Trillbilly Worker's Party - Episode 13: WWC Tuesday Night Raw (w/ special guest: Elizabeth Catte)

Episode Date: June 16, 2017

In episode 13, we welcome historian, author, and all around G, Elizabeth Catte to talk about author Joan Williams's attempts to cash in on the current fascination of the so-called 'White Working Class' with her recent articles and new book of the same title. We also talk about Elizabeth's forthcoming book "What You Are Getting Wrong About Appalachia" among other topics, including whether Harry Caudill's* dick ever graced the pages of Time-Life. *If you're wondering who Harry Caudill is, he was basically JD Vance before JD Vance was JD Vance, but more progressive on environmental issues. More here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harry_M._Caudill

I know y'all think I'm worthless, but I have edited podcasts before, and I'm not worth I'm just not too worth it. What? Hey, y'all. Elizabeth? Hey, hey. Yeah, hey, how are you? Pretty good.

How are you doing? Oh, I'm super good. Thank you. That's good to know. Hey, I have a question before we get started here. I think we- Yeah. On behalf of all of us, how do you pronounce your last name? Kat. Okay. Just like the critter. Just like the critter. Good to hear. Good to hear.

It's been an ongoing, almost sort of joke. Like we've referenced you several times in the show. I've been repping the shit out of Elizabeth Caddy. the shit out of Elizabeth Caddy. That's so funny. No, no, no. It's like, it's cat. Okay, cool. Nothing fancy about it.

Cool. Well, thanks for joining us today, Elizabeth. Hey, it's my pleasure. Well, I guess I should go, as if you didn't already know who we all are, but I'm Terrence. Tom. And Tanya. Hey. Hey. All right, let but I'm Terrence. Tom. And Tanya. Hey. All right, let me turn your mic up a little bit, Tanya,

lest I get accused of trying to silence our... Oh, hey, Matt. Yep. Sorry. You're on my phone line, man. I'm on your phone line. New number, who dis? I'm leaving this in I heard someone popping in there

New number who dis Sorry I actually use the phone during my show Not me Elizabeth can I call you back real quick Me or the person you're interviewing Elizabeth if she's still there. All right.

All right, good luck, everybody. Thanks. Elizabeth, are you there? Yeah. Sorry. Oh, wow. We are balling on a budget over here. Yeah.

We have one phone line. We're like high school kids kids we live at home with our parents our dad happens to be doing a radio show downstairs no this is like when you used to have a party line yeah my aunt had a party line in her holler and like everybody in the holler used the same goddamn phone and you could just eavesdrop on everybody hell yeah all right i was talking about party lines last night with my boyfriend we used to have one too and it was really creepy that I wanted to write letters to like please believe it or not

to hear people talking on my phone lines about the party line holler party lines alright Elizabeth let me call you back real quick ok sure sorry Jesus Christ it's too much.

Hello. Hi. All right. Welcome to the podcast. Thanks for having me. All right. So, yeah, I guess before we get started, Elizabeth, you want to give us a little bit of information about yourself,

a little bit of personal background, what you study, where you're from, etc.? Sure, sure. I am a public historian, kind of a different sort of historian, someone who tries to help members of the public as opposed to, you know, in the academy, understand history and use history more in their daily lives. I'm from East Tennessee, from Knoxville. Originally, I just moved to Stanton, Virginia. I have a book that's coming out in a couple months called What You're Getting Wrong About Appalachia

that sort of tackles the whole Trump JD Vance hillbilly LG phenomenon. Hell yeah. Our favorite topic. And the cover looks dope as shit. Oh yeah. It's yeah. It's super, super good. I'm really pleased with that. Um, so, so yeah, no, we can talk about, um, your book. I want to talk about your book a little bit. Um, I guess it'll probably tie into what want to talk about your book a little bit. I guess it'll probably tie into what we're going to be talking a little bit about today. Today, I wanted to get things started off with what's the matter with the white working class? What's up with that bunch? What is the matter with the white working class?

Yeah, what is the matter? Havens. Havens. So, you know, there's this new book out. There's probably one just about every week these days purporting to be a sort of soothsayer or interpreter of the white working class. And the most recent one is by someone named joan williams um what is it called um white working class overcoming class cluelessness in america what we wanted to do

was talk about this book on the podcast without actually having read any of it. We just know it's bad. Right. Well, she did. Okay, so Joan did write an article in the Harvard Business Review about this very thing right after the election, and it looks like they've just sort of turned her article into a book, if that sounds about right. So, yeah, I don't know.

Elizabeth, I guess the first question is, like, what is this idea of the white working class, and why does it have so much purchase, I guess, among such a large, well, I wouldn't even say it's a large group of individuals, but it maintains a very dominant place in the sort of discourse right now. Well, I mean, the big reason is it's very profitable for somebody, right? Whether it's kind of Ivy League educated academics

flexing their credentials, or liberals who feel like um sort of guilty from the election about misunderstanding um you know their downtrodden neighbors um this is a huge cottage industry of sort of explainer um uh books and articles that have come about and i would prepare yourself for many many more to come because it's about the right kind of point in time right for all the kind of think pieces and hot takes mine included i guess um that were written right after the election to kind of start coming out all at once um but yeah i mean i read the har Harvard Business Review piece when it came out, and it was exceptionally bad. And one of the reasons why I think it's so bad is you have this kind of class of people who think that they're social, well, they are social scientists, but they're kind of interpreting sort of weighty topics and complex social issues to a general audience.

sort of weighty topics and complex social issues to a general audience. And they say, well, what we're going to tell you is backed up with data, it's backed up with science, it's polling, we're kind of making this digestible to you. But it's also laden with a lot of, like, cheap anecdotes. My favorite one from her Harvard Business Review article about her father-in-law eating blood soup. Right. Yeah, I saw it right out of the gate as a poor person

and then like somehow that explains um his i guess you know long smoldering class resentment um growing up so these like little anthropological like observations about poor people that are peppered in through what is ultimately a really bland analysis about a complex group of people. So I think what we'll see when people start talking about this book is that there's no clear definition about who the white working class actually is. Like, what are the characteristics that make somebody working class decide, you know, voting a certain way or having a specific set of politics? Is it a way to kind of make class colorblind in a way that it should not be and that it's inappropriate to talk about?

And kind of playing an old game, an old game with saying that race and class, you know, one subsumes the other, but not really adding much to the conversation. Right. Yeah, you're exactly right. It's like a way to sort of, yeah, pay lip service to class and race without actually addressing what either of those mean or where they come from or the sort of like foundational sort of structures that make them up? I think like the people that populate this genre, the people like, you know, Joan Williams,

Boston J.D. Vance, and Charles Murray, I think what really gets them excited is this idea that they can make class discourse or discussions about class colorblind. And I think the reason that that gets them really excited is that they know that the way that we talk about class, and particularly people who are lower class, people who are poor, is so racialized, you know what I mean? Like, all the baggage, most of the baggage that we get when we talk about working class people and poor people, like we see them through these racial lenses, even if they're white, we kind of,

you know, get away with saying negative things about people because our culture has normalized saying negative things about people of color, for example, who are more often than white people to be living in poverty and that sort of thing. And so I think they get really sort of like turned on by this idea that they can deflect that onto different groups of people and continue these conversations, but using and substituting different subjects. So this idea that they can make, I don't know, sort of negative, they can dilute the bootstrapping narrative

by making it really colorblind at this moment where there's a lot of money to be made in casting your net far and wide in these narratives. How can we get in on that, Rick? I don't know, do some poverty tours in Whiteford, maybe. I've done my fair share of that. We're one step ahead of you there um been there so yeah it seems it's very interesting um and you make a very good point

it seems like it's a sort of way to neutralize the discussion about class it seems like a very effective way to neutralize uh class consciousness um to me anyways i don't know it just um it feels like by so i don't know uh an article that we had discussed before that i was talking to you about before um you came on was this one in the la review of books by david rodiger wrote rodiger i'm gonna get that wrong. But, like, one of the things he was talking about in his article is essentially, like, you know, Joan C. Williams can kind of, like, fudge the numbers and what she considers to be working class. She can fudge the numbers on what she considers to be sort of middle class. But she doesn't really get into any sort of profound observations

about what class is or about what the working class is in general in America. So it seems to me to sort of uphold the status quo, if that makes any sense. Yeah, I mean, people are responding, I think, who are sort of populating this genre. It feels like we have experienced a massive political tilt because we're in this really shitty political moment.

But the swing, I don't think, and you can correct me if I'm misinterpreting the numbers, is not hugely significant in a historical way. If you get to my dress, like 10,000 people flip-flopping their vote is not something that we need to realign our kind of understanding about race in class for, if that makes sense. And I think that the people who are sort of like applying their insight to these topics really want a ginormous political shift to be there that

really isn't, right? So poor people still aren't voting. Working class people are still racist. You know, sometimes white working class people still vote on the basis of their racial affiliation. And it's not really, I don't know, it's not a fundamental shift in our society where we have ended up now and it's kind of working from the present backwards to pretend that it is, if that makes sense. So you get a lot of funky things that people like Joan Williams does when she says, well, I'm talking about the middle class, but really I'm going to call it the working class, right?

I'm talking about the middle class, but really I'm going to call it the working class, right? Or I'm talking about white people, but I'm not going to discuss racial frameworks. So it's not providing any sort of great insight to people who study these things or who think critically about these things, but it probably is making people feel that they're approaching these topics in more, I don't know, that they're getting some kind of insight or knowledge from these, you know, books and articles because the people have impressive credentials, for example. So, you know, I don't know what the future will be for this kind of writing or academic response to the election, but it's kind of really, really limp at the moment.

Yeah. You know, this is something that we talked about in the very first episode about J.D. Vance, is that you can actually sort of plot the spectrum of white supremacist writing. plot the spectrum of white supremacist uh writing you can put people like jd vance and joan williams on that sort of spectrum um mostly because they're sort of giving credence to this idea of they're giving political consciousness to whiteness and and they're putting it into a class context and that's a very dangerous thing when you've got yeah rising fascism all across the world um and and it's really it's just really kind of scary when you um think about the fact that these books sell a lot and these are these are people that get uh put on cnn and you know they're very popular pundits and all this you know i just want to

read a quote from um this article i printed it off by uh this you're like a professor with the papers i know i came prepared god damn it this woman named uh lisa tilly uh you may have read this have you read this elizabeth um i don't. I don't think so. She wrote this article. It's in some publication called Wildcat Dispatches. I don't know. But it's Lisa Tilly, The Making of the White Working Class, Where Fascist Resurgence Meets Leftist Wags 80. So I just want to read a quote from this.

She said, These narratives are unsettling precisely because they serve to build a white political consciousness and therefore to do the work of the far right in constructing the ideal constituency for fascist politics to speak to. I mean, that kind of, that's pretty bleak. So you talk about the future of this kind of writing. I think it's finding a lot of purchase, not just, you know, we talked a lot about it on this show, but it's finding a lot of purchase

with the people who want to fucking march in Pikeville. It's a very dangerous narrative to be putting out there. Yeah, I think one of the most dangerous things about these narratives, they apply a sense of coherence and a sense of cohesiveness to white culture that's not there. I think J.D. Vance is a ghoul because he is using a reason and saying that 25 million people have a stable and coherent cultural identity. And that's not true. Hey, Elizabeth, can you hear me? Yep, I can hear you fine. Start with J.D. Vance is a ghoul.

Start with J.D. Vance is a ghoul, please. I'm sure he hear you say it. So one of the reasons why I think J.D. Vance is a ghoul is because he applies a sense of cohesiveness and coherence to a culture that just doesn't exist. There's 25 million

people who live in Appalachia. It's a multicultural place. He's saying that there's a dominant culture and that this culture has certain qualities, that it has genetic qualifications, and that, you know, if you don't belong in this culture, then you're not really, you know, part of the region, that, you know, you're not really, you know, part of the region that, you know, you're not somebody who's worthy of being discussed or considered, even in sort of these negative ways that he seems to favor and that people like him seem to favor. So I think that is incredibly dangerous. And I don't know, I get a lot of criticism for kind of saying that, you when you say that um there's a unified culture

here that it um you know is not homogenous that that does work for white supremacy but i absolutely think that it does yeah and you know what we've talked about on the show before is that we see this come in waves like you're saying this isn't this is it seems like there's a new audience for this right now but it's not necessarily new um and what we've talked about seeing this in waves is you know even around um around Katrina when Katrina popped off and just um the devastation in New Orleans was um taking over uh our TVs that we felt like that was around the same time that big news outlets really clung on to the strip mining movement and started being like, but wait, look at these poor white people mining coal the wrong way or whatever the fuck they decided they were going to say about it. mining coal the wrong way or whatever the fuck they decided whatever we're going to say about it um and even before that i mean the building we're in was created um that houses this community radio station was created during the war on poverty at a time when um poverty was not displayed on

television or anywhere uh as white and then and suddenly har Caudill drops his book. This is in the height of the Civil Rights Movement and the Vietnam War. And Harry Caudill drops his Night Comes to the Cumberlands at the right time, right place, right time. He just shows up with his dick out, right place, right time.

Literally. There's pictures in Life Magazine of Harry Caudill with his dick out. i'm sure you've seen them and so suddenly all the cameras shift here um and presidents are coming here and they launched the war on poverty and um even this institution we're in was started in that time uh they quickly decided we were too radical and pulled funding but we have prevailed but uh um yeah i feel like we've talked about this we're starting to sound like baptists we say everything three times you know we tell them what we're gonna tell them tell them and tell them what we told them well but i think it's because this idea is so persistent yeah um and it you

know it's just um it's kind of this idea that there was a lot of joking. There was a lot of joking right after the election from people on sort of like left weird Twitter. It was like the takeaway that the Democrats are going to have after the election was like, well, I guess it's time to get a little more racist. We're going to have to we're going to have to meet people where they're at. a little more racist we're gonna have to we're gonna have to meet people where they're at but but like the idea of meeting people where they're at does not mean meet people where they're at uh to be more sympathetic to their conservative values and uh and sort of fears of white uh white supremacy ending and all this it's it should be like you should be trying to understand the sort of social relations and power dynamics of society around you.

Like that's, you know, that's what leftists do. We don't come into a community and look at it and say, like, well, it's a white working class. They've been left behind here. Like that's just the diagnosis, everybody. And you've got to you've got to get a little more racist if you want to understand them. It's like that article that we were talking about in the Los Angeles review about Charles Roediger, it's interesting that he was talking about this term white working class wasn't even really existent prior to very recently.

It's not a term that has been prevalent in sort of American discourse. Yeah, no, it's a, I mean, it in sort of like the acronym that we all use now like the WWC no that's like it's a you know it's a recent it's a recent invention one of the I mean one of the things that I find really really fascinating that I struggle with in my work and I try to write about and try to you know apply critical thinking to is why people need Appalachia to be white. Because obviously we're not a place that has, you know, a lot of robust racial diversity in some areas, but I look, you know, you can look at the last census and 10 is like

the top whitest places in the United States, there are two in Appalachia, right? So casting the region as monolithic, as like this sort of like last bastion of the white working class, is a really kind of sleazy lens and dangerous lens to apply to the region. People use it, like you said, they really get excited that there are people up there who can complicate, you know, universal notions of things like white privilege. Like, J.D. Vance loves to kind of compare Barack Obama's daughters to coal miners in

West Virginia. Oh, my God. Like, you know, go explain privilege to a coal miner in West Virginia looking at, you know, Sasha Obama, who could benefit from affirmative action, never mind that they're, you know, African-American coal miners. But it's this idea that they really like that, you know, they like this complication that Appalachians provide. And I think, you know, that's something that we were talking about, you know, a little bit earlier, why people discuss class and race very badly in our current moment is because they like the idea that the working class can be,

the white working class can be almost like an oppressed minority. And so, you know, Appalachia has been sort of ground zero recently for that kind of, you know, sleazy fodder. Yeah, it encourages class cooperation. And by that I mean it encourages, if you appeal to the whiteness, you are basically encouraging cooperation among the working class and the ruling class.

Because it gives you a sort of common... And that's why I think like maybe jd vance and these people latch on to this idea and i could be wrong i don't know i mean i tend to look at this in a very marxist way but i i think that they they they push this so hard because it does sort of diffuse class solidarity it does sort of neutralize class solidarity if you can if you can cut out if you can carve out an entire sort of electorate from the working class and call them the white working class well that's it it is very effective at neutralizing class solidarity. And that's the last thing that the ruling class has won is for us to all band together.

Yeah, I mean, people like to teach. I mean, class mobility is, you know, if it exists at all, it's going to exist for white individuals and people to use class mobility at sort of lower middle class people. It's easier to kind of imagine a scenario where you can transcend sort of like the negative baggage associated with your class. But it's definitely, I think it is definitely driving a wedge. I don't know if you guys saw this, but some very private school recently had, I think it was Choate, had a headline like, Choate students have a new appreciation for hillbillies.

Yeah, I think I did see this. And so I also think that what I was going to say is I also don't think that you can achieve, like, class solidarity when you always feel like that you're the subject of pieces like this. Like, you're not doing the work. It's really hard. Like, I think really talented people can, like, build up and tear down at the same time. But I don't think that I'm equipped for that. So I'm sort of like a tearing down person.

And I think, you know, this political moment calls for both. So people who need to build coalitions, also people who need to keep like breaking down those stereotypes. And obviously very distracting to keep having to explain yourself, explain your, you know, your upbringing, explain your class consciousness to to the world at large yeah yeah um so you know and we don't have to spend much more time on it but there was one thing in this uh book that i found in the article that was fucking crazy um was about joan williams um like adoration of bill cl. As like, what she says, was she says he was the last Democratic president

to truly understand the white working class. Oh my God. So like, one of the funny things about this is that this article mentions this sort of campaign, this, and I don't know if you remember this. This is towards the end of the article. This campaign that Clinton's campaign team was doing in Michigan,

Maycomb County, Michigan. It says, The project invited white workers to identify as middle-class taxpayers in a white community rather than as workers in integrated plants and unions. The, quote,

white working class voter was attended to and half understood in a way that fully accented the white and engaged class negligibly. God, I really messed that term up. But so, that's interesting. And then in 2016, Trump did the exact

same thing in the exact same county. So it's very interesting to think about. Bill Clinton sabotaged his wife by providing the blueprint. Well, yeah, it's just like's very interesting to think about uh bill clinton sabotaged his wife by providing the blueprint well yeah it's just like these pollsters have this uh idea of this it's like sort of like you were saying earlier elizabeth like they have this idea that like the white working class like if you can sort of isolate them negate the class part emphasize the white part they can be flipped to sort of like do whatever you want to do with them and um

i don't know i just thought that was a very interesting part of the book uh and as we're roasting this book um that's just ridiculous that joan williams thinks that that's a just a really great idea i don't know maybe it's a short short that Bill Clinton used to wear or something but yeah oh yeah well so let's can we talk a little bit about your book I mean

yeah of course so what is everyone getting wrong with Appalachia I mean I'm sure you probably you've definitely mentioned some of the things but don't give it all away we want to buy your book yeah and tell everybody where they can find it to buy it so all of our listeners sure so so the book is basically me hating on um a lot of the articles and takes and sort of commentary that were generated that was generated about Appalachia during the election.

I actually counted them up at one time, and there are close to like 24 articles about McDowell County, West Virginia, like during this like four to six month sort of peak between, like right before the West Virginia primary and the general election. So I do a lot of, like, tearing down of those, but I also use history to kind of push back at these narratives because, I mean, what's striking to me, I'm sure it's what's striking to you, is when you read these pieces, there's so many types of individuals, so many important moments from history that are left out. According to what's written about Appalachia, I don't exist.

You guys don't exist. People with progressive politics don't exist. People of color don't exist. People who are trying to make the region better, you know, they just, they don't exist. Unless you're like a, you know, a disadvantaged coal miner with a sad story, you know, you really don't exist in these narratives. with a sad story, you know, you really don't exist in these narratives. So I try to use, you know, a lot of history from about the turn of the 19th century to the present day to kind of push back on this, to show where these narratives come from. I want to really

locate bad takes about Appalachia in an economy. So I want to show that writing shitty articles and books and narratives about Appalachia makes people money, makes people who aren't Appalachians money, I should say. So just to say that, you know, these are part of like a cycle of plunder that's been happening in the region. I also want to introduce people to a lot of people, to a lot of individuals and stories that are just completely left out so people like Appalachian group to save the land and the people all you know Blair Mountain make one things that people you know it might be on their radar or maybe they want to learn more about it and to talk about what radical action people and Appalachia have to take to arrest or, you know, mitigate the problem.

Elizabeth, I appreciate this so much. I'm pretty excited to get your book. And one, I want to know if you'll come do a book signing little thing in Wattsburg. We'd love to have you here. Yes, absolutely. If you're planning on touring around like a rock star. Yeah, if you send me your address on Twitter or something like that i'll send you a copy of the book yeah and we'd love to have you here too and i will come do all the all the stuff in whitesburg yay sounds great

um i i appreciate this so much because literally just today and this has been ongoing where I work we are dealing with severe um uh journalist fatigue every day almost we get a call from some journalist somewhere like today it was some woman in Belgium who is coming here next week and is being so pushy and she literally calls and this is they all do I want to talk to a out of work call minor and and you know and and you're just like well call the fucking unemployment office i don't know what to fucking tell you like and so of course we know people find the most end of the rope bastard yeah yeah why do you want to come here and salt people's wounds man and so you know we we were kind of you know we uh my co-worker planned this whole thing for

her she was like okay come on friday night get up saturday morning go to the farmer's market you can talk to people there then go to um then go to the small businesses in town you talk to people there on sunday i'll take you a tour around the county and then on monday you can go to cowan creek music school which is this beautiful music school that's happening it starts here on monday and the woman was like no no no i need direct contacts with people i need an out-of-work coal miner i want to get black lung myself yeah it's just like they have a fucking list quota and my i was in the office with my co-worker we share an office and she was literally yelling at this woman on the phone she was just like I told you that I have journalist fatigue right now and I just set this whole thing up for you

and I didn't know that what you actually wanted was to just leech off of any relationships we have in this community. Did you tell them all the unemployed coal miners were busy learning how to code? That's a funny thing. Actually, they had a funny joke about this on chapo this week is like coal miners are basically like chimney sweeps like it's like they don't really even exist anymore like yeah they do out west and there's some in west virginia still but there's like 36 employed miners in our county right now uh not a whole lot of them left um and it's funny you say that

because that that this megan fucking kelly shit from the weekend it's so hideous and and they aired at the same time as this godforsaken uh alex jones bit is aired is aired at the same segment as the Hillbilly Days. They call Rusty fucking Justice the bit source motherfucker in Pikeville. They call him a hillbilly hero and it's all wrapped in together. And I swear to God, I feel like this is a

targeted attempt to use poor white people, the white working class for her to bring her to like bring her conservative audience with her she's literally using us and and there's even a segment with um ada smith on there um talking about people leaving um the region for economic opportunities and they use this whole fucked up brain drain narrative which ada did not say but they're like everyone the best and brightest leaves.

And it's like, bitch, do we wear too much camo? Are we invisible? Where? We're here. We're here. What the fuck?

Oh God. Yeah. I think like when I was doing sort of like writing on my website, one of the articles that really made me snap was for a reason. You know, that website, it's like for, a reason, you know that website? It's like for— Yes, libertarian.

I mean, it's like a libertarian website. Oh, yeah. And it's a guy called Ron Bailey who wrote about his trip to, you guessed it, McDowell County, West Virginia. Oh, yeah. And he goes to, like, the office of Head Start or something like that, and he talks to children. And he's like, these children are just, they're like PR machines. They're like, you know, telling, you've got to feel bad for them because they're trying to tell us good things about their town.

And it's really horrible to think of, like, the other side to that where you're kind of, like, minding your own business as sort of like a 13-year-old and head start, and some guy from, from like a libertarian website comes into your office and i was like hey your existence sucks can i write it out that you got a good quote for me and this is like real fatigue that people are having and it's you know it it makes me very angry yeah it's impossible yeah you can say something tom you look like you want i had a joke worked up in my head But I couldn't articulate it

It's gonna be about Ron telling kids It was cool to smoke pot but paying taxes Was not cool But I couldn't finesse it Well Yeah so I totally feel that too Journalist fatigue

But I want to Sort of not necessarily pivot away from this, but I kind of just want to talk a little bit about what the future is for leftist organizing in general or how we can push back

on this white working class thing. Basically, what I'm asking you, Elizabeth, is how you feel about the absolute boy, Jeremy Corbyn. The absolute boy. Oh, I love Jeremy Corbyn. I lived in a part of the, it's not part of the UK, but I used to live in this place called the Isle of Man, which is right off the coast of England.

And so I have like radical minors on both sides of my family. I have like the British minors from the 1980s, family. I have, like, the British minors from the 1980s. They also have, like, Appalachian minors. So I was super excited to see what Labour did in the last election. And I think, like, as a leftist, as a person who is losing hope from time to time, the election really moved me in a way that, beyond my cynicism, that I feel on almost a daily or hourly basis about a way forward. Right. And so, like, do you have any thoughts

on, like, the lessons that we can take for, like, with that in mind into, I know it's a construct that doesn't exist but like uh what people term trump country you know what i'm saying like uh or rural organizing in general or or with this idea in mind i guess of trump country i don't know if that makes any sense yeah i mean i think one of the lessons from the british is go left or go home, right? There was a suspicion among pundits that Jeremy was too radical for his party, that he was pushing his party too far left in a really dangerous way. Sounds familiar.

Yeah, and I mean, it did. It sounded familiar. So I think, you know, the lesson for me is to keep pushing left. Obviously, it's going to be different for me because I'm going to try to organize here around health care. And that's not quite the same dynamic that people experience in the UK because they have universal health care. Yeah. that people experience in the UK because they have universal health care. But, you know, anti-austerity, universal basic income, universal health care, are sort of what I see personally as a way forward for regions like ours. I was reading in The Guardian, you know, The Guardian did like a follow-up about the Pikesville rally recently, and it was about two young women who were waitresses. I don't know if you guys read this.

But they were waitresses who were waiting on Matthew Heimbach and some traditional worker party people and how they were really tempted by... One of them was skeptical, but one of them was really tempted by what she was hearing about this faux support for working families. And we have to very strongly take that seriously and push back against it. We need to talk about our problems with race and our problems with gender in the region, because if we're not going to talk about them, somebody else is going to talk about them.

They're going to do it badly. So we need to control our narratives, both the good things about the region and the bad things about the region, and have these open conversations about what we can do better, what we can move forward, to keep pushing left, to give people, we have to give people something. The Democratic Party doesn't give people in Appalachia anything, I think. A friend of mine said recently something like, once you start hating Democrats, it's easy to keep hating Democrats. And I was a little bit skittish towards that when I first heard it, but now I'm kind of

on board. Yeah. That, you know, we have to take our own way forward. Yeah. It can get much worse, right? Well, that's true. So the reason I ask is because this idea, this construct of Trump country, seems to imply that where we live is any more conservative than anywhere else in the United States.

And first of all, you know, I think you probably agree with me that that's not true. Second of all, the United States at large is not a conservative country. The people in mass, if you are a Democrat, if you believe in democracy, I mean, a small T Democrat, you believe in democracy, you believe that people in mass working together make the best possible decisions for the future. And if you give them a vision that is compelling and that makes them want to fight with one another for that future, they'll work towards it. And I think that that's what Corbyn showed. But this idea that people like Joan C. Williams, who made her career as a feminist scholar, you know, a liberal scholar. It's like, if they keep putting forward this narrative

that these places are inherently conservative and you just have to go down to them and meet them where they're at and just get a little more racist, then they're going to continue to be ineffective. And so I think that it's just important to keep all that in mind, you know, as we sort of move forward as leftists. And I don't know, that's the reason I sort of like posed it in that framing, if that makes any sense. No, I mean, I'm a big believer in solidarity

and getting people to buy in to a shared commitment to one another, there's lots of potential for that to happen here. You know, history gives us great examples of that happening in the past, in the recent past in Appalachia. It's happening today, too, just a little bit more out of sight, perhaps. But, you know, if we can find ways to help people create the solidarity outside of sort of this narrative that's being imposed on us, that we are, you know, sort of like people who need to be saved by outsiders, people who need to be like pitied and protected. I think that might kind of bring some, I don't know, bring some brighter days to at least people, you know, in a small way. Yeah. And it feels like organizers all over the country have a lot to learn and gain from rural experiences.

And even beyond rural, even Appalachian experiences, it's like we know our neighbors, right? We talk to each other. We run into people we don't like at Food City, and we fucking talk to them, because we have to. We can't just write people off completely and never deal with them again, much as I have tried. Like you actually have to work through shit with people and, and go and be on a journey together of imperfection. We are like not perfect, We're fucking up. And we have to. We have to keep going together. We have to keep doing things together. And I feel like a lot of the organizing in big urban centers,

people can just write someone off and just go organize in another group of people. And like they don't have to deal with you anymore. You don't have to deal with them if you don't want to. And people are just more scared of each other I mean we I talked about this me when I go to cities I'm I'm fighting my own fear of other people because I'm out of my comfort zone and I can't imagine feeling like that all the time in a city where you just know so few of the people around you um any given time I just about know most of the people around me um no almost no matter where i'm at at least i've had conversation with them before um or know their sisters brother-in-law's kid or whatever it

is you know um so uh before we start sort of uh wrap this up i only had one more thing i wanted to talk about uh and it doesn't even really warrant much of a discussion because it's a stupid fucking podcast that nobody listens to. Not ours, the one I'm about to talk about. People actually listen to our podcast. But this podcast was... It's either people or bots.

I don't know. But this podcast from West Virginia, public broadcaster or or whatever was talking shit about our homie Elizabeth. Oh, my beef with the front porch? Yeah, yeah. So I just wanted to, on the Trill Billy podcast, fucking call out the front porch. Your shit. No one listens to you. Fuck your whole crew.

Fuck your whole crew. Tom's better at this than I am. Did y'all listen to my little segment that they did? It was weird. Say that again, Elizabeth. I mean, did you guys listen to the segment that they did? It was kind of weird. It was weird.

Very weird, yeah. I listened to it as weird. It was weird. Very weird, yeah. I listened to it as well. It was strange. They just wanted to hear both sides. I did not notice that the Black Panthers were in Pikeville until I listened to Lori Lynn on the West Virginia Public Radio. That is so absurd. So absurd.

Yeah, no, it's funny, though, that they're framing for that whole thing. It's like they have to have a conservative on there. Gotta hear both sides. Gotta hear both sides. Well, Elizabeth, I actually wanted to ask about your small business that you have that you do. You offer research support to organizers, right? I do. So I have a company on my history.

You're cutting out again, sweetie. Sorry. So I do research consulting. I have a small company called Passel, and we offer free research services to anybody that lives in Appalachia that we like. If we don't like you, you can't get our labor. But no, if you have like a community group that's, you know, trying to do work on some social issues like prison abolition, pipelines,

you think that you might need some historical perspective or you need to know how to use an archive or where some resources might be located. Anyone can feel free to contact us and we'll do our best to help. That is so helpful. The three of us have definitely run into this issue of trying to dig up a ton

of shit. Consider your first mission to find that archive photo of Harry Coddell with his dick in it. We made it bad. That's your first assignment from the Trillbillies. So that could be the cover art on this episode on SoundCloud. We're making it a t-shirt. That should be the Trillbillies.

Instead of the Avon lady, it's Harry Coddle leaning up against the Cadillac with his dick out. This is going to be our version of John Dillinger's dick in the Smithsonian. Yeah. Oh, gosh. this is going to be our version of uh john dillinger's dick in the smithsonian yeah oh gosh yeah i'm probably gonna hit you up for something and if yeah i mean and people i mean the other thing is like people need things like references for jobs and you know mentoring advice and things like that um so if you're a person who wants to try to find an internship at a museum or do something like that,

basically anything that we can do to help, we will do it. You can Skype me, email, whatever. We're at the disposal of cool people in the region.

We know a lot of cool people Yeah Well you definitely gotta come visit us in Wattsburg We'll take you to the temperature controlled Vault of the Apple Shop Archive You can get jiggy with it Oh nice And then we'll have you actually on the podcast

In the studio Get a group pic. Yeah. So, but yeah, Elizabeth, thanks for being on the show today. I mean, I guess we'll let you go. We've taken up a solid hour of your time. If you don't care, tell us one more time how to get your book. Oh, yeah.

So, Belt Publishing, just B-E-L-T, has the book now. It's available for pre-order. If you pre-order it now, I'd sign it, but, you know, you can wait. There'll be an e-book. Hopefully I'll get up to some bookstores, you know, in the region and do some events there. But check it out on Belt Publishing. If you think that you, if you have a media organization and you want, like, an advanced copy, there's contact information to kind of put in a request for that too.

Sweet. Cool. Perfect. Well, um, I'll definitely get it. So, um,

thanks for joining us and, uh, we'll see you on the interwebs and hopefully in person soon. Okay. You guys take care. Thanks so much. Thank you, Elizabeth. And that they up, cause I run that block Get me top, in my drop

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