It Could Happen Here - It Could Happen Here Weekly 73

Episode Date: March 4, 2023

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If you've been listening to the episodes every day this week, there's going to be nothing new here for you, but you can make your own decisions. The sun never sets on the British Empire, because God doesn't trust the British in the dark. Welcome to It Could Happen Here, a podcast that holds that the only good American tradition is rebellion against the British. I'm your host, Mia Wong, and today we're going to be talking about the happenings in the perfidious Albion. Joining me live from one of the most accursed states currently in existence is Sophie from

Mars, the co-host of Red Planet, a weekly leftist roundtable who does many other wonderful things that involve anarchism and organizing and stuff. Sophie, how are you hanging in there in this sort of increasingly failed state in the West? That was a very good introduction. I do think that Britain is largely out of God's sight and by consequence outside of his love. So I think you summed it up pretty well. I mean, I'm okay. I had experienced a minor hate crime today, so it's another normal day of being a trans person in the UK.

Some guy tried to film me on his phone, and I was like, hey, I can see that you're filming me. And he didn't argue and be like, no, I wasn't. So I know that he was. It was very cool. Yeah, it's all right. Yeah, Turf Island continues to be incredibly normal. And by incredibly normal i mean

i just this look look at the at the end of world war ii lots of states were divided into pieces the uk should have been one of them i i i hold that now oh that's true i mean trans people we we are working on destroying the union yeah this, this is this is all bad. It incredible stuff. I really thought it was going to be Brexit that that finally destroyed the United Kingdom. It was hatred of trans people that finally did it. Truly incredible stuff. So you want to ask me what it's like to be British? You know, OK, so I mean should we both do like accents for this one

should we should we both be like oi governor let's have some tea and crumpies so what a eel pie and some mashed peas oh okay so i i okay i you know i i i spent some time looking at, like, sort of British export charts and, like, a bunch of stuff on the British economy, and none of them at any point had Britain's chief export, which is jokes about Britain. No wonder your economy is in shambles. I think Britain's primary export is, like, white supremacist war crimes. That's true, but the thing is, like, the UK's, like, ability to export white supremacist war crimes that's true but the thing is like they're they're the the uk's like ability to export white supremacist war crimes is at an all-time low that's kind of like like it's really funny i was in armenia like fairly recently for surgery and i went to a talk by someone who like used to work in dc and now works with the armenian government and they were

talking about like how what kind of external support they could expect for, like, the conflict with Azerbaijan. And someone brought up Britain, and he was just like, Britain's not really a player on the international stage anymore. I mean, what is that? And I was like, woo! It's not that funny, but it's kind of like a sign of what the UK actually is now, which is in 2011, theish were like one of the

first people who decided they were going to bomb gaddafi but the problem is the the british the british like air force was capable of dropping of doing like maybe like three or four bombing runs before they just straight up ran out of fuel and the whole thing was like they like they had to draw the us in because the british no longer the British no longer had actual military capability to do imperialism anymore. So things are not great in the sort of white supremacy factory. We have reached a really bizarre point where our ruling class is divided. The whole story of the Dulles brothers and the creation of the CIA is like we are going through that in reverse at this point. But we've had one of the most interventionist histories

of any country ever. And now our ruling class is divided between we should carry on doing interventionism because it benefits us to be the worst, most ghoulish, vampiric country conceivable. And we shouldn't do that because it costs money. And why are we spending money on brown people? Yeah.

With just two terrible positions baffling out yeah it's it's fun it's it's it's it's a good time in the uk uh so you know speaking of speaking of it being a good time in the uk uh so i i solved i i've seen this before and i didn't like i didn't quite believe it and i look at the numbers and i we were talking about this a bit before we got on but it looks like the uk right now is projected economic performance is worse than russia's which is incredible because that is a country that is like under just unbelievably debilitating sanctions and is also like losing a war and uk's economy is more fucked than a country that is being shot with missiles. Like, how? I mean, we are also losing a war, but it's a war of ideas. That's true.

So, yeah, I think we should probably, when we last left the United Kingdom on this show, I think it was, I think Liz Truss had just been overthrown and we were now on our, UK is now on their, what, I think it was, I think Liz Truss had just been overthrown. And we were now on, UK is now on their second consecutive unelected prime minister. Oh, no, no, Mia, Mia, Mia. Second consecutive? Oh, no, right, because they never, no, no, no, no, they elected Boris Johnson, right?

Okay, no, this is a good place to start. This is a really good place to start. Is it three? to start this is a really good place to start um since tony blair we haven't had a prime minister who we elected to get into power like no sorry since david cameron we did actually elect david cameron but kind but only kind of like kind of maybe so like we had we had blair who is terrible and is worth getting into for a whole discussion in a minute. And then we had Brown, who was his chancellor, so kind of our vice president, who stepped in. And then he lost to Cameron.

Only Cameron had a coalition. That's why I say it's kind of maybe. Oh, yeah, yeah. He had the Lib Dem thing, and the Lib Dems decided to literally go back at everything they'd ever done. So the main thing that was happening with the Lib Dems was they promised to protect student

loan prices from going up. And they got massive support from young people and anyone who can see why it's good to be able to offer young people an education. Especially because Blair had this big famous speech where he was like, education, education,

education. That's my excellent tony blair impression um he um and and that's also worth getting into is that there's it's it's a very multi-faceted level of parasitic fuckery his whole education thing but because he had focused on education loads of people were really passionate about it and then the lib dems were like we're gonna stop them from making uh university fees nine thousand pounds a year and that was what got the lib dems an enormous amount of the vote and then they made a coalition with the tories and then immediately went back on it and made and that's why my my student loans are ridiculous even though i dropped out um my student loans are

higher than my partner's and i dropped out my second year and she dropped out after doing like six years of the same degree because she had the lower fee. Um, but I, um, so then there was Cameron again, but without the Lib Dems because everyone's sick of them and no one will ever vote for them ever again. The Lib Dems are just a funny side story. There are lots of like funny and cringe side stories in British electoral politics where it doesn't matter that much because they'll never get into power, but the succession of absolute clowns who've been in charge of this party or that party just is really funny. The Lib Dems have had a homophobe, but they had Nick Clegg,

then they had a homophobe who said that being gay was a sin, and then they had someone called Joe. What was she called? Swanson. Yeah. I think, I think that's right. Swinson,

something like this. And she started talking to this incredible, like neoliberal, like if you've ever seen, um, the thick of it, like she sounds, she,

she sounded like a character from the thick of it. She was talking about like people having skills, wallets and shit like this. Oh my God. Um, she also, I think killed a squirrel. There was a whole thing about that. Um oh boy then you know analogously there's like the um the

communist party of great britain which i hope to get into a bit later because that is a fascinating story but anyway the tory party is the one that matters the most for now so we had cameron then who do we have theresa may because cam Cameron bet big on us not voting for Brexit. And then Nigel Farage and Boris Johnson, et cetera, came in and were like, save the NHS migrants, blah,

blah, blah. And then we voted for Brexit. So then we had Theresa May by default because Cameron had left. So this is what I mean that like the Tory party has this ongoing strategy of just like swapping someone in and then like calling a general election really soon afterwards. And the incumbent's going to gonna win so it's like i don't consider that to be like someone winning

an election if they're already in through rat fuckery although i i feel i feel like it's it's still slow at least there was an election for them which is more of what's happening now yeah no it's it's definitely devolved like it's definitely gotten worse but like it i think we're on like the seventh unelected prime minister by my count but like yeah it it was like cameron then uh then may then boris johnson and then uh sorry yes boris johnson and then liz truss and now it's uh sunak because like did I get them the wrong way around? Anyway. No, no, I think that's the right order. Sunak literally didn't have

any opposition in the Tory party leadership election. Like he won by default. That's how dire it's gotten. Like they wanted Boris Johnson to come back and try again and he decided he wasn't going to bother and because of that there was no one to run against Sunak.

So he just won by default. Really incredible stuff. Yeah. And Sunak's a fascinating character as well, because he is incredibly green. And I don't mean environmentalist. I mean, like, he knows fucking nothing. And he's currently going through this, like, there was a measurable phenomenon with David Cameron where he was really was really naive and he went through the neoliberal thing of being like i'm gonna cut the red tape oh no that's not working i need massively authoritarian policies oh no that's

not working maybe this is a flawed ideology and just like just towards the end of his term he was like maybe this isn't working and then they got rid of him sunak is currently like very firmly in the stage of like trying to do as much libertarianism as possible and realizing that the state can only do libertarianism if they are also as authoritarian as possible yeah and i think you know i was going to get this in a bit but i think that there's a couple of things that have been happening simultaneously one is that like okay so we so we had, there was the incredibly brief phenomenon of trustonomics of, like, the British's attempt to, like, actually really sort of, I don't even know how to describe it, like, because British politics is always neoliberal, but, like, do a kind of neoliberalism that, like, nobody has seen since, like, I saw people describing it as, like, trying do do a kind of neoliberalism that like no nobody has seen since like i saw people describing it as like trying to do reaganomics without the dollar but i think

it's actually stupider than that because like a there are there are places where you could conceivably pull off reaganomics without the dollar right but like you have to have like kind of an economy which is the thing the uk no longer has after they shot themselves in the foot like 1 000 times with brexit yeah um let's trust published like a plan for what she was gonna do in terms of economic reforms and it crashed the pound unbelievably hard like just just like people not even the plan like not even the policies being implemented yeah people saw the plan and the pound halved in value overnight. Yeah, and there is stuff that I have seen in the wake of Trostonomics and in the wake of Rishi Sudak attempting to piece together an even sort of functional government that like i i never thought i would see like i i i mean i i i

guess i had seen the imf saying hold on you have to stop doing austerity before but like i i didn't think i'd see that for the about the uk no it's pretty impressive yeah like the other thing that i've seen that's i'm just genuinely i like i can't believe is i've seen mainstream newspaper outlets print things about the economy that you are just not allowed to say. Like I, I, I, I, I have seen mainstream newspapers admit that economic growth was actually better in the inflation rack and class war torn seventies. And it is now, which is like, that is like the single thing you are not allowed to say in all of economics. Because if you, if, if you actually pull out the growth rate chart and point out that economic growth was actually better in the 70s and it wasn't any success a decade, everyone immediately shoots parties where you can like suck and fuck with box johnson and that is like the highest privilege in british

society so you obviously want that yeah you can you can you can no longer fuck the pig i think things of this nature it gets bad very quickly was interviewed and he it was like front page kia stama saying i would kiss a tori and I just shared it being like look we already know David Cameron fucked a pig yeah Starmer saying he would kiss a Tory is just uh that's just a cherry on top so okay

I want to ask a little bit about what is going on in the British economy because I have spent some time attempting to figure out what the fuck even is the British economy. And as, as, as, as, as best I've been able to determine it produces, okay. It produces financial quote unquote financial services, which seems to be the UK sort of polite euphemism for doing money laundering for like both the regular bourgeoisie and

for this enormous class of like kleptocrats and petrol oligarchs who like get their money by extracting it directly from the state. Yeah. Um, it seems like, it seems like like you have that layer you have the layer below them who are just like somehow more landlords per capita than exist in like any other place that has ever existed and then below that there's this quote-unquote service economy thing yeah i think you're getting it i think you're pretty much getting it i think okay there are two sides to british politics there's this this economic one that you're pointing out which is like let me put a pin in the economics right that the economy of the uk is unbelievable and we'll get to it in a second and then there's the like the um the electoral politics that they try

to like that is is just a farce to try like, keep people from ever looking too closely at the economics. Like, ever looking with a sensible lens at the economics. The electoral politics is just, like, eternal war on a set of marginalized communities. Young people, immigrants, refugees, and asylum seekers, sex workers, trans people uh black and minority ethnic britains um the uh the grt community travelers uh enormously like that was something that like a lot of people thought that like new labor under blair was like so progressive and was like ending races it was a big like obama adjacent moment for us and like but they were horribly racist to travelers and that's like escalated in recent years to like um if people are familiar with the police crimes sentencing and courts bill like that

um got somewhat defanged but like one of the worst parts of the bill still got through was just like ending the right to roam which is effectively just a genocide against travelers yeah um when i mentioned sex workers like a lot of british sex workers are pushing for any kind of legal reform that would be better. But like our most progressive politicians like Jeremy Corbyn literally like still supports the Nordic model. Like it's it's a nightmare. that the social side of politics in the UK is just war on, as I say, like dividing up the entire population into marginalized groups forever, eternally, like saving this idea of like the blue collar working class white man who also earns like 80,000 pounds a year. Um, and, and that's the, that's the ideal voter, even though that's that's no one um and then there's the economics

okay so the and all of that is a smokescreen for the economics so like you said um lowest level there's the service economy because we like the rest of the imperial core exported all our industrial stuff uh to the imperial periphery when our industrial sectors got uh unionized uh we are now a service economy um so practically all jobs in the uk are poor people providing some kind of service for rich people um then like you say there's the landlords above that we have we have a wild time with landlords and that there is there is a plus side to that which is that like our tenants unions are fantastic like we have we have such a boom in tenants unions i've been interviewing activists and organizers for a couple of years now

and in the u.s you guys are doing okay with tenants unions you've got a bigger challenge because like the cops show up with guns to evict people so that is like that is a crazy time but like we have such bigger stronger tenants unions and like i think the possibility of something like a full-scale rent strike happening in the uk is actually pretty like pretty feasible um the us and then just don't like get that shit like i i i had back back back back when back when i was an incredibly naive youth and was in the dsa we had an entire like massive battle in my chapter about chapter about whether we should do tenants organizing. And I was on the side of the floor,

yeah, obviously we should do. I had one of the fucking Chicago DSA leadership people in this meeting said to my face, and I quote, how does building tenants unions build working class power? What? What? These people are

clowns. Absolute clowns just like every every every time they walk down the street their giant noses go hog like the clown she's going i'm not gonna i'm not gonna be in i'm not gonna i'm not gonna engage in anti-clown slander here i uh i i do not i i think it's very unfair on clowns to compare them to the dsa that's true that's um i there's a line in angel wing paradise where she says like um i don't want to be the head of the local dsa chapter i just want to be on the digimon the movie soundtrack i'm like fuck yes yeah okay speak speaking of the digimon the movie soundtrack all right very nice very nice i i maybe maybe maybe maybe we'll get sponsored by by digimon the movie that was we'll get sponsored by by by digimon the movie

that was yeah maybe here's an ad for digimon the movie yeah yeah i hope i it's it's gonna be fucking gold again or like we're gonna please okay just once again uh other we have talked about this on multiple shows now please stop dming other sophie about about about the stupid gold ads we know they're there which way yeah don't buy gold yeah and we're back i hope i hope you i hope i hope you're now with digimod uh they they got they got little monsters that turn into things with giant guns i hope that you being carpet bombed with digimon the movie ads has reshaped your brain to a higher consciousness, Digimon consciousness. Let's talk about financial services. You mentioned this very briefly, but this is actually so like, OK.

Most people in the UK working in like fucking Uber or like Deliveroo or some other uh nightmarish service sector job then there's uh the petty bourgeois uh who are so overwhelmingly landlords now and then and then there are mega landlords we have a ton of like mega landlords who something really insidious about that by the way is that we have a lot of like housing associations that claim to be like for the good of the tenant and claim to be like socially progressive trying to help people out and they actually own like thousands of properties and like there are people with like uh through the tenants union my partner knows someone who who hurt it was like raining in her flat because the leaks were so bad it was like rain indoors and she had like black mold and none

of her lights were working and that was like that was a housing association they they are some of the worst landlords and then above them the uk is running one of the biggest money laundering operations in the world uh maybe the biggest i think it's i don't i don't know like maybe maybe i don't i don't even i don't even think like the Cayman Islands or like or the Bahamas have like that kind of like or Panama has a kind of throughput we're really familiar with like Switzerland and like you say Panama

and the Cayman Islands and some people are somewhat familiar with Ireland as being like tax havens yeah but like none of these actually compare to Britain because Britain like forged all of these relationships with the entire world because it invaded them. And now it has those like the British Empire ended in name and legal function, but did not end in terms of financial services. Like that is our that is our grip on power is like that.

We do. Yeah. We just launder a bunch of rich people's money. There's a great documentary called the spider's web which talks about this and like the head of uh her majesty is right oh i guess it's his majesty now oh fuck the king just taking this opportunity to say fuck the king um hmrc anyway the head of hmrc like literally just works for the the money launderers like the people who are just trying to bring through like billions of of dollars to to launder um yeah like when i say about like the rest of our politics being a smokescreen it's because like this is everything for the british ruling class like it's all about them trying to to launder money and like i think that like the the recent rise in like far right populism or

attempt at that in the uk which by the way i don't think is going as well as they wish it was anymore but like well because they did because they did brexit it turns out brexit was a really bad idea yeah yeah i remember there was something for a while a while ago i was in some forum thread where they were just posting like Trump supporters realize they're going to die because of Trump. Um, it's a very similar phenomenon in the UK. Like you,

there's a lot of, and I don't really delight in it because it's just, it's just like looking a lot of working class, working class people suffering. Um, but there is a very like very obvious and noticeable trend of like people who voted for Brexit realizing that it's completely fucked everything about their life um but when there was this attempt at like raising far-right um like false class consciousness in a very trumpian way um that was all like a very

big attempt at the smoke screen because like if there's have you ever seen johnny english no what is johnny english there's this fucking rowan atkinson film where he like is a he he winds up being like a spy and the villain in that film is french of course because you know the oh the french are so evil compared to britain etc uh baguette and so on um and uh that guy who's played by John Malkovich wants to get the British throne and then sell Britain to private investors to turn the entire island into a prison.

So he's created modern Britain. Yeah, he's just outlining modern British politics, yeah. So, like... In terms of social policy like it would suit the ruling class of britain very very nicely if britain was just one big jail because like they they are only inconvenienced by having to cater to any kind of population like if the british population just all died the tories would be having such a good time like they would fucking love it if there was absolutely no one to govern over and britain could just like on paper have a population of 60 million and then they could use

that for the money laundering yeah but actually you go here and it's just a complete like ghost island like that everyone is gone yeah i mean it is that it's just it is like ghost island. Like everyone is gone. Yeah. I mean, it is that. It's just, it is just for money laundering. Like I think the London Stock Exchange is the oldest stock exchange, I think. I'm not sure. But like, obviously it's had a long time to develop and like it's, yeah, the, there is more fiscal capital or Marx would have called fictitious capital in the world now than there

is like real capital or Marx would have called fictitious capital in the world now than there is like real capital or financial capital and yeah a huge amount of it goes through the London Stock Exchange and through like yeah through the services of HMRC and through like

the various schemes that it's really funny I had to I had to I don't think this is like as insidious as it sounds but I was filling up my tax return recently and there was a question that HMSE like just straight facedly asked like have you participated in one or more tax avoidance

schemes and I was like this is a normal country this is a really normal normal country like they just asked how do you and i and like when when my partner saw this because she was filling out hers she was like is this just a trick question to get you to like dob yourself into the cops and i was like no no this is a this is a normal question in case you are a very very rich person who has engaged in a tax avoidance

scheme and you want to just report that and then the HMRC will be like, cool, good job, avoiding paying taxes. You know, when I was sort of like running through my research for this, I remembered a David Graeber quote about the British economy where he said something to the effect of

the United Kingdom's chief product is the docility of of its working class which is what allows oligarchs to just like put their money there because they know that they're gonna have a butler where no one's ever gonna steal it yeah which yeah but you know the sort of other side of of of the graver in the uk arc is you know towards the end of his life like he starts writing a lot about the revolt of the caring classes and about this sort of like and he was talking about he was talking about stuff that was happening like 2018 2019 yeah yeah a lot about like but the g-league shot actually too because there's a lot of uh yeah sort of and he was directly involved in some organizing to try and stop the IMF. Yeah, yeah.

But, you know, what's interesting to me about this is like – Oh, I don't want to let it go by without saying the IMF must be destroyed at all costs. Oh, yeah. That's a policy I have about mentioning the IMF. Like, yeah. Actually demonic. Real demons exist, and they're called the International Monetary Fund. Yeah, I talked about this in my neoliberalism episode.

And this is another sort of Graeberism thing, right, is the sort of – being attuned to the fact that all of this sort of like red tape cutting bullshit is actually just a smokescreen for an incredibly sort of unbelievably violent or oppressive bureaucracy. And the global wing of the violent or oppressive bureaucracy is the IMF. Yeah. global wing of the violent repressive bureaucracy is the imf yeah and well it's a really weird what i was saying before about like cameron realizing that neoliberalism doesn't work towards the end of the time that he was in office like what i'm referring to is that he wrote a letter to his constituency to his local council that he's supposed to represent and he said that like they'd been complaining that they didn't have the money to to to do the things they needed to do and he was like well you should just cut out the red tape.

Like, you should just clear out the backroom bureaucracy. That's the thing that's costing you all the money. And I think, with some time to reflect on this, where I think he gets that idea from is that he's seen how well it works for the ruling class. He's like, the more red tape we cut, the more we get rid of regulations, the more money we make. And so he's like, that is simple then.

Minus red tape equals more money we make and so he's like that is simple then minus red tape equals more money um and they replied to him like what the fuck are you talking about there is no backroom bureaucracy you cut our budget with austerity policies that's why there's no money and he was like oh fuck fuck like yeah well and i you know this this this seems to have like escalated to levels in the uk that are like sort of genuinely catastrophic i mean you know one thing that's sort of been quietly going on is like the sort of quiet privatization of the nhs yeah which is yeah the nhs is the national health service or as trans people call it, the No Healthcare Service. I haven't heard that one before. That's very good. Yeah, but, you know, okay, but I...

I'm currently, a good demonstration of that, actually, I am currently trying to get onto the pilot scheme Trans Plus, which basically gets you to the end of the waiting list, and if the pilot scheme goes well, hopefully we'll be getting rid of the... Hopefully, but, like, this is the good alternative right and to get onto it i need to get my referral which my gp told me they did but didn't do so to do that i need to get my current gp to write the referral to the gic and include a note that says this was meant to be done in august 2020 and to do that i called up called up the GP office the other day,

and they said, I was on the phone with the GP, and I said, go to the GIC's website, click on the section that says, you know, you're a GP and you're looking to refer a patient. And she was like, oh, I can't do that because of our computer systems. So what I'm going to need you to do is go to the website yourself

and click on the thing that says you're a GP, even though you're not, and download that that form and then email it to our office and then call the office and then get them to make the referral this is the good alternative this is the good alternative compared to just waiting for like 15 years and then killing myself this is the good option for health care on for trans people in the uk right now yeah it's a yeah like as as as as as like shitty as american trans health care is a lot of the time it is somehow well okay unless you're in a place that has made it illegal now which uh is fun it's it's a lot less fucked than the uk's for which is kind of incredible i really thought we would we were like outdoing the gop states like for for just a second there we were like inching ahead in how much our

country hates trans people and then like all these bands came out that were just like taking trans kids away from their parents or whatever yeah that's like okay no they they clearly won um yeah for now anyway we'll see we'll see whether you know whether like the rowling bill comes in in in 2024 or something that like yeah it's just like execute transgenders on site i would would not surprise me at all the oh god it's fun being just the scapegoat for yeah everything that's ever gone wrong ever hi this is mia in post this episode was recorded just days before brianna jai a 16 year old trans girl was stabbed to death in a town near liverpool um we haven't talked about it really on the show over the last few weeks because very little of what I and what I think the rest of

the crew have had to say about Brianna Jai's murder between sort of the racking sobs that yet another trans person taking from us is even remotely publishable. What I can say is that some of the wealthiest and most powerful people and institutions in the world are trying to exterminate us. And the BBC, the New York Times, JK Rowling, and every major British political party, and the American ones too, have blood on their fucking hands and should be treated accordingly. And on that bleak note,

yeah, we can go back to the rest of the episode. Yeah, it is wild being a country that, like, supposedly, like, the thing we probably have to be the proudest of in our entire history is creating a system for socialized medicine where people have free point-of-use healthcare. And since it was created, the ruling class have tried as hard as possible

to destroy it, and they're finally succeeding. I'm actually having friends are telling me recently that they're going to, like, hospitals, and the hospitals are telling them that they're privatized, and they'll have to charge them because they're going to like hospitals and the hospitals are telling them that they're you know they're privatized and they'd like they can't they'll have to charge them because they're not like uh contracted to do NHS work anymore so that's you know they're succeeding at that I we've probably wandered away from the point of what we were trying to say I yeah I have very resentful feelings to do with health care in the UK I'm currently playing with my comfort knife. I mean, I think this is sort of circling around

to the thing I wanted to talk about next, which is that like, you know, on the one hand, we have this sort of like, just the sort of monumental collapse of anything that could like conceivably make the UK a society. But on the other hand, Graeber is sort of like... A lot of people share the joke of me and why they're like, we live in a society. And I'm like, if you're in the UK sharing this, you are wrong.

We live in an economy. We live in an economy. It's pretty bleak. It would be fucking great to live in a society. I wish. fucking great to live in a society. I wish. But, you know, on the other hand,

David Graeber's final prediction has, like, now come true, which is that we are now actually, like, the UK is now sort of starting to see the full-scale revolt of the caring classes. Yes. And that has come in the form of, well, I have no idea when this episode's gonna come out. Sorry, everything's chaos right now.

But, as of time of recording i guess is it tomorrow that something like half a million people are going on strike and lo and behold who was going on strike people went on strike last week oh was it last week yeah yeah am i have i okay i'm a dumb ass isn't well aren't there more tomorrow on the first of february over half a million people went on strike and there were massive demonstrations and marches across the country it's the biggest strike and biggest marches that we've seen in like over a decade um we haven't seen marches this size since protests against the iraq war yeah yeah and well okay so inshallah they'll be more effective than the iraq war protests but i yeah i mean i i think it's interesting if you

look at the people who are who are striking it is it is people who do care labor it's teachers it's nurses it's ambulance drivers people in civil service like train and bus drivers who are like still on strike in various capacities. A point to pull you up on that, but it agrees with your point even more in terms of the rebellion of the caring classes. The current drive of the strikes from the RMT, that's Rail, Maritime, and Transport workers, big up the RMT.

My boys are incredible. Mick Lynch, shout out, love you to pieces. pick up the rmt my boys are incredible mick lynch shout out love you to pieces um uh the current strikes are actually driven by the janitorial staff um who are like some of the worst treated and worst paid among all of the train and transport staff um like bus drivers and train drivers and so on have joined in on it and that as you're saying is like is still part of the like rebellion of the carrying classes but um it's even more so because it's literally like the cleaners who were like yeah this is fucked we need better wages yeah and there's been one a and i think like what like postal workers are also on strike uh this other i'm pretty i'm pretty sure other people are also on strike too that i'm leaving

out here uh let's see so ambulance drivers civil servants teachers uh nurses uh training workers uh yeah like yeah university workers yeah university workers there are there are but i do not care about this i have no solidarity for them border agents on strike stay on strike baby fucking never come back to work just keep fucking striking we are starting the abolition of work with you congratulations we're now you have now finally become the vanguard of the working class it's what it's what you fucking cops have always wanted yeah you gotta do it now yeah well cops is an interesting uh thing as well because like uh on red planet every sunday 8 p.m to 11 p.m uk time uh check it out uh we um we we have a running prediction to do with the with the police that like as their job as class warfare becomes

more naked the police's job is more and more obviously just what it's always been to put down the working class but as your as your job just becomes like smashing like bottled water stands that people put up in a heat wave to help homeless people and like trying to evict people and trying to like stop people who are striking for better pay uh and also everyone around you constantly calls you a pig and like degrades you and is like are you enjoying what you're doing do you have a good life are you liking this job uh we'll see like lots of police quitting and actually this month the telegraph who can't really be trusted but this does fit into a larger pattern the telegraph reported that uh more cops had quit than had been recruited in the last month and that's one of the overall

pattern that has been going on for a while to be fair that that i i don't know i in the u.s every single newspaper says that every week and it's never true so yes i don't know i mean it does look like the i mean cops quitting in the uk has been on the rise since like uh like early last year um and enormously as well uh and you can tell because the Met has been putting out loads of recruitment ads which is really second... No, I have a little story about this actually. They have this ad in... Wait, is it nearly time for ads?

Because I could ad pivot right after this. Oh yeah, we have... Okay, incredible. So I was in Peckhamplex Cinema which is... Peckham is like a cheap community cinema. It's like, yeah, they deliberately

keep it cheap so that people can enjoy it. It's an event space and whatever. We were about to watch a movie, I forget what now, but there was this ad for joining the Met Police that was like this black guy talking about how he was really worried about his sister joining the police

because she's a black woman and she's a Muslimlim and he was worried she's going to face all this discrimination but actually she's having a great time and everyone loves her so it was totally okay the whole time and now i have this personal policy which is if there is an ad for crypto an ad for joining the the met the army whatever and no one else and and and if no one is yelling at the screen because they are being subjected to fascist propaganda that then then it's going to be me who's yelling so i just started yelling because like because like two weeks earlier when i was watching this ad like chris carver had been had been shot dead by met police officers in south london a black man right and London, a black man, right?

And they have a black man here telling us that actually the Met's really cool and doesn't do any racism. And I was just yelling and yelling about it. And I was yelling about, like, fucking, if people aren't familiar with the case of Sarah Everard, who was kidnapped and assaulted and murdered by Wayne Cousins, a Met police officer. Like, you know, I was just going off about all this stuff because i'm just like i like i was just responding directly to the ad like how are they running this shit as if we don't know all of this and just lift listing off everything that came to mind because again it's my fault it's my personal policy i'm not going to get any trouble for it and someone should be yelling when you're subjected to propaganda. Yeah. Anyway, speaking of propaganda, here's an ad for joining the Washington State Highway Patrol.

Ah. And we're back from your fascist propaganda session. I hope you didn't enjoy it. I hope you yelled the whole time. Yeah, and I guess the thing that is genuinely sort of different between the American and British police is that the British police, like, the American police is like every single American city is like at least, well, okay, so they're technically only about 40% police budget

by volume, but that doesn't count the money. You can check that out by Googling 40% police. Well, you will see a variety of things here. But, like, you know, it's it's it's technically only about 40 of the city's budget by volume but that's because that doesn't count the amount of money the police just steal but in the uk they actually kind of like they they were kind of stupid and they they seem to actually have kind of done neoliberalism to the cops which is very funny because it means that you get jeremy corby like, running on hiring more cops and it's like, sir, like, what?

No, it's, yeah. It's just like, you've been protesting, like, apartheid and illegal wars and all of this shit for, like, 35 years and you're like, we should have more cops. What the fuck are you talking about? Man, I remember, I was watching people who, like, used to be, like, autonomous in, like, fucking 2011 being like, no, we need more cops. Like, they were literally beating you up what the fuck is wrong with you oh my god that guy who fractured my skull i need more of that yeah no it's pretty fucked there is like an enormous amount of british brain going on where even our uh our like most progressive politicians will support support shit like that and like i

said earlier like the nordic model right like we yeah there are limits to the British imagination yeah because we've been doing this shit a long time we've really perfected the brain worms yeah I mean I have okay so my

least progressive theory is that there's something called large population island brain, which affects it affects the UK and Japan are the two sort of models of this, where you, like,

being on an island and then also running an empire drives you, makes you, like, absolutely psychotic in, like, very, very specific ways that are like both the same it's like you you you have a massive nonce culture like the way you do imperialism traditional lovable public nonces is is thriving uh we recently uh gary glitter recently got out of prison and then immediately went on to far right uh tv network gb news and said that woke cancel culture is the biggest problem.

Yeah. It's, it's, it's, it's, it is a very grim state of affairs. Yeah. Is what I will say about both the UK and Japan. Although I guess to be fair, to be fair to Japan, they did just assassinate their ex prime minister and probably the most, like probably the most like a store like probably the most successful historical assassination not done by the cia in like a hundred years or something like really incredible work on the part of the man with

electric blunderbuss the uk however not not there yet yeah i mean where's our you know where's our where's our homemade blunderbusses come on come on guys step it up guy this is not a call for leftist terrorism i am not no police please ignore what i just said i will say this thing about the british too like one of the sort of british psychoses that i think about a lot is like the specter of knife crime because it's like okay like on the one hand like on the one hand like yeah like okay so like people get stabbed and it sucks on the one hand, like, yeah, like, okay, so, like, people get stabbed and it sucks. On the other hand, like, having grown up in the U.S. in a country where, like, all of our kindergartners are basically being trained to, like, storm mat, like, do, like, human wave attacks and mass shooters. It's like, how are you guys, like, how are you guys, like, how is this the thing that you guys are, like, like, you have police brain about is knife crime? Like, come on. this the thing that you guys are like like you have police brain about is knife crime like i think

that no i i think that like the knife crime thing is a very american perspective on british politics like we don't actually talk about it that much oh thank god okay it's really like an american conservative talking point that like if you get rid of the guns they'll just stab each other so look at the uk they don't have guns and they're just stabbing each other um like some conservatives still care about knife crime here there was a big wave of caring about it when again it was like a few years labor were like doing their race like their their their hush hush racist racist policies to try and like brutalize the working class especially in black neighborhoods um but like no i mean the

cop brain is like in everything it's just it's not it's not like it's every i, the cop brain is, like, in everything. It's not, like, it's every... I think British brain is just an evolved form of cop brain. It's like when cop brain affects everything in life, then you are British. Yeah, and I guess also it's, like, you have cop brain and then also landlord brain at the same time. It's just, like, a truly sort of dastardly combination. What is a landlord but a cop for housing?

That's true. I say it was my fucking... Well, I guess... Okay, I think I have... No, that's not true. I haven't gotten there yet. But I am fast approaching the two weeks since my apartment was last flooded by sewage, Mark.

And I'm very excited about this. Love, love, love. love landlords love renting it's we we here on this podcast love landlords it's great still falling on me at least not oh god oh oh boy that's a new oh fun okay this has been This has been the Mia's apartment is falling apart update. Well, should we talk more about the rebellion of the caring classes? I think that's a really

pointed and worthwhile Graber prediction. I'm a big Grabe head. I have a friend who I just get onto Discord chat with and we, as we put it, Grabe out. I like to say I'm getting the grave from beyond the grave 24 7 but the but the

rebellion of the Karen classes is a really poignant thing to talk about because neoliberalism does not care about reproductive labor in the slightest and where like where older forms of capitalism had uh had that covered because women were basically fucking slaves um they now the uh

now like reproductive labor has to be done by professionals because everything must be marketized and of course being the most essential labor it's going to be the one with the shittiest working conditions and the lowest pay. That's neoliberalism for you. If it must happen, it must be dog shit. And so this is where we see the rebellion of the caring classes now, especially with the service sector economy. So within the imperial core, everyone's being put into some kind of care job, essentially. And they're treated like shit. And now they're starting to actually form unions and fight back,

which is really fucking cool. Yeah, I want to briefly interject here with a thing everyone gets wrong about Margaret Thatcher, which is that everyone and their mom will say that fucking quote about there is no society, there's only the individual, except they never leave out the next part of that sentence.

They always leave out. The part of it that they always leave out at the end is that the actual line goes and it's slightly weird because it was in response to a question, but basically the line is, there's no such thing as society. There are only individuals and the family.

There are men and women and there are families, is what she says. Yeah, yeah. Well, and also, yeah, yeah. To be clear, to be clear, Margaret Thatcher, not a friend of the transes. Shockingly. Wow, look at her guess.

But I think this family part's also very important because, you know, like, neoliberalism has these two conflicting tendencies, right? It has this one tendency that is, like, it's trying to use the family to create labor in two different ways at the same time. One is it's treating each person in a family as an individual who can go produce value for people but then secondarily right like

you know neoliberalism is an ideology of incredible alienation and incredible sort of atomization yeah and also it's it's it's an economy based on it's you know it it it it but simultaneously it has to be able to do reproductive labor. And the, the way that it sort of like bridges the gap of this contradiction is with this sort of alliance it has with the religious right. And with sort of like religious conservatism in general, because it can, it can put up this false,

and this is, this is where all the trad cath shit comes from. This is where all of the sort of like trad wife, like, Oh, Hey, you can, you can,

when she's saying there are individual men and women and there are families, there is an implicit thing there where she's saying families... Like, she is leaving out children as people because children are properties of family. Like, they belong to the parents. And also, like, whatever reproductive labor is done to make those children into individual men and women, that doesn't... that's just part of the family.

There's a lot of heavy lifting happening in there are families, right? Yeah. And I think the other part of this, right, is like this is the sort of like neoliberalism has this pseudo-populism that it generates. That's about sort of like the family and like the church, like the sites of sort of like this is how you resist sort of social alienation as you do these things. But like, both of these places are just- Yeah, neoliberalism has like a huge focus on consensus politics where they, they say

these are the resources that are available and you all get a say in how they're distributed in your community. You can come together and engage in the electoral process and consensus politics. And we all agreed on what, and this is all just process to manufacture consent because actually there are infinite resources available because we launder money for the rest of the entire fucking world and if this were like any other country that would have any kind of like uh uh trickle down to get into the reaganomics effect for the rest of the population but being being Britain, you know, the country that invented concentration camps and workhouses, no, absolutely

not. Not a red scent is going to be touched by the poors. Yeah, and I mean, that kind of, like, I don't know. I think that also sort of goes back to just, like, the containment of the working class, the British working class

as, like, a political force. And that's starting to come undone. But even then, like, you know, this is my, what, what, what, what have I, what are the things that I say that gets people the most mad at me is that like, there's like, okay, one in two day strikes are kind of like, like, you know, every single year, India has the largest general strike in human history. And it's one day and it does nothing. And the only times it hasn't done nothing on the times when people have actually like kept going on strike or like,

you know, March, March to farmers protest to one, two day strikes are a good practice to show that we could hold out for as long as possible. They shouldn't be like the whole thing. And, you know, okay. And like, I've talked about this before when we've when i've sort of like interviewed

nurses on this show and like like there are absolutely times especially especially in well actually i don't know if this is if this works the same way in the british nursing sector but like there's there's absolutely like there are absolutely tactical reasons why you want to do a limited duration strike especially in the nursing nursing sector, that have to do with how the contracts work at bringing in scabs. But one- and two-day strikes are kind of like – they're more symbolic than they are sort of like an actual instrument of class war. And I think part of something that you have to engage with in the British process – and this is also true in the U u.s but our unions are like there's like two of them and they represent about seven people so it winds up being less of a deal unless you're like a uc grad student on strike but it is also that like in britain the trade unions are just like actively directly

sort of like feeding into this incredibly dog shit, like political machine, which is okay. Yeah. This is an interesting question. Um, this is an interesting like thing to think through because, so if people aren't familiar, we had Thatcher bringing in the wave of neoliberalism,

uh, you know, along with everyone's favorite guy, Ronald mommy Reagan. And, um, she waged war on the miners especially but the unions in general across the uk and crushed the unions and for this she is forever remembered as a saint by the ruling

class and by the conservatives um but this was as i said earlier like this was a part of a trend in the imperial core where um the most strongly unionized sectors which were manufacturing and industrial and like uh mining uh were those unions had to be crushed so that that label and then that labor was outsourced to the imperial periphery yeah right and so now we're all in jobs in sectors where there are no unions and there are these huge corporate unions in the UK, like Unison, that basically claim to be able to represent any worker, which, you know, if you're a fan of the IWW, shout out to the Wobblies, that sounds pretty cool, but then, no. It's a massive yellow union.

If people aren't familiar with yellow unions, we should hopefully be having an episode of Red Planet soon about just making the distinction so that people can tell them apart really quickly but like yellow unions first came into existence in france i think uh and it was this pointedly this pointed change from red unions who are actually fighting class warfare and actually trying to like stop the capitalist notion of work to a yellow union which was like a corporate union and and and generally speaking it would originally be like the corporation who was having their unions like their workers were rebelling they would form a union that was employed by the corporation and

then be like look it's a union guys you can join that and you'll get better conditions and it was a trap but now we have with the miracle of neoliberalism, we have those that just are their own corporate entity. And they're like, we can represent any worker because we are a massive union with an entrenched corporate structure who have like direct ties and constant political deals with the with like political establishment, which like, you know, our labor party should rename itself at this point like it is actively anti-union especially the unions that are fighting for the actual working class uh like the uh today uh like as of recording this like an hour and a half ago the um there is a tory mp who used to be a labor mp until 2018 has just been made like the vice chair of the party and he's like obviously a dog shit guy but it's a really good demonstration of how like the Labour is now just the red Tories um Tory now comes in red um they um these these massive

unions my point is like it is again a neoliberalization of everything and it's a neoliberalization of unions where they get to just be a massive corporate structure competing in like a free market of unions yeah they're trying to like compete to offer workers the best thing and like oh we're most likely to succeed at our demands because we have the most workers behind us but like practically everyone knows that the what they're actually going to get for the workers who are with them is dog shit like yeah um my friend was talking to a nurse at one of these marches uh on the first efeb and she was just saying like she was with unison and then they said that what they were like actually pushing for was was still like under inflation and still like it just wouldn't be worthwhile at all.

So she's changing to be with the Royal College of Nursing instead. Yeah, we had enormous yellow unions in the UK. It's a real issue facing British labor organizing. We're going to talk more about that and the future of organizing in the UK in the next episode. For now, this has been It Could Happen Here. You can find us in the usual places on Twitter and Instagram,

Dust the British Empire. 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 Sonorum. 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. It's It Could Happen Here, a podcast where where i think turf island is legitimately my only

remaining british show i think i've gone to basically every other one so yeah welcome welcome to us talking about turf islands uh this is part two of our interview with sophie from mars and yeah we're gonna talk about how to make the uk less shit yay the u.s has gotten to a point like a like a level of unionization that decreases every year to the point where like it's people think of just like being in any union as like a socialist position and it's like guys i i i have really bad news about i fucking wish like it's it's really not that yeah and yeah but but i i think there's this there's also this sort of like i don't know like what one one of the things you you have to deal with when when you're dealing with the with like really very large unions they don't do anything like this. The thing in China that happens constantly is like,

yeah, China technically is one of the world's largest, largest unions. It like the, the, the last time that union did anything was actually weirdly, the last time that you didn't do anything was, was during Tiananmen.

And then ever since then they have done literally jack shit. Like everyone was like, Oh my fucking God, hold on. Oh oh no but like yeah you you get these things are like technically unions but you know they don't do anything they cooperate with bosses they also and this is something you also see in the u.s well you don't really see this in china you don't see this in china because there's they have one you trade union fed like they have they have a state trade union federation you see this in the u.s a lot

where you get these really shitty things where like so someone will be organizing union campaign and like another union will come like swoop in and be like ah hey look at these people like we'll give you like a better cut and they're doing this like basically because like the the okay there are there are unions that are like actually there are unions that are actually unions which is to say like there are there are unions that are sort of instruments of the working class and sort of organizational tools and then there are unions that are like we're forming a union so we can increase our member roles so we can like

you know like insofar as we're interested in expanding we're interested in expanding because if we expand more people will pay money into our bureaucracy and that's a real like that's a real issue and I don't know like it's, it's interesting. It's interesting to me to see whether the sort of one day strikes that have been happening in the UK kind of like.

I don't know, escalate is not the right word, but. Well, if we're discussing what should happen, what's going to happen next. And I mean, again, you don't know when this podcast is going to come out. So like it could be that I'm like, I might offer some predictions here and you might be able to like just look at the UK news and directly be like, Sophie was full of shit. But like, also, we should talk about young people in a minute because that's like pretty crucial to understanding uk politics but um but uh the the government right now like i said before about sunak like he's trying to put in these massively authoritarian policies because he's realizing that like without them you can't do neoliberalism effectively and one of them is like like i said about the pcfc bill which was already in the works before sunak came in but like now it's come you

know now it's come through and they're doing like a second wave of trying to do it they have the online safety bill which is not for anyone to be safe online it's trying to like control freedom of the press basically like it's it's it's it's most extreme proposal is basically that like people who are anti-capitalist and who are reporting on the news should be arrested uh normal british moment um uh and but one of these ones is he's trying to just ban strikes like he's effectively trying to ban strikes the the technical mechanism of it is that they are bringing in a bill that will demand a minimum level of service for certain industries um if the like and and it doesn't say what those minimum levels would be, but the MPs can decide on it later if they want, like set it to be whatever they want. And obviously they could set that minimum to just be complete normal service.

But even if they don't, like setting a minimum service defeats the point of a strike. And I think that if we're talking about what will happen next, we have this enough is enough movement right now. I'm not, I have mixed feelings about it. I have some suspicions. I am not the biggest fan of electoral politics, and I do feel like it has the whole knocks of something that could, like, launch a political party at any minute, and then it'll completely recuperate all energy that it has

and every other bit of energy that will die off. But I think that the response to legislation trying to ban strikes is probably going to be an escalation from these one- and two-day strikes into, like, holding out for as long as they possibly can to demand concessions from the government. And then, like, once you're in that territory, you're actually talking about, you know, do a worst for you. You're actually like, it's, it's, it's as the, as flow bots would say, compassion as

fast as you can go time. Um, we're, uh, I, I, I think that the movement of union of unions and class consciousness that's currently what rising in the UK is, uh, not going to respond by like lying down and taking it when the government tries to ban strikes i think that it's going to escalate and speaking of escalation is it time for ads yeah yeah they're gonna look the the washington state highway patrol is going to escalate things right into your skull very quickly so here's a here's an ad for an escalating worsening uh crisis of cryptocurrency and buy sophie coin the uh the only currency which supports the working class

and we're back on this this is reminding me of the the the the libcom oxidizable currency david harvey nft thing oh he was so bad incredibly funny not not my fault that you're so uh okay The Libcom oxidizable currency David Harvey NFT thing. Oh, he was so bad. Incredibly funny. Not my fault that you're so... Okay. That is a completely unrelated aside. Yeah. So let us get back to...

Yeah. Can I talk about young people for a minute? Yeah. I think this is a really important thing that is probably going to be me just like info dumping at you for a little bit because i feel very passionately about i also think it's very important to understanding uk politics it's that britain hates young people so much like it's inconceivable to people who live in other countries how much the the media, the political class, like, the ruling class, like, hates the young so fucking much. Like, if only under-35s could have voted in any of our recent elections, every borough in the UK would have been Labour.

That's less true now because our Labour is run by the fucking head of the crown prosecution service but like when it was corbin it would have all been labor and then if if people over i think like 60 could vote it's like all conservative um like there is they hate young people because they know that like social revolution will come from young people and they know that young people have like just a vastly different understanding of the world this is another um graber graberism right if we're gonna if we're gonna grave out like graber said that like the that you could probably see that a revolution has taken place if one generation and the next generation effectively speak a different language like if their understanding of the world is so it's completely irreconcilable and i think that one one interesting thing about Turf Island is that like trans rights are a really clear manifestation of that, where people under 35 are entirely in support of trans rights.

They're entirely in support of like self-determination of gender and like improving the health care situation and like informed consent healthcare and everything. And then people above that are like practically entirely against it. And it's, it's just like, we have this, we have this absolutely wild generational divide in the UK and they've been trying to reign that, like bring that under control with various policies for a long time.

So Tony Blair must be destroyed at all costs no that's the imf tony blair multiple things at the same time should go to jail in a world where no one else goes to jail no yeah that one that one works um tony blair margaret thatcher's greatest achievement um had this speech where he was like education education education and he was basically like we are going to make it so everyone goes to university and he also did a lot of other reforms to do with getting people into schools it was very it was it was it was contemporary with and very comparable to like bush's no child left behind kind of stuff um so he did a lot of stuff to try to like clamp down on youth and also create a pipeline for for young people to get

through high school and then go to university um he also like when i'm speaking of about clamping down on youth uh mia are you familiar with the asbo oh is that the fucking sonic gun things we're thinking about a different we're thinking about a different deranged british thing this is this is a policy measure it's just it's not it's not a weapon it's British thing. This is a policy measure. It's not a weapon. I mean, it is a weapon of class warfare, but it's the anti-social behavior order. And basically, this is part of the UK's system of exclusions, right?

We have a system set up where young people can be excluded from a career path and like a path to just like being a functional human being in society uh at at basically any moment right if a teacher takes against you they think you're rude they think you're misbehaving they can exclude you then that goes onto your educational record and then you know you might get a permanent exclusion which is what we call being expelled from school now right and then that is like statistically sets people on a massive path towards winding up in like juvenile offense centers like uh because they've been kicked out of a school and other schools don't want to take a kid who's been kicked out of a school right and then then what are they doing with that time like there are

no fucking youth centers there are no community centers like they've been all been completely destroyed by neoliberalism um uh so like we have this system of exclusions and and and and asbos are a big part of that so asbo stands for anti-social behavior order and basically it's like it's not just like a warning it's like it it comes from it's like it again is something that's going onto your permanent record. And if you then commit crimes, you're going to be punished more severely because you've been warned already. It's like, it was introduced and then like cheered on by the ghouls who run our country, like because it was going to deal with chavs which was our term for young working class people

um which is just our pejorative for being young and poor um but it obviously also was there to target like uh young uh young black kids young brown kids young traveler kids um and like and and that was you know that was blair like clamping down on any kind of existence outside of the pipeline that he was setting up for just being in school there was also this massive focus on like attendance came in around the same time that like schools would punish people for for having missed any time at all like when i was going to to high school we had like uh school assemblies where they would tell us about the importance of attendance like over and over and over again like probably a hundred times a term they would tell people that like they would

tell the kids that like uh attendance is the most important thing and like the difference in your grades will be enormous if you miss like a single lesson or a single week of school and they would like give awards to kids who had perfect attendance yeah yeah yeah, we have that. Yeah, yeah. Although it's less deranged, I guess. And then like, so that was Blair. And it's continued to kind of intensify that same thing for a long time. But like very recently, this is again, Sunak's authoritarian policies,

we've brought in something called Prevent. Now Prevent is a multifaceted civilian surveillance program where basically people can be referred to prevent which is capitalist white supremacist western centric uh re-education it's it's a re-education program it's it's if people are considered to be uh holding extremist views expressing extremist opinions then they can be referred to prevent now like a lot of the people in my kind of social circle uh will like meme about prevent because like all the language is about like making extremist content or whatever and obviously that's what i do for a living um but like but people would you know make a tweet about how they

they think that like the prime minister's a dickhead and then be like oh i'm gonna get referred to prevent and then it was noticeable that like actually no none of us are being referred to prevent right so like this isn't this isn't for us it's actually been put in place for two specific purposes i do know someone who's been i do know someone who knows someone who's been referred to prevent and the person they know who's been referred to prevent is a uh is a child right is a teenager uh because she works with trans youth and like being referred to prevent is really there as a system to control uh muslim populations and young people like that's what it's really there to target and trying to clamp down on young people expressing any kind

you know the the the the muslim side of that Muslim side of that has its own entire discussion you could have to do with Islamophobia and, like, terror and, like, there's a whole thing. to acknowledge that like uh extremist islamic terror is right-wing terror so then you if you merge those categories you would see that actually the far right is the biggest threat to everyone all the time whatever this is a whole other thing young people in the uk are under constant like barrage under this constant barrage of like media pressure shaming stigmatism and it's because they they are expected to either get a degree and succeed and get your 100k a year salary job and whatever or you are a piece of shit and you will go to jail and obviously the reality for most people is you're going to get your degree or drop out and then you're going to wind up working in some kind of service sector job actually right or if you're lucky a, like, office job where you can quiet quit and just

doss off all day, right? But, like, the attacks on young people serves a very specific function, and it's because they're aware of that rebellion of the caring classes, and they're aware of the social revolutionary potential of young people, and they're trying to stop it. Like, trying as hard as they can to stop it and their mechanism for doing that is that there's this pipeline from birth until the end of your university degree and then hope and then allegedly you get a job but you don't really um or else as i say you probably wind up in jail um the the university thing is also really really interesting because graber fucking everyone take a shot.

Graeber pointed out that, like, revolution often comes out of cases where the population isn't looking at, like, someone else gets some, like, the population doesn't look at the ruling class getting everything and then getting nothing and think that's unjust, we should overthrow them. Right? This is how monarchy and kingdoms was able to perpetuate for such a long time it's when they think that someone else who they consider comparable is getting something and they're not getting it that's when they feel the injustice and like i think this education education education speech and this moment and this policy set that neoliberalism and blair and everyone since then has tried to kick into like kick into action is going to turn out to be probably the biggest shooting themselves in the foot historically that we could measure because they've basically

made it that every person like every young person in the uk must try to go to university not wanting to go to university is considered socially like backwards and like then people go to university and then we all find that there are not jobs in the uk for everyone who's gotten a degree because they've basically set up the whole country to be a diploma mill like the whole entire country has this pipeline of everyone's going to get a degree and then and then what because there aren't fucking jobs and that's going to create that sense that like we are not getting what we deserve um yeah i think that the the the the marketization and the the like opening up all these universities to be like profit-driven uh diploma mills is is has radicalized an enormous

number of young people yeah which i which i think is really interesting because a lot of tory policy and like you know like one of the one of the things that Tories did right after they came to power, like right after 2008, was immediately went to war against sort of higher education, right? And immediately it started to do these increase in fees, and this is what produces the 2010 student movement. interesting to me that like it really kind of seems like i don't know if for them the cure was worse than the disease because like you know they they they they survived 2008 right and there was a real moment where it looked like globally that the ruling class was not going to survive 2008 and that like they were they were all about to come down and okay so they survived that but like yeah it really it really feels like they've sort of this is a similar thing that's happened in the u.s right which is like it turns out if if if you turn an entire class of your population into just like basic like basically basically the debt peons uh those

people get really really really pissed off yeah it's like you know okay so you don't have a bunch of highly educated people who are very very very angry at the people who force them to take out all these as conservatives are always pointing out have been through university which is a culture where they're going to be exposed to way more leftist ideas yeah i mean like like i like this is something i think about a lot which is like i i think i knew i knew one openly gay person in high school. Like there were zero trans people. And I got,

I got to like the first time. Well, there was at least one. Well, you know, look, I, I,

I, I had no idea. And the part of reason I had no idea, like, like the, the, the first time I like met someone who was like openly trans was like literally the first time I walked onto campus.

Yeah. And like, like the first people I meet was like a trans guy who fucking rips. I hope he's having a good day. Yeah. And like, like that, like,

you know, and I, I, I, I think there's this tendency in the U S particularly, there's this tendency to look at the university and look at like, yeah, like I'll be,

obviously if, if, if, if you're going to school in the U S and also if you're going to school in the UK, you, you are going to run into a Marxist professor who tries to break your strikes, right? Like, that's a thing that's true.

Like, there are a bunch of right-wingers on campus. Like, I went to the University of Chicago. I have seen my own fucking econ department. Our movement of that is largely Tufts. Like, Kathleen Stock or whoever, if you're familiar, like, yeah, our right-wing professors are almost always Tufts. Yeah, but like, you know, and Yeah. Our right-wing professors are almost always toughs. Yeah. But like, but like, you know, and there's, there's this real tendency to sort of like completely disregard the university as like a thing that can produce anything remotely leftist. And I,

and I think that's just wrong. Like there's, there's like, there, there was a reason a whole bunch of the universities in the U S were redesigned after 68. Like there, there, there, there's, there's a reason why like one of the, if you're.s were redesigned after 68 like there there's there's a reason why like one of the if you're doing a military coup in a latin american country one of the first things you do is roll tanks onto college campuses yeah if you don't roll tanks onto the college campuses those students are going to fight you until like all of them are fucking dead like yeah that's a you know like that that's like and as as as as much as you know you you can even hippies and hard hatsats thing, right?

Yeah. The media image the conservatives created, I think it was Nixon, like, the hippies and the blue-collar working class are incompatible and cannot work together, and the hippies are all university-educated, effet liberals, and working-class people are conservative reactionaries. And that's, like, largely stuck until you get actual class consciousness building like this is something we're seeing massively in the uk right now is like the the union the growing union movement like has so many university educated people involved in it

because like as soon as you start developing class consciousness that that notion you're talking about like that universities can't produce something leftist just like flies out the window and massively yeah and i i think that's why the u.s there's like this massive effort to sort of like i mean i'm just gonna call it a fucking psyop because it is like there's this massive psyop to get people to like not think that like being a barista is like a thing that produces value and it's like i'm gonna beat you to death with a copy of psyop is one of these things it's like it's like with serial killer where you wait if you're like if you're like well what's the difference between a serial killer and a cop who kills a bunch of people the difference is that the cop will never be found guilty right like once you start like

once you start looking at what you could call a psyop you're like oh the whole of capitalist media is a psyop. Yeah. But, you know, I think the very specific thing here is like, OK, if you look at who is in the UAW right now, the UAW is composed of two kinds of people. It is composed of people, the remaining people who work in the auto industry, and it is composed of grad student unions. Right. Yeah. of grad student unions right yeah and i i think i i i saw a statistic recently that i i think it's true although i wasn't able to verify it which is that like 30 percent by volume of the uaw's total membership right now are from p are from workers in the university of california system like the you know the the the the the actual class configuration that that is happening right now

is this very weird sort of alliance of industrial workers and then people and then people have been like people people who are highly educated who've been like kicked into really shitty service jobs and that's a real like and that that's the reason i i i genuinely like i i think the reason you see so much of this sort of like like the right-wing populism around sort of like the productive like working class thing is specifically because this is this is a genuinely very powerful political alliance even people like lula who like lula like fucking hate it like you can you can go back and read like a million hilarious lula quotes about like how much he hates fucking student radicals from like 1973 but he was just like a football fan guy right like he

was just like but like even even even after he becomes a labor leader like he he he has he spends a whole bunch of time like kicking all the student malice out of his strikes and stuff. He has this great line that was like, this guy walks into the door, I looked at his hands and they were perfectly smooth, and I said to myself, this man is a Trotskyite. Which,

but here's the thing, even Lula, who was like, he was like the... Most of the organized left around the world, it's very like, are the Trotskyites in the room with you right now? Yeah. Well, to be fair, to be fair, he was actually... In the UK, there are loads of Trots, actually.

In the UK, it's much more like, are the Maoists in the room with you right now? Yeah, that's true. But even Lula basically had to abandon that completely because it turns out that like you can't actually like you know as as as the sort of unions decayed in brazil as they did everywhere else i mean brazil still has fairly large unions but like brazil brazil the the kind of industrial stuff that like existed in brazil in like the 80s is gone right yeah and you know it's like well okay even even now like yeah his his base has a bunch of like it has it has a bunch of just, like, university-educated people working service jobs, right?

Yeah. And, you know, like, there's no actual, like, there's no version of a functional leftist political coalition that doesn't have that. And it's obviously- It's significant that two of the most prominent leftist theorists of the last like 20 years david graber and mark fisher both worked in education yeah right like fisher was pointing out the whole like second shift stuff kind of like we were talking about before with like reproductive labor and he was talking about how like exhausted people are because they do their job and then you know and it's not it's it's not just women anymore like this this this labor is expected of everyone i mean still

disproportionately women and disproportionately women of color but like you know he he was telling a story about like his uh colleagues working in a high school that they that the only time they could find to organize or first complain about their working conditions and then organize was like when they went to the pub after work together right yeah well i think it's also like i'm pretty sure it's true i know it's true agree but like like, those were both people from working class families who went into academia, which is a very sort of like, I don't know, it's a very, like you're now forcing a bunch of working-class people into universities yeah and then saddling the student debt and it's like i wonder i wonder what the things this will have understanding of the world around you at the cost of becoming a debt peon which will make your understanding of the world around you a very radical one very quickly yeah and it's like's like, okay, there is a certain extent

to which millennials get sort of less radical over time. But if you look at their less radical over time, it's like they go from autonomous to Corbinites. No, I mean, yes. And that's still not great if you're like... Yes, but like, yeah. Insofar as it happens, it's like that, right?

The trend of people becoming more conservative as they age is largely not affecting millennials and Gen Z. And I think that... I mean, one of the most obvious things to point to is the climate crisis right like yeah previous generations were not growing up being like the world will not be here when i reach retirement age unless we act i don't think it's impossible for people to sell out like there are still a limited number of sellout jobs you could take right but the problem is there's just there's there's not enough of them in order to like actually buy people off en masse and like any other thing particularly was like you know the thing that's supposed to make you more conservative is property

ownership and like who the fuck is gonna buy a house like oh yeah what like under under what circumstances yeah yeah i i am past the age when my parents bought a house. I am past the age where my grandparents bought a house. And I know like one person who's bought a house my age, who's like working for like a privatized rail company and whose partner like works for the police. Like no one's getting houses. Yeah. I mean, like my I was I was listening to my friends like who has a house like i have a friend who bought a condo yeah we're like but that's the thing like that that's that that that was that was another thing that was like they got help from their parents and it's

like help from your parents doesn't even get you a fucking house anymore like no that shit gets you a condo it's i i got like i got like a little bit of money uh after my dad died and it was enough to partially help for my my my surgery and then like fight off like uh rent debt for a few months and that was all and it just disappeared right it's like yeah and you know what I mean I mean I think I think like like Britain's inflation is somehow is worse way worse than the U.S.'s, which is truly stunning. And makes me, like, want to cry because, oh, my God. Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's something else.

It's truly something. Economically, the U.K. is. Again, we have to just keep on coming back to the fact that Britain is just a smokescreen. The whole of British society barely exists and is just a collection of reactionary buzzwords, and then a ton of people who are increasingly angrier and angrier about it.

I don't know. I had a really good conversation a little while ago with an old woman who lives in my neighborhood. We met through some community project stuff and she just came by while we were hanging out on the stoop and um yeah we were just talking about boris johnson it was right after boris johnson had come in and she was in like she was basically getting revolution pilled like she like she was not at all a political person for as long

as i'd known her and then like it was just yet another of the, like, revolving door. Like, the Tory party is currently running the boss rush strategy, that they just, like, keep on swapping out Tory prime ministers as fast as they can. And, like, I said to her, like, when people realize that, by definition, no one will ever hold the office who respects what the office is allegedly for, like serves the people or whatever. When people realize that, like, it's not just that, like, coincidentally, all of our prime ministers went to Eton and all of those like when they were in when they were then in Oxford, they were in like the Bullingdon Boys Club. It's not a coincidence. It's like that's the pipeline is how you get there. Like when people realize that and they realize that no one will ever hold the office of prime minister who is there to serve the country, they're going to realize that they have to take care of each other instead.

And we have to build something that we have to we have to build society from the ground up. And she was like, yeah, she was like, yeah i i think that's what's literally happening in our community right now yeah and i think that's sort of encouraging because like i don't know like just the absolute wreckage that was corbinism just like the complete shit show of how that entire project went yeah like i i i i know it's caused some people to sort of like basically like you know every every every every every successor generation of politics has like the person who used to be a trotskyite who is now like a labor minister or is now like a fucking tory minister you're a pete butajed and

kamala harris who are both raised by market mox's academics yeah yeah well i mean even like like uh google i i why am i blanking google who bill de blasio's wife is okay um she she was she was one of the founding members of the gohibi river collective oh wow yeah like there's a lot of shit like that i yeah but like yeah you know but like it as much as this is a thing, I don't know. Insofar as it seems like the UK has the potential to be something that's not this, it genuinely seems like it's going to be through labor, and it's going to be through sort of street actions and organizing. That's not taking place inside the Labour Party. No, I think practically everyone I know who was invested in corbin is now like no party could

possibly solve the problems of the uk because they watched like a guy oh here's a great movie recommendation a very british coup if people haven't seen this and it's pretty obscure so you probably haven't but like it's it's just about a guy who is on the side of the working class becoming prime minister and then how the media like as like character assassinate him and have him removed from power and like it's almost beat for beat what happened to corbin and it was made in like the 90s um but like uh you know a guy comes along and floats like very mild social democrat policies and the entire media class says that he's gonna like drag the country back to the 70s and And like there's like like soldier like they're like units in the army doing target practice on pictures of him and like people openly declaring that they will assassinate him if he comes into power and shit like this. And it's just like and then like people within the party work to sabotage his election.

The election in 2017 was lost by like 2 000 votes you know and then it's pushed out and replaced by the worst imaginable neoliberal top top cop ghoul kia starmer um and like that spectacle has radicalized people so hard like i don't know yeah i don't think i know anyone who who who who supported corbin who now thinks that our problems can be solved without mass uprising or at least like without union power basically like kicking the shit out of the government i don't i like yeah i don't really the the uk is we are we are don't vote pilled i think yeah which which i think is yeah i don't know like it it it it it it it it strikes me in my sort of like i don't know my

my cursory knowledge of british history that like the most effective sort of british left-wing political movements in a long time was the poltec stuff in the 90s which was defeated like into almost entirely by a combination of street movements and like non-party organizing yeah and you know i don't know the uk is in a very weird position where it's like i i don't know if there's a way it could have been different but it's like it very much looked like the like like the certainly just like the incredibly furthest right like just like absolute most shit parts of British society. We're going like far right parts of society. We're going to be in power forever.

But then some somehow they managed to do the thing that social democratic governments always do, which is like they they managed to produce a series of of like changes in the UK's class structure such that like they produced an entire, like they, they, they, like they, you know, well, I mean, they,

they, they, they got their worst nightmare, which is that they actually got into power and got to do all their policies. And it turns out if you actually do all of their policies, the entire world implodes without, without,

without, without, without some kind of functional opposition to make sure if they don't literally like press, press the destroy the economy button, they will press the news the economy button they will article that was like sunak is going to raise uh energy bills like 40 in april and it's like i shared it just being like they're just daring the working class to overthrow them at this point like yeah it's not that but like i've seen the same take um the leftist journalist

owen jones said a little while like when this trust was in he was like i'm pretty sure she's actually an undercover trotsky trying to initiate revolution by doing the worst policies possible like it really feels like that sometimes but it is just like as you say the nightmare of their politics that like they can't they are just um incapable of conceiving of the harm that they're doing and speaking of being incapable of conceiving of the harm that they're doing and speaking of being incapable of conceiving of the harm that they're doing here's an ad for raytheon i don't know something so when i said before about like the generational divide and how reactionary like older people in the uk are that applies to some of our like our older leftists as well so there is is this, like, offshoot of CPGB, the Communist Party of Great Britain,

called CPGBML, the Communist Party of Great Britain Marxist-Leninist. Oh, boy. They are fascinating. So basically, there was... Let me just refresh my memory. But, like, there was a split from CPGB a couple decades ago, I think, where people were just, like, where basically it was to do with the politics

of, like, supporting North Korea and, like, there were some Maoists involved and shit like this. There are some people involved who have done some, like, wild stuff in leftist terms. Like, there was someone who uh was involved with the spanish civil war and then like moved to china and took like positions in mao's government during the cultural revolution like oh boy who is like now i think the honorary president of cpgbml that's um isabel crook but basically what happened was um when the c when cpgb kind of split apart in the

60s one of the splinter groups was called the revolutionary marxist leninist league and then oh and then that immediately splintered as well and they and then they had a thing called the association of communist workers and that was founded by harpal bra now this is so bear in mind the bras for a second b-r-a-r because this is really interesting um so basically harpal bra um yeah he's he's old as dirt now he's still kicking around he does some like um uh like vod chats with like uh everyone's favorite real, definitely real communist, Caleb Maupin. Um, and the Bras, because of their role in this, like, splinter group and then the founding of CPGBML, it's kind of like a dynastic family of communists. Like, so Harpo Bras is the

father of Jyoti Bras, who's,'s like a notorious turf communist and and like she isn't officially uh in charge of cpg bml but like apparently nothing nothing is allowed that goes against her so it's like they've they've actually put a dynasty in in place oh boy yeah um but as i say that's all that's all part of the fact that, like, the older people in the UK are just, like, shockingly reactionary. It's good stuff. It's good stuff. Like, they're trying to do, like, working class organizing around how much they hate trans people. It's really good.

Yeah, I mean, that's the one thing I'll say about the US.s which is that like like we don't have as many like there are lib turfs but like the lib turfs don't really sort of like like they're kind of walled off from like tough is a very british thing i don't like i yeah like i've seen americans worry about it a lot i don't think it's going to take off with you guys I've seen Americans worry about it a lot. I don't think it's going to take off with you guys because we have a politics of British exceptionalism which is directly contrasted to US politics. It's very similar to how Canadian liberals work where every place where we can be progressive

we try to pride ourselves on not being as bad as the US. And so the specter of the gop not only like does not only do turfs literally receive money from far-right evangelical christian groups uh from the u.s but like the fact that the gp the the gop is there gives like supposed feminists in the uk this cover to pretend they're still progressives because like this they support abortion until a candidate comes along who hates trans people uh who also wants to you know to to make abortion illegal um i don't think that i don't know i i could be proven wrong about this but i don't think that like uh turfs are gonna get a foothold in the u.s in the same way because you you're like

reactionaries just function a bit a bit differently and like the trying to like um divide the progressive left with turfs is a very conscious strategy that's kind of like been designed and constructed for the uk like it's it's yeah it's liberals who are like we're so progressive because we're not the u.s who are then amenable to turf talking points in the uk uh who are really really out of touch and again there's like the generational thing but like i think that i think that turf island will continue to be notoriously tough island like i think that turfism will continue to be a very very very british phenomenon um i have seen what you're talking about with like swifts in the

u.s because like yeah i mean i will say like the other country i think is particularly really bad with this in mexico has enormous turf problem like in ways that are incredibly dangerous for yeah we've talked about this on this podcast but yeah it's very bleak um yeah i don't know the u.s yeah the u.s the danger is mostly from the far right and also from people like who who are like libs but who are like really like like i don't know like new york times collaborator types yeah yeah yeah i mean it's the same thing here we have like um i don't know if you know the comedian rob delaney um He's American, but he moved to the UK and he's been, you know, fighting for a long time alongside like union movements. I think he's like mostly a liberal.

Like he calls himself a socialist, but I don't think he's I don't think he would call himself a communist or anything like this. But like he said that when he moved to the UK, he was like, you're always pointing to American media by being like look how bad fox news is but truly every outlet of the uk media is fox news like yeah yeah the uk media is like somehow more fucked than the american media which is really amazing that has to do with that like that that that that ties in really strongly with our tradition of I was going to say lovable public nonsense again no that's not it of the bad thing, of the evil thing

Tony Blair, there it is Tony Blair was so close with Rupert Murdoch that he literally fucked Rupert Murdoch's wife he's the godfather of Rupert Murdoch's kids or the other way around he is like that with Rupert Murdoch there's a godfather of rupert murdoch's kids or the other way around i can't remember like he is he is like that with rupert there's a famous picture of like blair reading the sun and fuck the sun um reading the sun newspaper and like the the headline is like we love blair or whatever

um side sidebar briefly my uncle died in the hillsborough disaster if people aren't familiar with that i won't explain the whole thing but like the the passion with which i want the the sun newspaper destroyed in the most literal sense possible yeah fucking come and arrest me i will i will stand up in court and say this is on behalf of my goddamn family uh i am allowed to have this opinion um but like but like the the the way that like new labor was able to tie it all together is this like the progressive newspapers and the reactionary newspapers it's all working for the ruling class and then like neoliberalism you know benefits them enormously so like we have where before we had the the kind of faintest illusion of there being like a left-wing media and a right-wing

media now it's like there's the ruling class media and of there being like a left-wing media and a right-wing media. Now it's like, there's the ruling class media. And then there are like tiny, tiny, tiny independent leftist media sources, right? There's like, yeah.

YouTubers like me. There's like Navarro media. There's Owen Jones. Fucking libs, by the way. Yeah. There are like, there are like Trotskyites,

like making newspapers to fund their, like, well, mostly to fund making more newspapers to be honest but like you know um you know and they're just these tiny little crumbs and the rest of the media is just fucking dog shit to the point where like it's actually quite funny like it's gotten to the point where they're complacent because they're so not used to dealing with anything that represents the working class that they like they recently had mick lynch the head of the rmt union on a bunch of different like uk talk shows where they were

they were expecting to be able to like gotcha him with with the most transparent bullshit um yeah richard madeley said to him like what about the spirit of christmas your strikes are affecting people's ability to go home and see their family and he was like what about workers getting paid better dickhead and it was just like it was just like game over immediately like they are so not used to talking to anyone who cares about the working class that when someone kind of like it just not even an especially radical just like a union leader comes on to their show he he just owns them like he just butters their goddamn biscuits like it's it's amazing yeah we we had this with the rail strike we're like i remember was it business insider it was one of the business press guys had had someone they were like they were talking to like a rail

worker yeah and you can see on air this guy realizing that these people have zero days off a year and going what the fuck yeah it was just sort of like like even even the like business class guys were like wait hold on like what do you mean you have zero days off a year like what it's like yeah there's like a human empathy that like that they are not expecting to be a problem for them because like they're all parasitic fucking ghouls and then like they come into contact but they've been lied to about the the lives that the working class have to live yeah and then a working class person comes on and just tells them like oh no it's like this and they're like oh shit we should do something about

yeah it's like yeah and that's sort of like i don't know that that's that's sort of that's sort of shield like it's kind of the kind of insulation that gets built up just for me. Yeah, do you have anything else you want to say? And then also plug stuff. Fuck the police. Listen to Red Planet. Yeah, okay, if I'm plugging stuff, I'm going to say I'm Sophie from Oz. I make video essays on YouTube about politics, philosophy, sometimes about media. I did a little bit about Ye going on

Infowars and all his antisemitism and stuff pretty recently. I'm doing something about climate doomerism and how I believe that the world is not ending. It's just the collapse of the imperial core, and people are projecting the inability to get Starbucks and Deliveroo as

the apocalypse. That should be out sometime soon-ish. But what I really want you, it could happen here, listener, to check out is Red Planet because I think you'll really like it. It's a weekly leftist roundtable where we talk about how to make the world a better place.

It's every Sunday 8pm to 11pm UK time. Please Google to figure out what that is for you. It's on twitch.tv slash redplanetlive and we also have a podcast feed if you want to catch up on all the archived episodes. It should be available wherever podcasts are sold.

It's called Red Planet and it's a good time. We also... We have some solid overlap with what could happen here actually. We recently interviewed Maya Crimeu as well. Ah, yes. If you want more Maya content, we had a good chat with us and i can't imagine you don't because she's delightful wonderful wonderful person wonderful wonderful little kitty cat ah yeah this is what could

happen here you can find us in the places uh you can wage eternal war against the british imperialist ruling class etc etc uh you can do this from your home yep i've uh cool i've been sophie i've been playing with a browning 364 switchblade uh only in my house where it is legal to have it um and i apologize again to danil for all the clicking noises noises welcome i'm daniel 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 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. 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. Hello, everyone, and welcome to It Could Happen Here. Once again, hosted by myself, Andrew, along with the rest of the crew.

Mia and James. All right. And today I want to take a minute to talk about Ubuntu and not the Linux software, but the African philosophy. is a philosophical concept for those who don't know derived from some of the diverse and dispersed indigenous traditions of the roughly 360 million bantu-speaking peoples of africa bantu coming from the zulu word for people is a language family spoken by approximately 400 distinct ethnic groups and split into approximately 440 and 680 distinct languages slash dialects born as a result of the great bantu migrations that occurred in two major waves about 3 000 and 2 000 years ago across central east and south africa contrary to the maxim i think therefore i am ubuntu roughly translated from the gunibantu languages like osa and zulu means humanity and more specifically humanity towards others i am because you are

there are of course various names for the concept from language to language and ethnic group to ethnic group, including Boto, Muntu, Omundu, Bato, Utu, etc. But Ubuntu is definitely the most prominent and internationally recognized. According to the African Journal of Social Work, Ubuntu is a collection of values and practices that people of Africa or of African origin view as making people authentic human beings. While the nuances of these values and practices vary across different ethnic groups, they all point to one thing. An authentic individual human being is part of a larger and more significant relational, communal, societal, environmental, and spiritual world.

This, of course, is not unique to africa um what's any specific culture what's any specific ethnic group i think we'll find these sort of mirroring uh ideas in a variety of contexts because i think it really is something that's fundamentally human but i think it is good to look at how these ideas have manifested in those more specific contexts. I mean, in the oral literature of South Africa, Ubuntu has been in existence from as early as the mid-19th century. The reported translations for the term have covered the field of human nature, humaneness, humanity, virtue, goodness, and kindness. And so it's meant to be a sort of a parallel to the abstract idea of humanity. As a philosophy or as a worldview, Ubuntu really was popularized in the beginning of the 1950s,

most notably in the writings of Jordan Cush and Gumbane, published in the African Drum Magazine. From then into the 1970s, Ubuntu began to be used as a specific form of African humanism because, of course, in that 60s and 70s period, you had a lot of Afrocentric and Pan-African and Black Power ideas coming to prominence around the world. This of course also coincided with the period of decolonization or rather formal political independence that was taking place in the 1960s and this desire for these newly independent countries to pursue Africanization,

to sort of let go of some of the symbolic aspects of colonial rule. Of course, that process has not really been complete, and in many ways the post-colonial status is equivalent to the colonial status but in some ways some leaders were trying to pursue uh sort of a new african specific humanism as a philosophy for the burgeoning countries at the time is this a part of the episode where we tell everyone to read fanon again of course read fanon reads his air what i found interesting is that this this term ubuntu is idea of ubuntu particularly found it's uh it was particularly picked up in zimbabwe and in south africa in a very specific context where there was a transition to majority rule in 1980 ubuntuism or hunhuism was presented as the political ideology of newly independent zimbabwe um a guy named stan lake jwt samkange

um published a treatise basically on hunhuism or Ubuntuism or Zimbabwe indigenous political philosophy and he was basically trying to outline what the three major maxims that Shade's philosophy should be of course I would note that his interpretation being a statesman was notably hierarchical but for the reasons i will go into a bit later i don't believe that makes the core of ubuntu necessarily hierarchical but the three maxims that he had in mind for ubuntuism or hunhuism was that to be human is to affirm one's humanity by recognizing humanity of others and on that basis establishing respectful human relations with them the second maxim means that if and when one is faced with a

decisive choice between wealth and the preservation of life of another human being then one should opt for the preservation of life and then the third maxim um says that the king owed his status, including all the powers associated with it, to the will of the people under him. I think that's where you get most prominently this sense of hierarchy that would pervade certain interpretations of Ubuntu. This idea of a sort of a benevolent rulership,

that these benevolent statesmen and kings and prime ministers or presidents, that they would just exercise in the will of the people. And of course, this is a mythology that is interpreted and reinterpreted across various different regimes. In South Africa in the 1990s, Ubuntu as a concept was used as sort of a guiding ideal for the transition from apartheid to majority rule i think around this time is when

the international community started to hear more about the term ubuntu uh particularly as it appears in the epilogue of the interimim Constitution of South Africa, published in 1993. There's a need for understanding, but not for vengeance. A need for reparation, but not for retaliation. A need for Ubuntu, but not for victimization. End quote. Of course, as we see in South Africa today, that didn't play out very well. The understanding has not reached that point.

Reparations has not fully been achieved. And there's, I would say, a distinct lack of Ubuntu. Yeah, they kind of brought in Bank of America instead, which didn't go great. All right, yeah. They do. they kind of brought in bank of america instead which didn't go great all right yeah they do it's very um it's very big or it's in kenya rwanda it's ubuntu i think um but like you'll see the phrase or that word a lot around rwanda and like if you go to the kigali genocide memorial museum you'll see it a lot there um right like that is the country that has with some authoritarian issues like has put aside the differences which had previously

allowed the genocide to happen i guess i think that's fair to say yes yes that's what the um tootsie and the who do yeah yeah and the twa who often get missed out yeah but yeah terrible thing if people ever go to Rwanda I would highly recommend going to Rwanda like the Kigali Genocide Memorial Museum is an important thing

it's a very very well curated museum of like you said a terrible terrible thing that happened in South Africa the transition to democracy same of yeah like you said a terrible terrible thing that happened in south africa um the transition to democracy and nelson mandela's presidency in 1994 um like i said really brought the term to more well-known outside use um and one of the people who was a main main proponent of that was desmond tutu who was the chairman of the South African Truth and

Reconciliation Commission and also a preacher he sort of advocated an Ubuntu theology that was really formative in the development

of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission. He sort of moved the idea of Ubuntu from simply an African philosophy based on African values of community and kinship to Christian values and identity with the creator God. It was a sort of a strategy in an attempt to recover from the pains and brokenness of apartheid, anchoring Ubuntu into the Christian ideals of forgiveness and reconciliation as gifts from God for peaceful communal coexistence.

distance um and i'm hopefully not being too offensive when i say this um to me that's a quintessential example of how christian pacification hampers decolonization efforts because i've seen often that christian notion of forgiveness and reconciliation turns the blame onto the victims for not forgiving and expects little to nothing from the offender except maybe an apology often it's not even any restitution or reparations and so for all the talk of ubuntu uh theological ubuntu and otherwise um the situation in south af Africa is still very much whack. And I think that, that idea that, oh,

well, this is, it was in the past. It's over, get over it kind of thing is problematic. And it's something that needs to be resolved. The thing sort of decolonization is going to take place. Right.

So putting aside the theological applications, the somewhat problematic theological applications the ubuntu worldview is echoed in some senses worldwide you know social ecology point of view mutual aid all these concepts point to our interconnectedness as people and really point to the interconnectedness that we have as people that our systems are most certainly not built to support. We see that in capitalism. You know, capitalism doesn't embrace the interconnectedness of all people. It places us in opposition with another.

It atomizes us. It individualizes us. It alienates us from people, from ourselves and from others. So we must compete and stuff for the sake of survival. and from others so we must compete and stuff for the sake of survival um alienation of course in a capitalist context referring to our separation of our abilities from ourselves making us into mere tools for the use and benefit of our bosses i know the workplace is definitely not something that we have is that is based on mutual aid or Ubuntu, you know, rather than working together, working harmoniously, having access to means of production and sharing in an equally

placing situation of, of feud, of competition, of struggling constantly and being squeezed and wrung out for whatever our bosses can get from us. Yeah, when you said earlier that one of the key tenets was recognizing humanity in other people affirms your own humanity, I might be paraphrasing that, but that's exactly what capitalism doesn't do.

It just sees people as a tool to create more capital or to create more income. It doesn't recognize humanity. It sees you as a means, not an end, right? Exactly. And I mean, unlike in a communal system where your service to others is mutual, it's reciprocal, it's voluntary, we find ourselves in a situation where we must give away our labor our time and really our whole lives just to survive but that giving is not done uh out of the goodness of our hearts or or as part of a system a sort of a network of support a safety net uh or anything it's just

clawing towards survival you know disconnected from the well-being of the whole yeah very much so everything around us has been you know manufactured it's been transported it's been assembled and sold by other people right people just like us workers just like us um those people have lives just like ours they have all the same struggles that we do um but instead of relating to these people instead of freely sharing the fruits of our labor we're relating to the things that we have to buy and we don't see the working people behind them yeah i think another aspect of it is that which which I find particularly strange about, you know, the Hunhuism or Ubuntuism that Samkange was trying to advocate, is that I don't believe that Ubuntu or mutual aid or any of the principles that Ubuntu exposes is something that the state is compatible with. is something that the state is compatible with.

I don't think the state is compatible with the acknowledgement of one's responsibility to their fellow humans and the world around them. You know, the state is built on exclusion, on domination, on deprivation, on the hierarchical division of the state, generating this sort of inequality in decision-making power and influence over our own affairs.

It's about depriving certain people and elevating others whereas ubuntu is supposed to be about the importance of the humanity of both the individual and the community and about how all people are connected in a way that is meant to support and add to and contribute and glean and service one another if that makes sense you don't like the idea of this sort of community where everyone is giving and sharing and taking and everybody has something to contribute to this human whole i feel like there's something that's lost when that whole is disrupted by certain people being elevated to a status of having more power uh over others i mean part of

that humanity has to entail freedom to self-organize freedom to associate freedom to disassociate decision-making power autonomy you know otherwise what kind of humanity is that really how can people access their full humanity in themselves if they're being deprived by others and how can those others who are depriving certain people have access their full humanity when they're depriving others if you get what i'm saying yeah yeah i think that's perfectly right yeah and i mean pretty much same thing with um the system i mean with the capitalism with the state i mean with cis-heteropatriarchy which also elevates some people above others and denies those marginalized others full access to their humanity

um all of us are restricted in some ways from understanding ourselves, in ourselves and through others, by the ideology and system of patriarchy. And of course, this goes without saying, but what could be more incompatible with Ubuntu than colonialism? You know, it doesn't simply deny the humanity of those it exploits, but it also strips the humanity they exploit as. of those that exploit but it also strips the humanity the exploiters i mean as ms is there my reference to earlier wrote in discourse and colonialism colonization works to de-civilize the colonizer to brutalize him in the sense of the in the true sense of the word to degrade him and to awaken him to buried instincts to covetousness violence race hatred and moral relativism and we must show that each time a head is cut off or an eye put out in vietnam and in france they accept the fact

each time a little girl is assaulted and in france they accept the fact each time a madagascan is tortured and in france they the fact, civilization acquires another dead weight. A universal regression takes place. A gangrene sets in. A center of infection begins to spread. And that at the end of all these treaties that have been violated, all these lies that have been propagated, all these punitive expeditions that have been tolerated, all these prisoners who have been tied up and interrogated, all these patriots who have been tortured, at the end of all the racial pride that has been encouraged, all the boastfulness that has been displayed,

a poison has been instilled into the veins of Europe, and slowly but surely, the continent proceeds towards savagery. Powerful words, as usual, from Césaire. That was great. Yeah, it was very good yeah so i mean i think there's a lot of potential in the interpretation of ubuntu right which is both a flaw and a strength and when i get into the criticism a bit more you'll see why but regardless of course there is value to be gleaned from indigenous understandings there's power in finding our roots to secure our future and whether in a partnership an affinity group

an organization a community or beyond this basic principle of recognizing the authentic individual human being as part of a larger and more significant relational communal societal environmental and spiritual world is vital process of social revolution of confronting the powerful through protests and occupations and reclamations and expropriations uh and refusing to cooperate with the powers that be through strikes and boycotts and mutinies and other forms of interaction and in building new institutions like cooperatives and popular assemblies and libraries of things all of those things all those aspects of social revolution allow us to assert ourselves to recognize the mutual and egalitarian connection of all people you know a person with a boon to is open and available to others it's affirming to others

I feel threatened that others are able and good and so by recognizing like with Ubuntu you know recognizing that you're part of a greater whole that whole is diminished when others are humiliated or diminished when others are tortured or oppressed. And so someone with Ubuntu, someone who recognizes the interconnectedness of all humanity, is someone who has to be engaged in some form of social revolution, who has to be engaged in trying to free people, help people free themselves, so that they can engage in their own humanity

and so add to your own humanity in turn. And when it comes to the commons common ownership you know the reversal of the enclosure movement socialization whatever you want to call it that is also something that ultimately is about the bonds between people about the distribution of the means of production and of the fruits of all of our labor so that all can enjoy so that all can have a vested interest in our collective prosperity when it comes to you know community work you know Ubuntu is about this idea that we can work together you know in growing our food and distributing when we need um this idea that being a mother or being a father being a parent it's not just about being that to your own biological children but

rather in recognizing that we are all connected in that way it's it's like a it's like an understanding that there should not be this idea of orphans right this idea that we're all meant to look out for each other that no person is meant to be cut off from the sort of care um that is necessary for Korean to a fully realized person I mean even in the realm of education you see potential applications of Ubuntu in recognizing that everyone has different skills and strengths that people are not isolated, and that through mutual support, they can help each other to complete themselves.

As Audrey Tang argues, I mean, I think there needs to be an education that recognizes the importance of community, societal and environmental well-being. One that emphasizes the connection between all those things. of community, societal, and environmental wellbeing. One that emphasizes the connection between all of those things. One that involves interaction, participation, recognition, respect, and inclusion

as core tenants of the learning process. Of students learning from facilitators and the facilitators learning from students of recognizing that we hold both positions and that those positions are held from the moment we're born to the moment we eventually pass on as rich as the potential of ubuntu may be i don't want to put it out as if it's some sort of like flawless and perfect philosophy right it's not above critique it's not immune as i mentioned before to hierarchical interpretations and applications it's very much ripe for liberal sensibilities as we've seen departments of state speaking of ubuntu diplomacy um and Ubuntu foreign policy

and that sort of thing. Samkange's idea that, you know, part of Ubuntu is that the king owes a status, including all the powers associated with it, to the will of the people under him. I mean, right now, and for a while now, Ubuntu has not had a single solid framework of what exactly it entails, what it makes up, what it doesn't.

There's still a lot of fuzziness and inconsistency within different people's interpretations of the definition of Ubuntu. as one scholar Nyasha Mboti has noted there's an interpretation a certain interpretation of Ubuntu that sees Africans as you know naturally interdependent and harmony seeking that humanity is given to a person by and through other persons but there's a sort of a trap in that because humanity is also pretty messy the relationships between people can also be very messy it's not all sunshine and rainbows you know a broken relationship is as authentically human as a harmonious relationship you know a broken relationship can also be more ethical than a harmonious relationship um boti points to for example the freedom that follows from a break from oppression that follows from a break from a

relationship of domination to one of freedom and of course this idea that harmonious relationships are incapable of being oppressive is false you know a harmonious relationship can be quite oppressive um in the dynamics between people that are hidden under that veil of hunky-dory you know so i mean there's a lot of there's a lot to ubuntu there's a lot to Ubuntu. There's a lot of good to be gleaned, a lot of potential pitfalls to be avoided. So, you know, take what's of value, leave what's not, engage critically, water your plants, and have a good night. Welcome. I'm Danny Trejo. 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 My Cultura podcast network, available on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. and we're talking about species of sheep. Not really, we're not talking about species of sheep, much to my disappointment. Not yet.

Not yet, but that will be coming. We're going to be getting into clins, texels, mules, that kind of thing, big sheep stuff. But today we're actually joined by John. And John has been subjected to my weird introduction, but we're not talking about sheep today. We're talking about active transport infrastructure and we're talking about how cities tend to build that in certain communities and not in others. So welcome

to the show, John. Yeah, thanks for having me. I'll say that my partner would have been overjoyed if the podcast was actually about species of sheep. She's tired of hearing me talk about bikes, I'm sure. But here we are. Yeah, thanks for having me. I'm John Stalen. I'm an assistant professor at University of North Carolina at Greensboro. Great. Yeah. So I think to start off with, if you could kind of outline what sort of like, I guess people might not be familiar at all with bike infrastructure, certainly if they live in some parts of the US or like more rural areas, sort of what it looks like and what cities have been doing in the last few years building bike infrastructure and then how that relates toled in my book, which came out in 2019, but then I haven't kept up with it quite as much.

I've been trying to start working on other projects, but I keep tabs on things a little bit. I mean, basically, if we're talking about the standard rundown of infrastructure, the, the, I would say the most common thing that people think about and probably the most common thing that's built in part because it's quite cheap, uh, especially over the, say the last 20 years is the, the bike lane. Uh, you know, a bike lane is usually about three to five feet wide uh and it's in to the far right of the roadway if you're in the united states or you know if you're driving on the right um

tends to be where glass collects tends to be where car doors are um it and so that nevertheless was you know very common uh in places that were building bicycle infrastructure, that's what was being built. Um, in, I would say the last 10 to 15 years, there's been a push to do more what people might call Dutch style, uh, protected bike lanes um either they're protected by a buffer of uh kind of plastic posts that don't prevent an emergency vehicle from kind of getting where it needs to go but also don't prevent drivers from just driving into the bike lane really um so you'll see those and then you know parking protected bike lanes so the protected bike lanes sort of became the big demand from uh bicycle infrastructure planning practitioners

especially in cities like portland's you know san francisco oakland chicago new york city etc etc San Francisco, Oakland, Chicago, New York City, etc., etc., something that is actually protected by a curb. Usually, really, usually it's still like some kind of a plastic curb, right, or cars, right? You're not seeing a lot of, you know, concrete or brick curb work like you'll see in in the netherlands or something like that and then interestingly enough another piece of infrastructure that there was a funny kind of mea culpa or not mea culpa but um a uh re-evaluation of it was the shero uh which is just a sort of a chevron symbol in the middle of a car lane intended to remind drivers that cyclists are allowed to be there, but sort of put cyclists in a location where they would sort of garner the most hatred. And there was a recent editorial from Dave Snyder of the San Francisco Bicycle Coalition. He was a big pioneer just in general bicycle infrastructure i interviewed him for my dissertation and he uh he talked about how the they don't work though that was a mistake it was mistake kind of

um splitting the difference making it seem like you didn't have to take any space away from cars in order to fit bikes into the roadway so i don't know if that's kind of more than you wanted from that no no that's great because i think a lot of folks might not have seen all these different things. Certainly like if you're like me and you ride your bike every day, you notice each of these different things and some of them make you feel safer. Some of them don't. And some of them are just kind of tokenistic. I think a lot of this kind of gets to a bigger discussion, which is one maybe we can touch on, which is like who the city is for.

When we're building cities in this country, certainly it seems like we built them around cars with a few exceptions, like older cities and stuff. And increasingly, like if you ask for space and you are not a car, then to include people wanting to live on the streets, right? Like cars have free places to go at night, but people don't.

And so like this reallocation of space i think gets to a bigger question which is yeah maybe something you could speak to yeah so i mean the question of i think you can think of who both in terms of the mode of transport right it's It's very car dominant, uh, society, right. Um, and car, car driving is even on the rise in places like Copenhagen, right. There's kind of a lot of fretting among bicycle advocates in Copenhagen about, um, the rise of car usage. Um, so there's the, the, the sort of the mode of transport, you know cars aren't people right as you sort of pointed out just then and then so there's another layer to it that intersects with it which is cities being increasingly sort of oriented towards attracting higher income residents right

kind of creating an attractive urban environment there's a there's a kind of an intersection with the interest in attracting kind of high-tech or creative or knowledge-intensive types of jobs, right? Your software programmers. I think it was Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel, I use this in lectures all the time, he said something like um you can't be for a high-tech a creative city economy and not be pro-bike right so there's this there's this idea that you know may be a little bit spurious or it might be kind of loose causality but there's this idea that the kinds of workers that you want in your city that are either going to take high paying jobs and increase the property tax base or themselves create new startups entrepreneurial energy arts

culture and uh and things like that, right. That they are, they're attracted by bicycle infrastructure or bicycling or bicycle culture in, in, in some respects. Um, so there's that, that kind of the, the, the irony of course, is that those workers, you know, guilty, I have a car, right right typically bring cars with them right and so yes maybe they don't want to use them on a daily basis like i don't use my car on a daily basis i don't use my car to get to work right um but they you know are often kind of having it both ways right in a lot of ways in terms of, you know, buildings will be built with garages, right?

And that's only recently starting to be eroded, right? As just a, you know, a one-to-one parking ratio at a transit connected building. Yeah. And so when we're talking about it, the combination of these two things, right? Like affluent areas or cities trying to attract affluent people and cities trying to build bike infrastructure and something i've observed where i live which is san diego is that we've built a lot of bike lanes but only

connecting privileged communities to places where people do high income work and it seems like increasingly like riding your bike safely is a privilege that's only afforded to a certain group of people is that something that's broader than just in in my town i'd say so i mean i think you see this in um in where i did a lot of my research the san francisco bay area also did research in in and Detroit and Austin as well. That's not in the book, but yeah, that's, it's common. And there's a few different, there's kind of a, there's a degree of cumulative causality, as we would say in economic geography, right?

You have, going back to say the 1990s, you had bicycle advocates, primarily recreational, primarily middle class, largely white recreational cyclists, or and you start to see participants in bicycle advocacy organizations also being kind of bicycle commuters. kind of bicycle commuters, the kinds of jobs that were growing in urban centers in the 1990s and 2000s, or, you know, the first decade of this millennium, right? Are the kinds of, you know, if not high tech, the sort of professional technical technical type of employment right growing in urban centers um and there's relatively affordable housing in gentrifying neighborhoods that makes it feasible and and desirable actually that you could you could, you could, you know, find a fairly affordable house and be able to bike to work, right, two to three miles, right, rather than the commute in from the suburbs, or the commute out from the urban center to jobs at the suburbs, right. So the, I think that you get a lot of the initial energy around the bicycle movement.

If you look at critical mass, if you look at the San Francisco bicycle coalition in its early days, again, these are the things I'm familiar with. Uh, a lot of this sort of the political mobilization is around making those types of journeys, uh, easier, uh, more doable, right? You also have the phenomenon where the neighborhoods that are getting gentrified in this time are your sort of classic innermost streetcar suburbs developed around 100 years ago, fairly walkable themselves. They have a mix of commercial and residential. They aren't, by and large, industrial neighborhoods, right? The industrial neighborhoods where you still have a lot of truck traffic, where industry begat more industry or de-industrialization

really hollowed out the economic base, where you have large roadways, you have, you know, disinvestment and, uh, kind of a mix of small retail, et cetera, et cetera. Um, lower income population, uh, those were not, um, those were not areas where there were, there were attracting the kinds of people who would be listened to when they're demanding bicycle infrastructure right uh there are still lots of cyclists in those neighborhoods um in a place like east oakland uh or um uh north philadelphia or something like that right where there are a lot of people who ride bicycles, but they don't, they're not organized politically under the sort of the block of cyclists. And so there's this sort of paradox or in the way that I came around to this project was I was working in a bike shop in Philadelphia.

was working in a bike shop in Philadelphia. And I was sort of one of those white hipsters on fixies, right? At the same time, I spent a lot of my day speaking Spanish, talking with and helping people fix their bikes, mostly Latin American immigrants who were working as dishwashers or delivering food, buying bikes at Walmart, because it's what they could afford, even though they knew that they were crap, they just couldn't afford anything better, trying to get the most out of those bikes. And so there's this funny dichotomy. On the one hand, it's like, you have the cool bike already creative scene that is sort of trying to be encouraged maybe and on the other hand a lot of the people who are actually making do um on bicycles are not sort of part of

that vision i guess for for the city right um when i think about things in spatial terms as well, right, if you imagine going back to the journeys to work from a sort of close in residential neighborhood that is experiencing a lot of turnover, a lot of middle class, you know, mostly white, but not necessarily exclusively white in migrants. Um, the types of journeys that a lot of, you know, I'll, I'll, I'll take Durham, for example, where I live now, which is, um, not, there's not a lot of good bicycle infrastructure. There's a little, there's not a lot of good bicycle infrastructure, but there's some job growth in the downtown area. There's certainly a lot of job growth in the sort of the, the suburbs. job growth in the sort of the suburbs. But in terms of the kinds of jobs that, you know, working class jobs that are being created at Amazon fulfillment centers, those are at the urban periphery, right? They're not places that even in a kind of a gentrifying neighborhood, even if bicycle infrastructure were created, the sort of the

directionality of the feasible commute kind of runs against the feasible bicycle commute sort of runs against the very kind of spread out and scattered commutes in the sort of retail, wholesale, warehousing, manufacturing, et cetera, et cetera, the sectors that are experiencing job sprawl rather than a sort of a concentrated job growth in the sort of the urban center, right? So that's another aspect to it as well. Bike advocacy is very interesting to me, right? Like I was a bike messenger. I was a bike racer. I've made my living riding a bike. I've also just ridden my bike to get to work. And bike advocacy really hasn't reflected a broad swath of cyclists for a very long time. Do you think that's why we don't see better infrastructure in some some of these like de-industrializing areas for instance and does that lead directly to it being more dangerous like i you would be the person to

ask are there statistics to show that like it's more dangerous to ride your bike so i'll say a couple things um the uh the the the directionality or the causality is a little bit complicated. I would say certainly there was some evidence that bicycle advocates weren't in the early days. And there was a big sort of cultural shift in bicycle advocacy in the 1990s. Part of the 1990s, you have a lot of cyclists who are actually opposed to bicycle infrastructure. We still have, they're still a loud boomerish voice in San Diego. Yeah, exactly. The vehicular cyclists, right? Yeah. Can you explain that?

Sure. So vehicular cyclists, it was a philosophy expounded by John Forrester. I might have his book right here yeah uh in the book and it's not in the book effective cycling um where it was the idea was that cyclists should be riding like cars right which means riding fast center of the lane um behaving exactly like a car uh and they were very opposed to any infrastructure that would sort of create be created especially for bicyclists on the basis uh which there was maybe some slight truth to this that that cyclists would be banned from roads that didn't have dedicated bicycle infrastructure. There was a little bit of concern. I think I remember reading about a little bit of actual talk among legislators and planners that bicyclists would be kept off of main roads. And I think to their to their credit

they saw the creation of bicycle infrastructure at that time as basically designed to get cyclists out of the way of motorists right and so it was mainly to advance the interests of motorists. Right. Uh, but they were very hostile to, um, they're very hostile to a sort of a Dutch style model, which like, you know, these were guys who like to ride fast and like, you don't, you can't ride fast in the Netherlands. Yeah. Not, not everyone's physically able, nor really wants to go 40 miles an hour on a road next to cars exactly right so so it was very much around a strong fit confident cyclist

who knew all the laws of the road road really fast was very assertive um it obviously lent itself towards uh a sort of a a boomer type right um a sort of adventurous type um and it was very much that we that bicycle advocates should advance the interests of cyclists not try to grow the number of people cycling right and so the shift towards that maybe the critical mass moment is not the only thing but this is that's sort of a good moment to kind of tag it to the 1992 uh first critical mass era but you know earth day vehicle for a small planet all this sort of growing interest in in bicycling um the shift towards more people should be doing this yeah can you explain critical mass to people who haven't like participated because i think it's quite a unique and interesting

phenomenon sure yeah absolutely so um critical mass began in san Francisco in, I think, the first Critical Mass was 1992. office jobs who were sort of kind of culturally anarchistic or, you know, um, had these sort of anarchist or situationist kind of ideas, um, and who were, um, kind of organizing amongst themselves to ride home as a group. Right. And they started getting this idea of sort of having these monthly ride together happenings, right? They didn't call them protests and they weren't organized rides. They were sort of rolling festivals was the idea. I think the first name that they came up with, which mercifully didn't stick was like the commute

clot right so it was also about kind of jamming up the the regularity of the friday evening commute so it would be like the first friday of every month at commute time right um some some of these i think still happen in portland oh yeah yeah it's it's the critical mass still happens um there's a you know one of the chapters in my book i sort of trace this arc of critical mass through to the more kind of bike party oriented exactly exactly the slow roll type of model which i think is interesting because it's a little bit it's consciously less confrontational it's not held at at a time that would clog up um sure clog up evening traffic uh it's designed to attract kind of families people who aren't trying to have confrontations

with drivers or police right one of the things that sort of really put um put bicycle infrastructure on the agenda in san francisco was this mass arrest of critical mass in 1997 um supposedly because the mayor of san francisco willie brown at the time got stuck in one in his limo and was like furious. And so I asked the police to crack down next time. It was a huge, it was, it backfired massively politically, but it also created this opening for the, the San Francisco bicycle coalition, which actually was an organization. San Francisco, uh, critical mass was not an organization, right? It gave them this opportunity to say, well, what cyclists want is, you know, to actually build out the bike plan that supposedly exists, but nobody's been doing anything about, right. Um, so, I mean, that's

probably maybe more than you wanted to know, but the sort of that, that arc of critical mass as this sort of counter-cultural moment that created this opening for a more formal bicycle planning and advocacy organization or set of organizations to emerge, right? And maybe it's unfair. I think I'd probably do it in the book. It's a little bit unfair probably to call it a kind of depoliticization, but there was certainly a degree of kind of like explicit politics of sort of reclaiming the city more broadly from a kind of left perspective that does disappear somewhat in the sort of the rhetoric of the bike movement. Yeah, it's definitely lost some of that like radical edge where these types of, these types of, you know, when like 100 or 200 people on bikes take over streets in Portland every once in a while, it is way more in the form of like a big party.

It's like a roving block party. It does not have that same level of like, yeah, almost like situationist creating a happening or creating a, that affects the regular politics and affects the regular way that the city functions. Yeah. I mean, that being said, the, the sort of the successors like bike party in San Jose was a huge one.

And this, that bike party model kind of spread throughout California were often much bigger than critical mass. Right. Sure. A lot of times more diverse as well, right? So there's a really interesting kind of politics around, is the politics in the sort of explicit slogans

or is the politics in sort of like showing people that there is a kind of collectivity that they might be part of simply by virtue of like moving through urban space in a different way and for a lot of people it was their first time riding a bike in the city because they were so afraid of cars otherwise right you have the safety in numbers yeah yeah yeah it definitely um i know for a lot of people that was the case like i've done some critical masses i mean the uk we had UK we had Reclaim the Streets as well, which is a similar vibe. I remember in the early, I guess the first decade of this century, there would be critical mass rights before

anti-G8 protests. I remember in Octorada in Scotland and things, or not in Octorada, but before that and before other G ga protests would be mass rights and it's a very different scene to like bike advocacy now right yeah yeah and you saw this a little bit with like the occupy movement uh the at least my experience of the um the sort of early wave of the black lives matter movement in 2014 with the killing of Trayvon Martin, there were a lot that the bicycles seemed like an intuitive protest mode for many people. And that's probably sort of some of the cultural political tools of critical mass that sort of surface here and there. cultural political tools of critical mass that sort of surface here and there um but i i think for the 20th anniversary uh chris carlson who was one of the early organizers called it uh talked about critical mass all over the world and that san francisco felt kind of like the hole in the

middle of the donut right like it sort of created this reverberation but then it had actually withered to a degree in in the center and often the narrative is well you're you're getting like you're winning right so critical mass is no longer necessary because you're getting bike lanes you're getting um you know you're getting investment you're getting attention from planners, etc., etc., right? Obviously, the gains, whatever they are, are pretty kind of geographically circumscribed. infrastructure but how it's being developed is not actually serving people who like like have to use a bike to commute because they don't own a car and they can't afford a car like it's it's getting used to people who actually already have a lot of resources and like an interesting case in point in this is uh the belt line in atlanta which like started off in the you know as an idea in 1999 with wanting to create like a giant loop using like public transit uh having having rail

going around the city having bike having bike paths going all around the city uh being able to like connect the city with these with these like spaces uh for like green space and affordable housing and instead the project kind of manifested as this, like, like, is this project that was had up by real estate companies to replace a whole bunch of low income neighborhoods with the massive amounts of like, expensive restaurants and luxury condos, and, you know, putting, putting the Beltline and as a path to create these like, expensive, gentrifying areas around the city. And it's how these ideas can start off so good, and then when they get actually done,

it's manifested in a way that is actually not helpful to people who need this type of thing at all. Yeah, yeah. I mean, the Beltline, I don't know enough about it. I've read a little bit of the sort of academic literature and I've been there. And it is really kind of interesting how it is this, it is this huge investment in the reconversion of infrastructure, right. To sort of restore the value of the land surrounding it, right, sort of

old rail, old industrial infrastructure. And that's something that I don't think that you can, you're ever, you know, people, there are studies here and there that try to demonstrate the kind of the economic value of bicycle infrastructure, the contribution to tax, tax receipts, et cetera, et cetera. But it gets pretty hard to parse the causality. Especially when you're, you know, especially when compared to something that is really sort of overhauling the space, right? I don't, it, you know, the belt belt line is it's, I think probably it's success from a sort of a financial perspective has to do with it being a multi-use path, right.

Yeah. Yeah. Rather than it being bicycle infrastructure and sort of being, being framed as this much broader type of thing right rather than um a bike lane on a street right yeah yeah yeah yeah it's not great to ride down like at least on the weekend because you'll just be slalom full of full of people it's full of like i when i went when I was visiting last year, during the start of summer, I went with a friend to the area by Ponce city market, which is kind of a great example of the gentrifying force of, of the Beltline,

but also like, yeah, there's people who's trying, people who are trying to ride bikes around, but there's like kids on roller skates everywhere. There's it's, it's, it's pretty packed. It's getting, it's, it's getting pretty, pretty warm. Um, but there's it's it's it's pretty packed it's getting it's it's getting pretty pretty warm um but there's other parts that are like you know that are that are uh more isolated where it is much more of like a of like a commute path um but it's interesting it just like it like weaves in and out of these like retail and luxury apartment um you know pop-ups restaurants all along it exactly and all that stuff is is is like relatively new for all the stuff that is like specifically surrounding the surrounding like the construction of the

beltline yeah and i mean the um i think that you maybe see this just a little bit with like you know the direction that i've taken this the thinking about it, is more the sort of the types of urban strategies that have begun to incorporate bicycle infrastructure, right? Yes. Active transportation more generally as the kind of big driving forces rather than like, is this bike lane here causing gentrification? It's usually, it's often the other way around, right? gentrification it's usually it's often the other way around right bicycle infrastructure sort of emerges as a result of gentrification right or as a result of the in-migration of people who are going to be listened to right because of their status because of their income uh because they have kind of existing um capacities in in organizing for these types of things right um it's i think what's interesting is one of the

one of the positions i've sort of come around to right is thinking more about um not like should we do bicycle infrastructure because it might kind of create the perception of gentrification or cause gentrification or something like that and instead like you know what one of the things that gentrification results from when you're thinking about amenities that sort of lead to the revalorization of urban space is that they are in some way special, right? And so if the question is the specialness of this particular place, you know, Garrison, as you said, what makes a, you know, the kinds of places where you can safely ride a bike are fairly unique, right? They're not well distributed. Right. And so from my perspective, it's sort of the more routine

they become as an include as, as, you know, including them into urban space, the less special the places where they are built become, right? And it's so routine that it wouldn't be worth mentioning, right? It's like mentioning that there is a sewer line, right? It's like mentioning that it has connection to city water, which, okay, yeah, at the urban edge where I live, I don't live at the urban edge, but at the urban edge where i live um i don't live at the urban edge but in at the urban edge in the southeast um you know there isn't always connection to city water um yeah

like trying to get it normalized to the point where it's like obvious that it's something that is like a part of the city it's like yeah like right of course it's it's just as normal as like a sidewalk or a road or a power line. Which, to be fair, I don't have any sidewalks on my street. And most of the streets around me have a sidewalk on one side only. Portland also has very few sidewalks. Yeah. We do have those.

Yeah, I lived in Belgium for a while when I was racing. I lived in a town that was very much just like lots of Belgium, a shitty gray coal mining towns. I love Belgium, but this is a thing and like yeah they would never have beat you know the bike infrastructure was unremarkable it was just a thing that everyone used to go to the shops or go to school it wasn't you know that's like selling point for a brunch restaurant yeah and i think it's this kind of thing where it's bigger than just the infrastructure, right? A lot of the places where bicycle infrastructure has been really successful, right? Are these sort of dense, relatively dense areas, actually not the densest areas, right? Where everything was in,

is in walking distance, but the areas kind of just beyond there, right? Where there are shops, places of employment, services, etc., etc., all sort of within reasonable biking distance, or maybe long walking distance, right? But too short to really merit a trip on a bus or a train, right? And, you know, short enough that maybe some of us would feel a little bit silly getting in the car to go do it, right? So that kind of zone is also not terribly common in the United States, right? A lot of those places got destroyed to build highways, right? Or got destroyed to build kind of suburban style shopping malls um and so that's part of their part of their specialness but going back to the idea of um you know people in in the places where people were really relying on bicycles right that there

isn't necessarily infrastructure it's partially a data issue going back to your data question, right? The way that we collect data on bicycling is people bicycling to work, right? If people aren't in the workforce or they happen to not have a job, that is not counted in the census, right? Even if you bicycle to the train like I do, like if I get to fill out the census, I'm going to fill out train, right? Because that's the bulk of my journey when I commute. And so it skews your perception of where infrastructure might be needed if you're using data toward places where people are commuting by bicycle, right? Rather than, you know, commuting is only a quarter to a third of all trips, right? Rather than all the other trips that we don't know about, right? And sometimes we measure them with passive measurement, like pressure sensors in the streets, sometimes active measurement, like people doing bicycle counts on particular days. There's a whole history of that. Now we're using Strava, but then we're getting a very rich data set about a small subset of cyclists and hoping that that extends to most, if not all cyclists. Um, and then to your question, sorry, and I'll, I'll pause right to your question about the, um, the, the, the

data question, right? How, how deadly or how dangerous are various streets that don't have bike lanes, there is a big problem of the missing denominator, right? We don't know how many people cycle, so we don't know the rates of injury on these particular roadways in the same way that we do know car volumes and can have a better sense of the rates of injury uh in based on collisions right but you you do see clusters of collisions in places where um you know where they're large roads meeting where basically no very few if any traffic engineers would sign off on taking away some of that car capacity to to create more safety for cyclists and of course those those kind of compound those factors kind of compound right you maybe have an industrial area it's a big interface with a large urban arterial or an off-ramp to a highway right

these kind of all go together with um with potentially sort of lower um lower income area or sort of a lower um less pressure to improve that area. Yeah. So I'm thinking, when I think about how the bike movement missed an opportunity to be better, I always think about this moment in 2020 when this man called Dijon Kizzy was killed by police in LA.

And the incident which led to the cops shooting him began because the cops tried to pull him over for running a stop sign on a bike, right? Which is a thing that tens of thousands of white dudes in spandex do every single day in this country. And not a word was spoken by the bike movement, at least that I saw, by bike folks, you know, in sort of solidarity or opposition to what had happened, right?

It was just another thing that that went mourned by thousands of people and ignored by others so like it made me think about how we build maybe it's wrong to think about how we build a better bike movement and maybe it's better to think about how we make it unremarkable that you bike right we make it like not an identity thing but how do we make cities where people are safe that you bike right we make it like not an identity thing but how do we make cities where people are safe riding bikes i guess regardless of whether they're wearing spandex or they're just trying to get to the shops yeah i mean that's a really kind of an important question and in in my research a lot of people were grappling with that there was an

incident that mercifully didn't result in someone being killed or seriously injured. But, you know, a guy was pulled off of his bike by police, beaten up in San Francisco. And there was a big march afterwards. And some of the some bicycle advocates did show up, but it was not framed as this is something that, you know, is affecting us as cyclists right this is or that affecting some of us as cyclists right and an injury to one is an injury to all right that's not yeah that's not was not the kind of the frame that that people were were using to my

from what i could tell right um and you had bicycle you know black black bicycle advocates in East Oakland who didn't really frame themselves as bicycle advocates necessarily in the traditional, um, or the mold that is sort of determined by the sort of the hegemonically kind of white middle-class advocacy organizations, right. But they were very much bicycle advocates who, you know, um, a lot of were a lot of, a lot of what they did was sort of like teaching people to ride correctly so that they would have fewer interactions with police, right. Or, um, kind of managing interactions with, with police and, you know, hopefully becoming well enough known as cyclists that they weren't

kind of subject to the kinds of interactions that, you know, where police end up killing somebody, right? Now that I live in a place where very few people bicycle to work or for much of anything, right? I'm thinking a bit more holistically about uh you know it's now kind of a buzzword but you know a kind of a more car optional um city right where you don't need to have a car to do various things you know i'm i'm involved with bicycle advocates here, but like when I look around, I see like a bus stop that is a stick in a median, right? There's no bench, there's no sidewalks to get to it, there's no crosswalks or anything like that. And I mean, I think that one of the bigger questions is to make a place that's safe for cyclists safe for people walking safe for people walking their bikes or safe for people walking to transit right um is

reducing the kind of the space and the the way that space and speed go together right that are devoted to cars and a lot of that is like um reducing the the the distances that people need to travel right for various things right this gets into the sort of the 15 minute city stuff which is it's been really wild to see it being turned into this like, QAnon type, you know, Agenda 21, UN black helicopters type of conspiracy theory, right? Because I think of it as a very kind of milquetoast type of policy framework that's honored in the breach, right? Sort of like complete streets. There's a carve out for, unless a traffic engineer says it's not really feasible, and then we won't really question that judgment. We just won't do it, right? So, I mean, I do think it's bigger than,

modes of transport are really bigger than people's individual decisions, or even like what the sort of, once you are in your mode of transport, what the sort of once you are in your mode of transport what the sort of behavioral matrix is right it's sort of like what what does your life consist of right um what what do you do to like preserve your dignity with your co-workers right all of these kinds of things that feed people towards towards driving except in you know very specific places that, you know, have become special in the United States. I mean, there's a lot, there's a lot to say, right. It is really, it's much bigger than, than bicycling. It's the sort of the, the built environment.

And I think one of the things that what i land on in the book maybe belatedly right because these these things take years is um is this the way that bicycling is still kind of this interstitial um solution right it's sort of like kind of picking up scraps here and there in the built environment, right? It's like picking up some of the loose ends, right? In how cities are organized that makes them frustrating, difficult to navigate, right? And, you know, I think a lot of the energy, not exclusively, certainly, and bicycle advocacy has become much more diverse in part through like listening to

a lot of the voices of advocates of color and and uh women advocates and you know um kind of thinking beyond that sort of stereotypical you know not just the the middle-aged man in lycra but like the the sort of middle-aged guy on a surly right you know that that maybe successor to the middle-aged man in lycra right i'm certainly calling myself out um but the it's still very kind of an interstitial thing right um it's and the thing about the the urban transportation systems in the United States is that they leave a lot of interstices. Right. There's a lot of areas that are poorly served by anything but cars and honestly poorly served by cars. people a lot of the sort of the maybe not anger but certainly annoyance at bicycle advocacy and bicycle infrastructure um would be and i think you see this in portland too where it's like we've

been asking for sidewalks we've been asking the city to to like fill these potholes and instead there's these bike lanes that people who just got here are asking for, right? And so maybe that's a failure of solidarity on people coming, you know, people moving to a neighborhood, they're like, why is it so torturous to get somewhere by bike, rather than kind of maybe stopping and saying, all right, what have people been demanding here before I got here? Right. And how can I sort of contribute to that as well and sort of kind of merge our agendas potentially. But it is this sort of, it's a, it's an interstitial solution. Right. And so from, for me, you know, the bigger,

the bigger questions are sort of what, what role will bicycles play when we start to really take seriously the the kind of broader urban structure so you don't have these sort of islands of bikeability inside a sea of automobility right um do you have a situation where it actually becomes more practical to walk and take transit than it is to bike right i would you have a situation where it actually becomes more practical to walk and take transit than it is to bike right i would call that a that a win right and i think you know there's a there's a there's a degree to which we can get fixated on on the particular mode of transport i think because we all kind of like fell in love with bicycles and that was the sort of the gateway drug into thinking about like transport

and cities and how people move around and the sort of the history of urban planning, right? So, I mean, these are all, I don't know if I really kind of offered anything that sort of puts it all together nicely, right? But the idea that it really does need to become normalized. And if it actually sort of disappears in the process of being normalized, and it stops being a signifier of environmental rectitude or something like that. And, you know, if I could walk to a grocery store, instead of having to bike to a grocery store i would prefer that honestly where i am right now right even though i love cycling right and it's something that i'll never stop doing right so i think kind of thinking more holistically about what kinds of cities we need to

have to move beyond uh move beyond automobility both from a climate perspective and a social justice perspective um and just a almost like a thermodynamic perspective um so i mean that maybe that's the moving up to the level of physics is where one one kind of place to end yeah no i think that's very good yeah is there anything you'd uh you'd like to plug maybe uh people where people can find your book where people can follow you online anything like that any sort of projects you're interested in sure yeah so um my you can find me on twitter i'm at j-o-s-t-e-h-l-i-n book is, now it's a few years old. It's 2019 with University of Minnesota Press. It's called Cyclescapes of the Unequal City. And my latest work, I'm actually looking at

the politics of highway removal. So maybe scaling up in terms of infrastructure, thinking about sort of bigger, kind of the great clanking gears of urbanism rather than, you know, this little tiny stretch of pavement on the side how does the the fabric of the built environment have to change in order to grapple with climate change inequality um and sort of making a sort of a more human type of city yeah i think it's great i think it's a wonderful place to end thank you so much for giving us some of your afternoon john yeah thank you i really appreciate you taking the time and it was a really fun conversation. Hi, podcast fans. It's me, it's James. And it's just a tiny little pickup that I wanted to add to the end of this episode because I neglected to mention that Cyclista Zine did call out the police killing of Dijon Kizzee very explicitly and had an excellent piece on it, as they do on lots of other things. They are incredibly wonderful and and you can find them at cyclistazine.com.

They are not representative of the rest of the bike media, so well worth looking at if you like bikes and not the police murdering people. They're a wonderful publication. Okay, thanks. Bye. 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. Welcome to It Could Happen Here, a podcast about things falling apart and sometimes putting things back together. And, you know, today we're doing an episode that's kind of more on the intellectual and emotional end of a very specific set of things falling apart. And rather than clumsily try to introduce it myself, I'm going to bring on the person who I think some of the

thoughts that have kind of been going through my head, I know they've been going through the heads of a lot of the folks that we have here at Cool Zone for quite some time now. Thought Slime, you are a YouTuber and a good YouTuber who does a number of videos. Some of your recent ones are thoughts on AI art, a timeline of Elon's Twitter mistakes. You did a really fun video on the QAnon Queen of Canada, who is a pretty problematic character. Welcome to the show. Thanks for having me. Happy to be here. Do you want to just kind of start by reading us that thread you posted? Because you posted this on Twitter the other day, and I started chatting with it. And then we moved over to DMs and decided we should kind of do a little more formal thing.

Yeah. So basically, I said that I'm constantly considering making a why I left the left video about how my views have not changed one iota. But I've become completely disillusioned about my role in communicating them. one iota, but I've become completely disillusioned about my role in communicating them. Part of the reason I shifted my focus to trying to be just entertaining is because deep down, I don't really see a lot of value in getting people on my side anymore. I don't think it does anything or means anything, but the best I can do is give you information and hopefully a laugh. I used to feel like I was participating in something bigger than I think I really am, that I was helping in some small way towards a sort of shift towards a more revolutionary

mass consciousness. I think that was a bit of a childish fantasy in retrospect. Sometimes people will say, you made me an anarchist. And like, buddy, I don't even think it matters that I myself am an anarchist. And I regret that that sort of we're fighting the good fight mentality has allowed some of the worst grifters on the platform to flourish by manipulating people's passions for their own weird, petty reasons. I think what I do has a lot of value, but I'm just saying that I think I perceive that value to be is a lot different than what I thought it was a few years ago, is basically what I had to say. Yeah, that I think does such a good job of nailing the problem that I've been kind of dealing with emotionally as well, which is it's not – it would be easy to sum it up as like I no longer believe in trying to transmit leftist ideas or political analysis or that I don't believe in the value of trying to inform people about the world, because that's not how I feel. But there has been this shift. And I think probably the high point for the version

of me that was optimistic about the ability to use mass media to build power and the ability to take effective action on the left, I think that kind of crescendoed, I'm going to say June of 2020. And it had a pretty sharp drop after that point. And I both think it's valuable to still acknowledge kind of how remarkable what happened in 2020 was. For all of its flaws and all of the really messy fallout from it, we saw an uprising of unprecedented scale. And part of why the crackdown and response has been so gnarly is that it scared the hell out of a lot of really unpleasant people. And the media had a significant role to play in that, both in the fact that there were a lot of people who were kind of already organizing and radicalized when the shit started to hit the fan, and that as things happened, you know, what was happening in the streets, what the police were doing,

the different kind of marches and different campaigns that were being started got spread to people. And I do think that, you know, folks, you know, like you and me were a part of that. Although it never is far from my mind that the most influential piece of media that was recorded and disseminated during 2020 was the video of George Floyd being murdered, which was filmed by, you know, someone who just happened to be nearby and had the courage to film it. Not a professional journalist, not an influencer, not somebody who was a professional political thinker, and everything else combined didn't have the influence of that video. Yeah, I think that kind of gets to the heart of it, right? Is that we express support for ideas,

and thus people tend to treat us as though we are the progenitors of those ideas or the guardians of those ideas or the leaders of a kind of decentralized proxy party of some kind? I think, thankfully, there's that. I mean, there's always going to be. Everyone who makes popular media forms a little cult. And so there's always going to be a number of people who take any given person in the media more seriously than they deserve. And that includes the both of us. And that's not attempting to be humble or anything. That is simply a fact of how mass media works. I do think we've seen, I think there's been a mix of a healthy pushback against looking at people who are doing creating popular media as more than what they are and more than

what that media is capable of being. I think there has been a pushback against that in the last couple of years. It's been healthy. And I think there's been a pushback that's been unhealthy. I think people have forgotten some of the lessons of like, I think a good example would be there was a very justified backlash against, and when I say streamers here, I'm referring to people who are actually in the streets streaming during riots and protests and whatnot, right? And the justified part of that backlash was due to the fact that past a certain point, particularly, those streams were primarily being used by law enforcement, both to get charges on people and just to know where folks were as an intelligence gathering method. And I think that the backlash, which was understandable, and there was a lot of ugly behavior, including people who kind of got in after the early portions of that in order to make shitloads of money by streaming people getting the shit beat out of them by the cops.

And that was, I think, very justified, a pretty aggressive social response to that. But I think it's also caused a lot of people to forget that a huge part of why things kicked off in 2020 and why so many people got involved was Nico from Unicorn Riot on the ground every night in Minneapolis doing one of the most impressive pieces of citizen journalism that I think we've seen in this country. And so I do think that some of what's frustrating here is that it's difficult for people, it's difficult for us as a community to take some of the proper lessons from these things that are happening, from the push and pull of the conflict that we all find ourselves in, in

part because the nature of the way people express their understanding of these lessons via social media is very geared towards flattening them and making it a very simple matter of this is bad or this is good and not, well, in this period of time, this worked, and then it didn't, you know? There's no real sense of proportionality in these discussions. It isn't just a matter of like, hey, you fucked up, you should probably take this down, or this could be dangerous if you leave this up or if you continue to do this. It's more so like, what are you, a cop? What are you, some kind of cop doing this? Yeah. You know, let's let's spread that rumor around.

And I mean, yeah, the cop jacketing thing is kind of one part of the problem. But I I want to focus a little bit on what you were talking about in terms of what do you think as you're kind of looking at, you know, and we're all kind of staring 2024 as it approaches, what do you think is useful from media that attempts to analyze and share perspectives that are left-wing, that are anarchist-inclined? what do you think is actually the value that can be added to attempts to achieve greater justice in our society? Well, I think the answer is twofold.

I think, firstly, anything that drives people to real-life organizing and taking action outside of online spaces is obviously useful. Beyond that, though, like I think there is some value to just exposing people to ideas that they might not have found otherwise. But I think that a lot of that has been accomplished now. I feel like a lot of people are more familiar with the leftist ideology, one-on-one type of content that people might expect in that way. So yeah, I community develops a language that is to some extent its own. And that's part of politics, political analysis. If you're looking at things with a Marxist analysis or if you're analyzing things based on your understanding of generations of anarchist political philosophy. There's terms that you're going to use that other thinkers have created that are the terms that people use to discuss those ideas. But it is sometimes kind of a thin line between that and the thing that cults do,

where they come up with a bunch of specific terms that no one else uses in order to separate a community from the rest, from everyone else. And obviously, I don't think there's any intentionality there. I don't think people who are talking about, you know, the dialectic or whatever are attempting to separate their listeners from the mass of humanity. But I do think that happens sometimes. And when I listen sometimes to conversations on the left about justice in particular, about social justice, I wonder like, well, how is somebody who isn't like reading all this shit going to interpret this? Is it just going to like sound like nonsense to them? And I think maybe like part of the purpose, the positive purpose of mass media that looks at things from the left is trying to communicate with

folks who are not going to sit down, or at least who have not yet sat down and done a whole bunch of reading on the history and the politics, but whose hearts are in the right place and who I would like to be able to engage in conversations with folks who maybe kind of get their heads a little bit too full of specific terminology sometimes. I think it's a specific balancing act. Because on the other hand, you also have to give your audience a little credit that they're capable. Absolutely. But I think that you have to be able to meet people where they're at. But at the same time, if someone has expressed this idea in a way that's already sufficient. Like it's, it's a, why do the work of like trying to re-explain it, you know?

But that being said, I think there is a tendency to just assume people already are on our side or understand ideas to the level of complexity that we might like, and that people are on board with like what even something as simple as what capitalism means you know all the time you see people online who will say that like uh a a musician will post their uh band camp page and people will be like oh i thought you were anti-capitalist you know yeah it's it's like you know but like you also can't get caught up in the kind of weaponized ignorance that people, you know, like you can't make someone understand something if they have a particular reason not to want to. So I absolutely agree that like there is the danger of that group in speak. But it's a difficult problem to solve i think the kind of approach i take to it most of the time is that i

tend to write my scripts uh as though as though i am uh just the like like a child like i try to write uh as though i'm speaking to a five-year-old you know yeah i mean and i i think i i also i think a lot about and this is something you know here at cool zone i brought we brought on a couple of years ago um people who you know are are now making podcasts for the team who when we brought brought them on, had a lot less experience writing scripts and making media for mass consumption. And one of the things that I found it was kind of like my job to do repeatedly was to point out like, okay, stop, go actually go back to that term, because you just, you know, said a term that I think means a specific or you just referenced a thing from history that I think that

people are interested in and should know about, but you do have to like go in and explain it and walk people through it. And that's kind of part of, that's really one of the challenges I find, particularly with Behind the Bastards, right? Where we're talking sometimes about these complicated social movements and moments in history. And it's this kind of tug of war between you want to respect the intelligence of the audience and you want to give them enough detail that they have context and that they can maybe understand multiple sides of it. But also, you can't get bogged down in every detail, otherwise you're never going to finish the damn thing. And we can't all be Dan Carlin making 10 hour long podcasts. Unfortunately, I do like,

there's a degree to which I'm quite jealous of his work, the way he set up his workload. But I would just never be able to think of that many boxing analogies. Yeah, I don't know very much about boxing. I would probably just like throw in a whole lot of Balls Mahoney analogies. Yeah, a lot of lot of for me it would be a lot of super punch out references hell yes stan lee would always say to comic book writers that every comic is somebody's first comic

and so you kind of have to consider that like every piece of messaging you do might this might be like the first time someone is stepping out of a completely different ideological bubble than you might expect. And so, you know, it kind of has the messaging kind of has to stand on its own. But I think that's also like a unique problem to mass media because it also means that in a sense, it's much harder to like build on previous work. It's harder to like go from your one-on-one content and then get to the more advanced subjects because someone could just start at the more advanced part and get lost. I think that's a really apt way of describing what I also find is one of the central problems because a ton of the episodes of Bastards, especially the stuff when we focus on fascists, builds on itself, right? Yes. Your understanding of fascism in Romania will be influenced and is to some degree – you can't understand fascism in Romania without understanding fascism in Weimar, fascism in Italy, fascism in the United States during the same period and vice versa.

same period and vice versa. And so my hope is that the people who catch all of the episodes are building a really complex and durable understanding of the problem through it. But it's also the struggle of like, well, a lot of people are just going to be like, oh shit, I know Hitler, but maybe I'm not interested in hearing about Romania, you know, and I'm not going to click on those episodes. And there's nothing against people. Like when I listen to podcasts, I find myself doing the same thing where it's like, there's a million episodes of this show. I'm not going to listen. I don't have the time to listen to all of them.

Sure. Yeah. And that touches on another problem, which is that, you know, the subjects that people like us tend to cover are biased towards what we think people will find interesting. Yeah. You know, and beyond that, towards what we think people will find interesting. Yeah. You know, and beyond that, like what we ourselves find interesting to research. Yeah. And what, and what you can, and this is a thing that I try to point out on my subreddit

sometimes when people are like, I can't believe you haven't done this guy or that guy. And it's like, well, that doing the, that research is going to fuck me up. And like, so I'm not going to do it yet. I'm going to do this thing. That's funny. I'm going to read about the liver king this week. I need a break so the liver king is who we're talking about. Yeah.

Everybody needs a liver king in their life at some point. I read the Turner Diaries for one video. And people have been constantly like, oh, you should read Camp of the Saints. You should read Siege. And I'm like, oh, have been constantly like, oh, you should read Camp of the Saints. You should read Siege. And I'm like, oh, I don't know if I want to.

First of all, I don't even know if I want those things on my hard drive. Yeah. Yeah. Camp of the Saints is a little easier, but yeah, maybe maybe one of those a year and no more. That's like the most I would recommend from like a mental health standpoint. It's also like you don't need to read the full text of all of those. I mean, that's part of the thing is that like you can get a lot by checking in some excerpts and reading scholarly papers, analyzing this stuff. And there always will be that. And I think to a significant standpoint, like it's more important to understand, you know, and this isn't true for everybody because there's some people who, you know, are scholars of this stuff and you do need to do the deep reading. But if you want to understand the degree to which Siege and the Turner Diaries influenced the mass shootings that we see in the United States today that are carried out by the far right, you don't need to read those books to do that, right? There's plenty of really good scholarly analysis. And that's part of what you and I try to do for people. And what other folks who are

creating this kind of media, other journalists do for folks. Yeah, I would say that I strongly balk at the, I don't consider myself a journalist. strongly balk at the, I don't consider myself a journalist. Yeah. I mean, and I don't consider, that's something people talk about as well on the subreddit. I get a lot of like comments on people appreciating the journalism in the series. And we do in some of our shows, like, you know, we did, we went to the border of Myanmar last year, Garrison just got back from cop city. But like Bastards isn't journalism. Sometimes it's like celebrating journalism, but it's entertainment that I hope has like an educational quality to it. Yeah.

I don't say this to belittle myself. I just don't see that as the function of my job. I think like I have in the course of my work, occasionally done journalism by accident. I did a long interview where I had like, uh, about the Chaz and, and kind of the misconceptions that people had. And I had some, you know, talks with people within, and like, that is technically on its face, a piece of journalism. For sure. Absolutely. It's not what I consider my strength or role to be.

Well, honestly, this goes back to what we were talking about with the young woman who filmed the video of George Floyd. Journalism is a profession, but it's also just like a set of tools. And sometimes you will use those tools in order to do other things you know that that's that's certainly true I'm curious you and I you and I both kind of like make our work work differently mines ad supported obviously so my conversation with fans you know outside of like when I'm doing a live show is primarily through we have a subreddit and we have Twitter. And that's, you know, there's some difficulty there for one thing. Like every single guest we have, there are people who will be like, this is the best guest you've ever had.

And this person is the worst guest you've ever had. And there's absolutely no way to make decisions based on that. Right. It's just a bunch of straight. And there's absolutely no way to make decisions based on that, right? It's just a bunch of straight. No, absolutely not. You've got a different relationship or at least a different method of, I think, communicating. I imagine it's different because you're Patreon supported. I'm interested in how have, if at all, have you seen kind of the conversations about what people want from you and the way in which you've been talking with your fans?

How have you seen that change since 2020? Well, I think one of the major ways is since I've kind of taken a step back from this explicitly political content, it's a lot of people have kind of encouraged me to go more in that direction. And i have seen like a big drop in my support as a result uh i i think that it's it's a tricky balance to strike again many of these things are like a such a balancing act because i always am careful to remind people that like hey you can support me on patreon if you like what I'm doing and want there to be more of it. But please don't operate

under the assumption that doing so is activism or contributes to activism because it is not. You are not like making the revolution more imminent. Yeah, exactly. You know, you are getting

a little drawing that I'm going to put at the end of my video. Like that's the value proposition here. Yeah, exactly. You know, you are getting a little drawing that I'm going to put at the end of my video. Like that's, that's the value proposition here. Yeah. And I think that, you know, it's, it's, um, I don't, the reason I don't accept, uh, ad, ad, uh, reads on Thought Slime, I do on Scaredy Cats, uh, is because I don't want the perception that my views are going to be limited or held back by, you know, the desire to seek out advertisers, which whether or not I would have the, the integrity to withstand, like it, it would create the illusion, but that creates the problem

of, well, now I kind of have to do what I think that my audience will want. And that's its own kettle of fish. Like, am I pushing people to donate more than they might be comfortable with? And so that's, you know, I don't really know the ethics of it, to be perfectly frank. There have been times when people have made big donations and I've had to message them and say like, hey, I think you should probably take this money back. You probably weren't thinking straight when you sent me this money. I think you should probably have it back. Yeah. That's such an interesting thing for me because it also, you know, I I've, I've thought about that myself quite a lot. You know, I had a decision to make when we first started doing these shows about how it was going to be

done. And I, I took the ad supported corporate route. And I've been very happy with that so far. There's a lot of things it's let us do. There's certainly downsides to it, including occasionally advertising for the Washington State Highway Patrol. But it's one of those things, I made a comment, and this is part, one of the frustrating things about making media for a large audience is there's always going to be people who will read into what you've said, something you never meant. I made a comment once about like – because we get people asking, well, why don't you do a Patreon or whatever? Why do you do it this way? And I just made a comment like expressing what you had just expressed.

expressing what you had just expressed. Like, well, you know, I feel weird sometimes asking for money. And if I can just like get money from a big company and, you know, hire my friends and do my work, I feel okay doing that. It's how most of my career has worked. So that's what I'm most comfortable doing. And there were people who took from that, like, well, Robert doesn't think it's ethical to have a Patreon. It's like half of my friends make their living on Patreon.

I do not have an ethical problem with supporting yourself that way. I will say that when I heard you mention that in an episode and it did send a chill down my spine briefly. No, I mean, I think like Cody Johnston, who I've worked with for what, 15 years now, has a massive Patreon. Tom and Dave lived with some of my best friends, you know? Yeah, yeah, yeah. Like, it's, it's, I, I think it's perfectly, it's, it's certainly no less ethical, and you can make a case, people do, that it's more ethical than being ad-supported. It's just, like, I mean, some of it just comes down to, like, what kind of stuff are you making, and what kind of, like, person are you, and what's going to work best with you as like a creative method and a way of interacting with fans and they have downsides and they have positives you know it's also like a matter of of uh what what you're able to do to certain extent because like i don't know how to

get advertisers like any advertisers that i've ever gotten on my my horror channel have just reached out to me and like i don't know if I'm getting as much money out of them as I should be. I have no idea. I just kind of wing it, you know? But like, if you have that background in radio or broadcasting or what have you, like, it can, you know, it's a much more viable option for some people than it is for others. Yeah, yeah. I mean, a lot of why it works for me the way that it does is because I've had a 15- career in, not in broadcast,

but you know, in, in comedy writing and whatnot. And so I, I mean, that's how I got the, I got my podcast hosted on I heart in the first place. And,

and that's like a thing. And this is actually one of the things that concerns me most about the shit that's happening with AI right now, because you know, there's this the, the folks that kind of, I came into making media for all of us started as fairly apolitical comedy. I mean, that's Cody Johnston,

right? Some more news. Cody was making videos about like chat roulette and penises. Uh, when we, when we all started working together, um, very funny videos, but like we were making silly things. Um, and everyone has kind of, uh, moved into making like some, you know, pretty, pretty serious fact-based media. Um, you know, Cody does a very popular, very political kind of current event show. And, um, we were able to get good at making the kind of media that we made and build the connections that we built and build the audiences that we built because we had years of time where you could make a decent living writing stuff for the internet. And I see the kind of shit that I'm afraid AI is going to do to these jobs where people would get their start as writers and whatnot. Maybe it wasn't the best. You know, it's not you're not doing the best writing you're ever going to do the jobs that

get replaced by AI, but it's a foot in the door. And I keep I feel like I keep seeing the room for people to put their foot in the door get smaller and smaller every year. And that's that worries me a lot. I definitely know what you mean. That worries me a lot. I definitely know what you mean. I also feel that there's a fear among some people that you get crowded out of these spaces the more people there are doing this sort of thing.

And I kind of feel like that's not the case. The AI stuff, I definitely share your concerns, but yeah, the, the, the institutional barriers in people's way. Like, I think that like, uh, to be frank,

like I started doing this on a shitty $200 computer and, uh, uh, completely legal, uh, video editing software. I love legal video editing software. I found it in a dumpster and I use that. uh you know and then like through that i was able to like be able to afford a fancy camera and

some lights and you know uh but like i didn't know what i was fucking doing like it was all self-taught and i think there has to be that kind of diy attitude for people. And it is something I try to encourage in people is that like, just do it. Like I did it, you can do it. I think that's a great point because I am coming at this from the old man, doomerist perspective of somebody who like the world has changed from the way it was when I was young and people don't get their careers started that way anymore. And your point is very valid, that while changes in the industry have closed specific doors, they've also created some. And I think probably in the long run, it is better for people to get their foot in the door doing what you did than rewriting a bunch of press releases about tech gadgets for a shady website

that takes advantage of the Google algorithm, which is how I started my career. I think that's actually a really valid point. Yeah, I don't think that's, it depends on your end goal too, right? But I think like the thing that becomes incumbent on people like me is to like help people, you know, like I've experienced a certain amount of success. And so, and I attribute that largely to the fact that like, when I was just starting out, like I had no idea how to make people see my shit. I didn't like, I did not know what I was doing. And a bigger creator just reached out and was like, Hey, can I share your

video? I think it's really good. And it kind of snowballed from there. So my philosophy has always been like, you take these, you know, you, you make space for, to, to lift people up with you. And in doing so, it's not an entirely selfless gesture either, because in doing so, if, if there's an extremely talented person who succeeds partially because you help them. Now you have a connection to an extremely talented person, you know? Yeah. Like that's a sense of, for lack of a better term, mutual aid in a very loose sense, I suppose. That reminds me of something a good friend of mine and a colleague at Cracked who now helps run the Small Beans podcast network,

said to me years and years ago when he was directing a video, which is, I want to spend the rest of my career getting hired and fired by my friends, which is, I think, a nice way of looking at it. And there's a degree to which it's a very old Hollywood way of looking at it, but it doesn't, it also works very well in this. It can work very well in this new, this new kind of ecosystem that is still being put together. And I do think that it's, because I see a lot and I don't, I'm not someone who does a lot of time. Like I like to watch, I like to watch like the stuff that you put together, the stuff h bomber guy puts together where it's actual like um videos on topics and i'm learning something um the stuff that dan olsen puts together you know um i'm not so much into and this is not i'm not attacking

anybody i'm not like trying to shit on the field but personally i don't watch like the just kind of like stream stuff a lot and i it does seem like there's a lot of conflicts between people in that. And I'm, I'm wondering, you know, I, my hope is that there's more people building connections to create resiliency between the people who are trying to make good shit, um, and trying to make stuff that, that people enjoy and that has an impact on people and that even changes people in positive ways. Um, and it sounds like from what, from what you're talking about, you know, honestly, from what I experienced too, I do think that's more the case than like the drama that,

that goes viral on Twitter from time to time. Yeah. I think, you know, I hope so too. I think that, that it's, it's very easy to piss people off. And it's much harder to get people's attention by being kind. But, you know, look, you know, how many nice comments do I get in a day?

Can't count. But like, the one shitty comment will always stick out. It's the same way. Like, if I have a thousand pleasant interactions with someone else, nobody notices. But if I, you know, get in, if I pick a fight with somebody, you know, it's people are going to remember forever. I think that's the thing that unsettles me most. And this isn't actually even just like,

this isn't about streaming media or left-wing media or whatever. This is a problem of social media that you're right. It's the, it's the fights that always get most of the attention as opposed to the, I mean, not entirely because some of like the big moments, particularly in recent left-wing media, things like people doing these giant streams that raise huge amounts of money for a cause. So that certainly is a thing that happens and does get a lot of attention when it does happen. But you are fighting against, and I think we have to be consciously fighting against this system that does want to engender conflict. Yes. It's also kind of difficult, and keep in mind, this is

perhaps coming from a biased perspective, when there are individuals, and I'm not going to name names, who do see that as an easy source of generating attention. It's very easy to, the same way that if I'm going to make a video on a subject, I will frame it as I'm disagreeing with Ben Shapiro or I'm disagreeing with Jordan Peterson. It's very easy to go look at Thought Slime. There's a big piece of shit because he thought this when when actually this is the truth. It's more attention grabbing than just, you know, a kind of neutrally positioned argument. Yeah. So it's a it's a it's a tricky problem. Yeah.

Yeah. I think one of the ones that that I think on quite a lot. Well, I think that's most of what I wanted to talk about today. Did you want to throw in anything else? Or if not, we can go to plugs. Yeah, I mean, I'm good. That's pretty much it. I will say that one of the things that tends to bother me the most is people will occasionally say to me that they'll send a message saying, you seem like a really good person. And I will say, thank you, but please don't feel that way about content creators because why would I make a work that portrayed myself as a bad person?

And while I, in my mind, think I am a good person, I think it sets the dangerous precedent that you could allow yourself to be emotionally manipulated by someone else who might not be. Well, the name of the game, when you are creating media, particularly when you're creating media that's meant to make people feel things, part of that is manipulation, right? Yes. Manipulate is not an inherently negative term. Stanley Kubrick is trying to manipulate you when he makes a movie. I'm trying to persuade you. Yeah. It is incumbent upon the audience for their own protection to keep that in mind. And it's

incumbent upon ethical people who make stuff to not create cults, at least not create too many cults. Yeah. As much as you can avoid it for sure. Yeah. All right. You want to plug your pluggables? Sure. You can find my work at youtube.com slash Thought Slime or thoughtslime.com. You can also find my horror content at youtube.com slash Scaredy Cats TV. Scaredy Cats was taken. That's me. That's what I do. I make videos about farts and or butts. Well, thank you so much for coming on the show. That is going to be it for us today.

We will be back probably tomorrow. Hey, we'll be back Monday with more episodes every week from now until the heat death of the universe. It Could Happen Here is a production of Cool Zone Media. For more podcasts from Cool Zone Media, visit our website, coolzonemedia.com, or check us out on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts. You can find sources for It Could Happen Here updated monthly at coolzonemedia.com slash sources. Thanks for listening.

You should probably keep your lights on for Nocturnal Tales from the Shadow. Join me, Danny Trails, and step into the flames of right. An anthology podcast of modern day horror stories inspired by the most terrifying legends and lore of Latin America. Listen to Nocturno on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.