It Could Happen Here Weekly 166

your mail. Is Tommy Espinoza, who's a union steward for the National Association of Letter Carriers. Tommy, welcome to the show.

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

to strike, and how sort of weird that is. So Yeah, I was wondering if you could talk a bit about sort of the origins of the union and what effect that has had on how organizing works or doesn't work.

People were working months straight with no days off, and those were close to twelve hour days, and so these postal workers at the time qualified for welfare and decided in nineteen seventy to go on strike despite it being illegal. This conversation is not new. It was illegal then, it's illegal now. And I do want to be crystal clear here. I am not advocating for a strike that would also be against the law, and we don't advocate for anything

that's against the law. What I do want to advocate for is the right to strike, because being quasi federal, there's a lot of limitations in what the NAOC and the general postal unions are able to do. In total, there are nine bargaining agreements and seven unions within the Post Office, some of which are the manager's unions, so

take that as it is. Yet, on top of not being able to strike, none of our money that we collect as union does can be used for lobbying purposes, so they can't support a single candidate or any of the parties involved. We have a separate fund for that with the NAOC called the Letter Carrier's Political Fund, to try and circumvent the restrictions that are put on there. And as a result of that, it's like we're fighting with our hands tied behind our back. We are unable

to organize effectively. Our union leadership seems to be afraid of protests and picketing for fear that it'll be misconstrued or labeled as a strike, and they're I think generally afraid of public opinion.

buying attempting to buy politicians. And then also your leadership is like, we can't strike, I mean, we can't protest because someone might think it's a strike and the public might commit us. And it's like that that doesn't seem I don't know, it really seems like it's like it's not only have you tied both hands behind your back, you've like tied them behind your back to your legs and you're now rolling around on the ground.

they were calling for a national strike. Nixon called in the National Guard to try and deliver mail, and the National Guard had no idea what they were doing. There's an amazing video that I'll try and send you afterwards. It's just the National Guard at our cases where we sort the mail. An interviewer is asking him, do you think that you're doing a good job. It's just like, no, it's just some kid, you know. And don't get me wrong, I'm just some guy. But you need the training, you

need to know what you're doing. And it's not something that anyone can pick up in a day, but it's a job that anyone can do. But yeah, for the first time, the mail had stopped, and that won us collective bargaining binding arbitration, which is the process that I think most people within unions know what they mean, but to explain it, arbitration is what happens when our parties cannot agree on a settlement for a grievance, and eventually we call in a third party, an arbitrator to decide

for us, and those are generally lawyers. On top of binding arbitration, it gave us a new payscale and set in motion. I think over it's got to be hundreds of raises between the colas and the new pay table. It used to be twenty one years for you to reach the top pay scale, which is absolutely ridiculous, and I think it's eight. Yeah, So the Post Office was

forced to reorganize, and so is the union. This is where the American Postal Workers union was born, and from this strike we were able to settle on the National Agreement. So there's the National Agreement, which is our binding contract. There's the JCAM, which is the Joint Contract Administration Manual, which is what the Post Office and the union use as the interpretation of the contract. That way, we are not arguing and spending time about what the contract could mean.

We can just focus on whether or not someone broke our agreement. So after this, one would imagine that a quasi federal institution would honor the contract that was created, argain in good faith, and treat their employees. Isn't that right?

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

even though all of them technically committed a crime. And that's something that like, you know, I think, let me okay, the the enforcements of laws depends on sort of the the depends on a set of of relative balance of forces and whether people care about envoice in the law, which is how like for example, like if you pirate like seven movies and you get you get three copyright strike,

you go to prison. But you know, like the sam Altman or whatever like AI company can literally steal everything on the entire Internet and get.

done to the individual. Eventually, the Department of Labor says, yes, we will pay this individual, and the post office is liable to pay them. But now they are off the rolls, which means there's a greater period of time before this individual gets their money. And there's a certain form that within the post office the managers need to fill out.

I believe it's an eighty one thirty or you know, all these forms have some numbers associated with them that they just refuse to fill out and there's no recourse, there's no cheeze a path for us to take to make them hurry or make them get this individual the money that they're owed. And some people this doesn't ruin their lives and they've already paid off their house or whatever. But I imagine for many many working Americans that's that's their livelihood immediately down the drain.

which could be scheduled years out. I think if you do the math for our current rate of handling these cases and how many cases we have, it'll take around fifteen years to get through the long.

so that our employees have to wait. Something I do want to talk about that's outside of the grievance procedure if we can, is just what's going on with the post Office and the Postmaster General. Yeah, all right, So I want to go at this from the customer perspective first, because I think that's the best way to relate to people. I think, by and large, people are losing faith in the Post Office. Either you have no idea what's going on,

or you don't care, and that's fine, I'd say. Before I joined, I didn't think of them at all, and you know, they're just the guy that shows up at my house every morning. A lot of people seem to think that the post Office is going out of business, and our customers are facing increasingly long lines, misdelivered or lost mail, and an increase in postage for a service that is getting worse. People are paying more for worse service, and it's easy to point out those issues from the

outside and be rightfully upset at them. I do feel like we're doing a disservice to our our customers, and I'm not really not trying to attack them when I say that they're uninformed or clueless to the inner workings

of the Post Office. I do directly want to attack Congress and say that, yeah, when they post They had pushed forward a bill called the Postal Accountability and Enhancement Act in two thousand and six, which required the Post Office to prefund one hundred percent of its retiree health benefits and liabilities seventy five years into the future. What so overnight the post Office was handed a five point five billion dollar burden, and that's where the whole I

don't know if you remember. I certainly wasn't conscious of it at the time, to save our post office stickers that were being sold and trying to fund the post Office office. And really that's where the rhetoric of the post Office is going under comes from. The other thing I want to point out is that we are a quasi federal We actually accept nothing from tax payer monies. It says it's a service, but really the post Office has ran as a business. We don't even get subsidized

because they don't need to. My local union president loves to remind us that the post Office is a business that has a revenue of seventy eight point two billion dollars, and he'll want me to stress that the point two is extremely important because point two of a billion is twenty million. They are not in jeopardy. We are not going out of business. And the Postmaster General, Louis de Joy, he's the second highest paid public servant in America, just underneath the President of the United States.

as consolidation efforts for a business. So what they're doing is their consolidating infrastructure and the workforce, which means closing post offices in order to save money and shoving three installations into one building. That's why the lines are getting longer. It also means that from dispatch the employees have to drive an extra mile or two into their working zone, which of course means that we're going to go into overtime and this just throws a wrench in the mail

handling process. He has single handedly made the service a lot more reliable, and I do think that you're right. Irreliable, yeah, sorry, more unreliable, and I do think that you're right. He wants to destroy the post office not only for the election, but to the point where it makes more sense to go private. Now is the time to point out that the joy is a major shareholder in FedEx, which is which is a subcontractor for the USPS, and he has

millions of dollars in equity involved. He's got skin in the game.

And my commute isn't that bad. I think I'm about fifteen minutes each way, and I really can't imagine driving two hours after an eleven hour shift just to eat and come back and do it again.

an unknown amount of time until you quit. And if you're in a busy place, then that just means that they're going to work you to death. So when you join the workforce, immediately you lose time with your family. You lose time with your loved ones and your friends. And I myself am so fortunate that all my loved ones have been beyond understanding. But every time I talk about it that I get asked the same thing, why don't you quit?

et cetera. And so if you can just cause high turnover rates on purpose, that's that's the thing that a lot of these sort of business goule like Nightmare or factory people love in their workforces and makes everyone else's life just a living hell. But you know they're getting They're still getting paid.

strategy was. Everything's after the contract has been signed, and that's just not how unions were meant to be. They're meant to be from the bottom up, by the workers, for the workers. But it really does feel like it's like national is its own entity, and so I guess that would bring us to talking about the union and the future of the Union.

want to demonize that he's struggling. But what I do want to say is when you're going through something like that and you've accepted a position on the national level like this, you really need to either step down or appoint someone to handle things in your place. As negotiations started over a year ago, he kind of went missing and it was later revealed that he was inpatient, which is fine, get your help, but there was nothing left, no notes left for us to strategize with, and our

membership is just in the dark. And beyond that, the leadership has gone missing. It's it's very dark times for the NLC.

of people who can make decisions for themselves. And if it's if that's not happening and you get to the point where these decisions are being made by a very small number of people who can just sort of vanish, like that's that for whatever, and you know, literally whatever reason that is, right, it could just be you get sick. It could just be like what happens. That's just a

terrible way to organize things. And I guess it's also like I want to make take it like like like a little tiny tangent to be like, if you're doing any organizing project, your goal is to organize yourself out of a job. Like you're like, ideally, if you were in an organization, it should be able to function without you. There should Not having an indispensable person is a fiasco.

And so I was saying, we're an dark times, but there's such a bright future that I can see for us Branch nine of the NALC, and namely this individual Tyler Vasser, who when I had originally posted on Reddit asking for attention, he's the one that I thought would be great for this interview. His branch, Branch nine has passed a resolution to form an open bargaining strategy for

contract negotiations, and I hope this sweeps the nation. We're not allowed to strike as I've mentioned, and our leadership is so shy when it when it comes to activism or mobilization of the workforce. They don't want to touch the topic. The closest thing we have to it is a rally that is Enough is Enough that's being held in Baltimore soon about the violence that's being done to

to postal workers. We're being robbed and we're being harassed, but even then we're missing a large chunk of the danger that is posed to postal workers, because yes, we're being robbed on the streets, but we're also being bullied and harassed inside of our work places by management, by the people who are supposed to empower us to do the job effectively. And so they don't want to touch the topic of a strike, I think, for fear of retaliation. But to me, pushing for the right to strike is

a I'm not sure how to word this. It is such an important part of the nilc's identity, the postal strike of nineteen seventy, that it seems silly to ignore it today and pretend like it didn't happen. So for the future, I think that activism is our key to success. I think that the old heads that lead our union come from a time where unions were frowned upon, where

activism was frowned upon. But I think that public opinion will be largely in our favor, and that public opinion can really put pressure on the legislative branch on Congress, and if we are transparent about our union, what we're

asking for the issues that we're facing. I think that the public would be on our side if the people in America knew that management was falsifying time records or training records and interfering with workers' comps, claim and back pay, or that they're not paying the settlements that they've agreed to pay, that they're not scheduling arbitration sessions big or small, that they would care, and that they would join us

in the streets. And major thing that happened I think it was last year in the summer, we had a letter carrier. His name is Eugene Gates, who died in the Texas heat Jesus because management told him not to take as many breaks or he would face discipline. She's pressures that we face when when you're threatened that you will lose your job if you don't listen to us

you will push yourself to the point of exhaustion. And further, yeah, I think that the post Office killed mister Gates and there wasn't as much outcry or or anger behind the movement. I often find myself thinking that while I don't have the answers, I do know that we need to care more. Yeah, and it's hard to care when when you're exhausted. I acknowledge that.

happening in these workplaces. And the second thing I think that's sort of important in terms of getting people to you know, like trying to actually do like mass mobilizations even just to get people to understand what's going on, is that I think a lot of people who are facing these kinds of conditions, think that they're alone and think that it's just something that happens to them, or they've been in them for so long they think that

it's sort of normal. And having a bunch of people go no, like a happens and be it shouldn't happen is extraordinarily powerful because you know like that that feeling of isolation is is the thing that all of that you know, you're that your bosses depend on to make sure that you know you you just keep going along with these conditions even though they are just objectively horrific, And I think any strategy that's not based on that is just not going to go anywhere.

what I want to push is for union solidarity. I want the NLC to hire organizers, specifically organizers to try and get the public mobilized and as well as the work so that we can put pressure on Congress so that we can show our bargaining teams that we support them and so that we can have clearly defined bargaining terms.

And yeah, I think that having solidarity between unions and reaching out to the other movements in a time where union support is higher than ever is such a clear path that we are just ignoring for whatever reason because people are afraid to speak out against the Post Office. And so I'm really not sure what's going to happen with our current contract, but I do know that the fight never ends, and that while we stand on the shoulders of giants, we have to pay respect to these

giants by not giving up now. And I'm a relatively new employee and steward, but I'm really walking in the footsteps of some warriors. The brand president I mentioned, Ken Lurch, has given me so much support and education and has done so much hard work over the years that I don't have to reinvent the wheel, none of us do. We just have to continue the struggle.

your front door, says for the postal worker. You know, there's nothing better that you can do than talking about it. Word of mouth is the best advertisement.

Please look at the Mayan mar episodes, the Free Burmer, the Burmese Revolution, and look at the work that me. I believe you've done the same work as James with border kindness. Those are two topics that I think y'all hit really well and that really touched me as a person. Sometimes I'll relisten to those episodes when I'm having a hard day just to remind myself that it's all the same. It's all the same fight.

of our nation's capital, reveling in their newfound impunity. The dark days have come again because they never really left. All the battles and street fighting and organizing from twenty seventeen to twenty twenty brought us four years of badly negotiated peace while the rot continued unabated rot. It's a term I see a lot these days. My colleague and friend ed Zetron refers to the hell our tech oligarchs

continue to force upon us as the rot economy. Charlie Angus, a member of the Canadian Parliament, used the term rage rot to refer to now President Trump's Christmas Day message suggesting Canada should become the fifty first State. Over the last year, I've seen a slew of articles bemoaning democratic decay, the rot plaguing democracy, and the deep rot at the heart of our political system. One thing I have done the last four years is learn how to efficiently process

the carcasses of wild animals. So I hunt to raise and slaughter, but many are roadkill, harvested from the side of the road. My family comes from rural Oklahoma, so perhaps there's some epigenetic hillbilly memory that makes this so satisfying to me. But it's also changed the way I understand the word rot. Rot starts from the bone. If you look at the back leg of an animal that's been hit by a truck, you'll see it spreading a deep black bruise from the ball and socket joint out.

If your goal is to preserve good meat, then the key is to remove those limbs from the body and then the meat from the bone sooner rather than later. When I think of rot and how to arrest it, I think of dismemberment. This seems to be the one thing that almost every political person in the country agrees with the United States as it is, must be dismembered, disassembled, sliced from the rotten bone and changed into something more

palatable for whoever holds the knife. Joe Biden and the Democratic Party failed primarily because they refuse to start cutting. Their successors will not make the same mistake on the opposing side of the isle. Today, I see a lot of angry people arguing about what the knife ought to be cutting, and how much better they'd use it if it passed into their hands. That doesn't help any of

us right now. Migrants are dying of thirst while vigilantes destroy water drops left by activists who themselves will likely be criminalized in the near future. Homeless Americans trying not to freeze to death at knight may soon find themselves arrested, forced into camps where they'll be made to labor for pennies. Neo Nazi's cheer as the billionaire behind the throne makes

fascist salutes from the White House with smirking impunity. The knife is so far away from our hands, I find myself distrusting anyone who wastes time bemoaning how it ought to be used. Where does that leave us, though? Is there anything to do in this deep winter besides listen to the jackals? Howling outside our doors. I have an answer to this question. Yes, now is the time to try to test the boundaries of our collective cage. Now

is the time to experiment. Since the time of the Founding Fathers, this country and its system have been referred to as the American Experiment. One could see the very terms narcissistic, yet another solipsistic gasp of American exceptionalism. But I tend to think the appellation is one we've earned. This country is and always has been a test tube for new, often bad ideas about how a society ought to run. American civilization's only core value is throw shit

at the wall and see what sticks. That also happens to be the only real way to fight back against authoritarianism. There's a scientific paper I bring up often, the evolution of overconfidence, which set out to explain why people so often badly overestimate their own abilities. The authors pondered quote infidence also leads to faulty assessments, unrealistic expectations, and hazardous decisions.

So it remains a puzzle how such a false belief could evolve or remain stable in a population of competing strategies that include accurate unbiased beliefs now. The conclusion these researchers came to was that when significant resources are contested between two organisms, the organism most willing to try to take said resources, even if it is not the strongest, tends to succeed, often enough to make overconfidence evolutionarily beneficial.

This is the most basic explanation for how fascist movements continue to arise and improbably take power. Put simply, they always go for it. January sixth provides us with a fine example. It was a ludicrous, idiotic, reckless burst of stupidity, mocked for years by everyone except the perpetrators, who four years later find themselves with ultimate power. They didn't win

because they were the strongest. They won because they kept trying, and the people who should have stopped them feared bad press, the pushback of looking unfair, and so stood back well. The fascists made smaller grabs, gobbling up bits of the media, local school boards, and narrative oxygen around issues like immigration and now, well, we're here, and we'll continue to talk about here after these ads we're back. The coming days

will be ugly. Yet I feel it's my job to remind you that bad as this is We are not ym our Germany, and this is not nineteen thirty three. Trump and his lieutenants aren't battle hardened trench fighters. They're elon musk and a coterie of half enthusiastic, half frightened billionaires who got rich gambling on apps to let you rate your classmates tits. Their foot soldiers are used car salesmen from Encino, not Freikorps. The United States is not

starving to death crippled by war. It's irritated anxious because it's working people have been robbed blind by the same billionaires standing behind Trump now. The one thing we do have in common with Weimar is that our fascists now find themselves at the head of a state that capitulated to them, not out of enthusiastic consent, but exhaustion, cowardice, and above all, a feeling that it didn't really matter that last one, the feeling that nothing matters. The system

as fucked, there's no point in engaging or organizing. That is the most powerful weapon they have right now, because that feeling stops you and everyone else from opposing them, from interrupting as they reach out yet again to take something you love or need. But there's a danger here too.

In moments of stress and anger, the desire to do something, anything, can be intense, and when we're swept up in that mood, the natural tendency is defaulting to the things we know best, the things we've done before, the marches and chants and poster boards we've been walking and shouting and carrying all century long. Going back to those tactics without iteration or acknowledgment of their limitations and failures is a road to

more failure. I've been to a lot of protests, starting at Zuccati Park in twenty eleven an ending last year in Chicago at the dn C. One of the most dispeariting moments of my life was listening to young anti genocide activistsbow to shut down the DNC to quote make it great like sixty eight. This was a reference to

the nineteen sixty eight Democratic Convention. Mass protests were ignited there when the favorite anti war candidate, Eugene McCarthy was ratfucked by Democratic Party insiders in favor of Vice President Hubert Humphrey. The protests were quashed violently with tear gas and truncheons. Testers chanted the whole world is watching, and it's been a chant ever since. The world may have

been watching then, but the war went on. Nixon won election, then reelection, and then finally pulled US troops out of Vietnam after dropping enough bombs on Southeast Asia to have ended several Third reips. In twenty twenty four, a new batch of anti war protesters chanted the whole world is watching, and I can say unequivocally it was not. The Only people watching were me, several other journalists, and of course some people on Twitter. The police, as they kettled Maston

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

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

of imbibing footage of war crimes. They walked around and shouted. The police, and the city largely let them because they knew none of it was going to change a goddamn thing. I'd felt tremendous optimism right after Joe Biden resigned, not because I loved Kamala, but because it was something shocking, an upset, an experiment, or at least it seemed that way. At first. The DNC made it clear that Biden's advisors and consiglieris, the powers behind the throne, still ran the

show and would not allow any real change. The rot had spread too far, spoiling the meat, spoiling everything. It was my accurate belief in twenty twenty that the Democratic Party, broken as it was, had the numbers in the organizational capacity to slow the spread of fascism for a short time. It was my inaccurate belief in twenty twenty four that this might still be the case. I had a hope because I'd lost any sense of actual productive optimism. We

lean on hope when we have no ideas. To brace ourselves against hope, as George Miller reminded, us, is a mistake. If you don't fix what's broken, you'll go crazy. And that's where we are now going crazy. Committed Democrats, the decent, regular people who fill the party, not the soulless shogoths of capital running things, are going crazy because we returned to normal, decent politician to office. He kept the economy humming along, and everyone still hated him. Us are crazy

for a different reason. In twenty twenty, this country saw the largest sustained uprising of its modern history, and nothing fundamentally changed in its aftermath. The oligarchs who control social media set to tweaking, buying, or outright inverting their algorithms to ensure no similar movement whatever gain that kind of

steam again. Their efforts have largely been successful, and yet many organizers, be they progressive, social democrats, communists, anarchists, whatever, they're all still stuck in the same loops behind each march to nowhere, and tired chant is an equally tired hope. The social Democrats dream of a giant, continent sized Denmark with cyclists replacing Ford trucks, universal healthcare, good schools, and a bevy of other lovely things. Both political parties will

fight tooth and nail to prevent. The communists dream of a new October Revolution, but this one will work and not just create a new kind of dictatorship that ages and dies inside the space of a single human lifetime. Anarchists tend to be very good at seeing the flaws and the logic and futility of the hopes of the two previous groups, but they are just as bereft of

ideas for how to stop what's coming. Some tendencies dream of collapse, maybe even accelerationism, an end to industrial society, and then either living in the woods eating berries, or some kind of solar punk day dream wildflowers spouting from rubble. I sympathize, but try offering either future to a single mom who can't afford her five year old's insulin and

see how excited she gets. On the other side of the anarchist coin, you've got the helpers the people who cheerfully admit they don't know how to solve the big problem, but they do know how to provide free eye exams to homeless people once a month, or do water drops down at the border so migrants don't die of dehydration, or make it more expensive for the state to bulldoze

a forest and build a police training facility. If you are where we all are right now, ideas staring down the barrel of a nightmare, those are good folks to know. Like everyone else, they're defaulting to what they've been doing, but at least what they've been doing helps people. The larger solutions to our common woes, if they ever arrive,

will be something new, something we haven't tried yet. I feel very confident that they won't take the form of another march, or involve everyone finally agreeing to be the same kind of communist or anarchist or whatever. Sean Fain, chief of the United Autoworkers' Union, has called for a general strike in twenty twenty eight, and so far that is the only clear plan I have heard from anyone that feels like it has a ghost of a chance. It is audacious, and I recommend reading what Sean's laid

out about it. But half of why I support the idea is because it's audacious. The religious right got to where they are right now in this country by being bold, as.

Some leftists did the same and interpreted support for Luigi as proof that the body politic did indeed have energy for an uprising. I saw something a bit different, more than the actual killing itself. I think people were excited to see someone try something new. Luigi adopted a novel tactic. He carried it out in a novel way, and in doing so, he did more to punish one of the

oligarchs bleeding us dry than the entire occupy movement. Novelty is the one thing that ties Donald Trump and Luigimanngioni together. The enthusiastic public response to both men's actions and the simultaneous revulsion of traditional elites are mirrors of themselves. In twenty twenty four, Trump still had enough novelty to convince people that he might upset the apple cart in a way that benefited them. He rode a global anti incumbent

wave back to the White House. The consequence of this is that he and his are now on their way to becoming the new establishment. This is the downside of the fact that most legacy media outlets have started moderating their coverage of Trump, if not embracing him outright, he is being normalized. His toadies, Musk chief among them, are now our legitimate powers. What novelty remains will fade rapidly. I suspect the same thing will be true of the

copycats who follow in Luigi Maggioni's footsteps. Most of his plagiarists won't be good at what they do. At best, newly heightened security will see these people dropped before they get to pull a trigger. At worst, innocent folks will be killed or aimed by bullets and bombs that fail to hit their intended targets or do, but with a lot of collateral damage. So I don't know what the next new thing to actually work will be. But between Trump and Luigi, there aren't many old norms left to shatter.

We are in a time of enormous potential. Many new things are about to be tried, and as awful and bloody as the fallout from some of them will be, we all have no choice but to strap in and roll some dice of our own. The present is ugly, the future unwritten, but the only way we'll make it a better one is if we embrace boldness, creativity, and perhaps a little over confidence of our own. And this is not the end of the episode. We've got something

else for you, folks. But first, here's another ad break. Okay, everybody, we're back, And obviously what you just listened to is an essay I wrote about my thoughts and feelings today, the first day of the new Trump administration. I felt like that wasn't quite enough. And the first thing I actually came across this morning when I woke up, before I started subjecting myself to a barrage of horrible news, was a poem written by a friend of mine, Emily Gorzyinski.

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

This is the dawn of masculine energy, not the energy your father taught you about measuring twice and cutting once, about picking yourself up and how the sting of hydrogen peroxide means it's working or your grandfather who spent the days you spent smoking weed behind a seven to eleven, serving on a torpedo boat, waiting for the sharks, who never failed to stop to lend a hand to those in need, or say grace before dinner, or to help you with your math homework, or teach you not to

wear a necktie at a lathe. This is the year of cutting once and never measuring. Pencil in the blueprints with whatever comes out. It's faster that way. The season of hypocrites, and not of confidence, but confidence men. The masculine energy of the can, the scam, the bamboozle, the fraud, the pulling of the rug and the begging of the question.

Now is the killing hour. The clockhands float over the blood in the streets, and the rage, and the rage, and the uncorked hatred overflows, the minutes of impotence, expanding overflowing, fizzling. Deception gives way to more deception. Not a single promise is kept. Rapaciousness and rape and abandonment and the cutting of corners and KPIs A newborn died in the baby

box in Italy because the alarm censor didn't work. It is an honorless time, a time of only one question, not how or may or can or if or whether, but when how soon? No legacy, no history, no reputation. Build the factories, then abandon them. The soil keeps the memory, and and scars, and the floodwaters, and the clear windshields where the splatters of bugguts used to be, and the images in the twenty year old magazine still in the rack, and the guest bathrooms never used that showed how children

used to go sledding. And maybe the house is too big, No one comes by. I shoveled the neighbor's walk in the snow and salted it so he didn't slip on the ice and could receive his mail. He's an old man, one of the few black men left living in this neighborhood that was theirs. Once he sent me a letter, it went all the way to Richmond to come to

my door. He's the last man with dignity. In the letter, he told me he has a new toy, a laptop, which makes him happy because he's a big lover of history and he can go online and read about it. And I weep for this last dignified man who proudly wears a cap honoring his service. Because this is the era of synthesis and generation, and revision and content content, content,

and inverifiability and manipulation. This is the pseudo scene. I bought a bottle of wine from a century's old ye destroyed in a devastating flood, an unsellable bottle in the retail market, fundraiser souvenir. I kept it as a memento Mary of our changing world, a mud covered reminder of how we all must work, little by little to give the world forward. It broke when I tried to move it home on my seventy second flight of the year. It is the decade of hypocrisy. Even for those who

can see hypocrisy, they may be a vice president. And with every title change, I move farther from God, a God I never believed in. I was raised in New England towns named for Biblical places by people who thought working the rocky soil brought them closer to God. The only holy Men left are those in the fields Basra and Lebanon, and the Gilead and Hebron. The people who named those towns committed a genocide to name them, and four hundred years later in their namesakes the same. It

is the epoch of cadaverin. It is the knight of bonfires and Feuershpusche, then highlight of stories that dared in poems and albums. And I tried to sell a book, and I learned that there's only interest in a book when you put yourself into it to be consumed. Words are calories, measured in the amount of heat they gave a flame. I walked over the Westminster Bridge one night with a journalist who told me that they can't publish two good stories at a time because if one goes viral,

it punishes the other. The arcane footfalls of the algorithm dance. It is the sunset of craft and skills handed down in heritage, the waxing of a crass and pandering moon of pantomime, a frictionless night, a night where nothing dared, nothing gained, a night of shutters and locks. These are the dark ages, ages of embarrassing the future. There's a

shame here that penance cannot satisfy. The sturdy empty shells, the blue hyperlinks to nowhere, and a generation lost must be lost because profit cannot be taken from an idea. I think of the mimiograph machine stuck under the floorboards of the Solidara Nosche house, and the punks and the whores who copied radical zines in the public library, xerox machines, and the Yugoslavian Galaxia, and the novels now considered some of the greatest of all time, once banned for obscenity.

In Chochescu's house, the original TV remains. The revolutionaries didn't bother to steal it because there were only thirty minutes of broadcast TV each day. In the crepuscular light, birds dare to sing, even though they know the cats hunt below. In Vilnius, there is a tile in a square. They say, if you make a wish and spin around it three times, your wish will come true. At this tile a human chain formed and spanned three countries, and they sang at

Hadra Kim. On the right day, the morning light filters in over the lonesome island of Philfla and fills a hole drilled in the sandstone five thousand years ago, and has done so unfailingly over the millennia that have seen countless empires rise and fall, and the solstice of retribution will come again.

it's you, maybe it's not. You'll never know. Today we're not here to talk about who Robert Evans likes. But we are here to talk about what to do if your house is going to burn down or you have to leave because they think it might burn down. This is obviously a topic that is front of mind for people in southern California currently, given the massive wildfires that have engulfed whole neighborhoods of Los Angeles. There are fires in venturin Oxtard as well. Now the whole of East

County San Diego is under a red flag warning. Fire conditions continue because climate change continues, and we have decided as a society not to do anything about that, and so this shit is going to be the rest of our lives.

Fire it's coming for you. It's happening everywhere. Hooray, hooray. Yeah, lucky you the cleansing fire. I feel like there's a John Betchaman poem I could go off with here, but I'll spare you all right. So, if you are in a place where you are very likely to have to evacuate your home soonish for a fire, here are some things that you may wish to consider doing. I've harvested these from mutual a groups in LA and from the Cowfire website, where they give you advice on what to

do if you're evacuating. The first thing that you want to do is turn off your gas. For those of you who are not familiar, this is a flammable substance, and your gas pipe rupturing and then catching on fire would be bad, would be sad. It's pretty easy to do this. Normally, you should have a valve near the meter. Some places we'll have what's called an earthquake shut off or an earthquake valve, where you won't need a tool.

I'm not sure that. In fact, i'm pretty certain those are not mandatory, even in California, because I've lived places that don't have them. Then again, there are things that are mandatory that landlords just aren't doing. I think we all know that. Yeah, or like grandfathered into or whatever. Mm hmm, yeah. Yeah, given that people outside California are listening and the earthquakes are are fortunately not coming for us all just yet, I would just suggest that you

try and find where your gas shut off is. Now. It's often where the gas comes into the property, like there's a gas meter, and normally you're going to need some kind of tool to turn that. What I've used normally is just like an adjustable spanner or wrench for those of you in the United States, the people at California that you're talking to. Yeah, yes, yeah, I follow Californians. You can turn that valve so it's parallel with the pipe that's kind of shut off the gas coming into

your house. Do you mean perpendicular to the pipe. I'm curious. I think parallel is shut off.

be used if they need to be used. I have seen some suggestions to turn water off because I guess people's pipes are which is decreasing water pressure.

evacuated for wildfires living in California a few times. I'd like to think I have it pretty down now, But definitely the first time I was, you know, freshly minted European migrant. It was not familiar with this stuff, and it definitely just ran around grabbing things. So it turned out to be the wrong thing. It's like, cool, I've got three bicycles here, let me let me go to the shelter.

They can get you into like the boxes on a subway car, and they can turn on and off water, like I carry one in case you know you're in the apocalypse and you need to turn on the water at a rest area. You know that kind of thing. I've first learned about these from squatters, so it would just move into houses and then turn the water on. And they they're built in specialized ways to try and prevent squatter from doing exactly what I'm describing.

But you don't want to lock your front door like you're going to see a lot of stuff about looting. I will tell you right now that the people who are looting from wildfare survivors are the landlords who are charging one hundred and fifty percent of the rent that they were a month ago for people to find a flaceplace to live.

a good idea, right, that makes sense. So if you've got fabric curtains, I know they look nice, but take them down. Or you could just live like me and never purchase curtains and just I don't have to have the sun your face. What is happening to me right now?

the outside of your house. Flammable stuff that might catch outside your house is best either bought inside inside your shed if you have a shed or a garage or something, or in a particularly California piece of advice, CalFire suggests chucking your path to your furniture in the pool. So that is the thing that you can do. That makes some sense, it does. Have you seen the picture of this lady in the nineties who put all her fine china in her swimming pool before evacuating in a wildfire.

Oh that's amazing. Yeah, it's very like of the time, like it was a time when people could afford swimming pools. Yeah, and also people had china that they cared about, which is something that our generation Germany does.

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

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

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

If you have gates, you open them. The deal with fences and everything is that you don't want like a wick that brings fire to your house. So if the forest around you is burning, you don't want it to catch your fence and have that go right up to under the eaves catch eaves on fire.

surrounding garden. And then we came with the tractor and we put some different strawbeeres of different sizes, made a set of stairs and got her out.

how to open your garage without that. Yeah, because you don't want to be in a situation where you.

good time for us to pause for ads. I wonder if we will get an advert for electric garage.

That's okay, it's cute stories. People are in possession of a range, like like a big cooking if you have a very old house in the UK, or again if you're rich, you have these like cold burning or oil burning ovens, so they stay at a temperature and only have a number of doors. The coldest one you can put a lamb in there in the winter time and you can keep it warm that way, like in a live one. Yeah yeah, yeah, well, I mean any of them.

You can put a dead one and if you felt the need, if you look, you're saying okay, yeah, yeaheah no, yeah, yeah yeah. If you're looking to take care of your animal, you put them in there and keep the More so, if you have pets in your house, things to do before you evacuate would be make sure they have a collar on which has your name and your contact information.

your dog. Are you chip your pets?

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

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

at least giving it a chance you can before. Just to avoid having yourself in that situation, you need to make transport arrangements. You should be able to look where large animals refuges are, like in San Diego in the big fires, maybe fifteen years ago, they have them on Fiesta Island for a while. Little Island out in the bay or del Mar Racecourse is often a place in San Diego where you can take them. You should be able to find that now, if you're in Los Angeles,

you can find that. Now. Again, you're going to want to have your essential documentation. You are not going to want nylon halters for your livestock. I've seen a lot of people have, Like people have nyel on lead ropes for horses. We had like more hempy ones when I was younger, just because those a much left likely to melt, right, So that's why we had them in the UK. But we had them because we'd have them for a long time. But plastic key things that can melt. You don't want

to put them around your horse's head or near your horse. Okay, that makes some sense. Yeah, if you have chickens right now, you're going to run into the issue of AV and flu. Oh yeah, which is a further complication. So, like this is a scenario of like a big chicken shelter where you take them. It is not a good one for AV you and flu reasons also for like chicken dynamics reasons.

So that means you should make a plan. Now, you might have a friend who you're like, hey, I know that you're not normally a paltry person, but would it be cool in the event of us having to evacuate for me and my chickens to come and stay at your house. Making a plan now is going to avoid you being in a very difficult situation of either driving around with your birds in your in your truck being like where the fuck can I go? Or like being

turned away from places. Right. Yeah, The last thing I have here and then we're going to move on to packing your go bag is insurance. My house flooded when I was a kid, Like, it completely leveled the first floor of the house.

living if you can. It's not good for the body, not good for the soul, for the lungest. Probably cleaning out restaurants. Like a month later the power had been off for a month. Just going into the walk in, Oh my god, I've never seen so many people vomit, like one after the other being like no, I could do it. I'm a builder straight, Like, yeah, pretty horrific.

So don't recommend. If you can go around your house taking a video of your yeah, stuffs, it will just make it easier, Like this happened to my family, and like maybe you know the early two thousands, so it wasn't possible. Well, I mean I could have got the

old like Sony handicam out I didn't. So now you know you have a video camera in your pocket going around your house taking a video especially of you know, the things that are expensive and hard to move, you're going to align insurance to replace.

orange thing and take those with you. That where you've got the RX number and you can easily go to a pharmacy and be like, hey, this is my prescription for me. It has my name and the RX number. Can you issue me an emergency supply? And that's something they should be able to do. And also if you grab the whole bottle, then you've got you know, hopefully a decent supply. Hopefully your insurance isn't annoying and only lets you go three weeks at a time. Yeah, that's

that comes up for a lot of people. But I will not name any companies because I think it is against my contract to do that. I will say that if you have like your important documents, right, you're potentially your d to your house, if you're in on your car, your passport, your birth certificate is a big one. Yeah, you're right to be in this country. Yeah, any dream card, visa, that kind of thing, especially those in the after Well, this will come out in the era of Trump two

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

of firearms with you in a situation like this. You're not going to need them, and there's gonna be a lot of places that you won't want to bring them. Yes, you know, I would suggest locking them up, and like I say, documenting that you've done that, you may have to prove at some point that firearm no longer exists, and then that's probably the best way to do that. And being prepared to travel on foot. Like I said, another thing that people have been needing and not having

is P one hundred masks. So that's a particle filter generally in the three M and I think the Honeywell filters they're pink, so I'm talking about like a screw in filter here.

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

your daily life because they don't filter the exhale. It's much easier to breathe with a half mask respirator than a fabric mask, and you can switch out the cartridges and unfortunately almost all of them are various proprietary types of filters. Yeah, the bayonet mount is the three M style. There's a NATO version. If something looks more like a

gas mask, it's probably the NATO screw on kind. So you can get a half mask respirator, or you can get a fold face respirator, which is more or less what looks like a gas mask, but those coming kind of civilian styles that are using the same three M brand or Honeywell or whatever cartridges, or you can get the more military style that'll have the NATO style screw in. The military style is kind of overkill in terms of

it'll position you oddly socially. Yes, set me a fire, Yeah, I think that a thing that is worth everyone having. Are these respirators a half mask respirator or depending on your life, like if you use them a lot, or you're going to be protesting, or I don't know, there's a lot of different reasons you might want a full face one. They make really cheap knockoff ones that you can get imported. Although maybe if you're listening to this in the future. You can't get it imported. But they

work fairly well, they're just not quite as good. I've tested a whole bunch of them against various impacts and things like that.

This wouldn't be your proof of documentation necessarily, but it might be your like birth certificate, maybe like deeds and titles and things at a safe deposit box, because then if your house burns down, it's still fine.

to have. It has some advantages too, right, because sometimes you don't want the originals of your documents, Like, for example, you probably want a list of all of your bank accounts, the bank account numbers, your pins or your credit card numbers, like all of that stuff that you really don't want someone else to have, but if you lost you would be really sad. You probably want digital encrypted copies.

in the description here for you. But what is the like super fast speed round version of what you want to put in your go back?

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

more vibes based for the city. But you know, surprise surprises, mutual A groups who are feeding people, and they're doing that really well. So you don't need to hold a lot of food.

take a little inflatable pillow. So it's something that, like, you know, you will have comfort items like that that are things for you. I'll put those in there. I would avoid watching too much go bag content on YouTube because you're going to get anxious about the fact that you don't have like a folding short barreled rifle. And that's because you don't need it. No, what do you need? Like, like, I'm sitting next to my bullet proofst that I've used

before for work. I'm not taking it with me staying here. I can spend a lot of money on the plate, so I will be claiming those on inssurance. But you don't need that stuff. People are taking care of one another, and so pack with the things that will help you be comfortable. And consider that you might be spending a while in a hotel or a hostel or a refuge, or staying with a friend or family memor Yeah, and think what would make that more comfortable for you.

because it's not plastic. And I like it because I can use it to heat up water when it's really cold and have it like a little hot water bottle and snuggle with it. Yeah, so that's a nice thing. Yeah.

and sometimes you're doing ultramarathon. When you get to the aid station, they just have like big things of water, right, and you fill up your little water bottles you're carrying in your vest, and lots of people have these tiny collapsible cups that are made of like a thin rubber. They're made of the stuff that camel back bladders are made of. And then they can fill up that cup and they can drink from it, and they just keep it attached to their vest, right, and then off they

go running along. Oh interesting. These are very useful and I've started incorporating them in lots of my travel and like, yeah, emergency supplies because if you're in a place where people don't have cups, right that they have big things water, Now you have a vessel from which to drink. So those are surprisingly handy. Yeah. I also keep one of those.

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

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

like it just shit got really real really quickly. I remember I was on an all staff like the beginning of the year planning work call, and somebody just on the zoom was like, hey, something's happening and everybody who lives in DC should maybe check the TV, and then the line went dead.

DC has what's called home rule. So that's like the ability for DC to govern, like for our local government and leaders to like make decisions about what happens to the district, and on the campaign trail, Trump was saying he wants to change this, that DC's home rule would be revoked and that the federal government, basically him, would

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

or power. I didn't know it was going to turn out to be like a bunch of grifters and like people saying like hashtag resist and like meeting nothing yea, at the time, I really clung to that. This time around total night and day difference, like yeah, and I think the mood on the street I think reflected that I think that DC is exhausted. The people that generally I know who are like radicals who would be out on the street.

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

reproductive healthcare, transgender healthcare. People are making the calculation that it does not make sense to like needlessly throw yourself against the walls of the state when we can stick together and see and see what happens, and prepare for all of those other things that are going to actually impact you and people that that you know, like seriously, and it sucks to be stuck in that reactive position.

And there's things you can do proactively, but going outside and yelling in front of a fence probably isn't going to do any of those things. It's probably not going to help the people who are going to need help in the next few weeks. Yeah, and people are understanding that, and it's leading to people reacting quite differently than than what they did, you know, eight years ago.

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

I'm saying, don't mistake dunking on them on social media for doing anything that matters, because it doesn't.

to be like, where did we go wrong? Maybe the memes and the jokes and the calling them weird and then this and that that. Maybe it felt good in the moment, but it actually didn't translate what happened.

debates Stitch. Yeah, you know, But also I think that's a little different than just like calling him fucking Orange Mussolini or whatever the fuck. Like, I think there's a point in a messaging tactic. It's like Trump gets mileage out of the names he uses and the way in which that's part of how he got where he is. So I'm not saying that aspects of these tactics can't

be used. Well, I'm talking about the way in which people liberals and folks on the left are continuing to do the fucking like drump shit that's not getting us anywhere.

of Tuesday, the day after the inauguration. But yeah, like the return of the Proud Boys is like one one of the big things that I think we're gonna we're gonna see these next few weeks is the amount of all right militias or these you know, more like street gang type groups who've been so emboldened by by Trump essentially giving them permission to do whatever they want to now now that they know that they're not going to face any kind of like real legal repercussions for you know,

carrying out whatever actions they want to against people of color, queer people, et cetera.

the city. Right Like, after the Nazis took power, one of the big issues they had is like, we still have a lot of people who are kind of like in the middle, including most of the military, and one of the things that keeps scaring them is all these fucking goons running about. And we still want what the goons are doing, which is like certain people beaten and thrown in camps, but we don't want the goons doing it.

We want the cops doing it. And I guess kind of we're all waiting to see how different or similar what comes next looks to that.

and so he kind of had to do it. The degree to which he shows up and is close or actually directly embraces Proud Boys and guys like Tario is going to tell us a lot. And I think we'll be seeing that very soon. If they are kept at arm's length and kind of letting them out is all they do, then I don't know how much we're going to see of these guys. If there's a real embrace and an attempt to use them as a way to

kind of extra legally deal with his enemies. Then I think we start seeing them really make inroads and pushes in places like Portland, trying to get people out so that they can do violence to them and then you know, get pardoned or just have the violence ignored and the

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

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

And like these are hard realities, which is why it necessitates new kinds of thinking, creativity, you know, to some extent unsad usfying. And I guess part of what I would say is if people are giving you answers to what we need to do that sound very clear and satisfying, you should maybe not trust that totally. Yeah, because the responsible answer, in my opinion is that like it's very unclear how to get out of this or what the right things to do here are?

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

four Chan. The fact that like he's even just allowed to do that and like it doesn't actually matter, like this will not affect him in any way is more what's interesting to me, because yes, we've all known that

he's been a Nazi for quite a while. He's like shared things are like essentially like Nazi race science on Twitter before he is he has engaged with like extremely anti semitic conspiracy theories before, and you know, the largest anti semitism org in the country has completely capitulated to these people, so like they've hollowed out everything that's like supposed to be, like you know, the institutional blockages, whether that's you know, places like the Washington Post where that's

literally all of the tech companies, the degree to which like everyone has cozied up to Trump, which is also like, you know, very different from twenty sixteen. Exactly everyone was like fairly like united institutionally was united against Trump, and you know the same way we like we don't see you know, people out in the streets, you know, writing

or even doing like large protests. The actual you know, institutional powers have have decided to instead of actually trying to fight this guy, they're going to trying to see like how friendly they can be, like how much can

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

from twenty sixteen is like worth remembering. Like a phrase me and Robert talk about sometimes is like the forever twenty sixteen, Like the fact that it feels like we've never really left twenty sixteen. Everyone kind of acts like we're still in twenty sixteen, like this such load bearing year on our entire cultural consciousness. But the fact is we aren't in twenty sixteen anymore, and you can't act

like we are. You actually have to move on from that, and we're starting to see more of that in certain corners. You see some of that among some of the radicals, some of the anarchists as well as you know, the tech companies and the CEOs and the media companies. They're just you know, changing the degree to which they're moving away from their twenty sixteen mode.

very clear. You could not make it. You could not have made it clear where your alliance is. And let's go from there. Like it almost it almost is.

It's like an apple store inside. And the person who like started it and ran it did so because when they were younger, their partner had AIDS HIV in the AIDS and marijuana reduced some of their symptoms, and they had to go buy it in the nearby park, which was a lot uglier of a place and a lot like it was. It was sketchy, like they got robbed.

A couple of times there's a lot more violent crime and just kind of there are even in a place like San Francisco, which is so like gentrified in such a way like when you're when you're talking with like especially the older members of the queer community, they're not just like rich, out of touch tech people. They are old, battle scarred queers who went through some of the ugliest moments of this nation's history and we're kind of bracing

themselves forward again. So yeah, I'm very interested to see what it's what it's like this year, you know.

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

like like way before. If we're not going to be out in the streets doing you know, slightly mindless protest for your marching in circles, you can use that time to instead like educate yourself and build connections with people, and you know, read about these things that may become more and more important to know at least so you have an understanding of history as the next four years to start happening quite quickly.

to reinvent the wheel every single time. And like that type of like generational knowledge sometimes is really tricky to pass down in these sorts of spaces and it you know, it doesn't and it sometimes it requires a degree of initiative to like actually like seek out the information on your own. The internet's great, uh and terrible, but it has it has a it has a it has a vast catalog of history.

our God. I asked you to have mercy on the upon the people in our country who are scared now, and she referenced specifically transgender people, queer people, people in democratic families, independent families who were frightened right now about what the new administration means, as well as migrants, and she made a point of saying, like, the vast majority of whom are not in any way criminals.

his like novel made a critical like it is a critical life saving piece of technology that actually is what we should hope for from tech.

this is happening in our backyard. And I have to give it up for the service industry folks of DC the last couple of days, cause they, oh my god, I like have heard horror stories and I just I guess that's what I mean is that don't forget that there are real people who have to like put up with these people's bullshit and do it with a smile or they might get fired. And you know, in Adams Morgan, which is like pretty close to where I live, a woman at an Irish bar had to be removed by

a staffer because she was screaming white power at the bar. Like, these people do not get paid enough to deal with this,

and they are like the backbone of our city. So I just wanted to shout them out, especially since you know, Trump switched up the inaugurations because of the cold question mark and so a lot more of these people were just sort of wandering around the district on inauguration who otherwise would have been confined to like a very specific neighborhood downtown, and so they were going into our bars, going into our restaurants, and yeah, I just really feel

for my industry folks who had to deal with this. You know, they're not paid enough, but they really are

the backbone of our city. Hell yeah, you know, I started this conversation talking about all the horrible things that Trump has said about DC and how he's going to take it over federally, and like you know, he has said, like we will take over the horribly run capital of our nation and Washington clean up and rebuild the Capitol, so there's it's no longer a nightmare of murder and crime, but rather hell I know this like hell hole where like people live and raise their families and go to

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

obsessed with every aspect of this as guys like Stephen Miller, right, Like he even makes fun of Miller a little bit for that kind of stuff. So there's a degree to which, like well, his own personal eccentricities, there's aspects of this it might slow down.

is a Nazi salute. None of the headlines will say that Elon Musk did a Nazi salute. The articles won't say it either. You can't tell whether they've been cowed to submission by the threat of a defamation lawsuit, or if they're already running cover for the new regime. You scroll through your timeline, they made my gender illegal. They tried to repeal the fourteenth Amendment through executive order to end birthright citizenship. You can't follow it. It's too much.

The world has become a spectacle, and that spectacle is trying to kill you. Welcome to Ikadap and here I'm your host, Mio Wong. In societies where modern can editions of production prevail, all of life presents itself as an immense accumulation of spectacles. So wrote the French social theorist Gee de Board in his seminal nineteen sixty seven work

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

when nightmarish that de Board could ever have predicted. His elaborate metaphor is rendered thuddingly literal quote. Everything that was directly lived has moved away into representation, and indeed living has been replaced by the image of living. This phenomenon well is called instagram. The spectacle society of the spectacle opens is not a collection of images, but a social relation among people mediated by images. Today we literally call the collection of images we use to relate to each

other social media quote. Lived reality is materially invaded by the contemplation of the spectacle, while simultaneously absorbing the spectacular order, giving it positive cohesiveness. A reality TV star, the old human symbol of the spectacle, in which everything that was directly lived has been transformed into a representation, is now a president, the second time, driven by streamers and influencers and podcasters who stand as the new human symbols of

the spectacle. They have invaded real society and now rule it directly. In the nineteen sixties, the debate was whether you could ignore the spectacle because it wasn't real. The Board's elegant solution was that contemplating the spectacle makes it real. None of that matters anymore. You can't ignore the spectacle because it's here. It has physically invaded the world. Donald Trump is the president, the richest man on Earth is

Nazi saluting Elon Musk. The autonomous force the Board described as a spectacle no longer operates at the abstract level. It is the president of the United States. Everything is rendered thuddingly, transcendently literal. In de Board's usage, the spectacle is the management of society by mediating people's social relations through images. This sounds complicated, but on an intuitive level, you already understand this. You and I relate to each other through the one way mirror of a podcast app.

You relate to others by reacting to their TikTok videos. You watch the bomb fall on Palestine on Twitter. You relate to each other and the world through images, and that relation is a system of control. As de Board describes it, that mediation takes you out of the real world, a world that you can actually change with your actions, and thrust you into the world with the spectacle, a world where reality is quote an object of mere contemplation.

Today we call this the discourse. The work that inspired the nineteen sixty eight revolutions called it the spectacle. Why does it feel like this? The rot, the decay, the unreality of the moment that consumes you until one day Donald Trump is president and the next he's president again. The board has a simple answer. It's because the entire political, economic, and technological system is designed to make you isolated, afraid, and alone.

as separate. This is why the world feels like an endless doom. Scroll Instagram, TikTok live streaming this podcast. They're all based on isolation. Look at what happened to social media during the isolation of the pandemic, How it came to consume even more of our lives with the promise of connection that simply rendered us more and more and more isolated. The spectacle, given technological form in the social media app turns us into a mass in which we

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

contract to live under a s date, says a social theorist. You, the individual, gave up your labor to your boss voluntarily in another free contract between individuals, says the economist. Do not organize with anyone else to get paid more for that labor, or God help you. Try to create a system where you aren't forced to sell your labor every day. That's cheating, says the politician. Your job is to sell your labor, buy these products, and comment on a world

in which someone else is acting. The isolation of the spectacle ensures that we're incapable of collective action, not only because we're incapable of forming a collective. We're not even engaging in the world in which action can take place. The extent of the advance of the spectacle today is such that the unfolding of the economic system is designed to turn every part of you into a commodity, not

just your labor, but your identity, your beliefs. Everything that you are is sold to everyone else a spectacle, and in turn, everything that defines you becomes the spectacle itself. In a world where there is no action, just the image of someone else's actions somewhere else, a commercialized political identity is much easier to adopt than actually doing politics.

as easily make differently. But the second, slightly less ultimate hidden truth is that almost everything we think of as objects, money, capital, commodities are really just relations between abstracted out onto something physical. We interact with each other by using objects as forms of command. What do you think money is? Instead of

having real, equal social relations. And that makes it all the more dire that the social relations that compose this world are no longer even relations with each other at all, but relations with images. The spectacle is a strategy of control, as de Board rights quote, where the real world changes into simple images. The simple images become real beings and effective motivations of hypnotic behavior. The spectacle is a tendency to make one see the world by various means of

specialized mediations. It can no longer be grasped directly. As a spectacle advances, even rebellion is reduced to meaningless attacks on the symbols of power, never touching power itself.

The insurgents now on the right produced their masterpiece, Brazil's even more ineffectual cousin of January sixth, known forever as January eighth. On that day in twenty twenty three, for reasons that are almost totally incomprehensible to anyone whose mind has not been utterly melted by prolonged and terrible exposure to the spectacle, supporters of defeated President JayR. Bolsonaro stormed Brazil's capital. Bolsonaro, of course, had already fled to Florida.

The Presidential Palace, Congress, and the Supreme Court were literally empty when the protesters took them. There was nothing to be one, nothing to be gained. The protesters vain hopes that simply seizing the symbols of power would trigger a military coup to remove Lula and restore the Bolsonara regime evaporated like a morning dew, leaving nothing in their wake. January sixth at least attacked the site of the ritual

of power while the ritual was technically in progress. The attack was, of course, designed to stop the certification of the election. Congress was at least in session. Even if that attack, too, was the culmination of a series of ineffectual reruns of the Brooke Brothers' riots in but it's right wing political operatives did manage to steal an election by stopping the vote count in Florida in two thousand on January eighth. No one was even there, So how

do we get out? Lashing out at the symbols of power is pointless. You can't ignore them either. Elon's Nazi salute really does represent something. The opening of any solution is to go to the source. Trump and Elon are symptoms, not the disease. The spectacle is born of capitalism. It's a management strategy designed to suppress any attempt to end or even rearrange the terms of the class system. Trump

and Elon were likewise produced by two settler colonies. They are, in their own ways, the manifestation of the evil of colonialism and racism. To boards solution to these problems, of course, well the solutions that people bother to read. There is a staggeringly racist section of this work about how time passes in China that I simply cannot recommend. But the board's solution was workers' councils, and he got his wish. The next year, manufactory occupations of nineteen sixty eight. It

nearly worked. But the last workers Council fell a quarter of a century ago in Argentina, and there's no sign at the Workers' Council. The definitive fighting form of the working class for over a century is coming back. In some ways. This is liberating one hundred and seventy years ago. Marx wrote this in the eighteenth through mayor of Louis Bonaparte, his own response to a nation's nationalist attempt to restore its former glory by invoking the name of a previous leader.

The social revolution of the nineteenth century cannot take its poetry from the past, but only from the future. It cannot begin with itself before it has stripped away also pstitions about the past. In the days and weeks and months, and God help us all years to come, we're going to have to assemble a new fighting form, and no

one knows what it looks like yet. We could perhaps look at the airport protests from the first months of the original Trump administration, or masses of people, including a very young Mia who had not quite realized what gender she was, occupied airports all across the country to stop the implementation of Trump's Muslim ban by physically forcing the government to release the people who had detained in the airports.

The power of those protests was that they directly located the site where power was operating, the airport, and took them. The weakness of those protests was that people went home. And they went home because they had been told time and time and time again by the ACLU and by other legal organizations that the fight was over, that they could leave, and that the Muslim bans would be defeated by the courts. Most of you lived through it. Some of you remember the Muslim ban was never defeated by

the courts. It could possibly have been defeated in those moments, it wasn't. The contest was taken away from the real sight of power and into a domain largely ruled by the ruling class. But we can learn from both January eighth and the airport protests. Marching to a building doesn't guarantee you're actually targeting power. You must understand how the system is operating before you attempt to go up its works. A thousand miniature January eighths is no solution at all.

You must do the hard work of sifting to the tangle of rumors and lies at attempting to work out the actual structure of repression. It starts with community self defense. It starts with actually engaging with each other instead of the mediated images generated by an algorithm. You want to break out of the spectacle, talk to the people around you, Talk to the trans people and the immigrants in your

life and find out what they actually need. Figure out the concrete steps you can take to organize the people around you, and the steps you can take to lift them out of their despair. We're not going to develop a new fighting form glued to our phones alone in a digital crowd. We're going to figure it out by talking to each other, by acting in the real world, not by being rendered passive observers of the spectacle. We're going to do it by finding the real places where

power operates and taking them. And above all, we're going to do it together.