It Could Happen Here - It Could Happen Here Weekly 60

Episode Date: November 19, 2022

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I'm Robert Evans, the person that you're listening to, and one of the people who does this podcast. Boy, what a glorious introduction that was. Let me also introduce some human beings who you might know. First, we have Chris, and and we have james uh our our our correspondents in the field uh joining us today also is james's spanish civil war era mosen nagant yep that's right yeah i'm very happy that he's joining us he's going to make contributions throughout the uh throughout the episode just gonna so it's an antique bolt action rifle served in three world wars counting the current one that's right yep and it's about to

it's about to kick off uh yeah this one now which uh it might it might be it might be two in the l column for the most in the gun yeah it's it's it's it's had a it's served a mixed bag. Yep. Anyway, we're recording this the day of the elections, so everybody's having a horrible one. I'm having a firearm. Yeah, yeah, I did. I'm still hoping my Tech 9 comes in before Oregon votes on its next ballot measure. Anyway, today I wanted to talk a little bit about something that I've been thinking about kind of constantly, which is, it's called effective altruism.

And it's, the short end of this is that, like, it is a style of thinking about charitable giving that Elon Musk in particular has recently highlighted as like how he thinks about things. It's very popular with the billionaire set who are who are deeply invested in getting people to think that they're saving the world. Right. Right. The folks who want to be seen as like looking ahead and protecting the future of mankind and saving the world, but not doing it through things like paying more taxes and supporting less money power. So it's gotten kind of attacked recently because it's associated with guys like Musk and because he is markedly less popular now than he was, let's say, 10 years ago. But I wanted to talk about- $44 billion ago. Yeah, I wanted to talk because effective altruism, which is an actual movement, there's like organizations that espouse this.

There's hundreds of millions of dollars in charitable giving that gets handed out under the aegis of effective altruism. And as a heads up, like most of it's fine, like most of its charities to like get let out of water and stuff like it's not like effective altruism is not comprehensively some sort of like scam by the wealthy. It's more of a an honest theory about how charitable giving ought to work that has been adopted by the hyper-wealthiest justification for fucked up shit and married to something called long-termism, which we will be talking about in a little bit. But I want to talk about where the

concept of effective altruism comes from. If you read articles about this thing, most people who study it will say that it kind of, this got started as a modern movement in 1971 with an Australian philosopher named Peter Singer. And Singer wrote an article titled Famine, Affluence, and Morality. I think it was actually published in 1972. I don't know, one of the two, 71 or 72. And the essay basically argued that there's no difference morally between your obligation to help a person dying on the street in front of your house. Like if a dude gets hit by a car in front of your house, you are not more morally obligated to help him than to that, which is that we're all responsible for each other. And internationalism is the only actual path away from the nightmare. And when we do things like ignore authoritarians massacring their people, it inevitably comes back to affect us and like fuel the growth of an authoritarian nightmare domestically. growth of an authoritarian nightmare domestically. That is very true. But also, there's a fundamental silliness in it. Because one reason why there is a moral difference between helping a person dying in the street in front of you and somebody who's in danger in, I don't know, southern China,

is that like, you can immediately help the person in front of your house, right? Like if somebody gets hit, but you have the ability to immediately render life saving aid. It's actually quite difficult to help somebody who is, for example, getting shot at by the government in Tibet. Right. Like not that you don't have a moral responsibility to that person, but your moral responsibility to actually immediately take action when somebody is bleeding out is higher than your responsibility to try to figure out how to help people in distant parts of the globe. This is more nuanced than I think a lot of, especially like rich assholes like to, it's more nuanced than like the, I shouldn't say rich assholes. What's the problem with this is that it's the, this is the kind of revelation, like when you start talking this way, that feeds really well into a fucking TED Talk. It's a perfect fix for that morality.

Whereas the reality is like a lot more nuanced. And number one, it's also like, well, the kind of help that you would render to somebody who's been hit by a car in front of your house is very different and requires really different resources than the kind of help you would give people in, say, again, like Syria, who are being murdered by their government, right? If somebody gets hit by a car in front of your house, you run out with a fucking tourniquet and a bleed kit and you call 911, right? Those are the resources that you can immediately use. If Bashar al-Assad is firing poison gas at protesters in, you know, Aleppo, well, your stop the bleed kit is not going to help with that one way or the other, right? A very different set of resources are necessary. So it's foolish to compare them. Anyway, Singer did, and his essay was a big hit. It's often called like a sleeper hit for young

people who were kind of getting into the charity industrial complex, or at least were considering it. Now, I found an interview with one named Julia Wise, who currently works at the Center for Effective Altruism. And she started out as a social worker, to give you an idea of the kind of people who got into this. When she read Weiss's article, she was a social worker. She kind of fell in love with the concept. And when it started becoming a thing in like the 70s and 80s, it was, as she described, quote, a bunch of philosophers and their friends and nobody had a bunch of money. So it was also more when Singer put it out, kind of a wave, like a way of people kind of debating how to think about charity, which is,

is fine. People should always be like exploring stuff like that. So it's, it's not, I don't want to be like going after Singer too. Well, I do a little bit because Singer after kind of his movement has a couple of decades to grow,

winds up doing a Ted talk. And the Ted talk winds up kind of electrifying a very specific chunk of the American techno set. And you can see kind of in some of the writing on this, like the way in which his talking about sort of the morality of charity has gotten flattened over the years, quote, which is the better thing to do to provide a guide dog to one blind american or cure 2 000 people of blindness in developing countries um which is like i don't know both there's resources to do both um we again if you for example in the united states were to tax the billionaire class and corporations a lot

more you could provide that blind person in the United States with free healthcare in a way that many countries do. And we could also continue or even expand charitable giving, maybe if we were to do stuff like spend less money on our military. Again, it's like a false choice. But of course, it's because the reason this choice is there is because they're thinking about helping people purely in the form of like noblest oblige charity, right? They're thinking about periods like rich – like things that get improved when rich people put money into them. Yeah. So obviously, we should help one of these groups before the other because it's more effective and yada, yada, yada. Yeah.

groups before the other because it's more effective and yada yada yada yeah yeah well and i think i think that was one of the things that like there's a second way you can look at the original sort of problem of we have the same ethical responsibility of someone who gets hit by a car or someone's on the other side of the world is that like the other way you can look at that is like i don't care about what's happening to someone on the other side of the world so i don't have to care about this person who got hit by a car and that seems like yeah these people are doing it's like well do i really have to care about this person here because there's someone over there yeah i didn't like i can see like how this lines up with some of these like like bigger like meta-ethical kind of perspectives on on what equality is and what like your ethical obligations

are but then yeah it seems to just kind of be like a very clear like very clear slippery slope to making kind of malthusian excuses for doing fuck all right that's that's where the story is heading so oh good early 2000s he does like a ted talk you know the the momentum around this idea starts to build and it really gets a shot in the arm in 2013 with the work of an author named eric friedman uh friedman's new book or friedland's book at the time that was new was called reinventing philanthropy a framework for more effective giving um and he kind of he kind of extends the arguments that singer is making one of the things that he does is he he contrasts what saint jude's Children's Research Hospitals are doing

to like research children's medical or like illnesses that kids suffer and treatments for them with the Malagi Provincial Hospital in Angola. And he kind of contrasts two patients who are being served at the different hospitals for life-threatening conditions and concludes, quote, I'd probably also be very angry at the donors who are continually funding St. Jude and leaving Melangi Provincial woefully under-resourced. Why are the patients of St. Jude so much more worthy of life? And, like, yeah. What a ridiculous way to think about a children's hospital.

Fucking asinine. And the fact that, like, many of the people who are doing these fucking TED Talks and contributing to this, like, global tech class are the same people who are making fucking millions of dollars off the pharmaceutical industry which continues to neglect the diseases that people like in the colonial periphery suffer from because there's no profit in selling them drugs and instead you're selling bald and askew as to people in amer, right? Yes. We can... I mean, you could... If every single person who's gotten a TED Talk

had all of their wealth expropriated tomorrow, we could fund both of these hospitals. Exactly. Yes, yes, yeah, yeah. The world would be better. It's fundamentally a kind of obscenity to look at pharmaceutical companies, CEOs, making hundreds of millions and billions of dollars,

selling people often literal poison and jacking up the price of things like insulin to look at these tech CEOs accumulating tens of billions of dollars and to say donations to this children's hospital are robbing an Angolan hospital. So I won't be paying my taxes. Yeah. Why don't you go fuck yourself? Yeah. Yeah. And anyway, like, but this is like,

you can see who this appeals to, right? If you've like the kind of people who love the freakonomics books, which are bullshit, regressive, bad statistics, bad statistics. Can I tell one freakonomics story? Please.

Yeah. Okay. So one of my professors at UChicago was a political science guy, or I guess he was public policy. And there's a thing that Freakonomics guy wrote where he was trying to prove that money doesn't actually influence elections. Yes. Yeah. One of his real bangers. Yeah.

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

And so you can't figure out whether money is doing anything by measuring its effects on like votes on the floor because floor votes are bullshit. All of the important stuff has already – by the time the time a floor vote happens all the important political stuff has already happened and so he did this he did this whole thing where he was you know he had this great uh uh he had this great metric called like uh oh god and it was called like the the the the dairy cow coefficients which is like measuring like how how someone should vote versus like how many dairy cows ran it turns out you know if you look at what these people do in committee no yeah hey look it turns out lobbying money is unbelievably effective but because this fucking guy had like and this is something that like like this sort of distinction between between congress like

on the floor and congress and committee like there's a president whose name i'm forgetting who has this famous line that like congress and committee is congress at work congress on the floor is congress at play or something like that like it's like this is just like basic shit that if you know literally anything about how a field works you cannot yeah yeah if you want to if you want to if you want a good breakdown of why the freakonomics guy is full of shit uh Michael Hobbs and Peter Shamshiri, I think is his last name, have a new podcast called If Books Could Kill, and they break down with like citations and everything, like why everything in that book is horseshit. But like the reason why it's the only thing I'll disagree with you on, Chris, is I don't

think he's an idiot. I think he's very intelligent. And I think the thing that he's smart to do is he recognizes that there's a specific type of person and engineers and programmers are very likely to be this type of person who kind of fundamentally like they're oppositional defiant. If somebody, if something, if people say like, well, this is good or this is bad, they're going to take the, want to take the opposite stance. And if you can provide them a way to feel like they're enlightened and smart and actually looking at the data by doing it, then they'll take the opposite stance on stuff like

it's bad to let people buy elections or it's good to fund children's hospitals just because somebody's made them feel smart for being an asshole. That's what the Freakonomics guy does. Malcolm Gladwell does a subtler version of this as a general rule um and that's what that's what that fucking friedman is doing in this this book in 2013 i found a good review of it in the stanford social innovation review um that is uh pretty scathing like surprisingly scathing considering it's it's written by a bunch of like stanford

nerds this approach amounts to little more than charitable imperialism whereby my just cause is just and yours to one degree or another is a waste of precious resources this approach is not informed giving um and i think that that does a pretty good job of uh uh summarizing what i think is fucked up about it there's another thing that's really messed up which is that one of the conclusions that they gets come that they come to here is that um they don't recommend or there's an organization called gilfwell that kind of gets gets formed as a result of the book friedman writes and they recommend not to deliver like not to donate money to disaster assistance in the wake of the Japanese tsunami and oppose disaster relief donations in general.

Because, quote, and this is from Friedman, most of those killed by disasters could not have been saved by donations, which is number one. Like that's the donations are about like rebuilding communities. Generally, it's not like about the saving lives. Usually it's about like, well, all of the infrastructure was destroyed and rebuilding communities. Generally. It's not like about the saving lives. Usually it's about like, well, all of the infrastructure was destroyed and it must be rebuilt. Um, but okay.

Guy. Well, it's annoying too. Cause it's like, it's, it's not like there's not good critiques of like specifically always like the red cross. Oh,

it's all fucked up. The every single. Yes. I, yeah. But their critique is like the worst possible. Like, yeah.

The actual critiques are that every single large charitable organization is fucked up and if you go and talk to people on the ground they will bitch like if you go to fucking war zones people bitch more about ngos than the folks shooting at them half the time yeah yeah they bitch about it being inefficient about the stuff they're given being like bad quality or like nonsense, like just being handed out to be handed out, which is a thing that happens sometimes. And they bitch about well-paid aid workers staying in hotels and showing up for a couple of hours to like do a photo op. There's also more incisive, like, you know, that's not to say none of it's useful like for example as many complaints as people have everyone i've known who has been in a place where medicine sans frontier

slash doctors without borders has operated while they have complaints about doctors without borders are like it's good that there's more doctors here we fucking need them um and you know it's like unhcr plenty of things to complain about UNHCR. At every refugee camp I go to, also people have fucking water filters and tents and shit because of UNHCR, which isn't nothing. It's a damn sight more than nothing. And it's a damn sight more than any of these long termist motherfuckers are doing for people who are, I don't know, displaced by war. Yeah. And like some of the things that they're doing is like this is very strange kind

of attempt to calculate and create markets for human life and human suffering right which you see a lot if you work like i've worked in non-profit i've worked in in disaster response i've seen some of these things on the ground and it it you see these bizarre fucking decisions being made by by someone in an office who is likely never been on the ground of these situations. And it inevitably results in it's within these big organizations like the Red Cross and MSF, but also on a governmental level,

right? With people not having the autonomy to respond in a situation to reduce human suffering. And instead to be told to do something, which is supposedly evidence-based based on someone who's looked at the wrong criteria and come to the wrong conclusion hundreds of miles away and it's incredibly fucking yeah it's bureaucrats right and it's like we've we've we've we've somehow managed to create like the absolute worst possible nightmare system of you have a bunch of government bureaucrats and then you also have a bunch of sort of private

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

complaints i have is that there's a specific class of media people who the only answer they will accept is because uh there's not enough multi-family zoning which is just a part of why the rent is so damn high and reducing it to just that ignores um the price fixing software that tens of millions of americans uh like landlords use um it ignores shit like airbnb it ignores like the fucking problems in the construction industry the lingering effects of the 2008 crash it's very frustrating and it's the these kind of like freakonomics guys like to do the same thing like the the fucking freakonomics dude in particular one of the things he got famous for is being like, you know, the drop in crime in the 90s, this unprecedented fall in crime was due to abortion, which zero, I will say again, zero people who are experts on the topic of crime in America agree with. What they will say is actually there's a shitload of different things that contributed to the decline in crime.

And there's a good chance that abortion had an impact uh a bigger impact was probably getting the lead out of like reducing environmental lead although that gets overstated too there's all sorts of different shit including like air conditioning just the fact that like yeah yeah now more people have air conditioning and guess when violence is highest in the summer when people are stuck around each other outside and like all sorts of computer games computer games don't people doing crimes because they got something else to do but it's it you want to if you're going to be doing the kind of like if you're going to be doing ted talk fucking public works philosophy then it helps to just be able to like make one big malcolm gladwell style

fucking reveal anyway that's how all these people exist and how all of their morality is informed. After 2013, Friedman is kind of like followed up by this guy named William McCaskill, who was currently the he's a Scottish philosopher, which God, it's easy to get called a philosopher these days. And he is he is a personal friend of Elon Musk. When Musk's text messages got released as part of that court filing, some of them were with McCaskill, um, who was considering like putting a bunch of money into buying Twitter.

They ultimately decided not to. And I think because they just like, it seems like McCaskill just didn't trust that Musk had any sort of plan. So he is, I will say this, not an idiot. Um, but he's wrong in ways that are deeply fucked up. And he wrote a book that is currently a bestseller. It was published in August called What We Owe the Future. And the gist of this is that it's merging this kind of effective altruism with what's called long-termism, which is this argument that morally we have to consider the impact of our actions

as not just on people alive today, but in future people, which is fine. There's actually a lot to that idea. But the way it always works out is we can't pay attention to problems that people are suffering now. We have to work on saving the world from these bigger problems. And again, it's almost exclusively used as an argument for guys like Musk to like, well, we shouldn't tax billionaires out of existence because I see this with clarity, the problems that we face and the long-term solution is for

me to be able to push for these specific things that I think are the only way to save humanity. I'm getting ahead of myself a little bit here. Let's talk about McCaskill again. When he was at Oxford, he's an Oxford boy, James. Oh, look at that. We've had some bangers, I'm sure. Yeah. He started a group called Giving What We Can in 2009, and members were supposed to give away 10% of what they earned

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

how can we make sure they're effective like what can we do to make giving um work better which is again perfectly fine but it very quickly gets married to this kind of long-termist thinking um and they focus instead of stuff like for example funding hospitals stuff like preventing an artificial intelligence from killing everybody or like sending people to distant planets which are like cool and sci-fi and everything but also deeply unrealistic i'll say it right now our our threat is not that an ai kills us all there's certainly a threat that different kind of artificial intelligences are used by authoritarians to make life worse for everybody but by the way peter teal is a big backer of effective altruism he's one of the people building that fucking ai um this is the guy who wrote that thing about

earning to give right like that he was like this is a guy who did that yeah okay i'm familiar with he's made like a promise to never take more than 31 000 or something in income over the course like of a year in his life and give everything else to charity he gives all his book profits to charity but he also runs an organization that is spending more and more on keeping its people comfortable because i guess he doesn't have the money personally to spend anyway i think there's some sketchy shit there yeah this whole idea and i'm sure we're going to get to this right like it it it completely overlooks our obligation morally to agitate for structural change right like it says like if you can become a billionaire

through whatever bullshit evil fucking exploitative grift you can and then give 90 of that away you're still perpetuating a system in which one grifter gets rich and thousands of people die without fucking clean water but that's okay because you also donated some water filters or whatever like and it's not okay and it makes me very angry actually yeah no yeah it makes me angry too and it's one of those things if you look at like here's all the charities that mccaskill and his organization are putting hundreds of millions of dollars into they're not all bad a lot of them are good and i'm glad that money is going there but there's always this strain of deeply unsettling logic running through it.

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

admitted he probably wouldn't tweet about it. The answer, he believes, is to be honest about it. In philanthropy, big donors typically choose causes based on their personal passions. An ultra-subjectivist approach, McCaskill says, where everything is seemingly justifiable on the basis of doing some good. He doesn't think that's tenable. If you can save someone from drowning or ten people from dying in a burning building, what should you do, he proposesoses it is not a morally appropriate response

to say well i'm particularly passionate about drowning so i'm going to save one person from drowning rather than the 10 people from burning and that's exactly the situation we find ourselves in and like no it is not that is nonsense because among other things if you're a random person uh and you have a choice between saving someone from drowning or 10 people from dying in a burning building well you actually probably don't because saving people from drowning is a really difficult technical skill which is why people usually die when they try to rescue other folks who are drowning yeah the guy the creator of yugioh died trying to save a guy from drowning it's really hard and dangerous and also

so is rescuing people from a burning building which is why we have firefighters and guess what a lot of firefighters may not be very good at saving people from drowning because they have not trained for that they are different skills these are both problems but they're different skills but what if you instead spent that time uh buying some tesla stocks and then you sold them and instead invested in, I don't know, something that stops water from drowning people? It's bullshit. None of the problems we have are, none of the problems, I'm going to say right now, 0% of the problems we have are the result of some sort of like lifeguard firefighters standing in between a burning building and like a yacht race gone wrong and going oh god no yeah it's like the train he's doing the trotty problem like he's he's just he's trying to do the trotty problem it's funny that he's talking about sri lanka too because it's like

this is the perfect example this is the perfect example of a political crisis that is like completely intractable to all of these like none of these people donating the charities can like do literally anything about that because that's actually you know like this like the crisis of sri lanka is a is a is a both both it's a like it is but it's both a sort of short-term crisis of this like you know like utterly horrific genocidal political elite and then also a sort of long-term crisis about like the sort of structural position of like specific countries and sort of the the like global colonial system this is not something any of these people can solve the only thing the only way any of these people could solve this is if the people of sri lanka like just

expropriated them yeah but you know but because because because these because these people like because sri lankans do not have access to this guy and, like, six guns, right? There's no way, you know, he can just sort of sit there in his chair going, well, it's a crisis. I'm going to tweet about it. I'm not going to tweet about it. He's not going to tweet about it. I can tweet about it. Yeah, I will simply talk to newspapers about it instead of tweeting.

What I would say is that, like, here's the actual solution to the stupid problem this guy came up with. millions of Americans in exchange for them learning how to fight fires and getting basic life-saving care and getting trained in things like that so that they could deal with the consequences of climate change and be able to protect their communities effectively and be incentivized to gain the actual technical skills that would allow them to protect people. Well, then you would have more people capable of saving someone from a burning building or from drowning. But anyway, whatever. That's my pie-in-the-sky leftist solution to that. saving someone from a burning building or from drowning. Um, but anyway, whatever that's, that's,

that's my, that's my pie in the sky. Leftist solution to that is use funds taken from the rich in order to incentivize people to gain the skills that will allow them to protect their communities in the event of disasters. Um, anyway, whatever. Uh,

so over the last decade, all of this thinking has increasingly given way from a wonky theory on charitable giving by big-hearted guilt-ridden millennial kids and that's that's how this guy is always framed in articles mccaskill is he's like in fact i'm gonna fucking i'm gonna scroll down here to my notes and i'm gonna find the section of the article to like show you the way he gets fucking talked about in all of these quote 13 years ago william mccaskill found himself standing in the aisle of a grocery store agonizing over which breakfast cereal to buy if he switched to a

cheaper brand for a year could he put aside enough money to save someone's life like that's the yeah the sort of thoughts that you have when your engagement with global poverty is in the fucking cheerios aisle exactly exactly yeah of waitrose in oxford i'm sure like no fuck off sorry i'm so fucking angry at this shit like yeah and it's it's clearly very clearly i can see that this is going towards an excuse for incredibly wealthy people paying fuck all in taxes because they claim that that's not an efficient way to do things and they completely ignore all these structural things which have to exist for their effective altruism to occur in the first place. Right.

Yeah, it's anyway, this is effectively like over the years given away from this again, kind of this wonky theory by guilty millennial kids to this pop philosophy for the fintech set, because that's how these guilt ridden millennial kids wound up making a bunch of money. And yeah, that time article gives like, I just want to read another quote from it about one of the other guys who's involved in putting a lot of money into McCaskill's organization, quote, Mr. Mr. Bankman Freed makes his donations through the FTX Foundation, which has given away 140 million of which 90 million has gone through the group's future fund towards long-term causes. Mr. McCaskill and Mr. Bankman-Fried's relationship is an important piece in understanding the community's evolution in recent years. The two men first met in 2012, when Mr. Bankman-Fried was a student at MIT with an interest in utilitarian philosophy.

Over lunch, Mr. Bankman-Fried said that he was interested in working on issues related to animal welfare. Mr. McCaskill suggested he might do more good by entering a high-earning field and donating money to the cause than by working for it directly. Mr. Bankman-Fried contacted the Humane League and other charities, asking if they would prefer his time or donations based on his expected earnings if he went to work in tech or finance. They opted for the money, and he embarked on a remunerative career, eventually founding the cryptocurrency exchange FTX in 2019. Oh, first off that guy absolutely did not call any charities. Sorry. This was a four.

This was from the Forbes article. I use not the time article. First off, I don't believe that he, but if he did, it was something like, Hey, I don't have any skills or training. Do you want money or do you want me to volunteer? And they were like, who the fuck is this kid? Like, we don't believe that he but if he did it was something like hey i don't have any skills or

training do you want money or do you want me to volunteer and they were like who the fuck is this kid like we don't we don't need another asshole wandering around here trying to touch the cats send us your check yeah and so instead of i don't know getting trained as a vet tech or something where he would actually be able to help animals he founded a cryptocurrency exchange and contributed to the burning of massive amounts of carbon that will contribute to mass deforestation and the deaths of animals around the world that's good i think that there's another aspect of this which i think is sort of underexplored which is that utilitarianism is genuinely one of the greatest evils humanity has ever created every every bad decision anyone has ever made if you look behind it you can find utilitarianism.

It's the basis of all neoclassical economics. It's horrible, awful shit, everything bad in the world. Trace back to utilitarianism. It is an engine that allows rich people to feel good about hurting poor people. That's what it is. And that's what I think this all makes clear. So the actual rhetoric from these people is always like, especially if you're just kind of encountering it out in the wild, it's hard to argue with a lot of the time because they'll be like, well, look, we need to look at what's going to help the most people. And that's

why we're setting up none of this matters if we don't deal with this problem or that problem. And it's tailor made to sound profound. And again, in like a TED talk or the website for some charitable giving organization aimed at getting you to like put 10% of your income to long termist causes. But again, the fucked up shit crusts kind of around the edges for the most part in lines like these from a time profile on the casket. The first public protest against African American slavery was the 1688 Germantown Quaker petition. Slavery was only abolished in the british empire in 1833 decades later in the u.s and not until 1962 in saudi arabia history encourages mccaskill to favor gradual progress over revolution abolition he says is maybe the single best moral change ever

it's certainly up there with feminism and they're extremely incremental they don't seem that way because we enormously shrink the past but it's almost 300 years we're talking about. That wasn't the result of incremental change. It was the result against the people who owned slaves fighting viciously against any attempts to end slavery. Like, yeah, it was a it was a battle. It was a series of, in fact, a series of revolutions in a lot of cases, including like the Haitian Revolution and guys like John Brown. There were a shit bleeding Kansas. There were a shitload of people died fighting in order to end slavery. Like the

Civil War, dude! What do you call that? That's not incremental. A million people shot each other to death. You know, and so far as we can talk about sort of incremental progress, it's stuff like, okay, so the slaves in Haiti freed themselves by means of revolution and then sent a bunch of guns and weapons to people in Latin America so that their armies could march through Latin America and end slavery.

Many revolutions had to occur to end slavery because it was a powerful system at the center of global capital that a lot of entrenched and heavily armed interests were willing to die to maintain. that a lot of entrenched and heavily armed interests were willing to die to maintain. Which also is fun because I bet if you look through these people's supply chains, and this is almost certainly true of Elon Musk's supply chains, like, I mean, okay. Musk's supply chains in China, you can have some kind of debate as to whether the kinds of forced labor you're going to be encountering are slavery. Like, I bet if you look through 90% of the people who are effective altruists, you can find

slavery in their supply chains, and their argument will be like, well, I can't end slavery in my supply chain because it's less efficient. I guarantee it. They're all in the tech industry, and nobody has a laptop or a smartphone without the use of rare earth minerals that are acquired

via slavery. it's the same thing if you're wearing clothes you have something that slavery was involved in because the garment industry slavery is literally inextricable from it like the company that has tried the hardest to remove slavery from their from their production line patagonia yeah um they still fucking continually finds like oh nope there's some more yeah yeah they're pretty good about calling it out but yeah yeah they put a lot of money into that shit and they still it is hard um yeah anyway um i'm gonna read another fun quote from the forbes article mr bankman freed said he expected to give away the bulk of his fortune in the next 10 or 20 years if you're worried about existential

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

It is not, it doesn't quite get at all of the things that are deeply fucked up. And for that, I wanted to quote from another article I found on Aeon, A-E-O-N. It's an essay by, let me get the author here because it's quite good, about long-termism. by, let me get the author here, because it's quite good, about long-termism. It's an essay called Against Long-Termism by Emil P. Torres, a PhD candidate at a university in Hanover in Germany, Leibniz Universitat. I don't know. I feel silly every time I try to say German, so I'm not going to try that hard. But the article is very good, and it kind of gets at how this effective altruism movement has merged with long-termism in a way that specifically exists to buoy the interests of wealthy authoritarians around the world. Quote, this has roots in the work of Nick Bostrom, who founded the grandiosely named Future

of Humanity Institute, FHI, in 2005, and Nick Beckstead, a research associate at FHI and a program officer at Open Philanthropy. It has been defended most publicly by the FHI philosopher Toby Ord, author of The Precipice, Existential Risk and the Future of Humanity. Long-termism is the primary research focus of both the Global Priorities Institute and an FHI-linked organization directed by Hilary Greaves and the Forethought Foundation, run by William McCaskill, who also holds positions at FHI and GPI. Adding to the tangle of titles, names, institutes, and acronyms, long-termism is one of the main cause areas

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

Institute. This was co-founded by the multimillionaire tech entrepreneur, Jian Talin, who, as I recently noted, doesn't believe that climate change poses an existential threat to humanity because of his adherence to the long-termist ideology. Meanwhile, the billionaire libertarian and Donald Trump supporter, Peter Thiel,

who once gave the keynote address at an effective altruism conference, has donated large sums of money to the Machine Intelligence Research Institute, whose mission is to save humanity from superintelligent machines and is deeply intertwined with long-termist values. Other organizations such as GPI and the Forethought Foundation are funding essay contests and scholarships in an effort to draw young people into the community. While it's an open secret that the Washington, D.C.-based Center for Security and Emerging Technologies, CSET, aims to place long-termists within high-level U.S. government positions to shape national apology.

In fact, CSET was established by Jason Matheny, a former research assistant in FHI who's now the deputy assistant to U.S. President Joe Biden for technology and national security. Ford himself has, astonishingly for a philosopher, advised the World Health Organization, the World Bank, the World Economic Forum, the U.S. National Intelligence Council, the U.K. Prime Minister's Office, Cabinet Office, and Government Office for Science, and he recently contributed to a report from the Secretary General of the United Nations that specifically mentions long-termism. The short answer is that elevating the fulfillment of humanity's supposed potential above all else could non-trivially increase the probability that actual people, those alive today and in the near future, suffer extreme harms, even death. Consider, as I noted elsewhere, the long-termist ideology inclines its adherence to take an insouciant attitude towards climate change. Why? Because even if climate change causes island nations to disappear, triggers mass migrations and kills millions of people, it probably isn't going to compromise our long-term potential over the coming trillions of years.

If one takes a cosmic view of the situation, even a climate catastrophe that cuts the human population by 75% for the next two millennia will, in the grand scheme of things, be nothing more than a small blip, the equivalent of a 90-year-old man having stubbed his toe when he was two. So this is evil, right? This is vicious and vile and cruel. And it's one of those things, there's a book that I've talked about on the show a couple of times, that is quite popular called Ministry of the Future. And I think it's a very good book. And one of the attitude, like the basic premise of it is that climate change is addressed finally, and the worst aspects of it are dealt with and like begin to be repaired because of the establishment of an

organization called the ministry of the future it's this international organization that exists to like look out for the interests of unborn people and animals and plant species and part of how they do this is by murdering billionaires in their beds uh and blowing up planes to end international air travel which is so there's a verse like, again, the idea that like, we should be thinking about people and and living creatures who have not yet been born is reasonable. And the reasonable conclusion of that is, and so we should deal with things like climate change and stop like thoughtlessly degrading our environment so that people in the future will be able to live a quality life.

The argument that these long termists are making making is no that's foolish because in a trillion years none of it will matter and i intend to be alive in a trillion years because i will be an immortal machine man billionaire forever you know it's the thing about these people these people fucking suck it's like a thing about this if you believe this the only literally the only thing that you should spend your time doing is trying to dismantle every single nuclear weapon on the planet. Like, you should be forming your own private armies to, like, storm military bases to destroy nukes. And none of them will ever fucking do this. All these people will back candidates who, like, want to have more nuclear weapons. All these people will back candidates who, like, you know, I wonder how many how many people personally supported dropping a nuke

in the middle of a rock in 2004 like god yeah i anyway this is probably that's probably enough i i wanted to at some point i think we will be doing a more detailed look into some of these people and a more detailed look into some maybe maybe as a bastards episode but this is just getting more relevant and i wanted to give people i wanted to connect them with some like some some resources uh particularly that article on aeon about uh the the dangers of long-termism and uh yeah anyway be be advised this is what the fucking assholes who have spent like think about how many cool things the tech industry has actually made in the last decade it's it's not many right like it's mostly been vaporware like most of the different big apps and stuff have all are in the process of collapsing right now that's why the industry is falling apart very little value as we record

this in the metaverse yeah that's right's right. That's right. Without legs. It's like you're sitting right next to me, James, except for you have no laying legs and your mouth is open in an endless wordless scream. Finally. Anyway, that's what these assholes want to do. What they've done to the internet,

sucking the vibrancy and the life and like the freedom out of this this incredible creation and turning it into uh an engine for sucking your personal data out and marketing things to you and making you angry all the time as much as possible and convincing your parents and grandparents that fucking joe biden's been replaced by a lizard man um like the people who did that uh now think that we can't take care of people today because that would distract from our mission to take care of people who have never been born a trillion years from now.

Anyway, fuck them. Welcome. I'm Danny Thrill. Won't you join me at the fire and dare enter? Nocturnal Tales from the Shadows, presented by iHeart and Sonora. An anthology of modern-day horror stories inspired by the legends of Latin America. From ghastly encounters with shapeshifters to bone-chilling brushes with supernatural creatures. I know you. Take a trip and experience the horrors that have haunted Latin America since the beginning of time.

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Oh, wait, no, sorry. It could happen here. A podcast about stuff falling apart. And today, about the fact that things fell less apart than people were worried they were going to fall apart. And in some ways, might get better. So that's kind of nice. Sure. Yeah. On the whole, we're talking about the midterms today.

And on the whole, okay. I feel okay. Mid is an excellent description of the terms. feel okay yeah mid is an excellent description yeah yeah it's the midterms equivalent of getting like an ounce of of of like mid-grade weed for like 50 bucks but you find out later that like kind of in the middle of it was like half of a paper towel roll that they they stuck in there to push up the weight but it's like well at least i got weed all right i've introduced the podcast who do we who do we have here today oh you got me i'm james still that's right yeah yeah i'm garrison i did vote look at you wow way to be a way to be an anarchist Garrison

Or a Canadian Democracy was on the ballot Yeah I'm not committing voter fraud For the Democratic Party Yeah I also decided to not vote For the people who are doing

The war on drugs in California right now Garrison you continued your years-long tradition of submitting a crude drawing of the Premier of Canada to a ballot box. Shirtless Trudeau coming out of a cave. Who else do we have on with us right now? I'm here. I'm Christopher Wong, and i absolutely despise elections so i brought my friend who actually does like elections that's excellent token election enjoy pretty much yes hi i am jack i am am Christopher's token friend, as mentioned. And I'm here partly because of nepotism for knowing Christopher and partly because, as you reminded me before we got started, I had a 93% accurate prediction rating for all the elections that I was paying attention to this year. So I know some things. Yeah, congratulations.

I only made one prediction before this election, which was, boy, it doesn't feel like Dr. Oz is going to win. Which means you did better than a lot of the people who are paid to do this. Like, okay, that man said the word crudité in an election in Pennsylvania. there was he was never good the moment that ad came out he was going to lose I'd say that's much more nuanced than my my political analysis which was the fact that the other guy was much taller than him and also way harder like if they just uh settled it with

a fist fight fat man could have taken it yep yeah that seems good uh it was fun it was a fun election we all had a good time i enjoy that fucking marjorie taylor green and jd vance are going to be in congress together that's going to be fun for everybody we're all going to have a good time but i i suspect there's probably some stuff we haven't like as you may have noticed listeners we didn't do much in the way of pre-midterm content because we all hate it thank christ but but now now we're talking about it so uh what uh what what should we know about these midterms what what what kind of occurred to you as somebody who's like, actually has spent a lot more

time delving into the nitty gritty and thinking about what was likely to happen? So I told Christopher, I would say this, and in fairness, I do genuinely believe it. I think the story of these midterms, when historians look back at it, will be that the Dobbs Supreme Court decision had the same electoral impact in the United States as 9-11 did. I think that is going to be like how this plays out over time. Because when you look at how things were going before Dobbs and then how things were going after Dobbs, obviously things got a lot worse on the policy front because abortion became illegal in a lot of states. But the election essentially flipped overnight from what was going to be a

Republican wave to the even split that we got. And that makes this one of three post-World War II midterms where the incumbent party did well. and so this is definitely going to be a midterm that gets uh lectured about in poli sci 101 courses for the next hundred years also one of those one of those other three was the 9-11 was the post 9-11 yes yes it was yeah yeah i find that actually a really because obviously i i was aware just because there was so much coverage saying like this is the best performance from an incumbent party in a midterm since 2002 so i was aware of that fact but for some reason i hadn't put it together in my head that way that like yeah the the the this means that like the supreme court's decision on roe v wade had kind of a comparable electoral impact to flying two planes into a pair of

skyscrapers at the Pentagon, three planes. I mean, to be fair, the Supreme Court have killed, in terms of the immediate impact, the Supreme Court will have killed more people than that by like Thursday or something. Yeah. The other one was FDR's first midterm, right? No, the other one,

so I said post-World War II. Oh, okay. My bad. The other one was 1998 when the American electorate apparently got so mad at Republicans impeaching Bill Clinton that they decided to vote for Democrats in a midterm again. Well, that's the other thing Biden can do if it

goes south. It's good to know there are options on the table. Yeah, but I think Non-zero chance that'll happen anyway i mean i guess we're still waiting to shake out who knows yeah dark brandon i enjoyed from uh from a an entertainment perspective the like three months of lucidity that we got out of joe biden this year we'll see how many more he has in him yeah who knows so yeah like it so you're you're suggesting that dobbs has been like the really pivotal thing here in in swinging a lot of these close races right absolutely um and dobbs definitely being the number one factor um tragically because it's very cringe and i wish

this hadn't happened the January 6th investigation does actually seem to have also swung several important races I mean I'm interested in your thoughts on this but I actually I'm glad that it mattered that they tried to do a coup

and it's like I'm glad that people cared about that I'm glad it mattered I just think it sucks because the way they went about the investigation was so incredibly terrible. Oh, yeah. I mean, there was, yes. Yeah. Like, Merrick Garland is going to go down as, like, one of the most cowardly attorney generals in American history.

But, yeah, it's pretty clear that in a lot of races, like the investigation made a difference. I think this is really clear if we're getting into like very kind of under the hood. Democrats ran the table in competitive state level secretary of state races. And these are the officials that run elections.

And not only did Democrats run the table, pretty much every single one of those candidates outperformed the top of the ticket. So they outperformed governor and Senate candidates. Um, so there were a lot of people, this is another big story. The midterms is that swing voter swing voting is back, uh, not swing voting. I'm sorry. Split ticket voting is back. Um, there were quite a few, there were quite a few millions of voters this year who uh voted for a republican in the senate

or a republican for governor and then a democrat to run their state's actual elections that's kind of good it's that's also like it speaks promisingly of people's like engagement with the political system and education about it and the awareness of what these different things do. Yes. But other, like, not other than that, but just overall, high-level, Dobbs was 100% the big one. There is a person whose name I'm going to unfortunately mispronounce and that I should have looked up beforehand.

It's all right. This is a safe place for that. Thank you. But there's a person, there's a guy down in louisiana named john uh kulivan i think is my best guess and he is one of the people who makes money off of like looking at elections um and his big thing is that you can predict the outcome of elections just by looking at the nationwide composition of the primary electorate so like if Republicans turn out more voters in their primaries than Democrats do,

Republicans are going to win the election and vice versa. This has been true in pretty much every single election for the last 30 years or so. And he unfortunately got led astray this year because nationwide, at the end of the primary season, Republicans were up by about like five points. And so he was insisting the whole rest of the campaign that Republicans are going to win. That's obviously not really what happened. But if you look at pre Dobbs versus post Dobbs, the primary electorate post Dobbs was Democrats plus like up by one point that is the electorate that we got in the midterms

so Dobbs 100% set the tone of like what the midterms were going to be because we are not going to be legalizing abortion nationwide in the next two years because we are going to have a Republican House almost certainly Dobbs is almost definitely

going to be a huge House almost certainly. Dobbs is almost definitely going to be a huge factor in 24 as well. I mean, and I guess that, like, because the question I had, and I think a lot of people had running into this, especially people who are not election lovers, is like, do things matter, right? Like, was Dobbs going to matter?

And were the constant sort of Republican assaults Like, do things matter, right? Like, was Dobbs going to matter? And was the, were the constant sort of Republican assaults on the ability of people to vote? Was the fucking attacks on children's hospitals and on trans kids and stuff, like, was all of that going to work? Like, do things matter still? And, you know, we'll have to re-answer that question in 2024 but it does kind of seem like that's the positive takeout from this is not like you know it's it's probably probably too early to say are we seeing some sort of grand progressive swing or are people coming around on biden or whatever things politicos want to take, but it does kind of seem that on a very ground floor level,

it mattered that the Republicans were doing awful things. Yes, 100% mattered. I think Christopher and I have talked about how, in his words, Leah Thomas cost the Michigan Republican Party the election. Let's talk about that

because I think a lot of people I mean, yeah talk let's talk about that because i think a lot of people i mean yeah let's yeah let's talk about okay i'll i'll give the i'll give the meme version of it first the meme version of it basically is that there was okay so there were there there was a report released by the the republican party in michigan after the election where they sort of just got hammered. And part of what they're talking about was like, okay, so the inflation is like 7.7% right now, right? This is the freest election anyone has ever been handed. Like in human history, like a child could have won this election and the Republicans managed to

blow it. And one of the reasons they managed to blow it and one of the reasons to blow it was that they talked about this they spent they spent like 25 million dollars like specifically on ads about trans like trans kids in sports yeah and everyone in michigan was just like what the yes really not not just not just blew it but blew it in a way that they haven't blown it in 40 years because for the first time in 40 years democrats will have complete control of the michigan state government yeah yeah and it's like it's like the other things it wasn't just in michigan where this happened right like like quite possibly like one of the ways they're going to lose the senate is because like the republicans like entire sort of apparatus in nevada was running against the equal rights amendment which and specifically they were they were running against the equal nevada passing

the version of the equal rights amendment like specifically on the grounds of transphobia and the era passed by 17 points uh and republicans are about to lose that senate seat and it's just like i the my main version of this is that the Republican Party ran a platform that is like the political equivalent of like a street preacher, right? Like that is the constituency for this. It is like they unbelievably hate trans people. They like a unbelievably hardline anti-abortion position, which again, like nobody actually likes. which again, like nobody actually likes. And, you know, it turns out like if your constituency is street preachers,

like the thing an average person does when they run into a street preacher is walk past them. And it turns out that's what happened here. Like they tried this and they got owed. That's the meme version of it. Absolutely. I mean, that's not just the meme version of it. It's essentially what happened in Michigan and Pennsylvania and all of these states where hardline christian nationalists won republican primaries like they went down hard um and so as robert said yeah things actually mattered this election and that's a good thing

um and i think i know for me uh as like i went election night, very nervous about my own predictions because when I put together my, um, Google spreadsheet that will never be shown to any of you because of how insane it is. Um, and I was picking, you know, I got more races wrong by the way, by picking Republicans to win that Democrats actually won than the other way around. Because I kept second guessing myself. It's like, no, no, no, I'm not. I'm being too kind to Democrats. And then I went too far. But when I was making those predictions, honestly, I just kept thinking about like,

so I'm adopted. My parents are both white. And my mom is this like white woman from Appalachian, Ohio. And she is in her upper 60s. So she grew up in a world before Roe v. Wade. And I had never seen my mom so angry about anything in politics. And like she was very, very angry when Trump won. She has been very angry. She's been very angry about like January 6th. She's been angry about a lot of stuff the last several years, as is my dad, because they're both very normie Democrats. I've seen her than she was angrier about Dobbs. And it wasn't just like my mom. I was hearing from friends of mine from across the Midwest who also have like normie white suburban parents. And that was kind of the same thing that I was hearing from them, too, is like my mom is so

upset about this. My grandmother is so upset about this. These women who remembered what it was like to grow up in a world where abortion was not something that they had access to if they needed it. And that honestly, you know, it's obviously completely anecdotal. It's not data based or data driven in any way. But that was just what I kept thinking about as I was making predictions about how the midterm was going to go was, you know, I think that these people are angry enough that they are not going to care about inflation. They're not going to care about the fact that our economy is very clearly headed for a recession because this is going to matter more to them.

And it did. I kind of want to move on to talking about what what we think this sets us up for in 2024 because i think the the clearest and we talked about this a little earlier but sort of the clearest thing that's positive about this is that we have fewer state secretaries of state and state legislatures in the hands of the republican party which means more of a chance that like what people actually vote for is is going to matter now we're still dealing with the judiciary that is as fucked as it was prior to the midterms and in 2024 probably won't be less fucked in a way that is notable um in aggregate yeah we can all we can always hope and pray.

Yeah, there could be a couple of very specific car accidents. Yeah, yeah, yeah. On that point, actually, so I know a bang on about how the United States deals with its indigenous people a lot, but they slated, and we'll do an episode on it, but we're trying to do it properly. Slated for this Supreme Court session is to look at equal right the indian child welfare act uh and like the the challenge to it challenges a lot of the bases of other tribal law and in places like arizona right like indigenous people are a large like often like in 2020 they were supposed to be like the swing electorate um for like blue arizona so that could have positive

outcomes for for democrats it could they could i don't know how they could go out their way to disenfranchise indigenous people but they find new and exciting ways to do it all the fucking time uh so like that would be interesting um one thing i wanted to raise is like so i live in california which i think is seen as like the left coast and stuff but we have an alarming amount of really chudly people going to the house uh from california and um yeah it's becoming increasingly a bit like where like some of you live in o Oregon, where you have a very divided state. The far right in California is larger than the population of many US states. Yeah, yes.

And they're increasingly big mad about small things. But yeah, I'm just looking at the districts around the one I'm in, and a number of them have sent uh like anti-reproductive rights house representatives back to the house california is a state where um the democratic party likes to flop its way to victory uh it's one of it's one of the most incompetent state democratic parties in the country which is really saying something because you're talking about new york after this they're competing they're competing with new York, they're competing with Florida. Like, I mean, hey, Oregon's not didn't do great either. Like the state Democratic Party in Oregon

had their most narrow governor's race in a long time. And also, the Dems lost their their super majority in the state Congress. They did lose their super majority but democrats in oregon do now have the ability to uh redistrict again so they can take back that seat that republicans picked up uh because there was a constitutional amendment that got passed by the voters of oregon uh that says that if republicans do what they have done in the last few years in oregon which is walk out of the state house anytime that a law they don't like might pass. They get banned from running for re-election. But also, like, without the supermajority, I don't know that there's as much of a...

I mean, we'll see what happens. But, yeah, as a general rule, it seems like when you've got... There's no meaningful competition for what party is going to be in control of the state it becomes a haven for like the political equivalent of grifters to yeah suck in huge salaries and do very little um and yeah yeah like our mayor or to just do like... Like our mayor! Well, look at that! Our mayor also? Yeah. And she's up for re-election in a few months and we can only hope that she loses.

I can't imagine her winning. I mean, it could happen admittedly. It could happen here. It could happen here. Here's an ad break. Good work, Garrison. Yeah. What a professional. Here's an ad break. Good work, Garrison. Yeah.

What a professional. Ah, we're back. And you know what talking about the midterm elections makes me feel like doing? Smoking a cigarette. Buy cigarettes, kids. They're as good for you as democracy. All right, we're back. In some other interesting news, this is also the this this past midterms had uh more lgbtq candidates win office than ever before in a

midterm election there was a few uh notable wins uh specifically with trans people in the midwest actually uh which has been probably a decent sign it's it's a good sign you know yeah the hometown heroes are doing good yes there's been uh uh multiple multiple trans people and uh particularly uh quite a few trans women elected to state legislatives um across across the mid, like in Montana and inside... Controversial is putting Montana in the Midwest. You call Montana a Midwestern state. Is Montana a mountain state? I'm calling that out.

Yeah. Yes. Montana is a mountain West. See, well, the thing is, I grew up in Saskatch. Well, Montana is a mountain West. See, well, the thing is I grew up in Saskatchewan, which is like above Montana. And whenever you would drive down,

we would always stay in the more Midwest sections and everyone talks. It felt very Midwest to me because of where I lived in Saskatchewan. So apology, apologies to people who are Montana mountainers, I guess. Also apologies to the people of Chicago. No, no, we don't need to be apologetic.

They can fuck off. So Zoe Zephyr, who testified against anti-trans legislation previously, is now able to vote against it in Minnesota. Yeah, I want to talk about that very briefly which is that like sure sure okay there are a lot of queer communities in places that people just

fucking ignore yeah absolutely you can you cannot discount these places yeah like i said it's like like missoula specifically has has a like a like pretty substantive queer community they do good shit they're out there like they're like there's there's this sort of tendency i think to like like look at like a state and go like oh it's a red state like there's whatever the people who are just fleeing and it's like it's not true like there there are a lot of people who are like have for many years been building a community there and hanging on tenaciously and building it and also in missoula once in a while people take notice also in missoula the first non-binary uh candidate was elected in uh sj howell so two uh two trans people elected there in in uh in uh missoula so by the way did did did missoula do this people portland

i mean this would fall probably but portland's portland's like city council's like four fucking people yeah that's true yeah entirely yeah and it's one pretty conservative this past election actually um but uh we also had uh in minnesota uh leah fink is the first trans person in state legislator and in new hampshire uh they elected the first trans man to a u.s state house that's dope so yeah and and other other good thing is um arizona got a democratic governor uh which means a whole bunch of uh potential legislation will probably not get signed on uh because arizona did have have some pretty pretty bad anti-trans stuff come up in the past few years

I also want to talk about so the Arizona election was critical not just because it's amazing that fucking Carrie Lake's not going to be governor because she is an election denying ghoul but it's the nicest thing I've ever heard her describe

Blake Masters might be the scariest person who was running for election. He is the scariest. He has hardcore serial killer energy. Yes. Yeah, yeah. He was scary until he was funny, is the thing. Because, like, I, you know. When they fail, they're always funny.

Yeah. But, like, Christopher and I were talking about this before the podcast and like during the during the final debate between blake masters and mark kelly like am i allowed to swear on this podcast okay yeah like we're allowed to say whatever the hell we want perfect um in their final debate in their final debate between mark kelly and blake masters mark kelly's like final statement his concluding argument was essentially pointing at blake masters and going look at this fucking freak yeah yeah it was great it was which is the which is one of the most powerful things you could do in politics because he was just like the specific thing he did because his language was was i think a lot more um nuanced

than that because what he was saying is blake masters for those of you who don't know like one of the most like famous moments of this campaign is he he put out a campaign ad that was just him parking in the desert with a silenced handgun yes 22 22 yeah 22 which is a child's gun first off but anyway mentioning twice that the gun was German and like as he caressed it and then firing it blindly

at nothing and then the ad ends. No, he fired it across a lake. Yeah We don't see him shoot at something we don't see him hit a target he is his stance is dog shit anyway but it's just him taking a silenced pistol out repeatedly mentioning that the gun is german firing it and then the ad ends that's the whole ad it's like 90 seconds of him just fondling this gun and badly shooting it. It's worth giving the context that the person he's running against

is someone whose wife was shot in the head. Yes. Yeah, yeah, yeah, because Martin Kelly's very, very assassinated. But it's also just like, look, guns are a big part of American life. A lot of politicians have, including Democrats, have ads that involve guns, and usually it's like, here is me

hunting, you know? Or even like, here is me at the range with friends engaging in a thing that many Americans do. Masters was just blindly shooting a .22 caliber handgun after repeatedly mentioning that it's German. It was like someone showed an

alien, like a regular campaign ad of someone shooting a gun. And then. Yes. I mean, it's funny that that's the term that you use, because that was a term that was flying around like Arizona social media the entire campaign. It was like Blake Masters looks like an alien. Yeah. This is so fucked up and creepy.

That's what happens when you get pumped with Peter Thiel money. So he has this and he has a couple of others. Like he is. He is. he's a number one he worked with peter teal for years um he's doing all sorts of fucking ghoul shit on twitter like really mask off fascist unhinged shit and mark kelly in the debate isn't just like look at this freak he's like hey we all know guys like this who talk about how dangerous and how scary they are, but they've never done anything. They're just like weirdos

trying to scare you so that you'll think that they're powerful and don't fall for it. And it was perfect. And the good news is that Arizona voters did not fall for it because- No, they only did Blake Masters lose, but the best performing Republicans in Arizona were their House candidates. Like the statewide House popular vote for the for U.S. Congress, not the statehouse, was I think Republicans want it or are going to win it by like five. So Kari Lake already drastically underperformed that by six because she's going to win it by like five. So, Cardi Lake already drastically underperformed that by six because she's going to lose. And then so Blake Masters underperformed his house candidates by like 10 or 11.

Unbelievable. It's, it's, I mean, it, it really goes to show that whatever most Americans want, they don't want a fucking weirdo fascist freak threatening an astronaut's wife with a gun. No.

Really briefly, like also like on this note of all of the queer and trans candidates who won, I will point out this follows the pattern that has taken shape in the last decade, which is that these supposedly, well, not supposedly they are, but like these red and purple states in the South and the Midwest are sending queer and trans people into the halls of power a lot faster than deep blue states on the West Coast and in the Northeast, the first non, I unfortunately forget their name, but the first non-binary state legislator in the country was elected in Oklahoma. And they're not only non-binary, they are black and Muslim non-binary. Um, so it's like, you know, these, um, these communities as Christopher's like, Hey, these communities do matter. Uh, and we can't forget about them we can't abandon them but also like not just they matter but like as i will happily argue with any political operative from either coast uh we are much more likely to see some kind of progressive

resurgent and resurgence in this country led by candidates out of the south or midwest than either yeah yeah well and like look at like this is one of the everything's that you know so i have a lot of friends in the uh like michigan teachers union right and you know like right right now what is happening in michigan like in michigan is the teachers union is literally sending lists of laws like to to the governor that are like you need to get rid of this and you know like if even if you look at like like almost every other democratic party like in the country is just constantly at war with their teachers unions and you know and then you look at like you look at what's happening

in wisconsin and it's like and you look at what's happening in michigan well also wisconsin too like they have a much more labor friendly Democratic party than San Francisco Or the ghouls The ghouls in the Chicago machine The ghouls in Eric Adams office Yeah I don't know

Everyone ignores the Midwest And we're here damn it And we do good things It's a little bit of what we were saying earlier that like when you've got these states where because of the population layout the the the democratic party doesn't have to struggle to actually win for the most part you're a hell of a lot number one the party becomes effectively a cartel so they're very good at stopping any like upstart young progressive non-binary queer trans people from like getting a hold on in local politics you know we we just had the most

progressive member of the portland city council ousted by corporate business interests um and you know it it which is very different from the trend that you're seeing in places like Montana and places like Oklahoma with a lot of these very progressive, you know, young candidates. And it's because number one, maybe the state parties are a little more willing to throw a hail Mary, but also just like those individual people, the people running and the folks doing their campaign have had to be a lot

harder and a lot smarter to survive surrounded by people who hate them. And I think also like there's one of the ways that I, I was pretty sure that this wasn't going to be a red tsunami was, so I have some friends, I have friends who go to Wheaton college and for people who don't know who, what Wheaton college is, it is like, we're sorry that we're about to inform you yeah so Wheaton College is one of like I don't know maybe the

second behind like Brigham Young like most right we gave evangelical college in the U.S. like they they famously it's not as bad as Liberty yeah yeah it's like number three right but like so it's this is the sort of this is like the the intellectual center of um like of sort of evangelical politics like uh hold on let me make sure i have this right uh yeah like billy graham's family has funneled money into wheaton college for decades and decades now and okay so like wheaton is a like broadly speaking like a fucking ferociously hostile place to be anything other than a, like, a cishet white person, right? It is, like, unbelievably homophobic. It is really anti-Semitic.

And, like, a few months ago, I was walking, like, through wheaton downtown to visit a friend and in in the middle of fucking wheaton downtown there they're like there there was someone who on in their in their like fucking lawn had had like had a giant pride flag and like it wasn't like it was like it was like the the it was the the like the brown pride flag too right like that was like even like five years ago that would have been unimaginable like you would have been like you would have been fucking chased out of town by a mob like and that it's just there now and i don't know like they haven't been run out it's still there uh no i it's literally yes yes, everything that Christopher just said. And, you know, these are people that Christopher and I grew up with. Like we literally, I was,

there was a granddaughter of Billy Graham in my high school class. And I think, you know, as much as, you know, these people are not going to be socialists or progressives anytime soon. They are very much like normie moderate Democrats now. But there were a lot of suburban white people who got very turned off by Trump for the Republican Party. And I think this midterm is the confirmation that barring, you know, some kind of economic catastrophe that always, always throws elections to the out of power party. These normie white suburbanites are not going back uh and we you know when you look at trends across the country um you know jb pritzker won dupage county which is the county that wheaton is in yeah which is like you know this is yeah like this used to be within christopher and i's lifetimes this used to be a county that republicans banked on getting 300 000 votes

out of on a statewide margin level um and now it's being won up and down by democrats like democrats flipped the county executive office in dupage county this year um so like chicago suburbs are trending are continuing to trend left atlanta suburbs are continuing to trend left uh the like raleigh durham area north carolina is trending left the texas urban areas are trending left and this isn't just like in comparison to 2016 this is in comparison to 2020 two years ago which was a democratic environment um so the fact that these counties are swinging left in a year where the country, even though the overall results were fine, the country definitely swung right.

Like these people are not going back and not just that these people are not going back, but the ones who are staying Republicans, A, they're moving, they're leaving the suburbs and they're establishing their little new white flight outposts in other places. And the people who are replacing them are largely people of color. Like the suburbs today in America are 60 percent white as compared to in the year 2000 when they were something like 75 to 80 percent white. I think this year was the confirmation we needed that this is a permanent trend, that the suburbs from now on are either going to be awash or even, frankly, just places where Democrats will net votes. And this is all – there still is a lot of fear and there still is reason to be very concerned about the ability of the GOP's power to push things in a revanchist direction in an anti-democratic election to remove the ability of people. Because that is, you know, we're seeing them talk right now. We're seeing guys like Matt Walsh, Christopher Ruffo talk right now about the need to, like, stop young people from voting, to, like, crack down on mail voting. Like, this is not to say, like, all right, it's all done.

done um but it this is like i guess the thing that's that's optimistic about this overall is that it is um it's evidence that the the the the there was this kind of open question after trump won in in 2016 um and if one thing you could look at you could look at, you could look at 2018, you could look at 2020 now, 2022 and go like, well, clearly the trend since then has been for the GOP to lose big in most of these elections. But that was also anything but clear kind of as a result of,

of 2020 and the way COVID fucked things up. And this, this does seem to like cement that, that like, yeah, it, it may, it may have in the long run proved to be a major major tactical failure to to have gone for this guy the way

that they did oh yeah i mean and we can only hope um yeah i mean i personally from an entertainment factor uh cannot wait for the desantis versus trump primary um i will be i will be rooting for trump because he is funnier online um and also i don't think it would make a substantive difference uh in whether or not like who would be the nominee because desantis is just trump without the charisma yeah um but i think yeah hopefully like we saw the republican party pay a price this year for arguably the first time in a long time for their insanity um and it's good to see that that happened uh hopefully it will happen again and i will also note for anyone listening who does you, you care about

elections, you want to get involved somewhere. The next somewhere for you to get involved in is the state of Wisconsin, where there is a state Supreme Court seat up for election in April. If Democrats win that seat, they will flip the Supreme Court in Wisconsin. And that means that the absolutely insane Republican gerrymanders in that state, which pretty much render the state of Wisconsin a non-democracy, will likely get overturned if Democrats are able to flip the Wisconsin Supreme Court, which would mean a lot of good things could happen for a lot of people who live in that state. Okay, there is one other thing that is basically unrelated to this that I want to touch on before a lot of good things can happen for a lot of people who live in that state. Okay. There is one other thing that is like,

basically unrelated to this that I want to touch on before we close up, which is that the extent to which the Republicans have sort of entered chaos mode now, a with, with Trump just sort of like going off on DeSantis and like the, the Republican civil war happening. And then secondly because they they they seem it looks like they've gotten the chaos mode configuration of their house majority yep

yes um any anyone who pays attention to congress i would encourage you to get very very familiar with the term discharge petition uh which is a mechanism by which if you have a majority of the House that is willing to sign a piece of paper that says we should put this bill on the floor no matter what, it goes to the floor no matter what. And I think you're probably going to see Democrats

successfully put a lot of bills on the House floor in the next two years because they're going to get, they're going to pick off the Republican moderates in the northeast uh to sign these these pieces of paper um we should i think we should explain what exactly the republican position looks like because it's oh sure so um it's so i i should caveat this with the statement that there is still like i would say a five percent chance that democrats manage to scrap like scrape their way to a one seat majority um it's not likely by any means but like it is still theoretically on the table mostly because lauren bobert managed

to put herself in a position where she might actually lose um and but default modal outcome i would say is republicans end up with a three or four house seat majority uh in but what that means is that uh cal we get calvin ball for the next two years essentially uh because kevin mccarthy as a person um is well a he's like very unintelligent in general and this is like a very common sentiment that you will run into uh in people who pay attention to congress he is not personally capable of managing a house majority of four this is so widely accepted that nancy pelosi was willing to go on the record in an interview the other day saying that. And so who knows? Kevin McCarthy may not even end up being the speaker.

We may not have a speaker until March because no one would get 218 votes. But whoever has that job, whatever Republican has that job, it is going to be the most thankless job of their life that they will suffer through for the next two years. Because, you know, the pundit class and political operatives love to talk about how ideologically diverse the Democratic Party is in the House. And it's true because like on the left wing end of the caucus, you have people like Rashida Tlaib

and Ilhan Omar. And on the right wing end, you have people like Henry Cuellar who tragically survived his primary this year. But I think it has gone under the radar that Republicans in the House are arguably more ideologically diverse than Democrats are because the moderates or the moderate republicans in the house are like your very standard like socially liberal fiscally conservative types that were very popular in like 2010 um like you had like some of these northeastern republicans who are were more than happy to vote for same-sex

marriage though they would probably vote for uh like to codify roe they would probably vote to codify birth control uh legal like uh legality and on the other end you have marjorie taylor green and like mtg yeah if if there is a person on this earth who is capable of managing that caucus um i don't know who they are i don't think anyone knows who they are. And I think that the smartest thing that that person could do is not take the job and let someone else take the fall for what is going to be two years of chaos that will most likely hurt the Republican brand a lot in the next two years. Yeah, that's like one of the things that actually makes me slightly optimistic is that the Republican Party

is a diverse coalition and it had been being held together sort of, but by Trump. And now Trump's not on Twitter anymore. And Twitter may not exist by the time we get a new speaker. Oh, yeah.

Well, it's also, I think I might add, Chris, it's not just by Trump. And a part of why Trump was able to get the position he did is it's a mix of Trump and owning the libs, right? Like that's a huge part of why the most visible members of this caucus are where they are. That's a huge part of why the most visible members of this caucus are where they are. Like there's no there's no Marjorie Taylor Greene, right, without the way that particular social reinforcement pattern works. And. Yeah, I think that like that's not like number one, if Twitter goes away, which could have happened by the time you listen to this episode, that really gets in the way of their ability to own the libs. But also, if they're just getting their asses kicked up and down the country, they're no longer owning the libs. The libs have not been owned. No, they have not. And I think the other, you know, the other consideration here is that we like to talk a lot in this country, because it's true, about neither party

ever puts forth a substantive policy agenda. And there are a lot of Republican political operatives who are running around right now complaining and saying that Republicans lost because they failed to offer a viable alternative, except that's not true. Republicans did offer a policy agenda in this midterm. And that policy agenda was christian nationalism and american voters took one look at that and said are you fucking for real yeah yeah like that's the thing that like everyone like like people like all the fucking new york times columnists like people don't understand that like there's maybe 30 of the population who actually likes that shit and everyone else in the country is like, what the fuck?

Yeah. But you know, the actual sort of median person in the US is so much less like that than the median person that every pundit imagines. The version of reality that exists in sort of

like the minds of the media class like it's not true yeah they've created like incredible sandcastles in their mind now the tides like washing them away I don't know if the tides washing them away I think we can we can only hope that the New York Times gets

washed out to sea but I think you know i sorry go for it no no no please i was just gonna say like you know obviously the next two years are gonna be in the next two years um and no one can predict the future anyone who anyone who tells you in literally the next 18 months that they know how the 2024 elections are going to go is lying to you and you should block them and perhaps report them to like yeah whatever like non-retributive forms of authority exist in your local area but um my you know based on how this went if the same trends play out for the next two years, which would be suburbs continue

swinging left, Democrats continue to rack up problems with minority voters, but like not to the extent that we're going to like lose urban seats anytime soon. And Republicans continue racking up margins in the states and like the seats that they're already winning by 80 points, which helps them on a statewide level, but does not help them in the U S house. My, I would say like, assuming the current trends continue the trends we've had since 2016, um,

that would mean Democrats flip back the house in 2024. Uh, it would also mean that we are once again in like the fight of our lives for the Senate, as we likely will be for every single cycle for the next 10 years. So, just kind of get used to that um while you can when you have the breather um but yeah like we had an okay midterm that was literally a year ago looking like it was going to be possibly the worst midterm wipeout uh possibly possibly the end of of the republic as yeah literally literally yes literally yes um so you know 24 might be good i think the responsible thing to do now is to close

out by each giving one of our unhinged predictions for what we're going to see in 2024 and i'm going to start i think we're going to see Musk and McConaughey vie for the governor of Texas once Greg Abbott is forced out from a sex scandal. That's my call. Prove to me. When it happens, everybody

allow me some french fries. Oh god. It's going to happen. Calling it now. Oh, God. It's gonna happen. Calling it now. Tom Brady, I reckon. Tom Brady's gonna take a swing at it. At Texas? No.

One of those states up in where it's cold and rain all the time. Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. One of those. Yeah. I assume he's from, broadly speaking, Illinois to Wisconsin. Yeah. one of those yeah i assume he's from broadly speaking illinois to wisconsin yeah he is he would be running in new england please do not pin that on us yeah no yeah yeah bro but not that kind of cold like yeah just just gray not like like miserable cold like you will have on there oh yeah tom brady running in a place where you can't grow tomatoes is yeah yeah it's my prediction that feels good after his massive success selling the the the hit crypto platform ftx

what what can't tom brady do who knows don't answer don't ask that question put that out there robin win games for the buccaneers yeah true the argent germany yeah survive eating what any normal human being would eat on a given day uh garrison i don't know i don't i don't care about this type of thing very much that's the perfect reason to make a prediction unhinged prediction yeah i don't know i think one of the funniest things is that earlier this year there was this big bitcoin account who said that if things continue bitcoin's going to be a major factor in the midterms which is really funny so i'm not wrong so i'm saying that, what's an even dumber cryptocurrency? Doge would be the obvious one. I was thinking of Doge.

I was thinking of Doge. Dogecoin is going to be a significant factor in the 2024 election. Yeah. We still got two to go. Mine is that, okay, Pritzker is going to bring back like the old school democratic machine. And Biden is going to fall out a window.

Kamala Harris is going to sort of turn up. They're going to drain a dam in 30 years and find her body. Do we think that Biden's going to run again? Yes. No, he won't, because he will have fallen out of a building near the end of 2020, like the end of about 2023. Okay. Christopher is going to take over the US. Christopher is predicting.

That's your prediction that Joe Biden will fall out of a window. Christopher is predicting the forced defederation of Prague. Here's the thing. We all think that the threat to bourgeois democracy comes from the Republicans. It's not. It's Pritzker. Pritzker's going to coup the fucking country and probably 60% of the population is going to be completely on board because he's going to be less insane

than everyone that's been in charge of this country for the last 50 years. And you know who's going to save democracy then? Matthew McConaughey. Okay. That leaves me. What is my unhinged prediction? I don't think I'm going to top Christopher's

prediction about J.B. Pritzker. I... You know, I think my unhinged prediction will be that Taylor Swift runs for Senate in Tennessee. Oh, God! Oh, she could do it, yeah. Yeah, don't. Look, if she

If she brings on If she brings on The head of her fan club Who went to jail In Israel For refusing to serve In the IDF I think that

She actually might get Some progressive votes Yeah That may have been Untrue sadly The Oh The Swifty refusal

But maybe not Really Really Why Why did you even Introduce that possibility Why would you Why did you even introduce that possibility? Why would you say that to me? Because not all these beautiful things we believe in can be true.

But Taylor Swift running for Tennessee, she would almost certainly be better than whoever is a Tennessee senator now, right? Yeah. It's now Colonel Sanders or someone basically the same as Colonel Sanders, I imagine. Colonel Sanders was a Kentucky blackbird. That's Kentucky. Yeah, come on, British James. Colonel Sanders is Kentucky.

It's called Kentucky Fried Chicken. James, that was basically a slur. There is a type of guy epitomized by Colonel Sanders who also occupies all the Senate seats south of the Mason-Dixon line. That's not true. That's my stance, and I'm sticking to it. I am pushing back from this. Well, I'm going to watch a foghorn leghorn video

because that's who I'm thinking of now, James. All right, everybody. That's been the episode go vote swift yeah vote another couple of times just make sure yeah look the old chicago model vote early vote often yeah pay for pay for a few meals everyone go to colorado and vote against lauren poppers yeah yeah literally seven of you or whatever could swing this. Move to Colorado. We can't deal with her shit anymore. Fund raise in order to purchase a huge number of drones

and drop ballots over wherever it is in Colorado. They count votes. I assume Denver? Yeah. Blanket Denver in your ballots. And stop listening to podcasts Welcome, I'm Danny Thrill Won't you join me at the fire and dare enter

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Offline on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, I'm Jack Peace Thomas, the host of a brand new Black Effect original series, Black Lit, the podcast for diving deep into the rich world of Black literature. I'm Jack Peace Thomas, and I'm inviting you to join me in a vibrant community of literary enthusiasts dedicated to protecting and celebrating our stories. Black Lit is for the page turners, for those who listen to audiobooks while commuting or running errands, for those who find themselves seeking solace, wisdom, and refuge between the chapters.

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We just wanted to mention that both of our guests today are members of UAW, but they do not speak on behalf of UAW. Okay, enjoy the podcast. It could happen here. It's a podcast. It's a podcast. We're doing a podcast. It's a podcast. And today it's a podcast with me. I'm James and I'm joined by Chris and I'm joined by a couple of grad students from UC San Diego.

Today we're going to talk about grad student strikes. We're going to talk about the grad student strike vote that's coming up at UC San Diego. Today we're going to talk about grad student strikes. We're going to talk about the grad student strike vote that's coming up at UC San Diego and some other grad student strikes that Chris and I have been part of back in the middle ages. Okay, so I'm joined today by Alex. Alex, you're studying, I'm trying to get this correct, cancer genomics at UCSD, is that correct? That is correct. Thanks for having me. Yeah, you're welcome. And Tyler Bell as well. And Tyler, you're a postdoc and you're doing Alzheimer's research. Is that right? Yes. And you're both members of UAW? Yes, that's correct. I've been a member for at least two years. But yeah. Yeah. And I'm a member of the actual, the subset of UAW that just formed representing student researchers in completing their PhDs.

So we'll explain all the details of that, of course, going forward. Yeah, I think maybe we should start there and explain kind of the economic relationship of PhD and postdoc students to the university, like what work they do. And I guess as we were talking about beforehand, people might not even be familiar with the fact that you get paid by the university in many of these positions, right? So can you explain like how that works? Yeah, definitely. So yeah, as you mentioned, we do in our various roles as graduate students, teachers and postdocs,

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

Those students are known as graduate student researchers or GSRs who are represented by a new union that just formed because it actually became recently legal to form such a union in the state of California. We are represented by SRU bargaining for our first contract. And then we have the postdocs, which Tyler can probably talk more about, who are students who have completed their, or I'm sorry, I should, want to really clarify, they're not students. They are employees of the university who have completed their degree, so are no longer students and are doing research work in labs, usually driving their own projects forward under supervision of professors. So they are represented by a third union that's part of this sort of collective organizing

called UAW 5810. Wait, you have postdocs unions? Yeah. Oh, that's so cool. I think the one here at UC is actually the biggest and one of the first ones that formed. I remember I was on a Wikipedia page, which I shouldn't use as an academic,

but I totally saw us on there and I was like, holy crap. You made the game away. Yeah. Yeah. And I think it's fascinating because there are all these memes that you'll see as a graduate student. And then it's like when you finish your PhD where it's like you always think that you're going to get off the grind, right? Like you're like, oh, I'll do my MA and then I'll get off and then I'll do my PhD and then the people will respect me and I'll be compensated for the massive amount of work I do.

And then like, I'll just finish this postdoc. And then you're like, oh, I'm 55. You know, like it's all of those positions are heavily exploited by universities that make a metric shit ton of money from these people who, as you say, do most of the work that keeps the university running so perhaps we could talk about the issues that are at stake that are leading to this this strike authorization vote and maybe if we go through a little bit of a timeline as well that would be great yeah so maybe tyler maybe you could

like explain the 5810 timeline and i can talk a little bit about the SRU and I guess kind of 2865 one. Yeah, so chronologically, the postdocs were up for their contract negotiation, which that's just to set our wages, benefits and workplace safety and other types of protections we want. And that actually came up, I think in September of 2021. And I could be wrong on the date specifically, so much has changed. But we initially back in 2021, started actually asking people what they wanted to see in their new contract, like our members, because the union isn't like, like, I if I didn't care about the union, or no one else cared, it wouldn't exist. Like, it's the postdocs. And we have to take out like a couple of hours a week to do this thing. And sometimes it's 20 hours on top of our research, which is 40 hours. And so during that time, we surveyed everyone, got the demands that people wanted. And the top two issues that people asked for that they want

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

like affordable for postdocs, because currently we don't get any kind of like free pass for that um they don't even consider it um in fact you know they they probably think we all have cars which isn't true because a lot of postdocs are international scholars we were also asking for child care support because currently like a good bit of you know uh our postdocs have children um which is normal because this is a normal like family creation time or whatever you want to call it but um and indeed it can be one of the only times as an academic when it when it really sort of doesn't massively disadvantage your career to have to start a family right exactly and like postdocs like the whole preposition of a postdoc was you know there's not enough faculty

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

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

need to the table. And they've also been making unilateral changes to things like bullying policies and other workplace issues without even being at the bargaining table. And the last thing that they've been doing during this process is serving members of our union outside of the bargaining process. We don't know about it. I mean, we did find out about it and then we filed the, um, uh, the complaint. And so right now we're at a point where we've gotten a lot of things, you know, kind of like moved on in terms of things that aren't compensation in terms of

our bargaining, um, like things that we won such as bullying protections. That was something that we actually had to like have a big action for to actually get that on the table to move. So currently we won protections against bullying, which is kind of like pretty enormous because in academia, the university says we're against bullying and that they have all these resources for you, but the resources always end at we're right, you're wrong. And now we have something in our contracts, not just for the postdocs and academic researchers, but also for the other bargaining units to actually protect us in a process that we could grieve it as union represented workers. as postdocs and academic researchers because they started bargaining kind of like maybe um further along in that year with us but they're kind of at the same place of like not getting the same type of responses and um we just want them to actually come to the table bring the people that can make the decisions so that we can have you know affordable housing fair wages to

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

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

And that's money that usually goes to things like capital projects that could go back to keeping, you know, the postdocs actually living in an okay living situation. Can we just explain what capital projects are uh so capital projects are things like you know um planning out building buildings that they want and other things things that aren't really like compensation based or employee based you know because the university like uc is the biggest landowner and so they obviously want more and more things that they can develop um or lands that they can buy. And that's kind of what they kind of focus many of these indirects on.

And I really don't know the clear picture on indirects. And that's kind of the problem is that we don't know where all this money kind of goes. If people, obviously lots of our listeners aren't in San Diego, the scale of construction at UCSD is incredible. Like I've been here for 15 years now and I swear every time I go back there's a new building like and in terms of student housing it's nearly all student housing I think that they've built but yeah and if I can jump in about one of those which relates a lot to why graduate students have become more active on this campus. Three or four of those extraordinarily large buildings you're talking about were actually intended to be built as subsidized graduate

student housing, where you would be, you know, you get on a wait list, you're guaranteed once you get off the wait list, you can live there for two years and pay below market rent. That lasted for a little bit of time, but the university the university, uh, just a couple of years ago or so, uh, almost doubled, um, the price for those units. Uh, they tried to hide it behind saying that their capacity increases, but, um, what they're saying is for the same price as before, you can live with two people in a very small square footage studio apartment. Um, but really that studio is now just double. Um, So that is one of the things, certainly, that we are concerned about is that, yeah, a significant portion of the university's budget

does go into these capital improvement projects, which are nominally intended for student and postdoc benefit, but which tend to come back and not be quite as helpful in the long run. Yeah. I mean, it seems like they're just doing real estate speculation and then doing rent extraction from it which yeah and this is something they've done like they did this there's a very very similar thing in what like 2009 uh like like again like they built what i built a new building it was affordable for a short period of time and then it suddenly became completely unaffordable and like they've really consistently extracted rent from the people that they are underpaying yeah and those buildings were actually this this incident even got a lot of faculty on our side because those buildings were a major um draw for how we were able to recruit new people to come and

do research with us as we were saying yeah the, the cost of living here is really high. You're not going to get a huge stipend or salary, but we do have this subsidized housing and people had actually already committed to do their PhD here and labs at the university. And then the rent increase came out that April or May and people said, well, no. And then they, a bunch of people decommitted from programs. So it was a, it was a significant issue here, but they have not backed off of that. Yeah. And the problem with the university being one of the biggest landlords is that when they increase the rents for these even grad housing, it affects everyone else. So the prices, like my current rent, I live maybe a mile away from campus. My rent was $1,700, which was eating up most of my income anyway, and it went up to 2500. And,

you know, this is directly tied to like, the university setting a higher market rate, which then allows them to hurt everyone else that lives, you know, not just in around UCSD, but also in San Diego generally. Yeah, one of the big things about that we're trying to get the university to understand, and one of the reasons I'm proud of the demands that we're making in this round of bargaining is the effect we have on the local economy. And people who aren't even affiliated with the university have their lives affected based on the rent and based on the cost of things because of the economic footprint that we have.

And as Tyler mentioned, one of our demands is some more subsidized transit passes. The university already subsidizes a significant amount of transit, but it's not enough and it's not enough to actually really make a difference in terms of emissions in our region. So we're trying to raise both our own working conditions as well as make meaningful changes in the university released in part a very funny statement the other day that accused us, and used transit as an example, accused us of having a, quote, social justice agenda. So I wasn't quite sure if the university or Ron DeSantis wrote that particular release, but it was quite funny. The more I'm thinking about this right this is a public university why are they even charging rent they own the land right wait why are they even charging rent in the first place like what what is oh my god like well it's just the housing the housing example i brought up was funded through what they very proudly refer to as a public-private partnership. Oh, boy. So that's where the money is going. Oh, great.

It's going to investors. Oh. And recently for the postdocs, their solution to our housing crisis was they obtained some building in downtown San Diego, which is 12 or more miles away from campus. And the building starts at rents of $3,000 or more. Oh, this building yeah with the one with the creepy bed and the um the closet that comes out and kills your cat but no what it has like a closet that folds out oh good comes out the wall it's at their extended downtown yeah i've been to PRA a bunch of stuff about that building and they've been quite reticent to hand it over.

Oddly. So, Alex, is there any more context you wanted to add from your side about like is about sort of what is driving people to ask for a strike authorization vote? concerns as graduate students are certainly very similar to a lot of the concerns that postdoctoral students have, except that we make even less money than they do. So certainly urgent on the compensation side, our units are demanding a minimum graduate student stipend of $54,000 a year, whereas none of us make more than $33,000 or $34,000 right right now and that's very dependent on the program and very dependent on your source of funding so most make quite less than that. We also have a number of other issues that have come up and cause problems for students that we want to be able to have a union in order to rectify. I mentioned that our student researchers united union is actually new we're bargaining for our first contract And we think we're going to be able to get a lot of practical benefits out of that, not just in terms of a contract, but actually something where we can have some parity and some organization to come to bat for us when the university has known this for a long time but the payroll system that

manages graduate student stipends and fellowships and and and stipend disbursements is a bit unreliable for reasons that they can't quite explain oh boy yeah we had this uh when so i i wasn't i wasn't a grad student but i was an undergrad when our chicago's grad students went on strike and that was a big thing of like people would get paid. The university would, sometimes they wouldn't get paid enough. They wouldn't get paid at all. There was another time where they'd accidentally get overpaid and the university wouldn't tell them

and then they'd just take all the money out of their bank account. And it was a catastrophe. Yeah. Is it similar things here? Very much so. Yeah, I got overpaid and then I got overpaid once. Yeah, there is. At least my personal story with this is pretty much ever since.

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

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

just, you know, send polite emails and say, hi, can you pay me if you get a chance uh we will actually have a literal international union that will be sending those emails and say you know you fix this or by the terms of the contract we get x y and z damages um and we're hoping that that leads to improvements in the system as a whole because because it will get more expensive. So that is certainly one of the reasons we formed SRU after a brief vote to strike for recognition, because the university ignored the Employee Relations Board of California, which resulted in some very spicy press releases from Perb, which is great. But we did eventually get recognition. And now hopefully in a month or so

we'll have a contract yeah to explain for people as well who aren't familiar if you're teaching right you may not have been paid over the summer in in some positions like i know i wasn't in mine so like a late payment in september or even waiting till october like is you're already at the bottom of your savings like uh there were there were fall quarters that quarters at ucsd where like i lived in my car because i didn't didn't make it all the way through december on the savings i had you know so it really is and i'm sure there are a lot of still like unhoused graduate students at ucsd because the cost of living and the the wages are so divergent.

Yeah. Hey, Chris, you know what won't make you live in your car? Oh, God. There's no way you can actually. That's great. It's going to be the Washington Highway Patrol again. The San Diego Police Department won't let you live in your car? Yeah.

Todd Gloria. Okay. Yeah, this is brought to you by landlords enjoy these adverts and we're back and so what I wanted to talk about was some of the actions that have been taken by student organizations so far and also some of the repercussions that have come from those actions because again student organizing is a little different and I want people to understand that so maybe if it makes sense to start with this 2020 wildcat strike, we can start there. If you want to start further back, then we can start further back too. Yeah, no, 2020 is probably about the extent of how far

my experience goes back. But I can tell kind of the story of that a little bit. There was a movement that we refer to as COLA, which stands for Cost of Living Adjustment, and has a very convenient acronym, which resulted in people coming to protest with empty bottles of Coke on a stick, and that was a really common sign. It's fantastic. But that was a movement that started at University of California, Santa Cruz. One of the, for people who aren't familiar with UC, it is really actually many campuses together in one system. And this particular one started at our campus in Santa Cruz. And it was what is called a wildcat strike, which is, if you're not familiar with unions, that is, at least in America, there

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

Highway Patrol. Also, there's, well, I've asked, I'll send this to Chris and James to put in the footnotes, but there is a Vice article where someone did a lot of public records requests and found out that the FBI was also involved, or at least FBI provided technology was involved. There may have been sort of counterterrorism units involved in the state in interesting ways. But essentially, there was a highly militarized response to what was essentially a few grad students not doing grades. So this response, the images that came out of this, people getting arrested for being in the street and such, started to actually provoke sympathy actions across the rest of the campus. And there was really a campus-wide or a system-wide movement starting

to build. And then March of 2020 happened. And almost all of us, our labs shut down, the campuses shut down. Those of us who work from home could. Those of us who couldn't often had, you know, many other struggles to deal with and that kind of killed the pandemic essentially killed that movement but at the same time you know these UAW 2865 and UAW 5810 already existed SRU was starting to get formed at this time we actually managed to get card check recognition during the pandemic where no one could actually go to one central point and get cards so I'm quite proud of that. So we've sort of rebuilt off of kind of sort of the ashes of that movement. And even though it was not, and I personally support it, but even though it was not a university sort of, or excuse me, certainly not university supported, but union supported movement, I think it really helped to

kind of plant seeds for graduate students and postdocs having some, you know, some degree of labor consciousness. When I was doing walkthroughs to get people signed up for the union, get people to vote on the strike, they would say, you know, they haven't obviously been keeping track of all the bargaining, but say, oh, yeah, I remember. Is this like in Santa Cruz? I remember what they did. And people would be ready, you know ready to get involved. So it was a deferred kind of benefit given the pandemic, but I think it helped get a lot of the energy that we have today. Yeah, that's great to see, actually, because I know we really struggled with sort of political consciousness among the grad students in my time at UCSD. Yeah, I guess it makes sense.

I remember I were talking to some people who were sort of involved with it and like watching the videos coming out of it like that was i think like probably the most intense military response i think i've ever seen to a strike in the u.s it was wild like yeah the university chancellor chancellor of santa cruz at that time uh bragged or i don't know if it was bragged or complained, that they were spending $300,000 a day on that response. Yeah, they went incredibly hard. And I want to kind of get into why universities really, really strongly dislike strikes. And partly because they rely heavily on underpaid graduate student labor, right? And are increasingly relying heavily on underpaid adjunct labor as well to take the place of these expensive tenure

track positions. So can we talk about a little bit about what it means to strike as a grad student? Because it's not the same to strike as a grad student as it is to strike if you work on a production line. It really can make a serious impact on your whole career and it can make a serious impact on your relationship, perhaps with your supervisor or advisor or mentor. And so can you, one of you or both of you explain a little bit about the repercussions that come from striking as a graduate student? Yeah, I'm happy to share my thoughts.

And then Tyler, you can maybe talk about what postdocs are thinking. Um, from the, uh, TA perspective, I think I don't want to, I'm not currently, I'm currently a student researcher, so I'm not currently teaching. I think in that sense, it makes it, there's a little more cut and dry. It's, you're not going to teach your discussion section. You're not going to grade your exams. Those are very concrete things you can do that are sort of separate from your research work.

For those of us paid to do research, it's a little bit harder to figure out where exactly you're sometimes your labor for the university is and where you're kind of research and not wanting to sort of harm yourself like i know people who have planned their advancements to candidacy during this time and i think they're still going through with that because we consider well that's more academic that's more your personal uh kind of progress um in life and and so those sort of things will continue um uh but but i think it's uh one of the things um that that's sort of um uh important is sort of your day-to-day work in the lab and not necessarily just on your research project but on just sort of maintaining things, answering questions, communicating with collaborators, sharing your results with people, helping undergraduates in the lab, helping you know prepare figures or prepare text for your advisor to submit grants and all these other things that are not necessarily like I am doing this particular, you know, thing for my degree. So I know a lot of people are worried about especially because in the life sciences,

we have situations where we have experiments that go on for months, and they cost 10s of 1000s of dollars to run. And if you miss a time point on that, you're throwing months of your life and the window and that hurts yourself really more than the university. So it's been, I think, especially because organizing grad student researchers is something new, at least in America. I think it's something that in the coming years will be kind of considered more and people will kind of, I think, what I hope is people learn from whatever our experience happens to be next week when we walk out and start to kind of calibrate what does it look like? What is an effective work stoppage for a researcher look like? And I think people are, we've had a lot of discussions and we've had program meetings with a bunch of students

from my program got together and talked about this. And I think it might end up looking different for different people, but really what we're trying to communicate is, is don't do something that's going to, um, you know, damage yourself. Um, and, but, but, but do what you can to disrupt normal operations, show up at the picket, um, uh, and, and make sure you, you communicate, you know, to everyone around you why you're leaving and, and, and, you know, cause as much disruption as you can. That's kind of what our thinking is at the moment. Yeah. Anything else you want to add, Tyler?

Yeah. So I wanted to add that. So for this one, this strike, I mean, the reason that we're doing it is because they're not coming to the table in good faith. So I was going to correct my number. So we had 27 complaints that we filed with the California Public Employment Relations Board. And six of those were actually official complaints to the University of California. And so this strike is a little different because it's, you know, it's interesting to have to explain to other people why this is so important, especially in such a short time frame. And so for postdocs, like on a day-to-day basis, we do so much research that every day matters,

and our employment schedules aren't very long. So I say that postdocs are generally in there for five years, but PIs don't want to keep a postdoc for a year or two or longer. Especially like I've noticed a pattern here in academia in general that postdocs, some people prefer to keep them a year and two years because by the time you ask for pay raises or the time you ask for career development and to get to your next stage, you're not worth it to them anymore and they change you out. So when I come in as a postdoc, each position I've come in, every day mattered. And setting up my research experiment, setting up my papers, setting up what I was going to do for the job search, because you don't have that much time. It takes six to eight months to get even an initial interview for a faculty job. And that's a rare thing that you would get anyway.

I think about 2% of postdocs become faculty at this point. And so we're giving up a lot of yeah it's really bleak and so like right now i think the fact that we authorize the strike based on the um bad faith bargaining we did that because like things are so important but we know what we're going to lose so if you have to strike for weeks that is lost experiments that's lost time to do our publications be competitive for this competitive job field. And also we're going to let down a lot of people because we're kind of anchors in our lab for the undergraduates and the undergraduate students and also the techs in our lab. And so

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

And seeing them suffer, you know, most of us postdocs don't want to see anyone else have to go through that. So it's worth the lost time. And it's kind of incalculable, but I could say what we would lose because grants are so up in the air but you know we're talking millions of dollars for a grant cycle being lost if a postdoc can't you know submit the application we're talking you know uh what alex said how expensive this equipment experiments are in these big labs um in biology and engineering so it's really immeasurable and i think it's on the uc to come to the table in good faith and say, hey, let's not do this. Let's not ruin their research and their teaching, because that's the thing that we're here to support.

And I just want to say that overall, we're only less than one percent of UC's total budget. So what is it to give us a fair wage and a good housing so we can continue to not continue to continue to do our research and teaching and not have to go on strike and lose all of this yeah yeah i think it's very fair uh you know what else uh it only pays out one percent of their income to their employees is it uh the washington state highway patrol no it's not they pay no yeah yeah yeah it's disappointing isn't it and we're we're back yeah so i think you've done a really excellent job of explaining uh sort of what's at stake and what uh people can stand to lose i know it can be very confusing also as a teacher i will add like what do you do when you're you're not supposed to communicate right like so like what about when your students email

you that can be very difficult or, especially if it comes towards the time when you're writing application letters or you're writing letters of support for your BA students who want to go into an MA or PhD program. Many of us teach as much out of vocation as for the 30-odd grand a year we can make at a place where the cost of living is insane. And so we want to help those people because we care about our students.

And so it can be very hard for us to go on strike. I will say that we're very fortunate in the community college district here, which is a different system for people who aren't aware. It's an entirely different university system. We have a very strong union. And as a result, our adjunct faculty here are, I believe, some of the best paid in the country. They teach at a community college sometime. And that's exclusively thanks to a strong union and faculty being willing to back up that union.

So it does work, which is nice to see. But let's talk about some of the actions that have been taken already. I understand some folks occupied a very busy intersection earlier this year in the spring, right? Do you want to talk about that? Yeah, that was the action that we had back in April to sort of raise awareness of the issues with bargaining and some of the other things that were going on at that time um and i was really impressed with uh how well it went actually um in terms of uh the number of students who came out number who were actually willing to participate in that but yeah we got a several hundred people all together marched down to um the intersection for our san

diego listeners that's uh via la jolla and la jolla village drive just so you can get a picture of how important of an intersection this was those of you who know it, and did not allow any cars to be at an intersection for an entire rush hour, which was fantastic. We walked off a Whole Foods. It's a real... We did, yeah. Yeah, it took... Yeah, it took, I hope that San Diego PD billed UCSD for that because they had about 50 officers controlling traffic, two helicopters. It was quite a response. I talked to an undercover cop on the bridge over the highway.

They had, he was upset that he was missing something, some baseball game or something. I don't know. Should have been a cop. Could have avoided it. Exactly. Could have just left. Could have had a real job. Could have just left.

I'm actually staring at that intersection right now. And if I could tell you how busy it is, like we were terrified of what, like safety was the most important thing. And I think we did a good job being sure everyone was safe, but like it's busy. It is a heartline over here in La Jolla. Yeah.

My first day in Americaica i was walking with another grad student to try and find some food and uh we tried to cross that road got stuck in the middle got a jaywalking ticket and i knew i'd made a great choice in coming to california at that time yeah that is that road it's like if you want to cross all three ways because it's one of our one of our stupid california roads we can only cross the intersection on three sides so if you want to go all the way around that's going to be like five six seven minutes waiting at crosswalks it's it's oh my god but that's that's for maybe a different podcast about a transportation nightmare here in san diego yeah um i think there's one other action that we had that i would really want to

highlight and and this was about you know related to a postdoc. So maybe maybe Tyler can kind of fill in the details about the the action we had for for the that postdocs. I can't I can't I'm blanking on your name. But Tyler, were you able to talk about there's been so many postdocs in actions. So this is a really horrible case where someone who, you know, had brought up that there was data ethics issues in their lab, which obviously as any postdoc or graduate student, telling your boss that they're doing something wrong never goes well. But this person was bringing up this issue. This person also was pregnant. And at that point, the person, once they found out that this person was pregnant,

had decided, oh, well, you need to leave by the end of the year, which would make it to where the person would get deported, because this was an international scholar, in their third trimester in January. And so it was a horrible case. And have no income or insurance during her third trimester. Yeah. And so, Alex, if you have a good memory of the action, I'll let you speak about it because it was pretty awesome. Yeah, it was pretty great. We got a ton of people to rally in the health sciences area of campus. People essentially set up little mini pickets of the relevant buildings,

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

of the department and got him on video saying i think this person deserves an extension of their contract and a day or two later uh ucsd did actually award uh this postdoc um an extension of her contract but yeah that this is an incident that you know never would have seen the light of day um unless this had been raised uh unless we hadn't already had this kind of activist kind of consciousness going on because of the ongoing bargaining and the union was able to, postdoc union was able to win kind of, I think, out of a really terrible situation. I think Salvage probably wanted the best outcome. She'll be able to have her child here and look for new jobs in the meantime

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

being let go within four months of their employment in an inappropriate way. This person was kind of using their lab as that research mill I talked about, only really hired women postdocs and really did not treat them well, despite doing research in women's health. And the grad students also came out for that. And we got to save that person from getting immediately fired and they're better off now. Hell yeah. Yeah, it's great. I think that solidarity is super important and it's the only thing that stops the university from just rampantly exploiting everyone apart from

like 150 people at the very top. Yeah. Actually, on that note, can I ask, have y'all been working with like, I guess what's the tactical name for them? Like the other like the the the other non-student unions on campus oh it's like aft employee unions yeah yeah or like yeah yeah yeah they um unfortunately most of the unions don't have sympathy strike or uh yeah uh those

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

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

what you happen to have at the end of that is people that have generational wealth at the end of it who happen to stay in these programs. And I think that's what really motivated the faculty to come out and say something because like UC says, Oh, we support equity and diversity, but then they have seen constantly the university not do anything materially to change that. Yeah, yeah, it's good. It's good to see the faculty showing up.

And again, that's the sort of, that's how we fix these things, right? Is by sticking together with solidarity, with organizing. So maybe to finish up, if we talk about what next week's going to look like, or what next week might look like, I guess. Well, I guess it'll be this week by the time this comes out. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

So what can people look for on the timeline from UCSD? From the university or from the strike? From the strike, yeah. From the strike, yeah. Well, we'll have a number of pickets throughout campus, mostly kind of trying to keep them geographically oriented. So everyone from the surrounding buildings just go to, you know, one specific spot. We're doing, you know, signups,SD, but all the campuses. So that's our total bargaining unit membership across three unions is 48,000 people. Of those, 75% voted on our strike-off vote, 98% voted yes. So we're expecting a pretty significant turnout of that entire

membership to be on the picket line. So that will, there will be, you know, those TAs who are walking out will be the, that'll be the first disruption university feels before they feel the research disruption. They will very clearly see the teaching disruption and exams not taking place, grades not being entered, sections not being taught across every single campus. And that will certainly be something that they will have to deal with. And hopefully the size of the disruption in the first few days will convince them to come to the bargaining table in a reasonable way. And if not, we are prepared to continue until they do. to continue until they do. Yeah, and the other interesting part about what's going to happen next week

is that this is a picket line that is going to be not just including, you know, researchers and instructors, but also people that support us. So there's a big conference downtown for a lot of neuroscientists. And it's called SFN.

I can't remember what that stands for. But a lot of them are actually coming to the picket line to support us. Amazing. I didn't know about that. That's great. Yeah, I think that's pretty exciting. I didn't know it was in San Diego. But they're going to be here and also vouch for us.

Because UC does, like, we are the leading research group. And we contribute to a lot of the research that are at these meetings anyway. There's also going to be, it a child friendly picket line and for people with access needs we're going to have um you know virtual picketing and you'll see what that looks like um it's still being developed but i think that's pretty exciting as someone you know with a disability myself it's exciting that other people can contribute to that yeah it's very cool of you guys to do that. It's very cool. All right, how can people help? How can people support you?

How can people find you on the internet? Yeah, so I think if you want to keep up with the strike news, there's three Twitter accounts, the SRU UAW, UAW 5810, and UAW 2865. I think they kind of share a lot of the same content sometimes because we're all kind of doing this together, but that's a good place to keep track of the news. I know there is a link to there's a they've set up a hardship strike fund.

I don't have that link off the top of my head. But if you can put that in the notes, I guess. Yeah. Yeah. And if you go to fair, you see now dot org, it'll have all the information about what's happening, but also those type of links too. So if you want some context, it's a pretty good website.

Yeah. And then how about you two personally? Would you like to share your personal Twitters or do you just want to stick with the organizational ones? I would love to. I promise I'm not that fun, but mine is TylerBellPhD. That's my tag. Yeah I promise I'm not that fun but mine is Tyler Bell PhD that's my tag yeah and I'm Alex T. Wenzel

on Twitter once this is over I'll probably go back to tweeting entirely about my work and pictures of buses I love your Twitter Alex yeah Alex is a high value follow oh thank you Alex gives live updates about transit and it's exciting you see

a train it's all good it really like hits that like five-year-old child we have pretty electric buses in san diego now what can i say yeah yeah no all right all right thank you so much for your time both of you i really appreciate it best of luck next week maybe i'll come up and bring you i don't know some soup or like like a oil can that we can start firing on campus or something. I would love that. Let's do it. I have one here. Let's do it. I'm down. All right. Yeah, best of luck. And we'll look forward to hearing what happens.

Thank you so much for talking to us. Hello, podcast fans. I know you got to the end of the episode and you were thinking not enough james not enough strikes uh not enough ucsd so lucky you i've been up to san uc san diego today uh and i've recorded uh with tyler and alex uh at the strike and we got some audio of the strike going on as well uh it was really amazing really incredible to see that many people out never thought i'd see that at UCSD. So without further ado,

here's my interview with them. All right. So I'm here with Tyler and Alex again, this time with more background noise. We're at the strike now. How many people are here roughly? Oh man, somewhere probably around at least a couple thousand right now.

Definitely a couple thousand people out here. It's really impressive. I went to UCSD, if you haven't picked that up yet, and we did not get this many people, even when people started hanging nooses around campus. I don't think our project's got this big. So this is genuinely very impressive. And how have things gone so far?

What's been happening? I think things have gone really well so far. This is day two as we're recording this that we've been on strike. There has been some progress at the bargaining table that I've heard, but we do know that UC is going to try to drag this out. They think that they can outlast our momentum. But so far as you can really hear from the noise behind us and see all the different thousands of people converging

from all the picket locations across campus that they've been at since 8 in the morning. I think our energy is going strong. What do you think, Tyler? Yeah, so I think the energy is really strong here today. The UC did not expect us to come on day two, which we know because at bargaining they canceled our meetings for today because they didn't expect us to show up. But somehow, magically, a meeting emerged around 2 o'clock today,

and it may be due to the fact that 2,000 people are out here pretty pissed and want a fair contract. But yeah, I think the momentum is pretty high. We actually did more disruption today going directly talking to the deans and the faculty and screaming in their offices as they sat really comfy. I'll say, yeah, first floor seminars didn't go well today.

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

any particular sense, but it's the way the university run things. So there has been some emails that are sent out that are of questionable legal correctness as to whether we can be hurt in terms of our academic standing for participating on the strike. That is definitely not true. If we are, if the activity that's governed under the, what our union is representing us for. So we know we've had some issues with that. Tyler, I guess you could talk about maybe some other examples that have come out. So on the postdoc side, right now the university has released like an FAQ of sorts in an email where it says, oh, well, you'll have to tell the NIH that your postdocs aren't doing research and that their funding needs to get pulled.

But that's kind of a joke. There's no like reporting mechanism for that. It's more like a stipend for a living. So we're telling people just to stay strong. And people seem to kind of pass like the threat that they're making. And a lot of faculty see through it too. Is that okay? We've just intercepted you when you're going somewhere else.

That's all right, I'm here. Would you like to introduce yourself? I'm Vidya, I'm a postdoc. I'm pretty new. In UCSD, I joined in April and I came here having already done another postdoc and a PhD in Europe. I joined the union almost instantly when I came here since I've I was basically horrified for lack of a better way to put it. So I studied in the EU for 10 years

and my experience of academia is what I experienced there which was decent working conditions, being able to save money, not having to spend 50% of your salary on rent. So when I came here and experienced postdoc life, I couldn't believe it. So I believe I met Tyler when I came here for the first time and we did this orientation. That was awesome. And also horrifying at the same time, sorry.

It was awesome to meet you because I realized it was then that I learned how a labor union worked. My knowledge of labor unions was minimal up until the point that I moved here. So minimal that I didn't even know what labor unions in the EU functioned like until I came here and realized, oh my God, we are actually lucky to have a union

that supports postdocs. And this is not the case in a lot of places in the US. Yeah, yeah, that's true. So how has the strike action gone so far, from your perspective? It's been crazy. We've been planning this for so long. It's a bit surreal to be part of it.

I think it's been going great. It's been very energizing. And it's been intense. Yeah, it's hard, right? None of us really want to be out here and strike. And the fact that so many people are putting work on hold just speaks to the intensity and seriousness of the problem and what we're striking for. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I think that's very true. It's really impressive how many people here I can't over-interess.

Yeah. It's been for some time. Yeah, very impressive. So what's the, look, do you guys know how the bargaining has gone and what we can expect from here? Well, what we would like would be for the UC to meet us at the bargaining table and give us the fair contract. But repeating that ad infinitum while we withhold labor is the plan thus far. But what's actually been happening is

the UC just hasn't been paying fair, as you know. Yeah, it's been infuriating for me. It makes me very angry. It's very surreal, especially, I think, if you're used to a sort of more sane labor context, to see them just gaslighting and lying and doing what on the face of it is illegal stuff it's disrespectful is what i feel yeah and maybe illustrates sort of what they see

post-oxygraphic in economic terms yeah as a workforce whose rights are not to be valued to do a bulk of the work it's it's very disrespectful yeah no i think it certainly speaks to uh like i said earlier uh they're trying to outlast us and they think that we will reach a certain point where we no longer feel like we can avoid our work, that we can stay out here. And I think you would think that if that's their strategy, they would realize that we are in a point of desperation. We are in a point of precarity where we really need wages and compensation and workplace protections that meet the current economic situation that we live in, because right now that's not what we have.

And currently at the bargaining table, they're kind of putting a lot of our labor reps into like something that looks like like jaw, like jigsaw, like type trap rooms where they have only fluorescent lighting and no windows. And then them not knowing whether or not they're going to have to get a flight back because they're not going to meet with them that day. Them saying that they haven't reserved rooms, even though they have so much power. Who's taking up a room from them to meet with them

and actually come up with some proposals? I got an update that admin wasn't bargaining because they couldn't reserve a room? What does that mean? There's 48,000 people on strike. The entire system isn't working. What do you mean? It's your rooms also. You own the rooms.

That was a fascinating update. I'm sorry. I just had to mention something about that. So that's just all we have to know right now is that they keep canceling meetings, adding meetings. They're kind of just waiting us out to see how long we'll actually be on strike and whether or not we actually care about our contracts, which I think you being here today, you see how many people are out. No one's going to leave this picket line throughout the week. So yeah. Yeah. I think that's basically it. People aren't going to leave the picket line and the energy is awesome because people are fed up. People are fed up. People are fed up of being poor and homeless. And this is not why we come to grad school, right? I mean, I was very fortunate to have a good grad school experience and that's why I'm still in academia. But a majority of the people who come to the university,

spending savings, I know people with student loans back from India who are here to do a master's and are TAing, doing research, killing themselves because they had a dream. They literally moved across the world to come here following a dream and are ending up being broke.

And that's heartbreaking from a university as big as this. Nobody deserves to be treated this way. And I think everybody here is feeling it. If you go to fairucnow.org, there's a link to a strike fund right now, a hardship fund. And people can donate to that any amount they want to. And there's also, we're taking donations to actually feed people out here.

So if people have questions about that, they can just email the links at that website. Can people show up to the picket to help too? Would you like people to? People are very, very welcome to show up to the picket line to come help. All help is appreciated. You want to join us, you want to chant, you want to bring supplies, we'll be there. This is across all 10 UC campuses. If you're near a picket line, if you want to show support and solidarity, come join us.

Yeah, the virtual picketing is still happening. And what they've been actually doing is making sure people get here and know where to go since picketing is so transient. Like we're literally moving building to building as it's needed. And they're doing the calls for us and directing us. So which is a wild thing. But also the other thing is just people retweeting everything that we post, making sure that no one can silence us, because that's what UC wants. Thank you so much for coming. Thanks for giving us this platform. The awareness is really critical to make sure that UC can't ignore us,

so thank you so much for coming. Welcome. I'm Danny Thrill. Won't you join me at the fire and dare enter? Nocturnum, Tales from the Shadows, presented by iHeart and Sonora. An anthology of modern-day horror stories inspired by the legends of Latin America. From ghastly encounters with shapeshifters to bone-chilling brushes with supernatural creatures. I know you. Take a trip and experience the horrors

that have haunted Latin America since the beginning of time. Listen to Nocturnal Tales from the Shadows as part of Michael Duda Podcast Network, available on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. podcast or wherever you get your podcast. Hi, I'm Ed Zitron, host of the Better Offline podcast, and we're kicking off our second season digging into how tech's elite has turned Silicon Valley into a playground for billionaires. From the chaotic world of generative AI to the destruction of Google search, Better Offline is your unvarnished and at times unhinged look at the underbelly of tech from an industry veteran with nothing to lose. This season, I'm going to be joined by everyone from Nobel winning economists to leading journalists in the field. And I'll be digging into why the products you love keep getting worse and naming and shaming those responsible. Don't get me wrong, though. I love technology. I just hate the people

in charge and want them to get back to building things that actually do things to help real people. I swear to God, things actually do things to help real people. I swear to God things can change if we're loud enough. So join me every week to understand what's happening in the tech industry and what could be done to make things better. Listen to Better Offline on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, wherever else you get your podcasts. Check out betteroffline.com. Hey, I'm Gianna Prandenti.

And I'm Jemay Jackson-Gadsden. We're the hosts of Let's Talk Offline, the early career podcast from LinkedIn News and iHeart Podcasts. One of the most exciting things about having your first real job is that first real paycheck. You're probably thinking, yay, I can finally buy a new phone. But you also have a lot of questions like, how should I be investing this money? I mean, how much do I save? And what about my 401k? Well, we're talking with finance expert Vivian Tu, aka Your Rich BFF, to break it all down.

I always get roasted on the internet when I say this out loud, but I'm like, every single year you need to be asking for a raise of somewhere between 10 to 15%. I'm not saying you're going to get 15% every single year, but if you ask for 10 to 15 and you end up getting eight, that is actually a true raise. Listen to this week's episode of Let's Talk Offline on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

Hey, I'm Jacqueline Thomas, the host of a brand new black effect original series black lit the podcast for diving deep into the rich world of black literature i'm jack peace thomas and i'm inviting you to join me and a vibrant community of literary enthusiasts dedicated to protecting and celebrating our stories black Blacklit is for the page turners, for those who listen to audiobooks while commuting or running errands, for those who find themselves seeking solace, wisdom, and refuge between the chapters. From thought-provoking novels to powerful poetry,

we'll explore the stories that shape our culture. Together, we'll dissect classics and contemporary works while uncovering the stories of the brilliant writers behind them. Blacklit is here to amplify the voices of Black writers and to bring their words to life. Listen to Blacklit on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. It's the podcast it's it could happen here it is about something that could happen here very specifically um yeah i'm i'm christopher wong i'm here with james stout and garrison davis

hello hello to you both hello we all joined the Zoom call. That did happen here. It did. And that's the show, everybody. All right. Okay, so that's the thing that did happen here. Now we're going to talk about something that could happen here. Okay. That specific thing is a call by two Harvard academics to hire 500,000 more cops.

Nope. So, okay. I don't know when this is going to go up but sometime in the past there was a piece that went viral by a civil rights lawyer and anti-prison activist turned media critic alec karakatanis about a pair of harvard academics yeah who wrote this article calling for 500 000 more cops and this is okay like the fact that we have academics writing position papers basically that are calling for 500 000 more cops is terrifying in and of itself yeah but but crime is is is at a record high garrison you are about to see shit oh okay you are about to see you're about to see and hear

shit that is gonna make your fucking ears bleed because it's not shit like okay normally these are harvard academics right so you're assuming these are like right-wing that set ghouls right or like the equivalent in in in the sort of like yeah you know these are not this was written by a socialist and when i say a socialist right like i i don't mean a sort of like one of the sort of like terminally online desperate cranks trying to hold together like a maoist micro. I'm talking about people who are incredibly well-connected inside the mainstream socialist left. So the authors of this call for 500,000 more cops are Christopher Lewis, who is a Harvard

law professor who makes me embarrassed to have my own name, and more interestingly, Harvard sociology professor Adaner Usami. So who is Adaner Usami? He is on the board. He's on the editorial board of Catalyst, which is a Marxist. OK, do any of you two know what Catalyst is? Yeah. Besides the sequel to the Mirror's Edge original game?

No, I don't. Yeah. OK, so they're a Marxist magazine. They're supposed to be a more sort of theoretical Marxist magazine founded by a guy named Vivek Chibber, who's a pretty influential sort of like soaked-em Marxist who could be found literally in any of the last like five decades. You can find him yelling about the cultural turn in academia and calling for a return to political economy. The cultural turn. He's been talking. Is that a quote? Yes! He has been yelling about this for

decades. I think he's been yelling about this for longer than I've been alive. Oh god. That's how long this has been going on. People have definitely been fetching about the cultural turn for longer than any of us have been alive. And they've been wrong for that entire time. and okay chipper is like one of the guys who trained usami in the first place

now catalyst's other major founder um is much more famous and that's someone you probably have heard of uh who is one boshkar sankara who is the current president of the nation and also the founder of jacobin where and this is where it gets fun usami also on the editorial board of jacobin this is the guy caring for 500,000 more cops right this isn't coming from the usable sort of like rabid reactionaries this is coming from people who have serious credentials in the mainstream socialist left and okay so all right i want to talk about what's actually in the paper and the first thing i need everyone to understand about this from the get-go is that this is maybe the worst paper i've ever read like if if i had tried to turn this paper in to my like freshman under like it's like my an undergrad lit class i would have

failed like when i was in my freshman year in college i had to read biblical analysis written by a freshman ted cruz supporter who was arguing that there was a problem in the bible where there was no way for god to talk to people this is worse than that let me introduce you to the quran how is like how is how how is it worse chris okay so let's let's just start off right i'm gonna i'm gonna start off with a random part in the middle so you understand how just mind-numbingly atrocious this is okay so i'm gonna i'm gonna read this this is an article called and and i'm not kidding about the title of this quote the injustice of under policing in america uh yeah so we're starting off great we're starting off great so before we get into the actual main argument i'm just going to read this quote

which is uh all right let's hear it even if our answers prove unsound we hope that the combination of empirical social science and analytic moral and political philosophy we can oh god we contribute can help eliminate what alternative answers to those questions might have to look like to be sound which first off terrible writing science of marxist leninism this is i would prefer the immortal science of marxist leninism this is i would prefer the immortal science of marxist leninism this is awful like set this writing terrible send it back to an editor give them a decade they'll come back with it second off i literally cannot imagine two disciplines i would like rather less apply to the problem of mass incarceration than those

like these authors have dared ask the question what if we combined the bone-rattling stupidity of analytic philosophy with the sociologist's complete inability to do statistics and the answer is this and when i say complete inability to do statistics right i i need people to understand how bad this article is, right? Like, I viscerally need you to understand. So, okay, here is a quote. Here's another section of this article. But while firearm availability no doubt has some impact on the level of violence, we think the effect is likely to be small. A large effect would be difficult to square with other patterns across place persons and time consider

for example that while the united states has 10 times as many guns as el salvador the homicide rate there is roughly 10 times higher than it is here now stats knowers think for a second about what they just compared right the united states has 10 times as many guns. The homicide rate in El Salvador is 10 times higher, right? Famous countries with a similar population. Yeah, yeah. Okay, what does the U.S. have more of than El Salvador? Guns. That's it.

No, no, we have more guns, but we also have 50 times the population. The U.S. has 331 million people. El Salvador is 6.5 million people which means again if you're looking at this in terms of guns per capita right yeah all right el salvador's guns per capita is actually five times higher than ours oh wow that's quite impressive yeah from a financial perspective because we have a lot of guns. Yeah, right. And you know, okay. Again, if you're going to do basic statistics, right, you would think that these professors at Harvard University would know the difference between a rate of gun ownership

and the pure ownership of guns. They do not. They do not. Do they not? Or have they decided that they're going to pretend they don't? I don't. Okay, here's the thing. Going into this, right, I assume this was just sort of pure hack shit.

And I think a lot of it is. I think they also are genuinely this dumb. Like, I, genuinely, I, I, I, it's, it's really incredible. Like, I mean, again, like, the thing, like, the thing they've actually demonstrated with their own numbers is precisely the opposite of what they're arguing. thing they've actually demonstrated with their own numbers is precisely the opposite of what they're arguing the thing they've demonstrated with the numbers they have given us is that there is a correlation between gun ownership rates and the homicide rate right like they're trying to they're this entire section is about proving that they're that they that the number of guns doesn't like this isn't even like this isn't me like like i don't like this is not like me yelling about gun

control or whatever like this is just to get you to understand the level of statistics these people are on. And also, I should point this out. I tracked down their citation because I wanted to make sure I didn't, I wasn't misunderstanding their argument, right? So I tracked down their citation on these numbers, and I went to the paper they cited. And the thing they cited does not have gun ownership numbers for El Salvador. So I have no idea where they're getting any of these numbers. They've apparently quite possibly have pulled this out of their ass completely because apparently nobody checked if their citations actually contain the things that they're supposed to. This is what I wanted to talk about.

There is a thing that happens when you get tenure or you become a professor at a very established university. And that thing is you just say shit and people trust you like we've seen this time and again in the academy right that like peer review is not serving its function because like the status hierarchy of people in academia is more important to both the peer reviewers and the people doing the writing than the actual process of peer review yeah like i don't know their citations are this is an interesting uh this is i don't know they've like made the capital letters lighter they use a small arms survey i guess for that i'm just looking at it doesn't it doesn't it the show it doesn't have those numbers it's's amazing. Okay, so we've established that these people are absolute hacks whose work would have gotten me failed out of an undergrad course.

So to be fair, maybe it's technically possible that University of Chicago just holds its students to more rigorous standards than Harvard or MIT, whose journal published this, does their intellectuals. So, you know, you never know. This is also why I never use Jacobin as a source on this show. Also because they pay 50 bucks per article and that shit is way out of order.

Yeah, Jacobin, not a cool publication, actually. Not megabased. Yeah. Pay your workers if you're pretending to be socialist. Yeah, if you're trying to be like a laborer. Well, I mean, here's a tough location. Boshkar Sankara is on the record talking about his, quote,

petite bourgeois hustle, talking about how he made Jacobin. So, you know, okay. We'll get back to the class aspect of all of this next episode. But, okay, let's go back to this paper and let's take a second to look at what they're actually arguing.

All right. And the first thing i need you to understand about their argument is that their entire the entire substantive argument of this paper hinges on an absolutely enormous lie um let me let me let me let me quote this lie yet it also illustrates the much less well-known fact that America is not at all an outlier in its rate of policing. The United States has around 212 police officers for every 100,000 total residents, which ranks it in the 41st percentile of today's developed world. Now, as Alec Karakatonis points out, they've deliberately picked the lowest number of cops they can find – like the lowest reported number of cops in the U.S. they can find anywhere. So they picked 697,000 from – basically, like, they picked this number from an FBI reporting thing, but the FBI also says that they don't have all the cops there because it's basically like a voluntary reporting thing. So there's a bunch of cops that aren't there. And then here's from Cara Catanis, who's a piece about this. Quote, the professors, the professor then admitted privately over email that the U.S. census count is actually 1,227,788 police. That's 76% higher for the number they chose to use in their public article what is the significance of this using this number they admitted to me

the united states truthfully has 1.1 times the median rate in rich countries so they've been over email that they have this whole article is based on them lying about how many cops there are in the u.s and it's actually way worse than this because as he points out, this number the number that they're using only tracks public police so it doesn't count private police and if you count private police, that number doubles again

it's not like there's private police in America there's no private cops and the other thing this doesn't count is this counts zero federal agencies I was going thing the other thing this doesn't count is this counts zero federal agencies I was gonna say but it doesn't count federal agency does it count like state police even sheriff's deputies

actually I don't know if it counts sheriff's it might because they're not police they're deputies they're different a highway patrol I think who's to say all of the research going yeah we spend more time on this than they have already yeah right right okay like to to get it to get an understanding of this even if you exclude the feds entirely right if you exclude and again and this is

actually a bad idea because again we have like a fucking trillion federal agencies, for example, ICE and the Border Patrol, who, again, run just another police state inside of the American police state. Right. We have that. And obviously, OK, so he's comparing our level of policing to policing in like European countries. Right. And OK, I don't want to minimize how many border cops European countries have, but the U.S. has way fucking more border cops than they do. It is not comparable at all. They do horrible things. I will yell until the end of time about how every Frontex member needs to be, like, redacted, etc., etc., parody, but, like, no.

Great. Great work. etc etc parody but like no great great but even even even if you cut that out right the actual number of cops in the u.s is three times higher than the number they've given us actually it might be more yeah yeah so okay i feel like there's a there's anything that we can agree on as a nation is that america kind of has a lot of police that's like That's like what everyone kind of knows. That's like people in Europe. These people study criminal justice. The place with like the really, like, really militarized and heavy policing.

Yeah, like a person who moved to America, it is shocking how many cops there are, how many different cops there are, and how there are cops everywhere all the time. It is the thing that is very different about America. Oh, God. Okay, so... They may have used Statista to get that number.

Quite possibly. This is the most half-assed shit. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, I would absolutely, if one of my students in community college did this, we'd have a talk. Okay, okay. So do you know what else is based on the myth of under-policing? These adverts for private cops.

Yes. Federal Protective Service gets them. All right, we're back. Okay, so, all right. We've established that this argument is built on a pile of lies. However, the actual content of in line with the European countries, that somehow – and they never have a mechanism for how this would happen. This would somehow lower the incarceration rate. I think the mechanism is line, red line. That's what everyone says is that we have more police that lowers incarceration rates yeah yeah the entire argument here is what if the u.s was like sweden then there would be 500 000

more cops but somehow also less one also 1.9 million less uh prisoners so yeah well the only thing that's different between us and sweden is the cops they have more cops. Oh, God. Okay, so why are socialists pushing for this? And especially socialists, and again, these are people who in their article admit that they think the best way to deal with poverty and with crime is welfare programs, not mass incarceration. So, okay, so why are they pushing for this? And the initial answer is that they think they can reduce crime, specifically homicides, by increasing policing. And they think they can do this.

Which, to be fair, is an opinion that I would say at this point probably the majority of Americans have. Maybe. I don't know if I buy that. I don't know if that's true i think you may be a little bit further out of the overton window uh maybe a majority of americans i think do do believe that if there's a few more cops maybe we'll have a few less murders i don't know we'll we'll see about that but okay the other thing though that's sort of like amazing about this right is that they think okay so they think they can cut the homicide rate by hiring more police they also

think that hiring more police uh will solve the problem with policing because the problem with police is that the police don't do enough and so we need more of them i mean and then and then also and then also this will make them less violent. I mean, this is even like the whole Joe Biden, like, oh, we can't defund the police. We have to fund the police. We have to give them more resources. Bernie Sanders also made this argument.

If they have less resources, then that means they'll have to use more violence. And it's that style of argument yeah it's it's a neoliberal talking point yeah but what's interesting about this again is that these people nominally are socialists and you know in order to justify this right they they they argue that while being in prison is bad and then they list a bunch of uh consequences of being in prison being in a neighborhood is with high crime is also as bad for the same reason. They are literally arguing that being in a place with crime

is basically the same as being in prison. Big time prison understanders, the old Harvard professors. Like, I, look, okay, I, I, there are, there are very few people I would ever say this to. Panopticon, Garrison. Look, I hope these people get to do ethnography of this one day. Like, I hope. I hope they get to go study what the inside of a prison is like ethnographically.

Some participant observation. Yeah, I hope they get to go do this. Like, there are lines in this article. Like, here is a random line I've pulled from this article. They say at one point, quote, in fact, black people seem to be underrepresented among those who report ever having been arrested in their lifetimes. What? Okay, wait. All right.

All right. Hold on. That is a direct quote. Citation needed? What is it? What are they? They've done some absolutely insane i'm not even i'm not i'm not actually going to dignify them by laying out the stats bullshit that they've they've they've

attempted to justify this like we have already seen what their stats look like right it's like their stats are trying to compare a rate to a number yeah it's insane it's completely nuts like that's the one thing that that's the one thing that even racist Republicans know. They'll be like, yeah, there's more because I don't like black people. And you're like, that's not why, but whatever. Yeah, I'm just reading this paragraph now and it is actually pretty bad. So, okay, we have established this is bullshit pretty bad so okay i i the the okay so we have established this is bullshit right i i i want to read a kind of long section that i think gives the game away as to why they're arguing this

quote we think in the long run a significant expansion of social policy would reduce crime by addressing its root causes and in turn reduce the need and demand for both policing and imprisonment okay other work yeah this is true i would say probably probably true in other work we argue that any coherent conception of distributive justice or economic efficiency entails that the united states should expand its social policy but a significant expansion of social policy requires significant redistribution from rich to poor. Redistribution of this magnitude would require the poor to wield some kind of leverage over the rich. Given the collapse of the American labor movement and the electoral fracturing of the American working class, we doubt we will see anything like this soon.

Our aim in this essay is to say something useful about what should be done in the non-ideal world in which we live, not just in the ideal world in which we would like to live. To say something about that question, we limit ourselves to options that are revenue neutral. These are socialists. That's so bizarre. I think they may have walked outside of the big tent. They've just given up. There's actually more of this that is also

nuts. It keeps going. We can never have a better world. You know what that means? It's that we should instead just have more police yeah no here is here is there here is their defense of this but why consider only prisons and police why couldn't the government redistribute the existing pool of money from prisons and police to social program policy so true as many reformers have demanded we argue in quote and what's wrong with mass incarceration which

is a book that they're going to release that i hope nobody buys i don't trust them i hope gets them arrested this book is awful this is because social policy is bedeviled by what we call the efficiency feasibility paradox to address the root causes of crime would be meaningfully to change the opportunity structure for the most disadvantaged people in America. To do this by expanding untargeted universal social programs would require significant resources since the vast majority of beneficiaries are not America's most disadvantaged people. in a way that social spending is not. It costs about $300 billion a year to run the world's most extensive penal state, but something like $3 trillion

to run its most anemic welfare state. We admit there are significant... This is a slightly later paragraph. We admit there are significant obstacles to changing the balance that state and local governments strike between the arms of law enforcement. There are, after all,

reasons that the United States has involved its present-day penal balance. But our view is that the First World Balance... So the First World Balance is the thing they're talking about that supposedly Norway has or some shit where they have more cops per capita but less people incarcerated. But our view is that the First World Balance

is nonetheless substantially more feasible than the kinds of things that reformers tend to demand today. In the highly unequal oligarchic America in which we live at present, calls to reallocate a fixed pool of revenue will meet with less powerful opposition than calls to tax the rich. That is why we assume it is infeasible to expect the United States to build a generous welfare state in the mold of the Scandinavian social democracies. Proposals to use

hyper-targeted social policy to adjust the root causes of crime are similarly infeasible. As we have argued, to be efficient, a social policy intervention must meaningfully transform the opportunity structures

of those most likely to commit crime. Yet an intervention that transforms the structures of opportunity only in the in only those in this position will upend the effective incentive structure of unequal societies thus gumming up the economy and eliciting political opposition i mean here's here's the thing is that in some ways i agree that the united states won't get better by making social policies within my lifetime. But my solution to this is a legalist lifestylism, not hiring more cops. Well, don't worry.

There is a significant section of this where they shit on anarchism. Oh, yeah. We'll get to that. We'll get to that. Okay, good. This is what fucking happens when all your friends are also harvard professors you give up on real fucking people because you don't fucking talk to them and they're like oh well they'll never they'll it's obviously written by somebody who's currently like well off like

it's they're currently doing well which is why because they because they don't think the world's going to turn into a socialist utopia but they're personally doing okay the way to make the world feel better for them is maybe more police will make me feel safer like that's that's what that's what they're doing is because they're already well off and they're like well social change isn't coming i want to live a happier life maybe police will keep the bad people away from me yeah because they see poverty is an issue of poverty is upstream of crime and crime is a fucking annoyance to them because someone might steal their fucking bmw again crime living in a place with crime is the same as being in prison because you cannot conceive because it's a socialism without

fucking empathy or experience of fucking poverty, right? So you can make these ludicrous statements and all your friends in the smoking room at Harvard will agree with you, go, ho-hum, yes. Yep. Ah, ah. Yeah, and I mean, this is the thing. Very frustrating.

Like, they fundamentally, like, when Bernie lost the election, these people gave up on politics, right? Like that's what's happening. They're arguing that like not even is not even just like the class struggle is unw party thing and they're arguing that it's so impossible that anyone who has a plan to change anything has to pre-means test it to be compliant with a non-existent balanced budget amendment to get the right to support it like liz trust here shit like this is this was written by one of the people on the editorial board of jacobin yeah well that doesn't shock me but it is very funny to look at their citations which are like about 80 people being like this article is horse shit and then like uh like cop publication yeah yeah let's go oh so okay so so have having actually well okay so before we do we

should we should do another ad thing uh do you know what uh who else has uh completely abandons the idea that there's any possibility of social change in the world the conservative party and unionist party of great britain and northern ireland yeah do they do they sponsor the show i guess now we're going to take their money and give it to the IRA. Well, good for us. Yep, yep. Thank you, Rishi Sunak.

And, okay, we're back. So having abandoned politics in favor of complete capitulation to the forces of reaction, they turn towards a cost-benefit analysis of having more cops. The benefit, they argue, is less crime. And this is bullshit bullshit there is no statistical

evidence to having more cops reduces crime i i have done like i there are other reasons why this is bullshit i have done i have done entire series about there there is a lot of writing on this topic and how this correlation how this correlation is not actually effective. Yeah, and it's also, like, a very important thing here is this is a thing that's about what kind of crime you care about, right? Like, I have written an entire series

about why my, about, you know, the times when my police department was literally being run by multiple drug cartels at the same time, when they strapped dudes to fucking radiators and attached the balls to car batteries they shot children into the street they disappeared people to be tortured into fucking black sites and then they went to fucking iraq to teach the cia how to do it like like these people the cops are they are rapists they are kidnappers they are extortionists they are thieves they are torturers

they are murderers a lot of them are in literal neo-Nazi gangs who run their own serial killer competitions. None of this appears in any of the analysis that these dipshits have compiled. You don't want the old cultural turn to get involved. Yeah. Look at the material conditions here. Yeah, yeah. The material conditions apparently are

cop go up, crime go down, which... Yep. It's also important... I think it's important to note there's a really good article, I think it's important to note that there's a really good article i i think it was by m plus one called raise the crime rate from this is from like 2006 but they have that they have this point which is that like the reductions in the crime weight that we like see insofar as they happen are not actually reductions in the amount of crime going on

like what's happening is that like we put people in prison and then the crime happens to them there right like even even if you reduce the homicide rate outside of prison there's still the homicide rate inside of prison which nobody fucking gives a shit about and you know because again this crime doesn't go away all that happens is that it gets intensified and inflicted on a group of people the American public doesn't give a shit about so all of the violence all of the

rape all of the fucking murder all of the theft all of the shit we normally throw people in prison for in theory is just happening to people inside of prisons it's just that academics can stop pretending to give a shit about it when they don't have to see it yeah i like where i live right we just re-elected a sheriff who was overseen like 19 deaths in jail this year yeah in san diego right but that is not seen as an issue of evidently to the people who voted for her to the the Democratic Party who endorsed her. And instead, they would much rather

have that because they're presumably worried that the person who ran against her in the primaries would be too soft on crime and therefore their Teslas might get keyed. Yeah. So, okay, let's look at the supposed benefits.

Let's. I guess. Sorry, those are the benefits at let's look at the costs quote okay finally consider finally consider the cost of policing on the one hand a world of more policing would perhaps unsurprisingly be a world of more arrests based on recent work by chafflin our best guess is that the first world balance would be a world of almost 7.8 million arrests on the other hand for some for okay this is a direct quote by the way i need everyone to understand i am directly quoting them when i say this on the other hand for the somewhat speculative reasons we gave earlier we guessed that a world of more policing would be one of less police violence about 900 fewer people killed by the

police based on what the miracle occurs that's what that that's how james a miracle occurs more cops they do less violence yep yeah this you know you you could if you were for example a social scientist right at all you could look at all of the all of the other times the u.s has gotten more cops and tried to see if that like increased or decreased the amount of violence the police do now and you know but they don't draw a line they've drawn a line it's all good then i just i do want to draw attention to figure one where they have exactly one data point yeah and then they've just drawn a line to it from where the axes intersect to the data point and just be like line we've got line like this

whole thing is just sort of like like you know okay so even if somehow right by some miracle this occurred unless people were killed by the police like were killed by police violence because there was more cops which this is the kind of thing that for the purposes of this thought experiment, right, we are allowing people to believe this for the same reason that we allow children to believe in the Easter Bunny. So assuming this is real.

Hold up. Kids don't believe in the Easter Bunny. I have met kids who believed in the Easter Bunny. I understand believing in Santa, but do people actually believe in the Easterter bunny i i i have i have met kids who believed in the easter bunny i understand believing in santa but do people actually believe in the easter bunny not many not many but also also also most people don't believe the police will be more violent if if you have if it would be less violent if you have more of them how about a tooth fairy tooth fairy was yeah let's let's let let's let them believe this right this entire argument hinges on the theory that incarceration and arrest are distinct outcomes of policing. Right.

They're arguing that there's going to be more arrest, but that's OK because there will be less people in prison. Now, there is one tiny problem here that you may have seen, which is that when you arrest people it leads to people going to prison nowhere in this entire article have these two harvard professors at any point considered the fact that when you arrest someone they sometimes go to prison and that arresting more people will mean more people go to prison because that's what happens when you arrest someone. They've never considered this. And in fact, in fact, not only have they never considered this, they seem to believe that there is an inverse correlation between the number of people getting arrested and how many people go to prison. They think that 7,800,000 more arrests will somehow lead to 1.2 million people less in prison.

What the fuck? What? People in this country die in between arrest and their hearing, right? Like, in between arrest and having a fair trial. Like, yeah, to ignore that, it's not not just like ah it's not just wrong it's callously cruel also like they appear to have not looked at any point at the opportunity cost of having all these cops right yeah we pay tops a metric shit ton of money because they're the only unions that apparently the state cares about and like we could do something useful with that

money right like well the thing the thing they claim they're doing is is that they're going to fund less prisons and fund more cops and this will lead to less people being in prison now if this doesn't make any sense to you that's because it doesn't make any sense at all and and and again we have to come back to the question what do you think happens to people who get arrested like do these people think they get sent on vacation to Tahiti? Like, I know none of these people, none of the people writing this have been arrested, but like, you can't be this stupid. Like, there's no way.

I can't. God. So, okay. I'm going to close on some stuff here, which I'm going to close on the sort of anarchist stuff that they're ranting about. I'm going to read another quote from this. Some civil libertarians might prefer radical decarceration without any increase or perhaps even some reduction in police force size on the grounds that state-imposed violence or harm is morally different from and worse than interpersonal violence committed by private individuals.

An extreme version of this position would hold that no amount of interpersonal violence could ever justify the use of coercive force by the state but any state completely lacking in coercive power would be unable to enforce tax law and policy and thus unable to collect revenue without revenue the government could not provide public goods or a social safety net which also by the, I want to stop here and point out that in any other context, none of these people believe this because these people

are all neotardalists. They're all NMT people. And so they don't actually believe that money that they... In any other context, except this one, they understand that money is something created by the state.

Except here, where they have to justify police. Without revenue, governments cannot provide public goods or a social safety net. So this extreme version of civil libertarianism is essentially a kind of political anarchism. And we doubt many are in fact committed to this brand of anarchism. So, okay, let's unpack this a second. When they say civil libertarianism here, what they say is that anyone who proposes to defund the police or reduce a number of people in prison right in the next paragraph they argue that anyone who wants to do those things uh is actually

in favor of increasing the homicide rate because when there's less when there's less cops then quote serious crime runs unchecked in poor neighborhoods which leaves you with two choices right you can be an anarch quote-unquote anarchist and let the crime happen because you supported decreasing the number of cops, or you can support having more cops. Yeah, it's just an absurd extrapolation of a position. Yeah, well, but it's not just that. What they're doing here is they're giving their entire game away, right?

What they've admitted is that their ideal society requires, and this is what they are saying about the state's need for coercive power. With their own argument, the coercive power they need is the police. And so what they are saying is that their politics requires an entire class of rapist neo-Nazi murderers to enforce their vision of the welfare state like in order for there to be a welfare state you have to be a bunch of people who can fucking walk into your door and shoot you right there have to be a group of people who can fucking stand there grab your child smash their head into a wall 15 times and then fucking grab you and throw you through a window right this is what they are arguing and and this begs the question okay so why do these people want more cops and you know the caricature they offer up is that without cops everyone will just murder each other and so we need neo-nazi death squads to stop us all from murdering each other but okay that's stupid right like self-evidently police are only like police are not that old they've only been around for like 200 years

so we know that's not true so why do they actually want more cops? And, you know, something that's very interesting, given that this is an article about the police that is written by people who are on the editorial board of socialist magazines. Nowhere in this article does it mention the fact that the cops exist to protect private property, right? This is a huge part of what their existence, right? Their job is to ensure that there is one class of people who owns the factories and the fields and the grocery stores and the fast food chains and the fucking car dealerships and that there is another class who was forced to work for them and have their labor stolen every day of their lives.

mention it right but these people's version of quote-unquote socialism is one in which all that shit all the stuff that makes things like all the businesses all the corporations all of the all that shit is owned by capitalists and not the working class they need those cops specifically to protect the property of the ruling class from you right like that that that is ultimately what this is about the specter of crime and and this is true whether it's coming from socialists or whether it's coming from the most unbelievably deranged Blue Lives Matter cop freak. It is about stopping you from

taking what is yours. And that's the end of part one. In part two, we're going to look at the whole sort of background ideology that's running all of this. And it also sucks. So, yay. Come back tomorrow for more great news.

Ah, love it. Welcome. I'm Danny Thrill. Won't you join me at the fire and dare enter? Nocturnal Tales from the Shadows, presented by iHeart and Sonora. An anthology of modern-day horror stories inspired by the legends of Latin America. From ghastly encounters with shapeshifters to bone-chilling brushes with supernatural creatures. I know you. Take a trip and experience the horrors

that have haunted Latin America since the beginning of time. Listen to Nocturnal Tales from the Shadows as part of my Cultura podcast network, available on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hi, I'm Ed Zitron, host of the Better Offline podcast, and we're kicking off our second season digging into how tech's elite has turned Silicon Valley into a playground for billionaires. From the chaotic world of generative AI to the destruction of Google search, Better Offline is your unvarnished and at times unhinged look at the underbelly of tech from an industry veteran with nothing to lose.

This season, I'm going to be joined by everyone from Nobel-winning economists to leading journalists in the field. And I'll be digging into why the products you love keep getting worse and naming and shaming those responsible. Don't get me wrong, though. I love technology.

I just hate the people in charge and want them to get back to building things that actually do things to help real people. I swear to God, things can change if we're loud enough. So join me every week to understand what's happening in the tech industry and what could be done to make things better. Listen to Better Offline on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, wherever else you get your podcasts. Check out betteroffline.com. Hey, I'm Gianna Prandenti. And I'm Jimei Jackson-Gadsden. We're the hosts of Let's Talk Offline, the early career podcast from LinkedIn News and iHeart Podcasts.

One of the most exciting things about having your first real job is that first real paycheck. You're probably thinking, yay, I can finally buy a new phone. But you also have a lot of questions like, how should I be investing this money? I mean, how much do I save? And what about my 401k? Well, we're talking with finance expert Vivian Tu, aka Your Rich BFF, to break it all down. I always get roasted on the internet when I say this out loud, but I'm like, every single year you need to be asking for a raise of somewhere between 10 to 15 percent.

I'm not saying you're going to get 15% every single year, but if you ask for 10 to 15 and you end up getting eight, that is actually a true raise. Listen to this week's episode of Let's Talk Offline on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, I'm Jack Peace Thomas, the host of a brand new Black Effect original series, Black Lit, the podcast for diving deep into the rich world of Black literature. I'm Jack Peace Thomas, and I'm inviting you to join me and a vibrant community of literary enthusiasts dedicated to protecting and celebrating our stories. Black Lit is for the page turners, for those who listen to audiobooks while commuting or running errands,

for those who find themselves seeking solace, wisdom, and refuge between the chapters. From thought-provoking novels to powerful poetry, we'll explore the stories that shape our culture. Together, we'll dissect classics and contemporary works while uncovering the stories of the brilliant writers behind them. Black Lit is here to amplify the voices of Black writers and to bring their words to life.

Listen to Black Lit on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Podcasting. Oh, I love it. I love when we're talking to microfilms and people listen. Yay. Good for them. It's going to outlive microblogging.

Apparently. Apparently. Who could have thought? We've won, guys. We are the last medium standing. To be fair, I do think the majority of people on this call got this job. It's a small part because of micro-blogging. 100% because of micro-blogging.

Yeah, it's true. Look at where our posts have bought us that's right here to this moment on the podcast it could happen here the podcast where we don't explain what the podcast is that's right nope yep and yeah the podcast also contains me christopher wong contains garrison davis it contains j Stout. And allegedly Robert Evans says it. However, Robert Evans is... I think he's legitimately actually busy right now. He is recording something else or something.

Yeah, he's doing a marathon thing. But if you look at the iHeart page, it's only Robert. We have a lot of podcasts on... Yeah, anyway, it's true. On the Cool Zone Media. Yeah, on the Cool Zone Media. That's right so speaking of podcasts we've done on the cool zone media we did one that came out the one before

this one and what was it about it was it was about how a bunch of socialists want 500 000 more cops or specifically several interventions yeah so okay i i asked myself the question when i read this why why do they want this how did we get here because they're rich and they're scared yes so this is true it's there's also sort of there's also sort of deeper roots to what's happening here and okay so like it is true that there's been a whole wave of people who were sort of nominally progressive or like socialists 2016 or 2017 who turned right in the past few years particularly over racial issues like lee fang uh grand greenwald like more recently the tyt people like bashar sakara's been doing crime wave shit like kind of recently which was

actually really funny he had this tweet about how like oh the crime rate's not actually down there's specific neighborhoods where the crime where people are poor where the crime is up and then you look at the data and that's exactly the opposite of what's happening but okay so but this entire push for sort of more police is part of a broader political project that adonis to me and his sort of allies and Jacobin and et cetera, et cetera, I've been pushing for years now. And this sort of like political project is the class side of what's called the class versus race or the race versus class debate. So for people who were either weren't here for this or have like blissfully forgotten this, the,

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

like a small number of anarchists who think that like well race was a product of class anyways and so if you end the class system and abolish private property that's the sort of like actual central like mechanism of oppression society and if you do that like you know race will sort of fall apart and so you know you should um yeah whatever sure it's all false consciousness anyway yeah like these people are wrong i think they're less dangerous than the other kind of two people but we're also going to see one of these guys later. So there, there's the people I called the like class with like a K people who are just straight up like racists. Like they are,

they, they, they are class with a KKK. Yeah. Right. Like they, they, you know,

the, the, the groups of socialists I've compared them to are like the socialists who came to the U S after 1848. And we're like, Oh shit. Who cares? Like slavery.

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

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

from their main goal of achieving socialism and by achieving socialism i mean electoralism and by electoralism i mean getting these people elected to office yeah yeah i hate these people their politics sucks i i've been fighting them for a bit like since i became a leftist i've been at war with these people and to to get a sense of how we got from you you know, what was legitimately, in a lot of cases, what was at least legitimately an argument about how to deal with racism to a bunch of socialists going, we need 500,000 more cops. I want to take a look at a piece Adam Arusami wrote in Catalyst with David Zachariah called The Class Path to Racial Liberation. And I want to take a quote from its opening to give it a sense of people of like how awful this politics is.

This is like one of their sort of like opening statements about why they're taking the class side in the debate. We argue that the class race debate should center on one principal domain, the distribution of material resources. Now, okay, at first glance glance this seems kind of reasonable enough but there's another incredibly important aspect of any attempt to grapple with race in class that usami is just ignoring entirely and that's violence right race race is not just a measure of economic inequality it's an index of violence.

Racialization increases your risk of interpersonal violence, it increases your risk of sexual violence, it increases your risk of mass communal violence, a lot of lynchings or sort of ethnic cleansing campaigns. And maybe most importantly for this whole argument, being racialized dramatically increases the risk of suffering state violence. the risk of suffering state violence. And this is a real problem for the sort of class first people because, you know, Usami's sort of multiple, like multi-racial working class electoral project won't do shit to prevent people from experiencing state violence just because there's welfare programs. You know, we talked about this, what this looks like in our Brazil episodes, right? You actually have like legitimately a sort of united multi-racial working class that elects a social democratic government and they enact anti-poverty reforms and increase the size of the welfare state. And while this is happening, they also increase the incarcerated population by 620% and created a rate of police killing that is 11 times higher than it is in the US, right?

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

one of sort of Adonis like political projects is arguing that mass incarceration isn't about race at all but it's actually about class which uh so uh we're gonna see some more bullshit um he he wrote he wrote an article in catalyst called the economic origin of the mass incarceration alongside new chicago professor john clegg and i i have like i have an enormous special contempt for john clegg for two reasons here one because you know a donner's like an irredeemable jacobin like soak them hack right

clegg is nominally was was part of the sort of the anglophone marxist like ultra left right like he he was one of the contributors to the sort of to to the ultra left theory journal like ultra left or marxist communization journal end notes which you know like that influenced me a lot when i was like a tiny baby leftist and he i also have an incredible amount of contempt here because he's a harper schmidt fellow at the university of chicago and here's the thing okay i don't know what harvard is like right

i've never been there i don't know what their campus is like i don't know what it's like to be on campus at harvard i know what you chicago the chicago campus is like i know what there's a cop on every fucking. I know what the UChicago campus is like. I know that there's a cop on every fucking corner. I know that there's surveillance cameras literally everywhere. I know that they locked down the entire fucking campus while hundreds of heavily armed cops stormed through every building and every courtyard in the area every single time a kid steals

something from a gaming store and runs for it until they've hunted them the fuck down. And I know that, you know, I know that the cops almost fucking killed me while I was there during a police chase i know that john clegg was on fucking campus when the chicago police department shot a kid who was having a mental health crisis and to to watch this shit every single fucking day and to make this kind of argument is just fucking unforgivable it is it is fucking atrocious i i guess i should i should explain this a little bit for people who don't understand this so the university of chicago is like in the middle of the south side of Chicago. Most of the neighborhoods around it are 80% black, and then there is just this fucking university they've planted in the middle of it. the also the regular fucking cpds around there there are like for like blocks and like like through other neighborhoods there were just you chicago police officers there there are fucking

cpd cops everywhere it is a fucking militarized hellhole and yeah and you know like it is a place where like the way that race functions in the u.s is blindingly fucking obvious you can you can immediately understand it by looking like you you walk outside your fucking dorm you look at the cop and you look at how the cop treats people depending on what the race is right it is so unbelievably obvious however comma in this article clag and isabie are going to argue that mass incarceration is actually a product of class policy resulting from a lack of social democracy and underdevelopment resulting from a transition from an agrarian economy to an industrial economy in the in the 20th century

people are saying this and and the subsequent mass migration of black people north like what kind of agrarian economy we have to ask yeah who is doing the labor in said agrarian economy how much was paid it's like the basic argument that they're gonna make is that like well so there were a bunch of people who'd been slaves and then they became not slaves and then a bunch of them started migrating north but because there was this mass migration all these people showed up to these

cities where there was no infrastructure and then so there was a bunch of crime and then because of the crime there was mass incarceration which is okay we're going to get some more into this um but before we go into the sort of reactionary part of this article right you have to understand that when these people say that this is a a like a class-based policy like class here does not mean the same thing that it means for like you know a regular person who thinks about class or like you know a marxist which again both these people nominally are um here's from the journal specter which did a really good sort of critique of of this whole absolutely

dogshit article quote klegan usami's claim that class is essential to understanding mass incarceration amounts to a repackaging of a widely understood fact as revelatory insight and while they title their article quote the economic origins of mass incarceration they never delve further into class in a marxist or even critical sense instead they use educational attainment data as a proxy they note that a large portion of people who are imprisoned have low levels of educational attainment data as a proxy they note that a large portion of people who are imprisoned have low levels of educational attainment and i i i am glad to know that everyone on this call who does the exact same job as me uh we're all from different classes congratulations james you are now the bourgeoisie congratulations garrison you are now proletariat

i'm i guess the labor aristocracy that's why i'm here to expropriate the surplus value from your labor guys yep yeah and uh if you go to prison it's uh it's my fault yeah like i i just okay so like yeah what an asshole what a what a ridiculous fucking claim yeah and it's like like these these okay so like like usabi's like the jacobin people do this all the time right like they they have this they made this famous study about the people who vote for trump that was like oh it's people people who voted for trump did it in like working class areas and again working class was by education data and then also they didn't go because it turns out like this is actually true right there are a lot of people who voted for trump from working class areas it turns out who those people are, are the small business owners in working class areas.

But they didn't fucking go granular enough so that, you know, they do this shit all the time. Right. And this is the kind of analysis that like, like. Yeah. Using shit as a proxy for class. Yeah. It's like, it's a classic fallacious thing. Yeah.

Like, like, what's his name? Nicholas Kristof. Yeah. He did this too. Also, like, like this, this is, this is, we're getting fucking Kristof-level analysis out of these supposed Marxists. And, like, okay, so, alright, the curious thing here is that Clegg, at least on an intellectual level, knows better than this, right? Like, he wrote for Endnotes. Endnotes has a very sophisticated class analysis. Like he wrote for Endnotes. Endnotes has a very sophisticated class analysis. But if you're actually interested in the sweeping arc of the history of the proletariat, you can't make the kinds of arguments that Clegg is making in this thing. And so, you know, because he's trying to make this argument, he's reduced to this like, like just absolute like seventh rate, like fucking's this is really sad because for actual marxists and not sort of like liberal bourgeois hacks doing like fucking new york times bullshit you know class is about ownership right it's about who owns the means of production and who's

forced to work for them and you know okay so you have this you have the proletariat or like the working class who are the people who own nothing and are thus forced to sell their labor for people who do own stuff, right? But this also presents a problem for this entire argument because if you actually want to do class analysis, you have to understand that race plays a major role in who even gets to become part of the regular proletariat in the first place. Because most – there's a lot of people through the development of the course of capitalism who fucking never even got to become wage laborers because they were enslaved, they were exterminated, they were turned into debt peons. And, oh wait, guess who fucking got that shit? Oh yeah, it wasn't white people. And you know, if you're going to write, if you're going to be writing arguments and like explaining the rise of like a mass system of enslavement, you might want to think about this, but no. mass system of enslavement you might want to think about this but

no okay so do you know what else is responsible for a mass series a mass system of enslavement uh the advertising and how they affect our brains yeah that one I was gonna go with Stalin but

yours was good well same same div honestly yeah Stalin first mass marketer so true famously I was going to go with Stalin, but yours was good. Well, same dev, honestly. Yeah, Stalin, first mass marketer. So true. Famously, yeah. Stalin will send you a meal kit if you ask him. Okay, we're back. And we're back to talk about the other argument

of the economic origin of mass incarceration, which is that the argument that mass incarceration happened because people were legitimately scared about crime. Like, seriously, this is their argument. Their argument is that crime went up, people demanded less crime, and then the government did it. Like, I... Wait, did they give an analysis of the class of people? Well, okay, they make this fun argument that both black and

white people were demanding the end of crime which is sort of true but you know if you look at what like like yeah like obviously this is the thing right like you you can find people of any race who can who will take basically any political position and so if if you go looking for like black people who are tough on crime you can find it right there are black politicians who are like tough on crime right but that's also not the reason why mass incarceration happened like i'm sorry and also like you know if if you and you know there was there was also there were people who who like weren't tough on crime people who were like talking about who were talking about trying to end like sort of like like violence spikes but if you look at what

they were saying it was stuff like uh we want the police to like respect human rights instead of property rights and uh you know okay so i i yeah this is this is just sort of silly right yeah but but the the point of this is that this is basically this is their full-on broadside against abolitionism as like a body of work right it's sort of modern abolitionism um it's directly criticizing uh michelle alexander's uh the new dream crow mass incarceration in the age of color blindness and it's also like a volley basically against anyone who's trying to explain mass incarceration through race and so what they argue is that crime increased because there wasn't a strong labor movement to solve the problem that like caused solve the problems that cause crime with economic redistribution. So the state turned to like a cheaper option, which is prisons.

And is it a cheap? Well, OK, so they're they So they're not wrong in a – like there is some truth here, right? Which is that there is a reason that mass incarceration started spiking when capitalism went into crisis in the 70s and 80s. And it is actually genuinely cheaper for the bourgeoisie to run a prison state than it is to run a welfare state. But – and this is the important part, right? run a welfare state but and this is the important part right both the welfare state and the prison complex are different are just different forms of kind of insurgency usami who is a social democrat is ideologically incapable of understanding this his entire ideology is that like is based on the fact that the welfare state is the endpoint of socialism but this is completely backwards right

the welfare state and and social democracy were, but this is completely backwards. The welfare state and social democracy were first implemented by Bismarck, specifically as a way to buy workers off, to stop them from carrying out a socialist revolution and actually seizing the property of the ruling class and using the production for the benefit of mankind and not profit. That is why the

welfare state was invented. That was the first time it was put into practice. If you go back to Edmund Burke right in the French Revolution reform to preserve the idea that like we have to give people these little slices here and there like give them a treat and then they will never

come and take the cake if you read these people they're really explicit about this like they will just openly say we're buying off the working class but these absolute clowns have like somehow convinced themselves that this is what socialism actually is yep twin treats so yeah when treats social socialism is when socialism is when you you confuse table scraps for treats yeah and you know and this this comes to sort of the other thing that these that that these people can't understand which is that social democracy was a class compromise, right?

There was a deal that the capitalists and the working class agreed to. And when I say they agreed to this, right, like this isn't just sort of like then are like agreements that are made between the u.s government like like a huge portion of organized labor in the auto industry and the auto companies right which which basically like the the the substance of the treaty of detroit was like if you give us all of this welfare shit and benefits shit right we won't we will stop constantly going on strike these are explicit deals they're explicitly being negotiated between these massive trade unions and and like the the the capitalists who own companies by the American government. And so they get this deal. The deal is you get unions and pension and a vacation and healthcare as long as you don't seize control of factories and run them for themselves. like the 50s through the 70s but partially this held because also the u.s specifically which is really really rich as economy was growing really fast but you know but by the by the 1970s suddenly

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

And this meant that sort of the sort of kind of revolution to this was specifically about deploying the sort of, like, deploying the state against these people because, yeah, this movement is actively trying to destroy capitalism by destroying the racist police apparatus. And this is-

Yeah, yeah. Same time period, like AIM, for instance. Yeah. And and you know so the ruling class sort of loses their minds and this is this is also this is also part of what's happening here but the problem is the sort of jacobin cop freaks like need the police for their like social democratic hell world that they want to build and so they can't have any like it is it is incredibly structurally dangerous for them for people to be arguing that like the police are inherently a force of like systemic racial oppression because they want them around. Yeah.

And so they do all this. So they can keep playing 50 bucks per article. Yeah. And, you know, Clegg, meanwhile, as best I can tell, just doesn't want to use race as like an explanation for shit. Like they literally argue in this in this thing like in this in this article that white flight was actually just capital flight and wasn't about racism good and they just they're doing this entire thing about right this is the sort of political economy of of the city and they just they never mention they're so ruthlessly committed to their

program of not talking about racism they don't even mention redlining. It's like they've managed to go to the right of the Libertarian Party on race. It's like... Yeah. Outflank them to the right. So I'm going to read more from the Spectre article that's yelling at these people. Considering their investments in the category of violent crime,

Clegg and Usabi seem curiously serene about the practices that upheld segregation they would have us believe that such tactics are simply quote caste-based remedies of exclusion and that quote such strategies were rational even if suboptimal in the long run effectively rationalizing and apologizing for racism so this is great and then they cap this off with this giant like swelling crescendo of an argument about how the left can't ignore crime and you know okay so this is an argument with political consequences right and you can see those consequences in that in the 500000 cops article we were talking about yesterday. Here's a quote from that article. This figure shows the same prisoner and police data as shown in figure one, but this time denominated by the level of homicide rather than the population. America's outlying incarceration rate looks normal given the level of serious crime.

And now the level of policing in the united states appears exceptionally low compared to other countries so okay you can see the line of argument here right it goes like mass incarceration isn't about race it's actually about class and actually it's really about crime and then it goes from the crime to oh well this is about crime too we need to actually do something about crime. And then that turns into the only thing we can do about crime is have more cops. You know. And the other part of this, right, it goes back to the thing about like. OK, the thing about like that, you know, and this is something that Garrison was talking about yesterday, right?

Like the way in which you can only think the level of policing in the u.s is exceptionally low is if you never interacted with a cop and yes this is a deliberate thing right the the sort of jacobin cadre of like faux marxist like their entire political project was like originally was driving off the anarchists who'd founded occupy you know dream like and driving these people into the political wilderness and displace it with their sort of bureaucratic cop socialism right like what one of the first like big jacobin articles was a giant thing about why the zapatistas aren't a model for the american left because right like you can see what's happening here this is these people have been anti-anarchists like to their core and again because they need cops they need to get rid of the people who hate the cops like again the people who were actually on the streets during occupy who have seen shit like for example

the bloody stains on the wall outside of police holding pens where the cops smash the heads into of like every single person they arrested a thing that happened constantly during occupy right and these people who you know have seen the police shoot their friends eyes out like are incredibly inconvenient if you're trying to put yourself on top of a police state and you know so of course are abolitionists which means you also need to sideline them them and these are this you know this sort of strategy is an old entrenched like position of of these people um in 2018 jeremy gong who was like the one time basically like the dictator of dsa east bay uh was caught in in secret documents saying quote

we are not in cap this is by the way in his capital letters not for abolition of prisons i would go further 90 of black people want more police in their neighborhoods really all right yeah jeremy gong by the way asian dude not black uh fuck you eat shit i i hope you're having fun like well i don't have i don't hope you eat shit. I hope you're having fun. Like, well, I don't have to, I don't hope you're having fun.

I hope you're having a bad time losing another election by getting 3% of the vote or some shit. Like, fuck you eat shit. Um, yeah. And I should mention this also, like it, it,

it's a very obvious thing to say, but like, it should be pointed out that like everyone is making this argument like specifically these arguments about cops and about the stuffing about crime these people are all either white or asian and i i genuinely think that plays a pretty big role in why they're doing this it is just a breathtaking position to take in 2021 to yeah as a white person like i i'm looking at the uh anna casparian article which she wrote for newsweek a great source of unbiased content on the left about how we need to stop gaslighting progressives need to stop gaslighting people on crime to as a white person in 2022 like

take the stand with the platform that has been given to you with all the privileges that you have had and and gaslight black folks about the importance of race is just breathtakingly lacking in like context of self-awareness or like have you not been fucking paying attention like at least for the last two years if not for the last 20 years you know yeah and i mean like this is the whole thing right like they have this whole sort of political project that's like that like makes talking up like their goal is to make talking about this shit sound cringe because you know they and they have to right and this is this is this is also sort of class-based survival strategy right because like they these people couldn't fucking hack it as abolitionist scholars they have no fucking idea what they're talking about right if they if they if they have to actually intellectually like be in the same sphere

as like someone like ruth gilmore wilson they are going to get fucking blow like these people are like this this is like a fucking battle cruiser going to war against a speedboat right like they can't fucking hack it and so they have to sort of like do all of this shit to convince people that like no no it's actually really not about race uh it's it's actually about class this thing that i can very easily pretend to care about from academia in a way that i can't with you know pretending to care about race because like i can't even fucking fake it right and you know i would say this like back in 2018 right like jeremy gong and his allies are very careful to frame their view in terms of like well we want to end mass incarceration and police violence but we have to be tactical about how we

do it and the tactical about how we do it is black people want more cops right but that that was their internal documents their external their external statements were like yeah well some police abolitionism stuff looks like more cops anyways but you know internally they were always saying this and now with the you know these people think that there's a political right turn coming and they think that you know they can fucking take their mask off and just say what they really mean which is 500 000 more fucking cops and you know and part of what's going on here right is like like the reason this is happening is because when the uprising happened these people were just caught with their pants down because their entire political project for like fucking how how many years were they doing this like

seven years was elect bernie sanders and then he lost back to back successively to like hillary clinton who was maybe the least popular camp the democrats have ever run ever and joe biden who is a fucking senile rapist who like again was all like they lost his election to a man who couldn't remember who who he had been vice president under and they couldn't beat him right like so these people were completely discredited and then you know the uprising happened these people were caught with their pants down because they'd spent their entire fucking time or like arguing that like there's no path to liberation through race but like race any kind of racial like politics at all

intersectionality is bullshit like we just have to focus on class just to focus on class and their fucking pure class electoral campaign failed in oh hey guess what it failed in the south like wow damn i wonder why this politics fucking got swept by joe biden like okay and then you know and then the up the uprising starts and the uprising is you know the uprising is about anti-racism it is about people looking of the at the violence like of the police against black people and going fuck this and they have nothing right like the whole intellectual leadership here like all these people are fucking calling for world cops bernie sanders is arguing for more cops right like choppo's fucking choppo was literally making the same arguments that my fucking mayor made while she was

raising the fucking drawbridges to stop protesters from being able to get back into the middle of chicago which is that actually like cops uh becoming a cop is actually one of the few ways that uh non-white people can uh join the middle class right that was i think amber made that argument right um so you know they have nothing right and you know okay and and you know and the uprising eventually gets suppressed which is the best thing that ever happened to these people because if the uprising is to see these people were done right like but all of this has enormous consequences right which is the the failure of the working class to appear at the ballot box to like pull bernie sanders over the line against joe biden revealed something that was like patently obvious

to anyone who'd been watching how the working class is moving worldwide for the past 20 years which is that the only thing that can actually unify though if you care about class politics the only thing that can unify the working class and pull it together as a coherent political force to do a thing is their hatred of the police if you look if you look at what the working class politics in the 21st century the world working class finds its historical unity exactly and only on the barricade it appears undivided literally nowhere else it is impossible you can't do it the only thing that does it is is fighting the police like more broadly in like means of state violence right like if we look at the popular front in spain it's and you even get like cops who are installed by a socialist republican government joining the working class to fight the military but yeah instead we're going

to be like the working class will be united in this op-ed at newsweek.com yeah and there's this fucking electoral thing right and it's like no and i think that like this is partially about these people not understanding the sort of broad arc of of the last decade a decade and a half which is that like this was the actual meaning behind the people want to follow the regime right this this was what was going on in the last decade of uprisings and street movements across the world right is that that was the thing that could unify the working class but of course and this is the sort of secret of all of this right like these people don't want to unify the working class they only want to unify it if it's under their control.

The erupt, the eruption of, you know, like actually the working class standing side by side together, fighting the cops on barricades in 2020 was the worst thing that could possibly happen to them because it, you know, it pointed to another way of doing politics that they like in the,

in the street that they thought they'd, you know, crushed after the feat of occupy. And yeah. And, and, you know, they, they were, they were, they were incredibly scared by this.

They were pissed off by this. And, you know, I mentioned last episode I was going to talk about the sort of class politics that's at work here because, you know, these demands for more cops, like, they don't come from the working class, right? Like, insofar as there's ever been a referendum on the police as an institution it was 2020 and you know we know what that looked like right it

was a it was a bunch of fucking working class kids went into the streets and you know and fought like lions against the fucking cops and even the sort of liberal like the liberal middle and professional classes like eventually turned against them you know as as sort of 2020 rolled on right and you know the like those people still hung on for months and months and months you know like refusing to leave the streets even after the fucking federal marshal started literally assassinating people openly in the streets right like the the whole demand for more cops for like a harsher crackdown on crime all of this stuff comes from precisely the opposite direction. It's entirely generated by basically the media class.

Its class base is a combination of these sort of faux progressive media outlets. And originally this starts with the New York Times and the Washington Post and then moves left, nominally left, when it hits the fucking 2it and all of their like bullshit right and then you know and then at that point having having having went through the media people right it's it starts running through these pseudo-radical academics like christopher lewis and adanar usami and then the last group of people who are backing this is this is a very weird one but uh there's a collection of paid union staffers who like for their jobs because they're in the big unions work on police and prison guard contracts um this this was actually this is this has been a huge problem the dsa uh in in in what was it 2016 no 2015 2015 2016 one of the the npc

elections they had um for the for the national political committee which is like the dsa's big major body uh like governing body right uh they they accident people accidentally elected a police union organizer because he was like they knew he was a union organizer they didn't know that he organized police unions and then he he fucking refute like nothing nothing was gonna happen and then basically what happened is everyone on the left of the organization bullied him out and so he resigned but like yeah there's a lot of those people, right? And those people's class incentives are incredibly obvious, right? But didn't the AFL-CIO, even in 2020,

like, refuse to reject police unions, right? Yeah. People, if I remember, I think someone threw a Molotov, like, into the headquarters of the AFL-CIO because of it. Like, yeah, like, this was a whole fucking thing. And you know, like this sucks. Cops are not fucking workers. Jesus Christ.

Like they're, they're just not. If you, if you look at what they actually do, they are like, they're basically minor feudal Lords in that they extract rent from everyone by fucking walking on people and robbing them. And then they also extract rent directly from us by taking, by stealing just like enormous, increasingly large amounts of city funds under basically the threat of extortion and violence. Yeah. Little,

uh, dynios. Yeah, it's, it's, it's shit. I want to come back to the sort of left media outlets, right?

Because what we've been seeing here is that as, as these sort of left media outlets get larger right they increasingly adopt like insane small business tyrant politics because that's that's what they're becoming right tyt notoriously tried to bust its own union staff yeah because it turns out as journalists become bosses and capitalists they have they have their own class interests to look out for right yeah and they will continue producing this class discourse which serves as nothing other than like uh best like a safety sort of steam valve right for people who are frustrated by the class situation they work in if not like an outright sort of disinformation campaign about what class is yeah and you know and and there's i think there's another thing going on here too which is that like okay if if you're like a sort of like media outlet and your thing

is that you hate liberals and that you're on the left right there's there's kind of a cap to your audience base and specifically there's a cap to the kind of audience you can have that actually has money because you know you you can you can get a broke base of sort of progressive workers you can get some college students right but at some point like those those are not people that have a large amount of money yeah and at some point the right offers a listener base that has a bunch of money and this gives you a revenue base for sort of would-be like media tycoons hitting the limits of their original base and this is responsible for things like like max blumenthal and x like tyt reporter jimmy dore like descending it's just full-on covid denialism and conspiracy i mean you know it's it's not like these people were like doing good before but like you know

full-on right wing like like max blumenthal going from being like the most pro ccp guy the world has ever seen to literally writing articles about how social credit is coming to the u.s uh in a form of covet restrictions like this kind of shit and you know so like that's part of the class politics going on here like there's another thing which is like okay there's the harvard academics uh i don't think we need to say anything complicated about their class loyalties except that like none of these dipshits are ever be beaten half to death by a cop um yeah i mean we talked about the union bureaucrats right um they're slightly more complicated but again like in class terms you get people who are either driven by purely by sort of the the revenue that copy unions bring in and then you get people who are opposed to political organizations like the dsa taking firm stances against police union organizers because

it would affect their own ability to win off like win elections inside the dsa a thing that has happened so many times it's great it's it is very funny that they chose classes uh they chose uh like education level as their proxy for class and we are discussing this in the same week that we release an episode about a grad student strike at the largest university in the country because grad students are unhoused because they can't afford to pay their rent and feed themselves.

Yep. It is atrocious shit. Like, I just... Okay. I hate these people. Yeah, so I want to close off by talking about something, which is that there's also a political angle to all of this, right? These people,

all of these people doing this fucking tough on crime bullshit, all these people fucking going right, all of these people calculated that a right turn in American politics was coming, right? That's why TYT endorsed a fucking literally a Republican in California who was also an insane tough on crime guy. This is why they had endorsed a fucking literally a republican in california who was also an insane tough on crime

guy this is why uh this is why they had uh not no no uh uh rick caruso caruso yeah who was a republican who changed his party affiliations we could run the democratic thing who fucking sucks ass that's why they do it's that guy that that's why they had matt uh quote alleged pedophile gates on their show on fucking election night they They had Larry Elder on their show as well. Like election denialist, Larry Elder. Yeah. Like this, this wasn't just a pure product of these people going insane,

watching videos of like people looting grocery stores and turning into like tough on crime reactionaries. This was a political calculation. And. Big stuff. Yeah. But, but,

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

their fucking selves people who they will literally never meet put on a mask picked up a brick and waged war against the best funded police force in human history and for like a week and a half those same fucking Americans who the entire political spectrum had written off as hopelessly beaten down and passive and right wing and like people who will take any amount of abuse and never say anything back,

wrecked the fucking, wrecked the cop shit so hard. They lost control over the centers of multiple major American cities and had to call in the fucking National Guard who in turn got their shit wrecked so hard that they had to rely on liberal civil society to calm the protest down and even then the president would have fucking deployed the army against them if he'd actually been physically able to and the only reason that these people weren't fighting the fucking army in the streets was that was that the fucking american generals refused to go along with it

right like that that is who the US is. That is who this generation is. This generation is forever the generation that burned the third precinct. And the fucking ex-left is running right. Just don't fucking get it, right? They think the entire clock has been round back. They think that, like, the people who did that have already been destroyed. They don't matter.

The only thing left, you know, that you can do is join the right and mitigate the damage. And they're fucking wrong. They are wrong. They can't see it. They cannot see that there is no way to turn the clock back to before the uprising happened. They can't see that like this entire country, that the, that the American working class, that parts of the people who are not part of the American working class have been fundamentally changed. and yeah they just they just can't see it and because they can't see it the only thing that they're ever going to feel is the weight of their is the only thing they can feel is the weight of their ignorance and the only thing they're going to feel on top of that is them getting fucking buried by the weight of a history that has left them behind because fuck these people fuck the cops fuck the people who support the cops these people will be down but will be fucking drowned by the tide of history they thought didn't fucking exist fuck them okay this is what yeah i you can probably tell i wrote this really really pissed off at five in the fucking morning because jesus christ

that was good yeah yeah i agree with you pick up a brick put down the young turks yeah don't fucking support more cops every every everyone will hate you your co-workers will hate you your friends will hate you your family will hate you the guy the guy at the fucking quarter store will hate you yeah i don't if you find your fucking left hero stanning the people who murdered George Floyd or stood around and watched George Floyd being murdered, then they are not a leftist anymore. It's okay to tell them to fuck off and die. Yeah, and we can go back to the first episode, right?

The reason these people are calling for 500,000 more cops is that they've given up entirely, right? They literally do not think it is possible for anything to ever improve in the US. And they are wrong. Yeah, and I think that they're okay with the way that our police behave. And if that makes them feel comfortable and safe,

then they don't mind that people die at the hands of the police. Cops protect rich people. These people have gotten wealthy enough to have the cops now benefit them. It's that simple like that's that that's it's it's i think that really is the yeah yeah the drive the driving motivator here yeah and and i like i will say this too like if if we ever get to a point where we start fucking doing this like take us down too like this this is this isn't just a sort of like we're

trying to build our business or whatever i don't like i don't fucking care i i would i would rather fucking go broke in the streets i would rather fucking die than be a person whose job it is to say we need more cops fuck these people like god fuck them all yeah they've blocked me on twitter so i can't say it but you can get after them podcast fans oh god we are not inciting a harassment campaign instead go do better things go yeah don't waste don't know yeah in all seriousness don't waste your time doing discourse with people who exist to create bullshit discourse they're just a distraction go and help someone needs your fucking help. It's cold, it's wet, it's wintertime, and there are unhoused people

who are shivering on the street. So don't fuck with the young Turks. Just ignore them. They're pointless. They're useless. Go out there and fucking build the socialism that these people think is impossible.

Because we can do it, and we will. And then we will fucking laugh at them because we've done it and they are fucking bullshit yeah that's that's the episode hey we'll be back monday with more episodes every week from now until the heat death of the universe it could happen here as a production of cool Zone Media. For more podcasts from Cool Zone Media, visit our website, coolzonemedia.com, or check us out on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts.

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