Rev Left Radio - Abolish the Death Penalty: Organizing toward Abolition

Episode Date: February 25, 2025

Dawson Hicks from Project Hope to Abolish the Death Penalty joins Breht to discuss the organization, its founding by prisoners, its strategies and vision, the Alabama carceral system, the use of nitrogen hypoxia as the newest method of murdering inmates, the benefits of rehabilitation over punishment and slaughter, the utter moral depravity and intellectual mediocrity of U.S. politicians deciding who lives and who dies, the racial and class inequalities of the American injustice system, the question of free will as it relates to the legal system, and much more.  Learn more about, Follow, Donate, Join, or Support PHADP  Get 15% off any book at Left Wing Books HERE ------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Support Rev Left and get bonus episodes on Patreon Make a one-time donation to Rev Left at BuyMeACoffee.com/revleftradio Follow RLR on IG HERE Learn more about Rev Left HERE

Hello everybody and welcome back to Rev Left Radio. On today's episode we have on Dawson Hicks, who is a representative from Project Hope to Abolish the Death Penalty. His organization is operating out of Alabama. And today we're going to talk about the death penalty, all the philosophical, legal, political, and moral implications of it, how to fight against it, the barbaric. the barbarity of it, the needlessness of it, how politicians use, the murdering of other people as a way to do PR stunts from Clinton and Bush all the way up to modern day Trump. And we just cover so many issues, I think, in a really deep and profound way. And then at the end, we provide a bunch of ways for people to get involved in a reminder that

we are here not merely to intellectualize or, as Marx would say, to interpret the world and understand it analyze it abstractly, but to get involved and change it. And so there are many ways for people to get involved in. You know, this organization is in a deep red state in Alabama, doing amazing work. And it's an organization that was founded by prisoners in the Alabama carceral system on death row. And they've expanded to an inner and outer forms of the organization. And they do a lot of really important work. And so it's just another reminder that no matter where you live, there's work to be done and there's organizations to join and there are contributions to make. So this is a really, you know, wide-ranging conversation with Dawson and representing a really

important organization and I'm excited to share it with you today. And I also wanted to remind people that we have a union with our friends over at leftwingbooks.net and Kerspledeb, offering 15% off to any Rev Left listener for their ever-growing library of books on theory, on history, memoirs, all with a revolutionary appeal and dynamic to it. So it's leftwingbooks.net. In the show notes of this episode, I will leave a link that automatically applies the code Rev Left to get 15% off any book in the store, just to support an independent left wing book publisher, as well as to get people who are listeners of Rev Left a significant discount to make it just more accessible to them

to get access to that information, that theory, and that history. So again, that's leftwingbooks.net, and the link with automatic code that will be applied is in the show notes. You click on that, you find whatever text speaks to you that you want to buy, you get automatic 15% off. And so, yeah, I just wanted to make that where. And as always, if you like what we do here at RevLeft, you can support us at patreon.com forward slash RevLeft Radio.

We have a back catalog of hundreds at this point of bonus episodes and new bonus episodes every single month. If you want to support the show and get something in exchange, or if you don't want to sign up for that, you just want to make a one-time donation. You can do that at BuyMea Coffee.com forward slash Rev. Left Radio, links will be in the show notes. All right, without further ado, here's my conversation with Dawson Hicks from Project Hope to Abolish the Death Penalty on the Death Penalty, the Carceral System, the American Injustice System, and so much more. Enjoy. Hey, everyone. My name is Dawson Hicks. I'm the special events coordinator for Project Hoke to abolish the death penalty, and I

organize any direct actions, petition deliveries, any type of direct action we do to try and stop executions happening right here in Alabama. Well, welcome to the show, Dawson. It's an honor to have you on, and I'm glad to highlight, you know, this organization that's doing important work, especially in Alabama, you know, a pretty reactionary state from my understanding, and I think that'll become clear, especially on this issue as we go through this topic. So first off, you know, hats off to you and your comrades for organizing in that environment and organizing around this really important issue. I guess the first question is just

kind of tell us a little bit about Project Hope to abolish the death penalty. What is the organization's mission? And how did it come to be led by people currently on death row? Yeah. So the guys down at Holman, so Holman Correctional Facility in Atmore, Alabama. They've been doing this since 1989, so, I mean, even longer than I've been alive, but they started organizing themselves just because they were advocating for their own lives on death row. And part of that came after there was a, for those you that don't know a little bit of history is that there was a moratorium on executions back in the 70s. And then after that, they lifted it. They started doing their executions again and since then project hope came as a response out of that so they've been down

there they have a we have a board of directors and some different people that help us on the outside but the guys at home and have been doing it themselves organizing themselves for i mean soon to be 40 years now yeah that's incredible i was actually born in 1989 so that's my entire life they've been they've been organizing around that issue and and yeah coming like i love the idea of that organization obviously being spearheaded by, you know, the prisoners themselves and then also expanding outward to have people on the outside able to assist and, you know, do stuff like this. So that's really important. What do you see? I mean, we'll get into the specifics of the organization and some of the issues that you're facing right now, but just kind of zooming out a little bit,

what do you see as the most compelling moral, legal, and practical arguments against the death penalty as such and how do you respond to those who would argue that it serves as a deterrent or a form of justice? Obviously, our audience is going to be very sympathetic to your argument, but maybe there are people out there that haven't really thought about this issue, don't have good arguments, or don't have a really good conceptual grasp on the issue overall. Right. And I think as far as deterrence and it being like justice, a lot of people, especially talking about the death specifically, they approach it thinking that it is, you know, justice. This is making, you know, making things even. But what we try to advocate for and what we try to ask is,

is that really justice or is justice more changing the conditions to that make crime happen? And so that preventing crime before it happens, you know? So, and as far as they being a deterrent, the best argument against that is just that if it worked if it really was a deterrent then we would have a single execution maybe once every like 70 years and then we wouldn't have any other crime we wouldn't have capital murder we wouldn't have you know any of these crimes that warrant execution so the fact that we currently have just under 160 people currently on Alabama's death row and that's not even the biggest death row population in the country, that's enough to tell you that obviously this isn't stopping the crime. Obviously, it's not stopping murder or anything like that. Even though, you know, crime rates have gone down historically, you know, it still happens. So we try to ask, okay, this isn't deterring people, what does, what stops crime before it starts?

Because obviously, cruel punishment telling people, if you do this, will kill you, that's not stopping anything. so as far as like moral arguments the biggest one being that like people like to say an eye for an eye and then you know an eye for an eye makes the whole world blind um you just that you take life to make the argument that killing someone else is wrong and so it just the moment you dig just a little bit below the surface any kind of moral this is justice type of argument starts to fall apart And I mean, with the legal one, the biggest one is that people will say, well, the reason executions are so expensive is because people are on death row for years and years and years and all of this. And this is what you hear a lot from reactionaries, the solution to that being, well, to, you know, risk sounding like kind of vulgar, it's dig a hole, you know, shoot them or something, do something really quick, and then call it a day. And at that point, at that point, you're just advocating for getting rid of the process.

You're advocating for at that point, like, the fascist definition of execution. So it, you don't get to have your cake and eat it to you. You can't have due process, but also have incredibly quick, incredibly efficient executions. So you either just get rid of the due process. You have the system we have now where people are on death row for 20, 30 years, however long, before they're finally executed, or you just get rid of the practice altogether and try to find a different way of keeping people out of prison, right? So there's only three methods that you can go down. And two of them don't work and cause a lot of bloodshed, and one of them hasn't fully been

realized yet. So, and I, to me, that's also just the same practical argument, you know, uh, it, we haven't, we have like, examples in even comparable capitalist nations. Social democracies or whatever, the Germans of the world, they do rehabilitation and they see success from it. And we are yet to fully realize that here. But even in the United States, in very specific examples, you'll see programs where prisoners do rehabilitation. And I'm not specifically talking about the way we do work programs because it's just a very glossy coat on slavery. but in the way that oftentimes prisoners organize themselves or outside organizations will come in and do education programs, getting them degrees. In Alabama at Tuttweiler's women's prison, there is a gardening program there.

And, I mean, it's those programs where the prisoners organize themselves and they have people on the outside helping them out because these type of programs, these type of rehabilitation efforts don't come from the Department of Corrections themselves. they have no interest in doing this, obviously. They're interested in keeping people either killing them, which is what we're fighting, or just keeping them in the prison system, not paroling them. So just to keep getting that labor. So a lot of the time that thing has to come from itself, and that's where you see, that's where you see success,

and that's where you see actual rehabilitation happening. So it just comes down when you're talking to someone, you have to ask them, What, you know, what, we've seen success thus far. We have executed people. I mean, we've, you know, America's history of executions is horrific. It's, there's the historical component all the way going back to lynchings. And then there's the modern day version of it where, and we'll get into it, I know, but I'm talking about like gassing and nitrino hypoxia.

But I mean, even still, there are states that want to do like firing squads. There's injection where it is not the painless, easy way to go that people would, you know, think it is. And we can, there's another, we'll talk about that in a little bit because there's a specific action going on directly relating to lethal injections. But I guess all of that to encompass the idea that like, we just haven't done actual rehabilitation. here we've tried at it and we have seen success just from the little bits there are but if we were to actually have a type of um political willpower from powers that be to actually try and keep people out of prison then you know we you part of me wants to say who knows but then part of me also knows that we we've seen success we've seen at work we've seen people stay out of prison people

that get their lives back. And so that's a big thing we try to advocate for, not just stopping executions, but just creating a better alternative to the prison structure as it currently exists. Yeah, absolutely. And there's so many different things to talk about with this issue. I mean, one is like growing up, I kind of saw the shift from electrocution towards injection as a quote-unquote more humane methodology of murdering people. but the fact that there was ever a widespread use of electrocution in and of itself is just completely insane and barbaric.

And the thing is, is, you know, whatever, I mean, obviously people listening to a show like this are going to be very progressive on issues like this, but, you know, whatever your view on, you know, the death penalty is for, like, truly the worst of the worst of the worst crimes, any even cursory understanding of the American justice system will show that it is not a machine that. that reliably convicts or, you know, punishes people who really deserve it. And it is riddled with racial and class inequalities and divisions just by virtue of being a poor person. This is before we bring in race in the deep south. But, you know, or anywhere in this fucking country, as Malcolm X says, if you're below the Canadian border, you're in the south. But before we even bring in the racial component, which has always been, you know, one of the most determinative factors when it comes to the U.S. quote unquote justice. system, just pure class alone. If you are rich, if you have money, you can hire the best legal team possible and get off of really even atrocious crimes that you're almost certainly guilty

for. And if you are somebody with little to no resources, you know, you will get convicted and spend your life in prison for a crime. You almost certainly, and in some cases, provenly did not commit. And so just from the jump, we see this radical inequality. And that's one of the the, you know, the, the pretences of liberalism is like, you know, you're not going to be equal economically. You're barely equal politically, except in this very thin facade of a formal sense. But what liberals always ensure us is everybody is equal before the law. You know, you have a jury by your peers. You can go in front of a judge. You know, everybody has a right to legal counsel. And so there is this liberal delusion that, at least in this one section,

of society. We have made strides and done as much as we can to make people equal in the face of law. And that's just never been even kind of true. And it's not even kind of true today. And then when we go to the question of crime itself, a Marxist will always shift their eyes to social conditions. What creates crime? What creates desperation out of which crime emerges? Are there some form of crimes that, you know, even super comfortable and material well-off people will still make crimes of passion or just, you know, the rare sociopath or whatever? Of course. But the vast majority of crime historically and presently is rooted in and comes out of very specific social conditions. And that will right away take away this barbarous idea that we should execute people for the crimes they commit.

And we should immediately look to rectifying social conditions and trying to bring people up. That is from the jump of people born into a society with resources, with opportunities, with health care, with education, and also on the far end of this question is, as you were saying, you know, this attempt to rehabilitate people who even despite those good social conditions, if we can create them, still, you know, get lost in some way or another, commit, you know, genuinely terrible crimes. the goal for society, the best outcome for everybody involved, the prisoner, the society, and everybody along the line is to rehabilitate that person, to educate that person, to help that person get a new lease on life and come out and be a productive, contributing member of society in whatever ways that that means. So, you know, just all the way down the list, the death penalty in the United States is a barbarous, you know, holdover from a previous era that shouldn't even existed then and should not exist now. And then you add on the layer of irony of just a deep South

state like Alabama is. You know, the Christian dimension, most people there are going to consider themselves Christian and pro-life. And we can go all up and down in American society and see how there's not a shred of human dignity or respect for life anywhere along that spectrum of American institutions. And certainly when it comes to the justice system and the barbarous death penalty, it's about as clear of a diversion from the basic premises of Christian morality and pro-life that there is. So those are just some of my thoughts. And I was wondering if you have any thoughts on that. Yeah.

I mean, obviously when we do our organizing and stuff and we do the petition deliveries, we do all of those things, the peaceful actions that people tell you you're supposed to do, we do that. And we don't expect that the governor of Alabama, KIV, is going to have a change at heart and just suddenly see the humanity in our prisoners. And we don't expect that at all, but we do all of these things. We do this

open opposition to these institutions to show that, one, there is people that are dissenting to this, that are actively trying to do something about it, even if it is something as simple as signing the petition, showing up to the rally, doing things like that. But

the other part of it is that it's for us it's to say that okay well we're doing everything we need to do we're doing the right things we're doing the petitions we're doing the things that everyone tells you especially when you're kind of first stepping into any kind of activist space or anything you do the things people tell you to do and then eventually you have to start building your coalition and change your strategy from okay we're not going to try to change their hearts we're going to force their hand and when that happens when you have institutions like this that are in you know calling out their hypocrisy will always do it but we understand that they don't care that they're hypocrites if they cared they would stop um definitely but to say that

like the only solution at this point then is to build a coalition that connects not only with like other abolitionists but just across like the whole and i can talk about this in a second across like ideological lines to build a larger massive coalition to force the hand of these reactionary governments so and the the interesting thing specifically about like the death penalty space but there's a lot of other specific issues where you see this is that there's a lot of ideological crossover and there's a lot of people coming to this issue for very different reasons so we have we work with a lot of different um religious organizations we work with we have a very large and this is nationally too there's a lot of um christian groups that work with us there's a lot

of um jewish groups that work with us and so we have a really big like stake in some of the like religious institutions not like you know big churches because there's very different types of churches especially in the south um but the ones that actually care about justice are very you know tapped into this space um and then we have we have you know liberals we have people that fancy themselves progressive we have leftists we have all types of people we even have like some weirdly enough some conservatives that like even try to like you know they and when we're trying to deliver a material change to people that are on death row we're not going to tell someone no but you know it's it's it's one of those things where we take it piece by piece um but we we have a lot of

crossover and we work with a lot of different types of people and so I think that's a really good opportunity for people who wouldn't usually have a material analysis to be able to try and put that idea on them, to try to tell them, okay, look, the way we, the way a normal conservative or a liberal to look about the criminal justice system doesn't exactly work, right? So why don't we take on a more material analysis? Why don't we look at the base a little bit differently? And so you're able to, to start kind of having those conversations with people because no matter who you are, no matter where you lie on the ideological spectrum or whether you even are a political person at all or if you just don't care, you know someone or more than likely you have seen with your own eyes the criminal justice system. You've seen how it affects people. You've seen how it treats people. And that touches everyone. It's like, to me it's like health care. It's one of those issues that touches every single person.

It doesn't matter who you are. Yes. So, and it more often than not disproportionately affects certain, like, minorities and groups of people as well. But it really does touch everyone. So you can make that connection there, someone that usually wouldn't really listen to your position, you're able to get them to look at things differently. And then from there, you're looking at executions. We can look at the criminal justice system as a whole.

We can look at how we do prison labor. And then from there, we can look at labor. look at labor we can look at the way labor is handled not only for prisoners but for you yourself and so this is one of those things where it's like our issues are all connected and our struggles really are all connected because they just so easily tie into one another because the the state or the capitalist clash or bourgeoisie or whatever you want to you know however you want to ascribe it it's like this giant mass of just yarn and string and it's nodded and tangled in on itself And every single one of us just has a thread that we have to pull on.

And as you're pulling on those threads, you're grabbing other pieces at the same time. The knots come undone. Every single person has a part to play. And when you have a just larger coalition or you just have some type of larger mass movement, you've got a lot of hands on the string pulling on it, then it's easier for the whole thing to come apart. It's easier for it to come apart and to build something. better in its place. So I really, um, I try to be very like welcoming and especially when we're

doing, um, actions and protests and things like that. I try to be very welcoming to like all types of people because if you're willing to stand with us and you don't have to be 100% ideologically there, you don't have to 100% know exactly what we're advocating for and to understand it to the like most detailed degree, I just need your heart to be in the right place. Absolutely. Absolutely. I just want you to want justice. I want you to want something better and a better alternative. And if you can do that, if you can show up with that, then we can work on everything else. If you're not 100% there, like maybe you don't have all of the, I guess, the theory behind it and everything, that's fine. We can work with that. You know,

you're going to work with a lot of amazing people. You're going to learn a lot. You're going to get information from others because you're working among the masses and you're working among other people so that part's just going to come on its own so to i guess and even people on our you know side of the aisle that and i felt this way before i've been here where i feel like you know maybe i don't know enough maybe i'm not like ready to do this or that what i would say is just to just show up if your heart's in the right place if you want to struggle if you want to struggle if you want to be a part of something than to be a part of it actively step forward because you're going to surround yourself with so many people that have been doing this for so long and I for

example um our executive director Esther is the coolest person I know now she is 93 years old she has been fighting this fight for years upon years wow um she she she her whole story is really cool she was born in Germany in 1933 and then when she was younger they came to America and then she was fighting for death penalty abolition. She was fighting in Florida and actually got her husband off of death row. Her whole story is fantastic. But there are so many people that have been doing this type of work that are in this space for years and years. You're going to learn and you're going to be able to absorb all that knowledge.

So the first thing you got to do is just get out of your house and walk at your front door and show up, especially for us. if you're in Alabama, you know, you can keep up with the things we'll do. We'll talk about that later, I know. But you can show up to the actions, be a part of it. And then every single time we show up, we get more and more people that come out. Every single time we have a little bit of a bigger crowd. And eventually the crowd's going to be so big. They can't fit all of us in the building.

We're going to force their hand. And that's the strategy. That's really the only strategy is going to work outside of any time. type of federal action or lawsuit or anything like that. Yeah. And oftentimes for us and for what we do and for people organizing specifically on death throw, that's

completely out of their hands. Yeah. So we're kind of trying to more focus on the things that the average person can just show up and help us with and do. And more community like grassroots organizing. We do rely on this people that do have legal challenges

and things like that. We rely on that and it's so important to us. But we understand that that's sometimes out of our hands. Yeah, absolutely. And I think what you're articulating is just core, basic, obvious, essential reality of being an organizer is that you have to work with people with different ideas, with, you know, different understandings of the world. It is not about ideological purity, especially when you're working around an issue like this. And it's like only people that are completely disconnected from real world organizing have the luxury to insist on ideological

purity, getting out in the real messy world and interacting with people from all different backgrounds, all different ideological, you know, forms of conditioning and trying to bring them together. That's actually success. Bringing in conservatives, liberals, people of religious backgrounds, people that don't know anything about what, you know, our basic ideology is. Like if you were only trying to get, you know, socialist and communists, you know, in Alabama to work on this project, it's not going to go very far. There would have been like three of us and two of them would have already split off and gone to their own thing down the street.

Exactly. But as you were saying, in the process of organizing people, that educates and uplifts their consciousness. So no matter where they're coming from, if you can get them out in that rally or get them, you know, out into that organizational meeting, then you've already gotten them into a process by which their education and their political understanding is going to grow, their conscious awareness is going to grow in community with other people, fighting. together for something that's good, something that's, you know, beneficial to the community and

just decent human things to do. And so, yeah, anybody that's interesting in organizing, I mean, that's absolutely an essential perspective. And I think you did a great job of explaining that. But yeah, let's go ahead and you mentioned nitrogen hypoxia. So I think it was last year, correct me if I'm wrong, but Alabama last year carried out the first execution using nitrogen hypoxia. Can you kind of talk about what that is? What, I mean, what's so grotesque and disgusting about it as a method of murdering somebody and why it's crucial for the public to understand the dangers of other states attempting to adopt it? Yeah. So it started last year in January, so the very beginning of the year, and they did. At this point now, we've had five executions.

The most recent one was at the very beginning of this month, February. And so there's been five of them so far. Nitrogen hypoxia, what it is, is it's an execution method, you're strapped to the gurney, and they place a medical mask over your face and nose, or your mouth and nose, kind of like when you, when you, like a breathing mask, when you're in an ambulance or you go to the doctor, they give you one of those. So it's just a medical mask placed over, and they administer just straight nitrogen gas. And the idea, what they put forward and say is that it's supposed to be a humane execution method and that it's quick painless it they kind of put it as like when you go to the dentist and you get put to sleep or put under for a surgery or something like that that's kind of how they like to portray it now this had never up into the up into the first one in january of last year um this had never been done before um and no one had any idea going in none of the witnesses not even the Alabama Department of Corrections. No one had any idea what was going to happen. No one knew what was going to happen to the people when the gas starts getting administered. And so when it happened, all in all, the entire process from starting the gas to the declared death is about 20 minutes. The first six minutes of that are usually the prisoner on the gurney.

struggling, visibly convulsing, they will buckle and pull at their straps and restraints. It'll be very visible graphic suffering, spitting onto their mask. And then after that, for the 14, 15, however many minutes, after that, it's them laying on the gurney and just labor, slowly breathing, and the breathing slows and slows until eventually they're gone. And that entire process takes around 20 minutes, give or take.

It's only happened five times now, so we, you know, there isn't a lot of information to go off of, and any information that is there or does may or may not exist is completely private. This is part of one of our big struggles with Alabama Department of Corrections and the Alabama State Government is trying to get some transparency on this specific issue. So we have an ongoing campaign for them to do a external independent completely just outside of the hands of state investigation into the death penalty practices, into not only nitrogen hypoxia, but also the lethal injection.

And so to give a little bit of background, the whole reason nitrogen hypoxia was either. first put forward was because there was a there was a moratorium on executions and that was because they were doing the only lethal injection and so when they were doing that they were having issues finding veins they were having issues um actually being able to administer the drugs and that caused two or i believe three botched executions those are people that have now been executed by nitrogen hypoxia and so when they were failing to do the first executions, they

took a step back and said, okay, we're going to do an internal investigation into our execution methods and then we're going to come back. And part of what they did was after this, they offered everyone on death row the opportunity to change their sentence from

lethal injection execution to a nitrogen hypoxia one. And a lot of the prisoners, a lot of the people on death row, they made this decision. Part of it was because, they put it out there as if it was going to be a painless way to go. It was easy, no suffering, that type of thing. That was part of their decision making.

And then part of it also was, well, we know that the injection execution method is painful and it may not even work. So it wasn't so much as an option as it was coercion and just fear. It was a very fear-motivated decision that they presented to the people there. I mean, yeah, just think about that question. How do you want to be murdered? Yeah, like, how do you want to? So it's like, we could do the lethal injection. It may not work.

We may not be able to find a vein, but we'll do it. Or we'll do this new one with gas and it's never been done before. And no one knows how it's going to work. And now we know that it caused immense suffering. And it was not quick and painless like they said it was. They're still saying it was. They're still trying to say that everything that happens is expected and procedure, but there is no procedure because they never did this before a year ago. They had no idea what was going to happen.

So there was no procedure to go off of. And just thinking about the politicians, the bureaucrats and in a state government, just the absolute dipshits and dumbasses that run this society, like they're not deeply scientifically or morally informed on anything. They're not particularly deep thinkers struggling over the moral implications of their actions. I mean, it doesn't take much to look across this society's political spectrum and see the sort of people that are making these decisions. And that's just another reason and a big pile of reasons. That's just one more reason to not let these freaks murder people and try to figure out ways to do it more efficiently or whatever. It's just, it's so sick. Yeah, I mean, it really is they just want to.

And that was the only thing when they came back, the only thing that was seemingly different after the moratorium ended and they came back was that now lethal injection was more efficient. And now it was definitely going to kill you. That was the only difference that we could see. But of course, you know, they won't let us have any findings, even if they did have any findings. I mean, to be completely honest, we don't know.

And every time we go to them and try to get this information from them, we just can't get it. So we don't even know what they found if they found anything or if they just ended up just getting better drugs or if they just started sourcing it from a different place. That we don't know. And now we're starting to see, I think it's Louisiana right now is looking into doing estrogen hypoxia. And there's been, I think Oklahoma as well, one or two other states. It's starting to spread to other red states. and there's been more than a couple of bills

across the south and sort of Midwest where it's been proposed or just put onto their it would go into committees or whatever it is to start like the process of trying to make it a formal execution method. Louisiana, from what we can see, seems to be the next closest one to actually doing this. But we're hoping that some type of legal

challenge for the people that work on that end can come through and stop that but we're just going to hope i mean now there's legal precedent for it it's already happened a few times now at this point so it's not it they wouldn't be the first ones to do it even if you know you have the u.n or whoever i mean even for for all their faults even like the vatican being like hey don't gas someone to kill them you cannot do this you shouldn't do this i mean you don't have to be exactly riding for the Vatican or anything but you know something about broken clocks right absolutely yeah yeah and like you know i just you know my my class focused brain just just can't stop thinking about just the insane disparities like it when it was the last time we've ever ever in our lives

in the history of the u.s seeing a rich person get the death penalty it's never ever ever happened you can go you can bomb other countries you can facilitate the murder murder of tens of thousands of children. You can destroy the biosphere. You can poison fucking people by poisoning their rivers, their water sources for corporate profit. You won't even get so much as a fine half the time, let alone the threat of imprisonment, let alone the threat of the death penalty. But if you're a poor person, a black person, somebody that is marginalized in society that doesn't have the resources, that for whatever reason, you know, and almost I guarantee in almost every single case, even the most horrendous crimes that have been committed

that somebody paid ultimately with their life for. You can go back into that person's childhood, you can find trauma, confusion, abuse, you know, that set them on this horrific path, lack of impulse control. I mean, goes back to social conditions, goes back to people's childhoods, all these things. And because of a path that somebody was put on at a very young age, They're now having the dumbest people in the fucking world, these governors and these legislator politicians, deciding that they're going to put a mask over their face and suffocate them to death

or inject poison into their veins. And they're very serious people and very expensive suits sitting around talking about what's the best way to murder somebody, you know? And it's like a totally normal political process in this God-forsaken country. And just note, like, what is nitrogen hypox? see how does it kill it kills you by depriving your body of oxygen and replacing that oxygen with nitrogen which is suffocation so this is supposed to be the humane way of dying by replacing the oxygen in your body and your brain with nitrogen as you struggle and your whole body rides and

contorts and pain and fear because it is being deprived of its essential source of oxygen and replaced with a poisonous chemical, you know, in way too high amounts. Like, to call this a more humane method of murdering somebody, you might as well put a pillow over their face and let them struggle to breathe until they, until they give up or drown somebody. That's, that's about as humane as this is. So, I mean, again, it's just, it's just jaw dropping that this is still happening, that this is not only, it's not receding, it's spreading to other states.

I mean, here in Nebraska, we also have this ongoing multi-year fight over. the death penalty and our ghoulish Republican governors trying to get certain sorts of drugs so they can murder people with them. It's just a grotesque, you know, just another grotesque example of this entire political, economic, and social system. And it just makes me sick to my stomach when you think about the details of how this all plays out. And then other Republican governors looking over, not, you know, saying that's how they killed them. Maybe we should try that too. it's just like no attempt to solve the problem no grasp of human conditioning of childhood trauma no attempt to see these people as fully fleshed human beings that got a bad hand in life and that's not to take away all moral responsibility from people there are some truly you know horrific people out there but this is certainly not the solution to that and so again i just kind of want to bring in that dimension of moral horror and really drive that home because it is a core component of this entire disaster. Yeah. I mean, I think that a really great thing, that a great case that

encapsulates the entire conflict that's going on right now is the Luigi Mangione one. And I mean, it's, that's the entire argument right there. You can have someone who is responsible for, I mean, without, without too much hyperbole of piles of bodies. Yeah. Someone who is responsible for tearing apart so many families for just literally, literally. destroying lives and not even just causing people to die, but the amount of people that are just absolutely, they've had their lives decimated, their health taken from them. And the moment someone who is affected by that, affected by those conditions, either lashes out, and maybe it's not the most justifiable way, but it's always a way that at least to some extent in this specific

case is understandable to lash out from your conditions and to for someone in this specific circumstance fight back for the average person on death row and you can we encourage people if you want to to write to the guys on death row to communicate with them you are allowed to do that um if you talk to them like you said you'll hear stories of neglect and abuse and trauma and addiction and just every single thing that a person shouldn't have to grow up dealing with. And I mean, that story plays out again and again a million times over. And that, like you said, it doesn't absolve them of any responsibility. They made their decision.

Their actions are their actions. But the options presented before them was not their fault. Absolutely. The options they had were given to them by powers greater than them, powers that they will never know or see. So to allow some of these people to run around, allow some of these people to hold offices that are responsible for so much bloodshed. But then to say that justice is serving out death to the least advantaged among us, to me that's not. justice if if there is anyone in this world i don't think and i really do don't think that anyone deserves to be put to death even even the uh worst of the worst from the way we stand

from where we stand the worst of the worst i think a proper punishment is to force them to watch the world they would hate see come to fruition be built but um just to to like Take life away is not going to deliver justice. It doesn't do anything. The only thing we're doing is we're re-traumatizing. We're just destroying more. We're doing more destruction for the sake of stopping destruction. At a certain point, you have to put your feet in the sand

and say, we're not destroying anymore. We're going to start building. Absolutely. And we're going to start building something better. And we're going to start building better alternatives. And at a certain point, we're going to stop trying to get this. hollow revenge and instead we're going to create something more sustainable, something with more substance. And that's giving people better alternatives, giving people better ways

of living, giving people opportunity. And that's, you know, I mean, obviously for those of us that hold a material perspective, those of us to advocate for a different way of organizing in the economy, organizing our government, that much seems obvious to us, but I think we sometimes kind of forget how preconditioned a lot of, especially Americans are to the partial state, how we accept and expect in some instances for it to be a cruel and degrading and just harmful process, that it's supposed to be all of these terrible things. And the best thing is to just point out, at least to the average person, the person that will actually care and want to learn, to point out that contradiction and say that it doesn't make sense to treat someone like an animal and then expect them to act like a person. Yeah, exactly.

So I guess I would want people to try, and especially when you're talking to, and you'll be amazed, even people that you would think are for almost every other. issue are incredibly progressive um incredibly just like ideological sound like type of person someone you think is like they're on just about any issue oftentimes you'll find people that make specific instances for this issue you'll find a lot of people and even people that we organize with that are willing to kind of overlook executions and just the carceral state as it is um and i don't know why i don't know why criminal justice and And American foreign policy are the two specific issues that make people incredibly reactionary. But this is one of those issues.

This is one of those things where you really have to make that decision. Am I interested in justice in making things right for future generations or am I interested in revenge? Am I interested in feeling good? Because oftentimes it doesn't feel good. to advocate for like because it's it's cathartic to want to advocate for like even even um you know we're going to have a glorious revolution and we're going to guillotine every single like person above a certain income bracket yeah that we like to me that doesn't that's not going to fix things right to me is stopping the conditions from people getting to that point anymore so stopping

people from being at that level of exploitation and also stopping people from being at that level of level of like committing crime of being at that level of desperation you know and the to me those are the same thing so justice isn't justice isn't bloodshed justice is stopping the need for bloodshed it's it to make to give you like a a quip i guess to summarize the point i'm trying to make yeah i know i think that's incredibly well said and i love your point about even the people that are the worst of the worst like you know the people that are the richest and most powerful people in the world. Their best punishment is not, you know, necessarily to put them out of their misery, guillotine them, revolutionary violence or whatever, as cathartic. And even as sometimes, you know,

deserving as some of those people may be, you, you do a genocide. I'm sorry, my sympathy goes way the fuck down for you. But the other idea is like, you know, having their power and their wealth stripped from them, having them be held accountable by the people that they have harmed and watching us when they are helpless to do anything about it, watching us build a world that is antithetical to everything they've dedicated their lives to. That is the real justice. That's what I would really like to see. I would love to see these figures, yeah, behalf to see that world emerge

and know that their time on top of the brutal hierarchy is completely over. And to your point, though, about why otherwise decent people will, sometimes overlooked this issue or be like you know fuck it that person deserves it i think it's it's because it's one of two things one it's either an abstract thing so i just say hey this person you don't know them you know nothing about them here is this horrific thing they did and then that now your your moral intuition puts yourself in the position of the victim of that crime and then yeah you just say fuck him kill him i you know he did that to that person then he deserves to die so there's that abstraction or you even say here's a real life case this is a real prisoner on death row

this is the actual crime they committed somebody will say okay yeah i think that crime is so bad that i don't feel bad if they die but that's either an abstraction away from reality in the first case or a hyper one dimensionalization of the person on the other because if you take that same person who committed this horrific crime that is a monster to anybody with any sense of moral intuition and you go back through their lives right go back to their life see the path that produced them go back to their childhood see the conditions they were born into see the way that they were treated by their parents you know even zoom in neuroscientifically on their brain processes and their brain development and get all the facts social neuroscientific psychological we put together

a picture of how this person came to be there's a lot more understanding There's a lot more sympathy or maybe pity. That person is obviously a product of a horrific set of events that they had very little control over. I don't think people have much control over their lives. I think luck, good or bad, is like the bulk of where we end up. Even, you know, somebody that, let's say, they want to get super disciplined. Like, how are they so disciplined?

They take such good care of them. The urge to be disciplined is something you don't control. You don't control the next thought that comes out of your head. You don't control the beliefs, your deepest moral and political beliefs. You don't get to pick those freely. Those are just felt to be true within you. And, you know, the richest people to the poorest people, the best people to the worst people, go back and trace out their life.

And yeah, there are some decisive moments where choice was an option and people can make good or bad choices. But overwhelmingly, if we're really, really honest about things, we have very little control over who we, are what we believe what our thoughts are you know what our impulses are what our desires are how good we are at impulse control how you know socially intelligent we are on down the line and i think it's it's it's counterintuitive for people to come to terms with that because people want to think i am who i am i'm rich and i'm successful because i worked way harder than everybody and you know and and that's why i'm here and if you worked as hard as i did you would be here too we hear that all the time. And I think it's, I think ultimately it's bullshit. I think really, you know, choices come down

to a small percentage of who we are. And most of the things that shape us, our country, our language, the historical period we're born into, our parents in the way they raised us are so, our genetics are so far beyond our control. It's not even funny. And that's the bulk of who we are. And it's not, again, not to say that nobody has moral choice, that nobody can transcend and rise above that conditioning to make radical choices to be different. I think that's all on the table still. But in lots of cases, you know, people are the result of forces. They have absolutely no control over. And I think that changes the, that changes the, the, the, the dynamic a little bit when we're talking about these issues. Yeah. I mean, like, I think people don't want to sometimes

think about the idea that there's so many aspects of their life that they are actually aren't in control of because one you know we're a hyper individualist nation we're taught everything is centered around you and you are kind of in charge of everything in your own life if your affairs aren't an order it's your own fault but i think to an extent that understanding that you don't have as much control as you think you do is terrifying and it reminds you just how much you are by yourself at the mercy of powers that be and the institutions that you just happen to live under at that moment in time. And that's scary. That's so scary for a lot of people. And that's an understandable fear, especially when you see that these institutions, these powers that you live

under are horrifically cruel and arbitrary and how they dish out punishment and how they allocate resources only to themselves and those in their favor. That's terrifying. And to understand that if you aren't in good graces, then that could have, negative repercussions on you and your family. People don't want to accept that. So it's kind of the ostrich, you put your head in the sand and pretend like, no, I'm completely in control of everything happening directly around me.

And I think people are just so sheltered from how, in general, the world really works. I mean, just, you know, within the past couple of years, you see how easily a supply chain can be disrupted and how everything changes because of that. Every single person's life is affected. so I don't know how people are able to hold on to the idea that we're not all connected to each other and that we all have like that we don't have some kind of obligation to one another

this idea that I I don't know shit to no one I don't know shit to anyone I don't care but it's like you're so surrounded by people you're so affected by the actions of others that you know it's it's the same conversation. I have this with my wife all the time. I don't understand it. I don't understand how people can't, how it doesn't click. So I guess the only thing I can do is just to keep yelling about it until it eventually does click and people do start to understand that. But when you can rely on each other, when you can rely on the people around you, when you have a support system and people that care about you and are willing to uplift you, then, I mean, your life,

quality of life is better, you're less likely to commit crime, you're less likely to be subjected to the criminal justice system and carceral slavery and all of these things. So as we continue to advocate and work for that type of state structure or that type of government that actually cares for its people that provides a basic standard of living and doesn't rely on the exploitation of people here or around the world. In the meantime, we just have to do that for ourselves. And that's a way smaller scale than what's going to be possible for everyone. But you have to get started.

So, I mean, this is kind of my thing to everyone. It's just to get involved and get plugged in. So either with us, with Project Hope, or with any other organization, because like you're talking about earlier, they all blend together. I mean, you'll be amazed that you'll be working on a issue, and then you'll find out that you have allies all over the place. So when you get into specifically criminal justice type of reform or abolition work or anything of that nature, you're immediately going to have to start realizing that not only are you working with people in this, you're working for people fighting for racial justice.

Oftentimes you find people working fighting against environmental struggles. that just across the state lines we have people fighting against cop city so like all of these struggles connect in ways you would be amazed and you wouldn't think okay what does the carful system have to do with the environment or anything

but all of it plays a part they're building mega prisons right now as we're talking they're building megaprisons with taxpayer money with PPP loans like that's what's currently just here in Alabama and all over the country like all of these

struggles do connect together and I guess trying to get people to see that and build that I keep talking about that like a broader coalition but which is obviously so much easier said than done because you know who needs another like there's a million coalitions and groups and organizations out there but I guess really just people just need to be willing to talk to one another and find their common ground yeah and find where their struggles can interlink absolutely and yeah that's a you not to get too highfalutin, but that's a core insight of dialectical materialism, is that everything is inexorably and profoundly interconnected. And just by getting out there and not just being theoretical about it,

but practicing, trying to create change, you quickly and almost immediately bump up into the, you know, you come face to face with the interconnectedness of all of these issues. And that traces back to a single way in which we organize society, which is a round profit accumulation. And if you trace every single issue, trace every issue that you care about back to its root source, every injustice, it is the fundamental, you know, choice to organize society around profit accumulation for a few. And that has downstream effects all across the political, social, economic structures. And so that's why, you know, that's the difference between a liberal or, you know, the classic John Oliver effect where we're always looking at these different issues that are seemingly completely separate. and we're just trying to address them one by one versus a radical critique, which is to strike at the root of the problem and to see how all of these seemingly disparate issues are actually profoundly connected at their core.

And we can make a different choice about how we organize society. We can choose to organize society around creating the highest quality of well-being for human beings and the highest amount of human flourishing. And whoa, what a different system on every level we would get if that was just our core operating premise. and so it's a wonderful insight and you can get there theoretically but I think more than anything you get there in a real way by going out and trying to change the world and you bump up immediately against that and I just wanted to make one one quick point I know we're diverging from the outline but I'm okay with it because I like this deeper philosophical and organic conversation we're having because it does get to the core of so many of these issues but when

I was just talking earlier about you know the role of luck in people's lives and kind of the lack free will that people have you know this idea that we're all radically in control of our lives as you were saying is a nice fiction we want to believe that because the alternative is horrifying but when we really get down into the nitty gritty we see that so much of our lives that determined by forces that we can't control and there is a way on the individual psychological level that we can kind of overcome in some sense that hyperdeterminism and it's in line with the sort of spiritual and psychological things that I often talk about on this show, to the chagrin of some, but I think it's deeply important, which is that you can become more and more aware of your own conditioning.

Through practices like meditation, through the ability to develop your awareness to stand back from the machinations of your mind and your ego and your desire and watch it instead of immediately identify with it, you can stand back and watch your own conditioning. Watch how, you know, in Buddhist language, has talked about as karma, cause and effect, this chain of cause and effect that goes back to, you know, in some instances, previous lives, but just in our own life, your own condition, your own parenting, your own social structure, things you didn't have control over. You might not be able to radically change those things, but by stepping back in your own

awareness and watching how you're conditioned, watching how and when certain desires pop up, certain impulses arise, certain patterns of behavior play out in your life, just by standing back and becoming more aware of that, you have a freedom to not identify and engage in those behaviors. So I don't want to leave people with the sort of depressing thought that everything is kind of determined. Everything is beyond my control. I'm just being pushed around by forces I don't understand. No, you can understand them. And you can stand back in your own awareness and see them play out instead and even veto them, the worst aspects of it, rather than being a victim of it, completely identifying with it and being pushed around by it.

So there is something that can gain freedom, but it requires, you know, the ability to be aware. And I don't know if that hits home with you at all. Or for some people, it doesn't really sound like something that's important. But it's something I always push on Rev. Left because I think the inner and the psychological development is also tied to our outward political struggles. And the inner and the outer are two sides of the dialectical coin. And both must be attended to. Yeah, absolutely. I mean, I, you know, it's sometimes it's easy to fall into the trap of like, oh, history is going to happen and I can just let history happen to me. But I mean, you're not helpless, you know? Like, you are subject to the conditions around you. You're subject to the world you live in. But you're not helpless. There are absolutely things you can do. And there's only so much that you by yourself can do. But if you understand how you are conditioned, if you understand how you're able to get to the place you're at, well, now you can understand how you can go forward, you know? You

understand the past, now you can work for a future. So you're not, you're not hopeless. You have yourself, you have tons of people around you, whether you realize it or not, that, whether they realize that or not, they may feel the same way. They just may not know why they feel that way. So now that you have this knowledge, do your part to share that with others. And then, I mean, nothing, there's nothing in this world that can't be changed by the collective power of the masses. So if you want to change the world that you live in and you are scared by the reality of having to accept that you are subject to conditions that aren't entirely under your control, well, now you can do something about it and you can act. It's not set in stone. Nothing set in stone. The world is

whatever we want it to be. So, and that's, that takes uncomfortable change. And that takes a little bit of time where you have to be afraid. But overall, I do think it's worth it. I think that there is a confidence that comes from understanding that I can respond to the world around me. The world will influence me and I can influence the world back. And I think that there's a lot of confidence that comes from that. At least for me personally, that makes me feel more, not comforted, but more assured, you know, that I can do something about this. I don't have to just accept this. I don't have to just accept things are the way they are,

even though they do affect me, but I can also affect them. So it's not a one-way street. Absolutely. Yeah, and the first, putting it in Marxist terms, the first step of somebody that enters into this, you know, a way of understanding the world is this, your awareness is raised, right? You're breaking out of your ideological conditioning, your social conditioning.

You start to see the lies behind all the things that we've been told since we were children about how society functions, how we're the good guys, you know, how America is about freedom and democracy, blah, blah, blah, like the first step is demystifying that. And the way you do that is by raising your own social consciousness and the consciousness of others through education. And you never do it alone, right? If we never had access to other thinkers that came before us, other revolutionary leaders, other people that could explain this to us.

us, we would be in no position to overcome that ourselves. So once again, even though it's on the acute level, a individual raising their social consciousness and awareness and rising above their conditioning, that is impossible without the countless people that came before us that helped lay the groundwork to write those books or to create those videos or to explain things in layman's terms that we could grapple with and understand and use to elevate our own consciousness. So it's always communal. It's always a collective process. And then what do we do? we turn around and do that for others for the next generation coming up that's what i see rev left this show is being is being one of the many ways that people can engage with something and have that

demystification process occur which is a process of increasing your awareness so you are no longer susceptible blindly to the ideological forces that you have no control over and there's freedom in that and then once we have that the next step is coming together and putting that knowledge into action in the real world to change the world, as you were saying beautifully. So, yeah, I think it all connects, and I think it's an important thing to think about when we're discussing an issue like this. But I do want to kind of move on a little bit in this outline, and I've loved this discussion. I think it's really useful and important. But you mentioned earlier, you know, individuals currently on Alabama's death row.

You've talked about some of them getting the choice between brutal death by injection or brutal death by, you know, oxygen deprivation and suffocation. I was wondering if you can kind of bring this down into some individual stories, some individuals that you may be contacted or that work with the organization, kind of just talk about who they are, the struggles they face, how they wrestle with their own mortality in the face of this death penalty system, their interactions with the organization, in any cases that kind of highlight the humanity that is actually involved so we can not just talk about this in abstract terms, but bring it down to the human level. Yeah, absolutely. So there is one specific case I want to highlight, and this is one. It's Rocky Myers.

He's still currently on Alabama's death row. His case in particular really encapsulates just about any issue, specifically Alabama, has with the death penalty. And so to give you his story, he's currently on death throw. he was convicted by an all-white jury without possibility of parole for a murder of a white neighbor. The judge overrode the jury's decision in an imposed death sentence. And so the thing about that is that that is now considered outlawed in Alabama. And what would happen is it's called judicial override where the jury would convince him or convict him to life without parole. but a judge could override the jury and say, no, we're doing a deaf sentence all on their own.

Completely make that decision by themselves. That practice is no longer allowed. However, Rocky and numerous other people are still on death row because their sentence was overrid by a judge. And there have been attempts to try to fix that and to try to get these people off of death row if they've been sentenced due to judicial override

but so far we have not had any success trying to get that to pass or anything in Alabama so he's still on Duff Road because of that there's no evidence that links him to this murder except for a video recorder that was stolen from the victim

and Rocky still to this day maintains that it was found abandoned in the street and there was just a lot of the key testimonies and things like that were tainted there's a lot of police pressure there was a lot of outside influence and a lot of outside conditions that made this case very like strange um and made it like very inconsistent and just like it caused a lot of issues and so there's a lot of now there is a lot of um reason to believe that

Rocky is innocent and he does still maintain his innocence um part of and there's that aspect of it and then there's also the other aspect of it that even if he is

guilty which we have no reason to believe that's the case it would still be unconstitutional to execute him because he does have an intellectual disability and he reads at a primary school level and that's that's a story that's incredibly common

for people with intellectual disabilities to be on death row or to be executed despite the fact that it is unconstitutional to do that and that happens a lot it happens more often than you think because it's so common to have people that are on death row also have some type of either mental condition or an intellectual disability um and so with rocky's case there's a lot of relying on things like IQ tests, which we now know aren't accurate measures of intelligence. They've had, they've rejected his request for a deadline to extend executions and things like that. There's been a lot of unnecessary legal hurdles. There's been a lot of racial and class bias specifically affecting Rocky. And that's just, and this is just one person's case. This

is a story that could be told hundreds of times over across so many. different people on death wears all across the country. So Rocky, like I mentioned before, he was one of those people that was presented with the opportunity to either die by lethal injection, the new drugs that they brought forward, or by gas execution. And he chose gas. So he is one of the people that very well could be put up for metrogen execution. At this moment, there is no current death warrant out they come in it depends it really is at whenever the governor decides um and they'll they'll put those out and then we'll respond to that but um we don't know if or when any kind of death warrant will come out it's something it's kind of one of those

where with anyone on our death row we're just waiting but there is always the chance that at any moment someone with a strong case for innocence, someone that should not be there and has been there for years now could be killed by an incredibly horrific way. And that's just one story. But I think kids really encapsulates a lot of the issues and a lot of the reasons why the death penalty more often than not is completely arbitrary in how it's dished out. And it's used as a political tool by especially governors and attorney generals that want to be seen as tough on crime and want to be seen as this very like strong strong man type figure which is which is so fucking pathetic and it's happened it's just a political circus a stunt basically with other

people's lives and the balance i remember in both the clinton administration and the bush administration these issues came up and there was a little article i just pulled up to to think about this under Bill Clinton when he was the governor of Arkansas, Ricky Ray Rector, who was executed in 1992. Rector was convicted of murdering a police officer in 1981. After shooting the officer, he attempted suicide by shooting himself in the head, which resulted in severe brain damage and a significant decline in his cognitive abilities. By the time of his execution, Rector was so intellectually impaired that he reportedly did not understand what was happening. His case is infamous for the fact that he saved part of his last meal, quote unquote, four late.

indicating a fundamental lack of awareness of his appending execution. Clinton, who was running for president at the time, left the campaign trail to personally oversee the execution, signaling his commitment to, quote, unquote, tough on crime policies. Just disgusting. And then George W. Bush, governor of Texas, Texas executed multiple individuals with intellectual disabilities under Bush's administration, John Paul Penry.

Penry was a man with an IQ between 50 and 60, was sentenced to death despite evidence of severe intellectual disability. His case reached the Supreme Court, which ruled that executing intellectually disabled individuals was not unconstitutional at the time. While he was not executed under Bush, his case set legal precedent, until Atkins v. Virginia in 2002, which finally banned the execution of people with intellectual disabilities. Bush famously mocked a clemency plea from Carla Faye Tucker, a woman on death row, in an in an individual. interview showing a total lack of concern for those facing execution under his watch. So that that just really speaks to your point about in so many instances. These are the most vulnerable people in some instances have no fucking clue what's going even on and are used by these politicians as basically

their death, their life, their murder is used as a PR stunt to show that they are in Bill Clinton's case tough on crime or whatever the fuck. Just another just another just another layer of complete inhumanity that this system allows and that this is not just a one-off incident, but administration after administration, governor after governor, election cycle after election cycle, these things pop up again and again and again. And it's always the most vulnerable. It's always the people with the less resources, the most marginalized in society that can't fight back that are used, used as PR stunts for the advancement of these absolutely ghoulish politician's careers. It's just, it's just disgusting. I think something that

really demonstrates that is that the moment Trump got back to office, one of the first things he did, and this was one of the major highlight points of his first few things he wanted to do, was bringing back the death penalty. That was a huge thing. So like right at the end of Biden's term from a lot of public pressure from some of the national organizations that we work alongside, they were able to get almost all of the federal death row. Not exonerated, but just taken off of death row. And now they are pushing to try and reverse that decision. Pretty much being like, no, never mind, you're not going to be allowed to do that,

even though you have already done it. We're taking that back. And that's just because it's easy red meat. You know, it's, to me, it's the same as like, we're doing the trans bathroom bills. We're doing things like that because it's easy red meat for our voter base. So I look at us, we're killing the criminals. We're murdering the murderers. So it's just so obviously political points.

And to use real human life as a pawn, I just, I don't understand how people don't see a negative, long-term, negative impact on just how easily we can dehumanize people. and how quickly some person can really be from like committing a crime of desperation of being in a similar circumstance or even just being an innocent person who happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time if you're someone like Rocky Myers. It could realistically this time next year

be any person listening to the sitting on death row for something they didn't do because all of it is, it's arbitrary, it's incredibly discriminatory on the basis of race and class and it will always be used as a tool to make a politician look big and bad and tough like they're actually doing something about crime but it doesn't like we talked about earlier it doesn't actually do anything it doesn't actually do anything because this person has been in jail for probably 20 30 years

they have not seen the streets in multiple decades they are no harm or no danger to anyone So it becomes just reminding people, trying to remind people of humanity, trying to remind people of the humanity of others, even if they've committed crimes, even if they've done horrific things. I mean, some of the people, like, if you're someone that's on a federal death row, some of those are horrific, awful crimes. But we cannot sit here and pretend, like, the Trump administration actually cares about victims' families. We can't sit here and pretend like they actually care about the well-being of people and that this isn't just like a political show.

This isn't theater. And it's real people's lives being used for theater. Absolutely. And who are the real active dangers in society? It's these fucking people with all the money and all the wealth, the people that can start wars, the people that can have the power to execute somebody for a political PR stunt. It's the Clintons, the Bushes, the Obamas that can drone American citizens in other countries, blow up weddings, and hospitals and the Trumps who think that being tough, this little fucking rich prick who's never worked a day in his life wants to be a tough guy by coming into office and just

murdering people. He doesn't know anything about their cases. It's just this idea to his voter base that he's willing to do it is why he's doing it. It's just so fucking grotesque. And it's not going to stop until this system is systematically overthrown and replaced by a fucking actually humane system. There's no way to reform your set. your system out of this ghoulishness. This is what America is founded on. It's what it's maintained by. It's rotten to the fucking core.

There is no election or politician to vote for that is going to strike that at the root and actually solve those issues. And so that's why, you know, me personally, I'm anti-reformist in that sense. I don't think it's going to be sufficient to really purge the world of this rotten to the core-ass system. And you cannot lead this system without being a criminal and a terrorist. You know, you cannot rise to the top ranks of the U.S. Empire without being a morally despicable human being. And so any system that only allows the worst of the worst, people willing to murder and kill for such petty reasons to rise to the top of that system, that system is already invalid, in my opinion, and is ripe to be replaced by something that's actually rational. and humane and rooted in human flourishing, not the devastation of human life for its own sake.

Yeah. It just, it, for the, for at the risk of sounding too sappy with it, it just, it, you read like I read a lot of the letters that I'll, from the guys on our board that are at home and, and it just, it's hard not to, it's hard for it to not like kind of break heart every single time that you hear people's stories every time like you hear someone else like going into Alabama's death row or sentence to execution and to go and learn a little bit more about these people especially the people that have been there for years at this point

and they've had nothing but time to reflect and to grow and to be a different person and to just see the consistent that the consistent um thread that if there was just a little bit more support if there was just like a couple more people that actually gave a shit and actually wanted what's best for the their constituents that things could be so much different and so much better um and that just i mean that one it does it breaks your heart but it also it makes you so angry because it feels like it's such a waste of human life it feels like it's such a waste of potential because we um we have a newsletter that we that we put out four times a year every quarter and um it's usually just collections of essays and poetry and art and all kinds of

things from guys that are on alabama's death row and it just like it it like you'll read through them and you just see the amount of potential that gets wasted and thrown into the carcule system, the amount of humanity that is just disposed of. And it's hard not to see that and to not just be enraged. It's hard not to see these people. And to see them, they're constantly, like they've been doing this for years. So long. And they never, they never lose their hope they always keep fighting because it's all they can do is fight it's hard um not to see that and for it to not to just like make your blood boil to not want to like absolutely lose it but to know that you have to be willing to fight right now in the proper channels because the guys

that you're working for the guys that you're trying to advocate for are in direct captivity and are at the mercy of the Department of Corrections. And at any moment, if the Attorney General or Governors wanted, they could start just popping out executions. And they know that. Every single person in this space knows that. And that's the part that makes it so difficult. Because it's like at what, you know,

it's like you want to push and you keep pushing and you keep advocating. But at the same time, you know that the clock is ticking. Yeah. and that's what makes it so difficult and that's what kind of makes some of the work sometimes feel very like desperate like we the the clock is ticking for some of these people and i mean some of these guys have been held up for 20 30 however many years however long it takes for the execution for the death warrant to finally come through yeah yeah i mean the heartbreak in the rage are connected right i mean the heartbreak is you sing the injustice and your heart being wide open to it and then the rage at the injustice is just a natural byproduct of having your heart open up to it. And, you know, that's what I always tell people, I try to tell people on this show in whatever ways that I can is, you know, look at where you are in the history of humanity. We're obviously at a crucial juncture point of radical change as the possibility

of that being, you know, on the horizon right here in front of us. This century is going to be incredibly transformative in one way or another, good, bad, or ugly for the future of our entire species. And the question that always comes to me and that I always want to put at the front of anybody listening is, what kind of life do you want to live? You know, in America, the life that you're supposed to want to live is one where you're in constant, dogged pursuit of more money, more validation, more status. You want to be an influencer. You want a bigger house. You want the third car. Consume, consume, consume. That's what we're told is the quote unquote good life in the US. Never mind that that's becoming impossible. If it ever was possible

for the vast majority of Americans, it's now only possible for a tiny and shrinking percentage of people anyway. But even if it was available to all of us, is that how you want to spend your one life in the cosmos? Is just chasing these sparkly, you know, glittery fucking gadgets and more money and an extra room on your house? Or do you want to dedicate your whole fucking being to trying in whatever ways you can to making this world a better place for other human beings to organize to educate to uplift to serve other people to try to leave a positive impact not that your name will ever be remembered or that they'll ever build statues to you or i but that we spent our one life on this earth trying to advance the cause of our species and making a more

humane morally upright and human flourishing world than the one that we were given when we were born into it. That seems to me like a life that when you are on your deathbed, looking back over your life, that you can sigh a sigh of relief and acknowledgement that I lived my life in alignment with my deepest values. And in my own humble way, I made the world a better place than it was when I came into it. Isn't that the way that we should live our lives and completely reject this egoic fantasy of more, more, more, fulfilling a desire, having a new desire, fulfilling that desire, having a new desire. Consume, consume, consume. Isn't that it such an empty, rotten way to live your life? And when you're on your deathbed, are you really going to

give a fuck about how many zeros are in your bank account or how many nice dinners you consumed or how many cars you still have? Or are you going to be thinking, what are the human connections I made? What is my relationship to the people in my life? What did I do for the world. What did I spend my few decades, few precious decades on the face of this beautiful rock floating through space actually doing? And to put your life in those terms and to try to build a life that you'll be happy with looking back on your deathbed, I think that is something that we all have to keep in mind, and especially at this juncture in human history. Now, Dawson, I want to give you the chance. You mentioned earlier that there's a way for people to write to prisoners and

actually communicate with them. There's a newsletter that people can sign up to. Obviously, they can get involved with your organization. But before we get into all of those, I just, I know we deviated pretty severely from the actual outline. But is there any last words, anything that you had prepared to say that you want to make sure you get out or anything that you want to to say before we move into how people can get connected? Yeah. I guess the one thing I want to leave people with is that especially now the world that we live in as terrifying as it can seem as much adversity as it feels like people in our camp are up against that there are people that have had the threat of excruciating death held over their head for decades now and they still they still create

they still make art they still have joy they still struggle they still struggle and actively organize and if there are people with way worse conditions than us right now that are actively still fighting if people on death row can fight if people in Gaza can still fight if people all around the world in the most dire conditions can still fight than us in the imperial corps have no excuse and the sooner that we're able to pick ourselves up because right now yeah we we've been knocked down the the general american left has been knocked on its ass a little bit so now you got to assess assess yourself pick yourself up and then get back to it um if people in so much worse conditions can continue to fight

and never give up and never give into oppression no matter how bad it gets we have no excuse There's no reason why we can't be doing the same thing. So don't let the despair stop you. Don't let the fear stop you. Keep fighting and get involved with the work that's around you. It doesn't matter if it's perfect work. Work is work. You will change the work and the work will change you as you go about it.

So make it happen. Be willing to do something about it. See the problem. Do something about it. Yeah. Yeah. Nobody has to do it all. We all just have to do our part.

And there's a million ways to contribute and just gearing your life in that direction is you putting your life in service of humanity in its advancement. And there's nothing better that you can do. And at the end of the day, I don't want to sound glib with this. Of course, people on actual death row are facing an acute and imminent threat to their own life. But in the long run, we're all on death row. We only get a few decades on this fucking planet. And then it's who knows what happens after that.

nobody does. And so we have to think incredibly deeply about how we want to spend those decades. Somebody's sitting on death row in a prison cell right now, still creating, still organizing, still finding ways to find happiness and to connect with other human beings. As Dawson beautifully said, we have no fucking excuse. And so we all have a penny to throw into the well of human progress. And we can shove that penny in our pocket and run away, or we can throw it into the well and contribute to humanity's advancement. And I know what Dawson is doing. I know what I want to do. And I think if you're listening to a show like this, I know where your heart ultimately is. So thank you, Dustin, so much for this conversation. I apologize from deviating from the outline, but I

think this. Oh, no, it's all good. Yeah. This is in a great conversation. Absolutely. It's been amazing. I think it was better for our deviation from the outline just to have a deeply human conversation. And I really really respect what you do. You know, hats off to you. And I really appreciate you being so generous with your time to come on and share it with our audience. But before we let you go, this is where I think is really important. If you've listened to this conversation and you want to throw your penny in the well, there's ways to do it. So can you tell us how people can write to prisoners, the newsletter they can sign up with.

And if they're in your region or in your state, how they can directly get involved with Project Hope. Absolutely. So we have our own website. It's just PHADP. So Project Hope to abolish the death penalty.org. and we on our website we have a you can sign up for our email list where we consistently put out any updating any upcoming vigils and protest and actions that we have we have regular information that just goes out so we'll put out the weekly meeting every single week and then four times a year like I mentioned we have a newsletter that's also on the email list as well as that we have just social media we have Facebook and Instagram Instagram. So Esther, our director, she runs our Facebook and I run our Instagram. It's just, the Instagram is just phadip.a.l. And for Facebook, you can

just look up our organization name, Project Type 2Boss to death penalty. And then in our Instagram, we have a link tree. You can find other links there, anything we got going on. We try to keep it updated. Besides that, though, if you are in the Alabama area, come show up to a rally. We very regularly, whenever executions come out and they're going to happen, we will meet outside the Capitol building in Montgomery. And we rally. We organize. We spend time with each other, trying to build awareness just to anyone that happens to be there, people that show up. So if you're able to show up, if you're able to come out, we would love to have you and we would love to meet you and for you to

stay in with us. And if you're in other parts of the country, if you're in a state that does do executions look in your area there's most states have some type of uh whatever to for alternatives to the death penalty so there'll there's a lot of different state organizations and then there's also a lot of uh national organizations we work alongside with so death penalty action equal justice initiative um we work with some of the ACLUs the amy internationals of the world sometimes too so there's a lot of um there's a lot of different organizations for you to choose from all with different types of convictions and different types of organization structures.

So there's a whole list to choose from. But yeah, if you want to please get involved, just engage with us, follow us on social media, and we'll keep people updated on when executions happened. And yeah, besides that, just thank you so much to every single person that gets involved in this that writes to our to our guys,

at Holman that I forgot to mention that actually that's on the website as well you can go to contact us in that whole section they'll have a format for how you need to write letters they have to be handwritten letters no staples things like that um and you just they'll give you instructions on how to write it out for the specific cell number and inmate numbers so it goes to them um besides that though uh thank you so much and get involved get plugged in Absolutely. I'll link to all that in the show notes so people can easily and quickly get involved in whatever ways they can. And that's the thing that we're always trying to say here. It's important to understand the world, to understand theory, to understand philosophy, political realities, dialectical and historical materialism. But all of that is moot if you don't actually try to put that into practice. That's the whole point of our politics is to learn as much as we can so that we can change the world, right? Not just interpret it, not just sit back and talk about it. But, get out and do what we can. And so I hope people listening really continue to take that to heart.

And I know so many of our listeners do and will continue to. So thank you so much again, Dawson. Hats off to Project, hope to abolish the death penalty. The links will be in the show notes. And you have an open invite to come back on anytime and update us on your organization and your organization's wonderful and important work. Absolutely. Well, thank you so much.

It's been such a pleasure to get to be here. I really appreciate it. I found him by the railroad track this morning. I could see that he was nearly dead. I knelt down beside him and I listened. Just to hear the words the dying fella said, He said they let me out of prison Out in Trisco

For ten long years I paid for what I'd done I was trying to get back to Louisiana To see my rose And get to know my son Give my love To Rose Please want you, Mr.

Take her all my money Tell her buy some pretty clothes Tell my boy That Daddy's so proud of him And don't forget To give my love to Rose Won't you tell them, I said thanks for waiting for me. Tell my boy to help his mom at home.

Tell my role. to try to find another because it ain't right that she should live alone Mr. Here's the bag with all my money It won't last them long The way it goes

God bless you for finding minding me this morning Now don't forget To give my love to Rose Give my love To Rose Please want you missed her Take her all my money

Tell her buy some pretty clothes Tell my boy that daddy's so proud of him and don't forget to give my love to