Trillbilly Worker's Party - Episode 394: Bring The Kiln (w/ special guest Devin O'Shea)

Episode Date: May 29, 2025

Writer Devin O'Shea joins us to talk about the recent tornado that hit St. Louis: how it has revealed the socio-economic past, present, and future, and what we can expect in a world where climate change will continue to disrupt the social landscape Read Devin's article here: https://www.thenation.com/article/economy/st-louis-tornado-delmar-divide-recovery/ Support us on Patreon: www.patreon.com/trillbillyworkersparty

Okay, welcome to the show this week, Trailbilly listeners. We're joined by Devin O'Shea, who's a writer in St. Louis. We're going to talk a little bit about the tornadoes that they experienced about a week and a half ago. And well, you know, we also experienced the same storm it really the same storm that hit you guys hit us and Had a lot of very I don't know is just a very similar sort of a lot of sort of similar structural features of Of that but before we get into talking about the storm

You tease something just before we started recording Dolly Parton veiled profit Question mark Veiled profit crossover? Dolly Parton ex veiled profit She's like, she's got to tape him down in order to get into the costume To pass as the veiled profit himself Maybe she thought it was camp.

I don't know. Is it part of it? She's not entirely wrong I suppose. Yeah I was just saying that I was referencing Tom's piece in the Baffler about Dolly and about her headlining the Veiled Prophet Fair in the 1990s which was like Prophet Fair in the 1990s, which was like this big Reaganite celebration under the arch that ends in as all the old prophet things like embarrassing catastrophe, horrible like offense to the St. Louis black community. It's quite a ride. For our listeners who don't know who aren't familiar with St. Louis history, what is the Veiled Prophet Fair?

Oh yeah. So the Veiled Prophet is like a very strange Mardi Gras tradition that like a guy dresses up in a big veil and robes and he calls himself like the veil prophet of chorus and this costume comes from Ku Klux imagery from the 1870s and then he has a big debutant ball it's it's such a Yeah, is there is there any sort of defense of the clan looking attire. I mean, because I'm assuming that they're like, no, I know how it looks and the origins of it,

but we've reclaimed it. You're like lighting a cross on fire. Now I know how this looks. I know how this may seem, brother, but. Now I ain't got a racist bone in my body. But. You're cutting out the eye holes, you know, like I said. There's like very little engagement with any of those criticisms.

It's always like, no, this is a St. Louis tradition from tradition that had nothing to do with nothing going on in the past. It's got no symbology and yet it's very symbolic. Yeah. They just continuously bumble into the contradictions of St. Louis being a half black half white city and having this ruling elites that does this very public display of fucking clan worship It's happens over and over again We're gonna talk a little bit about this in once we get start talking about the tornado But what is the history of st. Louis like why is it a half black, half white city? I mean that it does that does sales like perfectly with the tornado stuff because there's you know St. Louis was really the place to be in the 1800s in like the Victorian era. It

was like it was projected to be the biggest city in the United States. A bunch of dickheads were trying to get the US Capitol moved to St. Louis in the 1890s. But there was also a ton of great migration happening from the south that was coming straight up the Mississippi River. And there was a lot of industrialists in St. Louis that were encouraging cheap black labor from the South to come up and settle in East St. Louis and industrial Maine St. Louis. It's always been the migratory path towards California and only the weirdest people stick around and didn't make it to California.

There's a bunch of different people here and a bunch of different immigrant communities. But it's always been a black city and it's like the Northwest outpost of the South, I feel like, yeah, it's a, and especially, so the thing that the piece is really about is how the tornado cut across the Delmar divide in St. Louis. And that's like this very well studied socioeconomic dividing line on Delmar Avenue where north of it, predominantly black very Poor like there's rich or richer middle-class black neighborhoods in North County, but in North City, it's like this is the the zone of like

the most impoverished the most overpoliced Ferguson isn't too far away from North City, where Michael Brown was killed. And yeah, there's just, there's a ton of history of like why it got that way. All of it's depressing. So buckle up. Well, until a little group called the St. Lunatics came along in the early 2000s. And then that's right, the tide started to turn. For a brief moment, Mellie was pulling us out of the muck. I saw him back in December of 23, my cousin and I went to a UFC fight in Las Vegas, which was a little more anthropologic for me than it was for him. And when we got back to the hotel, because he's like a professional gambler, and so they

would always put us up in these places and give us the royal treatment because they knew he was going to spend money or whatever and when we came back it was like a fever dream. I was look we were like back at the place like three in the morning I looked down in the lobby and there's just Nelly on like a little PVPA playing a like a medley of his hits for Dana White and his friends and I was like medley of his hits for Dana wide and his friends he does exist yeah that album is still grinding country grammar is responsible for me thinking growing up in New Mexico me thinking

that st. Louis was the south like it yeah that makes sense I didn't know anything about st. Louis or the South really I mean it kind of it kind of is it's Missouri's kind of one of Those tweener places, you know, it's kind of got a foot in the south and foot in the Midwest, you know Oh, yeah, it's like it's a weird like it almost that like geographic part makes the city Totally schizophrenic and like produce these really strange Totally schizophrenic and like produce these really strange

Like national symbols like during the George Floyd protests of McCloskey's sort of pointing guns at the protesters On their mansion steps. Oh Yeah, that was st. Louis. That's right. Yeah. All right. Yeah Yeah Every time st. Louis gets like popular is in the news. It's always for something like very dark I feel I feel like also to there might be a Sort of symbolically historically I guess of this kind of tension between you know The working-class African American communities and the rich white communities, you know, just encapsulating that one picture preps Which is also probably encapsulated in the veiled prophet

Which is also probably encapsulated in the veiled profit ritual Exactly like the what we're talking about the Del Mar divide is literally two blocks away from the McCloskey's Mansion and then they used to have the veiled profit ball in the Chase Park Plaza And that's another block to the south so all of these things are like Yeah next to each other can I just ask pose a question? I'm just thinking now like I mean is this is this I'm just stuck on the veil profit thing Are do is it I mean do black people are there what if you are a black guy that just walked in? Yeah, so like there's black staffs obviously that like cater the whole thing People who are working at the Hyatt will have come and talked to me before about like you know

fucking weird shit is going on here They make them wear and so forth Go ahead damn it. I'm sorry No, it's just it's bizarre cuz there's the guy and then there's all the girls in prom dresses and then all of the dudes in the club have medallions and are in tuxedos with white gloves and The medallions are all they seem anodyne But then I found one of them that somebody sent me that said a Latin phrase on it And you translated and it's veneration of the rope This is why Mardi Gras this is what white people would do with Mardi Gras right because like I don't really know the history

of Mardi Gras, but surely it's not like some top-down elite like it's like I Don't know right this this just sounds like a mixture which I guess I mean it's just sounds like a mixture between a secret society and literally the Klin you know with the little bit of like arcane mysticism thrown into it with like a twin peaks Laura Palmer thing too right don't they have like a felted prophet like yeah, they had the unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt was presented in belled prophet, right? Yeah, Ellie Kemper, yeah he's

Not been back to the ball so far as I know but All the former queens are invited to return every year Yeah, it's like it's all of that mixed in and it's actually exactly what you said, Terrence. It is white people Mardi Gras where they have shut down all of the Bakhtin carnival sort of like libidinal release of inverting the rules of society or like, you know, in Mardi Gras in New Orleans at its best, it's like pure anarchism. The king becomes the fool. The fool is the king. All of that is shut out. None of that's invited. Instead,

you have the CEO class of McDonald Douglas or Monsanto or Anheuser-Busch or Purina. Peabody Cole. Absolutely. One of the evilest to ever do it. And also not profitable either in like series of bankruptcies since like the 20 times. Go ahead, Tom. Oh, no, I was just going to say, I remember we had Jordan Camp on to talk about Clive Woods' book, Development Arrested. And I remember him and Terrence had a very elegant and elaborate discussion about that book that at the time was a hair too dense for my feeble mind to really sink my teeth

into. But an interesting aside that he gets into is that he kind of talks about the Arcana and like the origin story of the Klan and how like sort of the reason in the Delta, because the book is about the founding of the Delta Commission, how you know the planter class named cities like Cairo, Illinois or Philadelphia, Mississippi or Memphis, Tennessee after these like Egyptian cities and then like the clan running with that would call them so what the Grand Dragon, the Great Patrician, and all these like weird sort of semi-occult sort of symbolism. It seems like Vail Prophet's about, you know,

in that same sort of ecosystem. That's like a thousand percent right, because these are all Victorian-ass fancy boys who have been reading 1001 Arabian Nights. And if you've ever paged through that, there's an enormous amount of sex happening right away and a lot of racial tension. Like, interracial relationships are a major theme

of 1001 Nights and Edward Said, there's a whole thing about you know the European fancy lad mind wants to go and do what is being repressed in Victorian like society right they want to do that in the Oriental they want to get away and sort of like fantasize about it as a Persian king right right right it's exactly where those Mississippi town names come from. Yeah, well, yeah, we're like in Egypt Slaves allowed to happen Instead of the Great Pyramid though, you just build a giant, you know Bass Pro Shop in the shape of

That's right. I've driven by there. It's great on the way to a Grizzlies game. I have a question. What year did Dolly Parton do the Valed Profit fair? Was it before or after the Dixie Stampede was closed? Oh, I wonder. That's a good question. Oh, that was definitely, that was definitely before Dixie Stampede was closed. Dixie Stampede was around till like fairly recently. Dixie Stampede was closed. Dixie Stampede was around until like fairly recently. Damn. Yeah, this would have been,

it was only called the Veiled Prophet Fair from like 80, I think it started in 83 and then gets all the way to 94. And then they have a year where they close the bridge to East St. Louis because they're afraid of thugs and gang members coming over to- Oh my God. And ruining their racist parade by-

Exactly. Like a parade, okay. The like giant celebration of Americana where like George H.W. Bush is swearing in immigrants and also putting people like, people are enlisting in the military all at once, like under the arch. And they're like, we don't want the gangs here. So they shut down the bridge and got in a bunch of trouble because it reminded everybody of the East St. Louis pogrom in 1917. And that had to do with black people fleeing st. Louis over the bridges from explicitly racist like

Yeah, killing campaign was really very gruesome that I've never been but the arch Seems almost kind of occultish. I mean that that's a that's kind of a creepy Architectural is that a portal? It's a portal dark dimension. It's a portal It's true. I think the devil often appears in archways. That's like a theme in literature It was also built by aero surinam who is a Was a forerunner to the CIA the OSS white devil under an archer an archer. Talk about the Finnish architect that did the TWA Hotel in New York City. That's him.

Yeah, okay, yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, he was really into archways and also was in the OSS. Dude, damn. Really, Earl Sarden was in the OSS? That's... Oh, so social, yeah. Huh, interesting.

There's some portal energy, some occultish portal energy going on the white devil varieties White devil seems very in control of the city for much of its history Well, okay, well this might be a good place to Talk talk about the tornado that recently struck St. Louis and there was multiple in this storm, you know, it went across I think even Wisconsin and Illinois and obviously came down into Kentucky and we can talk a little bit about that in

a minute. But Devin, maybe just talk a little bit about what happened, like this was May 16th, right? What happened on that day and what were some of the failures that occurred to result in such a high both fatality count and amount of destruction? Yeah, this is another... I want to start by saying that St. Louis is a beautiful place to live. There's lots of redeeming things about the city. It is not, the upper class is very racist, but there's a large midsection

that is just getting by working class, lots of immigrant communities from all over the world, just to preface this and also very competent people in government, but the day before the tornado on Thursday, the city listened to an entire afternoon's worth of tornado sirens on a completely clear day. They went on for like an hour testing the system. And then the next day there was like a storm that was going to roll in in the afternoon. I got back to the house. I was like, you know, I'm gonna open the window and have a nice little

you know afternoon of watching the storm roll in while I work on some stuff and then a Severe weather alert goes out. No tornado siren goes off and a gigantic Like there's five categories for tornadoes and one that's a three with 150 mile per hour winds, touchdown in Clayton, an affluent suburb, and then goes for 23 miles through the city. Probably, it is probably the worst natural disaster in St. Louis's at least century-long history now. And it caused a lot of destruction where it touched down on the wealthy parts, but then it like sped up as it got to North City into the Ville, which is a historic black neighborhood. And then got even more intense in O'Fallon as it was exiting, going across

the Missouri River, across the Mississippi into Illinois, and it gets all the way up to Edwardsville. And it does a lot of damage on the north side because there's a strategic, century-long campaign to disinvest from North St. Louis. Yeah, you mentioned it a second ago the Delmar divide You know that I think what's so interesting to me about this is the kind of like socio-economic path of this tornado and like something that I experienced a lot we experienced a lot during the flood was just how Obviously natural disasters don't care about You know the class segregation

the political geography of Cities and in towns and stuff much like facts in that way much like yeah, I do not care But so yeah, so you Maybe talk a little bit about like why does when we've hinted at it obviously but like what is the delmar divide? and like what is What was this sort of path of the the tornado? There's yeah, it's sort of like it's a perfect metaphor for I think you know I Tear into your piece in the bath or about flooding, about the wave of like building in flood zones, of housing that becomes available in very

dangerous flooding areas. Uh, only the poorest and most exploitable workers live there. Um, and the Delmar divide is this big embarrassment because in 2014, the BBC, the British came over and did like a fucking documentary about how bad the, they called it an economic cliff because on one side there's houses that are worth millions of dollars and then like one block north of that is houses that you can buy for $4,000. That is because of redlining. The city leadership in the mid-century took this strategy around blight in urban development to use zoning

laws basically to liquidate the black neighborhoods, working class neighborhoods, especially in the center of the city that would have serviced the downtown industrial area. They didn't need those anymore. Mill Creek is the best example where they did a fraudulent voting thing where they're like, should we demolish this? Everybody say aye. Then the city was like, yeah, get rid of it. And so they evicted thousands of black families from Mill Creek and pushed

basically black St. Louisans north across the Delmar divide. Because at that time, the Ville was sort of a parallel middle-class economy. Like it was a Jim Crow, there was like a Jim Crow segregation line across Del Mar and on the north side you could have a perfectly productive, you know, you could send your kid to black schooling from elementary school all the way up through medical school at Homer G Phillips Hospital. You could own your own house, black small businesses, but

they're all separate. And then as deindustrialization takes, it just robs basically first the factories from North St. Louis and then it gets to the other ones. But you get this horrible economic rolling crisis. And then the city uses zoning laws to like blight neighborhoods, which I'm sure you are very familiar with. So just like poor people living somewhere that's blighted. We got to like disperse them and then get in there and level it to restructure. Right. I just want to comment, Devin, because, you know, it's something that you see reproduced out the country, but I've seen especially in Atlanta, you know, neighborhoods in southwest

Atlanta where it'll be just a difference of blocks, you know, of blighted homes. And then, you know, there are these houses where, you know, affluent white people live, you know what I mean? That like, and also just in terms of the social services too, I mean, this is something that I'm that happened and Mosley park, I think in Atlanta, I think in maybe the forties or the fifties where literally certain public services like garbage pickup, for example, those things, they stopped doing those things in these communities. And it's almost like they,

let they allow these communities to fall into disarray. You know what I mean? Yeah. In order to push people out. I think it's like a similar, like we were saying, St. Louis is the Northwest outpost of the South and a lot of these urban areas, New Orleans, Richmond, you can see that those cities are on the avant-garde of doing this disinvestment at home campaign

of like, let's cut out a little part of the city and just stop servicing it to save money You know and yeah, I've read this I read this book I've mentioned it a million times in the show but at this point over the last few months But I read this book by Melinda Cooper called counter-revolution And she talks about how like in after the neoliberal turn in the 70s and 80s Missouri more than any other state made municipal incorporation incredibly easy.

So as they would just push farther and farther outside of like the urban cores, you would have people just basically incorporating municipalities, like either because of like white flight, or as we're talking about like blight and all this, like they would just incorporate these municipalities either because of like white flight or as we're talking about like blight and all this like They would just incorporate these municipalities that had no services

You know no infrastructure or anything like that, but there also wasn't much of a tax base So like you had these overlapping features of white flight and de-industrialization And the way that they tried to capture revenue was through strip malls and speed traps. So it's like, it's just like this weird convergence of like consumerism and, you know, military disinformation. Yeah. Crazy. This is the thing that makes me the most fucking furious because in St. Louis, this has totally gone to its logical conclusion where that was the strategy

of the county. So there's this big dividing line between the city and the county, and really St. Louis is just one big blob, but there's a big distinction. So the county gets to sprawl west, and all the white people move to the western quadrants. And that worked for last century, and now's not working because like you have to invest in Utilities and like infrastructure and housing you have that working class people around to work the jobs of the strip mall and shit like that There's no public transit system. So everybody has a car It's totally carved up by roads. And so the only growth in Missouri is in St. Charles, which is like a northwest or a northeast

tumor of St. Louis that keeps expanding west. And our fucking governor gets together with these big cattle slaughtering operations for like the only new job growth is to turn the northeast part of Missouri into a big slaughter area. God, that's so fucking grim, man. Just the industrialization of mass slaughter as being this metaphor for just, I don't know, just the hollowing out of social services, not giving a fuck about people's lives at all.

Oh, man. Exactly. So then people move to these new counties near to do the slaughterhouse jobs And then they bitch about like how come there's no park around here and like how come there's no the sewers don't work And there's rolling blackouts and shit. It's like well dog. You don't pay any taxes and your house was five dollars Mike Davis talks about this in prisoners of the American dream like specifically like slaughterhouses and meatpacking Facilities like they used to be in the north They used to be closer to Chicago or in the upper Midwest or in the Northeast But again after the neoliberal turn they started relocating in the states like Kansas and Missouri and then the south where there's right-to-work laws they would

just hand out like you know tax abatements on all these facilities so there's not much of a tax base this this this is partially what explains the development of the red state right it's like this sort of relocation of production and quote unquote manufacturing to these states where there's no regulations, no work safety laws, no unionization. And they're not necessarily white people jobs either. A lot of those slaughterhouses end up being entirely run by Mexican labor that is, or labor from South America. And you know that there's some back alley deals with Tyson or whatever to be like, don't let ICE come around here. It's just, yeah.

Yeah, this is what Trump was referring to when he was like, well, there will still be some work permits for people to come over and do sort when he was like, well, you know, there will still be some like, you know, work permits for people to come over and do like sort of, you know, low wage work that's, you know, right, that nobody wants to do. Yeah, the work, the work that allows us to live, you know, you know, these luxurious kind of lives, you know, you can eat a steak, you know, that some guy was like, you know, slaughtering, you know, a bull, you know that some guy was like, you know slaughtering, you know a bull You know what I mean at the bad profit You can have a steak at the bad profit ball and see your daughter Presented to society by your best friend in business

Okay, well so like we are good. No good. No, it's good. I was just Classic did it again go ahead Terrence good. Well, I was just gonna talk about like we've got the So we talked about the tornado May 16th, right like Kentucky also got hit in this storm Kentucky also got hit in this storm 20 something people died in southern Kentucky and part of the reason why was I mean this was an extremely powerful storm But part of the reason why was after the doge cuts on the National Weather Service This National Weather Service station in Jackson didn't have an overnight operator so when this thing hit at midnight There was no one to basically like tell people to get out of their homes and all this

To what extent were the cuts to the National Weather Service? Did it play into the high number of fatalities in destruction in st. Louis? if at all I yeah, this is like sort of the debate right now is like, well, whose fault is the tornado? And some people, a lot of people are blaming the city's emergency office, SEMA, because they are saying we have a small office and we weren't there, we were at a meeting while the thing was happening. We didn't know that the storm was going to cause like this

many tornadoes. Like there's an abnormal amount of tornadoes that were caused by this one system. Like I think it was seven or something. That's not usual. And SEMA was saying that the fire department was supposed to press the siren button and warn everybody, but it didn't happen. Also the button didn't work but they tested it. Can I ask a question too? Because it actually turns that was what

you just asked was the question I was gonna ask before I interrupted you but I just wanted to know just to even to explain a little more so the the sirens went off the day before during tests but when they were actually needed to save people's lives, they didn't. So like the mayor said that, I think in the piece you said that she said that this was a human, an issue of human error, I think was the term she had used. So like, I mean, I guess I know this is what you're talking about, but why is it specifically that they didn't work the next day? It is a, it's some intersection of incompetence and like bureaucratic mismanagement and also that the weather service is going to get worse and worse at predicting like severe weather,

especially in the Midwest and in like the East Coast and the West Coast, they have a better percentage of prediction. But this hinterland where we live that's beautiful and where real Americans are, that's going to get worse and harder to predict. The St. Louis mayor also, we had an election and it was a big racial politics thing where the first black female mayor that came in off of the Ferguson protests, she was ousted by Kara Spencer, who's a white lady, who was a former banker, who was very business friendly. And she just got into office and then this big kerplosion happens.

Uh, the sh she makes some bad moves, but also I have to emphasize that being the mayor of a Rust Belt city is a fucking bad job. That is not a fun job. You know, it's your fault no matter what. And it's impossible to actually like I don't know There's larger forces at play and all of that stuff but yeah, this iron didn't go off because the button didn't work or something like that and Then a lot of people were just caught out in their cars and like 150 mile winds

And there's a lot of trees in st. Louis that then get turned into projectiles I got a tree falls on a guy and Condolette Park. Yes, like being hit with a cannon or something. Yeah a cannon. Yeah it's literally like artillery at that point if you get a trunk big enough, that's like then hurtling through the air and in on the north side, especially There's just a there's not money to do tuck pointing on brick homes, and there's no money to put in a new roof, and there's no money to make sure that your structural foundation is really sound.

And so it cuts through a lot of houses, I mean, it rips the roofs off of whole rows of houses. It fucking obliterated a church. The church collapsed in on a lady and killed her and she was really tragic. And then on top of that, you have this blasé Midwesternism about like, yeah, when the tornado sirens go off, I don't give a shit.

I'm just curious about, because I mean, we're gonna see this extreme, you know, this extreme weather, you know, happen all over the country, whether it's floods, you know, tornadoes, hurricanes, but like wildfires. But what is it? Maybe this is just a sidebar. I can never understand what it is about people who don't like have such a blase attitude. I'm not talking about people who really have nowhere to go.

They don't have the resources to go, you know? I'm just saying people who just don't take it I mean, I guess there's a whole bunch of questions wrapped up in answers wrapped up in that but it's just it's just terrifying man Cuz things are going to get worse, you know Yeah, I mean it's a The tornado is specifically weird because there's basically a three block Line through the city that just looks like it was shelled by martyrs and like it was blown up.

And then you go two blocks further and everything is totally fine. And like they never even lost power. It is hard to get then, I think, everybody in the city to even like empathize with people who are living in tents outside of a pile of rubble that was their house. Especially if it happens in an already impoverished community that's been disinvested.

A community that's been completely both abandoned and sabotaged over and over and over again. The black St. Louis wealth has been wiped off the boards now like four generations straight of just complete disinvestment. And it behooves everybody to pay attention to that because one day you're gonna need FEMA to show up.

One day you are gonna need the state legislature to like do emergency shit to make sure that this stuff, that you're not suddenly living in Mad Max, which it felt like for a minute there, of like, there's no rules anymore. You call the cops, how are they going to get there? There's 40 trees down between here and the police department. It's total anarchy and like how do you know when they come? How do you know when they're when they come because I know in your piece you mentioned that the mayor Had there was a curfew, you know, which obviously you don't want people I mean people who don't know if people unhoused people because of the storm

I don't know where they're gonna go But I guess you don't want people to be outside to be harmed. But also, I think you'd mentioned that she put a stop to a prohibited any sort of, I mean, I would call it mutual aid, you know, people going out there and helping one another. So like, what's that? What's that? What? How do you? I mean, I don't know. I'm not asking you personally. You're not the mayor, but just that kind of tension between, well, you don't want people to get hurt because there's all these particulates and toxic particulates in the air,

but also too, the fucking, you know, the municipality isn't gonna do shit, officials aren't gonna do shit, the cops are not gonna do shit and help you, you know? But it's the community, right? And this is where, you know, in times like this, crises like this, this is where you see communities get together and help one another out, you know? This is a really, that's a great question because like, that is the problem. There's

a bunch of like, roof insulation is annihilated and then spread into the breathing air as is asbestos and lead paint. Do you call it tornado lung? Is there a term for it? Yeah, they're like black lung man tornado It's just not the term you want to hear coming out of the doctor's mouth you got tornado long dog But it's a great question too, like there's all those dangerous things that are out there that you don't want to have a bunch of people just running around in the dark, falling on a rusty nail and then having to go to the hospital, overloading the hospital.

This person will remain anonymous, but there's also a reaction amongst, let's say, our fellow red-blooded Americans to tornado touches down, powers out, it's the end of the world. I'm going to take an entire handful of mushrooms. I'm going to take all the mushrooms and I'm going to wander around with my friend who's also on mushrooms, and it's going to be like the last of us. Then we're going to get kind of scared from wandering around, and we're going to go back to our house that's on a main, very busy street. We're going to get a little drunk, smoke a little weed, chill out, sit on the porch,

witness a gruesome car accident suddenly in which somebody has stolen a Kia, two guys, who I think were white, stole a Kia, slammed into another car, if that matters in the story, and then they take off running after the accident. And so this anonymous person starts chasing one of the Kia guys into the neighborhoods, flips, slashes his hand open, suddenly has a wound, and then him and his friend, who are both on mushrooms, suddenly fit the description of the key of thieves as the cops are now scouring the neighborhood.

This is like, go ahead. They're like, yo, there's no way you could be innocent taking drugs in the middle of a disaster. Yeah. Dude. It's just like compounding factors. We are so unprepared for it. I was thinking about this.

I read a story in the New York Times this morning about this group in Oklahoma that simulates wars. You know, we do war reenactment already, like Civil War, World War II, all that shit. They reenacted future we do war reenactment already in like Civil War World War two all the shit They react to future wars. They reenacted they're reenacting the Ukrainian Russian war right now Like why it's too soon? It's just like it's this it's this simultaneous like Disconnect from everything that like everything is artificial and superficial because we're on our phones all the time

That like everything is artificial and superficial because we're on our phones all the time Running smack dab into the actual reality of it. I've been thinking about this with regards to the storm chasing I saw because I like to fucking like I don't know what it is like I guess I've just clicked on a few too many videos of tornadoes and now my feed is constantly filled with storm chasers But it's all video. I've saw video these storm chasers in I don't know I want to say it was like Maybe it was Wisconsin or Iowa or something like that and they were there was They this guy was videotaping this tornado and there were cars Lined up for miles these were not and there were cars lined up for miles. These were not commuters.

These were, maybe some of them were, probably got stuck in it, but they were all storm chasers. Like people are so enamored with getting the content that like, it's like I said, it's like the artificiality of everything kind of running smack dab into the terrifying, gruesome reality of like, you know what I mean, of what's in front of us. It's like we don't need thousands of people out

videotaping storms. We need to actually be preparing for it, doing mutual aid, taking care of it. In fairness, Twister 2 dealt with this in a very... I was just about to say that Tom, I was literally just about to say that. But I think in classic American fashion, I think people took the wrong license from that movie.

They were like, no, this is cool. No, these guys had like a million followers. They were sitting in the eye of the tornado. You can do that. You can actually do that and not die like, no, dude. Jesus Christ. It's that's what I'm talking about. It's like everything is kind of simultaneously simulation, but then the simulation becomes real. Everything is kind of simultaneously simulation, but then the simulation becomes real. You wind up becoming the suspects of the psychodrama you're chasing, right?

Because you think it's cool and epic. A lesson circling back to the Russia-Ukraine war that, remember those people in the early days of that, that were like going over there thinking it was going to be epic and they didn't even know that they were just being enlisted as cannon fodder. Yeah. Yeah, right. Yeah. Oh.

Well, I mean, it's like you said, Terrence, it's like treating the spectacle as something that, I mean, as a spectacle instead of, and treating this natural disaster or war as a spectacle instead of seeing it as like a question of life and death, you know? Yeah. And survival, you know what I mean life and death, you know? Yeah. And survival, you know what I mean?

And community, you know? Yeah. There's, and there was a lot of like bad behavior right off the bat. Like you said, there's like a curfew that was put on the North wards, but they were out of power and there was not like, I don't know, there wasn't an immediate blow up. It wasn't like a Hobbesian thing because in St. Louis, there's a ton of mutual aid organizing, especially in the black community because of 2014, because of Black Lives Matter and George Floyd.

There are these legacy organizations that have community ties that immediately reacted. The mayor said, you shouldn't self deploy, which the organizers are taking as like their own, you know, oh, I'm self deploying today, you know, they're sort of like turning it around. So they did get out there and immediately start doing aid, feeding people, people need medicine, there's a lot of elderly people who need like medications and you know, all kinds of stuff just to like, they're very vulnerable, you know, a couple days without power is a deadly event for some people. And

so there was both all of those things were happening at once. This horrible, there was also a thing of like, there's hail coming in and a bunch of drivers on the highway stopped under an overpass and blocked traffic. I saw that. Fucking, that'll make you really a black pill, like all we deserve. But happening at the same time is also this community organizing and this awareness that Nobody's gonna come and save us. We have to do it ourselves. We have to like have these connections ready to go yeah, it's we're dealing with a lot of this in Kentucky because Kentucky slowly started to become part of tornado alley somehow

right in Jesus, but then on top of that, like we have, I think we have like maybe the second or third highest number of, we have the largest number of river mileage, navigable river mileage of any state except Alaska. Oh wow. But we also, that means we have a ton of dammed lakes, like they're manmade lakes that were made

in like the mid-century to prevent flooding, specifically in the Ohio River Valley. Those dams are all starting to outlive their purpose in the new climate paradigm. So like, it's just an interesting thing where like our legislature Slaters are in full denial about like the new climate paradigm right like climate denial as an ideology is kind of It justifies inaction. It's like we don't have an action. I mean we do have an action because of climate denial ideology But it's also because like climate denial as an ideological form

is just a form, a way of rationalizing not doing anything and basically sacrificing people to. Right. Yeah. No, I know. I mean, I was just in distant, like you mentioned this, I know it's a book that you've mentioned, but just the term even discounting the future, you know, you see in Atlanta, I mean, whether it's cop city and cutting down

a bunch of trees that are responsible for carbon capture and keeping the city not cool, but not boiling hot, or whether it's the fact that a lot of these roots, the trees, they prevent flooding. So it's like all of this foliage prevents the city from being swamped completely. Yeah. And it's like that, but also too, and I guess Devin, I wanted to ask you a question. There are definitely ways where capital and real estate kind of, I guess, decides whether or not to invest in some of these, in some communities that have been hit, but also there's the fact that they'll never be rebuilt.

Are you seeing in St. Louis, are you seeing maybe this exploitation by, do you think you'll see exploitation by real estate, by these mega builders and also simultaneously some of the most, again, already impoverished, disenfranchised, disinvested communities, the black working communities, that these neighborhoods and this infrastructure will never be rebuilt. Yeah. What's the abundance agenda say about natural disaster recovery? Good news, we've zoned your house for a 7-eleven That winning message

You can have all the hot dogs you want that's right The that's a great question because In the piece I get into a little bit of Paul McKee who's like a big super villain of st. Louis real development. He's just a giant slumlord. He literally owns properties that he lets fall down. The strategy is to buy up all of these North St. Louis in red lines districts, all these buildings, and then to let them collapse so that then you can clear them and then eventually down the line, redevelop them and sell the land for more. And so the big fear is that this is going to be like a Katrina level event where

you're going to displace more of the St. Louis black community, which makes the city what it is, is like an integral part of the organism. They were, the Post Dispatch was interviewing people in the Ville, and it's like, yeah, that guy works at Bush Stadium, the Cardinals Stadium. He's like vending stuff during the baseball games. This person is a trucker. They're circulating the goods in the center of the country. This is a childcare worker.

This is somebody who works in a kindergarten and gets paid shit to deal with your kids all day. So like, there's cheap, exploitable labor that then is going to get, I think, taken advantage of because, as we all know, it's just like it's a red... The Missouri legislature is full of fucking Republicans and they don't give a shit about North St. Louis and this has been a strategy for a long time. You get this climate denial, you got Josh Hawley coming in on a helicopter to land in the Aldi parking lot and say, I'm going to ask for FEMA funds even though he voted like

four times in a row to cut FEMA funding. I only want it when I need it or when it's kind of serviceable to me. Well, Devin, in fairness, he's worried about the crisis of masculinity so much that he ... That's true. ... as the softest man this side of the Mississippi, he felt compelled to write a book about masculinity. Everyone. Mr. Zero body fat over there and Mr. Beanpole himself.

That's right. That guy is afraid to kiss his wife, but he's the best man we have out here. What better vessel to deliver that message, you know? I read his manhood book, actually. I was going to write about it, but it was just so vacuous Wait, what the book called manhood? Oh the book is called By Josh Howard and any good any good quick hitters He takes like a big swing at epicureanism

Like Yeah, and like he thinks that epicurean mentality is the reason that we're all, and I sort of saw that as interesting because Marx wrote his dissertation on Epicureanism and sufficiency to only taking what you need in order to have a good life, not taking too much. And then Holly is like, yeah, that's the evilest thing I've ever heard. I'm very bizarre. He steals one of his wife's interesting parable stories. He talks about being a Supreme Court clerk in order to,

he's like, oh yeah, that relatable thing we all do. Like as if he was flipping burgers at McDonald's or some shit like that. Yeah. When I was clerking for Scalia, as we all do. When I was an underling, you know, for this fucking evil gnome. He's about to be everybody's fucking problem though, because he's going to run for president.

He was, I did, I've covered Coldwater Creek before. It's this nuclear poisoning in Florissant in North County that he has finally gotten the EPA to pay attention to. I think because he is trying to position himself as a do-gooder in the wasteland of the Midwest is gonna go to Washington and kill the tech monopolies or whatever. We'll see. Sorry I didn't mean to get us off task just Josh Holley makes me mad to think about. I agree, yeah. He's really, it's a sinister embarrassment to just picture him in your head.

I mean, when I think of him, it makes me laugh because I think of that picture with him doing the fist pump, the fist raise, you know, right on January 6th, and then just juxtaposed with him running away through the halls of Congress. Big chance. Like, coconut. Yeah.

Makes me laugh, man. Yeah, you can almost hear his voice cracking while he's running away. That's crazy. It's crazy. Well, OK, so there's several different threads there. We were talking about like maybe how this will shake out in future political developments in St. Louis.

There's a few things that like bring together some of these threads. Like, for example, you know, in your piece, De Devin you talked about there was this video going around of a Apartment building was it Lux living was it the one? the the I mean It's really kind of Sad in in a in a very grim way In our sort of macabre and almost kind of like funny way. This apartment building just kind of like falls apart.

Like the, we've talked a lot a bit about this on the show with both Kate Wagner and just me and Tom, just sort of like chopping it up, but just the standard of architecture right now, the standard of architecture right now, the standard of building both supplies and approach to it, you're basically creating these sort of popsicle houses, right, it's like they're not very sturdy. You've got all these brick buildings in St. Louis

that were able to withstand, at least the frame and the structure anyways, maybe not the roofs, but they're able to withstand at least the the frame in the structure anyways Maybe not the roofs but like they were able to withstand these high winds Whereas these like new apartment buildings that are being built just like fall apart like like are you the opposite direction? Yeah, it's not making them stronger. We had to make them even weaker Yeah, and that maybe that maybe talks. Maybe we can use that a little bit to talk about like you know, what are some of the developments on the ground in st. Louis that are like sort of like combining or running head straight into the like we talked about like the sort of new climate paradigm

Where you know like we we're obviously going to see greater frequency of storms, greater severity of storms, fewer actual warning signs and attempts to save people. Like what are we looking at in terms of the political developments on the ground? I mean, the architecture in St. Louis is like the selling point of the city for a lot of people, I think. It's a historic architecture. Do you guys also have, I mean, but there's also the aesthetic of like the Minecraft buildings of just like all the new developments, like you're saying, they're made out of like plywood and drywall and then they're sort

of cheap but they go up and they look modern kind of. Do you have those in Atlanta? Yeah, oh yeah for sure. Definitely do have them in Atlanta. That's the only new development that's sort of really happening. Lux is like one of the biggest property developers in Missouri and They had just finished these three big apartment buildings right sort of on the edge of the Delmar divide on the Bolivar and at the intersection of Forest Park Expressway and Therefore, you know their apartments their luxury apartments. There's a pool

There's you know people who are going to Washington University or maybe working at Barnes-Dewish Hospital. They live there. And there's a video of just the roof getting torn off of the top of one of them. It's being opened by a giant can opener or something. There's also another picture of the courtyard of that building with just all the shit from all of the apartments, like having gone out the window and down into the courtyard. And they just don't stand up. They can't stand up to 150 miles per hour winds and they were brand new. Um, and then juxtaposed with that is like St.

Louis is red brick is like an iconic part of the city. It's from the silt that the Mississippi River has deposited over centuries. The clay has built up. We also have a similar problem as Kentucky is like a lot of riverways. So flooding is a really big problem for the exact same reason. But they, in the 1850s, they developed or they built half of St. Louis with red brick with like mobile kilns where you would just wheel a kiln into a backyard, pump out a house worth of

bricks from the mud in the yard, and then like move on to the next one. So you could just hit up your boy and say, yo, bring the kiln. Bring the kiln. Yeah, yeah. We're gonna back to X and us. Move on to the next one so you could just hit up your boy and say yo bring the kill Talk about this in this piece actually is fascinating like there's two different kinds of bricks like a insulation brick But then there's like an exterior brick that you use in the tornado to the extent that it did destroy some of these houses now those bricks are just like mixed in together and Yeah, there's like the exterior bricks are left in the kiln to harden longer and glaze and then

I'm not a huge expert in this but you're not a brickologist huge expert in this, but- You're not a brickologist, no. Not a brickologist. I am, but for life failures. You know? But this was interesting before the tornado because there was a way of making money from harvesting bricks from falling down north side

buildings called doll houses. 99% Invisible did a very good podcast about this and like You would have somebody who would set an abandoned house on fire and then let the fire department come in and blast the Mortar out of the bricks and then come back the next day with a big shopping cart and like wheel away of like clean words of clean bricks. Yeah. Can you make a lot of money doing that? Fuck no, dude. Come on.

They're bricks. They're not like, you know, but for a second you can. It was very profitable suddenly to like do destruction and then harvest, like harvest the raw materials. Yeah. But you then had to you had the problem of the interiors and exteriors are all mixed up in the shopping cart. And so you the only people who are really buying a lot of them were in the south where there's perennial summer. You know, it never gets that cold. You don't need the exterior brick to insulate the inside of the house. And they were used for, you know,

I don't know, as if the devil has cursed this fucking city. They were used for plantation revival and restoration of plantation houses. That's like that's the Veiled Prophet curse right there in like real time. St. Louis just seems to be one of the most like historically cyclical cities that I've probably ever heard of. Like everything that you've mentioned just seems as if it's just coming full circle. It's really a recalibrate way. It's as if the sins and the blood that is soaked into the stone here has not been like

thought about or reconciled with and so we're just doomed to repeat this like brutal cycle of just yeah it's it's endlessly fascinating and also kind of a fucking bummer. Well I think that the kind of what we're driving at here is that we're kind of entering a new world where I mean to make it a little explicit a little on the nose it's sort of a perfect storm where you've got the continued disinvestment of certain communities segregation of them in a certain areas combining with the long-term trend in neoliberal housing policies and urban development,

in the sense that building materials are cheaper. You are more likely to die in a storm, probably, than you were 50 years ago. Maybe not 100 years ago, I don't know. Maybe, I mean, because if you get these huge storms like the ohio river flood of like 1937 or something right like 300 something people died in that so it's like but like I think the thing is is that um Also though with those earlier storms or like the galveston flood of like the early 1900s

Like they didn't have like warning systems like we Had 10 years ago, right which we're slowly doing away with I think you've just got a situation where our Perpetual systemic denial of what's happening is putting more and more people at risk and it's combining with the sort of political economy of Nate late neoliberalism where the solution isn't like we're just gonna we're not gonna you know we're not gonna deal with this on a large systemic scale like do any kind of large civic engineering anymore any kind of projects like that the solution is just basically like you know kiss your ass goodbye and pray to God hope hope that like every yeah cross your fingers

Hope that everything turns out alright And that's kind of the and then like when it doesn't when you get pushed out into the streets because you lost your home in a flood or a tornado Your presence in the street will be criminalized and because of the curfew and then you'll be sent to jail I think it's just like, yeah, it's just like the natural drift of this is to just, like we've said before, criminalize survival strategies. And if they make life more precarious, then they can expand that category of what counts as a survival strategy and then criminalize

it so that they can either lock you up or deport you or label you a subversive not you know not privileged enough to get benefits or welfare or anything like that It's just it's a very it is yeah, it's Mad Max world. It's a very grim individualist world that You know, let's see that's a neoliberalism kind of come full circle and you know, I don't even think this is just

Conspiratorial to say I mean, I think we've seen enough natural disasters in the past like maybe 20 years You know, I'm just thinking about Katrina especially Where I'm even thinking about the flood that happened to you guys in Kentucky, man I just think that you know, you have to just I just keep thinking about the phrase necropolitics, the decision of who gets to live and who gets to die, you know what I mean? And allowing something to happen or get as bad as it can get, or even preemptively allowing it to get bad by defunding the warning systems that would save people's lives. But it just feels like it's like, well, we didn't care about these people before anyway.

They were too expensive to take care of. They're undesirable. So why not just let them get wiped out by a flood or a storm? To me, it's similar to them defunding FDA food inspections and stuff. Yeah, we talked about that. Well, we talked about what is that? Models vertical integration.

Yeah, it's not what is what is that? So a molecules mouts vertical integration? Yeah, it's it's that It's not like it's not conspiratorial in the sense that they like come together and sit around and be like how can we kill the most? Amount of people right I think that like history kind of just propels people in certain directions like groups of individuals towards like certain directions and they land on solutions like Yes, deregulating the food supply And then like if a lot of people die in the process, it's similar to to defunding weather forecasting and stuff like that Yeah

Didn't have anything I it's just like the It's just like the, it always feels like there should be some breaking point for everyone to be able to see that or to be able to like, because that depends on a certain amount of not looking at the thing. Like, you have to have blinders on in order to just keep your sanity in a system like this because the chances of you just getting one-shotted by a tornado or a flood or something like that are just going up and up and up.

It does remind me of just how it does open up a space for if you can think about the world in a 10-year timeframe or a 20 year timeframe, you are a breath of complete fresh air in American politics. Like this does open up a big space for somebody to fill of like, can you just have a 10 year plan? Can you have some mild competency? Because if you can and you can pull it off, then there's tremendous, like, I think, organic supports to be reaped.

But we still are just like wandering the fucking, you know, wasteland right now. I agree. It's like the hubris of the ruling classes, they don't realize, I really don't think they realize that on a long enough timeline, these policies will also kill them. them like because there's not getting off No one's getting off the planet like they deluded themselves the Mars thing is another

It's a form of climate denial energy or ideology in my opinion. It's a kind of like denialist ideology that like Rationalizes the short-term squeezing of everything from our surplus But like they don't realize it on a long enough timeline like no one escapes the the tornadoes and floods like it comes for everybody Yeah, sir points you can't bargain with the ocean. Yeah, right or hunger, you know, yeah Yeah, which is also why the tornado in St. Louis is specifically a beautiful metaphor because it did destroy, it hurt these gigantic mansion districts in St. Louis that are right on the edge of the park.

Beautiful, gigantic houses built to impress people going to the World's Fair. These huge, huge villas, big trees in the yard. A bunch of that stuff got smashed, a bunch of Forest Park got fucked up, and the trees were, you know. So there's some sort of like metaphor about, you know, we're all in the same boat here, even though then the tornado got worse as it went north. There's also this underlying injustice of like the destroyed natural habitat of the city and the trees that are the solution to this whole thing of reforestation is the only thing

that can pull carbon out of the air in an efficient manner. Our refusal to do that is just so, it's thoroughly nihilistic, like very, very much we can't think about anything 20 years from now. Man, it's like they'd rather continue to subsidize the fossil fuel industry, you know, like send out cops, you know, to lock up so-called looters, you know, and then they come up with some fucking like idea out of snow piercer, yeah, we're gonna block out the Sun yeah And give a bunch of money to a bunch of startups to fucking do it you know right They're gonna fly you know CIA planes up and scatter the debris and then we're gonna be in like the matrix

Yeah, it's I think in the in the coming years You're gonna see the development of some really insane ideologies because like this is the way it works usually like I think people have this idea that like People get ideologies they form ideologies and then out of that you've got the like political economic developments But usually it's the opposite way like you had for example You had the Atlantic slave trade and then way like you had for example you had the Atlantic slave trade and then Racial ideologies grew out of that rather than the opposite way around and I think that you're gonna start to see that with like

These like, you know climate denial ideologies like there's this new moot book from Andreas mom He wrote he co-wrote it with somebody. It's called overshoot But it's a bad and I've not started reading it yet But it's about how in the last 10 years really specifically in the last five years All the major fossil fuel industries have decided like no we're not leaving stranded assets Like we're not gonna do anything about climate change like we're gonna we're gonna ride this motherfucker till it's in the dirt and so I think that like because they've made that decision they will now try to like reconstruct or You know retrofit certain etiologies into it to make it rational to people to make it seem like it's natural and

Yeah, and I know this sounds like an obvious point but like to that point Terrence there It's not that they're deciding not to do anything because they don't think it'll get that bad It's because they have their own internal scientists doing projections. They know how bad it's gonna get. That's why they're hungry. That should terrify you when they do shit like that because then they're like, oh well fuck it.

We're all gonna die anyway. Yeah. Yeah, I've got a bunker in Denver I'm gonna head to though. It's not gonna be a big deal for me personally. I'm gonna have a VR headset in there and like, whatever. And they really think that. And so the food runs out after like 10 years and I'm going mad and have to go above ground and they're like you know they're roving beds and marauders. They've adopted the plutocratic version of what Devin called earlier that midwestern like blase attitude towards like you know the

knowing the base of the flood type shit where it's like, yeah, it's uh, you know, whatever but They're gonna find out you know I am god's chosen But as soon as I step onto the super god and I give the automatic machine gun to my security personnel He's just gonna dome that person, you know Actually, that's that's that's the side but I think uh douglas rushff, he brings up in his book where he talks about all these billionaire preppers who are building bunkers and shit. One of their biggest concerns, and they even had a summit, I think they have one every

year, but I remember reading an article a couple years ago that detailed one summit they had. And their biggest fear is that their security is gonna turn out there. Exactly. That's a great quote. Which is why they're, excuse me, which is why they're trying to, thinking about implementing technologies like collars, like shot collars for their, what security guards gonna be like, okay, so you, give me this gun to protect you, but you want me to wear a shot collar. That's so funny. So that I don't, you know, start a mutiny or some shit like that, you know.

It's Jeff Bezos handing the like bomb collar to an Azov Italian general. I mean, it's like, well, okay, I guess this is my gig now. I don't think that's going to work like that. That Douglas Roskow book is really good though. It is really good. And also, I don't know if it's supposed It's not intentionally funny, but it is funny because you realize that these people are just as victim Do you know what I'm saying to this future that's barreling towards us as I am or any of us are?

They think they just have the more resources to do it But at the end of the day brother, this is gonna be the great equalizer If you can't go anywhere motherfucker, and I think they know that I think that's why they're all black-pilled I really do I think if that's why they're all like They are they are more black-pilled than any any person you could find on the left on Twitter or anything like that They know that yeah You know a bit why they're so black tool is because they have all the power all the resources and they can't escape entropy brother No, they can't escape the climate brother. They can't escape the climate apocalypse. And that causes some sort of like feedback loop

where it drives them into psychosis and mania. A hundred percent. And paranoia. Yeah. A hundred percent. They have their own class solidarity that won't let them, like, I don't know. I think about that too, like there does seem to be in just the zeitgeist of tremendous valuation of like nature and going out and

touching grass and being in nature is, you know, part of making content the same engine that makes people want to go chase tornadoes and stuff. But like we value that as a people of being able to go out into nature and experience it and have access to wildlife and trees and, you know, old stuff like that. And yet, and all these rich people are having children and they're damning those children to not have that benefit. So I don't know. It's really sadistic in that way too.

Man, this is a, I don't know where we should probably go soon. This is anecdotal, but maybe I've mentioned the story. I don't know, but I uh tripping balls many years ago and mushrooms and I was a natural disaster oh yeah well there I was just sitting I was sitting under this tree but not their natural disaster but I was sitting under this tree and you know I just had to thought to myself and I think about it often now especially with my nephew who's a four but you know like everybody should get to feel the grass between their toes you know know, and it made me incredibly sad. And I guess that's why like, you know, I've sort of been watching a lot of nature documentaries lately and it does make it

does make me kind of sad because future generations, you know, I mean, I don't even mean to be super pessimistic, but I mean, even we do even if we do something drastic right now, I think we've reached the point of like no return beyond the point of no return. So the only thing we can do now is just try to find out how to survive together. It's kind of unfair for, well, the kids of St. Louis as well to be under that kind of like that purview where you have this municipality, this society that doesn't give a shit about you, where you are expendable. You're at the whims of a problem that they've exacerbated, you know, the climate crisis that being, you know what I mean?

Yeah. And the whole trick then is to get people to like understand that that is the situation that they're your exploitation economically on the north side is intricately going to be tied to the environmental catastrophe that is going to one day be, you know, that's going to be outside your door. It's going to be unavoidable. I think, yeah, I think that this explains, in my opinion, the rise of someone like RFK Jr. It's like, it's a very vulgar explanation. He provides a very vulgar explanation for why we have this severance or disconnection from the natural world. Because we can't truthfully, rationally confront what is coming down the pike, we kind of can slip into these very crude and vulgar explanations for things like red 40

or whatever, I'm sure it's not good for you, but it's not what's causing society to go haywire or whatever, you know what I mean? It's like, right. It's kinda something different when I was in school. I don't say it in this program, but. I mean, this is just like the chemtrail shit, you know what I mean? That I did a lot in high school, you know what I mean? That, oh, they're like, you know,

intentionally polluting and it's like, well, okay, like, yeah, true, but not in the way that you think, brother. It's all cope, man. It's just like I said, like, I think the the rise of RFK Jr. to me is one of the most fascinating stories in modern politics. Like it's just, you know, specifically that the right wing would latch on to a lot of these sort of like naturopathic explanations of like returning back to our natural selves, the sort of like noble savage like view of humanity and all this but like and it's primarily because they just cannot Reckon with the fact that it's capitalism that has disfigured all of these Relations with ourselves with each other with the biosphere with our our own bodies, right? It's like they just it's all coped man. It's all it's just it's cool. Yeah

And it is fragile to I just like how long can you really sustain a guy it's coke. Yeah. And it is fragile too. It's just like, how long can you really sustain a guy like RFK Jr. in the public eye, in charge, like all of these things are on such short time spans that like immediately you're going to get tired of the guy who sounds fucking awful. Yeah. Who's an ex, you know, heroin addict. He sounds like he has, He sounds like he has. He sounds like he has.

Brother, he sounds like he has, I mean, like all types of bacteria, you know. Yeah. In his throat, man. Like, I don't know what's going on with that voice. It just, it feels very thin also. Like, it's not going to withstand the test of the administration for like four years even. I agree.

Well, I think we've kind of sort of thoroughly examined how a natural disaster gets made, right? It's not just the, it's dialectical. It's not just the it's it's Dialect cool. It's not just a natural part of it whether it's tornado or a flood is the social relations that are Already on the ground that kick into gear once something like this happens Yeah, and You know and I think that anybody who's experienced something like that will already recognize a lot of what we've talked about here But if they would like to read your article Devin, it's in the nation, right?

Yeah, it's in the nation. It's called I think St. Louis tornado cuts across an economic disaster zone or something like that. Yeah Yeah, check it out. I have a book about the Veiled Profit coming out with Haymarket Books. Hell yeah. It's going to be available to pre-order sometime, maybe in the fall. That'll be next year or something like that. Was this an on-the-ground piece? Have you ever gotten to go to a Veiled Profit Festival? You'd be surprised that they won't like,

they never invite me, which is strange. Oh wait, is it? Okay, so I'm completely musn't, this is just, this is an invite thing only. It's an invite thing only. Well, yeah, that makes sense. You can't just have a bunch of Klansmen just celebrate in the street.

That makes a lot of sense. But they did for most of the organization's history. It being exclusive and invite only is like a last five year sort of development. Oh, so you know they do it. You know after that shit, man, they got some like, not even Ozwide shut. The clan operates with Ozwide shut.

I was gonna say, what happened in the last five years? Was it because Jeffrey Epstein was, became a mainstream? What are all those? years was it because Jeffrey Epstein was yeah it was definitely the reaction of like the Ellie Kemper scandal that made them all like yeah we can't have just anybody and then and yet they will publish all of their names and pictures in this fancy pants big magazine called Town & Style every year. And so it's this weird synthesis of like,

it's secret, you're not invited, it's anonymous, and also I'm in it, you know? You said Town & Style? It's called Town & Style. That sounds like it should be named like Knight and Burning Cross or some shit like that. Yeah, right. Yeah, yeah, the Klansmen's call

But the Klansmen's clarion, you know You subscribe to a trade magazine for chicken fighters called the coxman Spurs and like all the you know stuff you need to fight chickens out the back of it you know and I'm sure that wasn't available at Barnes and Noble. Imagine how many different kinds of veils and crowns and staffs and robes you could buy out of that. They would deliver a burning cross to your door. Yeah, they would deliver a burning cross to your door We've invented the new self-burning cross Well, I will have to have you back on the show when your book comes out Devon or if I happens to be a true honor. I'm a long time true Billy's fan listener and fanboy and

Fan of everybody's writing including Tom and Terrence and Aaron and I both contribute to apocalypse confidential every once in a while Yes, they do Tell you in a while. Yes, we certainly do. Yeah. Hell yeah. Lots of connections. Hell yeah. Well, thanks for coming on, man. Really appreciate it.

Thank you all. I appreciate it. Yeah, thanks, Devan. Thanks, Devan. We'll have to have you back on soon. I hope you have a great rest of your week, and I would like to encourage everybody to please go subscribe to our Patreon. The link is in the show notes.

You'll be able to subscribe for just five dollars a month So please go do that and have a have a great weekend So Thanks for watching!