Trillbilly Worker's Party - Episode 97: Appalatchiks (w/ special guest Hannah Gais)

Episode Date: May 16, 2019

Writer Hannah Gais (@hannahgais) joins us to talk about her article in The Baffler about what the late Soviet Union's obsession with conspiracy theories can tell us about our current political and cultural moment. After that we discuss an article in the New York Times about an Appalachian coding nonprofit that turned out to be a fraud. Read Hannah's article here: https://thebaffler.com/latest/psychic-healing-at-the-end-of-history-gais Read the New York Times article here: https://www.nytimes.com/2019/05/12/us/mined-minds-west-virginia-coding.html And support our Patreon here: www.patreon.com/trillbillyworkersparty

Well, Hannah, before we get started, I just want to lay out a scenario. It's 1990, thereabout, and all three of us have kind of been partying all night and we're sort of like stoned and drunk and- Five years old. Right, five years old. Hanging out with Boris Yeltsin. And you stumble into a grocery store to get some food because you know you're fucked up and hungry. And Boris is just absolutely enamored with the tabloids next to the checkouts.

He's the bat boy. And also the frozen food, of course. Right, right. Boris does look like a guy that probably, you know, when things opened up, you know, the era after Gorbachev was doing Pizza Hut commercials and stuff, a guy that probably lived off TV dinners and canned food.

I can see it, actually. Yeah, it sounds pretty accurate. Although, I feel like his wife probably would prevent him from doing that, but if she was gone, he'd just be like, no, it's under the man all the way. Who is Boris Yeltsin's wife? What is her story?

I don't know that much about her except the fact that she was kind of religious interesting interesting yeah um that sounds like a very eastern kentucky thing like just a ne'er-do-well guy that's married to a super religious woman that like you know well i think boris yeltsin was like didn't what isn't there like a really famous story about him like getting found passed out drunk like on the White House lawn in the mid 90s? Yeah, I think it was. I forget if it was him who was the one who was wandering around trying to find pizza or someone else. But yeah, he had a bit of a drinking problem, to put it nicely.

Right. Yeah. So funny. um he had a bit of a drinking problem to put it nicely right yeah so funny um well so uh yeah i just wanted to lay out that scenario because i thought it was really funny it's just uh the the the promises of western society it's like of all the things that like you could sort of potentially see someone, you know, coming out of the Soviet bloc being interested in of Western society. It's that it's like the tabloids next to the checkout lines. Just being enamored by that. It's really insane. Yeah. Although I kind of get it.

Yeah. With supermarkets, too. Totally. Well, also, a lot of those stories are just made up. Yeah. A lot of them. Most of them. While some of those stories are even made up.

All the ones about aliens are correct, though. That's what I was implying. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Absolutely. That's what I was implying. Absolutely. Well, go for it well you know so yeah in the sort of um vein of made-up stories uh we'll just introduce our guests this week this week we have hannah gaze um did i say your say your last name right hannah yeah you did

okay um and we're talking to Hannah about your recent article in the Baffler called Psychic Healing at the End of History. By the way, I guess before we get started, Hannah, you're at 2 in the morning? Yep. Yep. So, you know, congrats on that. That's pretty good. Just laying out your bona fides here before we really get into the meat. Right.

Yeah. That's actually, that's all I've done in the past two years is, the only reason why I went to grad school is so I could fuck with Neera Tanden. That's a good reason to be in. Yeah. Better than most reasons, I'd say. Fair, fair. Yeah.

Hannah, what is your sort of topic or topics of study and research? Well, I'm a master's student, so I'm mostly doing coursework, but I'm focused primarily on Russia on the far right uh so the far right here and then connections to russia and interest in eastern europe and then also kind of like within russia proper ultra nationalists um fascists neo-nazis nasbol types nasbol types yeah all the All the good Red Brown Alliance stuff that really only makes sense in a Russian context. Right.

Well, today we're talking to you about conspiracy theories, I guess you could say, in also a Russian context, in the fall of the Soviet Union. Specifically about what was referred to as, I just love this word, extrasensory. I'm not saying it correctly. I'm saying it like an American. That's okay.

Just a great word, though. Yeah. Basically like TV quacks, people who claim to be able to do psychic healing and you know self-care homeopathic medicine positive thinking stuff like that so i guess before we get started though i wanted to just talk about like the context of that. Like why, you know, what was the sort of context in which these extra-sensi, but also the sort of conspiracy theories that came up around them, what was the context of that? Why was this not happening earlier than the late 80s and suddenly started happening in the late 80s? So it's always actually been around um i mean russia like here like pretty much most european countries has had a really big

population interested in anything from extraterrestrials to like bizarre conspiracy theories i mean there's it's been a lot of discussion of extraterrestrials in the Soviet era, too, and also interest in, like, psychics. I think the KGB, like the CIA, was trying to run similar tests to explore whether that was something that could be weaponized. But what happens in the late 80s is that things open up, culture opens up, and there's much more of a... The interest in this can go mainstream. So people can go on TV, do their weird healing seances, and do something that the party wouldn't have necessarily let them do before.

Yeah, and it sort of happened in this, like you know so you've got like maybe this sort of like actual institutional policies like glasnost or or what they called glasnost um but then you got like maybe what you could consider like maybe the breakdown of i don't know dogmas and beliefs uh just this sort of like sense that well as you wrote I think it's like or you didn't write it you quoted somebody it's like it was like an era of like thickened history it's like when the pace of events outstripped the moment of the movement of institutions and the understanding of leaders um so like yeah what how did that contribute to the sort of rise of i don't know conspiratorial thinking in a society that had well to be honest with you i don't know a lot

about soviet society before this so i can't make any generalizations yeah i mean i think a big fat factor and a big part of it was that um everything was just crazy and you're i mean there's another term that pops up i mean i'm sure you guys saw adam curtis's film hyper normalization right right yeah so that's actually used by a historian and theorist to talk about an era before that where people were just starting to realize that meaning had started to break down and that what was being said by these institutions wasn't true. I think in that period of thickened history, what you start to see is that people had already realized that what was going on

wasn't really the truth and what had been put out wasn't the truth um and there's an effort to grapple with that especially as everything is falling apart i mean you have the rise of these various nationalist independence movements um throughout the soviet bloc um later domestically in russia but that happened a lot later compared to some of the other Soviet states. Yeah, I saw Jacob Bacharach tweet something the other day, like all the booing 747s, like all those were going down, and he said something. He said, anything your elementary school teachers were telling you about the Soviet Union, like I'd say we're probably all around the same age right probably late 20s early 30s somewhere there about yeah is absolutely true of the United States right now why don't you will you talk a little bit about that yeah um I think I think it's definitely accurate I think

it's not quite uh I think it's nowhere near as bad um i think adam curtis especially kind of takes that bit and runs with maybe a little bit too much at times um but definitely within the trump era i mean what you're seeing is the manifestation of kind of how that chaos and breakdown of meaning happens like whether it's fake news or um hostility towards journalists or like these right wing whack jobs like Jacob Wall having a fucking press conference outside of someone's house today. I mean, it's hilarious. It's amazing. Well, and the funniest thing was there was like a garbage truck trying to pick up garbage

and you couldn't even hear the Jacob Wall and the other guy. And so it was just this. It's like it's like monty python or something it's comedy and it's just like you find all these weird parallels to some of these same stories um i was reading the other day working on a research paper on a certain type of like conservative far right movement in russia and one of the early manifestations of it was just this like maybe kind of like they don't write if they were bigger into memes and like maybe stupider um but the author was just describing what this like discussion circle did as well they didn't really anything, but they just got drunk a lot. And it's kind of like that. I mean, you,

you have all these like weird events happening and you have no way of like contextualizing them. Um, when you do try and contextualize them, just chaos runs all over the place. Yeah. It's, it's like, it's almost like the people in power what happens is like they have to make sort of concessions to that just sort of implicitly uh acknowledge that everything is just sort of on borrowed time and that the sort of established order of things is no longer really acceptable. But I don't know. You just sort of enter into this limbo period where nobody's really sure what to do

and sort of events happen at a sort of breakneck clip. And I feel like if there's anything, I don't know a whole lot about the sort of dissolution of the Soviet Union other than it just seems like Gorbachev who was trying to pizza commercial right right he was trying to do Tom showed me the pizza commercial for the first time just the other day but just uh just this just this sort of like I don't I don't really want to call him an idiot but just like kind of just a bumbling fool like just just like maybe maybe if I had to put it in a different way, was maybe completely

unaware of his role in history or his time in history or or maybe had read it incorrectly. I don't know. Regardless, he was it just seems like he just bungled it for a half decade and then things just unraveled. It's hard to say because there's a debate going around Soviet historians and has been going on forever. There was a Twitter poll the other day that encapsulated it perfectly, which was the question was, was the fall of the Soviet Union inevitable? And it was 50% yes and 50% no. Because it's really unclear.

I mean, like on the one hand, he was bumbling and there were a number of different things that he probably could have done. One of the big ones would be cracking down on some of these independence movements. Right. But then the question is, if you crack down on the independence movements and what happens after that right i mean if you use force that turns it into something else entirely um and it's really it's so unclear i mean he clearly knew didn't know what he was doing um but at the same time it didn't really seem like any of them knew what they were doing.

Yeah, it's kind of like, did you ever watch Death of Stalin? Yeah, twice, actually. Great, great movie. It's hilarious. Very dark, though. It's kind of like that, but under completely different pretext. It's like, so I don't know, I guess the historical context for this is that like the soviet economy was completely um just falling apart like the wheels were falling off um and you know their standard of living wasn't uh as high um and so you know there was this as

i understand it there was this maybe sort of debate in the early 80s as to like if you liberalize society in terms of open it up for free speech and things like that, would that encourage economic growth or is it the other way around? Is it like that you can only have a liberalized political society after you've sort of liberalized the economy and brought in markets and all this? liberalize the economy and brought in markets and all this. And so it just seems to me that there was a lot of different like ideas floating around, a lot of uncertainty about the future. And I don't know, things just sort of went off the rails. Yeah. And then you had, it's that, and then you had a pretty big conservative faction that didn't want liberalization to happen.

So this is kind of where the Nat Bowles come in because they were the ones who didn't want any liberalization. They thought everything, not necessarily that things were fine per se, but that this was going to lead to the breakup of the USSR. And I guess they were right in a way. But you have them pushing back on it. And I guess one of the big other factors too is events like chernobyl yeah yeah where you have the party saying no no nothing happened nothing happened and then the rest of the world is like no guys we're getting these really high radiation levels. Something happened.

This isn't normal. Also, why do you have so many firefighters over there? I think there could also be another similar situation. And Hannah, I need you to sort of check the veracity of the statement here because I think I saw this on YouTube. the veracity of this statement here because um i think i saw this on youtube but is it true that the soviets once traded a ton of warships for like billions of dollars worth of pepsi effectively making pepsi code the seventh most powerful military in the world and i guess they just ended up scrapping all the stuff uh no but doesn't pepsi try to go into space uh i can't i can't remember that's like right now like right now they're trying to right now i don't know what's the what's the objective are they gonna like make the pepsi symbol on the moon

or something space pepsi space pepsi yeah i don't know that's interesting what's your source for that claim or what was the context of it i don't know i was uh i think i was i forget what i was looking at but it was in preparation for this and then you know how like when you're just on youtube and it goes to something else yeah yeah yeah there was some dude that was talking about the history of fast food in the uss, a lot of it during this period. And like, you know, like the images of like the people lined up for like 12 city blocks to go to McDonald's and shit like that, you know. And then one of the things was that, I guess, I don't know if it was, was it, gosh, was it, no, it wasn't Brezhnev.

Who debated Nixon? Khrushchev. Khrushchev debated Nixon. Yeah. I guess he really liked Pepsi. And so like at first it started out with just like sending a bunch of like Stoli here in exchange for some Pepsi. And then it got to the point where like they were like something had happened and like they couldn't get Pepsi anymore. And so later on they sent a bunch of like warships and the CEO of

Pepsi at the time remarked that remarked that he was disarming the Soviet military quicker than the US Army trading Stoli for Pepsi is a really hilarious idea idea. Warships too. I like that more. I'm a coke man, but I mean it's a pretty fair try. Speaking of Adam Curtis and Chernobyl, there's an amazing Adam Curtis documentary from

I think the 80s or maybe the early 90s about nuclear power. It's called A is for Adam. And he really gets into Chernobyl. Yeah, it's just an incredible event. Just, I don't know. You said that like it was WrestleMania 13.

Yeah. Well, you had these Soviet like, Soviet apparatchiks, like, flying through nuclear clouds, like, as, like, like, as sacrifice. Like, they knew that they were, like, absorbing all this radiation, and they were, like, you know, like, they were putting themselves on the line for, like, I don't know. It's a really crazy film. Well, the craziest thing, too, is then all the people end up going back there and then, like, the whole stalker culture around it, too.

Right. Right. Which is just wild. I mean, I can't imagine going there. That's what Roadside Picnic is kind of based on a little bit. Well, Roadsideside picnic happened before that oh right yeah so stalker the movie it's really weird because there's the movie there's a short story and then chernobyl happens and that i think is like seven years later yeah no i forget what

exactly when the movie came out. But yeah, it's weird. And they always mention it too whenever you go to Chernobyl. I went there for a day a couple of years ago on one of those stupid tours that they have. Wow. Yeah, it's really weird. Do you have radiation protection gear? No, they spend all their time telling you about how it's okay.

Just don't step on that spot over there. It's like the Simpsons video game from the early 90s when the plant blows up. You just kind of have to avoid it. Just walk around. Yeah. So, okay. So, yeah, you had things like Chernobyl, you had things like these attempts to sort of liberalize or open up Soviet society to what they were calling market reforms and all these other things. And so in that sort of environment, you have the rise of a whole sort of host of maybe sort of conspiratorial ideas.

Like I had written down like at one point the Central Soviet Press Agency said that there were aliens and that they had touched down in Voronezh. I don't know if I'm going to be able to say that correctly. Yeah, it was in European Russia. I know I'm not going to be able to say that correctly. Yeah, it was in European Russia. And you had a sort of rise in right-wing, obviously, nationalistic, anti-Semitic conspiracy theories. The most fascinating, by far, is this new chronology,

which you could... That is a rabbit hole in and of itself, which you could that is a that is a rabbit hole in and of itself uh which i would love to read like flamenco's like seven volume thing on it's called history fiction or science the seven volumes that everyone who espouses new chronology has clearly read all of. Right, right. There have to, yeah. The idea of new chronology is pretty fascinating. Can you give us like maybe the abridged version, not the full seven volumes?

So it's a baby of Anatoly Fomenko, who is this mathematician. And he came up with this idea that there were two major breaks in traditional chronology. So there's one, I think in the fourth century, and then the second, I think is in the 11th or 12th century. And this was of course, all done by the West. And it was done by the West to push down Russia and make Russia the victim of this global conspiracy to deny its role in human history. And of course, yeah, it makes sense, right?

So Fomenko was this mathematician. So he had some street cred there, I guess. So, has some street cred there, I guess. I don't know what the equivalent of he would be nowadays. Maybe like Neil deGrasse Tyson or something. I had read that he studied topology or something. He studied surface... I don't know. I don't even know how to explain it.

Supposedly smart guy, basically. So, he gets all these other people interested in it supposedly smart guy yeah basically um so he gets all these other people interested in it like gary kasparov who is now a really big putin critic on twitter um read a book recently called winter is coming all about critiquing putin and everything in the like donald trump is just like putin he's very he's very big on like pro-russia gate stuff um fascinating the chess champion yeah for folks out there yeah yeah yeah and for some reason i people bought into this uh well for some reason a lot of people bought into the idea that russia had uh significantly altered altered our elections. Although I think it's a little easier to think that like Jesus Christ was alive and like running around.

Like it's a little hard to believe that Jesus Christ was running around in like the 12th century. Than it is that Putin altered the election outcome yeah yeah i feel like one of those is a little more attached to reality oh shit i see what you're saying yes yeah yeah um i don't really know what's going on with flamenco now or new chronology. It was really big in the 90s. And I think Kasparov has... I don't know what happens if you ask him about it. I've tweeted at him a couple of times asking him what he thinks. And he bites.

What? He'd take the bait. No, he hasn't blocked me, but he's never responded. That's a bummer. That's a real bummer. From what I understand, Fomenko's thesis is basically that what happened in the sort of chronological assembly of events is that events and people got copied. And so history is just a long series of plagiarism. and people got copied.

And so history is just a long series of plagiarism. That like people, the same people are just repeated over in history. And that like, I think that he had even said that like ancient Egypt stretched into the 17th century. Like, and that, you know, he moved to ancient Rome and he said that the events of the New Testament happened before the events of the Old Testament. It's pretty wild stuff. But he's a mathematician, so obviously he can do it. Yeah, he's a mathematician, right.

It's kind of like that book that was real big like maybe 10 years, that was, like, Lies Your History Teacher Didn't Tell You. You know what I'm saying? Like, it was a little more, it was woke. It was, like, it told you, like, history that, like, you know, your conservative history teacher didn't tell you. But this is the opposite, and it's hilarious. And by the way, children, take out your mercury failings. Exactly. Exactly.

mercury phalanx exactly exactly yeah i mean i feel like it it has more of a trappings of like trying to be intellectual and smart because there are other similar ones like there's a theorist love good me love who puts puts together some various theories about like how they're like different cultures and how they interact with each other. And they're like the little people who a lot of anti-Semites have been run with as being Jews. And somehow like the little people can like never fit into these real cultures and it creates all these problems. But it's always wrapped up in like much more academic language. Right. And incredibly dense so that to see through the bullshit, you have to read seven volumes of Anatoly Fomenko on why history isn't real. Right. So let that be a lesson for all you pseudo historians out there if you want to make a

rigid theory of history I guess even Marx did that to some degree to really understand historical materialism you kind of have to read Hegel and who wants to do that I know I go to school but I don't want to read Hegel exactly

so yeah there was all kinds of crazy you know pseudoscience pseudohistory uh atlantology you know uh sort of russian centered you know uh history of the lost city of atlantis right was that correct um just a lot of stuff like that um but yeah no the the real crazy stuff is the um you know i guess you could say like two guys really, Anatoly Kashparovsky and Alan Chumak. That's my Americanized – Chumak would probably be more accurate. Who were these two guys and what was their impact on Soviet culture? So Kasparovsky and Chumak were both Soviet psychics who, and there were a bunch of these, actually.

They weren't the only ones, but these are probably the two most prominent. They also disliked each other greatly. So they were both on Soviet TV. Chumak was in the morning, I think, and then Kashparovsky did his various seances. He did a couple of them that were a lot longer. Chumak's were a lot more focused on various maladies, so he'd start out the day with, oh, well, today the illness is allergies,

and then just start doing this weird weird hand wavy thing yeah it's yeah like one where it looks like he's petting a dog uh very special right and people i'm not quite sure where the water thing came from but one of the one of the things that people do would watch it would be to take these like glasses of water and stick it by the TV so that then that would suck in the healing rays that were coming out of Chumak going like this, um, for 15 minutes a day. And that would help them. Um, so then Kasparovsky was a little more crazy. So he, he popped up in 1988 doing this telesayance where he was helping a woman do surgery without anesthetic.

Of course, the woman later on was like, no, that was awful. It was nothing like what you said. It hurt really bad. Felt like someone cutting into me. Because they were. Yeah. And so he did that. And then God managed to get a primetime series of seances,

usually around like an hour, hour and a half, and draw these giant crowds in. We'd read these letters from people all over the place talking about their issues and even we get people up on stage uh you can find some photos of him like walking around even some now where he's walking around and there'll just be people like flopped on the floor um so he's like the the soviet benny hen yeah yeah it's interesting when i was reading that's what i was thinking because i mean i was raised pentecostal and like my family were like oral roberts acolytes you know and so like this shit didn't seem all that weird to me yeah you

know it's kind of a parallel and i think probably does that have something to do with like you know the inherent like religiosity of america versus like how of America versus how the Soviets were anti-religion and all that kind of stuff? I don't know. What I mean by that is, is that why maybe Schumacher or Kasparovsky or whoever, is that maybe why it wasn't funneled in that sort of spiritual context? It was more like a psychic, you know what I'm saying? Like an occult thing. Yeah, I think it's a combination of that. I think it's also because at that point

there is an institutional Russian Orthodox Church at that point that is growing. But they would see this as a threat. That it was pseudoscience. But if you actually look at polling data, people who are religious in Russia, and I'm sure this is the case with here, people who are religious are more likely to believe in superstition, superstitious beliefs of any kind. So psychic healing, evil eye. superstitious beliefs of any kind. So psychic healing, right. Uh, but yeah, I don't,

I actually don't know why it didn't have that much religious content. I mean, I suspect it's probably just because it was party, it was chosen by the party. It was like, this had to be approved by the party to go onto broadcast TV. Um, and maybe combining the two would seem a little too weird um plus there is a big pretty big tradition within soviet party leadership like kind of kind of being into this sort of thing like brezhnev had a faith healer oh yeah yeah um well even like one of the uh one of the preeminent american faith healers was peter popov who was born in soviet union right yes i mean maybe like he was exposed to that at a certain

point and just kind of take it took it over here in like more like you know christian charismatic context what wasn't kashperovsky also um he was a bodybuilder and he uh his like um i can't remember what they called it like emotional volition therapy or something like that it's like when he claimed it helped the soviets win in the 1988 olympics the soviet bodybuilding team win in the 1988 olympics yeah that's part of um i think the i think the telesaence was really what brought him into like more mainstream popularity but that was like that was where he got his his yeah started yeah okay i you think that that might have just been a cover for anabolic steroid use so this guy's got some purchase he's on tv this is why we're doing good it's not windstrawling

right well especially if you look at pictures of him too he's like this big early guy with like kind of looks like he was could have maybe been using steroids. I don't know. He reminds me a little bit of Arnold Schwarzenegger. Ah, okay. Just in terms of, like, the skin and, like, not exactly looking so hot. He did turn out to be, like, a right-winger in the 90s, right? He tried to make a go in politics as a nationalist?

Yeah. in politics as a nationalist yeah he uh he joined the uh inappropriately named liberal democratic party um europe is so funny like that you could have like fascist groups they're like yeah we're the liberal democratic party yeah and i mean he was in the duba for a little bit and then he just left. He was like one of their most high profile people. Yeah. In addition to Zerodowski, who's this really bombastic, crazy guy. It was him and Kasparovsky who were the biggest names at that point. Yeah.

So, you know, I had read in another thing that uh i think that you had linked to in your article about how it was like 70 57 percent of russians would you know were polled that they would lay aside whatever they were doing to watch cash porosity seances like when when cash porosity was on tv like the streets would be empty like you know in the sense like it you know in the same way that they were empty when they played big blockbusters on television and stuff. What does it tell us about how material conditions or political reality affects people's psychology I don't know, sort of like psychology at the sort of like interpersonal level? Like just in terms of what this means for some individual later? Yeah, yeah.

And I guess where I'm going with this, the reason I ask, where I'm going with this is because like you in your piece, you draw a sort of parallel to our current moment, you know, and how there's a rise in uh sort of conspiratorial thinking and you had linked to anna marlin's book and we had her on a few weeks ago and so i kind of just wanted to talk about that you know like how like instability um not just materially but in the sort of realm of ideas the marketplace of ideas. Oh, God. We almost made it through without mentioning the marketplace of ideas. Yeah, like, right, right.

Like, how does it affect, you know, like, you know, like how sort of pseudoscientific ideas gain purchase in mainstream and how, like, there's an increase in grifters and hucksters and stuff like that. Yeah, I mean, it's hard to say because I feel like it was, and how there's an increase in grifters and hucksters and stuff like that. Yeah. I mean, it's hard to say because I feel like it was unclear to me what that 57% who those people exactly are. Yeah.

But it definitely does seem to be that if you're in unstable material conditions, if you're in, I mean, Anna talks about this obviously, if you're in kind of unstable political conditions, economic conditions, if you're in, I mean, Anna talks about this, obviously, if you're, um, in kind of unstable political conditions, economic conditions, I mean, these are really, it's helpful to have some kind of like outside meeting, um, where you don't necessarily have to be thinking about, oh, well, I can't get bread down the street. Um, this is, this is something that I can kind of attach myself to. And the thing that came up when I was doing research for this though, is that a lot of

people didn't seem to think of it that way. Um, so I talked to one journalist who had done a short book on short book on kind of like just the general boob of like psychics in the 1990s. on kind of like just the general boom of like psychics in the 1990s and people didn't really seem to be thinking these viewers didn't necessarily seem to be thinking of it as oh i'm doing this because um i feel like i'm disconnected from kind of like the ability to live my life in the world uh it really did seem like they were just genuinely into it um so it's hard because i mean i think i do think like it has a pretty strong impact but if you're doing research on the ground and talking to like some of these viewers it's unclear as to whether they would necessarily think of it that way yeah do

you think there's any parallels to this kind of stuff and what we see and and when i when i bring this up i'm not like sub-tweeting anybody or anything or making fun of tanya or usual third but like this rise in sort of like interest in the occult and like, you know, fortune telling and tarot cards and all that kind of stuff like you're seeing now. And I wrote this piece for Popular like back in the fall about the Ouija board in the 70s when all these like race riots were going on in like Newark and Detroit and just all over the country. Ouija board sales actually outpaced Monopoly. Oh, wow. country Ouija board sales actually outpaced Monopoly and I think it's interesting you know when you're dealing with like when things are really bad and you're in the collapse this stuff becomes more popular and I wonder if that those two things are sort of related to what we're

seeing now people sort of you know embracing the witch aesthetic and you know like the the the group that came together to curse Brett Kavanaugh and all that stuff when that went down like you know you see like kind of the american version of it a little bit i think yeah definitely and i think it also is connected to to kind of like a broader understanding of spirituality also yeah like if you have fewer people associated with like an institutional church or kind of like a particular faith like faith structure or um set of beliefs like it's a lot easier to get attached to these kind of things um yeah that's interesting though i didn't know the ouija boards being that big oh yeah yeah they were huge yeah and i guess like we search for meaning you know in a lot of

it was i don't know it just kind of like it's a testament to how humans will search for meaning and just about anything you know just uh when when things don't really make sense anymore it's like you have something to like sort of you know attach your hope to yeah i feel like yeah that's you know this stuff's no more or less crazy than anything else but yeah yeah well i had read are you familiar with the writer um she's kind of controversial svetlana elixivich yeah yeah um she had written a book uh well she hadn't really written it she's kind of like studs turkle in the sense that she does like sort of oral history um but there's a book uh that she wrote called secondhand time and it's about uh it's just oral

history of the you know the last years of the soviet union and um and i thought it was interesting like one of the things um that is in it is that like towards the end like intellectuals were just selling all of their books either they were selling selling them all or just packing them up. Nobody was really reading anymore. You could go to used bookstores and see old copies of Gorky and all these other writers. It just kind of goes to show you how there had been a sort of like collapse of intellectual consensus around that time and and i think that can it seems to me like that contributed to um this situation where yeah you could have you know these sort of like tv preacher types doing seances on live television yeah definitely i mean i i actually i haven't read secondhand time but i read

she did a really good oral history collection about Chernobyl. Yeah. Which is, yeah, it's wild if you get a chance. Yeah. I think Keith Gesson translated it. But yeah, I think that's definitely a contributing factor because, I mean, intellectual debates and debates, especially between nationalist groups is really important throughout like the sixties, seventies, eighties. And I mean, there were various different warring camps and that continued,

but it's sort of, I think it's sort of became clear that that wasn't necessarily the direction that culture was going to go. Like people weren't necessarily going direction that culture was going to go. Like people weren't necessarily going to be buying. I mean, fake journals were always important, but it wasn't necessarily the main driver of change.

Yeah. Why was she controversial? Well, I wouldn't, I don't know because it's like this whole, she won a Nobel Prize for literature. So it's like, is it history or is it literature? It's like the Bob Dylan thing. What did Bob Dylan win? Bob Dylan won the Nobel Prize for literature.

Oh, yeah. Oh, right. It's kind of one of those situations. Yeah. Okay. I didn't know if she had like some sort of, you know, Nazbol skeleton in her closet, and we're just, like, kind of cloaking her. No, no.

She's brilliant. She wrote this great history. No. Speaking of Sir Noble, have you watched the HBO show yet? I started it. It was really dark. Was it? Yeah.

Hell yeah. Well, two of the actors from that show, The Terror, are in it. And I fucking love that show. That shit was badass. I love that show. The Terror? Yeah. Yeah.

It's awesome. Yeah. So I'll definitely watch Chernobyl. Yeah. It's better than the various. There was a movie, Chernobyl. Yeah, it's better than the various, there was a movie Chernobyl Diaries that came out a couple of years ago. It was just absolutely awful.

Do not watch it. Yeah, okay. I watched it for a piece and was like, I'm not doing this ever again. If I could just like blank out the past two, the two hours I spent doing that, I'd be happy. Yeah, speaking of watching something for a piece you had written

a long time ago I think maybe about a year or two ago about that movie Red Sparrow and I wanted to I wanted to watch it for this episode but I couldn't find it anywhere I couldn't stream it did you ever watch it Tom um it's so bad yeah I think that you're you had written it it's like the best like it's like the best example of america's current fascination with just russia in general it's like tailored to that fascination yeah it's like hot girl he's really bad does very bad things there's a little sex in there but yeah mostly just evil hot russian girl hannah what was your thoughts about the americans did you ever watch that i yeah actually i love the americans is it is it uh pretty uh yeah i'm making a

a gesture here folks that i'm says it's pretty spot on. Yeah, it was definitely spot on. I think, I don't know. I mean, I know people have had some issues with it, but I think they put a lot of effort into really trying not to be hysterical. I mean, of course, the whole thing is ridiculous. Like, how was it that Philip is able to run around Washington, D.C. looking really not that different in all these different disguises and never get caught?

All right. So it's absurd, but I mean, they had some pretty good help. I think Masha Gessen was the one who was doing a lot of the translation work for the one who was doing a lot of the translation work for the russian uh-huh put in a lot of work kind of getting actors who would be good so it wasn't just like rando they pulled off the street do your best russian accent here it's transliterated for you right go on yeah i've still never seen it i need to watch it you should um check it out yeah um well i that's uh i think we've we've thoroughly uh examined

psychic killers at the end of the soviet union is there anything else you want well i'll just like to close with this and like it what what would you say if people were interested on the subject what are the two or three texts or articles or whatever the you know the uh uh ancillary sort of reading you could do to so mark bennett's book um was really good uh resurrectionsrections for Brutals. I read this really, I linked to it in the piece. It's this really weird book called Soviet, let me pull it up actually. Soviet Homocus, I think, So that, um,

I think, uh, that was just like put together all of this weird literature on like how psychics were real, but it's also media commentary. And actually I don't really know how to make sense of the book, except I quoted a few times. Yeah. Um, that's definitely, that's definitely good if you want the more like um avant-garde take uh but yeah definitely mark bennett's book was just good i something that i forgot to bring up earlier is that um it's interesting that the central soviet state, news press agency or whatever, had said that aliens were real. Because I think that that got a lot of purchase in American UFO circles.

To the extent that, I was telling Tom about this a few months ago. There's like, if you peruse or browse through like amazon primes like really shitty uh documentaries they have on there i found one one time that was all about how the kgb knew that the pyramids were built by aliens uh before anybody else and that they had like kept it a secret um and so i think ufo conspiracy theorists in the 90s thought that like if we could just get into the kgb files we could find out like what they knew about

ufos and aliens it would be awesome to try yeah if they ever open those up isn't there a theory that like stalin was i wasn't i think st think Stalin was fascinated with Americans' fascination with conspiracy theories and with UFOs in particular, right? Wasn't he fascinated by our sort of scare panic about Orson Welles' War of the Worlds radio series? Have you ever heard that? Not particularly, although I definitely could see it. He was really interested also in religion too despite cracking down on it a lot so man of contrast man of contrast well there's a there's a theory uh i heard this on terry gross one time on fresh air

what there's a theory by this woman i don't remember her name now she wrote a book on area 51 it's just called area 51 that the aliens that were pulled out of the ufo outside of roswell were actually like sort of deformed or scientifically experimented on russians on Russians, Russian almost children, who had been placed inside of a UFO type thing and sent to America to basically induce some sort of panic. Panic. A UFO panic. Exactly. Exactly.

Because Stalin was... Because Orson Welles had the famous radio teleplay on War of the Worlds in the 1920s, and it freaked everybody out. They didn't know that it wasn't real. And so this fascinated Stalin. So the theory is he sent people in the UFO to scare Americans. And look, I wouldn't be telling you this

if I hadn't heard it on Fresh Air with Terry Gross. I mean, if Terry Gross had it on, it must be true. I'm thinking if by Terry Gross you mean the History Channel programs about how he was trying to make the army of like eight men or whatever. Is that the same program? Same program. Oh, I think you guys cut out. Oh, yeah, sorry. Can you hear us now? Yeah wacky stuff yeah well what i was gonna say is i think it uh it's interesting because there's a sort of

side plot that involves russia in the x files um so peak 1990s when everyone was obsessed with this kind of shit. Um, forget what, what season it is, but somehow Mulder ends up in a camp that's in Russia where they're experimenting with the weird alien, like black goo shit that like swims around your eyes. Um, so I didn't make sense if that's been going around uh that's amazing

yeah i'll have to watch that one um i've i've seen i've never i've not seen that episode i can't say i think it's it's one with alex krychek um i think it's just one or two episodes and probably one of the later seasons okay but i'm I'm re-watching The X-Files clearly, so. It's great. It's great to just put on and just have it on in the background or something, I mean. And someone walks in and then there's like

a weird gooey guy like crawling out of a grate and you're like, yeah, this is normal. Yeah, yeah. See this every day. Yeah. Well, do you have anything you want to plug, Hannah, before we let you go? I think that's, I think, not really. Okay. Well, if you.

I got to say this. Yeah. The best example of small world, when we were setting this up, I realized that I know, well, at least know of two of Hannah's cousins in Kentucky. Oh, really? And I may have rented off one of them. You have family here? I do, in Moorhead.

Hell yeah. Yeah. When I cold call people that write for the Baffler and stuff in New York, that's the last thing I expect. I mean, especially Moorhead with this like tiny tiny town I mean It's got a lot of You know like six degrees of separation

Rob Wiseman Shout out to Rob There's Chuck Woolery Steve Inskeep from NPR Billy Ray Cyrus of Old Town Road fame Yeah A lot of overlap there NPR. Billy Ray Cyrus of Old Town Road fame. Yeah.

A lot of overlap there. Totally. Yeah, there's your Heartland credential if anybody ever challenges it in the esteemed ivory towers of New York City. You need to wave the hillbilly cred like a motherfucker. I was also born in Wisconsin, so I have that going for me. Hell yeah.

Yeah. Salt of the earth. And then the lights went out. Oh, damn. I was also born in Wisconsin, so I have that going for me. Hell yeah. Hell yeah. Yeah. Salt of the earth. Yeah. And then the lights went out. Oh, damn. Uh-oh. That was so crazy.

Uh-oh. I'm just going to walk. There we go. Okay. Damn, that is some creepy shit. Cue up the X-Files theme. You guys don't post the video of this, do you? No, no, no.

Unfortunately, now. Yeah, that was pretty No, no, no. Unfortunately, no. That was pretty creepy, though, the way it just flicked. Yeah. Damn. Well, hopefully you're okay, Hannah, and hopefully the guards aren't after you. I'm all good. Harvard Security, if you're listening to this, I'm not taking over a classroom. Well, you can check out Hannah's piece at the baffler um psychic healing at the end of history and uh what's your twitter handle hannah where can they

find you on twitter uh at hannah gaze okay g-a-i-s right yep all right well um we thank you thanks so much and it's fun yeah this is a blast we'll have to do it again yeah totally it's great to talk with you guys yeah you too you know have a great uh rest your day and watch out for those guards we'll do it we'll see you all right take care bye Я повторяю десять раз и снова Никто не знает, как же мне хуёво И телевизор с потолка срисает И какую он мне никто не знает Всё это до того подзаевало

Что хочется опять начать сначала Куплет печальный он такой, что снова Welcome back, everybody. Hope you just enjoyed that great interview with Hannah Gaze. You have something you want to say about it, Tom? Okay. Full confession, we're recording this about a week and a half after we did the actual interview. A week. Only a week. And I was caught off guard

but I was like, did we just talk to Hannah again? In the podcast universe, we just talked to Hannah, man. Time truly is a flat circle in the podcast. That's right. It just happened. Well, anyways, we hope you enjoyed that.

But there was more news in the news. There was more news in the news this week that we wanted to discuss with you all. And just to kick things off, what I have termed in my mind as the Appalachian Firefest, as Firefest coming to Appalachia. I'm referring, of course, to the story in the New York Times from a friend of the show, in fact, former guest, Campbell Robertson, titled,

They Were Promised Coding Jobs in Appalachia. Now They Say It Was a Fraud. Mind to Minds came into West Virginia espousing a certain dogma fostered in the world of startups and TED Talks. Students found an erratic operation. Think I could be a good 60 Minutes announcer? I think you got him.

So, yeah, Kimball has this story in the New York Times about this company, MindMind, that came to, well, how should we dig into this, Tom? How do you want to dig into it? I think the obvious starting point is, you know, sometimes if you have a good idea, having a good name is like worth trying to do it anyway. Right. What's interesting about this is they didn't have a good idea having a good name is like worth trying to do it anyway right what's interesting about this is they didn't have a good name no to start with the idea it conjures up an image of somebody like digging into somebody's brains and like molding them how they want them to be scooping out like an ice cream scoop size of somebody's brain. You know that scene in Hannibal when he's eating Ray Liotta's brain? Yeah.

That's what conjures the mind. Yeah. Just our ARC overlords having a Chianti and a side of fava beans with fucking hillbilly brains. Right. So just to catch everybody up, MindMinds was a, the whole premise was, it was one of these

non-profits that was supposed to teach former coal miners how to code. And in fact, we even sort of talked about it on an old episode

with Elizabeth Katt. I don't remember what the exact number is. Maybe episode 27. I remember your cover art because it was so good because you took this old like fresco of

the Saints and just put coal mining helmets on all of them. You're right. You're right. I think it was called Working in the Code Mines.

It was. And it's actually I haven't migrated it back to the free Main Street feed yet. So it's actually on our Patreon. Yeah. migrated it back to the free Main Street feed yet. So it's actually on our Patreon. Yeah. But it is in the catalog of free episodes.

Right. Which, anyways. Regardless, if you want to go back and listen to it, actually I should have gone back and listened to it before we did this. We might just unlock it as a supplement to this. Yeah, for sure. So it was a nonprofit to this yeah for sure so it was a non-profit called mind minds it was promising west virginians to um teach west virginians how to write computer code and then get them well-paying jobs um uh the uh so almost none of those who signed up for mind minds are

working in programming now they described mind minds as an erratic operation where guarantees So it was started by these two people. And this is where we get into the fire fest. The fire fest-stivity. Baby, shoot this right to my goddamn veins. uh stivity baby shoot this right to my goddamn veins it was this is this is this is the sort of thing old dad dines out on it was started by two tech people from chicago um amanda laucher uh and her husband um they had been working in the tech industry in chicago and this is the thing i just don't really fully understand this but i guess amanda laucher's brother said that he had been

laid off and um and so uh amanda is she she was she originally from west virginia pennsylvania pennsylvania yeah um and so her and her husband quit their jobs and moved to pennsylvania to open Was she originally from West Virginia? Pennsylvania. Pennsylvania. Yeah. And so her and her husband quit their jobs and moved to Pennsylvania to open up this fucking tech thing. Okay. Which I don't, you know, I don't really know anything about. Anyways, Ms. Latcher now acknowledges that while she is still committed to the group's mission, the work has not been easy. Progress is difficult, she said in an email. With the current atmosphere in Appalachia, which is deeply interested in maintaining a

quote, culture, she blamed the opioid epidemic and the poverty culture of the region mentioning Hillbilly Elegy, the best-selling memoir by J.D. Vance, who, like Ms. Laucher, went from working-class Rust Belt roots to success in the tech sector. She added,

there are generations of hard work ahead. We'll be only a tiny force working toward change in the area I grew up. None of this, neither the experience itself nor Ms. Latcher's thoughts about its difficulty strikes some former students as surprising. That is, they say, how things tend to go in Appalachia. So here's the business model. The business model is this. A free 16-week coding boot camp

followed by paid apprenticeships with the program's for-profit arm a software consultancy apprentices worked full-time on projects for computer company clients but were also called upon to teach in the classes they had graduated from months earlier after working for a few months apprentices would either go on to salary jobs at the MindMinds company or go to a big tech firm such as Oracle. Every single one of them finds work, Ms. Lauter said of the boot camp graduates. Every single one of them.

Yeah, they all find a job. That's a direct quote. This is like echoes of the law school scam from the early 2000s. Yeah. You know how all the schools were fudging their employment statistics because... Yeah. I remember UK got in trouble because they were like, yeah, we're like 80-something percent employment. But they were counting their graduates that were working at just service jobs and anything.

If you were getting a paycheck, you counted towards their employment statistics. I think that's a very apt analogy. So as they go through this program, they start to notice a few things. There was never much of a syllabus. Students would be given an assignment and spend the next few days trying to figure it out mostly by themselves the usual answers to questions multiple students said was quote google it a few quietly wondered how much their teachers really knew unease began to settle in among some of the students they began to learn from their teaching assistants graduates of a recent mind mind class that the good stable jobs promised by the group were not nearly as stable as they appeared.

Firings and resignations were routine among the staff. One of the Beckley teaching assistants, a 33-year-old named Max Turner, had already been fired, then rehired after several fruitless months of searching for programming work. Some began to suspect that the program couldn't afford the job guarantee it was advertising.

Money woes did not make sense, given what they saw of the founder's lifestyle. The travels worldwide, the views from an office in Chicago's Trump Tower, the ever-replenishing tequila bottles at the West Virginia headquarters, the boozy house parties in Pennsylvania. This is firefest.

Firefest. Firefest. Yeah. Let's party like rock stars. Party like rock stars. Fuck like porn stars. Mind to minds, baby. Yeah. Fucking Ja Rule pops out of a goddamn life-size cake. Code like tech stars.

Man, so, you know, that's pretty much the gist, okay? Like, you really don't need much more of it than that. There's just two things I want to point out about this, though, okay? The first thing I want to point out is that this was made possible by a large grant from the Appalachian Regional Commission. Earl Grohl, baby. Where you at, Big Earl? Big Earl.

Big Earl is no longer at the ARC. But shout out to Big Earl. Does he follow you on Twitter still? He still follows me on Twitter. So shout out to Earl for sticking through all the tweets about uh fucking cum and what an abject failure his agency is that he gave his life to um so this came from arc so if you don't know what the arc is just a little real fast quick update. The ARC was an agency started in 1965 with the war on poverty. There's specifically an act.

It's called like the Appalachian Regional Development Act or some shit like that. Its whole purpose, ARC was, the ARC, I guess you could say their whole approach to economic development in the 60s or whatever was sort of at loggerheads with the um office of economic opportunity which was started which was the war on poverty agency right the office of economic opportunity the oeo sergeant shriver and the vista people whatever they their approach to economic development was you go in, you try to empower people politically. Now, you know, we... The legacy of which is still alive and well today. Right, right, right.

Every time you work on something non-profit, you gotta have community buy-in. That's exactly right. The thing is, is that I, you know, obviously as a communist, as a Marxist, I don't think that's how you really empower people. However, you know, I think that they had a good idea. Right. In the sense that, like, they were trying to go against the grain of capitalistic development. And their basic premise was you have to empower people politically for them to get out of poverty. Right.

Which is correct. That's a correct premise. It's just a general premise is correct. And also you had some, well, I think what started out as being class traitors in the bunch. Like didn't Jay Rockefeller come out of. That's how he made it his way to west virginia yeah um so you had those people their mission eventually ran into uh the arc's mission

the arc's mission was what they called growth center strategy right growth center theory they would try to build up these growth centers in the region and then by their theory that sort of development would trickle down to the parts out in the sort of remote parts of appalachia and the counties um arc was entirely um it, I would say really like it's entire for the first 10 years of its existence. It did two main things, highway development, built a fuckload of highways and roads. And the second thing was their sort of educational, uh,

vocational program. Right. Exactly. This is basically what mind to mind or mind minds or whatever. This is the uberization of that but yeah exactly i love saying the uberization yeah i've noticed you've been saying it a lot lately that's my word du jour it's good i like it um so so basically uh you know arc was not ever um it was never interested in like challenging existing power structures,

challenging the coal industry, anything like that. It also sort of became, in terms of how they mapped it out in the states and counties where they mapped it out, it also became sort of a cash grab, but also just a political sort of clout thing. I mean, if you look at the ARC map, it goes down to places that could just vaguely be considered Appalachian. Like I was talking with Lee Baines about this,

like Birmingham is in the ARC. Yeah. Elizabethtown, Kentucky. Atlanta, a lot of Atlanta is in there. Like people, somebody said, who's the best Appalachian rappers? And I said, well, the Migos are from Henry County, and Henry County is on the ARC map, technically. So Atlanta's in that.

Which, you know, you could make, with the loosest definition of Appalachia, I could get to Birmingham and Atlanta are Appalachian places. Right. But then there's some places that are like in Western Mississippi, where it gets a little dicey.

Yeah, I don't really know how they come up with this sort of, maybe they have an algorithm or something. They have some sort of formula to decide. Or you just had people that were politicians that were powerful in these places that said, just extend that map a little bit. That's the thing. That's the reason why Elizabethtown, which is not Appalachian by any fucking definition, all the way in western Kentucky. The whole reason is because Mitch McConnell got it added to the ARC so he could get funding for opioid and stuff.

Yeah, and a lot of... I was at the last ARC meeting they did in Clay County, and I was there with two guys from Munfordville, which is kind of western Kentucky, west-central Kentucky. And they were saying, because I asked them, I was like, they were like one of the most western part, like, counties on that map. And they said, well, yeah, well, back in the day

when they were drawing this up, we needed a landfill built, and they had, like, yeah, well, back in the day when they were drawing this up, we needed a landfill built. And they had like a couple of these projects. And so we had to leverage our political clout to get. I don't know if that's Anderson County. I forget what county Munfordville's in. But to get them added to the ARC map so they could get money for it. So that's a lot of how this stuff comes about. Like county that could vaguely be considered Appalachian needs ARC money to do X project.

Right. And the ARC has been systematically reduced to funding over the years, blah, blah, blah. I mean, but from its earliest inception, it was purely to sort of exist within the confines of private development, private sort of corporate development of the mountains. Yeah. If we are, you know, there's a few wacky things they did in the 70s. I don't want to go too far down this road. After the Buffalo Creek spell in 1972, they basically agreed with Pith and Cole that the dam broke as an act of God.

Yeah. They, at one point in time, I think it was Alvin Arnett, their executive director suggested that entire regions be given over to the coal companies and just depopulated. Because that was... I wonder if he's any

akin to Jared Arnett. Yeah, that would be a pretty funny thing. And then, you know, famously, I'd say the funniest fucking thing that ARC ever did was the satellite educational program that they had in the 70s. Where they launched a satellite. And the whole point was to beam down educational programs, which could have just been done by television, but you peel back the layers, and it was just a contract out to a satellite company.

That's always the thing. That's always the thing. The thing is, it's just like coal here. You see them doing what they call coal synergy projects, like the bridges to nowhere. You hear that a lot of times. And these different road projects. And they get different pots of federal money to do these projects because they're building infrastructure. But what it is is they're doing incidental mining.

Yeah. infrastructure but what it is is they're doing incidental mining yeah so basically they're building this this road that that nobody needs makes no fucking sense whatsoever but they're doing it as a way to get around the permitting process to mine coal so it's like oh well we slipped on a banana peel building this road and looks like there's coal here well we're just going to take it as per the agreement right and in this case it was like well uh oh shit i guess we slipped on a banana pill and we got a satellite folks but again the answer is never like buy new textbooks or uh anything like that never build up educational infrastructure it's like how can we like you know give some handouts to our friends in private industry and other stuff like this you know know, our buddy John used to always, and I used to think it was, I'd never tell him this,

but I always thought it was the dumbest thing when he was talking about the Space Needle Spa. So Matt and Terrence's friend wanted to, his big idea for economic development in the circa 2012-13 was to build a spa in the exact likeness of the Seattle Space Needle, but to do it in Appalachia. And I thought that was the dumbest thing, but if you look at it, the ARC had their fair share of Space Needle spas. They've had many, which brings me to my second point. The first point was that this is, I just wanted to know where this money came from

it came from the power initiative which was um i literally named in that in that essay that i wrote um i would also say you and me and even some others are sort of the granddaddies of the power initiative yeah i'd say that's we Our fingerprints are on the Power Initiative. That's very true, yeah. I'd say that's pretty accurate for sure. That's the thing. So the second thing I wanted to point out is that this is not an isolated thing at all.

You can look at the fucking ARC fund, like the organizations and projects that they funded in the same year that they funded MindMinds. And it's just a litany, just a list of pure Ponzi schemes. Oh, yeah. That's what we were just- A veritable cornucopic plethora of Ponzi schemes. So that's what you're just talking about.

It's not even a useful analogy. It's not even a useful analogy it's not even a useful and i mean it's not even analogy or a metaphor a clever metaphor to say that like economic development in places like appalachia is a ponzi scheme it's literally a ponzi skin is a ponzi straight up yeah um you know we joke about like everybody's ideas about making like uh soap out of horse cum and stuff like that that's the kind of shit we get honestly seriously that people pitch with a straight fucking face that no serious adult anywhere would take seriously but they expect us to buy it on and usually that's just the guys for

some bigger sort of thing that whoever's starting the horse cum soap company is trying to get money for yeah and so the point that i want to make with that is that you see a lot of people on twitter and stuff saying like oh jd vance like oh this is on jd vance blah blah i just want to say fuck jd vance but this is not just jd vance this has existed a long time for jd i would go so far as to say that the ARC is just as fucking complicit in all this shit. Because they operate on the same philosophy, the same mentality as what J.D. Vance is. Well, I think a lot of people saw, and I mean rightfully so, that the Mind Minds woman. Literally named. Literally named.

And then they just seized on that to dog pile on right right yeah and i have no love loss for jd but this has been going on yeah it's been going on and it hints at a systemic approach a long traditional systemic approach to development in the mountains yeah um and uh and so if i just had any like sort of rebuttal to that or any sort of solution to it and i know we've just been fucking hammering away at this from day one but it's it's class struggle if you really want to change people's circumstances they have to become empowered whether politically or um sort of you of in the workplace collectively or whatever, to be able to challenge local power structures to then be able to have control over their

own resources and have their own autonomy. Until that happens, you're just going to get more Ponzi schemes. Yeah. And so, I mean... Yeah. And by design, the ponzi schemes make that sort of collective action more difficult the uberization the oop i was waiting for you to chuckle at that the uberization of these little i don't know which i guess Ponzi schemes yeah like just it it makes sort of it makes class

struggle more difficult in terms of like withholding your labor and strike situations and whatever because it sort of makes everybody you know I mean by the nature of like say a pyramid scheme right everybody owns their own business so that's the thing about those like inverted like whatever you call it you call multi-level marketing yeah yeah yeah the the christian name you're responsible for your own sales and your own uh you know success and all this stuff blah blah blah yeah well and so the reason that these are basically ponzi i mean i guess they're not there not, I guess it's not a one-for-one thing. I literally just said, it's not even a metaphor,

it's literally a Ponzi scheme. So it's not really that, but it is a scam. I would say they're more pyramid schemes than Ponzi schemes. Ponzi's just more fun to say. Oh, okay. Yeah, it makes you sound smarter.

For sure. It's a pyramid. It's like Enron, really. Which is a Ponzi scheme oh okay sorry yeah i guess it is a ponzi scheme regardless it's a fucking scam the whole point is to diffuse dissent to to manage expectations and outrage about material conditions and all that other stuff if you're really looking for some sort of like liberatory um sort of political vision look at like the teacher strikes in west virginia that's what it would look like for things to get better around here yeah it's not gonna fucking be the arc and other people writing grants and fucking non-profits and all that other stuff like that that is just re-entrenching the sort of status quo the the same business interests i mean shit we've been

talking about this for years that it's you're exactly right the same business interest it's like anytime there is something new that looks like it could be quasi-legit, not in terms from our Marxist materialist perspective, but in terms of like what, you know, for the capitalists, like something that would actually create some decent paying jobs by their definitions. Okay. All of it goes to the people that already have the money and can get in on the ground floor of like the emerging technologies or whatever. Yeah.

But usually it's not even profitable in that sense. Yeah. Usually what they're doing is just creating these little shell businesses to get federal money and like to have like ready made fronts that already have popular support to launder money. Really. Essentially. Yeah. Because the political support is out there for it. Because, look, it's a sexy story to be like, we turned around a failing former mining community and so and so.

And now Jill makes $13 an hour making horse cum soap. If any business did open up making horse cum soap, there's a dildo factory in west virginia that we wanted to send tanya to um maybe if they start making horse cum soap uh we'll get on that beat yeah well anyways so uh if you want to read the story in its entirety uh in its in its in its in its full teeth grinding entirety which it will make you grind your teeth uh again as in the new york times the by campbell robertson they were promised coding jobs in appalachia now they say it was a fraud because it was a fraud um so yeah i hope you read it with a um sort of like universal lens on it. Understand that this isn't just an isolated thing.

This is the entire approach to economic development in Appalachia, and it's not helping anybody. In fact, it's making things worse. Yeah. I don't know. I guess, yeah, I guess you're right. I guess the ARC stuff leans more Ponzi scheme than the pyramid scheme. Because Ponzi scheme is just you get a bunch of advanced investors and just run off with their money.

In a pyramid scheme, you start your own business, but you're way under a bunch of people. And most of your proceeds go up while you keep very little of it. Right, right, right, right. Which is, honestly, just a little of it. Right, right, right, right. Which is, you know, honestly, just a normal labor job. Right, right. Well, it's like you've always said. Right now, I mean, it's been this way for a long time, but yeah, right now the hillbillies are a rich seam of grant money.

And, you know, the ARC and other nonprofits are going to continue to mine the fuck out of that scene of grant money um because look it's not like it's not like you're raking in millions but it's it is it's not insignificant it's not insignificant either um and uh you know people are fucking vultures vultures will set up on this place and just tear as much fucking capital out of it as left oh until it's nothing until it's nothing until it's yeah until it's just been picked apart there's no no fucking meat on the bones left at all just a skeleton i've been wrecking my brain today thinking based on our text conversation the other day like

where are the choke points here? You know? And I've been trying to think about it, not in terms of being like a nonprofit worker in this environment, but as just sort of like just a community member in the Appalachian transition movement. What could we do to create sort of, like the choke points of some sort of labor struggle

in this context and well i think it's education for sure um you see if you keep grinding away at that um like just look at what they were able to do. Like, basically shutting down government over that strike. Yeah. It's not insignificant, and especially if you, you know, you can get other industries on board with that as well, logistics. And I think healthcare. I mean, those are the two big industries around here. Industries, I use that term.

You know what I'm saying. Those are the two big employers, education and healthcare. Industries. I use that term. You know what I'm saying. Those are the two big employers. Education and healthcare. And they're you know they are the institutions that sort of keep the wheels moving. Those are the choke points I think.

If you could find a way to shut those down. Because you know we don't have a whole lot. It's not the coal industry anymore. We know that. I mean, maybe the gas industry in some ways, but even then, it employs so few people. Yeah, the oil and gas is sort of a set it and forget it industry.

Right, right. So it's harder. The service industry is just so, you know, like that sort of low wage work is like, that becomes difficult because there's just, you know, they don't value their workers nearly as much and they will just go find other people who doesn't. Right. Because they don't care about quality control either. Well, and it's also because there is no, look, there's no credentialization. You don't have to go get a college degree to work in the service industry. Yeah.

Whereas you have to do in the healthcare and education industry. Yeah. I'm not saying, I don't know, anyways. It is also a choke point, though, absolutely. Yeah. I mean, because look, if you could shut down all three of those things, healthcare, education, and the service industry, you'd be in business, man. You'd be living like a Frenchman. Anyways, the larger point that I wanted to make here is fuck nonprofits and fuck this whole approach to,

you know, a lot of people will try to tell you, like, look, that's how we get social justice. This is how we're fighting for justice. Fuck that. It's not. It's not it's not no it's it's all it is is it's uh you know it's making you feel like you're you know making a difference in the world well the thing the thing too about it is all of that money is just like i've i've been in rooms with these people i've been on city council here in this town.

I bet like I know how they think about these ARC grants and all this kind of stuff. You get a big grant and all of a sudden it dissolves into whatever accounts, these mystery accounts, you know. And then like when the ARC reporting comes around, they're not going to hold your feet to the fire. Right. Because you butter their bread. That's right. they're not going to hold your feet to the fire. Right.

Because you butter their bread. That's right. Some of the most powerful people in the country are like local politicians in places where the tax bases are very small and there's not a ton of political organization. Yeah. Because the people in Washington are most beholden to those people.

That is exactly correct. So, you know, just be on the lookout for scams like this. And if you see something, say something. Right. Tell a local Antifa. Yeah, tell a local Antifa or tell us. We'd love to shine a light on it. Yeah.

All right. Well, that about sums it up for the week. Hopefully you made it this far and enjoyed the episode, the interview with Hannah. Just want to remind everybody to please go to our Patreon to check that out. P-A-T-R-E-O-N dot com slash Trillbilly Workers Party. And I'll post a link to

Campbell's story and Hannah's story in the episode bio. You get a two for this week. Yeah, that's right. Double the reading. So yeah, go support us on Patreon., that's right. Double the reading. So yeah, go support us on Patreon. We got good stuff there all the time.

And you won't be disappointed. And so yeah, we'll see you on the Patreon.