It Could Happen Here - The Socialists Who Want 500,000 More Cops Part 2: Don't Talk About Race

Episode Date: November 18, 2022

We look at the broader intellectual project behind nominally leftist calls for more cops and the course of the so-called race-class debateSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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We've won, guys. We are the last medium standing. I do think the majority of people on this call got this job in such a small part because of micro-blogging. 100% because of micro-blogging. 100% because of micro-blogging.

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The podcast also contains me christopher wong contains garrison davis it contains james stout and allegedly robert evans says yeah however come on robert evans is yeah i think he's legitimately actually busy right now he is he is like recording something else or something yeah he's doing a marathon thing but if you look at the iheart page it's only robert Robert. We have a lot of podcasts on... Yeah, anyway. On the Cool Zone Media. Yeah, on the Cool Zone Media.

That's right. So speaking of podcasts we've done on the Cool Zone Media, we did one that came out, the one before this one. What was it about? It was about how a bunch of socialists want 500 000 more cops or specifically several intervention yeah so okay i i asked myself the question when i read this why why do they want this how did we get here because they're rich and they're scared yes so this is true it's there's also sort of there's also sort of deeper roots to what's

happening here and okay so like it is true that there's been a whole wave of people who were sort of nominally progressive or like socialists 2016 or 2017 who turned right in the past few years particularly over racial issues like lee fang uh grand greenwald like more recently the tyt people like bashar sakara's been doing crime wave shit like kind of recently which was actually like Li Feng, Glenn Greenwald, more recently the TYT people, like Bashar al-Sakhar has been doing crime wave shit like kind of recently, which was actually really funny. He had this tweet about how like, oh, the crime rate's not actually down.

There's specific neighborhoods where the crime, where people are poor, where the crime is up, and then you look at the data and that's exactly the opposite of what's happening. But okay. So, but this entire push for sort of more police is part of a broader political project that Adon Arusumi and his sort of allies in Jacobin and et cetera, et cetera have been pushing for years now. And this sort of like political project is the class side of what's called the have blissfully forgotten this, the race class debate was basically an argument about sort of the role of race in leftist organizing. own specific organizing around racial justice and like liberation movements or should we attempt to put class first and attempt to solve racism by appealing to like the interest of the entire

working class and only doing class-based organizing um there are broadly like three types of class first people and weirdly we're gonna see two of them here um there are a very small number of very committed and very radical marxists and like a small number of anarchists who think that like well race was a product of class anyways and so if you end the class system and abolish private property that's the sort of like actual central like mechanism of oppression society and if you do that like you know race will sort of fall apart and so you know you sure um yeah whatever sure it's all false consciousness anyway yeah like these people are wrong i think they're less dangerous than the other kind of two people but we're also

going to see one of these guys later so there there's the people i call the like class with like a k people who are just straight up like racists like they are they they are class with a kkk yeah right like they they you know the the groups of socialists i've compared them to are like the socialists who came to the u.s after 1848 and were like oh shit who cares like slavery like we don't care about slavery the actual thing that like is good for the working class is stealing more land for indigenous people and this is how we're going to solve the labor question oh yeah or also the sort of like like the the the people who were in the knights of labor like the 1880s who were like, all right, we need to defend labor.

The way we're going to defend labor is by ethnically cleansing the entire west coast of Chinese people. Like these are basically these guys, right? They're just straight up racist to what unions and healthcare. They used to be a real faction in the DSA formed around this like absolutely dog shit subreddit called Stupid Pole. There used to be a bunch of them in philadelphia and these kind of people like they were like red scares initial base and so by you know this is like the 2017 2018 2019 by now like in 2022 these people are almost entirely deranged tradcasts who spent literally their entire time deep-throating peter thiel's boot so they're kind of mostly like they're

just right-wingers now like that that's what's happened to these people um good riddance fuck them i yeah and then there are people like adaner usmi and bosh carson cara who don't really want to end capitalism and think that socialism is just sort of like welfare states and some unions and also they also and this is sort of critical tend to think that racial justice organizing is a distraction from their main goal of achieving socialism and by achieving socialism i mean electoralism and by electoralism i mean getting these people elected to office yeah yeah i hate these people their politics sucks i i've been fighting them for a bit like since i became a leftist i've been at war with these people and to to get a sense of how we got from you know what was legitimately in a lot of cases what was at least legitimately an argument about how to deal with racism

to a bunch of socialists going we need 500 000 more cops i i want to take a look at a piece uh adam aryusami wrote in catalyst with dav David Zachariah called The Class Path to Racial Liberation. And I want to take a quote from its opening to give it a sense of people of like how awful this politics is. This is like one of those sort of like opening statements about why they're taking the class side in the debate. We argue that the class race debate should center on one principal domain the distribution of material resources now okay at first glance this seems kind of reasonable enough but there's another incredibly important aspect of any attempt to grapple with race in class that usami is just ignoring entirely. And that's violence, right?

Race is not just a measure of economic inequality, it's an index of violence. And, you know, racialization increases your risk of interpersonal violence, it increases your risk of sexual violence, it increases your risk of mass communal violence, a lot of lynchings or sort of ethnic cleansing campaigns. And maybe most importantly for this whole argument,

like being racialized dramatically increases the risk of suffering state violence and this is a real problem for the sort of class first people because you know usami sort of multiple like multi-racial working class electoral project won't do shit to prevent people from experiencing state violence just because there's welfare programs you know which we talked about this what this looks like in our brazil episodes right? You actually have, like, legitimately a sort of united multiracial working class. It elects a social democratic government, and they enact anti-poverty reforms and increase the size of the welfare state. And while this is happening, they also increase the incarcerated population by 620% and created a rate of police killing that is 11 times higher

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

One of the big sort of political violence things is mass incarceration. And one of Adonis' political projects is arguing that mass incarceration isn't about race at all, but it's actually about class. Which… So we're going to see some more bullshit. He wrote an article in Catalyst the economic origin of the mass incarceration alongside new chicago professor john clegg and i i have like i have an enormous special contempt for john clegg for two reasons here one because you know a donner's like an irredeemable jacobin like soak them hack right clegg is nominally was was part of the sort of the anglophone marxist like ultra left right like he he was one of the contributors to the sort of to to the ultra left theory journal like ultra left or marxist

communization journal end notes which you know like that influenced me a lot when i was like a tiny baby leftist and he i also have an incredible amount of contempt here because he's a harper schmidt fellow at the university of chicago and here's the thing okay i don't know what harvard is like right i've never been there i don't know what their campus is like i don't know what it's like to be up be on campus at harvard i know what you chicago the chicago campus is like i know what there's a cop on every fucking corner i know that their surveillance cam is literally everywhere i know that they lock down the entire fucking campus while hundreds of heavily armed cops storm through every building in every courtyard in the

area every single time a kid steals something from a gaming store and runs for it until they've hunted them the fuck down and i know that you know i i know that the cops almost fucking killed me while i was there during a police chase i know that john clegg was on fucking campus when the chicago police department shot a kid who was having a mental health crisis and to to watch this shit every single fucking day and to make this kind of argument is just fucking unforgivable. It is fucking atrocious. I guess I should explain this a little bit for people who don't understand this. black and then there is just this fucking university they've planted in the middle of it and this college has the world's largest private police force there's the also the regular fucking cpds around there there are like for like blocks and like like through other neighborhoods there were just you chicago police officers there there are fucking cpd cops everywhere it is a fucking militarized hellhole and yeah and you know like it is a place where like the way that race functions in the u.s is

blindingly fucking obvious you can you can immediately understand it by looking like you you walk outside your fucking dorm you look at the cop and you look at how the cop treats people depending on what the race is right it is so unbelievably obvious however comma in this article clag and isabie are going to argue that mass incarceration is actually a product of class policy resulting from a lack of social democracy and underdevelopment resulting from a transition from an agrarian economy

to an industrial economy in the 20th century. Many people are saying this. And the subsequent mass migration of black people north. What kind of agrarian economy, we have to ask? Who is doing the labor kind of agrarian economy we have to ask yeah who is doing the labor in agrarian economy how much was paid it's like it's like the the basic argument that they're gonna make is that like well so there were a bunch of people who'd been slaves

and then they became not slaves and then a bunch of them started migrating north but because there was this mass migration all these people showed up to the like showed up to these cities where there was no infrastructure and then so there was a bunch of crime and then because of the crime there was mass incarceration which is okay we're going to get some more into this um but before we go into the sort of reactionary part of this article right you have to understand that when these people say that this is a a like a class-based policy like class here does not mean the same thing that it means for like you know a regular person who thinks about class or like you know a marxist which again both these people nominally are um here's from the journal specter which did a really good sort of critique of of this whole absolutely dog shit article quote kle and Usami's claim that class is essential to understanding mass incarceration amounts to a repackaging of a widely understood fact as revelatory insight.

And while they title their article, quote, the economic origins of mass incarceration, they never delve further into class in a Marxist or even critical sense. Instead, they use educational attainment class in a Marxist or even critical sense. Instead, they use educational attainment data as a proxy. They note that a large portion of people who are imprisoned have low levels of educational attainment. And I, I, I am glad to know that everyone on this call who does the exact same job as

me, we're all from different classes. Congratulations, James, you are now the bourgeoisie. Congratulations, Garrison, you are now proletgeoisie. Congratulations, Garrison. You are now proletariat.

I'm, I guess, the labor aristocracy. That's why I'm here, to expropriate the surplus value from your labor, Garrison. Yep. Yeah. And if you go to prison, it's my fault.

Yeah. Like, I just... Okay. So, like... What an asshole. What a ridiculous fucking claim yeah and it's like like these these okay so like like it was somebody's like the jacobin people do this all the time right like they they have this they made this famous study about the people who vote for trump that was like oh it's people people who voted for trump did it in like working class areas

and again working class was by education data and then also they didn't go because it turns out like this is actually true right there are a lot of people who voted for trump from working class was by education data and then also they didn't go because it turns out like this is actually true right there are a lot of people who voted for trump from working class areas it turns out who those people are are the small business owners in working class areas but they didn't fucking go grander enough enough so that you know they do this shit all the time right and this is the kind of analysis that like like yeah using shit as a proxy for class it's like it's a classic fallacious thing. Yeah, like, what's his name? Nicholas Kristof? Yeah, he did this too, also. Like, we're getting fucking Kristof-level analysis out of these supposed Marxists. all right the curious thing here is that Clegg at least on an intellectual level knows better than this right like he vote he wrote for endnotes endnotes has a very sophisticated class analysis

but if you're actually interested in the sweeping arc of the history of the proletariat you can't make the kinds of arguments that Clegg is making in this thing and so you know because he's trying to make this argument he's reduced to this like like just absolute like like seventh rate like fucking new york times pundit level analysis yeah it's like okay and you know like it's this is really sad because for actual marxists and not sort of like liberal bourgeois hacks doing like fucking new york times bullshit you know class is about ownership right it's about who owns the means of production and who's forced to work for them and you know okay so you have this you have the proletariat or like the working class who are the people who own nothing and are thus forced to sell their labor for people who do who do own stuff right but this also presents a problem for this entire argument because if you

actually want to do class analysis you have to understand that race plays a major role in who even gets to become part of the regular proletariat in the first place. Because most, there's a lot of people through the development of the course of capitalism who fucking never even got to become wage laborers because they were enslaved, they were exterminated, they were turned into debt peons. And, oh wait, guess who fucking got that shit? Oh yeah, it wasn't white people. And you know, if you're going to write, if you're going to be writing arguments,

like explaining the rise of like a mass system of enslavement, people and you know if if you're gonna write it and if you're gonna be writing arguments like explaining the rise of like a mass system of enslavement you might want to think about this but no okay so do you know what else is responsible for a mass series a mass system of enslavement uh the advertising and how they affect our brains. Yeah, that one. I was going to go with Stalin, but yours was good. Well, same div, honestly.

Yeah, Stalin, first mass marketer. So true. Famously, yeah. Stalin will send you a meal kit if you ask him. Welcome. I'm Danny Thrill. Won't you join me at the fire and dare enter? Nocturnum, Tales from the Shadows, presented by iHeart and Sonora. An anthology of modern day horror stories inspired by the legends of Latin America.

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that mass incarceration happened because people were legitimately scared about crime like seriously this is their argument their argument is that crime went up people demanded less crime and then the government did it like i wait did they did they give analysis of the class of people okay they they make this fun argument that both black and white people were demanding the end of crime which is sort of true but you know if you look at what like like yeah like obviously this is the thing right like you you can find people of any race who can who will take basically any political position and so if if you go looking for like black people who are tough on crime you can find it right there are black politicians who are like tough on crime right but that's also not the reason why mass incarceration happened like i'm sorry and also

like you know if if you and you know there was there was also there were people who who like weren't tough on crime people who were like talking about who were talking about trying to end like sort of like like violence spikes but if you look at what they were saying it was stuff like uh we want the police to like respect human rights instead of property rights and uh you know okay so i i yeah this is this is sort of silly right and you know but but the the point of this is that this is basically this is their full-on broadside against abolitionism as like a body of work right it's sort of modern abolitionism um it's directly criticizing uh michelle alexander's uh the new dream crow mass incarceration in the age of colorblindness and it's also like a volley basically against anyone who's trying to explain mass incarceration through race

and so what they argue is that crime increased because there wasn't a strong labor movement to solve the problem that like caused solve the problems that cause crime with economic like redistribution so the state turned to like a cheaper option which is prisons and is it a cheap option well okay so they're they're they're not wrong in this in like there is some truth here right which is that there is a reason that mass incarceration started spiking when capitalism went into crisis in the 70s and 80s and it is actually it is actually genuinely cheaper for for for the bourgeoisie to run a prison state than it is to run a welfare state but and this is the important part right both the welfare state and the prison

complex are different are just different forms of kind of insurgency usami who is a social democrat is ideologically incapable of understanding this his entire ideology is that like is based on the fact that the welfare state is the end point of socialism but this is completely backwards right the welfare state and and social democracy were first implemented by bismarck like specifically as a way to buy workers off to stop them from carrying out a socialist revolution and actually seizing the property of the ruling class and using the production for the benefit of mankind and not profit. That is why the welfare state was invented. Like that was the first time it was put into practice.

If you go back to Edmund Burke, right, in the French Revolution, reform to preserve the idea that like we have to give people these little slices here and there. Give them a treat, and then they will never come and take the cake. If you read these people, they're really explicit about this. They will just openly say we're buying off the working class. But these absolute clowns have somehow convinced themselves that this is what socialism actually is. Yep. Twin treats. Social is yep twin treats so yeah when treats social socialism is when socialism is when you you confuse table scraps

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

constantly going on strike these are explicit deals they're explicitly being negotiated between these massive trade unions and and like the the the capitalists who own companies by the american government and so they get this deal the deal is you get unions and pension and a vacation and like the the the capitalists who own companies by the american government and so they get this deal the deal is you get unions and pension and a vacation and like health care as long as you don't like seize control of factories and run them for themselves yeah and this held from sort of like the 50s through the 70s but partially this held because also the u.s specifically which is really really rich this economy was growing really fast but you by the 1970s, suddenly the rate of profit is starting to collapse. And suddenly it does actually become possible to both pay for the welfare state and have

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

It's also true that in the US, insofar as there was sort of a revolutionary force, it was black people doing the Panthers, doing the – I'm blanking on it – doing the Black Liberation Army. And this meant that sort of the kind of revolution to this was specifically about deploying the sort of like like deploying the state against these people because yeah yeah like this movement is actively trying to destroy capitalism by destroying the racist like police apparatus and this is folks too i guess yeah same time period like aim for instance yeah and you know so the ruling class sort of loses their minds and this is this is and this is also part of what's happening here. But the problem is the sort of jacobin cop freaks need the police for their social democratic hell world that they want to build. And so they can't have any – it is incredibly structurally dangerous for them, for people to be arguing that the police are inherently a force of like systemic racial oppression because they want them around yeah and so they do all this so they can keep playing 50 bucks per article yeah and

you know clegg meanwhile as best i can tell just doesn't want to use race as like an explanation for shit like they literally argue in this in this thing like in this in this article that white flight was actually just capital flight and wasn't about racism oh good and they just they're doing this entire thing about right this is the sort of political economy of of the city and they just they never mention they're so ruthlessly committed to their program of not talking about racism they don't even mention redlining it's like like they've managed to go to the right of, like, the Libertarian Party on race. It's like... Yeah. Outflank him to the right.

So I'm gonna read more from the Spectre article that's, like, yelling at these people. Considering their investments in the category of violent crime, Clegg and Usami seem curiously serene about the practices that upheld segregation. They would have us believe that such tactics are simply quote, caste-based remedies of exclusion and that quote, such strategies were rational, even if suboptimal in the long run. Effectively

rationalizing and apologizing for racism. So this is great. And then they cap this off with this giant like swelling crescendo of an argument about how the left can't ignore crime and you know okay so this is an argument with political consequences right and you can see those consequences in that in the 500 000 cops article we were talking about yesterday um here's a quote from that article this figure shows the

same prisoner and police data as shown in figure one but this time denominated by the level of homicide rather than the population america's outlying incarceration look rate looks normal given the level of serious crime and now the level of policing in the united states appears exceptionally low compared to other countries so okay you you can see the line of argument here right it goes like mass incarceration isn't about race it's actually about class and actually it's really about crime and then it goes from the crime to oh well this is about crime too we need to actually do something about crime and then that turns into the only thing we can do about crime is have more cops you know yeah and and the other part of this right it goes back to the thing about like okay the thing about like the you know and this is something that garrison was talking about

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

the people who hate the cops like again the people who were actually on the streets to reoccupy who have seen shit like for example the bloody stains on the wall outside of police holding pens where the cops smash the heads into of like every single person they arrested, a thing that happened constantly during Occupy. Right. And these people who, you know, have seen the police shoot their friends eyes out, like are incredibly inconvenient if you're trying to put yourself on top of a police state. And, you know, so, of course, are abolitionists, which means you also need to sideline them. And this sort of strategy is an old, entrenched position of these people. In 2018, Jeremy Gong, who was like the one time, basically like the dictator of DSA East Bay,

was caught in secret documents saying, quote, we are not, by the way, in his capital letters, not for abolition of prisons i would go further 90 of black people want more police in their neighborhoods really all right yeah jeremy gong by the way asian dude not black uh fuck you eat shit i hope you're having fun like well i don't have i don't hope you're having fun i hope you're having a bad time losing another election by getting three percent of the vote or some shit like fuck you eat shit um yeah and i should mention this also like

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

take the stand with the platform that has been given to you with all the privileges that you have had and gaslight black folks about the importance of race is just breathtakingly lacking in like context of self-awareness or like have you not been fucking paying attention like at least for the last two years if not for the last 20 years you know yeah and i mean like this is the whole thing right like they have this whole sort of political project that's like like makes talking up like their goal is to make talking about this shit sound cringe because you know they and they have to right and

this is this is this is also sort of class-based survival strategy right because like they these people couldn't fucking hack it as abolitionist scholars they have no fucking idea what they're talking about right if they if they if they have to actually intellectually like be in the same sphere as like someone like ruth gilmore wilson they are going to get fucking blow like these people are like this this is like a fucking battle cruiser going to war against a speedboat right like they can't fucking hack it and so they have to sort of like do all of this shit to convince people that like no no it's actually really not about race uh it's it's actually about class this thing that i can

very easily pretend to care about from academia in a way that i can't with you know pretending to care about race because like i i can't even fucking fake it right and you know i would say this like back in 2018 right like jeremy gong and his allies are very careful to frame their view in terms of like well we want to end mass incarceration and police violence but we have to be tactical about how we do it and the tactical about how we do it is black people want more cops. Right. But that was their internal documents. Their external statements were like, well, some police abolitionism stuff looks like more cops anyways.

But internally, they were always saying this. And now with these people think that there's a political right turn coming and they think that they can fucking take their take their mask off and just say what they really mean which is 500 000 more fucking cops and you know and part of what's going on here right is like like the reason this is happening is because when the uprising happened these people were just caught with their pants down because their entire political project for like fucking how how many years were they doing this like seven years was elect bernie sanders and then he lost back to back successively to like hillary clinton who was maybe the least popular camp the democrats have ever run ever and joe biden who is a fucking senile rapist who like again was all like they lost his election

to a man who couldn't remember who who he had been vice president under and they couldn't beat him right like so these people were completely discredited and then you know the uprising happened these people were caught with their pants down because they'd spent their entire fucking time or like arguing that like there's no path to liberation through race but like race any kind of racial like politics at all intersectionality is bullshit like we just have to focus on class just to focus on class and their fucking pure class electoral campaign failed in, oh, hey, guess what? It failed in the South.

Like, wow, damn. I wonder why this politics fucking got swept by Joe Biden. Like, okay. And then, you know, and then the uprising starts. And the uprising is, you know, the uprising is about anti-racism. It is about people looking at the violence, like, of the police against black people and going, fuck this. And they have nothing, right? Like, the whole intellectual leadership here, like, all these people are fucking calling for more cops.

Bernie Sanders is arguing for more cops, right? Like, Choppa was fucking, Choppa was literally making the same arguments that my fucking mayor made while she was raising the fucking drawbridges to stop protesters from being able to get back into the middle of chicago which is that actually like cops uh becoming a cop is actually one of the few ways that uh non-white people can uh join the middle class right that was i think i think amber made that argument right um so you know they have nothing right and you know okay and and you know and the uprising eventually gets suppressed which is the best thing that ever happened to these people because if the uprising succeeded these people, which is the best thing that ever happened to these people, because if the uprising had succeeded, these people were done, right? But all of this has enormous consequences, right? Which is the failure of the working class to appear at the ballot box to pull Bernie Sanders over the line against Joe Biden revealed something that was patently obvious to anyone who'd been watching how the working class is moving worldwide for the past 20 years.

for the past 20 years, which is that the only thing that can actually unify, if you care about class politics, the only thing that can unify the working class and pull it together as a coherent political force to do a thing

is their hatred of the police. If you look at what the working class politics in the 21st century, the working class finds its historical unity exactly and only on the barricade. It appears undivided

literally nowhere else. It is impossible impossible you can't do it the only thing that does it is is fighting the police like more broadly in like means of state violence right like if we look at the popular front in spain it's and you even get like cops who are installed by a socialist republican government joining the working class to fight the military but yeah instead we're going to be joining the working class to fight the military. But yeah, instead we're going to be like, the working class will be united in this op-ed at newsweek.com.

Yeah, or in this fucking electoral thing, right? And it's like, no. And I think that like, this is partially about these people not understanding the sort of broad arc of the last decade, decade and a half, which is that like, this was the actual meaning behind

the people want to follow the regime, right? This was what was going on in the last decade of uprisings and street movements across the world, right? Is that was the thing that could unify the working class. But of course, and this is the sort of secret of all of this, right? Like these people don't want to unify the working class. They only want to unify it if it's under their control. The eruption of, you know, like actually the working class standing side by side together fighting the cops on barricades in 2020 was the worst thing that could possibly happen to them because it you know it pointed to another way of doing politics that they like in

the in the street that they thought they'd you know crushed after the defeat of occupy and yeah and you know and they they were they were they were incredibly scared by this they were pissed off by this and you know i i I mentioned last episode that I was going to talk about the sort of class politics that's at work here because these demands for more cops, they don't come from the working class. on the police as an institution it was 2020 and you know we know what that looked like right it was a it was a bunch of fucking working class kids went into the streets and you know and fought like lions against the fucking cops and even the sort of liberal like the liberal middle and professional classes like eventually turned against them you know as as sort of 2020 rolled on right and you know the like those people still hung on for months and months and months you know like refusing to leave the streets even after the fucking federal

marshal started literally assassinating people openly in the streets right like the the whole demand for more cops for like a harsher crackdown on crime all of this stuff comes from precisely the opposite direction right it's entirely generated by the by the by by by basically the media class right it's it's class base is a combination of these sort of like faux progressive like media outlets and originally this starts with the new york times and washington post and then booze left or nominally left right and it when it hits like the fucking 2it and all of their like bullshit right and then you know and then at that point having having having went through the media people right it's it starts running through these pseudo-radical academics like christopher lewis and adan arusami and then the the last group of people who are backing this

is this is a very weird one but uh there's a collection of paid union staffers who like for their jobs because they're in the big unions work on police and prison guard contracts um this this was actually this is this has been a huge problem the dsa uh in in in what was it 2016 no 2015 2015 2016 one of the the npc elections they had um for the for the national political committee which is like the dsa's big major body uh like governing body right uh they they accident people accidentally elected a police union organizer because they knew he was a union organizer, but they didn't know that he organized police unions. He fucking refused.

Nothing was going to happen. Basically, what happened is everyone on the left of the organization bullied him out, and so he resigned. But yeah, there's a lot of those people, and those people's class incentives are incredibly obvious. Didn't the AFL-CIO even in 2020, like refuse to reject police unions right there?

But like, no, people, if I remember, if I remember, I think, I think someone threw a Molotov like into the headquarters of the AFL-CIO because of it.

Like, yeah, like this, this was a whole fucking thing. And you know, like this sucks. C cops are not fucking workers jesus christ like they're like they're just not if you if you look at what they actually do they are they're like they're basically minor feudal lords in that they extract rent from

everyone by fucking walking on people and robbing them and then they also extract rent directly from us by us by stealing just like enormous, increasingly large amounts of city funds under basically the threat of extortion and violence. Yeah, little uh, dynios. Yeah, it's, it's, it's shit.

Welcome, I'm Danny Thrill. Won't you join me at the fire and dare enter Nocturnum, Tales from the Shadows, presented by iHeart and Sonora. An anthology of modern-day horror stories inspired by the legends of Latin America. From ghastly encounters with shapeshifters

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Hi, I'm Ed Zitron, host of the Better Offline Podcast, and we're kicking off our second season digging into how tech's elite has turned Silicon Valley into a playground for billionaires. From the chaotic world of generative AI to the destruction of Google search, Better Offline is your unvarnished and at times unhinged look at the underbelly of tech from an industry veteran with nothing to lose. This season, I'm going to be joined by everyone from Nobel-winning economists to leading journalists in the field, and I'll be digging into why the products you love keep getting worse and naming and shaming those responsible. Don't get me wrong, though.

I love technology. I just hate the people in charge and want them to get back to building things that actually do things to help real people. I swear to God things can change if we're loud enough, so join me every week to understand what's happening in the tech industry and what could be done to make things better. Listen to Better Offline on the iHeartRadio app,

Apple Podcasts, wherever else you get your podcasts. Check out betteroffline.com. I found out I was related to the guy that I was dating. I don't feel emotions correctly. I am talking to a felon right now, and I cannot decide if I like him or not. Those were some callers from my call-in podcast, Therapy Gecko. It's a show where I take real phone calls from anonymous strangers all over the world as a fake gecko therapist and try to dig into their brains and learn a little bit about their lives. I know that's a weird concept, but I promise it's pretty interesting if you give it a shot.

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b thomas the host of a brand new Black Effect original series, Black Lit, the podcast for diving deep into the rich world of Black literature. I'm Jack Peace Thomas, and I'm inviting you to join me in a vibrant community of literary enthusiasts dedicated to protecting and celebrating our stories. Black Lit is for the page turners,

for those who listen to audiobooks while commuting or running errands, for those who find themselves seeking solace, wisdom, and refuge between the chapters. From thought-provoking novels to powerful poetry, we'll explore the stories that shape our culture. Together, we'll dissect classics and contemporary works while uncovering the stories of the brilliant writers behind them. Blacklit is here to amplify

the voices of Black writers and to bring their words to life. Listen to Blacklit on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. I want to come back to the of left media outlets, right? Because what we've been seeing here is that as these sort of left media outlets get larger, right? They increasingly adopt like insane small business tyrant politics because that's what they're becoming, right?

2IT notoriously tried to bust its own union staff. Yeah. Because it turns out as journalists become bosses and capitalists they have they have their own class interests to look out for right yeah and they will continue producing this class discourse which serves as nothing other than like uh best like a safety sort of steam valve right for people who are frustrated by the class situation they work in if not like an outright sort of disinformation campaign about what class is yeah and you know and and there's i think there's another thing going on here too which is that like okay if if

you're like a sort of like media outlet and your thing is that you hate liberals and that you're on the left right there's there's kind of a cap to your audience base and specifically there's a cap to the kind of audience you can have that actually has money because you know you can you can get a broke base of sort of progressive workers you can get some college students right but at some point like those those are not people that have a large amount of money yeah and at some point the right offers a listener base that has a bunch of money and this gives you a revenue base for sort of would-be like media tycoons hitting the limits of their original base and this is responsible for for things like Max Blumenthal and ex-TYT reporter Jimmy Dore descending into just full-on COVID denialism. It's not like these people were doing good before, but full-on right-wing – Max Blumenthal going from being the most pro-CCP guy the world has ever seen to literally writing articles about how social credit is coming to the U.S. in a form of COVID restrictions.

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

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

fucking going right all of these people calculated that a right turn in american politics was coming right that's why tyt endorsed a fucking literally a republican in california who was also an insane tough on crime guy this is why uh this is why they had uh no no uh rick caruso caruso yeah who was a republican who changed his party affiliation so he could run the democratic thing who fucking sucks ass that's why they that's why they had matt uh quote alleged pedophile gates on their show on fucking election night they had larry elder on their show as well like election denialist larry elder yeah like this this wasn't just a pure product of these people going insane watching videos of like people looting grocery stores and turning into like tough on crime reactionaries

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

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

And the only reason that these people weren't fighting the fucking army in the, was that the fucking American generals refused to go along with it, right? Like that, that is who the U S is. That, that, that is who this generation is. This generation is forever.

The generation that burned a third precinct and the fucking X left is running right. Just don't fucking get it right. They, they think the entire clock has been round back. They think that like those that like the, the people who did that have already been destroyed. They don't matter.

The only thing left, you know, you can do is join the right and mitigate the damage and they're fucking wrong they are wrong they can't see it they cannot see that there is no way to turn the clock back to before the uprising happened they can't see that like this entire country that the that the american working class that parts of the people who are not part of the american working class have been fundamentally changed and yeah they just they just can't see it and because they can't see it the only thing that they're ever going to feel is the weight of their is the only thing they can feel is the weight of their ignorance and the only thing they're going to feel on top of that is them getting fucking buried by the weight

of a history that has left them behind because fuck these people fuck the cops fuck the people who support the cops these people will be down but will be fucking drowned by the tide of history they thought didn't fucking exist fuck them okay this is what yeah i you can probably tell i wrote this really really pissed off at five in the fucking morning because jesus christ that was good yeah yeah i agree with you pick up a brick put down the young turks yeah don't fucking support more cops every every everyone will hate you your co-workers will hate you your friends will hate you your family will hate you the guy the guy at the fucking quarter store will hate you yeah if you find your fucking left hero standing the people who murdered george floyd or stood around and watched george floyd being murdered then they

are not a leftist anymore it's okay to tell them to fuck off and die yeah and i mean like and we can go back to the first episode right like the reason these people are calling for 500 000 more cops is that they've given up entirely right they literally do not think it is possible for anything to ever improve in the u.s and they're will they are wrong yeah and i think that they're okay with the way that our police behave and they're if that makes them feel comfortable and safe then they don't mind i mean cops people die at the hands of the police cops protect rich people these people have gotten wealthy enough to have the cops now benefit them. It's that simple.

I think that really is the driving motivator here. Yeah. And I will say this too. If we ever get to a point where we start fucking doing this, take us down too. This isn't just a sort

of like we're trying to build our business or whatever i don't like i don't fucking care i i would i would rather fucking go broke in the streets i would rather fucking die than be a person whose job it is to say we need more cops fuck these people like oh god Fuck them all. Yep. They've blocked me on Twitter, so I can't say anything. Get after them! Podcast fans. Oh, God. We are not inciting a harassment campaign. Instead,

go do better things. Yeah, in all seriousness, don't waste your time doing discourse with people who exist to create bullshit discourse. They're just a distraction. Go and help someone who needs your fucking help. It's cold, it's wet, it's wintertime, and there are unhoused people who are shivering on the street. So don't fuck with the young Turks.

Just ignore them. They're pointless. They're useless. Go out there and fucking build the socialism that these people think is impossible. Because we can do it and we will. build the socialism that these people think is impossible because we can do it and we will. And then we will fucking laugh at them because

we've done it and they are fucking bullshit. Yeah. That's the episode. 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

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