It Could Happen Here - It Could Happen Here Weekly 166

Episode Date: January 25, 2025

All of this week's episodes of It Could Happen Here put together in one large file.  The Lost Post Office Union Episode The Age of Cowards and What Happens Next How to Evacuate Your Home A Firsthand Account of the Inauguration & Trump's First Days About That Nazi Salute You can now listen to all Cool Zone Media shows, 100% ad-free through the Cooler Zone Media subscription, available exclusively on Apple Podcasts. So, open your Apple Podcasts app, search for “Cooler Zone Media” and subscribe today! http://apple.co/coolerzone  Sources/Links: The Age of Cowards and What Happens Next https://emilygorcenski.com/ How to Evacuate Your Home https://www.fire.ca.gov/prepare/get-ready-to-go https://www.liveliketheworldisdying.com/ About That Nazi Salute https://apnews.com/article/jair-bolsonaro-politics-brasilia-united-states-government-florida-state-29fad1e6c79a5737641932c939021e62 https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1852/18th-brumaire/ch01.htm https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/debord/society.htm https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/the-invisible-committe-to-our-friends  See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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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 going to be nothing new here for you, but you can make your own decisions. Either snow nor rain nor heat nor darkness can stop the Persian courier service. Welcome to Nick Kadab and hear a podcast about postal services. We asked the question, can the American capitalist class finally stop the American post office? I'm your host, Mia Wong. And with me to talk about.

What is going on with the post office, what's going on with the post office unions and yeah, how things are going downhill for the noble people who carry your mail is Tommy Espinoza, who's a union steward for the National Association of Letter Carriers. Tommy, welcome to the show. Thank you so much for having me. Thank you so much for giving us the mail here and the mail carriers, a platform to stand on.

Yeah, I'm really I'm really happy to and I'm really happy to get to talk to you about this. So I think the place we should start is with a bunch of very, very weird stuff in how labor law works. So. OK, for like most people in the United States, you have a federally protected right to strike if you have a union. That is not true for federal employees.

That is especially not true for members of the post office. And that is a real issue because the government has decided that like, yeah, no, all these people who do a vital service are not allowed to go on strike and it absolutely sucks. Yeah. So I think this this gets into sort of where I want to start, which is with the sort of history of the National Association of Letters Carriers, a union that is not allowed to strike and how sort of weird that is. So, yeah, I was wondering if you could talk a bit about sort of the origins

of the union and what effect that has had on how organizing works or doesn't work. Yeah, the right to strike has been a rather divisive topic. I'm sure you're familiar with unions and just generally Yeah, the right to strike has been a rather divisive topic. I'm sure you're familiar with unions and just generally people on our side of politics to be infighting a lot. I shouldn't come to a surprise. So in 1969, just over 50 years ago, the salary for postal workers was under $2 an hour.

People were working month straight with no days off. And those were close to 12-hour days. And so, these postal workers at the time qualified for welfare and decided in 1970 to go on strike despite it being illegal. This conversation is not new. It was illegal then, it's illegal now. And I do want to be crystal clear here. I am not advocating for a strike that would also be against the law. And we don't advocate for anything that's against the law. What I do want to advocate for is the right to strike because being quasi-federal, there's a

lot of limitations in what the NALC and the general postal unions are able to do. In total, there are nine bargaining agreements and seven unions within the post office, some of which are the manager's union, so take that as it is. Yet, on top of not being able to strike, none of our money that we collect as union dues can be used for lobbying purposes, so they can't support a single candidate or any of the parties involved. We have a separate fund for that with the NALC called the Letter Carriers Political Fund to try and circumvent the restrictions that are put on there. And as a result of that, it's like we're fighting with our hands tied behind our back. We are

It's like we're fighting with our hands tied behind our back. We are unable to organize effectively. Our union leadership seems to be afraid of protests and picketing for fear that it'll be misconstrued or labeled as a strike. And they're, I think, generally afraid of public opinion. Yeah, that's a debilitating set of conditions because you've effectively taken away sort of the two major tools that You know unions of basically across all political stripes use right? You've taken away the ability to strike You've taken away the ability to use your dues money to influence Elections so this immediately means you've taken away

the tool that sort of militant unions use, which is strikes. And you've taken away the tools that more conservative unions use, which is buying Paul attempting to buy politicians. And then also your leadership is like, we can't strike. We can't protest because someone might think it's a strike. The public might commit it. It's like that. That doesn't seem I don't know. It really seems like it's like it's not only if you tied both hands behind your back,

you've like tied them behind your back to your legs. You're now rolling around on the ground. Right. And so talk about what happens when we push past all of these barriers and just do it anyways. You know, in March 1970, 210,000 postal workers defied law, defied the general leadership of the time, and it all started in New York where people clocked in and at nine o'clock, they just walked out. Soon, let's see, it was Cleveland, Chicago, Los Angeles, the nation joined very shortly after

once it broke the news that they were calling for a national strike. Nixon called in the National Guard to try and deliver mail. The National Guard had no idea what they were doing. There's an amazing video that I'll try and send you afterwards. It's just the National Guard at our cases where we sort the mail and an interviewer is asking them, do you think that you're doing a good job? It's just like, no, it's just some kid, you know?

And don't get me wrong, I'm just some guy, but you need the training, you need to know what you're doing. And it's not something that anyone can pick up in a day, but it's a job that anyone can do. But yeah, for the first time, the mail had stopped. And that won us collective bargaining, binding arbitration, which is a process that I think most people within unions know what they mean, but to explain it, arbitration is what happens when

our parties cannot agree on a settlement for a grievance and eventually we call in a third party, an arbitrator, to decide us. And those are generally lawyers on top of binding arbitration. It gave us a new pay scale and set in motion, I think over, it's got to be hundreds of raises between the colas and the new pay table. It used to be 21 years for you to reach the top pay scale, which is absolutely ridiculous. And now I think it's about eight. Yeah.

So the post office was forced to reorganize and so was the union. This is where the American Postal Workers Union was born. And from this strike, we were able to settle on the national agreement. So there's the national agreement, which is our binding contract. There's the J-CAM,

which is the Joint Contract Administration Manual, which is what the post office and the union use as the interpretation of the contract. That way we are not arguing and spending time about what the contract could mean. We can just focus on whether or not someone broke our agreement. So after this, one would imagine that a quasi federal institution would honor the contract that was created

are going to be good faith and treat their employees fairly. Isn't that right? Yeah, no, this is spoken like someone who has never watched the federal government. And actually, yeah, absolutely not. Before we get into issues that. We face today, I do want to say that one of the main goals of our contract negotiations or of this episode really is to create public knowledge of how our contract is not being adhered to. If there

was one main goal that I'd have in mind is just to have the post office honor what they signed and agreed to do. Yeah, I mean, it's something that that. It's a part of being in a union that doesn't get talked about very much, which is that the contract doesn't mean anything unless the union enforces it, because the moment the contract happens, the bosses will attempt to not abide by it.

And this is what a lot of union militancy back in the sort of heyday of militancy see was I mean like you know if you look at like. How the uaw work like the sixties right they have a guy with a whistle standing on the line and if someone did a contract violation you blow the whistle and everyone would just sit down. And you immediately have a strike right it you know in like that level of built and see. And, you know, and like that level of built and see, you don't need to like be at that level to enforce a contract, but you have to actually be willing to do stuff and to fight management over it. And if you're not willing to do that, your contract is effectively meaningless. And that's a real issue with a lot of unions,

which just kind of circles back to one of the big issues that we face is that if we were to do that, that would be a willing full delay of mail and we could be charged for it just for trying to enforce the contract. Yep. Which I think the thing I think is really interesting just to circle back to the 1970s strike is that so the strike was illegal, right? Nixon brings in the army and the National Guard to break it.

And the strike still wins. And not only does it if it you know, I mean, you could argue whether it achieved total victory, but not a single person who walked off the line, got arrested, even though all of them technically committed a crime. And that's something that like, you know, I think. Let me look at it. OK. The the enforcement of laws depends on sort of the depends on a set of relative balance of forces

and whether people care about enforcing the law, which is how, like, for example, if you pirate like seven movies and you get you get three copyright strikes, you go to prison. But, you know, like the Sam Altman or whatever, like a company can literally steal everything on the entire Internet and get money for it and no one will ever prosecute them. Right. And so so, you know, whether or not something is illegal is to a large extent or the difference between something being illegal

and you going to prison for it largely has to do with the balance of forces involved. And that's something that you should keep in mind when. And this is this is this is the thing that that cuts the other way a lot, too. Right. Like a lot like employers Just do illegal actions literally all the time and it doesn't matter because the state doesn't care Yeah, by and large labor laws in america are set up in favor of the businesses of the employers if you're familiar with workers comp or Any of the systems involved in the

federal employees compensation act, it's not enforced. We have cases that are pending arbitration where someone's been run over by a worker has been run over by a postal vehicle. While they were working, the post office effectively takes them off of payroll to increase the damage done to the individual. Eventually, the Department of Labor says, yes, we will pay this individual and the post office is liable to pay them. But now they are off the rolls, which means there's a greater period of time before this individual gets their money. And there's a certain form that within the post office, the managers need to fill out, I believe it's an 8130 or, you know, all these forms have some numbers associated with them

that they just refuse to fill out. And there's no recourse, there's no path for us to take to make them hurry or make them get this individual the money that they're owed. And some people, this doesn't ruin their lives, and they've already paid off their house or whatever, but I imagine for many, many working Americans, that's that's their livelihood immediately down the drain.

Yeah. Unfortunately, we need to go to ads for a little bit because unfortunately, my my my boss's boss's boss's livelihood depends on these ads. Mine technically does, too. But like, Lord knows, I don't see that money. So ads. We are back. And yeah, I guess that leads into the next place you want to go to, which is talking about what are the specific grievances today that you all are dealing with and the

union is not dealing with? Right. So in terms of grievances within the union and our negotiation, a lot of it does have to do with the aforementioned workers' compensation. Employees are just simply not getting paid. I think the biggest problem with the union and the grievance procedure today is that management has figured out this really effective strategy. If they don't settle on the lower levels and it gets pushed up to arbitration, then we have a massive backlog of cases appending arbitration which could be scheduled years out. Yeah. I think if you do the

math for our current rate of handling these cases and how many cases we have, it'll take around 15 years to get through them all. Jesus Christ. Not assuming there's no new ones. Yeah, yeah. That's like, you know, when you go to a restaurant and there's that little stanchion out there that says it's a five-hour wait from this point, that's the point that we're at. Anything beyond today will be further along. Jesus Christ. And so I think that is just a major problem for us, clearly. Yeah. Management just not complying with any of this and it makes it so that our employees have to wait. Something I do want to talk about that's outside of the

grievance procedure if we can is just what's going on with the post office and the postmaster general. Yeah. Alright so I want to go at this from the customer perspective first because I think that's the best way to relate to people. I think by and large people are losing faith in the post office. Either you have no idea what's going on or you don't care and that's fine. I'd say before I joined I didn't think of them at all. You know, they're just the guy that shows up at my house every morning.

A lot of people seem to think that the post office is going out of business and our customers are facing increasingly long lines, misdelivered or lost mail, and an increase in postage for a service that is getting worse. People are paying more for worse service. And it's easy to point out those issues from the outside and be rightfully upset at them. I do feel like we're doing a disservice to our customers. And I'm really not trying to attack them when I say that they're uninformed or clueless

to the inner workings of the post office. I do directly want to attack Congress and say that when they post, they had pushed forward a bill called the Postal Accountability and Enhancement Act in 2006, which required the post office to pre-fund 100% of its retiree health benefits and liabilities 75 years into the future.

What? So overnight, the post office was handed a $5.5 billion burden. And that's where the whole, I don't know if you remember, I certainly wasn't conscious of it at the time, the Save Our Post Office stickers that were being sold and trying to fund the post office. And really, that's where the rhetoric of the post office is going under comes from. The other thing I want to point out is that we are quasi-federal. We actually accept nothing from taxpayer monies. It says it's a service but really the post office is

ran as a business. We don't even get subsidized because they don't need to. My local union president loves to remind us that the post office is a business that has a revenue of $78.2 billion and he'll want me to stress that the point two is extremely important because point two of a billion is 20 million. They are not in jeopardy. We are not going out of business. And the postmaster general, Louis DeJoy, he's the second highest paid public servant in America, just underneath the president of the United States. He's played word and clearance Thomas. Wow. Yeah, I think it was like 380 and eighty thousand a year or something like that. DeJoy was appointed by Donald Trump.

I'm assuming this is kind of a baseless assumption. So forgive me on not doing my research here, but I'm assuming that they're buddies because DeJoy has no idea. Yeah, wasn't wasn't she the guy that Trump brought in, like, specifically to destroy the post office as part of the campaign to steal the election? Yeah, so there's been a lot about DeJoy defrauding the election process. I I wasn't part of the post office to see the inner workings of it. So it's kind of hard for me to say if it was hearsay or not.

But I believe it, because DeJoy has no idea how to run a post office. He's never been involved with this kind of business. He is in the same way that Trump is a businessman, a horrible businessman, and his delivering for America plan could really be redefined as consolidation efforts for a business. So what they're doing is they're consolidating infrastructure and the workforce, which means closing post offices in order to save money and shoving three installations into one building. That's why the lines are getting longer. It also means that from dispatch the employees have to drive an extra mile or two into their working zone, which of course means

that we're going to go into overtime. And this just throws a wrench in the mail handling process. He has single-handedly made the service a lot more reliable. And I do think that you're right. Yeah, sorry, more unreliable. And I do think that you're right. He wants to destroy the post office, not only for the election, but to the point where it makes more sense to go private. Now is the time to point out that DeJoy is a major shareholder in FedEx. Oh, Jesus Christ. Which is a subcontractor for the USPS,

and he has millions of dollars in equity involved. He's got skin in the game. Love open corruption. So great. And so on the local level, on what's going on in my office, I actually have one of the better offices that I've seen or heard about. I have been sent to other offices and I have experienced firsthand the bullying and harassment from management, pushing us to go faster. But even at one of the better offices, I work 60-hour weeks. I don't have I work 60 hour weeks. I don't have set days off. It's not even a rotation

When I get home, I'm spent and my commute isn't that bad. I think I'm about 15 minutes each way And I really can't imagine driving two hours after an 11 hour shift just to eat and come back and do it again I mean, that's just unsafe like this Come back and do it again. I mean that's just unsafe like That's Yeah, it would be illegal. But since it's in the contract, it's not illegal. Oh my god So the sacrifice that you make when you're joining the post office Well, I guess I should explain when you join as a letter carrier the first 90 days they can fire you for any reason and a letter carrier, the first 90 days they can fire you for any reason and you're something called either a CCA or a PTF and that means part-time flexible or a city carrier assistant. You are only guaranteed four hours for showing up for work.

You're not guaranteed to be scheduled. So if they don't like you, they just will schedule you once a week for an unknown amount of time until you quit. And if you're in a busy place, then that just means that they're gonna work you to death. So when you join the workforce, immediately you lose time with your family, you lose time with your loved ones and your friends.

And I myself am so fortunate that all my loved ones have been beyond understanding. But every time I talk about it, I get asked the same thing. Why don't you quit? And the truth is, this job is awesome. I love it. I want to work it. I just want it to make sense and be livable. And'm not gonna give up just because We haven't reached the the point where it is, you know, if you walk away now, it doesn't get better I'm sure someone would take my place, but It helps to have people stick around

That's actually a pretty common, I mean, this is one of Amazon's shreds, right? Through their warehouses, they intentionally want to cycle through people because the more new people you have continuously cycling through, the less organized and the less sort of like knowledge they have, the less you have to pay them, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. And so if you can just cause high turnover rates on purpose, that's that's a thing that a lot of these sort of business ghoul, like nightmare factory people

like love in their workforces and makes everyone else's life just a living hell. But you know, they're getting, they're still getting paid. Right. And so I try and hold that in mind when I've been overworked and I'm at the end of one of my major shifts because I had to carry part of another route because someone else called out.

I really have to stop and think to myself that this other person else called out, I really have to stop and think to myself that this other person who called out is just as exhausted as I am, is probably going to get a letter of warning for calling out. That's another issue. They don't want you to use your leave. Jesus Christ. I'm going to file an unfair labor practice because they've been doing that a lot at my

office as well. It reminds me a lot, our issues of your recent episode, I think it was you, about the nurses union, the shift change episode. Their members are dealing with a lot of the same things where the unions are so big that they become detached from the membership and we are finding out afterwards what our bargaining agreements are, what our strategy was. Everything's after the contract has been signed. And that's just not how unions were meant to be. They're meant to be from the bottom up by the workers for the workers, but it really does feel like it's like national is its own entity. And so I guess that would

bring us to talking about the union and the future of the union. Yeah, let's get into that. So I got to be careful here because Brian Renfro, he's our national leader of the union. He's been struggling with problems in his personal life. And I don't feel like I'm ousting him as it's public knowledge, at least within the post office, it's public knowledge. He's dealing with substance abuse, with alcoholism. And that's something that hits very close to home within my family.

And I really don't want to demonize that he's struggling. But what I do want to say is when you're going through something like that, and you've accepted a position on the national level like this, you really need to either step down or appoint someone to handle things in your place. As negotiation started over a year ago, he kind of went missing. And it was later revealed that he was an inpatient, which is fine, get your help. But there was nothing left,

no notes left for us to strategize with. And our membership is just in the dark and beyond that The leadership has gone missing it's it's very dark times for the NALC Well, and that that's also just sort of like an organizational Problem, right? Like if your if your organization is set up in such a way that a small number of people being incapacitated means total paralysis and no one has any idea what's going on, that's just a bad way to run something. And especially it's a terrible way to run a union

because the union's power is supposed to be from its organization and from the collective power of a large, large organized group of people who can make decisions for themselves. And if that's not happening and you get to the point where these decisions are being made by a very small number of people who can just sort of vanish like that's that for whatever and, you know, literally whatever reason that is, right, it could just be you get sick. It could just be like whatever happens. That's just a terrible way to organize things.

And I guess it's also like I want to make take it like a little tiny tangent to be like if you're doing any organizing project, your goal is to organize yourself out of a job like you're like. Ideally, if you were in an organization, it should be able to function without you. There should not be having an indispensable person is a fiasco. Don't do that. This is true of both like your tiny local mutual aid group as much as is true of your giant national union.

So this has been this has been Mia talking about the indispensable person don't have. Well, yeah, that's kind of the funny thing about joining a union from an anarchist perspective. It gets a little funky how hierarchical they typically are and the problems that we know we are going to face when you have a system that's built like a pyramid. Yeah. Oh, yeah. And so I was saying, we're in dark times, but there's such a bright future that I can see for us.

Branch 9 of the NALC and namely this individual, Tyler Vassar, who when I had originally posted on Reddit asking for attention, he's the one that I thought would be great for this interview. His branch, branch nine, has passed a resolution to form an open bargaining strategy for contract negotiations. And I hope this sweeps the nation. We're not allowed to strike, as I've mentioned, and our leadership is so shy when it becomes to activism or mobilization of the workforce, they don't want to touch the topic.

The closest thing we have to it is a rally that is enough is enough, that's being held in Baltimore soon about the violence that's being done to postal workers. We're being robbed and we're being harassed. But even then, we're missing a large chunk of the danger that is posed to postal workers. Because yes, we're being robbed on the streets, but we're also being bullied and harassed inside of our workplaces by management,

by the people who are supposed to empower us to do the job effectively. And so, they don't want to touch the topic of a strike, I think, for fear of retaliation. But to me, pushing for the right to strike is a – I'm not sure how to word this. It is such an important part of the NLC's identity. The postal strike of 1970 that it seems silly to ignore it today and pretend like it didn't happen. So for the future, I think that activism is our key to success. I think that the old heads that lead our union come from a time where unions were frowned upon, where activism was frowned upon, but I think that public opinion will be largely in

our favor and that public opinion can really put pressure on the legislative branch on Congress. And if we are transparent about our union, what we're asking for, the issues that we're facing, I think that the public would be on our side. If the people in America knew that management was falsifying time records or training records and interfering with workers' comps' claim and back pay, or that they're not paying the settlements that they've agreed to pay,

that they're not scheduling arbitration sessions, big or small, that they would care and that they would join us in the streets. One major thing that happened, I think it was last year in the summer, we had a letter carrier, his name is Eugene Gates, who died in the Texas heat. Jesus, yeah. Because management told him not to take as many breaks or he would face discipline. These pressures that we face when you're threatened that you will lose your job if you don't listen to us, you will push yourself to the point of

exhaustion and further. I think that the post office killed Mr. Gates. And there wasn't as much outcry or anger behind the movement. I often find myself thinking that while I don't have the answers, I do know that we need to care more. And it's hard to care when you're exhausted. I acknowledge that. Yeah. Well, I think to care when you're exhausted, I acknowledge that. Yeah, well, I think there's two things about that. One, I mean, I don't, and this is something I've gotten to with a lot of the sort of interviews that I've done on this show is that I think a lot of very, very basic jobs have labor

conditions that are unimaginably appalling, that people just don't know about. And I think people are very sympathetic to once they actually understand what's happening in the kind of just a horror show stuff that's happening in these workplaces. And the second thing I think that's sort of important in terms of getting people to, you know, like try trying to actually do like mass mobilizations, even just to get people to understand what's going on is that I think a lot of people who are facing these kind of conditions think that they're alone and think that it's just something that happens

to them or they've been in them for so long. They think that it's sort of normal and having a bunch of people go no, like a this happens and B, it shouldn't happen is extraordinarily powerful because you know, like that that feeling of isolation is is the thing that all of that, you know, your that your bosses depend on to make sure that, you know, you just keep going along with these conditions, even though they are just objectively horrific. And I think any strategy that's not based on that is just not going to go anywhere. Right. And one of the strategies that I really want to push forward as I grow within the union, and don't get me wrong, I want to stay a steward.

I think that educating our members and being part of the workforce is my place in the union. But what I want to push is for union solidarity, I want the NALC to hire organizers, specifically organizers to try and get the public mobilized as well as the workforce so that we can put pressure on Congress so that we can show our bargaining teams that we support them and so that we can have clearly defined bargaining terms. And yeah, I think that having solidarity between unions and reaching out to the other movements in a time where union support is higher than ever is such a clear path that we are just ignoring for whatever reason because people are afraid to speak out against the post office.

And so I'm really not sure what's going to happen with our current contract, but I do know that the fight never ends and that while we stand on the shoulders of giants, we have to pay respect to these giants by not giving up now. And I'm a relatively new employee and steward, but I'm really walking in the footsteps of some warriors. The branch president I mentioned, Ken Lurch, has given me so much support and education and has done so much hard work over the years that I don't have to reinvent the wheel. None of us do. We just have to continue the struggle.

Yeah, and I think that's a great place to end, unless you have anything else that you want to make sure we get to. No, nothing on this topic. Yeah, so how can people support you and postal workers just in general if there's a specific place you want them to go? In general, there is on the NALC site, which is just nalc.com, there is a section where you put in your address and it it'll give you the email addresses, the phone numbers for your representatives so that you can make some noise. Again, we're amazingly limited in what we can do so there's not really anything that

you can donate to help us, including the Letter Carrier Political Fund. But yeah, just pay attention to us. Maybe leave a bottle of water out in your front door. It says, for the postal worker. There's nothing better that you can do than talking about it. Word of mouth is the best advertisement. Well, yeah, we will put that in the show notes. I hope you all win.

And I don't think I've ever said this genuinely in my life, but thank you for your service. I appreciate that. Yeah, I never imagined myself to become a federal employee. And it is just as bad as I imagined. Yeah. So I do want to shout out actually, it's a little meta, I guess, but I do want to shout out some important episodes of It Could Happen Here that hit me very closely if I can. Yeah, yeah, go for it.

Because a lot of the people listening will be postal workers that have been pointed in this direction. Please look at the Myanmar episodes, the Burmese Revolution, and look at the work that Mia, I believe you've done the same work as James with border kindness Those are two topics that I think y'all hit really well and that really touched me as a person Sometimes I'll relisten to those episodes when I'm having a hard day just to remind myself that it's all the same It's all the same fight that it's all the same. It's all the same fight.

Yeah, it absolutely is. And I mean, I think that's that's sort of the beauty. I mean, it's both the beauty and the horror of of this world is that on the one hand, all of us are being crushed by the same sets of forces. But on the other hand, it means that whatever fight that you're taking is also a part of the larger fight for get all of us free. Yeah, exactly. So just fight the burnout and stay in the fight.

Yeah. Yeah, this has been Nick Adappi here. Go make trouble for people who suck. Experiencing the news each day can feel like a journey. With Up First from NPR though, it doesn't have to be. Welcome to 15 easy minutes of breaking news, clarity on international and national affairs, and a casual tone that you can take in with breakfast. Begin your day informed, ready, and refreshed. Begin your day with Up First. Subscribe to Up First from NPR on the iHeartRadio app or wherever you get your podcasts.

John Stewart is back in the host chair at The Daily Show, wherever you get your podcasts. satirical takes on entertainment, politics, sports, and more from John and the team of correspondents and contributors. The podcast also has content you can't get anywhere else, like extended interviews and a roundup of the weekly headlines. Listen to The Daily Show, Ears Edition on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Snakes, zombies, sharks, heights. Speaking in public, the list of fears is endless. But while you're clutching your blanket in the dark, wondering if that sound in the hall was actually a footstep, the real danger is in your hand when you're behind the wheel.

And while you might think a great white shark is scary, what's really terrifying and even deadly is distracted driving. Eyes forward, don't drive distracted. Brought to you by NHTSA and the Ad Council. The OGs of uncensored motherhood are back and batter than ever. I'm Erica.

And I'm Mila. And we're the hosts of the Good Moms Bad Choices podcast, brought to you by the Black Effect Podcast Network every Wednesday. Historically, men talk too much. And women have quietly listened. And all that stops here. If you like witty women, then this is your tribe.

With guests like Corinne Stephens. I've never seen so many women protect predatory men. And then me too happen. And then everybody else wanna get pissed off because the white said it was okay. Problem. My oldest daughter, her first day in ninth grade grade and I called to ask how I was doing She was like, oh dad, all they were doing was talking about your thing in class

I ruined my baby's first day of high school and slumflower. What turns me on is when a man sends me money Like I feel the moisture between my legs and a man sends me money. I'm like, oh my god. It's go time I'm like, oh my God, it's go time. You actually sent it? Listen to the Good Moms, Bad Choices podcast every Wednesday on the Black Effect Podcast Network, the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you go to find your podcast. Robert Evans here, and this is It Could Happen Here. And boy, it sure is. Now, I don't know where we go from this point, and neither does anyone else.

On the moment before I wrote this, I woke up groggy from my chemically assisted sleep to a barrage of horror. Donald Trump signing anti-trans legislation into law. Elon Musk giving a double fascist salute, Donald Trump saluting and dancing with the village people, Proud Boys tramping through the streets of our nation's capital, reveling in their newfound impunity. The dark days have come again because they never really left. All the battles and street fighting and organizing from 2017 to 2020 brought us four years of badly negotiated

peace, while the rot continued unabated. Rot. It's a term I see a lot these days. My colleague and friend Ed Zitron refers to the hell our tech oligarchs continue to force upon us as the rot economy. Charlie Angus, a member of the Canadian parliament, used the term rage rot to refer to now President Trump's Christmas Day message suggesting Canada should become the 51st state. Over the last year I've seen a slew of articles bemoaning democratic decay, the rot plaguing

democracy and the deep rot at the heart of our political system. One thing I have done over the last four years is learn how to efficiently process the carcasses of wild animals. Some I hunt or raise and slaughter, but many are roadkill, harvested from the side of the road. My family comes from rural Oklahoma, so perhaps there's some epigenetic hillbilly memory that makes this so satisfying to me. But it's also changed the way I understand the word rot.

Rot starts from the bone. If you look at the back leg of an animal that's been hit by a truck, you'll see it's spreading a deep black bruise from the ball and socket joint out. If your goal is to preserve good meat, then the key is to remove those limbs from the body and then the meat from the bone sooner rather than later. When I think of rot and how to arrest it, I think of dismemberment. This seems to be the one thing that almost every political person in the country agrees with.

The United States as it is must be dismembered, disassembled, sliced from the rotten bone and changed into something more palatable for whoever holds the knife. Joe Biden and the Democratic Party failed primarily because they refused to start cutting. Their successors will not make the same mistake. On the opposing side of the aisle today, I see a lot of angry people arguing about what the knife ought to be cutting and how much better they'd use it if it passed into their hands. That doesn't help any of us right now.

Migrants are dying of thirst while vigilantes destroy water drops left by activists who themselves will likely be criminalized in the near future. Homeless Americans, trying not to freeze to death at night, may soon find themselves arrested, forced into camps where they'll be made to labor for pennies. Neo-Nazis cheer as the billionaire behind the throne makes fascist salutes from the White House with smirking impunity. The knife is so far away from our hands I find myself distrusting anyone who wastes time bemoaning how it ought to be used.

Where does that leave us though? Is there anything to do in this deep winter besides listen to the jackals howling outside our doors? I have an answer to this question. Yes, now is the time to try, to test the boundaries of our collective cage. Now is the time to experiment. Since the time of the founding fathers, this country and its system have been referred to as the American experiment.

One could see the very term as narcissistic, yet another solipsistic gasp of American exceptionalism. But I tend to think the appellation is one we've earned. This country is and always has been a test tube for new, often bad ideas about how a society ought to run. American civilization's only core value is, throw shit at the wall and see what sticks. That also happens to be the only real way to fight back against authoritarianism. There's a scientific paper I bring up often, the Evolution of Overconfidence, which set out to explain why people so often badly overestimate their own abilities.

The authors pondered, quote, Overconfidence also leads to faulty assessments, unrealistic expectations, and hazardous decisions. So it remains a puzzle how such a false belief could evolve or remain stable in a population of competing strategies that include accurate, unbiased beliefs. Now the conclusion these researchers came to was that, when significant resources are contested between two organisms, the organism most willing to try to take said resources, even if it is not the strongest, tends to succeed, often enough to make overconfidence evolutionarily beneficial. This is the most basic explanation for how fascist movements continue to arise and, improbably,

take power. Put simply, they always go for it. January 6th provides us with a fine example. It was a ludicrous, idiotic, reckless burst of stupidity mocked for years by everyone except the perpetrators, who, four years later, find themselves with ultimate power. They didn't win because they were the strongest. They won because they kept trying. And the people who should have stopped them feared bad press, the pushback of looking unfair,

and so stood back while the fascists made smaller grabs, gobbling up bits of the media, local school boards, and narrative oxygen around issues like immigration. And now, well, we're here. And we'll continue to talk about here after these ads. We're back! The coming days will be ugly, yet I feel it's my job to remind you that, bad as this is, we are not Weimar Germany.

And this is not 1933. Trump and his lieutenants aren't battle-hardened trench-fires. They're Elon Musk and a coterie of half-enthusiastic, half-frightened billionaires who got rich gambling on apps to let you rate your classmates' tits. Their foot soldiers are used car salesmen from Encino, not Freikor. The United States is not starving to death crippled by war. It's irritated, anxious because its working people have been robbed blind by the same billionaires standing behind Trump now. The one thing we do have in common with Weimar is that our fascists now find themselves at

the head of a state that capitulated to them not out of enthusiastic consent, but exhaustion, cowardice and above all, a feeling that it didn't really matter. That last one, the feeling that nothing matters, the system is fucked, there's no point in engaging or organizing, that is the most powerful weapon they have right now because that feeling stops you and everyone else from opposing them, from interrupting as they reach out yet again to take something you love or need. But there's a danger here too.

In moments of stress and anger, the desire to do something, anything can be intense. And when we're swept up in that mood, the natural tendency is defaulting to the things we know best, the things we've done before, the marches and chants and poster boards we've been walking and shouting and carrying all century long. Going back to those tactics, without iteration or acknowledgement of their limitations and failures, is a road to more failure. I've been to a lot of protests, starting at Zuccotti Park in 2011 and ending last year

in Chicago at the DNC. One of the most dispiriting moments of my life was listening to young anti-genocide activists bow to shut down the DNC to quote, make it great like 68. This was a reference to the 1968 Democratic convention. Mass protests were ignited there when the favorite anti-war candidate, Eugene McCarthy, was ratfucked by Democratic party insiders in favor of Vice President Hubert Humphrey. The protests were quashed violently with tear gas and truncheons. Protesters chanted, the whole world is watching,

and it's been a chant ever since. The world may have been watching then, but the war went on. Nixon won election, then re-election, and then finally pulled US troops out of Vietnam after dropping enough bombs on Southeast Asia to have ended several Third Rites. In 2024, a new batch of anti-war protesters chanted, the whole world is watching, and I can say, unequivocally, it was not. The only people watching were me, several other journalists, and of course, some people on Twitter. The police, as they kettled, maced, and arrested members of the crowd, barely seemed to care.

The DNC didn't shut down. Kamala Harris was made the nominee. There wasn't even a real anti-war candidate for party insiders to ratfuck in her favor. Garrison Davis, my colleague and friend, remarked to me afterwards that the DNC had been somehow much more depressing than its Republican counterpart a month earlier. He was right. On the stage floor, all the Democrats had to present were aging celebrities and Bill Goddamn Clinton drooling out the same platitudes that led us to the Trump era in the first place and doing their best to ignore delegates who walked out and slept in front of the convention

center to protest the genocide in Gaza. Meanwhile, in the streets, a lot of very nice, earnest people, alongside a handful of grifters, did the only thing they could think of doing after months of imbibing footage of war crimes. They walked around and shouted. The police and the city largely let them because they knew none of it was going to change a goddamn thing. I felt tremendous optimism right after Joe Biden resigned. Not because I loved Kamala, but because it was something shocking, an upset, an experiment, or at least it seemed that way at first. The DNC made it clear that Biden's

advisors and consigliaries, the powers behind the throne, still ran the show and would not allow any real change. The rot had spread too far, spoiling the meat, spoiling everything. It was my accurate belief in 2020 that the Democratic Party, broken as it was, had the numbers and the organizational capacity to slow the spread of fascism for a short time. It was my inaccurate belief in 2024 that this might still be the case. I had a hope because I'd lost any sense of actual productive optimism. We lean on hope when we have no ideas to brace ourselves against. Hope as George Miller reminded us, is a mistake.

If you don't fix what's broken, you'll go crazy. And that's where we are now. Going crazy. Committed Democrats, the decent, regular people who fill the party, not the soulless shoggoths of capital running things, are going crazy because we returned a normal, decent politician to office. He kept the economy humming along, and everyone still hated him. Leftists are crazy for a different reason. In 2020, this country saw the largest sustained uprising of its modern history and nothing fundamentally changed. In its aftermath, the oligarchs who control social media set to tweaking, buying, or outright inverting their algorithms to ensure no similar movement would ever gain that kind of steam

again. Their efforts have largely been successful. And yet many organizers, be they progressive social democrats, communists, anarchists, whatever, they're all still stuck in the same loops. Behind each march to nowhere and tired chant is an equally tired hope. The social democrats dream of a giant continent sized Denmark with cyclists replacing Ford trucks, universal healthcare, good schools, and a bevy of other lovely things both political parties will fight tooth and nail to prevent.

The communists dream of a new October revolution, but this one will work and not just create a new kind of dictatorship that ages and dies inside the space of a single human lifetime. Anarchists tend to be very good at seeing the flaws and the logic and futility of the hopes of the two previous groups, but they are just as bereft of ideas for how to stop what's coming. Some tendencies dream of collapse, maybe even accelerationism, an end to industrial society, and then either living in the woods eating berries or some kind of solar punk daydream, wildflowers spouting from rubble.

I sympathize, but try offering either future to a single mom who can't afford her 5 year old's insulin and see how excited she gets. On the other side of the anarchist coin you've got the helpers, the people who cheerfully admit they don't know how to solve the big problem, but they do know how to provide free eye exams to homeless people once a month, or do water drops down at the border so migrants don't die of dehydration, or make it more expensive for the state to bulldoze a forest and build a police training facility. If you are where we all are right now, bereft of ideas, staring down the barrel of a nightmare,

those are good folks to know. Like everyone else, they're defaulting to what they've been doing. But at least what they've been doing helps people. The larger solutions to our common woes, if they ever arrive, will be something new. Something we haven't tried yet. I feel very confident that they won't take the form of another march or involve everyone finally agreeing to be the same kind of communist or anarchist or whatever. Sean Fain, Chief of the United Auto Workers Union, has called for a general strike in

2028 and so far that is the only clear plan I have heard from anyone that feels like it has a ghost of a chance. It is audacious and I recommend reading what Sean's laid out about it. But half of why I support the idea is because it's audacious. The religious right got to where they are right now in this country by being bold. As I laid out earlier, fascists win because they try, and this is something we need to copy. Shit can be different, but not unless you're willing to try different shit.

Many pundits and columnists were shocked and horrified by the massive and instant support for Luigi Mangione when he assassinated the CEO of United Healthcare. Both the tutting gatekeepers of traditional media and the actually sweating oligarchs characterized this as evidence of bloodthirstiness. Some leftists did the same, and interpreted support for Luigi as proof that the body politic did indeed have energy for an uprising. I saw something a bit different. More than the actual killing itself, I think people were excited to see someone try something

new. Luigi adopted a novel tactic. He carried it out in a novel way, and in doing so, he did more to punish one of the oligarchs bleeding us dry than the entire Occupy movement. Novelty is the one thing that ties Donald Trump and Luigi Mangione together. The enthusiastic public response to both men's actions and the simultaneous revulsion of traditional elites are mirrors of themselves. In 2024, Trump still had enough novelty to convince people that he might upset the apple

cart in a way that benefited them. He rode a global anti-incumbent wave back to the White House. The consequence of this is that he and his are now on their way to becoming the new establishment. This is the downside of the fact that most legacy media outlets have started moderating their coverage of Trump if not embracing him outright. He is being normalized. His toadies, Musk chief among them, are now our legitimate powers. What novelty remains will fade rapidly. I suspect

the same thing will be true of the copycats who follow in Luigi Mangione's footsteps. Most of his plagiarists won't be good at what they do. At best, newly heightened security will see these people dropped before they get to pull a trigger. At worst, innocent folks will be killed or maimed by bullets and bombs that fail to hit their intended targets, or do, but with a lot of collateral damage. So I don't know what the next new thing to actually work will be, but between Trump and Luigi, there aren't many old norms left to shatter. We are in a time of enormous potential. Many new things are about to be tried and as awful and bloody as the fallout from some

of them will be, we all have no choice but to strap in and roll some dice of our own. The present is ugly, the future unwritten, but the only way we'll make it a better one is if we embrace boldness, creativity, and perhaps a little over confidence of our own. And this is not the end of the episode. We've got something else for you folks. But first, here's another ad break. Okay, everybody, we're back. And obviously what you just listened to is an essay I wrote about my thoughts and feelings

today. The first day of the new Trump administration, I felt like that wasn't quite enough. And the first thing I actually came across this morning when I woke up before I started subjecting myself to a barrage of horrible news was a poem written by a friend of mine, Emily Gorchinsky. It's called The Time of Cowards. And I think it's a very useful thing for you to hear right now. I think it's a good companion to what I wrote.

So I'm going to let Emily take it away before I do that. If you want to read the poem in text form or find her other work, you can go to EmilyGorchinski.com. That's EmilyGorchinski.com. Here it is, The Time of Cowards. It is the time of the coward. It is the age of the liar and greed and avarice and lost boys and a dopamine hit and fractals and velocity and velocity and velocity and go go go don't stop don't stop to realize the indecency the disloyalty the dishonor the discreditability the parsimony the hordes hoarded behind the gates the gatekeepers keep.

This is the dawn of masculine energy, not the energy your father taught you about measuring twice and cutting once, about picking yourself up, and how the sting of hydrogen peroxide means it's working. Or your grandfather, who spent the days you spent smoking weed behind a 7-11 serving on a torpedo boat waiting for the sharks. Who never failed to stop to lend a hand to those in need or say grace before dinner, or to help you with your math homework, or teach you not to wear a necktie at a lathe. This is the year of cutting once and

never measuring. Pencil in the blueprints with whatever comes out. It's faster that way. The season of hypocrites and not of confidence, but confidence men. The masculine energy of the con, the scam, the bamboozle, the fraud. The pulling of the rug and the begging of the question. Now is the killing hour. The clock hands float over the blood in the streets and the rage and the rage and the uncorked hatred overflows. The minutes of impotence expanding,

overflowing, fizzling. Deception gives way to more deception. Not a single promise is kept. For pacieness and rape and abandonment and the cutting of corners and KPIs, a newborn died in a baby box in Italy because the alarm sensor didn't work. It is an honorless time, a time of only one question.

Not how or may or can or if or whether, but when. How soon? No legacy, no history, no reputation. Build the factories, then abandon them. The soil keeps the memory. And the burn scars and the floodwaters and the clear windshieldaters and the clear windshields where the splatters of bug guts used to be. And the images in the

20 year old magazines still in the rack and the guest bathrooms never used. That showed how children used to go sledding and maybe the house is too big. No one comes by. I shoveled the neighbor's walk in the snow and salted it so he didn't slip on the ice and could receive his mail. He's an old man. One of the few black men left living in this neighborhood that was theirs once. He sent me a letter. It went all the way to Richmond to come to my door. He's the last man with dignity. In the letter he told me he has a new toy, a laptop which makes him happy because he's a big

lover of history and he can go online and read about it. And I weep for this last dignified man who proudly wears a cap honoring his service because this is the era of synthesis and generation and revision and content, content, content, and in verifiability and manipulation. This is the pseudoscience. I bought a bottle of wine from a centuries old vineyard destroyed in a devastating flood. An unsellable bottle in the retail market, a fundraiser souvenir, I kept it as a memento mori of our changing world. A mud covered reminder of how we all must work little by little to give the world forward.

It broke when I tried to move it home on my 72nd flight of the year. It is the decade of hypocrisy, even for those who can see hypocrisy. They may be a vice president, and with every title change, I move farther from God, a God I never believed in. I was raised in New England towns named for biblical places by people who thought working the rocky soil brought them closer to God.

The only holy men left are those in the fields. Basra and Lebanon and Gilead and Hebron. The people who named those towns committed a genocide to name them, and 400 years later, in their namesakes, the same. It is the epoch of cadaverine. It is the night of bonfires and feuerspüche, the twilight of stories that dared in poems and albums, and I tried to sell a book and I learned that there's only interest in a book when you put yourself into it to be consumed. Words are calories measured in the amount of heat they give a flame. I walked over the Westminster Bridge one night with a journalist who told me that

they can't publish two good stories at a time. Because if one goes viral, it punishes the other, the arcane footfalls of the algorithm dance. It is the sunset of craft and skills handed down and heritage. The waxing of a crass and pandering moon of pantomime, a frictionless night, a night where nothing dared nothing gained, a night of shutters and locks. These are the dark ages, ages of embarrassing the future. There is a shame here that penance cannot satisfy. The sturdy, empty shelves, the blue hyperlinks to nowhere. And a generation lost must be lost because profit cannot be taken from an idea.

I think of the mimeograph machines stuck under the floorboards of the Solidare Noche houses, and the punks and the whores who copied radical zines in the public library Xerox machines, and the Yugoslavian Galaxia, and the novels now considered some of the greatest of all time, once banned for obscenity. In Troshevsku's house, the original TV remains. The revolutionaries didn't bother to steal it

because there were only 30 minutes of broadcast TV each day. In the crepuscular light, birds dare to sing even though they know the cats hunt below. In Vilnius, there is a tile in a square. They say if you make a wish and spin around it three times, your wish will come true. At this tile, a human chain formed and spanned three countries and they sang. At Hadrakim, on the right day, the morning light filters in over the lonesome island of Filfla and fills a hole drilled in the sandstone five thousand years ago and has done so unfailingly over the millennia that have seen countless empires rise and fall and the solstice of retribution will come again. Experiencing the news each day can feel like a journey.

With Up First from NPR though, it doesn't have to be. Welcome to 15 easy minutes of breaking news, clarity on international and national affairs and a casual tone that you can take in with breakfast. Begin your day informed, ready and refreshed. Begin your day with up first subscribe to up first from NPR on the iHeart radio app or wherever you get your podcasts. John Stewart is back in the host chair at the daily show, app or wherever you get your podcasts. You get hilarious satirical takes on entertainment, politics, sports, and more from John and the team of correspondents and contributors. The podcast also has content you can't get anywhere else, like extended interviews and

a roundup of the weekly headlines. Listen to The Daily Show, Ears Edition on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Snakes, zombies, sharks, heights. Speaking in public, the list of fears is endless. But while you're clutching your blanket in the dark, wondering if that sound in the hall was actually a footstep, the real danger is in your hand, when you're behind the wheel.

And while you might think a great white shark is scary, what's really terrifying and even deadly is distracted driving. Eyes forward, don't drive distracted. Brought to you by NHTSA and the Ad Council. The OGs of uncensored motherhood are back and batter than ever. I'm Erica. And I'm Mila.

And we're the hosts of the Good Moms Bad Choices podcast, brought to you by the Black Effect Podcast Network every Wednesday. Historically, men talk too much. And women have quietly listened. And all that stops here. If you like witty women, then this is your tribe. With guests like Corinne Stephens.

I've never seen so many women protect predatory men. And then me too happen. And then everybody else wanna get pissed off because the white said it was okay. Problem. My oldest daughter, her first day of ninth grade, and I called to ask how it was going. She was like, oh, Dad, all they were doing

was talking about your thing in class. I ruined my baby's first day of high school. And slumflower. What turns me on is when a man sends me money. Like, I feel the moisture between my legs when a man sends me money. I'm like, oh my God, it's go time. You actually sent it? Mm.

Listen to the Good Moms Bad Choices podcast every Wednesday on the Black Effect Podcast Network, the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you go to find your podcast. Hi, everyone, and welcome to the podcast. I was going to go for a really Robert Evans intro there, but I bottled it. I am a coward and I couldn't do it. I hate all of you

It's Margaret Killjoy everyone here to spread the good news. I was trying to Robert Evans it. Oh, okay Yeah, and it doesn't he only hate a certain percentage of them. Oh, right. Mm-hmm Statistically speaking he likes some of you. Yeah, I know cuz I nice people listen to Robert likes, maybe it's you, maybe it's not, you'll never know today. We're not here to talk about who Robert Evans likes, but we are here to talk about what to do if your house is going to burn down or you have to leave because they think it might burn down. This is obviously a topic that is front of mind for people in

Southern California currently given the massive wildfires that have engulfed whole neighborhoods of Los Angeles. There are fires in Ventura and Oxstead as well now. The whole of East County San Diego is under a red flag warning. Fire conditions continue because climate change continues and we have decided as a society not to do anything about that and This shit is going to be the rest of our lives if you're on the East Coast or somewhere else and you're like Oh, I'm fine. I'm not on the West Coast Bad news for you. You're not fine Slowly more and more the East, including the Northeast, is being seen as a fire prone area. And we're seeing an increase in fire out East as well.

Yeah. The United Kingdom has wildfires now, a thing that did not exist. Do you all even have wild over there? Yeah. We have land owned by the monarch fires. Yeah, okay. We have like parks and protected land. We have commons to a degree, but not like public land like the US does. When I was a kid, we used to burn the stubble in straw fields. That's how few fucks we gave about fires. We just burn it and then plow it back in. And air quality, I guess.

That is not a thing that people engage in anymore. That's probably for the best. Fire, it's coming for you. It's happening everywhere. Hooray! Hooray, yeah, lucky you. The cleansing fire. I feel like there's a John Betjeman poem I could go off with here, but I'll spare you. Alright, so if you are in a place where you are very likely to have to evacuate your home soonish for a fire, here are some things that you may wish to consider doing. I've harvested these from

mutual aid groups in LA and from the CAL FIRE website where they give you advice on what to do if you're evacuating. The first thing that you'll want to do is turn off your gas. For those of you who are not familiar, this is a flammable substance and your gas pipe rupturing and then catching on fire would be bad, would be sad. It's pretty easy to do this. Normally you should have a valve near the meter. Some places will have what's called an earthquake shutoff or an earthquake valve where you won't need a tool. I'm not sure that, in fact, I'm pretty certain those are not mandatory even in California

because I've lived places that don't have them. Then again, there are things that are mandatory that landlords just aren't doing. I think we all know that. Yeah, or like grandfathered into or whatever. Mm-hmm. Yeah, yeah. Given that people outside of California are listening and the earthquakes are, unfortunately, not coming for us all just yet, I would just suggest that you try and find where your gas shutoff is now. It's often where the gas comes into the property, like

if there's a gas meter, and normally you're gonna need some kind of tool to turn that. What I've used normally is just like an adjustable spanner or wrench for those of you in the United States. The people of California that you're talking to. Yeah, yes, yeah, hi fellow Californians. You can turn that valve so it's parallel with the pipe

and that's gonna shut off the gas coming into your house. Do you mean perpendicular to the pipe? I'm curious. I think parallel is shut off. Interesting. With water you turn it off by moving it perpendicular. I've never messed with a gas line. I've lived weird and off-grid instead. Yeah, let me have a look. I'm checking now. Yeah, sorry, it wants to be at 90 degrees to the pipe.

So it should be in line with the pipe when you start at 90 degrees to the pipe when you turn it off. Which you can just kind of imagine as like, when it's in line, you can imagine like, oh, that's how the gas and water can flow through. And then when it's to the side, it's like, oh, now it's blocking it. That's how I remember. That's much easier visually if you imagine like the hole in the valve lining up with the handle thing on there. Yeah. So you want to turn that off. I've seen some suggestions that you want to turn water off. It's much easier visually if you imagine like the hole in the valve lining up with the handle thing on there. Yeah.

Do you want to turn that off? I've seen some suggestions that you want to turn water off. Generally the advice is not to turn your water off and to hook up your outdoor hoses to your outdoor taps such that they can be used if they need to be used. I have seen some suggestions to turn water off because I guess people's pipes are bursting which is decreasing water pressure. And it seems like that's probably a like city versus rural or like city to city kind of divide. You should listen to your local authorities around this kind of thing. Right, like in the case of California you

can go to CAL FIRE right and there will be evacuation advice on the CAL FIRE website there might even be on your city website. Some of it is useful. This is a useful thing. If you do need to turn off your water, again, water shutoffs could be in a variety of places, so it kind of depends, especially if you're on a well, you're probably rural, and if you're rural, you're probably going to be leaving it on. Yeah. You're probably not turning off your water.

Yeah. But if you, if you do need to, it's just a pipe going into your basement that you turn the valve on. You can sometimes be at the side of your house. You might need to give this a little bit of WD-40. Sometimes there's a little plastic box as well, and a little plastic box has a little hole, and you kind of have to shove a screwdriver in that hole and pop it open. We're now talking about city water again, right? Municipal water.

Yes, yeah, that's city water, yeah. That's where if you have a water meter box, and the shutoff's in there. Familiarize yourself with that stuff now so that you're not doing it in a panic later and that's kind of where a lot of what we're talking about today is important. It's if you do it now, you don't have to dash about your house grabbing, thinking, is this important? Do I need this? Do I need that?

Right. Because like I've evacuated for a while, as far as living in California a few times. I like to think I have it pretty down now, but definitely the first time I was, you know, freshly minted European migrant, it was not familiar with this stuff. And definitely just ran around grabbing things.

It turned out to be the wrong things. It's like, cool, I've got three bicycles here. Let me go to the shelter. And you can get something called a water key or a silcock key. And I have a thing, I have not personally used it. I have a thing called an eight way key. Sometimes they're called four way keys, depends on how many little wrenches on them are on them.

And these are just cheap things that have like basically all of the weird wrench style things that you would never otherwise use like all the weird like triangle things they can get you into like the Boxes on a subway car and they can turn on and off water Like I carry one in case you know you're in the apocalypse and you need to turn on the water at a rest area You know that kind of thing I first learned about these from squatters It would just move into houses and then turn the water on And they they're built in specialized ways to try and prevent squatters from doing exactly what I'm describing

Yeah, so you couldn't use your standard socket set or what happened. Yeah, that's where you need these specialized keys Yeah, and they're not very expensive by now. They're also not very high quality This isn't the kind of thing you're going to want to use over and over again. They're usually cast and like they break. Yeah, it's like pot metal. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. But they're all right, as far as I can tell. Yeah, and then you're hopefully not going to need to use them very much.

Other things that you should turn on or off, turn off your air conditioning. No one's in the house anyway, don't need it. I would consider leaving your exterior lights on. This is just going to help firefighters see things and see your house in the event that your house is still there. You can close your windows and doors. It's amazing how much difference closed doors even internally make in fire spread. There are plenty of videos you can watch about this online, but like it's amazing how much difference it makes having those closed. But you don't want to lock your front door. Like you're going to see a lot of stuff about looting. I will tell you right now that the people who are looting from wildfire survivors are the landlords who are charging 150% of the rent that they

were a month ago for people to find a place place to live. Also if my house is about to burn down and you go steal all my stuff, good. Have it. Yeah, yeah. Lucky you. Like, I hope you don't get burned. Like, yeah, compared to if a firefighter needs to enter that house to prevent it burning down, it takes a meaningful amount of time to break down a door.

Yeah. And you can save that time by leaving it open. So yeah, that is something that I think you will get the wrong impression of if you're watching too much corporate news. If you can close metal shutters on your windows, but remove curtains. Flammable things near windows. Generally not a good idea. Right.

That makes sense. So if you've got fabric curtains, I know they look nice, but take them down. Or you could just live like, like, like me and never purchase curtains and just... I don't have the sun in your face. No. What is happening to me right now? Curtains are great. We're going to start a whole interior design thing

and when I teach James interior design. Where you hang your curtains. Yeah, James is effectively squatting in a house that he actually rents. You should also move flammable items into the middle of the room. Again, right? That's where the, uh, the fire is not. And then before you go, choose an outfit that covers your legs and arms. Right.

And you'll want to wear some sturdy shoes as well. Something that's comfortable, something you could potentially sleep in and wear for a few days and not be uncomfortable. Shoes that you could walk in, right? We saw a lot of people in LA weren't able to take their vehicles as far as they had expected to be able to. And so having a pair of shoes that you're comfortable in, your nice, comfy walking shoes is definitely a useful thing to have and something to think about.

I hope you're not listening to this dashing around your house, if you are, best of luck. Yeah, good luck to you. Yeah, yeah, but you can prepare all this stuff now. For the outside of your house, flammable stuff that might catch outside your house is best either bought inside, inside your shed, if you have a shed or a garage or something, or in a particularly California piece of advice,

Cal Fire suggests chucking your patio of furniture in the pool. That is the thing that you can do. That makes some sense. It does. Have you seen the picture of this lady in the 90s who put all her fine china in her swimming pool before evacuating in a wildfire? Oh, that's amazing. Yeah, it's very like of the time.

Like it was a time when people could afford swimming pools. in a world fire. Oh, that's amazing. Yeah, it's very like of the time. Like it was a time when people could afford swimming pools. Yeah. And also people had China that they cared about, which is something that our generation generally does not. Unless they inherited it from their parents and in which case they still also, yeah. Right. They have like one plate.

Yeah. Yes. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Apparently it's a big issue with people like inheriting China and not wanting it and just dumping it on goodwill. Yeah, I believe it. Yeah, I, apparently it's a big issue with people like inheriting China and not wanting it and just dumping it on goodwill's Yeah, I believe it. Yeah, I can see that So yeah, you can put stuff in your pool if you don't want to burn if it is possible for you to do that You had something you mentioned Margaret about your fence right living in a more rural setting

Yeah, can I actually just kind of like really quickly run through some if you yes fire protecting your house There's two things you're gonna do one is the oh I'm going to run away now version. And then there's the ahead of time version. The really quick basic version of the ahead of time is that and this is more applicable rurally but you want to have a defensible space. You know everyone everyone's going to give you a different number but like a hundred feet from your house you don't want densely packed trees especially conifers.

And you're going to want, you know, the one tree is okay, as long as it's a little bit further from the other, you're going to want to clear out yard debris, even though leaving leaves on the ground is overall good, you kind of want to create this space where there's not a lot of leaf litter and things like that. Directly under your house, so that the eaves don't catch, you want to make sure that you don't keep a lot of flammable stuff there. And if like, if I was fleeing my house in a hurry, I would be pulling all the stuff away from under the eaves that I should have pulled away from under the eaves months ago.

If I were to design my house better, there would be a basically a three foot like gravel line around the edge of my house, right? Of landscaping. Yeah. But the other things that you're going to want to do is you're going to want to look for how embers can get in through the vents and stuff, like in your roof area or under wherever. And you're going to want to basically make sure, and it might already have that, but

you want to make sure that there's tighter than chicken wire. I think you want quarter inch mesh covering those things. Yeah, like construction netting. Yeah, metal, but. Yeah, it's metal. It's just the name of things. Yeah, like construction netting. Yeah, well, metal, but... Yeah, it's metal, that's just the name of it. It's what they put into concrete, I think. I use it to build chicken runs for similar reasons. Well, because raccoon hands can't get through it

and raccoons, they're bastards as it turns out. Yeah, that makes sense. If your porch is wooden, you have a porch. You don't want fire to get underneath it. And so you can keep your wooden porch, but you wanna screen off underneath of it to keep flaming debris from going under there. And then if you have a wooden fence,

consider having the like first 10 feet or so of the fence, be brick or something like that. I can't afford this, but imagine you can. Then you would want the first chunk of it to be that way. If you have gates, you open them. The deal with fences and everything is that you don't want like a wick that brings fire to your house. So if the forest around you is burning, you don't want it to catch your fence and have that go right up to under the eaves, catch the eaves on fire and now you have a structure

fire. So what you're going to do is you open the gates if you're leaving and then for example my plan because I have a wooden fence that goes all the way up to my house is that if I have more than like five minutes to flee a fire, if I have a half an hour to flee a fire I am taking the chainsaw and I am cutting down about 10 feet of that wooden fence before I leave. And that should dramatically increase the chances that my house will survive a fire. Yeah, smart move.

And then the other thing with the pool thing, and this is a thing I've like read about, but I've never, there's no version of my life where I'm ever going to have a pool. If you live in a fire prone area, they actually make pumps that are designed to pump your pool water into a fire hose. And they have saved a lot of rural areas and probably city areas too, by having that accessible to firefighters immediately. Your pool can become a resource for the people who are coming in to try and keep your house intact.

Yeah. Amusingly, we used one of those when I was a kid. We had a horse that liked to get out. And one day she got out. We all went looking for, of course, there were some wealthy people who like, well, they didn't live in the village that we lived in. They owned it because Britain has never moved on from the feudal era. And they had a pool and that was where a horse was.

And so the fire brigade came and they used one of those things, just pumped out the water and just like hosed down the surrounding garden. And then we came with the tractor and we put some different straw bales of different sizes and made a set of stairs and got her out. That's the least relatable story I've ever heard about England. Yeah, just like rural people living the dream. Yeah, yeah. He was a good horse. Misty. Yeah, we had a lot of horses that like, we had access to land and not a great deal of finances. So we inherited problematic courses, I think, for people who had like, who had the means to purchase that is relatable to the Americans. Yeah. Okay. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Any people find themselves in

this situation. I'm sure. Yeah. Horse poor is a whole thing. Yeah, it is. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah any people find themselves in this situation. I'm sure yeah horse poor is a whole thing Yeah, it is. Yeah Yeah It's it's the rich people who buy fancy horses and then like find that horse not to their liking and can afford to discard A living thing that they spent more than a car is worth on one and also mean horse poor is you have a horse But you don't have any money and you're like, yeah You're partly poor because you have the horse, because horses are incredibly expensive to maintain. Yes, they are. Vets cost a lot.

Yeah. Anyway. So, yeah, make sure, not quite in horse relation, but if you are more of a horseless carriage transport person, if you are, this is a very American thing, in possession of an electric garage door opener, it is a good idea to work out how to open your garage without that. Because you don't want to be in a situation where you can't use your vehicle because you can't open your garage. Or you don't want to be dashing around going where's the bloody cord? Not the time. So work out how to do it. Now also your front gate. Hopefully you don't live in a gated community. It's not the way to live. But if you do for whatever reason, you know, know how to open the gates. Or if you have an electric front gate to your drive, I suppose, know how to open that.

Margaret, now will be a good time for us to pause for ads. I wonder if we will get an advert for electric garage doors. Or electric horses. Oh yeah, maybe. Do they dream of electric hay? We'll find out in this advertising break. Alright, we are back and now we're continuing on the theme of animals because they are our little friends. Yeah.

So if you have animals inside your house, pets, we had farm animals inside my house growing up so I guess it's not exclusive, pets. We knew we had farm animals inside my house growing up, so I guess it's not exclusive to pets. We used to bring the lambs in when it was cold. Little orphan lambs. Again, this is turning into like James story time. It's okay. It's cute stories. People are in possession of a range, like a big cooking. If you have a very old house in the UK, or again, if you're rich, you have these like coal burning or oil burning ovens. So you stay at a temperature and you have a number of doors. The coldest one, you can put a lamb in there in the wintertime and you can keep it warm that way. Like in a live one?

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Well, I mean, any of them, you can put a dead one in if you felt the need. But this isn't a way to cook it. If you're looking to take care of the animal You put that put him in there and keep more so if you have pets in your house Things to do before you evacuate would be make sure they have a collar on which has your name and your contact information Yeah, I'm a big fan of the breakaway collars, especially for dogs We never had collars on a dog showing up so dogs were always out in the fields right and going through hedges and stuff And you don't want them to get caught up

Yeah because their dogs were always out in the fields, right, and going through hedges and stuff, and you don't want them to get caught up. Yeah. And so I'm a big fan of those, especially in a situation where your pet's going to be scared, you know, God forbid that you lose, your pet goes running for a bit. Yeah. You don't want them to get caught up by their neck. You also probably want to chip your dog also, or chip your pets.

Yes, yeah. Because I was going to say, now is a good time, or you have the time to chip your pet, to make sure you have a carrier, make sure you have their vaccination records, all that stuff. And also particularly rabies vaccination is like the thing that you need to make sure

that you have with you. There's a lot of places you can't go with a pet like Canada, unless you have. Yeah, yeah. Hopefully you and your pet will be fine and you'll come home in a few days. But keeping that stuff is important. If you have a cat having a,

so you can buy those little mobile litter boxes. If you're in danger of having to evacuate, just buy one and check in your vehicle now. Of course, any medications that your pet has, right? You'll want to have a supply of those and those will want to be in your little go-bag. It's also nice to have some familiar toys and things that smell like home. So consider putting them in the carrier now and then they'll just be there and you won't have to look for them. They have advice if you have to leave your pet which would be a pretty heartbreaking situation to be honest. I uh Yeah I think that choosing to be in charge of an animal's entire life is a pretty solemn vow

Yes, I would agree and I don't think I would leave them to burn. I think yeah, but I guess there's probably I mean you see like for example I know we're gonna talk about livestock in a second but like you know people have had to like Let loose some of their horses because they can only personally escort so many horses or whatever right? yeah, a few years ago my friend and I were in a situation where a Stables had more horses than it did vehicles. And we were able to go in a vehicle with a tow truck and just help. They would load them up and just be like, go to the evacuation point with these horses.

And so having a plan for that is good. But yeah, I struggle conceive of leaving pets. I grew up with dogs and they were part of my family. Yeah. I suppose there's some situation I am not imagining where it is literally a necessity, but I struggle to. Yeah, I heard about people in LA who were forced to leave relatives who were not mobile,

which is just fucking heartbreaking. Just, you know, one of the worst things I could imagine happening. Which is literally why I actually think that your evacuation plans, I'm not trying to blame those people that we're talking about, but actually think that your evacuation plans, I'm not trying to blame those people that we're talking about, but I believe that your evacuation plans need to include people with disabilities who are in your area, not just in your house, but elsewhere.

Like, if you have someone who can only travel by a wheelchair, then you should be considering for your only vehicle a wheelchair accessible vehicle. Like, this is the kind of thing that I think that like, plans need to include people who are at different levels of ability. Yeah. Yeah. If you have older people in your neighborhood, people who might not have their cell phone on or on them all the time, they might not get that like beep, beep, buzz, buzz.

Yeah. If you have like older folks who live alone in your neighborhood, you should know that, you know? Yeah. Yeah. A few years ago, I helped some older neighbors evacuate. You live in a community and you need to take responsibility and take care of one another. If you have livestock, again, like, you know, I grew up with livestock. I think you're taking responsibility for that animal's life and that includes situations where you might have to help that animal escape in a way that like it's not necessarily like lucrative for you. Right. So that might just mean opening your fences,

right? Opening your gates. If you're not able to evacuate that animal, at least giving it a chance. You can before just to avoid having yourself in that situation, need to make transport arrangements. You should be able to look where large animals, uh, refuges are. Like in San Diego in the big fires, maybe 15 years ago, they had them on Fiesta Island for a while, up to the island out in the bay or Del Mar race course is often a place in San Diego where you can take them. You should be able to find that now. If you're in Los Angeles, you can find that now.

Again, you're going to want to have your essential documentation. You are not going to want nylon halters for your livestock. I've seen a lot of people have like that. People have nylon lead ropes for horses. We had like more hempy ones when I was younger, just because those are much less likely to melt, right? I'm not sure that's why we had them in the UK, but we had them because we'd had them for a long time. But plastic-y things that can melt,

you don't want to put them around your horse's head or near your horse. Okay, that makes some sense. If you have chickens right now, you're going to run into the issue of avian flu, which is a further complication. So like this is the scenario of like a big chicken shelter where you take them. It's not a good one for avian flu reasons, also for like chicken dynamics reasons. So that means you should make a plan now. You might have a friend who you're like, hey, I know that you're not normally a poultry person,

but would it be cool in the event of us having to evacuate for me and my chickens to come and stay at your house? Making a plan now is going to avoid you being in a very difficult situation of either driving around with your birds in your truck, being like, where the fuck can I go? Or being turned away from places, right? The last thing I have here, and then we're going to move on to packing your go bag, is insurance.

My house flooded when I was a kid. Like it completely leveled the first floor of the house. Everything was gone. Which since it's England is actually the second floor to Americans. Yeah, it's true. It was actually the... It was the ground floor. You to... It was the ground floor. It was the ground floor.

You had to hide on the first floor. Yeah, yeah. I love to go into a lift and be confused in this country after 16 years of living here. Go up and down, up and down, playing this stupid game until I Google what do Americans call the floors. But you can't do it because you're in the lift and your phone doesn't work. It's one of my favorite experiences. Especially because you try to Google what do American lifts do and they're like, what the fuck is a lift? Yeah, yeah, it's true. Yeah, yeah, an elevator. Yeah, it's not an elevating experience for

me. My favorite thing to pick on James Saban. I don't know why. Yeah, it's true. I'm sure I'm the only person who does it. I'm sure it never happens to me. Yeah, it was never an issue when I worked in a building with a lift and would routinely miss my own floor. So much so that I just took the fire escape. So I remember it taking months.

The time I was working in construction and what we were doing was for the most part, pulling wet carpet out of people's homes that had flooded. Highly recommend not doing that as a way to make a living if you can. It's not good for the body, not good for the soul. Not good for the lungs probably. Oh, cleaning out restaurants like a month later, the power have been off for a month, just going into the walk-in. Oh my god. I've never seen so many people vomit like one after the other being like, no, I could do it. I'm a builder boom straight like yeah pretty horrific so don't recommend if you can go around your

house taking a video of your yeah stuffs it will just make it easier like this happened to my family like maybe you know the early 2000s it wasn't possible well I mean I could have got the old like Sony handycam out but I didn't so now you know you have a video camera in your pocket, going around your house, taking a video, especially of, you know, the things that are expensive and hard to move you're going to rely on insurance to replace. Yeah. And then this is actually a decent regular prepper practice regardless. This isn't a like, oh, I'm just about to have to run out for a fire.

This is a like, every six months or every year or every time you get a new weird expensive thing that you put in your house, make this video so that it's easier to prove all of the stuff that you had that needs to be replaced. Yeah. If you do that on a regular basis, there's a little bit of like security of like, where do you put it? Do you really want, you know, but it's honestly, for almost all people, probably totally fine to just have that on the cloud.

Yeah, I think it did. Don't put it on Facebook, but like. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Don't direct the insurance company to your Instagram while you post an interior video of your home every month. Yeah. That's such a thing, I guess. Join us next month for Behind the Podcasts.

Yeah, podcast cribs. It's me in my shed. It's me critiquing your interior design. You have, that will be a weekly podcast for some time. Shame James. Anyway. James shame podcast. Yeah. LA things that I've heard people, things that you will need. If you have a nebulizer, if you're a person who uses a nebulizer to help them breathe, those are in very high demands. You're probably not going to be able to replace it, so bring that with you. If you have medications, ideally grab the meds in the little orange thing and take those with you. That way you've got the RX number and you can easily go to a pharmacy and be like,

hey, this is my prescription for me. It has my name and the RX number. Can you issue me an emergency supply? And that's something they should be able to do. And also if you grab the whole bottle, then you've got, you know, hopefully a decent supply. Hopefully your insurance isn't annoying and only lets you get three weeks at a time. Yeah, that's, that comes up for a lot of people, but yeah.

I will not name any companies because I think it is against my contract to do that. I will say that if you have like your important documents, right? Your potentially your deed to your house. If you own one, your car, your passport, your birth certificate is a big one. Yeah. You're right to be in this country. Yeah. Any green card, visa, that kind of thing, especially those in the after.

Well, this will come out in the era of Trump 2.0. So those documents are going to be very important for some people, right? Your DACA registration. Put those in a file and grab the whole thing, bring it with you. Do not rely on scanned copies of those, especially your immigration documents. If you're a person who has firearms, records of the serial numbers of those are gonna be useful. And again, I would just snap a picture.

It's not reasonable or sensible to be taking a lot of firearms with you in a situation like this. You're not going to need them. And there's gonna be a lot of places that you won't want to bring them. Yes. I would suggest locking them up. And like I say, documenting that you've done that.

You may have to prove at some point that that firearm no longer exists and that's probably the best way to do that. And being prepared to travel on foot, like I said. Another thing that people have been needing and not having is P100 masks. So that's a particle filter generally in the 3M. And I think the Honeywell filters, they're pink. So I'm talking about like a screw-in filter here. Although they do make P100 masks that are more like,

they look more like COVID masks. They're just a little bit thicker and yeah. Yeah, they're a little bit more sort of burdensome than those masks, but that is what you need if you're in those situations. So if you have one of those, I have ones like when I'm, when I'm epoxying wood, I have a little half face respirator that I wear for that. We will actually talk about masks, Margaret, after some of the products and services

that support the show have talked about themselves. It'd be pretty sick if it's Honeywell. Yeah, that'd be pretty small. Yep. All right, here we go. [♪ Music playing. [♪ Music playing. Alright, we're back. Thank you, Honeywell. Yeah.

For keeping us safe from tear gas. Although I'm kind of a 3M girl, I gotta admit. Oh, controversial. Okay. I know. So, one of the things I did during 2020 was aM girl, I gotta admit. Oh, controversial. Okay. I know. So one of the things that I did during 2020 was a lot of testing of protest care. And if you wanna see, I've written up a whole bunch

of pieces about exactly everything about masks and body armor and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. But in general, when you think about masks, there's sort of three levels that actually matter or useful. There's the version that we kind of see as a COVID mask. There's a version where it's like you wear it around your face and you make sure you get a rated one. And N95 is better than nothing for smoke,

but a P100 is better. And then there is a half mask respirator. Half mask respirators are great. They are probably the sweet spot for this. They are less good for pandemics because they do not filter the exhale. They're better for your daily life because they do not filter the exhale. They're better for your daily life because they don't filter the exhale. It's much easier to breathe with a half mask respirator than a fabric mask.

And you can switch out the cartridges and unfortunately, almost all of them are various proprietary types of filters. Yeah. And the bayonet mount is the the 3m style There's a NATO version if something looks more like a gas mask It's probably the NATO screw on kind. Mm-hmm So you can get a half mask respirator or you can get a full face respirator Which is more or less what looks like a gas mask

But those come in kind of civilian styles that are using the same 3m brand or Honeywell or whatever cartridges or you can get the more military style that'll have the same 3M brand or Honeywell or whatever cartridges, or you can get the more military style that'll have the NATO style screw in. The military style is kind of overkill in terms of it'll position you oddly socially. Yes, certainly in a fire. Yeah. I think that a thing that is worth everyone having are these respirators, a half mask respirator or depending on your life, like if you use them a lot,

or you're going to be protesting, or, I don't know, there's a lot of different reasons, you might want a full face one. They make really cheap knockoff ones that you can get imported, although maybe if you're listening to this in the future, you can't get it imported, but they work fairly well, they're just not quite as good.

I've tested a whole bunch of them against various impacts and things like that. I think that half masks are great. They're just not quite as good. I've tested a whole bunch of them against various impacts and things like that. I think that half masks are great. I keep a half mask in my truck literally for wildfire smoke because when I'm traveling, if I'm driving out west, I've been around wildfire smoke while traveling before. Another thing just really quickly, they make these for dogs as well. Oh, cool.

They're more like COVID mask style and my dog hates it, you know, but you could train your dog into not hating it. I just haven't, I just keep it around to be like, well, if it really, if we had to sleep in the vehicle in a smoky area, my dog would hate it and he would put up with it, you know, and he would survive. I like masks, they're great.

Yeah, they are good. The half facial respiratory is great. That's what I use, like I say, when I'm epoxying so I don't get high, because that would be bad. Yeah. Oh, and then really quickly about physical stuff like deeds and all of that stuff. Yeah. I'm actually kind of curious because it's like, I see why it matters the most to have

the physical originals. For most crises, a lot of people talk about how safety deposit boxes at banks are kind of the way to go for stuff like that you don't need on a regular basis. This wouldn't be your proof of documentation necessarily, but it might be your like birth certificate maybe like deeds and titles and things at a safe deposit box because then if your house burns down, it's still fine. LA wildfire kind of disproves this a little bit, right? Because then you're like, well, what if your bank burns down?

Yeah. Yeah. And then if it's not on your property, you can't grab it and go. So it's a little bit complicated. I think overall, I think that there's a real advantage to keeping stuff in a safety deposit box off site. And then also, I just want to shout out that fireproof safes aren't fireproof. Yeah. Not for the situation that we're talking about here. Right. They are designed for like your kitchen catches fire or your bed catches fire and your safe is under your bed. Yeah and the fire fighters come and they get out in 15 minutes but some stuff gets charred. Right. When there is

a structure fire and a structure is destroyed, fireproof safes like all other safes are generally not protecting their contents and that's not the safe fault of the fire safe. It's just they're not designed for that Google the melting point of steel for this and many other interesting internet things that you can learn jet fuel can't melt fire proof safe which is why they build buildings out of it oh and one more thing about documents really quick while the original matters having copies is like better than nothing. 100%.

And also just like scanning and having them on encrypted hard, like a cryptid USB stick. A little USB stick with all of your stuff is a really pretty good thing to have. It has some advantages too, right? Because sometimes you don't want the originals of your documents. Like, for example, you probably want a list of all of your bank accounts. Yeah. The bank account numbers, your pins or your credit card numbers, like all of that stuff that you really don't want someone else to have.

But if you lost, you would be really sad. You probably want digital encrypted copies of that available to you. Yeah, yeah. Also your like master passwords and all that terrible, horrible stuff that's scary to put onto a USB stick. Yeah, that's why you're putting it there and not on the internet. Yeah. So really quickly, Margaret, it's going to be a long one, I guess. You and I talk about prepper stuff, it went long?

Yeah, shocking. GoBags. We've done a whole episode on GoBags. If you're new to the show, hello, welcome. You can go back and listen to Margaret and James talking about GoBags. We'll try and put a link in the description here for you. But what is the like super fast speedrun version of what you want to put in your go bag? Oh Lord, uh, change of socks and underwear, your basic toiletries, like the kind of

like travel toiletries, because your go bag is like more like, sorry it's not gonna be a long tangent, your go bag is like more likely I have to spend the night in my car than like I'm starting a new life somewhere out in the plains. And so the small little things like bring deodorant even if you don't have deodorant in your daily life because you might be crammed into a place with lots of other people.

I've seen tons of requests for deodorant in the LA mutual aid chat almost every day. Yeah, no, it makes a lot of sense. So basic toiletries and a little bit extra to share. I think whether or not you menstruate, you should have tampons, for example, in your go bag. And so I think that the basic toiletries, basic first aid slash survival stuff, and then like change of clothes and also like at least one or two morale items.

I keep a Nintendo Switch in my go bag. It Skyrim is I need a Skyrim box in order to fight anxiety sometimes. Yeah, yeah. You can get those tiny little Gameboys now, which have like, it looks like a Gameboy, but it's every game ever. Yeah, yeah. I have one of those in there, too. OK, sick. Yeah, those would be a perfect item for one of those. That actually I had like almost no electricity at the beginning of COVID.

And so the ability to play the Sega Genesis version of Shadowrun from like the 90s was crucial to me because I didn't have enough electricity to run a computer. Yeah. And look, that's fine. And it's probably gonna be more important to you than half the shit you see people online putting in their go-backs. Like, you don't need a gender-affirming hatchet. You will have a lot more fun with your tiny Game Boy. Things that you don't need that I see people, I see people hauling a lot of food. Everyone who's evacuated at L.A. is having a miserable time. They are eating Everyone who's evacuated in L.A. is having a miserable time. They are eating the best they ever have.

So many people want to help and food is a way that so many of us express affection and care for one another. So many people are getting fed right now. Thanks to the efforts of mutual aid groups, really. Remarkably doesn't seem to be so much by... You'd think L.A., a city on a major fault line, would have some kind of supplies for an earthquake that required feeding lots of people. Seems like it's more vibes based for the city. But you know, surprise surprise, it's mutual aid groups who are feeding people and they're doing that really well. So you don't need to haul a lot of food. Having a little bit of food though, a little bit of shelf stable food. I really recommend

bars you don't like as the food that you put in your go bag. Because if you put in bars that you do like, you're going to eat them when you're bored bored one day Yeah, and you don't want to go to the store highly recommend I say this literally all of the bars and all my bags have been eaten Yeah, last week, but that's because there's been like a winter storm So I haven't been out to the grocery store and I just have been like sugar craving so I eat even the gross bars I live in San Diego. I have no excuse I just do it because I can't be bothered to leave my office and go to my kitchen sometimes Yeah, so find the one that you don't like put it in your bag. Just have a couple.

Yeah. It's not to keep you sustained, it's to keep you from being grouchy. Like, don't think of it as like, I need to put entire meals in my go bag. Think of it as like, I need enough sugar and whatever to keep my like, head space right. Yeah, I kind of like to layer them in between things. I do this when I'm camping too. I'll get like those little peanut butter packets. Yeah. And just like, just throw a few in there and then you're like, oh yeah, you know what? I do this when I'm camping too. I'll get like those little peanut butter packets. Yeah.

And just like throw a few in there and then you're like, oh yeah, you know what? I am being cranky. Let me just snuff this and I'm going to be better. I do highly recommend peanut butter. I take it when I travel a lot as well. It's like a comfort food for me. It's filling, it's compact, it's not that bad for you. When I lived out of a backpack, I kept a plastic jar of peanut butter at the bottom of my pack

always because I knew no matter what I had at least two days worth of calories in the bottom of my bag. Yeah, yeah. It's a wonderful thing, peanut butter. So yeah, put some of that in there. There are things that like you probably don't need shelter, right? But it might be nice to have a little compact blanket. Right.

Especially if you're going to have to stay at one of those. One thing, a little comfort item that I always take, I've taken this all over the world, is an inflatable pillow. Like there are a lot of hardships that I will endure. I like to sleep on a pillow. And so I take a little inflatable pillow. So it's something that like, you know, you will have comfort items like that,

that are things for you. I will put those in there. I would avoid watching too much go bag content on on YouTube because you're gonna get anxious about the fact that you don't have like a folding short barrels rifle and that's because You don't need it Nor do you need like a Like I'm sitting next to my bulletproof vest that I've used before for work. I'm not taking it with me Staying here. Yeah, I did spend a lot of money on the plate, so I will be claiming those on insurance,

but you don't need that stuff. People are taking care of one another. And so pack with the things that will help you be comfortable and consider that you might be spending a while in a hotel or a hostel or a refuge or staying with a friend or family members and think what would make that more comfortable for you. I think that's a really good way to put it. It's the get out of town for the weekend bag.

It's not the end of the world bag. I think that if you are more rural, you might want some basic camping stuff. Yeah, definitely. But the average person probably doesn't. I mostly have this at the like, there's my go bag, and then there's the stuff that's kind of always in my truck. Yeah, that's where I'm at too. I like to go camping.

So I have my camping stuff in my truck because then it takes me less time to go camping. Yeah. And so like, I am almost certainly not bugging out on foot from my house. And if I had to, then I would have to bring a, not my go bag, I would have to bring a hiking bag, you know? Most of the time, if you have access to a car and roads because you're escaping an emergency, you're getting to somewhere with enough civilization that you have, you can expect some level of shelter and food.

Yeah, exactly. But I do, I will say, have some water. Don't go overboard. Like I think that having like a little bit of like chemical water filtration and a water bottle or a little water filter and a water bottle, you know, no reason not to. Yeah. I will say specifically like get a Soya Squeeze. They're tiny.

The filtration is better than most other filters that are that size. Get it, put it in your backpack, leave it there. They're handy to have. And then yeah, get a little, I like to have, again, this is a little comfort thing. I like to have again. This is a little comfort thing I like to have a stainless steel now jeans size bottle. It's not made by analogy things made by clean canteen I like it because I could drink water out of it I like it because it's not plastic and I like it because I can use it to heat up water when it's really cold and Have it like a little hot water bottle and snuggle with it. Um, yeah, that's a nice thing

Yeah I use also like a single wall steel canteen so that you can heat water in it. If you get the double wall ones, then you can't heat them over a fire because they're vacuum, insulated or whatever. But then other people I know are like, well, they want the ability to have like, their insulated tea bottle. Yeah, sure. You do you.

So I will also say battery packs for phones is a big one. Again, you're less likely to need to hunt squirrels with axes and you're more likely need to keep your phone charged and other people's phones charged. One of those little Hydra charging cables, which breaks water. That's what I was about to say too, yeah. Yeah, get one of those.

Get a little wall wart and keep it in there so you can turn a wall socket into a USB socket if you need that to charge your stuff. Another thing that is surprisingly handy in lots of situations is I like to run a lot and sometimes you're doing an ultra marathon when you get to the aid station, they just have like big things of water right and you fill up your little water bottles you're carrying in your vest and lots of people have these tiny collapsible cups that are made of like a thin rubber they're made of the stuff that camelback ladders are made of.

And then they can fill up that cup and they can drink from it and they just keep it attached to their vest, right? And then off they go running along. Oh, interesting. These are very useful and I've started incorporating them in lots of my travel and like, yeah, emergency supplies. Because if you're in a place where people don't have cups, right, but they have big things of water, now you have a vessel from which to drink. So those are surprisingly handy. Yeah.

I also keep one of those. I don't know if it's the same one you're talking about, but it like collapses up almost accordion style. It's like the camping ones, but even it's way lighter than those. Ah, OK. I have the camping style one and I keep it in there as a like emergency dog bowl. Yes, I know. Yeah, those are great for that too. And you can you can drink hot things out of them, which is nice.

Yeah. And another thing that I keep in my go bag is I keep the meds that my dog is on and I keep some of the meds that I take in there. And you know, it's like, my dog only gets the meds once a month. So I go to my bag and I pull out the meds and I give them to my dog from my bag. Because why not? And if you have other people, whether they're not fully grown yet or are, that you also take care of, you need to make sure you have a little bit of their stuff in there. Like, keep a dog toy in your go bag. Yeah, if you have a child toy. If you need to keep medicines cold, there's a product called Frio, F-R-I-O.

They're not paying me, I've never got one for free, but you dip it in water and it uses evaporative cooling to keep your insulin cold, I have used them. Oh, they are very handy, they don't rely on electricity, it's very nice. So yeah, if that's something that you need then that is hopefully something useful to you. My last thing would be a little torch, a little pocket flashlight, or even better a headlamp, like a head torch, because lots of places in LA lost power, right?

If you're having to go places at night, it's much easier if you can see where you are going. They're not expensive, they're great gifts. Bring a few, give them to friends, make new friends. Hopefully this has repaired you. The last thing, of course, Margaret, is a gold bullion with Ronald Reagan's face on it. Oh, I forgot to mention that. Yeah, you need to trade. Rather than having a system of mutual

aid, which we naturally do, instead we should interject a complicated barter system, ideally on the gold standard. Yeah, in which shiny metal replaces our natural instinct to help one another. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. That's how it's been. That's humans. Famously. Not a species.

Just bring a copy of Debt by David Graeber into your room. Yeah, yeah. Bring Atlas Shrugs and then as you pass the fires, just start ripping that shit off, throwing it in there. Let it burn. Having a paperback book, if you like that. It's not weight efficient, but you know what, like morale matters.

Yeah, yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Bring the Dawn of Everything by David Graeber. That'll occupy you through most natural disasters. It's a thick book. It is. It is indeed.

If you can't reach something, very handy. Stand on that. He really thought he did us one final solid. RIP David Graeber. Yeah, and then on RIP to David Wengro is a lot. Yes, yeah, yeah. Shout out to David Wengro. The other David, the less venerated David who also wrote that book. I always feel bad when I just talk about Graeber stuff and I talk about Don of Everything and

then I don't talk about the other David. Yeah, sometimes I'll just say the Davids and then people will look at me and... Yeah, totally. It's a level. But I know. Yeah Yeah, we don't speak to Margaret. I can say the David's she knows which David's I mean. That's why we're friends. Yeah Anyway, yeah, it's gonna be okay or it's not but you know what you weren't gonna survive being alive Anyway, and keep your car half full of gas like when you're on your way home and make sure that you fill up if it's less Than halfway full. Plug your electric car in.

Don't skip plugging your little electric car in at night. Yeah. Because the night that you do is the night that you need it. So you do the little things, take care of one another. Yep. Yeah. Yeah. Experiencing the news each day can feel like a journey. With Up First from NPR though, it doesn't have to be. Welcome to 15 easy minutes of breaking news, clarity on international and national affairs,

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the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you go to find your podcast. Oh, welcome back to It Could Happen Here, a show where it's now happening here. A thing that we've said in a joking way a number of times, but now it just is this is you know a Podcast we're having a good time. I'm Robert Garrison Davis my co-host colleague and today We're talking about Trump's inauguration with a good friend of ours who was present at the thing itself a good friend of ours who was present at The Thing itself, Bridget Todd.

Bridget, welcome to the program. Thank you for having me. It's actually my first time on It Can Happen Here. I'm like a little nervous. I hope it goes well. Yeah. You're an OG guest over on Bastards, so it's about time we had you on here.

How are you feeling, Bridget? Just in general, before we get into the specifics, how are you doing in the first full day of this new era? Oh, not great Bob We were talking off mic like I need to figure out a self-care plan and Part of this is on me that I feel like I I am one of those people that has kind of checked out a little bit I'm like, oh who I am. I gotta take a back from this. And now that I'm taking a step back in, I'm like, I need a plan for how I'm going to pace myself

and not lose my fucking shit every fucking day. Yeah, it's probably not for the best that right at the same time as this has all happened, the people who make gas station drugs have figured out how to take the chemicals in kratom, which in leaf form is a generally safe drug, and hyper-con hyper concentrate them into basically Fucking heroin, so I'm just working on staying away from that shit too much of the news. You know that's the way you got to do it

I'm also doing dry January and trying to eat healthy. That's tough I'm not doing that so I have no outlets. I can't drink. I'm not I don't do drugs I'm fucking eating lentil soup every night I got nothing. There's nothing I can do to cope. I'm keeping myself. Okay, I just eaten venison every single day But yeah, I'm carrying on our Vegas tradition and I've moved into gambling. Nice. Oh, you're gambling now Huh? Not actually but instead of doing something stupid for inauguration day, me and my friends got together and all played anarchist poker. So that was fun.

I lost about $10 to my friends. So that's fair. How often did you say, I hardly know her? Like about four times. Yeah, that's the right amount of times. But we also got quite drunk. By the time we started our second game I was also dressed like data from the next generation

Complete with silver face paint the entire time and a poker visor So that was that was how I spent yesterday I'm glad you got to experience the health that that actor experienced Bridget. Let's talk about the inauguration. Let's do it All right. So I kind of come in in firsthand. When did you sort of lock down your plans to actually be there? So initially my plan was to get out of town. Totally. I'm going to go out. I don't want to be here.

I'm going to hide on the mountains with a rifle. Like that. You're joking. But like, no, no, no, I'm not joking. And I was in. So I live in D. I've lived in DC most of my life I was in DC in my apartment when January 6 happened and I remember being so Scared there was a curfew in DC. Like it just shit got really real really quickly I remember I was on a wall staff like beginning of the, planning work call and somebody just on the Zoom was like, hey, um, something's happening and everybody who lives in DC should maybe check the TV. And then the line went dead.

That's what I remember the most. So I was planning on getting out of town and then I thought, fuck it. Why should these people drive me out of my own city? I want to be out on the streets. I want to be out in my community. I want to be connected. And so yeah, I went out to the People's March protest. I went out as far as I could to inauguration downtown just to get a sense of what the vibes were. Yeah. All right. Well, let's get into the vibes. How were they? Weird as hell. Because I think this is something that I think people might not really think about a lot. So being from DC, living here most of my life,

people really obviously think of it as a seat of national power. And they sometimes forget that there are over 600,000 DC residents who just live here, work here, have their lives here. And so this stuff all plays out like practically in our backyards, while arguably we have less electoral political power and less agency in some ways because DC is not a state. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Our congressional representative Eleanor Holmes Norton, she can like vote in committees and introduce legislation and stuff like that, but she can't vote. And so all of this matters for- It's so fucked up. Dude, don't even get me started. Like, I could talk about statehood all day long. That's like such a funny shitty compromise. Like, you can be there and like talk,

but you can't do anything. Like, you just... I'm sorry. That's just so fucked up. It is. And it's like, I mean, like like there are so many reasons why it sucks It DC's not a state but ultimately it's like we deserve to have political power We deserve to have a say like Wyoming a state. Have you ever fucking been to why you go God like and I mean I could talk all day when

Republican lawmakers got get on TV and I remember they would shit on DC by saying things like There's not even loggers who live there It's not even a real place like as if the only way to actually meaningfully exist in the United States It's like you have to have loggers who live there like it's so infuriating and none of those motherfuckers know a logger know a logger. I know. So all of this background really matters to Trump's kind of tense relationship with DC, like the district. Trump, as y'all might remember, spent quite a lot of time just talking straight shit about

the district and announcing these like big plans to take over DC. The background is a little bit complicated, but the quick and dirty version is that DC has what's called Home Rule. So that's the ability for DC to govern, for our local government and leaders to make decisions about what happens to the district. And on the campaign trail, Trump was saying

he wants to change this, that DC's Home Rule would be revoked and that the federal government, basically him, would dictate how DC is run as a city. Because DC is not a state, technically any president could have that authority to interfere with how DC is run. So, yeah, any president could take over the police department and take over the powers our mayor, Muriel Bowser, currently has over the city. Yeah. So, I guess first off, of your your friends how many folks kind of made the same call like what was the general decision? Cuz I'm looking at like footage of

Proud Boys marching through fucking DC again for the first time and almost half a decade and like yeah Where are the people you know on this kind of stuff? I mean this in the most literal sense Nobody zero I was out there flying solo and I had multiple friends be like, you're crazy to go down there. Like everybody, and I guess that's something else that I wanted to talk a bit about, which is that, the first time around during Trump's inauguration, I was like out on the streets.

I was like, it sounds so silly now, but like, I almost don't even want to get into it, but the idea of like resist, that had not yet become a cliche to me. And in the aftermath of Trump's first election, I was really clinging to that for like whatever hope or power, I didn't know it was going to turn out to be like a bunch of grifters and like people saying like,

hashtag resist and like meaning nothing. At the time, I really clung to that. This time around, total night and day difference. Like, yeah. And I think the mood on the street, I think reflected that. I think that DC is exhausted. The people that generally I know who are like radicals, who would be out on the street. A lot of those people were like, we're sitting this one out.

Yep. Yeah. That was like a refrain I street. A lot of those people were like, we're sitting this one out. Yep. Yeah. That was like a refrain I hear from a lot of black and brown organizing folks here in D.C. Like, this is not our fight. We are we are sitting this one out. And I don't blame anybody. Right. Like, it's a lot. We've all been through a lot. Yeah. And that's that's I guess if I could get across something and people

listen, it would be like, don't just show up because they are right now. They have the cops. They have the courts. If they want you to show up in the street, the best thing to do sometimes. I'm not going to say this is going to be consistently the case, but it's like, don't give them what they want. Don't be where they want you to be. Don't make it simple for them, you know? Again, I keep trying to say, and I'm not saying this in like a, I'm so smart, I know what everyone needs to be doing. I don't. But it's like not what we did last time, because that just didn't do it.

Exactly. Didn't do it all. Didn't knock it out of the park. Wasn't a home run. The last time Trump was in office, y'all remember like the women's march and pussy hats and all of that. I actually staffed the women's march that time around. I was one of the digital street team folks.

So I was like very invested. This time around, they changed the name, they rebranded to the people's march and they only had a couple of thousand people out there. And so, you know, I think it really goes back to what you were saying, Robert. Personally, I have a hard time with the idea that what we did then is what we should be doing now, that that playbook is still going to work. And frankly, like, 69% of white women voted for Trump, right? And so, like, the idea that I would feel safe and feel solidarity with a bunch of women out on the streets like being like boo Trump it's just like

it's I understand why the turnout was so low because I feel like Solidarity and March on the street is clearly not where we're at. So that is not how we should be meeting this moment Well, and even last j20 there was like a large large radical contingent And those people are similarly sitting out. And when you're looking towards the next few months, looking at like what kind of ice raids are going to happen, looking at what's going to happen for like reproductive health care, transgender health care, people are making the calculation that it does not make sense to like needlessly throw yourself against the walls of the state when we can stick together and see and see what happens and

Prepare for for all of those other things that are going to actually impact you and people that that you know Like seriously and it sucks to be stuck in that reactive position and there's things you can do proactively But going outside and and yelling in front of a fence probably isn't going to do any of those things. It's probably not going to help the people who are going to need help in the next few weeks. And people are understanding that and it's leading to people reacting quite differently than what they did eight years ago. I agree. Yeah. I mean, Garrison, you really said it. And in this moment, personally, I am really wondering like what my role is, like, where

can I fit in? There was a time where, you know, just being out on the street yelling, like being so frustrated I have to take to the streets and scream in impotent rage, that would feel like something. And I just think in 2025, I have to figure out like what it is I can contribute and contribute that. And I don't know that it's Protest as it as it used to be like I used to be somebody who like Protest was my thing like, you know

I really got my start in the anti-war movement when I was in college and like that felt like something I don't think that that's what it is for me anymore Maybe it's just age to you age out of it or something. Sure I think some of it is that like the only meaningful definition of intelligence really is the ability to adapt to changing circumstances. And when the circumstances change in the way that they have and you're like well time to do exactly what we tried in 2017, that is not intelligent right? Like I'm not trying to be mean and again I'm not saying I know what the smart thing is but it is we got to be pivoting., I'm not saying I know what the smart thing is,

but it is, we got to be pivoting. We got to pivot in a lot of different directions right now. So yes, and I don't know that I see some of the institutional powers that be, even people who are like ostensibly like on our side doing that pivot, right? Like I'm very much in this sort of like nonprofit industrial complex. All the organizations who were like, oh, well, where should we put in our money and this and that? The first time around, I just see them doing the same old thing. And it's like, I don't know that that is what's going to save us.

And like, don't get me started on how useless the Democrats are, because I'll go all day. But like when Trump announced that he was moving the inauguration inside, they printed little jokey shirts that said snowflake. I'm just so sick of that. That sort of sneering, dunking, useless stuff that doesn't translate to meaningful action. I'm just so sick of it. I wanted to gouge my eyes out.

Yes. Yeah, I mean, that's what's in part, what lost some of the election is that general attitude and that conception of them throughout the country. And yeah, getting your little snide remarks during Hegg's confirmation hearing might make you feel good and might generate a good clip for social media, but is that actually going to stop him from getting into the cabinet position? I've had so many arguments about this with people over the last few days who still insist

that like, well, the fascists can't stand you making fun of them. That's what they hate is you laughing at them. And like, I think there was a stage at which that was a valid tactic. And you know, there may be elements of that in the future, but like, no, they don't care. They're winning. I'm not saying like, don't fucking make jokes with your friends to like keep yourself self sane. I'm saying don't mistake dunking on them on social media for doing anything that matters because it doesn't

Okay, I'm not even sure like I have so much to say about this So I have been saying this for a very long time and you know, we were all at the Democratic National Convention I have to admit that I was there as an influencer at the Democratic National Convention, I have to admit that I was there as an influencer, but the thing that annoyed me so much was like that exact sentiment, and that exact sentiment fucking lost. And the thing that pisses me off now is the complete unwillingness to be like, where did we go wrong? Maybe the memes and the jokes and the calling them weird and this and that, maybe it felt good in the moment But it actually didn't translate what happened unwilling to do that completely unwilling Now you know you see I would almost argue that like the weird stuff

I think if they'd stuck with it there was something there I think the I think the in the emphasizing how outside of like the American norm These guys were and like what we want to accept in our communities. Like there was something there but they didn't stick to it. You know, the next big time we saw Tim Walz, he was talking about what how he wanted to be friends with JD Vance on the fucking debate stage. You know, but also I think that's a little different than just like calling him fucking orange Mussolini or whatever the fuck. Like I think there's a point in a messaging tactic.

It's like Trump gets mileage out of the names he uses and the way in which that's part of how he got where he is. So I'm not saying that aspects of these tactics can't be used well. I'm talking about the way in which people, liberals and folks on the left, are continuing to do the fucking like, Trump shit. That's not getting us anywhere.

I could not agree more. And yeah, I mean, I agree. I think the weird stuff could have like, had legs. I think that they were kind of like scattershot at that point and they were like, oh, people seem to like this. Let's lean into this. Oh, this new thing, let's lean into that.

The thing that I remember very clearly was when Tim Walz was talking about how, oh, we have a saying in Minnesota, it's mind your own damn business. Yes, yes. Yeah, so like my partner is from Minnesota and he was like, oh, that is like absolutely a Minnesotan thing, mind your own damn business.

Yeah. You can sell that, yeah. So I agree, but yeah, the like calling Elon, Elmo, like all these little cutesy things might feel good and like get you a hit of dopamine and get you a few You know likes on whatever but it just it's not gonna save us and I'm so sick of it I feel I feel like in some ways it's all anyone has to offer right now and I'm sick of it One of the interesting things when looking back at the last version of Trump's J20 is you did have these large militant groups, what would later probably be dubbed Antifa

by the media, but there was a presence in the street. And this time around, really the only sizable militant presence in the street was like the first return of the Proud Boys. Did you stumble across a gaggle of black and yellow clad militants in the streets? Oh, yellow and black. Not a gaggle. I saw one lone one who I'm sure was like, I've lost my groove. Oh, like a little duck. I'd help a baby duck get back to its mom last year It was just like that. Yeah right down to the IQ

I have some friends right now who are in the DC airport and it is chud central over there Oh fucking bad. Oh, it sounds quite bad I I I saw a friend posted about like all of the Trump merch and They were sitting next to two individuals debating race science In the airport terminal. So that is the vibes of the DC airport as of as of Tuesday The day after the inauguration But yeah like the return of the Proud Boys is like one one of like the big things that I think we're gonna we're gonna see these

Next few weeks is the amount of far-right militias or these more like street gang type groups who have been so emboldened by Trump essentially giving them permission to do whatever they want to now, now that they know that they're not going to face any kind of like real legal repercussions for carrying out whatever actions they want to against people of color, queer people, etc. And that's going to be interesting to see. This is certainly a sign that suggests some embrace, but I'm kind of wondering, if we're looking back to the Nazis, the OGs, what the Nazis did was marginalize and actually purge a lot of these guys fairly quickly because the folks that were the best at rabble rousing

and fighting in the streets were also kind of like the least reliable at helping to keep a stable system in the city, right? Like after the Nazis took power, one of the big issues they had is like, we still have a lot of people who are kind of like in the middle, including most of the military. And one of the things that keeps scaring them

is all these fucking goons running about. And we still want what the goons are doing, which is like certain people beaten and thrown in camps, but we don't want the goons doing it. We want the cops doing it. And I guess kind of we're all waiting to see how different or similar what comes next looks to that. And I mean, what do you make of like,

I guess I knew it was coming, but when all those J6 goons got pardoned, and so like, you have like, the leader of the Oath Keepers, the leader of the Proud Boys, getting released from DC Jail, like, what do you make of that? There's two things. Number one, this is something that he had campaigned on. It's something that there was a lot of support from his base for, you know? Like, the fact that, in order to kind of protect himself, he had to really heavily embrace the idea

that nothing bad happened on January 6th, and if it did, it was the fault of, you know, the mean old Biden cops. And so he kind of had to do it. The degree to which he shows up and is close or actually directly embraces Proud Boys and guys like Tario is going to tell us a lot and I think we'll be seeing that very soon.

If they are kept at arm's length and kind of letting them out is all they do, then I don't know how much we're going to see of these guys. If there's a real embrace and an attempt to use them as a way to kind of extra legally deal with his enemies, then I think we start seeing them really make inroads and pushes in places like Portland, trying to get people out so that they can do violence to them and then get pardoned or just have the violence ignored and the other people get thrown into prison. And I don't really know which way I think that the state is landing right now, which

is not to say like I think one is clearly less violent than the other, because his other option is he's going to be having his feds do that kind of shit. I think that's where a lot of my anxiety comes from, the not knowing of, like, it could go this way or that way. Both are bad, but what flavor are we going to get? Like, that's the thing that is really getting to me right now. Yeah. Do you want to talk about what the Prideoud Boys were actually like up to on Monday?

Yeah. So as you said, this was the first time that they in mass came to D.C. since January 6th, and they marched through the streets of D.C. holding a banner that said, congratulations, President Trump. And they chanted, whose streets our streets, which, by the way, that is such like, again, as someone who kind of like came up on like street protests, y'all are doing the chant all late. Like, I hate that. I mean, the situation has continued to be proven correct. The levels of recuperation for even like your like diametrically opposed like militant enemy side is just fucking crazy.

Yes. And I felt this I mean, speaking of J6 writers, who were all, you know, pardoned, I saw this video that really kind of broke my heart. It was a video that some MAGA dipshit took outside of the jail where all those people were being held. And so there's a black DC elder who clearly is just like minding her business, walking down the street in her city, and she gets baited into an on video screaming match

outside of the DC jail where this MAGA guy yells like, like, oh, we didn't do anything wrong. No crime was committed. And she's like, you all killed a cop. No cops got killed, which is not true. Like it goes back to what you were saying, Robert, about how there is this need to quickly have it be back to what you were saying, Robert, about how there is this need to quickly have it be like something that wasn't that big of a deal.

And one, to see that in person in this video was wild to me. But two, seeing like a DC elder like take the bait broke my heart because I wish I could have been in that moment to be like, honey, you don't need to be screaming. This guy wants you to be screaming at him. He wants this video of you screaming at him on the street. This is like exactly what he wants. Yeah, I entirely agree. You know, the biggest takeaway from being out was just how sparse it was. Like, you know, the first time around, I probably had four different people staying with me,

two of whom got arrested during the big anti-Trump protests. This time around, I didn't have anybody, I didn't know anybody who was there. And I do think that reflects kind of where people are at. I think people are exhausted, people have been through a lot. People are maybe pacing themselves and sort of like don't want to blow their rage wad on the first week, which I totally understand. But I think it really remains to be seen like whether or not this vibe is going to take us through the next four years.

Are people just tuning out? Are we checked out? Are we so exhausted and overstimulated already that we're not going to really be paying attention? And in some ways, like I feel like that's exactly what authoritarians want. Yes. That's where it's difficult. Or that's one of the many things that is difficult is that, like, checking out is not the answer, but you simply can't react to everything that happens. Showing up and burning yourself out in the street, it's like the cops

continue to do bad things and every time a cop does a bad thing, you and your friends throw yourselves at a police station until you all get arrested. Then you won't be able to do bad things and every time a cop does a bad thing you and your friends throw yourselves at a police Station until you all get arrested Then you won't be able to do anything else because you'll be in jail, you know Like it and and and like these are hard realities, which is why it necessitates new kinds of thinking creativity, you know it to some extent Unsatisfying and I guess part of what I would say is if people are giving you answers To what we need to do that sound very clear and satisfying you should maybe not trust that totally

Yeah Because the responsible answer in my opinion is that like it's very unclear How to get out of this or what the right things to do here are? or what the right things to do here are. We just know that what we've been doing hasn't been working. And the first step to wisdom is accepting that. Oof, I love that. Something I know that isn't working is I'm glad that we're not doing...

I thought you were gonna pivot to ads. Actually, let's pivot to ads. You're so good at ads. Like you could teach a class on it. Oh, yeah. Well, I waited 28 minutes this time to do it, but at least we have the second one in there. We're back, Bridget. Sorry, where were you going?

Something that I'm glad we were not doing this time around is, remember during the first Trump administration how the Washington Post changed their tagline to, democracy dies in darkness and everybody gave them a shit ton of money because it was like, yeah, we need like good investigative journalism, traditional media, that's going to save us. I'm glad that this time around we've all cut the shit and it's like, no, they're part of it. They're not gonna do a goddamn thing. Absolutely not.

Yes. They don't give a fuck. Fucking Jake Tapper couldn't roll over fast enough. And like, so even, I mean, I'm sure y'all have talked about this to death and I have been thinking about it nonstop, but Elon's seeing how the traditional press reported on his salute. It's like, oh, what did he do?

Like, like the way they will contort themselves to not just come out and say it is astonishing to me. Yeah, that's I mean, that's one of like the scariest things is the degree to which they're trying to memory all stuff happening as it happened And at the same time, okay. Yeah, he did a Nazi salute. He's a Nazi This is not the first thing that's made that clear We need to move on knowing he's a Nazi, but we need to move on you know like that. That's right I don't know

I don't know what to do other than you know Maybe there's some utility and spreading clips of him next to the fucking guy from American History X, but I don't know. I don't know how that's going to help. The fact that he's in this position where he can do something like that on stage and it actually doesn't matter is like so much more frightening to me than like, than like Elon Musk like doing like a very like low border control like version of the salute when he's like wrapped up in some like excitement that he's trying to like meme to like his like fans on 4chan.

The fact that like he's even just allowed to do that and like it doesn't actually matter. This will not affect him in any way is more what's interesting to me because yes, we've all known that he's been a Nazi for quite a while. He's like shared things that are like essentially like Nazi race science on Twitter before he is he is engaged with like extremely anti semitic conspiracy theories before. And you know, the largest anti semitism org in the country has completely capitulated to these people. Oh my god. So like they've hollowed out everything that's like supposed to be like, you know, the institutional blockages, whether that's, you know, places like the

Washington Post, whether that's literally all of the tech companies, the degree to which like everyone has cozied up to Trump, which is like also like very different from 2016. Exactly. Everyone was like fairly like united institutionally was united against Trump. And you know, the same way we like we don't see, you know, people out in the streets, you know, writing or or even doing large protests, the actual institutional powers have decided to, instead of actually trying to fight this guy,

they're gonna try to see how friendly they can be, how much can they get out of this? There's this resignation. And I don't know how long that'll last. I'm not sure if once Trump becomes the establishment figure that he's been deriding for the past few years, once he falls back into that zone, if we're going to see more resistance to him from institutional levels.

But you can't count on it. And the degree to which it is different from 2016 is worth remembering. A phrase me and Robert talk about sometimes is the forever 2016. the fact that it feels like we've never really left 2016. Everyone kind of acts like we're still in 2016. Like this is such load bearing year on our entire cultural consciousness. But the fact is we aren't in 2016 anymore and you can't act like we are. You actually have to move on from that. And we're starting to see more of that in certain corners. You

see some of that among some of the radicals, some of the anarchists, as well as, you know, the tech companies and the CEOs and the media companies. They're just, you know, changing the degree to which they're moving away from their 2016 mode. You actually just gave me a little bit of a silver lining that I had not realized, which is like, it kind of is useful to see so clearly where these institutions and power holders stand. And it's like, when like, I remember watching tech companies like change their logos to Black Lives Matter or post the black square. It's kind of freeing to be like, we don't have to do that shit anymore.

We all don't have to pretend and we don't have to pretend either. We know where you stand. you've made it very clear. You could not make it, you could not have made it clear where your alliance is, and let's go from there. Like it almost is sort of like trimming the fat a little bit. We no longer have to take these institutions as serious as allies or something. Yeah, there's gonna be a degree to which like,

people's masks come off more than usual. I mean, I think certainly this next Pride Month will be interesting to see how people change. We know Pride Month 2022 or even, you know, Pride Month 2017. Yeah, I was at Pride in San Francisco in 2020 and it was very big, very happy. But there was like a rind to it. You know, there was like an edge to it of. Are we going to be able to keep doing this? You know, there's a dispensary.

You know, I don't smoke, but a friend of mine who I stay with when I'm at San Francisco does, and so I was with them at this dispensary. And it had like a sign talking about its history, which was that the person who founded it's a very nice one. It's like an Apple store inside. And the person who like started it and ran it did so because when they were younger, their partner had AIDS, HIV and then AIDS and marijuana reduced some of their symptoms and they had to go buy it in the nearby park, which was a lot uglier of a place and a lot like, it was sketchy, like they got robbed a couple of times,

there was a lot more violent crime, and just kind of, there are even in a place like San Francisco, which is so like gentrified in such a way, like when you're talking with like, especially the older members of the queer community, they're not just like rich, out of touch tech people, they are old, battle scarred queers who went through some of the ugliest moments of this nation's history

and were kind of bracing themselves for it again. So yeah, I'm very interested to see what it's like this year, you know? But even that, I feel like there's a, I mean, it's grim shit, but there's a kind of hope in it that like we've been, people have been here before, right? Like, you know, there have always been queer people, trans people, black and brown people, immigrants,

like we are America and like we've always been here, baby, we're always gonna be here and like making our way and like holding on and bracing ourselves and doing what we gotta do and enduring, like that is what we fucking do. And so in some ways, as grim as that is, it's kind of hopeful? Question mark also? Yep. I'm just on the edge of my seat. Yeah.

I mean, it's certainly, you know, lots of people who I surround myself with are, you know, looking towards ways to take control of like their own bodies and stop relying like wholly on any kind of government, government, like agency or agency or model for that, as well as doing a lot of reading on the old anti-deportation, anti-ice resistance from years and years ago, not just from the Trump era, but from the stuff way before. If we're not going to be out in the streets doing slightly mindless protest where you're marching in circles, you can use that mindless protest where you're marching in circles. You can use that time to instead like educate yourself and build connections with people

and you know, read about these things that may become more and more important to know, at least so you have an understanding of history as the next four years start happening quite quickly. That's so insightful. Yeah, I think when things feel hopeless, reading about how folks, you know, our elders, the folks who came before our ancestors, how they dealt with stuff like this has been really hopeful. And it's like, yeah, I guess I just try to tell myself, you've been it feels uniquely tragic, but in some ways it is not. And as scary as that is, it can also be sort of like grounding.

Yeah, and like the same things won't work, but you also need to understand the things that didn't work last time. And it's good to know the things that did. Like it's important to have that understanding so you don't feel like you're having to reinvent the wheel every single time. And like that type of

like generational knowledge Sometimes is really tricky to pass down in these sorts of spaces and it you know It doesn't and it sometimes it requires a degree of initiative to actually like seek out that information on your own The Internet's great and terrible, but it has it has a it has a it has a vast catalog of history Yeah I want to talk a bit about the speech that that bishop gave at the Trump's first church service as president the second time around. Because that is of all of like the fucking media people getting clapped at for making

fun of whichever, you know, Hagseth or whoever. Yep. That I think actually did matter a little. At least it was the there was the courage of saying it to their faces in a way where their reactions were had to be filmed. It's also it's also not trying to dunk. It's not trying to create like a viral moment. It's like genuinely upsetting to them to get like reminded of like what it means to be human. Yeah.

And like maybe that's more important than trying to get your like Katie Porter top 10 funniest moments in Congress like a compilation. Exactly. Yeah, and to be very clear, if you didn't catch this, the right Reverend Mary Ann Budd, BUDDE, who was the Episcopal Bishop of Washington during a church service where Trump and Vance and basically everybody in the new government

was sitting made a direct plea quote from this from an NBC Washington article referencing Trump's belief that he was saved by God from assassination but said you have felt the Providential hand of a loving God in the name of our God I asked you to have mercy on the upon the people in our country who are scared now and Then she referenced specifically transgender people, queer people, people in democratic families, independent families who were frightened right now about what the new administration means as well as migrants. And she made a point of saying like the vast majority of whom are not in any way criminals

and- Yeah, like regardless of whether or not they have the right paperwork. Yeah. There was rage on Vance's face, which is part of why I'm like, that's an act of actual courage. There's been one Republican representative who said that she needed to be deported, but she's born in New Jersey. So deported back to New Jersey? Yeah. Representative Mike Collins of Georgia. So one of your guys, Gare. Oh, thanks. Thanks.

Gare, are you from Georgia? Well, no, but I live in Georgia. They live there now. And as somebody who lives in Georgia, the only people that I think should be deported back to New Jersey are the Costco guy and his kid. Get them out, send them back. Now, I do think we should be deporting

large numbers of people to New Jersey just because my old boss and friend Daniel O'Brien lives there and I wanna fuck with him a little bit, make the traffic worse. Like, see how you deal with that, Danny boy. No, it was, I think, the most useful thing I've seen yet. It's still largely symbolic, but like... At least someone took a big public risk, you know?

Courage. Yeah. I think it's the writer Sarah Kendozer who has this line that I always think of if you can't be brave be kind I think that like people who we see doing acts of big acts of bravery right now Like that's I mean it's just there are so few of them And I think especially when I look at like the tech leaders they have so much fucking money Somebody said on blue sky What is the point of having fuck you money if you never say fuck you to anybody right like The way that these people turned out to be such yellow-bellied cowards is Wild to me and so people actually having conviction and actually speaking out to power

I think we should be lifting that up wherever it happens Yeah, I can think of like one tech guy with a lot of money Who's turned out to have any kind of a backbone and it's the guy who made that fire watching app that? Everyone in California is using right now watch duty Who's basically it said stuff along the lines of like I don't know I see all these other guys who got rich in tech talking about going to mars and I think it's much more useful to Try to help people survive on earth something along those lines and has like novel made a critical like it is a critical life-saving piece of technology that actually is what we should

hope for from tech, you know? Anyway, Bridget, what else did you want to kind of make sure we got into today? Well, this is going to sound a bit random, but I have to just make sure that this gets in there because, you know, I'm talking about the impact of Trump's inauguration and what the next four years will look like for, you know, not just for people nationally, but folks right here in DC, where this is happening in our backyard. And I have to give it up for the service industry folks

of DC the last couple of days, because they- Oh my God. I like have heard horror stories and I just, I guess that's what I mean, is that don't forget that there are real people who have to like put up with these people's Bullshit and do it with a smile or they might get fired and you know in adam's morgan

Which is like pretty close to where I live a woman at an irish bar Had to be removed by a staffer because she was screaming white power at the bar Like these people do not get paid enough to deal with this and they are like the backbone of our city So I just wanted to shout them out, especially since, you know, Trump switched up the inauguration because of the cold question mark. And so a lot more of these people were just sort of wandering around the district on inauguration who otherwise would have been confined to like a very specific neighborhood downtown. And so they were going into our bars, going into our restaurants. And yeah, I just really feel for my industry folks who had to deal with this.

You know, they're not paid enough, but they really are the backbone of our city. Hell yeah. You know, I started this conversation talking about all of the horrible things that Trump has said about DC and how he's going to take it over federally. And like, you know, he said, like, we will take over the horribly run capital of our nation and Washington Clean it up and rebuild the capital. So there's it's no longer a nightmare of murder and crime But rather hell hole I know this like hell hole where like people live and raise their families and go to parks and ride bikes

And have great times. Yeah, you know I had a chance to talk to the mayor about this and I will say our mayor Muriel Bowser is not convinced that any of this will happen. She is saying like, you know, I think that Trump says a lot of things. I think at the end of the day, he is probably not going to mess with DC's home rule. And so I just wanted to say that if you're if you're in DC and you're listening and you're thinking like what does Trump mean for DC? Are all these big threats that he has made going to come true? All I can tell you is that our mayor

does not think it is likely. So if that is useful to you, I hope it brings you some comfort. Oddly enough, one thing that's given me comfort is like Trump has twice in the last day, both when talking about Gaza and when talking about North Korea, weirdly enough, gone under digressions

about how good it is a place to build condos. And the degree to which he's still focused on like real estate deals as opposed to the broader fascist project is hopeful just because like he is a bottleneck through which a lot of this has to cover. And he is clearly not as personally obsessed with every aspect of this as guys like Stephen Miller, right? Like, he even makes fun of Miller a little bit for that kind of stuff. So there's a degree to which, like, well, his own personal eccentricities,

there's aspects of this that might slow down. This motherfucker is not out here trying to genuinely govern. Like, come on. No. So in some ways, that is heartening of like, oh, well, he's just going to like do his scams and whatever, whatever. Like if he were to actually take over DC, that's an incredible amount of work and labor.

And I don't think he's got it in him. So maybe in some ways, some of these threats will like fly under the radar. I don't know. Yeah. Guess we'll see. Guess we'll see. Bridget, where can people find you?

Well, you can listen to my podcast, There Are No Girls on the Internet, about the intersection of identity and tech. And you can follow me on Instagram at BridgetMarianDC. All right. Find Bridget, follow Bridget, and follow somebody smart. I don't know who they are. Figure that out. Good luck.

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And women have quietly listened. And all that stops here. If you like witty women, then this is your tribe. With guests like Corinne Stephens. I've never seen so many women protect predatory men. And then me too happen. And then everybody else want to get pissed off because the white said it was okay. Problem.

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when a man sends me money. I'm like, oh my God, it's go time. You actually sent it? Listen to the Good Moms Bad Choices podcast every Wednesday on the Black Effect podcast network, the iHeartRadio app, Apple podcast, or wherever you go to find your podcast. The richest man in the world does a Nazi salute while giving a speech at the inauguration of the new president.

He does a second one. In another age, it is the most significant event in world history. It's maybe the third most fascist event of the day. NBC re-uploads the address and cuts away from the sick hail it broadcasted live. You refresh your timeline. Everyone is arguing about whether it was even a Nazi salute. You watch the video. It's a Nazi salute. The second one is a Nazi salute. None of the headlines will say that Elon Musk did a Nazi salute. The articles won't say it either. You can't tell whether they've been cowed to submission by the threat of a defamation

lawsuit or if they're already running cover for the new regime. You scroll through your timeline. They made my gender illegal. They tried to repeal the 14th Amendment through executive order to end birthright citizenship. You can't follow it. It's too much. The world has become a spectacle. And that spectacle is trying to kill you.

Welcome to It Could Happen Here. I'm your host, Mio Wong. In societies where modern conditions of production prevail, all of life presents itself as an immense accumulation of spectacles. So wrote the French social theorist Guy de Borde in his seminal 1967 work, The Society of the Spectacle. De Borde is typically written off as just another theorist of early mass media, and today his work is generally confined to the art world.

Which is, to be fair, largely a demonstration of the fact that nobody who talks about him has ever gotten past the opening paragraphs of the book, and made it to the part where he demands the formation of art workers' councils. But this is the age of the spectacle, in ways more nightmarish than De Boer could ever have predicted. His elaborate metaphors rendered thuddingly literal. Quote, everything that was directly lived has moved away into representation. And indeed, living has been replaced by the image of living. This phenomena is called Instagram. The spectacle society of the

spectacle opens is not a collection of images but a social relation among people mediated by images. Today we literally call the collection of images we use to relate to each other social media. Quote, lived reality is materially invaded by the contemplation of the spectacle while simultaneously absorbing the spectacular order, giving it positive cohesiveness. A reality TV star, the old human symbol of the spectacle in which everything that was directly lived has been transformed into a representation, is now a president the second time, driven by streamers and influencers and podcasters who stand as the new human

symbols of the spectacle. They have invaded real society and now rule it directly. In the 1960s, the debate was whether you could ignore the spectacle because it wasn't real. The board's elegant solution was that contemplating the spectacle makes it real. None of that matters anymore. You can't ignore the spectacle because it's here. It has physically invaded the world. Donald Trump is the president.

The richest man on earth is Nazi saluting Elon Musk. The autonomous force the board described as a spectacle no longer operates at the abstract level. It is the President of the United States. Everything is rendered thuddingly, transcendently literal. In de Boer's usage, the spectacle is the management of society by mediating people's social relations through images This sounds complicated

But on an intuitive level you already understand this You and I relate to each other through the one-way mirror of a podcast app You relate to others by reacting to their tick-tock videos. You watch the bombs fall on Palestine on Twitter you relate to each other and the world through images, and that relation is a system of control. As de Boerde describes it, that mediation takes you out of the real world, a world that you can actually change with your actions, and thrusts you into the world of the spectacle, a world where

reality is quote, an object of mere contemplation. Today, we call this the discourse, the work that inspired the 1968 revolutions called it the spectacle. Why does it feel like this? The rot, the decay, the unreality of the moment that consumes you until one day Donald Trump is president and the next he's president again. DeBoerde has a simple answer. It's because the entire political, economic and technological system is

designed to make you isolated, afraid and alone. Quote, technology is based on isolation, and the technical process isolates in turn. From the automobile to television, all of the goods selected by the spectacular system are also weapons for a constant reinforcement of the condition of isolated, lonely crowds. Later, he writes, what binds the spectators together is no more than an irreversible relation at the very center which maintains their isolation. The spectacle reunites the separate, but reunites it as separate. This is why the world feels like an endless doom scroll.

Instagram, TikTok, live streaming, this podcast, they're all based on isolation. Look at what happened to social media during the isolation of the pandemic, how it came to consume even more of our lives with the promise of connection that simply rendered us more and more and more isolated. The spectacle, given technological form in the social media app, turns us into a mass in which we are all, somehow, terrifyingly alone. We're not people who form a crowd that could do anything from celebrate a holiday to burn the third precinct. We're spectators.

We're listeners. We're viewers. We're spectators. We're listeners. We're viewers. We're chat. Not living, but commenting on the image of living. The spectacle, the app, the image mediates our social relations

with each other and ensures that together in a lonely crowd we rot in isolation and do only the two things the capitalist system needs us to do, work and consume. Atomized individuals are the ideal subject of capitalism, the basis on which everything is built. You entered into a free contract to live under a state, says a social theorist. You, the individual, gave up your labor to your boss voluntarily in another free

contract between individuals, says the economist. Do not organize with anyone else to get paid more for that labor or God help you try to create a system where you aren't forced to sell your labor every day. That's cheating, says the politician. forced to sell your labor every day. That's cheating, says the politician. Your job is to sell your labor, buy these products, and comment on a world in which someone else is acting. The isolation of the spectacle ensures

that we're incapable of collective action. Not only because we're incapable of forming a collective, we're not even engaging in the world in which action can take place. The extent of the advance of the spectacle today is such that the unfolding of the economic system is designed to turn every part of you into a commodity, not just your labor, but your identity, your beliefs.

Everything that you are is sold to everyone else's spectacle, and in turn, everything that defines you becomes the spectacle itself. In a world where there is no action, just the image of someone else's action somewhere else, a commercialized political identity is much easier to adopt than actually doing politics. You don't have to do politics. You can just put on a red hat and watch the man on TV make the liberals angry. You don't need relations with your family. You have Facebook groups.

Your relations to the world are relations to images. David Graeber wrote that the ultimate hidden truth of the world is that it is something that we make and could just as easily make differently. But the second, slightly less ultimate hidden truth is that almost everything we think of as objects, money, capital, commodities, are really just relations between people, abstracted out onto something physical. We interact with each other by using objects as forms of command. What do you think money is? Instead of having real, equal social relations.

And that makes it all the more dire that the social relations that compose this world are no longer even relations with each other at all, but relations with images. The spectacle is a strategy of control. As DeBoard writes, Quote, where the real world changes into simple images, the simple images become real beings and effective motivations of hypnotic behavior. The spectacle is a tendency to make one see the world by various means of specialized

mediations. It can no longer be grasped directly. As a spectacle advances, even rebellion is reduced to meaningless attacks on the symbols of power, never touching power itself. But when the insurgents manage to penetrate parliaments, presidential palaces, and other headquarters of institutions, as in Ukraine, in Libya, or in Wisconsin, It's only to discover empty places, that is, empty of power and furnished without any taste. So wrote the Invisible Committee in the distant Halcyon days of 2014. It could have been written yesterday. Nine years later, the insurgents, now on the right, produced

their masterpiece. Brazil's even more ineffectual cousin of January 6th, known forever as January 8th. On that day in 2023, for reasons that are almost totally incomprehensible to anyone whose mind has not been utterly melted by prolonged and terrible exposure to the spectacle, supporters of defeated president Jair Bolsonaro stormed Brazil's capital. Bolsonaro, of course, had already fled to Florida. The presidential palace, congress, and the supreme court were literally empty when the protesters took them. There was nothing to be won.

Nothing to be gained. The protesters' vain hopes that simply seizing the symbols of power would trigger a military coup to remove Lula and restore the Bolsonaro regime evaporated like a morning dew, leaving nothing in their wake. January 6th, at least, attacked the site of the Ritual of Power, while the Ritual was technically in progress. The attack was, of course, designed to stop the certification of the election. Congress was at least in session, even if that attack too was the culmination of a series of

ineffectual reruns of the Brook Brothers riots in which right-wing political operatives did manage to steal an election by stopping the vote count in Florida in 2000. On January 8th, no one was even there. So how do we get out? Lashing out at the symbols of power is pointless. You can't ignore them either. Elon's Nazi salute really does represent something. The opening of any solution is to go to the source. Trump and Elon are symptoms, not the disease. The spectacle is born of capitalism. It's a management strategy designed to suppress any attempt to end or even rearrange the terms of the class system. Trump and Elon were likewise produced by two settler colonies.

They are, in their own ways, the manifestation of the evil of colonialism and racism. The board's solution to these problems, of course, well, the solutions that people bother to read, there is a staggeringly racist section of this work about how time passes in China that I simply cannot recommend. But the board's solution was workers councils. And he got his wish the next year during the factory occupations of 1968. It nearly worked, but the last workers council fell a quarter of a century ago in Argentina, and there's no sign that the workers council, the definitive fighting form of the working class for over a century, is coming back.

In some ways, this is liberating. A hundred and seventy years ago, Marx wrote this in the 18th premiere of Louis Bonaparte, his own response to a nation's nationalist attempt to restore its former glory by invoking the name of a previous leader. The social revolution of the 19th century cannot take its poetry from the past, but only from the future. It cannot begin with itself before it has stripped away all superstitions about the past. itself before it has stripped away all superstitions about the past. In the days and weeks and months, and God help us all years to come, we're going to have to assemble a new fighting form. And no one knows what it looks like yet. We could, perhaps, look at the airport protests from the first months of the original Trump

administration, where masses of people, including a very young Mia who had not quite realized what gender she was, occupied airports all across the country to stop the implementation of Trump's Muslim ban by physically forcing the government to release the people who had detained in the airports. The power of those protests was that they directly located the site where power was operating, the airport, and took them. The weakness of those protests was that people went home. And they went home because they had been told time and time and

time again by the ACLU and by other legal organizations that the fight was over, that they could leave, and that the Muslim bans would be defeated by the courts. Most of you lived through it, some of you remember. The Muslim ban was never defeated by the courts. It could possibly have been defeated in those moments. It wasn't. The contest was taken away from the real side of power and into a domain largely ruled by

the ruling class. But we can learn from both January 8th and the airport protests. Marching to a building doesn't guarantee you're actually targeting power. You must understand how the system is operating before you attempt to go up its works. A thousand miniature January 8ths is no solution at all. You must do the hard work of sifting through the tangle of rumors and lies and attempting to work out the actual structure of repression. It starts with community self-defense.

It starts with actually engaging with each other, instead of the mediated images generated by an algorithm. You want to break out of the spectacle? Talk to the people around you. Talk to the trans people and the immigrants in your life, and find out what they actually need. Figure out the concrete steps you can take to organize the people around you and the steps you can take to lift them out of their despair.

We're not going to develop a new fighting form glued to our phones alone in a digital crowd. We're going to figure it out by talking to each other, by acting in the real world, not by being rendered passive observers of the spectacle. We're going to do it by finding the real places where power operates and taking them. And above all, we're going to do it together. 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, coolzonedmedia.com, or check us out on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts. You can now find sources for It Could Happen here listed directly in episode descriptions. Thanks for listening. Experiencing the news each day can feel like a journey. With Up First from NPR though, it doesn't have to be. Welcome to 15 easy minutes of breaking news, clarity on international and national affairs, and a casual tone that you can take in with breakfast. Begin your day informed, ready, and refreshed. Begin your day informed, ready and refreshed.

Begin your day with Up First. Subscribe to Up First from NPR on the iHeartRadio app or wherever you get your podcasts. John Stewart is back in the host chair at The Daily Show, which means he's also back in our ears on The Daily Show Ears Edition podcast. Join late night legend, John Stewart and the best news team for today's biggest headlines, exclusive extended interviews and more.

Now this is a second term we can all get behind. Listen to The Daily Show Ears Edition on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Welcome to Decisions Decisions, the podcast where boundaries are pushed and conversations get candid. Join your favorite hosts, me, Weezy WTF, and me, Mandy B. As we dive deep into the world of non-traditional relationships and explore the often taboo topics surrounding dating, sex and love.

Every Monday and Wednesday, we both invite you to unlearn the outdated narratives dictated by traditional patriarchal norms. Tune in and join the conversation. Listen to Decisions Decisions on the Black Effect Podcast Network, iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. We want to speak out and we want this to stop. Wow, very powerful. I'm Ellie Flynn, an investigative journalist, and this is my journey deep into the adult entertainment industry. I really wanted to be a player boy, my doll. He was like, I'll take you to the top, I'll make you a star.

To expose an alleged predator and the rotten industry he works in. It's honestly so much worse than I had anticipated. We're an army in comparison to him. From Novel, listen to The Bunny Trap on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.