Behind the Bastards - It Could Happen Here Weekly 60

Episode Date: November 19, 2022

All of this week's episodes of It Could Happen Here put together in one large file.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

What would you do if a secret cabal of the most powerful folks in the United States told you, hey, let's start a coup? Back in the 1930s, a Marine named Smedley Butler was all that stood between the U.S. and fascism. I'm Ben Bullitt. I'm Alex French. And I'm Smedley Butler. Join us for this sordid tale of ambition, treason, and what happens when evil tycoons have too much time on their hands. Listen to Let's Start a Coup on the iHeart radio app, Apple podcast, or wherever you find your favorite shows. Did you know Lance Bass is a Russian trained astronaut? That he went through training in a secret facility outside Moscow, hoping to become the youngest person to go to space? Well, I ought to know because I'm Lance Bass. And I'm hosting a new

podcast that tells my crazy story and an even crazier story about a Russian astronaut who found himself stuck in space with no country to bring him down. With the Soviet Union collapsing around him, he orbited the earth for 313 days that changed the world. Listen to The Last Soviet on the iHeart radio app, Apple podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. What if I told you that much of the forensic science you see on shows like CSI isn't based on actual science and the wrongly convicted pay a horrific price? Two death sentences and a life without parole. My youngest, I was incarcerated two days after her first birthday. Listen to CSI on trial on the iHeart radio app, Apple podcast, or wherever

you get your podcasts. Hey, everybody, Robert Evans here, and I wanted to let you know this is a compilation episode. So every episode of the week that just happened is here in one convenient and with somewhat less ads package for you to listen to in a long stretch if you want. If you've been listening to the episodes every day this week, there's got to be nothing new here for you, but you can make your own decisions. It could happen here is the podcast that you're listening to. I'm Robert Evans, the person that you're listening to, and one of the people who does this podcast. Boy, what a glorious introduction that was. Let me also introduce some human beings who you might know. First, we have Chris and we have James, our correspondents in the field.

Joining us today also is James's Spanish Civil War era, Mohsen Nagant. Yep, that's right. Yeah, I'm very happy that he's joining us. It's going to make contribution throughout the episode. It's an antique bolt action rifle, served in three world wars, counting the current one. Yeah, and it's about to kick off this one now, which it might be two in the L column for the Mohsen Nagant. Yeah, it's served a mixed bag. Yeah, anyway, we're recording this the day of the elections, so everybody's having a horrible one. I'm having a fire around. Yeah, I did. I'm still hoping my tech nine comes in before Oregon votes on its next ballot measure. Anyway, today I wanted to talk a little bit about something

that I've been thinking about kind of constantly, which is it's called effective altruism, and it's the short end of this is that like it is a style of thinking about charitable giving that Elon Musk in particular has recently highlighted as like how he thinks about things. It's very popular with the billionaire set who are who are deeply invested in getting people to think that they're saving the world, right? The folks who want to be seen as like looking ahead and protecting the future of mankind and saving the world, but not doing it through things like paying more taxes and supporting less money being in politics and all that kind of jazz, like not anything that would actually harm their their personal ability to exercise power.

So it's gotten kind of attacked recently because it's associated with guys like Musk and because he is markedly less popular now than he was, let's say 10 years ago. But I wanted to talk about $44 billion ago. Yeah, I wanted to talk because effective altruism, which is an actual movement, there's like organizations that espouse this, there's hundreds of millions of dollars in charitable giving that gets handed out under the ages of effective altruism. And as a heads up, like most of it's fine, like most of its charities to like get let out of water and stuff, like it's not like effective altruism is not comprehensively

some sort of like scam by the wealthy. It's more of a an honest theory about how charitable giving ought to work that has been adopted by the hyper wealthy as justification for fucked up shit and married to something called long termism, which we will be talking about in a little bit. But I want to talk about where the concept of effective altruism comes from. If you read articles about this thing, most people who study it will say that it kind of this got started as a modern movement in 1971 with an Australian philosopher named Peter Singer. And Singer wrote an article titled Famine Affluence and Morality. I think it was actually published in 1972. I don't know, one of the two, 71 or 72. And the essay

basically argued that there's no difference morally between your obligation to help a person dying on the street in front of your house. Like if a dude gets hit by a car in front of your house, you are not more morally obligated to help him than you are morally obligated to help people who are dying in Syria. And obviously, there's a version of truth to that, which is that we're all responsible for each other. And internationalism is the only actual path away from the nightmare. And when we do things like ignore authoritarians massacring their people, it inevitably comes back to affect us and like fuel the growth of an authoritarian nightmare domestically. That is very true. But also, there's a fundamental silliness in it, because one reason why there

is a moral difference between helping a person dying in the street in front of you and somebody who's in danger in, I don't know, Southern China, is that like, you can immediately help the person in front of your house, right? Like if somebody gets hit by, you have the ability to immediately render life saving aid, it's actually quite difficult to help somebody who is, for example, getting shot at by the government in Tibet, right? Like not that you don't have a moral responsibility to that person, but your moral responsibility to actually immediately take action when somebody is bleeding out is higher than your responsibility to try to figure out how to help people in distant parts of the globe. This is more nuanced than I think a lot of,

especially like, rich assholes, like to, it's more nuanced than like the, I shouldn't say rich assholes, what's the problem with this is that it's the, this is the kind of revelation, like when you start talking this way, that that feeds really well into a fucking TED talk. It's a perfect fix for that morality. Whereas the reality is like a lot more nuanced where, and number one, it's also like, well, the kind of help that you would render to somebody who's been hit by a car in front of your house is very different and requires really different resources than the kind of help you would give people in say, again, like Syria, who are being murdered by their government, right? If somebody gets hit by a car in front of your house, you run out with a fucking

tourniquet and a bleed kit and you call 911, right? Those are the resources that you can immediately use. If Bashar al-Assad is firing poison gas at protesters in Aleppo, well, your, your stop the bleed kit is not going to help with that one way or the other, right? A very different set of resources are necessary. So it's, it's foolish to compare them. Anyway, Singer did. And his essay was a big hit. It's often called like a sleeper hit for, for young people who were kind of getting into the, you know, the charity industrial complex, or at least we're considering it. Now, I found an interview with one named Julia Wise, who currently works at the Center for Effective Altruism. And she was a started out as a social

work, like to give you an idea of the kind of people who got into this, when she read Weiss's article, she was a social worker. She kind of fell in love with the concept. And when it started becoming a thing in like the 70s and 80s, it was as she described, quote, a bunch of philosophers and their friends and nobody had a bunch of money. So it was also more when Singer put it out kind of a, a wave, like a way of people kind of debating how to think about charity, which is, is fine. People should always be like, exploring stuff like that. So it's not, I don't want to be like going after Singer too well, I do a little bit. Because Singer, after kind of his movement has a couple of decades to grow, winds up doing a TED talk. And the TED talk winds up kind of

electrifying a very specific chunk of the American techno set. And you can see kind of in, in some of the writing on this, like the way in which his talking about sort of the morality of charity has gotten flattened over the years, quote, which is the better thing to do to provide a guide dog to one blind American or cure 2,000 people of blindness and developing countries. Which is like, I don't know, both there's resources to do both. Again, if you, for example, in the United States were to tax the billionaire class and corporations a lot more, you could provide that blind person in the United States with, with free healthcare in a way that many countries do. And we could also continue or even expand charitable giving, maybe if we were to do stuff like spend

less money on our military. Again, it's like a false choice. Like it's worth, but, but of course, it's, it's because the reason this choice is there is because they're thinking about, they're thinking about helping people purely in the form of like nobless oblige charity, right? They're, they're thinking about periods like rich, like things that get improved when rich people put money into them. So obviously we should help the, you know, one of these groups before the other because it's more effective and yada, yada, yada. Yeah. Yeah. Well, and I think, I think that was one of the things that like, there's a second way you can look at the original sort of problem of we have the same ethical responsibility of someone you could sit by a car or somebody's on the other

side of the world. Is that like, the other way you can look at that is like, I don't care about what's happening to someone in the other side of the world. So I don't have to care about this person who got hit by a car. And that seems like these people are doing, it's like, well, I don't really have to care about this person here because there's someone over there. Yeah. I can see like how this lines up with some of these like bigger, like meta ethical kind of perspectives on what equality is and what like your ethical obligations are. But then yeah, it seems to just kind of be like a very clear, like very clear slippery slope to making kind of mouth use you and excuses for doing fuck all right. That's, that's where the story's heading.

So. Oh, good. Early 2000s, he does like a TED talk, you know, the momentum around this idea starts to build. And it really gets a shot in the arm in 2013, with the work of an author named Eric Friedman. Friedman's new book or Friedland's book at the time that was new was called Reinventing Philanthropy, a framework for more effective giving. And he kind of he kind of extended kind of extends the arguments that singers making. One of the things that he does is he contrasts what St. Jude's Children's Research Hospitals are doing to like research children's medical or like illnesses that kids suffer and treatments for them with the Milaji Provincial Hospital in Angola. And he kind of contrasts two patients who are being served at the different

hospitals for life threatening conditions and concludes, quote, I'd probably also be very angry at the donors who are continually funding St. Jude and leaving Milaji Provincial woefully under resource. Why are the patients of St. Jude so much more worthy of life? Yeah. What a ridiculous way to think about a children's hospital fucking asinine. And the fact that like many of the people who are doing these fucking TED talks and contributing to this like a global tech class are the same people who are making fucking millions of dollars off the pharmaceutical industry, which continues to neglect the diseases that people like in the colonial periphery suffer from, because there's no profit in selling them drugs. And instead,

you're selling bold miscreants to people in America, right? Like, yes, we can, I mean, like you, you could if we just if every single person who had a who's gotten a TED talk had all of their wealth expropriated tomorrow, we could fund both of these hospitals. Exactly. Yes. Yeah. The world would be better. It's fundamentally a kind of obscenity to look at pharmaceutical companies, CEOs making hundreds of millions and billions of dollars, selling people off in literal poison and jacking up the price of things like insulin, to look at these tech CEOs accumulating tens of billions of dollars, and to say donations to this children's hospital are robbing an Angolan hospital.

So I won't be paying my taxes. Yeah. Why don't you go fuck yourself? Yeah. Yeah. And anyway, like, but this is like, you can see who this appeals to, right? If you've like, the kind of people who love the Freakonomics books, which are bullshit, regressive, bad statistics, bad statistics, objectively bad. Can I tell one Freakonomics story? Please. Yeah. Okay. So one of my professors at UChicago was a political science guy. Or I guess he was public policy. And there's a thing, there's a thing the Freakonomics guy wrote, where he was trying to prove that money doesn't actually influence, like doesn't actually influence election. Yes. Yeah. One of his real bangers. Yeah. And, you know, what my, my, my,

my professor wrote a paper about that, which is that, you know, again, this is a sort of perfect example of how dumb this guy is that he doesn't, this is how economists think, right? Like they, when they go into a field, they go in thinking they already know everything and they can prove sort of whatever they want because, okay, but the thing this guy doesn't understand, right? Is that like, and this is the thing most people in the US do not understand about how Congress works is that like, all of the shit that's happening on the floor of Congress, all of those votes, that is not, that is not real Congress, right? That, that is fake Congress, nothing, nothing important to actually happens there. All of the important stuff in Congress

happens in committees. And so you can't figure out whether money is doing anything by measuring its effects on like votes on the floor because floor votes are bullshit. Every, all of the important stuff has already, by the time, by the time a floor vote happens, all of the important political stuff has already happened. And so he did this, he did this whole thing where he was, you know, he had this great, I, I, he had this great metric called like, oh God, it was called like the, the, the, the, the, the Dairy Cow Coefficient, which is like measuring like how, how someone should vote versus like how many Dairy Cows ran, and it turns out, you know, if you look at what these people do in committee, no, yeah, hey, look, it turns out,

it turns out lobbying money is unbelievably effective, but because this fucking guy had, like, and this is something that like, like the, the sort of distinction between Congress, like, on the floor and Congress and committee, like, there's a president whose name I'm forgetting who has this famous line that like, Congress and committee is Congress at work, Congress on the floor is Congress at play or something like that. Like, it's, it's like, this is just like basic shit that if you know literally anything about how a field works, you cannot do the freaking out what this guy does. If you want to, if you want to, if you want to a good breakdown of why the freakonomics guy is full of shit, Michael Hobbs and Peter

Shamshiri, I think is his last name, have a new podcast called If Books Could Kill, and they break down with like citations and everything, like why everything in that book is horseshit, but like the reason why it's, the only thing I'll disagree with you on Chris is I don't think he's an idiot. I think he's very intelligent. And I think the thing that he's smart to do is he recognizes that there's a specific type of person and engineers and programmers are very likely to be this type of person who kind of fundamentally like their oppositional defiant. If somebody, if something, if people say like, well, this is good or this is bad, they're going to take the, want to take the opposite stance. And if you can provide no way

to like feel like they're enlightened and smart and actually looking at the data by doing it, then they'll take the opposite stance on stuff like it's bad to let people buy elections or it's good to fund children's hospitals just because somebody's made them feel smart for being an asshole. That's what the freakonomics guy does. Malcolm Gladwell does a subtler version of it as a general rule. And that's what, that's what the fucking Friedman is doing in this, this book in 2013. I found a good review of it in the Stanford social innovation review. That is pretty scathing, like surprisingly scathing, considering it's, it's written by a bunch of like Stanford nerds. This approach amounts to little more than charitable imperialism,

whereby my just causes just and yours to one degree or another is a waste of precious resources. This approach is not informed giving. And I think that, that does a pretty good job of summarizing what I think is fucked up about it. There's another thing that's really messed up, which is that one of the conclusions that they get come that they come to here is that they don't recommend or there's an organization called Givwell that kind of gets gets formed as a result of the book Friedman writes. And they recommend not to deliver like not to donate money to disaster assistance in the wake of the Japanese tsunami and oppose disaster relief donations in general. Because quote, and this is from Friedman, most of those killed by disasters could not have

been saved by donations, which is number one. Like that's the donations are about like rebuilding communities. Generally, it's not like about the saving lives. Usually it's about like, well, all of the infrastructure was destroyed and it must be rebuilt. But okay, guy. Well, it's annoying to you because it's like, it's, it's not like there's not good critiques of like specifically the Red Cross. Oh, it's all fucked up. The every single. Yes. I, yeah. But their critique is like the worst possible. Like, yeah, the actual critiques are that every single large charitable organization is fucked up. And if you go and talk to people on the ground, they will bitch. Like if you go to fucking war zones, people bitch more about NGOs than the

folks shooting at them half the time. Yeah, they bitch about it being inefficient about the stuff they're given being like bad quality or like, like nonsense, like just being handed out to be handed out, which is a thing that happens sometimes. And they bitch about well paid aid workers staying in hotels and showing up for a couple of hours to like do a photo op. There's also more incisive like, you know, that's not to say none of it's useful. Like for example, as many complaints as people have, everyone I've known who has been in a place where medicine sans frontiers slash doctors without borders has operated while they have complaints about doctors without borders or like it's good that there's more doctors here. We fucking need them. And you know, it's like

UNHCR, plenty of things to complain about UNHCR at every refugee camp I go to also people have fucking water filters and tents and shit because of UNHCR, which isn't nothing. It's a damn site more than nothing. And it's a damn site more than any of these long termist motherfuckers are doing for people who are I don't know displaced by war. Yeah. And like, I some of the things that they're doing is like this is very strange kind of attempt to calculate and create markets for human life and human suffering, right? Which you see a lot if you work like I've worked in nonprofit, I've worked in disaster response, I've seen some of these things on the ground and it you see these bizarre fucking decisions being made by by someone in an office who has likely never been on the

ground of these situations and it inevitably results in within these big organizations like the Red Cross and MSF, but also on a governmental level, right, with people not having the autonomy to respond in a situation to reduce human suffering and instead to be told to do something which is supposedly evidence based based on someone who's looked at the wrong criteria and come to the wrong conclusion hundreds of miles away and it's incredibly fucking ridiculous. It's bureaucrats, right? And it's like we've somehow managed to create like the absolute worst possible nightmare system of you have a bunch of government bureaucrats, and then you also have a bunch of sort of private, we have like different, we're watching a collision of different kinds of private sector

bureaucrats, like you have your sort of NGO bureaucrats, you have and then you have these billionaires who are also just fucking bureaucrats and all of them are just doing box ticking and we get like just the absolute worst nightmare fusion of horrible bureaucracy and capitalism, which is a great way to run programs to have people not die. And like so much of this comes from what that the whole like freakonomics thing to me strikes me as like we like you said reading the Wikipedia article about a subject and then applying trying to find out where you can apply a market to it and then posting that as the solution. It's stuff we have the episodes we're dropping on bastards, well the week before this episode will air are about like why the rent is

so damn high. And one of the complaints I have is that there's a specific class of media people who the only answer they will accept is because there's not enough multifamily zoning, which is just a part of why the rent is so damn high and reducing it to just that ignores the price fixing software that tens of millions of Americans like landlords use. It ignores shit like Airbnb. It ignores like the fucking problems in the construction industry, the lingering effects of the 2008 crash. It's very frustrating. And it's the these kind of like freakonomics guys like to do the same thing, like the the fucking freakonomics dude in particular, one of the things he got famous for is being like, you know, the drop in crime in the 90s,

this unprecedented fall in crime was due to abortion, which zero, I will say again, zero people who are experts on the topic of crime in America agree with. What they will say is actually there's a shitload of different things that contributed to the declining crime. And there's a good chance that abortion had an impact. A bigger impact was probably getting the lead out of like reducing environmental lead, although that gets overstated too. There's all sorts of different shit, including like air conditioning, just the fact that like, yeah, now more people have air conditioning. And guess when violence is highest in the summer, when people are stuck around each other outside and like all sorts of computer games computer games don't be doing

crimes because they got something else to do. But it's it you want to if you're going to be doing the kind of like if you're going to be doing TED talk fucking public works philosophy, then it helps to just be able to like make one big Malcolm Gladwell style fucking reveal. Anyway, that's how all these people exist and how all of their morality is informed. After 2013, Friedman is kind of like followed up by this guy named William McCaskill, who is currently the he's a Scottish philosopher, which God, it's easy to get called a philosopher these days. And he is he is a personal friend of Elon Musk, when Musk's text messages got released as part of that court filing. Some of them were with McCaskill, who was considering like putting

a bunch of money into buying Twitter, they ultimately decided not to. And I think because they just like it seems like McCaskill just didn't trust that Musk had any sort of plan. So he is, I will say this, not an idiot. But he's wrong in ways that are deeply fucked up. And he wrote a book that is currently a bestseller, it was published in August, called What We owe the future. And the gist of this is that, like, it's merging this kind of effective altruism with what's called long termism, which is this argument that morally, we have to consider the impact of our actions as not just on people alive today, but in future people, which is fine. There's actually a lot to that idea. But the way it always works out is we

can't pay attention to problems that people are suffering now, we have to we have to work on saving the world from these bigger problems. And again, it's almost, it's almost exclusively used as an argument for guys like Musk to like, well, we shouldn't tax billionaires out of existence, because I, you know, I see this with clarity, the problems that we face. And the long term solution is for me to be able to push for these specific things that I think are the only way to save humanity, right? I'm getting ahead of myself a little bit here. Let's talk about McCaskill again. When he was at Oxford, he's an Oxford boy, James. We've had some bangers. Yeah, he started a group called giving what we can in 2009. And members were supposed to give away

10% of what they earned to the most cost effective charities possible, which is fine. There's nothing wrong with that idea, basically. And it was like, it's supposed to be basically a lifelong promise that like, you know, we're all, because you assume Oxford people, a lot of them are going to wind up making very good money, you know, as we move into our careers, this will be a more and more influential kind of giving. But yeah, they dropped the ball if they'd had me there. But yeah, those meetings might have gone a little bit different living in his car. Yeah, over time, though, he's kind of moved into he's merged this. And again, the whole effective altruism movement, a lot of it does start reasonably with people being like, are these charities we're donating to

working? How can we make sure they're effective? Like what can we do to make giving work better, which is again, perfectly fine, but it very quickly gets married to this kind of long termist thinking. And they focus instead of stuff like, for example, funding hospitals, stuff like preventing an artificial intelligence from killing everybody or like sending people to distant planets, which are like cool and sci fi and everything, but also deeply unrealistic. I'll say it right now. Our threat is not that an AI kills us all. There's certainly a threat that different kind of artificial intelligences are used by authoritarians to make life worse for everybody. But by the way, Peter Thiel is a big backer of effective altruism. He's one of the people building that fucking AI.

This is the guy who wrote that thing about earning to give, right? Like that he was like, this is a guy who did that. Yeah, okay, I'm familiar with he's made a promise to never take more than $31,000 or something and then come over the course of a year in his life and give everything else to charity. He gives all his book profits to charity. But he also runs an organization that is spending more and more on keeping its people comfortable because I guess he doesn't have the money personally to spend. Anyway, I think there's some sketchy shit there. Yeah, this whole idea, and I'm sure we're going to get to this, right? Like it completely overlooks our obligation morally to agitate for structural change, right? Like it says that like, if you

can become a billionaire through whatever bullshit evil fucking exploitative grift you can, and then give 90% of that away, you're still perpetuating a system in which one grifter gets rich and thousands of people die without fucking clean water. But that's okay because you also donated some water filters or whatever, like, and it's not okay. And it makes me very angry, actually. Yeah, it makes me angry, too. And it's one of those things. If you look at like, here's all the charities that McCaskill and his organization are putting hundreds of millions of dollars into, they're not all bad. A lot of them are good. And I'm glad that money is going there. But there's always this strain of deeply unsettling logic running through it. Now, I want to quote from

a time article that I think kind of gets in a very subtle way has this guy's number. When I start thinking in practice, if you've got if you've got some things that look robustly good in both the short and the long term, that definitely makes you feel a lot better about something that is only good from a very long term perspective, he says. This year, for example, he personally donated to the lead exposure elimination project, which aims to end childhood lead exposure and the Atlas Fellowship, which supports talented high school students around the world to work on pressing problems. Not all issues are equally tractable, but McCaskill still cares about a range. When we met in Oxford, he expressed concern for the ongoing political crisis in Sri Lanka,

though admitted he probably wouldn't tweet about it. The answer, he believes, is to be honest about it. In philanthropy, big donors typically choose causes based on their personal passions, an ultra subjectivist approach, McCaskill says, where everything is seemingly justifiable on the basis of doing some good. He doesn't think that's tenable. If you can save someone from drowning or 10 people from dying in a burning building, what should you do? He proposes, it is not a morally appropriate response to say, well, I'm particularly passionate about drowning. So I'm going to save one person from drowning rather than the 10 people from burning. And that's exactly the situation we find ourselves in. And like, no, it is not. That is nonsense. Because among

other things, if you're a random person and you have a choice between saving someone from drowning or 10 people from dying in a burning building, well, you actually probably don't because saving people from drowning is a really difficult technical skill, which is why people usually die when they try to rescue other folks who were drowning. The creator of Yu-Gi-Oh died trying to save the guys from drowning. It's really hard and dangerous. And also, so is rescuing people from a burning building, which is why we have firefighters. And guess what? A lot of firefighters may not be very good at saving people from drowning because they have not trained for that. They are different skills. These are both problems, but they're different skills.

But what if you instead spend that time buying some Tesla stocks and then you sold them and instead invested in, I don't know, something that stops water from drowning people? It's like none of the problems we have are none of the problems. I'm going to say right now, zero percent of the problems we have are the result of some sort of like lifeguard firefighter standing in between a burning building and like a yacht race gone wrong and going, oh God, no. Yeah, it's like he's doing the trolley problem. He's just trying to do the trolley problem. It's funny that he's talking about Sri Lanka, too, because it's like, this is the perfect of example. This is the perfect example of a political crisis that is completely intractable

to all of these... None of these people donating the charities can do literally anything about that because that's actually... The crisis of Sri Lanka is both a sort of short-term crisis of this utterly horrific genocidal political elite and then also a sort of long-term crisis about the structural position of specific countries and the global colonial system. This is not something any of these people can solve. The only way any of these people could solve this is if the people of Sri Lanka just expropriated them. Because Sri Lankans do not have access to this guy and six guns, there's no way... He can just sit there in his chair going, well, it's a crisis. I'm going to tweet about it. I'm not going to tweet about it. He's not

going to tweet about it. I can tweet about it. Yeah, I will simply talk to newspapers about it instead of tweeting. What I would say is that here's the actual solution to the stupid problem this guy came up with. Well, if we were to tax all of the billionaires to the point that they weren't billionaires and then put that into a massive new works progress fund that instead of just building national parks, provided rental assistance to millions of Americans and exchange for them learning how to fight fires and getting basic life-saving care and getting trained in things like that so that they could deal with the consequences of climate change and be able to protect their communities effectively and be incentivized to gain the actual technical

skills that would allow them to protect people, well, then you would have more people capable of saving someone from a burning building or from drowning. But anyway, whatever, that's my pie-in-the-sky leftist solution to that is use funds taken from the rich in order to incentivize people to gain the skills that will allow them to protect their communities in the event of disasters. Anyway, whatever. So over the last decade, all of this thinking has increasingly given way from a wonky theory on charitable giving by big-hearted guilt-ridden millennial kids, and that's how this guy is always framed in articles. McCaskill is he's like, in fact, I'm going to fucking, I'm going to scroll down here to my notes and I'm going to find the section

of the article to like show you the way he gets fucking talked about in all of these. Quote, 13 years ago, William McCaskill found himself standing in the aisle of a grocery store agonizing over which breakfast cereal to buy. If he switched to a cheaper brand for a year, could he put aside enough money to save someone's life? Like, that's the... Yeah, the sort of thoughts that you have when your engagement with global poverty is in the fucking Cheerio's aisle. Exactly, exactly. Yeah, of weight throws in Oxford, I'm sure. Like, no, fuck off. Sorry, I'm so fucking angry at this shit. And it's clearly, very clearly, I can see that this is going towards an excuse for incredibly wealthy people paying fuck all in

taxes because they claim that it's not an efficient way to do things and they completely ignore all these structural things which have to exist for their effective altruism to occur in the first place, right? Yeah, it's... Anyway, this is effectively like over the years given away from this, again, kind of this wonky theory by guilty millennial kids to this pop philosophy for the FinTech set because that's how these guilt-ridden millennial kids wound up making a bunch of money. And yeah, that time article gives... Like, I just want to read another quote from it about one of the other guys who's involved in putting a lot of money into McCaskill's organization. Quote, Mr. Bankman Freed makes his donations through the FTX Foundation, which has given away

140 million, of which 90 million has gone through the group's future fund towards long-term causes. Mr. McCaskill and Mr. Bankman Freed's relationship is an important piece in understanding the community's evolution in recent years. The two men first met in 2012 when Mr. Bankman Freed was a student at MIT with an interest in utilitarian philosophy. Over lunch, Mr. Bankman Freed said that he was interested in working on issues related to animal welfare. Mr. McCaskill suggested he might do more good by entering a high-earning field and donating money to the cause, and by working for it directly. Mr. Bankman Freed contacted the Humane League and other charities, asking if they would prefer his time or donations based

on his expected earnings if he went to work in tech or finance. They opted for the money, and he embarked on a remunerative career, eventually founding the cryptocurrency exchange FTX in 2019. First off, that guy absolutely did not call any charities. Sorry, this was from the Forbes article I use, not the Time article. First off, I don't believe that he... But if he did, it was something like, hey, I don't have any skills or training. Do you want money or do you want me to volunteer? And they were like, who the fuck is this kid? We don't need another asshole wandering around here trying to touch the cats. Send us your check. Yeah. And so instead of, I don't know, getting trained as a vet tech or something,

where he would actually be able to help animals, he founded a cryptocurrency exchange and contributed to the burning of massive amounts of carbon that will contribute to mass deforestation and the deaths of animals around the world. That's good. I think that there's another aspect of this, which I think is sort of underexplored, which is that utilitarianism is genuinely one of the greatest evils humanity has ever created. Every bad decision anyone has ever made. If you look behind it, you can find your utilitarianism. It's the basis of all neoclassical economics. Horrible, awful shit. Everything bad in the world. Trace back your utilitarianism. It is an engine that allows rich people to feel good about hurting poor people.

That's what it is. And that's what I think this all makes clear. So the actual rhetoric from these people is always like, especially if you're just kind of encountering it out in the wild, it's hard to argue with a lot of the time because they'll be like, well, look, we need to look at what's going to help the most people. And that's why we're setting up none of this matters if we don't deal with this problem or that problem. And it's tailor made to sound profound. And again, in like a TED talk or the website for some charitable giving organization aimed at getting you to like put 10% of your income to long-termist causes. But again, the fucked up shit crusts kind of around the edges for the most part and lines like these from a time profile on the Caskel.

The first public protest against African American slavery was the 1688 Germantown Quaker petition. Slavery was only abolished in the British Empire in 1833. Decades later in the US and not until 1962 in Saudi Arabia. History encourages McCaskill to favor gradual progress over revolution. Abolition, he says, is maybe the single best moral change ever. It's certainly up there with feminism and they're extremely incremental. They don't seem that way because we enormously shrink the past, but it's almost 300 years we're talking about. That wasn't the result of incremental change. It was the result against the people who own slaves fighting viciously against any attempts to end slavery. Like, yeah, it was a it was a battle. It was a series of in fact,

a series of revolutions in a lot of cases, including like the Haitian Revolution and guys like John Brown. There were a shit bleeding Kansas. There were a shitload of people died fighting in order to end slavery. Like the Civil War, dude. What do you call that? That's not incremental. A million people shot each other to death. You know, and it's so far as we can talk about sort of incremental progress, it's stuff like, OK, so the like the slaves in Haiti freed themselves by means of revolution and then sent a bunch of guns and weapons to people in Latin America so that their armies could march through Latin America and end slavery. Like many revolutions had to occur to end slavery because it was a powerful system at the center of global capital that a lot of

entrenched and heavily armed interests were willing to die to maintain, which also is fun, because I bet I bet I bet if you look through these people's supply chains, and this is almost certainly true of Elon Musk's supply chains, like, OK. Musk's supply chains in China, you can have some kind of debate as to whether the kinds of forced labor you're going to be encountering are slavery. Like, I bet if you look through 90% of people who are effective altruists, you can find slavery in their supply chains. And their argument will be like, well, I can't end slavery in my supply chain because I guarantee it, they're all in the tech industry. And like nobody has a laptop or a phone smartphone without the use of rare earth minerals that are acquired via

slavery. It's the same thing if you're wearing clothes, you have something that slavery was involved in because the garment industry slavery is literally inextricable from it. Like the company that has tried the hardest to remove slavery from their from their production line, Patagonia, still continually finds like, oh, no, there's some more. They're pretty good at calling it out. But yeah, they put a lot of money into that shit. It is hard. Anyway, I'm going to read another fun quote from the Forbes article. Mr. Bankman Fried said he expected to give away the bulk of his fortune in the next 10 or 20 years. If you're worried about existential risks of a really bad pandemic,

you sort of can't stall on that, Mr. Bankman Fried said in an interview. That is how his text messages popped up among hundreds of others sent to Mr. Musk. Mr. Bankman Fried ultimately did not join Mr. Musk's bid. I don't know exactly what Elon's goals are going to be with Twitter, Mr. Bankman Fried said in an interview. There was a little bit of ambiguity there. He had his hands full in the months that followed as cryptocurrency prices crashed. The Twitter deal has been volatile in its own way with Mr. Musk trying to back out before recently announcing his intention to follow through with it after all. In August, Mr. Musk retreated Mr. McCaskill's book announcement to his 108 million followers with the observation

worth reading. This is a close match to my philosophy. So that's kind of the surface of where we are now. It doesn't quite get at all of the things that are deeply fucked up. And for that, I wanted to quote from another article. I found an Aeon, A-E-O-N. It's an essay by, God, let me get the author here, because it's quite good about long termism. It's an essay called Against Long Termism by Emil P. Torres, a Ph.B. candidate at a university in Hanover in Germany, Liebnitz Universitat. I don't know. I feel silly every time I try to say German, so I'm not going to try that hard. But the article is very good. And it kind of gets at how this effective altruism movement has merged with

long termism in a way that specifically exists to buoy the interests of wealthy authoritarians around the world. Quote, this has roots in the work of Nick Bostrom, who founded the grandiosly named Future of Humanity Institute, FHI, in 2005. And Nick Bextet, a research-associated FHI and a program officer at Open Philanthropy. It has been defended most publicly by the FHI philosopher Toby Ord, author of The Precipice, Existential Risk in the Future of Humanity. Long termism is the primary research focus of both the Global Priorities Institute and an FHI-linked organization directed by Hillary Greaves and the Forthott Foundation, run by William McCaskill, who also holds positions at FHI and GPI.

Adding to the tangle of titles names, institutes and acronyms, Long termism is one of the main cause areas of the so-called effective altruism movement, which was introduced by Ord in around 2011 and now boasts of having a mind-boggling $46 billion in committed funding. It is difficult to overstate how influential Long termism has become. Karl Marx in 1845 declared that the point of philosophy isn't merely to interpret the world, but change it. And this is exactly what Long termists have been doing, with extraordinary success. Consider that Elon Musk, who has cited and endorsed Bostrom's work, has donated $1.5 million to FHI through its sister organization, the even more grandiosly named Future of Life Institute. This was co-founded by the multi-

millionaire tech entrepreneur Jan Tallinn, who, as I recently noted, doesn't believe that climate change poses an existential threat to humanity because of his adherence to the Long termist ideology. Meanwhile, the billionaire libertarian and Donald Trump supporter Peter Thiel, who once gave the keynote address at an effective altruism conference, has donated large sums of money to the Machine Intelligence Research Institute, whose mission is to save humanity from super intelligent machines and is deeply intertwined with Long termist values. Other organizations, such as GPI and the Four Thought Foundation, are funding essay contests and scholarships in an effort to draw young people into the community. While it's an open secret that the

Washington DC-based Center for Security and Emerging Technology, CSET, aims to place Long termists within high level U.S. government positions to shape national apology. In fact, CSET was established by Jason Matheny, a former research assistant in FHI who's now the deputy assistant to U.S. President Joe Biden for technology and national security. Ortt himself has astonishingly, for a philosopher, advised the World Health Organization, the World Bank, the World Economic Forum, the U.S. National Intelligence Council, the UK Prime Minister's Office, Cabinet Office, and Government Office for Science, and he recently contributed to a report from the Secretary General of the United Nations that specifically mentions Long termism. The short

answer is that elevating the fulfillment of humanity's supposed potential above all else could not trivially increase the probability that actual people, those alive today and in the near future, suffer extreme harms, even death. Consider, as I noted elsewhere, the Long termist ideology inclines its adherence to take an ensucian attitude towards climate change. Why? Because even if climate change causes island nations to disappear, triggers mass migrations, and kills millions of people, it probably isn't going to compromise our long term potential over the coming trillions of years. If one takes a cosmic view of the situation, even a climate catastrophe that cuts the human population by 75% for the next two millennia will, in the grand scheme of things,

be nothing more than a small blip, the equivalent of a 90 year old man having stubbed his toe when he was two. So this is evil, right? Like, this is like, this is vicious and vile and cruel. And it's one of those things, there's a book that I've talked about on the show a couple of times that is quite popular called Ministry of the Future. And I think it's a very good book. And one of the attitude, like the basic premise of it is that climate change is addressed finally, and the worst aspects of it are dealt with and begin to be repaired because of the establishment of an organization called the Ministry of the Futures, this international organization that exists to look out for the interests of unborn people and animals and plant species.

And part of how they do this is by murdering billionaires in their beds and blowing up planes to end international air travel, which is, so there's a verse, like, again, the idea that we should be thinking about people and living creatures who have not yet been born is reasonable. And the reasonable conclusion of that is, and so we should deal with things like climate change and stop, like, thoughtlessly degrading our environment so that people in the future will be able to live a quality life. The argument that these long termers are making is, no, that's foolish, because in a trillion years, none of it will matter. And I intend to be alive in a trillion years because I will be an immortal machine man, billionaire forever. You know, it's the thing

about these people. These people fucking suck. It's like, the thing about this, if you believe this, the only, literally the only thing that you should spend your time doing is trying to dismantle every single nuclear weapon on the planet, like, you should be forming your own private armies to, like, storm military bases to destroy nukes. And none of them will ever fucking do this. All these people will back candidates who, like, want to have nuclear weapons, all these people who will back candidates who, like, like, you know, I wonder how many of these people personally supported dropping a nuke in the middle of a rock in 2004, like, God. Yeah, I anyway, this is probably, that's probably enough. I wanted to, at some point, I think we will be doing a more detailed look into

some of these people and a more detailed look into some maybe maybe as a bastard's episode. But this is just getting more relevant. And I wanted to give people, I wanted to connect them with some, like, some, some resources, particularly that article on Aon about the dangers of long termism. And yeah, anyway, be advised, this is what the fucking assholes who have spent, like, think about how many cool things the tech industry has actually made in the last decade. It's not many, right? Like, it's mostly been vaporware, like most of the different big apps and stuff have all are in the process of collapsing right now. That's why the industry's falling apart very little about you as we record this in the metaverse. Yeah, that's right. That's right.

Without legs. This time you're sitting right next to me, James, except for you have no laying legs and your mouth is open in an endless wordless scream. Finally. Anyway, that's what these assholes want to do. What they've done to the internet, sucking the vibrancy and the life and like, the freedom out of this, this incredible creation and turning it into an engine for sucking your personal data out and marketing things to you and making you angry all the time as much as possible and convincing your parents and grandparents that fucking Joe Biden's been replaced by a lizard man. Like the people who did that now think that we can't take care of people today because that would distract from our mission to take care of people who have never been born

a trillion years from now. Anyway, fuck them. During the summer of 2020, some Americans suspected that the FBI had secretly infiltrated the racial justice demonstrations. And you know what? They were right. I'm Trevor Aronson and I'm hosting a new podcast series, Alphabet Boys. As the FBI sometimes you got to grab the little guy to go after the big guy. Each season we'll take you inside an undercover investigation. In the first season of Alphabet Boys, we're revealing how the FBI spied on protesters in Denver. At the center of this story is a raspy voiced cigar-smoking man who drives a silver hearse. And inside his hearse was like a lot of guns.

He's a shark and not on the good and bad ass way. It's a nasty shark. He was just waiting for me to set the date, the time, and then for sure he was trying to get it to heaven. Listen to Alphabet Boys on the iHeart Radio App, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. What if I told you that much of the forensic science you see on shows like CSI isn't based on actual science? The problem with forensic science in the criminal legal system today is that it's an awful lot of forensic and not an awful lot of science. And the wrongly convicted pay a horrific price. Two death sentences and a life without parole. My youngest, I was incarcerated two days after her first birthday. I'm Molly Herman. Join me as we put forensic science on trial

to discover what happens when a match isn't a match and when there's no science in CSI. How many people have to be wrongly convicted before they realize that this stuff's all bogus? It's all made up. Listen to CSI on trial on the iHeart Radio App, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. I'm Lance Bass, and you may know me from a little band called InSync. What you may not know is that when I was 23, I traveled to Moscow to train to become the youngest person to go to space. And when I was there, as you can imagine, I heard some pretty wild stories. But there was this one that really stuck with me about a Soviet astronaut who found himself stuck in space with no country to bring him down. It's 1991. And that man, Sergei Krekalev,

is floating in orbit when he gets a message that down on earth, his beloved country, the Soviet Union, is falling apart. And now he's left defending the Union's last outpost. This is the crazy story of the 313 days he spent in space, 313 days that changed the world. Listen to the last Soviet on the iHeart Radio App, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. Everything's dead. Wait, no, sorry. It could happen here, a podcast about stuff falling apart. And today, about the fact that things fell less apart than people were worried they were going to fall apart. And in some ways, that might get better. So that's kind of nice. Sure. Yeah. On the whole, we're talking about the midterms today. And on the whole, okay.

I feel okay. Mid is an excellent description of the terms. It's the midterms equivalent of getting like an ounce of like mid-grade weed for like 50 bucks. But you find out later that like kind of in the middle of it was like half of a paper towel roll that they stuck in there to push up the weight. But it's like, well, at least I got weed. All right. I've introduced the podcast. Who do we have here today? Oh, you got me. I'm James still. That's right. Yeah. Yeah, I'm Garrison. I didn't vote. Look at you. Wow. Way to be an anarchist, Garrison, or a Canadian. Same diff. Democracy was on the ballot.

I'd like committing voter fraud for the Democratic Party. Yeah. Yeah. I also decided to not vote for the people who are doing like the war on drugs in California right now. No. Garrison, you continued your year's long tradition of submitting a crude drawing of the Premier of Canada to a ballot box. Yep. Shirtless Trudeau coming out of a cave. Who else do we have on with us right now? I'm here, Christopher Wong, and I absolutely despise elections. So I brought my friend who actually does like elections. Excellent. Token election enjoy.

Pretty much. Yes. Hi. I am Jack. I am Christopher's token friend, as mentioned. And I'm here partly because of nepotism for knowing Christopher and partly because, as you reminded me before we got started, I had a 93% accurate prediction rating for all of the elections that I was paying attention to this year. So I know some things. Yeah. Congratulations. I only made one prediction before this election, which was boy, it doesn't feel like Dr. Oz is going to win. Which means you did better than a lot of the people who are paid to do this. Like, okay, that man, that man said the word crude detay in an election in Pennsylvania. Like there was, he was never good. The moment that ad came out,

he was going to lose. I see. That's much more nuanced than my political analysis, which was the fact that the other guy was much taller than him. And also way harder. Like if they just settled it with a fistfight, that man could have taken it. Yep. That seems good. It was fun. It was a fun election. We all had a good time. I enjoy that fucking Marjorie Taylor Greene and JD Vance are going to be in Congress together. That's going to be fun for everybody. We're all going to have a good time. But I suspect there's probably some stuff we haven't like, as you may have noticed, listeners, we didn't do much in the way of pre-midterm content because we all hate it.

Thank Christ. But now we're talking about it. So what should we know about these midterms? What kind of occurred to you as somebody who's like actually has spent a lot more time delving into the nitty gritty and thinking about what was likely to happen? So I told Christopher, I would say this. And in fairness, I do genuinely believe it. I think the story of these midterms, when historians look back at it, will be that the Dobbs Supreme Court decision had the same electoral impact in the United States as 9-11 did. I think that is going to be like how this plays out over time. Because when you look at how things were going before Dobbs and then how things were going after Dobbs, obviously, things got a lot worse on the policy front because abortion became

illegal in a lot of states. But the election essentially flipped overnight from what was going to be a Republican wave to the even split that we got. And that makes this one of three post World War II midterms where the incumbent party did well. And so this is definitely going to be a midterm that gets lectured about in policy 101 courses for the next 100 years. Also, one of those, one of those other three was the 9-11, was the post 9-11. Yes, yes, it was. Yeah, yeah. I find that actually a really, because obviously, I was aware just because there was so much coverage saying like this is the best performance from an incumbent party

in a midterm since 2002. So I was aware of that fact. But for some reason, I hadn't put it together in my head that way that like, yeah, this means that like the Supreme Court's decision on Roe v. Wade had kind of a comparable electoral impact to flying two planes into a pair of skyscrapers at the Pentagon in three planes. Or you can't play that victory, whatever. To be fair, the Supreme Court have killed, like in terms of the immediate impact, the Supreme Court will have killed more people than that by like Thursday or something. So. Yeah. The other one was FDR's first midterm, right? No, the other one, so I said post World War II.

Oh, okay. My bad. The other one was 1998, when the American electorate apparently got so mad at Republicans and P.T. Bill Clinton that they decided to vote for Democrats in a midterm again. Well, that's the other thing Biden can do if it goes south. It's good to know their options on the table. Yeah, but I think. Non-zero chance that'll happen anyway. I mean, I guess we're still waiting to see the shakeout. Who knows? Yeah. Doc Brandon.

I enjoyed from an entertainment perspective the like three months of lucidity that we got out of Joe Biden this year. We'll see how many more he has in him. Yeah. Who knows? So yeah, like, so you're suggesting that Dobbs is being like the really pivotal thing here in in swinging a lot of these close races, right? Absolutely. Dobbs definitely being the number one factor tragically because it's very cringe and I wish this hadn't happened. The January 6 investigation does actually seem to have also swung several important races.

That's I mean, I'm interested in your thoughts on this, but I actually, I'm glad that it mattered that they tried to do a coup. And I'm glad that people cared about that. I'm glad it mattered. I just I just think it sucks that because the way they went about the investigation was so incredibly terrible. Oh, yeah. I mean, there is. Yes. Yeah. Like Merrick Garland is going to go down as like one of the most cowardly attorney generals in

American history. But yeah, it's pretty clear that in a lot of races, like the investigation made a difference. I think this is really clear if we're getting into like very kind of under the hood. Democrats ran the table in competitive state level secretary of state races. And these are the officials that run elections. And not only did Democrats run the table, pretty much every single one of those candidates outperformed the top of the ticket. So they outperformed governor and Senate candidates. So there were a lot of people. This is another big story. The midterms is that swing voter swing voting is back, not swing voting, I'm sorry, split ticket voting is back. There were quite a few. There were quite a few millions of voters this year who

voted for a Republican in the Senate or a Republican for governor and then a Democrat to run their state's actual elections. That's kind of good. It's also like speaks promisingly of people's like engagement with the political system and education about it and the awareness of what these different things do. Yes. But other like like that other than that, but just overall high level Dobbs was 100 percent the big one. There is a person whose name I'm going to unfortunately mispronounce and that I should have looked up beforehand. It's all right. This is a safe place for that. Thank you. But there's a person there's a guy down in Louisiana named John Kulivan, I think is

my best guess. And he is one of the people who makes money off of like looking at elections. And his big thing is that you can predict the outcome of elections just by looking at the nationwide composition of the primary electorate. So like if Republicans turn out more voters in their primaries and Democrats do, Republicans are going to win the election and vice versa. This has been true in pretty much every single election for the last 30 years or so. And he unfortunately got led astray this year because nationwide at the end of the primary season, Republicans were up by about like five points. And so he was insisting the whole rest of the campaign that Republicans are going to win. That's obviously not really what happened.

But if you look at pre-Dobbs versus post-Dobbs, the primary electorate post-Dobbs was Democrats plus like up by one point. That is the electorate that we got in the midterms. So Dobbs 100% set the tone of like what the midterms were going to be because we are not going to be legalizing abortion nationwide in the next two years because we are going to have a Republican house almost certainly. Dobbs is almost definitely going to be a huge factor in 24 as well. I mean, and I guess that like, because the question I had, and I think a lot of people had running into this, especially people who are not election lovers is like, do things matter? Right? Like it was Dobbs going to matter and was the, were the constant sort of

Republican assaults on the ability of people to vote was the fucking attacks on children's hospitals and on trans kids and stuff like was all of that going to work? Like do things matter still? And you know, we'll have to re-answer that question in 2024, but it does kind of seem like that's the positive takeout from this is not like, you know, it's probably too early to say, are we seeing some sort of grand progressive swing or are people coming around on Biden or Biden or whatever things politicos want to take? But it does kind of seem that like on a very like ground floor level, it mattered that the Republicans were doing awful things. Yes, 100% mattered. I think Christopher and I have talked about how in his words,

Leah Thomas cost the Michigan Republican Party the election. Let's talk about that because I think a lot of people, I mean, yeah, let's talk about that. Okay, I'll give the meme version of it first. The meme version of it basically is that there was, okay, so there was a report released by the Republican Party in Michigan after the election when they sort of got hammered. And part of what they're talking about was like, okay, so the inflation is like 7.7% right now, right? This is the freest election anyone has ever been handed, like in human history, like a child could have won this election. And the Republicans managed to blow it. And what are you saying? They spent like $25 million, specifically on ads

about like trans kids in sports. And everyone in Michigan was just like, what the? Who? Really? Not just blew it, but blew it in a way that they haven't blown it in 40 years because for the first time in 40 years, Democrats will have complete control of the Michigan state government. Yeah. Yeah. And it's like, it's like, the other thing is it wasn't just in Michigan where this happened, right? Like quite possibly like one of the ways they're going to lose the Senate is because like the Republicans like entire sort of apparatus in Nevada was running against the Equal Rights Amendment, which and specifically they were they were running against the equal Nevada passing the version of the Equal Rights Amendment, like specifically on the

grounds of transphobia. And the ERA passed by 17 points. And Republicans are about to lose that Senate seat. And it's just like, by me version of this is that the Republican Party ran a platform that is like the political equivalent of like a street preacher, right? Like that that is the constituency for this. It is like they unbelievably hate trans people. They like a unbelievably hard line anti-abortion position, which again, like nobody actually likes. And you know, it turns out like if your constituency is street preachers, like the thing an average person does when they run into a street preacher is walk past them. And it turns out that's what happened here. Like they tried this and they got out about that. That's the meme version of it.

Absolutely. I mean, that's not just the meme version of it. It's essentially what happened in Michigan and Pennsylvania in all of these states where hard-blind Christian nationalists won Republican primaries. Like they went down hard. And so as Robert said, yeah, things actually mattered this election. And that's a good thing. And I think I know for me as like I went into election night, very nervous about my own predictions because when I put together my Google spreadsheet that will never be shown to any of you because of how insane it is. And I was picking, you know, I got more races wrong, by the way, by picking Republicans to win that Democrats actually won than the other way around. Because I kept second guessing myself

just like, no, no, no, I'm not. I'm being too kind to Democrats and then I went too far. But when I was making those predictions, honestly, I just kept thinking about like, so I'm adopted, my parents are both white and my mom is this like white woman from Appalachian, Ohio. And she is in her upper 60s. So she grew up in a world before Roe v. Wade. And I had never seen my mom so angry about anything in politics. And like she was very, very angry when Trump won. She has been very angry. She's been very angry about like January 6. She's been angry about a lot of stuff the last several years, as is my dad, because they're both very normie Democrats. But my mom has never been angrier. As far as I've seen her, then she was angrier about Dobbs.

And it wasn't just like my mom, I was hearing from friends of mine from across the Midwest, who also have like, normie white suburban parents. And that was kind of the same thing that I was hearing from them to is like, my mom is so upset about this, my grandmother is so upset about this, these women who remembered what it was like to grow up in a world where abortion was not something that they had access to if they needed it. And that honestly, you know, it's obviously completely anecdotal. It's not database or data driven in any way. But that was just what I kept thinking about as I was making predictions about how the midterm was going to go was, you know, I think that these people are angry enough that they are not going to care about inflation.

They're not going to care about the fact that our economy is very clearly headed for a recession, because this is going to matter more to them. And it did. I kind of want to move on to talking about what we think this sets us up for in 2024. Because I think the the clearest, and we talked about this a little earlier, but sort of the clearest thing that's positive about this is that we have fewer state secretaries of state and state legislatures in the hands of the Republican Party, which means more of a chance that like what people actually vote for is is going to matter. Now, we're still dealing with the judiciary that is as fucked as it was prior to the midterms. And in 2024, probably won't be less fucked in a way

that is notable in aggregate. Yeah, we can all we can always hope and pray. Yeah, there could be a couple of very specific car accidents. Yeah. Yeah. On that point, actually, so they were, I know a bang on about about like how the United States deals with its indigenous people a lot. But like, they slated, and we'll do an episode on it, but we're trying to do it properly, like slated for this Supreme Court session is to look at the Indian Child Welfare Act. And like, the challenge to it challenges a lot of the bases of other tribal law. And in places like Arizona, right, like indigenous people are a large, like often like in 2020, they're supposed to be like the swing electorate for like blue Arizona. So that could have positive

outcomes for for Democrats, it could, they could, I don't know how they could go out their way to disenfranchise indigenous people, but they find new and exciting ways to do it all the fucking time. So like, that will be interesting. And one thing I wanted to raise is like, so I live in California, which I think is seen as like the left coast and stuff, but we have an alarming amount of really chudly people going to the house from California. And yeah, it's becoming increasingly a bit like where like some of you live in Oregon, where like you have a very divided state. The far right in California is larger than the population of like, many United US states. Yeah, yes. And they're increasingly big mad about small things. But yeah, like I'm just

looking at the districts around the, what I mean, and a number of them have sent a like anti reproductive rights house representatives back to the house. California is a state where the Democratic Party likes to flop its way to victory. It's one of, it's one of the most incompetent state Democratic parties in the country, which is really saying something because we're talking about New York after this. They're competing, they're competing with New York, they're competing with Florida life. I mean, hey, Oregon's not didn't do great either. Like the state Democratic Party in Oregon had their most narrow governor's race in a long time. And also the dims lost their their super

majority in the state Congress. They did lose their super majority, but Democrats in Oregon do now have the ability to redistrict again. So they can take back that seat that Republicans picked up because there was a constitutional amendment that got passed by the voters of Oregon that says that if Republicans do what they have done in the last few years in Oregon, which is walk out of the state house any time that a lot might pass, they get banned from running for reelection. But also like without the super majority, I don't know that there's as much of a new I mean, I will see what happens. But yeah, it's there as a general rule, it seems like when you've got there's no meaningful competition for what party is going to be in

control of the state. It becomes a haven for like the political equivalent of grifters to suck in huge salaries and do very little. And yeah, yeah, like on math, or to just do like our mayor. Look at that. Our mayor also. Yeah. And she's on for reelection in a few months, and we can only hope that she that she loses. I can't imagine her winning. I mean, it could happen immediately. It could happen here. It could happen here. Here's an ad break. Good work, Harrison. Yeah. What a professional. Ah, we're back. And you know what? Talking about the midterm elections makes me feel like doing smoking a cigarette. Buy cigarettes, kids. They're as good for you as democracy. All right, we're back. In some other interesting news,

this is also the this this Pestman terms had more LGBTQ candidates win office than ever before in a midterm election. There was a few notable wins, specifically with trans people in the Midwest, actually, which has been probably a decent sign. It's a good sign. You know, those heroes are doing good. Yes. There's been a multiple multiple trans people, particularly quite a few trans women elected to state legislatives across across the Midwest, like in Montana and inside. Controversial. I'm calling that out. Yes. Well, the thing is, I grew up in Saskatchewan, which is like above Montana. And whenever you would drive down, we would always stay in the more Midwest sections and everyone talks. It felt very Midwest to me because of where

I lived in Saskatchewan. So apologies, apologies to people who are Montana mountainers, I guess. Also apologies to the people of Chicago. No, no, we don't need to be apologizing. They can fang off. So it's always effort who testified against anti trans legislation previously is now able to vote against it in Minnesota. Yeah, I want to talk about that very briefly, which is that like. Sure, sure. Okay. There are a lot of queer communities in places that people just fucking ignore. Yeah, absolutely. You cannot discount these places. Yeah, like I said, it's like like Missoula specifically has has a like a pretty substantive queer community. They do good shit. They're out there like they're like there's there's

this sort of tendency, I think to like, like look at like a state and go like, oh, it's a red state, like there's whatever the communities you're just fleeing. And it's like, it's not true. Like there are a lot of people who are like have for many years been building a community there and hanging on tenaciously and building it. And also in Missoula, people take notice. Also in Missoula, the first non binary candidate was elected in SJ Howell. So two, two trans people elected there in in in Missoula. So by the way, did you want to do Missoula? Do those people Portland? I mean, this would follow. But Portland's Portland's like city council is like four fucking people. Yeah, that's true. Yeah, entirely. Yeah. And it's one pretty conservative this past election,

actually. But we also had in Minnesota, Leah Fink is the first trans person in state legislative legislator. And in New Hampshire, they elected the first trans man to a US state house. Let's go. So yeah. And another other good thing is Arizona got a Democratic governor, which means a whole bunch of potential legislation will probably not get signed on. Because Arizona did have some pretty, pretty, pretty bad anti trans come up in the past few years. I also want to talk about so the Arizona election was critical, not just because it's amazing that fucking Kerry Lake's not going to be governor because she is an election denying ghoul. But Blake Masters might be the scariest person who was running for elections. He is the scariest

he is. He was scary until he was funny is the thing because like I, you know, when they fail, they're always funny. Yeah. Christopher and I were talking about this before the podcast and like during the during the final debate between Blake Masters and Markelly, like I'll just swear on this podcast. We're allowed to say whatever the hell we want. Perfect. In their final debate between Markelly and Blake Masters, Markelly's like final statement, his concluding argument was essentially pointing at Blake Masters and going, look at this fucking freak. Yeah. Yeah. It was great. It was which is one of the most powerful things he could do in politics because he was just like like the specific thing he did because his language was was I think a lot more nuanced

than that because what he was saying is Blake Masters for those of you who don't know, like one of the most like famous moments of this campaign is he put out a campaign ad that was just him parking in the desert with a silenced handgun. Yeah. Which is a child's gun first off. But anyway, mentioning twice that the gun was German and like and then firing it blindly at nothing. And then the ad ends. No, no, he fired it across the lake. Yeah. Yeah. We don't see him shoot at something. We don't see him hit a target. He is his stances, dog. Anyway, but it's just him taking a silenced pistol out repeatedly mentioning that the gun is German firing it and then the ad ends. That's the whole ad. It's like 90 seconds of him just

fondling this gun and badly shooting it. It's worth giving the context that the person he's running against is someone whose wife was shot in the head. Yes. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Because Martin Kelly's very nearly assassinated. So that's but it's also just like, look, guns are a big part of American life. A lot of politicians have had, including Democrats, have ads that involve guns. And usually it's like, here is me hunting, you know, or even like here is me at the range with friends engaging in a thing that many Americans do. Masters was just blindly shooting a.22 caliber handgun after repeatedly mentioning that it's German. Yeah. It was like someone showed an alien like a regular campaign ad of someone

shooting a gun and then. Yes. I mean, it's funny that that's the term that you use because that was a term that was flying around like Arizona social media, the entire campaign. It was like Blake Baster's looks like an alien. Yeah. So that's what happens when you get pumped with Peter Teal money for so. So he has this and he has a couple of others like he is he is on. He's a number one. He worked with Peter Teal for years. He's doing all sorts of fucking goo shit on Twitter, like really mask off fascist unhinged shit. And Mark Kelly in the debate isn't just like, look at this freak. He's like, hey, we all know guys like this who talk about how dangerous and how scary they are, but they they've never done anything. They're just like weirdos trying to

scare you so that you'll think that they're they're powerful and like don't don't fall for it. And it was perfect. And the good news is that Arizona voters did not fall for it because no, they sure did. You know, not only did Blake Masters lose by the best performing Republicans in Arizona were their House candidates. Like the statewide House popular vote for the for US Congress, not the state House, was I think Republicans want it or are going to win it by like five. So Kari Lake already drastically underperformed that by six because she's going to lose. And then to Blake Masters underperformed his House candidates by like 10 or 11. Unbelievable. It's it's I mean, it it really goes to show that whatever most Americans want,

they don't want a fucking weirdo fascist freak threatening an astronaut's wife with a gun. No, really briefly, like also like on this note of all of the queer and trans candidates who won, I will point out this follows the pattern that has taken shape in the last decade, which is that he's supposedly well, not supposedly they are. But like these red and purple states in the south and the Midwest are sending queer and trans people into the halls of power a lot faster than deep blue states on the west coast and in the northeast. The first non I unfortunately forget their name, but the first non binary state legislator in the country was elected in Oklahoma. And they're not only non binary, they are black and Muslim non binary. So it's like, you know,

these these communities as Christopher's like a these communities, you matter, and we can't forget about them, we can't abandon them. But also like not just they matter, but like, as I will happily argue with any political operative from either coast, we are much more likely to see some kind of progressive resurgence, resurgence in this country led by candidates out of the south or Midwest than either. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Well, and like, look at like, this is one of the everything that that you know, so I have a lot of friends in the like Michigan teachers union, right. And, you know, like right right now what is happening in Michigan is like in Michigan is that the teachers union is literally sending lists of laws, like to to the governor that are like,

you need to get rid of this. And you know, if you look at like, like almost every other Democratic party, like in the country is just constantly at war with their teachers unions. And, you know, and then you look at like, you look at what's happening in Wisconsin, and it's like, and you look at what's happening in Michigan. Well, also Wisconsin too was like, they have a much more labor friendly, like Democratic Party than like fucking San Francisco, or like the ghouls in like, like honestly, the ghouls in the Chicago machine, right? Langston Eric Adams office. Yeah, right. Like, there's there's there's, I don't know, they're like, everyone ignores the Midwest, and we're here, damn it, and we do good things.

Well, it's a little bit like, I mean, it's a little bit of what we were saying earlier that like, when you've got these states, where because of the population layout, the the Democratic Party doesn't have to struggle to actually win for the most part. You're a hell of a lot. Number one, the party becomes effectively a cartel. So they're very good at stopping any like, upstart young progressive non binary queer trans people from like, getting a hold on in local politics, you know, we just had the most progressive member of the Portland City Council ousted by corporate business interests. And, you know, it which is very different from the trend that you're seeing in places like Montana and places like Oklahoma with a lot of these very progressive,

you know, young candidates, and it's because number one, maybe the state parties are a little more willing to throw a Hail Mary, but also just like those individual people, the people running in the folks doing their campaign have had to be a lot harder and a lot smarter to survive surrounded by people who hate them. And I think also like, there's one of the ways that I was pretty sure that this wasn't going to be a red tsunami was so I have some friends, I have friends who go to Wheaton College. And for people who don't know what Wheaton College is, it is like, we're sorry that we're about to inform you. Yeah, so Wheaton College is one of like, I don't know, maybe the second behind like bring him young, like most right, we gave

evangelical college in the US, like they they famously, it's not as bad as the liberty. Yeah, yeah, it's like number three, right. But like, so this is the sort of this is like the intellectual center of like, sort of evangelical politics, like, let me make sure I have this right. Yeah, like Billy Graham's family has funneled money into Wheaton College for decades now. And okay, so like Wheaton is a like, broadly speaking, like a fucking ferociously hostile place to be anything other than a like a cishet white person, right? It is like, unbelievably homophobic, it is really anti symmetric. And like a few months ago, I was walking, like through Wheaton downtown to visit a friend. And in the middle of fucking Wheaton downtown, there were someone who

on in their in their like fucking lawn had had like had a giant pride flag. And like it wasn't like it was like it was like the the the the the like the brown pride flag too, right? Like that was like, even like five years ago, that would have been unimaginable. Like you would have been like you would have been fucking chased out of town by a mob. Like, and that it's just there now. And I don't know, like they haven't been run out. It's still there. No, I it's literally yes, everything that Christopher just said. And you know, these are people that Christopher Christopher and I grew up with. Like we literally I was there was a granddaughter of Billy Graham in my high school class. And I think, you know, as much as you know, these people

are not going to be socialists or progressives anytime soon, they are very much like normie, moderate Democrats now. But there were a lot of suburban white people who got very turned off by Trump from the Republican Party. And I think the this midterm is the confirmation that barring, you know, some kind of economic catastrophe that always always throws elections to the out of power party. These normie whites of urbanites are not going back. And we, you know, when you look at trends across the country, you know, JB Pritzker won DuPage County, which is the county that Wheaton is in. Yeah, which is like, you know, this is, yeah, like this used to be within Christopher and I's lifetimes. This used to be a county that Republicans banked on getting 300,000

votes out of on a statewide margin level. And now it's being won up and down by Democrats, like Democrats flipped the county executive office in DuPage County this year. So like Chicago suburbs are trending are continuing to trend left. Atlanta suburbs are continuing to trend left. The like Raleigh, Durham area, North Carolina is trending left, the Texas urban areas are trending left. And this isn't just like in comparison to 2016. This is in comparison to 2020, two years ago, which was a democratic environment. So the fact that these counties are swinging left in a year where the country, even though the overall results were fine, the country definitely swung right. Like these people are not going back and not just that these people are not going back,

but the ones who are staying Republicans aid, they're moving, they're leaving the suburbs and they're establishing their little new white flight outposts in other places. And the people who are replacing them are largely people of color. Like the suburbs today in America are 60% white as compared to in the year 2000, when they were something like 75 to 80% white. So this is, I think this year was the confirmation we needed that this is a permanent trend that the suburbs from now on are either going to be a wash or even frankly, just democratic places where Democrats will net votes. And this is all there still is a lot of fear. And there still is reason to be very concerned about the ability of the GOP's power to push things in a revanchist direction

in an anti democratic election to remove the ability of people. Because that that is, you know, we're seeing them talk right now, we're seeing guys like Matt Walsh, Christopher Ruffo talk right now about the need to like stop young people from voting to like crack down on male voting. Like this is not not to say like, all right, it's all done. But it this is like, I guess the thing that's that's optimistic about this overall is that it is it's evidence that the the the the there was this kind of open question after Trump won in 2016. And if one thing you could look at you could look at 2018 you could look at 2020 now 2022 and go like, well, clearly the trend since then has been for the GOP to lose big in most of these elections. But that was also

anything but clear kind of as a result of of 2020 and the way COVID fucked things up. And this this does seem to like submit that that like, yeah, it may it may have in the long run proved to be a major major tactical failure to to have gone for this guy the way that they did. Oh, yeah, I mean, and we can only hope. I mean, I personally from an entertainment factor cannot wait for the DeSantis versus Trump primary. I will be I will be rooting for Trump because he is funnier online. And also, I don't think it would make a substantive difference in whether or not like who would be the nominee because DeSantis is just Trump without the charisma. But I think, yeah, hopefully, like, we saw the Republican Party pay a price this year for arguing

the first time in a long time for their insanity. And it's good to see that that happened. Hopefully, it will happen again. And I will also note for anyone listening who does, you know, you care about elections, you want to get involved somewhere. The next somewhere for you to get involved in is the state of Wisconsin, where the there is a state Supreme Court seat up for election in April. If Democrats win that seat, they will flip the Supreme Court in Wisconsin. And that means that the absolutely insane Republican gerrymanders in that state, which pretty much render the state of Wisconsin a non democracy, will likely get overturned if Democrats are able to flip the Wisconsin Supreme Court, which would mean a lot of good things can happen for a lot

of people who live in that state. Okay, there is one other thing that is like, basically unrelated to this that I want to touch on before we close up, which is that the extent to which the Republicans have sort of entered chaos mode now, a with with Trump just sort of like going off on DeSantis and like that there's a war happening. And then secondly, because they see it looks like they've gotten the chaos mode configuration of their house majority. Yep. Yes. And you anyone who pays attention to Congress, I would encourage you to get very, very familiar with the term discharge petition, which is a mechanism by which if you have a majority of the house is willing to sign a piece of paper that says we should put this bill on the floor,

no matter what it goes to the floor, no matter what. And I think you're probably going to see Democrats successfully put a lot of bills on the house for in the next two years, because they're going to get they're going to pick off the Republican moderates in the Northeast to sign these these pieces of paper. We should I think we should explain what exactly the Republican position looks like because it's Oh, sure. So it's so I should caveat this with the statement that there is still like, I would say a 5 percent chance that Democrats managed to scrap like scrape their way to a one seat majority. It's not likely by any means, but like it is still theoretically on the table mostly because Lauren Boebert managed to put herself in a position where she might

actually lose. And but default modal outcome, I would say is Republicans end up with a three or four house seat majority in. But what that means is that we get Calvin ball for the next two years, essentially, because Kevin McCarthy as a person is well, a he's like very unintelligent in general. And this is like a very common sentiment that you will run into in people who pay attention to Congress. He is not personally capable of managing a house majority of four. This is so widely accepted that Nancy Pelosi was willing to go on the record in an interview the other day saying that. And so who knows, Kevin McCarthy may not even end up being the speaker. We may not have a speaker until March because no one would get 218 votes. But whoever

has that job, whatever Republican has that job, it is going to be the most thankless job of their life that they will suffer through for the next two years. Because, you know, the the pundit class and political operatives love to talk about how ideologically diverse the Democratic Party is in the house. And it's true because like on the left wing end of the caucus, you have people like Rashida Slave and Ellen Omar and the right wing and you have people like Henry Cuellar who tragically survived his primary this year. But I think it has gone under the radar that Republicans in the House are arguably more ideologically diverse than Democrats are because the moderates for the moderate Republicans in the House are like your very standard,

like socially liberal, fiscally conservative types that were very popular in like 2010. Like you had like some of these northeastern Republicans who were more than happy to vote for same sex marriage, though they would probably vote for like to codify Roe, they would probably vote to codify birth control legal like reality. And on the other end, you have Marjorie Taylor Green and like if MTG. Yeah, if there is a person on this earth who is capable of managing that caucus, I don't know who they are. I don't think anyone knows who they are. And I think that the smartest thing that that person could do is not take the job and let someone else take the fall for what is going to be two years of chaos that will most likely hurt the Republican brand a lot in the

next two years. Yeah, that's like one of the things that actually makes me like slightly optimistic is that like the Republican Party like isn't like a diverse coalition and it had been being held together sort of but like by Trump. And now Trump's not on Twitter anymore. And Twitter may not exist by like the time we get a speaker. Oh, yeah. Well, it's also I think I might add, Chris, it's not just by Trump and a part of why Trump was able to get the position is it's it's a mix of Trump and owning the Libs, right? Like that's that's a huge part of why the most visible members of this caucus are where they are. Like there's no there's no Marjorie Taylor Green, right, without the way that particular social reinforcement pattern works. And yeah, I think that like that's not like

number one if Twitter goes away, which could have happened by the time you listen to this episode that really gets gets in the way of their ability to own the Libs. But also, if they're just getting their asses kicked up and down the country, they're no longer owning the Libs, the Libs have not been owned. No, they have not. And I think the other you know, the other consideration here is that we like to talk a lot in this country, because it's true about neither party ever puts forth a substantive policy agenda. And there are a lot of Republican political operatives who are running around right now complaining and saying that Republicans lost because they failed to offer a viable alternative, except that's not true. Republicans did offer a policy agenda in

this midterm. And that policy agenda was Christian nationalism. And American voters took one look at that and said, Are you fucking for real? Yeah, like that's the thing that like everyone like like people like all the fucking New York Times columnists, like people don't understand that like there's maybe 30% of the population who actually likes that shit. And everyone else in the country is like, What the fuck? Yeah. And, you know, but you know, like the like the actual sort of median person in the US is so much less like that than the median person that every pundit imagines that like the version of reality that exists in sort of like the minds of the media class, like it's not true. Yeah. They've created like incredible sandcastles in

their mind. Now the tide's like washing them away. I don't know if the tide's washing them away. I think we can we can only hope that the New York Times gets washed out to sea. But I think, you know, I sorry, go for it. No, no, no, please. I was just going to say like, you know, obviously the next two years are going to be the next two years. And no one can predict the future. Anyone who anyone who tells you in literally the next 18 months that they know how the 2024 elections are going to go is lying to you and you should block them and perhaps report them to like whatever like non-retributive forms of authority exist in your local area. But my, you know, based on how this went, if the same trends play out for the next two years,

which would be suburbs continue swinging left, Democrats continue to rack up problems with minority voters, but like not to the extent that we're going to like lose urban seats anytime soon. And Republicans continue racking up margins in the states and like the seats that they're already winning by 80 points, which helps them on a statewide level, but does not help them in the US House. My I would say like, assuming the current trends continue, the trends we've had since 2016, that would mean Democrats flip back the House in 2024. It would also mean that we are once again in like the fight of our lives for the Senate as we likely will be for every single cycle for the next 10 years. So, you know, just kind of get used to that while you can when you

have the breather. But yeah, like we had an OK midterm that was literally a year ago looking like it was going to be possibly the worst midterm wipeout possibly possibly the end of the Republic as a matter of literally, literally, yes. So, you know, 24 might be good. I think the responsible thing to do now is to close out by each giving one of our unhinged predictions for what we're going to see in 2024. And I'm going to start, I think we're going to see Musk and McConaughey vie for the governor of Texas once Greg Abbott is forced out God from a sex scandal. That's my that's my call proved to me show show when when it happens everybody everybody allow me. Yeah, some French fries. Oh God. It's going to happen. Calling it now. Tom Brady,

I reckon Tom Brady's going to Tom Brady's going to take a swing at it at Texas. No, one of those states up in where it's cold and rain all the time. Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, one of those. Yeah, I assume he's from broadly speaking, Illinois to Wisconsin. Yeah. He is he would be running in New England. Please do not pin that on us. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, bro, but not that kind of cold. Like, yeah, just just gray, not like like miserable cold, like you will have from there. Yeah, Tom Brady running in a place where you can't grow tomatoes is my prediction. That feels good. After his massive success, selling the the the hit crypto platform FTX. What can't Tom Brady do? Who knows? Don't answer. Don't ask that question.

Put that out there, Robin. Win games for the Buccaneers. Yeah, yeah. To Germany. Yeah. Survive eating what any normal human being would eat on a given day. Garrison. I don't know. I don't I don't care about this type of thing very much. That's the perfect reason to make a prediction. Unhinged prediction. Yep. I think one of the funniest things is that earlier this year, there was this big Bitcoin account who said that if things continue, Bitcoin is going to be a major factor in the midterms, which is really funny. Not wrong. So I'm saying that what's what's what's an even dumber cryptocurrency? Doge would be dogecoin. I was thinking of I was thinking of dogecoin is going to be a

significant factor in the 2024 election. Yeah. We still want to go. Mine is that mine is that okay. Pritzker is going to bring back like the old school democratic machine and Biden is going to fall out a window like Kamala Harris is going to sort of like turn up like they're going to drain a dam in 30 years and find her body and Pritzker is going to run again. Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah. He won't because he will have fallen out of a building that near the end of 2020, like the end of about 2023. Okay. That's your prediction that Joe Biden will fall out of a window. Pritzker is going to. Pritzker's definition of Prague. Like we all think that like the sort of like threat like the threat to bourgeois democracy

comes from the republic is it's not. It's Pritzker. Pritzker is going to coup the fucking country and probably 60 percent of the population is going to be completely on board because he's going to be less insane than like everyone that's been like in charge of this country for the last 50 years. Yep. And you know who's going to save democracy then? Matthew McConaughey. Yeah. Okay. That leaves me. What is my unhinged prediction? I don't think I'm going to top Christopher's prediction about J.B. Pritzker. You know, I think my unhinged prediction will be that Taylor Swift runs for Senate in Tennessee. Oh, God. Oh, she could do it. Yeah. Yeah. Don't, don't. Look, if she brings on, if she brings on the head of her fan club who went to jail in

Israel for refusing to serve in the IDF, she actually might get some progressive votes. That may have been untrue, sadly, the, uh, the Swiftie refusal, but maybe not. Really, really? Why, why'd you even introduce it? Why would you, why would you say that to me? Yeah, because not all of these beautiful things we believe in could be true. But Taylor Swift running for Tennessee, she would almost certainly be better than whoever is a Tennessee senator now, right? Yeah. It's now Colonel Sanders or someone basically the same as Colonel Sanders, I imagine. Colonel Sanders was a Kentucky. That's Kentucky. Yeah. Come on, come on, British. James. Colonel Sanders is Kentucky. It's called Kentucky Fried Chicken. James, that was basically

a slur. There is a type of guy epitomized by Colonel Sanders who also occupies all the Senate seats south of the Mason-Dixon line. That's not true. That's my stance and I'm sticking to it. I am pushing back on this. Yeah. Well, I'm going to watch a Foghorn Leghorn video because that's, that's who I'm thinking of now, James. All right, everybody. That's been the episode. Go. Vote Swift. Yeah. Vote another couple of times. Just make sure. Yeah. Look, the old Chicago motto, vote early, vote often. Yeah. Pay for, pay for a few meals. Everyone go to Colorado and vote against Lauren Puffins. Yeah. Yeah. Literally seven of you or whatever could swing this. Move to Colorado. We can't deal with her shit anymore. Fund raise in order to purchase

a huge number of drones and drop ballots over wherever it is in Colorado they count votes. I assume Denver? Yeah. Blanket Denver in your ballots and stop listening to podcasts. During the summer of 2020, some Americans suspected that the FBI had secretly infiltrated the racial justice demonstrations. And you know what? They were right. I'm Trevor Aaronson and I'm hosting a new podcast series, Alphabet Boys. As the FBI sometimes you get to grab the little guy to go after the big guy. Each season will take you inside an undercover investigation. In the first season of Alphabet Boys, we're revealing how the FBI spied on protesters in Denver. At the center of this story is a raspy voiced cigar-smoking man who drives a silver

hearse. And inside his hearse was like a lot of guns. He's a shark and not in the good and bad ass way. He's a nasty shark. He was just waiting for me to set the date, the time, and then for sure he was trying to get it to heaven. Listen to Alphabet Boys on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. What if I told you that much of the forensic science you see on shows like CSI isn't based on actual science? The problem with forensic science in the criminal legal system today is that it's an awful lot of forensic and not an awful lot of science. And the wrongly convicted pay a horrific price. Two death sentences and a life without parole. My youngest, I was incarcerated two days after her first birthday. I'm Molly

Herman. Join me as we put forensic science on trial to discover what happens when a match isn't a match and when there's no science in CSI. How many people have to be wrongly convicted before they realize that this stuff's all bogus. It's all made up. Listen to CSI on trial on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. I'm Lance Bass and you may know me from a little band called NSYNC. What you may not know is that when I was 23, I traveled to Moscow to train to become the youngest person to go to space. And when I was there, as you can imagine, I heard some pretty wild stories. But there was this one that really stuck with me about a Soviet astronaut who found himself stuck in space with no country to bring

him down. It's 1991 and that man Sergei Krekalev is floating in orbit when he gets a message that down on earth, his beloved country, the Soviet Union, is falling apart. And now he's left defending the Union's last outpost. This is the crazy story of the 313 days he spent in space, 313 days that changed the world. Listen to the last Soviet on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. Legal disclaimer. Okay, it's actually me, not the legal disclaimer guy from Metaclad, but we just wanted to mention that both of our guests today are members of UAW, but they do not speak on behalf of UAW. Okay, enjoy the podcast.

Uh, it could happen here. It's a podcast. It's a podcast. We're doing a podcast. It's a podcast. And today it's a podcast with me. I'm James and I'm joined by Chris and I'm joined by a couple of grad students from UC San Diego. Today we're going to talk about grad student strikes. We're going to talk about the grad student strike vote that's coming up at UC San Diego and some other grad student strikes that Chris and I have been part of back in the middle ages. Okay, so I'm joined today by Alex. Alex, you're studying. I'm trying to get this correct. Cancer genomics at UCSD. Is that correct? That is correct. Thanks for having me. Yeah, you're welcome. And Tyler Bell as well. And Tyler, you're a postdoc and you're doing Alzheimer's research.

Is that right? Yes. And you're both members of UAW? Yes, that's correct. I've been a member for at least two years, but yeah. Yeah. And I'm a member of the actual, the subset of UAW that just formed representing student researchers in completing their PhDs. So we'll explain all the details of that of course, start going forward. Yeah, I think maybe we should start there and explain kind of the economic relationship of PhD and postdoc students to the university. What work they do, and I guess as we were talking about beforehand, people might not even be familiar with the fact that you get paid by the university in many of these positions, right? So can you explain like how that works? Yeah, definitely. So yeah, as you mentioned, we do in our various

roles as graduate students, teachers and postdocs. We do a lot of work, majority of the work in fact, that is critical for the university to function as it does. And we do that in a few different roles. Some of us are paid to teach or TA classes. We call those academic student employees who are represented by one of our unions, UAW 2865. The remainder of PhD students are actually paid directly to do their research. And this is usually funded off of grants or other money that the university has your marked for research. So as we are progressing towards our degrees, we are doing work that is productive in our labs to get papers out, get grant funding coming in, and we receive a stipend to perform that work. Those students are known as graduate

student researchers or GSRs who are represented by a new union that just formed because it actually only became recently legal to form such a union in the state of California. We are represented by SRU bargaining for our first contract. And then we have the postdocs, which Tyler can probably talk more about, who are students who have completed their, I'm sorry, I should get one really clarified students, they are they are employees of the university who have completed their degree, so are no longer students and are doing research work in labs, usually driving their own projects forward under supervision of professors. So they are represented by a third union that's part of this sort of collective organizing called UAW 5810.

Well, you have postdocs unions? Yeah, that's so cool. I think the one here at UC is actually the biggest and one of the first ones that formed. I remember I was on a Wikipedia page, which I shouldn't use as an academic, but I totally saw us on there and I was like, holy game away. Yeah. Yeah. And I think it's, it's fascinating because if there are all these like memes that you'll see as a graduate student, and then it's like, when you finish your PhD, where it's like, you always think that you're going to get off the like, the grind, right? Like, you're like, Oh, I'll do my MA and then I'll get off and then I'll do my PhD and then the people will respect me and I'll be compensated for the massive amount of work I do. And then

like, I'll just finish this postdoc. And then you're like, Oh, I'm 55. You know, like it's, all of those positions are heavily exploited by universities that make a metric shit ton of money from these people who, as you said, do most of the work that keeps the university running. So perhaps we could talk about the issues that are at stake that are leading to this, this strike authorization vote. And maybe if we go through a little bit of a timeline as well, that would be great. Yeah. So maybe Tyler, maybe you could like explain the 5810 timeline and I can talk a little bit about this or you and I guess kind of to a 65 point. Yeah. So chronologically, the postdocs were up for their contract negotiation, which that's just to set our wages,

benefits and workplace safety and other types of protections we want. And that actually came up, I think in September of 2021. And I could be wrong with the date specifically, so much has changed. But we initially back in 2021, started actually asking people what they wanted to see in their new contract, like our members, because the union isn't like, like, I, if I didn't care about the union or no one else cared, it wouldn't exist. Like, it's the postdocs. And we have to take out like a couple of hours a week to do this thing. And sometimes it's 20 hours on top of our research, which is 40 hours. And so during that time, we surveyed everyone got the demands that people wanted. And the top two issues that people asked

for that they want it changed was our wages and also the housing. We wanted affordable housing, because right now, you know, over 70% of academic workers, including the postdocs who you would think, you know, you have a PhD, this is a time you can finally have affordable housing. And you don't have to worry about food scarcity and all these other things that you've worried about as a graduate student. So just take this in the context of like, we're postdocs, we're supposed to be like the most paid, or at least a better off because we have our PhD, think about like what that means for the graduate students and those that aren't yet at that stage yet. And so when we went forward with our proposals, we create a lot of other things that we thought were important,

including things like transit, bargaining demands to make public transit like affordable for postdocs, because currently, we don't get any kind of like free pass for that. They don't even consider it. In fact, you know, they, they probably think we all have cars, which isn't true, because a lot of postdocs are international scholars. We were also asking for childcare support, because currently, like a good bit of, you know, our postdocs have children, which is normal, because this is a normal like family creation time or whatever you want to call it. But it can be one of the only times as an academic when it when it really sort of doesn't massively disadvantage your career to have to start a family, right? Exactly. And like postdocs, like the whole proposition of a postdoc

was, you know, there's not enough faculty spots for once you get a PhD. And postdocs now can last five, if not longer, like five years or longer. And there's a new position called an academic researcher, which is the type of like title that you get when you can no longer be a postdoc. But it's also because there's just not enough faculty. So they put you into a different title to do research. And collectively, both us postdocs and people that are academic researchers, we don't get any affordable childcare. We don't have affordable housing. And our wages are below the cost of living. And currently, we went through the proposals back then. And we, over time, a year and a half, have not really made any leeway on these proposals that actually changed the material

conditions for postdocs. Like the university has been, you know, bargaining in bad faith that we have multiple unfair labor practice lawsuits against from our public relations board from the employers. And three of those have been, sorry, let me get those numbers right. Multiple of those have actually been successfully have complaints filed against the university. Some of the things that the university has done, and particularly while we've been bargaining, is one, not bringing the information to the table that we request, like denying our request for information. They have also refused to bring the people that can make the type of decisions that we need to the table. And they've also been making unilateral changes to things like bullying policies

and other workplace issues without even being at the bargaining table. And the last thing that they've been doing during this process is serving members of our union outside of, like, the bargaining process, like we, we don't know about it. I mean, we did find out about it. And then we filed the, the complaint. And so right now we're at a point where we've gotten a lot of things, you know, kind of like moved on in terms of things that aren't compensation in terms of our bargaining, like things that we won, such as bullying protections, that was something that we actually had to like have a big action for to actually get that on the table to move. So currently, we won protections against bullying, which is kind of like, pretty enormous because in academia,

the university says we're against bullying, and that they have all these resources for you, but the resources always end at, we're right, you're wrong. And now we have something in our contracts, not just for that postdocs and academic researchers, but also for the other bargaining units to actually protect us in a process that like we could grieve it as, you know, you represented workers. And so right now, the reason that we had to authorize the strike, especially for our group as postdocs and academic researchers, because they started bargaining kind of like, maybe further along in that year with us, but they're kind of at the same place of like, not getting the same type of responses. And we just want them to actually come to the table,

bring the people that can make the decisions so that we can have, you know, affordable housing, fair wages to actually do the research that we do here. And I just want to say that we bring a lot of value to the university through grants, in particular as postdocs. So we do most of the writing of research papers, conducting the experiments. People think that if people think that faculty sit there and run a wet lab and actually do the work, you know, the work of the wet labs, you know, that would be an amazing faculty person, but they're really busy in terms of like having to write grants themselves. We do the bulk of the work and actually making the research happen. We do a bulk of the training in terms of the graduate students and the undergrads that are in

the lab. And so we provide an enormous value to the university. But at the same time, while we provide these values, the university doesn't want to give us a fair living condition or affordable housing. And the last thing I'll say, and I'll let Alex talk about the other units, is that, you know, we bring a ton of value to the university because of these grants. And for every hundred dollars of that grant that is given to the university, the university charges things like the NIH, you know, you know, $58 in indirects. So this is a ghost money that we don't know where it goes. Our PIs don't get to have a say over. And that's money that usually goes to things like capital projects that could go back to keeping, you know, the postdocs actually living in an okay

living situation. Can we just explain what capital projects are? So capital projects are things like, you know, planning out building buildings that they want and other things, things that aren't really like compensation based or employee based, you know, because the university like you see is the biggest landowner. And so they obviously want more and more things that they can develop, or lands that they can buy. And that's kind of what they kind of focus many of these indirects on. And I really don't know the clear picture on indirects. And that's kind of the problem is that we don't know where all this money kind of goes. If people obviously lots of listeners aren't in San Diego, the scale of construction at UCSD is incredible. Like I've been here for 15 years now

and I swear every time I go back there's a new building like and they can turn to student housing. It's nearly all student housing, I think that they've built. But yeah, and if I can jump in about one of those, which relates a lot to why graduate students have become more active on this campus. Three or four of those extraordinarily large buildings you're talking about, we're actually intended to be built as subsidized graduate student housing where you would be, you know, you get on a wait list, you're guaranteed once you get off the wait list, you can live there for two years and pay below market rent. That lasted for a little bit of time. But the university just a couple of years ago or so almost doubled the price for those units.

They tried to hide it behind saying that their capacity increases. But what they're saying is for the same prices before you can live with two people in a very small square footage studio apartment. But really that studio is now just double. So that is one of the things certainly that we are concerned about is that, yeah, money of a significant portion of the university's budget does go into these capital improvement projects, which are nominally intended for student and postdoc benefit, but which tend to come back and not be quite as helpful in the long run. Yeah, I mean, it seems like they're just doing real estate speculation, and then doing rent extraction from it, which...

Yeah, and this is something they've done, like they did this, there's a very, very similar thing in what, like 2009. Like, again, like they built, what I built into your building, it was affordable for a short period of time, and then it suddenly became completely unaffordable. And they've really consistently extracted rent from the people that they are underpaying. Yeah, and those buildings were actually, this incident even got a lot of faculty on our side because those buildings were a major draw for how we were able to recruit new people to come and do research with us. As we were saying, yeah, the cost of living here is really high. You're not going to get a huge stipend or salary, but we do have this subsidized housing. And

people had actually already committed to do their PhD here in labs at the university, and then the rent increase came out that April or May, and people said, well, no, and then a bunch of people decommitted from programs. So it was a significant issue here, but they have not backed off of that. Yeah, and the problem with like the university being one of the biggest landlords is that when they increase the rents for these even grad housing, it affects everyone else. So like the price is like my current rent, I live maybe a mile away from campus. My rent was, you know, 1700, which was eating up most of my income anyway, and it went up to 2500. And, you know, this is directly tied to like the university setting a higher market rate, which then allows

them to hurt everyone else that lives, you know, not just in around UCSD, but also in San Diego generally. Yeah, one of the big things about that we're trying to get the university to understand, and one of the reasons I'm proud of the demands that we're making in this round of bargaining is the effect we have on the local economy. And people who aren't even affiliated with the university have their lives affected based on the rent and based on the cost of things, because of the economic footprint that we have. And as Tyler mentioned, one of our demands is some more subsidized transit passes. The university already subsidizes a significant amount of transit, but it's not enough. And it's not enough to actually really

make a difference in terms of emissions in our region. So we're trying to raise both our own working conditions as well as make meaningful changes in the university's impact in the region. And in response to that, the university released in part a very funny statement the other day that accused us and used transit as an example, accuses us of having a quote social justice agenda. So I wasn't quite sure if the university or Ron DeSantis wrote that particular text release, but it was quite funny. The more I'm thinking about this, right, this is a public university. Why are they even charging rent? They own the land, right? Wait, why are they even charging rent in the first place? What is, oh my god, like, this is just so

absurd. The housing example I brought up was funded through what they very proudly refer to as a public-private partnership. So that's where the money is going. Oh, great. It's going to investors. And recently for the postdocs, their solution to our housing crisis was they obtained some building in downtown San Diego, which is, you know, 12 or more miles away from campus, and the building starts at like rents of $3,000 or more. But like I said, or fish building. Yeah, with the one with the creepy bed and the closet that comes out and kills your cat. But the what? It has like a closet that folds out. Oh, good. Comes out the wall. Is that their extent to downtown? Yeah, I've been trying to PRA a bunch of stuff about that

building and they've been quite reticent to hand it over. And oddly, so, Alex, is there any more context you wanted to add from your side about like, is about sort of what is driving people to ask for a strike authorization vote? Yeah, definitely. I mean, our concerns as graduate students are certainly very similar to a lot of the concerns that postdoctoral students have, except that we make even less money than they do. So certainly urgent on the compensation side, our units are demanding a minimum graduate student stipend of $54,000 a year. Whereas none of us make more than 33 or 34 right now. And that's very dependent on the program. And very dependent on your source of funding. So most make quite less than that. We also have

a number of other issues that have come up and caused problems for students that we want to be able to have a union in order to rectify. I mentioned that our student research is United Union is actually new. We're bargaining for our first contract. And we think we're going to be able to get a lot of practical benefits out of that, not just, you know, in terms of a contract, but actually something where we can have some parity and some organization to come to bat for us when the university creates issues. For example, the university has known this for a long time, but the payroll system that manages graduate students' stipends and fellowships and stipend disbursements is a bit unreliable for reasons that they can't quite explain.

Oh boy. We had this at, so I wasn't a grad student, but I was an undergrad when our you Chicago's grad students went on strike. And that was a big thing of like people, like people would get paid, the university would, sometimes they wouldn't get paid enough, they wouldn't get paid at all. There was another time where they accidentally get overpaid, and the university wouldn't tell them and then they just take all the money out of their bank account. Yeah, yeah, catastrophe. Yeah. Is it similar things here? Very much so. Yeah, I got overpaid and then I got overpaid once. Yeah, there is, at least my personal story with this is pretty much ever since, so I applied for and received an NIH individual fellowship for all

the other nerds out there. It's an F31 NIH fellowship, but essentially what that says is the NIH likes my research proposal and they are going to fund a portion of the rest of my PhD. So in a sense, I've offset the cost of my labor by bringing an extra a few tens of thousands of dollars to the university. However, the processing for that has not been smooth. And there are months where I simply have to remind them to pay me. And when that paycheck doesn't come through my very hardworking program coordinator, it's not her fault, but she has been open support tickets, she has to go through 10 different levels of bureaucracy to find out where the holdup is. And so what that results in is people oftentimes not getting significant

portions of their stipend and tell well into the beginning of the first or second week of the month. I personally am been lucky enough to build up some savings living here, but many students, especially our first years coming right out of college, have not been able to do that. And a lot of times at the first of the month, we have people, people will come to me and say, they just didn't, they, I don't know why my stipend check didn't work. I can't pay rent or I can't get groceries. And these issues have been going on. This has not been one time things or sporadic things. These are things that have been continuously going on for years. And what we're really hoping for is that with the creation of this student researchers union, that we will be

able to not just, you know, send polite emails and say, Hi, can you pay me if you get a chance? We will actually have a literal international union that will be sending those emails and say, you know, you fix this or by the terms of the contract, we get X, Y and Z damages. And we're hoping that that leads to improvements in the system as a whole, because it will be more expensive. So that is certainly one of the reasons we formed SRU in our after a, a brief vote to strike for recognition because the university ignored the employee employee relations board of California, which resulted in some very spicy press releases from pub, which is great. But we did eventually get recognition and now hopefully in a couple

and a month or so we'll have a contract. To explain for people as well who aren't familiar, if you're teaching, right, you may not have been paid over the summer in some positions. Like I know I wasn't in mind. So like a late payment in September or even waiting till October, like is you're already at the bottom of your savings. Like there were, there were full quarters, that quarters at UCSD where like I lived in my car because it didn't make it all the way through to summer on the savings I had, you know, so it really is. And I'm sure there are a lot of still like unhoused graduate students at UCSD because of the cost of living and the wages are so divergent. Yeah. Hey, Chris, you know what won't make you live in your car?

Oh, God, there's no way you can actually. That's right. It's going to be the washes that have a patrol again. The San Diego Police Department will let you live in your car. Todd Gloria. Okay. Yeah, this is bought to you by landlords in Jordy's Adverts. And we're back. And so I wanted to talk about with some of the actions that have been taken by student organizations so far and also some of the repercussions that have come from those actions because again, student organizing is a little different and I want people to understand that. So maybe if it makes sense to start with this 2020 Wildcat Strike, we can start there. If you want to start further back, then we can start further back too.

You know, 2020 is probably about the extent of my, how far my experience goes back. But I can tell kind of the story of that a little bit. There was a movement that we refer to as COLA, which stands for cost of living adjustment and convenient as very convenient acronym, which resulted in people coming to protest with empty bottles of Coke on a stick. And that was a really common sign. It's fantastic. But that was a movement that started at University of California, Santa Cruz. One of the, as people aren't familiar with UC, it is really actually many campuses together in one system. And this particular one started at our campus in Santa Cruz. And it was what is called a Wildcat Strike, which is if you're not familiar with unions,

that is, at least in America, there are very careful rules that you have to follow of when exactly you are allowed to call a legally protected strike. And that's often dependent on your contract or the labor laws of your state. But it is possible for workers to get together without the explicit approval of their union and take the added risk that involves to hold a labor stoppage. So I'm not sure of the exact number, but somewhere between 50 and 100 or 200 or so TAs, so teaching assistants at the Santa Cruz campus, decided to withhold teaching and also final exam and semester or sorry, quarter grades for a quarter in, I believe this would have been fall or fall of 2019. And they held, they held essentially daily pickets and protests

at their central entrance of their campus. And this resulted in quite an extreme response from Santa Cruz administration, University of Santa Cruz administration. They called in the California Highway Patrol. Also, there's, I will, I've asked, I'll send this to Chris and James put in the footnotes, but there is a vice article where someone did a lot of public records requests and found out that the FBI was also involved, or at least FBI provided technology was involved. There may have been sort of counterterrorism units involved in the state in interesting ways. But essentially, there was a highly militarized response to what was essentially a few grad students not doing grades. So this response, the images that came out of this, people getting

arrested for being in the street and such started to actually provoke sympathy actions across the rest of the campus. And there was really a campus wide or a system wide movement starting to build. And then March of 2020 happened. And almost all of us are labs shut down, the campuses shut down. Those of us who work from home could, those of us who couldn't often had, you know, many other struggles to deal with and that kind of killed the pandemic essentially killed that movement. But at the same time, you know, these, you know, U of W 265 and U of W could get 10 already existed, SRU was starting to get formed at this time, we actually managed to get car check recognition during the pandemic where no one could actually go to one central point

and get cards. So I'm quite proud of that. We sort of rebuilt off of kind of sort of the ashes of that movement. And even though it was not, and I personally support it, but even though it was not a university sort of, or excuse me, certainly not university supported, but union supported movement. I think it really helped to kind of plant seeds for graduate students and postdocs having some, you know, some degree of labor consciousness. When I was doing walkthroughs to get people signed up for the union, get people to support on the strike, they would say, you know, they haven't obviously been keeping track of all the bargain, but say, Oh, yeah, I remember, is this like in Santa Cruz? I remember what they did. And people would be in and be ready,

you know, to get involved. So it was a deferred kind of benefit given the pandemic. But I think it helped get a lot of the energy that we have today. Yeah, that's great to see actually, because I know we really struggled with sort of political consciousness on the, on the, among the grad students in my time at UCSD. And yeah, I guess it makes sense. Like the, I remember, like, I were talking to some people who were sort of involved with it and like watching the videos coming out of you, like that was, I think, like, probably the most intense military response of ever. I think I've ever seen to a strike in the US. It was wild. Like, yeah. The university chancellor, chancellor of Santa Cruz at that time, bragged, or I don't know if it

was bragged or complained that they were spending $300,000 a day on that response. Yeah, they went incredibly hard. I want to kind of get into why, like, the university is really, really strong, strongly dislike strikes. And partly because they rely heavily on underpaid graduate student labor, right, and are increasingly relying heavily on underpaid adjunct labor as well, to take the place of these expensive tenure track positions. So can we talk about a little bit about, like, what it means to strike as a grad student, because it's not the same strike as a grad student as it is to strike if you work on a production line, right? Like, it really can make a serious impact on your whole career. And it can make a serious impact

on your relationship, perhaps with your supervisor or advisor or mentor. And so can you one of you or both of you explain a little bit about the repercussions that come from striking as a graduate student? Yeah, I'm happy to share my thoughts. And then, Tyler, you can maybe talk about what the postdocs are thinking. From the TA perspective, I think, I don't want to, I'm not currently, I'm currently a student researcher, so I'm not currently teaching. I think, in that sense, it makes, there's a little more cut and dry. It's you're not going to teach your discussion section, you're not going to grade your exams. Those are very concrete things you can do that are sort of separate from your research work. For those of us paid to do research, it's a little bit

harder to figure out where exactly you're, sometimes your labor for the university is and where you're kind of research and not wanting to sort of harm yourself. Like, I know people who have planned their advancements to candidacy during this time, and I think they're still going through with that, because we can say, well, that's more academic, that's more your personal kind of progress in life. And so those sort of things will continue. But I think it's one of the things that sort of important is sort of your day-to-day work in the lab. And not necessarily just on your research project, but on just sort of maintaining things, answering questions, communicating with collaborators, sharing your results with people, helping undergraduates in

the lab, helping, you know, prepare figures or prepare text for your advisor to submit grants, and all these other things that are not necessarily like, I am doing this particular, you know, thing for my degree. So I know a lot of people are worried about, especially because in the life sciences, we have situations where we have experiments that go on for months, and they cost tens of thousands of dollars to run. And if you miss a time point on that, we're throwing months of your life and the window in that hurts yourself really more than the university. So it's been a, I think, especially because organizing grad student researchers is something new, at least in America. I think it's something that in the coming years will be kind

of considered more and people will kind of, I think, I hope, what I hope is people learn from our, whatever our experience happens to be next week when we walk out and start to kind of calibrate what does it look like, what is what is an effective work stoppage for a researcher look like. And I think people are, we've had a lot of discussions and we've had program meetings, so a bunch of students from my program got together and talked about this. And I think it might end up looking different for different people, but really what we're trying to communicate is, don't do something that's going to, you know, damage yourself, but do what you can to disrupt normal operations, show up at the picket, and make sure you communicate, you know,

to everyone around you why you're leaving and, you know, cause as much disruption as you can. That's kind of what our thinking is at the moment. Yeah. Anything else you want to add, Ty? Yeah. So I wanted to add that. So for this one, this strike, I mean, the reason that we're doing it is because they're not coming to the table in good faith. So I was going to correct my number. So we had 27 complaints that we filed with the California Public Employment Relations Board and six of those were actually official complaints to the University of California. And so this strike is a little different because it's, you know, it's interesting to have to explain to other

people why this is so important, especially in such a short timeframe. And so for postdocs, like on a day-to-day basis, we do so much research that every day matters and our employment schedules aren't very long. So I say that postdocs are generally in there for five years, but PIs don't want to keep a postdoc for a year or two or longer, especially like I've noticed a pattern here in academia in general that postdocs, some people prefer to keep them a year and two years because by the time you ask for pay raises or the time you ask for career development and to get to your next stage, you're not worth it to them anymore and they change you out. So when I come in as a postdoc, each position I've come in, every day mattered and setting up my research experiment,

setting up my papers, setting up what I was going to do for the job search because you don't have that much time. It takes, you know, six to eight months to get even an initial interview for a faculty job. And that's a rare thing that you would get anyway. I think about 2% of postdocs become faculty at this point. And so we're giving up a lot of, yeah, it's really bleak. And so like right now, I think the fact that we authorize this strike based on the bad faith bargaining, we did that because like things are so important, but we know what we're going to lose. So if you have to strike for weeks, that is lost experiments. That's lost time to do our publications, be competitive for this competitive job field. And also we're going to let down a lot of people

because we're kind of anchors in our lab for the undergraduates and the undergraduate students and also the techs in our lab. And so if we're gone, the lab just kind of dies, especially if the grad students walk out too. But I think we know that the value that I would get personally for my career, it isn't worth it if I see not only myself suffering each year, not being able to make my rent and able to feed myself, like eating one meal a day is not really great. And being able to afford one wardrobe this entire two years of employment is not great either. And I'm a postdoc and I see the graduate students who I was a graduate student two years ago, there's not a real border there. And seeing them suffer, you know, most of us postdocs

don't want to see anyone else have to go through that. So it's worth the lost time. And it's kind of incalculable, but I could say what we would lose because grants are so up in the air. But you know, we're talking millions of dollars for a grant cycle being lost. If a postdoc can't, you know, submit the application, we're talking, you know, what Alex said helps expensive this equipment and experiments are in these big labs in biology and engineering. So it's really immeasurable. And I think it's on the UC to come to the table and good faith and say, Hey, let's not do this. Let's not ruin their research and their teaching. Because that's the thing that we're here to support. And I just want to say that overall,

we're only less than 1% of UC's total budget. So what is it to give us a fair wage and a good housing so we can continue to not to continue to continue to our research and teaching and not have to go and strike and lose all of this? Yeah, I think it's very fair. You know what else? Only pays out 1% of their income to their employees. The Washington State Highway Patrol notes, not they pay. Yeah, yeah, it's disappointing, isn't it? Yeah, we're back. Yeah, so I think you've done a really excellent job of explaining sort of what's at stake and what people can stand to lose. I know it can be very confusing. Also, as a teacher, I will add like, what do you do when you're you're not supposed to communicate, right?

Like, so like, what about when your students email you, that can be very difficult or especially if it comes towards the time when you're writing application letters or you're writing letters of support for your your BA students who want to go into an MA or PhD program, like, you don't want like, if many of us teach as much out of vocation as for the 30 odd grand a year, we can make it a place where the cost of living is insane. And so like, we want to help those people because we care about our students. And so it can be very hard for us to to go and strike. I will say that we're very fortunate in the community college district here, which is a different system for people who aren't aware. And it's a entirely different university system.

We have a very strong union. And as a result, our iJoke faculty here are, I believe, some of the best paid in the country. They teach at a community college sometime, and that's exclusively thanks to a strong union and faculty being willing to back up that union. So like, it does work, which is nice to see. But let's talk about some of the actions that have been taken already. I understand it. Some folks occupied like a very busy intersection earlier this year in the spring, right? Do you want to talk about that? Yeah, that was the action that we had back in April to sort of raise awareness of the issues with bargaining and some of the other things that were going on at that time. And I was really impressed with how well it went actually in terms

of the number of students who came out, number who were actually willing to participate in that. But yeah, we got several hundred people all together, marched down to the intersection for our San Diego listeners at Via La Jolla and La Jolla Village Drive, just so you can get a picture of how important it has been in intersection this was, those of you who know it, and did not allow any car student at intersection for an entire rush hour, which was fantastic. We looked off a whole food. It's a real. Yeah, it took, I hope that San Diego PD build UCSD for that because they had about 50 officers controlling traffic to helicopters. It was quite a response. I talked to an undercover cop on the bridge over the highway they had. He was upset that he was missing something,

some baseball game or something. I don't know. Could have had a real job. I'm actually staring at that intersection right now. If I could tell you how busy it is, we were terrified of what, safety was the most important thing. And I think we did a good job being sure everyone was safe, but it's busy. It is a heartline over La Jolla. My first day in America, I was walking with another grad student to try and find some food, and we tried to cross that road, got stuck in the middle, got a J walking ticket, and I knew I'd made a great choice in coming to California at that time. Yeah, that is that road. It's like, if you want to cross all three ways, because it's one of our

stupid California roads, you can only cross the intersection on three sides. So if you want to go all the way around, that's going to be like five, six, seven minutes waiting at crosswalks. But that's for maybe a different podcast about our transportation nightmare here in San Diego. Yeah. I think there's one other action that we had that I would really want to highlight, and this was about related to a postdoc. So maybe, Tyler can kind of fill in the details about the action we had for that postdoc's reasons. I'm blanking on your name, but Tyler, were you able to talk about? There's been so many postdocs and actions. So this is a really horrible case where someone who had brought up that there was data ethics

issues in their lab, which obviously, as any postdoc or graduate student telling her boss that they're doing something wrong, never goes wrong. But this person was bringing up this issue. This person also was pregnant. And at that point, the person, once they found out that this person was pregnant, had decided, oh, well, you need to leave by the end of the year, which would make it to where the person would get deported because this was an international scholar in their third trimester in January. And have no income or insurance during her third trimester. Yeah. And so, Alex, if you have a good memory of the action, I'll let you speak about it because it was pretty awesome. Yeah, it was pretty great. We got a ton of people to rally in the health

sciences area of campus. People essentially set up little mini-pickets of the relevant buildings, basically not blocking the insurance, but making sure everyone who went in knew exactly why we were there and what the issue was. And they were eventually, towards the end of the day, I wasn't there at that point, but they were able to actually get up to where the chair of her department's office and lab were. And there was nothing threatening that went on, but I do believe the cops were called nonetheless. And my understanding was, this is just rumor, but he told someone that he really needed them to leave because he had to get to the bathroom and didn't want to talk to the students. So that was a funny part of the story. But they did get him on video because

they eventually were able to talk to the chair of the department and got him on video saying, I think this person deserves an extension of their contract. And a day or two later, UCSD did actually award this postdoc an extension of her contract. But yeah, this is an incident that never would have seen the light of day unless this had been raised and unless we hadn't already had this kind of activist kind of consciousness going on because of the ongoing bargaining and the union was able to postdoc union was able to win kind of, I think out of a really terrible situation, I think salvage probably one of the best outcome. She'll be able to have her child here and look for new jobs in the meantime to, you know, whatever her family wants to do,

extend the visa or go back to their original country. But they essentially they have security, some measure of security now, which wouldn't have happened without raising quite a disruption over it. And I also want to say that this was a postdoc and the grad students came out to protect a postdoc. So all these invisible lines that the university draws like obviously there were postdocs there too. But if you think about the number of graduate students, like they are the immune system that has come out and saved a bunch of postdocs through these actions. There was another action with someone that was being let go within four months of their employment. In an inappropriate way, this person was kind of using their lab as that research know I talked about, only really

hired women postdocs and really did not treat them well, despite doing research in women's health. And the grad students also came out for that. And we got to save that person from getting immediately fired. And they're better off now. Oh, yeah. Yeah, it's great. I think that sort of popularity is super important. And yeah, it's the only thing that stops the university from just rampantly exploiting everyone apart from like 150 people at the very top. Yeah, actually, on that note, can I ask, have you all been working with like, I guess, what's the tactical name for them? Like, like the, like the, like the other non student unions on campus? Oh, it's like AFT employee unions. Yeah, yeah, like, yeah, yeah. Yeah, they unfortunately,

most of the unions don't have sympathy strike or those sorts of things in their contract if they they cannot do an official strike if they're under contract. But yeah, they've definitely been helping in terms of kind of raising consciousness and awareness. I know the ones that have the ability to, you know, maybe cancel their classes or use class time to teach about the strike or, you know, do things like that have been there that they're planning to do that. What's nice as well is that this isn't really a union, but there's kind of a non university affiliated sort of group of faculty who, you know, advocate for changes across the entire campus and they're organizing a very large petition and letter writing campaign from faculty members

supporting our action, which I think is really critical because the university won't listen to us, but they may listen to if you get to a critical mass of professors supporting what we're doing. So there's been, you know, not universal, certainly, but but there's been a great deal of solidarity, even coming from some of the people who who the university I think has relied on to be more on their side, which is the professors. Yeah. And if like the faculty association, I think that's pretty awesome because you could imagine that UC doesn't want them to ever unionize, but they obviously see the leaky pipeline where grad students are, you know, either not staying in their programs or postdocs aren't coming. And you just, you know what you

happen to have at the end of that is people that have generational wealth at the end of it who happen to stay in these programs. And I think that's what really motivated the faculty to come out and say something because like UC says, oh, we support equity and diversity, but then they have seen constantly the university not do anything material to change that. Yeah. Yeah, it's good. It's good to see the faculty showing up. And again, that's this sort of that's how we fix these things, right, is by sticking together with solidarity with organizing. So maybe to finish up, if we talk about what next week's going to look like, or what next week might look like, I guess, or I guess it'll be this week by the time this comes

out. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So what can people look for on the timeline from UCSD? From the university or from the strike? From the strike, yeah. From the strike, yeah. Well, we'll have a number of pickets throughout campus, mostly kind of trying to keep them geographically oriented. So everyone from the surrounding buildings just go to, you know, one specific spot. We're doing, you know, signups, organizing strike pay, all those sorts of typical things have been going on this week. And the walkout begins November 14th for across, you know, not just UCSD, but all the campuses. So that's our total bargaining unit membership across three unions is 48,000 people of those 75% voted on

our strike off vote 98% voted yes. So we're expecting a pretty significant turnout of that entire membership to be on the picket line. So that will, there will be, you know, those TAs who are walking out will be the, that'll be the first disruption university feels before they feel the research disruption, they will very clearly see the teaching disruption and exams not taking place grades not being entered, sections not being taught across every single campus. And, and that will certainly be something that they will have to deal with and, and hopefully the size of the disruption in the first few days will convince them to come to the bargaining table in a reasonable way. And if not, we are prepared to continue until they do.

Yeah. And the other interesting part about what's going to happen next week is that this is a picket line that is going to be not just including, you know, researchers and instructors, but also people that support us. So there's a big conference downtown for a lot of neuroscientists. And it's it's called SFN. I can't remember what that stands for. But a lot of them are actually coming to the picket line to support us. I didn't know about that. That's great. Yeah. Yeah, it's I think that's pretty exciting. I didn't know it was in San Diego, but they're going to be here and also, you know, vouch for us. Because UC does like we are the leading research group and we contribute to a lot of the research that are at these meetings anyway.

There's also going to be it's a child friendly picket line. And for people with access needs, we're going to have, you know, virtual picketing. And you'll see what that looks like. It's still being developed. But I think that's pretty exciting as someone, you know, with a disability myself, it's exciting that other people can contribute to that. Yeah, it's very cool of you guys to do that. It's very cool. All right. How can people help? How can people support you? How can people find you on the internet? Yeah. So I think if you want to keep up with the strike news, there's three Twitter accounts, the SRU UAW UAW 5810 and UAW 2865. I think they kind of share a lot of the same content sometimes

because we're all kind of doing this together. But that's a good place to keep track of the news. I know there is a link to, there's a, they've set up a hardship strike fund. I don't have that link off the top of my head. But we can put that in the notes, I guess. Yeah. Yeah. And if you go to fairucnow.org, it'll have all the information about what's happening, but also those type of links too. So if you want some context, so pretty good. Yeah. And then how about you two personally, would you like to share your personal Twitter? So do you just want to stick with the organizational ones? I would love to. I promise I'm not that fun. But mine is Tyler Bell, PhD. That's my tag. Yeah. And I'm Alex T. Winsall on Twitter. Once this is over, I'll probably go

back to tweeting entirely about my work and pictures of buses. I love your Twitter, Alex. Yeah. Alex is a high value follower. Oh, thank you. Alex gives live updates about transit, and I was excited. You'd see a train. It's all good. Alex did pretty like hit that like five year old child. We have pretty much buses in San Diego now. What can I say? Yeah. Yeah. All right. Thank you so much for your time, both of you. I really appreciate it. Best of luck. Next week, maybe I'll come up and bring you some soup or like an oil can that we can start firing on campus or something. I would love it. Yeah. Let's do it. I have one here. Let's do it. I'm down. All right. Yeah. Best of luck. And we'll look forward to hearing what happens.

Thank you so much for, thanks so much for talking to us. Hello podcast fans. I know you got to the end of the episode and you were thinking, not enough James, not enough strikes, not enough UCSD. So lucky you. I've been up to UC San Diego today and I've recorded with Tyler and Alex at the strike. And we got some audio of the strike going on as well. It was really amazing, really incredible to see that many people out. Never thought I'd see that UCSD. So without further ado, here's my interview with them. All right. So I'm here with Tyler and Alex again. This time with more background noise. We're at the strike now. How many people are here roughly? Oh man, somewhere probably around at least a couple thousand, right? Right now.

Definitely a couple thousand people out here. It's really impressive. I've read to UCSD, if you haven't picked that up yet, and we did not get this many people even when people started hanging nooses around campus. I don't think I've ever just got this big. So yeah, this is genuinely very impressive. And how have things gone so far? What's been happening? I think things have gone really well so far. This is day two as we're recording this that we've been on strike. There has been some progress with the bargaining table that I've heard, but we do know that UC is going to try to drag this out. They think that they can outlast our momentum. But so far as you can really hear from the noise behind us and see all the different, you know, thousands of people

converging from all the picket locations across campus that they've been at since eight in the morning, I think our energy is going strong. What do you think, Tyler? Yeah, so I think the energy is really strong here today. The UC did not expect us to come on day two, which we know because at bargaining, they canceled our meetings for today because they didn't expect us to show up. But somehow, magically, a meeting emerged around two o'clock today. And it may be due to the fact that 2,000 people are out here pretty pissed at one affair contract. But yeah, I think the momentum is pretty high. We actually did more disruption today, going directly talking to the deans and the faculty and screaming in their offices as they sat really comfy. But I'll say, yeah,

first floor seminars didn't go well today. I'll put it that way. Nice. All right. There was something that I know both of you have posted about like intimidation and unfair labor practices. Are you comfortable talking about that, even in big terms? Yeah, I can talk in generalities. Well, the labor law that governs us is a little bit complicated because some of us also receive course credit for the work that we do that is protected under activity that protects our strike activity, which is a little bit of an anti-labor practice in and of itself. There's no reason I have to sign up for 12 credits of just existing doing work. That doesn't make any particular sense, but it's the way the university run things.

So there has been some emails that are sent out that are questionable legal correctness as to whether we can be hurt in terms of our academic standing for participating on the strike. That is definitely not true if the activity that's governed under what our union is representing us for. So we know we've had some issues with that. Tyler, I guess you could talk about maybe some other examples that have come out. On the postdoc side, right now the university has released like an FAQ of sorts in an email where it says, oh, well, you have to tell the NIH that your postdocs aren't doing research and that their funding needs to get pulled. But that's kind of a joke. There's no like reporting mechanism for that. It's more like a stipend for a living. So we're telling

people just to stay strong and people see kind of past like the threat that they're making and a lot of faculty see through it too. Is that okay? We've just intercepted you when you're going somewhere else. You would like to introduce yourself? So I'm Vidya. I'm a postdoc. I'm pretty new. In UCSD, I joined in April and I came here having already done another postdoc and a PhD in Europe. I joined the union almost instantly when I came here since I was basically horrified for lack of a better way to put it. So I studied in the EU for 10 years and my experience of academia is what I experienced there, which was decent working conditions, being able to save money, not having to spend 50% of your salary on rent. So when I came here and experienced postdoc life, I couldn't believe it.

So I believe I met Tyler when I came here for the first time and we did this orientation. That was awesome and also horrifying at the same time. Sorry. It was awesome to meet you because I realized it was then that I learned how a labor union worked. My knowledge of labor unions was minimal up until the point that I moved here. So minimal that I didn't even know what labor unions in the EU functioned like until I came here and realized, oh my god, we are actually lucky to have a union that supports postdocs and this is not the case in a lot of places in the US. Yeah, yeah, that's true. So how has the strike action gone so far from your perspective? It's been crazy. We've been planning this for so long. It's a bit surreal to be part of it.

I think it's been going great. It's been very energizing and it's been intense. Yeah, it's hard, right? None of us really want to be out here and strike and the fact that so many people are putting work on hold just speaks to the intensity and seriousness of the problem and what we're striking for. Yeah, yeah, I think that's very true. It's really impressive how many people are here. I can't over it. Yeah, some time. Yeah, very impressive. So let's see. Do you guys know how the bargaining has gone and what we can expect from here? Well, what we would like would be for the UC to meet us at the bargaining table and give us the fair contract. But repeating that ad infinitum while we withhold labor is the plan thus far. But what's actually been happening is the UC just hasn't been

paying fair, as you know. Yeah, it's been infuriating for me. It makes me very angry. It is very surreal, especially I think if you're used to a sort of more sane labor context to see them just like gaslighting and lying and doing what on the face of it is illegal stuff. It's disrespectful is what I feel. Yeah. Maybe it illustrates sort of what they see post-oxygraphic in economic terms. Yeah, as a workforce whose rights are not to be valued or do a bulk of the work, it's very disrespectful. Yeah, no, I think it certainly speaks to, like I said earlier, they're trying to outlast us and they think that we will reach a certain point where we no longer feel like we can avoid our work, that we can stay out here. And I think

you would think that if that's their strategy, we realize that we are in a point of desperation, we are in a point of precarity, where we really need wages and compensation and workplace protections that meet the current economic situation that we live in, because right now that's not what we have. And currently at the bargaining table, they're kind of putting a lot of our labor reps into like something that looks like jigsaw, like type trap rooms, where they have only fluorescent lighting and no windows. And then them not knowing whether or not they're going to have to get a flight back because they're not going to meet with them that day. Them saying that they haven't reserved rooms, even though they have so much power. Who's taking up a room from them to meet

with them and actually come up with some proposals? I got an update that admin wasn't bargaining because they couldn't reserve a room. What does that mean? There's 48,000 people on strike. The entire system isn't working. What do you mean? It's your rooms also. You own the rooms. That was a fascinating update. I'm sorry. I just had to mention something about that. So that's just all we have to know right now is that they keep canceling meetings, adding meetings. They're kind of just waiting us out to see how long we're actually beyond strike and whether or not we actually care about our contracts, which I think you being here today, you see how many people are out. No one's going to leave this picket line throughout the week. So yeah. Yeah. I think that's basically it.

People aren't going to leave the picket line and the energy is awesome because people are fed up. People are fed up. People are fed up being poor and homeless. And this is not why we come to grad school, right? I mean, I was very fortunate to have a good grad school experience. And that's why I'm still in academia, but a majority of the people who come to the university spending savings, I know people with student loans back from India who are here to do a masters and are doing research, killing themselves because they had a dream. They literally moved across the world to come here following a dream and are ending up being broke. And that's just heartbreaking from a university as big as this. Nobody deserves to be treated this way. And I think everybody here is feeling it.

If you go to fairucnow.org, there's a link to a strike fund right now, a hardship fund, and people can donate to that any amount they want to. And there's also, we're taking donations to actually feed people out here. So if people have questions about that, they can just email the links at that website. Yeah. Can people show up to the picket to help too? Like, would you like people to? People are very, very welcome to show up to the picket line to come help. All help is appreciated. You want to join us. You want to chant. You want to bring supplies. We'll be there. This is across all 10 UC campuses. If you're near a picket line, if you want to show support and solidarity, come join us. Yeah, the virtual picketing is still happening. And what they've

been actually doing is making sure people get here and know where to go since the picketing is so transient. Like, we're literally moving building to building as it's needed. And they're doing the calls for us and directing us. So which is a wild thing. But also the other thing is just people retweeting everything that we post, making sure that no one can silence us because that's what UC wants. Thank you so much for coming. Thanks for giving us this platform. The awareness is really critical to make sure the UC can't ignore us. So thank you so much for coming. During the summer of 2020, some Americans suspected that the FBI had secretly infiltrated the racial justice demonstrations. And you know what? They were right. I'm Trevor Aronson, and I'm hosting

a new podcast series, Alphabet Boys. As the FBI sometimes, you got to grab the little guy to go after the big guy. Each season will take you inside an undercover investigation. In the first season of Alphabet Boys, we're revealing how the FBI spied on protesters in Denver. At the center of this story is a raspy voiced cigar smoking man who drives a silver hearse. And inside his hearse was like a lot of guns. He's a shark. And on the gun badass way. And nasty sharks. He was just waiting for me to set the date, the time, and then for sure he was trying to get it to happen. Listen to Alphabet Boys on the iHeart Radio app, Apple podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. What if I told you that much of the forensic science you see on

shows like CSI isn't based on actual science? The problem with forensic science in the criminal legal system today is that it's an awful lot of forensic and not an awful lot of science. And the wrongly convicted pay a horrific price. Two death sentences and a life without parole. My youngest, I was incarcerated two days after her first birthday. I'm Molly Herman. Join me as we put forensic science on trial to discover what happens when a match isn't a match and when there's no science in CSI. How many people have to be wrongly convicted before they realize that this stuff's all bogus. It's all made up. Listen to CSI on trial on the iHeart Radio app, Apple podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. I'm Lance Bass and you may know

me from a little band called NSYNC. What you may not know is that when I was 23, I traveled to Moscow to train to become the youngest person to go to space. And when I was there, as you can imagine, I heard some pretty wild stories. But there was this one that really stuck with me about a Soviet astronaut who found himself stuck in space with no country to bring him down. It's 1991 and that man Sergei Krekalev is floating in orbit when he gets a message that down on earth his beloved country, the Soviet Union, is falling apart. And now he's left defending the Union's last outpost. This is the crazy story of the 313 days he spent in space. 313 days that changed the world. Listen to the last Soviet on the iHeart Radio app, Apple podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts.

It's the podcast. It's it could happen here. It is about something that could happen here very specifically. Yeah, I'm Christopher Wong. I'm here with James Stout and Garrison Davis. Hello. Hello to you both. Hello. We all joined the Zoom call that that did happen here. And it did show everybody. All right. Okay, so that's the thing that that did happen here. And now we're going to talk about something that could happen here. And okay, that specific thing is a call by two Harvard academics to hire 500,000 more cops. Nope. So okay, I don't know when this is going to go up. But some time in the past, there was a piece that went viral by civil rights lawyer and anti-president activist turned media critic, Alec Kara Katanas, about a pair of Harvard academics.

Yeah, who wrote this article calling for 500,000 more cops. And this is okay. Like, the fact that we have academics writing position papers basically that are calling for 500,000 more cops is terrifying in and of itself. But but crime is is is at a record high. Garrison, you are about to see shit. Oh, okay. You are about to see you're about to see and hear shit that is going to make your fucking ears bleed, because it's not shit. Like, okay, normally, these are Harvard academics, right? So you're assuming these are like right wing Nats at ghouls, right, or like the equivalent in in in the sort of like, yeah, you know, these are not this was written by a socialist. And when I say a socialist, right, like, I don't mean a sort of like one of the sort of like, terminally

online desperate cranks trying to hold together like a Maoist micro sect. I'm talking about people who are incredibly well connected inside the mainstream socialist left. So the authors of this call for 500,000 more cops are Christopher Lewis, who is a Harvard law professor who makes me embarrassed to have my own name. And more interestingly, Harvard sociology professor Adaner Usami. So who is Adaner Usami? Um, he is on the board, he's on the editorial board of Catalyst, which is a Marxist man. Okay, do you do you have you two know what Catalyst is? Yeah. Yeah. Besides the sequel to the Meers Edge original game? No, I don't. Yeah, okay. So there's there's a Marxist magazine, there's supposed to be a more sort of theoretical Marxist, like,

magazine founded by a guy named Vivek Chibber, who's a pretty influential sort of like, soaked in Marxist who could be found literally in any to any of the last like five decades, you can find him yelling about the cultural turn in academia and calling for a return to political economy. Yes, yes. He's been yelling about this for decades longer. I think he's been yelling about this for longer than I've been alive. Oh, God, like, that's how long this has been going on. People have definitely been like, scratching about the cultural turn for longer than any of us have been alive. Yeah. And they've been wrong for that entire time. Yeah. And and Chibber is like one of the guys who trained Usami in the first place. Now, Catalyst's other

major founder is much more famous. And that's someone you probably have heard of, who is one Bashkar Sankara, who is the current president of the nation and also the founder of Jacobin, where and this is where it gets fun. Usami also on the editorial board of Jacobin. Haha, this is the guy caring for 500,000 more cops, right? This isn't coming from the usable sort of like rabid reactionaries. This is coming from people who have serious credentials in the mainstream socialists left. And okay, so I want to talk about what's actually in the paper. And the first thing I need everyone to understand about this from the get go is that this is maybe the worst paper I've ever read. Like if I had tried to turn this paper in to my like freshman

under like into like my an undergrad lit class, I would have failed. Like when I was in my freshman year in college, I had to read biblical analysis written by a freshman Ted Cruz supporter who was arguing that there was a problem in the Bible where there was no way for God to talk to people. This is worse than that. Let me introduce you to the Quran. How is it worse, Chris? Okay, so let's just start off right. I'm going to start off with a random part in the middle so you understand how just mind numbingly atrocious this is. Okay, so I'm going to read this. This is an article called and I'm not kidding about the title of this quote, the injustice of under policing in America. Yeah, so before we get into the actual main

argument, I'm just going to read this quote, which is all right, let's hear it. Even if our answers prove unsound, we hope that the combination of empirical social science and analytic moral and political philosophy, we can contribute can help eliminate what alternative answers to those questions might have to look like to be sound, which first off terrible science of Marxist Leninism. I would prefer the immortal science of Marxist Leninism. This is awful. Like said this writing terrible, send it back to an editor, give them a decade, they'll come back with it. Second off, I literally cannot imagine two disciplines I would like rather less apply to the problem of mass incarceration than those. Like these authors have dared ask the question, what if we combined

the bone rattling stupidity of analytic philosophy with a sociologist's complete inability to do statistics? And the answer is this. And what would I say complete inability to do statistics, right? I need people to understand how bad this article is, right? Like this really needs you to understand. So here is a quote. Here is another section of this article. But while firearm availability, no doubt has some impact on the level of violence, we think the effect is likely to be small. A large effect would be difficult to square with other patterns across place, persons and time. Consider, for example, that while the United States has 10 times as many guns as El Salvador, the homicide rate there is roughly 10 times higher than it is here.

Now, stats knowers, think for a second about what they just compared, right? The United States has 10 times as many guns, the homicide rate in El Salvador is 10 times higher, right? Famously countries with a similar population. Yeah. Yeah. Okay. What, what does the US have more of than El Salvador? That's it. That's it. No, no, we have more guns, but we also have 50 times the population. The US has 331 million people. El Salvador is 6.5 million people, which means, again, if you're looking at this in terms of guns per capita, right? El Salvador's guns per capita is actually five times higher than ours. Oh, wow. That's quite impressive. Yeah. And like financial perspective, because we have a lot of guns. Yeah. Right. And

you know, okay. Again, if you're going to do basic statistics, right, you would think that these professors at Harvard University would know the difference between a rate of gun ownership and the pure ownership of guns. They do not. Do they not? Or have they decided that they're going to pretend they don't? I don't, I, okay. Here's the thing. Going into this, right, I assume this was just sort of pure hack shit. And I think a lot of it is. I think they also are genuinely this dumb. Like I genuinely, it's really incredible. Like, I mean, again, like the thing, like the thing they've actually demonstrated with their own numbers is precisely the opposite of what they're arguing. The thing they've demonstrated with the numbers they have given us is that there is a

correlation between gun ownership rates and the homicide rate, right? They're trying to, this entire section is about proving that they're, that the number of guns doesn't, and like this isn't even like, this isn't me, like, like, I don't like, this is not like me yelling about gun control or whatever. Like this is just to get you to understand the level of statistics these people are on. And also I should point this out. I tracked down their citation because I wanted to make sure I didn't, I wasn't misunderstanding their argument, right? So I tracked down their citation on these numbers and I went to the paper they cited. And the thing they cited does not have gun gun ownership numbers for El Salvador. So I have no idea where they're getting any of these

numbers. They've apparently, they quite possibly have pulled this out of their ass completely because apparently, apparently nobody checked if their citations actually contain the things that they're supposed to. Yeah, this is what I wanted to talk about. There is a thing that happens when you get tenure or you become a professor at a various established university, and that thing is you just say shit and people trust you. Like we've seen this time and again in the academy, right? That like peer review is not serving its function because like the status hierarchy of people in academia is more important to both the peer reviewers and the people doing the writing than the actual process of peer review. Yeah. Like their citations are, this is an interesting,

this is, I don't know, they've like made the capital letters larger. They use a small arms survey, I guess for that. It doesn't have those numbers. It's amazing. Okay, so yeah, we've established that these people are absolute hacks whose work would have gotten me failed out of an undergrad course. So to be fair, maybe it's actually, it's technically possible that University of Chicago just holds its students to more rigorous standards than Harvard or MIT whose journal published this, does their intellectuals. So, you know, we never know. This is also why I never use Jacobin as a source on the show. Also because they pay 50 bucks per article and that shit is way out of it. Yeah, Jacobin, not a cool publication actually, not mega based. Yeah,

pay your workers if you're pretending to be socialist. Yeah, if you're trying to be like a labor. Yeah, yeah. But Boshkar Sankara is on the record talking about the quote, his quote, petite bourgeois hustle talking about how he made Jacobin. So, you know, okay, we'll get back to the class aspect of all of this next episode. But okay, let's go back to this paper and let's take a second to look at what they're actually arguing. All right. And the first thing I need you to understand about their argument is that their entire, the entire substantive arguments of this paper hinges on an absolutely enormous lie. Let me quote this lie. Yet it also illustrates the much less well known fact that America is not an all in outlier in its rate of policing. The United

States has around 212 police officers for every 100,000 total residents, which ranks it in the 41st percentile of today's developed world. Now, as Alec Kerakotanus points out, they've deliberately picked the lowest number of cops they can find any like the lowest reported number of cops in the U.S. they can find anywhere. And so they picked 697,000 from basically like it's they picked this number from an FBI reporting thing. But the FBI also says that they don't have all the cops there because it's basically like a voluntary reporting thing. So there's a bunch of cops that aren't there. And then Pierce Kerakotanus, who's a piece about this quote, the professors, the professor then admitted privately over email that the U.S. census count is actually 1,227,788 police. That's

76 percent higher for the number they chose to use in their public article. What is the significance of this? Using this number they admitted to me, the United States truthfully has 1.1 times the median rate in rich countries. So they've been over email that they have this whole article is based on them lying about how many cops there are in the U.S. And it's actually way worse than this because as he points out, right, this number, the number that they're using, only tracks public police. So it doesn't count private police. And if you count private police, that number doubles again. It's not like there's private police in America, though. There's no private cops, right? And the other thing is, the other thing this doesn't count is this counts zero federal agencies.

I was going to say, but it doesn't count federal agencies. Does it count like state police even? Sheriff's deputies? Yeah, actually, I don't know if it counts sheriff's. It might. Because they're not police. They're deputies. They're different. A highway patrol? I mean, who's to say? Who's to... Yeah, I mean, here's the thing, here's the thing. Anyway, yeah, we spend more time on this than they have already. Yeah, right, right. Okay, like, to get it to get an understanding of this, even if you exclude the feds entirely, right? If you exclude... And again, and this is actually a bad idea because again, we have like a fucking trillion federal agencies, for example, ICE and the Border Patrol, who again, run just another

police state inside of the the American police state, right? We have that. And obviously, okay, so he's comparing our level of policing to policing in like European countries, right? And okay, I don't want to minimize how many border cops European countries have, but the U.S. has way fucking more border cops than they do. It is not comparable at all. They do horrible things. I will yell at the end of time about how every every friend text member needs to be like redacted, et cetera, et cetera parody, but like, no, great. But even if you cut that out, right? The actual number of cops in the U.S. is three times higher than the number they've given us. Actually, it might be more... Yeah. Yeah, so okay. I feel like there's anything

that we can agree on as a nation is that America kind of has a lot of police. That's like, that's like what everyone kind of knows. That's like people like really militarized and heavy policing. Yeah. Like a person who moved to America, it is shocking how many cops there are, how many different cops there are, and how there are cops everywhere all the time. It is the thing that is very different about America. Oh, God. Okay. So... They named you Statista to get that number. Quite possibly. This is the most unfair shit. Yeah. Yeah. I would absolutely, if one of my students in community college did this, we'd have a talk. Okay. Okay. So do you know what

else is based on the myth of underpolicing? These adverts for private cops. Yes. Mm-hmm. Federal protective service gets them. All right. We're back. Okay. So, all right. We've established that this argument is built on a pile of lies. However, the actual content of the argument is also really funny and completely incomprehensible. So, their argument is that somehow, if the US had more cops, right, and if the ratio of cops to people, like, that the US had was like in line with the European countries, that somehow, and they never have a mechanism for how this would happen, this would somehow lower the incarceration rate. I think the mechanism is line, red line. That's what everyone says, is that we have more

police that lowers incarceration rates. Yeah. Yeah. The entire argument here is what if the US was like Sweden, then there would be 500,000 more cops, but somehow also less, also 1.9 million less prisoners. Yeah. Well, the only thing that's different between us and Sweden is the cops. They have more cops. Oh, God. Okay. So, why are socialists pushing for this? And especially socialists, and again, as these are people who in their article admit that they think the best way to deal with poverty and with crime is welfare programs, not mass incarceration. So, okay, so why are they pushing for this? And the initial answer is that they think they can reduce crime specifically homicides by increasing policing. And they think they can do this. Which

to be fair is an opinion that I would say at this point, probably the majority of Americans have. Maybe. I don't know if I buy that. I don't know if that's true. I think you may be a little bit further out of the Overton window. Maybe not. I don't know. The majority of Americans, I think, do believe that if there's a few more cops, maybe we'll have a few less murders. I don't know. We'll see about that. But, okay, the other thing, though, that's sort of like amazing about this, right, is that they think, okay, so they think they can cut the homicide rate by hiring more police. They also think that hiring more police will solve the problem with policing, because the problem with police is that the police don't do enough, and so we need more

of them. And then also, this will make them less violent. This is even the whole Joe Biden, like, oh, we have to, we can't defund the police. We have to fund the police. We have to give them more resources. Bernie Sanders also made this argument. If they have less resources, then that means they'll have to use more violence, and it's that style of argument. It's a neoliberal talking point. Yeah, but what's interesting about this, again, is that these people nominally are socialists. And, you know, in order to justify this, right, they argue that while being in prison is bad, and then they list a bunch of consequences of being in prison, being in a neighborhood is with high crime is also as bad for the same reason. They are literally arguing that being in a place

with crime is basically the same as being in prison. Yeah, big time prison, I understand, as the old Harvard professors. Look, okay, there are very few people I would ever say this to. I hope these people get to do ethnography of this one day. Like, I hope they get to go study what the inside of a prison is like. Some participant observation. Yeah, I hope they get to go do this. Like, there are lines in this article, like, here is a random line I've pulled from this article, they say at one point, quote, in fact, black people seem to be underrepresented among those who report ever having been arrested in their lifetimes. What? That is a direct quote. They've done some absolutely insane. I'm not actually going to dignify them by laying out

the stats bullshit that they've attempted to justify this. Like, we have already seen what their stats look like, right? Their stats are trying to compare a rate to a number. Yeah, it's insane. It's completely nuts. That's the one thing that even like racist like Republicans like no is like, they'll be like, yeah, there's more because because I don't like black people. And you're like, that's not why but whatever. Yeah, I'm just reading this paragraph now and it is actually, this is yeah, pretty bad. So, okay, I, okay, so we have established this is bullshit, right? I want to read a kind of long section that I think gives the game away as to why they're arguing this quote, we think in the long run, a significant expansion of social

policy would reduce crime by addressing its root causes and in turn, reduce the need and demand for both policing and imprisonment. Okay, other work. Yeah, this is true. I would say probably true. In other work, we argue that any coherent conception of distributive justice or economic efficiency entails that the United States should expand its social policy. But a significant expansion of social policy requires significant redistribution from rich to poor. Redistribution of this magnitude would require the poor to wield some kind of leverage over the rich. Given the collapse of the American labor movement and the electoral fracturing of the American working class, we doubt we will see anything like this soon. Our aim in this essay is to say something useful about

what should be done in the non ideal world in which we live, not just in the ideal world in which we would like to live. Wait, let me read this next sentence. It gets worse. Okay, to say something about that question, we limit ourselves to options that are revenue neutral. These are socialists. I think they may have walked outside. They've just given up. Yeah, like they've, you know, okay, so there's actually more of this that is also like, it keeps going. We can never have a better world. You know what that means is that we should instead just have more police. Here is their defense of this. But why consider only prisons and police? Why couldn't the government redistribute the existing pool of money from prisons and police to social

program policy? So true. As many reformers have demanded. We argue in what's wrong with mass incarceration, which is a book that they're going to release that I hope nobody buys. I don't trust them to make a book about mass incarceration. This is because social policy is bedeviled by what we call the efficiency feasibility paradox to address the root causes of crime would be meaningfully to change the opportunity structure for the most disadvantaged people in America. To do this by expanding untargeted universal social programs who require significant resources since the vast majority of beneficiaries are not America's most disadvantaged people. Because penal spending is hyper-targeted in a way that social spending is not. It costs about 300 billion

dollars a year to run the world's most extensive penal state, but something like three trillion dollars to run its most anemic welfare state. We admit there are significant obstacles to changing the balance that state and local government strike between the arms of law enforcement. There are, after all, reasons that the United States has involved its present day penal balance. But our view is that the first world balance is the thing they're talking about that supposedly Norway has or some shit where they have more cops but like per capita but less people incarcerated. But our view is that the first world balance is nonetheless substantially more feasible than any of the kinds of things that reformers tend to demand today. In the highly unequal oligarchic

America in which we live at present, calls to reallocate a fixed pool of revenue will meet with less powerful opposition than calls to tax the rich. That is why we assume it is infeasible to expect the United States to build a generous welfare state in the mold of the Scandinavian social democracies. Proposals to use hyper-targeted social policy to adjust the root causes of crime are similarly infeasible. As we have argued, to be efficient, a social policy intervention must meaningfully transform the opportunity structures of those most likely to commit crime. Yet an intervention that transforms the structures of opportunity only those in this position will upend the effective and central structure of unequal societies thus gumming up the economy

and eliciting political opposition. I mean here's the thing is that in some ways I agree that the United States won't get better by making social policies within my lifetime but my solution to this is a legalist lifestyleism not hiring more cops. Well don't worry there is a significant section of this where they shit on anarchism. This is what fucking happens when all your friends are also Harvard professors. You give up on real fucking people because you don't fucking talk to them and they're like oh well they'll never they'll it's obviously written by somebody who's currently like well off like it's they're currently doing well which is why because they because they don't think the world's going to turn into a socialist utopia but they're personally doing okay the way

to make the world feel better for them is maybe more police will make me feel safer like that's that's what that's what they're doing is because they're already well off and they're like well social changes isn't coming I want to live a happier life maybe police will keep the bad people away from me. Yeah because they see poverty as an issue of poverty is upstream of crime and crime is a fucking annoyance to them because someone might steal their fucking BMW. Why is worse again crime living in a place with crime is the same as being in prison. Because you cannot conceive because it's a socialism without fucking empathy or experience of fucking poverty right so you can make these ludicrous statements and all your friends in

the smoking room at Harvard will agree with you go ho ho yes. Yeah and I mean I mean this is the thing very frustrating like they fundamentally like when Bernie lost the election these people gave up on politics right like that's what's happening they're arguing that like not even is not even just like the class struggle is unwinnable they're arguing that basic liberal politics is impossible yes right like taxing the rich like is a thing that that's not like a radical thing that's like like the basic that's like a basic democratic party thing and they're arguing that it's so impossible that anyone who has a plan to change anything has to pre-means test it to be compliant with a non-existent balanced budget amendment to get the right to support it.

Like Liz trust you shit like this is this was written by one of the people on the editorial board of Jacobin. Yeah well that doesn't shock me but it is very funny to look at their citations which are like about 80% people being like this article is horse shit and then like like cop publications. Yeah let's go. So okay so having actually well okay so before we do we should we should do another ad thing. Do you know what who else has completely abandoned the idea that there's any possibility of social change in the world? The conservative party and Unionist party of Great Britain and Northern Ireland. Yeah do they sponsor the show I guess now we're gonna take the money and get it for us. Yep yep thank you Rishi Sunak. And okay we're back so so having

abandoned politics in favor of complete capitulation to the forces of reaction they turn towards a cost benefit analysis of having more cops. The benefit they argue is less crime and this is bullshit there is no statistical evidence to having more cops reduces crime. There are other reasons why this is bullshit I have done an entire series about. There is a lot of writing on this topic and how this correlation is not actually effective. Yeah and it's also like a very important thing here is this is a thing that's about what kind of crime you care about right. Like I have written an entire series about why my about you know the times when my police department was literally being run by multiple drug cartels at the same time when they strapped dudes to fucking radiators

and the acid balls the car batteries they shot children to the street they disappeared people to be tortured into fucking black sites and then they went to fucking Iraq to teach the CIA how to do it. Like these people the cops are they are rapists they are kidnappers they are extortionists they are thieves they are torturers they are murderers a lot of them are in literal neo-nazi gangs who run their own serial killer competitions um none of this apply like appears in any of the analysis that these dipshits have compiled and it's you don't want the old cultural turn to get involved. Yeah look at the material conditions here. Yeah yeah the material conditions apparently are cop go up crime go down which it's also important like I think it's important to know

there's a really good article I think it was my M plus one called raise the crime rate from this one like 2006 but they have that they have this point which is that like the reductions in the crime way that we like see insofar as they happen are not actually reductions in the amount of crime going on like what's happening is that like we put people in prison and then the crime happens to them there right like even even even if you reduce the homicide rate outside of prison there's still the homicide rate inside of prison which nobody fucking gives a shit about and you know because because again this crime doesn't go away all that happens is that it gets it gets you know intensified and inflicted on a group of people the american

public doesn't give a shit about so you know all of the violence all of the all of the rape all of the fucking murder all of the theft all of the shit we normally throw people in prison for in theory is just happening to people inside of prisons is just that academics can stop pretending to give a shit about it when they don't have to see it yeah i like where i live right we just reelected a sheriff who was overseeing like 19 deaths in jail this year in san diego right but that is not seen as an issue of evidently to the people who voted for her to the democratic party who endorsed her and instead like they would much rather have that because they're presumably worried that the person who ran against her in the primaries would be too soft on crime and therefore

you know that teslas might get keyed yeah so okay let's look at the supposed benefits let's i get i sorry those are the benefits let's look at the let's look at the costs quote okay finally can sit finally consider the cost of policing on the one hand a world of more policing would perhaps unsurprisingly be a world of more arrests based on recent work by chafflin our best guess is that the first world balance would be a world of almost 7.8 million arrests on the other hand for some for and okay this is a direct quote by the way i need everyone to understand i am directly quoting them when i say this on the other hand for the somewhat speculative reasons we gave earlier we guessed that a world of more policing would be one of

less police violence about 900 fewer people killed by the police based on what america occurs that's what that that's how james america occurs yeah well more cops than do less violence yep yeah this you know you you could if you were for example a social scientist right at all you could look at all of the all of the other times the us has gotten more cops and tried to see if that like increased or decreased the amount of violence the police do now and you know put it on a line they've drawn a line it's all good they're like i just i do want to draw attention to figure one where they have exactly one data point yeah and then they've just drawn a line to it when axes intersect to the data point and just like line look online like this whole thing is

just sort of like like yeah okay so even if somehow right by some miracle this occurred unless people were killed by the police like we're killed by police violence because there was more cops which this is the kind of thing that for for the purposes of this thought experiment right we are allowing people to believe this like for the same reason that we allow children to believe in the easter bunny so assuming assuming this is real hold up i kids don't believe in the easter bunny i i have i have met kids who believed in the easter bunny i understand believing in santa but do people actually believe in the easter bunny not many not many but also also also most people don't believe the police will be more violent if if you have if it will be less violent if you have

more of them how about a tooth fairy the tooth fairy was yeah let's let's let's let's let them believe this right this entire argument hinges on the theory that incarceration and arrest are distinct outcomes of policing right they're arguing that there's gonna be more arrest but that's okay because there will be less people in prison now there is one tiny problem here that you may have seen which is that when you arrest people it leads to people going to prison nowhere in this entire article have these two harvard professors at any point considered the fact that when you arrest someone they sometimes go to prison and that arresting more people will mean more people go to prison because that's what happens when you arrest someone they've never

considered this and in fact in fact not only have they never considered this they seem to believe that there is an inverse correlation between the number of people getting arrested and how many people go to prison they think that seven million eight hundred thousand more arrests will somehow lead to 1.2 million people less in prison it's yeah even what people in this country die in between arrest and their hearing right like in between arrest and having a fair trial like yeah to ignore that it's it's not just like it's not just wrong it's callously cruel also like they appear to have not looked at any point at the opportunity cost of having all these cops right yeah we pay tops a metric shit ton of money because they're the only unions that apparently the state cares about and

like we could do something useful with that money right like well the thing the thing they claim they're doing is that they're going to fund less prisons and fund more cops and this will lead to less people being in prison now if this doesn't make any sense to you that's because it doesn't make any sense at all and and and again we have to come back to the question what do you think happens to people who get arrested like do these people think they can send on vacations to heady like i i i know none of these people none of the people writing this have been arrested but like they can't be this stupid like there's no way god so okay like i'm gonna close on some stuff here which i'm gonna close on the sort of anarchist stuff that they they're ranting about um i'm gonna i'm gonna read

another quote from this some civil libertarians might prefer radical decarceration without any increase or perhaps even some reduction in police force size on the grounds that state imposed violence or harm is morally different from and worse than interpersonal violence committed by private individuals an extreme version of this position would hold that no amount of interpersonal violence could ever justify the use of coercive force by the state but any state completely lacking in coercive power would be unable to enforce tax law and policy and thus unable to collect revenue without revenue the governor could not provide public goods or a social safety net which also by the way i want to stop here and like i point out that like they like in any other context none

of these people believe this because like these people are all deal chart lists like that they're all nmt people and so they don't actually believe that money that they they in any other context except this one they understand that money is something created by the state except here when they have to justify police uh without revenue governments cannot provide public goods or a social safety net so this extreme version of libertarian of civil libertarianism is essentially a kind of political anarchism and we doubt many are in fact committed to this brand of anarchism so okay well let's unpack this take it when they say civil libertarianism here what they say is that anyone who proposes to defund the police or reduce a number of people in prison right in the next

paragraph they argue that anyone who wants to do those things uh is actually in favor of increasing the homicide rate because when there's less when there's less cops than quote serious crime runs unchecked in poor neighborhoods which leaves you with two choices right you can be an anarch quote unquote anarchist and let the crime happen because you supported decreasing number of cops or you can support having more cops yeah it's yeah it's just an absurd extrapolation of a position yeah well but it's it's not just that they they've get what they're doing here is they're giving their entire gateway right what they've admitted is that their ideal society requires and this is what they are saying about the state's need for coercive power right with their own argument

they the the course of power they need is the police and so what they are saying is that their politics requires an entire class of rapist neo-nazi murderers to you know like to enforce their vision of the welfare state like in order for there to be a welfare state there have to be a bunch of people who can fucking walk into your door and shoot you right there have to be a group of people who can fucking stand there and grab your child smash their head into a wall 15 times and then fucking grab you and throw you through a window right this is what they are arguing and and this begs the question okay so why do these people want more cops and you know the caricature they offer up is that without cops everyone will just murder each other and so we need neo-nazi

desk wall to stop us off murdering each other but okay that's stupid right like self-evidently police police are only like police are not that old they've only been around for like 200 years so we know that's not true so why do they actually want more cops and you know something something that's very interesting given that this is an article about the police that is written by people who are on the editorial board of socialist magazines nowhere in this article does it mention the fact that the cops exist to protect private property right this is this is a huge part of what their existence right their job is to ensure that there is one class of people who owns the factories and the fields and the grocery stores and the fast food chains and the fucking

car dealerships and that there is another class who was forced to work for them and have their labor stolen every day of their lives and of course these sort of like faux pro-cop these pro-cop like faux social democrats will never mention it right but these people's version of quote-unquote socialism is one in which all that shit all the stuff that makes things like all of the businesses all the corporations all of the all that shit is owned by capitalists and not the working class they need those cops specifically to protect the property of the ruling class from you right like that that that is ultimately what this is about the specter of crime and and this is true whether it's coming from socialists or whether it's coming from the most like unbelievably deranged

blue lies matter cop freak it is about stopping you from taking what is yours and that that's the end of part one in part two we're gonna look at what the whole sort of background ideology that's running all of this and it also sucks so yay come back tomorrow for more great news ah love it during the summer of 2020 some americans suspected that the fbi had secretly infiltrated the racial justice demonstrations and you know what they were right i'm trevor erenson and i'm hosting a new podcast series alphabet boys as the fbi sometimes you gotta grab the little guy to go after the big guy each season will take you inside an undercover investigation in the first season of alphabet boys we're revealing how the fbi spied on protesters in denver at the center of this story is a raspy

voiced cigar smoking man who drives a silver hearse and inside his hearse was like a lot of guns he's a shark and on the good badass way and nasty sharks he was just waiting for me to set the date the time and then for sure he was trying to get to the heaven listen to alphabet boys on the i heart radio app apple podcast or wherever you get your podcast what if i told you that much of the forensic science you see on shows like csi isn't based on actual science the problem with forensic science in the criminal legal system today is that it's an awful lot of forensic and not an awful lot of science and the wrongly convicted pay a horrific price two death sentences in a life without parole my youngest i was incarcerated two days after her first birthday

i'm molly herman join me as we put forensic science on trial to discover what happens when a match isn't a match and when there's no science in csi how many people have to be wrongly convicted before they realize that this stuff's all bogus it's all made up listen to csi on trial on the i heart radio app apple podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts i'm lance bass and you may know me from a little band called in sync what you may not know is that when i was 23 i traveled to moscow to train to become the youngest person to go to space and when i was there as you can imagine i heard some pretty wild stories but there was this one that really stuck with me about a soviet astronaut who found himself stuck in space with no country to bring him down

it's 1991 and that man sergey krekalev is floating in orbit when he gets a message that down on earth his beloved country the soviet union is falling apart and now he's left defending the union's last outpost this is the crazy story of the 313 days he spent in space 313 days that changed the world listen to the last soviet on the i heart radio app apple podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts podcasting oh i love it i love when we talk into microfilms of people listen yay good for them it's gonna outlive micro blogging apparently yeah okay who could who could have asked we've won guys we are the last medium standing i will to be fair i do think the majority of people on this call got got this job because

it's a small part because of micro 100 percent because of like a block yeah yeah it's true look at where our posts have bought us that's right here to this moment on the podcast it could happen here the podcast where we don't explain what the podcast is that's right yep and yeah the podcast also contains me christopher wong contains garrison davis it contains james stout and allegedly robert evans says yeah however come a robert evans is i think he's legitimately actually busy right now he is he is like recording something else or something yeah he's doing a marathon thing but if you look at the i heart page it's only robert we have we have a lot of a lot of podcasts on yeah anyway it's true on on the cool zone media yeah on on the cool zone media that's

right mm-hmm so speaking of podcasts we've done on the cool zone media we did one that came out the one before this one and what was it about it was it was about how a bunch of socialists want 500 thousand more cops or specifically it's disappointing yeah so okay i i asked myself the question when i read this why why did they want this how did we get here because they're rich and they're scared yes so this is true it's there's also sort of there's also sort of deeper roots to what's happening here and okay so like it is true that there's been a whole wave of people who were sort of nominally progressive or like socialists 2016 or 2017 who turned right in the past few years particularly over racial issues like li fang uh grand green wall like more recently the tyt

people like bashar sikhar is we're doing crime wave shit like kind of recently which was actually really funny he had this tweet about how like oh the crime race is not actually down there's a specific neighborhoods where the crime where people are poor where the crime is up and then you look at the data and that's exactly the opposite of what's happening but okay so but this entire push for sort of more police is part of a broader political project that adana usami and his sort of allies and jocoban and etc etc have been pushing for years now and this sort of like political project is the class side of what's called the class versus race or the race versus class debate so for people who weren't either weren't here for this or have like blissfully

forgotten this the the race class debate was basically an argument about sort of the role of race in leftist organizing um the argument was basically like okay should we understand race as like a structural force in in the us that requires its own specific organizing around racial justice and like liberation movements or should we attempt to put class first and attempt to solve racism by appealing to like the interest of the entire working class and only doing class based organizing um there are broadly like three types of class first people and weirdly we're going to see two of them here um there are a very small number of very committed and very radical Marxists and like a small number of anarchists who think that like well race was a

product of class anyways and so if you end the class system and abolish private property that's the sort of like actual central like mechanism of oppression in society and if you do that like you know race will sort of fall apart and so you know you can't show us um whatever sure it's all false consciousness anyway yeah like these people are wrong i think they're less dangerous than the other kind of two people but we're also going to see one of these guys later so there there's the people like called the like class with like a k people who are just straight up like racists like they are they they they are class with a kkk yeah right like they they you know the the groups of socialists i've compared them to are like the socialists who came to the us after 1848

and were like oh shit who cares like slavery like we don't care about slavery the actual thing that like is good for the working class is stealing more land for indigenous people and this is how we're going to solve the labor question oh yeah or also the sort of like like the the the the people who were in the nights of labor like the 1880s who were like all right we need to we need to defend labor the way we're going to defend labor is by ethnically cleansing the entire west coast of chinese people like these are basically these guys right they're just straight up racist you want unions and healthcare um they used to be a real faction in the dsa um formed around this like absolutely dog shit subreddit called stupid poll um they used to be a bunch of them in philadelphia

and these kind of people like they were like red scares initial base and so by you know this is like the 2017-2018-2019 by now like in 2022 these people are almost entirely deranged tradcats who spend literally their entire time deep-throating peter thiehl's boot so they're kind of mostly like they're just right-wingers now like that that's what's happened to these people um good riddance fuck them i yeah and then there are people like ordinary usami and bosh karsankara who don't really want to end capitalism and think that socialism is just sort of like welfare states and some unions and also they also and this is sort of critical tend to think that racial justice organizing is a distraction from their main goal of achieving socialism and by achieving

socialism i mean electoralism and by electoralism i mean getting these people elected to office yeah yeah i hate these people their politics sucks i i've been fighting them for like since i became a leftist i've been at war with these people and to get a sense of how we got from you know what was legitimately in a lot of cases what was at least legitimately in arguing about how to deal with racism to a bunch of socialists going we need 500 000 more cops i i want to take a look at a piece adam or usami wrote in catalyst with david zakariya called the class path to racial liberation and i want to take a quote from its opening to give it a sense of people of like how awful this politics is this is like like one of their sort of like opening statements about what what

there's why they're taking the class side in the debate we argue that the class race debate should center on one principal domain the distribution of material resources now okay at first glance this seems kind of reasonable enough but there's another incredibly important aspect of any attempt to grapple with race in class that usami is just ignoring entirely and that's violence right race race is not just a measure of economic inequality it's an index of violence and you know racialization increases your risk of interpersonal violence increases your risk of sexual violence increases your risk of mass communal violence a lot of lynchings or sort of ethnic cleansing campaigns and maybe most importantly for this whole argument like being

racialized dramatically increases the risk of suffering state violence and this is a real problem for the sort of class first people because you know usami sort of multiple like multi racial working class electoral project won't do shit to prevent people from experiencing state violence just because there's welfare programs you know which we talked about this what this looks like in our brazil episodes right you actually have like legitimately a you know like a sort of united multi racial working class at alexis a social democratic government and they enact anti-poverty before performs and increase the size of the welfare state and while this is happening they also increase incarceration the incarcerated population by 620 percent and created a rate of police

killing that is 11 times higher than it is in the us right and this is the thing these people really don't want anyone to think about which is that race is actually more complicated than economic inequality which this entire politics is just dedicated to not seeing because class first politics like a lot of what it really is about amounts to a theoretical framework that gives you a way to argue that race is not an explanatory framework for literally anything so you don't have to talk about it and anyone who talks about it is dividing the working class or some shit and it yeah class traitor yeah it fucking sucks and you know like one one of the big sort of political violence things is mass incarceration and one of sort of a donor is

like political projects is arguing that mass incarceration isn't about race at all but it's actually about class which so we're gonna see some more bullshit um he wrote he wrote an article in catalyst called the economic origin the mass incarceration alongside you chicago professor john clagg and i have like i have an enormous special contempt for john clagg for two reasons here one because you know a donor is like an irredeemable jocobin like soak them hack right clagg is normally was was part of the sort of the anglophone barksist like ultra left right like he was one of the contributors to the sort of to the ultra left theory journal like ultra left sort of barksist communization journal end notes which you know like that influenced me a lot when

i was like a tiny baby leftist and he i also have an incredible amount of contempt here because he's a harper schmitt fellow at the university of chicago and here's the thing okay i don't know what harvard is like right i've never been there i don't know what their campus is like i don't know what it's like to be up be on campus at harvard i know what you chicago the u chicago campus is like i know what there's a cop on every fucking corner i know that their surveillance camera is literally everywhere i know that they locked down the entire fucking campus with hundreds of heavily armed cops stormed through every building in every courtyard of the area every single time a kid steals something from a gaming store and runs for it until they've hunted them the fuck down and i know that you know

i i i know that the cops almost fucking killed me while i was there during a police chase i know that john clegg was on fucking campus when the u chicago police department shot a kid who was having a mental health crisis and to to watch this shit every single fucking day and to make this kind of argument is just fucking unforgivable it is it is fucking atrocious i i i guess i i should i should explain this a little bit for people who too don't understand this so the university of chicago is like in the middle of the south side of chicago it like the name like most neighborhoods around it are like 80 black and then there is just this fucking university they've planted in the middle of it and this college has the world's largest private police force there's the also the regular fucking

cpds around there there are like for like blocks and like like through other neighborhoods there were just u chicago police officers there there are fucking cpd cops everywhere it is a fucking militarized hellhole and yeah and you know like it is a place where like the way that race functions in the u.s is blindingly fucking obvious you can you can immediately understand it by looking like you you walk outside your fucking dorm you look at the cop and you look at how the cop treats people depending on what the race is right it is so unbelievably obvious however comma in this article claggett is to me are going to argue that mass incarceration is actually a product of class policy resulting from a lack of social democracy and underdevelopment resulting from a transition

from an agrarian economy to an industrial economy in the in the 20th century people are saying this and and the subsequent mass migration of black people north like oh what what kind of agrarian economy we have we have to ask yeah who is doing the labor in a certain agrarian economy how much why they paid it's like it's like the basic argument that they're gonna make is that like well so there are a bunch of people who'd been slaves and then they became not slaves and then a bunch of those started migrating north but because there was this mass migration all these people showed up to these like showed up to these cities where there was no infrastructure and then so there was a bunch of crime and then because of the crime there was mass incarceration which is

okay we're gonna get some more into this but before we go into the sort of dream people reactionary part of this article right you have to understand that when these people say that this is a like a class-based policy like class here does not mean the same thing that it means for like you know a regular person who thinks about class or like you know a marxist which again both these people nominally are um here's from the journal specter which is a really good sort of critique of of this whole absolutely dog shit article quote Clegg and Usami's claim that class is essential to understanding mass incarceration amounts to a repackaging of a widely understood fact as revelatory insight and while they title their article quote the economic origins of mass

incarceration they never delve further into class in a marxist or even critical sense instead they use educational attainment data as a proxy they note that a large portion of people who are imprisoned have low levels of educational attainment and i i i am glad to know that everyone on this call who does the exact same job as me we're all from different classes congratulations james you are now the bourgeoisie congratulations garrison you are now proletariat i might guess the laborerist ocracy that's why i'm here to expropriate the surplus value from your labor yes yep yeah and uh if you go to prison it's uh it's my fault yeah like i i just okay so like yeah what an asshole what a what a ridiculous fucking claim yeah and it's like like these these okay so like like

usami's like the jocobin people do this all the time right like they they had this they made this famous study about the people who vote for trump that was like oh it's people people who voted for trump did it in like working class areas and again working class was by education data and then also they didn't go because it turns out like this is actually true right there there are a lot of people who voted for trump from working class areas it turns out who those people are are the small business owners in working class areas but they didn't fucking go grand earl up enough so that you know they do this shit all the time right and this is the kind of analysis that like like yeah using shit as a proxy for class is like a it's a classic fallacious thing yeah like like what's

his name uh nicolas christoff uh yeah he did this too also like like this this is this is we're getting fucking christoff level analysis out of these supposed marxists and like okay so all right the curious thing here is that clag at least on an intellectual level knows better than this right like he vote for end notes end notes has a very sophisticated class analysis but if you're actually interested in the sweeping arc of the history of the proletariat you can't make the kinds of arguments that clag is making in this thing and so you know because because he's trying to make this argument he's reduced to this like like just absolute like like seventh rate like fucking new york time is pundit level analysis yeah right it's like okay you know and like

this is really sad because for actual marxists and not sort of like liberal bourgeois hacks doing like fucking new york times bullshit you know classes about ownership right it's about who owns the means of production who's forced to work for them and you know okay so you have this you have the proletariat or like the working class who are the people who own nothing and are thus forced to sell their labor for people who do who do own stuff right but this also presents a problem for this entire argument because if you actually want to do class analysis you have to understand that race plays a major role and who even gets to become part of the regular proletariat in the first place because most does a lot of people through the development of the course of capitalism

who fucking never even got to become wage laborers because they were enslaved they were exterminated they were turned into debt pions and oh wait guess who fucking got that shit oh yeah it wasn't white people and you know if you're gonna write it if you're gonna be writing arguments like explaining the rise of like a mass system of enslavement you might want to think about this but no okay so do you know what else is responsible for a mass series a mass system of enslavement uh the advertising and how they affect our brains yeah that one I was gonna go with Stalin but yours was good well same same dev honestly yeah Stalin first mass marketer so true famously yeah Stalin I'll send you a meal kit if you ask him okay we're back and we're back to talk about

the other argument of the economic origin of mass incarceration which is that the argument that mass incarceration happened because people were legitimately scared about crime like seriously this is their argument their argument is that crime went up people demanded less crime and then the government did it like I wait did they did a give analysis of the class of people well okay they make this fun argument that both black and white people were demanding the end of crime which is sort of true but you know if you look at what like like yeah like obviously this is a thing right like you can find people of any race who can who will take basically any political position and so if you go looking for like black people who are tough on crime you can find it

right there are black politicians who are like tough on crime right but that's also not the reason why mass incarceration happened like I'm sorry and also like you know if you and you know that there was there was also there are people who who like weren't tough on crime people who were like talking about who were talking about trying to end like sort of like like violent spikes but if you look at what they were saying it was stuff like uh we want the police to like respect human rights instead of property rights and uh you know okay so I yeah this this is just sort of silly right it yeah but but but the the point of this is that this is basically this is their full on broadside against abolitionism as like a body of work right it has sort of modern abolitionism

um it's directly criticizing uh Michelle Alexander's uh the new Jim Crow mass incarceration at the age of colorblind lists and it's also like a volley basically against anyone who's trying to explain mass incarceration through race and so what they argue is that crime increased because there wasn't a strong labor movement to solve the problem that like caused solve the problems that caused crime with economic like redistribution so the state turned to like a cheaper option which was prisons and the is it a cheaper option well okay so they're they're they're they're not wrong in this in like there is some truth here right which is that there is a reason that mass incarceration started spiking when capitalism went into crisis in the 70s and 80s and it is actually it is actually

genuinely cheaper for for for the bourgeoisie to run a prison state than it is to run a welfare state but and and this is the important part right both the welfare state and the prison complex are different are just different forms of kind of insurgency usubi who is a social democrat is ideologically incapable of understanding this his his entire ideology is that like it is based on the fact that the welfare state is the endpoint of socialism but this is completely backwards right the welfare state and and social democracy were first implemented by bismarck like specifically as a way to buy workers off to stop them from carrying out a social revolution and actually seizing the prop like seizing the property of the ruling class and using the production for

the benefit of mankind and not profit that is why the ship the welfare state was invented like that was the first time i was putting the practice if you go back to edmund burk right in the french revolution reform to preserve the idea that like we have to give people these little these little slices here and there like i give them a treat and then yeah then then it will never come and take the cake and if you read these people they're really explicit about this like they will just openly say we're buying off the working class but these absolute clowns have like somehow convinced themselves that this is what socialism actually is yep 20 treats so yeah when treats socialism is when socialism is when you you confuse table scraps for treats

yeah and you know and this this comes to sort of the other thing that these that these people can't understand which is that social democracy was a class compromise right there was a deal that the capitalist in the working class agreed to and when i when i say they agreed to this right like this isn't just sort of like an like it kind of is an abstract deal but there were also very literal deals right there's this thing called the treaty of detroit which is this massive basically set of negotiations and then art like agreements that are made between the u.s government like a huge portion of organized labor the auto industry and the auto companies right which which basic like the the the the the substance of the treaty of detroit was like

if you give us all of this welfare shit and benefits shit right we won't we will stop constantly going on strike these are the explicit deals they're explicitly being negotiated between these massive trade unions and and like the the the the capitalist who own companies by the american government and so they get this deal the deal is you get unions and pension and a vacation and like healthcare as long as you don't like seize control of factories and run them for themselves yeah and this held from sort of like the 50s through the 70s but partially this held because also the u.s specifically which is really really rich this economy was growing really fast but you know but by the by the 1970s suddenly the rate of profit is starting to collapse

and suddenly it does actually become possible to both pay for the welfare state and have capital turn into more capital at the same time and you know what happens is is is full on class war over the course of 70s in the 80s and the you know the the capitalist win the class war and the product of this and this is true not just in the u.s but in in like a lot of other neoliberal countries too is that there is a massive military the state is sort of stripped down to nothing in terms of like providing services but there's this massive build up of the military and police and also prisons and so you know this isn't some sense like if you if you want a class-based explanation of mass incarceration like this is part of what that's a big part of what's going on it's also

true that in the u.s in so far as there was sort of a revolutionary force it was black people doing like like doing the panthers doing the blanking on it doing the the black liberation army and this meant that sort of the sort of kind of revolution to this was specifically about deploying the sort of like like deploying the state against these people because yeah yeah like this movement is actively trying to destroy capitalism by destroying the race like police apparatus and this is folks too yeah yeah same time period like aim for instance yeah and you know so the ruling class sort of loses their minds and this is this is also this is also part of what's happening here but the problem is the sort of jocobin copfreaks like need the police for their like social democratic

hell world that they want to build and so they can't have any like it is it is incredibly structurally dangerous for them for people to be arguing that like the police are inherently a force of like systemic racial oppression because they want them around yeah and so they do all this bullshit so they can keep playing 50 bucks per article yeah and you know clag meanwhile especially i can tell just doesn't want to use race as like an explanation for shit like they literally argue in this in this thing like in this in this article that white flight was actually just capital flight and wasn't about racism good and they just they're doing this entire thing about right this sort of political economy of the city and they just they never mention they're so ruthlessly

committed to their program of not talking about racism they don't even mention redlining it's like like they've managed to go to the right of like the libertarian party on race it's like yeah outflank him to the right so i'm gonna i'm gonna read more from the specter article that's like yelling at these people considering their investments in the category of violent crime clag and usuby seem curiously serene about the practices that upheld segregation they would have us believe that such tactics are simply quote cast based remedies of exclusion and that quote such strategies were rational even if suboptimal in the long run effectively rationalizing and apologizing for racism so this is great and then they they cap this off with this giant like swelling crescendo of an

argument about how the left can't dig or crime and you know okay so this is an argument with political consequences right and you can see those consequences in that in the 500 000 copter article we were talking about yesterday um here's a quote from that article this figure shows the same prisoner and police data as shown in figure one but this time denominated by the level of homicide rather than the population america's outlying incarceration look rate looks normal given the level of serious crime and now the level of policing in the united states appears exceptionally low compared to other countries so okay you can see the line of argument here right it goes like mass incarceration isn't about race it's actually about class and actually it's really

about crime and then it goes from the crime to oh well this is about crime too we need to actually do something about crime and then that turns into the only thing we can do about crime is have more cops you know yeah and and the other part of this right it goes back to the thing about like okay the thing about like that you know and this is something that garrison was talking about yesterday right like the the way in which you can only think the level of policing in the us is exceptionally low is if is if you never interacted with a cop and yes this is a deliberate thing right the the sort of jocobin cadre of like faux marxist like their entire political project was like originally was driving off the anarchist you'd found at occupy you know dream and like and

driving these people into the political wilderness it is place it with their sort of bureaucratic cop socialism right like what one of the first like big jocobin articles was a giant thing about why the zappatistas aren't a model for the american left because right like this is these people have been anti-anarchists like to their core and because they need cops they need to get rid of the people who hate the cops like again the people who were actually on the streets dream occupy who have seen shit like for example the bloody stains on the wall outside of police holding pens with a cop smash the heads into of like every single person they arrested a thing that happened constantly dream occupy right and these people who you know have seen the police

shoot their friends eyes out like are incredibly inconvenient if you're trying to put yourself on top of a police state and you know so of course are abolitionists which means you also need to sideline them and and these are this you know this sort of strategy is an old entrenched like position of of these people um in 2018 germy gong who was like the one time basically like the dictator of dsa east bay uh was caught in in secret documents saying quote we are not in cap this is by the way in his capital letters not for abolition of prisons i would go further 90 percent of black people want more police in their neighborhoods really all right yeah germy gong by the way asian dude not black uh fuck you eat shit i hope you're having fun like well i don't

have i don't hope you're having fun i hope you're having a bad time losing another election by getting three percent of the vote or some shit like fuck you eat shit um yeah and i should mention this also like it's a very obvious thing to say but it like it should be pointed out that like everyone is making this argument like specifically these arguments about cops and about the stuff thinking about crime these people are all either white or asian and i genuinely think that plays a pretty big role in why they're doing this it is just a breathtaking position to take in 2021 to yeah as a white person like uh i'm i'm looking at the uh anacaspian article which uh she wrote for news week a great source of unbiased content on the left about how uh we need to stop gas

lighting progressives need to stop gas lighting people on crime uh to as a white person in 2022 like take the stand with the platform that has been given to you with all the privileges that you have had and and gas like black folks about the importance of race it is just like breathtakingly lacking in like context of self-awareness or like have you not been fucking paying attention like at least for the last two years if not for the last 20 years you know yeah and i mean like this is the whole thing right like they have this whole sort of political project that's like like makes talking up like their goal is to make talking about this shit sound cringe because you know they and they have to right and this is this is this is also sort of class

based survival strategy right because like they these people couldn't fucking hack it as abolition of scholars they have no fucking idea what they're talking about right if they if they if they have to actually intellectually like be in the same sphere as like someone like Ruth Gilmore Wilson they are going to get fucking blow like these people are like this is this is like a fucking battle cruiser going to war against a speedboat right like they can't fucking hack it and so they have to sort of like do all of this shit to convince people that like no no no it's actually really not about race uh it's it's actually about class this thing that i can very easily pretend to care about from academia in a way that i can't with you know pretending to care about race because

like i can't even fucking fake it right and you know i would say this like back in 2018 right like germany gong and his allies are very careful to frame their view in terms of like well we want to end mass incarceration and police violence but we have to be tactical about how we do it and the tactical about how we do it is black people want more cops right but that that was their internal documents their external their external statements were like eh well some police abolitionism stuff looks like more cops anyways but you know internally they were always saying this and now with the you know these people think that there's a political right turn coming and they think that you know they can fucking take their mask off and just say what they really mean which

is 500 000 more fucking cops and you know and part of what's going on here right is like like the reason this is happening is because when the uprising happened these people were just caught with their pants down because the their entire political project for like fucking how how many years were they doing this like seven years was elect bernie sanders and then he lost back to back successively to like hillary clinton who was maybe the least popular candidate ever run ever and joe biden who is a fucking senile rapist who like again was all like they lost his election to a man who couldn't remember who who he had been vice president under and they couldn't beat him right like so these people were completely discredited and then you know the uprising happened

these people were caught with their pants down because they spent their entire fucking time organ like arguing that like there's no path of liberation through race like race any kind of race like politics at all intersectionalities bullshit like we just have to focus on class just to focus on class and their fucking pure class electoral campaign failed in oh hey guess what it failed in the south like wow damn i wonder why this politics fucking got swept by joe by like okay and then you know and then the up the uprising starts and the uprising is you know the uprising is about anti-racism it is about people looking at the violence like of the police against black people and going fuck this and they have nothing right like the whole intellectual leadership here like

all these people are fucking calling for world cops bernie sanders is arguing for more cops right like choppa was fucking choppa was literally making the same arguments that my fucking mayor made well she was raising the fucking draw bridges to stop protesters from being able to get back into the middle of chicago which is that actually like cops becoming a cop is actually one of the few ways that a non-white people can join the middle class right that was i think amber made that argument right um so you know they have nothing right and you know okay and you know and the uprising eventually gets suppressed which is the best thing that ever happened to these people because if the uprising is to see these people were done right like but all of this has enormous

consequences right which is the the failure of the working class to appear at the ballot box to like pull bernie sanders over the line against joe byton revealed something that was like patently obvious to anyone who'd been watching how the working class is moving worldwide for the past 20 years which is that the only thing that can actually unify though if you care about class politics the only thing that can unify the working class and pull it together as a coherent political force to do a thing is their hatred of the police if you look if you look at what the work of working class politics in the 21st century the world the working class finds its historical unity exactly and only on the barricade it appears undivided literally nowhere else it is impossible you

can't do it the only thing that does it is is fighting the police like more broadly in like means of state violence right like if we look at the popular front in spain it's and you even get like cops who are installed by a socialist republican government joining the working class to fight the military but yeah instead we're going to be like the working class will be united in this op-ed at newsweek.com yeah or in this fucking electoral thing right and it's like no and i think that like this is partially about the people not understanding the sort of broad arc of of the last decade decade and a half which is that like this was the actual meaning behind the people want to follow the regime right this this was what was going on in the last decade of

uprisings and street movements across the world right is that that was the thing that could unify the working class but of course and and this is the sort of secret of all of this right like these people don't want to unify the working class they only want to unify it if it's under their control the the eruption of you know like actually the working class standing side by side together fighting the cops on barricades in 2020 was the worst thing that could possibly happen to them because it you know it pointed to another way of doing politics that they like in the in the street that they thought they'd you know crushed after the feat of occupy and yeah yeah and you know they they were they were they were incredibly scared by this they were pissed off by this and

you know i i i i mentioned last episode i was going to talk about the sort of class politics that's at work here because you know these demands for more cops like they don't come from the working class right like in so far as there's ever been a referendum on the police as an institution it was 2020 and you know we know what that looked like right it was a it was a bunch of fucking working class kids went into the streets and you know and fought like lions against the fucking cops and even the sort of liberal like the liberal middle and professional classes like eventually turned against them you know as as sort of 2020 rolled on right and you know like those people still hung on for months and months and months you know like refusing to leave the streets even

after the fucking federal marshal started literally assassinating people openly in the streets right like the the whole demand for more cops like a harsher crackdown on crime all of this stuff comes from precisely the opposite direction right it's entirely generated by the by the by by by basically the media class right it's its class base is a combination of the sort of like faux progressive like media outlets and originally this starts with the new york times in washington post and then booze left or nominally left right and it hits like the fucking to it and all of their like bullshit right and then you know and then at that point having having run through the media people right it starts running through these pseudo radical academics like christopher lewis and

adenara usami and then the the last group of people who are backing this is this is a very weird one but there's a collection of paid union staffers who like for their jobs because they're in the big unions work on police and prison guard contracts um this was actually this is this has been a huge problem the dsa uh in in in what was it 2016 no 2015 2015 2016 one of the the mpc elections they had um for the for the national political committee which is like the dsa's big major body uh like governing body right uh they they accident people accidentally elected a police union organizer because he was like they knew he was a union organizer they didn't know that he organized police unions and then he he fucking refute like nothing nothing was gonna happen and

then basically what happened is everyone had left the organization bullied him out and so he resigned but like yeah there's a lot of those people right and those people's class incentives are incredibly obvious right but didn't the afl cio even in 2020 like refused to reject police unions right there but like no people people if i remember if i remember i think i think someone threw a molotov like into the headquarters the afl cio because of it like yeah like this this was a whole fucking thing and you know like this sucks cops are not fucking workers jesus christ like they're like they're just not if you if you look at what they actually do they're they're they're like they're basically minor feudal lords in that they extract rent

from everyone by fucking walking on people and robbing them and then they also extract rent directly from us by take it by stealing just like enormous increasingly large amounts of city funds under basically the threat of extortion and violence yeah little daimyo's yeah it's it's it's shit i want to come back to sort of left media outlets right because yeah what we've been seeing here is that as as these sort of left media outlets get larger right they increasingly adopt like insane small business tyrant politics because that's that's what they're becoming right to it notoriously tried to bust its own union staff yeah because it turns out as journalists become bosses and capitalists they have they have their own class issues to look out for right yeah

and they will continue producing this class discourse which serves as nothing other than like best like a safety sort of steam valve right for people who are frustrated by the class situation that they work in if not like an outright sort of disinformation campaign about what class is yeah and you know and and there's i think there's another thing going on here too which is that like okay if if you're like a sort of like media outlet and your thing is that you hate liberals and that you're on the left right there's there's kind of a cap to your audience base and specifically use a cap to the kind of audience you could have that actually has money because you know you can you can get a broke base of sort of progressive workers you can get some

college students right but at some point like those those are not people that have a large amount of money yeah and at some point the right offers a listener base that has a bunch of money and this gives you a revenue base for sort of would-be like media tech who's hitting the limits of their original base and this is responsible for things like like max blumenthal and x like two i tv reporter jimmy door like descending it's just full-on covid denialism and conspiracy i mean you know it's it's not like these people were like doing good before but like you know full-on right wing like like max blumenthal going from being like the most pro ccp guy the world has ever seen to literally writing articles about how social credit is coming to the us in a form of

covid restrictions like this kind of shit and you know so like that's part of the class politics going on here like there's another thing which is like okay there's the harvard academics i i don't think we need to say anything complicated about their class loyalties except that like none of these dipshits are ever be beaten half the death by a cop um yeah i mean we talked about the union bureaucrats right um they're slightly more complicated but again like in class terms you get people who are either driven by purely by sort of the the revenue that cop unions bring in and then you get people who are opposed to political organizations like the dsa taking firm stances against police union organizers because it would affect their own ability to win off like win

elections inside the dsa a thing that has happened so many times it's great it's it is very funny that they chose classes they chose like education level as their proxy for class and we're discussing this in the same week that we released an episode about a grad student strike at the largest university in the country because grad students are unhoused because they can't afford to pay their rent and feed themselves yep it is it is atrocious shit like i just yeah okay i i hate people um yeah so i want to close off by talking about something which is that there's also a political angle to all of this right these people all of these people doing this fucking tough on crime bullshit all these people fucking going right all of these people calculated that a right turn in american politics

was coming right that's why tyt endorsed a fucking literally a republican in california who was also an insane tough on crime guy this is why uh this is why they had uh no no no uh rick caruso caruso yeah who was the republican who changed his party affiliations we could run the democratic thing who fucking sucks ass that's why they do it's not right that that's why they had matt quote alleged pedophile gates on their show on a fucking election night they had larry elder on their show as well like election denialist larry elder yeah like this this wasn't just a pure product of these people going insane watching videos of like people looting grocery stores attorney getting like tough on crime reactionaries this was a political calculation and what stuff

but uh yeah but but but they fucked up right these people fundamentally don't understand what this country is they're scared they've given up they saw a single homeless person on the street and turned into a fascist and they think that the american people are just hopelessly reactionary the only thing that's left to do is solve the situation by selling out and they're fucking wrong smart they don't think they don't credit people with having like compassion or empathy or intelligence either yeah they think they would go the direction their stupid grift show points yeah and and they're wrong they're incredibly wrong this is a country that in the name of fighting racism and the police in the name of solidarity with people who are not their fucking cells people who they

will literally never beat put on a mass picked up a brick and waged war against the best funded police force in human history and for like a week and a half those same fucking americans who the entire political spectrum had written off as hopelessly beaten down and passive and right wing and like people people who will take any amount of abuse and never say anything back wrecked the fucking wrecked the cop shit so hard they lost control over the centers of made multiple major american cities and had to call in the fucking national guard who in turn got their shit wrecked so hard that they had to rely on liberal civil society to calm the protest down and even then the president would have fucking deployed the army against them if he'd actually

been physically able to and the only reason that these people weren't fighting the fucking army in the streets was that was that the fucking american generals refused to go along with it right like that that is who the us is that that that is who the generation is this generation is forever the generation that burned a third precinct and the fucking x left is running right just don't fucking get it right they think the entire clock has been round back they think that like those that like the people who did that have already been destroyed they don't matter the only thing left you know you can do is join the right and mitigate the damage and they're fucking wrong they are wrong they can't see it they cannot see that there is no way to turn the clock back

to before the uprising happened they can't see that like this entire country that the that the american working class that parts of the people who are not part of the american working class have been fundamentally changed and yeah they they just they just can't see it and because they can't see it the only thing that they're ever going to feel is the weight of their is the only thing they can feel is a way to their ignorance and the only thing they're going to feel on top of that is them getting fucking buried by the weight of a history that has left them behind because fuck these people fuck the cops fuck the people who support the cops these people will be down but will be fucking drowned by the tide of history they thought didn't fucking exist fuck them

okay this is what yeah i you could probably tell i wrote this really really pissed off at five in the fucking morning because jesus christ that was good yeah i agree with you pick up a brick put down the young turks yeah don't don't fucking support more cops every every every one will hate you your co-workers will hate you your friends will hate you your family will hate you the guy the guy at the fucking quarter store will hate you yeah if you find your fucking left hero standing the people who murdered george floyd or stood around and watched george floyd being murdered then they are not a leftist anymore it's okay to tell them to fuck off and die yeah and i mean like and we can go back to the first episode right like the reason these people are calling

for 500 000 more cops is that they've given up entirely right they they literally do not think it is possible for anything to ever improve in the us and then when they are wrong yeah and i think that they're okay with the way that our police behave and there if that makes them feel comfortable and safe then they don't mind i mean cops people died at the hands of the police cops protect rich people these people have gotten wealthy enough to have the cops now benefit them it's it's that simple like that's that that's it's it's it's i think that really is the yeah yeah the driving motivator here yeah and i like i will say this too like if we ever get to a point where we start fucking doing this like take us down too like this isn't just a sort of like we're trying to build our

business whatever i don't like i don't fucking care i i would i would rather fucking go broke in the streets i would rather fucking die than be a person whose job it is to say we need more cops fuck these people like oh god fuck them all yeah mm-hmm they've blocked me on twitter so i can't say that you okay get after them podcast fans oh god we are we are not inside like a harassment campaign instead no go do better things go yeah don't waste don't know yeah at all seriousness don't waste your time doing discourse with people who exist to create bullshit discourse so just a distraction go and help someone needs your fucking help it's cold it's wet it's winter time and they run house people who are shivering on the street so don't fuck with the young turks just ignore them

they're pointless yeah go go go go go out there and fucking build the socialism that these people think is impossible because we can do it and we will and then we will fucking laugh at them because yeah we've done it and they are fucking bullshit yeah that's that's the episode hey we'll be back monday with more episodes every week from now until the heat death of the universe it could happen here is a production of cool zone media for more podcasts from cool zone media visit our website cool zone media dot com or check us out on the i heart radio app apple podcast or wherever you listen to podcasts you can find sources for it could happen here updated monthly at cool zone media dot com slash sources thanks for listening what would you do if a secret

cabal of the most powerful folks in the united states told you hey let's start a coup back in the 1930s a marine named smithley butler was all that stood between the u.s and fascism i'm ben bullitt i'm alex french and i'm smithley butler join us for this sorted tale of ambition treason and what happens when evil tycoons have too much time on their hands listen to let's start a coup on the i heart radio app apple podcast or wherever you find your favorite shows did you know lance bass is a russian trained astronaut that he went through training in a secret facility outside moscow hoping to become the youngest person to go to space well i ought to know because i'm lance bass and i'm hosting a new podcast that tells my crazy story and an even crazier story about a russian

astronaut who found himself stuck in space with no country to bring him down with the soviet union collapsing around him he orbited the earth for 313 days that changed the world listen to the last soviet on the i heart radio app apple podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts what if i told you that much of the forensic science you see on shows like csi isn't based on actual science and the wrongly convicted pay a horrific price two death sentences in a life without parole my youngest i was incarcerated two days after her first birthday listen to csi on trial on the i heart radio app apple podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts