It Could Happen Here Weekly 60

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

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
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 gonna be nothing new here for you, but you
can make your own decisions. Uh, it could happen. Here

(00:34):
is the podcast that you're listening to. I'm Robert Evans,
the person that you're listening to, and one of the
people who does this podcast. Boy, what a what a
glorious introduction that was. Let me also introduce some human
beings who you might know. First, we have Chris and

(00:55):
and we have James. Are are our correspondence in the
field joining us today. Also is James's Spanish Civil War
era moson the gaunt YEP. That's right. Yeah, I'm very
happy it's joining us. It's going to make contribution throughout
the episode. Just gonna It's an antique bolt action rifle

(01:17):
served in three world wars. That's right. Yeah, and it's
about too, it's about to kick off. Yeah, this one
now which it might it might be it might be
two in the alcolumn for the most in the gun. Yeah,
it's it's it's it's had a it's served a mixed bag.
Um yea. Anyway, we're recording this the day of the elections,

(01:41):
so everybody's having a horrible one. Um yeah, I'm having
a firearm. Yeah, yeah, I did. I'm still hoping my
my Tech nine comes in before Oregon votes on its
next ballot measure. Anyway, Um, today I wanted to talk
a little bit about something that I've been thinking about

(02:01):
kind of constantly, which is, um it's called effective altruism.
And it's the short end of this is that like
it is a style of thinking about charitable giving that
Elon Musk in particular has recently highlighted as like how
he thinks about things. It's very popular with the billionaire set,

(02:25):
who are who are deeply invested in getting people to
think that they're saving the world, right, Um, the folks
who want to be seen as like looking ahead and
and and set protecting the future of mankind and saving
the world, um, but not doing it through things like
paying you know, more taxes and supporting you know less

(02:46):
money being in politics and and all that kind of jazz,
like not not anything that would would actually harm their
their personal ability to exercise power. So it's gotten kind
of attacked recently because it's associated with guys like Musk
and but as he is markedly less popular now than
he was let's say, ten years ago. Um, But I wanted, Yeah,

(03:07):
I wanted to talk because effective altruism, which is an
actual movement, there's like organizations that espouse this. There's hundreds
of millions of dollars in charitable giving that gets handed
out under the ages of effective altruism. And as it
heads up, like most of it's fine, like most of
its charities to like get let out of water and
stuff like. It's not like effective altruism is not comprehensively

(03:29):
some sort of like scam by the wealthy. It's more
of a an honest theory about how charitable giving ought
to work that has been adopted by the hyper wealthiest
justification for fucked up ship and married to something called
long term is um, which we will be talking about
in a little bit. But I want to talk about
where the concept of effective altruism comes from. If you

(03:50):
read articles about this thing. Most people who study it
will say that it kind of This got started as
a modern movement in nineteen seventy one with an austra
Ellian philosopher named Peter Singer, and Singer wrote an article
titled Famine, Affluence and Morality. Um. I think it was
actually published in nineteen seventy two. I don't know one

(04:11):
of the two seventy one or seventy two, And and
the essay basically argued that there's no difference morally between
your obligation to help a person dying on the street
in front of your house, Like the dude gets hit
by a car in front of your house, you are
not more morally obligated to help him than you are
morally obligated to help people who are dying in Syria,
you know. Um. And obviously, like there's a a version

(04:36):
of truth to that, which is that we're all responsible
for each other, and internationalism is the only actual path
away from the nightmare. And when we do things like
ignore authoritarians massacring their people, it inevitably comes back to
affect us and like fuel the growth of an authoritarian nightmare. Domestically,
that is very true, um, But also there's a fundamental

(04:57):
silliness in it because one reason why there is a
moral difference between helping a person dying in the street
in front of you and somebody who's in danger in
I don't know, southern China is that, like, you can
immediately help the person in front of your house, right,
like if somebody gets hit, but you have the ability
to immediately render life saving eight, it's actually quite difficult
to help somebody who is, for example, getting shot at

(05:19):
by the government uh in Tibet, right Like, not that
you don't don't have a moral responsibility to that person,
but your moral responsibility to actually immediately take action when
somebody is bleeding out is higher than your responsibility to
try to figure out how to help people in distant
parts of the globe. Um, this is more nuanced than
I think a lot of especially like rich assholes like

(05:43):
to It's more nuanced than like the the I shouldn't
say rich assholes. What what's the problem with this is
that it's the this is the kind of revelation like
when you start talking this way that that feeds really
well into a fucking ted talk. It it's a perfect
fix for that morality. Whereas the reality is like a
lot more nuanced where and number one, it's also like,

(06:04):
well that the kind of help that you would render
to somebody who's been hit by a car in front
of your house is very different and requires really different
resources than the kind of help you would give people
in say, again like Syria, who are being murdered by
their government. Right, if somebody gets hit by a car
in front of your house, you run out with a
fucking tourniquet and a bleed kit and you call nine
one one, Right, those are the resources that you can

(06:25):
immediately use. If Buthar al Assad is firing poison gas
at protesters in you know, Aleppo, well your your stop.
The bleed kit is not going to help with that,
one way or the other. Right, a very different set
of resources are necessary. Um, So it's it's foolish to
compare them anyway. Singer did um and his essay was

(06:48):
a big hit. It's often called like a sleeper hit
for for young people who are kind of getting into
the you know, the charity industrial complex, um or at
least we're considering it. I found an interview with one
named Julia Wise, who currently works at the Center for
Effective altruism um, and she was a started out as

(07:09):
a social work, like to give you an idea of
the kind of people who got into this. When she
read Weiss's article, Um, she was a social worker, she
kind of fell in love with the concept. And when
it started becoming a thing, and like the seventies and eighties,
it was, as she described quote, a bunch of philosophers
and their friends and nobody had a bunch of money.
So it was also more when Singer put it out,

(07:31):
kind of a a wave, like a way of people
kind of debating how to think about charity, which is
is fine. People should always be like exploring stuff like that.
So it's it's not I don't want to be like
going after Singer too well, I do a little bit
um because Singer after kind of his movement has a
couple of decades to grow, winds up doing a Ted

(07:53):
talk Um, and the Ted talk winds up kind of
electrifying a very specific chunk of the American techno set um.
And you can see kind of in in some of
the writing on this, like the way in which his
talking about sort of the morality of charity has gotten
flattened over the years quote which is the better thing

(08:15):
to do to provide a guide dog to one blind
American or cure two thousand people of blindness and developing
countries um, which is like, I don't know both. There's
resources to do both. Um. We Again, if you, for
an example, in the United States, were to tacks the
billionaire class and corporations a lot more, you could provide
that blind person in the United States, uh with with

(08:38):
free healthcare in a way that many countries do. Um.
And we could also continue or even expand charitable giving,
maybe if we were to do stuff like spend less
money on our military. Again, it's like a false choice,
like it's worth but but of course it's It's because
the reason this choice is there is because they're thinking
about they're thinking about helping people purely in the form
of like nobless obliged charity. Right, They're they're thinking about

(09:01):
periods like rich like things that get improved when rich
people put money into them. Um. Yeah, so obviously we
should help you know, one of these groups before the
other because it's more effective and yeahda YadA YadA. Yeah. Yeah, Well,
and I think I think that was one of the
things that like the there there's there's a second way
you can look at the original sort of problem of
we have the same ethical responsibility someone who could sit

(09:23):
by car or somebodys on the other side of the world.
Is that Like the other way you can look at
that is like I don't care about what's happening is
some one of the other side of the world, so
they don't have to care about this person who get
hit by a car. And that seems like people are
doing It's like, well, really have to care about this
person here because there's some word over there. Yeah, I did,
like I can see like how this lines out with

(09:44):
some of these like like bigger like meta ethical kind
of perspectives on what equality is and what like your
ethical obligations are. But then yeah, it seems to just
kind of be like a very clear, like very clear,
slippery slope to making kind of mouth used and excuses
for doing fun. Right, That's that's where the story is heading.
So so good. Early two thousands, he does like a

(10:07):
ted talk. You know, the momentum around this idea starts
to build and it it really gets a shot in
the arm. In two thousand thirteen, with the work of
an author named Eric Friedman, Uh, Freedman's new book or
Freedland's book at the time that was new was called
Reinventing Philanthropy a Framework for more effective giving um and
he kind of he kind of extends the arguments that

(10:29):
singers making. One of the things that he does is
he he contrasts what St. Jude's Children's Reach their hospitals
are doing to like research children's medical or like like
illnesses that that kids suffer and treatments for them, um
with the Malagi Provincial Hospital in Angola. Um and he
kind of contrasts to patients who are being served at

(10:49):
the different hospitals for life threatening conditions and concludes, quote,
I'd probably also be very angry at the donors who
are continually funding St. Jude and leaving Melangi Provincial woefully
under resourced. Why are the patients of St. Jude's so
much more worthy of life? Like, Yeah, what a ridiculous
way to think about it. Children, fucking asinine. And the

(11:11):
fact that like many of the people who are doing
these fucking ted talks and contributing to this like a
global tech class are the same people who are making
fucking millions of dollars off the pharmaceutical industry, which continues
to neglect the diseases that people like in the colonial
periphery suffer from because there's no profit in selling them drugs,
and instead you're selling boldness cures to people in America, right, Like,

(11:32):
yes we can, I mean, like you you could if
we just if if every single person who had a
who's gotten a TED talk had all of their wealth
appropriated tomorrow, we could fund both of these hospitals exactly, Yes, yeah,
it would be better. It's fundamentally a kind of obscenity
to look at pharmaceutical company CEO is making hundreds of

(11:53):
millions and billions of dollars, selling people often literal poison
and jacking up the price of things like insulin. To
look at these text CEO is accumulating tens of billions
of dollars and to say, donations to this children's hospital
are robbing an Angolic hospital, so I won't be paying
my taxes. Yeah, why don't you go funk yourself? Yeah,

(12:17):
and anyway, like but this is like you can see
who this appeals to, righte If you like the kind
of people who love the freakonomics books, which are bullshit
regressive statistics story please. Yeah, Okay, So one of my
professors at Chicago was a political science guy, um or

(12:39):
I guess with public policy, and there's there's a thing,
there's a thing the freakonomics guy wrote where he was
trying to prove that money doesn't actually influence, like, doesn't
actually influence left. Yeah, and and you know what my my, my,
my professor wrote wrote a paper about that, which is
that you know and again this is this is a
perfect example of how done this guy is. That he

(12:59):
doesn't This is how condis think, right, Like they when
they when they go into a field, they go in
thinking they already know everything and they can prove whatever
they want because, ok, but the thing this guy doesn't understand, right,
is that like and this is the thing most people
in the US do not understand about how Congress works.
Is that like all of the ship that's happening on
the floor of Congress, all of those votes that is
not that is not real congress, right, that that is

(13:20):
fate Congress. Nothing nothing important to actually happens there. All
of the important stuff in Congress happens in committees. And
so you can't figure out whether money is doing anything
by measuring its effects on like votes on the floor,
because floor votes are bullshit. All of the important stuff
has already by the top, by the tip of floor
vote happens, all the important policing stuff has already happened.
And so he did this, heard this whole thing where

(13:40):
he was you know, he had this great I I.
He had this great metric called like uh oh god,
and it was it's called like like the the dairy
cow coefficients, which is like measuring like how how someone
should vote versus like how the dairy cows running. And
it shows out, you know, if you look at what
these people do in committee, no, yeah, hey, look it
turns out a lotting money is unbelievably effective. But because

(14:03):
this fucking guy had like and this is something that
like like this sort of distinction between between Congress like
on the floor and Congress and committee. Like there's a
president whose name of forgetting, who has this famous line
that like Congress and committee is Congress at work, Congress
on the floors, Congress at play or something like that.
Like it's it's like this is just like basic ship
that if you know literally anything about how a field works,

(14:25):
you cannot do if you wanna, if you wanna. If
you want a good breakdown of why the free economics
guy is full of shit? Michael Hobbs and Peter sham
Shary I think is his last name, have a new
podcast called If Books Could Kill and they break down
with like citations and everything, like why everything in that

(14:45):
book is horseship, but like the reason why it's the
only thing I'll disagree with you one Chris is I
don't think he's an idiot. I think he's very intelligent,
and I think the thing that he's smart to do
is he recognizes that there's a specific type of person
and engineers and programmers are very likely to be this
type of person who kind of fundamentally like their oppositional defiant.
If somebody if something, if people say like well this

(15:08):
is good or this is bad, um, they're going to
take they want to take the opposite stance. And if
you can provide the way to like feel like they're
enlightened and smart and actually looking at the data by
doing it, then they'll take the opposite stance on stuff
like it's bad to let people buy elections or it's
good to fund children's hospitals just because somebody has made

(15:28):
them feel smart for being an asshole. Um, that's what
the freakonomics guy does. Malcolm Gladwell does a subtler version
of it as a general rule. Um, and that's what
that's what the fucking Freedman is doing in this this book.
In two thousand thirteen, I found a good review of
it in the Stanford Social Innovation Review. Um. That is uh,

(15:50):
pretty scathing, Like surprisingly scathing considering it's it's written by
a bunch of like Stanford nerds. This approach amounts to
a little more than charitable imperialist them, whereby my just
causes just in yours to one degree or another, is
a waste of precious resources. This approach is not informed
giving UM and I think that that does a pretty

(16:11):
good job of summarizing what I think is fucked up
about it. There's another thing that's really messed up, which
is that one of the conclusions that they gets come
that they come to here is that, um, they don't
recommend or there's an organization called gilve Well that kind
of gets gets formed as a result of the book
Freedman Rights, and they recommend not to deliver, like not

(16:33):
to donate money to disaster assistance in the wake of
the Japanese tsunami UM and opposed disaster relief donations in general.
UM because quote and this is from Freedman, most of
those killed by disasters could not have been saved by donations, UM,
which is number one. Like that's the donations are about
like rebuilding communities generally. It's not like about the saving lives.

(16:55):
Usually it's about like, well, all of the infrastructure was
destroyed and it must be rebuilt. Um. But okay, guy,
Well it's annoying to you because it's like it's it's
not like there's not good critiques of like pacifically always
like the Red Cross. Oh, it's all fucked up. Every
single yes critique is like the worst possible, like the

(17:15):
critiques yea, every single large charitable organization is fucked up.
And if you go and talk to people on the ground,
they will bitch. Like if you go to fucking war zones,
people bitch more about NGOs than the folks shooting at
them half the time. Like yeah, they bitch about it
being inefficient, about the stuff they're given being like bad
quality or like um, like nonsense, like just being handed

(17:39):
out to be handed out which is a thing that
happens sometimes, and a bitch about well paid aid workers
staying in hotels and showing up for a couple of
hours to like do a photo op. Um. There's also
more incisive, like you know, that's not to say none
of it's useful. Like, for example, as many complaints as
people have, everyone I've known who has been in a

(17:59):
place where medicine sans Frontiers slash Doctors without Borders has operated,
while they have complaints about doctors without borders are like,
it's good that there's more doctors here. We fucking need them. Um.
And you know, it's like U h c R. Plenty
of things to complain about you and h c R.
Every refugee camp I go to. Also, people have fucking
water filters, intins and ship because of you and h

(18:20):
c R, which isn't nothing. It's a damn site more
than nothing, And it's a damn site more than any
of these long term ass motherfucker's are doing for people
who are I don't know, displaced by war. Yeah, and
it's like some of the things that they're doing is
like this is very strange kind of attempts to calculate
and create markets for human life and human suffering, right,

(18:40):
which you see a lot if you were like I've
worked in nonprofit, I've worked in in disaster response, I've
seen some of these things on the ground, and it
it you see these bizarre fucking decisions being made by
by someone in an office who is likely never being
on the ground of these situations, and it inevitably results
in it's within these big organizations at the Red Cross

(19:03):
and MSF, but also on a governmental level, right, with
people not having the autonomy to respond in a situation
to reduce human suffering, and instead to be told to
do something which is supposedly evidence based based on someone
who's looked at the wrong criteria and come to the
wrong conclusion hundreds of miles away. And it's right us,
it's bureaucrats, right, And it's like we we've we've, we've

(19:24):
we've we've somehow managed to create like the absolute worst
possible and night mirror system of you have a bunch
of government bureaucrats and then you also have a bunch
of sort of privates that we have. We have like
different we're watching a collision of different kinds of private
sector bureaucrats, like you have, you have your sort of
engeo bureaucrats you have, and then you know, and then
you have these billionaires who are also just fucking bureaucrats,

(19:45):
and all of them are just doing box ticking, and
we get like just the absolute worst nightmare fusion of
horrible bureaucracy and capitalism, which is a great way to
run programs to have people not die. And so much
of this comes from what that. The whole like free
economics thing to me strikes me like we didn't, like
you said, reading the Wikipedia active about subject and then

(20:07):
applying trying to find out why you can apply a
market to it, and then posting that solution. It's stuff
we have. The episodes were dropping on Bastards well the
week before this episode will air, are about like why
the rent is so damn high? And one of the
complaints I have is that there's a specific class of
media people who the only answer they will accept is
because there's not enough multi family zoning, which is just

(20:28):
a part of why the rent is so damn high.
And reducing it to just that ignores UM, the price
fixing software that tens of millions of Americans, uh like
landlords use UM. It ignores shit like airbnb. It ignores
like the fucking problems in the construction industry, the lingering
effects of the two thousand eight crash. It's very frustrating,

(20:49):
and it's the these kind of like freakonomics guys like
to do the same thing, like the fucking fre economics student.
In particular, one of the things he got famous for
is being like, uh, you know, the up and crime
in the nineties, this unprecedented fallen crime was due to abortion,
which zero I will say again zero people who are
experts on the topic of crime in America agree with.

(21:10):
What they will say is actually there's a shipload of
different things that contributed to the declining crime, and there's
a good chance that abortion had an impact. A bigger
impact was probably getting the lead out of like reducing
environmental let although that gets overstated too. There's all sorts
of different ship including like air conditioning, just the fact
that like, yeah, now more people have air conditioning, and
guess when violence is highest in the summer, when people

(21:31):
are stuck around each other outside and like all sorts
of computer games. Don't people crimes because something else to do,
but it's you want to if you're gonna be doing
the kind of like if you're gonna be doing Ted
talk fucking uh public works philosophy, then it helps to
just be able to like make one big Malcolm glad
while style fucking reveal. Anyway, that's how all these people

(21:53):
exist and how all of their morality is informed. After
two thousand thirteen, Friedman is kind of like followed up
by this guy named William McCaskill, who was currently the
he's a Scottish philosopher um, which god, it's easy to
get called a philosopher these days, um. And he is
he is a personal friend of Elon Musk. When must

(22:16):
tests messages got released as part of that court filing,
some of them were with McCaskill um, who was considering
like putting a bunch of money into buying Twitter. They
ultimately decided not to, I think because they just like
it seems like McCaskill just didn't trust that Musk had
any sort of planned So he is, I will say this,
not an idiot, um, but he's wrong in ways that

(22:37):
are are deeply fucked up. And he wrote a book
that is currently a bestseller. It was published in August
called What We Owe the Future and the gist of
this is that, like it's merging this kind of effective
altruism with what's called long term is um, which is
this argument that morally we have to consider the impact
of our actions as not just on people alive today

(22:59):
but in future your people, which is fine. There's actually
a lot to that idea, But the way it always
works out is we can't pay attention to problems that
people are suffering now. We have to we have to
work on saving the world from these bigger problems. Um.
And again it's almost it's almost exclusively used as an
argument for guys like Musk to like, well, we shouldn't

(23:20):
tax billionaires out of existence because I you know, I
see this that with clarity the problems that we face,
and the long term solution is for me to be
able to push for these specific things that I think
are the only way to save humanity. Right. I'm getting
ahead of myself a little bit here. Let's talk about
mccaskell again. Um, when he was at Oxford. He's an
Oxford boy, James. Uh, look at it we've had in

(23:42):
Bangus sure. Yeah. Uh. He started a group called Giving
what we Can in two thousand nine. Uh, and members
were supposed to give away ten percent of what they
earned to the most cost effective charities possible, which is fine,
there's nothing wrong with that idea basically, and it was
like supposed to be basically a lifelong promise that like,
you know, we're all because you assume Oxford people, a

(24:02):
lot of them are going to wind up making very
good money. You know, as we move into our careers,
this will be a more and more influential kind of
giving um. But yeah, dropped the board. If they'd had
me there that, Yeah, those meetings might have gone a
little bit different in Yeah, Over time though, he's kind

(24:25):
of moved into he's merged this and and again the
whole effective altruism movement. A lot of it does start
reasonably with people being like, are these charities were donating
to working? How can we make sure they're effective? Like
what can we do to make giving um work better?
Which is again perfectly fine, but very quickly gets married
to this kind of long termist thinking um and they

(24:48):
focus instead of stuff like, for example, funding hospitals, stuff
like preventing an artificial intelligence from killing everybody, or like
sending people to distant planets, which are like cool, and
sci fi I and everything, but also deeply unrealistic. I'll
say it right now. Our our threat is not that
an AI kills us all. There's certainly a threat that
different kind of artificial intelligences are used by authoritarians to

(25:10):
make life worse for everybody. But by the way, Peter
Teal is a big back or of effective altruism. He's
one of the people building that fucking aim. This is
the guy who wrote that thing about earning to give
right like that. He was like, this is the guy
who did that. Yeah, okay, I'm familiar. Promise to never
take more than thirty one dollars or something and income

(25:32):
over the course like of a year in his life
and give charity. He gives all his book profits to charity.
But he also runs an organization that is spending more
and more on keeping its people comfortable because I guess
he doesn't have the money personally to spend anyway. I
think there's some sketchy ship there. Yeah, this whole idea,
and I'm sure we're gonna get today right like like,

(25:53):
it completely overlooks our obligation morally to agitate for structural change,
right like. It says like if you can become a
billionaire through whatever bullshit, evil, fucking exploitative grift you can,
and then give nine of that away. You're still perpetuating
a system in which one grift gets rich and thousands
of people die without fucking clean water. But that's okay

(26:16):
because you also donated some water filters or whatever like.
And it's not okay, and it makes me very angry. Actually, yeah, yeah,
it makes me angry too. And it's one of those
things if you look at, like, here's all the charities
that mc caskell and his organization are putting hundreds of
millions dollars of dollars into. They're not all bad. A
lot of them are good, and I'm glad that money
is going there, but there's always this strain of deeply

(26:37):
unsettling logic running through it. Now, I want to quote
from a Time article that I think kind of gets
in a very subtle way, has this guy's number. When
I start thinking in practice, if you've got if you've
got some things that look robustly good in both the
short and the long term, that definitely makes you feel
a lot better about something that is only good from
a very long term perspective. He says. This year, for example,
he personally donated to the Let Exposure Elimination Project, which

(27:00):
aims to in childhood let exposure, and the Atlas Fellowship,
which supports talented high school students around the world to
work on pressing problems. Not all issues are equally tractable,
but McCaskill still cares about a range. When we met
An Oxford, he expressed concern for the ongoing political crisis
in Sri Lanka, though admitted he probably wouldn't tweet about it.
The answer, he believes, is to be honest about it.
In philanthropy, big donors typically choose causes based on their

(27:22):
personal passions and ultra subjectivist approach. McCaskill says, where everything
is seemingly justifiable on the basis of doing some good,
he doesn't think that's tenable. If you can save someone
from drowning or ten people from dying in a burning building,
what should you do, he proposes, It is not a
morally appropriate response to say, well, I'm particularly passionate about drowning,
so I'm going to save one person from drowning rather

(27:43):
than the ten people from burning. And that's exactly the
situation we find ourselves in and like, no, it is not.
That is nonsense because, among other things, if you're a
random person, uh, and you have a choice between saving
someone from drowning or ten people from dying in a
burning building, well you actually probably don't because satan people
from drowning is a really difficult technical skill, which is

(28:04):
why people usually die when they try to rescue whether
folks who were drowning. The guy the creator of Hugo
died trying to from drowning. It's really hard and dangerous,
and also so is rescuing people from a burning building,
which is why we have firefighters. And guess what, a
lot of firefighters may not be very good at saving
people from drowning because they have not trained for that.

(28:25):
There are different skills, and these are both problems, but
they're different skills. But what have you instead spend that
time buying some testlas dogs and then sold them and
instead invested in Uh I know, I fink it's something
that stops water from from drowning people. Like, none of
the problems we have are are None of the problems
I'm going to say right now, zero percent of the

(28:47):
problems we have are the result of some sort of
like lifeguard firefighter standing in between a burning building and
like a yacht race gone wrong and going oh god, no,
it's like the trade doing the troning problem. He's he's
just he's trying to do Tony problem. It's funny that
he's talked about Sri Lanka too, because it's like this

(29:07):
is the perfect example. This is the perfect example of
a political crisis that is like completely intractable to all
of these like no, no, no, none of these people
donating the charities can like do literally anything about that,
because that's actually you know, like this like the crisis
of Sri Lanka is a is a is a both
both is it like it is, but it is both
a sort of short term crisis of this like you know,

(29:30):
like utterly horrific genocidal political elites, and then also a
sort of long term crisis about like the sort of
structural position of like specificcific countries and sort of the
global colonial system. This is not something any of these
people can solve. The only the only thing, the only
way any of these people could solve this is if
the people of Sri Lanka like just expropriated them. But
you know, but he but because because because because these people,

(29:52):
like because Sri Lankas do not have access to this
guy and like six guns. Right, there's no there's no way,
you know, he can just sort of sit there with
his chair going, well, it's a crisis. I'm gonna tweet
about it. I'm not gonna tweet about it. He's yeah,
I was. I was simply talked to newspapers about it
in tweeting. What what I would say is that, like,
here's the actual solution to the stupid problem this guy

(30:15):
came up with. Well, if we were to tax all
of the billionaires to the point that they weren't billionaires
and then put that into a massive new like works
progress fund that instead of like just building national parks,
provided like rental assistance to millions of Americans in exchange
for them learning how to fight fires and getting basic
life gave saving care and getting trained in things um

(30:37):
like that, so that they could deal with the consequences
of climate change and be able to protect their communities
effectively and be incentivized to gain the actual technical skills
that would allow them to protect people. Well, then you
would have more people capable of saving someone from a
burning building or from drowning. Um, but anyway, whatever, that's
that's that's my that's my pie in the sky. Leftist

(30:59):
solution to that is use funds taken from the rich
in order to incentivize people to gain the skills that
will allow them to protect their communities in the event
of disasters. Um, anyway, whatever. Uh So, over the last decade,
all of this thinking has increasingly given away from a
wonky theory on charitable giving by bighearted, guilt ridden millennial kids.

(31:20):
And that's that's how this guy has always framed in articles,
McCaskill is. He's like, in fact, I'm gonna fucking I'm
gonna scroll down here to my notes and I'm gonna
find the section of the article to like show you
the way he gets fucking talked about in all of
these quote. Thirteen years ago, William McCaskill found himself standing
in the aisle of a grocery store, agonizing over which
breakfast cereal to buy. If he switched to a cheaper

(31:40):
brand for a year, could he put aside enough money
to save someone's life? Like that's the Yeah, that's sort
of like that you have where your engagement with global
poverty is in the fucking Cheerios aisle exactly exactly the
yeah of weight Rose in Oxford. I'm sure like, no, funk, Sorry,

(32:00):
I'm so fucking angry at this ship. And it's it's clearly,
very clearly I can see that this is going towards
an excuse for incredibly wealthy people paying funk all in
taxes because they claim that that it's not an efficient
way to do things, and they completely ignore all these
structural things which have to exist for their effective altruism
to occur in the first place. Right, Yeah, it's um anyway,

(32:23):
this is effectively like over the years given away from
this again kind of this wonky theory by guilty millennial
kids to this pop philosophy for the fintech set, because
that's how these guilt written millennial kids wound up making
a bunch of money. Um. And yeah, that time article
gives like I just want to read another quote from
it about one of the other guys who's involved in

(32:44):
putting a lot of money into McCaskill's organization quote Mr
Mr Bankman Freed makes his donations through the ft X Foundation,
which is given away a hundred and forty million, of
which ninety million has gone through the group's future fund
towards long term causes. Mr McCaskill and Mr Bankman Fried's
relationship as an important piece and understanding the community's evolution
in recent years. The two men first met in two

(33:04):
thousand and twelve, when Mr Bankman Freed was a student
at M I T with an interest in utilitarian philosophy.
Over lunch, Mr Bankman Freed said that he was interested
in working she related to animal welfare. Mr McCaskill suggested
he might do more good by entering a high earning
field and donating money to the cause and by working
for directly. Mr Bankman Freed contacted the Humane League and
other charities, asking if they would prefer his time or

(33:26):
donations based on his expected earnings if he went to
work in tech or finance. They opted for the money,
and he embarked on a remunerative career, eventually founding the
cryptocurrency Exchange nineteen. First off, that guy absolutely did not
call any charities. Um, sorry, this was a four. This
was from the Forbes article I used, not the Time article. Um.

(33:49):
First off, I don't believe that he but if he did,
it was something like, Hey, I don't have any skills
or training. Do you want money or do you want
me to volunteer? And they were like, who then is this? Kids, like,
we don't we don't need another asshole wandering around here
trying to touch the cats. Um, send us you a check. Yeah,
And so instead of I don't know, getting trained as

(34:09):
a vet tech or something where he would actually be
able to help animals, he founded a cryptocurrency exchange and
contributed to the burning of massive amounts of carbon that
will contribute to mass deforestation in the deaths of animals
around the world. That's good. I think that there's another
aspect of this, which I think is sort of under explored,
which is that utilitarianism is genuinely one of the greatest
evil's humanity has ever created, every every bad decision anyone

(34:32):
has ever made. If you look behind it, you can
find your deilitarian is like it's a basis of the
basis of all economics. It's horrible, haything bad in the world.
It is an engine that allows rich people to feel
good about hurting poor people. That's that's what it is.
But and that's what I think this all makes clear.
So the actual rhetoric from these people is always like it,

(34:54):
especially if you're just kind of encountering it out in
the wild. It's hard to argue with a lot of
the time because they'll be like, well, look, we need
look at what's going to help the most people, and
that's why we're you know, setting up None of this
matters if we don't deal with this problem or that problem.
And it's it's Taylor made to sound profound and again
and like a Ted talk or the website for the
Charitable Giving organization aimed at getting you to like put

(35:15):
ten percent of your income to long termist causes. But again,
the funked up ship crusts kind of around the edges
for the most part in lines like these from a
time profile on the Castle. The first public protest against
African American slavery was the six eighty eight Germantown Quaker petition.
Slavery was only Yeah. Slavery was only abolished in the
British Empire in eighteen thirty three decades later in the US,

(35:37):
and not until nineteen sixty two in Saudi Arabia. History
encourages mccaskell to favor gradual progress, so for revolution, abolition,
he says, is maybe the single best moral change ever.
It's certainly up there with feminism, and they're extremely incremental.
They don't seem that way because we enormously shrink the past.
But it's almost three hundred years we're talking about. Um.
That wasn't the result of incremental change. It was the

(35:58):
result against the people who enslaves, fighting viciously against any
attempts to end slavery. Like it was a it was
a battle. It was a series of in fact, a
series of revolutions in a lot of cases including like
the Haitian Revolution and guys like John Brown. There were
a ship bleeding Kansas. There were a shipload of people
died fighting in order to end slavery. Like yeah, it's

(36:20):
a civil war, dude, what do you call that? That's
not incremental. A million people shot each other to death,
you know, And it's it's so far as we can
talk about sort of income with the progress, it's stuff
like okay, So the like the slaves in Haiti freed
themselves by means of revolution and then sent a bunch
of guns and weapons to people in Latin America so
that their armies could march through Latin America and end slavery,

(36:42):
Like many revolutions had to occur to end slavery because
it was a powerful system at the center of global
capital that a lot of entrenched and heavily armed interests
were willing to die to maintain. Which also is fun
because I I I bet, I bet if you look
through these people supply chains, and this is almost certainly
true of Elon must supply chains, like I mean, okay,

(37:06):
must supply chains. In China. You can have some kind
of debate as to whether the kinds of forced labor
you're going to be encounting our slavery, Like I I
bet if you look through night present the people who
are affective aulters, you can find slavery in their supply chains,
and their arguments will be like, well, I can't slavery
and must supply chain because I guarantee it. They're all
in the tech industry, and like nobody has a laptop

(37:29):
or a smartphone without the use of rare earth minerals
that are like acquired via slavery. It's it's the same
thing if you're wearing clothes, you have something that slavery
was involved in. Because the garment industry, slavery is literally
inextricable from it. Like the company that has tried the
hardest to remove slavery from their from their production line, Patagonia,

(37:49):
UM still continually finds like, oh, no, they're smart. Yeah,
they're pretty good. I'm going out, But yeah, they put
a load of money into that ship and they still
it is hard. Um. Anyway, UM, I'm going to read
another fun quote from the Forbes article. Mr Bankman Freed
said he expected to give away the bulk of his
fortune in the next tender twenty years. If you're worried

(38:11):
about existential risks of a really bad pandemic, you sort
of can't stall on that. Mr Bankman Freed said in
an interview. That is how his text messages popped up
among hundreds of others sent to Mr Musk. Mr Bankman
Freed ultimately did not join Mr Musk's bid. I don't
know exactly what Elon's goals are going to be with Twitter.
Mr Bankman Freed said in an interview there was a
little bit of ambiguity there. He had his hands full

(38:31):
in the month that followed his cryptocurrency prices crashed. The
Twitter deal has been volatile in its own way, with
Mr Musk trying to back out, before recently announcing his
intention to follow through that after all. In August, Mr
Musk retweeted Mr mccaskeell's book announcement to his hundred and
eight million followers with the observation worth reading this is
a close match to my philosophy. So that's that's kind

(38:54):
of the surface of where we are now. Um. It
is not. It doesn't quite get at all of the
things that are deeply fucked up. And for that I
wanted to quote from another article. UM. I found an
a on a E O N. It's an essay by h.
Got Let make it the author here because it's it's
quite good about long term as. It's an essay called

(39:15):
against long termism by Emil P. Torres, a phb candidate
at a university in Hanover in Germany uh Leibnitz Universitat.
I don't know. I feel silly every time I try
to say Germans, so I'm not going to try that hard.
But the article is very good, um, and it kind
of gets at how this effective altruism movement has merged

(39:36):
with long term is um in a way that specifically
exists to buoy the interests of wealthy authoritarians around the
world quote. This has roots in the work of Nick Bostrom,
who founded the grandiosely named Future of Humanity Institute f
HI in two thousand five, and Nick Bestead, a research
associated FHI and a program officer at Open Philanthropy. It

(39:58):
has been defended most publicly by the HI philosopher Toby Ord,
author of the precipice Existential Risk in the Future of Humanity.
Long Termism is the primary research focus of both the
Global Priorities Institute and an f HI in linked organization
directed by Hillary Greeves, and the Forethought Foundation run by
William mccaskell, who also holds positions at f HI and
g p I. Adding to the tangle of titles, names,

(40:20):
institutes and acronyms, long termism is one of the main
cause areas of the so called effective altruism movement, which
was introduced by Ord in around two thousand even eleven
and now boast of having a mind boggling forty six
billion dollars in committed funding. It is difficult to overstate
how influential long termism has become. Karl Marx in forty
five declarded that the point of philosophy isn't merely to
interpret the world, but change it, and this is exactly

(40:42):
what long term USTs have been doing with extraordinary success.
Consider that Elon Musk, who is cited and endorsed Bostroom's work,
has donated one point five million dollars to FHI through
its sister organization, even more grandiosely named Future of Life Institute.
This was co founded by the multimillionaire tech entrepreneur Jan Talinn,
who has a recently noted doesn't believe that climate change
poses an existential threat to humanity because of his adherence

(41:04):
to the long termist ideology. Meanwhile, the billionaire libertarian and
Donald Trump supporter Peter Teal, who once gave the keynote
address and an effective Altruism conference, has donated large sums
of money to the Machine Intelligence Research Institute, whose mission
is to save in humanity from super intelligent machines and
is deeply intertwined with long termist values. Other organizations, such
as g p I and the Foe Thought Foundation are

(41:26):
funding essay contests and scholarships and an effort to draw
young people into the community. Well, it's an open secret
of the Washington d C. Base Center for Security and
Emergence and Emerging Technologies c SET aims to place long
termsts within high level US government positions to shape national apology.
In fact, c SET was established by Jason Mathani, a
former research assistant and f HI who is now the
Deputy Assistant to US President Joe Biden for Technology and

(41:49):
National Security. Or It himself, has, astonishingly for a philosopher,
advised the World Health Organization, the World Bank, the World
Economic Forum, the U S National Intelligence Council, the UK
Prime Minister's Office, Cabinet, all US in Government Office for Science,
and he recently contributed to a report from the Secretary
General of the United Nations that specifically mentions long term
is um. The short answer is that elevating the fulfillment

(42:10):
of humanities supposed potential above all else could not trivially
increase the probability that actual people those alive today in
the near future suffer extreme harms even death. Consider As
I noted elsewhere, the long termist ideology inclines its adherence
to take an Insusian attitude towards climate change. Why because
even if climate change causes island nations to disappear, triggers
mass migrations and kills millions of people. It probably isn't

(42:31):
going to compromise our long term potential over the coming
trillions of years. If one takes a cosmic view of
the situation, even a climate catastrophe that cuts the human
population by se for the next two millennial will, in
the grand scheme of things, be nothing more than a
small blip, the equivalent of a nine year old man
having stubbed his toe when he was two. So this
is evil, right, Like, this is like, this is vicious

(42:53):
and vile and cruel, and it's one of those things.
There's a book that I've talked about on the show
a couple of times UM that is quite popular called
Ministry of the Future UM, And I think it's a
very good book. And one of the attitude, like the
basic premise of it is that climate change is addressed
finally and the worst aspects of it are are dealt
with and like begin to be repaired because of the

(43:15):
establishment of an organization called the Ministry of the Futures.
Its international organization that exists to like look out for
the interests of unborn people and animals and plant species.
And part of how they do this is by murdering
billionaires in their beds uh and blowing up planes to
in international air travel, which is so there's a version.
Like again, the idea that like, we should be thinking

(43:37):
about people and and living creatures who have not yet
been born is reasonable, and the reasonable conclusion of that
is and so we should deal with things like climate
change and stop like thoughtlessly degrading our environment so that
people in the future will be able to live a
quality life. Um. The argument that these long terms are

(43:58):
making is no, that's foolish, because in a true billion years,
none of it will matter. And I intend to be
alive in a trillion years because I will be an
immortal machine man billionaire forever. You know, it's about these people,
these people like you think about this. If you believe this,
the only literally, the only thing that you should spend
your time doing is trying to dismantle every single nuclear

(44:18):
weapon on the planet. Like you, you you should be
forming your own private armies to like storm military basis
to destroy nukes. And none of them will ever fucking
do this. All these people will back candidates who like
want to have a nuclear weapons. All these people who
will back candidates who like, like, you know, I I
wonder how many these people personally supported dropping a nuke
in the middle of a rock in two thousand four,
Like god, yeah, anyway, this is probably that's probably enough.

(44:45):
I wanted to At some point, I think we will
be doing a more detailed look into some of these people,
and a more detailed look into some Maybe maybe it's
a Bastards episode, but this is just getting more relevant,
and I wanted to give people I wanted to connect
them with some like some some resources, particularly that article
on a on about the dangers of long termism and

(45:08):
uh yeah, anyway, be be advised. This is what the
fucking assholes who have spent like think about how many
cool things the tech industry has actually made in the
last decade. It's it's not many, right, Like it's mostly
been vaporware, like most of the different big apps and
stuff have all are in the process of collapsing right now.
That's why the industry is falling apart as we record

(45:31):
this in the metaverse. Yeah, that's right, that's right. Legs
like you're sitting right next to me, James, except for
you have no laying legs in. Your mouth is opened
in an endless, wordless scream. Um finally, anyway, that's what
these assholes want to do, what they've done to the Internet,
sucking the vibrancy and the life and like the freedom

(45:54):
out of this this incredible creation and turning it into
uh an engine for sucking your personal data out and
marketing things to you and making you angry all the
time as much as possible, and convincing your parents and
grandparents that fucking Joe Biden has been replaced by a
lizard man. Um. Like the people who did that, uh

(46:16):
now think that we can't take care of people today
because that would distract from our mission to take care
of people who have never been born a trillion years
from now. Um, anyway, fuck them. Everything's dead. Wait no sorry, Um,

(46:46):
it's it could happen here a podcast about stuff falling
apart and today about the fact that things fell less
apart than people were worried they were going to fall apart,
and in some ways got might get better. So that's
kind of that's kind of nice. Sure, Yeah, on the whole,

(47:06):
we're talking about the mid terms today and on the
whole Okay, I feel okay, an excellent descripture. Yeah, it's
the mid terms equivalent of getting like an ounce of
of of like mid grade weed for like fifty bucks,
but you find out later that like kind of in

(47:29):
the middle of it was like half of a paper
towel roll that they stuck in there to push up
the weight. But it's like, well, at least I got weed.
All right, I've introduced the podcast Who do We? Who
do we have here? Today? Oh? You got me? I'm
James Still that's right. H Yeah, I'm Garrison. I didn't vote.

(47:55):
Look at you. Wow. Way to be a way to
be an anarchist, Garrison or can Adien same deaf democracy? Yeah?
I like committing voter fraud for the Democratic Party. Yeah yeah.
I also decided to not vote for the people who
are doing like the war on drugs in California. Right now, Garrison,

(48:17):
you you continued your your years long tradition of submitting
a crew drawing of the Premier of Canada um to
to a ballot box ship. Let's Trudeau coming out of
a cave. Who else do we have on with us?
Right now? I'm here, Christopher Wong, and I absolutely despise elections.

(48:42):
So I brought my friend who actually does like elections
that's excellent token election in Jordan pretty much. Yes, Hi,
I am Jack. I am Christopher's token friend, as mentioned um,
and I'm here partly because of nepotism for knowing Christopher

(49:03):
and partly because, as he reminded me, before we got started,
I had a ninety three accurate prediction rating for all
of the elections that I was paying attention to this year,
so things, congratulations. I only made one prediction before this election,
which was, well, he doesn't feel like dr oz is
gonna win, which which means you did better than a

(49:28):
lot of the people who are paid to do this. Like, Okay,
that man, that man said the word crew didtay in
an election in Pennsylvania, Like there was he was never good.
The moment that d came out, he was going to lose.
That's much more nuanced than my my political analysis, which

(49:52):
was the fact that the other guy was much taller
than him and also way hot. Like if they just
settled it with a fistfight, Pat could have taken it. Yep,
which that seems good. Uh, it was fun. It was
a fun election. We all had a good time. I
enjoy that. Fucking Marjorie Taylor Green and j d vance
are going to be in Congress together. That's going to

(50:13):
be fun for everybody. We're all gonna have a good time.
But I suspect there's probably some stuff we haven't like.
As you may have noticed listeners, we didn't do much
in the way of pre mid term content because we
all hate it. But but now now we're talking about it.
So what what? What? What should we know about these
mid terms? What? What? What kind of occurred to you

(50:35):
as somebody who's like actually has spent a lot more
time delving into the nitty gritty and thinking about what
was likely to happen. Um. So I told Christopher I
would say this, and in varness, I do genuinely believe it.
I think the story of these mid terms, when historians
look back at it, will be that the Dobbs Supreme

(50:57):
Court decision had the same electoral impact in the United
States as nine eleven did. I think that is going
to be like how this plays out over time, um,
because when you look at how things were going before
Dabbs and then how things were going after Dabbs, obviously
things got a lot worse on the policy front because
abortion became illegal in a lot of states. Um. But

(51:19):
the election essentially flipped overnight from what was going to
be a Republican wave to the even split that we got.
And that makes this one of three post World War
two midterms where the incumbent party did well, and so
this is definitely going to be aim in term that
gets lectured about in policy one on one courses for

(51:42):
the next hundred years. Also one of those, one of
those other three was to push le because it was yeah, yeah,
actually really because obviously I was aware, just because there
was so much coverage saying like, this is the best
performance from an incumbent party in a mid term since
two thousand two. So it was aware of that fact,
but for some reason I hadn't put it together in

(52:03):
my head that way that like, yeah, the this means that,
like the Supreme Court's decision on Roevie Wade had kind
of a comparable electoral impact to flying two planes into
a pair of skyscrapers, said the Pentagon plates. I mean,
to be fair whatever, to be fair, there Spreme Court
have killed Like in terms of the immediate impact, the

(52:25):
Screme Court will have killed more people than that by
like Thursday or something. So yeah. The other one was
was fdos fest made term right. Uh No, the other
one so that so I said, post Woe War two.
The other The other one was when the American electorate
apparently got so mad at Republicans in p team Bill

(52:46):
Clinton that they decided to vote for Democrats in a
good term. Again. Well that's yeah, that's the other thing
Biden can do if it, if it goes south. It's
good to know their uptions. Yeah, but I think non
zero chance that will happen any way. I mean, I
guess we're still waiting. Who knows. Yeah, dog Brandon, I
enjoyed from from an entertainment perspective, the like three months

(53:09):
of lucidity that we got out of Joe Biden this year.
We'll see how many more he has in him. Yeah,
who knows? So yeah, like it. So you're you're suggesting
that Dobbs has been like the really pivotal thing here
in swinging a lot of these close races, right, absolutely, um,
and Dobbs definitely being the number one factor. Um. Tragically,

(53:32):
because it's very cringe and I wish this hadn't happened.
The January six investigation does actually seem to have also
swung several important races. That's I mean, I'm interested in
your thoughts on this, but I actually I'm glad that
it mattered that they tried to do a coup, and

(53:53):
I'm glad that people cared about that. I'm glad it mattered.
I just I just think it sucks that because the
way they went about the investigation was so incredibly terrible. Yeah. Um,
like Marrick Garland is going to go down as like
one of the most cowardly attorney generals in American history.
But um, yeah, it's it's pretty clear that in a

(54:13):
lot of races like the the investigation made a difference.
I think this is really clear if we're getting into
like very kind of under the hood. Um, Democrats ran
the table in competitive state level secretary of state races,
and these are the officials that run elections. UM. And
not only did Democrats run the table, pretty much every

(54:34):
single one of those candidates outperformed the top of the ticket.
So they outperformed governor and Senate candidates. UM. So there
are a lot of people. This is another big story
the midterms is that swing voter. Your swing voting is
back not swing voting, I'm sorry, Split ticket voting is back. Um,
there were quite a few there were quite a few
millions of voters this year who voted for Republican in

(54:58):
the Senate or Republican and for governor and then a
Democrat to run their states actual elections. That's kind of good.
It's so that's also like speaks promisingly of people's engagement
with the political system and education about it and the
awareness of what these different things do. Yes, um, but
other like like that, other than that, but just overall

(55:20):
high level Dobbs was the big one. Um. There is
a person whose name I'm going to unfortunately mispronounce and
that I should have looked up beforehand. So all right,
this is a safe place for that, thank you. But
there's a person there's a guy down in Louisiana named
John uh cool Van I think is my best guests,

(55:41):
And he is one of the people who makes money
off of like looking at elections, um. And his big
thing is that you can predict the outcome of elections
just by looking at the nationwide composition of the primary electorate.
So like, if Republicans turn out more voters in their
primaries and Democrats to Republicans are going to win the

(56:02):
election and vice versa. This has been true in pretty
much every single election for the last thirty years or
so UM, and he unfortunately got led astray um this
year because nationwide at the end of the primary season,
Republicans were up by about like five points, and so
he was insisting the whole rest of the campaign that

(56:24):
Republicans are going to win. That's obviously not really what happened.
But if you look at pre Dbs versus post OBS,
the primary elector at post OBS was Democrats plus like
up by one point. That is the electorate that we
got in the mid terms. So Dobbs set the tone

(56:45):
of like what the mid terms were gonna be, Um,
because we are not going to be legalizing abortion nationwide
in the next two years, because we are going to
have a Republican House almost certainly Dobbs is almost definitely
going to be a huge factor in twenty four as well.
I mean, and I guess that, like because the question

(57:07):
I had, and I think a lot of people had
running into this, especially people who are not election lovers,
is like do things matter? Right? Like? It was Dobbs
going to matter? And was the were the constant sort
of Republican assaults on on the ability of people to vote.
Was the fucking attacks on children's hospitals and on trans

(57:29):
case and stuff like, was all of that going to work?
Like do do things matter still? And uh, you know,
we'll have to renswer that question. But it does kind
of seem like that's the positive take out from this
is not like, you know, it's it's probably probably too
early to say are we seeing some sort of grand

(57:50):
progressive swing or are people coming around on or Biden
or whatever things politicos want to take. But it does
kind of seem that, like on a on a very
like ground floor level. Uh, it mattered that the Republicans
were doing awful things, Yes, mattered. Um, I think Christopher
and I have talked about how, in his words, Leah

(58:11):
Thomas cost the Michigan Republican Party in the election. Uh,
let's let's talk about that, because I think a lot
of people, I mean, yeah, let's yeah, let's talk about Okay,
I'll give the I'll give the meme version of it first.
The meme version of it basically is that there was Okay,
so there there there was a report released by the

(58:32):
Republican Party in Michigan after the election when they sort
of got hammered, and part of what they're talking about
was like, okay, so inflation is like seven point seven
percent right now, right, this is the freest election anyone
has ever been handed, like in human history, Like a
child could have won this election, and the Republicans managed

(58:53):
to blow it. And one of these they talk about
this they spent they spent like twenty five million olders,
like specifically on ads about trans like trans kids in sports,
and everybody missed it. Was just like what the yes,
this really not just not just blew it, but blew

(59:14):
it in a way that they haven't blown it in
forty years. Because for the first time in forty years,
Democrats will have complete control of the Michigan state government. Yeah. Yeah,
And it's like it's like the other things. It wasn't
just in Michigan where this happened, right like like quite possibly,
like one of the ways they're going to lose the
Senate is because like the Republicans like entire sort of

(59:35):
apparatus and Nevada was running against the Equal Rights Amendments,
which and specifically they were running against the equal Nevada
passing University of the Equal Rights Amendment, like specifically on
the grounds of transphobia, and the e ARRA passed by
seventeen points. Uh, and Republicans are about to lose that Senate. See.
And it's just like my main version of this is

(59:56):
that the Republican Party ran a platform that is like
a political equivalent of like a street preacher, right, like
that that is the constituency for this. It is like
they unbelievably hate trans people. They like an unbelievably hard
line anti abortion position, which again like nobody actually likes.
And you know, it turns out like if if if

(01:00:17):
your constituency is street preachers, like the thing an average
person does when they run into a street preacher is
walked past them. And it turns out that's what happened
to you, Like they got oh that's that's that's the
mean version of it. Absolutely, I mean that's not just
the mean version of it is essentially what happened, um
in Michigan and Pennsylvania, in all of these states where

(01:00:38):
hard line Christian nationalists won Republican primaries, like they went
down hard um and so as Robert said, yeah, things
actually mattered this election, and that's a good thing. Um.
And I think I know for me, as like, I
went into election night very nervous about my own predictions

(01:00:58):
because when I put together my UM Google spreadsheet that
will never be shown to any of you because of
how insane it is UM. And I was picking, you know,
I got more races wrong, by the way, by picking
Republicans to win that Democrats actually one than the other
way around, because I kept second guessing myself. It's like, no, no, no,

(01:01:20):
I'm not I'm being too kind to Democrats and then
I went too far. But when I was making those predictions, honestly,
I just kept thinking about, like, so I'm adopted. My
parents are both white, and my mom is this like
white woman from Appalachian, Ohio, and she is UM in
her upper sixties, so she grew up in a world

(01:01:41):
before Roe V. Wade UM, and I had never seen
my mom so angry about anything in politics, and like
she was very very angry when Trump won UM. She
has been very angry. She's been very angry about like
January six. She's been angry about a lot of stuff

(01:02:02):
the last several years, as is my dad UM because
they're both very normally Democrats. But my mom has never
been angrier as far as I've seen her than she
was angrier about Dobbs. And it wasn't just like my mom.
I was hearing from friends of mine from across the
Midwest who also have like normy white suburban parents, and

(01:02:27):
that was kind of the same thing that I was
hearing from them too, is like, my mom is so
upset about this, my grandmother is so upset about this.
These women who remembered what it was like to grow
up in a world where abortion was not something that
they had access to if they needed it, um. And that, honestly,
you know, it's it's obviously completely anecdotal. It's not databased
or data driven in any way. But that was just

(01:02:48):
what I kept thinking about as I was making predictions
about how the mid term was gonna go, was you know,
I think that these people are angry enough that they
are not going to care about and Saan, They're not
going to care about the fact that our economy is
very clearly headed for recession, um, because this is going
to matter more to them, um, And it did. I

(01:03:11):
kind of want to move on to talking about what
what we think this sets us up for because I
think the clearest and we talked about this a little earlier,
but sort of the clearest thing that's positive about this
is that we have fewer state secretaries of state and
state legislatures in the hands of the Republican Party, which

(01:03:34):
means more of a chance that like what people actually
vote for is going to matter. Um. Now, we're still
dealing with the judiciary that is as fucked as it
was prior to the mid terms and probably won't be
less fucked in a way that is notable. Um and aggregate, Yeah,

(01:03:55):
we can. We can always hope and pray. Yeah, they
can to be a couple of very specific yeah, yeah, yeah,
yeah on that point. Actually, So there I know a
bang on about about like how the United States deals
with its Indigenous people a lot, but like they slated

(01:04:15):
and we'll do an episode on it, but we're trying
to do it properly. Like slated for this Supreme Court
session is to look at AQUA right, the Indian Child
Welfare Act, and like the challenge to it challenges a
lot of the basis of other tribal law and in
places like Arizona, right, like indigenous people are a large

(01:04:37):
like often like they're supposed to be, like the swing
electorate for like Blue Arizona. So they could have positive
outcomes for for Democrats. It could. They could. I don't
know how they could go out their way to do
in French trans indigenous people, but they find you and
exciting ways to do it all the fucking time, So
like that will be interesting. And one thing I wanted

(01:04:58):
to raise is like, so I live in California, which
I think is seen as like the left coast and stuff,
but we have an alarming amount of really chuddly people
going to the House from California, And yeah, it's becoming
increasingly a bit like well, like some of you live
in Oregon, where you have a very dif the far
right in California is larger than the population of like

(01:05:21):
many United US states. Yeah, yes, and they're increasingly big
mad about like small things. But yeah, like I'm just
looking at the districts around the one I'm in, and
a number of them have sent like anti reproductive rights
house representatives back to the House. California is a state where, um,

(01:05:45):
the Democratic Party likes to flop its way to victory.
It's one of it's one of the most incompetent state
Democratic parties in the country, which is really saying something
because they're competing. They're competing with they're competing with Florida. Like,
I mean, hey, Oregon's not didn't do great either, Like
the state Democratic Party in Oregon had their most narrow

(01:06:06):
governor's race in a long time, and also the Dems
lost their their supermajority in the state Congress. They did
lose their supermajority, but Democrats in Oregon do now have
the ability to redistrict again so they can take back
that seat that Republicans picked up because there was a

(01:06:28):
constitutional amendment that got passed by the voters of Oregon
that says that if Republicans do what they have done
in the last few years in Oregon, which is walk
out of the state House anytime that a lot might pass,
they get banned for running for re election. But also,
like without the supermajority, I don't know that there's as
much of any I mean, we'll see what happens um,

(01:06:50):
but yeah, it's there. As a general rule, it seems
like when you've got there's no meaningful competition for what
party is going to be in control of the state,
it becomes a haven for like the political equivalent of grifters.
To sucking huge salaries and do very little um and yeah,

(01:07:11):
yeah like math or to do like star mare look
at that. Also yeah, and she's up for re election
in a few months. Then we can only hope that
she that she loses. I can't imagine her winning. I mean,
it could happen. If it could happen, it could happen.

(01:07:34):
Here's here's an ad break. Good work, Garrison. Yeah, what
a professional. Ah. We're back. And you know what talking
about the midterm elections makes me feel like doing smoking
a cigarette? Buy cigarettes, kids, They're is good for you
as democracy. All right, we're back. In some other interesting news.

(01:07:59):
This is so the this this pessimn terms had more
lgbt Q candidates win office than ever before in a
midterm election. There was a few notable winds, specifically with
trans people in the Midwest actually, which has been probably

(01:08:19):
a decent side. It's it's a good side. You know,
heroes are doing good. Yeah. There's been a multiple multiple
trans people and trans uh particularly quite a few trans
women elected to state legislatives across across the Midwest, like
in Montana and inside uh Midwestern that out yeah, well

(01:08:57):
Mountain West. See, well, the thing is I grew up
in Saskatchewan, which is like above Montana, and whenever you
would drive down, we would always stay in the more
midwest east sections, and everyone talks it felt very Midwest
to me because of where I lived in Saskatchewan. So
apology of apologies to people who are Montana mountaineers, I guess, apologies, No, No,

(01:09:23):
we don't need to be so. Zoe Zephyr, who testified
against anti trans legislation previously, is now able to vote
against it. Um in Minnesota talked about that, like very briefly,
which is that like, okay, there are a lot of
queer communities in places that people just fucking ignore. Yeah,

(01:09:45):
absolutely can you cannot discount these places. Yeah, It's like
Missoula specifically has has a like like pretty substitutve queer community.
They do good ship, they're out there like they're like
there's there's this sort of tendency I think to like
like look at like a state and go like, oh,
it's a red state, Like there's whatever the commune which

(01:10:06):
you were just fleeing, and it's like it's not true.
Like there there are a lot of people who are
like have for many years been building a community there
and hanging auccenaciously and building it. And also in Missoula,
people take notice. Also in Missoula, the first non binary
candidate was elected in uh s J. Howell so to
uh to trans people elected there in in uh in Missoula.

(01:10:30):
But the way did did did did Missoula Missoula do this?
People in Portland would fall probably, but Portland's Portland's like
city councils like four people. Yeah that's true, Yeah, entirely. Yeah,
and it was pretty conservative that this past election actually, um,
but we also had in Minnesota lay a thing because

(01:10:54):
the first trans person in state let us, let let
us later. And in New Hampshire they elected the first
transman to a US Statehouse. So yeah. And the other
other good thing is um Arizona got a Democratic governor,
which means a whole bunch of potential legislation will probably
not get signed on because Arizona did have some pretty

(01:11:17):
pretty pretty bad anti transport to come up in the
past few years. I also want to talk about. So
the Arizona election was critical, not just because it's amazing
that fucking carry Lake's not going to be a governor,
because she is an election denying Google. Um, but the
nicest thing Blake Masters might be the scariest person who

(01:11:39):
was running for election. He is he is the scariest
he was for serial killer. Yeah yeah, yeah he was.
He was scary until he was funny, is the thing,
because like I you know, when they failed, they're always funny. Yeah.
But Christopher and I were talking about this before the
podcast and like during the during the final debate between

(01:12:01):
Blake Masters and Mark Kelly, like and I want to
swear on this podcast, like we're allowed to say whatever
the hell we want, perfect um debate. In their final
debate between Mark Kelly and Blake Masters, Mark Kelly's like
final statement, his conclusion argument was essentially pointing at Blake

(01:12:23):
Masters and going, look at this fucking freak. Yeah. Yeah,
it was great. It was just the which is one
of the most powerful things he could do in pols
because he was he was just like, like the specific
thing he did because his language was was I think
a lot more nuanced than that, because what he was
saying is Blake Masters, for those of you who don't
don't know, like one of the most like famous moments

(01:12:46):
of this campaign is he he put out a campaign
ad that was just him parking in the desert with
a silenced handgun mentioned which is a child gun first off,
but anyway, mentioning twice that the gun was German and
like Germans to arrested, and then firing it blindly at nothing,

(01:13:10):
and then the ad he fired it across the lake. Yeah,
we don't see him shoot at something. We don't see
him hit a target. He is his stances dogs anyway.
But it's just him taking a silence pistol out repeatedly
mentioning that the gun is German, firing it, and then
the ad ends that's the whole a seconds of him

(01:13:33):
just fondling and badly shooting it. It's worth giving the
context that the person he's running against is someone whose
wife was shot in the head. Yes, yeah, yeah, yeah,
because d so that's but it's also just like, look,
guns are a big part of American life. A lot
of politicians have, including Democrats, have ads that involved guns,

(01:13:56):
and usually it's like here is me hunting, you know,
or even like here is me at the range with friends,
engaging in a thing that many Americans do. Masters was
just blindly shooting a twenty two caliber handgun after immediately
mentioning that it's chairman. It was it was like someone
showed an alien like a regular campaign ad of someone

(01:14:17):
shooting a gun, and then yes, I mean, it's funny
that that's the term that you use, because that was
a term that was flying around like Arizona social media
the entire campaign. It was like, Blake Bastards looks like
an alien and you get red with Peter Teel money
for so so he has this and he has a
couple of others like he is, he is, he's a

(01:14:40):
number one. He worked with Peter Teel for years. Um
he's doing all sorts of fucking ghoule ship on Twitter,
like really mask off fascist, unhinged shit. And Mark Kelly
in the debate isn't just like look at this freak.
He's like, hey, we all know guys like this to
talk about how dangerous and how scary they are, but

(01:15:00):
they they've never done anything. They're just like weirdos trying
to scare you so that you'll think that they're they're powerful,
and like, don't don't fall forward it And it was
perfect and the good news is that Arizona voters did
not fall for it, because you know, not only did
Blake Masters lose by the best performing Republicans in Arizona

(01:15:23):
where their House candidates, like the statewide House popular vote
for the for U S Congress, not the Statehouse was
I think Republicans want it or going to win it
by like five. So Carli Lake already drastically underperformed that
by six because she's gonna lose. And then to Blake
Masters underperformed his House candidates by like ten or eleven. Unbelievable.

(01:15:49):
It's it's I mean it. It really goes to show
that whatever most Americans want, they don't want a fucking
weirdo fascist freak threatening uh there an astronaut's wife with
a gun. Yeah. Really briefly, like also like on this note,

(01:16:09):
of all of the queer and trans candidates who one
um I will point out this follows the pattern that
has taken shape in the last decade, which is that
these supposedly well not supposedly they are, but like these
red and purple states in the South and the Midwest
are sending queer and trans people into the halls of
power a lot faster than deep blue states on the

(01:16:32):
West coast and in the Northeast. The first non unfortunately
forget their name, but the first non binary state legislator
in the country was elected in Oklahoma. And they're not
only non binary, they are black and Muslim non binary.
UM so it's like you know, these um these communities

(01:16:54):
as Christophers like a, these communities do matter, and we
can't forget about them, we can't abandon them. But all
so like not just they matter, but like as I
will happily argue with any political operative from either coast,
we are much more likely to see some kind of
progressive or surgeon and resurgeons in this country led by
candidates out of the South or Midwest than either Yeah.

(01:17:17):
Well and like like look at like this is one
of everythings that that you know, so I have a
lot of friends in the like Michigan Teachers Union, right
and you know, like right right now, what is happening
in the Michigan Like in Michigan is that the teachers
Union is literally sending lists of laws like to to
the governor that are like you need to get rid
of this. And you know, if you like if even

(01:17:38):
if you look at like like almost every other democratic
party like in the country is just constantly at word
with their teachers unions and you know, and then you
look at like you look at what's happening in Wisconsin
and it's like it's like, what's happening in Michigan. Well,
I also Wisconsin to with like they have a much
more labor friendly like Democratic Party even like fucking a

(01:18:00):
Francisco or like the ghouls in like like honestly the
ghules in the Chicago machine, right Eric Adams office. Yeah, right,
Like there's there's there's I don't know, they're like everybody
doors the Midwest and we're here, damn it, we do
good things. Well's it's a little bit like I mean,

(01:18:20):
it's a little bit of what we were saying earlier
that like when you've got these states where because of
the population layout, the Democratic Party doesn't have to struggle
to actually win for the most part, you're a hell
of a lot. Number one, the party becomes effectively a cartel.
So they're very good at stopping any like upstart young progressive,

(01:18:43):
non binary, queer trans people from like getting a hold
on in local politics. You know, we we just had
the most progressive member of the Portland City Council ousted
by corporate business interests um and you know it, which
is very different from the trend that you're seeing in
places like Montana, and its like Oklahoma with a lot
of these very progressive, you know, young candidates. And it's

(01:19:04):
because UM number one, maybe the state parties are a
little more willing to throw a hail Mary. But also
just like those individual people, the people running in the
folks doing their campaign have had to be a lot
harder and a lot smarter to survive surrounded by people
who hate them. And I think also, like there's one

(01:19:25):
of the ways that I was pretty sure that this
wasn't going to be a read tsunami was so I
have some friends. I have friends who go to Wheaton College,
And for people who don't know who what Wheaton College is,
it is like, we're sorry that we're about to inform you. Yeah,
so Wheaton College is one of like I don't know,
maybe the second behind like Graham Young, like most right

(01:19:49):
wing evangelical college in the US, like they they famously
it's not as bad as the Liberty Yeah, yeah, it's
like number three, right, But like so it's this is
this is like the the intellectual sense of UM, like
of sort of evangelical politics. Like me, make sure I
have this right, Yeah, like Billy Graham's family has funneled

(01:20:09):
money into Wheaton College for decades in two days now
and okay, so like Whetton is a like broadly beaking,
like a fucking ferociously hostile place to be anything other
than a like assist head white person, right, it is
like unbelievably homophobic. It is really anti Semitic. And like

(01:20:32):
a few months ago, I was walking like through Wheaton
downtown to visit a front and in the middle of
fucking Wheaton downtown, they're they're they're like there there was
someone who on in their in their like fucking lawn
had had like had a giant Pride flag and like
it wasn't like it was like it was like the

(01:20:53):
there was the like the brown Pride flag too, right,
Like that was like even five years ago, that would
have been unimaginable, Like you would have been like you
would have been fucking chased out of town by m Bob.
Like and it's it's just there now, and I don't know,
like they haven't been run out. It's still there. No,

(01:21:15):
it's literally yes, everything that Christopher just said, and you
know these are people that Christopher, Christopher and I grew
up with like we literally I was there was a
granddaughter of Billy Graham in my high school class. UM.
And I think you know, as much as you know,
these people are not going to be socialists or progressive
at anytime soon. They are very much like normy moderate

(01:21:37):
Democrats now. But there were a lot of suburban white
people who got very turned off by Trump for the
Republican Party. And I think that this midterm is the
confirmation that, barring you know, some kind of economic catastrophe
that always always throws elections to the out of power party. Uh,

(01:21:58):
these Norman white urban nights are not going back. Uh.
And we you know when you look at trends across
the country. Um, you know JB. Princker one do Page County,
which is the county that Wheaton is in, which is
like you know, this is yeah, like this used to
be within Christopher and I's lifetimes. This used to be

(01:22:20):
a county that Republicans banked on getting three hundred thousand
votes out of on a statewide margin level. Um, and
now it's being one up and down by Democrats. Like
Democrats flipped the county executive office in du Page County
this year. Um, So like Chicago suburbs are trending are
continuing to trend left, Atlanta suburbs are continuing to trend left. Uh,

(01:22:42):
the like Raleigh Durham area in North Carolina is trending left.
The Texas urban areas are trending left. And this isn't
just like in comparison to twenty six. This is in
comparison to two years ago, which was a democratic environment.
Um So, the fact that these counties are swinging left
in a year where the country, even though the overall

(01:23:02):
results were fine, the country definitely swung right. Like these
people are not going back. And not just that these
people are not going back, but the ones who are staying.
Republicans aid, they're moving. They're leaving the suburbs and they're
establishing their little new white flight outposts in other places.
Um and the people who are replacing them are largely
people of color. Like the suburbs today in America are

(01:23:25):
sixty percent white as compared to in the year two
thousand when they were something like seventy percent white. Um
So this is I think this year was the confirmation
we needed that this is a permanent trend that the
suburbs from now on are either going to be a
wash or even frankly just democratic places where Democrats will
net votes. And this is all There still is a

(01:23:48):
lot of fear, and there's still is reason to be
very concerned about the ability of the GOP's power to
push things in Revanteus direction in an anti democratic election,
to remove the ability of people because that that is
you know, we're seeing them talk right now. We're seeing
guys like Matt Walsh Christopher Ruffo talk right now about
the need to like stop young people from voting, to

(01:24:08):
like crackdown on mail voting. Like this is not not
to say like, all right, it's all done, um, but
this is like, I guess the thing that's that's optimistic
about this overall is that it is um. It's evidence
that the there there was this kind of open question

(01:24:31):
after Trump won in UM and if one thing you
could look at, you could look at you could look
at two and they're like, well, clearly the trend since
then has been for the GOP to lose big in
most of these elections. But that was also anything but clear,
kind of as a result of of in the way

(01:24:52):
COVID fuck things up. And this this does seem to
like submit that that like, yeah, it may it may
have the long run proved to be a major, major
tactical failure to to have gone for this guy the
way that they did. Oh yeah, I mean and we
can only hope. Um. I mean, I personally, from an

(01:25:12):
entertainment factor, cannot wait for the de Santas versus Trump primary. Um,
I will be. I will be rooting for Trump because
he is funnier online. Um. And also I don't think
it would make a substance of difference uh in whether
or not like who would be the nominee, because the
Santis is just Trump without the charisma. Um. But I

(01:25:36):
think yeah, hopefully, Like we saw the Republican Party pay
a price this year for arguably the first time in
a long time for their insanity. Um, and it's good
to see that that happened. Hopefully it will happen again.
And I will also note for anyone listening, who does

(01:25:57):
you know you care about elections? You want to get
involved somewhere. The next somewhere for you to get involved
in is the state of Wisconsin, where the there is
a state Supreme Court seat up for election in April.
If Democrats win that seat, they will flip the Supreme
Court in Wisconsin, and that means that the absolutely insane

(01:26:20):
Republican gerrymanders in that state, which pretty much render the
state of Wisconsin a non democracy, will likely get overcharged
if Democrats are able to flip the Wisconsin Supreme Court,
which would mean a lot of good things could happen
for a lot of people who live in that state. Okay,
there is one other thing that is like basically I'm religious,

(01:26:41):
that I want to touch on before we close up,
which is that the extent to which the Republicans have
sort of entered chaos mode now a with with Trump
just sort of like going off on the Santis and
like the Republican Civil War happening. And then secondly, because
they see it looks like they've gotten the chaos mode

(01:27:02):
configuration of their House majority. Yes, um, any anyone who
pays attention to Congress, I would encourage you to get very,
very familiar with the term discharge petition, which is a
mechanism by which, if you have a majority of the
House is willing to sign a piece of paper that

(01:27:23):
says we should put this bill on the floor no
matter what it goes to the floor. No matter what, um, and,
I think you're probably gonna see Democrats successfully put a
lot of bills on the House floor in the next
two years because they're going to get they're going to
pick off the Republican moderates in the northeast to sign
these these pieces of paper. We should I think we

(01:27:44):
should explain what exactly the Republican position looks like, because
it's oh sure, so um it's so, I should caveat
this with the statement that there is still like I
would say, a five percent chance that Democrats may manage
to scrap, like scrape their way to a one seat majority. Um,

(01:28:06):
it's not likely by any means, but like, it is
still theoretically on the table, mostly because Lauren Bobert managed
to put herself into position where she might actually lose UM.
And but default modal outcome I would say is Republicans
end up with a three or four House seat majority.

(01:28:26):
Uh in. But what that means is that UHL, we
get Calvin Ball for the next two years, essentially because
Kevin McCarthy as a person, UM is well a he's
like very unintelligent in general. And this is like a
very common sentiment that you will run into uh. In
people who pay attention to Congress, he is not personally

(01:28:48):
capable of managing a House majority of four. This is
so widely accepted that Nancy Pelosi was willing to go
on the record in an interview the other day saying that, um,
and so, who knows, Kevin McCarthy may not even end
up being the speaker. We may not have a speaker
until March because no one would get two and eighteen votes. Um.

(01:29:11):
But whoever has that job, whatever Republican has that job,
it is going to be the most thankless job of
their life that they will suffer through the two years.
Because you know, the the pundit class and political operatives
love to talk about how ideologically diverse the Democratic Party
is in the House. And it's true because like on
the left wing end of the of the caucus you

(01:29:32):
have people like Rashida Claib and Ellen Omar, and the
right wing end you have people like Henry quay Are,
who tragically survived his primary this year. Um. But I
think it has gone under the radar that Republicans in
the House are arguably more ideologically diverse than Democrats are

(01:29:53):
because the moderates, the moderate Republicans in the House are
like your very standard like socially liberal, fiscally conservative types
that were very popular and like two thousand ten, um,
like you have like some of these Northeastern Republicans who
are were more than happy to vote for same sex marriage,
though they would probably vote for uh like to quodify row,

(01:30:17):
they would probably vote to codify birth control legal like reality.
And on the other end you have Marjorie Taylor Green
and like if MTG. Yeah, if if there is a
person on this earth who is capable of managing that caucus, Um,
I don't know who they are. I don't think anyone

(01:30:37):
knows who they are. UM, And I think that the
smartest thing that that person could do is um not
take the job and let someone else take the fall
for what is going to be two years of chaos
that will most likely hurt the Republican brand a lot
in the next two years. Yeah. That that's like one
of the things that actually makes me like slightly optimistic

(01:30:59):
is that like the Republican Party like is it is
it like a first coalition and it had been being
held together sort of like by Trump, And now Trump's
on on Twitter anymore, and Twitter may not exist by
like the time community speaker. Well, it's also I think

(01:31:23):
I might add Chris, it's not just by Trump. And
part of why Trump was able to get the position
did is it's it's a mix of Trump and owning
the Libs, right, Like, that's that's a huge part of
why the most visible members of this caucus are where
they are, Like, there's no there's no Marjorie Taylor Green
right without the way that particular social reinforcement pattern works.

(01:31:46):
And um, yeah, I I think that like that's not
like number one, if Twitter goes away, which could have
happened by the time you listen to this episode, that
really gets gets in the way of their ability to
own the Libs. But also so if they're just getting
their asses kicked up and down the country, they're they're
no longer owning the Libs. The Libs have not been owned, No,

(01:32:08):
they have not. And I think the other you know,
the other consideration here is that, um, we like to
talk a lot in this country because it's true about
neither party ever puts forth a substance of policy agenda. Um.
And there are a lot of Republican political operatives who
are running around right now complaining and saying that Republicans

(01:32:29):
lost because they failed to offer a viable alternative. Except
that's not true. Republicans did offer a policy agenda in
this midterm, and that policy agenda was Christian nationalism, and
American voters took one look at that and said, are
you fucking for real? Yeah, yeah, like that that's the
thing that like everyone like like people like all the
fucking New York Times calumn this, Like people don't understand that.

(01:32:52):
Like there's maybe thirty of the population who actually likes
that ship, and everyone else in the country is like,
what the fuck? And you know, and but but you know,
like the like the the the actual sort of median
person in the US is so much less like that

(01:33:14):
than the median person that every pundit imagines that like
the version of reality that exists in sort of like
the minds of the media class. Like it's not yeah,
they've they've they've cre they've created like incredible sand castles
in their mind. Now the tides like washing them away.
I don't know if the tide washing them away. I
think we can we can only hope that The New

(01:33:34):
York Times gets washed out to see. But I think,
you know, I sorry, go for it, no, no, no please.
I was just gonna say, like, you know, obviously the
next two years are going to be the next two years, UM,
and no one can predict the future. Anyone who anyone
who tells you and literally the next eighteen months that

(01:33:55):
they know how the two four elections are going to
go is lying to you, and you should lock them
and perhaps to report them to like whatever like non
retributed forms of authority exists in your local area. But
um my, you know, based on how this went, if
the same trends play out for the next two years,

(01:34:17):
which would be suburbs continue swinging left, Democrats continue to
rack up problems with minority voters, but like not to
the extent that we're gonna lose urban seats anytime soon. Um,
and Republicans continue racking up margins in the states and
like the seats that they're already winning by eighty points,
which helps them on a statewide level, but does not

(01:34:37):
help them in the U. S. House. My I would say, like,
assuming the current trends continue the trends we've had since sixteen, UM,
that would mean Democrats flip back the House in two
thousand twenty four. H it would also mean that we
are once again in like the fight of our lives
for the Senate, as we likely will be for every
single cycle for the next ten years. So you know,

(01:34:59):
just kind of get used to the um while you
can when you have the breather um. But yeah, like
we had an okay in term that was literally a
year ago looking like it was going to be possibly
the worst in term wipe out, possibly the end of
the Republic as literally literally, um, so you might be good.

(01:35:25):
I think the responsible thing to do now is to
close out by each giving one of our unhinged predictions
for what we're going to see in and I'm going
to start. I think we're gonna see Musk and McConaughey
VI for the governor of Texas once Greg Abbott is
forced out god from a sex scandal. Um, that's my

(01:35:47):
that's my call. Proved to me, show show when when,
when it happens? Everybody, everybody alowe me, Yeah, some some
French fries, Oh god, it's gonna happen. Calling it now,
Tom Brady, I reckon, Tom Brady is gonna Tom Brady
is gonna take a swing at it at Texas. No

(01:36:09):
one of those states up in where it's cold marines
all the time. Oh yeah, yeah, yeah, one of those. Yeah,
I assume he's from, broadly speaking, Illinois to Wisconsin. He is,
he would be running in New England. Please do not
pin that on us. Yeah yeah, yeah, yeah, bro, but
not that kind of cold like yeah, just just gray,

(01:36:29):
not like like miserable cold like you will have there. Yeah.
Tom Brady running in a place where you can't grow
tomatoes is Yeah, it's my prediction that feels good after
his massive success selling the hit crypto platform f t X.
What one can't Tom Brady do? Who knows? Don't, don't

(01:36:50):
ask that, whyn't put that out there? Robert win games
for the Bucketeers. Yeah, in Germany. Yeah, survive eating what
any normal human being would eat on a given day. Garrison,
I don't know, I don't. I don't care about this
type of thing very much. The perfect reason to make

(01:37:11):
unhinged prediction. I don't know. I think. One of the
funniest things is that earlier this year there's this big
bitcoin account who said that if things continue, bitcoin is
going to be a major factor in the mid terms,
which is so so I'm saying that what's the what's

(01:37:37):
what's the even dumber cryptocurrency? Um I was thinking of?
I was thinking of, does coin is gonna be a
significant factor in election? Yeah? Uh? Mine is that? Mine
is that? Okay, Pritzker is going to bring back like

(01:37:57):
the old school democratic machine, and but by Biden is
gonna fall out a window like Kamala Harris. He's going
to sort of like turn up like that they're going
to drain a damn in thirty years and find her
body and going to run again. Yeah, yeah, he won't
because he will have fallen out of a building then
near the end of at the end of about three Christmas.

(01:38:24):
That's your prediction that Joe Biden will fall out of
a window the fourth comenetration of Prague. Like we we
we all think that like the sort of like threat,
like the threat to bourgeois democracy comes come comes from
the Republicans. It's not. It's Pritzker. Prisker is gonna coup
the fucking country and probably sixty percent of the population

(01:38:44):
is going to be completely on board because he's going
to be less insane than like everyone that's been like
in charge of this country for the last fifty years.
And you know, he's gonna save democracy then okay, yeah, okay,
leaves me. What is my unhin prediction. I don't think
I'm going to top christophers prediction about JP prinsker Um.

(01:39:08):
You know, I think my unhin prediction will be that
Taylor Swift runs for Senate in Tennessee. Oh god, oh
she could do it. Yeah, yeah, I don't don't look
if she if she brings on, if she brings on
the head of her fan club who went to jail
in Israel for refusing to serve the idea, I think
that actually might get some progressive Yeah, that may have

(01:39:30):
been untrue sadly, the oh the Swifty refuge, but maybe
not really. Why why did you even introduce that? Why?
Why would you? Why would you say that to me? Again?
Because not all these beautiful things we believe it could
be true, But Taylor Swift running for Tennessee, she would
almost certainly be better than whoever is a Tennessee senator
now right, Yeah, it's now Colonel Sanders or someone basically

(01:39:55):
the same as Colonel Sanders, I imagine, can Hucky Yeah,
come on, come on, Brittany James is Kentucky. It's called Kentucky.
Fried chicken, James, that was that was basically a slur.
I there is a type of guy epitomized by Colonel

(01:40:17):
Sanders who also occupies all the Senate seats south to
the Mason Dixon line. That's not true. That's that's my
that's my stunts, and I'm sticking to it. I am
pushing back on this. Well, I'm gonna watch a fog
Horn Leghorn video because that's that's who I'm thinking of now, James,
all right, everybody that's been the episode, mm go vote swift, Yeah,

(01:40:42):
vote another couple of times. Just make sure, yeah, the
old Chicago model. Vote early, vote often pay for pay
for a few meals. Everyone go to Colorado and vote
against Yes, literally seven of you or whatever conswing this
move to color Right. We can't deal with that Sha anymore.
Fund raise in order to purchase a huge number of

(01:41:05):
drones and drop ballots over wherever it is in Colorado.
They count votes. I assume Denver. Yeah, like at Denver
in your ballots and stop listening to podcasts. Legal disclaimer Okay,

(01:41:32):
it's actually me not the legal disclaim a guy from
Medical aud but we just wanted to mention that both
of Our guests today are members of you a W,
but they do not speak on behalf of you a W. Okay,
enjoy the podcast. Uh could happen here? It's it's it's

(01:42:05):
this podcast. It's podcast. We're doing a podcast. It's a podcast,
and today it's podcast with me. I'm James and I'm
joined by Chris and I'm joined by a couple of
grad students from you see San Diego. Today we're going
to talk about grad students strikes. Are going to talk
about the grad student strike Volte that's coming up at
you see San Diego and some other grad students strikes
that Chris and I have been part of back in

(01:42:27):
the Middle Ages. Okay, so I'm joined today. But Alex, Alex,
you're you're you're studying. I'm trying to get this correct.
Cancer genomics a U C s D. Is that correct?
That is correct? Thanks for having me. Yeah, you're welcome.
And Tyler Bell as well. And Tyler you're a post
doc and you're doing Altzheimer's research, so right, yes, and

(01:42:48):
you're both members of U a W. Yes, that's correct.
I've been a member for at least two years. But yeah,
and I'm a member of the actual the subset of
you aw that just formed representing student researchers in completing
their PhDs. So we'll explain all the details of that
of course going forward. Yeah, I think maybe we should

(01:43:10):
start there and explain kind of the economic relationship of
PhD and POSTDC students to the university, like what what
work they do and the As we were talking about beforehand,
people might not even be familiar with the fact that
you get paid by the university in many of these positions, right,
So can you explain like how that works? Yeah, definitely.

(01:43:32):
So Yeah, as you mentioned, UM, we do uh in
our various roles as graduate students, teachers, and post docs.
We do a lot of work, majority of the work
in fact, that is critical for the university to function
as it does, UM, and we do that in a
few different roles. Some of us are paid to teach

(01:43:53):
or t a classes. We call those academic student employees
who are represented by one of our unions you aw
to eight six five. The ragnder of PhD students are
actually paid directly to do their research, and this is
usually funded up of grants or other money that the
university has your march for research. So as we are
progressing towards our degrees. We are doing work that is

(01:44:13):
productive in our labs to get papers out, get grant
funding coming in, and we receive a stipend to perform
that work. Uh. Those students are known as graduate student
researchers or gsrs, who are represented by a new union
that just formed because it actually became recently legal to
form such a union in the state of California. We

(01:44:33):
are represented by s are you bargaining for our first contract?
And then we have the post docs, which Tyler can
probably talk more about. Who are students who have completed
their I'm sorry I should We're really clarified. Are not
students they are They are employees of the university who
have completed their degrees so are no longer students and
are doing research work in labs, usually driving their own

(01:44:55):
projects forward under supervision of professors. So they are represented
by a third union, and that's part of this sort
of collective um organizing called you a w F A ten.
Well you have postox unions. Yeah, well that's so cool.
I think the one here you see is actually the
biggest and one of the first ones that formed. I

(01:45:16):
remember I was on a Wikipedia page, which I shouldn't
use as an academic, but I totally there and I
was likely made the game away. Yeah, yeah, And I
think it's it's fascinating because if there are all these
like memes that you'll see as a graduate student, and
then it's like when you finish your pH d, where
it's like you always think that you're going to get

(01:45:37):
off the like the grind, right, Like you're like, oh,
I'll do my m A and then I'll get off
and then I'll do my pH d and then the
people respect me and I'll be compensated for a massive
amount of work I do. And then like I'll just
finish this post doc and then you're like, oh, I'm
fifty five, you know. Like it's all of those positions
are heavily exploited by by universities that make a metric

(01:45:57):
ship ton of money from these people, who, as you say,
do most of the work that keeps a university running.
So perhaps we could talk about the issues that are
at stake that that are leading to this this strike
authorization vote, and maybe if we go through a little
bit of a timeline as well, that would be great. Yes,
maybe Teller, maybe you could like explain the fifty ten
timeline and I can talk a little bit about this,

(01:46:19):
are you, and I guess kind of place a five
point yeah. So chronologically the post talk we're up for
their contract negotiation, which that's just to set our wages,
benefits and workplace safety and other types of protections we
want UM. And that actually came up I think in
September of UM, and I could be wrong with the

(01:46:40):
date specifically. So much has changed, but we initially back
in UM started actually asking people what they wanted to
see in their new contract, like our members, because the
union isn't like like I if I didn't care about
the union or no one else care to what exists
like it's the post docs and we have to take
out like a couple of hours a week to do
this thing, and sometimes is twenty hours on top of

(01:47:01):
our research which is forty hours. And so during that
time we surveyed, everyone got the demands that people wanted,
and the top two issues that people asked for that
they want it changed was our wages and also the housing. UM.
We wanted affordable housing because right now, UM, you know
over of academic workers, including the post docs, who you

(01:47:23):
would think you know, you have a PhD. This is
the time you can finally have affordable housing and you
don't have to worry about food scarcity and all these
other things that you're worried about as a graduate student.
So just take this in the context of like we're
post docs. We're supposed to be like the most paid
or at least a better off because we have our PhD.
Think about like what that means for the graduate students
and those that aren't yet at that stage yet. Um.

(01:47:44):
And so when we went forward with our proposals, we
um create a lot of other things that we thought
were important, including things like transit UM bargaining demands to
make public transit like affordable for post docs because currently
we don't get any kind of like free paths for that.
They don't even consider it um. In fact, you know,
they probably think we all have cars, which isn't true

(01:48:06):
because a lot of post docs are international scholars. We
were also asking for child care support because currently, like
a good bit of you know, our post docs have children. Um,
which is normal because this is a normal like family
creation time or whatever you wanna call it, but um,
it can be one of the only times as an
academic when it when it really sort of doesn't massively

(01:48:28):
disadvantage your career to have stuff me right exactly. And
like post docs, like the whole preposition of a post
doc was, you know, there's not enough faculty spots for
once you get a PhD. And post docs now can
last five if not longer, like five years or longer.
And there's a new position called an academic researcher, which

(01:48:49):
is a type of like title that you get when
you can no longer be a post doc. But it's
also because there's just not enough faculty, so they put
you into a different title to do research. And UM collectively,
both US post docs and people that are academic researchers,
we don't get any affordable childcare, we don't have affordable
housing UM, and our wages are below the cost of living.

(01:49:10):
And currently we went through the proposals back then and
we over time a year and a half have not
really made any leeway on these proposals that actually changed
the material conditions for post docs. Like the university has
been you know, bargaining in bad faith that we have
multiple unfair UM labor practice lawsuits against from our public

(01:49:33):
relations board for the employers UM and three of those
have been UM. Sorry, let me get those numbers right.
Multiple of those have actually been successfully have complaints filed
against the university. Some of the things that the university
has done in particularly while we've been bargaining is one
not bringing the information to the table that we request,
like denying our request for information. They have also refused

(01:49:55):
to bring the people that can make the type of
decisions that we need to the table. And they've all
also been making unilateral changes to things like bullying policies
and other workplace issues without even being at the bargaining table.
And the last thing that they've been doing during this
process is serving members of our union outside of like

(01:50:15):
the bargaining process, Like we we don't know about it.
I mean, we did find out about it, and then
we followed the UM the the complaint and so right
now we're at a point where we've gotten a lot
of things, you know, kind of like moved on in
terms of things that aren't compensation in terms of our
bargaining UM, like things that we want such as bullying protections.

(01:50:37):
That was something that we actually had to like have
a big action for to actually get that on the table.
To move. So currently we won protections against bullying, which
is kind of like pretty enormous because in academia, university
says we're against bullying and that they have all these
resources for you, but through resources always end at we're right,
you're wrong. And UM. Now we have something in our contracts,

(01:50:59):
not just for that post docs and acondic researchers, but
also for UM the other bargaining units to actually protect
us UM in a process that like we could grieve
it as you know, UNI represented workers UM. And so
right now, the reason that we had to authorize the strike,
especially for our group as post docs and economic researchers,
because they started bargaining kind of like maybe UM further

(01:51:23):
along in that year with us, but they are kind
of at the same place of like not getting the
same type of responses and UM. We just want them
to actually come to the table, bring the people that
can make the decisions so that we can have you know,
affordable housing, fair wages to actually do the research that
we do here. And I just want to say that
we bring a lot of value to the university through

(01:51:43):
grants in particular as post talks, so we do most
of the writing of research papers, conducting the experiments. UM.
People think that if people think that faculty sit there
and run a wet lab and actually do the you know,
the work of the wet labs. Um. You know, that
would be an amazing faculty person, But they're really busy
in terms of like having to write grants themselves. We
do the bulk of the work and actually making the
research happen. UM. We do a bulk of the training

(01:52:05):
in terms of the graduate students and the undergrads that
are in the lab, and so we provide an enormous
value to the university. But at the same time, while
we provide these values, UM, the university doesn't want to
give us a fair living condition or affordable housing. And
the last thing I'll say and then I'll let Alex
talk about the other units, UM, is that you know,

(01:52:26):
we bring a ton of value to the university because
of these grants. And for every hundred dollars of that
grant that is UM given to the university, the university
charges things like the nih you know, um, you know,
fifty eight dollars and indirects. So this is a ghost
money that we don't know where it goes. Our pis
don't get to have a say over, and that's money

(01:52:47):
that usually goes to things that capital projects that could
go back to keeping you know, um, the post docs
actually living in uh An Okay living situation. We just
in what capital projects are so counter projects or things
like you know, um planning out building buildings that they
want and other things things that aren't really like compensation

(01:53:10):
based or employee based, you know, because the university, like
you see as the biggest landowner and so they obviously
we want more and more things that they can develop
or lands that they can buy um, and that's kind
of what they kind of focus many of these indirects on.
And I really don't know the clear picture on indirects,
and that's kind of the problem is that we don't
know where all this money kind of goes. It's they

(01:53:32):
if people. Obviously lots of our listeners are in San Diego.
The scale of construction at UCSD is incredible. Like I've
been here for fifteen years now, and I swear every
time I go back there's a new building, like and
they contend to student housing. It's really old student housing.
I think that they've built. But yeah, and if I

(01:53:52):
can jump in about one of those, which relates a
lot to why graduate students have become more active on
this campus. UM. Three or four of those extraordinarily large
buildings you're talking about, we're actually intended to be built
as subsidized graduate student housing, where you would be you know,
you get on a waite list, you're guaranteed once you
get off the way, which you can live there for

(01:54:13):
two years and pay below market rent. UM. That lasted
for a little bit of time, but the university just
a couple of years ago or so almost doubled um
the price for those units. They tried to hide it
behind saying that their capacity increases, but um, what they're
saying is for the same price as before, you can

(01:54:33):
live with two people in a very small square footage
studio apartment. UM. But really that studio is now just
double UM. So that is one of the things, uh,
certainly that we are concerned about is that, Yeah, money
of what significant portion university's budget does go into these
capital improvement projects which are nominally intended for student and
UH and postdoc benefit UM, but which tend to come

(01:54:56):
back and and not be quite as helpful in the
long run. I mean, it seems like they're just doing
real estate speculation and then doing rent extraction from it,
which yeah, and this is something they've done, like they
did this, this is a very very similar thing in
what like two thousand nine. Like like again, like they
built what I built into your building. It was affordable
for a short a period of time, and then it

(01:55:17):
suddenly became completely unaffordable, and like they've really consistently extracted
rent from the people that they are under paying. Yeah,
and those buildings were actually this this incident even got
a lot of faculty on our side because those buildings
were a major um draw for how we were able
to recruit new people to come and do research with us.

(01:55:37):
As we were saying, yeah, the costle living here is
really high. You're not going to get a huge stipend
er salary, but we do have the subsidised housing. And
people had actually already committed to do their PhD here
in labs of the university, and then the rent increase
came out that April or May and people said well no,
and then they a bunch of people decommitted from programs.
So it was it was a significant issue here. But

(01:56:00):
if not backed off of that, and the problem with
like the university being one of the biggest landlords, is
that when they increase the rents for these even grad housing,
it affects everyone else. So like prices, like my current rent,
I live maybe a mile away from campus. My rent
was seventeen hundred, which was eating up most of my
income anyway, and it went up to and you know,

(01:56:23):
this is directly tied to like the university setting a
higher market rate UM, which then allows them to hurt
everyone else that lives you know, not just in around UCSD,
but also in San Diego generally. Yeah. One of the
big things about UM that we're trying to get the
university to understand, and one of the reasons I'm proud
of the demands that we're making UH in this round
of bargaining is is the effect we have on the

(01:56:45):
local economy and of people who aren't even affiliated with
the university have their lives affected based on the rent
and based on the cost of things because of the
economic footprint that we have. And as how I mentioned,
one of our demands is UM some more subsidized transit passes.
The university already subsidizes It's a significant amount of transit,
but it's not enough, and it's not enough to actually

(01:57:06):
really make a difference in terms of emissions in our region.
So we're trying to raise both our own working conditions
as well as as make meaningful changes in the university's
impact in the region. And in response to that, the
university released in part a very funny statement the other
day that accused us and used transit as an example,
accused us of having a quote social justice agenda. So

(01:57:27):
I wasn't quite sure if the university or um Ronda
Santis wrote that particular sans release, but uh, it was.
It was quite funny, you know, Okay, like that. The
more thinking about this, right, this is a public university.
Why are they even charging rent? They own the land, right,
why are they even charging rent in the first place?

(01:57:48):
Like what what is? Oh my god? Like, well, it's
just the the housing example I brought up was funded
through what they very proudly refer to as a public
private partnership. So that's where the one is going. Oh great,
it's going to investors. And recently, for the post docs,
their solution to our housing crisis was they obtained some

(01:58:11):
building in downtown San Diego, which is you know, twelve
or more miles away from campus and the building starts
at like rent of three thousand dollars or more. But
like I said, this building, yeah, with the one with
the creepy bed and the closet that comes out and
kills your cat. But you know what it has like
a closet that folds out o comes out. Is that

(01:58:36):
their extended downtown. Yeah. I've been trying to p R
A and a bunch of stuff about that building and
they've been quite reticent to hand it over and toddly. So, Alex,
is there any more contexts you wanted to add from
your side about like is about sort of what is
driving people to to ask for a strike authorization vote? Yeah, definitely.
I mean, our concerns as graduate students are certainly very

(01:58:59):
similar to a out of the concerns that postdoctoral students have,
except that we make even less money than they do.
So certainly UH urgent on the compensation side, our units
are demanding a minimum UH graduate student stipend of fifty
four thousand dollars a year UM, whereas UH none of
us make more than thirty three or thirty four right now,

(01:59:20):
and that's very deficient of the program and very dependent
on your source of funding, so most make quite less
than that. UM. We also have a number of other
issues that have come up and cause problems for students
that we want to be able to have a union
in order to rectify. I mentioned that UM our Student
Researchers United Union. It actually knew. We're bargaining for our

(01:59:41):
first contract, and we think we're going to be able
to get a lot of practical benefits out of that,
not just UM you know, in terms of a contract,
but actually something where we can have some parody and
and some for some some some organization to come to
back for us when the university creates issues. For example, Uh,
the university has known this for a long time. But
the payroll system that manages graduate students stipends and fellowships

(02:00:03):
and and and and to stipend disperse mints is a
bit unreliable for reasons that they can't explain. Boy, so
I wasn't I wasn't a grad student, but I was
an undergrad when our Chicago's grad students when a strike,
and that was a big thing of like people like
people would get paid in the university would sometimes they

(02:00:25):
wouldn't get paid enough. The wouldn't get paid at all.
There was another time where they accidentally get overpaid and
the university wouldn't tell them and then they just take
all the money out of their bank account and catastrophe. Yeah.
Is it similar things here? Very much? So? Yeah, yeah,
there is at least My personal story with this is

(02:00:47):
um uh pretty much ever since so, I applied for
and received in in i H Individual Fellowship. For all
the other nerds out there, I got it. It's a
thirty one in i H Fellowship. But essentially what that
says is the n i H likes my research proposal
and they are going to fund a portion of the
rest of my PhD. So in a sense, I've offset

(02:01:08):
the cost of my labor by bringing an extra a
few tens of thousands of dollars to the university. Um However,
the processing for that has not been smooth, and there
are months where I simply have to remind them to
pay me. And when that paycheck doesn't come through, my
very hard working program coordinator, it's not her fault, but
she has been open support tickets. She has to go

(02:01:28):
through ten different levels of bureaucracy to find out where
the hold up is, and so What that results in
is people often times not getting significant portions of their
stipend and tell well into the beginning of the first
or second week of the month. UM. I personally am
been lucky enough to you know, build up some savings
living here UM, but many students, especially our first year

(02:01:50):
is coming right out of college, have not been able
to do that. And a lot of times at the
first of the month we have people, you know, people
will come to me and say they just didn't they
I don't know why my stipmens I didn't work. I
can't pay rent, or I can't get groceries. And these
issues have been going on. This have not been one
time things or sporadic things. These are things that have
been continuously going on for years. And what we're really

(02:02:15):
hoping for is that with the creation of this Student
Researchers Union, that we will be able to not just
you know, send polite emails and say hi, can you
pay me if you get a chance, We will actually
have a literal international union that will be sending those
emails and say, you know, you fix this, or by
the terms of the contract, we get X, Y and
Z damages UM. And we're hoping that that leads to

(02:02:37):
improvements in the system as a as a whole, because
it will get more expensive. So that issaraily. One of
the reasons we formed s are you and are after
a brief vote to strike for recognition because the university
ignored the employee religious part of California, which resulted in
some very spicy press releases from herbs which is great, um,
but we did eventually get recognition and and now hopefully

(02:03:00):
in a couple in a month or so, we'll have
a contract. Yeah, to explain for people as well who
aren't familiar. If you're teaching right, you may not have
been paid over the summer in some positions like I
know I wasn't in mind, so like a late payment
in September or even wait until October, like is you're
already at the bottom of your savings, like there were

(02:03:22):
there were full quarters the headquarters at UCSD where like
I lived in my car because it didn't make it
all the way through the summer and the savings I had,
you know, So it really is. And I'm sure there
are a lot of still like and how it's graduate
students at UCSD because of the cost of living in
the the wags are so divergent. Yeah, hey, Chris, you

(02:03:42):
you know what won't make you live in your car?
Oh God, there's no way that's It's going to be
the watches that Harry patrol again, Todd Gloria, Okay, yeah,
this has brought to you by Landlords into The's adverts

(02:04:03):
and we're back. And so what I wanted to talk
about was some of the actions that have been taken
by student organizations so far, and also some of the
repercussions to come from those actions, because again, student organizing
is a little different, and I want people to understand that.
So maybe if it makes sense to start with this wildcats, right,
we can start there. If you want to start further back,

(02:04:24):
then we can start fither back to you. You know,
is probably about the extent of my how far my
experience goes back, Um, But I can tell kind of
the story of that a little bit. Um. There was
a movement that we referred to as COLA, which stands
for a cost of living adjustment and convenient as very
convenient acronym, which resulted in people coming to protest with

(02:04:47):
empty bottles coke on a stick. And that was a
really common science fantastic UM. But that was a movement
that started at the University of California, Santa Cruz. One
of the for people aren't familiar with. You see, it
is really actually many campuses together in one system. In
this particular one started at our campus in Santa Cruz,
UM and it was what is called a wildcat strike,

(02:05:08):
which is if you're not family with unions that is
um UM, at least in America, there are very uh
careful rules that you have to follow of when exactly
you are allowed to call a legally protected strike, and
that's often dependent on your contract or the label laws
of your state. UM. But it is possible for workers
to get together without the explicit approval of their union

(02:05:30):
and UH take the added risk that involves to hold
a labor stoppage so UM I'm not sure of the
exact number, but somewhere between fifty and a hundred or
two hundred or so t a s um SO teaching
assistance at the Santa Cruz campus decided to withhold teaching
and also final exam and UH semester or sorry quarter

(02:05:53):
grades UH for a quarter uh in I believe this
would have been fall or followed twenty team UM and
they held UM. They held essentially daily pickets and protests
UM at their central insrance of their campus, and this
resulted in quite an extreme response from Santa Cruz administration,

(02:06:17):
University of Santa Cruz administration. UH. They called in the
California Highway Patrol. UM. Also there's will I've asked, I'll
send this to christ and James put in the footnotes.
But there is a Vice article where someone did a
lot of public records request and found out that the
FBI was also involved, or at least FBI provided technology
was involved. UM. There may have been sort of counter

(02:06:38):
terrorism UH units involved in the state in interesting ways UM.
But essentially there was a highly militarized response to what
was essentially a few grant students not doing grades. UM.
So this response, the images that came out of this,
people getting arrested UH for being in the street and
such UM started to actually provoke sympathy actions across the

(02:07:01):
rest of the campus and there was really a campus
wide or system wide movement starting to build. And then
March of happened and almost all of us are labs
shut down, the campuses shut down, UH. Those of us
who work from home could, UM. Those of us who
couldn't often had you know, many other struggles to deal with,
and that kind of killed the pandemic, essentially killed that movement.

(02:07:23):
But at the same time, UM, you know these uhh
u A W twets at five and you could get
ten already existed. SRU was starting to get formed at
this time. We actually managed to get car check recognition
during the pandemic where no one could actually go to
one central point in get cards. So I'm quite proud
of that. And we sort of rebuilt off of kind
of UM, sort of the ashes of that movement. And

(02:07:44):
even though it was not UM and I personally supported,
but even though it was not a university sort of
excuse me, certainly not university supported, but union supported uh movement. UM,
I think it really helped a kind of um plants
needs for graduate students and post docx having some you know,
some degree of labor consciousness. When I was doing walkers

(02:08:05):
to get people signed up for the union, get people
quote on the strike, they would say, you know, they
haven't obviously been keeping track of all the barguing, but
would say, oh, yeah, I remember, is this like in
Santa Cruz, I remember what they did, and people would
be and be ready, you know, to get involved. So um,
it was a deferred kind of benefit given the pandemic,
but I think it helped get a lot of the

(02:08:26):
energy that we have today. Yeah, that's great to see actually,
because iknew we really struggled with sort of political consciousness
on the on the among the grab seeds in my
time at E C. S D. And Yeah, I guess
it makes us like that they were I remember, like
I were talking to some people who were sort of
involved with it, and like watching the videos coming out
of here, like that was I think, like probably the

(02:08:47):
most intensive military responsive I think I've ever seen to
a strike at the US. It was wild. Like, Yeah,
the university chancellor, chancellor of Santa Cruz at that time
bragged or I don't know if it was Brad or
complained that they were spending three hundred thousand dollars a
day on that response. Yeah, they went incredibly hard. And

(02:09:08):
I want to kind of get into why, like the
university is really really strongly strongly dislike strikes and partly
because they rely heavily on underpaid graduate student labor and
increasingly relying heavily on underpaid adjunct labor as well to
take the place of these expensive tenure track positions. So
can we talk about a little bit about like what

(02:09:30):
it means to strike as a grad student, because it's
not the same strike as a grad student as it
is to strike if you work on a production lineup right, Like,
it really can make a serious impact on your whole career,
and it can make it a serious impact on your
relationship prets with your with your supervisor or advisor or mentor,
and so can you can you one of you or
both of you explained a little bit about the repercussions

(02:09:51):
to come from striking as a graduate student. Yeah, I'm
having to share my thoughts and then and then um Tyther,
you can maybe talk about what uh what post docs
are thinking? Um from the uh t A perspective, I
think I don't want to. I'm not currently I'm currently
a student researchers, so I'm not currently teaching, I think,

(02:10:11):
and that since it makes there's a little more cut
and dry. It's you're not going to teach your discussion section,
You're not going to grade your exams. There's are very
concrete things you can do that are sort of separate
from your research work. For those of us paid to research,
it's a little bit um harder to figure out where
exactly you're sometimes you're labor for the university is and
where you're um uh kind of research and and and

(02:10:35):
not wanting to sort of harm yourself. Like I know
people who have planned their advancements to candidacy during this time,
and I think they're still going through with that because
we can say, well, that's more academic, that's more your
personal a kind of progress um in life, and and
so those sort of things will continue, um. But but
I think it's one of the things, um that that's

(02:10:55):
sort of um important is is um sort of your
day to day work in the lab and not necessarily
saying your research project, but on just sort of maintaining things,
answering questions, communicating with collaborators, sharing your results with people,
helping undergraduates in the lab, helping um you know, prepare

(02:11:17):
figures or prepare text for your advisor to submit grants,
and all these other things that are not necessarily like
I am doing this particular, you know, I think for
my degree. UM. So I know a lot of people
are worried about, especially because in the life sciences. We
have situations where we have experiments that go on for
months and they cost tens of thousands of dollars to run,
and if you miss a time point on that we're

(02:11:38):
throwing months of your life and out of the window,
and that it hurts yourself really more than the university.
So it's been a I think, especially because organizing grad
student researchers is something new, at least in America. UM.
I think it's something that in the coming years will
be kind of considered more and people will kind of

(02:11:58):
I think I hope. What I hope is people learn
from our whatever our experience happens to be next week
when we walk out and start to kind of calibrate,
what does it look like? What is what is an
effective work stoppage for a researcher look like? UM? And
I think people are are We've had a lot of discussions,
We've had programmed meetings, so a bunch of students from
my program got together and talked about this UM and
I think it might end up looking different for different people,

(02:12:20):
But really what we're trying to communicate is is don't
do something that's going to UM, you know, damage yourself. UM.
But but but do what you can to disrupt normal operations.
Show up at the picket, um uh, and and make
sure you you communicate, you know, to everyone and around
you why you're leaving, and and and you know, cause
as much disruption as you can. That's kind of what

(02:12:42):
our our thinking is at the moment. Yeah, and I
thin guts you want to add t Yeah, so I
want to add that. UM. So for this one, this strike,
I mean, the reason that we're doing it is because
they're not coming to the table in good faith. So
I was going to correct my numbers. So we had
twenty seven UM complaints that we fouled with the California

(02:13:03):
Public Employment Relations Board, and six of those were actually
official complaints to the University of California. And so this
strike is a little different because it's you know, it's
interesting to have to explain to other people why this
is so important, especially in such a short time frame.
And so for post docs, like on a day to

(02:13:24):
day basis, we do so much research that every day matters,
and our employment schedules aren't very long. So I say
that post docs are generally in there for five years.
But p I don't want to keep a post talk
for a year or two or longer, especially like I've
noticed a pattern here in academia in general that post docs.
It's some people prefer to keep them a year and

(02:13:46):
two years because by the time you ask for pay
raises or the time you ask for curd development and
to get to your next stage, you're not worth it
to them anymore, and they change you out. So when
I come in as a post doc, each position, I've
come in everyday mattered and setting up my research experiment,
setting up my papers, setting up what I was gonna
do for the job search, because you don't have that
much time. It takes you know, six to eight months

(02:14:08):
to get get even an initial interview for a faculty
job UM, and that's a rare thing that you would
get anyway. I think about two percent of post talks
become faculty at this point, and so we're giving up
a lot of Yeah, it's really bleak, and so like
right now, I think the fact that we authorize a
strike based on the UM bad faith bargaining. We did

(02:14:30):
that because like things are so important, but we know
what we're gonna lose. So if you have to strike
for weeks, that is lost experiments, that's lost time to
do our publications be competitive for this competitive job field. UM.
And also we're gonna let down a lot of people
because we're kind of anchors in our lab for the
undergraduates and the under and the graduate students and also

(02:14:50):
the text in our lab. And so if we're gone,
the lab just kind of die, especially if the grass
roots walk out too. UM. But I think we know
that the value that I would get personally for my career, UM,
it isn't worth it if I see not only myself
suffering each year, not being able to make my rent
enable to feed myself, like eating one mill a day

(02:15:12):
is um not really great, and being able to afford
one UM wardrobe this entire two years of employment is
not great either. UM. And I'm a post doc and
I see the graduate students who I was a graduate
student two years ago. There's not a real border there,
UM and seeing them suffer. You know, most of us
post talks don't want to see anyone else have to
go through that. So it's worth the lost time, and

(02:15:34):
it's kind of encalculable. But I could say what we
would lose because grants are so up in the air.
But you know, We're talking millions of dollars for a
grant cycle being lost if a post doc can't you know,
submit the application. We're talking you know, uh what Alex said,
how expensive this equipment and experiments are in these big
labs UM in biology and engineering. So it's really immeasurable.

(02:15:58):
And I think it's on the u C to come
to the table and good faith and say, hey, let's
not do let's not's not ruin their research and their
teaching UM, because that's the thing that we're here to
support UM. And I just want to say that overall,
we're only less than one percent of you see's total budgets.
So what is it to give us a fair wage
and a good housing so we can continue to not UM,

(02:16:18):
to continue to continue to do our research and teaching
and not have to go and strike and lose all
of this. Yeah, yeah, I think it's very fair. You
know what else, It only pays out one percent of
their income to their employee, said the Washington to stay
higher patrol notes not they pay Yeah. Yeah, Yeah, it's disappointing,

(02:16:39):
isn't it. Yeah, We're we're back. Yeah. So I think
you've done a really excellent job of explaining sort of
what's at stake and what people can stand to lose.
I know it can be very confusing. Also as a teacher,
I will add, like what do you do when you're
you're not supposed to communicate right like, so, like what
what about when your students email you? That can be
very difficult or especially if it comes towards the time

(02:17:02):
when you're writing application letters or your writing letters of
support for your your be a students who want to
go into an m a. Or pH d program, like
you don't want like many of us teach as much
out of vocation as for the thirty ye old grand
a year. We can make it a place where the
cost of living is insane, and so like we want
to help those people because we care about our students

(02:17:23):
and and so it can be very hard for us
to go on strike. I will say that we're very
fortunate in the community college district here, which is a
different system and for people who aren't aware it's an
entirely different university system. We have a very strong union
and as a result, our I junct faculty here are
I believe some of the best paid in the country.
The teacher the community college sometimes and it's exclusively thanks

(02:17:46):
to a strong union and faculty being willing to back
up that union, so like it does work, which is
nice to see. But let's talk about some of the
actions that have been taken already and understand it. Some
folks occupied like a very busy intersection earlier this year
in the spring, right you want to talk about that. Yeah,

(02:18:06):
that was the action that we had um UM back
in April UM to sort of raise awareness of the
you know, issues of bargaining and some of the things
that we're going out at that time UM and I
was really impressive how well it went, actually UM in
terms of the number of students who came out number

(02:18:28):
we are actually willing to participate in that. But yeah,
we gotta several hundred people altogether marched down to UM
the intersection for our San Diego listeners. That's via La
Joya and La Hoya Village Drive, just so you can
get a picture of how important of an intersection this
was those of you who know it. UM and did
not allow any cars at the intersection for an entire
rush hour, which was fantastic UM and the whole foods

(02:18:53):
we did. Yeah, yeah, I took UH I hope that
UM sic p D build UCSD for that because they
had about fifty officers controlling traffic to helicopters. UM it
was quite a response. I talked to an undercover cop
on the bridge over the highway they had. He was
upset that he was missing something, some baseball game or something.

(02:19:15):
I don't know. I could have had a real job
just left. Yeah, I'm actually staring at that intersection right now,
And if I could tell you how busy it is,
Like we were terrified of what, Like safety was the
most important thing, and I think we did a good
job being sure everyone was safe. But like it's busy,

(02:19:35):
it's it is a heartline over your My first day
in America, I was walking with another Grats to try
and find some food and we tried to cross that road,
goes stuck in the middle, got to jaywalking ticket and
right I knew I had made a great choice in
coming to California at that time. Yeah, that is that

(02:19:56):
road takes like if you want to cross all three ways,
because it's one of our one of stupid California roads,
we can only cross the intersection on three sides, so
we're gonna go all the way around. That's going to
be like five six, seven minutes waitning at crosswalks. It's
it's but that's that's for maybe a different podcast about
nightmares here in San Diego. UM. I think there's one
other action that we had that I would really want

(02:20:17):
to highlight and and this was about, you know, related
to a post dox. So maybe maybe Tyler can kind
of film the details UM about the the action we
had for UM for the UH postox redence. I can't.
I can't. I'm blanking on her name, but made may
be able to talk about There's been so many post
docs and actions. So this is a really horrible case

(02:20:39):
where someone who you know had brought up that there
was data UH ethics issues in their lab, which obviously,
as any post soccer graduate student telling your boss that
they're doing something wrong never goes well. UM, but this
person was bringing up this issue. This person also was
UM was pregnant and UM at that point the person,

(02:21:00):
once they found out that this person was pregnant, UM
had decided, oh, well, you need to leave by the
end of the year, UM, which would make the make
it to where the person would get deported. Because this
was an international scholar UM in their third trime. Master UM,
you know, in in January, and so it was too
more insurance during her third trimester. Yeah, and so Alex,

(02:21:23):
if if you have a good memory of the action,
I'll let you speak about it, because it was pretty awesome. Yeah,
it was pretty great. We got a ton of people
to rally in the health sciences area of campus. UM
people essentially set up little mini pickets of the relevant
buildings UM basically not blocking the insurance, but making sure
everyone went in new exactly you know why we were

(02:21:45):
there and what the issue was. And they were eventually
towards the end of the day. I was I wasn't
there at that point, but they were able to actually
get up to UM where UM the chair of her
department's office in lab were UM and I there nothing
threatening that went on, but I do believe the cops
were called nonetheless UM and and my understanding was this

(02:22:06):
is just rumor. But he told someone that he really
needed them to leave because he had to get to
the bathroom and didn't want to talk to the students.
So that was funny part of the story. UM. But
they did get him on video because they eventually were
able to talk to the chair of the department and
got him on video saying I think this person deserves
an extension of their contract. And that day or two

(02:22:27):
later UCSD did actually award this post doc um and
extension of her contract. But yeah, that this is an
incident that you never would have seen the light of day,
um unless this had been raised. Uh, unless we hadn't
already had this kind of activists kind of consciousness going
on because of the ongoing bargaining, and the union was
able to post union was able to win kind of

(02:22:49):
I think out of a really terrible situation, I think
salvage probably one of the best outcome. She'll be able
to have her child here um and look for new
jobs in the meantime to um, you know whatever her
family wants to do extended visa or or go back
to their original country. But they essentially they have security, uh,
some measure of security now, um, which wouldn't have happened

(02:23:10):
about uh raising uh quite a disruption over it. And
I also want to say that this was a post
doc and the grad students came out to protect a
post doc. So all these invisible lines at the university
draws like obviously there were post docs there too. But
if you think about the number of graduate students, like
they are the immune system that has come out and

(02:23:31):
saved a bunch of post docs through these actions. There
was another action with someone that was being let go
within four months of their employment, um in an inappropriate way.
This person was kind of using their lab as that
research mill I talked about only really hired women post
docs and really did not treat them well, um despite
doing research in women's health. And um, the grad students

(02:23:53):
also came out for that, and we got to save
that person from getting immediately fired and they're better off. Man. Hell, yeah, yeah,
it's great. I think that sort of diarity is super important,
and yeah, is the only thing that stops university from
just rapidly exploiting everyone apart from like a hundred and
fifty people at the very top. Actually, on that note,

(02:24:14):
can I ask have you been working with like I guess,
what's the tactical name for them, like the like the
like the the other non student unions on campus. Oh
it's like a f tis yeah yeah, like yeah, yeah yeah.
They Unfortunately most of the unions don't have sympathy strike

(02:24:36):
or uh those sorts of things. In their contract if
if they cannot do an official strike if they are
under contract. But yeah, they've definitely been helping in terms
of kind of raising consciousness and awareness. I know, the
ones that have the ability to, um, you know, maybe
cancel their classes or use class time to teach about

(02:24:57):
the strike or you know, do things like that. UM
have been um uh there there that they're planning to
do that. UM. What's nice as well is that this
isn't really a union, but there's kind of a non
university affiliated sort of group of faculty who you know,
advocate for for for changes across the entire campus, and
they're organizing a very large petition and letter writing campaign

(02:25:19):
from faculty members supporting our action, which I think is
is really critical because the university won't listen to us,
but they may listen to if you get to a
critical massive of professors supporting what we're doing. UM. So
there's been uh, you know, not universal certainly, but but
there's been a great deal of solidarity, even coming from

(02:25:41):
some of the people who who the university I think
has relied on to be more on their side, which
is the professors, like the Faculty Association. I think that's
pretty awesome because you can imagine that you see doesn't
want them to ever unionize, but they obviously see the
leaky pipeline where grass students or you know, either not
staying in their programs or post talks aren't coming. And

(02:26:04):
you just you know, what you happen to have at
the end of that is people that have generational wealth
um at the end of it, who happened to stay
in these programs. And I think that's what really motive
the facony to come out and say something because like
you see says, oh, we support equity university, but then
they have seen constantly the university not do anything materially
to change that. Yeah, yeah, it's good. It's good to

(02:26:26):
see the fact that he's shooting up UM. And again
that's it's sort of that's that's how we fix these things, right,
is by staking together with sort of dearity, with organizing.
So maybe to finish up, if we talk about what
next week is going to look like, what next week
might look like I guess or I guess it'll it'll
be this week by the time this comes out, Yeah yeah, yeah, yeah,

(02:26:47):
So what can people look for and the on the
timeline from U c s D from the university or
from from from from the from the strike. Yeah, that's right. Yeah, Well,
we'll have a number of pickets throughout campus, UM mostly
kind of trying to keep them geographically oriented, so everyone
from the surrounding buildings just go to you know, one
one specific spot. We've we're doing you know, sign ups,

(02:27:09):
organizing strike pay, all those sorts of typical things have
been going on this week, UM, and the walkout begins
November for across you know, not just UCSD but all
the campuses. So that's our total um UM bargaining unit
membership across the three unions is for people of those

(02:27:29):
voted on our strikeout vote voted yes. So we're expecting
a pretty significant turnout of that entire membership to be
on the picket line. UM. So that will there will
be UM, you know, those t as who are walking
out will be that that will be the first disruption
university feels before they feel a research disruption. They will
very clearly see the teaching disruption and exams not taking place,
grades not being entered, UH, sections not being taught across

(02:27:53):
every single campus and UM and that will certainly be
UM something that they will UM have to deal with
the end and hopefully the size of the disruption in
the first few days will convince them to come to
the bargaining table in a reasonable way UM, and if not,

(02:28:15):
we are prepared to continue until they do. And the
other interesting part about what's gonna happen next week is
that this is UM a picket line that is going
to be not just including you know, researchers and instructors,
but also people that support us. So there's a big
conference downtown for a lot of neuroscientists and UM it's

(02:28:37):
it's called sf N I can't remember what that stands for, UM,
but a lot of them are actually coming to the
picket line to support us. I didn't know about that.
That's great, Yeah, yeah, it's I think that's pretty exciting.
I didn't know it was in San Diego, but UM,
they're gonna be here, and also, you know, vouch for
us because you see does like we are the leading
research group and we contribute to a lot of the

(02:28:58):
research that are at these meetings. Anyway. UM, there's also
going to be it's a child friendly picket line and
for people with access needs, we're gonna have UM, you know,
virtual picketing and you'll see what that looks like. Um,
it's still being developed, but I think that's pretty exciting.
As someone, you know, with a disability to myself, it's
exciting that other people can contribute to that. Yeah, it's

(02:29:19):
very cool to you guys to do that. It's very cool.
How can people help? How can we support you? How
can people find you? On the internet? Yeah, So, I
think if you want to keep up with the strike news,
there's three Twitter accounts, the s r U U a
w u W and you a W two week six five.
I think they kind of share a lot of sim
content sometimes because we're all kind of doing this together.

(02:29:40):
But that's a good place to keep track of the news.
I know there is a link to UM. There's a
they've set up a Hardship strike fund UM. I don't
have that link off top of my head, but if
you yeah to us later and if you go to
fair you see now dot org it have all the
information about what's happening, but also those type of links

(02:30:03):
to UM. So if you want some contact, so it's
pretty good. Yeah, and then how about YouTube personally? Would
you like to share your personal Twitter so or do
you just want to stick with the the organizational once. Um,
I would love to. I promise, I'm not that fun,
but minus Tyler Bell PhD. That's my dad. Yeah, and

(02:30:25):
I'm Alex t Winzel on Twitter. I once this is over,
I'll probably go back to tweeting entirely about my work
and pictures of busses. Your Twitter, Alex, Yeah, is a
high value follow. Thank you. Alex gives live updates about
transit and it's exciting. You see a train, It's all good.

(02:30:45):
It pretty like hits at like five year old child.
We have pretty much of busses in San Diego. Now
what can I say here? Yeah? All right, all right,
thank you so much of your time, both of you.
I really appreciate it. Best to luck next week. Maybe
I'll come up and bring you, i know, sim super
like like an oil can that we can start firing
on campus or something. Yeah, let's do it. Have one here,

(02:31:07):
let's do it. I'm down, all right, Yeah, best of
black and we'll look forward to hearing what happens. Thank
you so much for thanks so much for talking to us. Hello,
podcast fans. I know you got to the end of
the episode and you were thinking not enough James. Not
enough strikes, not enough UCSD. So lucky you. I've been
up to since you see San Diego today, and I've

(02:31:30):
recorded with Tyler and Alex at the strike and we
got some audio of the strike going on as well.
It was really amazing, really incredible to see that many
people out Never thought I see that UCSD. So without
further Ado here his main view with them all right,
So here with dying Alex again this time with more
background noise. We're at the strike now. How many people

(02:31:53):
are here? Roughly oh man somewhere, probably around at least
a couple of thousand right right now. Definitely a couple
of thousand people out here. It's really impressive. Like I
read do U C s D if you haven't picked
that up yet, And like we did not get too
many people even when like people started hanging new seas
around campus. I didn't. I didn't think I'm being so
I did again. This is genuinely very impressive. And what's

(02:32:16):
been what's been happening? UM? I think things have gone
really well so far this since day two as we're
recording this, that we've been on strike. UM, there has
been some progress at the bargaining table that I've heard, um,
but we do know that you see is going to
try to drag this out. They think that they can
outlast our momentum. But so far as you can really
hear from the noise behind us and see all the
different you know, uh, thousands of people converging from all

(02:32:38):
the pict locations across campus that they've been at since
eight in the morning, I think our energy is going strong.
Where do you think, Tyler? Yeah, so I think the
energy is really strong here today. Uh. The UC did
not expect us to come on day two, which we
know because at bargaining they canceled our meetings for today, um,
because they didn't expect to show up. But somehow magically
a meeting immerged around two o'clock today, and it maybe

(02:32:59):
do to the fact that two thousand people are out here.
Pretty piste, uh and one a fair contract. But yeah,
I think the momentum it's pretty high. We actually did
more disruption today, going directly talking to the deans and
the faculty and screaming in their offices as they sat
really comfy. But I'll say, yeah, first floor seminars didn't
go well today. I'll put it that way, all right,
there was something that I know the university about like

(02:33:21):
intimidation and un friend lavorite practices, and you come too, Yeah,
I can talk to generalities. UM there's uh well, the
labor law that governs us is is is a little
bit complicated because some of us also receive uh course
credit for the work that we do that is protected
under activity that protects our strike activity, which is a

(02:33:42):
little bit of an anti labor practice in and of itself.
There's no reason I have to sign up for twelve
credits of just existing doing work. That doesn't make any
particular sense, but it's the way the inversity run things. So, UM,
there has been some emails that are sent out that
are are questionable legal correctness as to whether um we
can be hurt in terms of our academic standing for
participating on the strike. That is definitely not true, UM

(02:34:04):
is if we are if the is activity that's governed
under the what our union is representing us for UM.
So we know we've had some issues with that. Tyler,
I guess you could talk about maybe some other examples
that have come out. It's on the postox side. Right now,
the university has released like an f a Q of
sorts in an email where it says, oh, well, you'll
have to tell the niage that your postox aren't doing

(02:34:26):
research and that they are funding needs to get pulled.
But that's kind of a joke. There's no like reporting
mechanism for that. It's more like a stipend for a
living um. So we're telling people just to stay strong
and uh, people see you kind of pass like the
threats that they're making, and a lot of faculty see
through it too. Okay, we just intercepted you. When you're
going somewhere else, you would you like to introduce yourself?

(02:34:47):
All right? So them post doc um, I'm pretty new
in your c s C. I joined in April, and
I came here having already done another post doc and
a PhD in Europe. I joined the union on this
instantly when I came here, since i've I was basically horrified,
for lack of a better way to put it, so,

(02:35:08):
I studied in the EU for ten years and my
experience of academia is what I experienced there, which was
decent working conditions, being able to save money, not having
to spend fifty of your salary on ransom. When I
came here, and experienced post stock life. I couldn't believe it.
So I believe. I met Tyler when I came here

(02:35:30):
for the first time and we did this orientation that
was awesome and awesome horrifying at the same time. Sorry,
it was awesome to meet you because I realized it
was then that I learned how a labor union worked.
My knowledge of labor unions was minimal up until the
point that I moved here, so minimal that I didn't
even know what labor unions in the EU functioned like

(02:35:50):
until I came here and realized, Oh my god, we
are actually lucky to have a union that supports postdocs,
and this is not the case in a lot of
places in the US. Yeah, yeah, that's true. And so
how has the strike action gone so far? Expect it's
been crazy. We've been planning this for so long. It's
a bit surreal to be part of it. I think

(02:36:10):
it's been going great. It's been very energizing, and it's
been intense. Yeah, it's hard, right, none of us really
want to be out here and strike, and the fact
that so many people are putting work on hold just
speaks to the intensity and seriousness of the problem and
what we're striking for. Ye yeah, yeah, I think that's
very true. It's really impressive. How many people here I

(02:36:31):
can't over Yeah some time. Yeah, very impressive. So let's see. Look,
do you guys know how the bargaining has gone and
what we can expect from here. Well, what we would
like would be for the u SEE to meet us
at the bargaining table and give us a fair contract.
But um repeating that ad infinite um bobby with whole

(02:36:55):
labors is the plan thus far. But what's actually been
happening is um U SEE just hasn't been paying fair
as you know. Yeah, it's it's been. It's been infuriating
for me. It makes me very angry. It's very serree
and especially I think if you're used to a sort
of more sane labor context, to see them just make

(02:37:18):
a gas lighting and righting and doing what I'm fraise
for it is illegal stuff. It's disrespectful, is what I feel. Yeah,
maybe illustrates sort of what they see post toxographs in
economic gens. Yeah, as a workforce whose rights are not
to be value to do a bulk of the work.
It's it's very disrespectful, you know, I think it certainly

(02:37:40):
speaks to uh. Like I said earlier, they're trying to
outlast us, and they think that we will reach a
certain point where we we no longer feel like we
can avoid our work, that we can stay out here.
And I think you would think that if that's their strategy,
would realize that we are in a point of desperation,
We are in a point of procarity, um, where we
really need wages and compensation and and and workplace protections

(02:38:03):
that meet the current economic situation that we live in,
because right now that's not what we have, and currently
at the bargaining table, they're kind of putting a lot
of our labor reps and to like, uh, something that
looks like like jaw like jig saw like type trap
rooms where they have only for lesson hiding and no windows,
and then them not knowing whether or not they have
to get a flight back because they're not going to
meet with them that day. UM, them saying that they

(02:38:24):
haven't reserved rooms, even though that you know, they have
so much power. Who's who's taking up a room from them?
Um to meet with them and actually come up with
some proposals. I got an update that admin wasn't bargaining
because they couldn't reserve a room. What does that mean
there's forty eight thousand people on strike, the entire system
isn't working. We mean, it's your rooms also, you own
the rooms. I'm I was, I bet that was a

(02:38:45):
fascinating update. I'm sorry, I just had to mention something
about that. So that's just all we have to know
right now is that they keep canceling meetings adding meetings.
They're kind of just waiting us out and see how
long we'll actually be on strike and whether or not
we actually care about our contracts, which I think you
being here today, you see how many people are out
and no one's going to lead EVE this picket line
throughout the week. So yeah, yeah, I think that's basically it.
People aren't going to leave the picket line, and the

(02:39:06):
energy is awesome because people are fed up. People are
fed up, people are fed up being poor and homeless,
and this is not why we come to grad school, right.
I mean, I was very fortunate to have a good
grad school experience and that's why I'm still in academia.
But the majority of the people who come to the
university spending savings. I know people with student loans back
from India who are here to do a master's and

(02:39:29):
are teeing doing research, killing themselves because they had a dream.
They literally moved across the world to come here following
a dream and our ending up being broken. That's that's
heartbreaking from a university as big as this. Nobody deserves
to be treated this way, and I think everybody here
is feeling it. If you go to fair you see
now dot org there's a link to a strike fund

(02:39:51):
right now, a hardship fund, and people can donate to
that any amount they want to. And there's also we're
taking donations to actually feed people out here. So people
have questions about that, they can just email the links
at that website. UM. Yeah, can people to like would
you like? People? People are very very welcome to show
up to the picket line to come help. All help

(02:40:12):
is appreciated. You want to join us, you want to chant,
you want to bring supplies, we'll be there. This is
across all ten you see campuses, if you're near the
picket line, if you want to show support and solidarity,
come join us. Yeah, the virtual picketing is still happening,
and what they've been actually doing is making sure people
get here and nowhere to go, since the picketing is
so transient, like we're literally moving building to building as

(02:40:33):
it's needed, and they're doing the calls for us and
directing us, so which is a wild thing. But also
the other thing is just people retweeting everything that we post,
making sure that no one can silence us, because that's
what you see. Once. Thank you so much for coming,
Thanks for giving us this platform. The awareness is really
critical to make sure that you see can't ignore us.
So thank you so much for coming. It's the podcast,

(02:41:07):
it's it could happen here. It is about something that
could happen here very specifically. Um, yeah, I'm I'm Christopher Wong.
I'm here with James Stout and Garrison Davis. Hello, Hello,
do you both hello? We all joined the SIMP call
that that did happen here, and that did show everybody
all right, Okay, so that's the thing that that did

(02:41:27):
happen here, and now we're gonna talk abou something that
could happen here, and that specific thing is uh a
call by two Harvard academics to hire five hundred thousand
more cops. Nope, so okay, they're like, I don't I
don't know when this is going to go up. But
sometime in the past that there was a piece that

(02:41:48):
went viral by civil rights lawyer and anti prison activist
turned media critic Alec karaka Tanis about a pair of
Harvard academics who wrote this article calling for five thousand
more cops. And this is okay, Like the fact that
we have academics writing position papers basically that are calling
for five thousand more cops is terrifying in and of itself.
But but but crime is that a record high You're

(02:42:12):
about to see ship. You're about to see You're about
to see and hear ship that is going to make
your fucking ears bleed because it's not ship. Like okay,
normally these are Harvard academics, right, So you're assuming these
are like right wing nats at Google's right or like
their equivalent in in in the sort of like you
know these are not. This was written by a socialist.

(02:42:33):
And when I say a socialist right like, I don't
mean a sort of like one of the sort of
like terminally online desperate cranks trying to hold together like
a maoist micro sect. I'm talking about people who are
incredibly well connected inside the mainstream socialist left. So the
authors of this call for five hundred thousand more cops
are Christopher Lewis, who is a Harvard law professor who

(02:42:55):
makes me embarrassed to have my own name, and more
interestingly of a sociology professor, auditor usumy So who is
auditor Usumi um. He is on the board. He's on
the editorial board of Catalyst, which is a Marxist man. Okay,
do you do you have you two know what Catalyst is? Yeah,

(02:43:15):
besides the sequel to the Mirror original game and l
I don't. Yeah, okay, so they're they're a a Marxist magazine.
There supposed to be a more sort of theoretical Marxist
like magazine founded by a guy named vi Vic Chibber,
who's a pretty influential, sort of like soaked Marxist who
could be found literally in any any of the last
like five decades, you can find him yelling about the

(02:43:36):
cultural turn in academia and calling for a return of
political economy. Yes, yes, about this for decades longer. I
think he's been yelling about this for longer than I've
been alive. God, Like, that's how long has been going on.
People have definitely been like fetching about the cultural turn

(02:43:59):
for long than any of us have been alive. Yeah,
and they've been wrong for that entire time. And him
is like one of the guys who trained us to
me in the first place. Now catalysts other major founder
um is much more famous, and that's someone you probably
have heard of, who is one bosh Car Sunkara, who

(02:44:20):
is the current President of the Nation and also the
founder of jocobin where and this is where it gets
fun us to me also on the editorial board of Jocobin.
This is the guy caring for five hundred that was
in More Cops. Right. This isn't coming from the usable
sort of like rabid reactionaries. This is coming from people
who have serious credentials in the mainstream socialists left and Okay,

(02:44:45):
so all right, I want to talk about what's actually
in the paper. And the first thing I need everyone
to understand about this from the get go is that
this is maybe the worst paper I've ever read. Like
if I had tried to turn this paper in to
my like freshman under like into like an undergrad class,
I would have failed, Like when when when I was

(02:45:06):
in my freshman year in college, I had to read
Biblical analysis written by a freshman Ted Cruise supporter who
was arguing that there was a problem in the Bible
where there was no way for God to talk to people.
This is worse than that and the Koran. It's like,
how is how how is that worth? Chris? Okay, so

(02:45:27):
let's let's let's just start off right. I'm gonna I'm
gonna start off with a random part in the middle,
so you understand how just mind numbingly atrocious this is okay,
So I'm gonna I'm gonna read this. This is an
article called, and I'm not kidding about the title of
this quote, the Injustice of under policing in America. Uh yeah,

(02:45:48):
so we're starting we're turning off right, so yeah, so
so so before we get into the actual main argument,
I'm just gonna read this quote, which is right. Even
if our answers prove unsound, we hope that the combination
of empirical social science and analytic moral and political philosophy

(02:46:12):
we can we contribute can help eliminate what alternative answers
to those questions might have to look like. To be sound, which,
first off, terrible scism. This is why I would prefer
the immortal science of markis Latinism. This is awful, like said,
is writing terrible? Said it back to an editor, give
them a decade, they'll come back with it. Second off,

(02:46:32):
I literally cannot imagine two disciplines I would like rather
less apply to the problem of mass incarceration than those
like these authors have dared ask the question, what if
we combined the bone rattling stupidity of analytic philosophy with
the sociologist complete inability to do statistics? And the answer
is this? And what I say, complete inability to do statistics? Right,

(02:46:56):
I need people to understand how bad this article is,
right like I I like, I like viscerally needs you
to understand. So here, here is here, Here is a quote.
Here's another section of this article. But while firearm availability,
no doubt has some impact on the level of violence,
we think the effect is likely to be small. A

(02:47:18):
large effect would be difficult to square with other patterns
across place, persons, and time. Consider, for example, that while
the United States has ten times as many guns as
El Salvador, the homicide rate there is roughly ten times
higher than it is here. Now stats, nowhere's think for
a second about what they just compared. Right, The United

(02:47:39):
States has ten times as many guns. The homicide rate
in El Salvador as ten times higher. Right, Yeah, yeah,
I think, Okay, what what does the US have more
of than El Salvador? No, no, we have more guns,
but we also have fifty times the population. The million

(02:48:02):
people of Salvador is six point five million people, which
means again if if you're looking at this in terms
of guns per capita, right, A salpits guns per capita
is actually five times higher than ours. Wow, that's quite impressive. Yeah,
and financial perspective, because we have a little guns. Yeah. Right,
and you know, okay, again, if you're if you're gonna

(02:48:25):
do basic statistics, right, you would think that these professors
at Harvard University would know the difference between a rate
of gun ownership and the pure owner of ship of guns.
They do not. They do not, do they not? Have
they decided that they're going to pretend they don't. I don't. Okay,
here's the thing going into this, right, I assume this

(02:48:46):
was just sort of pure hackshit, and I think a
lot of it is. I think they also are genuinely
this dumb like genuine I I it's it's really incredible,
like I mean again, like the thing like like, the
thing they've actually demonstrate with their own numbers is precisely
the opposite of what they're arguing. The thing they've demonstrated
with the numbers they have given us is that there

(02:49:06):
is a correlation between gun ownership rates and the homicide rate, right,
Like they're trying to there. This entire section is about
proving that they're that they that the number of guns
doesn't like that, this isn't even like this isn't me
like like I don't like this is not like me
yelling about gun control or whatever. Like this is just
to get you to understand the level of statistics these

(02:49:26):
people are on. And also I should point this album.
I tracked down their citation because I wanted to make
sure I didn't I wasn't misunderstanding their arguments, right, So
I tracked down their citation on these numbers, and I
went to the paper they cited, and the thing they
cited does not have a gun ownership numbers for El Salvador.
So I have no idea where they getting any of
these numbers they apparently they quite possibly have pulled this

(02:49:47):
out of their ass completely because apparently apparently nobody checked
if their citations actually contain the things that they're supposed to.
This is what I wanted to talk about. There is
a thing that happens when you get tanya or you
become professor at the very established university, and that thing
is you just say shit and people trust you. Like
we've seen this time and again in the academy, right that,

(02:50:09):
like peer review is not serving its functioned because like
the status hierarchy of people in academia is more important
to both the peer reviewers and the people doing the
writing than the actual process of peer review. Yeah, like
their citations are this is an interesting Uh, this is

(02:50:29):
I don't know that they they've made the capital letters larger.
They used a small arms survey. I guess for that.
Obviously it doesn't it doesn't. It does show it doesn't
have those numbers. It's amazing. Okay, So you know we've
we've we've established that these people are absolute hacks whose
word would have gotten be failed out of an undergrad course.
So to be fair, maybe it's actually it's it's technically

(02:50:52):
possible the University of Chicago just holds its students to
more riduous standards than Harvard or M I. T. Whose
journal published this does their intellectuals. So you know, I,
I we we never know. This is also I never
used Jacobin as a source on the show because they
pay fifty bucks per article and that ship way. Yeah,
Jacobin not a cool publication, actually not mega based. Yeah,

(02:51:18):
your workers, if you're pertaining to be socialised. Yeah, she's
trying to be like a labor But Bosh Garconara is
on the record talking about the quote, his quote petite
bourgeois hustle, talking about how we made Jacobin. So you know, okay,
well we'll we'll get back to the class aspect of
all of this next episode. But okay, let's go back

(02:51:38):
to this paper, and let's take a second just look
at what they're actually arguing. And the first thing I
need to used to understand about their argument is that
their entire, the entire substantive argument of this paper hinges
on an absolutely enormous lie. Um here, let me let
let let me let me we quote this lie. Yet

(02:51:59):
it also illustrate rate's the much less well known fact
that America is not in all an outlier and it's
rate of policing. The United States has around two hundred
and twelve police officers for every hundred thousand total residents,
which ranks it in the forty one percentile of today's
developed world. Now, as Alec Carricatanas points out, they've deliberately

(02:52:19):
picked the lowest number of cops they can find any like,
the lowest reported number of cops in the US they
can find anywhere. Um, and so they picked six hundred
thousand from basically like it's it's they picked this number
from an FBI reporting thing. But the FBI also says
that they don't have all the cops there because it's
it's like it's basically like a voluntary reporting thing. So
there's a bunch of cops that aren't there. And then, um,

(02:52:41):
here's from Karakatatas, who's a piece about this quote the professors.
The professor then admitted privately over email that the US
census count is actually one million, two hundred twenty seven thousand,
seven eight police. That's seventies six percent higher for the
number they chose the US article. What is the significance
of this using this number? They admitted to me the

(02:53:04):
United States truthfully has one point one times the media
rated rich countries. So they've been over email that they have.
This whole article is based on them lying how many
cops there are in the US. And it's actually way
worse than this because as as as he points out right,
this number than to the number that they're using only

(02:53:28):
tracks public police, so they doesn't count private police. And
if you count private police, that number doubles. Again, not
like there's private police, there's there's no FIV cops, right
and and the other thing isn't this the other thing
is doesn't count? Is this counts zero federal agencies? I
just gonna say that it doesn't count. Federal agency doesn't

(02:53:49):
count like state police even I think, I think, actually
I don't know. You can't shareff Is that not police?
Their deputies? They're different patrol. I mean, who's who's to say,
who's spent more time on this if they have already yeah,

(02:54:10):
right right, okay, like to to get it to to
get it understanding of this, even if you exclude the
Feds entirely right EXCLA. And again, and this is actually
a bad idea because again we have like a fucking
trillion federal agencies, for example, ice in the Border Patrol,
who again run just another police state inside of the
American police state. Right, we have that and obviously, okay,

(02:54:33):
so he's comparing our our level of policing to policing
in in uh in like European countries, right, and okay,
I I don't want to minimize how many border cops
European countries have, but the US has way fucking more
border clan they do not like, they do horrible things.
I will yell at the until the end of time

(02:54:55):
about how every every friend text member needs to be
like redacted, etcetera, etcetera parody. But like, no, great, even
even even if you cut that out right, the actual
number of cops in the US is three times higher
than the number they've given us. Actually it might be yeah, yeah, okay,
I feel like there's there's anything that we can agree

(02:55:17):
on as a nation is that America kind of has
a lot of police. That's like that's like what everyone
kind of knows. That's like people like people the place
with like the really like it's like really militarized and
heavy policing. Yeah, like like a person who moved to America,
it is shocking how many cops there are, how many

(02:55:38):
different cops there are, and how there are cops everywhere
all the time. It is the thing that it is
very different about America. Oh god, okay, so statistic to
get that number quite possibly like that ship. Yeah yeah,
I would absolutely if one of my students in community.

(02:56:02):
God days, we'd have a talk. Okay, okay, So do
you know what else is based on the myth of
under policing these adverts for private cops. Yes, Federal Protective
Service gets them. All right, we're back, uh okay, So
all right, we've established that this this is, this is

(02:56:23):
This argument is built on a pile of lines. However,
the actual content of the argument is also really funny
and completely incomprehensible. So their argument is that somehow, if
the US had more cops, right, and and and if
if if if the ratio of cops to people like

(02:56:43):
that the U S had was like in line with
the European countries, that somehow and there they never have
a mechanism for how this would happen, This would somehow
lower the incarceration rate. I think the mechanism is line
that's whatever one says is that we have more police
that lowers incarceration rates. Yeah. Yeah. The entire argument here

(02:57:05):
is what if the US was like Sweden, then there
would be five thousand more cops, but somehow also less
one also one point nine billion less uh prisoners. So well,
anything that's different between US and Sweden is oh god, okay.
So so what why are socialists pushing for this? And

(02:57:26):
especially socialists and again as these are these are people
who in their article admit that they think the best
way to deal with with poverty and with crime is
welfare programs, not mass incarceration. So okay, so why why
why are they pushing for this? And the initial answer
is that they think they can reduce crime, specifically homicides

(02:57:46):
by increasing policing, and they think which should be fair
is an opinion that I would say at this point
probably the majority of Americans have maybe I don't know
if I buy that. I don't know if that's I
think you may be a little bit further out of

(02:58:06):
the Overton window. The majority of Americans, I think, do
do believe that if there's a few more cops, maybe
we'll have a few less murders. I don't know. Well, well,
well we'll see about that. But Okay. The other thing though,
that's sort of like amazing about this right is that
they think, okay, so they think they can cut the

(02:58:26):
homicide rate by hiring more police. They also think that
hiring more police i will solve the problem with policing
because the problem with police is that the police don't
do enough, and so we need more of them. And
then and then also and then also this will make
them less violent. I mean, this is something, This is
even the this is even like the whole like Joe Biden, like,

(02:58:50):
we have to we can't we can't defund the police.
We have to fund the police, have to resources because
if if they have less resources, then that means they'll
have to use more violence. And it's that that style
of arguments, it's it's talking point. Yeah. But what's interesting
about this again is that these people nominally are socialists,

(02:59:10):
and you know, in order to justify this right, they
argue that while being in prison is bad, and then
they list a bunch of consequences of being in prison,
being in a neighborhood is with high crime is also
as bad. For the same reason. They're literally arguing the
being in a place with crime is basically the same
as being in prison, big time Prinston understanding, like I look, okay,

(02:59:40):
there are there are very few people I would ever
say that, Garrison. Look, I hope these people gotta do
withthnography of this one day, Like I I hope, I
hope they get to go study what the inside of
prison is like I think participant observation. Yeah, I hope
they do this like you, like they're they're there. There
are there are lines in this article like here here,

(03:00:03):
here is a random line I've pulled from this article,
and they say at one point, quote, in fact, black
people seem to be underrepresented among those who report ever
having been arrested in their lifetimes. What alright? That is
a direct quote citation need. What they've done some absolutely insane.

(03:00:25):
I'm not even I'm not I'm not actually going to
dignify them by laying out the stats bullshit that they've
they've they've attempt to justify this, like we have already
seen what their stats look like, their stats are trying
to compare a rate. Yeah, it's insane, it's completely nuts.
Like that's the one thing that that's the one thing
that even like racist like Republicans like no is like

(03:00:48):
they'll be like, yeah, there's more because because I don't
like black people, and you're like, that's not why, but whatever. Yeah,
I'm between this paragraph now and it is actually it's bad.
So okay, I think, okay, so we have established this
is bullshit, right, I want to read a kind of

(03:01:09):
long section that I think gives the game away as
to why they're arguing this quote. We think, in the
long run, a significant expansion of social policy we reduce
crime by addressing its root causes, and in turn reduced
the need demand for both policing and imprisonments. Okay, other work,
this is true, I would say probably probably true. In

(03:01:31):
other work, we argue that any coherent conception of distributive
justice or economic efficiency entails that the United States should
expand its social policy. But a significant expansion of social
policy requires significant redistribution from rich to poor. Redistribution of
this magnitude will require the poorer to wield some kind
of leverage over the rich. Given the collapse of the

(03:01:51):
American labor movement and the electoral fracturing of the American
working class, we doubt we will see anything like this soon.
Our aim in this essays to say something useful about
what should be done in the non ideal world in
which we live, not just in the ideal world in
which we would like to live. Just to hold on, wait,

(03:02:12):
let me let me, let me read this next sentence.
It gets worse. Okay, to say something about that question.
We limit ourselves two options that are revenue neutral. Ah,
these are socialists, so bizarre. I think they may have
walked outside. They've yeah, like like they've they've you know, okay,

(03:02:34):
there's okay, So there's actually more of this that is
also like like it keeps going, can never have a
better world. And you know what that means is that
we should have more police. Here here, here is there,
Here is their defense ofness. But why consider only prisons
and police. Why couldn't the government redistribute the existing pool

(03:02:54):
of money from prisons and police to social programs, as
many reformers have to ended, We would argue in and
What's Wrong with Mass Incarceration? Which is a book that
they're going to release that I hope nobody buys. This
is because social policy is bedeviled by what we call

(03:03:16):
the efficiency feasibility paradox. To address the root causes of
crime would be meaningfully to change the opportunity structure for
the most disadvantaged people in America. To do this by
expanding untargeted universal social programs will require significant resources, since
the vast majority of beneficiaries are not America's most disadvantaged people,

(03:03:36):
because penal spending is hyper targeted in a way that
social spending is not. It costs about three billion dollars
a year to run the world's most extensive penal state,
but something like three trillion dollars to run its most
amnemic welfare state. We admit there are significant This is
a slightly lated prograph. We admit there are significant obstacles
to changing the balance that state and local government strike

(03:03:58):
between the arms of law enforcements. There are, after all,
reasons that the United States has involved its present day
penal balance. But our view is that the first world balance,
So the first world balances is that the thing they're
talking about that like supposedly Norway has or some ship
where they have bore cops, but like per capita but
less people incarcerated. Um. But our view is at than

(03:04:18):
first world balance is nonetheless substantially more feasible than any
of the than the kinds of things that reformers tend
to demand today. In the highly unequal aligarhic America in
which we live at present, calls to calls to reallocate
a fixed pool of revenue will meet with less powerful
opposition than calls to tax the rich. That is why

(03:04:41):
we assume it is infeasible to expect the United States
to build a generous welfare state in the mold of
the Scandinavian social democracies. Proposals to use hyper targeted social
policy to adjust the root causes of crime are similarly infeasible.
As we have argued, to be efficient, a social policy
intervention must' meaning we transformed the opportunity structures of those

(03:05:02):
most likely to commit crime. I mean, an intervention that
transformed the structures of opportunity only in only those in
this position will up end the effective in such a
structure of unequal societies, thus coming up the economy and
eliciting political opposition. I mean here's Here's the thing is that,
in some ways I agree that the United States won't

(03:05:22):
get better by making social policies within my lifetime. But
my solution to this is a legalist lifestylist of not
hiring workoffs. Well, don't worry, there is there is a
significant section of this. Wheathery shipped on anarchism. Okay, okay,
this is what fucking happens when all your friends are

(03:05:43):
also Harvard professors. I mean it's also real fucking people,
because you don't fucking talk to them and they're like, oh,
the lever it's it's obviously written by somebody who's currently
like well off. Like it's they're currently doing well. Which
is why because they because they don't think the world's
going to turn into socialist utopia, but they're personally doing Okay.

(03:06:07):
The way to will make the world feel better for
them is maybe more police will make me feel safer
like that, that's what that's what they're doing is because
they're already well off and they're like, well, social isn't coming.
I want to live a happier life. Maybe police will
keep the bad people away from me. Yeah, because they
see poverty of an issue of poverty is upstream of crime,

(03:06:27):
and crime is a fucking annoyance to them because someone
might steal their fucking BMW again crime. Living in a
place where crime is the same as being in prison
because you cannot conceive because it's socialism without sucking empathy
or experience of fucking poverty. Right, so you can make
these ludicrous statements and all your friends in the smoking

(03:06:50):
room a Harvard will agree with you. Go harm yes,
and I mean, I mean this is the thing very frustrating,
Like they they fundament sleep like when Bernie lost the election,
these people gave up on politics. Like that's what's happening there.
They're arguing that like not even is not even just
like the class drug goes is unwinnable. They're arguing that

(03:07:10):
basic liberal politics is impossible, right, like taxing the rich
like is a thing that that that's not like a
radical thing, that's like like the basic that's like a
basic democratic party thing. And they're they're arguing that it's
so impossible that anyone who has a plan to change
anything has to pre means test it to be compliant

(03:07:32):
with a non existent balanced budget amendment to get the
right to support it, Like Liz trust here, shit like
this is what this was written by? What of the
people on the editorial board of Jocobin. Yeah, well that
doesn't chock me. But it's very funny to look at
their citations, which are like people being like this article

(03:07:54):
is horse shit, and then like like cop publications, Yeah,
ok yeah, let's go so okay, so so have having
actually well okay, so before we do we should we
should do another add thing. Do you know what? Who
else has completely abandoned the idea that there's any possibility
of social change in the world. The Conservative Party and

(03:08:18):
Unions Party in quite written in Northern Island. Yeah do
they do. I guess now we're going to take the
money out there. Thank you, Richie sa and okay, we're back.
So so, having abandoned politics in favor of complete capitulation
to the forces of reaction, they turned towards a cost
benefit analysis of having more cops. The benefit, they argue,

(03:08:42):
is less crime. And this is bullshit. There is no
staistical evidence to having more cops produces crime. I have done, like,
there are other reasons why this is bullshit. I have done.
I have done the entire series about there is a
lot of writing on this topic and how discorely this
correlation is not actually effective. Um, but yeah, and and

(03:09:06):
and it's also like a very important thing here is
this is this is this is the thing that's about
what kind of crime you care about, right, Like I
have written an entire series about why my about. You know,
the times of my police department was literally being run
by multiple drug gartels at the same time when they
strapped used to fucking radiators and attacking the balls the
car batteries. They shot children in the street, They disappeared

(03:09:27):
people to be tortured in the fucking black sites, and
then they went to fucking a rock and teach the
CIA how to do it. Like like these people that
the cops are they are rapists, they are kidnappers, they
are extortionists, they are thieves, they are torturers, they are murders.
A lot of them are in literal neo Nazi gangs
who run their own serial killer competitions. Um, none of
this apply, like appears in any of the analysis that

(03:09:48):
these dipshits have compiled. And it's when the old cultural
turn to get involved. Ye look at the material conditions here, yeah, yeah,
then the material conditions apparently are cop go up, crime
go down, which it's also important, Like I think it's
important to note there's a really good article, I think
it was my amplist one called raise the Crime Rate

(03:10:08):
from It's from like two thousand six. But they have
that they have this point, which is that like the
reductions in the crime way that we like see insofar
as they happen, are not actually reductions into the amount
of crime going on. Like what's happening is that, like
we put people in prison and then the crime happens

(03:10:32):
to them there. Right, Like, even even if you reduce
the homicide rate outside of prison, there's still the homicide
rate inside of prison, which nobody fucking gives a shit about.
And you know because because again, this crime doesn't go away.
All that happens is that it gets, it gets, you know,
intensified and inflicted on a group of people the American
public doesn't give a shit about. So, you know, all

(03:10:54):
of the violence, all of the all of the rape,
all the fucking murder, all of the theft, all of
the ship we normally throw people in isn't for in theory,
is just happening to people inside of prisons. It's just
that academics can stop pretending to give a shit about
it when they don't have to see it. Yeah, I
like where I live, right, We just re elected a
sheriff who was overseen like nineteen deaths in jail this

(03:11:14):
year in San Diego. Right, but that is not seen
as an issue of evidently to the people who voted
for it, to the Democratic Party who endorsed her, and
instead like they would much rather have that because there
presumably worried that the person who ran against her in
the primaries would be too soft d own crime and
therefore you know, their teslas might get keyed. Yeah, so, okay,

(03:11:37):
let's let's look at the supposed benefits. But less I
guess those are the benefits. Let's look at let'sok at
the costs. Finally consider, finally, consider the cost of policing.
On the one hand, a world of more policing would
perhaps unsurprisingly be a world of more arrests. Based on

(03:11:57):
recent work by Chaplain our best guests at the First
World Balanced would be a world of almost seven point
eight million arrests. On the other hand, for some for okay,
this is a direct quote. By the way, I need
everyone to understand I am directly quoting them when I
say this. On the other hand, for the somewhat speculative
reasons we gave earlier, we guess that a world of

(03:12:19):
more policing would be one of less police violence. About
nine fewer people killed by the police based on what America.
That's what that's that's how James americle occurs more cops
than do less violence. Yep, yeah, this you know you

(03:12:40):
could if you were, for example, a social scientist, right
at all, you could look at all of the all
of the other times the US has gotten more cops
and tried to see if that like increased or decreased
the amount of violence the police do. And you know
the line, if you want the line, it's all good.
I just I do want to your attention to figure
one where they exactly one day to point and that

(03:13:02):
they've just drawn a line to it, dissected a data
point like blind oline. Like this whole thing is just
sort of like like okay, So even if somehow, right
by some miracle, this occurred and less people were killed
by the police, we're killed by police violes because there
was more cops. Which this is the kind of thing

(03:13:24):
that for for for the purposes of this thought experiment, right,
we are allowing people to believe this, like for the
same reason that we allowed children to believe in the
Easter Bunny. So kids don't believe in the Easter Buddy,
I have I have met kids who believed in the
Easter Bunny. I understand believing in Santa but people actually

(03:13:46):
believe in the Easter Bunny. Not many, not many. But
also also also most people don't believe the police will
be more violent if if you have if it would
be less violent if you have more of them. Yeah,
let's let's let's let's let them believe this. Right, This
entire argument hinges on the theory that incarceration and arrest

(03:14:07):
are distinct outcomes of policing. Right, they're arguing that there's
going to be more arrest but that's okay because there
will be less people in prison. Now, there is one
tidy problem here that you may have seen, which is
that when you arrest people, it leads to people going
to prison. Nowhere in this entire article have these two

(03:14:31):
Harvard professors at any point considered the fact that when
you arrest someone, they sometimes go to prison, and that
arresting more people will mean more people go to prison,
because that's what happens when you arrest someone. They've never
considered this, and in fact, in fact, not only have
they never considered this, they seem to believe that there

(03:14:52):
is an inverse correlation between the number of people getting
arrested and how many people go to prison. They think
that seven million, eight hundred thousand more arrests will somehow
lead to one point two million people less in prison.
It's yeah, even the fucking what people in this country

(03:15:13):
die in between arrest and they're hearing, right, like, in
between arrested and having a fair trial, Like, yeah, to
ignore that, it's it's not just like, it's not just wrong,
it's callously cruel. Also, like they appeared to have not
looked at any point at the opportunity cost of having
all these cops. Right, we pay tops a metric ship

(03:15:35):
ton of money because they're the only unions that apparently
the state cares about, and like we could do something
useful with that money, right, Like, well, the thing, the
thing they claim they're doing is that they're going to
fund less prisons and fund more cops, and this will
lead to less people being in prison. Now, if this
doesn't make any sense to you, that's because it doesn't
make any sense at all. And and and again we

(03:15:56):
have to come back to the question, what do you
think happens a people who get arrested? Like do these
people think they could send a vacation to Tahiti. Like
I know none of these people, none of the people
writing this have been arrested, but like you can't be
the stupid, Like there's no way God. So okay, like

(03:16:17):
we're I'm gonna close on some stuff here, which I'm
gonna close on the sort of anarchist stuff that they
they're ranting about. Um, I'm gonna'm gonna read another quote
from this. Some civil libertarians might prefer radical decarceration without
any increase or perhaps even some reduction in police force size,
on the grounds that state imposed violence or harm is
morally different from and worse than, interpersonal violence committed by

(03:16:39):
private individuals. An extreme version of this position would hold
that no amount of interpersonal violence could ever justify the
use of commercive force by the state, but any state
completely lacking and coercive power would be unable to enforce
tax law and policy, and thus unable to collect revenue.
Without revenue, the governor could not provide public goods to
a social safety net. Which also, by the way, I

(03:17:01):
want to stop here in like point out that like
they like in any other context, none of these people
believe this because like these. These people are all deal
chart lists like that, they're all unempty people, and so
they don't actually believe that money that they they in
any other context except this one, they understand that money
is something created by the state, except here when they

(03:17:21):
have to justify police. Without revenue, governments cannot provide public
goods or a social safety net. So this extreme version
of libertarian civil libertarianisition is essentially a kind of political anarchism,
and we doubt many are in fact committed to this
brand of anarchism. So okay, well, let's unpack this second.
When they say civil libertarianism here, what they say is
that anyone who proposes to defund the police or reduce

(03:17:44):
a number of people in prison. Right in the next paragraph,
they argue that anyone who wants to do those things
is actually in favor of increasing the homicide rate because
when there's less when there's less cops than quote, serious
crime runs unchecked in poor neighborhoods, which leaves you with
two choices. Right, you can be an anarch quote unquote

(03:18:04):
anarchist and let the crime happen because you supported decreasing
the number of cops, or you can support having more cops. Yeah,
it's yeah, it's just an absurd extrapolation of a position. Well,
but it's it's not just that they've they've given. What
they're doing here is they're giving their entire gameaway. Right.
What they've admitted is that their ideal society requires and
this is what they are saying about the state's need

(03:18:26):
for coercive power, right with their own arguments. They the
course of power they need is the police. And so
what they're saying is that their politics requires an entire
class of rapist, neo Nazi murderers to you know, like
to enforce their vision of the welfare state. Like, in
order for there to be a welfare state, who have
to be a bunch of people who can fucking walk
into your door and shoot you, Right, there have to

(03:18:47):
be a group of people who can fucking stand there,
grab your child, smash her head into a wall fifteen times,
and then fucking grab you and throw you through a window. Right.
This is what they are arguing, And and this plays
the question, Okay, so why these people want more cops,
And you know, the caricature they offer up is that
without cops, everyone would just murder each other. And so
we need neo Nazi desk wats to stop us often
murdering each other. But okay, that's stupid, right, like self

(03:19:13):
Evidently police police are only like police are not that old.
They've only been around for like two hundred years, so
we know that's not true. So why do they actually
want more cops? And you know something, something that's very interesting,
given that this is an article about the police that
is written by people who are on the editorial board
of socialist magazines, Nowhere in this article doesn't mention the

(03:19:34):
fact that the cops exist to protect private property. Right.
This is this is a huge part of what their existence. Right.
Their job is to ensure if there is one class
of people who owns the factories in the fields and
the grocery stores and the fast food chains and the
fucking card dealerships, and that there is another class who
was forced to work for them and have their labor
stolen every day of their lives. And of course these

(03:19:55):
sort of like faux pro cop, the pro cop like fox.
Social democrats will never mention it, right, but these people's
version of quote unquote socialism is one in which all
that ship, all the stuff that makes things like all
of the businesses, all of the corporations, all of the
all of that ship is owned by capitalists and not
the working class. They need those cops specifically to protect

(03:20:15):
the property of the ruling class from you, right like that.
That that is ultimately what this is about, the specter
of crime. And and this is true whether it's coming
from socialists or whether it's coming from the most like
unbelievably deranged Blue Lives Matter, cop freak. It is about
stopping you from taking what is yours. And that that's
the end of part one. In part two, we're gonna

(03:20:38):
look at the whole sort of background ideology that's running
all of this, and it also sucks. So yeah, come
back tomorrow for more news. Love it? Yeah, podcasting, Oh

(03:21:11):
I love it. I love when we're talking to microfilms
and people listen. Yeah, good for them. It's gonna outlive
microblogging apparently. Yeah, okay, who could who could have thought?
We've won? Guys? We are the last medium standing. Well,

(03:21:31):
to be fair, I do think the majority of people
on this call got got this job small part because
of like, yeah, yeah it's tree. Look at where our
posts of bought us here to this moment. On the
podcast it could Happen Here podcast where we don't explain

(03:21:54):
what the podcast is. That's right, yea, And yeah, the
podcast also contain me, Christopher Wong, contains Garrison Davis, it
contains James Stout m and allegedly Rebert. However, Evans is
I think he's legitimately actually busy right now. He is.
He is like recording something else. There's yeah, he's doing

(03:22:15):
a marath and think but if you look at the
Ihart page, it's only Robert. We have. We have a
lot of a lot of podcasts on Yeah, anyways, on
the Cool Zone Media. Yeah, on the Cool Zone Media.
That's right. So, speaking of podcasts we've done on the
Cool Zone Media, we did one that came out the
one before this one, and we'll see it about it

(03:22:36):
was it was about how a bunch of socialists want
more cops. Yeah, so okay, I asked myself the question
when I read this, why why do they want this?
How did we get here? Because they're rich and they're scared? Yes,

(03:22:57):
this is true, it's there's there's also sort of there's
also sort of deeper roots to what's happening here. And okay,
so like it is true that there's been a whole
wave of people who were sort of nominally progressive or
like socialistity dozens six, ten or two and seventeen who
turned right in the past few years, particularly over ratio
issues like Leafing, Grant Greenwald like more recently the t

(03:23:18):
y T people like bush Ar Sakara's were doing crime
wave ship like kind of recently, which was actually really funny.
He had this tweet about how like, oh, the crime
race is not actually down. There's a specific neighborhoods where
the crime where people are poor, where the crime is up,
and then you look at the data and that's exactly
the opposite of what's happening. But okay, so, but this
entire push for sort of more police is part of

(03:23:40):
a broader political project that Donna Roused me and his
sort of allies in Jocoban and etcetera, etcetera, been pushing
for years now. And this sort of like political project
is the class side of what's called the class versus
race or the race versus class debate. So for people
who were either weren't here for this or have like
blissfully forgotten this, the race class debate was basically an

(03:24:03):
argument about sort of the role of race in leftist organizing. Um.
The argument was basically like, Okay, should we understand race
is like a structural force in in the US that
requires its own specific organizing around racial justice and liberation movements,
or should be attempt to put class first and attempt
to solve racism by appealing to the interests of the

(03:24:23):
entire working class and only doing class based organizing. Um,
there are broadly like three types of class first people. Weirdly,
we're gonna see two of them here. Um, there are
a very small number of very committed and very radical
Marxists and like a small number of anarchists who think
that like well, race was a product of class anyways,
and so if you end the class system and abolished

(03:24:44):
private property, that's the sort of like actual central like
mechanism of oppression society. And if you do that, like
you know, race will sort of fall apart, and so
you know you should um whatever consciousness anyway, Yeah, like
these people are wrong. I think they're less dangerous and
the other kind of two people. But we're also gonna
see one of these guys later. So there there's the

(03:25:07):
people like call the like class with like a k
people who are just straight up like racists like they
are they are class with a kkk yeah right like
they you know, the groups of socialists I've compared them to,
or like the socialist who came to the US after
Etty and we're like, oh, ship who cares like slavery,
Like we we don't care about slavery. The actual thing

(03:25:28):
that like is good for the working classes, stealing more
land for indigenous people, and this is how we're going
to solve the labor question. Or also the sort of
like like the the people who were in the Nights
of Labor, like the eighteen eighties, who were like, all right,
we need to we need to defend labor the way
we're gonna defend labors by technically cleansing the entire West
coast of Chinese people like these are basically these guys
right there, they're just straight up racists to want unions

(03:25:50):
and healthcare. Um. They used to be a real faction
in the d s a UM formed around just like
absolutely dogshit subreddit called stupid pole Um. They used to
be a bunch of them in Philadelphia and these kind
of people like they were like red scares initial base
and so by you know, this is like the by
now like two, these people are almost entirely deranged trade

(03:26:13):
cats who spent literally their entire time deep throwing Peter
Field's boot. So they're kind of mostly like they're they're
just right wingers now like that that's what's happened to
these people. Um, good riddance fuck um. I yeah. And
then there are people like ordinary used to be in
Bosh carcent Kara who don't really want to end capitalism

(03:26:34):
and think that socialism is just sort of like welfare
states and some unions. And also and they also and
this is sort of critical, tend to think that racial
justice organizing is a distraction from their main goal of
achieving socialism. And by achieving socialism, I mean electoralism, and
by electoralism, I mean getting these people elected to office.
I hate these people. Their politics sucks. I've been fighting

(03:26:56):
them from like since I became a leftist. I've been
at war with these bowl and to to get a
sense of how we got from, you know what, what
was legitimately in a lot of cases, what was at
least legitimately in arguing about how to deal with racism
to a bunch of socialists going, we need more cops.
I want to take a look at a piece r

(03:27:17):
Adam or Usami wrote in Catalyst with David Zachariah called
the class path the racial Liberation, And I want to
take a quote from its opening to give it a
sense of people of like how awful this politics is.
This is like like one of the sort of like
opening statements about what what the's why they're taking the
class side in the debate. We argue that the class
race debate should center on one principal domain, the distribution

(03:27:41):
of material resources. Now, Okay, at first glance, this seems
kind of reasonable enough, But there's another incredibly important aspect
of any attempt to grapple with racing class that Usumi
is just ignoring entirely. And that's violets, right. Race. Race

(03:28:02):
is not just a measure of economic inequality. It's an
index of violence. And you know, racialization increases your risk
of interperson inter personal violence, and increases your risk of
sexual violence, and increases your risk of mass communal violence
on lynching or sort of ethnic cleansing campaigns, and maybe
most importantly for this whole argument, like being racialized dramatically
increases the risk of suffering state violence. And this is

(03:28:25):
a real problem for the sort of class first people
because you know, something sort of multiple like multi racial
working class electoral project won't do ship to prevent people
from experiencing state violence just because there's welfare programs, you know,
which we talked about this what this looks like in
our Brazil episodes. Right, you actually have like legitimately a
you know, like a sort of united multi racial working
class at election social democratic governments and they enact anti

(03:28:48):
poverty before performs and increase the size of the welfare state.
And while this is happening, they also increase incarceration the
incarcerated population by six and created a rated police killing
that as eleven times higher than it is an US right.
And this is the thing these people really don't want
anyone to think about, which is that race is actually
more complicated than economic inequality, which this entire politics is

(03:29:12):
is dedicated to not seeing because class first politics, like
a lot of what it really is about, amounts to
a theoretical framework that gives you a way to argue
that race is not an explanatory framework for literally anything,
so you don't have to talk about it and anyone
who talks about it is dividing the working class or
some ship, and it, yeah, it fucking sucks. And you know,

(03:29:34):
like one of one of the big sort of political
violence things is massacrceration. And one of sort of donna
is like political projects is arguing that massacrcepiration isn't about
race at all, but it's actually about class, which so
we're going to see somewhere bullshit, um, he wrote. He

(03:29:56):
wrote an article in Catalyst called the Economic Origin the
mass Incarceration a longside New Chicago professor John Clegg, and
I have like I have an enormous special contempt for
John Clegg for two reasons here. One because you know,
a Donner is like an irredeemable Jocobin like soaked them
hack right. Clegg is nominally was was part of the
sort of the anglophan Barxist like ultra left right, like

(03:30:18):
he he was one of the contributors to the sort
of to to the ultra left theory journal like ultra
left Barxist Communization Journal end Notes, which you know, like
that influenced me a lot when I was like a
tiny baby leftist. And he I also have an incredible
amount of contempt here because he's a Harper Schmidt fellow
at the University of Chicago. And here's the thing. Okay,
I don't know what Harvard is like, right, I've never

(03:30:38):
been there. I don't know what their campus is like.
I don't know what it's like to be be on
campus at Harvard. I know what you Chicago. The Chicago
campus is like. I know, but there's a cop on
every fucking corner. I know that the surveillance campus literally everywhere.
I know if that they locked down the entire fucking campus,
will hundreds of heavily armed cops storm through every building
in every courtyard in the area every single time that
kids steal something from a gaming store and runs for

(03:31:00):
it until they've hunted them the fun down. And I
know that, you know, I I know that the cops
almost fucking killed me while I was there during a
police chase. I know that John Clegg was on fucking
campus when the Chicago Police Department shot a kid who
was having a mental health crisis. And to to watch
this ship every single fucking day and to make this
kind of argument is just fucking unforgivable. It is. It

(03:31:22):
is fucking atrocious. I I guess I should. I should
explain this a little bit for people who do don't
understand this. So, the University of Chicago is like in
the middle of the South side of Chicago. It's like
the nigh like most neighborhoods around it are like black.
And then there is just this fucking university they've planted
in the middle of it. And this college has the
world's largest private police force. There's the also the regular
fucking cpds around there. There are like for like blocks

(03:31:45):
and like like through other neighborhoods there were just Chicago
police officers there. There are fucking CPD cops everywhere. It
is a fucking bibilitorized hell hall. And yeah, and you know,
like it is a place where like the way that
race functions in the US is blindingly fucking obvious. You
can you can immediately understand it by looking, Like you

(03:32:06):
walk outside your fucking dorm, you look at the cop,
and you look at how the cop treats people depending
on what the race is. Right, it is so unbelievably obvious. However,
Comma in this article Clagg, it is to me are
going to argue that mass incarceration is actually a product
of class policy resulting from a lack of social democracy
and underdevelopment resulting from a transition from an agrarian economy

(03:32:28):
to an industrial economy in the in the century, and
the subsequent mass migration of black people north. Like what
kind of a grarian economy? We have to watch economy?
How much paid? It's like it's like the basic argument

(03:32:50):
that they're gonna make is that, like, well, so there
are a bunch of people who had been slaves and
then they became not slaves, and then a bunch of
them started migrating north. But because there was this mass migration,
all these people showed up to the like showed up
to these cities where there was no infrastructure, and then
so there was a bunch of crime, and then because
of the crime, there was mass incarceration, which is, okay,
we're going to get some war into this. But before

(03:33:12):
we go into served the reactionary part of this article, right,
you have to understand that when these people say that
this is a a like a class based policy, like
class here does not mean the same thing that it
means for like you know, a regular person who thinks
about class, or like you know, a Marxist which again
both these people nominally are. Um. Here's from the journal Specter,

(03:33:34):
which a really good sort of critique of of this
whole absolutely dogshit article. Quote Clegg and usums claim that
class is essential to understanding mass incarceration amounts to a
repackaging of a widely understood fact as revelatory insight. And
while they titled their article quote the Economic Origins and
mass Incarceration, they never delve further into class and a

(03:33:57):
Marxist or even critical sense. Instead, they use educational attainment
data as a proxy. They note that a large portrait
of people who are imprisoned have low levels of educational entertainment.
And I I'm glad to know that everyone on this
call who does the exact same job as me, we're
all from different classes. Congratulations, James, you are now the bourgeois.

(03:34:18):
The congratulations Garrison, you're not proletariat, I might guess, the
labor aristocracy. Why I'm here to expropriate the surplus value
from your labor gyeah? Yeah, And if you get to prison,
it's it's my fault. Yeah, Like I I just okay,
So like what an asshole? What would ridiculous fucking claim? Yeah?

(03:34:42):
And it's like like these okay, so like like it
was some these like the Jocobin people do this all
the time, right, Like they had this they made this
famous study about the people who vote for Trump that
was like, oh, it's people people who voted for Trump
didn't like working class areas and the game woarding class
was by education data. And then also they didn't go
because it's up like this is actually true, right there
there are a lot of people who vote with Trump

(03:35:02):
for working class areas. It turns out who those people
are are the small business owners who work class areas.
They didn't fucking go grand your love, so that you
know they do this ship all the time, right, and
this is the kind of analysis that like like proxy
for class. It's like it's a classic fallacious thing. Yeah,
like like what's his name, Nicholas Christoff, but yeah he

(03:35:24):
did this too, also like like this is this is
this is We're we're getting fucking Christoff level analysis out
of these supposed Marxists and like, okay, so all right.
The curious thing here is that clag at least on
an intellectual level, knows better than this, right, Like he
votes he wrote for end notes and notes has a
very sophisticated class analysis. But if you're actually interested in

(03:35:47):
the sweeping arc of the history of the proletariat, you
can't make the kinds of arguments that Clagg is making
in this thing. And so, you know, because because he's
trying to make this argument, users used to this like
like just absolutely like like seventh rate like fucking New
York Time is pundit level analysis. Yeah, it's like okay,
you know, like there there, it's it's this is really

(03:36:07):
sad because for actual Marxists and not sort of like
liberal bourgeois hacks doing like fucking New York Times bullshit.
You know, classes about ownership, right, It's about who owns
the means of production and who's forced to work for them.
And you know, okay, so you have this, you have
the proletariat or like the working class, where the people
who own nothing and are thus forced to sell their
labor for people who do who do own stuff. Right.

(03:36:28):
But this also presents a problem for this entire argument,
because if you actually want to do class analysis, you
have to understand that race plays a major roland who
even gets to become part of the regular proletariat in
the first place, because most there's a lot of people
through the development of the course of capitalism who fucking
never even got to become wage labors because they were enslaved,
they were exterminated, they were turned to debt peons and

(03:36:50):
oh wait, guess who fucking got that ship? Oh yeah,
it wasn't white people. And you know, if if, if
you're if you're gonna write and if you're gonna be
writing arguments and like playing the rise of like a
mass system of enslavement, you might want to think about this.
But no, okay, So do you know what else is

(03:37:12):
responsible for a mass serious a mass system of enslavement? Uh?
The advertising and how they affect our brains. Yeah, that one.
I was going to go with Stalin, but the same
same day if honestly, yeah, Stalent first mass marketer so
true famously Yeah it Stalin. I'll saying you're me okay,

(03:37:32):
if you're asking, Okay, we're back, and we're back to
talk about the other argument of the economic origin of
massive carecederation, which is that the argument that massive carcederation
happened because people were legitimately scared about crime, Like this
is their argument. Their argument is that crime went up

(03:37:53):
people demanded less crime, and then the government did it,
Like wait did they did they give an outsis to
the class of people. Okay, they make this fun argument
that both black and white people were demanding the end
of crime, which is sort of true. But you know,

(03:38:13):
if you look at what like like yeah, like obviously,
and this is the thing, right, Like, you can find
people of any race who can who will take basically
any political position, and so if if you go looking
for like black people who are tough on crime, you
can find it. Right, there are black politicians who are
like tough on crime. Right, but that's also not the
reason why massacretiation happened, Like I'm sorry, And also, like

(03:38:35):
you know, if you and you know that there was
there was also there are people who who like weren't
tough on crime, people who were like talking about who
were talking about trying to end like sort of like
like violent spikes. But if you look at what they
were saying, it was stuff like we want the police
to like respect human rights instead of property rights, and uh,

(03:38:56):
you know, okay, so I yeah, this is this is
just sort of silly, right yeah, But but but the
point of this is that this is basically This is
their full on broadside against abolitionism as like a body
of work, right, it's a sort of modern abolitionism. Um,
it's directly criticizing Michelle Alexander's The New drym Crow mass

(03:39:17):
incarceration in the Age of Color Blindness. And it's also
like a volley basically against anyone who's trying to explain
mass incarceration through race. And so what they argue is
that crime increase because there wasn't a strong labor movement
to solve the problem that like caused solve the problems
that cause crime with economic like reistribution, So the state

(03:39:37):
turned to like a cheaper option, which is prisons. And
is it a cheap proprition? Well, okay, so they're they're
they're not wrong in this, Like there is some truth here, right,
which is that there is a reason that mass incarceration
started spiking when capitalism went into crisis in the seventies
and eighties. And it is actually it is actually genuinely

(03:39:58):
cheaper for for for the boys where you need to
run a prison state that it is to run a
welfare state. But and and this is the important part, right,
both the welfare state and the prison complex are different,
are just different forms of kind of insurgency it used
to be. Who is a social democrat is ideologically incapable
of understanding this. His his entire ideology is that like

(03:40:21):
is based on the fact that the welfare state is
the end point of socialism. But this is completely backwards, right.
The welfare state and and social democracy were first implemented
by Bismarck, like specifically as a way to buy workers off,
to stop them from carrying out a socialist revolution and
actually seizing the pro like seizing the property of the
ruling class and using the production for the benefit of
mankind and not profit. That is why the ship the

(03:40:41):
welfare state was invented. Like that in practice, if you
go back to Edmund Burke right in the French Revolution,
reform to preserve the idea that like, we have to
give people these little these little slices here and there,
give them a treat, and then then then then they
will never come in and take the cake. And if
you read these people, they're really explicit about this, Like

(03:41:02):
they will just aquidly say we're buying off the working class.
But these absolute clowns have like somehow convinced themselves that
this is what socialism actually is. Social socialism is when
socialism is when you confuse table scraps for treats, and
you know, and and this this comes to sort of

(03:41:22):
the other thing that that that these people can't understand,
which is that social democracy was a class compromise. Right.
There was a deal that the capitalist of the working
class agree to. And when I when I say they
agree to this, right, like, this isn't just sort of
like an like it kind of is an abstract deal.
But there are also very literal deals. Right. There's this
thing called the Treaty of Detroit, which is this massive,
basically set of negotiations. And then are like agreements that

(03:41:45):
are made between the US government like like a huge
portion of organized labor in the auto industry and the
auto companies, right, which which basically like the substance of
the Treaty of Detroit was like if you give us
all of this welfare ship and benefits ship, right, we
won't we will stop constantly going on strike. These are
explicit deals. They're explicitly being negotiated between these massive trade
unions and and like the capitalist who owned companies by

(03:42:09):
the American government, and so they get this deal on
the deal is you get unions and pension and a
vacation and like health care, as long as you don't
like seize control of factories and run them for themselves.
And this held from sort of like the fifties through
the seventies. But partially this held because also the US specifically,
which is really really rich as economy was growing really fast.

(03:42:30):
But you know, but by by the by the suddenly
the rate of prophet is starting to collapse, and suddenly
it does actually become possible to both pay for the
welfare state and have capital turned into war capital at
the same time. And you know what happens is full
on class war over the course of seventies and the eighties,
and you know, the capitalists win the class war. And
the product of this, and this is true not just

(03:42:51):
in the U s but in in like a lot
of other neoliberal countries too, is that there is a
massive military that this the state is sort of stripped
down to nothing in tern of like providing services, but
there's this massive build up of the military and police
and also prisons. And so you know, this isn't some
sense that like if you if you want a class
based explanation of mass incarceration, like this is part of

(03:43:12):
that's a big part of what's going on. It's also
true that in the US, insofar as there was sort
of a revolutionary force, it was black people doing like
like doing the panthers, doing the like blanking on it,
doing the Black Liberation Army, and this meant that sort
of the sort of kind of revolution to this was
specifically about deploying the sort of like like they're deploying

(03:43:32):
the state against these people because yeah, like this movement
is actively trying to destroy capitalism by destroying the races
like police apparatus, and this I guess at the same
time period like aim for instance. Yeah, and you know,
so the ruling class sort of loses their minds and
this is this is also this is also part of
what's happening here. But the problem is the sort of

(03:43:53):
Jocobin cop freaks like need the police for their like
social democratic hell world that they want to build, and
so they can't have any like it is it is
incredibly structurally dangerous for them. For people to be arguing that,
like the police are inherently a force of like systemic
racial oppression because they want them around yeah, and so

(03:44:14):
they do all this. Yeah, and you know, Clegg meanwhile,
especially I can tell, just doesn't want to use race
as like an explanation for ship Like they literally argue
in this in this thing, like in this in this
article that white flight was actually just capital flight and
wasn't about racism. Good, And they just they're they're doing
this entire thing about right this our political economy of

(03:44:37):
the city, and they just they never mentioned they're so
ruthlessly committed to their program of not talking about racism,
but don't even mention redlining. It's like like they've managed
to go to the right of like the Libertarian Party
on race. It's like them to the right. So I'm

(03:44:57):
gonna I'm gonna read more from the Spector article. That's
like yelling at these people considering their investments in the
category of violent crime. Clegg and used to be seemed
curiously serene about the practices that upheld segregation. They would
have us believe that such tactics are simply quote cast
based remedies of exclusion, and that quote such strategies were rational,

(03:45:19):
even if suboptimal in the long run, effectively rationalizing and
apologizing for racism. So this is great. And then they
capped this off with this giant, like swelling crescendo of
an argument about how the left can't ignore crime. And
you know, okay, so this is an argument with political consequences, right,

(03:45:43):
And you can see those consequences in that in the
cops article we were talking about yesterday. Um here, here,
here's a quote from that article. This figure shows the
same prisoner and police data as shown in figure one,
but this time denominated by the level of homicide rather
than the population amor because outlying incarceration look rate looks
normal given the level of serious crime, and now the

(03:46:05):
level of policing in the United States appears exceptionally low
compared to other countries. So okay, you can see the
line of argument here, right, It goes like mass incarceration
isn't about race, it's actually about class, and actually it's
really about crime. And then it goes from the crime
to oh, well, this is about crime too. We need
to actually do something about crime. And then that turns

(03:46:27):
into the only thing we can do about crimes, have
more cops, you know, and and and the other part
of this, right, it goes back to the thing about like, okay,
the thing about like that, you know, and this is
something that Garrison was talking about yesterday, right like the
way in which you can only think the level of
policing in the US is exceptionally low, is is if

(03:46:48):
you never interacted with a cop. And yes, this is
a deliberate thing, right the sort of Dracobin cadre of
like faux marx Is, like their entire political project was
really originally was driving off the anarchists you found it Occupy,
you know, drinking like and driving these people into the
political wilderness. It is placed it with their sort of
beer credit cops socialism. Right like what one of one

(03:47:10):
of the first like big Jocobin articles was a giant
thing about why this Zapatitis aren't model for the American
left because right like this is that these people have
been anti anarchists like to their core, and again because
they need cops, they need to get rid of the
people who hate the cops. Like again, the people who
were actually on the street street Occupy, who have seen
ship like for example, the bloody stains on the wall

(03:47:31):
outside of police holding pens where the cops smashed the
heads into of like every single person they arrested a
thing that happened constantly drink occupy right, and these people
who you know have seen the police shoot their friends
eyes out, like, are incredibly inconvenient if you're trying to
put yourself on top of a police state. And you
know so of course our abolitionists, which means you also
need a sideline them them and and these are this

(03:47:54):
you know, this sort of strategy is an old entrenched
like position of of of these people. Um in, Jeremy Gong,
who was like the one time basically like the dictator
of d. S. A. East Bay, was caught in in
secret documents saying quote, we are not in caps, by
the way, in his capital letters, not for abolition of prisons.
I would go further of black people want more police

(03:48:17):
in their neighborhoods. Really yeah, Jeremy Gong, by the way,
Asian dude, not black. Fuck you eat ship. I hope
you're having fun, Like, well, I don't have I don't
hope you're having fun. I hope you're having a bad
time losing another election by getting three percent of the
vote or some ship like fuck you eat ship. Um yeah,
and I should mention this also like it's a very

(03:48:41):
obvious thing to say, but like it should be pointed
out that like everyone who's making this argument like that,
specifically these arguments about cops and about the stuffing about crime,
these people are all either wider Asian, and I genuinely
think that plays a pretty big role in why they're
doing this. And it's just to breathtaking position to take

(03:49:04):
as a white person, Like I'm looking at the anarchist
Barring article which she wrote for news Week, great source
of unbiased content on the left about how where we
need to stop gas lighting progressives need to stop gas
lighting people on crime too, as a white person, take
the stand with the platform that has been given to you,

(03:49:25):
with all the privileges that you have had, and and
gas like black folks about the importance of race. It's
just breathtakingly lacking in like context of self awareness or
like have you not been fucking paying attention like at
least for the last two years, if not for the
last twenty years, you know, And I mean, like this
is the whole thing where like they have this whole

(03:49:47):
sort of political project that's like like makes talking about
like their goal is to make talking about this ship
sound cringe, because you know, they and they have to
write this is this, this is this is also sort
of class based revival strategy, right because like they these
people couldn't fucking hack it as abolitionist scholars. They have
no fucking idea what they're talking about. Right If they,
if they, if they have to actually intellectually like be

(03:50:08):
in the same sphere as like someone like Ruth Gilmore Wilson,
they are going to get fucking blow. Like these people
look like this is this is like a fucking battle
cruiser going to war gets a speedboat, right, Like, they
can't fucking hack it, And so they have to sort
of like do all of this ship to convince people
that like, no, no, no, it's actually really not about race. Uh,
it's it's actually about class, this thing that I can

(03:50:30):
very easily pretend to care about for academia in a
way that I can't with you know, pretending to care
about race, because like I, I can't even fucking fake it, right,
And you know I would say this's like back in right,
Like Jeremy Gong and his allies are very careful to
frame their view in terms of like, wow, we want
to end mass incarceration in police violence, but we have
to be tactical about how we do it, and the

(03:50:51):
tactical about how we do it is black people want
more cops, right, But that that was their internal documents.
Their external their external statements were like, well some police
abolition is some stuff looks like more cops anyways, But
but you know, internally they were always saying this. And
now with the you know, these people think that there's
a political right turn coming and they think that, you know,
they can fucking take their mask off and just say

(03:51:11):
what they really mean, which is five more fucking cops,
and you know, and part of what's going on here, right,
it is like, like the reason this is happening is
because when the uprising happened, these people were just caught
with their pants down because their entire political project for
like fucking how how how many years were they doing this?
Like seven years was elect Bernie Sanders, and then he
lost back to back successively to like Hillary Clinton, who

(03:51:36):
was maybe the least popular can the Democrats ever run ever?
And Joe Biden, who is a fucking senile rapist who
like again it was like, um, they they lost his
election to a man who couldn't remember who who he
had been vice president under and they couldn't beat him, right, like,
so these people were completely discredited, and then you know,
the uprising happens and people were caught with their pants

(03:51:56):
down because they spent their entire fucking time or like
arguing that there's no path liberation through race, like race,
any kind of race politics at all, intersectionalities bullshit, like
we just have to focus on class, just to focus
on class, and they're fucking pure class. Electoral campaign failed
in oh, hey, guess what it failed in the South,
Like wow, damn, I wonder why this politics got swept

(03:52:17):
by Joe Biden. Okay, And then you know, and then
and then the up the uprising starts, and the uprising
is you know, the uprising is about anti racism. It
is about people looking at the at the violence like
of the police against black people and going fuck this
and they have nothing right, like the whole intellectual leadership here,
like all these people are fucking calling for world crops.

(03:52:37):
Bernie Sanders is arguing for Moore cops right like Rapo
was fucking Trampa was literally making the same arguments that
my fucking mayor made. Well, she was raising the fucking drawbridges.
Is stop protesters from being able to get back into
the middle of Chicago, which is that actually, like cops,
becoming a cop is actually one of the few ways
that non white people can join the middle class. Right.

(03:53:00):
I was like, I think Amber made that argument, right, Um,
so you know they have nothing right and you know, okay,
and and and you know, and the uprise eventually gets supressed,
which the best thing that ever happened to these people,
because if the uprising has to see these people were
done right. Like, but all of this has enormous consequences, right,
which is the failure of the working class to appear
at the ballot box. And like Paul Bernie Sanders over

(03:53:20):
the line against Joe Biden revealed something that was like
patently obvious to anyone who've been watching how the working
class is moving worldwide for the past twenty years, which
is that the only thing that can actually unify the
if you care about class politics, the only thing that
can unify the working class and pull it together as
a coherent political force to do a thing is their
hatred of the police. If if you look at if
you look at what the work of working class politics

(03:53:42):
in the century, the world, the working class finds his
historical unity exactly and only on the barricade it appears undivided.
Literally nowhere else it is impossible. You can't do it.
The only thing that does it is fighting the police
more broadly and like means of state violence. Right, Like
if we look at the popular friend in its Spain,

(03:54:02):
it don't you even get like cops who are installed
by a socialist republican government joining the working class to
fight the military. But yeah, instead we're going to be
like the working class will be united in this op
ed at news week dot com or and there's this
smoking electoral thing, right, And it's like no, and I
think that like this this is partially about this people
not understanding the sort of broad arc of of the

(03:54:24):
last decade a decade and a half, which is that,
like this was the actual meaning behind the people want
to fallow of the regime. Right this, this was what
was going on in the last decade of uprising in
the street movements across the world. Right, is that that
was the thing that could unify the working class. But
of course, and and this is the sort of secret
of all of this, right, Like, these people don't want
to unify the working class They only want to unify

(03:54:46):
it if it's under their control. The erupt the eruption
of you know, like actually the working class standing side
by side together fighting the cops on barricades in twenty
was the worst thing that could possibly happen to them,
because you know, it pointed to another way of doing
politics that they like in the in the street that
they thought they'd you know, crushed after the feet of
occupy and yeah, and you know, and they were, they were,

(03:55:08):
they were incredibly scared by this. They were piste off
by this. And you know, I I I mentioned last episode,
I was going to talk about the sort of class
politics that's at work here because you know, these demands
for more cops, like they don't come from the working class, right, Like,
in so far as there's ever been a referendum on
the police as an institution, it was and you know,

(03:55:31):
we know what that looked like, right, It was it
was a bunch of working class kids went into the
streets and you know and fought like lions against the
fucking cops, and even the sort of liberal like the
liberal middle and professional classes like eventually turned against them,
you know, as as rolled on right, and you know,
like those people still hung on for months and months

(03:55:53):
and months, you know, like refusing to leave the streets
even after the fucking federal marshal sort of literally assassinating
people openly in the streets. Right, Like the whole demand
from more cops for like a harsher crackdown on crime.
All of this stuff comes from precisely the opposite direction. Right.
It's entirely generated by the by the by by by
basically the media class. Right. It's it's class based is

(03:56:14):
a combination of these sort of like faux progressive like
media outlets. And originally the starts with the New York
Times and the Washington Post, and then moves left are
nominally left right, and when it hits like the fucking
T I T and all of their like bullshit right,
and then you know, and and and then at that point,
having having having went through the media people, right, it's
it starts running through these pseudo ratical academics like Christopher

(03:56:36):
Lewis and Autinario Sami and then the last group of
people who are backing this this is a very weird one.
But there's a collection of paid union staffers who like
for their jobs because they're in the big union's work
on police and prison guard contracts. Um, this this is
actually this is this is this has been a huge
problem the d s A in in In said one

(03:57:00):
of the NC elections, they had um for the for
the National Political Committee, which is the d s A
is big major body, like governing body. Right. They they
accident people accidentally elected a police union organizer because he
was like they knew he was a union organized, but
they didn't know that he organized police unions. And then
he he fucking refeat like nothing, nothing was going to happen.
And then basically what happened is everyone had left the

(03:57:22):
organization bullied him out and so he resigned. But like, yeah,
there's a lot of those people, right and those people's
classes actives are incredibly obvious. Right, But didn't the a
f l c I O even in like refused to
reject police unions right there? But like, no, people, if
I remember, if I remember, I think I think someone
threw a malt off like into the headquarters the because

(03:57:44):
of it, Like yeah, like this this this is the
whole fucking thing, and you know, like this sucks. Cops
are not fucking workers, Jesus Christ, Like they're they're just
not if you if you look at what they actually do,
they're they're they're like they're basically minor feudal lords in
that they extract rent from everyone by fucking walking on

(03:58:07):
people and robbing them. And then they also extract rent
directly from us by staking, by stealing, just like enormous
increasingly large amounts of city funds under basically the threat
of extortion and violence. Yeah, little dames, Yeah, it's it's
it's ship. I want to come back to the sort
of left media outlets, right, because what we've been seeing

(03:58:27):
here is that as as these lot of left media
outlets get larger, right, they increasingly adopt like insane small
business tyrant politics. Because that's that's the different coming right too.
I t notoriously tried to bust its own union staff. Yeah,
because it turns out as journalists become bosses and capitalists,
they have they have their own classes just to look
out for, right, Yeah, and they will continue producing this

(03:58:48):
class discourse which serves as nothing other than like best
like a safety sort of steam valve, right for people
who are frustrated by the class situation they work in.
If if not like an outright sort of disinformation campaign
about what class is. Yeah, and you know, and and
and there's I think there's another thing going on here too,
which is that like, okay, if if you're like a

(03:59:10):
sort of like media outlets and your things that you
hate liberals and that you're on the left, right, there's
there's kind of a cap to your audience base, and
specifically as a cap that the kind of audience you
can have that actually has money, because you know, you
can you can get a broke base and sort of
progressive workers, and you can get some college students, right,
but at some point, like those those are not people
that have a large amount of money. Yeah, And at

(03:59:32):
some point the right offers a listener base that has
a bunch of money, and this gives you a revenue
base for sort of would be like media attack who's
hitting the limits of their original base. And this is
responsible for things like like Max Blue menhal and X
like t I T Reporter Jimmy Door like descending it
is just full on COVID nihilism and con I mean,
you know, it's it's it's not like these people were

(03:59:53):
like doing good before, but like, you know, full on
right wing, like like Matt Max Bluementhal going from being
the most pro CCP guy the world has ever seen
to literally writing articles about how social credit is coming
to the us UH in a form of commed restrictions
like this kind of ship. And you know, so like
that that's part of the class politics going on here.

(04:00:13):
Like there's another thing, which is like, okay, there's the
Harvard academics. I don't think we need to say anything
complicated about their class loyalties except that, like, none of
these dipships are ever be beaten half the death by
a cop um. Yeah, I mean we talked about the
union bureaucrats, right, Um, they're more complicated. But again, like

(04:00:34):
in class terms, you get people who are either driven
by purely by sort of the revenue that copying is
bring in, and then you get people who are opposed
to political organizations like the d s A taking firm
stances against police union organizers because it would affect their
own ability to win off like win elections inside the
d s A, A thing that has happens so many times.

(04:00:55):
It's great. It's it's very funny that they chose classes,
and they chose like education level as their proxy for class.
And we are discussing this in the same week that
we release an episode about a grad student strike at
the largest university in the country because grad students are
unhoused because they can't afford to pay their rent and
feed themselves. It is. It is a Trocias ship. Like, Okay,

(04:01:21):
I need hate people. Um, yeah, So I want to
close off by talking about something, which is that there's
also a political angle to all of this. Right, these people,
all of these people doing this fucking crime bullshit, all
these people fucking going right, all of these people calculated
that a right turn in American politics was coming. Right.
That's why t Yet endorse a fucking literally a Republican

(04:01:43):
in California who was also an insane, tough on crime guy.
This is why. That's why they had no Noso Caruso.
Yeaho was a Republican who changed his party affiliations. We
could run the Democratic thing. Who fucking sucks, asked, That's
why theyre that, That's why they had Matt quote alleged
pedophile Gates on their show on election night, Larry Elder

(04:02:05):
on this show as well, like election denialist Larry Elder. Yeah,
like this this wasn't just a pure product of these
people going insane watching videos of like people looting grocery
stores and turn to get tough on crime. Reactionaries. This
was the political calculation and stuff. But yeah, but but
but they sucked up. Right, These people fundamentally don't understand

(04:02:25):
what this country is. They're scared, they've given up. They
saw a single homeless person on the street and turn
into a fascist. And they think that the American people
are just hopeless, the reactionary and the only thing that's
left to do is solve the situation by selling out.
And they're smart. They don't think. They don't credit people
with having like compassion or empathy or intelligence either. Right,
they think they would go the direction their stupid grift

(04:02:46):
show points. Yeah, and and they're wrong. They're incredibly wrong.
This is a country that, in the name of fighting
racism and the police, in the name of solidarity with
people who are not their fucking seals, people who they
will literally never beat, put on a mass picked up
a brick and waged war against the best funded police
force in human history. And for like a week and
a half, those same fucking Americans who the entire political

(04:03:08):
spectrum had written office hopelessly beaten down and passive and
right wing and like people people who will take any
amount of abuse and never is anything back wrecked. The
fucking wrecked. The cops shit so hard they lost control
over the centers, have made multiple major American cities and
had to call in the fucking National Guard, who in
turn got their ship wrecked so hard that they had
to rely on liberal civil society to call him the

(04:03:29):
protest down. And even then, the President would have fucking
deployed the army against them if he had actually been
physically able to. And the old reason that these people
weren't fighting the fucking army in the streets was that
was that the fucking American generals refused to go along
with it. Right like that, that is who the U
s is that that that is whose generation is. This
generation is forever the generation that burned the Third Precinct,

(04:03:52):
and the fucking X left is running right. Just don't
fucking get it right. They think the entire clock has
been brown back. They think that like those that, like
the of people who did that, I've already been destroyed.
They don't matter. The only thing left, you know that
you can do is join them right and mitigate the damage.
And they're fucking wrong. They are wrong. They can't see it.
They cannot see that there was no way to turn
the clock back to before the uprising happened. They can't

(04:04:14):
see that, like this entire country, that the that the
American working class, that parts of the people who are
not part of the American working class have been fundamentally changed.
And yeah, they just they just can't see it. And
because they can't see it, the only thing that they're
ever going to feel is the way that there is.
The only thing they can feel is the way of
their ignorance. And the only thing they're going to feel
on top of that is them getting fucking buried by

(04:04:36):
the weight of the history that has left them behind.
Because fun, these people, fuck the cops. Fun the people
who support the cops. These people will be down, but
will be fucking drowned by the tide of history they
thought didn't fucking exist. Fuck them. Okay, this is what Yeah,
you can probably tell I wrote this really really piste
off at five in the fucking morning, because Jesus Christ,

(04:05:01):
that's good. Yeah, yeah, I agree with you. Pick up
a brick, put down the young Turks. Yeah, don't fucking
support more cops. Every every everyone will hate you. Your
coworkers will hate you, your friends will hit you, your
family will hit you. The guy, the guy at the
fucking quarter store will hate you. Yeah. And if you

(04:05:22):
find your fucking left hero standing the people who murdered
George Floyd or stood around and watch George Floyd being murdered,
then they are not a leftist anymore. And it's okay
to tell them to fuck off and die. Yeah, And
I mean, like, and we can go back to this
our first episode, right, Like, the reason these people are
calling for five more cops is that they've given up entirely, right,
They literally do not think it is possible for anything

(04:05:44):
to ever improve in the US, And then well they
are wrong. Yeah, And I think that they're okay with
the way that our police behave and there if that
makes him feel comfortable and safe, then they don't mind
people die at the hands in the police. Cops protect
rich people. These people have gotten wealthy enough to have
the cops now benefit them. It's it's that simple, Like,

(04:06:07):
that's that, that's it's it's it's I think that really
is the yeah, trying motivator here. Yeah, And like I
will say this to like, if we ever get to
a point where we start sucking doing this, like take
us down to this. This is this isn't just a
sort of like we're trying to build our business whatever.
I don't like, I don't fucking care. I would I

(04:06:27):
would rather fucking go broke in the streets. I would
rather fucking die than be a person whose job it
is to say we need more cops. Fuck these people. God, yeah,
m m. They've plumped me on Twitter, so I can't
say get off to him podcast fans. God, we are

(04:06:52):
not insigning harassment campaign instead nowhere other things. Yeah, I
don't waste Yeah, I know seriousness. Don't waste your time
doing this course with people who exist to create bullshit
discourse said, just a distraction. Go and help someone needs
your help. It's called it's wet, it's wintertime and everyone
the house, people who are shivering on the streets. So
don't funk with the young talk. Just ignore them. Point

(04:07:14):
to say, go go, go, go out there and fucking
build the socialism that these people think is impossible, because
we can do it, and we will, and then we
will laugh at them because we've done it and they
are fucking bullshit. Yeah, that's that's the episode. Hey, we'll

(04:07:36):
be back Monday, with more episodes every week from now
until the heat death of the universe. It Could Happen
Here is a production of cool Zone Media. For more
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You can find sources for It Could Happen Here, updated
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(04:07:59):
for listening.