Trillbilly Worker's Party - Episode 179: Party's Over

Episode Date: December 31, 2020

A recap of the year 2020, in historical narrative form. Support us on Patreon: www.patreon.com/trillbillyworkersparty

Well, I'll just go ahead and get right into this, the most miserable day of the year. For me. Why? Rivaled only perhaps by the previous three days. Um, it's just, New Year's Eve, who needs it? You don't like fresh starts? I don't like fresh, well, I do like fresh starts. I like fresh starts i don't like well i do like fresh starts i like fresh starts in like march so you like fresh starts when the sun kind of pokes out and i'm not vitamin d depleted and

thinking about taking my own life so you're not against the idea of a new year or or in segmenting time into years you're just against the idea of it falling in the middle of winter wait we can do that no no years yeah you could do it with no year like how do we mark the passage of time just we don't you seasons we could just do seasons yeah like oh i remember back in spring yeah i guess the the idea of months dates hours minutes everything really has to do with the legal system think about it yeah where were you at on the night of march 16th at around 8 13 p.m that's true they did invent time so they could solve crimes i forgot about

that but history if we just did seasons we'd have tons of plausible deniability as i agree hey i forget where i was back in the spring of 17 who's to say really yeah i'm i'm with you i mean you're right it falls by falling in the middle of winter it gives you this false sense of hope whereas if a new year actually began at the beginning

of March let's say April April Fool's April 1st that's a good new year then yeah then that would be a good new year

yeah what we need actually is for January February maybe even March to sort of congeal into one month of... You know what I'm saying? That'd be a slog, though. See, the thing is, if that's the case, the last couple months of the year would be so brutal.

You'd get your nut months of the year would be so brutal you would you'd get your nut early in the year and then you'd have nothing to look forward to the rest of the year you you know what i'm saying like the first couple months would be nice yeah nice be fucking noise man but then the rest of the year would be a slow downhill, you know what I'm saying? Is it not already, though? I mean, are we all not just marching toward the cliff that is December 31st? And then we all get to trick ourselves that January 1 is the time for new beginnings, but it's hard to have new beginnings when you're just entering a colder fucking month.

What I'm saying is that right now the way it's arranged is the first couple months are a slow incline. And you peak in July and August. And then it's a slow decline. Whereas in your new formula for a new year, it would be incline right out the gate. And then the rest of the year for seven, eight, nine months, it would be inclined right out the gate and then the rest of the year for seven eight nine months it would be all decline you know what i'm saying yeah yeah that's true we would we'd still be enduring all the brutal season it just we would just mark it differently so when you think about it it's really the perfect it's already perfect when why change it when you really think about it man it's the perfect it's already perfect when why change

it when you really think about it man it's already not good you sound like you like new years i don't feel one way or the other about it i do think that the idea of new starts fresh starts is good obviously i guess so i guess i'll uh agree to disagree that on that a little bit have you ever had a memorable new year's best new year's i ever had senior year of high school i got shit face in my best friend tim's backyard man those were the days we We were living. We were living. We were living. What was the song that marked it?

Oh, man. What was... Let's see. Let's see. Let's see. That would have been 2005, 2006. What was big? There was a song with, like, every Houston rapper on it. Still tipping.

Or draped up in... Still tipping on 4-4s? That was not the one. There was a song with like 40 Houston rappers on it. Bro, every Houston rap song has 40 Houston rappers on it. Not one Houston rapper has ever made a song without at least three other Houston rappers on it. Not one Houston rapper has ever made a song without at least three other Houston rappers on it. Well, okay, I will say then...

Find me a Houston rap record that's just one rapper on the song by himself. By their self, I'm sorry. If I type this in, mid-2000s, Houston rap songs with hundreds of rappers. Hundreds. Were you a Swisher House guy? Yeah.

Were you into DJ Michael Watts? The 50 best. Yeah. Were you into DJ Michael Watts? The 50 best. Yeah. Draped up and ripped out. Know what I'm talking about.

Yeah, I remember that song. Man, Houston had a moment there right about that time. You're right. And they didn't let up for a while. Till Slim Thug pissed his pants, which I've been there oh yeah yeah yeah yeah um well uh so but yeah no so you're not a fan you're not a fan of new years i had a brief respite where i thought devin i'm gonna get into new year's that happened around roughly the same time as you i was in college and this girl stephanie had hit me up and was like how you coming you're coming back for the new year's party and i was well i

hadn't planned on it but when she said that i said well i mean i might do a walk through keep it light you know and then i went and i got me a walkthrough, keep it light, you know. And then I went and I got me a 12-pack of Miller Lite, and I started drinking them in Wattsburg, and I finished them when I got to Moorhead. The song of the night was, well, I didn't finish them. I drank about half of them. I've been drunker than fuck.

I drank 12 beers in two hours. The song of the night was, you remember, W wipe me down by boozy and webby and mouse and that whole crew because i'm on wipe me down as i'm on that was yeah that was the song and nothing really happened as it turned out stephanie wasn't into me but uh man i see it's just it's all just near mrs man new year's dude it's hopped up oh man this is gonna be great we're gonna ring in the and it's just you end up fucking depressed playing on your phone fucking maybe pissing your pants if you're slim thug i'm with you like i said i've not had a good New Year's since 2005, 2006. Man, there was a rumor that Devin the Dude had a cousin in Hobbs

and that he would come visit Hobbs in the cover of Night. Like, you know, that he would come visit Hobbs surreptitiously. No one knew about it. That's either absolutely true. I don't know. Or the hallmark of somebody that can engineer a lie. Because somebody that can engineer a lie can make something as implausible as that seem very true. Which, I mean, I guess Devin Duke could have a Hobbes cousin.

That's not that outlandish. Right, right. I got a cousin in Baton Rouge cousin yeah i mean it's doable that song that album ti uh that album hadn't come out yet king by ti that was a good album and i had got front to back and side to side the Front to back, yeah. The UGK sample. Yeah, that's good. Yeah, yeah. Oh, fucking A. Listen,

I've been trying all morning to do a Mitch McConnell impersonation. It's a lot harder. Well, that's it. Let's ask you a question. Listen. I keep going. What?

The American people don't want $2,000. Listen. That's like my... Dude, it's hard. That's pretty close, though. You're getting pretty close. He's got cotton. He tastes like he's got cotton balls.

He tastes. Yeah, you got to do like the Marlon Brando at the Godfather table reading and put cotton in your jaws to really do Mitch McConnell. Yeah. Listen. That's my. Amy McGrath. Listen.

I'm going to go to D.C. Yeah. I just. I don't know. I like I venture into Bill Cosby impersonation. I ain't even touching that. Listen. We're going to get two thousand,000 tax No don't do cosmic

God damn it Anyway Alright anyways Another day Another week Another day that Kentucky is the Wielded inordinate influence over the Affairs of the planet

Something we've been doing Proudly since about 1783 He wielded inordinate influence over the affairs of the planet. Something we've been doing proudly since about 1783. Yeah, that's right. When we broke off of the tyranny of Virginia. It became our own state. I think multiple states broke off the tyranny of Virginia, you know? Virginia used to be the Texas of the United States. Really?

Everybody wore bolo ties up there and drove long-ass Cadillac Eldorados with bullhorns on it? That's right. Where are you from, boy? You look... Come to Virginia, everybody just talks like they're from Texas. Yeah, yeah, yeah. They talk like Buddy Garrity. But you ain't from Richmond, are you?

You want to play big-time high school football? Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah. So, yeah. yeah yeah yeah um so uh so yeah so we're currently in the midst of stimulus negotiations although i'm pretty sure they're done last time i heard mitch mcconnell said that the senate would not be hearing the bill with two thousand dollar000 checks in it, he said that $600 is enough. This, of course, spurred a whole new round of people basically blaming Kentucky for the nation's ills. And you know what?

I'm just going to start accepting it. We are the reason everything's fucked up. That's right, motherfuckers. We're bad guys. We're fucking bad. It's a hill turn, baby. It's a hill turn. We're fucking bad guys.

Yeah. So what if we contain 12 of the nation's 25 poorest counties? We run shit, baby. We wield our influence just to fuck you all over. We don't do anything to pat our own pockets it's principle right we're like the joker we just want to see the world burn we're bad we're just bad we're just we're just bad dudes with attitudes a couple of bad dudes with attitudes the idea of like impoverished fit addicted holler people voting enthusiastically for Mitch McConnell is very funny.

Yeah. His entire – No, no, you go ahead. I was just going to say his entire base is upper middle class, like, used car dealership owners. Yeah, horse people in Louisville. Like, you know, whatever. we've said it millions of times but the fun the image that people have of the mitch mcconnell voter is funny to me yeah they think everybody's just out like somewhere with a moonshine still in a cabin and just with

vote mcconnell signs and they're fucking weed patched. Yeah. Bro, let me tell you something. Here's an essential truth of Eastern Kentucky. Nobody, nobody, everybody just kind of wants to be left the hell alone. People don't venture out and go vote and stuff like that.

Most people. Only the local power brokers like anywhere else and upwardly mobile people yep yeah it's not like mcconnell's got a big toe hold up in fucking perk creek yeah although i was thinking about this the other day you know how mcconnell every six years comes to pine mountain grill yeah somebody could chill in the cut in perk creek and peck him off from about 400 yards if they really wanted to it would be easy it really would be easy if you were a good enough shot this is a parody it's a parody account yeah right right right that was funny to me though seeing

hundreds and thousands of people being like it'd be crazy if he just died. I mean, it's, you know, it's like, if a lot of people are just saying that out loud, the FBI can't fucking come after all of us, so. That's true. I don't suggest killing Mitch McConnell. I don't believe in taking human life, NSA. But what I do think is that if the natural course of things wanted to kind of speed up a little bit. Yeah. Who are we to question God's plan?

We are at the whims of history. We've got no agency. There's nothing we can say. If there was, Bernie would be president. I mean, there's nothing we can say or do, actually. You know, sometimes things just happen. That's true.

So. And you know what? That's a good segue into what I wanted to do with this week's episode. I wanted to kind of do this week's episode sort of like a Year Zero episode. But for the year 2020 i know that i know that it's kind of a cliche or a meme to be like oh 2020 let's get it we got to get on let's get it in the rearview mirror we got to move on let's get 2020 let's hindsight's 2020 yeah it's like that song like happiness is lubbock in my rearview mirror isn't that what

it was called yeah i think you're right uh the guy who sang that died of covid this year i'm pretty sure mac davis yeah they all did um one one in a thousand amer died of COVID-19 one in a thousand over 20 million Americans have it or had it almost 10% of the country I was going to say yeah not quite but pretty close

like 7% that's pretty fucking insane if everybody that fucking contracted COVID-19 would have voted for Amy McGrath instead of fucking... Fucking sitting it out in the goddamn hospital, we wouldn't be dealing with this shit right now. Think about it.

The people who are loudest about that are people who don't need two thousand dollars so shut the fuck up yeah all right the rest of us just know that it's generally not been in the cards for us to get anything good from government in a minute also this goes back to what we were saying i think last week or the week before if you're outraged about something where the fuck you direct your outrage I mean in this country it's so diffused you have to live in DC to like overthrow the White House or whatever you have to live in Kentucky to overthrow Mitch McConnell if you don't like him but I mean it's just like it's none of its representative I don't

know it's it's just uh it's so diffused and there's nothing you can really do about it one way or the other. You just have to hope the people that live in the place where the person you don't like has politics you agree with. Or develops leprosy. Because we can't do assassinations anymore. It's poor form. They'll come in and cuff and stuff you. That's right. That's right.

So that's out. Everybody needs to stop with them little guillotine fantasies. Nobody's going to kill nobody. No, I... Listen, I agree. Listen, I agree. No, so I wanted to do... You could call it a recap of 2020, but it's not a recap.

I don't want to do a recap of 2020. I want to give 2020 the 18th of Brumaire treatment. Okay. I'm reading this book by Veronica Hedgewood about the 30 Years' War. I want to give it that kind of treatment, a sort of narrative type. I thought you said, I'm reading this book. It's called the 18th Brumaire of Napoleon Bonaparte. I thought that's what you were going to say.

It's a pamphlet, my friend. You know what? People ain't doing pamphlets anymore either. All the old tools of political warfare, assassinations, and pamphlets, nobody's doing them anymore. It's all at the ballot box now that's right just something to think about going into a new year yeah um we don't have to reinvent the wheel here folks friend of mine

hit me up this morning and said that i said all you podcasters spreading this uh force the vote crap are really putting us out there i was like man we're over here talking about the cosmic significance of fucking the jupiter and saturn alignment what the fuck you talking about we're lost at sea man if you weren't online you would have no idea what the force the vote thing is even about it It is entirely an online, which is not to say that it's not real. It's just, it's a fucking, it's theater. It's a media

spectacle. Our buddy Jordan had a good tweet yesterday. I paraphrase him. It was basically about the reduction of politics to a bunch of going live on Instagram and Discord servers and all that kind of stuff to to spout off platitudes about what's going on or whatever.

And that's true. It's like our politics have almost become influenced by the influencer culture in some ways. Well, it's just the sort of Facebookification of it it's like they go on those platforms to say the things that people like so people can say i like that and they can hit the heart button or the you know laughing emoji button you know what i mean and i've done my and i've done my part yeah i've done my part by gassing you up with the likes and the retweets and i'm not listening.

That's not me coming off the top saying, like, oh, man, you got to get out and knock door to door because you're too online. I ain't saying that either. I don't care what you do anymore. I don't either. Because I don't know. I don't know. I don't know what you do. I don't know how things get better.

I'm not happy. Well, hopefully. Do what? I'm not happy. Well, hopefully... Do what? I'm not happy. Hopefully by this exercise, it'll give you a better understanding of what is and isn't possible. Honestly, the reason I wanted to do this is because I want to kind of identify some broad social patterns oh god

in the way that the year unfolded are we gonna do uh oh my god are we going to like rate our accuracy basically that was my original plan for this episode. But I abandoned that plan as soon as I listened to an episode of ours. Because what I was going to do is I was going to go back and listen to some of our old episodes from March and April and see where our heads were at. What did we get wrong? Yeah, but I listened to 30 minutes of one episode and I was like, dude, I cannot do this. I hate our show. I hate the show. I cannot do this. so i abandoned that plan and i and i came up with

something much easier much more palatable much more understandable much more accessible and it dawned on me as i was sort of typing all this out as I was sort of creating it all, that 2020 is an amazing year because it perfectly reveals to you how sometimes, history can be very untidy, can be very messy, but sometimes, everything lines up perfectly

to give you a tidy narrative. Right. And sometimes, that can even fit neatly within a year. So 2020 is unique in the sense that the crisis began the first month of the year and it created a political dynamic within which all these smaller dynamics and everything unfolded. And then it resolved itself by the last month of the year. Of course, you could say, Terrence, things aren't resolved at all.

Things are looking to be even worse or whatever. That's not the point I'm trying to make. As I start to unfold this narrative, you will understand that this story has a beginning, a middle, and an end. It has an act one and act two. Standard three-act structure. It's got standard three-act structure. Compelling protagonist. It has compelling protagon 1 and Act 2. Standard three-act structure. It's got standard three-act structure. Compelling protagonist. It has compelling protagonists and characters.

That's exactly right. And it has a resolution. The resolution is not what you want it to be. It never will be. Your favorite books and movies, they never end the way you want them to. Or at least any of them worth their salt will never end the way you want them to, or at least any of them worth their salt will never end the way you want them to. They'll always leave you wondering, it's like the end of Sopranos. Like, what really happened?

It's up to us to decide. It's up to us to interpret. Take your own advantage of what happened to Tom. Yeah, and maybe all the Lucians didn't get tied up. Maybe they get carried over into the next season or episode or sequel or whatever. Horrible miniseries. Or horrible miniseries. Which leaves you sometimes with more questions than answers.

That's exactly right. So this year, like I said, we get a three-act structure. And so I have, for you, the listening audience, divided the year into three neat and tidy acts for you to marvel at, to marvel at the gift of history. So, but before we start, like any any good story you need a prologue you need an opening scene before you dive into the first act so this prologue opens up on me in a hospital bed in lexington kentucky man you should think about a harbinger of things to come.

Exactly right. That is exactly right. God, dude. You've got to think about that. That night you claimed to me that you had pierced the veil. And I finally got you calmed down. And then you handed

me your computer and you said, there's a lot of things i wrote in my early 20s i'm ashamed of we make sure they're deleted off this hard drive make sure my brother gets everything and i was like gets what you fucking cats all my passwords you fucking cats in your 2007 tacoma okay i'll make sure it gets there. My will and testament and all my passwords, you got it. But for those of you who don't have access to the Patreon,

this time last year, we were recording this on New Year's Eve, but if you wind the clock back to, I believe it was December 30th. December 28th. 28th. Or 29th, because our show was Street Fight in Columbus was the 28th, I think, and it was the next night.

Yeah, that's right. That's right. That's right. Because the catalyst for this night was given to us at the Street Fight show. So, prologue. Scene opens up. Me in a hospital bed, sweating profusely, grabbing onto the nurse's collar. Am I going to fucking make it?

You know, eyes massively expanded, the pupils in the eyes. I had taken too many drugs, too many drugs, over a 24-hour period of time. And I had pierced the veil. We were on our way to an Unknown Henson show who, six months later, would be super canceled. Super canceled. Spoiler, we didn't make it to Unknown Henson.

Yeah. So I had pierced the veil. Every story needs a shaman character. One second. In the opening scenes. One more thing I want to say about that. Unknown Henson, to bring it full circle,

you know why he got canceled? Because he called Dolly Parton a big-tittied bimbo that supported BLM. Seriously, something in the universe was happening in Lexington, Kentucky that night. You're right. The veil was thinner.

I mean, it was quite literally, yes, Twin Peaks. The veil between the canceled and not canceled was as thin as it had ever been that night. Exactly. So I had ever been that night. Exactly. So I had pierced this veil. I had seen through to the other side. I had seen the future. I was your seer, your shaman. And I looked at Tom and I said,

impending doom is coming, my friend. Something bad is going to happen. Something bad is coming. I think I even said that literally. Something bad is coming, my friend. Something bad is going to happen. Something bad is coming. I think I even said that literally. Something bad is coming. And we have to stick together if we're going to make through it. It's the only way we're going to make it through. This bad thing that's about to come.

And I let you go on a walk by yourself because I was like, yeah, for sure, man. So that's the prologue. End scene. act one begins we're dropped down in the middle of an america that is in its own form of advanced drug addlement um it's year three of the trump presidency democratic primary is going on um also i feel like this kind of gets lost in everything. We're in the midst of a pointless and theatrical impeachment process. So that's how the year opened up. But as you pointed out earlier, this story will have a revolving cast of characters.

this story will have a revolving cast of characters um like i said it's gonna leap from governors to mayors to presidential candidates and senators and congressmen and women um at no point in our story will we hear from any tribunes of the plebs the only one that will get close is bernie but at no point in our story will we have an mlk will we have a eugene debs those those that era of american history is over there are no voices of the masses anymore there's just the masses we have no input in the political process whatsoever like i said no martin luther king jr no eugene debs um it will it will basically just be the unwashed masses and the closest we can get to a Tribune Bernie Sanders. And I have to apologize for that because while I could have answered the bell on that,

I didn't. I retreated. The masses were crying out. Just wanted to say my bad. It's like, yes, it's like the dock worker grabbing on the linen shirt and saying, take power, you cowards, and you shirked your historical responsibility. Yeah. So our revolving cast of characters. I'll just list some of them out for you.

And there will be more. I'm sure I'll list some and you can throw them in. We've got the first class, the presidents, senators, congressmen candidates donald trump joe biden obviously bernie sanders mitch mcconnell chuck schumer and nancy pelosi all of the democratic primary cast pete butta judge uh amy klobuchar kamala harris who had bowed out of the primary by this point when we're dropping. Yeah, she was kind of out by like Halloween of 2019. Yeah, yeah. She was gone.

Yeah. Anthony Fauci. And obviously one that will come back up later. A very minor role, but a very crucial role. That's right, Senator Jim Webb. Yes. Let's not forget. No, fan favorite, Ruth Bader Ginsburg.

Or Girth Vader Ginsburg, depending on who you're asking. ginsburg or girth vader ginsburg depending on who you're asking um then we've got the governors uh cuomo andrew cuomo steve beshear uh rick desantis uh gavin newsom gretchen whitmer you know that that whole cast of people they will be important in in the first act in the first act. In the second act, we will have the mayors. Ted Wheeler, Greg Fisher, Keisha Bottoms, Bill de Blasio. You know, those who are cast of characters, so keep all of them in mind. James Wiley Craft.

James Wiley Craft. Mayor of Whitesburg, I can't say. So, like I said, we dropped down in the middle of January. We got this impeachment process going on. The historical background is a society deeply demoralized, ravaged by years and years of neoliberalism, public health infrastructure completely broken down.

Nothing to really live for except for sports drugs and entertainment drugs and entertainment that's exactly right sports were gone most of the year that's where i'm really just drugs and entertainment um right off the bat things are starting to feel a little off kobe bryant dies for example that was pretty metaphorical man sports figure one of the colossal sports figures too yeah yeah that should have been the can you get more metaphorical than that my friend the sports figure dies the year the sports die the year the sports died. God. So, in January, news starts trickling in from China of a new virus that's just been discovered. It's got very strange characteristics. We're not really sure what's up with it.

Several of these massive Chinese cities have gone into lockdown. These cities that you've never heard of with 20 million people in them. They go into lockdown. I should have mentioned earlier that one of our main characters is Xi Jinping. He will be a main character in our story. Several of these big cities go into lockdown. Fauci and Trump tell us

everything's fine. It's going to be fine. Nothing's going on. It's contained in all these other places and also um we should say that trump knew that wasn't true when he said it yeah exactly probably knew it wasn't true when that was said according to that new 30,000 word piece in the new yorker byer by Lawrence Wright about the plague year, there was something called like Operation Crimson or something like that last year, which was a simulation of what would happen in the U.S. if a massive airborne pathogen, coronavirus, was to hit our soil.

And it went terribly. Another thing, you know what's interesting about that? it terribly another thing you know let me tell you what's interesting about that also at the start of the year something else that's not entirely unrelated to all this but we forget that this this kicked off the year was trump also decided to nuke solomon uh yeah solomone solomone yeah custom solomone yeah solomone and and also also with that didn't the united states play out war games where like if they were to take out solomone what would happen in one of those scenarios was that we would lose 30 000 we'd get our asses yeah those war games were in the mid 20002000s but yeah that was uh we had done simulations for several different things that happened this year all of which pointed to our

imminent failure and we didn't listen to any of them and we didn't listen to any of them did not pay attention to any of them um so yeah we started getting news of this thing whatever at the end of february i was at a wedding in Buffalo, and I met this dude who had just gotten off a plane, the last flight from Italy, where they were locking things down. And I'd just read Origi's Long 20th Century about Italy and plague and all this, and I was like, man, this sounds kind of fucked up. And then a week later, I mean, literally a week later,

that's when they start locking things down the very first coronavirus case was identified in the u.s on january 19th we started to get a couple more in february but then by march it was pretty obvious this was everywhere that this was everywhere so they had to start locking things down they start locking locking down New York. It's pretty piecemeal at first. But then in about mid-March, they realize we're going to have to shut everything down comprehensively. All businesses closed. People are going to be laid off. This entire process of realizing that the economy needs to be shut down, realizing that there's not enough PPE to protect healthcare workers, this sets off mass chaos. If you go back to what we were saying at

the time, which obviously you can never go back and say, what did I get right or wrong? But you can look at it from a historical perspective we were amazed at how fast everything was moving and i guarantee you that if you're listening to this and you reel the clock back in your mind you will start to remember that panicked feeling you had in march and april where you were like events are moving so fast you can never even really fully engage with them grapple with them process with them history is being created right in front of your eyes every single day every square inch of the earth yeah yeah it's and even like down to like even the precautions because you remember like when they and and listen i've heard like

people on the right say this and i think that they're it's not unwarranted granted they come up with some pretty uh interesting conclusions but they did move the goalposts a little bit about like the mask wearing like oh you don't need masks this is not like they do in february this is airborne but they knew there was a shortage in march and april of ppe for a number of reasons uh one of those is because i think hadn't obama opened like 39 pandemic response centers around the world and when trump came in in his first budget he shut down like 35 of them just because they were obama era that is that and that is also in that lawrence wright new yorker thing right uh so like they're saying oh you don't need masks if you're not sick.

And that wasn't true. That was never true. They knew that wasn't true, but they said that just because they didn't want this. Still, what eventually even ended up happening was this grand rush to go raid the shelves of Home Depot for N95s and everything else. And it still happened. But, like, yeah. Tony Fauci. Man, liberals love fucking Tony Fauci,

but Fauci's culpable in a lot of this, too, honestly. He was saying, you're exactly right, in March and April that masks were not necessary. Right. Or at least in March. And we knew this was aerosol spread at least on february 2nd according to that bob woodward thing yeah you know this whole process so several things happen in march that are phenomenal um and and this is why we're doing

this episode because 2020 is a year that will serve as the pivot, I think, for what happens in the next century. It will be the year that is the hinge pivot. That everything sort of pivots on. Because several things happen. All of these things that are occurring, they're occurring in this larger economic context

of an economy that had basically just been sort of papered over with masking tape and popsicle sticks in 2008 the entire economy is is just basically built on debt and that is a tinder keg just an you know a fucking yeah it's a tinder keg waiting to be ignited so this whole situation runs up against that thing and sets it on fire the whole economy goes into recession you know you've got stock markets tanking the price of oil goes beneath zero as demand drops off for oil yeah i'll never forget that my cousin ryan said i'll pay you 35 to come take a barrel from me. So that happens.

Millions of people are laid off work. The government is trying to pass relief, but it's not able to keep up with what's going on. State unemployment offices aren't able to keep up with all the people asking for unemployment. with all the people asking for unemployment. The government itself is taking PPE from states and governors that it doesn't like, giving them to governors that it does like in a very feudal, vassal-type situation. Do you remember the New England Patriots team airplane that had all the PPE on it? Yeah. I mean, it's mass chaos chaos you've got mass chaos um so in this

in in this whole melee of things going on people being laid off mass unemployment every week you get more and more i mean i don't know if you remember the surreality. I don't know how to say it. Just the surreality of seeing those new unemployment weeks, unemployment numbers every week just go up and up and tick, up and up and up every week. It was incredible. Yeah. Culminating in a situation eventually where we had like half the country out of work,

but the stock market started going nuts again. The stock market was going crazy. Which is a very dangerous situation. That is exactly what started to happen in April. Well, in May. The stock market started going back up in May. But in April, in order to prime the pump for that, they start coming out and saying

look the economy can't stay shut down for long we're gonna have to sacrifice some people some people are gonna have to die that's when they that's yeah that's when they went with the like let's give them to our children to moloch ground let yes yes that's when they started saying it's time to sacrifice your children and mama and papa to the almighty dad you even had like u.s senators people that make decisions about what happens in our lives go on the news channels and suggest that like some people would gladly die for this country to keep the economy afloat yes like suggesting like, your grandmother would consider it a patriotic act if you went and, like, died doing your seven and a quarter hour job just to keep, you know, the registers ringing. Yes. They've said that with a straight face, Terrence.

It was like nothing you had ever seen before. This was completely unprecedented. We've never seen this kind of shit. I mean, the last time Americans have been asked to make sacrifices like that was when the Great Depression happened and FDR was asking people to give the government their gold. Yeah. You know? We've not been asked to just, like I said, go into— It's a funny wrinkle, though, because now we were asking people to give their lives so people didn't have to give up their gold.

Exactly. It was the opposite. It was the exact opposite. Just the fucking wholesale inverse. So the government tries to do a few things like bailing people out. It passes the CARES Act. Everybody gets $1,200. like bailing people out.

It passes the CARES Act. Everybody gets $1,200. But this CARES Act is just a massive handout to corporations. And it doesn't even include enough loans to cover the small businesses, which initiates a fascinating dynamic of class conflict in this country. Because you've got millions of workers out of work, but then you've got small business owners who can't stay open because they can't afford to they don't small businesses are pretty cash uh dependent cash heavy businesses and it was a weird thing too because it's like that like i remember like this is even just a few months ago and i might be getting a little

bit ahead but like that like the government started using like these refrains that were like well you know like it's kind of like echoes of the jfk that's not what you can do for you know but what you can do for your country that that type of thing and it's like right god help me for even i'm not even gonna say it with the small business thing but like it is a weird expectation to just expect people to give up their livelihood you know what i mean like when the government's doing nothing like nothing no stimulus no anything and just like well you're gonna lose your business like, well, you're going to lose your business or whatever it is you're doing. It's just part of the war effort, essentially.

Yeah. You know what I mean? It's just a very strange expectation. That will be a theme that comes back over and over again over the course of 2020 you have this dynamic get born early on in the first few months of the year that i can only describe as basically but it's kind of like the climate change thing um and you know people put the onus for climate change on the individual your personal carbon consumption and all this you get this sort of impulse created early on

that says that individual individuals are basically responsible for the right that's that's that's the point i was trying to get with that with what i was trying to get at with that thing is it was like this weird shifting of like personal responsibility and beating home the point of personal responsibility as a way to like sort of absolve the government of having to do anything that is exactly right yeah yeah and so and so what happens is um it creates this it creates this like battlefront like this whole battlefield where individuals are pitted against individuals. Those individuals are in larger classes, and those classes have expressions of antagonism and conflict. And their own interests.

And their own interests. But you start seeing this manifested in some really interesting ways. By the end of April, you have the first wave of anti-lockdown protests right you have people in like michigan saying they're going to storm the governor's mansion and kidnap the governor and all this even though i think that was an fbi plot yeah but um or here in kentucky uh you've got people um gathering in frankfurt in Frankfurt and protesting outside the General Assembly building. I mean, this is everywhere. You know what was interesting?

Do you remember there was like a honeymoon for Andy Beshear for a minute, and then after that took place, it was more like, oh, yeah, wait, that's how we're supposed to feel about this. It's an infringement yeah this is an interesting part because in this moment this is the rise of i mean this is the as i was saying earlier we have a revolving cast of characters in this moment is when governors come out on the stage in the spotlight and you get the rise of like sexy governors you know what i mean like daddy basheer daddy andy and like andrew cuomo everybody you know want him

to make their calves cramp oh my god i forgot about that shit dude and then remember when there was a push do you remember when there was a push for cuomo to be president yeah yeah he had even written a book about how good he handled the covet crisis that was out by like august right when the second spike was happening but i guess i'm getting ahead of myself right well that's the thing man all you have to do is hold office in new york during a crisis to be deemed good doesn't matter actually your numbers or how well you handle it if you're in office rudy giuliani was a national hero this is a disgusting fucking like vermin this man that everybody looks at down it's just like he i don't want to even be around him because he like leaks some sort of mink oil off of him and now and like but but back then like he could do no wrong you know what i mean

yeah um i think the larger theme we're working at here in act one is you had in a matter of about 45 days a wholesale devaluation of human life from we've got to get human capital stock back to work and people have to die from that to something we haven't mentioned yet and something that completely blew our minds at the time and made us realize we were in a new paradigm. The pandemic primary. When they made people go vote in the middle of a pandemic when everything else was shut down. You had to go stand in line with other people and vote for Joe Biden because it was important that Bernie did not win. You had to save the republic etc yeah right and you know what's what's interesting about that is like during the

general they had no qualms about democrats had no qualms about pushing the vote by mail and all this kind of stuff they're so fucking stupid in their calculus that they create the conditions to like spur these sort of right-wing conspiracies and stuff because they're so fucking stupid in their calculus that they create the conditions to like spur these sort of right-wing conspiracies and stuff because they're so fucking deluded but like they had no qualms during the primary of asking people to get out and risk life and limb to go vote for joe biden's stupid ass but in during the general they were like a very much more measured approach about your health and all this kind of stuff because it was more important that bernie lose than trump lose right i do genuinely think that i think that like they may not think that explicitly or

consciously but their own actions show that that is how they feel right i think correct um but yeah so that's the theme of act one the wholesale devaluation of life um of crumbling infrastructure and an inability of the government to do anything to help people through it and to um remove the burden of action from individuals to the collective political body. This had all happened, like I said, within about 45 days. And so then things kind of enter a holding pattern, right? Towards the end of May, they're starting to say, okay, we're going to start easing lockdowns. It looks like things are starting to ease.

So then we enter a holding pattern right until until act two act two can be dated to a specific date may 25th that is the day george floyd is killed by a minneapolis police officer that is the beginning of act two because act two begins the mass unrest of the summer. You have insurrections in major American cities. You have the burning of a police precinct station in Minneapolis. You know, they started out as protests early on. I went to one in Pikeville and I went to one in Harlan that i thought was going to get violent but surprisingly didn't yeah i went to a few in lexington and and uh one turned into kiss a cop

day remember that was some of those early ones did yeah some of those were like yeah we got to find common ground and all that stuff yeah yeah some of those early ones had that um feel good you know love is the answer blessed union of souls vibe to them right um but then things started to um unravel and it this was not because of the protesters again one of the main things about this episode and one of the one of the reasons why I think it's important is because future historians need to be able to hear it from the people themselves. The people themselves were and I'm not saying this in a lib way. I'm saying that historically the facts of the matter are that the people aren't the ones who started burning things. The cops escalated first. The cops were a counter-revolutionary force that were unleashed on a population right

that wasn't sure what to do i mean they were just given free reign they were kidnapping people they were shooting tear gas also not wearing not you never saw cops wearing masks any of that stuff now you see fop lodged sitting here pissing and crying about all the officers they lost over the summer to COVID-19. Exactly. It's exactly right. Yeah, I mean, like, you just have, you turn on the TV and half of D.C. is burning. I mean, it was pretty insane. Do you remember when we had, like, Trump put one of, like, the big-name generals to just patrol the streets of D.C.? Uh-huh.

That's what I was going to say next. They deploy the National Guard in several major cities. Louisville, D.C., Portland. In Louisville, the National Guard killed a guy, David McAtee. Yeah. In Portland, they're firing state-of-the-art tear gas at people that nobody had seen before. I mean, this was, we are thoroughly into Act 2. This is a qualitatively different set of circumstances than Act 1.

You know, we are in the stage where things are sort of disassembling and assembling themselves back again. Yeah. So like in the middle of all this, how are Dems handling this? How are the Democrats handling this? The only tribune of the plebs that we had that could have given any kind of expression

to the rage here had already bowed out. I'm talking about Bernie. He had already bowed out and gotten behind Biden. So there was no way that any of our demands were going to be harnessed any of our rage was going to be harnessed by the democrats uh despite having clear demands like defund the police and in some cases even abolish the police no they basically came out and started scolding people uh you know telling them how they should feel rather than or saying, we hear you, you know, without actually doing anything.

And like I said earlier, this is the rise. If Act One was the rise of the governor, the sexy daddy governor, Act Two is the rise of the feckless, cowed mayor, you know, who is completely cowed to police interests. I'm talking about Greg Fisher, Ted Wheeler, Keisha Bottoms, Bill de Blasio. Bill de Blasio's daughter was fucking basically kidnapped by cops, and he said, please, please, no, please, please, please. Please give me my daughter back. No, I mean. please give me my daughter back no i mean uh please can i have one daughter

i mean you know at this point the virus had kind of gone down we were sort of lulled into gone down we were sort of lulled into complacency and with regards to the virus but i mean again they were acting like it was all on us to begin with um you know the virus had gone down but that was mostly because everybody was unemployed the economy hadn't quite kicked back up yet these this unemployment fed into the mass unrest in the cities um you know you have kind of waves inside of larger waves where things ebb and flow they wax and wane you know what i mean more out more riots and stuff break out etc um but then towards the end of act two is when like like all good stories, everything starts to reassemble and set itself up for act three. Several things start to happen. Um, the schools

start to open back up and sports resume. And this coincides with a slow and gradual, steady increase in COVID. COVID starts to spike again. It's slow at first, but it starts to go back up. And also, too, we know that even during the protests, because, I mean, largely outside, a lot of people intentional about mask wearing and so forth, that even these big mass gatherings did not result in big COVID spikes anywhere. Right. I'm assuming that was mostly because they were outside.

This is largely an airborne disease. A lot of the people who were protesting, most of them were wearing masks. But you get people inside schoolhouses. You get them inside businesses. And that's where this thing is spread out. And that's what starts to happen. Economy starts to open back up gradually over the course of the summer. And schools start opening back up.

And then several things happen at the end of Act 2. Several very weird things. The first is that Obama re-enters the fold. Our itinerant... Killjoy. Vacationing former president. Yes, buzzkill former president. Re-enters the fold.

And how does he do it? He squashes the NBA walkout strike, basically. Right. I mean, that is, I think his, you could say that there were a few moments before that, obviously, like when everybody coalesced around Biden, Obama obviously had a hand in that. But I feel like his first major act coming back on the scene was saying, now LeBron, we can't be having you shut down the NBA. LeBron, shut up and dribble.

So I guess we should set that up a little bit. What happened was the NBA had done this bubble thing where they basically had quarantined everybody all the players and coaches and staff and personnel everybody that creates the nba as a entertainment product and where else the happiest place on earth disneyland norlando and it was kind of a success i mean there had no COVID cases the entire time they were there. They were very strict about if somebody broke the protocols, that they were, like, immediately excommunicated, et cetera, et cetera.

And what had happened was Sterling Brown, who plays for the Milwaukee Bucks, had been a victim of police brutality, I think twice, two different times. And so, like, after the George Floyd stuff, he goes to Giannis and Ted Acumpo, who's one of the big stars in the league, and then the Milwaukee Bucks decide they're not going to take the floor one night. Now, the whole impetus for the bubble coming together was to, like, you know, draw, raise awareness and all those things that we we talk about right rhetorical things to the police killings and right like

that was the right yeah and you just saw people had like different sayings on the back of their shirt from you know more generic stuff like equality to more like what's that mean stuff like yeah plan plan fight like what's that mean stuff like uh yeah plan plan like what was that uh i forget what it was but something to the effect of like um you know like community finance planning or something like that yeah um was it like participatory participatory budgeting like that kind of shit yeah yeah yeah yeah they had a different word for it but whatever i know what you mean and uh so this is a big thing right because the bucks walk out and then like all

of a sudden other teams say they're not going to take the floor. So they have, you know, used all this money and resources to put this bubble together. And immediately it shuts down and the protests start reverberating to other leagues. Major League Baseball teams are not taking the field. Tennis players aren't. Golfers, whoever. And, like, as far as, like, a collective action targeted at something it's working because like even in a year where revenues are down they have to do everything they can to keep what money they can in so they like basically were like leaning on these owners and stuff they were hitting them

where it hurts yeah they were hitting them where it hurts and uh when you when something starts working that's when obama shows up that's right and chris paul who is the head of the nba players association and lebron as sort of the god king of basketball call obama and say hey we need some counsel here what do you think we should do and that's when obama in essence told them to shut up and dribble right shutting down what could have been one of the bigger sort of mass like it now i feel like it's just going to sort of be a blip you know what i mean and it could have been a massive massive historical moment it was it you're exactly right it had the potential to be and when it happened when we first heard about about it, it was like, this is big. This is a huge sort of paradigm shifting event.

But also, too, telling how far the window has shifted in this country to where the only worker collective action that was really working comes from extremely well compensated workers. You know what i mean you're right like sag actors and like mb mbpa members and shit like that you know what i mean yeah i i think that um the interesting thing about that is that that isn't necessarily new um this was going on in the 1930s with actors and, you know, you'd have communist filmmakers and stuff. But I don't think that, I mean, I don't know. Obviously, the labor movement was much better organized.

It was an actual political force in the United States at the time. But you didn't have the democratic party necessarily trying to um there were obviously anti-communist hearings but those were mostly done by like insane xenophobes and people like joseph mccarthy and shit right what you have in this scenario is a figurehead from the party that is supposed to represent working people ostensibly coming out and saying no i mean if you look at it from the party that is supposed to represent working people ostensibly coming out and saying no i mean if you look at it from the 10 000 foot perspective his two major actions in 2020 were first of all making sure that bernie went down so killing that social movement and

then second of all making sure that any kind of social movement that had been created in the dynamic space of the summer protests and riots, whatever social movement was being created out of that was also killed. Because it was starting to find expression in the sports leagues and in those workers. It's so fucked up, man. You want me to tell you why? Because Barack Obama should be looked at as the biggest villain in this moment by a mile. Right. And he will absolutely go down as the person that helped install Joe Biden and save the republic. Like, you know what I'm saying? He will be the one that like sort of orchestrated in an Oz like fashion from behind the curtain, made sure that we were all OK. like fashion from behind the curtain, made sure that we were all okay.

And furthermore, to really belabor the point, once again, for future historians, to really belabor the point was single-handedly responsible in killing two major social movements in this country. The first of which was the movement created by Bernie. The second of which was the movement created by Black Lives Matter, which he did over the entire course of his presidency. Yeah, by the way, he got a head start on this in 2015, for the record. Right. Yeah. But comes back out of the woodworks after being completely vacant and absent for four years of Trump's presidency to do this.

Yeah. So that's the first you know yeah after fucking just like paris saddling with fucking richard branson and shit comes back out to squash the two biggest mass movements like that we've seen in a long time in this country right so so that happens um like i said the context for all this is covet is going back up. Everything is opening back up from schools to sports to businesses. COVID is gradually increasing. You have this moment where the social movements of the summer are starting to congeal into something, but they are dashed upon the rocks by the Democratic establishment.

And then at the end of Act 2, the very end, we get something that we all thought was going to happen. We didn't think it would happen this year. But really, just like I said, the beautiful contingency of history, Ruth Bader Ginsburg kicks the fucking bucket in mid-September. Man. in mid-september um man opening up a seat on the supreme court which the republicans immediately rushed to fill with amy coney barrett um thereby ensuring the supreme court is ruled by insane conservative ghouls for the next however many years, 6-3 Supreme Court, all because of the Democrats' own hubris, arrogance, and fecklessness.

Yeah. So that's the end of Act 2. Dog, can you imagine this? Just think about this for a second. interact too. Can you imagine this? Just think about this for a second. They don't have the presence of mind to ask

somebody in their 80s with a history of like some cancers with very low cure rates to step down while they have power. And also just punt another appointment when they could have easily filled it.

That's how short-sighted they are in the sense that COVID was, I've said this, I said this, I think, on the last episode, on the last free episode. But the thing about COVID, it is single-handedly the most revolutionary force to hit American soil in probably 150 years. disrupted every single social relation in this country has drilled down through the superstructure through culture through politics into the economic base itself um and has you know it was completely uh unforeseen right i mean even though people were saying it was going to happen this is how short-sighted the Dems are. Even if Ruth Bader Ginsburg didn't die from fucking cancer,

she was still at risk to die from something like COVID. Yeah. I mean, but none of their plans had factored in any of these contingencies. They had only been looking for the here and now. They had not been looking for how to maintain power because they don't want that they don't care about any of that don't care about people making people's lives better right they only care about the short-term gains and uh and all of that basically imploded on them um at the

end of act two but then like i said we enter a kind of holding pattern uh covid's getting worse things are are uh the protests have mostly died down um but covid is going back up life is trying to resume in really strange fashion uh it's just the kind of simulation of what life used to be people are pretending that things are going to be better. They're looking forward to Christmas. The election is closing in. And then the beginning of Act 3, like I said, just like you can date the beginning of Act 1, just like you can date the beginning of Act 2,

you can date the beginning of Act 3. Act 3 begins when Donald Trump gets COVID-19. First weekend of October. Dude. It is. You can set your watch by it, can't you? You can. Because, and I'll tell you why.

I'll tell you why this is the perfect date for the beginning of act three. All throughout the pandemic, all of the forces that had been created in Act One, pushing responsibility on this from the government to the individual, basically trying to normalize and devalue human life and normalize the loss of it, normalize the virus. life and normalize the loss of it normalize the virus all of those things came home to roost when cut when donald trump and everybody around him got covet so all year they had been trying to normalize this virus once again i'm staying this for future historians for the historical record they had been trying like hell to to normalize this revolutionary force in american life to normalize this thing that had been like i said disrupting social relations killing people

you know causing mass chaos they'd not been able to do it they finally managed to do it in their own minds i don't think they actually managed to do it in their own minds they finally managed to do it when donald trump and everybody around him got covid because then they came out and they said you don't have because because trump got over it we all thought he was gonna die for a brief moment and it was one of the most ecstatic moments of 2020 but he lived through it and the first thing he said when he got out of it he said don't fear this thing don't let it dominate your life look at me i did it we got the best doctors right that's the other way you got the best doctors that's right so i think they thought that this would help him win the election push him past the finish line it's too little too late

too little too late election comes around uh biden wins trump and and everybody tries to um tries to uh contest it um but they fail one thing before we get too far away from this i want to say is that you could tell donald trump was a guy that had never felt the death sting before. Had never feared for his life. Because there was like... You could see it on his face. There was such a fear, even down to his inimitable, am I going out like Stan?

You know? There was such a fear to him. And then after he had got out of Walter Reed, he was... I've never seen a man that happy to be alive. I mean, he was doing these weird videos on the White House lawn that had ambient, cheery music that was inspired by morning dew on the grass.

You know what I mean? Right, right. He was not talking like in his weird like disconnected sociopath tone he was like talking like in this weird perverted but perverted hopeful way it was kind of it was the whole thing it was the expression of a dying empire embodied in one human being yeah the minute he said am i going out like stan he provided a rhetorical actual expression to what this empire has been asking itself all year are Oh, my God. So, at the beginning of our story, we identified two forces here.

And I wasn't explicit about it enough. But now that we're at the end of Act 3, I need to make it completely explicit. The first force is in a year of crisis and revolution, you have the mismanagement force. You have the force that tries to normalize it all and tries to basically suppress it. Right. That is represented by Trump. Correct. The second force performs a function that is sort of dialectically complementary to the first force.

That is represented by Biden. That force tries to suppress the social movements that come out of, rather than trying to suppress the crisis itself, it tries to suppress the social movements that come out of the crisis. That's represented by biden these are the political dynamics that are created when this thing starts to really get seeded into the population and take off and unravel society and that's why i think this story has a revolution a resolution sorry an actual resolution there'll be no revolution, there will not be a revolution. That resolution is Joe Biden winning. That resolution is, on a narrative level... The only possible outcome.

Yes, the only possible outcome. The assassination of the social movements that, for a brief moment, promised to revolutionize American life, to take back our autonomy and our own lives. I'm not saying that they're dead forever. I'm not saying that they won't come back in 2021. But if and when they do, it will be under a new dynamic. The dynamic we are in now has come to an end. It has ended.

It ended when Joeiden was elected president because it represents like i said the conquering the assassination of those social movements and social forces the assassination of bernie sanders by the coward barack obama that is exactly exactly what it is and so by biden winning this dynamic has come to a close there are still things up in the air we don't know how how things are going to shake out we're not going to get our two thousand dollars it looks like but perhaps the biggest loose hanging thread that we don't have a resolution to and that will carry us into the next dynamic whatever you want to call that is the fact that this vaccine rollout has been an unmitigated disaster so far yeah complete disaster i mean there was a story as we're recording this new year's eve 2020 there was

a story just yesterday that said we're on track to let millions of x of these vaccinations expire because they can't get to where they're gonna go right um and that under the current regime schedule of of this rollout if we're not looking we're looking to reach herd immunity with the vaccine in seven years yeah seven fucking years my friend i mean it's like we we were told a month ago that this vaccine was here and that we could finally see the end of this and now it's becoming clear oh we forgot oh you actually have to be organized enough to roll out something like this you can't just have the vaccine and every no everything's fine blah blah if you don't pay people to stay home if you don't do anything to actually stop

the spread yeah you can't you can't it's like you can't out train a bad diet you know what i mean i can run six miles a day but if i'm gonna go home pound six cokes and a fucking steak and whatever it's all for not you know that is exactly right um so yeah you've got a situation where um the vaccine is not getting rolled out to the extent that it is it's gonna go to people who do definitely need it frontline health care workers and essential workers but as we mentioned on our patreon a few weeks ago, rich people are already trying to cut in line for this. Right. And I heard an absolutely haunting story on NPR this morning about nurses who, after a year of this, they're just completely burnt out. I think that when this started, there was motivation.

There was inspiration inspiration you know from there was that yeah like all hands on deck let's stop this thing exactly unity but eggs exactly but as we're dragging into go go ahead no i was just going to say but like you were saying like getting ready to say i think after dragging into this and with zero assistance from the regulatory bodies, federal government, the people that make decisions about how we live, then, yeah, why? You know what I mean? Yeah, that was the story. They were interviewing nurses, and this guy was saying the people, the nurses I work with, they're so burnt out that they're starting to look for other jobs. They're starting to look for other careers.

They just can't do this anymore. And that goes back to what I was saying. As we reach the end of the year, you should, in your sort of mind palace, in your time machine, go back. Go back to March and April and ask yourself, how did I feel back then? What did I expect was going to happen? What was unfolding at the time? What kind of sort of social forces dynamics were unfolding that shaped how I viewed things? One of those things was, you're right, people were all hands on deck, inspired.

We can do this. We can get through this together. But that is not coming true. And in fact, it looks like we are going further down the drain spiral. Well, perhaps to me, one of the darkest expressions of this is Joe Biden, a man who's not eat up with the truth. Joe Biden, a man who's not eat up with the truth, they'll stand up there and say, no, hell no, I don't support fracking.

And then in the next breath say, fracking's not going anywhere. By his own admission, he said that, like, it looks like we're going to be years getting everybody vaccinated. Yeah. Like that current clip, you know. Normal life as we knew it prior to February and March 2020 is so far off. You have to basically consign it to the dustbin of history.

It's not coming back in any way, form, or fashion. Well, what I think is the psychic toll this is all going to take. I mean, we're talking about, we can talk about healthcare tolls and all this kind of stuff, but the psychic and mental toll this has taken on a whole generation, multiple generations. We don't even know how to,

we don't even know what the reverberating effects are. You know what I mean? Yeah. So. Well, I think, I don't want to end on like a downer note. No, I don't either. I don't either because it's not, I mean, all's not lost.

I mean, that's not, we're just talking about today as it stands today. Yeah. I think another reason I wanted to look back at this year and why I want to have it on a sort of record for the future is that if anything, if anything, 2020 should show you not the complacency of the American populace, not that we are helpless and we have no agency and there's nothing we can do about any of this.

I want to show you in the sort of tradition of Marx with the 18th premier and in chapter 10 of Capital, there are various social forces at work that have their own interests. And they try to further their interests on the sort of chessboard or whatever. And if anything, 2020 should disabuse you of the idea that Americans just are helpless and that we are complacent and can't do anything about it. On the contrary, it should tell you that there are social movements that are there. They find opportunities,

you know, gaps in the sort of wall that they can sort of squeeze through and deliver whatever to the hegemonic power structures or whatever, and they'll take them when they can. The problem is that you'll always run up against people and other forces that say that they're your friend.

For example, Obama or Biden or whatever. And their actual function, their actual goal is to make sure, is to see you taken down right and that those are the two lessons we should learn from bernie and from the summer black lives matter riots and protests yeah which is that and both of those or go ahead no no no no go ahead i was just gonna say that both those social movements were 100 percent um in their own sort of ingenious way that the democrats are so good at doing they were co-opted and conquered like i said assassinated right um and that's once again it's not to say that they are finished because it's never over it's never finished this is the lesson of history it'll never be over it'll never be over there's always it's

always disassembling and reassembling itself for the next confrontation right um and so that's what you have to look for in the coming year because if you think that in the coming year as these things get worse as the health care system starts to break down, as fewer and fewer people get the vaccine that were promised it, as more and more people die because the virus will get worse. One in a thousand people in this country die from COVID, man. That still blows my mind. I mean, it defies comprehension. Yeah. As those things progress, there will 1000% be other forces and movements that will rise up to change that, to confront it, to do something.

And I think that the lesson should be that we, I don't know, stay vigilant against people trying to take it down. But we need some sort of organization, man. We need a sort of better sense of the landscape and what's possible in America. I mean, I guess you could look at it and say, well, we've got people in Congress looking out for us. Sure, that's fine, but we have to figure out some other organizational vehicle to coalesce all this rage and energy into, I guess.

Right. And as long as some of us are still wedded to the Democratic Party, that's not going to happen. To me, that's maybe the biggest lesson of 2020. Yeah. We're still connected by some sort of connective tissue to the Democratic Party, and that was our ultimate undoing in the end.

Right. I think. Yeah, that's true, man. It's, I think, to tack on to that, what I would say, too, is really just a classic lesson. Watch out for fake friends. I mean, really. I mean, you can read all the theory you want, but just simple cliches and sayings like that.

Have a good... Say much more wisdom. Keep your grass cut low that's that's that's really what you need to know well that about sums it up i think um this is obviously the last episode of 2020 um like i said i wanted to give the year the treatment that it deserved from a historical, political, economic perspective. Hopefully we told you a compelling story. 2020 was a year that could be told in narrative historical form.

Like I said, it had three acts. And who knows? Maybe 2021 will be the same. Maybe 2021 will be so insane, it will blow through those three acts within a month. I mean, it's like Lennon said, you know, like a week happens in ten years.

You know. The thing. You know the thing. You know the thing. So. So anyways, thanks for listening to the show this year. I know that it's been a hard year for us at the Trillbillies. I know multiple times I had mental breakdowns and wanted to quit this show.

We've been wracked by breakups, disease, pestilence, injuries. That's right. But on we trudge. But there were's right. But on we trudge. But there were good things. But on we trudge. So I imagine it's probably the same for the rest of you as well. So just want to thank all of you for being there with us as we go through this. Absolutely.

Absolutely. Yeah. absolutely yeah and uh you know um we have a patreon if you want to go support us over there um there is more episodes you can do more hanging out with us there as well let's go check that out and uh yeah we'll see you uh see you in We'll see you in the new year. All right, friends. We'll talk to you later. Bye-bye.