Chapo Trap House - Bonus: Chris Talks Hurricane Relief & "Disaster Socialism" with Tallahassee DSA

Episode Date: November 23, 2018

Here's a little Thanksgiving bonus for you all: Producer Chris talks to members of the Tallahassee DSA about their disaster relief efforts after Hurricane Michael. They discuss their idea of "disaster socialism": the opportunity to bring networks of solidarity created by organizations like DSA to direct aid of afflicted communities in the wake of these (increasingly frequent) climate disasters. We also discuss failures of state relief organizations, the presence of right-wing vigilante groups after the storm, and free pizza as praxis. Tallahassee DSA Disaster Relief Fund: https://www.gofundme.com/dsa-tlh-hurricane-relief-fund Support and donate to Mutual Aid Disaster Relief: https://mutualaiddisasterrelief.org/donate/ Cosby Hayes is an artist, activist and co-chair of the Tallahassee DSA and co-host of the podcast Tropical Depression with Ryan Ray and Daniel Moran. https://soundcloud.com/tropicaldepressionpodcast Pearson Bolte is the co-host of Coffee with Comrades: http://www.coffeewithcomrades.com/ Ryan Ray is an electoral organizer with Tallahassee DSA.

Hi, everyone, and happy Thanksgiving! I hope you've all finished your turkey and pie and, I don't know, cranberry torts because it's time for some veggies. That's right, it's producer Chris back with one more interview from activists around the country. Today we head down to Tallahassee, Florida, where, in the spirit of giving, we'll be talking to members of the Tallahassee DSA about their work providing disaster aid in the wake of Hurricane Michael back in October.

They'll be telling us all about how work with socialist groups like DSA can help provide aid in disasters like this as well as explain their idea of disaster socialism, which I found quite interesting. We'll be talking a lot about things like solidarity and praxis, so if you like using those words online, this might be an interesting one for you. As always, I'm open to hearing more activist stories to discuss, and you can DM me at to say what again on Twitter with suggestions for things I should follow up on, but this is honestly probably the last one of these I'll get to this year.

So enjoy shuffling off up to your room to game with scraps from the Thanksgiving meal, and while you do, please enjoy this interview. On the week of October 10th, Hurricane Michael made landfall on the Florida Panhandle. It was the third most intense hurricane to make landfall in the United States and the second only in sustained wind speed to Hurricane Andrew in 1992. Michael caused severe damage to communities throughout the region, with destruction particularly intense around the city of Mexico Beach, Florida. At least 45 deaths have been attributed to the storm and an estimated $14.58 billion

in damages. In the aftermath of the storm, with state and federal disaster services lacking, many community groups stepped in to provide disaster relief. Today I'm talking to the Tallahassee DSA who organized a range of actions to assist various disenfranchised communities in recovery, where state help was just not adequate. They reached out to us first to inform us of their work and try to broadcast the region's need for aid, but also to explain a new kind of experience for their group. As much as disaster capitalism might be a thing, we covered it on episode 152, The Schloch

Doctrine with guest Naomi Klein. So is disaster socialism, and the value and effect of direct action with democratically organized groups during disaster relief has become sharply apparent to them. So we're going to talk to them a little bit about their work. Cosby Hayes, Pearson Bolt, and Ryan Ray, welcome to the show. So can you introduce yourselves and tell us your positions in the Tallahassee DSA? Yep, my name's Cosby Hayes, and I'm the co-chair of the Tallahassee DSA. Ryan Ray, I did communications for the chapter and helped organize a fundraising effort.

My name's Pearson Bolt. I'm a member of the Tallahassee DSA, member of the DSA Libertarian Socialist Caucus, member of Mutual Aid Disaster Relief, yeah. So let's start off by talking a little bit about the storm itself. Can you kind of describe what it looked like on the ground there and what the immediate aftermath was in terms of destruction and what you were dealing with in a community basis? Yeah, so Tallahassee was largely unscathed by the storm.

We had a lot of downed trees, and most of the city was without power for several days. That's not unusual in this area. When a storm really of any significant size comes through, we do experience those types of things, but the communities just to the west and south of us were hit extremely hard. And it's incredible, it looks like nothing that I've ever seen before. Complete forest tipped over, houses just obliterated, these folks lost everything. Yeah, and you said that the city where the worst of the storm hit Mexico Beach is basically not there anymore.

Yeah, so Mexico Beach is completely destroyed. I think there was like one house that had been built for the end times that had survived. Other than that, it was a complete loss. They've actually evacuated everyone from Mexico Beach and they're slowly letting people come back to assess their property damages and things like that. But the town itself is no longer considered a town and is a complete loss. I think I saw the picture of that one house that remained and just everything around it is just a field of desiccated boards and stuff.

Mexico Beach is largely kind of like not a resort town, but an area where many people own second homes and go there to vacation and to enjoy the beach. However, there are many poor families that live there and the towns around Mexico Beach are widely impoverished. These people did not have anything before the storm. And after an event like this, they're left with nothing and many times not even given the resources on how to start to rebuild. Yeah, so I'm assuming that after a town like that is destroyed, most of the people who

own second homes just kind of abandon the area and whoever's left there is kind of left to deal with the complete void of infrastructure. Yeah, and unfortunately, the folks who have the means and did own second homes down there, they're the first ones to apply for those FEMA grants and the people who really need them in some of these smaller communities that are less affluent aren't always given the resources to apply for those types of things. And if you don't know where to start, you're not going to start, so it's not going to come. For a lot of wealthy folks, it was mostly an insurance matter, but thousands of people

lost literally everything. Could you tell me a little bit about what kind of advanced preparation, what kind of organizational work Tallahassee DSA was doing to get ready for this kind of thing? To be totally honest, a lot of the Tallahassee DSA response was very spontaneous, but mutually disaster relief, which is an organization that I do organizing with, is this is their thing. They were involved when Hurricane Michael came through and Hurricane Irma, Hurricane Maria, they went to Puerto Rico multiple times, installed solar.

And so when the Hurricane Michael rolled through, mutually disaster relief folks were ready and willing to participate and to help in the aid of folks in affected communities. There is currently a sort of a distribution hub up at the Unitarian Universalist Church in Panama City, which is continuing to receive supplies and distribute supplies and do work in that community. And so we in Tallahassee benefited greatly from the organizing efforts that had gone into mutually disaster relief sort of decentralized network. And if I could, in terms of DSA's intervention into this, Cosby and I were taking refuge

together when the storm made landfall and we thought, when we still thought that the storm might well destroy Tallahassee or do serious damage to the city, we're out of power at this point, we're just waiting for things to blow over and we were actually contacted by some comrades through DSA chapters around the country. The comedian Dave Anthony, actually, I know a friend of yours show reached out to us and asked if there was anything that he could do, and that actually, yeah, right. I think he was our first substantial donor. I know Virgil Texas also gave a very generous donation.

But we basically, people asking if there's anything they could do kind of spurred Cosby and myself to put together a fundraising effort, and it just kind of came together from there. And I have to say the outpouring of support from chapters all over the country, I would say probably 90 or 95% of the money that was donated towards our effort came from lefties, came from the incredible DSA network, from folks as far-flung as Burlington, Cleveland, Bloomington, North Texas, Houston DSA, and so it all came together very organically. A lot of chapters around Florida came and mobilized and I did this work with us. Yeah, Orlando DSA, Spacecoast DSA actually sent members up and used their own money to

buy supplies and to get here and to help out, and so that was really, really amazing to see and essentially every chapter in Florida helped out in one way or another. The other thing that I wanted to add to that was just as far as getting ready and what our plans were as the DSA, the storm, the storm is going to be studied for years because of how quickly it developed. It really did happen in the matter of like three days or less, and there was a little bit of misinformation on where the storm was going to go and so a lot of folks in Tallahassee evacuated.

Our chapter is made up largely of undergrads and graduate students, so a lot of those folks have left town and we were all kind of just like worrying about our own safety and what we needed to do to get ready for the storm. Were it not for Pearson and his network of different organizations that were mobilizing in the hours before the storm hit and the power went down, he plugged us in and got us set up with a ton of different amazing organizations. That was kind of what initially sparked our interest and like, hey, we have the manpower, let's start putting together a network and see what the DSA can do to help out and then

it just kind of took off from there as people were reaching out to us asking where they could donate. Organizations like the Socialist Rifle Association, the Florida People's Advocacy Center, the Poor People's Campaign all jumped on. We had people, local elected officials and people running for office here in Tallahassee that were jumping into the group chat and finding ways that they could get involved, so it was really amazing to have the DSA kind of be a part of that. That confluence of forces all coming together is really what made this work well.

That's awesome to hear and we'll get into this a little more later, but that does sound great that what you have is this organization that through the order that it has is able to kind of jump in and seamlessly graft onto all these other groups working at the same time and just having the ability to mobilize people quickly around need is one of the strongest features of having a responsive, a well-working, responsive organization. It really was solidarity at action. I also do want to shout out all the other DSA chapters that came, although I do want to say that Space Coast DSA has an unfair advantage for having the coolest regional name for a

DSA chapter. Yeah, and the best logo. I'm sure it does. I can just imagine the DSA space patch that I'm sure that they have. So let's talk about the aftermath then. What exactly did you guys mobilize to do? What were some of the actions like? Were you expanding effort?

What did you find worked the best or was the most efficient use of your labor and what kind of didn't work out the best? So I'm actually from Tallahassee, so I had a pretty good knowledge of the surrounding communities to the south and southwest of here. Just having spent a ton of time in a lot of these places that are completely decimated. So I immediately reached out to folks in towns like Bluntstown, Bristol, yeah, Bluntstown, places like Port St. Joe, and for the first couple days, it was really hard to get in contact with any of these people because no one relief aid and workers were not actually

able to access a lot of these towns because the primary, when people think of rural North Florida, they might think of farmland, but for the most part, it's actually lumber. So it's these pine forests all along the road. So when a big storm like this comes through, those trees tip over really, really easily. Yeah, you got that sandy soil. Yeah, and they have really tiny root systems and they grow really quick, so they just all tip over and it was very hard to get in and out. But within a few days, we spent the first few days just kind of going around Tallahassee

in a truck with a ton of supplies, gasoline, deodorant, toothbrushes. We even contacted a couple of local restaurants, a pizza shop that was willing to donate hot meals and we just drove around and looked for communities that needed them rather than going to some of these larger organizations and handing the supplies off to them. We just took it in a direct action way and really just tried to give the supplies, put the supplies in the people's hands that needed it. What were the deficiencies of state and federal response that you saw? And were you able to kind of actively step in to replace any of these things, even if

you were kind of going around and trying to address things as you saw them basis? Yeah, absolutely. So FEMA was pretty much nowhere to be found. I saw police standing around with their hands in their pockets more often than I saw police actually doing anything, which is to be expected to a large degree. There were arbitrary lane blockages from authorities who weren't explaining why they were cutting off certain roads. But I think probably most egregiously while we were out in Alfa, Florida, the Customs

and Border Patrol were consolidating and hoarding supplies in a localized region and making it so that anybody who wanted to get badly desperately needed supplies had to go through a security checkpoint. And they were justifying this around fears of looting or liberating the supplies that were already stolen from people. And kind of this whole idea of disaster capitalism is very much wrapped up in a much larger resurgence from the far right and from reactionary forces. These things don't happen in a vacuum and rhetoric around Muslims or around immigrants

or around Mexicans is entirely designed towards consolidating state power. And what ends up happening in these disaster zones is that when that power is consolidated, it restricts the ability for actual working class people to get their hands on desperately needed supplies, which is where we came in and we're trying to actually put people in touch with either networks or organizations or more specifically trying to just simply put supplies into people's hands so that they could go home and give water to their children or to put food on the table for their families. At one point, I was in Bluntstown with like 50 hot pizzas that have been donated by a

good friend of ours who's running for city commission here in Tallahassee and I drove down to the poorest neighborhood that I knew of in Bluntstown and just started handing these pizzas out to families and a cop pulled up on me, asked for a pizza and then proceeded to tell me that I was making a big mistake by handing these hot pizzas out to the folks in this community because all they were doing was sitting around at their houses waiting for people to hand them things that they needed and that my time and my pizza would be better spent given to the relief workers and the linemen and the law enforcement officers downtown. So it's just little things like this, perspectives like this that perpetuate that type of thing

and meanwhile the public in these small towns are all working together. We saw people cleaning out their refrigerators, restaurants cleaning out their refrigerators coming to the center of town and cooking over fires and on grills and just handing the food out for free, you know, because it was going to go bad anyways. So that's the word to me, the real deficit of state aid comes in, it's the most vulnerable communities are either ineligible to receive the aid or are reluctant to seek it. So it sounds like what you were really seeing is that where there was state aid, it was being used either explicitly for or in tandem with a flexing of state muscle in terms of

sorting out who and who is not worthy of the pizzas of community. Just one other thing that I wanted to add on the initial relief work that we were doing just besides like loading up trucks and trucks full of everyday goods that people were going to need to stay healthy and safe was through the Florida People's Advocacy Center we got plugged in with an organization that was focusing on providing relief work to undocumented folks in a small town in Quincy which is in Gadsden County just kind of northwest of Tallahassee and we went over there, we were giving supplies, they started to trust us, it's pretty amazing because in a lot of these areas it's very conservative and on any other day they would

have an issue with anyone calling themselves a socialist but they were welcoming us with open arms. We were actually able to go to some of these people's houses who were undocumented and need our migrant workers and help them put tarps on their roofs and things like this which was so important in the days just after the storm because it actually didn't rain for about a week after the storm passed so we had a little bit of time to help some of those people really protect their homes and their livelihoods. So it's now about a month out after the storm.

It sounds like some of the initial work that you were doing is a little kind of like bailing out a boat of just doing what you can where you can to help things out. Has this coalesced into more organized work to kind of target more effort at certain places or are you still kind of going around and spot by spot giving aid where you can? Yeah, as I mentioned earlier the Universalist Unitarian Church is where folks with mutual disaster relief are doing organizing in Panama City, Panama City is far to the west of us, it's about two and a half hours west of where we're sitting right now. That region is still ravaged.

It still looks just tragic. I drove a comrade up there last week and it still looked about as bad as most of the places in Tallahassee were the first day of the storm. It's really, really, really bad out there. And so yeah, there's definitely still need for volunteers, for people. If folks are interested in coming down, if they have technical skills, if they are willing to tarp roofs, if they are willing to cut down trees with chainsaws, if they have any type of woodworking or yardworking skills and people want to get engaged, I would encourage

them to reach out some mutual disaster relief. As I mentioned before, they are a sort of decentralized organization who are committed towards responding to disasters from a grassroots model of solidarity, not charity, based around recognizing our shared humanity and our shared need for one another instead of the traditional sort of non-government agency kind of model of the nonprofit industrial complex of let's get as much money and then I'm going to tell you what to do and where to put that money. That instead is all based around going, listening to people's needs, responding to those needs, and coming from a place of humility of open hearts and open minds and open hands to try

and respond to people and meet their material needs and not from like a sort of weird proselytizing way of, we're socialists and we're here to save you, but from just a solidarity. This is what it's based all around is upon, you know, the sort of axiom of do unto others as you would have them do unto you. Yes, and I want to pick up on that point in just another minute, but a few more questions about the on the ground. One point that you mentioned that I wanted to pick up on, just as we're talking about how certain communities, the more disenfranchised communities are disproportionately affected

by these kinds of disasters, not just because of, you know, the disaster itself, but because of their response and how it's delivered and what kinds of, you know, state organs they have to interact with. You said over email that there was a situation that was developing where people's houses were destroyed and because they didn't have houses, they were getting evicted and then because they didn't have, because they were evicted and didn't have permanent addresses, they couldn't be eligible for FEMA relief. Can you talk a little bit about how that kind of vicious circle gets created for people

down there? Absolutely. It's disaster capitalism at work. That's it in a nutshell. You know, the idea was that these tenants are being driven from their homes because landlords don't want to have to put up with them and house them. They want to tear everything down and chalk it up as a loss and get those people out of there.

And so people were getting, you know, two or three days notice that they had to be out of their homes, right? They had to pick up all their stuff and leave or else everything that they owned would be thrown out. And a lot of really amazing work has gone into organizing around squatters rights and around ensuring that these people are aware of their rights as tenants and able to see that it's actually illegal for them to be kicked out of their premises after a disaster relief.

It was encouraging. One very rare ray of light was that police said that they were going to refuse to evict people because of, and this is crucial, because of the on the ground organizing that people in the community were doing to educate each other and to refuse to acquiesce to the demands of their landlords and said, people were saying, fuck you, we are going to stay here. These are our homes. You know, we've paid rent. We are trying to respond and get our lives together after losing everything.

And so it's been really encouraging to see folks respond to that and give people homes and give people shelter in a very sort of decentralized way. The, of course, the big trouble with that again is the idea of the sort of top down bureaucratic network of people not being able to get relief from FEMA because they don't have an address anymore. Naturally, this is part and parcel to the whole problem of hierarchy and bureaucracy in general, because it's in, it's total in capability to actually meet the material needs of people who are suffering, especially in the wake of something like a climate catastrophe

induced hurricane. And so, you know, I think it holds a lot of, it really brings to light the, the, the, the fallacy of looking to people in authority to protect us, to looking to the state to protect us or to looking to our landlords to have our back. They're not going to save us. We have to save each other. We have to look out for one another. And that's again what this whole disaster relief response has been all about since day

one. Yeah. Let me do just one more point. And then I want to bring all these threads of, you know, relief through solidarity together. Because I do want to talk about perhaps the most sensational thing that you sent me is that you mentioned that there were some hate groups also doing disaster relief in the area. You mentioned a league of the South as well as some vigilante patrolling groups like the oath keepers and, you know, various looters will be shot signs.

Can you, can you talk about that kind of dark relief that's going on on the other side of the other side of the horseshoe? Yeah, exactly. Yes. The exact other side of the horseshoe where we're both doing solidarity, just one is good and one is dark solidarity. Exactly. Yeah.

Yeah. So we heard multiple reports of League of the South being in the area. I think even someone who was in our initial disaster relief chat had somehow gotten tied in to their, their communication line and had seen that they were planning to come, we're planning to come to the area and look out for other white people. We were fortunate enough to never run into them. And then in addition to that, in Mexico Beach, as things deteriorated and before the National Guard actually forcibly removed everyone from Mexico Beach, there was a vigilante group

that was riding around at night. A few percenters. Yeah. Yeah. And, you know, essentially just looking for anyone who they find suspicious, they're just trigger happy assholes with guns who are looking, you know, it's like, this is their dream, right? It's like apocalypse.

They can just ride around and shoot poor people. Right. Yeah. I think another, you know, big thing to hit on here again is like on the, you know, horseshoe other side of the coin kind of conversation. The whole thing is that fascism creeps by aping and parroting things that the left does really well. Right.

And then trying to incorporate them into its project, right? And this is why we're seeing an uptick in far right and reactionary and fascist and proto-fascist groups utilizing this method of responding to disasters because they see, holy shit, it actually works. It actually meets people where they're at. It starts conversations. It gets engaged in communities. And so people see that or our enemy sees that and they say, okay, great, we can take that.

We can use that in order to further our fascist agenda. I think that it's really crucial that we recognize when those things are happening because it's going to be crucial. As I mentioned earlier about the Custom and Border Patrol, it's going to be crucial that we recognize again and again and again that these things are intersectional, that these things are all happening simultaneously, that the rise of fascism is directly linked to the collapse of capitalism and the destruction of our social ecology through global climate change.

Yeah. And I think it's telling that one of the main ways that that comes out is, you know, in this kind of grotesque parody of aid, the natural sponsor for them is more like punishment and trying to keep people out and afraid rather than, you know, the aid domination instead of the aid and solidarity. So let's segue then into the aid and solidarity, something that's, you know, basically the end of every one of these questions has come to this idea of disaster socialism. And that in organizing the response to this disaster, it allowed you to put some of the

ideals and organizing principles of your various groups in front of real people and use them in a very physical, real-world way. And so now imagine me doing the anime guy pointing at the butterfly meme. Is this praxis? Right. Well, I mean, right-wing policies that we've seen at the state and federal level make these disasters much worse. I mean, if you think that our society is unequal at normal times, it seems like sometimes we're

in a permanent state of emergency these days, but when you see an actual natural disaster and acute catastrophe like this, it makes those rifts even more jagged and it makes those chasms even more obvious that they could die. So I know Pearson's very experienced in dealing with this stuff, so I'll let him speak some more. Yeah. So here's the thing, when a disaster happens, it doesn't matter if it's a social disaster, if it's an ecological disaster, if it's an economic disaster.

When disasters happen, they bring people together. There's something about the way that human beings respond to catastrophic, horrifying, heartbreaking events that is so profoundly rooted and dedicated around this idea of mutual aid, of meeting people where they're at, responding to them and trying to help them. And I think that this is, it holds the truth, the lie of, oh, well, human beings are selfish creatures and we should have this sort of ontological basis for capitalism because people are just inherently selfish and so they're always going to just consume, consume, consume as much as you take from them.

But that's not what you see, right? What you see is us going around to people and us sharing stuff with each other mutually. I have so many stories of people coming to us and saying, oh my gosh, what are you guys doing? And we're saying, oh, well, you know, we're just being neighbors. And they're like, oh, cool, can we come with you? Like, there are these two kids. Do you remember Kotzi?

There are these two kids. The very first day. There are these two kids who just came up to us and we were like cleaning up their yard or whatever and they were like, what are you guys doing? And we were like doing disaster relief and they're like, are you guys with an organization? And I don't think we even said we're with an organization because that's not what it's about. It's about people.

And so we were just like, no, we're just, you know, being neighbors. And they were like, cool, can we come help you? And so they jumped in the back of the truck and we just kind of drove around together for another two hours and clean stuff up. And you know, that is what it actually looks like in the wake of a disaster. It doesn't look like this sort of post-apocalyptic vision that you might see in, you know, something cliche like the walking dead or some shit. In reality, what it is is that people come together, they band together and they share

with one another. See each other where they're at and they try and love and support and protect each other. And the difficulty then becomes fearing out how do we create a world, a culture, whatever, in which that impulse is nurtured, in which that impulse is celebrated, in which that impulse is cultivated so that it becomes the norm rather than something that only happens in the event of a catastrophe. You know, this idea of disaster capitalism that Naomi Klein writes about is of course, you know, directly antithetical to a system of mutual aid.

You know, Peter Kropotkin wrote, the mutual aid is a factor of evolution. It's this idea that human beings and all organisms come together in symbiotic relationships to support each other, to protect each other, to defend each other. And that is so much more rooted in our way of interacting with and being with one another than us praying on each other and us hurting each other. And the sort of isolating and atomizing structure of capitalism is so harmful to genuine community and to genuine human relationship. And I think that these disasters, as horrifying as they are, can offer us a small glimpse

of what a better world might look like. And we can fight for that world, but it's going to take a fight. It's not going to be something that we can just roll over and wait for, that we can check a box for. It's going to be something that we're going to have to fight for. Second that. Yeah, that well said. You know, it's almost as if capitalism creates these conditions of vicious competition that

it then ascribes to human nature. Almost. Who would have thunk? Who would have thought? And from what you were saying earlier, I thought it was interesting about just on a practical organizational level what DSA in this area is able to do, how you effectively describe it as DSA as a conduit for this kind of system of national nationwide solidarity to kind of focus efforts at a local pinpoint and then you all on the ground there can put that

aid into a larger, more horizontal network of people through the Unitarian Church and all the groups associated with it. You were saying that then takes that national solidarity, puts it at a specific place and then allows the group there to spread that out among all the people that need it on the ground there in, as you've said before, a responsive way that a place that meets people at what they need and with the people that they are there with and already trust. You know, and that because I'm interested in, you know, like a bureaucratic mechanisms of creating efficient distribution of systems.

But you know, that seems like a particularly interesting facet of how this one organization that we are all a part of DSA can interact with other people on the ground to create a good and positive relationship with people in times of need. Exactly. This is practice as well as practice and we spent a lot of good will for the left and the DSA. Yeah, and I think there's just a level of trust that comes from the solidarity of being in an organization like this and truly believing in it and knowing that if there's another

member of the same organization on a different side of the country that you have the same ideals and that you're willing to just jump right in and trust them. I had a woman reach out to me from East Bay DSA. She was a retired nurse and she called herself a lifelong socialist and she actually got in touch with our chapter. She was searching for some family, friends of hers in Panama City and she hadn't heard from them and it was almost a week after the storm and she had reached out to other organizations that were actually in Panama City and hadn't heard anything back.

So what did she do? She reached out to the closest socialists in the area and asked for us to help out and we were actually able to put her in touch with a journalist who worked for the newspaper there in Panama City. He was not only able to locate them, he was able to help them find a better distribution site for the dialysis that they needed and he was able to give them locations and times where they could go to pharmacies to receive the medication that one of the older individuals they were with needed and that all just came through solidarity being DSA members.

Hell yeah, that rocks. So let's move into a few of my final points here. What does the long-term look like in terms of relief and repair in the area and given my nerdery and preoccupation with creating good positive structures, what are some of the things that you have learned or gained from this experience that you can kind of put into a more long-term organizing strategy? I kind of touched on it before because I think that it bears reiterating. Global climate change is not something that is a future event, it's something that is

happening right now, it is something that is intimately tied to the collapse of capitalism and the rise of fascism and if we do not take that seriously, if we do not see that as an epoch-shifting event, if we do not see it as the potential collapse of human civilization, which is what it is, then we could potentially wave goodbye to the future, either our future or our children's future or our children's children's future. And I'm not willing to do that. So I think that more than anything, this series of events has lit a fire under my ass to really take serious the cause of anti-fascism and the cause of global climate change and

to recognize the interconnectedness and the overlap and the intersection of these things. And I think that what ends up happening when we have these decentralized networks that are able to respond autonomously is that they can be equipped with the tools, with the desires and with the ability to confront a multitude of different threats, whether they are threats of fascist uprising, whether they are threats of continued climate catastrophes, whether they are threats of economic collapse. When we come together and we build these decentralized networks, they don't happen in a vacuum, they don't happen in a void, it's not something that just comes together and then is sort

of disassembled later and sort of dissipates instead. We are trying to be very intentional about building strong bonds and actual relationships that go beyond just, hey, you're my comrade or you're my comrade, but hey, you're my friend and I fucking love you and I cherish you and I want to look out for you and be there for you and I'm going to have your back and I know you're going to have my back. And I think that it doesn't, it's not set enough on the left, but like, you know, the reason why we're going to win is because we fucking care about each other and we love one another and I think that that is such an important lesson that we've kind of taken

away or at least that I've taken away is that that love is something that needs to be nurtured and that it's something that is going to need to turn into a fucking vicious fire to fight back. Yeah. And we've just speaking specifically about our chapter, we've had members who, you know, they come to the meetings, but they're maybe not the most active members in our chapter who have like slowly taken charge, they've made their own connections, they're organizing amongst themselves to make runs to some of these communities, they've made their own

contacts in those communities that they're communicating with regularly to find out what supplies they need. So like, yeah, for the first month, it was, it's been super hot and rainy and now it's starting to get, you know, cold outside to the point where if you don't have, if you don't have the ability to stay warm, it could potentially be dangerous. So, you know, we've just seen a lot of empowerment and growth in our members who have really taken charge and started leading the way. So that's been, that's been really amazing as well as just building a coalition with

a lot of these other groups that may or may not have taken us seriously prior to seeing us in action in this hurricane relief. We've had members of Planned Parenthood, the Poor People's Campaign, the Florida People's Advocacy Center, and I could go on and on who we have built real ties with now and that we'll be working with in the future on this project and on many others down the line. That's all so well said. And so, I mean, I'm sure that for me hearing it, and I'm sure for all of you that must feel so precarious, but also empowering to be able to put some of these things, these

ideas into actual real world practice, whether it be just moving logs or delivering pizza, I mean, putting the ideas behind it into the world feels good, man. So I'm going to end on one last thing that's almost a throwaway. Y'all just had an election and it's still going. And so, you know, to channel Matt Crisman, it's all really about the spectacle, right? So how did the election play out there? I know that, you know, it's very contested. You're dealing with a state that has a lot, traditionally a lot of issues having good

easy elections. And then on top of that, you're doing in a region that was just decimated by a weather disaster. Was there any issue involving the election in the affected areas of the hurricane? I'm going to defer to our political wonk here, Ryan Ray on this one. Yeah, let's walk out. Speaking of disasters, right? They're actually in Bay County where some of the most intense damage was seen.

There was some controversy over ballots being emailed, which I think actually rules, but you know, that's against the law. It seems like basically any irregularities were sort of incidental there and didn't have any systemic impact on the elections. I think a lot of us here thought that this might be the one. We thought that Andrew Gillum and his relatively progressive campaign, probably the most left oriented campaign for statewide office that we've seen and the contemporary period was going to prevail and maybe even pull Bill Nelson along with him over the finish line.

Oh God, that fucking Rick Scott is a true goal. Yeah, an actual vampire. He's a fucking red skull with a little peach putty pulled over his face. Oh my God, that's the perfect description of him. He literally looks like a red skull. Yeah, he looks terrible. He never noticed that before. He was famously called Bat Boy in the National Enquirer and I think that kind of landed because

it rings so true. If I could, locally, we had a left Bernie Krat-oriented city commission candidate that was successful. Nice. I ran that campaign. We sort of both have survivor's guilt over how the overall landscape was, but Jeremy Matlow was just elected to Hassee City Commissioner on a pretty unapologetic lefty basis, so we're happy about that.

But generally, of course, our very terrible politics just continued to be really bad here at the state level. Well, congrats on your local issue and I don't know, observing from afar, it does look like Florida might soon, hopefully with the recent enfranchisement ballot initiative, it might tip over from being the bad state to being the, I guess, kind of okay state. So good luck on that for you guys in the elections to come. I think that's basically all I have to say. All the work that you guys are doing sounds great and you've had really interesting things

to say to kind of put it in context of the work that you all do in the DSA. Is there any final words that you would like to say? Oh, sure. Yeah. Again, just, I can't stress this enough, Mutually Disaster Relief is doing excellent work, almost all of the work that they have done goes unappreciated and unnoticed and with a platform of the sort that you guys have, it would be really great if you could boost their funding and donation pages.

There are some really humble people, there are some of the most genuine, fantastic, down-to-earth comrades that I've ever met. They inspire me every fucking day. They're beautiful people and they're going to continue to do this work and they're going to continue to need funding and support for doing that work because as we've said multiple times on this interview already, global climate change is here and the catastrophes that it will wreak are already having havoc on the world. I mean, the California wildfires are just another example of the kind of catastrophes

that we are going to continue to see as our climate disintegrates around us and people are responding to that using a model of mutual aid and I think that that model needs to continue to spread so we can send you the links to their fundraisers and to their donation page and you can maybe put in the show notes, that'd be great. Yeah, I would love to put those in the show notes and I will put them in the show notes and they are in the show notes. Oh shit, yeah, great. If I could, I would just like to say thanks Virgil for supporting us directly and thanks

to Dave Anthony, thanks to y'all for having us on and Cosby and I run a podcast called Tropical Depression, maybe you should be interested to check out. Yeah, we'll throw all these links in the description. Yeah, and I just want to say, this is Cosby, I just want to say that we really appreciate everything that you all have done and that all the other chapters of the DSA have done and I want to shout out my co-chairs, Scott Chandler and Micah Maxwell. Well thank you guys so much for coming on, this has been a great discussion and best of luck to all your work down there and solidarity.

Solidarity, comrade. Solidarity, comrade.