It Could Happen Here Weekly 60

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 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 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, 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 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, 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 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, 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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, 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 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 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 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, 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 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 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 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 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 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 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

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

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 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 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,

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 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, 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 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 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 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 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 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, 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 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 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 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, 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 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 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. 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 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 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 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 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, 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 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 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, 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 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 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, 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.

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 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

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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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, 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 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 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 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 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 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 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. 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 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

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, 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, 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

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 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 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. 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 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,

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, 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 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 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 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. 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 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 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, 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 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, 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 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

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, 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,

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 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, 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 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 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 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 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 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 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, 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 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

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 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

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 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 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 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 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 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 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

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.

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

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

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 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 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, 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, 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 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. 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, 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. 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 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

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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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, 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 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 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 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 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 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, 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

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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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

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 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 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 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 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 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 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, 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 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 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 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 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 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 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, 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 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 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 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 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, 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 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 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, 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, 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. 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. 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 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 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, 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,

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 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. 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 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 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 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 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 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 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, 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

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, 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 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 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

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 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. 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, 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

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 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.

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 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 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, 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, 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 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 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 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 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 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 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, 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 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, 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 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, 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 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 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 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

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 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 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 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 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 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 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, 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

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 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 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, 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. 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 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. 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 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 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, 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

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 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

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.

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,

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 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. 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 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 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 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, 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 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, 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.

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 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 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,

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 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 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 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 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.

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 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.

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 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 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 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, 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 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, 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 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 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 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 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.

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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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, 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

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

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 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. 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 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

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 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. 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 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 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 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.

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, 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 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 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 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, 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 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 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 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 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

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 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 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 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. 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 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, 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 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 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 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? 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 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

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 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, 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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

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,

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 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, 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 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 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, 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 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 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. 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 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 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

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 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 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 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 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, 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

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 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 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 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 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, 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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. 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, 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,

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 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 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 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, 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 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 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. 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, 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 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 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 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, 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, 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 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 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 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 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 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

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 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, 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 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

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 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 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 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 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, 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, 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 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 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,

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 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 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 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. 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 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 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. 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, 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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? 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, 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 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 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

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 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 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 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

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 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 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 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

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 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 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 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 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, 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 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 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

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.

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 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, 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 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 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 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, 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 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 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, 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 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, 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, 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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, 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 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 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, 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 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 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 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, 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 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 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 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, 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, 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 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 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 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.

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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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, 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, 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, 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, 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.

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 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 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 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 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, 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, 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 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 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, 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 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 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 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 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

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 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. 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, 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

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 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 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 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 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, 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 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 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 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

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 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 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 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, 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 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 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 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 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 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 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

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 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 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 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 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 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 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

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 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

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

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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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, 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

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 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 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, 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 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 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

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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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

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 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 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 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 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, 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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, 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 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. 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? 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 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 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 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 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.

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

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 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, 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 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, 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 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, 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

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 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 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 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

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 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 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 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 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. 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 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

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 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 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 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 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

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, 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, 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 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 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

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 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 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 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 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 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 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, 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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. 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. 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 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 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, 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 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

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,

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, 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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. 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 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.

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,

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 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 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 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 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 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 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, 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 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 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,

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 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 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, 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 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 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 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 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 podcasts from cool Zone Media, visit our website cool zone media dot com, or check us out on the I Heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts. You can find sources for It Could Happen Here, updated monthly at cool zone media dot com slash sources. Thanks for listening.