Trillbilly Worker's Party - Flood

Episode Date: August 2, 2022

unlocked premium episode about the flood that came for east kentucky in august 2022

I don't know how this is going to go, but let's give it a shot. I'm going to start recording. Coming to you from a safe location, I've always wanted to say that. Let me ask you a question. Did you ever think you would be the recipient in need of thoughts and prayers from our leaders? Yeah. I mean, that's the thing like every day you wake up and the thoughts and prayer gauge is is running kind of low and you wake up one day and it's all of a sudden high and then you're like uh-huh wow what happened oh shit was it a school shooting was it

this and then you walk outside to find yourself in 28 feet of flood water. When your thoughts and prayer gauge is bursting at the seam, like one of those red hot thermometers in the cartoons. Stay inside. Stay inside. Close your eyes and go back to bed. Oh, no. Oh, no.

Thoughts and prayers came from me today fuck place you never thought she'd be you know we've done a lot of i guess maybe for the lulls maybe for the maybe at the time we were feeling it you know we did an episode called we're broken our hearts are too this time we mean it yeah i don't know you know just preliminary comments preliminary thoughts i don't know how long this one will go this might be our first 15 minute episode. We did a 30 minute or like our third episode. It might be one of those. The subject matter is definitely not easy to talk about.

Not easy to make funny. I thought there is some comedic elements to it. The whole thing is, okay, so it's weird it's disorienting because it's been my life and nothing but that has been going on for four days and it's like weird to think to know that the outside world is going on okay like everything is humming along just fine and i don't begrudge anyone for that that's everybody's in their own like everyone's trying to survive their own private climate hell or or regional climate hell so it's like there's also like heat waves in portland

and flooding in st louis um and so it's you know it so it's hard to expect anyone to even really know about it. But... Yeah, there's a million little fires everywhere. Literally in California right now. I think it's the beginning of their wildfire season. Yeah, it is...

What is there to say really? Well, it's probably the vengeful God of the Old Testament. God's back on his Old Testament shit is what's happening. And he says, I'm going to destroy the West Coast by fire, like I said in the scriptures,

and I'm going to give these poor hillbillies, I'm going to give them a little dose of the old classic. I'm going to give them a little dose of God classic. That is God classic. Back on his bullshit.

Yeah. I mean, it makes sense because some of the things I've seen over the last four days have been truly biblical. I mean, I'm laughing, but i'm laughing through the pain you don't understand like this sucks uh there's no there's nothing really insightful or profound to say about it it just fucking sucks um so if you're living under a rock which dude there are probably literally people who listen to this show who probably were not aware that Eastern Kentucky had a one in 1000 year flood,

like worse than the 57 flood. I was talking to D who was like five or six years old in the 57 flood. He's always been around. He's D is at once ageless and forever young. And he was telling me like their whole house got ruined in that flood. And they lost almost everything. Except for the photos. Everybody held on to the photos.

And you always felt weird about hanging on to them because they were covered in grime. And you knew the grime was actually shit. Like human refuse. Excrement. Excrement, yeah. But this flood, I think, was like six or seven inches, like the water level. Or the rain amount was like six or seven inches more than that flood. Like this was something that defies comprehension, defies human articulation.

It was a massive fucking storm. And it dropped, I think, like 11 inches in less than 12 hours. Like 12 hours, right. Like it was overnight. I went to bed Wednesday night and it started to lightning a little bit. And I woke up Thursday morning. Classic, classic summer thunderstorm. That's going to be nice to sleep to tonight.

Exactly. But then just, I don't know. Like that seems like years ago. That day, Thursday, that seems like fucking years ago that day thursday that seems like fucking you age that much in four days yes it has been fucking crazy i mean just just the stage the stages of reckoning and processing and coming to terms with it realizing that you're not actually in a dream the whole the whole thing is uh but i was like delivering so i've mostly been doing mutual aid stuff and as i pointed out on twitter i've mostly been using trill billy's money to do it so if you signed up for patreon

gotcha motherfucker i'm using your money for supplies. Yeah. Here you are thinking we were fattening ourselves for the day of the slaughter. No, sir. Here you are thinking we're buying bottles of water and Clorox wipes. Yeah, it's... I should have fattened myself for the day of the slaughter i should have too i've been trying that has been a long-term project of mine to fatten myself for the slaughter i've

been trying and it's not every time i go to the doctor you're a hard gainer what-huh it's uh but no like so whitesburg our town got demolished it got like that i pointed out on twitter like the old neighborhood like my old neighborhood technically i was like on a hill above it but that whole neighborhood i would have survived had i still yeah i would have yes um that whole neighborhood got completely inundated four people dead just in that neighborhood i think so i think so um you know like i don't know man it's it I just remember, like, getting there on Thursday afternoon. Driving in on Thursday afternoon was very just eerie. Because I was over here in Pound.

But our office is in Whitesburg. And so we wanted to go check on the office. And the bottom floor of the office was inundated. An aquarium. An aquarium, literally, all the way up to our floor. Shout out to Dr. Goody's pain clinic. Not widely known. Our office is set on top of a pain clinic.

Yeah, that's... So that office got completely inundated and a lot of silt and so dude just just just just follow me on this uh on this for a minute like something i can't stop thinking about so like obviously the smells are a very interesting part of a flood like after the waters recede and there's all this debris uh deposited on every single surface the sun comes out and then like bakes that shit and some of it turns dry and it's like kicked up so like everywhere you went was in a haze just i hate that smell and the smell is that it's like smells like kind of like it smells smells like kind of like shit but also like if you've ever had like a cat piss somewhere

in the house that's like that you didn't find but you kind of smelled it it smells like everything if everything could potentially have a smell this would be it you've got petroleum uh you've got septic tanks like septic like you know sewers shit uh fertilizer was a big one i smelled fertilizer a lot i smelled a lot of natural gas and propane. Dude, the gas station at the intersection in Hindman, like that whole intersection buckled, and that gasoline in that tank all went into the river. I mean, something like 20 20 000 gallons or something like that like just just gasoline well thankfully joe brandon's bringing the prices down so

not that much of a loss as it was it would have been two weeks ago that yeah that briefly for a brief time that was the most expensive river in eastern kentucky yeah just like you just think about stuff like that though like the amount of just insane chemicals that just get released and put out in there during a flood well here's the thing that we were i mean we well i'll get to it in a second but like uh i was going around to the various houses and stuff, and I got to the Apple shop, and there's guys in there in hazmat suits, and I'm just like, hazmat suit? That's a little overkill.

And I'm like, huh. Oh, yeah, maybe it's not good for me to just be walking in there and breathing noxious fumes in these places. Well, that's why they were giving out tetanus shots. They were literally riding around in an AT giving out tetanus shots um they were literally riding around in an atv giving tetanus shots oh yeah they had hepatitis a like there's all kinds of like brother you should not touch flood water i cannot i cannot stress to you dude the whole fucking thing like i cannot stress to you like the uh like the challenges to municipal not just

municipal infrastructure but municipal governance in general like one thing that i keep coming back to over and over is how the social hierarchy is simultaneously suspended momentarily during a crisis but at the same time like reified like yeah that's what fortified in a way too like you sent me the thing about um like them declaring uh basically martial law you know what i mean it's like oh we have a hard fast curfew now we're gonna stop looters i mean same shit you saw in katrina the same dog see anytime these pop up our fucking town is in under occupation like i cannot like dude they brought so that our our sheriff's department lost like six police cruisers which you know this the county will immediately like replace those and like probably there's like 12 or 50 different bridges around the county that need repair first and they'll probably be like oh no no we gotta buy those we gotta replace those

six police cruisers first order of business boys from the flood damage we gotta replace all these ar-15s that went missing like they they will 100 prioritize that um but but like uh as a result of that they've brought in law enforcement from out of town so like downtown whitesburg is like an occupied territory from police departments in like gallatin tennessee and shit you know what i'm saying like yeah people that have no jurisdiction here really whatsoever no relationship to the community like not that our cops do because our cops don't even have any fucking relationship to the community but it's just like so like on thursday on thursday before the waters had even receded like there were still parts of the county that were completely inaccessible, and that still are,

because it started raining again today, and not to mention all the people stranded who live across creeks, and the only way they get across it is a bridge, and that bridge is destroyed. Like, multiple, you know what I mean? Like, they're having to lift people out with helicopters and stuff, like...

If this were the 70s, the Soviets would have been in here. The Soviets would have, absolutely. Building our infrastructure bridges. But on Thursday, the water hadn't even fucking receded yet. And immediately, I start getting texts and people start talking about rumors about people looting. Like, oh, there's people looting out there. there's people looting people's homes and all this it's just like what how what and what john boats i've got fucking flood pirates i'm the cat i'm the you

see me i'm the captain now i've taken all your water damaged goods out of your garage it's like dude to the degree any of that's true just let them fucking have it your shit is completely covered in not just floodwaters and but like gasoline and like just like all your shit is ruined like there is no private property anymore you know what i mean it's like you see how that like plays out how that creates a situation where the cops immediately have to assert themselves because like they don't do jack shit people on downtown whitesburg like all the businesses and everything people that live there and everything we're all dragging their shit out onto the street and like because they had to they had to get it out of there immediately before it

started to like you know mildew and everything it's all ruined anyways they gotta fucking just get rid of it fema will come by and get it but like as they're doing this there's like traffic coming by and stuff but like the cops weren't doing jack shit someone literally asked the police to block off the road while they did this and the and like the police like got angry or something like that and like drove to the end of the street like they don't do shit all they do is spread rumors about looters because like in baldy all they can they only know how to do a few things like when true crisis hits they don't do jack shit they turn into little demons man they're terrorists they just start fake fucking rumors about people looting and stuff to get people like more paranoid and like the fucking shit i saw like the the look on people's faces like uh like the conditions they

were in who the fuck is looting i'll grant that it's probably happened a few times but like for the most part people are trying to fucking survive like people they don't have the energy to do it they don't have the means to do it they don't have the means to do it like what the fuck are you talking about it reminds me of the of the biblical story of of when the rich young ruler goes to hell and he calls for lazarus to put a drop of water on his tongue and it's like the whole story is not about you know about you know what you think it is in that story the story is about the hubris of a guy who has died and went to hell who still thinks he lords over a guy who is still alive on earth you know what i mean uh-huh it's like in this time like you think all of your things are

your things you think all you have all these preconceived notions about how the world works and you can throw it out really you can just throw it out absolutely because when it hits the fan the rules change man and it's like uh you responded that one of two ways you could double down on the reactionary asshole thing or you can realize we're all in this together you know yeah i mean it's i think it's natural that people will probably get paranoid and protective of stuff during a time like this, or at least feel, you know, they're vulnerable. They've just gone through something really, you've gone through something really traumatic, and so you're really vulnerable, and you're looking for any threats that might further harm you, put you in danger or something like that that's all understandable but like the police getting out here and literally making statements like we're gonna get these dirtbag sons of bitches like what mickey steins or sheriff said and we're gonna what did he say like uh make a lesson out of them or something it's like i've been all around this county the last four days and not county. I went to Neon, Hemp Hill, Isom, like Heinman. I've been all over the fucking place.

I've seen no indication that like people are trying to widespread bedlam. Right. Bedlam and anarchy. No, like people. What people are doing is they're displaced. They have no resources like water or food. And they're looking to the few institutions in this fucked up place that have the ability to do that. Which is mostly like churches and the city governments who are usually having to set up in a makeshift area or something like that.

That's what, I mean, That's what they're doing. It's not... I don't know. Whitesburg is under curfew. We're under fucking martial law curfew. Yeah. Because of rumors. They had one example...

Probably fueled by the people that established the curfew. Yeah. Oh, absolutely. They had one example and the quote was like and we are hearing word of others it's like what the fuck like i'm always fascinated at how cops can literally just make up reality they can make up whatever the fuck they want and then go after the people just like with the opioid epidemic make up whatever the fuck they want and use it as pretense to like go after people yeah oh fucking it it's just like this is already bad enough the fact that i have to like deal with these fucking demons yeah yeah that's the yeah to me it's like

oh well you see the world one of two ways either that the looters are the human scum or that the people who are using like isolated and probably precious few cases of stuff like that going on as evidence of a broader epidemic that they use to just like justify their existence by stepping in and you know the last thing anybody needs in a fucking crisis is like the clamp down put on them you know what i mean yeah like people need a fucking curfew like i don't dude it's people need to be able to move around they need to be able to move around without fear and to feel like they have shelter and their needs taken care of it just fucking disgusts me it's just and everybody like you said a shell shock that is i mean i understood

like what you were talking about when i was down there and stuff it's like nobody can really put a sentence together and yet at the same time it's like um there are like you know obviously for every like asshole like the sheriff or whatever, there are 10 examples of the helpers. People showing up and rescuing people in boats and everything else. You certainly want to highlight them, too. You don't want to just focus on the negative. But it is like when things like this happen, and I'm kind of new to this sort of thing but when things like this happen i think you start to see like what a lot of people's character is about like people that

you didn't even like know uh sort or couldn't really even like you know i don't i don't know what i'm trying to say i'm kind of stumbling over it. You just kind of see where people stand on things in the world. What's our opportunities going forward? How are we going to respond to this? It's an open question how this all shakes out. If we're just going to perpetuate constantly being suspicious of our neighbors and you know and and uh you know spreading rumors and and all that kind of shit it's like well we don't have a chance we don't even have a puncher's chance you know yeah we got we had enough of that before the flood to get in with you know yeah it's um it's really you know i was like at

the high school today just volunteering up there and um you know and i was like running food from the kitchen to the cars and then for a while, I packed shit up. At one point, I was in the kitchen putting food on the cart to take it out there. This guy who you know, I don't want to dox him or whatever, but he comes in there. He's like,

yo, can I get 15 of these boxes? These are for the state police. I'm just like... Yeah, coming right up. I got you. I got just like... Yeah, hey, coming right up. I got you. I got this one myself, guys. Yeah, thanks for letting me know.

Yeah. It's just like... It's like Super Troopers. Need 15 number ones for the cops. It's like, A, they have their little fucking cruisers. Oh, I guess not. They lost six of them.

But like... Had. What? I just like... They're not in there helping out. The only time I've seen... The only time I've seen them is when they're menacing people like downtown like patrolling neighborhoods and like stuff i did see them at one like supply drop off

and i turned the fuck around i was like no i'm just gonna go to another one like fuck no like why why would you fucking have cops at your... None of the churches that I went to had them. Like, nobody's gonna come to, like, pick supplies up if there's fucking cops there, probably. Like... And also, what are y'all policing? They exist to fucking punish poor people. What are y'all policing? Is somebody gonna go stick up the fucking supply drops?

Exactly! Nobody's doing that. Exactly. Everything's in the fucking river. Yeah. People talking about, like, stealing things. Like like stealing shit from the river and selling it. It's just like, okay, like who the fuck are you selling it to? How would you flip it that fast?

How can you get tons of copper and then just immediately flip it in like Perry County, which is also underwater? Yeah, you'd have to drive to fucking probably uh winchester to sell it exactly i'm just i i'm just taking my rage and frustration out on the police because like they're you know they don't do shit and they're easy targets that's we we pay taxes for we might as well besmirch them exactly yeah i can talk all shit i want to about my pay the goddamn salary but like it's it's fucking astounding honestly though the um something i've been thinking about a lot since i read that andreas malm book fossil capital it's like he's got an interesting thing in there about how like social criticism now, like social theory.

Social theory now is mostly devoted to space, understanding geography, the distribution of things. But that wasn't the case maybe like, I don't know how long ago, 70 years ago maybe. Back then social theory was mostly focused on time, which I think is an interesting distinction. The reason that he brings it up is because he's trying to add a value form to coal, to fossil use. He's talking about how when you burn fossil fuels, you're engaging in a process that stretches back, like, millions of years. Like, fossil fuels are, like, fossilized time. You know what I mean? Right.

Yeah. It's like you're burning a time capsule. Yeah. Like, there could be a dinosaur bone in there. There could be a Bee Gees 8 track in there. You don't know. Right. You know?

Which is a really great, you know, it's a powerful powerful idea especially when you apply it to like class class struggle like all things across time are linked and everything like it's i've it's i've been trying to orient my mind and think about that more but all of us ourselves are going to be fossil fuel one day soon yeah and and living out the new reality because of their combustion like their use like the after this happened andy beshear the governor was on twitter like well we don't know why this happened dude there's nothing that incensed me worse than that glibness is that what that means glib yeah i think so yeah glib yeah uh or he's the tom cruise what'd he say to matt lauer with him you're glib i think with him with it's more like um feigned ignorance it's kind of like a chris hayes it's a willful ignorance yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah

it's why is this happening it's like i don't know how to tell you this, but your father and everybody like you has aided and abetted one industry in particular that stretches all across the state. Okay. Even right where he grew up in Western Kentucky, in the Illinois Basin. Big coal mining place out there. It's not just Eastern Kentucky. but you've allowed these places to be hollowed out and the wholesale alteration of the landscape to the point that when things like this do happen not to mention that like the whole industry was aiding and facilitating that process of climate change where we're at now like when all this stuff comes to a head guess what a lot of those natural protections aren't there

because basically we live in a place made up of popsicle sticks now yeah i mean cause of people that andy beshear and people like him have allowed to do whatever the fuck they want for their whole lives it is astounding it is inexcusable that not a single person has pointed out in the national media that the reason this is happening, there's one fucking reason. It's the coal industry. It's the fucking coal industry. Each and every one of these motherfuckers that just got to put everything down and walk away five years ago when the price of coal was finally not profitable anymore. Just got to walk away, cash in all their fucking bonds, everything.

Each and every one of them should be rounded up like that fucking movie where Eric Bannon plays like a Mossad guy, Munich or whatever. Like they should be hunted down and put against a fucking wall.

Knott County has almost 20 deaths. The reason why is like 60% of that fucking county is strip mined. Where the fuck do you think the water's gonna go? There's less land. They put all the fucking

mountains in the streams. Like, they fucking killed those people, man. Like... Yeah. Yeah, and there's just gonna be no accountability for that.

It's an act of God. It makes me so fucking mad, dude's just i don't it's just no mention of that no mention of that in any story and then like the thing is is like the people that do mention it's oh it's not the time for politics well when is it time man when is it when is it finally going to be time how many people got to die how many many people gotta have their lives upended and destroyed and everything else for these motherfuckers to actually be held accountable it's i'm trying to de-stress more it literally is like that scene on airplane like i chose the wrong week to stop smoking like i'm i really did literally recently like i have been trying better to be less stressed out and to get less worked up because it's literally killing me like my stomach is so bad but like dude neon neon isn't a city

anymore neon is closer i said this to you a city anymore. Neon is closer. I said this to you the other day. Neon is closer to like social governance structure to like a commune or a garrison. Like when I came in there like Friday, like you have to go through these checkpoints basically because it's almost inaccessible because the road there has completely in some parts cratered, fallen off the mountain. So you basically have to go through checkpoints. When we got there, they were still lifting heavy.

They were still in the heavy machinery phase of things, of just trying to remove the largest objects from the bridges and everything. You pull in. They've got a makeshift city hall set up in a muddy parking lot under a pop-up tent with like a large particle board out front with like city hall just scrawled in it in spray paint it was i'm dude like like we could we could go to neon and set up a shadow government with a slightly nicer sign and immediately steal legitimacy 100 dude these these i mean it's uh it's astonishing a building there got ripped up from its foundation

weisberg is a wider valley than neon neon's a lot more narrow so that water just funneled through that motherfucker through i mean we're talking cars in houses houses on top of houses the entire downtown i mean i just it's it's just hard to even describe man it uh you know when you see those like sort of pictures on the internet of like cars on top of like telephone poles and trees and stuff i've always wondered like damn how's that herpa well i know now yeah no i mean water is so fucking powerful i mean it's terrifying dude it is something i mean we've talked about this on the show a number of times but like seeing this firsthand we are insane to think that we can just take whatever we want out of the earth and just continue to perpetuate climate change and all that shit and that we can just someday some brilliant guy like elon musk is going to just out engineer the climate crisis because i

would tell you something with water you can't bargain with it at a certain point. It's a great equalizer. Yeah. It's king. There's a reason why it's a widely used... To destroy the world? Yeah, like that fable, that tale, is not only in the Bible. I think it's in other Abrahamic religions as well. It's like...

The boy that stuck his finger in the dock to save holland i mean it's a tale as old as time you cannot out engineer it dude it's it's really astounding um you know another thing it's like just how much this country hates poor people, obviously. But how you're right. It's like people like Andy Brashear when this stuff happens. I don't know, man. It's just a fucking trip.

I can't even explain it. It's just such a... You don't even have to look too far dude i saw this thing james bruggers used to write for the um courier journal i believe james did but he shared this thing about climate change and surface mining and it's basically i put it up in the show notes but the u.s army corps of engineers study forecast this was in uh 1980 basically they they took the period of time from 85 to 2015 uh-huh and then they did this study to forecast how an increase in like extreme rainfall as the planet continues to warm could affect stream flows in the ohio river basin which is includes a lot of ours flows into the ohio river yeah's got this map, and it basically shows that the place with the largest land disturbance

is also going to see the biggest increase in stream flows. And I'll just go ahead and tell you exactly where it is. The confluence of the Kentucky, Big Sandy, and Upper Cumberland Rivers is like red. That's us. That's us. Coming in second is out in the canal on the little canal in the ohio river and huntington side of west virginia which has also saw tons of flood in the last couple years too it just makes me so fucking mad dog but check the big the big sandy in the upper

cumberland so basically they're showing these the kentucky river is going to see basically a 15 increase but the big sandy the lower and the upper cumberland are looking at 35 increase in normal flow so like these streams and tribs that usually you know peacefully have like four or five inches of water in them are going to be like a foot high two feet high and stuff like that going forward now i, I mean, the question becomes, it's like how safe is it to even live in places like this going forward? Yeah, that's why like Rand Paul for a while was like advocating paying people to leave here. I mean, there's...

And go work in South Dakota or Wyoming wyoming in the right right i mean there is a case to be made that like it is it is unsafe to put extremely like prefab very like cheap housing trailers in floodplains that is very dangerous and again testament to how much this country hates poor people but i guess even dialing back further you could make the case that because this land is so scarred because there is so much land mass has been removed and the the topography's natural ability to drain without catastrophic flooding has been greatly diminished that like as a result we do we should be rethinking how people live in these places if if at all i mean granted i'm i'm not like

one of these people that's like pay them to leave like they need to get out but like obviously there should have been contingency plans um but even but even that like there was there were just failures of infrastructure like communications going out like i talked to a couple two nights ago who lived out in thornton and they the last thing they said like his name was aaron and he was telling me that the last thing that they sent out to their family was like the water's getting high i'm getting really scared and then the fucking communicate like the app wireless went out they didn't that's another thing dude like like these motherfuckers need to be drug out and shot too dude i had people i hadn't talked to in

years i hadn't talked to in years. I hadn't talked to in years. Our buddy Wes, we used to net bats with, called me. Couldn't find his wife and kid for all morning and all afternoon. He calls me like 3 o'clock. He's like, dude, I'm losing my mind. I'm hearing Isom's getting wiped out up there where he lives. And it's like people were calling me like, you got any contact inside? And only people with AT&T and only some of them could call out you know yeah i mean like aaron was telling me this guy was telling me that

like they they were just by themselves right for seven hours like no way to know what else was going on and we're telling themselves like hopefully the the flooding is just in thornton like just thornton is flooding and then like they get their cell service back like eight hours later it's like oh no every everything is wiped out i mean it's just and and i don't know the mechanics of this stuff i don't know like the engineering like i don't know if that was inevitable if this community if communications were going to get knocked out anyways in something like this, in a thousand-year storm. But I don't know. At the same time, weren't there probably ways to protect...

Well, dude, it's no different from what's been going on here. People put down rickety-ass fucking housing for people. They put the bare minimum in there we don't even have reliable plumbing and fucking water in a place that yielded so much money for the whole entire world and people here live and don't aren't connected to sewer not connected to a city water in a lot of places you know what i mean it's like it's just it's just continuation of that it's like okay we can make a huge profit if we just put down like the bare minimum and if it goes down it goes down because who gives a fuck about these people these are some of the poorest fucking communities in the united states it's astonishing it really is like katrina

it's like fucking katrina it's just like no one cares it's these are poor people poor and working people no one cares about them it's it's it's this and that's why the police are out basically hunting them uh because they've so internalized that themselves that that's all they can do they're already vulnerable displaced and now they've got police hunting i mean it's just i don't know, man. It's just, we truly need communism. I don't say that as a cringe thing. I mean, it's, we've got to do better than this, man.

This is... Well, and I think things like this are like bad. You know, like the whole idea of like, we can truly, to God, do better than this. You know what I mean? I think that's present in people's minds. I don't think that's lost on people. But, I mean, it's just a catastrophe, man.

It is. It's, it's... you do see how people in our society have been trained obviously over many decades to be suspicious of others paranoid insular uh caring only about themselves and this is extremely canned and everybody always says this after a natural disaster but now i understand why it's like you do see people shed those um those impulses and things that have been all drilled into each and every one of us yeah and that to me is a very interesting thing like it's this is it's again people always say this kind of stuff after these events but i i see why it's like um not like sort of like capitalist social relations the indoctrination of all of it not not even that can get down to the level of um making us not care about each other when shit hits the fan. Like, it does show you how kind of, like, febrile or, like, tenuous capitalism is, in a way,

or our present arrangement of things, that because we do care for each other, it is a negation. You say, you say, you see spurts of it you know what i mean yeah you see temporary you see like you know our anarchist friends would call them temporary autonomous zones spring up you know i don't really think of it as that, but I think you see little flashes of humanity where like, oh, imagine if we just did this all the time, though, y'all. In fair weather, you know what I mean? You see the bonds and the love and all these things, and you see that, and you're like, oh my God, the world could be so much better, but we can't really see how we would do this all the time

because you see all the wreckage and the waste and everything laying around so it's like oh we associate this with sucking but like morally and spiritually you can kind of see the wheels turn for people you know what i mean well it's another way that capitalism has kind of baked in a contradictory logic to it because what it does is it it makes people hyper aware of the fact that they're vulnerable and when you're vulnerable you need other people um and obviously vulnerability and fear can create rat reactionary politics like with the rumors about looting and the cops and all that but it can also create i guess the word that immediately comes to mind is communism but i don't mean it like that i don't mean it like i just mean that like it creates uh a dynamic i don't mean that i don't want to sound

like we're being self-serving or anything like that but but it does it it it's a natural state you know what I mean? Like when we say communism, this is like what we're naturally gravitate toward. You know what I mean? Like the idea of like, I've never even thought about that

in terms of communism because I've been so pumped full of anti-communism for so long. You know what I mean? I don't even, I've never really thought about it as that root word of like communal living

and like the abolition of private property that sounds scary for somebody who's told that all they should aspire to in life is to own property you know what i mean i would yeah i would say it's not our natural state i just think that human beings contain within us two impulses sometimes or multiple impulses and that in a in a crisis like your role your station in society kind of kicks in and if you're a cop like obviously it goes towards like the reactionary position um but if you are in you know a working class or not necessarily though i mean even capitalists could probably experience this as well and even our conservative politicians um you know like angie hatton who has been very helpful and stuff like even them like i think we

what it is it's a matter of politics it's like do we want to continue on after this like when we rebuild do we want to continue down the path with like more cops and stuff that make this more painful and hard when they do have. Or just going back to our own atomized lives. Yeah. You know what I mean? Like that does like you see that camaraderie in those like sort of that. I mean, I hate to sound, you know, cheesy, but like that coming together in a community.

And it's like, oh, OK, well, now that like now when everything's cleaned up, we just get to go back to just our own shitty existence where we just ignore everybody in the social relations and just like i don't know watch tv and fucking order shitty take it well it's harder to ignore you know what i mean like it's harder to ignore i think that again well i guess the point i was working towards is that i think more and more people in a warming world are going to come to find that out too. That, I don't know, that you need like planning. You need a communal planning. You need people looking out for each other. A way of life that is not undergirded by the profit motive.

of life that is not undergirded by the profit motive a way of life that is not make you have to sell your labor to survive that does not ask you to live in a flood plain because you don't make x amount of money enough you know what i mean yeah yeah that you have to live in dangerous and precarious circumstances because you're poor yeah i mean like there really is very stark like the richest fucking guy in our town don childers lives at the top of a fucking hill i mean he gets to watch it all you know what i'm saying like it's it's there really are and i'm not i mean i don't know poor people live at the top of hills too and rich people live in floodplains i'm not i don't want to like universalize i just i just mean that like um no rich people usually live at the top of hills that's it's kind of true

don blanket shipped right like he lived at the top of that fucking mountain in like got private water popped up to yeah right fucking god um but i mean it's just it's just uh well i mean another thing i think it's a reactionary impulse that we have to kind of curb, too, on the left, is like thinking that everybody's bad because they've not come to class consciousness. Right. That's what I was talking about last night.

I've kind of lost my mind. I've been having these temporary moments of insanity. But being an ex-Christian, I kind of think of coming to class consciousness almost like getting saved. I feel like it's a condition of the heart now. And I don't think that because somebody has not come to class consciousness that they're a bad person or whatever. I just don't think they're going to get into heaven, so to speak.

What I mean by that is they have to live life not sharing in the richest tradition there is, and that is taking up the cause. I think this is really the stark contrast between liberalism and leftism, too, too is liberalism wants to they kind of they want to be sort of separate from the working class in theory they like they know like uh like there's it's a pitying liberalism sort of pities the working class whereas leftism says no i'm in this with you you know what i mean we're we're kindred we're one in the same here now and that's a whole different tradition to tap into you know like if you if i was thinking about this last night if you're talking about if you want to parse out the differences between liberalism and leftism you know i think that is like for most of it and i think all those those

differences relate barrett here and and i again i'm not saying that you should not contribute to you know this non-profit that non-profit again i don't think anybody those are bad people but i think even more important in times like this is like what you're talking about the banding together and community and so forth yeah like i think that's uh liberals think that um well they see a like a social compact or a contract made with the workers like they want workers and bosses to get along like because you know the context in which that was forged, that ideology, was post-World War II. And it made sense. Rising rate of profit and all that.

Obviously, they don't have anything to say. They're completely apart from reality, as shown by Andy Beshear. The funny thing about Andy Besheer's tweet was like it's almost like he was protesting too much it was like we have no idea i swear to god we have no idea why this keeps happening yeah it's like i wish i had the answers i guess we'll all understand it in the sweet by and by just like these i would just love these guys are not dumb guys you know i mean they understand history yeah you know i just i think it's it's just it's just if you can't read the tea leaves on why this is happening it's just willful ignorance at best at this point i i think

i genuinely think that cops i well so they spread those rumors because they need to justify their own existence because they're not doing jack shit but i also think that part of it is that they realize that they have to do it because they have to be able to portray the poor and working class as a whole as selfish greedy uh looking out for mean, whatever. Lazy, won't work. Which they aren't any one thing. It's just that they exist as a class, and they have a specific set of needs,

and if they get those needs, which is safe shelter, food, water, all these things, then that means no more cops. Because that means a society where there's planning there is sharing there is no private property ultimately that's the thing there can be a world without private property it like it existed once yeah i don't know yeah oh man it is weird it's uh it's uh i'm not saying that like it when it existed that things were great because no things actually weren't good before private property our conception of it, things weren't great. It's just that you can create a world without it that is great. It is possible. That is great.

We have the resources and the know-how to do that now. It is the Graeber quote. The great secret of the world is that it's something we make, and we could just as easily make it different and uh yeah and that's you see you see in crisis how that is most certainly true dude they're also saying stuff like um county judge says to watch for scam artists for fema applications like again i have seen no indication that there are like roving bands of guys guys dressed up in in uniforms yeah i'm gonna do i'm gonna i'm gonna give me like a little name tag that just says fema and like kids riding crayon just like yeah clipboards and pin like pin

protectors in your pockets like also like how are you gonna scam somebody as a fema like they're the ones that give you the money right like yeah i'll give oh give me yeah like surely to god i don't, like, who are these female scam artists? Like, I just, um. Oh, my God. An interesting thought experiment would be to make, like, a Facebook burner page and just start a rumor about somebody that's, like, scamming somebody and just see how quick it goes around until you can just say, Hey, I made this up, and in, like, two days, this was shared, like, 6,000 times or whatever. I mean, it's just, like, you see even the county, the judge executive,

like, they don't even, they don't do anything either, so they have to, like, perpetuate these false facts. I mean, meanwhile, like, there's groups, there's networks of people out there. Like, I was working at the high school and this dude came by with a massive like flatbed like two-ton pickup truck or whatever and was like yo he was like did you tell him say hey man i got a truck it would tow this son of a bitch right out of here. Easy. What's the towing capacity on that Zerk? No problem.

You're a lot working that thing. I mean, he was an old coal miner. He was like an old, he was probably in his 60s or 70s. And he was just picking shit up to distribute it out in the county. And it's just like, it's just people doing shit like that. I was just talking to him and I was just picking shit up to distribute it out in the county, and it's just, like, it's just people, like, doing shit like that, like, I was just talking to him, and I was like, yeah, well,

I was here, here, and here yesterday, you should hit up these spots, and he was like, definitely, thank you for the advice, and he, and so it's like, you know, there's, like, these, like, informal networks, like, there is a network of, like, aid and help, and then there's like these fucking like yeah there's these demons who like are trying to be like well well before you get carried away here before you get carried away with all your help let me just uh let me just make sure that you are fully aware of the people you're helping that you know it's just like i mean it's like means testing right it's like a form of means testing in real time about like actual been it's i don't know you know it's like the it's like you're right like the analogy with lazarus the lazarus is is perfect like they expect someone to

pay peonage to them right or whatever Or whatever. Even after they're, yeah. It's, well, the good news is we have the antidote for them. All we got to do is throw a little unknown white powder on them and they just melt. It's really amazing. That is really funny. The thing about the fentanyl scare is really funny because it's like cops admitting their own, like, kryptonite. Like, dog, don't tell everybody that you're, like, deathly afraid of fentanyl scare is really funny because it's like cops admitting their own like kryptonite like dog don't tell don't tell everybody that you're like deathly afraid of fentanyl you know i'm just gonna like put it in like a little puff gun or something like that like a little puff

uh thing for cooking or something and just yeah yeah when i get pulled over just like like in their face. Ah! Yeah. Like, you have handed us your Achilles heel. Why would you do that? That's so dumb. Yeah, once you, it's like the poker edge, man. Once you spot somebody's tail at the table, you don't say a fucking word about it, you know?

Yeah, and the great thing about it is that, like, it's literally impossible to ingest fentanyl that way you can so you can do it with anything just put some flour just put some flour in your palm and go you know it'd be really crazy if you really want to freak them out you hit a line of that of the unknown powder right before you throw it on them just let them know they're dealing with a crazy person yeah man the thing that really gets me about that is like sad this is like you know he's a human scum that would do this and it's like man people that would fear monger at a time like this or humans are like you know like on the other side it's like if you think that's true what about the people that basically blow these

things out of proportion like people that are already suffering and now like they have to be like hyper vigilant worrying about like these desperados going around stealing their junk like dude you're right dude there are people out there who lost everything everything their house Everything. Everything. Their house, their clothes, their pets, family members. And they queue up. They have to line up at the few places and institutions around here that are handing out supplies. And they're starving. Like, they need water.

Their babies need, like, formula, diapers and stuff. Like, this is, they need, like, disinfectant formula diapers and stuff like this is they need like disinfectant like they're covered in fucking mud and rainwater and you're gonna sit your fat fucking ass at the computer in the sheriff's department and spread rumors that they're out like pulling basketballs out of the river and selling them oh yeah yeah oh damn man wait till you wait till you hear about what don childers does exactly but because he's a rich man it's legitimized exactly yeah jesus christ man i'm just i i i'm just venting obviously i've just got a lot of pent-up fucking anger and

it's just hard not to have it's it is if you could see this if you could smell it experience it like the people who did this must pay yeah they must fucking pay yeah yeah yeah you see that no yeah like floods happen but they are also socially constructed events yeah you know this i mean yes this was a one in a thousand year flood but like we created this place to be a death trap for it to be a one in a thousand year flood but like we created this place to be a death trap for it to be a one in a thousand year flood because of all of the things the coal industry left when it left i don't know in that ways it's kind of like covet it's like were the seeds of this already sown two three decades ago you know what i'm saying yeah but that's an argument for time

you know what i mean like time as a as a valuable powerful tool for understanding in history as a tool for understanding the world yeah i don't know man that's weird man i i tell you it's not fully set in on me yet i mean i went through the wreckage of my childhood home you know which is gone and i felt that same thing that i feel like when you know a relative dies and you just don't feel as sad as you should feel yeah and i'm sitting here like god why like everything i've ever had you know i was walking through there man i was picking up pictures and stuff and it's funny i had a scarface poster that said the world is yours and it's just floating in a bathtub not like on the other side of the house you know it's like i don't know it was kind of funny but uh i hadn't fully assessed all that kind of stuff man about everybody my

family lost everything they had but it doesn't feel like it yet you know it comes in stages man and i didn't even grow up here i mean like i don't have family here i just have lived in whitesburg a long time and it's my community it's my home and it's hard enough for me and yeah you know i mean it's just i don't know if i mean if you want to like i was saying on twitter that if you live in the surrounding area like you could literally just pack your car full of shit and drive it down like follow that at pikeville pride account or ek y mutual aid and like drive it down to various spots but honestly the probably the best thing would just be to like give to some of these mutual aid stuff like i mean like we maybe before i put this out maybe i'll set up a venmo for true abilities or something like that

and we can like do it that way but uh but we have been getting a lot of stuff, information and intel and stuff from EKY Mutual Aid, and we have been spending a lot of Trillbillies money to help out with supplies and stuff. The only reason I don't want to start a GoFundMe is because Tom and I learned during the Harlan coal miners blockade that sometimes you get inundated with all this money just not set up to to deal with

yeah exactly and uh or pay the taxes on it when it comes right right right and like um i mean i appreciate those of you who have sent me money through my personal Venmo and if you want to do that maybe like hit me up in the DM or I don't know I don't want to give out my personal Venmo in public because I don't want to get a shitload of money well and I can't be trusted with it so

I'd be too tempted to pocket it I've got too much looter and desperado in me but I can say for a i've i've got too much uh looter and desperado in me but i can say for fact like i've got uh i've spent over i've spent about two thousand dollars by this point um and that's just supplies like water diapers hygiene cleaning stuff food and so uh your hard-earned dollars folks that's where they're going on patreon.com. But also, I don't want to do a thing where, like, I want to be clear.

Like, I don't want people to, like, sign up and think that that's the only way. I shouldn't have even said that, confused it that way. But it was just. We also take a payday. Let's make no mistake about it. It's just, like, it's like fog of war type shit it's still so early that like people are just now starting to get into like these organized units and like ways of doing it whereas like there's those first few days where we were all just like

we were just yeah shell shocked just completely unsure of what to do and doing it sort of haphazardly now we're getting a better sense of like how to streamline it and make it better so maybe i'll put maybe i can do like a trim trail billy's venmo or something but if i don't there are other accounts that you can give to and uh and like i said i pointed it out like apple shop has like a list of flood resources uh on one of those is like the governor's fund which is and there's like a lot of cop stuff maybe avoid that part don't fucking give money to god anything to do with cops or anything like that it is it is amazing these cocksuckers get in on that and it's like you know what y'all these billion dollar police

departments why don't you just fucking you know uh take a little bit out of that fun and give it to people right yeah actually be a public servant like you're supposed to be yeah like the reason probably i guarantee you multiple people probably died because some small like town up one of the hollers decided to splurge the police budget on an mrap or something yeah uh i shouldn't even laugh that's fucking dark as hell it is dark it's all it's it is all extremely dark um but there are people doing mutual aid and just getting supplies to people. I literally can't explain several places I pulled up. People just start pulling supplies off the back of the truck that need them. And the relief that some of these workers have who are distributing these items like the

relief when you show up with supplies and stuff dude there's places that just haven't even been accessed yet this is we're recording this on sunday this is four days after the original flood and some of these places haven't even been accessed or breached yet like they we don't really know the scope of it all yet. Yeah, there was a community by Blackie. I was at the high school today, and these guys were talking about a community sort of by Blackie, and they stopped through there because they were dropping stuff off around there.

And they were the first people there who had come by and checked on anybody. And there's people out there just completely stranded. The death toll right now is nearing 30, and there's people out there just completely stranded like the death toll right now is nearing 30 and like there's still so many unaccounted i cannot put into terms how catastrophic and apocalyptic this is this is unlike anything and i'm not and i don't want to be one of those people like oh you, like we never get covered in the media or whatever. I mean, that is true, and it's really a goddamn shame. But I also don't know if it would change a whole lot.

It's so weird because it's like when the implications were Donald Trump getting elected, that's all you saw was coverage of this. But like when actual just real regular ass people are yes in need and very much in need now it's like they don't give a everybody that wanted their story about the beleaguered pissed off coal miner voted for trump or you know i mean there are good people like campbell robertson friend of the show that's that's doing good reporting on this and stuff uh he uh he talked to my sister my sister uh told him the story about uh them having to escape their house and take their chances with the flood water and stuff my nephew i told him man you're you're immortalized as a hero in the paper record now

he's like he's like yeah i've kind of am aren or not that's awesome yeah no you're absolutely right like yeah they care a whole fucking lot when it's and that's partially behind like why so many of these like people online say like well this is what they get for voting for ran paul mitch mcconnell i don't even know if people are even saying that anymore it could just be like bots at this point. I don't know. I think there's just like bots that people like use to just like get a rise out of people or something. Yeah, I'm sorry, Paul257838U.

Like, you're not real. Yeah, I haven't. I'm sentient, motherfucker. At least I can vote. You can't even vote't even vote bitch you're a little ai pussy sure i'll die one day and you'll get to live forever i've i've not had a whole lot of time to scour the tl so i don't even know what the discourse is on this if there even is at all i i kind of get the feeling that it's one of those things that's so dark and fucked up like the tornadoes in western kentucky that it's like you can't there's nothing you can even say about it it's just all you can do is sigh man i just i'm having a hard fucking time honestly

it's it's fucking it's it's this sucks the thoughts and prayers meters running lows why i mean i i told you this morning i want to disappear but i do feel that way it's like we've created the conditions for the worst nightmares and we don't care and there are people on the ground that do care and they're trying to make it better and that's honestly that's the only reason that i'm not completely just like my eyes like pitch black like i'm walking around like a zombie just pissed off about the looters. Honestly, I really, again, it's cliche, but I really am amazed at how when shit happens, people find a way to help other people. That is, I always hesitate saying anything about human nature,

but it is something some of us do. I'm too quick to go to it. I'm too quick to go to it. I'm too quick to go to it. But you're right. For all the air we waste pissing and moaning about these fucking vermin-ass cops, we don't give enough shine to people that do help out and that are quick to help out.

And everybody out there listening, send a little message, check in on us and all the way up to everybody on the front lines of it doing the shit like like and that's most people most people are not cops yeah and you can take a little solace in that i do have to say i do get a little depressed at the overwhelming number of supplies that come in through donations that is i i do love that i'm not saying that like don't do it i get depressed i'm a little i'm a little disheartened by the tons and tons of water needed that people i i just let's let's cut it back dial it back a little bit people how about it but from like uh a sort of sociological standpoint or something i don't know what the word would be like

it depresses me that the federal government dude i've not seen i've only seen what you're saying yeah i've only seen like a few national guard it's kind of like how health care is also basically kept along by go fund me's and stuff like that's your only way for us to help each other is to uh you know send supplies at a time like this basically that there's no robust administrative states that can help out and help coordinate things that would make things a lot fucking easier and it would make people's lives a lot uh better immediately but it's just it's just yeah they it's we've just got a society where everybody leans on the on the largesse of the i don't know how you say that but of the churches and all that kind of stuff

i'm not saying that's a bad thing but it's like you know last season in blowback in cuba and they were talking about like when it was on the churches to take care of the poor and the unhoused and everything else like you had like just mass just fucking destitution in the streets and then when fidel took over almost none uh-huh fairly quick you know right that's what happens when you prioritize porn working people right right oh man well uh be on the lookout for links i feel like i could probably keep talking about this for another two hours, but at the same time, I just needed to process it. I just needed to record so I could process it

because it's just astounding. And there's hardly any media about it. I don't know. That's tough. I hate to laugh at this, but, you know, my mom's, you know, I've talked about it on the show. My mom's been sick and in the hospital for the last month and a half or so. And I go down there, and we're, like, me and my sister

and everybody deliberating, like, when we should tell her stuff, you know, and like she's laid up and it's kind of funny. She's like, I just can't wait to go home and lay on my own bed. And I'm like, yeah, we'll get there one of these days.

And then the other day she grabbed the little hospital. She goes, let's see what's going on in the world. I was find the news channel i just put down i was like i probably watched ncis las vegas or something you know whatever's on tv during the day it's like an episode on like flood damage in eastern kentucky like what the how did they turn this out so fast yeah so it's dark but kind of guess i don't know wow um well anyways like i said uh i'll have those links up thanks for listening everybody uh i don't know what the schedule is going to be like going forward. I just had to take a break this afternoon to calm, to collect myself, even though doing this show gets me so worked up my tummy hurts,

and that's not good for what I'm trying to do right now. But I had to, at the same time, sort of step back from it and process it. So I don't know what the schedule is going to be. We'll probably still put out two a week, but don't bank on them on any particular day or time going forward right now. Yeah, exactly. And if it's one a week, apologies in advance. Who even knows?

Like I said, it's still, as D. Davis said earlier today, still fog of war period. All right, well, thanks for listening and tuning in for for caring sorry to bum you out on this sunday i mean this is the thing you talk about your life and this is our life now so yeah um but uh anyways thanks for listening thanks for the donations thanks for caring and everything uh we will keep you posted talk to you later