Trillbilly Worker's Party - Episode 58: Welcome to the Abyss

Episode Date: June 22, 2018

On the eve of a daring canoe trip, we talk with our buddy Alex Desha about immigration, concentration camps, the general dissolution of society, and a really good essay by John Berger about Hieronymous Bosch and Subcomandante Marcos. You can find that essay here: https://www.theguardian.com/books/1999/nov/20/books.guardianreview

I don't know how to describe this because I don't know what the good lefty take is on this. But it's the one thing in life. Yeah, it is kind of complicated, right? You make an insane amount of money just based strictly on your physical gifts that you have no control over and your potential. It is kind of a moral paradox right yeah because it's you don't want to say that gm should be better at picking players based purely off of their physical attributes but that's what the game is that's what it is that's just you know that's one of the shitty facts about life is that your physical prowess and gifts determine so much of your

trajectory yeah that's true it's unfortunate yeah it was there a time that you could have that there was like a fork in the road and you could have gone in one direction or the other sort of like a david foster wallace thing you ended up a podcaster but you could have been a i could be a tennis player i could probably i could have probably legitimately have been if i dedicated myself to my fitness i could have probably got a world ranking. Maybe. I mean, I'm going to walk that back. They only rank 1,800 and I'm sure that I couldn't get... I don't know.

That's a lot of players though. I have a victory over the best junior in the country of Panama. Really? Yeah. In the year 2002 or 1. 1,800 players is...

You could do that. It's kind of like being on the New York Times bestseller list. They make it seem like it's this big thing, but all you gotta do is sell 5,000 books. Yeah. And then you're on. Then you're on. Which doesn't... That seems achievable. Well, if you know 500

people, and then they know, do the math for me here. I've got, I've painted myself to a corner. If they know five other people, if every person, if 500 people know five people

and they all tell them to buy this book and they do, you're in business. That would get you what, 2,500? I guess you would need 10.

500 people need to know 10 people each. Anyways, that's the way. I can't do basic math. How do you think kids who could do math in their head, like what is it? What do they got going on up there that allows them to

do that? They just see numbers and it just all adds up. Alex, were you good at math in your head? Yeah, were you good at doing math in your head? No. Okay. Well, point is, you need to sell 5,000 and that seems achievable. Yeah.

Look at him in his hat. Louise is very Concerned right now That we're gonna like go and drown on this trip And I'm like you know Alex is there He's helped me out of a few Bad You know What would you say

Alex helped me I've been in a dicey situation on the water with Alex. But I put Tom in a dicey situation. I think I'm responsible for Tom not going back in the water. Yeah. I hit my head so hard on that rock. I still think about that. The light should have went out, but...

Yeah. Well, if you were... That was a fun trip. Yeah. That was a fun trip. Yeah, that was a fun trip. Well, he's got the physical prowess you need for a river guide. You've got a very river guide physique. You don't ever think you're in a pinch with Alex. If you're getting ready to get into fisticuffs, you think, I got a solid second right here.

Right. Right. Right. It's just reassuring. You know, it's placebo. It's nice. Yeah. We're very compliment-heavy people. Yeah, up north, they don't give compliments.

It's a vast generalization. Man, they- We have this notion that everybody above Mason Dixon is just scowling their face. I think Southerners pride themselves on really hating the participation trophy generation. It's really the Northerners. Those are the ones that really hate the participation trophies. We love them. Are we the participation

trophy generation is that what they say about us is that what the old people say about you know what i think is so fucking funny about that is like if we are like they're the ones that came up with the participation trophy systems it's like we didn't do that as children very true it is really funny that that generation um is so was so probably more so than any other generation and i only say that like because our generation might be one of the first to sort of put the idea out there that the self actually isn't all that exists but i feel like that generation like that boomer generation and the one right after it, was people saying, you know, you're unique. There's no one like you. You can do anything you want.

You know what I mean? Like, you. Well, it's interesting you brought this up. I just finished the Andrew Cunanan miniseries. What's that? The Assassination of Gianni Versace. Oh, really? Yeah.

And his dad made him believe he was a special boy. He called him his prince and gave him the master bedroom in their new house they moved into. And they had two other children. What? Yeah. So he... So he went on to kill some people.

So he... Who? Versace did? Andrew Canana. Oh. He was the guy that killed Versace? That killed Versace. Why did he kill him?

Well, I think basically the gist of it was that he was like this guy that was like a male prostitute and hooking up with all these rich guys. He murdered Lee Miglin, who was like a Chicago real estate tycoon. Really? Yeah. So he's a serial killer so i mean if you think about it not bad praxis honestly so he's down here like killing billionaires yeah so you're saying basically though he benefited probably not a billionaire

but i mean right he's a millionaire he still probably exploited people's labor to build his empire. Right. Right. So, yeah, you're right. So basically what we're saying. So basically the official Trill Bailey stance is Andrew Cunanan was a comrade. And to raise your children, pick one out of all your kids who you think will go the farthest. Isolate him.

Give him everything he or she wants. They. Give him everything they want. He bought him a Porsche at age 14. Couldn't even drive it. So, but Andrew, Kanan was also bourgeois up here in Sand Lake. His dad was a Filipino immigrant that kind of like, you know, was one of the rare exceptions of the bootstrap thing.

Yeah. And I guess got a job with like Merrill Lynch maybe. You know, Andrew Cunanan's enabling father, probably a comrade because he embezzled a lot of money off of Merrill Lynch and ran off to the Philippines with him. Is this true to everyone? I'm not co-signing his abuse of Andrew and his mother, but this is like my stance on the Unabomber.

I'm rehabilitating the Cunanan's. Yeah. Well, it's like we said, if you want, there's, is he still in prison? No, he killed himself. Oh. Yeah. After he got.? No, he killed himself. Oh. Yeah. After he got. Pulled a gun on himself.

Basically, there's some spoilers here, but after he killed Versace and Meg, like he killed all these people in a span of like two weeks. And then there was like a manhunt that lasted a little bit and then he shot himself. The whole thing wrapped up in a few weeks though. In your social justice league, okay, could you imagine, like, you've got the Unabomber, and he's,

you've got, okay, so opening shot of a film. You've got the human, Ted Kaczynski, is that his name? Ted Kaczynski, yeah. He's like, he is just in his prison cell, just got his feet kicked up,

and he's just like, fuck. You know, in prison. And And then all of a sudden, a massive hole just blows up in the side of his prison wall. And then just like stepping through it is like Andrew Canaan and that guy. But he's like the ghost of Andrew Canaan. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And they're like, Ted on quick um the social justice league has been assembled like we're busting you out

the gop is trying to pass another tax cut not on our watch It's like I said You don't want his skills going Waste is what I'm saying I'm gonna go Fuck Ted Cruz Dress him up in panties Then slash his throat

What are you gonna do? God damn Well speaking of Ted Cruz That's a hard bit. Yeah. Ted Cruz had a... Ted Cruz's solution to the child separation... That's ought to be good.

Yeah, no, he's proposed a bill. It's called, like, Protecting Something Children. I don't even remember the name of it. It's got a sort of typically Orwellian name. And in typical Ted Cruz fashion, what's gonna happen is in two weeks, he's gonna push this shit for about two weeks, then he's just gonna go along with whatever Trump's doing.

It's called Protect Kids and Parents Act. We're gonna put them in tents in an enclosed area and make sure that nothing gets them yeah fucking schmuck um isn't it funny though how all those

the craziest bills like the most insane batshit bills have the nicest names it's like the protect parents and children act that's what we want to do right I don't want to protect

Parents and children So yeah Here we are What's going on over there You got any pieces to speak Yeah not really Let me take a stab at it can I You said it's a little light

It's very light Why don't you read the one in the far left First the big one I circled It's pretty light. Why don't you read the one in the far left first, the big one I circled. It's pretty bad, Tom. The thing is, is that when things are bad, you just read the first sentence. This is bad.

Well, when really crazy news dominates, the speaker piece gets incredibly bleak. It's a good sort of barometer or gauge on how sort of desperate people are. You know what I'm saying? And I don't mean that materially. I mean desperate for blood. They want blood. Here we go.

Let's start right at the top, Mr. President. America's people are proud of what you are doing. We do wish that you would declare it M13. M13. Not a firecracker. Not MS-13. We do just wish that you would declare M-13 a terrorist group so we can stop this murdering, drug dealing,

and transforming young children's brain. Pressure to be put into the M-13 club. What the? That's not even a sentence. Mr. President. M-13 isn't a thing. M-13 isn't a... I like how they call it the M13 club.

They're playing golf on the weekends. Mr. President, you can do it with a stroke of a pen. American people are not stupid. We know what the Democrats have done. Not all of them. There are good Democrats. Wait, wait, wait. That's like the same thing we say about cops.

There are a few good ones. I don't say that. No, people do. People do, yeah. There are good Democrats. Yeah, there are. A few. A few good ones.

That used to be your favorite insult to me. I was really pissed at Alex one time, and I called him, I said, Alex, you're a good Democrat. And it cut him so low. It cut him so low. Just look at his face. I wish you two had went through when I was on the council and become the first Marxist cops. Remember that, man?

Oh, yeah. We belong, man. We belong. Anyways. They're good Democrats. Okay, man. Anyways. They're good Democrats. Okay, let's see. Get your wall built. They're whining and crying about parents being separated from their children

but social services have separated parents and children since they became an organization also. God bless America. Hoorah. Appreciate it. I swear to God. of separated parents and children since they became an organization also god bless america well here's the thing and it's really interesting that that that comment points this out like with a stroke of a pen because i don't know if you remember this but in 2008 it seemed like every fucking thing that got proposed that ob ran on, once he got elected, he was just like, oh, well, there's nothing I can do about this. This is in Congress's hands. He could ban clothes.

He could ban clove cigarettes. Did he do that? He really did. That was one of the first laws he signed into law. He might have even done that before they bailed the banks out. They passed the law to ban clove cigarettes. First things first. before they bailed the banks out.

They passed the law to ban closed cigarettes. First things first. We have to get rid of these very pleasant smelling. Yeah. But here's the thing. Trump is now proving that all those things that the Democrats said they couldn't fucking do in 2008, like stop the war immediately, close Guantanamo, they actually could fucking do it, turns out. And they could have did it unencumbered for Obama's first two years.

They had no checks. No checks. What would we get done? Banning clove cigarettes and cash for clunkers. And now, it just fucking kills me. With a stroke of a pen, Mr. President, the American people are not stupid. And the last thing that we needed is somebody that calls MS-13 the M13 Club, knowing that Trump has the pen.

Right. Yeah, yeah. Well, that's the thing. It's just like, ostensibly, it's not... I mean, okay, I don't think Trump sat down and said, we gotta start putting him in cages, blah, blah, blah.

Ostensibly, he went to Jeff Sessions and said, Jeff, they're all rapists and whatever. Just make sure that they all inflict as much harm as possible. Zero tolerance. He probably, in his stream of consciousness, probably mentioned that at one point. rapists and whatever just make sure that they all inflict as much harm as possible zero tolerance he probably in his like stream of consciousness probably mentioned that at one point like zero tolerance it's like when uh like when he's uh you know when he's talking about the space

force like you know that was a news item like that seems like so long ago now but uh he's like um it's gonna be like the Air Force, separate but equal. I don't think he knows what separate but equal meant. That did get buried amongst a lot of really insane shit this week. But he literally said separate but equal. Like he has no idea yeah and that also suggests that also suggests to me that he was like somebody had just put that in front of him and he'd read that like that was on his mind you know what i mean yeah dude well it's the thing it's just like it's the thing it's the

thing with like melania wearing that jacket today i don't actually think that was intentional and i don't think trump saying separate but equal was intentional no they are literally just that tone yeah they're fucking done either that or counterpoint to that trump might have asked her to wear that because he knew that would get like some kind of headline you know then, that's like a Kanye move. Trump is just not even anywhere near that level of manipulation. He's got a fucking hole in his brain. Exactly. All he understands is brute force.

Yeah. And that's why. Law and order, separate but equal. Space force. Jesus Christ. It's just one of the weird hallmarks of our time that, like, you know, you have crime is going down. Been dropping. Has been dropping, but they are revamping a sort of Justice Department and approach to policing that was born out of an era of high crime.

was born out of an era of high crime. And the same thing with immigration. Our immigration numbers now are way below what they were around the year 2000. But they are coming up with harsher policies to punish those people and penalize those people. It's like,

these things that they're saying are a huge problem. Like, he's always talking about Chicago and the gangs and all that. And people have pointed this out on Twitter a lot, but yeah, it's literally, like, their reference for everything is just the 90s.

Yeah. The 80s and 90s. Yeah. Specifically the early 90s. Yeah. The big disaster films like Adam Curtis talks about and like the Wall Street.

Which was a very, you know, and that's the thing, man. I was reading the other day about the 1992 Republican Convention and the very first night they had a very similar thing to like what they had at the 2016 Republican Convention. Maybe they always have these. I'm not entirely sure. But essentially it was very. Nobody was checking for.

Was that Bob Dole? No, Bob Dole was 96, wasn't he? George H.J. Yeah, George H.J. Yeah, he ran. He ran again. Right. Yeah.

But it was just like this incredibly, you know, you had guys like Newt Gingrich and like, I don't know. you know, you had guys like Newt Gingrich, and, like, I don't know, I guess, what I've been thinking about a lot this week and last week with all these news stories about the detention centers, the concentration camps, and especially, like, the right's response to them is that, like, we really are seeing now

the depths that there are to this, I don't know like the fundamentalist set in this country yeah America is such a fundamentalist country like I was reading the other day about how in the 80s every time the the Reagan's every time the Reagan administration even mentioned like Libyan terrorism like the tourism and economy in Europe would dip massively because Americans would get so fucking scared that they wouldn't go to Europe because they thought that around every corner was just a Libyan waiting to blow them the fuck up. And it was like, these trends and these, like, thoughts.

Wait, wait, wait, wait, wait. Okay, Libyan terrorism in Europe. Yeah, Libyan terrorism. That was the bombing in Italy. That was the bogeyman of the 80s. Remember, they even, like, they went after Gaddafi. They even like shot down a Libyan airplane. PBS News hours like they would

do those little things where it's like they have the capability to send a bomb. Back to the future. The first one. The terrorists are Libyans. You remember that? In the parking lot like they're Libyans. Yeah that's right. But anyways that was like the bogeyman back then. Yeah.

But I guess what I'm saying is that, like, these, and it's really interesting to watch, like, conservatives like Steve Schmidt and stuff, like, on Twitter, who joined the party back then in the 80s be like, well, this is just a step too far. This is not the party I joined. Like, what the fuck did you think was gonna happen what do you think you were signing up for I don't understand this what did they think

I don't know I really don't know but bad week good follow up to that any parent that would put their child in that position does not deserve a child Like, good follow-up to that. Any parent that would put their child in that position does not deserve a child. Dude, there are like six more in that. Why worry about them?

I'm assuming they're talking about the immigrant kid thing. Yeah. There are like several more in that same vein. Oh, shit. Dude, it is so bad. It is so bad. And I don't know if you remember this alex in like 2012 after around the time of the election like um just me getting in arguments with people about

like uh i mean like i saw the real depravity of these people in 2012 you know what i mean like people who were so fucking mad that obama won again mostly i'm talking about my family members who were so mad they were like worked up into a white supremacist frothing rage on facebook talking about how they wanted to turn texas into like um what it used to be and have it secede and basically be like just a white realm uh you know what i mean just leban's realm essentially and like i don't know it's just the things people said about like taking welfare away from children. And I would surmise that their life did not change in any meaningful way. At all. During that entire eight years.

It's like when people get their fucking panties in a knot about 9-11. And don't get me wrong, it's a fucking terrible thing. But I'm saying like when they feel this very visceral tie to that it's like your life did not change in the immediate

aftermath you know what I mean like you know you're just fucking they gouged you on gas prices for like two days the gas prices were probably better

then I mean once we got to war then yeah okay you want a mic? you want a mic? you want a mic? alright uh Then, I mean, once we got to war, then yeah, okay. You want a mic? Just, you know, I don't know. You know, I have a four-year-old as a parent. I'm just, I don't know.

Absolutely appalled to the point of just not having much in the way of words. But these guys, they can care about a child. I don't know. You remember Elian Gonzalez? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, fuck, how much did we spend on that one child to get him here?

Right. Yeah. I forget all about that. I forgot about Elian, too. What was that? And they want to talk shit about parents, like, trying to create a better life for their children. Right. You know,

like, what, they think it's like just cupcakes? Like, why would they take their kids away from cupcakes? And the thing is, is they don't actually, and this is the thing about Republicans, is that they don't they've sort of championed themselves as like the party of family values or whatever in trying to protect the atomic nuclear unit,

family unit or whatever. Tucker Carlson even had a tweet or rant he went on the other night about it. Alex, I don't know if you saw this. He literally said that immigrants pose an obstacle to everyday Americans trying to succeed. Like he literally, it's just totally like Third Reich talking point. literally it was just it's just totally like third reich talking point that like immigrants are literally standing in the way of the whites middle-class americans ability to to uh to be successful well you know i you know i live in buffalo now and you know we've had a pretty heavy you know population uh uh decrease you know over decades and like one of the things that uh has been contributing to the supposed comeback or revitalization of buffalo is we've had

well unless you know i can't remember but you know in recent years we've had about 15 000 uh refugees right come to the area and you know they've taken these dilapidated parts of the city and they are building a new economy in Buffalo. I mean, they want to say it's the governor's, you know, Buffalo billion or whatever, but it's the influx of people into the area. And in our case, it's refugees, immigrants. So, you know, I don't see it. Right. I just don't. It's weird.

It's weird, though. it right i just don't it's weird it's weird though like for a party that spends so much time talking about families though um it's like when you think about it families aren't irrational to profit making like they're actually they actually they're an impediment they're an impediment to profit making right like you like to to be able for a capitalist system that they want for it to work and to sort of like create as much fucking wealth and profit as possible every single human being has to be alienated and reduced to his just very most isolated because you you have to keep a cheap labor force right and you have to make good

consumers you know what i mean yeah and you have to pad in aspiration right you got to buy these things to get to a certain level or whatever right but you know so i you know getting rid of the so-called chain migration to kind of the basis of our immigration system you know our our immigration system like passed in like 1965 that was mostly, you know, in an instant enactment has been, has had family reunification as its basis. So, and so Republicans and Trump and a number of Democrats, they want to make it, they want to gear it more towards skills, right? They want to bring more people in with skills and they want to lessen the, the ability to bring family members over. But in order to actually, you know, pay people the low wages and to have them, uh, come in, you actually still need

people's families. I mean, there's a lot of unpaid labor that goes into keeping, uh, the, uh, people able to work. Right. Right. Um. You know, families take care of kids. Immigrants, they pool their resources so they can buy property and they can start a business. And so if you just say, we're just going to let people into this country that have a certain skill set and not consider people's families,

I think you're also going to see that backfire. Totally. Yeah. Well, it's just it's just you know they spend so much time talking about oh i don't know it's just like it's weird it's like okay so they passed this executive order last night um and um you know they're going to ostensibly end family separation at the border whatever which why was that happening in the first place this is a genuine question i mean like i'm do either of y'all know uh i'm probably gonna butcher it but like so i mean i just want to

know what their justification for it was well their justification is they say that they have a zero tolerance policy now so they are prosecuting every uh i guess illegal uh border crossing and so they're turning it into like i've read this because they they are using like the courts as this just ever turning mill just to immediately get people processed and fucking back to their countries or whatever but but they're also into detaining detaining people indefinitely, right? Yeah, and what this executive order is doing is it's trying to codify indefinite detention for families. Right. So I think right now current law says

you can't keep a child more than 20 days or something. Well, this executive order, you know, everybody on my Facebook's like, oh my God, we won. Right. You know, families get to stay together we won. Families get to stay together. Well, they get to stay together in fucking jail. In jail, yeah.

Indefinitely. In tent cities, yeah. So, I don't know. At least they're together now. Well, what I saw was... That's peak Democrat. Yeah. They don't care about anybody's material conditions as long as they got each other.

Well, and maybe this goes back to what we were saying earlier because again i don't think trump has this like sort of 12th dimensional chest thing about this he's sort of making it up as he goes along and whatever but doing that executive order last night actually was helpful in some ways because it released a certain degree of anger of people's anger like it released it was a certain degree of people's anger. It was a pressure valve in some ways. Well, I don't know. Maybe that's a sort of simplistic way of looking at it.

Well, no, I mean, it's good for him. Trump's an abuser. I mean, it's an abusive behavior. So he creates the problem and then, you know, brings everybody to a boiling point and then just offers just a tiny bit just to relieve that little pressure. And then he expects us to praise him. And then it just moves on to another thing. So nothing is ever good enough. And that's the problem with, I think, a lot of people in this country, especially the people that are calling for civility on our part

and civil discourse, they think, well, if we just speak professionally and we give praise where praise is due, things will work out. They treat it like it's fucking, like if they just watched a red X-Man. You know what I'm saying? Like, Magneto's not coming off this shit.

You know what I'm saying? No, no, it's just, it's going to stay bad and it's going to get worse. No matter, you know, how respectable you are to Trump or the party. I'm just going to gonna clarify i'm with magneto i'm just saying if the democrats are professor x and company i see you're yeah maybe it's a bad now it's kind of an inverted analogy but it makes sense professor x and them think that they believe in decorum and all that shit right i don't know. You're all's governor, Governor Matt Bevin. Right.

Did you all ever read that? I seem to remember an article. I can't remember what it was about, but it was like writing that, you know, Matt Bevin is a warrior and, you know, the Democrats in this state, they just don't have an answer to that

and they think that, you know, the rules apply. Right. The rules don't apply. And they're not going to apply and you can't have somebody who, you know, isn't right the rules don't apply right and they're not going to apply and you can't have somebody who you know isn't going to be an advocate or isn't going to be a warrior well when you got all the rising stars in the state house saying they voted for bevin's guy yeah it's like just psychologically he has the upper hand when they come in like

who the who the fucking democrats gonna to run in Kentucky next time? Nobody can, like, Babin will win. Tom Sexton. Babin will win. Tom Sexton. And, like, we're saying now, like, after the whole teacher shit, we're like, man, there's no way in hell that motherfucker's getting reelected. Yeah. He probably will.

Watch. I mean, who the fuck? Mitch McConnell's urging him to run again stay home run again he's thinking about jumping ship i like win again i like to um i read this article the other day about how andy barr before the executive um order andy barr split with the trump administration and uh about this policy and you know and the funny thing was like the headline was like andy barr splits with trump administration over child separation policy but then it's got like 10 batshit insane quotes underneath where like we need the most utmost

secure borders and lock them in fucking cages and throw them away but it's like almost like the joe manchin thing yeah yeah yeah like where joe manchin was like right he like he was the last democrat to sign on but and then he's like oh but here's what we need we need fucking land black hawks motherfucker yeah he was like listing off mraps he wants like fucking brownsville texas to look like they're playing goddamn war games perpetually. 50 motherfuckers with.50 caliber machine guns mowing them down. Mowing them fucking down, baby. Dude, but then they had Andy Barr,

but then they had McGrath. Amy McGrath, wasn't that her name? And it's just their classic fucking scenario where she's like, of course I support a strong, secure border. And it's just just like you don't have to say that no no one and why don't you go to voters in kentucky and say these people are full of fucking shit and just say right what they're telling you is just not true objectively it's just not true they are lying to you what is logical about needing black hop helicopters to stop six-year-olds yeah to me

like there's nothing more morally clear about that i mean that's the only thing that people can agree on though is like securing more money for the border i mean obama did that when he so we had a chance for a while that they thought of you know passing comprehensive immigration reform but and in preparation for that obama didn't want to appear weak and he was just like so he started deporting the fuck out of people yeah and this was just this was to uh you know quell any uh republican thoughts that he was weak or that he was going to be weak on the border exactly you know so but all we did was push the needle further right you know now the only thing that is acceptable policy is to fucking deport people and detain them.

Yeah, yeah. So you're right. It's like when you've got that. I mean, and plus I was reading an article the other day. Not only were they deporting people, but years before any of this started, they were drugging kids. Like they were giving them psychotropic drugs just to fucking make them shut up. Because understandably they're losing their shit. My daughter loses her shit if she doesn't see me for like eight hours.

Exactly. Guards drunk, sexually harassing, raping people. Yeah, the one guard raped a four-year-old girl. This is Obama's fucking legacy. And it's the same thing when like, you know know I'm not going to pretend like I wasn't deeply disturbed by everything I was reading last week but at the same time it's just like how are you not surprised

this is what this is the world you wanted yeah but also like look at where we're at now now we're just happy oh at least the kids are together well we're not talking about indefinite detention we're not talking about not provide about immigrants having no access to legal representation. We're not talking about four year olds and six month olds going up and being

in front of judges without any form of representation. We're talking about all the front rows. They've gotten rid of all money, just every single dollar that was supposed to go towards advocacy and assisting immigrants. They've just got rid of that. It's all just border security money. now the needle you know of the range of what is acceptable to discuss is now we're just talking about like maybe the kids should be together with the parents while they're in jail yeah yeah exactly life's hard sometimes

you know they'll get through it but but they don't even have a kind of shit well they don't even have a plan for that because they don't even know if they'll be able to get some of these kids back to their parents. There is no plan for that. No, no, no, no, no, no. They do have a plan, my friend. Oh, yeah.

23andme.com, motherfuckers. Gonna match up the DNA. We're gonna find them, baby. This was a real thing. It's a find them baby this was a real thing it's a real thing this is a real thing did they suggest it because is there like

one of those 50% discounts going on right now oh they do have a discount going on right now yeah I mean if we're gonna get a deal I mean

maybe I figure out where you come from yeah it's a double edged sword though because all the white motherfuckers who are woke but are saying

they're Native American. Or stay in the hell away from me. Stay in the hell away from me. Belarusian. What? No. I'm 116th Cherokee. No.

I'm 164th Shawnee. Yeah. On my mother's side. Okay. But seriously. I mean, all week, I just want to make, like, an impassioned plead. Anybody who listens to this show and has not at least come around to think having socialist sympathies, how do you not see stuff like this and think that this country is moving further and further to the right

and that there is not disaster on the horizon for every fucking thing you can think of? I mean, Tom was just talking about this yesterday. Climate change, disaster. Immigration, disaster. I mean, health, you know, our individual and collective health, just disaster. All of it. And I feel like hell right now. Capitalists and neoliberals on down to the municipal level, they just have, they have

no answer. They have no vision. There's nothing. And things are no they're deferring on all policy concessions they're deferring to these fucking uh fucking tech utopian guys that create these problems fucking push out fucking cab drivers in the case of uber yeah well what's crazy to me is that society, not just the elements of our, that society is literally falling down around us. You know, it's like, I was reading this story the other day about New York City.

It's in Harper's. And it's like about how, it's about how like, it's just, I read this amazing statistic about how during Bloomberg's mayoral reign from 2003 to 13 or whatever, they built 40,000 buildings and tore down 25,000. It's just like the only capital that gets actually expended out in the world and used, it's all invested in just private property. And all the institutions we had built up for the longest time, like a welfare state and public commons, we thought that those things were going to support the sort of nuclear family, and that was the success of capitalism.

But both of those things are eroding now. You've got a public welfare state that it's just municipalities are just going broke left and fucking right and then you've got like what like what i was saying like once you've started to erode that like you're going to start seeing problems in our abilities to maintain families and like all of these sort of capitalistic aspects of the system that were built on that like home ownership and all that shit so all that is just crumbling yeah and so yeah so it's like and and and so what you've got is people looking at that and and when they look at those like us us just sitting around us three like we look at that we say oh this is the obviously the work of the

people at the very top of the system this is ceo is one percent the elite but the trump people look at that and i shit you not i'm not exaggerating they literally think it's because of immigrants that's that's what they've literally embodied they think that deep down my dad thinks this oh the trump oh the trump voters yeah yeah like the yeah okay yeah I'm sorry. I'm sorry. Yeah, no. They think that like the villains in society, that the reason that all these things are falling apart is because we've got people pouring through the fucking border. They'll believe anything, man. I was like, I was talking to Tom.

I was having this conversation with my dad and he was telling me that people come to this country from Canada to get healthcare. no they don't exactly that's that's never happened I just wanted to fucking scream they paid one guy to say that one time but he didn't do it this is the fucking thing if they did it was some rich bastard that just wanted to you know come to come to see some specialist and i love how they have they demonize that they're like well fucking canada you wait at the doctor's office for four hours before you see a doctor it's like what the fuck do you do here i've never gotten straight in to see a fucking doctor not once in my life yeah no it's it's it's crazy but um but they've embodied it all, man.

They've fully taken it in and internalized it. And now they're seeing what they want to see. Trust me, when I say there are a lot of people out there, Trump's inter-party approval rating is higher than any president since FDR. They truly believe this stuff. But this blue wave's coming. And this is why I'm trying to make this impassioned plea to the liberals. We have to beat these people. And you can't fucking do it.

Get the fucking... With half steps. Get the fucking lead out of your ass. And you don't do it by reaching across the aisle or trying to satisfy a Trump voter to try to get another old white dude to vote for you. Exactly. You have to build a bigger base. You have to enfranchise more people. Yeah. That's the only way to do it.

That's the only way to do it. We can the only way. That's the only way to do it. We can't outgun them. All these people having these fantasies online of violent revolution are fooling their fucking selves. You see what the police state's been beefed up to?

The fucking military industrial complex? Yeah. Yeah, go ahead, pal. See what happens to you. Yeah. All we've got... You're looking for your

fucking profiles and courage moment and circle jerking your buddies online. Quit with the shit. Yeah. I mean, I admire it. I believe in it in theory, but it's just not.

Since I'm here, I really wouldn't mind if we went and shot some shotguns later. Of course you would. I've got one. The other day I asked Alex, this shotgun you gave me, is it a 12 gauge or a 20 gauge? He texted me back and he said, I've already put down a deposit on the

canoeing place. And I was like, I'm not going to kill myself. I'm not going to shoot myself if that's what you're implying. It was one of those weeks that I was supposed to check. Oh, shit. You know, I don't know. Maybe it's just easy. You know, it's something small.

Something that, you know, the mind can grasp. It's something small, something that the mind can grasp. I mean, people don't bat an eye when J.P. Morgan or another company, they steal billions. Yeah. Or somebody dumps a bunch of PCBs or PFOAs into a system. God, you know, those, you know, those, those welfare people, those 2% of welfare people in Erie County taking like an extra $200,000 over 10 years. Oh my God, we got to fucking shut down welfare. And here's the thing. Think about like what you just outlined.

You have to be literally insane to actually believe that. So when it, trust me when i say you will not convert any single person who thinks that it is a it is a mugs game it is a waste of fucking time it's a waste of love i mean it's a waste of emotion and shit and this is you know like everybody you see these fucking things on twitter people like you gotta cut out your racist family members and trump fans just like it's just like, no, you don't. Tell them to their fucking face you're going to defeat them. Like, that's what you have to do because you're not going to convert them.

You're not going to change their minds. You have to beat them in the arena of fucking politics. Politics. Politics is the answer. That's the thing. That is the thing. Politics isn't some little fucking one-upsmanship game you have with your fucking family or whoever. Or pointing out hypocrisies on Facebook. This is real shit.

People are in fucking cages. This is real shit. It's not just a fucking point game argumentation you get on Facebook or whatever. I'm not into that pointing out hypocrisies thing, but to Alex's point, one that I do like to point out is that, like, food stamp fraud is, like, less than $100 million a year in this country. But the goddamn Pentagon can lose $120 billion in their couch cushions. Wasn't it, like, something like $21 trillion that they can't account for? Yeah, they can't account for. It's like $21 fucking trillion.

Oh, yeah, over time. Yeah, over time. I'm talking about, like, last year they lost, like, $120 billion. Yeah. I don't know. Just pulling their pockets out I'm just talking about like last year they lost like $120 billion. Yeah. I don't know. Just pulling their pockets out and they're empty like flies. A fly comes out. I don't know.

What's it called when we just print more money to make the numbers right? Yeah. Just print. I'm not kidding. I think I read something the other day. It was like 20. Somebody wrote like 21 trillion. It was like some Harvard or MIT study found $21 trillion missing since like 1990.

That would be funny to run a government. Just like, just print some more money. Oh, it's been done. Yeah, oh yeah. Let's talk about Bitcoin. Yeah, what about it? No, I don't care about Bitcoin. You think the government could just create that and it's in here i don't i don't know you know that maybe that i wonder if we could

tax it yeah can we i don't know i don't really know what bitcoin is here's the thing all i know is people like to collect it it's like the new gold i used to talk to the new pokemon yeah i used to talk to alex about this pogs could. Could you imagine? Yeah, yeah, yeah. God damn it. Pogs will be the currency in the communist dictatorship. But it would be funny to work in an enforcement agency in a heavily communist state. Like something that goes after...

Like an enforcement agency that like goes after cryptocurrencies and stuff like that you know you're just kicking in people's door cough it up sir yeah it would be pretty it would be pretty fun I think I guess what I'm saying is that I'd love to run

last week I said my dream job was being a clearly I have authoritarian desires clearly I want to because last week I said I wanted to run a newspaper or a magazine where I'm the managing editor and I just tell everybody so where do you fall on the

political compass authoritarian left I guess maybe I do but only if I'm running it listen all I'm running it. Listen, all I'm saying. So the people that you can date, I think they actually made a list of people you could date based on the political compass. You might have to date the old guard or something, the old revolutionary guard.

Right, right. Yeah. Well, I think we should examine that we need a cult of personality uh dictator and i'm just saying i've got nothing going on i'm available i think i you know i can either uh dates you know my union rep or uh or somebody that you know can make molotov cocktails to keep me warm at night. I can go down that spectrum too. Right. So you're not on the authoritarian left.

It really just depends on the issue. Yeah. You're on the line. When it comes to agriculture, very authoritarian left. No. You got to plan the farms, man. The vanguard. Right. Well, man. The vanguard. Right.

Well, fuck. So, damn, maybe we really went in on just one single Speak Your Peace. That's the most we've dialed in ever on a single Speak Your Peace. I mean, that was awful, but, you know, that was a gem. Thank you for reminding me of that. I'd forgotten all about Speak Your Peace. Here's a little palate cleanser for you guys. If there was anybody Jeff Foxworthy was talking about with his

it might be a redneck routine. Yes, I'm so glad you read this. Well, if you call the swap shop looking for social services and saying you need a welfare check live on the air, you may be a redneck. You might be a redneck. I heard this happen live. That happened. So you called

this in? Yeah, I called that in. Buddy, I need three applications for this. Is the Patreon not coming this month? No, the Patreon's not coming this month. There's been some hang-ups yeah damn damn damn oh let's see what else we got here why do i keep doing that oh man yeah that tucker carlson shit put me in a bad place before the civil war oh that one's not a funny one necessarily, but you might like it. One Bible passage was mis- in parentheses.

Used again and again by slavers as an argument for slavery. Romans 13. Guess which Bible passage Jeffrey Beauregard Sessions used to defend the cruel practice of harm. I can't read. What the fuck is wrong with me? Cruel practice of harming immigrant children. Romans 13. I do remember They didn't have to put Romans 13 at the end.

They should have just left that. I remember having that quoted at me as a teenager when I was you know, I've hated George Bush and shit. I had Romans 13 quoted at me by my youth pastor. What is Romans 13? What's the... Basically, like, you're supposed to respect authority.

That's pretty much it. Oh, yeah. One that was always thrown out at me is rebellion is the spirit of Antichrist. It's like... Really? Satan was the first union organizer. I don't know.

I grew up Unitarian universalist so yeah it's like we can read the bible today or we can read something else yeah sing kumbaya songs literally i've been to a few unitarian universalist sort of events you hang around social justice circles long enough you wind up in one you stumble into one yeah you know i you gotta walk a line i mean my rebellion was to join the military so yeah yeah what do you think about that um that's a big debate on twitter right now which which part whether ex-soldiers should be in the, I don't know, in the left.

If you should welcome ex- I hang out with Alex because he's an ex-soldier. I get valor for it. I'm like, I got this buddy. He totally went there, man. Dude, man.

I don't know. No, that's bad. That that sounds really bad i don't mean it like that i just um well i think the dsa veterans uh committee they're doing a lot of good work and you know i think it lends a pretty solid perspective um especially if you you know understand uh well you can't tell the story of class in this country without the military. No, that's honestly where I, you know, I mean, I grew up, you know, being talked to about class, but it wasn't until, you know, I joined the military where I felt like I truly experienced class,

and I think I developed a lot of my consciousness, uh, in the military and after my military service that, you know, maybe I would have come to it, uh, without it, but you know, I'm, I think, uh, I think, uh, within, uh, the military, you can, there's a lot of chance to develop class consciousness but you know that's again it's a whole long debate and it's just right I don't know we're here to tell you kids you don't have to do that anymore Alex actually died

so you didn't have to do that don't do it kids don't do it there's other ways there's easier ways yeah yeah no i think those people are terrible pushing their kids across that border so they can come into these united states send every one of them children back to mexico even with a bulldozer god i'm dude i'm telling

you dang there's some really dark shit out there right now and it's really crazy when you see and that's what i'm talking about you have these moments and maybe it's just from facebook or my family or speak your piece where you have these sort of events that happen and when people dig into reactionary positions like this it's really you really i don't know man it you again you have to detach yourself enough to say, I'm never going to convert this person because only an insane person can justify sending a child back in a fucking bulldozer.

Bulldozer, yeah. That literally happens in Gaza, too, by the way. They bulldoze people in their fucking homes. So I can't stress this enough. When I say these people believe these things and they mean it they will go to links to actually see it done and so you you you should keep that in mind you're and and and ask yourself are the tepid lukewarm politicians i'm uh currently supporting who do they have an answer for people that want to bulldoze not just humans but

baby humans? And the answer is no. They don't. The most, exactly, personally Amy McGrath is going to tell you we need secure and safe borders. No, you need to get fucked is what you need to do. Yes, exactly. Get as far fucking away from that person as you can

because they want the opposite of what you want. They want to be able to sleep at night is basically it they're fine with the fucking blood and the misery and everything but they just want you to think that um that they're not that they're actually morally outraged by it this is why this is what i was talking about the other day man this is why conservatives are so much better at outrage than liberals and it's just like because they could they actually believe these things they're and and especially this is i guess what i'm talking about like media conservatives because you gotta be craving to be in the media anyways and so it's just like so it's not much of a moral leap for them to just be actual genocidal pieces of shit

like tucker carlson right i don't know i got an argue with a friend of mine the other day you know be actual genocidal pieces of shit, like Tucker Carlson. I don't know. I got in an argument with a friend of mine the other day. He's been real big into supporting blue candidates and sending them his money. Oh, man. What a sucker. And he espouses all these values,

but it comes down to it. He's a rainbow capitalist. But the... Oh, God. I actually... I stopped talking to him for a little while because this is right when, I mean, Israel, this has been going on for a while. But, like, you know, I think most recent bad thing in Gaza. He's just like, I just don't care. I don't think that's really, that's really a core issue for voting in America. And I'm like, he's just like, that candidate, Amy McGrath, she supports Israel's right to defend itself. Does she really?

Of course she does. Yeah, it was on her campaign platform. Oh, fuck her. She probably flew planes in and out of that motherfucker after she just got done strafing 30 fucking villagers i oh i'm gonna go refuel and there's like but he could sit there and tell me that he cares about kids and cares about everything in in one one swell but then you know he's like when i say that well how can you vote how can you give money to a candidate that you know isn't going to condemn

what's going on in gaza right now and his answer to me was that's just i don't i don't see that as a core issue it's like he's i don't see how that's important to the election i'm like that's their basic moral fucking compass if they're not even willing to you know acknowledge you know that what's going on is at the very least apartheid and you know more likely just genocide. Yeah. I'll tell you how. That person is, you know, not fit for office in my book. No, exactly. No.

And it's the same thing with, like, ICE, too. I mean, this is like I was telling Tom the other day. It's like I saw people on Twitter being like, oh, this Democrat is embracing abolish ICE. This Democrat is embracing abolish ICE. I mean, like. Like Democrat is embracing abolish ICE. Good. Yes, that's good. I don't want to throw water on it and be like, oh, whatever. If we can somehow work the electoral system to get to a point

where we can abolish these institutions like ICE and Homeland Security, that would be great. That would be awesome. And I would absolutely work towards that. Which, by the way, have only existed for what? 15 years? years i mean alex was just talking about it it's like we we got along pretty well with that only exists since 2002 and they spend more on and i was only since like 2007 or so than any other enforcement agency combined right fbi atf is tom ridge still there is he remember when tom Ridge was the...

I just remember hearing the whole anthrax scare. I remember hearing the name Tom Ridge a lot. There's a King of the Hill bit about it. I was like, that's a good dated reference. Yeah. Yeah, no, I should clarify. You know, I guess what I'm saying, though, is that I don't think that...

Maybe the party infrastructure exists for that to happen maybe they can actually do it but i guess what i'm finding out and what people i guess need to internalize is that there is no party that exists for anybody that's not the ruling class like the democratic party is that and and and i'm not one of these people who's like a party like that should exist because i don't think that if i think if a party like that existed i'm not sure that it could enact the reforms and things we need right but also when we talk about politics is the answer we're not necessarily talking about electoral politics yes anyway yeah that should be that distinction should be made

right yeah i mean i don't know i guess i guess five days out of the week i fall on the side of electoral politics are dead in but but that's just because what i've seen in my lifetime right and i'm only basing that off of experience but it doesn't mean that we so i you know it's i don't know people like well one or the other well we are like, well, one or the other. Well, we can't just focus on one or the other. We have to do both. We have to do both. It doesn't mean that, just because I'm saying that, yes, I believe in working on electoral politics doesn't mean that I don't think that we should be devoting a majority of our efforts into building our own structures.

Yeah. Yeah, you're absolutely right. Our own community. Our own donating mechanisms. Tip me at Act Blue. I was talking about your point about Amy McGrath and sort of all that stuff. I was going to bring this up,

but I couldn't scramble to find it, but I wanted to mention this before it got too untopical. What? So a friend of mine made this post. was just about basically in essence you know uh he says uh i could not be more in favor of providing latin american people with sanctuary from their sometimes awful conditions in their home countries you know etc etc and the comments, enter this guy that says, two parts. I hate when people tee things up like that. Two parts.

Two parts. Yeah. That makes me sweat. Two parts, period. I sweat when people do that. Yeah, I'm over here getting nervous. And I remember being so palpably angry on this when I was taking a shit at a bay

mon in and lexington kentucky this morning uh one it is frustrating how there is a complete absence of latin american violence in our political dialogues we just make movies about fucking drug cartels you fucking idiot sicario tv showsario, you're a goddamn fool. Any portrayal of a Latino in any cop movie? Exactly. Exactly. What was that cop movie we watched together? End of Watch? End of Watch.

Oh my god. You guys remind me of the End of Watch guy. By Marxists? If the Taliban, ISIS, and a nuclear North Korea, which I don't know if this is like, I'm not persuaded North Korea ever had a nuclear weapon or nuclear capabilities. More on that in a minute.

Same here. Have clear antagonists. Where is the international response to the cartels? Are you fucking serious dude and are you not fucking paying attention i think there are people out there who generally 100 genuinely think that cartels want nukes oh yeah they think that what would they even fucking do with the nuke what are the maintenance costs on a nuke how much cocaine would you have to sell just to maintain a nuke god damn man that's a lot of blow oh my god they're working on no they're working on lean infrastructure man they don't

want they don't they don't want that shit yeah listen this shit. The biggest fucking oxymoron I think I've ever come across. Further questions could be, should the United States and our allies consider militaristic efforts to reduce the violence? A militaristic effort to reduce the violence. You, sir, are a goddamn idiot. A violence in Latin America. How much is the economic and social obligation we should take with that? Oh, dear God.

Where do we even start with that? I mean, hold on a second. There's more. Remember, two parts. Sorry, I'm new to this podcast game. Second, I learned, and I'll leave this guy's name out, that economic relief by migration towards urban areas is inevitable. What is being witnessed, though,

is that instead of migrating toward one's national capital or metropolises... I don't even think That's a fucking word Plural Why don't you just say We're migrating to Metropolitan areas

Or Metropolises People really want to Metropolises Metropolises I don't know Anyway Metropoles

Metropoles Metropoles Anyway Kind of sexy. Instead, for many, immigration, E-M-I-G-R-A-T-O-N. Oh, yeah. We won't knock him for that. That was bait.

He wanted somebody to tell him that he spelled it wrong so that he could be like grammar Nazi. Let's not police people's grammar. No, I don't believe in that. It's classist. Is a significant alternative. But who can blame them? Itinerancy is a fundamental human right. You can't tell people where to live, same wise as you can't tell people who to love, what to believe,

or other classical liberal ideas that I thought were self-evident. But I digress. What does he think? I don't know. First of all, I thought that identifying as a classical liberal, that tells you a lot about somebody from Jump Street. If somebody

identifies themselves as a classical liberal. Right. Yeah, what does it tell you? Well, they're not our friend. It means that they are are we going back to like the third estate here what do we what do they mean i guess is it they mean like someone who is believes in the constitution and um believes in free trade inquiry and free thought and decorum apparently i mean a classical liberal can i mean can i mean they could be a constitutional monarchist and in fact i would yeah i'm sure there's plenty of cases of that right like that

guy's probably a constitutional oh yeah what what was his point about um what was his point about you can't tell people where to live just in the same way you can't tell them who to love i guess he was advocating man i thought he was just saying we should all just throw our passports away but which is good but wasn't he also just talking about a military intervention i mean i mean if he's a classical liberal and he's like studied all this like you know we've been fucking around in south america since the monroe doctrine oh way way way back yeah right also i just don't understand how anybody could look at this and say we're not actually paying enough attention to the drug cartels like this is the

the bogeyman that they're using to justify i know you know not to go down too far down that that lane but you know didn't we didn't we kind of create M13? MS13. The M13 Club. The M13 Club. I think we created that M13 Club through our deportations. So what are the origins of MS13?

I really don't know anything about it. They're a Salvadorian street gang, right? Uh-huh. That's all I know about them. I know that... They were started by a bunch of people that we deported back in the 80s and 90s. Interesting. And then, yeah. I don't know much else about them. I know that. They were started by a bunch of people that we deported back in like the 80s and 90s. And then, yeah.

I don't know much else about them. I know that Lisa Ling went to a prison in El Salvador. And one of the guys said very menacingly, if we wanted you dead, you'd already be dead. And she just had this like real crazy look on her face. and she just had this real crazy look on her face. And I think that's where MS-13 captured the imagination of the American conservative. Also, there was another prominent story about one of the MS-13 cutting a fetus out of a pregnant woman's stomach

and throwing her in the Hudson River or something. Oh my God. Like, yeah, fucked up things do happen, but this is not like... Well, it's like we were saying earlier, every sort of ruling class or whatever has this sort of bogeyman. And in the 80s, it was Libyan terrorists. Libyan. And in the 90s, it was the super predator, which Hillary Clinton played a huge role in

creating. That's right. In the 2000s. It was Jihadists It's just so fucking dumb, so I don't know if I'm allowed to google stuff is this like Scrabble absolutely like Scrabble? Absolutely. Podcasting as Scrabble. We should institute that rule because me and Tom get way too much fucking shit wrong

to have any excuse. To have all this data at our fingertips, it's hard. We're instituting Scrabble rules here? We'll allow you a pass. Okay, alright. Well, no. MS-13 apparently started in like 1980 in los angeles really yeah that's what i thought i thought i remember watching some hyped up fucking trump uh

propaganda thing on discovery you know like discovery will be like going inside ms-13 and then they'll like follow three guys around there was this kid when i lived in las vegas there was this kid edwin that went to the school that that my ex-girlfriend worked at and to like you know like how in the same way like uh uh you know you had those guys that like alluded to having like an uncle that was like mobbed up or some shit to like get people not to fuck with it. Edwin always made allusions to his, because his brother would always pick him up from school

and he was all tatted up and shit. He'd always be like, you know, he's affiliated. MS-13. And he was Salvadorian. I would fuck it up. I'd probably be trying to tell him,

I got an uncle that's an MS-14. I mean 13. The M13 club. God damn it. So they originated in Los Angeles. I mean, the Kiwanis. God damn it. It's not MS-13.

He's in the fucking Rotary Club. All right. Yeah. There, you got me. You want to beat me up? Beat me up. Hey, man. That's how we'll know society. Rotary Club's dangerous. Yeah. They, you got me. You want to beat me up, beat me up. Hey, man. That's how we'll know society.

Rotary Club's dangerous. Yeah, they really are. They're basically a bunch of rich people. Yeah, they're bringing immigrants in, right? I think that's where Pizzagate started. Kiwanis. Fucking Kiwanis. Listen, folks.

We've got these guys. They march in all the parades. They wear these really funny hats. They got little feathers on them. They're collecting glasses for blind kids. Unbelievable. That would be a really nice turn if Trump went to demonizing the Knights Templar and the Masons. Yeah, that'd be great.

It actually would not be far off brand. Alex Jones has been doing that for... That's true. That was his grift before Obama. Yeah. That was breaking into Bohemian Grove. Bohemian Grove with that one dude, John Ronson. Yeah, yeah.

So, BMS-13 came from los angeles what's their connection to south el salvador but that's okay so this is gonna sound like a stupid question maybe one of you can answer this for me um and all the discussion i see about like oh we've got people so i read this article earlier today about how there are more displaced people in the world right now the more refugees it's something like 60 million 68 million there are more refugees in the world right now than at any point in history since world war ii and um there is like they're calling it a refugee crisis which sounds fucked up i don't know like a migrant crisis or whatever but um how much is what's going on right now with people coming from

mexico not just mexico but south america and central america they say they're the thing i always hear is like they're fleeing violence on us ultimately all this is pretty well actually it's kind of bullshit because more people are actually leaving the united states to go back now that's not like including deportations or whatever i mean like of their own elect i i always thought in the other way around i thought that was kind of a result of like naphtha too though right like didn't naphtha just sort of like obliterate a large large segments of the mexican economy and just concentrated more wealth into the top and so you had you know people sort of families trying isn't that wasn't that one of the reasons why um there's so much immigration

from mexico and guys i'm asking genuinely i really have no idea it's kind of immaterial let me it's kind of immaterial but i'm just i'm just trying to 97 identify the structural forces at work here yeah i you know well i mean i think it led to a restructuring uh pretty heavy restructuring the mexican mex restructuring of the Mexican economy. I'm not sure what areas it decimated. I mean, you had the Maculadoras in northern Mexico, but I'm pretty sure it decimated a lot of the indigenous agricultural industry. I think NAFTA really opened up Mexico to U.S. crops and U.S. corn, which at least when I was in Oaxaca in 2004, that was a pretty big deal.

But it's like corn, didn't the Bush administration subsidize corn? Because they wanted ethanol. We heavily subsidize corn in this country. It wouldn't be profitable otherwise to grow feed corn or any of that stuff. Why? Because not a lot of people eat it? No, it's in everything. But the prices are really low on it. Anyway, there's a lot of corn subsidies.

And yeah, they went up even higher. Yeah, because of the push in ethanol and this whole biofuels push. So maybe we need someone on this podcast. I want to turn this podcast into a corn pod, agriculture podcast. I want to talk to somebody who can tell me how we're going to play in the agriculture sector. Well, if we want to talk about agricultural terrorism, The shift of customs and border protection from looking at agricultural goods to, I'm going to just track down a bunch of illegals. Right.

That has actually decimated. That has brought a lot of pests in this country and cost this country billions of dollars every year in agricultural pests and lost items. I mean pests. That's what those terrorists on 9-11 did you're absolutely right isn't this sort of the so the net effect of 9-11 if you really want to talk about how it's really changed our lives we've let it drove the price of corn up right and it brought in the japanese or the uh japanese marmorated sting some bug yeah but no you're

right like that would be in an actually functioning non-fascist society the role of border customs and shit would be just checking to make sure that the shit we're bringing in doesn't have some kind of bull weevil that's going to some kind of moth yeah that's going to eat up all of our crops and fucking drive prices up and but now jesus fucking christ good point alex bing this is uh not only is this really funny that you say that because like you notice how trump's like using this sort of dehumanizing like infestation language all that kind of stuff yeah with regards to humans not bull evils dude it's so dark it is really it is really dark so back on uh m13 i'm just gonna call the m13 club that's all right um we're on their side let's say mara struccia what is our stance funny mister yeah i mean according to Wikipedia, a lot of the gang members from Los Angeles were deported.

And so instead of addressing the underlying conditions that, you know, cause people to want to join a gang, we just kept deporting them. And that turned into a recruitment strategy so the more people we deported the more they were able to recruit and so the larger the game was able to become interesting so this is kind of like one of those

Taliban situations where a classic addition by subtraction it's an American tradition right there. It's an American tradition. It's an American tradition. Creating our future enemies. Well, we're repeating those same mistakes.

I mean, I don't know if you read those pieces come out of New Jersey or in Long Island and whatnot. But like where they talk about MS-13, you know, getting toe holds in our high schools and whatnot. Well, we're just, you're just deporting those people again. The issue is still there. Right. So we're repeating the same mistakes, apparently, from the 80s and 90s. And I guess we made the same mistakes in the 2000s. I just imagine somebody in 300 years going on a podcast talking about American history

and they're scrolling through the Wikipedia page going, looks like they made the same mistakes in... Yeah. Well, they just couldn't get it together. We'll make the same mistakes in 2019. Go to the 2030 tab where I'm communist dictator. Looks like you turned on me. Let's consult the crystal ball.

Who's going to be our next sort of bogeyman that we're going to pin all of our eels on? So if it's following a trend, right? So let's just start picking arbitrary starting point. Are we talking about? I already know. I know exactly who it's going to be. What they're going to do... Like after all this MS-13 is just going to the wind.

What we're going to do, man, is once the... We're going to keep up our current trend of humiliating agency heads in public, shutting down prisons actually establishing a very effective and powerful left in this country and so what they're going to do is merge MS-13 with like a militant leftist

group and it'll be the Zapatistas that'll be the next we gotta invade Oaxaca or Chiapas it'll be the Zapatistas and then We got to invade Oaxaca, folks. Or Chiapas, folks. Yeah, right. It'll be the Zapatistas. And then... Listen, they're sending us all this coffee. We don't know what's in the coffee.

I thought you were going to say we were going to merge Antifa with MS-13. Oh, yeah. Well, the same thing. Subcomandante Marcos and me. I'm kind of more... He's got a badass rig with like the The ski mask And the pup Fuck yeah dude The Zapatistas are the shit

They are man That's badass Yeah I'm with him There's a There's a really good They're doing something right They're still around

There's a really good John Berger Article I sent At Tom a while back It's in the It's in that book I was reading it earlier That's why I bought The Zapatistas up, I guess.

But where he... Do you read John Berger? Did either of y'all read John Berger at all? I just read a bunch of sci-fi. Yeah. I got ants, man. I can't read good. Well, he wrote about this.

He wrote about Hieronymus bosch that that the dutch painter the artist lemmish painter yeah yeah hieronymus i never know how to say it the garden of earthly delights was he a surrealist or yeah her paints hell a lot doesn't yeah but he wasn't a surrealist he was like in the 1500s that's because what is we don't know how the hell to talk about art it was a long time ago. I know that. We just know the names and we know we like

or we don't like. Right. But he's got a John Berger has a really good essay about him and he's talking so you know at least what the Hieronymus Bosch

painting looked like. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Like the stereotypical one. Just chaos. Fucking hell. Like a fucking big bat with its mouth open and fucking

I just remember a lot of things coming out of people's butts yeah yeah yeah things coming out of people's asses bloody dicks flying out of bat mouths Bosch's prophecy was of the world picture which is communicated to us today by the media under the impact of globalization with it's delinquent need to sell

incessantly both okay hold on actually let me go back a second so okay again imagine things flying out of asses bloody dicks everything there is no horizon there there is there is no continuity between actions there are no pauses no paths no pattern no past and no future there is only the clamor of the disparate fragmentary present everywhere there are surprises and sensations yet nowhere is there any outcome nothing flows through everything interrupts there is a kind of spatial delirium compare this space to what one sees in the average publicity

slot or in a typical cnn news bulletin or any mass media news commentary there is a comparable incoherence a comparable wilderness of separate excitements, a similar frenzy. Brasch's prophecy was of the world picture which is communicated to us today by the media under the impact of globalization with his delinquent need to sell incessantly. Both are like a puzzle whose wretched

pieces do not fit together. And this was precisely the term that Subcomandante Marcos used in a letter about the New World Order last year. He was writing from Chiapas, Southeast Mexico. He sees the planet today as the battlefield of a fourth world war. The third was the so-called Cold War. The aim of the belligerence is the conquest of the entire world through the market.

The arsenals are financial. There are nevertheless millions of people being maimed or killed every moment. The aim of those waging the war is to rule the world from new abstract power centers megapoles there's that's the word not metropoles but megapoles i guess that would be yeah your fur coat i was looking for megapoles of the market which will be subject to no control except that of the logic of investment meanwhile nine-tenths of the women and men living on the planet live with the jagged pieces that do So, Subcomandante Marcos. He sees the battlefield.

He sees the planet today. He's bearish on rural and bullish on urban. Did I get that backwards? Right. Bearish means sailing, right? Yeah, he is. I guess he is pretty. What's Shappas is mostly like?

I don't know that much about it. I don't know. I know they live kind of in the farming area. They do coffee, right? Like a lot of that. There's a lot of extractive industry in Chappas, I think. Yeah. Yeah.

That looks as Mexican-American as you. Yeah. Yeah, tell us. Yeah. here can we yeah yeah we can click we can click off that diversity checkbox yeah all right this is we're gonna end the episode on this but I just want to go through the seven pieces of this puzzle the subcomandante Marcos lays

out none of this is a nice are you bringing are you bringing this book on the canoe trip? You want me to? I kind of do. I'll bring this book on the, I can read you. Read you all of John Berger's essays. All right. The first piece.

That'd be nice. The first, this is, again, Subcomandante Marcos, his seven-piece puzzle to getting a complete sort of Hieronymus Bosch triptych view of the world as it stands in this current moment the first piece he named has a dollar sign on it and it is green little caricature that's all right the piece yeah keep going the piece consists of the new concentration of global wealth in fewer and fewer hands and the unprecedented extension of hopeless poverties. The second piece is triangular and consists of a lie.

The new order claims to rationalize and modernize production and human endeavor. In reality, it is a return to the barbarism of the beginnings of the industrial revolution with the important difference this time around that the barbarism is unchecked by any opposing ethical consideration or principle. I'm going to read that again. In reality, it is a return. I don't think you're listening to me.

I'm just kidding. The new order is fanatical and totalitarian. Within its own system, there are no appeals. Its totalitarianism does not concern politics, which by its reckoning have been superseded by global monetary control. Consider the children. 100 million in the world live in the street. 200 million are engaged in the global labor force.

The third piece is round like a vicious circle. It consists of enforced immigration. The more enterprising of those who have nothing try to immigrate to survive. Yet the new order works night and day according to the principle that anybody who does not Go off, King. the fourth piece is rectangular like a mirror it consists of an ongoing exchange between the commercial banks and the world racketeers for crime too has been globalized the fifth piece is more or less like a pentagon it consists of physical repression the nation states under the new order have lost their economic independence their political initiative and their sovereignty the new that's for damn sure. The new rhetoric of most politicians

is an attempt to disguise their political as distinct from civic or repressive powerlessness. The new task of the nation states is to manage what is allotted to them, to protect the interests of the market's mega enterprises and, above all, to control and police the redundant. As we just enumerated. The sixth piece is the shape of a scribble

and consists of breakages. On one hand, the new order does away with frontiers and distances by the instantaneous telecommunication of exchanges and deals, by obligatory free trade zones like NAFTA, and by the imposition everywhere of the single unquestionable law of the market. And on the other hand,

it provokes fragmentation and the proliferation of frontiers by its undermining of the nation-state. For example, the former Soviet Union, Yugoslavia, etc. A world of broken mirrors, wrote Marcos, reflecting the useless unity of the neoliberal puzzle. The seventh piece of the puzzle has the shape

of a pocket and consists of all the various pockets of resistance against the new order, which are developing across the globe. The Zapatistas in Southeast Mexico are one such pocket. Others, in different circumstances, have not necessarily chosen armed resistance. The many pockets do not have a common political program as such. How could they, existing as they do in the broken puzzle? How could they, existing as they do in the broken puzzle? Yet their heterogeneity may be a promise.

What they have in common is their defense of the redundant, the next to be eliminated, and their belief that the Fourth World War is a crime against humanity. That's us. we're the seventh piece so anyways the seven pieces will never fit together to make any sense this lack of sense this absurdity is endemic to the new order as bosch foresaw in his vision of hell there is no horizon the world is burning every figure is trying to survive by concentrating on his own immediate need and survival claustrophobia at most extreme, is not caused by overcrowding, but by

the lack of any continuity existing between one action and the next that is close enough to be touching it. It is this hell that is hell. It is this that is hell. The culture in which we live is perhaps the most claustrophobic that has ever existed. In the culture of globalization, as in Bosch's hell, there is no glimpse of an elsewhere or an otherwise. The given is a prison, and faced with such reductionism, human intelligence is reduced to greed. Marcos ended his letter by saying, It is necessary to build a new world, a world capable of containing many worlds, capable of containing all worlds. What the painting of Bosch does is to remind us, if prophecies can be called reminders, that the first step towards building an alternative world has to be a refusal of the world picture implanted in our minds

and all the false promises used everywhere to justify and idealize the delinquent and insatiable need to sell. Another space is vitally necessary. First, a horizon has to be discovered, and for this we have to refine hope against all the odds of what the new order pretends and perpetrates. Hope, however, is an act of faith and has to be sustained by other concrete actions. For example, the action of approach, of measuring distances, and walking towards. This will lead to collaborations which deny discontinuity. The act of resistance means not only refusing to accept

the absurdity of the world picture offered to us, but denouncing it. And when hell is denounced from within, it ceases to be hell. In pockets of resistance as they exist today, the other two panels of Bosch's triptych, showing Adam and Eve in the Garden of Earthly Delights can be studied by torchlight in the dark. We need them.

I would like to quote again the Argentinian poet Juan Gilman. Death itself has come with its documentation. We're going to take up again the struggle. Again we're going to begin. Again we're going to begin. All of us. Against the great

defeat of the world. Little compañeros who never end. Or who burn like fire in the memory again and again and again. Damn. Well. That's how you podcast.

That's how you fucking do a podcast thanks for joining us Alex oh man thanks for having me well hopefully we don't die on our canoeing trip well I gotta finish making our tabbouleh and you gotta pack yeah I gotta pack

but uh if if we do die this was a hell of a last episode to go out on. Man, that last part was just like very apocalyptic in a weird way. Well, I don't know. I didn't find it apocalyptic. No, no, no.

I just mean like with the Hieronymus Bosch thing. Like all this like Booker Revelation-esque language in these seven pieces and then like the image of the flaming bloody dicks flying out of bat mouths these are serious times

I think one thing that I pulled out of that was you know maybe I'm completely misinterpreting it but he was talking about you know

seeing the horizons I think part of our role as you know socialists is to point out the limits of our current system right which it yeah it's something on the opposite end the republicans do extremely well yeah extremely well and this is why they're good at politics but they're saying that you need

we need to accept something that's within that system and something less. Right. So I think our role is to show the limits of our current system and to say, you know, these are the constraints of government. But from that point, craft a vision of what is possible once we show that these are the limits of our current system. So, you know. You're right. That is traditionally so you know you're right that is traditionally you know i was listening to that revolutions podcast about the revolution of 1848

and about how like the first socialists and the first marxists like they distinguish themselves from all the other existing radicals at the time by by critiquing the limits of society by saying like um this is how far we seem to be able to go you know and why why does it have to be this way i mean you you can intercede in history we that is well and that's what we have to do i mean it's like what we were talking about earlier like the horizon for every single issue that we list that you can even think of is catastrophe it's calamity and the only way to stop it is by if is if leftists can intercede in that i i hope that within my lifetime maybe my vision will be the one that's you know passed and overthrown yeah yeah well that would really bring it full circle.

It might happen tomorrow. Your vision might be it might happen tomorrow. Are you worried about strainers? I'm a little worried about strainers. Let's not worry about strainers.

What's strainers? It's like a It's a tree across the river that you can drown in. Yeah. No big deal. Or get impaled on. I mean, just about any imaginable bad thing. Trees and water scare the fuck out of me.

I did go under one with Regina Donner one time. Oh, yeah. That was really crazy. I mean, it pinned her against it, and it just took her right out of the boat, man. It'll take you right out of the boat. No, man. Oh, man.

It's a life-changing moment. It's a life-changing moment, your first strainer. See what you're made out of. So if I die tomorrow, this will be my last episode moment Your first strainer See what you're made out of So if I die tomorrow This will be my last episode Death by strainer It's nice knowing you audience I mean Thanks for everything

Where would you rank this episode? Like you know I'd say it's in our top five That's a strong one to go out on Yeah I got ants Yeah no it's a good one It's a good one

Alright I'll try to keep the I'll try to keep the Cheerbillies complete You got to move back man This will be your moment though This will be your moment This will be like

John Bonham dying I'll I'll do you better than I did Tom I'm sorry Tom Alright thanks for listening everybody