Rev Left Radio - Understanding the South w/ Dixieland of the Proletariat

Episode Date: September 8, 2021

Breht talks with the wonderful comrades from Dixieland of the Proletariat about life in the American South. We discuss the history of the south, labor struggles, the current covid-19 outbreak in the south, how climate change impacts that region specifically, race and indigeneity, and much more!  Learn more about, contact, and support Dixieland of the Proletariat: https://linktr.ee/dotprole Outro Music: "Three Great Alabama Icons" by Drive-By Truckers ----- Support Rev Left Radio: https://www.patreon.com/RevLeftRadio or make a one time donation: PayPal.me/revleft LEARN MORE ABOUT REV LEFT RADIO: www.revolutionaryleftradio.com

Hello everybody and welcome back to Revolutionary Left Radio. On today's episode, I'm doing a collaboration with the wonderful folks over at Dixieland of the Proletariat. It's a dope podcast centered out of the South, tackling southern issues, southern history, southern perspectives, but obviously from a left-wing socialist-Marxist perspective as well. So today we have on Nelson, Kai, Tommy, and Tyler. from Dixieland of the Proletariat to just talk about politics in the South, the history of the South, misperceptions of the South, the COVID and climate crises occurring in the South, etc. This is really, really fun. They're a great group of people, and I know you're going to love

this wonderful conversation. To find everything that the Dixieland of the Proletariat do, I will link to their link tree in the show notes. So if you have some extra money, you really want to support a good project, support some great comrades. I highly encourage you to check that out and support as you will. So without further ado, here's my conversation with Nelson, Kai, Tommy, and Tyler of Dixieland of the Proletariat. Enjoy. I'm a graduate student in political science and one of the hosts of the podcast, Dixieland and the proletariat. I am the entity known as the former pig farmer Tyler.

I'm just, I'm an idiot. I'm trying to do good, trying to be a good lefty, but yeah, that's about it. I'm Tommy. I play games, and I'm the host on Dixieland of the Proletariat, and I edit the show sometimes. So all the horrible things and the mistakes. the terrible quality is all my fault. So you're welcome. You're welcome.

I'm Kai. I'm the token Indian on the show and also the token woman on the show. And also the token serious one on the show. And I live in England. Here we are as a Southern podcast and I live in England. Interesting. Well, it's an absolute honor and a pleasure to have all of you on. This has sort of been a long time coming.

I've wanted to do a collaboration. with Dixieland for a while, so this is it. So thank you all for coming on. And let's just go ahead and get into the conversation. But let's start with the podcast itself. So for those that don't know, what is Dixieland of the Proletariat? What are you trying to accomplish with it? And how did you all come together to create it initially?

So the podcast Dixieland of Proletariat, basically what had happened was is a Part of the one made and shared on Facebook. I get, yeah, yeah. actually we started the page and it like started sharing memes and it blew up from there but like the original the original idea for the podcast i was listening to a lot of pros of the roundtable old pro shout out to them and uh i was like you know what i could do this and then uh being a generic white dude that's bald with a beard i was like you know what i could i could definitely do a podcast and uh you can do a lot of things with the confidence of a white man so then i uh i got up with uh i got up with friends one of them including tyler uh and i was like you know know, I've been noticing a lot of folks on social media just interested in the South because like everyone's really interested in Appalachia, right? It's like like Blair Mountain, etc. Like that whole like the whole mystique of Appalachia, like the whole thing is like a, it's very popular on social media. But then people started really having questions about the

South, like the deep South. And no one really knew how to answer those things. And a lot of people had moved our way from the south. And I was like, you know what? We should do something to give people, uh, to break misconceptions about the South because what had happened a lot of times where I would go up north because half my family, I'm half Yankee. So I would, uh, I would go up north and I would have people legitimately asked me like, have I ever been to a clan meeting or like, do I fuck my cousin? And I was like, is this all you all you think about when you think of the South is like, you know, banjos and racist. And I was just like, I know plenty of people that aren't like that. I know plenty of people in my family that aren't like that. Obviously,

my friends are not like that. There's a deep, radical history of the South that just is not told. And so I was like, you know what? We could platform people to tell this story that are not what people think or what comes to mind when people think of the South. So, the idea was to come together and to do this. I had a friend that had a studio. So we just sat down. We had a theme one night. The first episode we did was blood and coal about coal mining.

And we went from there and we just started. And it's built. It's grown. We've brought in different hosts. And right now it is what it is right now. And the idea is, like I said, to really give people a different, idea what the South is. It's the most diverse region of the country. And when I tell people that 55% of the black population in the United States live in the South, their heads explode.

Like they don't understand it because you see liberals all the time like, yeah, let the South go, nuke the South blah. It's like, if you do that, then you literally are telling marginalized people and poor people that live here that y'all don't matter, like that we don't matter. And so the idea was to do that, to platform people who can tell that story, to tell a different history. And really at the, like the name of the podcast, Dixieland of Proletariat came to me from like a play on dictatorship of the proletariat. And the idea was like to do that and to be, you know, it's a play on dictatorship with Proletariat. We can do everything. But like how in my mind I couldn't find the words to describe it until we had a host come on and they said, I understand what y'all are doing.

You're taking traditional southern identity and using it in a way to promote a message that people normally would not hear. So the idea is to get people, whether they be, you know, Yankee liberals or southern conservatives that are working class to listen and to be like, hey, I didn't know that about the South. And I'll give you an example where that's worked, I have a friend of mine from college that works in a shipyard in South Alabama. and in 2016 he voted for Trump and after listening to the podcast he'll call me up like almost after every podcast calls me talking the phone and after listening for a while he was like man I was wrong to vote for Trump like I get it now like unions are good

I don't I don't agree with that stuff that I used to anymore and now on his hard hat he wrote remember Blair Mountain and so like the yeah so the idea is to really change people's preconceived notions about the South yeah plus the other name three crackers and a nigger were already taken so we can't use

I don't think the RSS feed would go out to that many a podcast apps here we go I gotta be living proof of how this shit works like I went from a fucking libertarian to an anarchist to a fucking tankie and now I'm looking at

fucking Maoism hell yeah beautiful trajectory yeah like fucking it's a great thing I really like that though I love the especially in the south where there is this sort of this history that's often obscured and eliminated to tie that in so people's sort of sense of self-identity and the culture they come from can then be framed within like a broader argument for unions for socialism for class struggle etc that's the only way it's going to

happen it's certainly not going to happen by some you know northern college kid talking down to southerners about what they should and shouldn't believe I got I got one more One more thing. It really, this kind of happened recently. We had a guest on and he sounded different than he sounded on TikTok. And I was like, I know he's from the South. He's from Louisiana and he like, he sounds different. And he was code switching because like people on TikTok, when you hear Southern accent,

especially a distinct one like his from that part of Louisiana, like this preconceived notion that we're stupid. So one of the saddest things I, when I get messages on social media, we're like, oh my God, yeah, I moved to New York. or I moved to Portland, I moved to Chicago, I moved to, you know, anywhere outside the South. And they have to dramatically hide their accent because their positions on things have been questioned because they have a draw. And I'm talking about people with like, I'm talking about people that are experts in their fields, like people with upper degrees,

like people would like that anywhere, like they should be recognized as people who know what they're talking about. But because they had that southern draw, it's automatically perceived that they're racist and stupid. And real quick, I think drive-by truckers said it best. They said that racism is a worldwide problem. And it's a big problem in America, but it's always been played easy with a southern draw. Like, it's always been perceived with a southern draw.

Hey, fuck man. Yeah, and Black Red Guard said it best. Like when you told us what Malcolm X said, if you're below the Canadian border, you're in the South. The entire country's racist. absolutely like it's not just the south yeah one of the uh the and we'll get into misperceptions in a second but you've already touched on the fact that the south especially by like naive northerners is seen as particularly racist but there's also these incredibly diverse communities in the south

that lots of places in the north don't exist so you could have southern communities you know working class communities that are much more diverse than these white enclaves that exist all over the north. And you'd probably face more day-to-day racism in some of those northern communities than in those southern ones. But there's like this haughty sense of superiority in the north, specifically around the concept of racism as if the north isn't just as racist and hasn't historically been the same. And that quote by Malcolm X, I think, gets at that. Yeah. And I've talked about this a couple of times on the show about it because of the diversity and because, you know, you can't go anywhere without saying a black person or a white person.

person because we have to interact with each other on a daily basis. We have on, like, people, more people have firsthand experiences dealing with black people rather than how other people get information about black people, which is through TV, the media, and the news, which is not always positive. 90% of the time, it's not positive. So that firsthand interaction does a lot to a society than, you know, what you read or see or hear about. I think, Kai, I don't know if you want to, but like, Kai had the best story, like, leaving America and going to another country and still experiencing bullshit.

Oh, yeah. Like, so I spent the first 20 years of my life in Florida and I moved to England, um, almost 12 years ago now. And one of the things that I realized upon moving here is that the racism is still there. In some ways, it's even more virulent, but because it has a different accent and because of the way that it's couched within the culture, it's not seen as like a problem to deal with. It's just part of the fabric of everything. So when I got here and I had been given all these ideas that Europe is some kind of great place where racism doesn't exist, mostly because the idea is that Europe is still completely white somehow. So how can you have racism when they're all white? I can tell you, it's because they choose which country they're going to be racist against when it comes to the white people. But when I moved here, I realized quickly just what kind of language still exists here. So I already mentioned, I'm Native American. And when I've had people come to me and they realize that I'm Native American either by me saying so or because I'm taking part in a

cultural event, I've been called more racist names to my face than I ever did in the United States and they have no idea that it can be offensive in any way because they they never had to think about racism as a problem they never had to think about the words that they used and even though I grew up in what everybody considers like the racism hotbed of the world and you know in the south in Florida Florida being always considered crazy when it comes to a state that's not something I ever experienced when I was there I did I did have racism done to me spoken around me, seen lots of it, but it was it was seen as a problem and seen as an issue that you had to take a certain side on that I never experienced that kind of nuance to it once

I moved to Europe. That's really interesting. There's also the added element I would assume of Europe not having like genocided indigenous people on whose land they occupy and that probably increases the gap of understanding for the average European. There's actually something to say about that. So I live in England. There's a history of England basically practicing

their genocidal tendencies on the Irish. They practiced it on the Irish. They practiced it on the Welsh. They practiced it on the Scottish. And even though this doesn't come down really to a race issue, I mean, depending on how you want to see the difference in Celts versus Normans, there's

some phenotypic phenotypic differences, however, it's not really a race issue. All of those tactics that they used on the Irish, on the Scottish, on the Welsh, ended up just being refined and used for their further colonial interests further down the line. And then you have things elsewhere in Europe, where you have the Roma being persecuted, no matter where they go. You have Armenian genocide. you have religious genocide, some kind of cleansing, lots of ethnic cleansing when it comes to Jewish people and all that. It exists here. It's just that they couldn't always point to a skin tone and say, and this is why. I see. Yeah. Well, let's go ahead and move on and talk

about sort of how your experiences living in the South have shaped you. So maybe you could talk about unique experiences that you've had a living in the South, but specifically I'm interested in how living in the South has shaped each of your politics. So, uh, um, I, it's, it's funny because like, uh, like, myself, Kai and Tyler will, will joke about our dads all being like conservatives and right wingers. And so like, personally me growing up, my dad is on the Trump train 100%. Uh, he was Q and on before Q&N was Q&O. My mom is like, my mom is Italian. She's from New York. And she's, you're, you're run a middle liberal and so like growing up in the south um i think what people need to realize

is that like the difference between urban and rural poverty is different right so like you'll see poverty in like a big city right and there's like tons of resources to help people like granted obviously there's i'm not saying that there's not problems there's problems resources don't get allocated specifically. But what I've seen firsthand is the effects of how bad rural poverty is where there is no one around you for miles. And I'll give you a perfect example. In 2014, I helped a friend of mine run for Congress. And we're in the second correctional district in Alabama, which takes up, I think, 14, 15 counties. Like, it's huge, massive. And we had to go out like along the black belt right so like we'll and we'd actually we go into counties that

weren't in our district to like get donations and support etc whatnot so like driving in these rural counties and seeing like people who don't have a pot to piss in literally uh like towns would go in like the only source of food is a is a stop and go like a gas station right that might have eggs and milk and cheese like there's no gross store. That might be a Walmart, but if you don't have a car, it's like 50 miles down the road and you don't have anything. They don't have city water. They have well water. They don't, and this is probably one of the most horrible things is you start going out to like Louns County and Dallas County and you go out in the sticks, right? So like, people don't have money for septic

tanks. And there is no county or city water, right? So they straight pipe the shit. into their backyards because that's the only thing that they can do and because of that you have hookworm like for all her problems aOC finally like brought this brought this to attention she didn't have to she was in new york uh that like hookworm is a problem in Alabama a disease that shouldn't be in what you would think america is supposed to be the quote unquote great greatest fucking country in the world we have hookworm in kids because there's There's shit in their yards. And the UN came through to Alabama, Mississippi, right?

And I'm just going to say what they said. And I know it might not be what the clearest way or the using the right terms or whatnot. But the UN came in and said, Alabama, Mississippi, the deep south, South Carolina, Georgia, Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana, right? Have third world poverty. And in the quote, unquote, quote, greatest country in the world, which y'all know is bullshit. Like, we have these problems. And in the richest country that's ever existed on the face of the earth,

we have people that are dying from diseases that shouldn't be, that could be completely, if the government literally went in and just bought people a septic tank, they wouldn't have these problems. But because they don't and because we'd rather, you know, fund wars and all other bullshit that, they're straight piping shit into their backyards and kids are dying because of it. So just seeing that that rural poverty in the South really was like even before then, obviously I had my, my awakening really was in high school when I read the manifesto,

but like seeing it firsthand is like it's in your face and it's just like, wow, like, holy shit. That was basically my like, even before then and really that was like the icing on the cake. Like, what the fuck? Like, this shouldn't happen. And people should not have to live like this. Rural. Anyone else?

Want to go next? I mean, age is grown up. A lot of people, a lot of minorities growing up, like, are taught that, you know, you know, why D is bad. And, like, especially me. Like, my mother, she, she did, you know, attend a lot of marches, my grandmother. And she, she raised me. She, you know, she was there. She talked about how, you know, she marched in Alabama.

on certain days. Like, she has pictures. Like, she was in the Rosa Parks Museum. She's done a lot of activism in her day. And I remember from the time growing up, you know, as early as I could, every year, every year. God, I hated it. But I thank her for it today.

But we, she made me and my brother watch roots, like back to back. I don't know if you've ever seen roots, but that shit is fucking long. They would have that, I would have that on like TBS for like a week. you had to sit down and watch like an hour route today and I had to write about it like what did I learn from this hour roots yeah

I learned never to steal from a white man or he'll cut your cut your foot off that's what I learned but yeah me Nelson and I went to the same high school and around then you know Bush was in the office

and you know Nelson radicalized me you know he we talked and then from then on you know, we've been in this fight, but yeah, I owe a lot of my, my activism today to Nelson, so. It's beautiful. Oh, I brought back an immortal technique CD from New York. Yeah, he did. It did.

It changed my life. I woke up and I showed him my manifesto and he said, no, no, not that. Yeah, what got me was like, just growing up poor and my high school was super clicked up and, like, I was wearing like fucking shitty clothes. and like it was just like everybody was so fucking vain so like it was hard for me to connect with people and then like once i got out of high scott rebelled i found like the metal scene and the hardcore punk scene and that just like that taught me a really good lesson that's how i met tommy that's how i met nelson and it's just like fucking there's a guy named rabies and he said don't forget the struggle don't forget the streets like we're all fucking we're brothers

and sisters and all in the same fight and nelson fucking radicalized me too as a uh he was a server I was a cook, we always talk shit and now here we are I guess I'm going to be the only one who's not going to credit my activism to a white man specifically that one who's tackling right now

how hard on you guys thankfully I've only known Nelson for a little over a year yeah thank God you lucked out So more along Tommy's route, when you grow up not white, you have no choice but to be not white. So my dad's side of the family is white. That's how I have the Trump supporter in my family.

But my mom's side is Native American. And there was never a choice. There was never a choice to not be radicalized in some way. And I've told the story before on the show that the first time that I can remember clearly being the one to speak up, in front of any kind of authority figure is when I was literally in like the first grade was the first time because we would have, so this is in the 90s, it's in the early 90s. We would have, you know, Thanksgiving time. They'd make a paper bag teepee in the classroom and have everybody draw, you know, their dream catchers and all that. And I didn't like that. And my mom didn't like that.

So my mom came into the school and insisted on telling actual traditional stories and actual craft things and stuff like that. And then by the time I was in the fourth grade, we had a thing called Colonial Days, which now sounds horrible. I don't know if they would do that these days, but it was called Colonial Days where every student was given a person who was famous in the colonial era in the United States that we had to learn about. And then on a certain day, we had to dress up like them and go into the school cafeteria and recite facts. So if you had five classrooms, there was one, you know, John Smith and one Virginia Dare in each classroom. So you'd have five John Smiths.

And I basically threatened my teacher that if she didn't give me Pocahontas, there would be issues because she was the only Native American on the possible list. And from that point on, Pocahontas has been a passion of mine to learn about her. But also, I came into that cafeteria amongst a bunch of little girls wearing Disney's Pocahontas costumes, wearing my own regalia. and getting up there and telling what my mom taught me rather than what I got from the Disney movie or what I got from the school library books. And even though that might not be particularly southern, it did happen in the south.

It did happen in Florida. There's no way to not be who my family made me. There is no way for me to not be radicalized from the very moment that I could start speaking. And whether that happened in New York, where my mom's family is from, whether that happened in Baltimore, where my dad's family's from, or whether that happened in Florida, where I was born, it was always going to be like that. Absolutely.

Well, we've talked about some misconceptions of the South. Maybe if anybody wants to touch on more, we haven't obviously addressed them all. But I was hoping you could touch on those and then talk about some of the overlooked positive aspects of the South because there is this overwhelming, like, you know, sort of shitting on the South. And we don't often hear anybody saying some positive aspects of it.

So you can take that in whatever direction you want, whoever wants to go first. I sometimes, and I do, I know that Tommy and Tyler have thanked me for their radicalization. I need to thank Kai for keeping me in check because I've learned a lot from Kai and I have had to reexamine a lot of my positions on how I think about certain things. So when I get asked this question, I need to realize that like, I, Nelson, like just because you think this certain way, like it's not, it may not be true. and I think right off the bat I don't want to be like I'm I want to right off the bat I want to be like I'm not a southern apologist right my dad is a confederate apologist like I've heard all that bullshit my entire life right and I'm not a southern apologist I want to be clear the South has problems but what I tell people is this the South has his problems but we've progressed to the liberal New England style racism that everybody he is comfortable with everyone being white people because my grandfather my dad's father's from boston he's a guinea from boston right most racist piece of shit i ever met my entire life

and when i tell you it was so bad that my mother had to go up to our family business and tell my grandfather if you do not stop saying the n-word around your grandson you will never see him again and he reluctantly like getting him to stop saying that word right was a chore and he didn't want to but he did because he wanted to see his grandson but that like that really is like he's from boston and he moved to montgomery and his his his racism flourished at that time but he all he grew up in new england and then i have to look at like well boston rioted in the 70s when they try to desegregate their schools. So it is really a nationwide problem.

I mean, Tommy and I were talking about sundown towns a while back. And Tommy made a good point. He's like, man, I'm black. The entire country is a sundown town. And I was like, shit, fuck, you're right. Like, that's one of those things. Like, I had to check myself was like shit. Like, just because, you know, we talk shit about Coleman.

And like, it just made me stop and think for a second. It's like, God, Tommy is right. Like, I never had that feeling of not being safe. going somewhere. And Kai's probably felt the same way as a Native American and as a woman. Like I have not feeling safe in certain situations. And me as like the bald bearded fat white dude has, I have never felt unsafe in the situation.

So like when I talk about the South, I try to always talk about positive things, but I want to make it clear that I'm not a Southern apologist. And this podcast is not Southern apologizing for, I mean, we are apologizing for the bullshit that's. happen. But we're not going to be like, the South is fucking perfect. It's just Yankees that are bad. No, obviously, South has its fucking problems. But the point is, is that when

Yankees talk down to us and they think that we're stupid just because we live in a certain part of the country or they think that we're racist just because we live in a certain part of country, that's when they cross the line and be like, whoa, calm down there. Let me learn you something. And in the words of, that's like a total Tyler saying, I totally jacked that from him. But, um, but no, I think that one of the, like, some of the big things that you need to touch on, like, everyone talks about Blair Mountain and the coal miners wars, but like, that also happened in Alabama. Like, they were minor strikes here. And the big thing that we did an episode on was the sharecroppers union. If you have not read Hammer and Ho, you need

to read Hammer and Ho. Because the Communist Party United States, the 1930s in Alabama was 100 was like 100% black and they built the sharecroppers union and it was led by black people and they fought the clan they fought cops they got guns and they said fuck you and they won they got things that they demanded and and it it worked and it should be a a guide book a guide to people now that want to organize I also think that, and this is horrible that I didn't, I didn't know this until I got into a graduate program about Lowndes County Freedom Organization, like Stokely Carmichael, right? And Snick, like, I didn't know that Stokely, their friend Lowns County Freedom Organization, like their logo, the Black Panther was what Bobby Steele and Huey Newton got the idea for the black pant. Like they asked Stokely like, hey, can we use this thing? And he was like, yeah. Like that whole thing started in the county over from me. Like, and there's also other things. things they don't talk about. We had our own version of the

Tulsa Race Massacre in I think it's in Barbara Bullitt County Black people tried to go vote during Reconstruction and the white folks that shot them and massacred a bunch of them because they tried to vote. And

there's so many other things that like people don't talk to the Scottsboro the Scottsboro Boys trial like I said the sharecroppers Union this whole notion of like radical politics in the South is completely overshadowed by the people who were pushed to the forefront like people like George Wallace and Strom Thurman and Senator Eastling. And then you also have to touch on like, people like Huey Long, who was literally saying the same things back then,

like you hear like quote unquote progressive politicians say today. But like Huey Long put like force behind that and did what needed to be done to get things passed. So yeah, there's a lot of things that we touch on the podcast, that people come on the show and talk about that need to be said that people really don't think happen in the South. So yeah, I mean, it's it's crazy that when people actually take the time to listen to Southern voices, they'll hear people saying things that they agree with and that they are like, wow, I didn't know that that was down there. And that's, and that's, that's what we hope to accomplish. I think when, when other people think of the South and think negatively of the South, I want you to say to yourself, how did we get

in that position? And there are things that the South is, is, you know, notorious for. And that's poor education, um, wealth and, and among, among other things. It's still segregated. Um, not, not by rates, but definitely by a neighborhood in class, which might as well be the same thing. But you have to understand, like, the South, what you consider the South are the first, one of the first 13 states of this country, built on oppression, created on oppression. And they have mastered the art of oppression. Our laws have written us into poverty. And it is so hard to work your.

out of that because of the way they have redesigned the legislator, the legislature where they have all the power. The mayor has no powers in most southern states. The governors have no powers in most southern states. They don't. It's all legislative. And it's hard to fight that. And it's hard to come back from that. And it's all in oligarchy. I can specifically speak on Alabama that there are, you know, like four or five major families, four or five major people that hold power in the state. And that will no matter who is elected to what office, they hold the power in the state do those do those families that rich powerful families have historical roots that go back i'm sure to oh yeah oh yeah plantation owners 100% exactly in southern politics

it's a term they're called the big mules and so like the the old money families that when i talk about and it's not just Alabama like the south in general you can go to any southern state and people know like okay that family runs etc whatnot um there the big mules of southern politics It's the planter class. It's the, it's the, it's the, it's the, the, the textile, the people that came after the planter class that were basically the same as the planter class. They just couldn't run plantations anymore. So they just started big businesses.

But like that all money goes back generations. Like it wasn't all destroyed during reconstruction. Like they, slave owners got reparations. Slaves didn't. So it's, it's a continual process that is extremely hard to beat because exactly what Thomas said. Like what Thomas said is true that it's written in a bunch of state constitutions as a check to the populist movement that like governors really don't have a lot of power when it comes to the state and how things work. It's the legislature because they can gerrymandered the legislatures in the state senate so that the same people stay in there forever. The same problem that we have in the federal and Congress, the federal level is the same problem exacerbated in southern states because it's,

is literally written in our state constitutions that, like, the governors are not the most powerful people. It's the state leg. And it's hard to get them out of power. Unless you have like a Huey Long character come in and add people shot and thrown in the swamp. Like that was the alternative. And it's extremely hard to unseat these people. When it comes to things that are positive about the South that people overlook, part of my reason of being on the podcast is to remind people that there are points of view that go beyond 1860, that go beyond 1492, that there are people who have existed in the South for thousands and thousands of years, that indigenous people are original Southerners. And that when we think of the South commonly right now is that the South

is something that was built out of the actions of plantation owners and the Civil War and the legislature that came before and after those things and the racism that permeates the area. But there's way more to the South, as in the actual global area, as in the people who have been there for thousands of years, then the actions of the colonizer country of the United States. They are a colonizer. It is not only their history that matters. So one of the first things that I did, I first peered on the show as just a guest and I would come on and do indigenous history, and I've done it of several areas, one of those being Stone Mountain in Georgia. And I always start my episodes by going back as far as I possibly can in the

history, and that being sometimes up to 14.5,000 years of human habitation in these areas, and that the South is also an area of extreme natural beauty of environments that you can't get anywhere else in the world, things like the Everglades being as important as they are for pollution, for cleaning the water and all these things, for animals that don't exist anywhere else in the world. And unfortunately, the South is one of those areas that was colonized so early and so quickly. that we've lost so many of those resources, of those animals, of those habitats, that people don't even think of the South as being so unique and so beautiful because of the land and because of the indigenous people there that I've explained on the show. It's very, very difficult to talk about the indigenous history of the South because the South is one of the first areas to be impacted by foreign-born diseases when colonizers came over. So indigenous people dropped by the hundreds of

thousands very, very early on. And even though the written European record is not the be all end all of history, it is what we're using right now to think to try to piece together this history of people that existed here before the colonizers came or how their daily lives ran when colonizers first appeared on those shores. But because they died off so quickly, we're having to build those histories back purely through speculation and digging and trying to piece together stories that might have existed within cultural boundaries, oral histories and things like that, things that Western science and historians don't like to acknowledge that these histories exist and that they are valid, even though it's an oral history. So when people

think of the South, I want them to, there's no way that we can erase what the South is now because of the colonizers' actions, because of the civil war, because of the racism, because of chattel slavery that ended up being pooled in the South, we can't change any of that. That is definitely how the story of the land is progressing at the moment. However, I want people to see it as more than that. There is land here. There's natural monuments. There's indigenous history.

There's natural history. There's geology. There's incredible, just natural areas. I never knew how beautiful Alabama was until Nelson started showing pictures of when he goes hiking. And that's, you know, that's coming from somebody who came on the show to expose those areas of the South. And I had no idea that Alabama was like that. And as much as, as much as all of these things matter, as much as the Civil War matters and everything that happened from, you know, 1619, about, you know, 1492 and then 1619. And everything that's happened since then matters, there's more to it than just what the government has done, what colonizers have done, and how that's shaped everything since then. incredibly well said absolutely the furthest south i've ever been is uh is louisville kentucky

unfortunately but i i know there's lots of beauty down there that i really i really am interested in exploring if it's ever feasible uh financially for me to do so i think that's an important point i think a lot of people too in their head like because of all these stereotypes about the south it's sort of when you think of the most beautiful places in the united states i don't even think it's often even considered you know you look to the mountain west or the pacific northwest but there's lots of beauty that goes completely unrecognized in the south as there is where I live here in the Midwest which is also I think sometimes written off in that sense as well but there's real beauty everywhere obviously no it really is like it's it's the south is one of the

most like forested beautiful natural scenery they can't like they call Alabama like the Amazon of North America because like all the waterways and just the the everything we have like the natural beauty like that is Alabama and And it's sad that, like, people ride it off completely because of stereotypes. And I think that if more people were to explore the South, that they would see that it's, it's a lot better and a lot more beautiful than people give it credit for. I think if people had at least one chance to stand in an unspoiled mangrove off the coast of Florida, and you can see the manatees and you can see the color of the water

or you go down to the Everglades and unfortunately it's being overrun by invasive species at the moment but if you go down there and you see the alligators and you can smell that peaty smell of kind of plant decay and water and heat from the sun or if you go somewhere like Stone Mountain and you see something that's geologically so interesting and so eye-catching without the Confederate carvings that are on it, you know, if you have a chance to to see these things, they make a mark on you and they should be more, more treasured than they are at the moment, just because they're in what is considered a tainted part of the United States. That disgusting massive participation trophy.

Like, it's so. Built by the KKK and the daughters of the Confederacy. Oh, my God. I hate that bullshit so goddamn much. Like, I hate the, the, the, the, just. anything like people the confederacy god anyone anyway yeah fuck robert lee absolutely Alabama has a ton of waterfalls too by the way it's great yeah I almost drowned near one but oh my god you've got a lot of good squirrel on that yeah nice that is true Nelson isn't wrong that

the Alabama has really distinctive geological and natural features and I didn't realize this until I had met them, that that area, this kind of area of multiple river basins and all that has more ecological diversity than most of the rest of the United States. I think, and also just to piggyback on what Kai's saying and like tie it all into history, like in one of my Southern politics classes, like the professor starts off with like a wildlife, like geography lesson about the South. And how that directly impacted the history of the South. Because like it was a meme going around like a while ago that was like where the most fertile soil is in the South is the black belt has the highest percentage of black people is also where all the plantations were.

So like because the soil and the sediment, everything from millions of years ago made this some of the most fertile farmland. that impacted farming which then brought slavery etc etc so like it it all ties in but the problem Kai at the nail on the head like it's so beautiful but people forget that and people don't know about this because all you see is what Kai says is colonizer history

and there's so much more of the South than that absolutely well let's go I want to talk about the pandemic and climate change, but I think we'll end on those. So let's just talk now about how the specific struggles that have happened over, we've mentioned some of them

throughout. There were indigenous struggles and continue to be. There's black struggles and continue to be. And so much of the racism and the stereotypes about the South, this one-sided view where it's the white reactionaries that people remember in history, the loud mouse and

the clan and the Confederates, but those are all also shaped and inherently imply the ongoing never-ending resistance by those they sought to oppress and dominate. And so that struggle has always shaped the entire region and, of course, the entire country. So can you talk about some of the struggles that maybe people might not be fully aware of and just how black and indigenous struggles in particular have shaped the politics and culture of the South? Well, I'll speak specifically about one struggle.

is the fact that a lot of these public schools are named after you know, Civil War heroes like, you know, Robert E. Lee, Jefferson. Actually, yeah, all the Montgomery public schools are. Yeah, Robert E. Lee, Jefferson Davis. What's the other one else? Sydney Lanier.

Yeah, I think he was the poet lawyer that can finish or something. I don't know. It's tied in there somewhere. And, you know, just that every day. And the fact that we don't, we don't put invest any money into our public schools. And it shows our public schools are run down. There are no teachers. They're all just, you know, most of these classrooms are filled with substitute teachers.

They can't find people that hold, you know, actual teaching positions because they go to the charter school. schools and the private schools here, you know, where they, where they do actually make money. That, that struggle specifically, man, it's, God has been so long. We actually got the Robert Lee statue taken down during the whole BLM riots last year. And someone, someone actually took the statue down. And that was great. But, you know, they're still there. The names are still there. and, you know, we're still fighting to get those names removed. It's like the legacy of the Confederacy is, like, graffiti over the otherwise beautiful South. The statues and the carvings and all the names of the public institution.

Yeah. And, like, what road is? I don't know what road it is. I'm terrible roads. But, you know, there's a giant, what, Sons of the Confederacy, that giant flag out there. On I-65 between Montgomery and Birmingham is a massive... I got a league. of the south, two minutes away from

my house, like their clubhouse. Yeah. And there's a massive Confederate flag on I-65 between Montgomery and Birmingham. It's like, son of the Confederate veterans, learn your history. And it's just like, oh, fuck off. We got one of those in Florida, too. It pops up

five minutes after the billboard that says, go to hell or the devil will get you. Jesus. Yeah, yeah. We have a Confederate flag on 75. I think, 75 or 95, right outside of very large city

owned by the daughters of the Confederacy. Jesus. The only, the joke is like the only one that should be allowed to stand is that one on private property of Nathan Bedford Forrest because it just looks horrible. Like it's literally like one of the worst pieces of, I don't even going to call it art. It's like the statue is disgusting.

And it's like, if this is what white supremacy is supposed to be, then I, cool. Because he looks stupid. like shit. Yeah, just complete shit. It's just bad. It can stay if we get a placard that says horse fucker on it or something.

Anybody who doesn't know, Nathan Bedford Forrest was really enamored of his horse. Oh my God. Interesting. Yeah. It fucking, fucking, the joke is like, also, Robert Lee, like, fucking loved his fucking horse. He's buried nexters. They dug up his whole, they, they buried Lee

and they buried his horse, like, right next to him. So the, the joke is that Lee fucked his horse. There's several of them in the South. Oh, definitely. A quote, an old friend. The only Confederate that needs a statue is the cock-eyed cousin-fucker who shot

Stonewall. It's some sort of damn yanky trick. That guy gets a statue. Cock-eyed cousin-fucker who shot Stonewall Jackson. Well, if it's specifically

indigenous issues in the South, What I would say is the largest kind of overarching issue. We have kind of the same grievances as Tommy was talking about, that we have a lot of horrible colonizer history naming our public institutions that black and indigenous people have to deal with if we're going to live in what is now the United States. But beyond that, I would say for indigenous people in specific, it's that the tribes in the South have almost no institutional power. And it kind of comes back to what I was saying that southern tribes are some of the first affected by diseases when the conquistadors and everybody started coming to the south, that it drastically dropped the numbers of people.

And then we had issues of when you look at the indigenous history, it's kind of up to a certain point a lot more tribes were trying assimilation to deal with. the colonizers rather than outright fighting. And as the United States became more of a country and it started Western expansion, those tribes were kind of seeing the effect of this assimilation tactic and decided, no, we're going to fight instead because it was less of we need to outright, the colonizers were less thinking we need to outright kill everybody when they were dealing with the earlier tribes, especially in the eastern seaboard and the south. And as they moved westward, it turned into outright killing everybody they could. So that's what started your Indian wars and stuff like that. But because of these low numbers, this assimilation, and then you had things that were purposely drawing indigenous people out of the South, the Trail of Tears was not just one Trail of Tears. There were several trails of tears, multiple forced marches out of their territories and into Indian territory, ended up in Oklahoma. And then you had the Seminole who were escaping the colonizers further north and escaping down into Florida and basically walling themselves off from everyone else to protect themselves. So you have very, very small pockets of indigenous people throughout the South now who don't command any power when it comes to dealing with the colonizers. And that's not to say that any other tribe has necessary power when it comes to dealing.

with colonizers. Most of the time, these are what is considered sovereign nations. Native nations are considered sovereign nations, although the United States does not treat them like that. In the South, their populations are so small, and there was so much kind of assimilation that we end up fighting each other rather than fighting the common enemy. And then you have places like Georgia, which has literally zero recognized federal tribes in Georgia. And I didn't know that until last year. And you would think, you know, for somebody like me who's so used to looking at indigenous history and knowing where the pockets of indigenous population are, I didn't think it was possible that Georgia could have zero federally recognized tribes because there are so many

Georgia Cherokee. There are so many Lumby who ended up moving further south. There's so many Creek, who even though they were traditionally further west than Georgia, they could have moved into Georgia, but there are no federally recognized tribes there. And if you are not federally recognized, you have no power to bargain or seek funds or anything for your tribe as people. And that just, it's a sucking away of the power in these places that has, they didn't need to commit full-on physical genocide anymore. They could just paper it all away. They could paper away people's federal recognition. They could paper away the tribe's existence as a whole. They could paper away and say, well, you don't meet the like quantum standards. So you are no

longer Lumby or Cherokee or Creek or, sorry, Muskogee. It became less about physical bodies and more about just making them disappear slowly. So for us, it's, it's, the South had original Southerners. It had original people who lived on these lands that are slowly disappearing. The languages are disappearing. I have an uncle, an adopted uncle in my family because I am not Muskogee personally. But my uncle is one of, I would say five, but I think a couple have died recently, one of less than five speakers, fluent speakers of the Muskogee language, five of one of the largest tribes that used to exist in the United States.

And this has led to people like my uncle really issuing anything to do with what is the United States and living off grid and teaching his children only Muskogee. You only speak Muskogee when you're on that land. and trying to to produce enough food to subsist out there. They're one of the few places in Alabama because they are in Alabama that have Buffalo free roaming in the area. Buffalo did used to exist as far down south as Alabama, but you wouldn't think that now because of the destruction of the Buffalo and everything. So for indigenous people,

there's this kind of this lack of power, this lack of recognition. When you think of tribes, You think of Western tribes. You might think of northern tribes kind of further up into Canada and all that, but you do not think of southeastern tribes. So we just kind of exist as ghosts

on our own land. And that recognition, we're getting better at it by having things like land recognitions. Nelson does one at the end of all of our shows. Just to kind of put the idea out there that indigenous people are here, they were here, they are here,

they continue to be here and that this land is not something that belongs to the United States. This land doesn't, well, it doesn't belong to indigenous people either, but we were here first and we take it very seriously to take care of that land in ways that the colonizers aren't doing. So might as well, you know, acknowledge us above anybody else at that point. But yeah, that's what I think of when it comes to like indigenous issues in the South. Let me tell you real quick. How I met Kai. We did our second episode on the Battle of Horseshoe Bend, and we released it.

And I, he fucking killed our ass. Oh, my God. When I tell you, I was scared shitless when Kai messaged us, and I was like, and she was like, I'm an indigenous woman, et cetera, et cetera. And I'm watching, blah, blah, blah. And you did, et cetera, and gave tips and points. And I was just like, oh, shit, oh, shit. I worked out of the chiefs as an anarchist.

What? Wild shit like that. I was like, oh, my God. And I was like, hi, Kai. Well, thank you so much. And I was just like, I was, what Kai said was 100% true. It was like, and like afterwards was like, shit, I could have like, we should have had somebody on that wasn't like a white dude talking about the battle of horses you bend.

And like one person came to mind. I was like, damn, I could have had this person on. and like it that it grew and it grew from like you know listening to kai and like since then like we we've bonded over our mutual love of ghost adventures and uh and her making fun of me i started my friendship with him by threatening him and it's going to continue the same way foundation of all great friends i'm so i'm so used to to situations where i'm the only indigenous person with eyes on this or the only indigenous person willing to say like i'm watching you I'm watching what you're going to see you and say.

So, yeah, they did. They did the best that they could. I would give them a good B forever on that. It could be worse. No, no. And then Kyle, later on, Kai sent the picture of one of her uncles in, like, in regalia,

like pretending to scout this, this white dude at a, at a fucking reenactment. I was like, oh. Like, it was, I was like,

I was like, I was like, I was like, I was like, I was like, a lot. Like, the uncle who's scary shit right now.

Nelson loves my stories about my uncle who used to do a lot of reenactments since he got a permanent job. He doesn't do them as much anymore. But yeah, I told him all these stories about my uncle going into quote unquote British encampments at reenactments and stuff

and stealing all of their shit and warhooping in the woods to just make them piss themselves. Yeah, that's where my family goes. Oh, no. My threat was actually pretty, tape. They're like, oh no, the ghosts, they're going to get us.

We just reenact it. It's not real. Well, you know, something that I thought of when you were talking specifically about that using the image of like the ghost. I think it's sort of visceral and powerful. But in college football teams, it seems that both the legacy of colonization and the legacy of the Confederacy are like weirdly also perpetuated through the mascots. of these college football teams.

Does that sound right in the South specifically? Oh, heck yeah. So where I grew up, if you were going to a college, if you're going to a state college, four-year college, you're either going to be a gator or a seminal. And for the longest time, I didn't give a single shit

about what the college experience was like if you went to FSU. I just didn't want to go somewhere where they had a mascot that was a seminal. Nothing against a seminal, like personally, but that, that image is that they've decided to use an entire tribe as a symbol of fierceness, I guess, because, you know, we need to scare our football opponents or something like that. And, yeah, I mean, even though it doesn't necessarily pertain to the South, it is, you know, completely into wider U.S. sports as well. I mean, we only just recently lost the term Redskins from the Washington team, very recent. That uncle that I was talking about that lives off off grid was one of the plaintiffs in that case with Amanda Black Horse.

And then you have, you know, the Indians and all of these, they only just got rid of the chief Wahoo image. That horrible, horrible holdover from the 40s, I'm pretty sure. And it's just not taken seriously. Nobody has to take it that seriously because, oh, it's either, oh, we're honoring you or it's not that. bad or, you know, there's other things that we use as mascots that they don't complain about it basically. A lot of times it comes up as the Fighting Irish. The Fighting Irish did not have the same physical representations as any of these other teams. The FSU Seminoles don't really have that bad of a physical representation. However, a lot of the other ones definitely did. And

it comes to the Seminoles, as far as I know, and I'm not Seminole myself, like I said, they have an understanding between the tribe and the school and the school has a specific allocation for Seminole students if they want to study there. I don't know if that's ever been used. I didn't go to the school. I'm not Seminole myself. But when I did look into it, there is a certain partnership when it comes to those in particular. But yeah, it's right for to pick it, honestly. And I'm really surprised that it's, you know, 2021 and we're finally starting to lose these horrible

representations. Right. Like my high school, when I played high school football, we were the Wetumka Indians. And it would always be some white dude in fucking the most racist-ass Indian face paint riding out on a fucking horse before the fucking games. It's just like, e-y. Yikes.

And they still do it to this day. Really? Like, it's still the We-Tumka Indians. It's still white dudes painting their face up, riding out shirtless with a fucking spear for the games. Like it's... Did, um, Tyler, I don't did, uh, did Ole Miss,

are they still the rebels? No, that changed, uh, I want to say about two or three years back. Really? Yeah, they're not the rebels. I think they ditched their mascot too. I don't, I, I, yeah. But yeah, for the, for all my childhood, it was the old Miss rebels and it was the Confederate looking dude. And like, it, it, even in the Confederate imagery in,

in high school, like the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, Lee Generals like it's Jesus there's a still like Tommy said there was a statue outside of Robert Lee like the there's the Jeff Davis volunteers and the Lanier poets and but like that that imagery is is so prevalent still and it's finally getting addressed and it's finally starting to come down because people realize I'm like hey this is some racist bullshit but I mean growing up like you had fucking heroes like the goddamn Dukes of Hazards who's their call was the general lay had a fucking rebel flag on the top Like, it's just, it's hard.

It's so fucking hard to escape here. Like, it's, and what's so crazy, what's so insane is that specifically Robert Lee, Jeff Davis, and Sidney Lanier High School are all, like, 99% black. And then when you have these school board meetings, all you see these old white people show up in opposition of it who have nobody at this school. No one. It's just that they went to this school. like thousands of years ago

back when they did segregate and didn't let black people into the school when they went there they're like you can't change the name of it that's when I went to school and learned all my racism

but I do have a traumatic story about I was in high school band and I was forced to play this this song the Tomahawk Chop are you familiar with that?

vaguely yeah and um i tell you i had this old racist extremely racist drum major who would who would stand up and look me like specifically oh my god directly and i'm the drum major i'm the one who led the tomahawk top he did he also led the tomahawk tommy Tommy you and i are starting our own podcast first off first off you're canceled Nelson We were the knights, and it was an axe, and it was the top. Wait a minute, wait a minute. If it's an axe, did you still have to do the, oh, oh, all that? Did we?

Oh, yeah, yeah, it was. That's the fucking time of a hotchop. That was based on, like, native songs, Nelson. Don't try to give me, we were the knights. I'm fucking canceled from when I was 16 years old. Well, they would do that thing in the audience, too, with their arms and everything. Yeah, yeah. Oh, that fucking.

The Atlanta Braves. It's like, not forget, like, the only Major League Baseball team like that anyone around here supports is they still have the Tom Hog Shop. Oh, yeah. There's, there's lots of stadiums and places where they've tried to get rid of those, those actions and songs and stuff like that. They won't play them like on the Tannoyne anymore. But people in the stadium will just do it on their own. Just do it themselves. Just like, just imagine if like fucking whatever they play in Germany, let's say soccer had the like the fucking Berlin Zyclan Bee. It's the same thing. Yeah. It's incredible. Yeah, those European soccer fans are racist as fuck, though. It's not, they probably would totally be down for that. Like, they're fucking racist and shit.

Well, yeah, they have like the more fascist-based clubs, and then they have the anti-fascist clubs and shit. It's a whole culture over there. Yeah, and they throw, like, one of my favorite, Mario Bell Tolly, like, the Italian strikers is black, and, like, they'll throw, like, bananas at him when he tries to play, and it's fucking horrible. Well, they're just trying to raise this potassium, okay?

if we talk sports for too long Tommy is going to break out in Hives but I will say since I moved to Europe it is definitely like you know which football fans you need to steer way clear of because they are going to attack somebody

I had my own experience with English football racists okay as I had a traumatic experience at a bar I was watching the Euro final I was rooting for Italy and I got called by an Englishman a big nose cunt and I was like you know know what? It's anti-italian discrimination.

And I'm not going to lie. For a second, I thought that when Tommy was going to talk about traumatic experience, I thought he was going to talk about how gamers are oppressed. Because Tommy, before this was definitely playing Gears of War Live. Oh, yeah, dude, I'm so fucking oppressed as an Xbox

live gamer. Let me tell you, I can't go on there and say the N-word anymore without getting banned. That's so racist. Reverse racism is real. In that one instance. all right well let's zoom in on this last question because i really do think it's important and obviously if you've anybody's listened to the last several episodes of revel-left you know

it's a it's a particularly unhealthy obsession i have which is sort of staring into the abyss of climate change and trying to make sense of it and it's clear that climate change is going to impact all of us but each region of the country and the world really will face their own unique challenges and impacts. And the South specifically, from Texas to Florida and everywhere in between, you know, the American West aside with the wildfires is really set up to face a lot of the impacts and has the sort of institutional class and racial segregation and poverty that will just make all of these disasters, hit harder, be more disastrous, and impact the most vulnerable,

the most intensely. So just kind of go around the horn. and what are your thoughts on on climate change? How has it already begun to impact the South? And how do you see it playing out in the years to come? Brother, it's hot as fuck. It's hot as fuck. Hot or that's up, man.

God, it's hot as shit. I'm not going to lie, man. It's like the devil's fucking armpit down here. But like, with the humidity, it's God awful. Like, I remember I had to go out and cut the grass and I'm out there for maybe an hour and a half. And, like, I come back inside just to take a break, cool off. and it's like I just got out of a fucking pool.

Like, it's, I'm stretched. Like, people like, when I talk about, when we talk about heat in the south and all of us can agree that like, when you talk about heat in the south, it is different because I had a family that moved to Arizona and they were like, it's 120 degrees, but, you know, that Alabama heat, you step off that damn plane and you just hit with that wall of humidity and it's gross, it's disgusting, and you can't get in the shade to cool off because it's in the shade. And like, it's like Tyler said, it's gotten worse.

also and and Kai's probably used to it more than all of us but like hurricanes have gotten stronger like and it's it's getting worse and there are more of them every year and they're getting more powerful

and what was the last one not the it was like two years ago the one that hit uh Mexico City Beach the one that hit the panhandle pretty hard Harvey Harvey was it Harvey that hit the panhandle hard

Harvey's the one that fuck Texas up real bad what was the one that was the one that hit florida the cat five that was like more damage than katrina i can't i can't remember the exact name of it but it it did it tore it tore out like interstates and like there was there were whole towns that were gone there were interstates that were gone it was bad it leveled like panama city beach was is was fucked like my had a cousin and lived down there he was like they were still pulling bodies out of these woods like weeks afterwards people were dead they didn't know but like uh it it like that like that like people we all live through watch the images of Katrina and like we're getting like Katrina level

hurricanes more often than what we'd expect I think they said the damage I think it was Martin that I can't remember it was like 2018 but uh that hurricane structure like more damage was caused by it than Katrina and so like that's the major issue because like right now what we just had like three hurricanes like back to back to back and it's getting to the point where like they're causing more damage they're more powerful they're displacing people so like on top of it being just hot as shit that whole season from like june to november is like everyone's just bracing for like when's the next big one going to come and like i totally feel how like people folks in the pacific northwest like that fucking hides hottest shit up there and people don't have air conditioners

and it's it's disgusting and try to tell people you know open your windows open your doors and drink cool like drink as much water as you can try to get it's the airflow going because we've been dealing with that down here for as long as we can remember and it's getting worse and so obviously you're going to have people who can't afford electricity for their to have their AC on are going to be the ones dying a heat stroke people out in the fields like to have to work in the farms Alabama in the south is still a massive agricultural industry and it's migrant workers that are out in the fields and they're dying a heat stroke because it's so goddamn hot and it's going to get worse and so i mean that we all know

we've got to get together and organize and whatnot but like it's it's bad yeah um climate change uh like directly affects the south and in in a lot of different ways um especially you know florida like florida shoreline is shrinking mara mara lago is projected to be underwater in the next like what 20 years um but it's it's so hard to get to get that kind of activism going in the South, I believe, because a lot of a lot of Southerners are entrenched in religion. Religion is very strong here, and it's hard to bring up, you know, science without, you know, being anti-religion. And some, you know, some atheist andes out there who can't really relate to people or talk to people. I have a hard,

have a hard time connecting these things in a way that it doesn't, you know, turn off the religious, if that makes sense. Um, but yeah, yeah, climate change is a, is a huge, huge issue. Oh, and I do want to talk about the fires in, in, in California for a second, um, something that I learned from Kai, but when they stole this land from the Native Americans and the Native Americans try to teach them how to do control burns, and they're like, yeah, fuck that. And so as you see what's happening now, everything is just engulfed in flames. Like, it's just, it's bad. No, no one is doing the due diligence to do any, thing, scientists have said that, you know, we are either at the point or past the point in which we need to act fast. And I don't think anything is going to happen in the near future. So I honestly believe we're all fucked. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, it's hard to disagree with you when you look around the country. I just watched a documentary today called Bring Your Own Brigade. And it's about the wildfires in the West, its relationship to climate change, but also a huge

part of it is the mismanagement by the colonizers after they came over here and the complete ignoring of indigenous ways of maintaining and managing the land for thousands of years before, you know, colonizers came over and within a couple hundred years, we have our entire planet on the brink of

fucking collapse. But hey, don't worry because Jeff Bezos is going to space guys. Don't worry. At least we have that. So he can hover above us and watch us. The United States of space. Fucking a lasium type shit. Exactly. Exactly. I just wanted to make this point too about the heat in the south specifically is, you know, the climate scientists are worried about heat waves because they can push what's known as the wet bulb temperature, the air plus humidity together into high parts where a human body can't cool off. So if it's above 95 degrees Fahrenheit and the humidity is above 90 percent, the human body literally cannot sweat and cool it.

self off and you can only live even healthy can only live for a few hours in those conditions so you add that on top of poverty on top of electrical grids going down because they're stressed with the people that do have AC blasting it and it's just going to be it's going to be very very just terrible

the entire the entire country but that region in particular you're basically describing like Monday like it's just hot a shit yeah it sounds like Florida every day it sounds like Alabama every day it's between July and August is fucking god awful How many AC companies do we have, AC repair people?

Jesus, there's so many. I can't tell you how many Facebook posts I see every day. Like, yeah, my AC is out. Yeah, my AC is out. It's just like going through ACs. My mom just replaced hers after five years. Damn. Just bought a new one.

My dad does this real delicate dance with the AC back at the house in Florida where if you touch that thermostat any lower than 78, 78 is still pretty warm for an indoor temperature. And we also have something called Torazo floors in Florida being as moist as is. Tarazzo floor is sweat when it's that hot and it's that humid. So the inside of the house is always moist and you can't have it any cooler than 78. If it's the middle of the night, you might be able to take it down to 76. But if you have it any lower than 78, it will basically burn itself out and then you are

screwed. And my mom has medical devices. and she needs to be kept at a cooler temperature because her health is fragile. So I've ended up having to buy them a generator with several forms of fuel and get them a window unit AC so that when the power, not if, when the power goes down, my mom can survive the heat. Actually, so like I said, I spent the first 20 years of my life in Florida. I was just used to it. And then when I moved to England, the summers have been getting worse.

I know that they have been getting worse. And in England, people have built their houses for keeping in heat because winter's pretty shitty. So they've built all these houses for keeping in heat. We don't have large windows. We don't have large doors. Nobody has in-built AC systems.

I've never seen a window unit in this country. So as the summer have gotten worse, there have actually been studies that up to 8 to 900 more deaths happen in hot summers in England than when we have a relatively mild summer, that 8 to 900 more people die during those time periods. And even though that's nothing to do with the South, I did grow up in the South. I know how to keep my house cool. I know how to keep myself cool. And I've been, I've personally watched older people in England wearing, you know, your proper trousers. your proper shirt with a sweater vest. And it's like 90 degrees. And even though we would look at

90 degrees and say, well, that's not, you know, that's not the hottest has ever been. That's hotter than it is usually in England. And people die in that heat because they don't know how to deal with it. And it's not really their fault. They've never had to, they've never had to learn this before. But when it comes to, you know, when it comes to climate change, especially in places like Florida, like we've been here. Florida, I feel like has been hearing the siren longer than a lot of other places because it all started with, you know, sea level rise. And Florida is basically sea level. Most of Florida is basically sea level. We have one mountain. It's called Mount Dora. It's not a mountain. It's a hill. And so we've been hearing this kind of siren for

as long as I can remember. I remember hearing it, you know, when I was in elementary school back in the in the mid-90s. And we're used to the hurricanes, obviously. and watching the El Niño slash the La Niña effect and how that's going to bring your hurricanes closer or push them farther away, how strong they get. By the way, Nelson, that was Hurricane Michael in 2018. Michael, that was it. Okay. It was only a category four. And it was still bad.

And it fucked Panama City. So, yeah, like, I, when I, so when we're not in, in the current timeline with the virus and all that, I did used to go home for about three to four months a year, spend time with my family. And I would be home sometimes when hurricanes would come through. And the system for keeping power, for keeping water and everything, you'd think it'd be better in Florida, but it wasn't. Because there was a lot of places where nobody was investing in infrastructure in Florida to keep things like power and keep things like water running when you have huge, you know, natural events like this. they were only starting to change that maybe in the last four years that I was going home where we would always lose power during a hurricane

we would always lose water we would always have enough so I was home when we had I can't remember which one it was I think it was Imelda or something like that it was an eye hurricane where we had a water oak this gigantic water oak come down

it actually snapped the concrete base of the building it was next to it snapped it in up into the sky. And you would say, you know, we're used to these hurricanes and all that, but they're happening, it's just back to back to back, to back, and they're getting stronger. And if we're not going to exist, if we're not going to build our communities to exist with the weather, so I would say something, you know, like the original structures in Florida from the indigenous people you have to close, which have your floor raised.

You always build your large villages next to water. so that you get the coolness from the water, the breeze off the water coming in. If you're not going to continue to create your communities in a way that exists with the climate there, then we need to invest in infrastructure to keep people just alive when these things happen. And there's a lot of places in the South,

in Florida, in rural Florida, where nobody's put that infrastructure in, and people die as a result from it. And then real quick, on the flip side of that, we saw what the fuck happened in Texas, like with the massive snowstorms and people froze to death.

And then people are like, one of the biggest things that pisses me off and pisses probably all of us off is when Yankees like, oh, they deserved it because blah, blah, blah. No, we don't, ones fucking deserves that, man. They're like poor kids and, yeah, and trailer perks.

Exactly. They're poor kids. They're poor people, homeless people freezing the death. Like, people literally froze to death in Texas. Like, that shit's wild. Like, because Texas is not, just like the Pacific Northwest, people in Washington State and Oregon are dropping dead because of the heat,

because no one you're not used to that they're not used to southern temperatures we're used to 120 degrees 110 like with the heat index like it it's July and August like you're going to have multiple days of that and we know how to handle that people in texas people in the south like do not know how to handle snow like that and our houses our homes our infrastructure is not designed to take snow storms they do not have the snow plows they don't have the salt trucks they don't have the sand equipment like they don't know how to they don't know they don't even remember rat pipes and shit like it's not does they don't have these big my like i said my family's like my mom's from new york we don't have the big fucking gas powered furnaces in the bottom of the houses that like are

a thousand fucking degrees right and so like people are not used that six inches of snow shut down Atlanta yeah six inches of snow shut down the busiest airport in the world so we're not used to this and climate change with it happening is making people have to wake up be like shit like we have to do something but it's the same capitalist class the rich that like Tommy said Jeff Bezos is going to the fucking space like Elon Musk and all them that they're punching a ticket out of here and like Tyler says like an elicium type deal like it it's it's like the rich are always going to be okay and the poor are going to have to suffer the rich people didn't freeze the death in Texas like four people did uh rich people aren't dropping dead of heat strokes in the

Pacific Northwest, poor people are. So it's either we get back and we start listening what Kai said, we listen to indigenous voices. Tommy said too, we listened to indigenous voices, like, how to fix this or we're all going to die. I mean, Ted Cruz just bounced to Cancun

while, you know, poor people are freezing to death in Texas. Out of you. And then made fun of it at CPAC. It was not a big deal. Yeah, I remember that. Fuck him. Piece of shit. Fucking Zodiac killer. He is the Zodiac killer. When we talk about COVID?

Yeah, I was going to say one more thing about COVID, and we can wrap it out. I'll just open it up because I know right now the South's being hit hard. I think 20% of all new cases in the U.S. are coming out of Florida specifically. I seeUs are being overwhelmed. So tell me your thoughts on COVID and vaccine hesitancy in the South and where that comes from. It's bad. Last time I checked, we're at negative 29 ICU beds in Alabama. If you're fucking white, you have no reason to be hesitant about getting the fucking vaccine.

You're a person of color and you're a little wary. Yeah. I can write that off the fucking the Tuskegee shit. Like that did happen. Like if you're a white person, you're scared to get the vaccine, you have no reason. And like what, and to piggyback with what Tyler just said, like, my mom is one of the people's giving out the vaccine, right? And she's like, it's, people are like, oh, it's, it's black people not getting it. Oh, it's people of color not getting it.

Mom's like, it's like, she's like, I see black families come in all the time. Because there was outreach to the churches, right? She's like, I do not see white people coming to get these vaccines. I was to drop my fucking kids off at school last week. And there were parents out front of the school protesting their kids having to wear a mask. And when I drove past and I couldn't help it. But to roll down the window and just yell at them, get a fucking job, you losers. And they were so upset.

Like, and these were like, well-dressed. Like, you could tell they were like upper middle class people upset that their kids have to wear a fucking mask. The kid probably doesn't give a shit. Exactly. It's about the parents. Exactly. Get over your fucking ego. Like if my dad, the fucking Reagan baby, who showed me Rambo at fucking four years old, can go get a goddamn vaccine? You can get a fucking vaccine. I think a lot of hesitancy comes from just a lot of the misinformation that's out there.

A lot of the misinformation that's peddled on, on, you know, Facebook, on Twitter and on the news, giving it an equal platform to actual science has been the most detrimental to this vaccine I've ever seen. I think Walter, I don't know, the guy on MSNBC, he went to his hometown, went to a hospital and talked to a bunch of people

who haven't gotten vaccinated yet but we're in the hospital with COVID. And a lot of them, they weren't vaccine, they weren't anti-vaccine. They were just hesitant. they just didn't know. They were just misinformed or it misled by certain things. And they were like, you know, I'll just wait.

You know, I just thought, you know, maybe if I wait, you know, see all this stuff and this stuff, you know, wait until it gets FDA approved. It's all misinformation and all peddled by by people like Fox News who, by the way, are all vaccinated. Everybody who works at Fox News is vaccinated, point blank period. They are vaccinated. Everybody in Congress is fucking vaccinated. Point blank, period. That is how it is. And they just peddle this bullshit and get people scared and they just, you know, sit back and say, oh, no, you know, I'll just wait.

And they die. They die. They don't have access to Walter Reed Medical. They don't. Some of these people don't even have insurance. Like, they don't. Some people, they did a study. Some people believe that you have to pay for this vaccine.

A lot of people believe that you have to pay for it. that you have to have insurance to get it. And you don't. You can go right now. There are no lines. You can go right now and get your first shot. At least get one shot. Do something.

My mom had people come in with prescriptions. She's like, you don't need a prescription. Like, come on and get the vaccine. I have someone very close to me for personal reasons. Like, I don't want to put her shit out there. But like, I have someone very close to me who's an ICU nurse and has been dealing with COVID from the beginning. And she told me she's like, I'm sick and tired of telling middle-aged white men.

that are yelling at me that they're going to die. And she was like, I want to yell at them back and be like, you're going to fucking die. But I can't. But it's like the angry, rage-filled middle-aged white dude coming in who didn't get vaccinated, who thought that COVID wasn't bad, that it's just like the flu, blah, blah, whose oxygen levels are dipping into the 70s and needs to be intubated. It's like, I want to go home.

And she has to be like, if you go home, you're going to die. The amount of oxygen that you need is you can't have that at home. you have to stay here and it's like the the look on their faces she's had so many people like this look of regret like wishing they had gotten the vaccine and there's a number of stories from Alabama hospitals where doctors have been like the patients are dying and they're like can I get the vaccine now and they're like no man it's too late like you're going to die like or it's it's going to be bad and uh and to touch like to touch on tom what to Tommy said like our governor governor me ma she is vaccinated but she is not expanding but she is not expanding

in Medicaid. And so our rural hospitals have all shut down, basically, and people who live in counties without ICU beds, without access to regional medical facilities or hospitals or anything, have to travel to get some sort of health care because our Republican supermajority and our governor that people were praising a few weeks ago for, you know, saying, we need to get the vaccine. We need to not tell people, we need to start blaming unvaccinated folks. And like everyone was like, I was like, no, meant fuck her because she has not done anything to help people and and and and it's it's it's it's it's a cancer survivor she's elderly she has those pre uh those conditions that would kill her if she got covid she is like prime target for like she needs the vaccine she got it and she hasn't

helped anyone get it she has like the state government and her and all of them have not done anything to help people get the vaccine. They shut down rural hospitals to make it goddamn near impossible to get health insurance. And it's, they haven't expanded Medicaid and people are dying. Fucking. And then all of it culminates into the fucking fascist Trump having a stupid fucking rally and Coleman Alabama and saying,

oh, people, I got the vaccine. You have your freedom. I got the vaccine. You should get it. And they booed it. ass, yeah. They booed their God, their Lord and Savior, they

booed. And they have literally Trump and the Republicans and all those fuckers, those opportunists sons of bitches, they have created a monster that they can not control now. And it's going to get worse because they literally I never thought I'd

see the day. The most racist fucking city in Alabama's fucking Coleman Alabama and they fucking booed him. because he said get the vaccine. That to me is fucking insane. And it's like,

we are fucked if that is the mentality of people like that. And it's not Native Americans. It's not black people. It's not people of color. It is middle class, racist, petite bourgeois, white people that are the ones that drug. Who are supposed to care about

so much? But like they don't say that like this shit is starting to seriously fucking impact people younger and younger and younger. We, in Florida, we have, we have school districts that are just crumbling from within. I was just looking at, as I saw a story earlier, Brevard County, Brevard County has a good-sized population. Brevard County has at least 10% of the school district is in quarantine right now. That's like 7,000 kids, I think it's close to 8,000 kids are in quarantine right now. They have 7,000 staff.

10% of them are in quarantine right now. They have over 1,000 cases, and school started a couple weeks ago. Yeah, all of my kids who are in school, like, we've all been notified from their teachers that each one of the kids, like someone in their class has had COVID. One of them's in fucking daycare and COVID's gone around in there. Like, it's fucking, it's ridiculous. Horrifying. Look, if you were in the military, which most of Americans were, you were strapped down and given all. kinds of shit that you didn't know what was in it you you had to get vaccines you if you

traveled outside of the country to to certain places you have to get certain vaccines like it like we should strap people down like we did in the Spanish flu and fucking give them the vaccine just fucking shoot people up I swear to God because that's the only way the shit's going to change that's the only way it is going to if you went to public school you got your vaccines you had yeah I had my I had people friends I know in the military they lined them up with a fucking gun. Pop, pop, pop, pop, pop, pop, pop, pop, got all the vaccines. My uncle was one of my dad's brothers, one of those Q&on fucking psychos like my dad.

And he loved going on fucking mission trips. You want on a mission trip. My cousin, who is the only other person that's left-minded like me in the family, on that side of the family was like, dad, you got shot up with like 20-something vaccines just to go to Haiti for a mission trip. Why won't you get the COVID vaccine? You don't know what the fuck they gave you. Yeah, exactly.

They could have given, they could have fucking inject you. with a microchip there. Yeah. Or how about all the unvaccinated people to fucking New Jersey and tell them don't leave? I support that.

Tyler, you don't understand like this podcast has like a reach. It's like 10 times more than ours. Someone's going to hear that. That's all right. No, but like,

but yeah, it's okay. They're from New Jersey. Yeah, they're from New Jersey. Yeah, they're from New Jersey. But if people are going to shit on the south, we could shit on New Jersey. but um but yeah and on the flip side the navajo nation last time i heard it's 100% vaccinated

like it's fucking wild i i would say for my for my part in this conversation that i'll i'll compare and contrast two people in my family my father who is a white boomer who has several who has several pre-existing conditions like so many so many and my uncle who is native american who is, I think, on the cusp of boomer and gen X, neither of them are vaccinated. When it comes to my uncle, it's because, based on where he lives, based on the education that he's had,

based on being indigenous and knowing what kind of medical fuckery has been done to indigenous people for hundreds of years at this point, he is not vaccinated. And I will say right now that it's due to fear and the history of all of this. And I am way less likely to be angry at him. I don't like it, especially because my family works in tourism.

He works in tourism in Florida. He is going to be in contact with so many people from so many places and you never know what's going to happen. I don't like that he's not vaccinated, but I'm less likely to get into a full screaming argument with him that I am with my father, who has had every privilege, growing up, except maybe money. That's maybe the only privilege that he does not have, who white men don't get experimented on in the United States. White boomer men don't have to deal with the kind of interactions that we've found in the past where certain medications don't work on certain people of certain races because they never tested the interactions for people of those

certain races. So he's never had to worry about that. He's never had to worry about anything. These vaccines were basically made for somebody like him, and he is still refusing because he's just inundated with Fox News, his own pharmacists. And I'll say now that where my parents live in Florida is very metropolitan, very kind of mixed. And when we moved there, there was no money in the area, but it has turned into a very upper middle class area over the last 30 years. Um, you know, there's, there's nothing stopping him in this area, but he still refuses to do it with his, his pharmacist backing him because the pharmacist has said from his mouth that it's not FDA approved and the whole that, the whole, uh, virus is bullshit and all that. That this is, this is a pharmacist saying this to my dad. Um, and my dad is the caretaker of my mom who, as I said, is, uh, medically delicate. Um, and if, if anything happens between them, if my dad, my mom, my mom, my mom, my mom, my mom, my mom. is fully vaccinated. If anything happens with my dad, I need to get my mom out of that house as soon as possible because even though she's vaccinated, I can't take the risk of her even getting a mild

infection at this point. And if I have to move her out of there, I'm going to have to sit on a plane for 10 hours from the UK back to Florida so that I can take care of her because she can't be left alone because of her various medical conditions. She can't be left alone. So I will have to go back and stay with her for as long as possible after possible. exposing myself on on the flight in the airports getting to her possibly getting a rental car and all that um so that i can take care of her so my so and my husband also has medical conditions he has

weak lungs and even though he's fully vaccinated if he gets even a mild form of this i have to worry about him so my dad's singular choice because that's always his thing is that it's his choice because it's his body because why don't we just co-op the entire uh you know rhetoric of um of the abortion activist. Right. Because fucking rich, if you want to ask me. My body, my choice. Yeah.

Yeah. So this one choice that he's decided to make, if it works out poorly for him, he's going to ruin four people's lives. Yeah. And it just doesn't, it doesn't sink into his brain because the one thing that he could say to me is, oh, I'm not afraid of death.

It's not about you. It's literally not about you. I'd have to leave my husband alone. I'd have to be on a plane for 10 hours. and my mom is going to have to move out of her house that she's lived in for 30 years because you decided not to get vaccinated. My dad tried to like string together

like completely illogical just conspiracy boomer nonsense. And like I apparently the virus was made in a lab in Wuhan and but it's not bad but the vaccine is is bad. It's just like literally the there's a group. It's bad.

I get that we're not. supposed to like these generational wars it's not the real thing it's like a class thing but like how poverty and like how stuff like overlaps in the United States with like poverty and ethnicity right

there's like reactionary and like boomerness fucking overlap yeah and there's a group that's like sounds like the ramblings of a lead poisoned baby boomer and I'm just like some of the shit that I hear them say is just it's just from people that you thought were like like somewhat educated is just mind

boggling my dad as my dad is your typical upper middle class boomer went to college petite bourgeois and believes like this shit like will not get that this we have like a running thing on the podcast to see which whose boomer dad was going to get vaccinated first tyler one and it's a neck to neck dead last of between my dad and kai's dad who probably would be best friends in real life but then they both give each other COVID but like it's it's just it's completely mind-boggling i don't i don't get it i get this i guess this a generation divide i don't i don't like i had the fucking bra about that you would think the people who grew up with the fucking polio pandemic and like whose parents got them vaccinated for polio

like fucking my my the good italian grandfather in new york was a doctor and gave out free polio vaccines my mom remembers getting a fucking smallpox polio vaccine like how those people don't realize how that shit was eradicated and think that like oh Oh, the COVID vaccine is bad. But it's fucking mind-boggling. It really is. Yeah. Even because of this anti-vax resurrection, like polio has even come back in certain places.

Like, all these diseases that we eradicated are popping back up because of this anti-vax rhetoric. That didn't just start because of COVID, but it's been going on for a long time, a long time. It just exploded because of COVID. And I do want to address, because on Fox News, they had a guy on there that said, you know, it was black people that were hurting the country. The governor of Texas. Yeah. Yeah.

That's the monster really false, but 100% false. In fact, they don't even break it down like that. It's broken down by party lines. And Republicans are the worst about the vaccines. But as far as African Americans go, there's a higher percentage of African Americans that are vaccinated. than white people. Well, now that being said, a lot of the vaccine hesitancy from

black people, yes, there is some vaccine hesitancy, but a lot of it has to do with access to the vaccine. A lot of these communities in the south where black people are, a lot of these facilities are, you know, were built, you know, away from these

black towns, from these black settlements. So they have to travel far where they don't, A, have transportation to get to these places, or they're just too far away where they can't get to them. Now, that is a situation that, you know, it's hard to overcome. But as a whole, as black people as a whole, who can get the vaccine, who are able to get the vaccine, we are getting the vaccine.

So that's just fucking bullshit right when talking points. Absolutely. I can't believe Greg Abbott fucking said that shit, man. Fuck him. Three times, three times vaccinated. Just like what Tommy was saying earlier, like, you know, Abbott is fully vacced, DeSantis is Vaxed. Trump is vaxed. Marjorie Taylor Green is almost certainly vaxed, but they play into the bullshit. And their supporters are the ones fucking dying. Yeah. It's bonkers. Look at where they're

getting their money from. A lot of these people made money from COVID. A lot of these people invested in stocks, changed money. Kelly Loughler, huge example, made billions off of COVID, which is insider trading. Don't know why she's not. Well, I do know why she's not in jail. You know, she is white in America. And insider trade. trading is, you know, that's just, that's nothing. That's a good felony. That's just how you make money, you know, if you're not inside of trading, then you're not making money.

Exactly. But, yeah, I mean, these people are making money off of you dying. They're profiting from you dying. And you're just letting them do it. And they're just talking you into an early grade. Why, they have the, they have the best medical procedure. Like, when Trump got it, I mean, everybody kind of like, oh, shit, it's going to happen. Like, it's going to get his ass.

But he got the best treatment in the fucking world. So, of course he's not going to die. Fucking Balsanaro in Brazil gets COVID. Balasaro. But whatever that. Balasarro. Balsallso wood down there. Balsallosur.

Down there. Bobasor down there on Brazil, man. He gets it every fucking week. He's had COVID like five fucking dies, dude. When the fuck is he going to die? For real. Fascist. Dashist live forever.

For real. Before anybody wants to cancel Nelson or the rest of us for making fun of a foreign name, Balnaero is the fucking devil. I don't go, fuck what we did happen. Fuck him. Yeah, balls are hard, bro, is a pretty... You know what I really want to... I've tried that, like, we've said it before,

but, like, I really having to watch what I say on the... Because your podcast is, like, pristine compared to our, like, our thing, our racket we got going. Not anymore, Nelson, go ahead. We are the southerners who brought the tank. The South will rise again. Hell yeah, and this Mad Max climate change future will have The Southerners will be the ones

Tarran is taking over Rev. Left Radio, I'm your host, Nelson. But no, it's like, I, fuck, I've said before I wish that fucking Greg Abbott, someone would just roll his ass off a fucking cliff. He's fucking, for real. Like, he really, like, he really is like a fucking big piece of shit. He's a fucking trash bag. And like all of them, all the Southern Republicans, it's a fucking death cult. Like, people are like, the Republican, like, it's funny.

like people it's not funny but it's funny if you're a southerner they're like that didn't vote for trump it's like people like oh my god trump how could this happen it's like dude trump's been saying the same shit we've been hearing from fucking boomers at bars that we worked at since fucking 2010 like they like all these people when the republicans swept like southern state houses in 2010 they all were saying the same shit that trump said they fucking uh the people at the fucking bars that we worked at in the service industries and everything i probably heard it in the entertainment in Florida like they all literally were saying the same shit that Trump said and it culminated in 2016 when I saw that like Ohio was going to go for fucking Trump

I'm like all that I was like it's done it was this like that the the that mentality has spread I want a reporter down here coined it the Alabamaification of America like I hate it it is it as from a podcast supposed to be like it said like we're saying this is a different version of South no this fucking racist piece of shit. and they're all fucking elected. They come from the Southland. Mo Brooks is a goddamn fascist, dude. Fuck him.

True, truly a fascist. I love how he got fucking booed. You think Trump's fucking scary? Look up goddamn Emery Flommer. Oh, my God, dude. Oh, dear God. Little fucking Pinochet. Really?

Our fucking mayor that we had for like 30 years from like the 70s, like maybe like from the, all the way to 1999, Amory Falmer, they called him the Little Dictator. He fucking, I had people I worked with, Tyler worked with him too and back the house that fucking told us that Jump Street

fucking in 1980s would drive around and fucking scoop third ship would scoop around right around Montgomery scoop up black folks and beat him with fucking telephone books

and like he was a monster and he was a Republican and he was a fucking monster he would ride around hanging off the side of the SUVs smoking a cigar with a big ass fucking revolver on his hip

yeah everywhere he went with bodyguards and fucking pistols and shit it was crazy And one ironic fucking thing about that is when the Klan tried to march through Montgomery

in like the 80s. He like met them at the border of the county and told him they couldn't march through. I don't fucking what the fuck it's weird. It's like one of those weird things but like fucking no he was a fucking the shit that he did was he fucking ran this town like a fucking dictator. Yeah and his family

big money like it's that old money like he's one of the families. He met he probably met them at the border and told him they couldn't because it's just territory at that point. You don't need the Klan if you're already doing it yourself. I own the racism in this town. He didn't want someone out racist.

He was like, hold on here. This is my town. Like, we don't want the Klan here because I'm the biggest racist in these part of root and tooting varm. Nobody beats on my blacks, but me. Jesus Christ. The Klan, have you not been my police force? Holy shit, yeah.

It was all of them. They were just in the hood. God, damn. Absolutely. You just want to march, we'd be it with phone books. God. These are rookie tactics. What do you mean you're going to march?

But, oh, my God. It's just... Last guy marched through here, started up a whole bunch of trouble. We had to get the fire hose. Oh, man. Fucking... Let's not forget George Wallis.

Let's not forget George Wallace. Fuck him, dude. I took the best. Okay, I know we got to. I know. What do you mean? What's Wallace and Biden our best friend? One of the best things I heard about Wallace was in this.

If anyone, like, there's a great song I drive by truckers called Three Alabama icons. And they had the best line about George Wallace. He said, and George Wallace was burning in hell. Not because, not because of his overt racism, but because he did. in the 80s the last time he ran for governor he did this whole apology thing and won like 90% of the black vote

and ended up opening up like the state to the administrations to black people faster than the federal government in a lot of northern states but they say he's burning in hell because he was just an opportunist piece of shit that in his quest for power he threw black people under the bus

and made their lives fucking hell and that's why he's burning in hell because he's just him and Strom Thurman and all those fucking racist that are that are now the it's like every time you see like a Rand Paul or not you got to stop throwing Biden's friends under the bus now like but it's like it's like someone should I'm not artistically inclined in anyway but someone should do like a thing where it's like you take like you take like Mo Brooks and Rand Paul and like some other like prominent southern Republicans right and like put them in the foreground and the background they should just have the

fucking uh like hovering over them just like a fucking shadow of like wallace and senator eastling and strong thurman because they're literally saying the same exact shit just with dog whistles like if anyone really wants to know what the south is like anyone wants the politics of the south uh listen to the fucking what's his face got caught on a hot mic um god lee at water yeah that water is the other one yeah if you really want to hear what about the party switch and you want to hear what modern-day Republicans sound like and where they got the ideology from, listen to Lee Atwater on a hot mic

talk about the Southern strategy because he literally coins it, it's perfectly, and I'm not going to repeat what he says because he uses some pretty fucked-up language, but like it basically lays out the pattern of going from being overtly racist to dog whistles and how it's the same exact thing.

Absolutely, and just to add to that last point, libertarianism, right? Libertarianism in America is just racist Southern authoritarianism turned into one giant ideological dog wisdom. Jesus, thank you. Let me tell you.

Let me tell you. Fuck libertarians, okay. Like, libertarians at your best, you advocate for child sex. Like, go fuck yourself. Like, get out of here. My favorite quote that I think I coined is if you push a libertarian down the stairs,

there'll be a fascist before they hit the bottom. because you put libertarianism under any real world pressure, it's just straight up right-wing authoritarianism. Exactly. And it's crazy because Barry Goldwater, like I guess the champion, like right libertarianism as a Republican, literally came to Alabama and they welcomed him with open arms and he was the first Republican to really crack the deep south since Reconstruction.

And it's because he championed segregation, quote-unquote, state's rights. So like when people are like, the party switch didn't happen blah blah blah blah blah as like it did and there's plenty of proof out there and still the day confederist apologists say that it was a war about states rights not about slavery we have a libertarianism yeah i know a whole episode about that i tell you a bird nelson quotes is uh if libertarians had the way child workers would be buying heroin with bitcoin exactly right yeah they're fucking i mean name one member of nambla that's not a libertarian just name exactly there are not The Libertarian Party and Nambla are completely overlapping circles.

Exactly. The same thing. All right. Well, in that amazing note, we are up at two hours here. So, first of all, thank you all. We got a whole other hour, man. We got to break that Stalin episode and that fucking mandatory O.C. Blair Mountain shit. We got an hour and a half of this shit, man.

I don't know what you're talking about. Well, one time we'll bring the drinks and then we'll do a three, four hour episode, you know. Oh, man. Are y'all didn't? I did. I forgot mine. All right, well, seriously, honestly, thank you so much all of you for coming on,

Nelson, Kai, Tommy Tyler. Absolute pleasure to finally speak with you. And yeah, let's do it again some time. People definitely check out Dixieland of the proletariat, and I'm actually going to let you plug that before we go. So where can listeners find you and your show online? First off, Brett, okay, we're all Southerners, right? We know what a backhanded compliment is when we fucking hear one, all right?

You're telling it, you just, like, told us all, go fuck our stuff. I would never He was like bless his heart Like to all of us Yeah so check us out Dixieland the Proletariat or Dixie Prol Wherever you get your podcast We go through Lipsum

But we're on iHeartRadio Spotify YouTube Everywhere But SoundCloud because fuck SoundCloud Because we had a huge problem with them When it came to our No Evil Foods episode And they didn't put back up that episode When No Evil Foods pulled their bullshit

it. If you want to hear about that, we got three episodes on it. But yeah, basically everywhere you can listen to podcasts, we're on there. We have a Patreon where we donate our monthly surplus to groups that are run by and our help marginalize people directly. We just redid the tiers. It's $1, $3 or $5. With that, we have a Discord. We have Patreon-only episodes of a series called After Dark where we talk shit until Tyler says some shit that's completely off the fucking rails and then we have to end it. We got- Edit it with Elevetti music. Elevita music.

We're on every social media platform, Facebook, Twitter, TikTok. Yeah, Nelson's favorite, TikTok. I fucking hate TikTok. Instagram, everywhere, Twitter. And we're on Twitch. Watch the show. Yes, okay. I'm going to watch me play game.

But most importantly, we do React content. We do a lot of stuff that we can't do on the podcast. And we also play Jackbox. Jackbox games, which are pretty cool, you know, anybody in the show, you know, if we have open space, you guys can join in and play with us. It's fun. We have a good time. That's on Saturdays every other Saturday. When Tommy, when Tom, when I get my shit together. I will say that all the good ideas mostly come from Kai and she tells me and I forget

about them. And then like three months later, I'm like, we should do this. And Kai's like, you fucking white bastard. I told you this three fucking months ago. you colonize a piece of shit I did tell him to put the episodes on YouTube about a year ago and they just started and so but yeah so well I'm trying we're working with a cast

I'm trying to get them to get the Patreon only episodes up in more places but apparently some apps don't really like that especially the big ones so hopefully those episodes on YouTube as well like I said through our Patreon but you can listen to them like I said through our Patreon on um

basically every this type in Dixieland the proletariat or Dixie pro on on Google or if you'd still use ash Jeeves or wherever the Yahoo and dot prol on Twitch yes yeah dot prol DOT proe pro

and yeah support us on there Tommy is the anti Hassan Pikin Piker uh yeah I don't have a three million dollar house I'm just saying Tommy rents a house with one of his friends doesn't have essential heating hair.

I know no shit on Hassan fire for getting that house. Good on you, man. Big up. All right. Leftist can have houses. Okay. I agree with that. All right.

Well, I'll link to all of that in the show notes or at least as much as I can. And I have to say, if you guys do a jackbox thing, invite me on, I love playing that shit. I'd love to come on here. Oh, fuck yeah, man.

It'd be fun. Hell yeah. I do have to say that our jackbox games get a little spicy. Oh, my God. Fuck it. Fucking jackbox. talk about George Watt If anybody wants to cancel you

It's going to be from a Jack Boxing Okay Talk about fucking But yeah We got a we got a link tree So I have the one link that gives you fucking everything So you don't have to put like all the fucking things in there But yeah

If you hit us up on social media You're nine times at a 10 going to talk to me So I'm already sorry about that From the beginning For me if I wake up early that is true Nelson to it and if you're on if it's Twitch is definitely Tommy because I don't know how to fuck that shit works um but yeah we got merch too we have a merchant we have a merch store we just got t-shirt design one of them has Tyler's beautiful face on it and uh it's it's it's they got some cool shit and we got a sticker that guy designed and don't forget the yollinarity sticker for me yalladari sticker we have the uh no place for you know fascism hatred etc whatnot we got our logo uh we got the Tyler for corner Elmore County corner um yeah so we got a bunch

of shit so just check us out wherever you get your podcast etc oh I'll link it all in the show notes with that with that link tree and yeah hit me up anytime let's do it again I love what you're doing at Dixon land of the proletary keep it up can I say we'll lay down out real quick yeah I know what you're gonna do

real quick though uh Brett on behalf of all of us thank you so much you're literally I told the I told these I told I don't want to say guys but we got Kyle I told all I told all of everybody here that uh um this is like the i i see rev left is like the gold standard and so like for two years ago day one i was like god if we just get on fucking rep yeah he's been talking about this i've

been talking about this for like two fucking years so like for you to for to be like you can come on my podcast and let us into your space dude that is that means the world to me and our fans are fucking wild and they're so happy that this happened and i'm not gonna lie dude i was fucking shit in my britches. I was so goddamn nervous. I was just like, dude, this is fucking Brett from Red Left Radio. Like, do you fucking understand? This is like, this is God tier level shit. Well, I deeply, deeply appreciate that. It seriously means the world to me. And I, and the know that I played any role at all in helping influence or inspire you to create Dixieland and do what you do, it's incredibly humbling. So I love having

you on and I would love to do it again. Hell yeah, dude for sure. Tyler, Tyler, take us out. Okay, well, to everybody who listens to Red Left Radio from all of us, land of the proletariat good lord willing and the creek don't rise we'll see y'all next time I'm going to be able to be able to be. I grew up in North Alabama back in the 1970s, when dinosaurs still roamed the earth. Speaking, of course, of the three great Alabama icons, George Wallace, Bear Brine, and Ronnie Van Zandt. The Ronnie Van Zand wasn't from Alabama, he was from Florida. He was a huge Neil Young fan.

But in the tradition of Merle Haggard writing Noki from Muskogee to tell his dad's point of view about the hippies in Vietnam, Ronnie felt that the other side of the story should be told. Naliyang always claimed that Sweet Home Alabama was one of his favorite songs, and legend has it he was an honorary pallbearer in Ronnie's funeral, such as the duality of the Southern Fang. And Bear Bryant wore a cool-looking red checkered hat and won football games. And there's few things more loved in Alabama than football and the men who know how to win at it. So when the bear would come to town, there would be a parade. Now me, I was one of them pussy boys because I hated football. So I got a guitar. But a guitar is a poor substitute for a football with the girls in my high school.

So my band hit the road. and we didn't play no Skinnerd either. I came of age, rebelling against the music in my high school parking lot. It wasn't until years later, after leaving the South for a while, that I came to appreciate and understand the whole Skinner thing in its misunderstood glory. I left the South and learned how different people's perceptions of the Southern thing was from what I'd seen in my life, which leads us to George Wallace. Now Wallace was for all practical purposes, the governor of Alabama from 1962 until 1986.

Once when a law prevented him from succeeding himself, he ran his wife Lurlien in his place, and she won by a landslide. He's most famous as the belligerent racist voice of the segregationist south, standing in the doorways of schools and waging a political war against a federal government that he decried as hypocritical. Wallace had started out as a lawyer and a judge with a very progressive and humanitarian track record for a man of his time. But he lost his first bid for governor in 1958 by hedging on the race issue against the man

he spoke out against integration. Wallace ran again in 62 as a stomp segregationist and won big and for the next decade spoke out loudly. He accused Kennedy and King of being communist, and he was constantly on national news, representing the good people of Alabama.

And you know, race was only an issue on TV in the house that I grew up in. Wallace was viewed as a man from another time and place. But when I first ventured out of the south, I was shocked at how strongly Wallace was associated with Alabama and its people. You know, racism is a worldwide problem, and it's been since the beginning of recorded history.

And it ain't just white and black, but thanks to George Wallace, it's always a little more convenient to play it with a southern accent. And bands like Leonard Skinner attempted to show another side of the south, one that certainly exist, but few saw beyond the rebel flag, and this applies not only to their critics and detractors, but also from their fans and followers. So for a while, when Neil Young would come to town, he'd get death threats down in Alabama. Ironically, in 1971, after a particularly racially charged campaign, Wallace began backpedaling, and he opened up Alabama politics to minorities at a rate faster than most northern states or the federal government.

Wallace spent the rest of his life trying to explain away his racist pass. And in 1982, he won his last term in office with over 90% of the black vote, such is the duality of the southern thing. And George Wallace died. back in 98, and he's in hell now, not because he's a racist. His track record is a judge, and his late life quest for redemption make a good argument for his being at worst, no worse, the most white men of his generation, north or south. But because of his blind ambition and his hunger for votes, he turned a blind eye to the suffering

of black America, and he became a pawn in the fight against the civil rights cause. Fortunately for him, the devil is also a southerner. So this song's gonna take place in hell, told from the devil's point of view, as he does what any good southerner would do when company's coming. He brewed up some good sweet tea, and he whoops up some southern hospitality for the arrival of the new guest. So... ...and...

...and...