Welcome to the Crumbles

land and hundreds of thousands of heads of cattle. So you were trying to decide between the spam and the canned chicken. When you heard the commotion start a few wiles down from your position, you knew immediately that it had to be about coffee. In the last month, you've seen two fist fights and a dozen screaming matches start by the corner of the store that had once held dozens of friendly, colorful bags of different coffee brands. The last time it had looked that way was a long

time ago. Before the great plantations of Central America had succumbed to blight, fire and drought, there was still coffee capitalism always found a way, but it was harsher and more bitter than it had been before, and it was also much more expensive. Each customer was limited to one half pound per week when it was in stock. You've gotten lucky today and bought a bag, But evidently another

customer had been less fortunate. He seemed to be screaming at a staff member, berating her for the problems caused by a supply chain that had been breaking for the last decade. You couldn't back it up with data, but you feel like this sort of thing happens more and more often every year, not just the supply chain disruptions, but the outbursts of violence and rage. You don't even

stop to watch the videos on social media anymore. If customers screaming and starting fights over the ground, beef that wasn't there for their Fourth of July barbecue or whatever. You can't tell me there's no coffee. I've seen a dozen assholes with coffee in their carts. If they have a right to it, I have a right do it. You turn away from your cart and sneak a glance

down the other aisle in spite of yourself. The angry man is heavy set around six feet tall and wearing a T shirt with a faded, thin blue line flag on its back. He's yelling at a reedy young man wearing the uniform of a grocery store clerk. This poor kid had probably been stalking apple sauce a few minutes earlier. Now he was the target of this man's entitled rage. I know you keep more in the back. I don't

give a shit about your excuses. Get it. As the young clerk tries to explain again that there's no coffee left in the store, a security guard rounds the corner at the other end of the aisle. He yells hey and puts a hand on the taser at his belt. Sir, you need to leave. I'm not leaving without my coffee. You realize with a start that a small crowd has

started to form behind you. You feel sudden anxiety at the fact that you've left your cart undefended, and pull away from the scene to put your hands on it. You were lucky enough to get coffee and the last carton of eggs, and a lot of customers in the store would happily steal either. Mercifully, your card has survived the altercation unmolested, You wheel it away from the ongoing confrontation towards the self checkout. Maybe you can avoid the

worst of the line that way. The yelling stops, and as you wheel your cart up to the checkout counter, you see the angry man's storm out of the grocery store, cursing under his breath. The security guard and the clerk follow a few feet back and stop when he exits the building. They both sigh with relief, and for a few minutes, you lose yourself in the task of running

your products through the self checkout. As you prepare to pay, you happen to look up just in time to see the angry man re enter the store through the front door. You see the gun in his hand an instant before he raises it up just a few feet from the clerk's face and fires. On June, Victor Lee Tucker Jr. Thirty walked into the Big Bear Supermarket into Kalb County, Georgia. A story employee, forty one year old Lakita Willis, noticed he was not wearing a face mask and violation of

the store's policies. Lookita informed Victor that he would have to wear a mask to continue shopping. Victor Tucker left the store in a huff and returned with a gun, which he used to murder Lakita Willis and wound the store security guard, an off duty sheriff's deputy. Lakida and that security guard are not the only victims of this sort of violence. At a Flint, Michigan, dollar store, a forty three year old father of eight and employee was

shot dead over a mask. The city of Stillwater, Oklahoma, was forced to reverse a mask ordinance when it led to a surge of violence against service industry employees. We could go on, but we won't. This is it could happen here a podcast about collapse dedicated to chronicling where we all of us are headed in the very near

future if things continue on their present course. The first season of this show focused on the possibility of a second to American Civil War, and compared to that, perhaps a shooting in a grocery store over coffee seems low stakes. When Hollywood turns its eyes towards the subject of collapse, they nearly always focus on the exciting parts. Buildings tumbling down, mass violence in the streets, bandits and gunfights, and explosions, and all the stuff that looks rad on a silver screen.

But that's not how collapse looks to most of the people who are forced to endure it. Civilizations die by paper cuts more often than by bullets. Everyone listening has and the last year in Change watched the global society we live in take a solid body blow in the form of COVID nineteen. Many of the terrible things we experienced that year. The supply line crunches, the culture war over masks, the anti lockdown protests, the explosion of conspiracism

among millions of people stuck at home online. These things are easy to attribute to the freak coming of a plague. But COVID was not a speed bump. It was the harbinger of a new era. It revealed how fra duel much of the infrastructure of modern life truly was. I wrote this episode while the city of Portland, Oregon, braced itself for an unprecedented heat wave, with temperatures nearing a hundred and twenty degrees. Last year's fire season saw Portland

blanketed and a cloud of rancid yellow smog. More than half a million people living in Oregon had to flee their homes over ten percent of the state's population. Stores ran out of respirators, fire axes, and emergency supplies. The American West's heat wave is a product of the same thing that may soon strip the coffee from your store shelves, climate change. In April of one, US coffee stockpiles hit a six year low, even with Brazil's record twenty twenty crop.

That country is now experiencing its most severe drought in decades, which will sink production further. The global coffee deficit, the amount of the Earth's coffee production falls below demand, is expected to hit ten point seven million bags this year. The previous project was a short fall of eight million. In the vignette that opened this episode, I mentioned a meat shortage caused in part by cyber attacks on meat

processing plants that actually happened. On May thirty first one, JBS, the world's largest meat supplier, was hacked, shutting down much of their operations on Australia, Canada, and the United States from a rite up. In the Wall Street Journal quote the culprit a ransomware attack didn't just hit its target, it royaled the U s food industry from hog farms in Iowa to small town processing plants in New York restaurants.

The hacks set off a domino effect that drove up wholesale meat prizes, backed up animals in barns, and forced food distributors to hurriedly search for new supplies. The attack was the latest clash between cyber criminals and companies integral to the functioning of the U. S economy. It was another disruption to the U. S food industry after the COVID nineteen pandemic last year forced weeks of plants shutdowns, and this year an economic rebound has stretched suppliers ability

to meet demand. Now I read that whole quote because it illustrates the way all these problems build upon themselves. Our supply chains are what mathematicians call a chaotic system. If your knowledge of chaos theory comes primarily from Dr E and Malcolm, the gist of it is this certain complex systems can be impacted in huge, unexpected ways by seemingly minor changes because so many things are interacting at once that a change in one can set off a

chain of other changes. The most common framing of this observation is the phrase a butterfly flapping its wings in China, can cause a hurricane in New York, and variations of the same. The world we live in and the infrastructure that makes our daily lives possible, is such a system. We've all seen ample evidence of that over the last year.

It really hit home from me earlier in twenty one when a friend of mine who works as an ear nurse at a local hospital sent a message to a signal chat for my local friend group and warned, the hospital is full. Don't get hurt. Initially, we all assumed coronavirus was the cause, but no, he explained very few of the cases that had filled his r and multiple

overflow rooms had anything to do with a viral infection. Instead, the cause was a mix of things, people celebrating in dumb ways as the state reopened, overdoses and car accidents, et cetera. In normal times, these might not have drained the system, but a huge number of doctors and nurses quit during the worst of the plague. My friend calls the period wherein now where aspects of modern society that once seemed immutably solid start to fall apart all at

once as the crumbles. I find this a much more useful framework for discussing the future than the dreams of collapse shared by apocalypse obsessives. One April second study showed that at least one in five healthcare workers have considered quitting as result of the virus. More than thirty six hundred u S healthcare workers died in COVID's first year. These strains hit the medical system in the midst of

an ongoing drought and healthcare workers. By five the u S is likely to face a shortage of more than four hundred thousand home health aids, twenty nine thousand, four hundred nurse practitioners, and between fifty four thousand, one hundred and one hundred and thirty nine thousand physicians. We went into the pandemic with a shortage of doctors and nurses.

At least some of the six hundred thousand American deaths from the virus were certainly due to a lack of qualified medical professionals, and now COVID has further exacerbated that shortage, ensuring that the next great strain on our health care system it's even harder, which will drain away more professionals, which will make the next pandemic or natural disaster even more devastating. This is the way the crumbles work. Problems

feed into calamities and turn into catastrophes. A healthy society has the wherewithal to diagnose its problems and patch the holes in its systems when they appear. We do not live in a healthy society. The problems that will confront us over the next fifty years rising sea levels, out of control wildfires, crop failures, greater waves of ref you geez are no less imposing than the COVID nineteen pandemic.

The virus could have been halted by something as simple as getting everyone to wear masks and avoid crowded indoor spaces for a few weeks. The United States could not handle that. In April, I watched a crowd of anti lockdown protesters surround a group of doctors and nurses in the Oregon state capital Salem. The healthcare professionals carried signs that said please, we just don't want you to get sick. Protesters spat at them and screamed diaper mouth, mocking the

face masks they wore. Several of these protesters carried rifles. As you probably guessed by now, this is not a particularly optimistic podcast, but It's also not my intention to infect you with a sense of doom. The worst problems we face all have solutions, or at least strategies for adaptation and harm reduction. To my mind, our most pressing problems fall into three broad categories. One the environmental consequences

of modern civilization. This is going to be by far the most unibomery point I make to day, but it cannot be avoided. As I type this, fires are burning throughout Oregon, even in the famously wet northern reaches of the state. Towns in northern California with huge amounts of rainfall thirty eight inches in some cases are so low on water that citizens have been restricted to fifty five

gallons per day. Prior to twenty twenty one, Portland's record high temperature was a hundred and seven degrees this June, before the hottest part of the year. It beat that record for three days straight. The year before twenty twenty, Australia suffered a mega fire, the largest in its history, which burnt more than twenty three hundred square miles. All these fires are just preludes. The world is only getting

hotter from here on out. As I write this, the United Nations Climate Science Advisers issued a draft report warning that the worst projected impacts of climate change are hitting much faster than previously expe did. We will probably reach one point five degrees celsius of warming by twenty twenty six. Now, for years, staying under one and a half degrees celsius

has been the goal. The target amount of warming. Mainstream climate scientists and climate conscious politicians wanted to limit us too. If we were to stop all other forms of emissions right now, agriculture alone would carry us over the one point five degree celsius line in just a handful of years. Most institutional messaging posits one point five degrees of warming

as the acceptable, even relatively pleasant option. A UN Climate Change tweet from earlier this year made that point in image form, showing depictions of the Earth's atmosphere in green, yellow, and red one point five degrees celsius, two degrees celsius, and three degrees celsius plus with the text. The difference between one point five two degrees and three to four degrees average global warming can sound marginal. In fact, they

represent vastly different scenarios for the future of humanity. It is true that two or three degrees of warming would create a radically different world than less than one and a half. But the data and our lived experience has made it increasingly clear that one point five degrees, which we will hit period in the near future, is a calamity of almost incomprehensible dimensions. The phenomenon we're all staring

down the barrel is called climate tipping. One example of this would be unprecedented heat waves causing mass wildfires, which release more carbon into the atmosphere, which speeds up warming, which accelerates the whole cycle onward and upward. Scientists in Europe recently found that climate tipping is likely to cause sudden shifts in the Gulf Stream, which will cause sudden and massive temperature changes in normally tempered zones like western Europe.

The last devastating heat wave to hit France and twenty nineteen killed at least fifteen dred people. This particular study was the result of scientists from eighteen universities working in tandem. Their spokesman, doctor Michael Gill, told fizz dot org quote these results indicate that climate tipping is an imminent risk in the Earth system. Even the safe operating space of one point five or two degrees above present generally assumed by the I p c C might not be all

that's safe. According to the precautionary principle, we must consider abrupt and irreversible changes to the climate system as a real risk, at least until we understand these phenomena better. The central problem is that our previous models were far too optimistic, largely in their assumptions about how gradual the

warming caused by carbon release would be. Another recent study, published in Science Advances, analyzed twenty years of data to study the transfer of carbon dioxide between land plants in the atmosphere. Its findings suggest that if present trends continue, forests in twenty forty will absorb only half as much carbon dioxide as they do now. So when we hit one and a half degrees celsius, which we will permafrost will start to thaw, releasing methane, which will warm the planet.

Forests will hold less carbon, more fires will burn, an estimated hundred and fifty million people will die due to pollution. These factors all make it likelier that we will hit two degrees celsius of warming or even higher, at which point we will experience catastrophic permafrost thawing alongside another two hundred and thirty billion tons of carbon burping out of the soil. The effects of this will be catastrophic for all of us, but they will be particularly disastrous for

the traditional victims of capitalism Africans. I want to quote from an article in The Independent by Ugandan writer Vanessa Naicaate quote. This year, abnormally warm temperatures and heavy rains have led to swarms of locusts destroying hundreds of thousands of hectares of crops in East Africa. Twelve million people in Ethiopia, Kenya and Somalia are in dire need of food. Lake Chad has runk to a tenth of its original size over the last fifty years. Half of Nigeria has

no access to water. It is hard to be encouraged by stories of meatless burgers or moonshot technologies when communities around you are battling an endless and worsening cycle of drought, famine, cyclones, floods and destruction. This is my world at one point to degrees celsius of warming. This is not progress. Vague distant targets for twenty thirty or twenty fifty will not keep the world well below two degrees celsius of warming,

as the Paris Agreement promised. I can tell you a two degrees celsius hotter world is a death sentence for countries like mine. Now, when you lay it all out like that, it can be pretty overwhelming. For perspective's sake, it is important to note that nearly all of the carbon that's causing these problems was released into the atmosphere within the span of a human lifetime. It is, in short,

the result of industrial society and its consequences. Right now, there is more carbon in the atmosphere than at any point in the last eight hundred thousand years, and perhaps as far back as fifteen million years. But all this carbon started flowing into the atmosphere just three hundred years ago in the seventeen hundreds, when England started burning coal

and kicked off a global drive to industrialization. The vast majority of the carbon in our atmosphere was pumped out even more recently than that, as David Wallace Wells writes in his book The Uninhabitable Earth quote, the majority of the burning has come since the premiere of Seinfeld. Since the end of World War Two, the figure is above

eighty five percent. The story of the industrial world's Kama Kaze mission is the story of a single lifetime the planet brought from seeming stability to the brink of catastrophe in the years between a baptism or bar mitzvah and a funeral. That fact has a tendency to inspire false hope and some if the real problem only started a lifetime ago, perhaps we can solve it in the space of a lifetime. But reality does not work that way,

my friends. Once the carbon is out there, released from trees burning in millions of acres of wildfires, from the exhaust pipes of hundreds of millions of cars, or from the smoke stacks of factories, it is there to stay. If we transitioned entirely to nuclear power tomorrow, that carbon

would still be warming us for decades. And as the globe warms up, it dries out the soil, which in turn heats the world further, which pushes more people to install a c which increases emissions, which dries out the soil, which leads to wildfires, which releases more carbon, and on and on and on and on it goes. And this brings me to pressing problem number two, the authoritarian renaissance. In two thousand eleven, the Syrian Civil War started, sending

millions of Syrian refugees fleeing into Europe. In two thousand and fourteen and fifteen, nearly two million people filed for asylum in the EU. Contrary to popular opinion, experts are heavily divided on whether or not climate change played a major role in sparking the conflict, but the refugee crisis did play a major role in sparking something else, the rise of Europe's authoritarian right wing. I'm going to quote now from a Leibnitz Institute for Economic Research report by

Andreas Steinmeyer. Quote. In the Upper Austrian state elections in two thousand fifteen, the far right Freedom Party of Austria doubled its vote share from two thousand nine and obtained over thirty percent of the vote with a fierce anti asylum campaign. Polls indicate that support for the Freedom Party remained roughly at the level of two thousand nine state elections until late two thousand fourteen, but subsequently increased drastically.

In two thousand fifteen, When refugee numbers started to grow, the salience of the issue in the media, measured as the number of newspaper articles covering the refugee situation, increased almost in proportion to the number of asylum applications. Upper Austria was no exception in Europe. The Sweden Democrats, for instance, obtained five point seven percent of votes in the two

thousand ten parliamentary elections in Sweden. After that, support increased parallel to the rising number of refugees, which increased earlier in Sweden than in other European countries. In parliamentary elections in two thousand fourteen, the Sweden Democrats obtained twelve point nine percent of the vault and pulled around twenty percent in late two thousand fifteen at the peak of the refugee inflow into Sweden. The alternative for Germany a f D,

was not founded until two thousand thirteen. Poles show was sharp increase in support of up to fifteen percent along with growing refugee numbers. Now During the two thousand and sixteen election Canada, Donald Trump in the United States constantly harped on the danger of refugees from Syria, but also from places in Latin America like Guatemala, whose economies had

been devastated by climate change. These climate refugees and the false perception that they were causing crime and of violence, fed into a rising American fascist movement that is still with us today. Authoritarians have always used fear of the other, and specifically fear of foreign asylum seekers, to stoke division. That part of their job is only going to get easier. The UN projects that by twenty fifty an additional two

hundred million people will be climate refugees. This was the entire population of planet Earth during the high of the Roman Empire, clawing desperately at the iron gates of any country better off than where they've left. Climate change doesn't just provide opportunities for authoritarian politicians. It tends to make society itself more authoritarian by increasing military conflicts and domestic crime.

In two thousand and fourteen, the U. S Department of Defense authored an annual Defense Review that noted, quote the nature in pace have observed climate changes and an emerging scientific consensus on their projected consequences pose severe risks for our national security. The report goes on to warn about conflicts over resources, particularly water in places like Lake Mead, Nevada and the Colorado River system, where conflicts over scarce

water could spiral into violence. As I write this, a group of militiamen under the banner of Aim and Bundy have set up shop by the Klamath River in central Oregon, claiming to represent the interests of farmers being denied their normal allotment of water due to severe drought conditions. Bundy at All have threatened to break onto federal land are

armed and released the water. As that Department of Defense reports so aptly noted, these effects are threat multipliers that will aggravate stressors abroad, such as poverty, environmental degradation, political instability, and social tensions, conditions that can enable terrorist activity and other forms of violence. We've already seen how both main parties in the United States react to violence and the perception of violence. President Trump responded to a popular uprising

against police brutality with a wave of police brutality. He was almost universally supported in his re election bid by police unions. On January six, at least thirty one police officers took part in the Capital insurrection aimed at keeping Trump and power Despite this fact, President Biden suggested in June that communities should spend much of the three hundred and fifty billion dollars in COVID nineteen aid dispensed in

May to hire more police officers. A few days earlier, his administration released its plan for dealing with domestic terrorism, inspired by the violence of the Capital Riot. This included an additional hundred million in funding for local law enforcement. All this is to say that the state only has one solution to deal with the problems we will increasingly face, and that solution is to put more men with guns

in our communities. Platoons of goons armed with grenade launchers and armored vehicles may in fact provide some protection to the people at the very top of our society, but they will not protect you. That's not just my own personal bias speaking. And there were more than eight hundred thousand sworn law enforcement officers serving nationwide, the highest number ever. That same year, homicides raised nearly among the nation's ten

largest police departments. The average clearance rate in those departments, however, dropped by seven percent to about This means a few things. Murders rose in the United States, with more cops than ever before. Those cops solved fewer of the murders committed than they had in prior years. President Biden's one budget included twenty two billion dollars to fight global climate change. His two budget calls for thirty six billion dollars in funding.

That is a substantial rate of increase, but even thirty six billion dollars is only about one sixth of what the United States spends on policing and incarcerating its citizens each year. The cost to stop global warming at less than two degrees celsius is a contentious issue, but one estimate places it at as much as fifty trillion dollars.

Whether you buy that estimate or not, by any sober analysis, thirty six billion is a drop in the bucket compared to what will be necessary to avoid the worst case scenario. And the worst case scenario is coming. If we want to have any chance at avoiding it, we're going to have to organize. And that brings me to pressing problem number three, weaponized unreality. Starting in two thousand sixteen, Russian

disinformation became a major media buzzword. There were stories about that nation's Internet Research Agency, its armies of botanuts and trolls aimed as stoking division and pushing certain narratives into the American consciousness. Russia absolutely has an advanced disinformation operation, but the media made a mistake focusing on them alone.

The reality of the situation is that nations, corporations, political parties, extremist movements, and every other organization with its shipped together does the same thing the Russians do. The name of the game is to take lies, propaganda, incendiary claims in rage bait and use them to stoke the ire of millions of people. I can't claim credit for creating the term weaponized unreality. That one goes to my friend Carl, but the term does a brilliant job of describing the problem.

If the coronavirus has taught us one thing, it's that the right lies can be deadlier than a thousand or six hundred thousand guns when properly deployed. Weaponized on reality is part of why our present problems with climate change have gotten so very dire. Starting in the nineteen seventies, Exxonmobile and later a host of other oil and gas companies, borrowed a public relations strategy initially invented to serve the

needs of big tobacco. The Union of Concerned Scientists describes the strategy as manufactured uncertainty by raising doubts about even the most indisputable scientific evidence. Adopted a strategy of information laundering by using seemingly independent front organizations to publicly further

its desired message and therefore confuse the public. Promoted scientific spokespeople who misrepresent peer reviewed scientific findings or cherry pick facts, attempted to shift the focus away from meaningful action on global warming with misleading charges about the need for sound science. That all sounds pretty bleakly familiar to us now after a year of dueling coronavirus conspiracy theories matas de sized que and on bullshit and stop the steel style election disinfo.

Weaponized un reality is often used by politicians and grifters people like Alex Jones or Andy No, to make quick profits or energize their base during an election. Such individuals seldom consider or fully anticipate the long term impact of building out an alternate counter factual reality. Think of former President Trump begging his supporters to get vaccinated and trying to take credit for the creation of a vaccine that forty one percent of his followers think is some sort

of Chinese Bill gatesy and genocide conspiracy. Or think of Mike Pence, whose career is built on decades of right wing lies about abortion, climate change, terrorism in the economy. Now think of Mike huddled in fear behind his bodyguards as a mob of fanatics burst through the halls of power with murder on their minds. The problem with weaponized unreality is that to really make it work, you have to craft an entire alternate reality for the true believers, one with its own meat ea in its own self

reinforcing cycle of disinformation. This is extremely profitable and creates a durable base of support for the precise reason it is tremendously dangerous. Two entirely separate realities cannot coexist in the same political system. The unreality that the right wing has spent decades building is centered around the contention that its enemies, Democrats and the left, are literal servants of Satan, hell bent on building a system that will exterminate real

Americans and moss. At present, twenty three percent of Republicans believe Satanic pedophiles control the US government, the media, and the financial sector. Roughly fifteen to twenty percent of Americans nationwide share the same belief. Nearly thirty percent of Republicans believe that patriots, which their unreality has defined as white conservatives, may need to resort to violence in order to restore

their version of American values. The good news is that a clear majority of Americans do not abide by those views, but they don't need two. In nineteen thirty two, the National Socialist German Workers Party had their best performance in a legitimate election and got just thirty seven point three percent of the vote. A minority party can manage tremendous bloodshed if they are sufficiently unified, their opponents are sufficiently disorganized,

and the political system is biased in their favor. All of those things were true of the Nazis in the nineteen thirties, and all of those things are more or less true of our situation now. The next three years in change will bring continued climate related collapse. This added strain will reveal more and more of the holes in

our infrastructure. As I type this, a massive condo complex in Florida has just collapsed into a sinkhole, killing dozens, and the state of Oregon has issued a warning that a chlorine shortage threatens the state's ability to properly sanitize drinking water. A new study has revealed that despite six months of counter disinformation efforts, one third of Americans still believe the election was stolen by the Democrats, the same

percentage you believed that in No Wimber. On June one, American news network host Pearson Sharp got in front of his viewers and said this about the election he believed had been stolen. How many people were involved in these efforts to undermine the election? Hundreds, thousands, tens of thousands. How many people does it take to carry out a

coup against the presidency? And when all the dust settles from the audit Arizona and the potential audits in Georgia, Michigan, Pennsylvania, Nevada, and Wisconsin, what happens to all these people who were responsible for overthrowing the election? What are the consequences for traitors who meddled with our sacred democratic process and tried to steal power by taking away the voices of the American people? What happens to them in their sundry internet?

Heidi holes Q and UN believes took this broadcast as hard evidence that their long awaited storm was coming and the mass execution of democratic officials and journalists was about to begin. I don't think I have to spend much time here saying how dangerous this is. What I do want to do is point out that Pearson Sharp was also a major personality on Sputnik, a Russian propaganda news outlet. I don't bring this up to further any sort of Russia Gate fervor, because I don't think that's one of

our main problems. But the kind of content Pierson made for Sputnik is important. His job was to repeatedly slander the White Helmets, an organization of Syrian volunteers who helped provide medical aid and the immediate aftermath of Syrian regime bombings. A complex and sophisticated propaganda campaign has turned them into

boogieman for a sizeable chunk of the international left. There are conspiracy theories that the White Helmets actually staged and faked all of the chemical weapons attacks and bombings, but shar Al Assad's air force did against civilian targets. On June eleventh, two thousand eighteen, Pearson took a state sponsor trip into Syria, escorted by the soldiers of a dictator

who has killed half a million of his citizens. He posted this, everyone, literally everyone you made in Syria will tell you how grateful they are to be living under government held areas and that the Syrian army freed them from torture under Western backed rebels. Only the terrorists complain about being liberated. That last line, only the terrorists complain about being liberated strikes hard within my soul. The point of this digression is again not about Russian propaganda, but

about the kind of man Pearson sharp is. He has made for years a career out of denying the violence of brutal dictators and justifying massacres with propaganda, and in one he's decided that the trumpe Ist wing of the Republican Party is the place to be. He is not alone.

The same night that one American news broadcast dropped, Tucker Carlson got on his show and in front of a graphic of a Democratic Party donkey with the words anti white Mania written in front of it, he said this, The question that we should be meditating on day in and day out is how do we get out of this vortex, this cycle Before it's too late. How do

we save this country before we become Rwanda. It's interesting that Tucker brings up Rwanda here, Interesting and telling because the genocide that cost a million people their lives in that country was driven in part by a talk radio station called r t l M. Scholars describe r t l M as a de facto wing of the extremest Hutu government that started the massacre. Roughly ten percent of the violence that occurred has been tied directly to specific

r t l M broadcasts. Now, look, I promised this wasn't going to be a Dumer podcast, and I mean to keep to that. While the three factors I mentioned are churning us all in the direction of hell, they're not the only factors to consider. We, the people who do not want to live in a dictatorship or see the mass murder of our fellow citizens, are in the majority, and we have tools with which to fight against our enemies.

The last year and struggles of the pandemic have brought with them a tremendous rise in the number of organizations practicing mutual aid. This term has its origins and anarchist political theory, and is very different from charity. In charity and individual or organization with plenty gives aid to people who cannot help themselves. Mutual aid is when communities rise up to serve their own needs without waiting for their government or some in GEO to do it for them.

The goal of mutual aid is not just to handle immediate needs, but to build dual power. When you build dual power, you are essentially creating organizations that fulfill the useful roles formerly filled or poorly filled by the state. Doing this reduces or eliminates people's reliance on the state, and as a result, vastly increases the public's bargaining position. If you want to force massive sweeping changes on the system will replace it entirely, you're going to need to

build dual power first. Mutual aid is also just fucking inspiring, And when you spend as much time staring into the this as we all do these days, you need inspiration. While researching this article, I came across a wonderful piece and The Guardian about the rise of mutual aid, and I want a quote from it here. During the final thousand days of the Second World War, shipyard workers in the San Francisco Bay area produced one thousand warships a

warship a day. Something like that epic urgent industry seems to be at work now, but outside the federal government or any government. In early April, the Bay Area branch of the news site Hoodline reported on Thursday morning, two tons of rolled sheet plastic arrived at a warehouse in Alameda. By the end of the weekend, it had become sixteen

thousand plastic face shields. That remarkable turnaround is entirely owed to self organization by Bay Area makers who have transformed maker spaces, universities, fabrication shops, and almost anyone with their own sewing machines, C and C machine, or three D printer into an ad hoc core of medical supply manufacturers. The report called the self organized effort involving industrial design

students and teachers a distributed factory. Let's do send. Realized efforts organized without top down authority are exemplary mutual aid. In April fourteenth, nurses and seven doctors from the same institutions set off for a one month assignment on the Navajo Reservation, whose residents are facing high levels of infection. They were coordinated by the existing ucsf Heal Initiative, which works with impoverished and vulnerable communities from Haiti to Nepal.

Its mission statement is we seek to embody solidarity and contribute to the movement for global health equity led by communities themselves. This initiative, based on the principle of solidarity not charity, has been working with communities under stress for six years and will still be there when the immediate crisis is over. When faced with the looming specter of fascism and gangs of heavily armed racists spent on massacrring the other, mutual aid may seem like a poor defense

at best. This is not the case. It is, in fact, the only thing that can pull us back from the brink. Weaponized on reality works because people are angry, confused, and frightened. Now of the thirty of Republicans willing to kill to save their concept of America are bigots, and the things that confuse and anger them are equality in progress. But those people are only dangerous at scale when there is a much larger number of less radical people scared and

confused enough to buy into their lies. The one thing that can cut through lies, that can build the empathy necessary to forestall terror is community. When you help people with their material needs and provide them with a community that makes them feel valued and cared for, they are unlikely to support your murder. Effective mutual aid also undercuts the ability of authoritarians to profit as much from climate change. When the system falls apart, authoritarians always promised to fix it.

The best way to put lie to that promise is to build a better solution to the problems, one that works in real time periods of collapse, and we are right now all living through collapse, our times in which people are more open to new modes of living, new visions of how the world could exist. That's why these times are so dangerous, but it's also why they hold

so much promise. Right now, we face the risk of falling together into the darkness, but we also have the opportunity to build a new world from the ashes of the old. Either way, we'll be doing it together. For my part, I know which option I prefer. What about you,