It Could Happen Here Weekly 93

you can make your own decisions. Ah, welcome to it could happen here a podcast where myself, Garrison Davis and James Stout just created a new soon to be beloved fiction character, Racist Sherlock's Holmes. And don't worry, We're not done workshopping at It's not ready to go public yet. But when this bit drops you people are gonna lose your minds. Ah, how's everyone doing today?

was far too online for a presidential campaign ad. And I felt like it was time to kind of have a discussion about meatball Ron because obviously things in Florida are very ugly right now. As a fascist, which he definitely is, Ronda Santis is an effective administrator, yeah, which I mean he's good at twisting the administrative state that exists into a weapon to attack marginalized groups. He's been

effective at that. What's happening legally, you know, in the laws, you know a lot of the anti trans laws, the anti drag laws in Florida is very frightening. What he's been doing to the Florida education system, state education system is very unsettling, And you know that is all of that is worthy of further discussion. But I think because the most immediate concern we have is like, is this guy going to be able to do that on a

national scale? Right, Which is not to say that we should just let Florida, you know, sink into the abyss. I don't believe that. But at the moment, Ron de Santis is tied for second place against Donald Trump. So it kind of it behooves us to ask the questions purely for the purpose of self defense. Can Ron de Santis win? Right? Could he actually become not? Even the first question is like could he become the Republican presidential candidate? Can he beat Donald Trump? And the short good answer

to that is I don't think so. It's not looking good. Not looking good for all Meatball. Ron agreed, and I wanted to get into why and kind of some of the fundamental flaws as a guy who is there was kind of this belief fear, I think a reasonable fear among a lot of liberals and folks on the left that because of how effective he's been consolidating and expanding his power in Florida, and because he's generally seemed like less of a like Donald Trump, has certain competences as

an authoritarian. There's things he's very good at, but he was not good at being the president. He was not good at using power. He's not too much of a fascist in a lot, He's not an effective fascist, right Like, he wasn't good at picking people to like do things for him. He wasn't good at He was good at

hurting people in a blunt way. But he was kind of incompetent at rerat like a competent fascist, like Hitler was a competent fascist, right he was not in there long in an elected position before he had effectively made it impossible to oust him without military force. And Trump was never good at doing that stuff. And the worry is that rond de Santis would be The good news is that Rondi Santis is incompetent as a politician and

a political candidate. So I wanted to kind of start with why a lot of his the people who do form his base, which is quite shrinking at the moment, he's losing a lot of support, why they thought he was capable of winning the primary and the general. And when you when you look into kind of why, a lot of sort of Republican like legacy Republicans, the folks who often get called Rhinos. Why a lot of them

decided to back Ron Dea Santis. The best summer you're going to get comes from Phil Huffines, who is a businessman in Texas whose car dealership ran a series of ads that are like plasted forever in the memories of everyone who lived in the DFW area in the late nineties early two thousands, and in a CNN interview a few days ago, he said this, when one looks objectively at who can beat Biden, it's going to be DeSantis. We already had a match with Biden and Trump. Trump

turns out Democrats better than anybody. DeSantis will be able to articulate more clearly what Republicans stand for, and he's not going to be bogged down in other stuff that Trump brings to the election. I don't think that was a logical thing to think a year ago, right, because it is true that Trump turns out the dims. The idea that like DeSantis isn't going to get bogged down

and shit has become kind of fundamentally silly. Like he's gotten bogged down in the fact that a lot of his you know, backers are invested in culture warship that does not sell well on a national level. This whole like anti trans crusade, on the anti woke shit is not a big vote getter. It just gets the base behind you, and like you're never going to beat Trump in a race to the base. You know, Trump has the core of the hard right Republican party in his

pocket and they're not gonna like move on from anybody. DeSantis' hope should have been like going after independence, people on the edge, people who are like unhappy with Biden. And I think when you pick this sort of like hate crusade, it hasn't worked well. But Huffines decided that, like, yeah, this guy, this is the dude who has a shot. I think he can actually like pull it out from Trump. I think he's got the ability to like get a lot of people in the middle or close to the middle.

This has been proven kind of absurd over the last couple of months of stagnating poll numbers. Huffine says that the governor recently held a meeting with about one hundred and fifty Texas Republicans in Dallas, where he quote impressed them with his stamina, youth, and performance in recent Florida state elections and There's a number of reasons think that this is a bad strategy that like really laying on his performance in the last Florida election is like a

good way for him to win support. One of these has to do with the fact that, like Florida is the national watchword for crazy right, like like the rest.

be anything like that place. Like what a horrible What a horrible idea. This is a sentiment that you will find among Republican thought leaders. Quote. One Republican consultant who has worked on presidential campaign said DeSantis was making a classic governor's mistake by talking extensively about his past accomplishments. Put bluntly, people in Ohio or Iowa do not want to be Florida. They don't care about Florida, and they are tired of hearing about Florida.

and everywhere else was bad. But the US economy overall, in terms of like the numbers that you know economists care about allies is like doing reasonably well, and like, of the shit that is bad in the US economy, it's not any better, Like inflation is not better markedly better in Florida than it is in Iowa. Right, there's just not a good case to be made because like when you're not when you can't really drive the economic point home, when you can't be like, look at how

much better Flora is doing than your home. You know, it's a it's a fucking paradise compared to the you know, shitty economy in Ohio. That's an argument you can make if there's any evidence for it. But when you're like, you can't really make the economic argument. It all comes down to culture war stuff, and most Americans don't want this culture war shit going on in their backyard because

it's like a gross, weird pain in the ass. So right now, the bulk of DeSantis support comes from higher income, old guard Republicans, the kind of were lukewarm for Trump from the beginning, and the kind to point out rightfully that he didn't win against Biden and it is time

for new blood. This is true, but current polling indicates it's not what most GOP voters want, which is kind of the big problem the Republicans have is that this is why Trump's definitely gonna win, you know, as the primary campaign, is that like the hardcore of the GOP cannot be overcome by the moderates because the hardcore is so in lockstep about what they want, and what they want is Trump. The moderates don't have control of the party, but the moderates are the ones who can like actually

win a general election. So yeah, it's a tough situation for them to be in. And one of the things that kind of shows how fucked Ron is is that, like Ron won reelection in Florida in his last cubernatorial campaign by about twenty points a year or so ago. In Florida, Trump currently has a twenty point lead on him.

Trump more than they like him. Bad situation to be in, and a number of early backers in DeSantis's orbit have begun to acknowledge this reality. I'm gonna quote from NBC News here. Yeah, there are a number of people grumbling about it, no doubt. A Desantist downer said, there is an overall sense, including with me, that he just is

not ignited the way we thought he would. And I find that really interesting because you get versions of that a lot that like we were expecting him to really take off as soon as he started campaigning, and he hasn't,

and that was our only strategy. You get this, and like if you read interviews with like folks who were in the DeSantis orbit and people because a number of his early backers have like peeled away and rescinded their their endorsements and given them the Trump it was this hope they had that like once as soon as he's out in front of America, Americans are going to love this guy because he's all the good stuff about Trump with none of the baggage. And that was just fundamentally

disastrously wrong. And I think one of the things we're starting to see is that the Dysantis people didn't have another plan for how to get this guy elected. Like their plan was that we think that Trump's policies are popular, but everyone doesn't like Trump, and no, that's actually not accurate.

legislative assistants and all that stuff for elected leaders. And because to me, to just a guy sitting out there, like I'm worried about Ron because what he's doing in Florida. But from the moment I saw the guy speak, I was like, well, this man has no charisma whatsoever. And if you can't think about like how a guy could attract voters. If there's nothing that seems appealing about a candidate to you, if you can't understand their charisma, that's

probably a good sign that they can't get elected. I am not mystified by why any president who was won in my lifetime won, right. George W. I've been in a room with George W. Bush and watched him spoke to in immediately made sense why people fucking love George W.

You can see the charisma, you can see the way he connects to audiences, you can see the things about him that people find appealing. There's not a mystery. It's not mysterious why Obama got elected. He's a deeply charismatic man. And you know, Joe needed a little bit of help, that's why he lost so many presidential campaigns beforehand. But next to Donald Trump, he seems like a much more appealing person. Like, I'm not mystified, and I'm not mystified

by why Trump got elected. Next to Hillary Clinton, Trump felt not like a politician, not like the same people who would let us down. There was this degree to which like, you should never be you should if you're looking at like whether or not someone can win an election, you should never be like, well, I don't get it,

but I guess maybe they have. They must have some sort of charisma because everybody's talking about them as a serious candidate now Honestly, if you can't see anything about appealing about a candidate, then that might be a good sign that they're doomed. And I think DeSantis is fucking doomed. And this is kind of a thing that a lot

of his early backups has started to realize. One DeSantis aligned operative told NBC, from my understanding, if we don't see a bump in the polls, we're basically going to shut down the idea of a national operation. This is really something that we're probably going to see. I wouldn't be surprised if he kind of has a blowout politically pretty early in the primary season next year, because he

raised a lot of money earlier in his campaign. He raised about twenty million or so between mid May and the end of June of this year, which actually put him ahead fundraising wise of Trump by about two million or so. But the Trump campaign ended last quarter with twice as much cash on hand as Wrong Alongside is

still dominating lead in the poll. So Ron has raised a lot of money, which kind of speaks to the number of sort of like Republican you know, institutional backers who hoped that he could win where Trump had failed. But he blew all that shit, and it didn't get him anything right, Like he didn't raise a b Like he crept up a teeny amount in the polls, but he's still like tied for second with Donald Trump despite

blowing all of that money. And I think we're going to reach a point pretty quickly where if he doesn't immediately take you know, a state or two or three from Trump in the early primaries, any kind of hope he has for further donations is going to dry up, because, like, why would you keep wasting that money. We all saw how much money he got wasted trying to take Trump out of the primaries in twenty sixteen. I do think people are going to be a little more gun shy

this time. There have already been a number of recent layoffs of major staffers by DeSantis. He's kind of purged a big chunk of the people who started his campaign. One of the things that's a little interesting about him in his political career is that as a politician, he has always been kind of noted as kind of weird within Florida politics because every election he's had, he's had an entirely new team of people. He does not work

with the same people twice. He does not have like bring people back for his campaigns, which is really unusual in US politics for a successful politicans. When you win, you tend to bring him back a lot of the same people who helped you win the last time. And so the fact that Ron doesn't do that, that he's got such basically one hundred percent churn in his teams

suggests a couple of things. One, he's not great to work with, and two, the people who work with him and have been successful and are good don't see him as someone with national potential. Right They don't want to keep working with him because then they get kind of trapped in the loop of being a DeSantis guy. They want to move on somewhere rounse else because they think

governor is as high as this guy can go. You know, Like that is kind of one of the things that you see when you note this dude has such total turnover in his fucking teams. Now again, for all of the money that he spent, Ron's polling numbers have changed

basically nil from when he announced his candidacy. According to New York Magazine, kind of coalated a bunch of this together in the real clear Politics average of polls starting July first, twenty twenty two, Trump had a thirty four point lead over Ron DeSantis and fifty two point eight percent of the vote in national surveys, with DeSantis at eighteen point five At present, he's got Trump's lead over to Santas. So a year ago, Trump had a thirty

four point lead over to Santis. Now he's at thirty two, which is not the speed of movement that you want to see. After a year of effectively campaigning. On the national surveys, DeSantis has gone from eighteen point five percent to about twenty one percent, which again is just kind of like a disaster rate of change. Now this is

just one pole. There's probably potentially outliers here. I've seen other polls that show DeSantis at more like twelve percent and tied with Vivic Ramaswami, who is another GOP candidate. Like the fact that Vivek, who is not nearly the kind of national name that DeSantis is, is tied with him and some polls now is fucking disastrous. He and

Trump are pretty close in terms of funding. Vivek has raised only a fraction of what DeSantis has raged so that's a pretty bad sign kind of a fucking disaster. One major area in which Ron lags behind Trump is his ability to draw interest and what amounts to free advertising from the media. Trump famously got about a billion dollars in free publicity in twenty sixteen thanks to relentless media coverage of his every move, gaff and speech. He

understood it didn't matter if it was negative. It didn't matter that they were shit talking to me. What matters that they're keeping my face out front, right, this is a thing that will bring me support, It will bring me donors, It will make my supporters see me as like this kind of gladiator fighting for them. He leaned

into this shit. On the surface, Ron and Trump are kind of the same in their approach to the media, and that if you go to a Assantis speech, you go to a Trump speech, they're going to call the media the enemy of the people or some variant thereof. They're going to talk about the need to control the press. They're going to like support authoritarian measures against like free you know, the free press. Like again, if you're kind of just looking on the surface, it seems like they

have the same attitude towards the media. But the way they treat journalists is completely different, and that DeSantis has no strategy with the media. He just attacks them. If you're if you're right wing media, if you're some podcaster he likes, He'll go on your show, he'll talk to you. But he ignores the liberal media. He ignores the mainstream media. But that's that's different from having a tactic for dealing

with them. Trump has a strategy with the media. He will howl that they're the enemy of the people in front of crowds. He'll talk about locking up journalists. But if you like read articles about him after a speech or whatever, he always gives the press their time. He knows a lot of these guys by name. He has relationships with reporters. He's had relationships with like Maggie Haberman

of The Times. He's he's able to be like friendly with these people and social with them, which isn't like, doesn't make it's not doing that to be a good person. He's doing it because like he wants them to feel comfortable around him and cover him.

do this. DeSantis has none of this background, So he's just trying to copy like the hostile vibe of Trump without understanding the action like media backing that Trump puts into his UH, into his like relationship with UH, with like with like advertising and with having you know, any any amount of coverage that will get Republicans be like, oh, this is a guy that's worth voting for.

the image of being unfair and unbiased. Like when Trump would go out and sit down with the New York Times, sit down with the Posted down, he would often get coverage that like, let him say his piece, let him make his case, like they would because they didn't want to feel like they were being biased, and he was giving them some of his time. But when you just cut the media off like the Santis has done, you

don't get that from them. You don't get any of like the benefit of this sort of like idea of impartiality, which cuts down on your ability to actually like reach people who might be converted to vote for you. This is highlighted particularly well in a segment from a recent New York Times article on Dessanta's difficulty getting press coverage. Quote. Assigned to cover the reelection campaign of Governor Ron de Santis of Florida, Miles Cohen, a young ABC News reporter,

found himself stymied. The governor would not grant him an interview, aids barred him from some campaign events, and interrupted his conversations with supporters. When mister Cohen was finally able to ask a question about the governor's handling of Hurricane Ian, mister DeSantis shouted him down, stop stop, stop, and scolded the media for trying to cast dispersions. The Dessanta's campaign then taunted mister Cohen on Twitter, prompting a torrent of

online vitriol. So on election night, mister Cohen de camp to a friendlier environment for the news media mar A Lago, where former President Donald J. Trump greeted reporters by name. He came up to us, asked how the sandwiches were, and took twenty questions. Mister Cohen recalled mister Trump, who heckled the fake news in his speech that evening elevated

media bashing into a high art for Republicans. But ahead of the next presidential race, potential candidates like mister DeSantis are taking a more radical approach, not just attacking nonpartisan news sources but out ignoring them altogether. And yeah, I think that kind of like gets at the core of what a bad strategy this is. And it shows all of the Republicans right now because of Trump's success in twenty sixteen, which we do have to remember, was not

based on converting a majority of Americans. It was based in part on like the electoral system and just raw luck that shit broke the way it did. But they are looking at like his success in twenty sixteen and trying to copy that. But it's like a cargo cult thing, right, they don't actually understand what he did that work. They see him bashing the media and his speech is They're like, well, I'm gonna be even harder. I'm not going to talk

to the media at all. And it's like, well, you have eliminated for yourself the primary benefit that Trump true out from this.

in his speech. The media knows what's up now, like they've already seen this like playbook get played. It's not like it's you can't treat it like eight years ago.

the he's the Democratic primary guy. Say it comes out that his son has been smoking crack with prostitutes, and like there's pictures of his hog everywhere and he was involved in So he gets charges against him for commit a couple of crimes that might sink a presidential campaign in twenty sixteen, nobody gives a shit about Hunter Biden, Like zero moderate it's not a single vote is being changed as a result of the Hunter Biden situation in

twenty twenty or it's a different landscape and these people haven't. This is a good thing. I am frightened for when a new you know, there's another coup in conservative politics and somebody understands that it's a different year. Yeah, but we are fortunate at this moment, and you know who else is fortunate.

and a governor's race is not a federal election. He simply can't succeed against Trump with the same tactics that worked in Florida's or against Florida's anemic state Democratic Party. When he's tried to rebut the naysayers who see his cause as largely doomed, DeSantis has tried to publicly downplay the significance of national polls. It is one of my favorite things whenever people point out, like, your polls have not moved in a year, and you've spent millions and

millions of dollars. He'll be like, I don't trust those polls. Those polls don't really matter. You can't trust the poll to get how wrong the polls were in twenty sixteen articles.

campaign contributions because it's due a super pack. So these are like the thick pockets people. So we get an idea of how he is marketing his campaign right now that it's in a crisis, and it starts with a state of the race update with a subtitle, the ballot is very fluid. Early state voters are only softly committed to the candidates they select on a ballot question this

far out, including many Trump supporters. Our focused group participants in the Early States even say they don't plan on making up their mind they meet the candidates or watch them debate. Well, we know Trump's flor is twenty five percent. That leaves three quarters of the electorate willing to consider other viable options. What has not changed to the candidates

who are realistically being courted by the electorate. As it has been for the last year, Trump and DeSantis remain the only viable options for two thirds of the likely Republican primary electorate. While Tim Scott has earned a serious look at this stage as Bio is lacking the fight that our electorate is looking for in the next president. We expect Tim Scott to receive appropriate scrutiny. In the

weeks of HEEAD. We found low to no interest in Vivek, Bergham and Nikki, while too many voters will not consider Pincer Christie for them to be remotely viable. Now I agree about pens and Christie. Neither of those people is going to be the primary candidate. But again Vivek and some polls is right up there with Ronda Santis. So yeah, note that neither of them is gonna win.

have any hope of building up momentum. Yeah. Language like this from the memo has to have experienced Republican politico's nervous. While Super Tuesday is critically important, we will not dedicate resources to Super Tuesday. That's slow our momentum in New Hampshire. We expect to revisit this investment in the fall. I'm sure you will not a great sign, guys, the memo.

the way he eats in public. Like there's like six or seven different videos out that are him trying to eat something and looking like a goober and people making fun of him, Whereas like again, Trump has because he's actually charismatic. Trump can like sit in a truck and look like a dufus playing truck driver and everybody's like, look at that guy. Even people who hate him are like, well, that's kind of endearing. Look at him. He's hogging the horn. He's pretended to be a big truck driver.

further investment. We found that when voters hear about the governor's bio, principally as a dad and as a veteran, they like him and are open to hearing more about him. This is to say nothing of his successes on parental rights, his leadership bringing Florida's economy back during and after COVID, fighting illegal immigration, and ensuring Border Act security. That he's not just a fighter, but most importantly a winner. A major paid media effort featuring the governor's bio will help

us to convert three big issues that you know. That's again, so the three big issues he's highlighting that he says like, these are the things that are going to get voters onto us enough of them that we can overcome Trump's twenty five percent floor. Our anti immigration stuff. Well, I'm sorry, man, Trump's got you beat there. The wall is his right.

he's trying. Like again, it's just bad strategy. It's a bad strategy within the context of what his people have laid out as a strategy. Right, Like, if the good strategy is go for the other seventy five percent of the voters, well you probably don't do that by promising to be even harder on the border.

He's not if you're a donor, he's not exhibiting the idea that he knows how to copy what Trump did and do it one better, like your goal here at if you're running against Trump based on kind of what they lay out, is what their strategy needs to be, which is get the other seventy five percent of people to back us instead of Trump. You need to be you don't need to be yes ending you are acknowledging by laying that out as the strategy that Trump his

appeal is. He's got a dedicated base of appeal, but it's limited, and so if you are trying to make the case that you're more electable than him, you need to show how you have a wider base of like a whiter repeal than he does. And you don't do that by being like, I'm even shittier on the border like anyway, just a bad strategy since he doesn't have

a strong case to make an absolute numbers. Ron's campaign has made the call to push heavily on the forgotten Man narrative, arguing a soft conspiratorial view that a cabal of shady elites is colluding to ruin American greatness. Here's another quote from that memo. Equally important, we will offer an economic message to disrupt and win economy voters. American decline was not an accident. It was a choice. Our elites do not consider themselves Americans so much as they

think of themselves as citizens of the world. Their loyalty is not to a discrete nation, but to the bottom line on a balance sheet, and the decisions they made in leading this country over the past few decades has reflected that worldview. They have governed in their interests rather than ours. And I do think there's a germ of something interesting there. There's this idea of like economic populism,

which was a factor in Trump's campaign. It's interesting to me how close Ron's idea is to like outright anti Semitic conspiracy theory language, like, yeah, they don't recognize borders. Uh, they're citizens of the world, which is a you know, very similar to a lot of the arguments that like the Nazis would make about the Jews, is that like they're a borderless people who exist within this like financial

system rather than like our national like co citizens. Right, it's interesting to me that he's got that this in that memo. Again, I don't think it's a good strategy. I think the way Trump, Trump's just better at doing this right at like he's made himself like there's a lot of people who consider Trump like their kind of guy, like a working class dude, even though he's a billionaire with a gold toilet. I don't see that DeSantis has the ability to like win that kind of support from working people.

They're like, boy, I do want you to look up legal insurrection dot com because their website's very interesting, Like starts with this like phonetic breakdown of the phrase legal insurrection. Like that's their logo that includes like a definition a rising up against established authority, rebellion, revolt in conformity with or permitted by law. That's a nonsense phrase, because there's

no such thing as a permitted legal insurrection. We had this argument actually, like back in around eighteen sixty and guess where it ended. Like, I'm not saying it's bad to have an insurrection. I think some insurrections are potentially really good, but they're never legal. Otherwise they're not an insurrection. Yet the same silly.

I'm a criminal. I want to I want to overthrow the government. You know what's cool is being a criminal who wants to overthrow the government. We all love criminal This is why Star Wars is the biggest movie series. We love criminals who want to overthrow the government. That's who the founding fathers of this country.

administration and before that, the Obama administration. The federal government, specifically the executive branch alphabet agencies, has been completely corrupted by the Obama, Biden and now the Biden Harris administrations. We all know it, and we're all disgusted and disheartened by the myriad ways the Obama administration targeted political opponents. That's why Trump's twenty sixteen campaign to drain the swamp was so potent. We knew the depth and breadth of

the corruption. The partisan Banana republic style attacks on political opponents and we wanted it stopped. Unfortunately, Trump was not able to drain the swamp at all, not even a little bit. So when Biden took office in twenty twenty one, he just got to work picking up Obama's attacks on ascent with a deep state still fully embedded through the executive branch, having spent the intervening years openly working as

the resistance to Trump's the duly elected president's agenda. God, it's such, first off, very funny that they're trying to like make the resistance to be anything but like Twitter libs. Yeah, Like I do find it funny that they're like fucking trying to treat this like a boogeyman.

I think a strength he has not maybe capitalized on enough is this idea, because this is something Trump proved he was unable to do, like he didn't go in there and unseat the deep state. And DeSantis has actually been kind of effective at resisting the federal government and even sidelining some FEA mineral agencies within Florida. And there's some actual like potential for strength here with Trump's base.

I don't know that this gets you moderates, but like it's weird to me that he hasn't pushed this harder. Part of that maybe the fact that he's, like everything else, really bad at it. Kind of His strongest attempt to provide sort of a countervailing force to federal law enforcement was his activation of the Florida State Guard, which seventeen or so states have state guards. It's just kind of

like a state version of a National Guard. Potentially, Florida's had not been active in a while, and he reactivated them, claiming that it was going to be a force of volunteers who could respond to hurricanes and other public emergencies. But what he was actually doing was trying to create a paramilitary organization. He is in the process of attempting to do this now these people are undergoing like military training and whatnot. He's trying to get them access to

like weaponry. Like this is potentially kind of concerning, but he's really fucking bad at it. There was a really interesting New York Times article recently that kind of goes into the problems the Florida State Guard have had sort of spinning up. And it's a very funny read because it's like it's like a little kid's idea about how

you would build a paramilitary organization. So on paper, the Governor's office has said that one of the Guard's missions would be quote to ensure FLOYDA remains fully fortified to respond not only to natural disasters, but also to protect its people in borders from illegal aliens and civil unrest.

And then the New York Times article continues, the deployment this spring has been mired in internal turmoil, with some recruits complaining that what was supposed to be a civilian disaster response organization had become heavily militarized, requiring volunteers to participate in marching drills and military style training sessions on weapons and hand to hand combat. At least twenty percent of the one hundred and fifty people initially accepted into

the program dropped out or were dismissed. And if you get into this, the people dropping out are like the veterans, they're like military officers and stuff who got into this thing and then are like, I was in the military for twenty years, you know, I did deployments here and here, and I came into this thing and it's a bunch of civilians dressed as soldiers yelling at me to do push ups in march in a field and like trying to be an asshole to me because they're angry that

like I have military experience that they think they know better. Like it is like the volunteers said, the training seemed poorly structured, with an order to minimum amount of time spent, as one of them described it, marching in fields. Some of the men said that as veterans with years of experience in the military, they were offended when they were yelled at by junior instructors acting like drill sergeants who

disregarded their previous ranks. I find this really fucking funny if you guys seen those videos coming out about like they're these classes where if you're like a rich or you know, upper middle class dude, you can pay like ten grand to spend five days doing a fake version of the Seals hell weak like you rolling, you're like incredible, Like yeah, you're like carrying, like hitting stuff with big hammers.

You're like crawling on your back through rocks. You're doing all these like shitty, painful exercises while like some dude who probably fucking got an other than honorable separation from the Marine Corps as a private second class like screams at you a lot, and it's you know, that's what you feel. Yeah, yeah, rolling around on a one wheel yelling at you that you're you know, just like making a bullshit reasons to be angry at you, because idiots honestly have it.

You might get some votes. I don't think you'd win a lot of moderates, but you might get the base away from Trump.

creative than anything else he's tried. Anyway, this is all a bad idea. I want to close by reading one last anecdote from that New York Times article on Ron meetball Ron's attempt to make an army. A fifty one year old former Marine captain who had retired from the military with a disability and later joined the State Guard also clashed with instructors during initial boot camp last month,

raising concerns about the training. In an assault complaint filed with the Clay County Sheriff's office, the man said he was accused by the State Guard commander of being the leader of the group that had been criticized in the organization and its leadership. He was then forcibly pushed into a van against his objections and driven to the command boost, where he was fired and escorted off base. Of the nine original State Guard recruiters and commanders who's months recruiting

for the organization, Fewer than a third remained. The staff director, who had been a proposion of the less militarized version of the group, appointed in January, was removed from his post just two days before the inaugural graduation. The program's personnel director was fired this week. So good.

they are now, you know, on strike. At the same time have both kind of independently announced strikes after a breakdown in negotiations with the major studios, and to talk with me today about what's going on. What's it like being a writer on strike? Is my friend and one of the people who makes a show that helps keep me on the ragged edge of sanity. Sore and Bowie sorin. How you doing woo?

of writers over the last like ten years. So a decade ago, about thirty three percent of TV writers got what was paid like the minimum rate, which is kind of the minimum rate you get paid to get staffed on a union show. And the WGA says that about half of TV writers are at that point. Now, writer pay has declined about fourteen percent over the last five years.

And that's with inflation. That's like, if you kind of take out inflation, right, everybody's making a yeah with inflation, it's like, yeah, about twenty three percent writer producer pay over the last decade with inflation factored in so that sucks because people aren't why twenty three percent less TV?

In fact, I think we're watching more TV than we ever have before, like so it and I like, if you listen to the kind of numbers given by streaming platforms about how many people are watching it, sure doesn't seem like TV writers have have been gotten twenty three

percent worse at their jobs. So anyway, there was the WGA went into negotiations earlier this year and basically to kind of, you know, shorten it, we're asking for more money, more money and residuals, more money and upfront pay changes to some policies that streamers were using to kind of avoid. There's been sort of this effort by streamers for a while now to kind of kill the concept of a writer's room in a lot of shows, and they have a couple of different sort of fucky ways to do that.

like a director's medium. That's like the big sort of like guiding you know, through the vision of like what a film is going to be. And TV is a writer driven medium. More often you'll at least hear that a lot. And I kind of want to talk about like what is a writer's room and what has been changing in terms of how studios have been trying to edge that concept out?

And the reason that you have so many writers on a show like that is because while you're working on it, it's also in production, so as stories are being broken, and that means that there are rooms where people are creating a story together. As that's going on, there's like six other things going on, like you're going to have

they're probably filming during that time. And if that's your particular written by episode, like that's the episode with your name on it, you might be on set for that because you're going to be having to make changes on the fly. While that's going on. There's table reads happening, there's joke punch ups happening, So there's generally a separate room for that. And so you need like a pretty big group of people to just make a show, to just write a show. And that's that's to keep the

hours within like to keep them bearable. I mean, it doesn't even you wouldn't even turn that into a nine to five. Generally, that's still a lot of hours with

a lot of people, but at least it's bearable for everybody. Now, streaming has tried to change that because they're tired of hiring so many writers and they're tired of paying writers and so with streaming, there's different loopholes that they can get into, which is, if you start creating a show before it's even technically green lit, you can start having writers write episodes, but because it's not green lit, you're

not beholden to the same rules through the WGA. You can start hiring people at their at a minimum even if they are should be making more than that. And depending on what your position is at as a writer, like you start as a staff writer, then you move up to story editor, then executive story editor, and you move up and up and up from there. Generally, what happens is if you leave a show as as an executive story editor, you don't then go to another show

and drop back down to staff writer. You maintain the position that you have because you've now learned the trade enough that usually you have a skill set that's valuable enough that you should be being paid for being an executive story editor. So what they're doing is they're making sure that people are not being paid for the roles that they generally have because they can do that before

show has been green lit. And then they will say we're going to write, like, let's just write twelve episodes and that's a lot, like that's a whole season of time, but they're doing it before it's green lit. And then what happens is you will have these writers who are burning the midnight oil trying to get this thing done and calling in a lot of favors from friends because

you have such a small group of writers. You have maybe like in a pre green lit room, you've got like three or four people trying to write an entire season of a show, and as they're writing it, they're like they're calling in favors from friends and be like will you come edit this and stuff? Because you don't have enough people for everything. You have to break all these stories simultaneously. You have to know what's going on in each individual room, but you don't have enough bandwidth

for all of that. So you're calling in favors from other people. Do we just come and like look at this? Will you just take a look? Like we need like eyes on this, And so you're calling in favors from friends. Students have figured out that they can they can you can ask people to do this. Essentially, it's like they

get a natural part of the writing process. Every writer, in every form of writing does a version of this, and they're like, what if we did this to help to make it easier to starve ye, Yeah exactly, and then and then what they would do. There's different tactics beyond that, which is like once those are appen, once those episodes are written, then maybe the studio will will uh. They can kind of pick and choose when they want

to release that. They don't have like a it's not like in broadcast television where everything gets released in the fall. It's just like you can choose when you want to release it, So maybe you wait a year or whatever, you release it, and then you can release it in two seasons. So if you have twelve episodes, you can cut those into six six six.

it's like you lose out on all that. Then you can also because you're breaking it up, you don't have to pay people to like advance them to the next the next season, and then that would also be released

over the course of like two years. And so you have a writer who's written for maybe like eleven weeks on something on a show, and then they don't know that they have that job again for another two and a half years, and so there's no consistency, there's no and nothing is stable, and that makes it very very difficult for writers to keep their jobs and maintain a writing job.

we just watched and The Bear. Probably the standout episode of The Bear from season two is this like episode about a family Christmas party that's just this absolute, like anxious nightmare. That's an hour long episode, twice the length of a normal episode, And oftentimes that's kind of a mixed thing with TVs, but it works in this one, and the fact that it's so much longer actually like helps with like trans you could you can only do that with shows that work the way they do in streaming.

That wouldn't have been a thing that you would have gotten to do in nineteen ninety three probably. But while I think like there's a lot of cool stuff structurally that's gotten to come out of that, it's also it's it's made the compensation so much worse. It's made the job so much less reliable. Like it's it's like it's really stark how much more difficult it's become to make a living in TV. Yeah, well TV is more popular than ever.

Residuals is another one that's like it. The way that residuals work is if you have a show that then gets played again through syndication or through streaming, you should then get a residual check for every time that the episode that you wrote shows up on television. And it was very easy to track that as it would show up on like our show on American Dad. Yeah, I know that it's going to get played on Cartoon Network. I know that it's going to get played at these

other spots. The TBS will rerun it at some point, and I can I know when those are coming in. With streaming, it's much more difficult to determine when somebody watched something, not because those numbers don't exist, but because all these platforms that are created by studios will not give out that information. That information is like in a black box where you have no idea how often a show gets streamed. There's a couple of reasons, like people

are speculating as to why that might be. One is that either shows are getting watched way more often and people are not getting the proper residuals that they should be, or that the whole business model doesn't quite work. Yeah, it's all yeah, yeah, And if you found out how little people were actually watching television, this whole all investors, everything, the whole thing would collapse. I don't know which is true. I don't care. I just want to know what the

numbers are. So like a big part of a big part of this is is the WJA asking different streaming platforms. You got to you got to be more transparent. You got to tell us how well our show is doing, so that we know if people are getting paid properly.

increase compensation for their members. For those eight guys, I'm gonna guarantee you Ari Emmanuel the highest compensated of these CEOs over at Endeavor three hundred and eight million dollars.

And like, I don't think he made any of your He's not responsible for any of your favorite shows whatever, like lying in the Great you know made you made you laugh or cry or like whatever, whatever joke from American Dad keeps you uh, you know, makes you suddenly start like bawling out laughing while you're driving down the highway. That was not Ari am manual. Ye, neither the shows

were Endeavor whatever. You know what I you know what I'm trying to do here, right, Yeah, Yeah, Ted Sarandos whatever fucking you know, Bob Eiger, all these guys like they're they're I mean fundamentally like Bob Iger. One of the big things he did was pushed the The Flash movie out into theaters, really put a lot of money into that thought it was going to be important for

the brand going forward. Lost so much money lost, like probably about as much money as like the Writer's Guild is asking for it increased compensation this year, like if they just hadn't made that movie. So let's talk you guys went on strike. What it's been like two months now already.

know the people there. Now it's like going to the gym every day where you get to know the people there and then you build your community, and so I've got this group of people that, like I go there. Those are just people that like I happen to talk to because like we'd see a truck going and we're like, oh, hope that's not teams or truck or whatever. And then and then you just like strike up a conversation with somebody.

You start talking, and then you find out that this person like ran Malcolm in the Middle for eight years, and you're like, oh, okay, cool.

the way the studios can get around paying writers. But I also wonder on the opposite and like, how many shows do we get because of connections people make out of the picket line, because like folks meet each other and get talking, and like I do I do wonder if that's like a thing.

Like you're just talking to people and then all of a sudden your jobs come up and you start talking about your work and then people are like after li while, like well, like send me something, like send me some of your writing, and then you just become buddies and like you start working on stuff accidentally together. And I guarantee that, like by the end of this, there'll be writing teams that didn't exist before, and there'll be people

who want to make stuff together. Plus the studio pipeline will be empty, so like they're gonna want to like fill it with They're gonna want to fill it. Yeah, when the strike ends, And guarantee, there's gonna be people from the lines who came up with stuff on the lines who are gonna be like we've got lots, like there's what about this and be like yes that buy it.

like sag After has joined the strike. There's a lot of a lot of people who are very famous and prominent talking about issues that go well beyond Hollywood.

fucking nineties. We've talked about like Jack Welch and ge and kind of like how that company was turned from something that made stuff to something that produced stock value and fired people and you're you're getting that all across entertainment right now. And I think this is I think, and this is something I think kind of everyone knows on some level, this is an inflection point, right, you know.

AI is a part of it, the fact that we're about to see them try to use this technology to cut down the number of people they have to pay even further. But it's like this is bigger than Hollywood. Hollywood is just getting a lot of attention because actors know how to get attention.

whatevery way you can do that, you do it, and a lot of times the way you do that is that you just fuck everybody at the bottom and figure out how to carve out money from them and bring it rise it to the top. And so yes, I think that it's what happened was the WGA went on strike. The WGA is a very strong, good guild, good union that like does not blink, and and everyone saw that, and immediately people were on the side of the WGA in a way that I think no one anticipated that.

All everybody else in unions is like, no, this is wrong, like we should. We were dealing with the exact same stuff, and universally everyone seems to be on the side of unions right now. Then that's like we should use that, like we should, we should ride that wave a little bit. And absolutely they should, because there's there's so many things that are systemically broken right now just happens to be the entertainment industry is the only one that I have it. Yeah, I have skin in the game on.

we can get them to accept it. And you know, this is right around when SAG was, you know, deciding to strike and Ron Pearlman gets on and makes a little video where he basically says, you know, we can burn your houses down, Like there's more than one way

to lose a house. And I thought the important thing about sharing that because one of the ways you know, media works is that there's people let the things that people are willing to listen to and that can like affect them and change their minds is partly dependent on

the situational context at the time. This is why so many of like the journalist, much of the journalism have done the far right, Like has been articles that I felt like I had to get out within an hour or two of a shooting because people will pay attention to these these things that are problems that are important.

They won't lead if I do a deep dive on how this specific kind of radicalization works normally, but if somebody has just been shot, they'll listen, you know, And that's like a fortunate but that's the way people are.

And there's this I thought. What I thought was important about that is that not that you know, Ron Pearlman threatened to burn down a guy's house, that's just kind of funny, but what he was doing there that's really valuable that I think more people need to think about is accepting that when you're saying something like, well we just need to wait for writers to lose their homes,

that's a violent threat. That is a threat to harm somebody for your own personal gain, and we shouldn't view that as like fundamentally morally different than saying I want to go rob a guy with a thirty eight, right like I don't. I don't feel like there's a big moral gap between them. And you can get people to actually kind of who maybe wouldn't think about that, to think about that this way. And I think that's an important thing to transmit in this time.

It was more removed, you see, And so you're absolutely right, like having hell Boy come out and be like there's lots of ways to lose a house, it's like, oh.

like I liked everything about it. I felt like it was financially stable and I was getting what I deserved, and I was just happy. And that's not what's happening across like eighty percent of other shows right now. And so like we left, we left our show in solidarity of other writers because at some point, you know this, I maybe won't have this job anymore and I'll have to go get another job. And also for all the people who are working those other jobs, and it's really

really struggling right now to even make ends meet. We know they're watching, they're working on three different shows a year, like they came and pay their rent, like we're working on behalf of them, but more importantly, like we're striking on behalf of all of the other writers who are going to come along after this, Like the fact that the two thousand and eight strike happened was the reason that my show is so good and has such good benefits and like why the show is is comfortable for

writers because they fucking went to work and like they got what they needed from the studios even though it was hard and it was bitter and a lot of them lost their jobs over it. And so now it's just like even though it sucks and I'm not happy about it, it's it's our turn to do it. It's like our turn to make sure that everything works.

forced out of his home. Like that's not why they're doing this, because I mean, yeah, that.

it's not the kind of stuff you do. It's not like investigation. You can't have a machine do that. And it's like we have, but how do you think people learn to do what I do? Like part of it is like doing the like that's the feed or right, it's part of what you're saying about like TV writing. It's like they're trying to kill the way in which people learn how to continue this art for Yeah.

it's it's the same thing. And when you talk about AI, like you if you were to write an episode of a show and you ever written by credit on it, you get a script fee for that, and ultimately, like what the studios want is to just have a piece of shit AI written script to begin with, and then they're not paying a script fee to anybody, and then writers just fix that and so like, yeah, it's it's all these differently cost saving measures then ensure that no

one will ever come up through this industry again and learn all the things.

apart and sometimes you put them back together again. And as you probably have noticed, presumably from the last interview, maybe from reading the news, maybe from like talking to people who are in unions, we are in a genuinely historic period of labor militancy in this country. That is effectively we are now we are. We are now entering the second phase of the hot Summer of twenty twenty three. We used to have hot summers all the time. People do what that meant, so now it just means like

global warming. But long ago in the galaxy, far far away, there are these things called hot summers when everyone would fucking go on strike and there'd be you know, sort of masters just as a capital estate. And yeah, we're fucking going back. There's talk with me about the next series of massive private sector strikes that we're about to get. Is Rehee Smith and Oliver Rose, who are rank and

file ups workers and teamsters doing the standard disclaimer. These individuals do not represent the union or the positions of the union. They are speaking as individuals. Yeah, we have this is this is the disclaimer for the lawyers, it is also true. Yeah, but recent Oliver, welcome to the show.

And yeah, we're all going to be going on strike, and well, we are potentially going to be on strike, and if we are, UPS is kind of going to be in a world of hurt because it is very hard to replace three hundred and forty thousand workers and what economists have told me is a tight labor market.

is that actual union density is really low and hasn't been increasing that much. On the other hand, like everyone seems to lake unions and everyone wants to go on strike, and I don't know, it's a it's a really interesting sort of set of conditions right now.

You know something that I've been thinking about a lot is uh you know, it's like ups is A is a major, major company in a whole logistics sector, right yeah, and like we can set that standard for that logistics company or like a piece of shit company like Amazon can. So if we win, and we win big, that could absolutely encourage more organizing in those other sectors, leading to an increase of union density. So hopefully that's like the way forward past all these strikes.

we're done. You know, with giving all of the wealth that we're creating to the company and now it's going back into our hands.

it's like there. Meanwhile, you know, they're given their fucking like CEO and shareholders like dividends and stock buybacks and all of that in addition to the profits that they are reaping, right, because profits is just the cream of the crop, right, Like that's everything past business expenses, what they're paying out like salary, so that's not even being touched. And yeah, no, it's time for us to say we want that.

You know, we have drivers who are doing you know, twelve hour shifts and you know even up to like fourteen hours you know, every day, and then also getting you know, uh contacted to come in you know on their day off, have to do six day weeks.

all my shift in the trailer loading boxes. You know, there's no airflow, those things, you know, can you know, be five to ten degrees hotter, you know, like at a minimum than the yeah, ambient temperature last summer, like on a mid ninety day, I recorded one hundred and eight degrees you know inside the trailer. So you know, there's not necessarily any kind of protections currently for that.

So you know, that's one big lack in the contract is having those kind of you know heat heat protection and you know that is.

beyond what's just stipulated in the contract. However, when you kind of get late into the contract, like you know, towards the expiration date, the base pay that was agreed on for the last contract is no longer acceptable. And while it gives them the leeway to increase our rate wage, they can always go back down to the lower wage should they choose to. And last year at the hub that I worked at, it was right after peak, in peak season. We were hired on at twenty seven dollars

an hour. And come February, you know, we're all walking into the job and there's one of the supervisors there who is frankly looking like she's not having a good time having to stop to talk to each of us to explain, oh, yeah, so we are going to be bringing your pay down to fifteen fifty an hour.

It's a classification related to the type of hub that I am at, And so I'm only like at this hub, I work maybe twelve hours a week if I'm lucky, So this is twelve hours a week at fifteen fifty

an hour with an attendance bonus. But if I get sick one of those days, that means I have a paycheck, a weekly paycheck that is going from roughly two hundred dollars to like maybe roughly eighty and that is just it's totally totally unacceptable the way that they can kind of like, yeah, with the plague going on, yes, being sick is highly likely right now. And yeah, no, they're just kind of able to like yo yo us around

on these ages like whenever they want. And so a demand that is being circulated in the grassroots of the union. Leadership hasn't really talked about it to my knowledge, but there is, you know, a petition going around to have a starting wage of twenty five dollars an hour, and you know, right now that would only be because right now this year, I'm making twenty four and they didn't do that bullshit. I think kind of an anticipation of

the strike coming. They didn't want to make us, you know, more angry, and so that would only be a dollar increase for me, but also it would prevent them from doing that in the future, right Yeah.

You know, there's multiple hubs in the area, and they're all just on different pay scales, you know, for the same kind of you know, same same area, doing the same work, and we had just have these like fluctuating pay scales, you know, I know for us, it was you know, right after peak season, and they're like, oh, thanks so much for the most successful peak season ever. We made record breaking profits. We couldn't have done this

without you. By the way, we're cutting all of your pay and now, of course you know we're getting paid above twenty five and hey, that helped their profits. So you know, it's absolutely absurd to say, oh, well, you know, we can't afford you know, these higher wages when they can't.

early July. It was they leaked, it got leaked their economic proposals for us, and they had the part timers starting at seventeen dollars an hour seventeen and like, I just I don't think that's affordable anywhere.

So you know, if you go back to like the original fifteen campaign, right wage like that wage which was already like kind of nonsense in like twenty twelve, like with inflation that's like nineteen thirty now, Yeah, so this is you know, this is this is how much like inflation has sort of deteriorated wages and that, and that's just sort of like you know, the economic terms, like inflation is like the bundle of goods, right, and that that's not accounting for the fact that, for example, the

increase in housing prices has been way higher for the sort of like avig rated inflation. Right. Healthcare costs are increasing higher from the sort of quote unquote Aviatrade inflation, and so like, yeah, it's like, yeah, this sounds like a lot of money. It's fucking not like no, simply is not.

to meet their material needs. You know, definitely have to you know, consider this as you know, big picture, this is a national agreement, and you know, we got to get that really solid foundation and then we can expand from there.

now three weeks. It'll be interesting to see what the TDU, which is the Team Service for a Democratic Union, which is a reform caucus inside our union. It'll be interesting to see what their line is on this. So, oh my gosh, what a what a bomb drop to get in the middle of a podcast about this.

what do we need? You know out of these you know, five year contracts, and you know, I think it was just you know, a few days ago, got you know, get an update from the local you know, basically a week before you know the contract ends, you know, and they're you know, talking about this is like one of the most transparent contracts there's ever been. There's all these updates and you know, there's more rank and file, all

you know, members involved in the bargaining. And it's like, well, that's great, you know that shows you know how far you know, we've come, I guess, but also it's still just it's kind of sad to think that you know, this, this process that's all banned by NDA is the most transparent transparent it's been.

this on the entire class. And it really looks like both the Teamsters and ups, like you know, really wanted to cut a deal as you know, part of part of this attempt to keep everything going and to keep this stuff from happening, which I mean I think makes sense, right if you're you know, if if you're UPS, you don't act like we're we're having an actual sort of like workers and surgaency like having having having a summer this hot like isn't good for like, it isn't good

for UPS. It's arguably not good for some of the more sort of like some of the more sort of conservative union leaderships either who do who unlike a lot of workers do not want to be on strike because that like that cut that cuts into the sort of war chest of capital that they have to manage.

better to not go on strike. And like, I I know, I know, like and to me that's like a little bit wild because one there is so much and we

could demand so much more. But also like you know, collective action, you know, in order to be consistent, to be good at it, it requires you to undertake it, right Like, and you know, when I think about like how our local is, they have a very service model orientation to unionism as opposed to an organizing model, and I, you know, I was really under the impression that this potential strike could have kind of like you know, lit a fire under their ass and like kind of got

back into like the organizing aspect of unionism, right uh.

more specific, uh, but like well over that. And they would look at our union meetings where we have maybe fifty to seventy people, and they're just kind of like, well, this is just as good as it's going to get.

for you, and like that's that's good. Like you know, there are some unions that barely do that much, and the fact that they do that is great.

in involved. And most people, you know, it's just a job for them, and they don't know all the things that a union can provide for them or how a union can back them up. And part of that's because you know, union leadership, you know, has decided that that's not something they really they don't need to be as engaged with the members as they could be.

election turnout tends to be just atrocious. You don't actually want more people being involved because the more people that are involved, the more likely is it a bunch of people are going to show up in the election. Someone's good and you know when someone's gonna look at one of the deals you cut and it's gonna be like,

what the fuck are you doing? Right, So there's there's there's a lot of sort of perverse intensive structures in terms of like just to sort of the basic organizational electoral structure that gets you, you know, like people cutting deals and culling and you know, like trying to cut off the sort of like hot summer and its knees.

voting that way. Eventually they did change it after they got pressure I think probably from up top and below. But one of the members who is involved was like, oh no, no, no, no, like it'll be better if it's just the people that are motivated enough to go, because they're the ones that are going to like vote the

thing on through. And that was just that was wild too, seeing that sort of perspective, because if we you know, if the union is there, if like you know, our union reps, our business agents, if they're there, if they're constantly engaging membership, then we will all be on the same page. Like they're the ones that have all of

the like you know, the like technical information. They're the ones that can really talk to they can talk to people about you know, like this is how much UPS is making and profits, this is like what they're paying our CEO, this is.

have been there a few years. A part timers like don't know their rights under our contract and you know it was only because of organizing and you know, talking with people that I know those rights and can you know then share that you know knowledge with other you know, teamsters. But it's kind of like, well, why why are we having to do this? And I mean, of course internal organizing, you know, knowledge is super important, but it'd be nice, you know why, you know, why isn't there a you know,

like a welcome packet. Why are there you know, not more maybe not like full meetings, but at least something where you know, our union officials can meet with rank and file members. And I think I'm partly you know, speaking to that because you know, the shift I work is during union meetings, so you know, attending those is not you know, not quite feasible, uh, you know for

me or other people on my shift. And I know that's also kind of seems like it's led to this like some contempt for part timers like oh, we're not involved, you know, we don't care, but it's like we don't you know, we don't necessarily know you know about the meetings, or that you know, there's the scheduling conflict, or you know, again talking about like we don't even know what our you know, basic rights are you know under our contract.

And you know, this pisses me off for like a lot of reasons, one of which is that, like my grandma was a teamster and she was a she was a union punch card operator. Like back in like the seventies and eighties, and you know, my grandma is like like not like a leftist, right like, we have to stop her from giving money to the Fallen Gong. Like she's so you know, this is this is the kind of thing super dealing with you, right, But like she

loved going on strike, right like. And that's the thing that like my family who's not like particularly sort of labor friendly or like, oh yeah, no, we love going on strike. Because that's that's why she has insurance, right because because the team shirts were going with any eighties teams just go on shrike, and I you know, and I think I think that's an everything that's like this, you know, this kind of well okay, then there's two

ways to look of it at it. One is that it's a fundamental misreading of the situation that's happening right now, which is, no, people absolutely love going on strike. People are really excited to go on strike. People who people whose politics are not like, you know, people whose polities are not aligned with the left, really like going on strike and are really excited about it. And this is something that's happening sort of irrespective of this, there's been

a bunch of wildcat strikes. This is something that's been happening sort of irrespective of like actual union membership, as

people want to do this. We've also seen sort of the great resignation over the last few years of you know, what is effectively a massive like part of the reason the conditions for labor are like this strong right now is because there's been this massive informal strike of people just sort of of people, you know, walking off the job, like deciding their job fucking sucks and quitting, and that's been putting a lot of pressure on employers and you know,

and as simultaneous this, you know, I think I think the reading of this that's more sort of cynical is that, like, these people know this, right, they know that people want to go on strike, and they're looking at it and they're terrified, and their conclusion is like, we have to fucking stop, you know, we have to stop with this

wave of labor militancy before it gets going. Because if it gets going, and you know, if you're like, if you're you know, like a sort of centrist liberal politician, or if you're like a conservative union bureaucrat, like that's terrifying for you, then there's you know, there's there's a lot of people who have a lot to lose if if you know, like if really sort of a president wave of labor militancy gets going.

be able to that. Like, you know, we're going to get this kind of agreement that most people will want, and it's not going to happen, and we've had all of this build up and you know, it's kind of

kind of you know, fall flat. And then you know, also I've a fair amount of time on picket lines as like a community supporter, and you know, there is something incredibly magical about being on strike, you know, like there's often just this outpouring of community support for the workers, right and workers get to see that their labor is extremely valued by the larger community, and I think that

is really important. I think that builds bonds of solidarity, and you get to see the other unions who come out and support of your strike, and then you know, you go and support them, and then it creates Yeah, it creates these bonds that you know aren't really they can be achieved without it, but it's just so much more bonding. I guess I'm going to use the term bonds a lot, but and there really isn't a substitute

for it. And you know, and then people also they get to experience the power that they have as you know, as labor right like they be can they realize it's like oh wait, no, Like I'm on strike and this company is like the shit is hitting the fan for them because they don't have us who know how to do our jobs in there doing them right. Like you know, I was at a picket line for this other company a few years back, and like the workers there on

the line were constantly giving the updates. They'd be like, yeah, man, it's wild I heard in there that like, you know, the managers are trying to do our jobs and like none of what they make is edible and they're throwing it all away and like breaking the machines are breaking like yep, and so they're one they're seeing that, yes, their labor is specific, it has value, it is necessary and crucial, and they are getting that community support and

you know, there's not a lot of other opportunities for those realizations to happen.

a decade, and it changed the city. Like Chicago is a you know, was for i mean decades, decades and decades. This just like interminable machine run like neoliberal hellhole. And you know, I mean I'm not going to say like Chicago's like some kind of like you know, like beacon of the Left or whatever, but like the city is

just different after it. And it was just the one truck they kept they kept going on Shrek and they kept going on the Shrek, and you know, you can you can look at the quality of their wins and you can sort of like you know, like I mean there's a like I know, I mean, like I know people who like have quipbals with sort of like exactly what happened in the contract negotiations, but like you know, they they went on strike multiple times and they won and that really and then you know, the every thing

happened is the thing you were talking about, right, is like suddenly you're at these pickets and like the entire community is showing up, like everyone's showing up with food, Like it changed, it changed the city, and you know, and I think this guess is an everything I think is important here about and what's you know, sort of the potential that being averted is. The interesting thing about this strike wave is that we've had a number you know, we've we had like the whole we had sort of

the wildcat teacher strikes in twenty seventeen. We've had a couple of a couple of waves of teacher strikes, but like most of the strikes that have been happening at public sector unions, we haven't had these giant strikes other than basically, I mean there's been some right, there's there's there's been a lot of strikes in the healthcare sector.

We haven't had a strike like at this scale in the private sector in you know outside basically like the Team series and is like the Team Series and like the Guild are like the only two big unions on that who go on strike like even kind of regularly.

Even that's like that's like a once in like twenty year thing, right, And so I don't know, like I think, I think just sort of the the potential of what's being lost here is enormous if if what happens is that this deal, which is like I'm not great from when I've seen it from the initial things. Although again, like we still don't fucking know what's in this deal, and we're not going to for like a bit at like at least until they fucking release the thing.

just going to keep happening. You know, by the time we get to twenty twenty eight, you know, probably get up to twenty five dollars an hour. Maybe, but by that time, you know, who knows what we're actually going to need in order to survive in this economy. Yeah, so, you know, I feel like that wage is just not it's not proactive enough for what we're going to need

in the coming years. And you know, in there there is stuff about like, you know, wage increases for like you know, however long you've been there and stuff like that. But yeah, I you know, you know, like I graduated from high school in like two thousand and eight, and I just feel like the my entire life, the economy has just been fucking shitty. And when they tell me the economy is great, my finances are still fucking shitty.

you just aren't living for those first five years. I don't know.

seem ideal for me. And yeah, I would I would like to see some numbers on so that wait list is that going down, like, because that's like what I'm waiting for is to be able to you know, snag one of those full time inside positions, but I don't know. And like when you think about, you know, seventy five hundred full time positions, it's also worth to keep in mind that ups employees three hundred and forty thousand people.

shouldn't be working seventy hour weeks. Yeah no, maybe we should cap that at thirty with you know PT pay that you know pays like full time. But of course you know we're not there. You know, we need these jobs that can actually provide you know, definitely not going to knock that, but you know, would definitely like to see that overall shift kind of just you know in our culture of you know, we don't need to work more to have our needs met.

But still, yeah, it's like a lot of weight, you know, because we're carrying so many packages every day. Yeah, it's a lot of wear and tear on the body.

too low. You know, it's that kind of constant you know, harassment or you know maybe sometimes like you know, I know, my supervisor is a little bit more subtle about it, you know, versus you know outright being like, oh, you need to work faster because That's the thing is in our contract. You know, there's no kind of productivity quota. You know, we work safe, we follow the methods. That's something I really try and you know, really focus on because you know, ideally, yeah, I want to you know,

I would like to be here longer. Yeah, silly enough as that is for a job with terrible conditions, but you know, also it's a job that and that Yeah, that's the big thing. And it's like, I don't you know, what's a pinch you're going to do if you know, I'm you know, have some kind of you know, grave injury from from the job pension but still, yeah, you're dead with heat exhaustion.

now really thinking about that. Seventy five hundred full time jobs three percent, two or three percent, depending on the metric that you're looking at.

I don't know what the TDU line is going to is going to be on this, so it's like.

look too good. Actually, you know, he he kind of looks like he's losing everything as he slowly watches it all crumble. So let's see, let's start by talking about everyone's favorite topic campaign finances. I know this is what everyone tunes in to listen to.

disclosures exposed is DeSantis's heavy dependence on high contributors. So just just about fifteen percent of fundraising contributions came from donors who gave less than two hundred dollars, and the vast, vast majority of DeSantis's money has come from donors who gave the legal maximum of three three hundred dollars in the primary, which also means that those who gave that can cannot contribute any more money either. So he's running out of people that are actually able to fund his operation.

this past week. Previously, DeSantis had upwards of ninety people on payroll, but just this month they've eliminated thirty eight jobs in a variety of departments, cutting more than one third of his payroll. DeSantis' cutbacks are nearly equal to

the size of Trump's entire twenty twenty four campaign staff. Dessentus' campaign manager Grenera Pek said in a statement I believe late last week quote following a top to bottom review of our organization, we've taken additional aggressive steps to streamline operations and put Ron DeSantis in the strongest position to win this primary and defeat Joe Biden. So that was their little statement accompanying the news of firing almost forty

people from their campaign. According to The New York Times, advertisers are quote promising to reorient the DeSantis candidacy as a quote unquote insurgent run and remake it into a quote unquote leaner, meaner operation. So this is the new strategy that they're trying to do, is instead of having ninety people on staff in a largely ineffectual strategy, have a more insurgent run with a smaller number of people.

But in addition to the dozens of staff members who've been let go this July, to senior advisors have also departed this month to work for an outside pro DeSantis nonprofit. One of these senior advisors, who was supposed to oversee the campaign's television messaging, voluntarily left quote as the reality

of a disappearing advertising budget set in. So these these two more more kind of seasoned Republican advisors saw what was happening in the campaign, and they're still pro DeSantis, but they believe they can be more effective by working from outside of the actual campaign. That's so funny, which is not a great sign for DeSantis's internal internal team here if you have people like who's still like you, but they just can't work for you because you're doing such.

two thousands movie. They want to be they want to be the bad guy in like the fucking super villain hero movie. Right, Like that's you don't you don't say that about a guy who's good like this. You wouldn't like the Biden campaign. If they came to Joe and we're like, we want to do a Biden is everywhere thing,

he'd be like, now that sounds kind of creepy. Guys like I already got a little bit of a problem with that, what with a hair sniff, and I don't really want to really want to jump on that train.

Wave episode. It turns out to be slightly more self inflicted than what than what at least I said in the episode, because I didn't want to make claims that I couldn't back up. Because we have we have some

new new information regarding this video. I'm gonna I'm going to quote from this this article in the Times quote a Dissanta's campaign aid had originally produced the video internally, passing it off to an outside supporter to post it first and making it appear as if it was generated independently. According to a person with knowledge of the incident, so this video turned out to be actually be made in house.

This actually was made by someone who was working for Rondasantis as as we speculated it initially, but we couldn't really like say for sure because it was it was posted first on a third party account.

the guy who posted the first homophobic meme one. But yeah, so we found out Sunday night that it was actually made by someone at the Dasantas campaign, which kind of justified a lot of our suspicions about DeSantis employing staff of zoomers who don't actually understand how to win a political election and are more interested in just creating fascist memes, which is seems to be not a very effective strategy

for DeSantis so far. So again, just the day that this news broke that that the video was actually made in a house, another fash wave of inspired video, but with much much more overt Nazi imagery, was shared online by a Dysantis campaign staffer. I'm Robert. Have you seen this video?

So I guess we should probably talk about what a wojack is in case someone is unfamiliar. If you've ever spent any amount of time on the Internet, you've probably seen memes with kind of crudely drawn like human faces and heads. These are called wojack memes. They're very popular in like political spheres. They kind of kind of rose to prominence on four Chat and spread spread out from there.

Everyone kind of uses them. Nowadays they're pretty common, but there's a few specific like wojack characters, like the chad is one. One of the more popular ones is the doomer wojack, which is someone who has taken the black pill, so to speak. They've they've they've looked at modern society and have decided that it's not worth engaging in. Now there's this. There's doomers on the right, there's dumers on

the left. There's doomers who look at like climate change and the acceleration of like of of of capitalism and just decide, hey, this is this is too far gone. So they become a doomer, and they're on the left. There's also doomers on the right who are like looking at gay marriage and the acceptance of trans people, being like, oh, this is so socially degenerate. It's the society is too far gone, and then they become a doomer. But they're

on the right. So it's it's it happens on. It happens on both sides, and both both sides use doomer memes. Uh yeah, this one is because we're talking about it in this context of fash wave. This is obviously a fascist doomer meme. But that's that's kind of what I mean when I say there's there's a doomer wojack sitting sitting at a computer. It's like it's like a guy with a beanie, like a scruffy beard. He looks like

very depressed and tired, that sort of thing. So as as these kind of headlines about Trump's not conservative enoughness are flashing on this computer, the dumer Rojack is looking increasingly disillusioned and apathetic. Then there's the clip of Trump holding up a Pride flag that plays right before we see Trump signing the First Step Act, the twenty eighteen Criminal Justice Reform Bill. Then headlines flash about violent criminals

being released into the streets, that sort of thing. So the dumer BoJack is looking at all these things about Trump, looking more and more depressed, when suddenly a doorway appears with an almost angelic light pouring in from behind, and as the door opens, we see a silhouette of Ron DeSantis. More short clips of Ron play, and now the wojack is looking happy, almost like exuberant, seemingly kind of random.

Images of outer space, volcanoes, rocket launches, surfing and the beach flash quickly on screen with with like glitchy silhouettes of Ronda Santis looming above coastal ocean side cities that are lit up by a sunset. A don't tread on Florida Alligator flag spins onto screen like it's a fucking like MS paint like edit, and then the the video flashes more clips of DeSantis wearing sunglasses standing in front of American flags as the sunset. Happy Woejack fades in.

So this is another wo shack meme of somebody almost like tearied eyed with like contentment, staring into the horizon as like a sunset is behind their head. It kind of it kind of reminds me of like the that guy who who stole that plane in Seattle.

was sort of suicidal. There's very sad audio of him talking too, because he gets on with air traffic control and he makes sure that he's not going to hurt anyone else, and like then the plane goes down, you know, he goes down in it, and it's it's very bleak. He was not a man who wanted to hurt anybody. It's just this kind of like exist. I found it

set to a lot of vapor wave tracks. Actually, like the audio the conversation between them, because he's kind of I think a lot of people identify with his sense of like I don't really know why I was ever here. I don't really know.

very similar. I've seen people post this image in threads about sky King before, and I think a lot a lot of people to understand it's like this this act, that this this Skyking thing, that this has more in common with like accelerationist like terrorism than what most people can like really understand about like between like shooting a random person for like violent crime and this like this, this is more this, This is closer to why people

do accelerationist like terroristic acts. But this guy was like not actually a monster, so he didn't do that. He like explicitly didn't want to hurt anybody. He explicitly didn't want to try to land the plane at the airport because he thought he might hurt somebody.

We get more shots of beachfront cities and rocket launches, followed by headlines about Dysantis on a variety of topics, including his anti immigration actions, his use of Florida's National Guard in other states, DeSantis's anti diversity initiatives, his anti education bills, his anti drag bills, the cancelation of pride parades in Florida, and in general just kind of how DeSantis has been pushing Florida further right. So after this barrage of headlines, we get to the most mask off

from a moment of the video. The flag of Florida fills the screen with two lines of armed troops at either side marching towards the flag. A still photo of Dysantis is center frame, with his head right in the middle of the seal of Florida, which is on the center of their state flag. The head in front of the seal creates this almost like halo effect around Desantas's head, and then the seal turns into a spinning son and rad as we zoom into the symbol as troops march

into center, and then the video ends. The sun and Rad is on screen for about ten seconds. So this was a pretty upsetting thing to see on Twitter.

video was shared by at least one campaign staffer. It's a very short video, but it plays into a strain of like accelerationist propaganda tropes that even the previous Fashionay video didn't didn't even really have in many of the same ways, like like all of all of like the dooomer wojack slowly becoming like happy and content than putting on military fatigues to go fight for Ron de Santis, who's now in the center of like a haloed son and rad like it's it's it is emulating a type

of meme that both gained popular in order to specifically like inspire mass shootings to happen, and also to like to get young depressed males to channel their depression into like fascism. It has a whole bunch of tropes like it's it's it's it's really just like playing by the playbook. So the video was first posted on the Twitter account Ron DeSantis fancams, which is a horrible sentence. Yeah, the account is a few months old, but its visible posts

only go back to June. They post a lot of videos, all in a very similar style, which leads you to believe that whoever operates the account must be making the videos themselves. One video from the account plays clips of people describing Dasantis as fascist, edited together with clips of DeSantis deploying National Guard and calling for civilian state military force under his control, all sliced together next to footage of Nazis and Mussolini played over an upbeat e d

M track. So it's all like explicitly fascist stuff like like like it's people like rev like it's like a proud, proudly embracing the fascist label. So this style of video is almost identical to the homophobic Pride Months video that

we discussed last week. And considering the recent news that the other video shared by the Dasantas Warham account was secretly made by a campaign staffer, that led myself and others to assume that this son and Red video was most likely made by the same person inside DeSantis's campaign and was operating this DeSantis fancam account as a sock puppet. But you know, I could not prove this myself, really, I it's just it's it's a it's a hard thing

to kind of backtrack this. I this account was pretty clean in terms of like I tried to like, you know, do do pretty pretty basic osin on this account, But it's it was, it was I could not find out much about it. But the campaign staff member that first shared this sun and Red video to his own Twitter account was former National Review writer Nate Hakman. We will we will talk about Nate Hawkman's exploits shortly shortly after

this this hat break. All right, we are back and in a much better position currently than twenty five year old Nate Hawkman.

Funtes himself appeared in the Twitter space, and Hawkman thanked him for radicalizing children by saying, quote, You've gotten a lot of kids based and we respect you for that. And he also said that Fuentes quote is probably a better influence than Ben Shapiro on young men who might otherwise be conservative unquote. So Hawkman has retweeted the Dysantis fancam account at least six times before he shared this on and rata video this past Sunday. But he's not

the only Dysantis linked account to share these videos. The campaign's war room Twitter account and the pro DeSantis Never Back Down superpack have also shared videos from this Rond

Dessanta's fancam Twitter account. By using this fancam account to post videos and then by retweeting on Nate's account, someone was certainly testing the waters to see how close the Dysantas campaign can get to just doing explicit Nazi shit, and considering the New York Times, who Hawkman has written for, by the way, basically confirming that the person who made the Pride Month video was secretly employed by Dysantis and posted the a third party to get some distance from

the official campaign. This led many to suspect that Hawkman was secretly the person behind this fancam account due to the similarities in video styles and his frequent boosting of the account. The sun and Ride video was deleted the same day was posted, and the fancam account has not

posted since then. But then suddenly, just a few hours ago as of time of recording, news dropped that Nick Hachman has been fired from the Dasantis campaign, and the sources at Axios confirmed that he has in fact secretly been making these Fashway videos. So it was it was Hawkman on all along. This is what happens when you hire a twenty five year old Groypewer to work on your to work on your presidential bid.

Desanta's campaign like it's it's all. It's all very like dark but like comical, like it's it's silly, like uh, similar to the Descentus video we talked about in the last Adventures in Fashionate episode. This video it was not meant to like convince older Trump supporters to vote for Dissantis, right, like that, that's not the intention of posting this video.

just like cartoonish to the median voter. What this video is trying to do is signal to self describe fascists that Dysantis is their guy, and trying extremely desperately to create another like meme magic moment like we had in twenty sixteen to recruit a slew of teenage Nazis to try and meme another based president into office, which isn't gonna work this time around, because it's not twenty sixteen anymore.

Like we we've we've already been we've already been inoculated to some degree to this, to this style of of campaign tactics, all of all of the all the people in like like four chan. Isn't the thing that it used to be. It is, it is, It is a shell of its of its former self. But like what we have here on like the DeSantis side is like in terms of hiring people like hackmen. Right, these are like seasoned gropers who grew up and are now like

getting into their twenties. Uh, you know, they're taking jobs at National Review and as and as campaign staffers. But due to their isolated, niche political upbringing, they have deluded themselves into thinking that there's like a mythical far right youth voting block that just like quite simply doesn't exist. So you can spend all day making and retweeting these meme heavy videos with Nazi imagery that really only succeed in turning off the reliable boomer Republican voters. Now, like,

there's a few other you know, future scenarios here. If these if these like up and coming gropers continue to like grow up, polish their act, take more jobs as staffers or on Capitol Hill, and like slowly grow in numbers as they learn to like hide their power level like hea like hide their amount of racism, then we might have a problem. If they like actually like put like intentionality into a long term strategy to like put more of these young freaks into positions in Washington, but

we're simply not there yet. Like in the case of Hawkman, he kind of just like he blew up the spot right like he went like he went too hard, too fast, and then he got fired because they don't want that shit.

Nazi mass shootings like in twenty eighteen. The halo effect around DeSantis's head is certainly cause for concern, but there's a lot of other factors that go into that sort of thing, and that is kind of just more of like an ever present fear that anti fascists have, and you know, people do a lot of work and trying to catch these guys before they actually do mass shootings and try to try to isolate the spread of this style of propaganda for that very reason. So yeah, I mean,

it's it's certainly an interesting trajectory. When I started, like finishing this episode earlier today, I had no idea that Hawkman was going to get fired, had no idea that it was going to be confirmed that Hawkman was the one making making these videos. So that's kind of some breaking news on our side. It's it's been a few days.

If you're if you're listening to this, at the end of the week, I'm going to read out one tweet from this guy, a double Doink, who is a stupid, stupid handle no offense, but he made a made a made a made a pretty good point here I quote. I think DeSantis's real problem isn't just that he's racist, It's that his campaign is racist in the same way a really annoying teenager is your average xenophobic suburbanite dad looks at a son and rad roejack ad like his

son crack his car. A lot of people are arguing that your average fifty six year old Trump supporter isn't as racist as your average DeSantis supporting Zoomer, but that's not the point. Putting weird blood and soil shit in your ads smells it's deeply uncool to the exact people that you want to impress unquote, and I'll add it's it's it's deeply uncol to the exact people you want to impress if you want to win at being president and like are trying to move over Trump voters. It's

just it's just it's just not going to play. So this is this is the state of the de Santa's campaign. Now, they've they've shed almost forty people from their staff. The guy that was supposed to lead their television ads has left. They seemingly just have no idea what the fuck to do They They tried to have this guy do this like backdoor nazi video sock puppet strategy that has also resulted in not very good things for this for the

Desanta's campaign. So I guess we'll we'll see how their how their campaign develops, if they if they continue this sort of like fash wave rhetoric and style. I kind of doubt it now that now that now that Hawkman is out. But yeah, it's been a certainly certainly an interesting interesting few months here, or a few weeks here rather in terms of in fashwave videos resurfacing again for the first time in quite a while. In terms of like mainstream of political use.

But with the right, it is all about power, and when something like this fails, when it actually weakens a campaign, when it weakens the insurgent right, when it makes them less able to exert power. Yeah, I kind of feel like we may have seen the last of this, as a thing that matters. Right, Yeah, I'll.

way of taking a big body blow. Now, I think some people misinterpreted our discussion as downplaying anti fascists and leftists attempt to disrupt dark Mega and fash wave in

general by like proliferating the satirical dark branded memes. So in the episode, we talked about the methodology behind this, this this strategy of like normies seizing onto memes and aesthetics, thus making them cringe and unattractive to the niche groups that they that that once enjoyed using them with Dark brand And there were certainly an attempt from anti fascists and leftist posters to appropriate fash waves aesthetics with the hope that if spread widely enough, it would disarm some

of fashwaves more dangerous and inspirational aspects. But you can't really force mainstream like virality. This kind of thing works best when it appears natural, and for the majority of Dark Branded posters, they were just doing this shit for like shits and giggles like that. That was the primary factor, is that it was funny, and no effort to damage fash waves legibility would really be successful without mainstream spread.

A small group of leftists could mean like eternally, but until it breaks through that bubble, it would have little to no effect. Now, because of how Twitter's algorithm worked during the summer of last year, after a few months, Dark Branded did in fact break through to the liberal mainstream. But I've seen nothing to suggest that the White House staff had any intention of trying to damage fash Wave's legibility by sharing laser I memes in August to twenty twenty two.

That was certainly not accidental, but correct. The part that the liberals played was an accidental part in killing this That's that's the point.

like ruining the funny dark branded memes. But like me, like myself and research colleagues during this time, like that was when we realized that if, like if liberals keep sharing these cringy memes, we might actually have a shot at killing off a fash wave. So yes, this was to not discount the efforts of anti fascists or others who pioneered the spread of dark Brandon and their attempts

to insert it into greater public consciousness. But I think to frame this as like a meticulously planned siop from the very start, is also kind of inaccurate in like a very like spotlighted way like this was. This was a collaborative effort with with the with the liberals not realizing the degree that their collaboration played in this larger game of trying to disarm fascist aesthetics and like meme styles.

So yeah, that's one one clarifying note as we hopefully wrap up this dysantis fashwave sega for the time being, because I definitely did not plan on making this episode when I when I finished recording last week with you.

point out. It's like, oh, we've done all the things that was in the original Communist Manifesto, and it's like, no, no, we never got rid of this, you know. It's it's also one of the things that like you get these sort of like capitalist triumphalist accounts that like, oh, we eliminated child labor. This is like this is proof the system works. No, this, the battle over child labor is a battle that we are in the middle of losing, and we are losing it in worse and worse ways

every day. So okay, so why why are we Why are we dealing with a new resurgence of child labor in this country. There's there's a lot of reasons. One of the big problems is that vast swaths of the US sees child labor is morally good. You know, they see something like oh, this is like you teach your kids. It's like how you yeah.

less socially acceptable child labor. Right, So, like I think most people agree if you're not running the business that like children shouldn't be working in like slaughterhouses or whatever. But you know, there's like lots of things that people are like, oh, no, kid working in a restaurant, like that's completely fine. Like oh, it's like a like a fourteen year old is like doing farm work on a farm, Like that's fine.

everyone else. And this is you know, if you ever listened to argue to someone about the minimum wage, right, one of the big arguments about the minimum wage is that like, oh, well, it's like it's like kids get the minimum wage, so like it's fine. It's like one, it's not like children are not morally worth less and their labor is also not worth less than an adult, like like if if you're gonna exploin them like this.

through things like like opposing minimum wage increases. Used to hold you know, hold down wages sort of indirectly because and this is another reason like capitalists love child labor is that children are you know, like they're physically smaller than adults, they're easier to control, they have less social power, and because you know, because of that, you can pay

them less. And because of you know, because because people just in our society don't fucking like kids, and because of that, it's so it's just socially accessible to just pay them less.

This boy was nine years old. While stories like these produced outrage in many quarters, in the cold producing regions, there is no such concern the view that quote the little devils like it, as one cold boss put it, seemed to be the prevailing sentiments. Child labor wasn't discussed

these regions because it wasn't seen as an issue. So this is like nineteen hundreds of American view, like early nieten hundreds of American view on this right, like people, my people, I mean capitalists, and also people who are incredibly desperate and don't have enough money to get by like love child labor. There's you know, it takes a long time for like an actual series anti child labor campaign to like get started in the US. And of course the exact people who you would expect to oppose

banning child or posed banning child labor. I'm gonna read this from the also from the bar laboristics. The chairman of the National Association of Manufacturers said about a law to abolish child labor. Quote this union, this labor union plot against the advancements and happiness of the American boy, is a ploy. Is also a ploy against individual industrial expansion and prosperity in this country. So this is what their thing is. Their argument is that is that children

don't oppose child labor. This is this is being foisted upon them by outside agitated labor unions. And also if we're not allowed to use child labor, and if we're not allowed to have a nine year old be put in a mine, the entire American economy will collapse and every manufacturer will go broke.

thing is the Laurence Textile Strike. And this strike is probably most famous today for popularizing the slogan we want bread and roses too, which is, you know, like wrung down the halls of labor and socialist histories, like the names of newspapers, songs, poems, and also like being the namesake of a truly dogshit DSA caucus. We're not going to talk about this strike enormously. Here the short, the very very short version of this strike, and this is

a nineteen twelve strike. The short version of it is that there's a law pass in Massachusetts that would have reduced like the number of hours that you could have women and children work from a blistering fifty six hours to a leisurely fifty four hours a week.

like from a bunch of different places. The part of it that's not talked about as much is that another huge person of the workers we're is fucking.

on the strike. It's more and more violence, and as this goes on, the workers at like the adult workers at this plant decide, Okay, we're gonna like send the children who are both like both the child workers and also like just people's kids to New York to keep them safe and also to make a political point. But like, hey, look they're they're running our children out of town, and this goes great. The first way is just go great

for the children. Like a bunch of people in New York show up are like yay, hey, we'll take care of these kids. Like and this makes like the officials in Lawrence be like, you have to stop this. It looks really bad for us. And so they they like assembled outside of the next train that was trying to leave and tried to stop them. Oh my god, so she shouldn't be really brististics Again, When the next group of children prepared to depart the train station, they were

met by police and soldiers. The police refused to let them board the trains and launched an attack on the group. A seven year old was given a black eye when she was picked up and thrown into a patty wagon by police. Another witness. Another witness testified to children being thrown around like rags.

doesn't do anything throwing around a bunch of children like rags. Finally, it turned out was the thing that was bad enough that it like started a congressional investigation.

have to? Okay? Unfortunately, because it's gonna get so much worse when Tyler's episode is over. So the product of this is that there starts to be like a really mainstream push against child labor, which is, you know, a thing you would have thought would have started earlier, because again, we're on like century two of child labor in the US by this point, right like in the in an entity called the United States. But you know, apparently it takes this to actually make people go, wait, maybe this

is bad. And the product of this is you get this thing called the Kenning Owen Child Labor Act nineteen sixteen. Now, as we sort of talked about earlier, right, the weakness of this law is that it, you know, it allows kids to be used as laborers, like inside of the family unit. So like if you're on a family and

this is a very very broad category. Right, so it's you know, you can you can force your child to work as long as like you're their parents, right, you're the one making the money off of them, and not like a capitalist. But even this, even this is considered too strong of a law. And in nineteen eighteen, the Supreme Court rules and it's unconstitutional to ban child labor. Wait what Yeah, they do it the uiple times, multiple times. And we really cannot emphasize this enough on this show.

The Supreme Court is and has always been just one of history's greatest monsters.

of child labor in the country. And here's the thing, like even now, even before all the horror show stuff that we're about to get to that's happening right now, like not kids, like we never actually dealt with child labor through like the law. Like we just basically outsourced, you know, Okay, we we had to find someone whose labor is cheaper than like an American child, and we did. It's either like mechanization other immigrants who like don't have

legal citizenship status, or just outsourcing. And then you know, our kids still fucking do work, you know, like are like they're like it's very common for ten and twelve year olds to work. It's just that it's usually like babysitting or like bowing lawns. And we've we've decided that like, no, this is actually fine, Like it is actually fine to fucking put twelve year olds in a labor market.

able to successfully decrease the severity of it. And you know, in the last twenty years, there'd been a decline in what economists and I really cannot emphasize enough this is the actual phrase they use, is child participation in the labor markets.

got killed by machinery, had a conveyor belt. Sixteen year old Will Hampton died working at a landfill, and sixteen year old Michael Schulz died working for a logging company. There have been other child labor deaths recently. Those are

just sort of the most recent ones. And I want to get in to this shit that's been happening because in the last really in the last been under like eight years, things have gotten you know, like the til labor situation in the US was never good, and we'll talk about that later, but like things have gotten so much worse. There's been almost a factor of four increase in twenty fifteen in kids working illegally and hazardous jobs. It's actually probably well, it's unclear to me whether the

numbers are actually worse than that. I don't know, because I think almost all of this these districts are being undercounted like dramatically because those numbers are just like violations that are caught and go into that a bit later.

But meanwhile, like right now, Arkansas, Iowa, New Hampshire, New Jersey, and Vermont have already passed laws in the last two years that weakened restrictions on child labor, and bills are appearing like across the country to do fucking more of the same stuff, like they want to allow fourteen year olds to serve alcohol in bars. It's you know, it is. It is truly horrific, and it's being driven by restaurant business associations across the country who want to, you know,

use child labor. And that's bad. The fact that there's more stuff that's that you know, is on the horizon is not good. But for an enormous number of people, regardless of what the law says, the situation is absolutely intolerable. Here's from the New York Times. In many parts of the country, middle and high school teachers in English language larder programs say it is now common for nearly all of their students to rush off to law long shift

after their classes end. They should not be working twelve hour days, but it's happening here, said Valeria Lindsay, an arts language arts teacher at Homestead Middle School near Miami. For the past three years, almost every eighth grader in her English learner program, about one hundred students, was also carrying an adult workload. So there's been a massive surge since twenty twenty one in unaccompanied minors entering the US.

And this has been driven by a lot of sort of you know, it's been driven by pandemic driven poverty, a massive obseration of violence in a bunch of countries in Central America, a lot of which has to do with a like you know, the the US back to q Andel, Southador about a decade ago. You know, there's a lot of stuff going on. It's all very bad,

and it's been pushing people here. But you know, like the situation for immigrants getting into the US is never good, but Biden specifically has managed to make it worse because Biden's sort of like Biden's immigration policy has been resting on getting kids out of shelters as fast as humanly possible and just like throwing them at literally anyone who claims to be a sponsor, right, And you know, this has gone about as well as you would expect it

would when someone like starts to you know. One of the I think was the New York Times was talking about this woman who's working. You quit working in a health human services like office because they had a quota of getting rid of twenty percent of their kids a week and if they didn't do it, they would get dated. Yeah, they had a quota for we need to get twenty percent of the kids out of the shelter every week.

to investigate these cases that she largely stopped reporting them. Instead, she settled for explaining to the children that they were entitled to lunch breaks in overtime.

floors of slaughter the kill floors of slaughterhouses. We are talking about like, we are talking about fourteen year olds who are like literally making food that like you are eating. Yeah, and we're still right, So this is this is happening in a large part because there's been a sort of like a giant surgeon on a company of miners. Well, it turns out a lot of those miners are on a company because the Biden administration wouldn't let their fucking

parents into the country. And this is where this is where we need to get into the fucking like the whole sort of like sex trafficking panic, right because you know, one of the things that that this panic, specifically about sex trafficking, has covered up is that most human trafficking is not sex trafficking. It's almost all labor trafficking. Almost also too strong a word, but it's mostly by volume.

Most of it is is labor trafficking, which nobody gives a single shit about because you know, there's no you can't you can't have a moral panic around like you can't have a moral panic around labor trafficking like people who aren't white. And simultaneously, all the business groups who would normally fund these panics like love this shit because you know, all all of these capitals ghouls drinking a thousand dollars bottles of wine, un they're thirty million dollar yachts.

All of that shit is paid for by child labor, so of course they don't give a shit about it. In fact, they love it. And the you know, the product of this is you have a bunch of fucking twelve year olds who are effectively in debt bondage, working twelve hours a fucking day in a slaughterhouse or a

paper bill. I'm gonna read another thing for the New York Times, which is, I don't know, so many of these things are so depressing, but like I think this is the most depressing thing I've read in this entire I don't know, like in ages, I didn't get how expensive everything was, says thirteen year old Jose Vasquez, who works twelve hour shifts, six days a week at a commercial egg farm in Michigan and lives with his teenage sister. I'd like to go to school, but then how would

I pay rent? Thirteen thirteen? You know? And of course one of you know, like the everything about this, right is these these are people dealing with the fucking American housing market. Right. The American housing market is intolerable to adults who work full time, who work like full time jobs or multiple part time jobs. Right, this is a thirteen year old. How the fuck is a thirteen year old? It's supposed to be paying rent?

drives out the price of housing. Because all of these people are competing for the same like fucking one Vedroe apartment for sixteen time dollars a months, right, And so every everything just sort of spirals in on each other and until you get you get a fucking thirteen year old working, working, fucking this is this is nine ninety six. This is the fucking like thing I talked about in China is at nine am, nine pm, six days a week at a fucking egg farm in Michigan. In you know,

in any just world, people would die for this. In this world, and you know, people have fucking died for this. It's a bunch of children who are dying on their fucking jobs in this world though. The people, you know,

the people who die for this are children. And the Biden administration again is actively aiding fucking human traffickers by kicking all these kids out to their families, like they're kicking all these people out to just like fucking anyone as soon as humanly possible, and not allowing these people's families into the country, and then doing literally nothing at all to ensure that like the people who are fleeing into this country like have a place to live, or

like any kind of reasonable job or any way to support themselves, you know, and we could, we could fucking like there are there are individual people in the US who benefit from this child labor who you could fucking like throw into a box tomorrow, take all of their money, and you could fund this entire program or individual people. Right, No one will fucking do it. They will let these kids. They will let every single one of these kids die before a single billionaire has to fucking spend a single

cent taking care of these kids. Meanwhile, the actual child laws that exists in this uh uh you know that that exists in the US are completely useless because regulatory agencies are taking one of two approaches. Either they do nothing, or they spend some time investigating so they can get a cut of the child labor money by issuing a fine to the company.

And the product of these raids is you put is they put the families of the kids who are doing the child labor in prison or deport them, and then they do nothing about the actual you know, so a lot of what's happening is happening to contractors, right, so they'll find the contractor the parent company. Nothing will fucking happen. And the parents of these kids, who also like cannot fucking survive and in a lot of cases are doing this because literally they do not have enough money to

pay rent or buy food for their kids. Those people are getting fucking sent to prison. Are the only people, by the way, again, the only even even though all of these companies are systematically hiring children, they are getting children killed, the only people going to prison are the families of the fucking kids.

to split cow carcasses. According to court records, some students, and again when they say students, they're not talking about college students. They're talking about middle and high school students,

suffered chemical burns. And we're so sleep deprived after working their night shift, they dozed off in classes, according to a local prosecutor in court records when asked about the children, like the actual kids who are supposed to be you know, the ones being saved by these by the fucking Department of Labor raids. The Department of Labor pulled a it's not my departments, and we're like, yeah, fuck it, we don't know what happen to these kids. Hope they're okay,

have fun. And there's one more part of this Washington Post article that I want to read just to sort of like, I don't know. I think the big problem with all of this coverage is that it's treating this problem as if it's new. Yeah, this is sort of like a unique product of like, oh, it's a tight labor market in the pandemic. It's like, no, no, it's not.

Here's what the Washington Post. We have never in my memory found the types of violations that are being found on hazardous occupations that David wheel a professor of social policy and management at Brand's University who was a top

labor official in the Obama administration, it's outrageous. Now, this is bullshit, dreaming Wheels Obama administration, there was absolutely a shit ton of migrant workers and my specifically migrant children workers doing a bunch of incredibly dangerous and hazardous work. It's just that they were mostly in agriculture. I mean some of them were also in slaughterhouses, right, Like, some of the shit was already happening as nobody paid attention

to it, and it's gotten worse. But again, they were also just a shit ton of kids fucking like picking tomatoes in like one hundred and ten degrees in California. That was always happening. It was always fucking happening. Obama specifically made it worse because one of again, one of the things about using immigrant child labor is that you like, if if you commit a labor violation against one of these, against against against again someone someone who is undocumented in

a child, what the fuck are they gonna do about it? Right? They can't go to the government. They go to the government, they get deported.

Things you can notice about these stories is that if you if you look at the locations right, most of the places with these not all, but a lot of the places where these are happening are very very anti immigrants southern border states in the Southern states and border states.

And the reason or or or places or some places in the Midwest like Kansas or Nebraska, and a lot of the reason why this stuff happens here, right is you know, if you're if if you're like, uh, if you're a politician, right, and you know and your your allies are local business owners, you get you get you get to play this sort of like you get you get to play both sides of the of the fucking spectrum. Right.

On the one hand, you get to you get to keep hiring a bunch of mon documented immigrants, and on the other hand, you whip up this like enormous social hystoria about them so that all these people you know, can can be more effectively disciplined and crushed. Right, And everyone fucking knows how this game works, right, like all the all the people with any real power like actually

understand this. It's it's why, it's why, Like the Justice Department or like you know, all of all the immigration agencies never go after the companies you hire people, They only ever go after the actual workers themselves.

you know what I mean. I think anyone with a brain can figure that out, because this kind of intricate system doesn't just like pop up in a year or two out of nowhere. It's been building it on itself. I don't know.

Protect the Kids was always racialized, Like they don't give a shit about the kids dying and meatpacking plants because they aren't white, right, They're immigrant kids who these freaks want to fucking kill anyways, And if those kids die in the job, nobody gives a shit, right, So.

No one's helping me. This is the only option I have, and it just becomes this like snaky in its own tail bullshit where it's just I don't know, there's no there's no good out for them because no one's fucking helping them and their family's not there and they need to fucking survive. So it's this thing where it's like they're consenting to it in a in a sick way, like not because they not, because they're consenting to it because they want to because they need to to survive.

And the people that are in power know that and take advantage of it. And I don't know, the lack of empathy across the board is just inhumane and disgusting and I hate that.

And you know it's at some at some point they're like, we will hit a point where it's fucking too much, it will cease to be You're right, and our responsibility is to get everyone to that point.