed the Women's March that
time around. I was one of the digital street team folks.
So I was like very invested. This time around, they
changed the name, they rebranded to the People's March, and
they only had a couple of thousand people out there,
and so, you know, I think it really goes back

(02:00:22):
to what you were saying, Robert.

Speaker 5 (02:00:23):
Personally, I have a hard.

Speaker 9 (02:00:26):
Time with the idea that what we did then is
what we should be doing now that that that playbook
is still going to work. And frankly, like sixty nine
percent of white women voted for Trump, right, and so
like the idea that I would feel safe and feel
solidarity with a bunch of women out on the streets
like being like boo Trump. It's just like, it's I

(02:00:47):
understand why the turnout was so low, because I feel
like solidarity march on the street is clearly not where
we're at.

Speaker 5 (02:00:54):
So that is not how we should be meeting this moment.

Speaker 10 (02:00:56):
Well, and even last Jay twenty there was like, you know,
a large, large radical contingent, and those people are similarly
sitting out, and you're looking towards the next few months,
looking at like what kind of ice raids are going
to happen, looking at what's going to happen for like
reproductive healthcare, transgender healthcare. People are making the calculation that
it does not make sense to like needlessly throw yourself

(02:01:18):
against the walls of the state when we can stick
together and see and see what happens, and prepare for
all of those other things that are going to actually
impact you and people that that you know, like seriously,
and it sucks to be stuck in that reactive position.
And there's things you can do proactively, but going outside
and yelling in front of a fence probably isn't going

(02:01:41):
to do any of those things. It's probably not going
to help the people who are going to need help
in the next few weeks. Yeah, and people are understanding that,
and it's leading to people reacting quite differently than than
what they did, you know, eight years ago.

Speaker 9 (02:01:54):
I agree, Yeah, I mean, Garrison, you really said it.
And in this moment personally, I am really wondering, like
what my role is, Like where could I fit in?
There was a time where you know, just being out
on the street yelling, like being so frustrated I have
to take to the streets and scream in impotent rage.
That would feel like something. And I just think in

(02:02:17):
twenty twenty five, I have to figure out like what
it is I can contribute and contribute that and I
don't know that it's protest as it used to be.
Like I used to be somebody who like protest was
my thing, Like you know, I really got my start
in the anti war movement when I was in college,
and like that felt like something. I don't think that
that's what it is for me anymore. Maybe it's just
age too, you age out of it or something.

Speaker 1 (02:02:38):
Sure, I think some of it is that, like the
only meaningful definition of intelligence really is the ability to
adapt to changing circumstances. And when the circumstances change in
the way that they have and you're like, well, time
to do exactly what we tried in twenty seventeen. That
is not intelligent, right, Like, I'm not trying to be mean,

(02:02:59):
And again I'm not saying I know what the smart
thing is, but it is we gotta be pivoting. We
gotta pivot in a lot of different directions right now.

Speaker 9 (02:03:07):
So yes, and I don't know that I see some
of the institutional powers that be, even people who are
like ostensibly like on our side, doing that pivot, right, Like,
I'm very much in this sort of like nonprofit industrial complex.
All the organizations who were like, oh, well, where should
we be putting our money and this and that the
first time around, I just see them doing the same

(02:03:29):
old thing.

Speaker 5 (02:03:29):
And it's like, I don't know that that is what's
going to save us.

Speaker 9 (02:03:32):
And like, don't get me started on how useless the
Democrats are, because they'll go all day. But like when
Trump announced that he was moving the inauguration inside, they
printed little jokey shirts that said snowflake. I'm just so
sick of that, like that sort of like sneering, dunking,
useless stuff that doesn't translate to meaningful action. I'm just

(02:03:53):
so sick of it. I wanted to gouge my eyes out.

Speaker 10 (02:03:56):
Yes, yeah, I mean that's what's in part what lost
of the election is that is that general attitude and
that conception of them throughout the country. And yeah, getting
your little like snide remarks during Haig's est confirmation hearing
might make you feel good and might generate a good
clip for social media, but is that actually going to
stop him from getting into the cabinet position.

Speaker 1 (02:04:17):
I've had so many arguments about this with people over
the last few days who still insist that, like what
the fascists can't stand you making fun of them. That's
what they hate is you laughing at them. And like,
I think there was a stage at which that was
a valid tactic, and you know, there may be elements
of that in the future, but like, no, they don't care.
They're winning. I'm not saying like, don't fucking make jokes

(02:04:38):
with your friends to like keep your stell self sane.
I'm saying, don't mistake dunking on them on social media
for doing anything that matters, because it doesn't.

Speaker 9 (02:04:48):
Well, okay, I'm not even sure, Like I have so
much to say about this. So I have been saying
this for a very long time. And you know, we
were all at the Democratic National Convention. I I didn'mit
that I was there as an influencer, But the thing
that annoyed me so much was like that exact sentiment,
and that exact sentiment fucking lost. The thing that the

(02:05:10):
thing that pisses me off now is the complete unwillingness
to be like, where did we go wrong? Maybe the
memes and the jokes and the calling them weird and
then this and that that. Maybe it felt good in
the moment, but it actually didn't translate what happened.

Speaker 5 (02:05:24):
Unwilling to do that, completely unwilling.

Speaker 1 (02:05:26):
Now, you know, you see, I would almost argue that,
like the weird stuff, I think if they'd stuck with it,
there was something there. I think the I think the
the emphasizing how outside of like the American norm these
guys were and like what we want to accept in
our communities, Like there was something there, but they didn't
stick to it. You know. The next big time we

(02:05:47):
saw Tim Walls, he was talking about how how he
wanted to be friends with Jade Vance on the fucking
debates Stitch. Yeah, you know, But also I think that's
a little different than just like calling him fucking Orange
Mussolini or whatever the fuck. Like, I think there's a
point in a messaging tactic. It's like Trump gets mileage
out of the names he uses and the way in
which that's part of how he got where he is.

(02:06:09):
So I'm not saying that aspects of these tactics can't
be used. Well, I'm talking about the way in which
people liberals and folks on the left are continuing to
do the fucking like drump shit that's not getting us anywhere.

Speaker 9 (02:06:21):
I could not agree more. And yeah, I mean I agree.
I think the weird stuff could have like had legs.
I think that they were kind of like scattershot at
that point, and they were like, let's tell people seem
to like this let's lean into this, Oh, this new thing,
let's lean into that.

Speaker 8 (02:06:35):
Yeah.

Speaker 5 (02:06:35):
The thing that I remember.

Speaker 9 (02:06:36):
Very clearly was when Tim Walls was talking about how,
oh we have a saying in Minnesota it's mind your
own damn business.

Speaker 4 (02:06:43):
Yes, yes, yeah, so like.

Speaker 9 (02:06:44):
My partner is from Minnesota, and he was like, oh,
that is like absolutely a Minnesotan thing.

Speaker 5 (02:06:50):
Mind your own damn business.

Speaker 1 (02:06:51):
Yeah, you can sell that.

Speaker 4 (02:06:53):
Yeah, so I agree.

Speaker 9 (02:06:54):
But yeah, the like calling elon Elmo, like all these
little cutesy things might feel good and like get to
a hit of dopamine and get you a few you know,
likes on whatever, but it's just it's not gonna save us.

Speaker 5 (02:07:07):
And I'm so sick of it.

Speaker 9 (02:07:08):
I feel like, in some ways it's all anyone has
to offer right now, and I'm sick of it.

Speaker 10 (02:07:23):
One of the interesting things when like looking back at
the last version of Trump's Jay twenties, you did have
you know, these large, large militant groups you know what
would later probably be dubbed Antifa by the media, but
there was there was a presence in the street, and
this time around, really the only sizeable militant presence in
the street was like the first return of the Proud Voice.

(02:07:48):
Did you stumble across a gaggle of black and yellow
clad militants in the streets?

Speaker 5 (02:07:54):
Not a gaggle, I saw one, lone one. I'm sure.
It was like I've lost my groom.

Speaker 1 (02:08:00):
Like a little duck. I had to help a baby
duck get back to its mom last year. It was
just like that, right down to the IQ.

Speaker 10 (02:08:07):
I have some friends right now who are in the
DC airport and it is chud central over there.

Speaker 4 (02:08:15):
It sounds quite bad.

Speaker 10 (02:08:16):
I I saw a friend posted about like all of
the Trump merchant Uh. They were sitting next to two
individuals debating race science in the airport terminal. So that
is the vibes of the DC Airport as of as
of Tuesday, the day after the inauguration. But yeah, like
the return of the Proud Boys is like one one

(02:08:37):
of the big things that I think we're gonna we're
gonna see these next few weeks is the amount of
all right militias or these you know, more like street
gang type groups who've been so emboldened by by Trump
essentially giving them permission to do whatever they want to
now now that they know that they're not going to
face any kind of like real legal repercussions for you know,
carrying out whatever actions they want to against people of color,

(02:09:00):
queer people, et cetera.

Speaker 1 (02:09:01):
And that's going to be interesting to see. Like this
is certainly a sign that suggests some embrace, but I'm
kind of wondering if we're looking back to the Nazis
the Ogs. What the Nazis did was marginalize and actually
purge a lot of these guys fairly quickly, because the
folks that were the best at like rabble rousing and
fighting in the streets were also kind of like the

(02:09:22):
least reliable at helping to keep a stable system in
the city. Right Like, after the Nazis took power, one
of the big issues they had is like, we still
have a lot of people who are kind of like
in the middle, including most of the military, and one
of the things that keeps scaring them is all these
fucking goons running about. And we still want what the
goons are doing, which is like certain people beaten and

(02:09:44):
thrown in camps, but we don't want the goons doing it.
We want the cops doing it. And I guess kind
of we're all waiting to see how different or similar
what comes next looks to that.

Speaker 9 (02:09:55):
And I mean, what do you make of Like, I
guess I knew it was, but when all those J
six booms got pardoned and so like you have like
the leader of the Oath Keepers, the leader of the
Proud Boys getting released from DC jail, Like, what do
you make of that?

Speaker 1 (02:10:12):
There's two things. Number One, this is something that he
had campaigned on. It's something that there was a lot
of support from his base for, you know, like the
fact that in order to kind of protect himself he
had to really heavily embrace the idea that nothing bad
happened on January sixth, then if it did, it was
the fault of you know, the mean old Biden cops,

(02:10:33):
and so he kind of had to do it. The
degree to which he shows up and is close or
actually directly embraces Proud Boys and guys like Tario is
going to tell us a lot. And I think we'll
be seeing that very soon. If they are kept at
arm's length and kind of letting them out is all
they do, then I don't know how much we're going

(02:10:54):
to see of these guys. If there's a real embrace
and an attempt to use them as a way to
kind of extra legally deal with his enemies. Then I
think we start seeing them really make inroads and pushes
in places like Portland, trying to get people out so
that they can do violence to them and then you know,
get pardoned or just have the violence ignored and the

(02:11:15):
other people get thrown into prison. And I don't really
know which way I think that the state is landing
right now, which is not to say, like I think
one is clearly less violent than the other, because his
other option is he's going to be having his FEDS
do that kind of shit.

Speaker 9 (02:11:29):
I think that's where a lot of my anxiety comes from,
the not knowing of like it could go this way
or that way. Both are bad, but what flavor are
we going to get? Like, That's the thing that is
really getting to me right now.

Speaker 10 (02:11:40):
Yeah, do you want to talk about what the probaboys
were actually like up to on Monday?

Speaker 9 (02:11:45):
Yeah, So, as you said, this was the first time
that they in mass came to DC since January six,
And they marched through the streets of DC holding a
banner that said congratulations President Trump, and they chanted who
streets our streets, which, by the way, that is such
like again as someone who kind of like came up
on like street protest. Yeah, y'all are doing the chant

(02:12:06):
all late, Like I hate that.

Speaker 10 (02:12:08):
I mean, the situation is continued to be proven correct.
The levels of recuperation for even like you're like diametrically
opposed like militant enemy side is just fucking crazy.

Speaker 5 (02:12:19):
Yes.

Speaker 9 (02:12:20):
And I saw this, I mean, speaking of J six
rioters who were all, you know, pardoned, I saw this
video that really kind of broke my heart. It was
a video that some maga dipshit took outside of the
jail where all those people were being held. And so
there's a black DC elder who clearly is just like
mining her business, walking down the street in her city

(02:12:42):
and she gets baited into an on video screaming match
outside of the DC jail where this maga guy.

Speaker 5 (02:12:49):
Yells like like like.

Speaker 9 (02:12:51):
Oh, we didn't do anything wrong, no crime was committed,
and she's like, you all killed a cop.

Speaker 5 (02:12:56):
No cops got killed, which is not true. Like the
it goes back to what you.

Speaker 9 (02:13:00):
Were saying, Robert about how there is this need to
quickly have it be like something that wasn't that big
of a deal and one to see that in person
in this video was wild to me. But two, seeing
like a DC elder like take the bait broke my
heart because I wish I could have could have been
in that moment to be like, honey, you don't need
to be screaming. This guy wants you to be screaming

(02:13:22):
at him. He wants this video of you screaming at
him on the street.

Speaker 5 (02:13:26):
This is like exactly what he wants.

Speaker 1 (02:13:28):
Yeah, I entirely agree.

Speaker 9 (02:13:31):
You know, the biggest takeaway from being out was just
how sparse it was. Like, you know, the first time around,
I probably had four different people staying with me, two
of whom got arrested during the big anti Trump protests.
This time around, I didn't have anybody. I didn't know
anybody who was there. And I do think that reflects
kind of where people are at. I think people are exhausted,

(02:13:54):
people have been through a lot. People are maybe pacing
themselves and sort of like don't want to blow their
race wad on the first week, which I totally understand.
But I think it really remains to be seen, like
whether or not this vibe is going to take us
through the next four years.

Speaker 5 (02:14:09):
Are people just tuning out? Are we checked out?

Speaker 9 (02:14:12):
Are we so exhausted and overstimulated already that we're not
going to really be paying attention? And in some ways,
like I feel like that's exactly what authoritarians want.

Speaker 1 (02:14:21):
Yes, that's where it's difficult, or that's one of the
many things that is difficult, is that like checking out
is not the answer, but you simply can't react to
everything that happens showing up and burning yourself out in
the street. It's like the cops continue to do bad things.
If every time a cop is a bad thing, you

(02:14:41):
and your friends throw yourselves at a police station until
you all get arrested, then you won't be able to
do anything else because you'll be in jail, you know.
And like these are hard realities, which is why it
necessitates new kinds of thinking, creativity, you know, to some
extent unsad usfying. And I guess part of what I

(02:15:01):
would say is if people are giving you answers to
what we need to do that sound very clear and satisfying,
you should maybe not trust that totally. Yeah, because the
responsible answer, in my opinion is that like it's very
unclear how to get out of this or what the
right things to do here are?

Speaker 4 (02:15:21):
We just know that what we've.

Speaker 1 (02:15:23):
Been doing hasn't been working, and the first step to
wisdom is accepting that.

Speaker 4 (02:15:28):
Oof.

Speaker 5 (02:15:29):
I love that.

Speaker 9 (02:15:30):
Something I know that isn't working is I'm glad that
we're not doing.

Speaker 1 (02:15:36):
I thought you were going to pivot to ads. Actually,
let's pivot to ads.

Speaker 9 (02:15:41):
You're so good at ads, like you could teach a
class on it.

Speaker 1 (02:15:45):
Oh yeah, well I waited twenty eight minutes this time
to do it. But at least we have the second
one out there. We're back, Bridget, Sorry, where were you going?

Speaker 9 (02:16:04):
Something that I'm glad we are not doing this time
around is remember during the first Trump administration, how the
Washington Post changed their tagline to Democracy dies in Darkness
and everybody gave them a shit ton of money because
it was like, yeah, we need like good.

Speaker 5 (02:16:18):
Investigative journalism, traditional media, that's gonna save us.

Speaker 9 (02:16:22):
I'm glad that this time around we've all cut the
shit and it's like, no, they're part of it.

Speaker 5 (02:16:26):
They're not gonna do a goddamn thing.

Speaker 1 (02:16:28):
Absolutely not. Yes, they don't give a fuck. Fucking Jake
Tapper couldn't roll over fast enough and.

Speaker 9 (02:16:35):
Like so even I mean, I'm sure y'all have talked
about this to death and I.

Speaker 5 (02:16:39):
Have been thinking about it nonstuff.

Speaker 9 (02:16:41):
But Elon's seeing how the traditional press reported on his salute,
it's like, like, oh, what.

Speaker 5 (02:16:48):
Did he do?

Speaker 9 (02:16:48):
Like, like the way they will contort themselves to not
just come out and say it is astonishing to me.

Speaker 1 (02:16:56):
Uh yeah, that's I mean, that's one of like the
scariest things is the degree to which they're trying to
memory all stuff happening as it happened, and at the
same time, Okay, yeah, he did a Nazi salute. He's
a Nazi. This is not the first thing that's made
that clear. We need to move on knowing he's a Nazi,
but we need to move on, you know, like that
that's right. I don't know, I don't know what to

(02:17:18):
do other than you know, maybe there's some utility and
spreading clips of him next to the fucking guy from
American History X, but I don't know. I don't know
how that's gonna help.

Speaker 10 (02:17:27):
The fact that he is in this position where he
can do something like that on stage and it actually
doesn't matter is like so much more frightening to me
than like like Elon Musk like doing like a very
like low mortar control like version of the salute when
he's like wrapped up in some like excitement and he's
trying to like meme to like his like fans on
four Chan. The fact that like he's even just allowed

(02:17:50):
to do that and like it doesn't actually matter, like
this will not affect him in any way is more
what's interesting to me, because yes, we've all known that
he's been a Nazi for quite a while. He's like
shared things are like essentially like Nazi race science on
Twitter before he is he has engaged with like extremely
anti semitic conspiracy theories before, and you know, the largest

(02:18:10):
anti semitism org in the country has completely capitulated to
these people, so like they've hollowed out everything that's like
supposed to be, like you know, the institutional blockages, whether
that's you know, places like the Washington Post where that's
literally all of the tech companies, the degree to which
like everyone has cozied up to Trump, which is also like,
you know, very different from twenty sixteen. Exactly everyone was

(02:18:32):
like fairly like united institutionally was united against Trump, and
you know the same way we like we don't see
you know, people out in the streets, you know, writing
or even doing like large protests. The actual you know,
institutional powers have have decided to instead of actually trying
to fight this guy, they're going to trying to see
like how friendly they can be, like how much can

(02:18:52):
they get out of this. There's this like resignation, and
I don't know how long that'll last, Like I'm I'm
not sure if like, you know, once Trump becomes the
establishment figure that he's been like deriding for the past
few years, like once he falls back into that zone,
if we're going to see more resistance to him from
like institutional levels, but you can't like count on it.

(02:19:13):
And the degree to which it's it is like different
from twenty sixteen is like worth remembering. Like a phrase
me and Robert talk about sometimes is like the forever
twenty sixteen, Like the fact that it feels like we've
never really left twenty sixteen. Everyone kind of acts like
we're still in twenty sixteen, like this such load bearing
year on our entire cultural consciousness. But the fact is

(02:19:33):
we aren't in twenty sixteen anymore, and you can't act
like we are. You actually have to move on from that,
and we're starting to see more of that in certain corners.
You see some of that among some of the radicals,
some of the anarchists as well as you know, the
tech companies and the CEOs and the media companies. They're
just you know, changing the degree to which they're moving

(02:19:54):
away from their twenty sixteen mode.

Speaker 5 (02:19:56):
You actually just.

Speaker 9 (02:19:57):
Gave me a little bit of a silver lining that
I had not read, which is, like, it kind of
is useful to see so clearly where these institutions and
power holders stand. And it's like when like I remember
watching tech companies like change their logos to Black Lives
Matter or post the Black Square, it's kind of freeing

(02:20:17):
to be like, we don't have to do that shit anymore.
Y'all will have to pretend, and we don't have to
pretend either. We know where you stand. You've made it
very clear. You could not make it. You could not
have made it clear where your alliance is. And let's
go from there. Like it almost it almost is.

Speaker 5 (02:20:30):
Sort of like trimming the fat a little bit.

Speaker 9 (02:20:33):
We no longer have to take these these institutions as
serious as allies or something.

Speaker 10 (02:20:38):
Yeah, there's going to be a degree to which, like
people's masks come off more than usual. I mean, I
think certainly this next Pride month will be interesting to
see how people change, you know Pride months twenty twenty two,
or even you know Pride twenty seventeen.

Speaker 1 (02:20:53):
Yeah, I was at Pride in San Francisco in twenty
twenty and it was very big, very happy, but there
was like a rind to it, you know, there was
like an edge to it of are we going to
be able to keep doing this? You know, there's a dispensary.

(02:21:14):
You know, I don't smoke, but a friend of mine
who I stay with when I'm at San Francisco does,
and so I was with them at this dispensary and it
had like a sign talking about its history, which is
that the person who found it it's a very nice one.
It's like an apple store inside. And the person who
like started it and ran it did so because when
they were younger, their partner had AIDS HIV in the

(02:21:37):
AIDS and marijuana reduced some of their symptoms, and they
had to go buy it in the nearby park, which
was a lot uglier of a place and a lot
like it was. It was sketchy, like they got robbed.
A couple of times there's a lot more violent crime
and just kind of there are even in a place
like San Francisco, which is so like gentrified in such
a way like when you're when you're talking with like

(02:21:57):
especially the older members of the queer community, they're not
just like rich, out of touch tech people. They are old,
battle scarred queers who went through some of the ugliest
moments of this nation's history and we're kind of bracing
themselves forward again. So yeah, I'm very interested to see
what it's what it's like this year, you know.

Speaker 9 (02:22:17):
But even that, I feel like there's a I mean,
it's grim shit, but there's a kind of hope in
it that like we've been people have been here before, right,
Like yeah, you know, there have always been queer people,
trans people, black and brown people, immigrants, Like we are America,
and like we've always been here, Baby, We're always gonna
be here and like making our way and like holding
on and bracing ourselves and doing what we gotta do

(02:22:39):
and enduring like that is what we fucking do. And
so in some ways, as grim as that is, it's
kind of hopeful.

Speaker 5 (02:22:45):
Question Mark.

Speaker 10 (02:22:46):
Also, Yep, I'm just on the edge of my seat ugh, Yeah,
I mean certainly, you know, lots of people who I
surround myself with are you know, looking towards ways to
take control of like their own bodies and stop relying,
like Holly on any kind of government, government agency or
model for that, as well as doing a lot of
a lot of reading on the old like anti deportation,

(02:23:09):
anti ice resistance from like years and years ago, not
just from like the Trump era, but from the stuff
like like way before. If we're not going to be
out in the streets doing you know, slightly mindless protest
for your marching in circles, you can use that time
to instead like educate yourself and build connections with people,
and you know, read about these things that may become

(02:23:30):
more and more important to know at least so you
have an understanding of history as the next four years
to start happening quite quickly.

Speaker 5 (02:23:38):
That's so insightful.

Speaker 9 (02:23:39):
Yeah, I think when things feel hopeless, reading about how folks,
you know, our elders, the folks that came before our ancestors,
how they dealt with stuff like this, has been really hopeful.
And it's like, yeah, I guess I just try to
tell myself, you've been here before and people found a
way to make it through. And you know, it feels

(02:24:01):
uniquely tragic, but in some ways it is not. And
as scary as that is, it can also be sort
of like grounding.

Speaker 10 (02:24:08):
Yeah, and like the same things won't work, but you
also need to understand the things that didn't work last time,
and it's good to know, and it's good to know
the things that did. Like it's it's it's important to
have the understanding so you don't feel like you're having
to reinvent the wheel every single time. And like that
type of like generational knowledge sometimes is really tricky to
pass down in these sorts of spaces and it you know,

(02:24:28):
it doesn't and it sometimes it requires a degree of
initiative to like actually like seek out the information on
your own. The internet's great, uh and terrible, but it
has it has a it has a it has a
vast catalog of history.

Speaker 1 (02:24:40):
Yeah. I want to talk a bit about the speech
that that bishop gave at the Trump's first church service
as president the second time around, because that is of
all of like the fucking media people getting clapped at
for making fun of you know, whichever you know, hegg
Seth or whoever.

Speaker 10 (02:25:00):
Yep.

Speaker 1 (02:25:00):
That I think actually did matter a little. At least
it was the there was the courage of saying it
to their faces in a way where their reactions were
had to be filmed.

Speaker 10 (02:25:09):
It's also not trying to dunk. It's not trying to
create like a viral moment. It's like genuinely upsetting to
them to get like reminded of like what it means
to be human. Yeah, and like maybe that's more important
than trying to get your like Katie Porter top ten
funniest moments in Congress, like a compilation exactly.

Speaker 6 (02:25:30):
Yeah.

Speaker 1 (02:25:30):
And to be very clear, if you didn't catch this,
the right Reverend Mary Anne Bud b DDE was the
Episcopal Bishop of Washington. During a church service where Trump
and Vance and basically everybody in the new government was sitting,
made a direct PLEA quote from this is from an
NBC Washington article referencing Trump's belief that he was saved

(02:25:50):
by God from assassination. Bud said, you have felt the
previdential hand of a loving God, and the name of
our God. I asked you to have mercy on the
upon the people in our country who are scared now,
and she referenced specifically transgender people, queer people, people in
democratic families, independent families who were frightened right now about
what the new administration means, as well as migrants, and
she made a point of saying, like, the vast majority

(02:26:12):
of whom are not in any way criminals.

Speaker 4 (02:26:14):
And yeah, like regardless of whether or not they have
the right paperwork.

Speaker 1 (02:26:17):
Yeah. There was rage on Vance's face, which is part
of why I'm like, that's an act of actual courage.
There's been one Republican representative who said that she needed
to be deported, but she's born in New Jersey.

Speaker 5 (02:26:29):
So deported back to New Jersey.

Speaker 1 (02:26:31):
Yeah, Representative Mike Collins of Georgia. So one of your
guys gare, oh.

Speaker 10 (02:26:36):
Thanks, then there are you from Georgia.

Speaker 4 (02:26:39):
Well, no, but I live in Georgia.

Speaker 1 (02:26:41):
I'd live there now.

Speaker 10 (02:26:42):
And as someone who lives in Georgia, the only people
that I think should be deported back to New Jersey
are the Costco guy and his kid. Get them out,
send them back now.

Speaker 1 (02:26:51):
I think I do think we should be deporting large
numbers of people to New Jersey just because my old
boss and friend, Daniel O'Brien lives there, and I want
to fuck with them a little bit, make the traffic worse,
Like see how you deal with that, Danny boy.

Speaker 10 (02:27:06):
No, it was, like I think, the most useful thing
i've like i've seen yet. Yeah, it's still like largely symbolic,
but like at.

Speaker 1 (02:27:13):
Least someone took a big public risk, you know, yeah, yeah, Perage. Yeah.

Speaker 9 (02:27:18):
I think it's the writer Sarah Candozer who has this
line that I always think of, if.

Speaker 5 (02:27:22):
You can't be brave, be kind.

Speaker 9 (02:27:24):
I think that like people who you see doing acts
of big acts of bravery right now, Like that's I mean,
it's just there are so few of them. And I think,
especially when I look at like the tech leaders, they have.

Speaker 5 (02:27:35):
So much fucking money.

Speaker 9 (02:27:37):
Somebody said on tlusky, what is the point of having
fuck you money if you never say fuck you to anybody?

Speaker 1 (02:27:41):
Right?

Speaker 9 (02:27:41):
Like, the way that these people turned out to be
such yellow bellied cowards is wild to me. And so
people actually having conviction and actually speaking seats of power,
I think we should be lifting that up wherever it happens.

Speaker 1 (02:27:54):
Yeah. I can think of like one tech guy with
a lot of money who's turned out to have any
kind of a backbone, And it's the guy who made
that fire watching app that everyone in California's using right now,
watch Duty, who's basically had said stuff along the lines
of like, I don't know, I see all these other
guys you got rich and tech talking about going to Mars,
and I think it's much more useful to try to
help people survive on Earth something along those lines, and

(02:28:15):
his like novel made a critical like it is a
critical life saving piece of technology that actually is what
we should hope for from tech.

Speaker 3 (02:28:26):
You know.

Speaker 1 (02:28:27):
Anyway, bridget what else did you want to kind of
make sure we got into today?

Speaker 5 (02:28:30):
Well this is going to.

Speaker 9 (02:28:31):
Sound a bit random, but I have to just make
sure that this gets in there, because you know, I'm
talking about the impact of Trump's inauguration and what the
next four years look like for you know, not just
for people nationally, but folks right here in DC where
this is happening in our backyard. And I have to
give it up for the service industry folks of DC
the last couple of days, cause they, oh my god,

(02:28:51):
I like have heard horror stories and I just I
guess that's what I mean is that don't forget that
there are real people who have to like put up
with these people's bullshit and do it with a smile
or they might get fired. And you know, in Adams Morgan,
which is like pretty close to where I live, a
woman at an Irish bar had to be removed by

(02:29:13):
a staffer because she was screaming white power at the bar. Like,
these people do not get paid enough to deal with this,
and they are like the backbone of our city. So
I just wanted to shout them out, especially since you know,
Trump switched up the inaugurations because of the cold question
mark and so a lot more of these people were
just sort of wandering around the district on inauguration who

(02:29:33):
otherwise would have been confined to like a very specific
neighborhood downtown, and so they were going into our bars,
going into our restaurants, and yeah, I just really feel
for my industry folks who had to deal with this.
You know, they're not paid enough, but they really are
the backbone of our city. Hell yeah, you know, I
started this conversation talking about all the horrible things that

(02:29:54):
Trump has said about DC and how he's going to
take it over federally, and like you know, he has said,
like we will take over the horribly run capital of
our nation and Washington clean up and rebuild the Capitol,
so there's it's no longer a nightmare of murder and crime,
but rather hell I know this like hell hole where
like people live and raise their families and go to

(02:30:14):
parks and ride bikes and have great times. Yeah, you know,
I had a chance to talk to the mayor about this,
and I will say our mayor, Muriel Bowser, is not
convinced that any of this will happen. She is saying, like,
you know, I think that Trump says a lot of things.
I think at the end of the day, he is
probably not going to mess with.

Speaker 5 (02:30:33):
DC's home rule.

Speaker 9 (02:30:34):
And so I just wanted to say that if you're
if you're in DC and you're listening and you're thinking, like,
what does Trump you know, mean for DC? Are all
of these big threats that he has made going to
come true? All I can tell you is that our
mayor does not think it is likely. So if that
is useful to you, I hope it brings you some comfort.

Speaker 3 (02:30:50):
Now.

Speaker 1 (02:30:50):
Oddly enough, one thing that's given me comfort is like
Trump has twice in the last day, both when talking
about Gaza and when talking about North Korea, weirdly enough,
gone under degre rress about how good that it is
a place to build condos, and the degree to which
he's still focused on like real estate feels as opposed
to the broader fascist project is hopeful just because like

(02:31:14):
he is a bottleneck through which a lot of this
has to cover, and he is clearly not as personally
obsessed with every aspect of this as guys like Stephen Miller, right,
Like he even makes fun of Miller a little bit
for that kind of stuff. So there's a degree to which,
like well, his own personal eccentricities, there's aspects of this

(02:31:34):
it might slow down.

Speaker 9 (02:31:35):
This motherfucker is not out here trying to genuinely govern,
like come on, I know. So in some ways that
is heartening of like, oh, well, he's gonna like do
his scams and whatever whatever, Like if he weren't to
actually take over DC, that's an incredible amount of work
and labor, and I don't think he's got it in him.
So maybe in some ways some of these threats will

(02:31:55):
like fly under the radar.

Speaker 1 (02:31:57):
I don't know. Yeah, guess we'll say, yes, we'll see
bridget Where can people find you?

Speaker 5 (02:32:03):
Well, you can listen to my podcast.

Speaker 9 (02:32:04):
There are no girls on the internet about the intersection
of identity and tech. And you can follow me on
Instagram at Bridget Marie and DC.

Speaker 1 (02:32:11):
All right, find Bridget, follow Bridget and uh follow somebody smart.
I don't know who they are. Figure that out. Good luck, godspeed.
Fuck them if they can't take a joke.

Speaker 2 (02:32:42):
The richest man in the world does a Nazi salute
while giving a speech at the inauguration of the new president.
He does a second one in another age. It is
the most significant event in world history. It's maybe the
third most fascist event of the day. And be he
re uploads the address and cuts away from the sig

(02:33:03):
hal at broadcasted live. You refresh your timeline. Everyone is
arguing about whether it was even a Nazi salute. You
watch the video. It's a Nazi salute. The second one
is a Nazi salute. None of the headlines will say
that Elon Musk did a Nazi salute. The articles won't
say it either. You can't tell whether they've been cowed

(02:33:26):
to submission by the threat of a defamation lawsuit, or
if they're already running cover for the new regime. You
scroll through your timeline, they made my gender illegal. They
tried to repeal the fourteenth Amendment through executive order to
end birthright citizenship. You can't follow it. It's too much.
The world has become a spectacle, and that spectacle is

(02:33:51):
trying to kill you. Welcome to Ikadap and here I'm
your host, Mio Wong. In societies where modern can editions
of production prevail, all of life presents itself as an
immense accumulation of spectacles. So wrote the French social theorist
Gee de Board in his seminal nineteen sixty seven work

(02:34:13):
The Society of the Spectacle. The Board is typically written
off as just another theorist of early mass media, and
today his work is generally confined to the art world,
which is, to be fair largely a demonstration of the
fact that nobody who talks about him has ever gotten
past the opening paragraphs of the book and made it
to the part where he demands the formation of art workers' councils.

(02:34:38):
But this is the age of the spectacle. In ways
when nightmarish that de Board could ever have predicted. His
elaborate metaphor is rendered thuddingly literal quote. Everything that was
directly lived has moved away into representation, and indeed living
has been replaced by the image of living. This phenomenon

(02:35:00):
well is called instagram. The spectacle society of the spectacle
opens is not a collection of images, but a social
relation among people mediated by images. Today we literally call
the collection of images we use to relate to each
other social media quote. Lived reality is materially invaded by

(02:35:22):
the contemplation of the spectacle, while simultaneously absorbing the spectacular order,
giving it positive cohesiveness. A reality TV star, the old
human symbol of the spectacle, in which everything that was
directly lived has been transformed into a representation, is now
a president, the second time, driven by streamers and influencers

(02:35:46):
and podcasters who stand as the new human symbols of
the spectacle. They have invaded real society and now rule
it directly. In the nineteen sixties, the debate was whether
you could ignore the spectacle because it wasn't real. The
Board's elegant solution was that contemplating the spectacle makes it real.

(02:36:06):
None of that matters anymore. You can't ignore the spectacle
because it's here. It has physically invaded the world. Donald
Trump is the president, the richest man on Earth is
Nazi saluting Elon Musk. The autonomous force the Board described
as a spectacle no longer operates at the abstract level.

(02:36:27):
It is the president of the United States. Everything is
rendered thuddingly, transcendently literal. In de Board's usage, the spectacle
is the management of society by mediating people's social relations
through images. This sounds complicated, but on an intuitive level,

(02:36:48):
you already understand this. You and I relate to each
other through the one way mirror of a podcast app.
You relate to others by reacting to their TikTok videos.
You watch the bomb fall on Palestine on Twitter. You
relate to each other and the world through images, and
that relation is a system of control. As de Board

(02:37:11):
describes it, that mediation takes you out of the real world,
a world that you can actually change with your actions,
and thrust you into the world with the spectacle, a
world where reality is quote an object of mere contemplation.
Today we call this the discourse. The work that inspired

(02:37:31):
the nineteen sixty eight revolutions called it the spectacle. Why
does it feel like this? The rot, the decay, the
unreality of the moment that consumes you until one day
Donald Trump is president and the next he's president again.
The board has a simple answer. It's because the entire political, economic,

(02:37:54):
and technological system is designed to make you isolated, afraid,
and alone.

Speaker 3 (02:38:01):
Quote.

Speaker 2 (02:38:02):
Technology is based on isolation, and the technical process isolates
in turn. From the automobile to television, all of the
goods selected by the spectacular system are also weapons for
a constant reinforcement of the condition of isolated, lonely crowds. Later,
he writes, what binds the spectators together is no more

(02:38:23):
than an irreversible relation at the very center which maintains
their isolation. The spectacle reunites the separate, but reunites it
as separate. This is why the world feels like an
endless doom. Scroll Instagram, TikTok live streaming this podcast. They're

(02:38:44):
all based on isolation. Look at what happened to social
media during the isolation of the pandemic, How it came
to consume even more of our lives with the promise
of connection that simply rendered us more and more and
more isolated. The spectacle, given technological form in the social
media app turns us into a mass in which we

(02:39:07):
are all somehow terrifyingly alone. We're not people who form
a crowd that could do anything from celebrate a holiday
to burn. The third precinct, or spectators with listeners were viewers.

Speaker 4 (02:39:23):
Or chat.

Speaker 2 (02:39:25):
Not living, but commenting on the image of living the
spectacle the app The image mediates or social relations with
each other and ensures that together in a lonely crowd,
we wrought in isolation and do only the two things
the capitalist system needs us to do, work and consume.

(02:39:49):
Atomized individuals are the ideal subject of capitalism, the basis
on which everything is built. You entered into a free
contract to live under a s date, says a social theorist. You,
the individual, gave up your labor to your boss voluntarily
in another free contract between individuals, says the economist. Do

(02:40:11):
not organize with anyone else to get paid more for
that labor, or God help you. Try to create a
system where you aren't forced to sell your labor every day.
That's cheating, says the politician. Your job is to sell
your labor, buy these products, and comment on a world
in which someone else is acting. The isolation of the

(02:40:33):
spectacle ensures that we're incapable of collective action, not only
because we're incapable of forming a collective. We're not even
engaging in the world in which action can take place.
The extent of the advance of the spectacle today is
such that the unfolding of the economic system is designed

(02:40:53):
to turn every part of you into a commodity, not
just your labor, but your identity, your beliefs. Everything that
you are is sold to everyone else a spectacle, and
in turn, everything that defines you becomes the spectacle itself.
In a world where there is no action, just the

(02:41:15):
image of someone else's actions somewhere else, a commercialized political
identity is much easier to adopt than actually doing politics.

Speaker 4 (02:41:24):
You don't have to do politics.

Speaker 2 (02:41:26):
You can just put on a red hat and watch
the man on TV make the liberals angry. You don't
need relations with your family, you have Facebook groups. The
relations to the world are relations to images. David Graber
wrote that the ultimate hidden truth of the world is
that it is something that we make and could just
as easily make differently. But the second, slightly less ultimate

(02:41:50):
hidden truth is that almost everything we think of as objects, money, capital,
commodities are really just relations between abstracted out onto something physical.
We interact with each other by using objects as forms
of command. What do you think money is? Instead of
having real, equal social relations. And that makes it all

(02:42:14):
the more dire that the social relations that compose this
world are no longer even relations with each other at all,
but relations with images. The spectacle is a strategy of control,

(02:42:36):
as de Board rights quote, where the real world changes
into simple images. The simple images become real beings and
effective motivations of hypnotic behavior. The spectacle is a tendency
to make one see the world by various means of
specialized mediations. It can no longer be grasped directly. As

(02:42:59):
a spectacle advances, even rebellion is reduced to meaningless attacks
on the symbols of power, never touching power itself.

Speaker 3 (02:43:08):
Quote.

Speaker 2 (02:43:09):
But when the insurgents managed to penetrate parliament's presidential palaces
and other headquarters of institutions, as in Ukraine, in Libya,
or in Wisconsin, it's only to discover empty places that
is empty of power and furnished without any taste. So
wrote the Invisible Committee of the Distant halcyon days of

(02:43:31):
twenty fourteen, it could have been written yesterday. Nine years later.
The insurgents now on the right produced their masterpiece, Brazil's
even more ineffectual cousin of January sixth, known forever as
January eighth. On that day in twenty twenty three, for

(02:43:51):
reasons that are almost totally incomprehensible to anyone whose mind
has not been utterly melted by prolonged and terrible exposure
to the spectacle, supporters of defeated President JayR. Bolsonaro stormed
Brazil's capital. Bolsonaro, of course, had already fled to Florida.
The Presidential Palace, Congress, and the Supreme Court were literally

(02:44:14):
empty when the protesters took them. There was nothing to
be one, nothing to be gained. The protesters vain hopes
that simply seizing the symbols of power would trigger a
military coup to remove Lula and restore the Bolsonara regime
evaporated like a morning dew, leaving nothing in their wake.

(02:44:36):
January sixth at least attacked the site of the ritual
of power while the ritual was technically in progress. The
attack was, of course, designed to stop the certification of
the election. Congress was at least in session. Even if
that attack, too, was the culmination of a series of

(02:44:56):
ineffectual reruns of the Brooke Brothers' riots in but it's
right wing political operatives did manage to steal an election
by stopping the vote count in Florida in two thousand
on January eighth. No one was even there, So how
do we get out? Lashing out at the symbols of
power is pointless. You can't ignore them either. Elon's Nazi

(02:45:21):
salute really does represent something. The opening of any solution
is to go to the source. Trump and Elon are symptoms,
not the disease. The spectacle is born of capitalism. It's
a management strategy designed to suppress any attempt to end
or even rearrange the terms of the class system. Trump

(02:45:45):
and Elon were likewise produced by two settler colonies. They are,
in their own ways, the manifestation of the evil of
colonialism and racism. To boards solution to these problems, of course,
well the solutions that people bother to read. There is
a staggeringly racist section of this work about how time
passes in China that I simply cannot recommend. But the

(02:46:09):
board's solution was workers' councils, and he got his wish.
The next year, manufactory occupations of nineteen sixty eight. It
nearly worked. But the last workers Council fell a quarter
of a century ago in Argentina, and there's no sign
at the Workers' Council. The definitive fighting form of the
working class for over a century is coming back. In

(02:46:33):
some ways. This is liberating one hundred and seventy years ago.
Marx wrote this in the eighteenth through mayor of Louis Bonaparte,
his own response to a nation's nationalist attempt to restore
its former glory by invoking the name of a previous leader.
The social revolution of the nineteenth century cannot take its
poetry from the past, but only from the future. It

(02:46:56):
cannot begin with itself before it has stripped away also
pstitions about the past. In the days and weeks and months,
and God help us all years to come, we're going
to have to assemble a new fighting form, and no
one knows what it looks like yet. We could perhaps

(02:47:17):
look at the airport protests from the first months of
the original Trump administration, or masses of people, including a
very young Mia who had not quite realized what gender
she was, occupied airports all across the country to stop
the implementation of Trump's Muslim ban by physically forcing the
government to release the people who had detained in the airports.

(02:47:40):
The power of those protests was that they directly located
the site where power was operating, the airport, and took them.
The weakness of those protests was that people went home.
And they went home because they had been told time
and time and time again by the ACLU and by
other legal organizations that the fight was over, that they

(02:48:01):
could leave, and that the Muslim bans would be defeated
by the courts. Most of you lived through it. Some
of you remember the Muslim ban was never defeated by
the courts. It could possibly have been defeated in those moments,
it wasn't. The contest was taken away from the real
sight of power and into a domain largely ruled by

(02:48:24):
the ruling class. But we can learn from both January
eighth and the airport protests. Marching to a building doesn't
guarantee you're actually targeting power. You must understand how the
system is operating before you attempt to go up its works.
A thousand miniature January eighths is no solution at all.

(02:48:47):
You must do the hard work of sifting to the
tangle of rumors and lies at attempting to work out
the actual structure of repression. It starts with community self defense.
It starts with actually engaging with each other instead of
the mediated images generated by an algorithm. You want to

(02:49:09):
break out of the spectacle, talk to the people around you,
Talk to the trans people and the immigrants in your
life and find out what they actually need. Figure out
the concrete steps you can take to organize the people
around you, and the steps you can take to lift
them out of their despair. We're not going to develop

(02:49:31):
a new fighting form glued to our phones alone in
a digital crowd. We're going to figure it out by
talking to each other, by acting in the real world,
not by being rendered passive observers of the spectacle. We're
going to do it by finding the real places where

(02:49:51):
power operates and taking them. And above all, we're going
to do it together.

Speaker 1 (02:50:00):
Hey, We'll be back Monday with more episodes every week
from now until the heat death of the universe.

Speaker 4 (02:50:06):
It could happen Here is a production of cool Zone Media.

Speaker 2 (02:50:08):
For more podcasts from cool Zone Media, visit our website
coolzonmedia dot com, or check us out on the iHeartRadio, app,
Apple podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts, you can
now find sources for it could happen here, listed directly
in episode descriptions.

Speaker 4 (02:50:23):
Thanks for listening.

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