Trillbilly Worker's Party - **UNLOCKED** Fuck It, We Sprawl (w/ special guest Kate Wagner)

Episode Date: April 24, 2025

Free episode might be a little late this week, so we're unlocking our Patreon episode from Monday, featuring our old pal Kate Wagner, author of the blog McMansion Hell. Our conversation covers a lot of ground: the Pope, the modern conservative movement's relationship to Catholicism, whether or not the bourgeoisie might be giving up on their own project, the so-called "Abundance" agenda, urban sprawl, and much more. If you'd like to hear more premium content like this, please subscribe to our Patreon: www.patreon.com/trillbillyworkersparty

Alright, we're rolling. Welcome, Trollbilly listeners, for your episode for April 21st, the day after Easter. The day after 420 Easter. I was thinking about this, you know when Jesus Christ was on the cross and they had to um... Yeah. Who could forget? You know. Have you guys remembered that?

One of the biggest hells of all time, brother. No, no! No, no, I'm kidding. I don't know what you're thinking about that. No. I have you guys remember that biggest elves of all time brother You remember it like when they had to pierce his side because he had like well Isn't it so that they live longer because like won't being on the cross give you like a Dima or something like that I? Thought it was like some what's what's the guy who? who got his a liver picked out by By vultures it was like a harkening back to that sort of I think it's Prometheus right That yeah, I guess it's from a yes. Yeah, I think if correct me if I'm wrong Tom I don't remember the science, but they try to teach us the science of this in like Sunday school

But it was like you can get an endema from being on the cross too long And then like it causes so much swelling that you can't breathe. And so they had to pierce the side to release the fluids. You know what I'm saying? Like cracking your knuckles gives you arthritis, apparently, supposedly. Like that kind of thing. Really, honestly, just a primitive paracentesis.

You know what I mean? That's true. Not markedly different from cool sculpting. That's true. That is true Could you um could you imagine if one of the guards? Handed Jesus the blunt and he took the hit and the air went out of his out of his Smoke went out of his side The biblical story is not true because you have a push you take it

That the robot the robot soldiers who were standing around observing him on the cross they suddenly get contact high you know And they're like dad we fucked up bro. We should have done that shit to him. Thanks brother Dude, I was just asking it's I'm just saying it's 420 Easter. Okay, like it's you You just Jesus would have laughed Jesus obviously was laughing the Pope is dead The Pope is dead after gotten high brother the last person he saw was JD Vance JD Vance killed the Pope with his aura Dude, JD Vance killed the Pope with his aura. With his bad aura. Just a heinous vibe.

I saw somebody say, I wish I could remember who it was, but they had posted that it's not that JD Vance killed the Pope, but more so that the Pope lost his will to live after seeing JD Vance. And I think that's a meaningful difference. You know what I mean? I think that the fact that you didn't just die because this individual killed you, but their rancid energy was enough to sort of, I don't know, just make you- Let go.

Yeah, you're just like, yo, not that there's no point, right? I've said what I have to say. And I mean, the Catholic Church and the Vatican and the Pope all that all that horrific horrible shit that's involved with like you know organized religion I mean he was a he was a cool pope you know so I feel like I feel like it was a little bit too a little bit too serendipitous you know that he died after meeting um you know the second most evil man you know who is it the literal antichrist right exactly could you imagine you're fixing to park this mortal coil in one of the last visages you have to gaze into? Is that goddamn bloated moon face of him?

The Pope saw him not even as how JD Vance looks but the meme that people have been doing where he looks like a bloated, like a, you know, Cabbage Patch Kid. You know? That's what he saw, brother. That's the last thing that he saw, son. Yeah, the face of the Antichrist revealed itself to the Pope, and it killed him. He was like, yo, let me- He couldn't look upon it anymore, that's what it was. He was like, let me check your scout

for the 666 numerals, you know? I mean, let me see, yo. It's like first the Ohio State State Trophy and now the Pope Well first first first books in general like reading in general and then the nation and then the Ohio State Trophy He's now the tariff czar Everyone is ready when all the financiers are ready to kill themselves in their Manhattan offices because it's all going down, like, don't worry Vance will be the sacrificial lamb at the altar of fascism, you know. Well.

Gotta do it to him. That is true. No successors. Yeah, no, we have to quit. I'll add something else to that, Kate. I think from here on, here to for this moment, we gotta quit letting hillbillies go to Yale. I've never seen that happen.

I've never seen that shake out good. Every hillbilly I know that went to Yale, they couldn't handle the responsibility of it. That's so true. I mean, also to, I saw Terrence, to yell, they couldn't handle the responsibility of it. That's so true. I mean, also to saw Terrence, you sent it in the group chat of this is you called it surreal because it's very surreal. It's Trump, I guess, today announcing that all flags

at federal buildings would be flown at half mast because of the post passing. And it was so surreal because you had the Easter bunny, you know, like an NFL mascot, right, in his suit there. And, you know, one thing I kept thinking was that that's probably JD Vance, you know, because people would stone him to death if they saw him standing beside, you know,

because they're like, I mean, not literally that people think this but it is again Serendipitous that I'm the last person the Pope saw was JD Vance So I just like to imagine JD sweating like I'm pearling you know he's sweating so heavily that he's pearling It's a waterfall and that hot suit Unable to present himself as himself because people would kill him standing next to John Donald Trump silently well Yeah, he needs to sweat more in fairness. He's retaining too much fluid. In a just world, I don't mean to demean these people,

but I'm just saying in the correct universe, a guy like JD Vance, his job would be the guy that dresses up as the Hardee's mascot or something outside of the Hardee's and spins the, you know, like, come in, three dollar cheeseburgers or whatever like that would be his job But now he's that for the White House He's been excised. He'd be spinning sighs like for a car wash like the car wash Yeah, you're all off base here the job that he got and this is really just I mean

this is just as good a distillation of where America's at is a guy that is cut out to dress up in the Uncle Sam outfit out in front of a tax joint you know like Uncle Sam's tax prep service or something like that is the second most powerful man in the you know not so free world you know it's kind of like dress for the job you want you know, not so free world, you know, it's kind of like dress for the job you want, you know, and it's still it's like, yeah, they rip you off there too, you know, that's true. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, exactly. Oh, you mean, yeah, like this is like JD Vance, not a real Catholic. So I'm a real Catholic, you know, like, you know, I grew up and they were singing Latin in church, you know

It was one of those churches. It wasn't like the spooky fire and brimstone Protestant ass churches It was like medieval that's what I belong to is the spooky ass fire and brimstone Yeah, I mean it was all spooky Catholicism like the Saints, you know, yeah Anyways, like you know, like JD Vance is not a real Catholic. And that's what Pope Francis basically told him, I think, before he quit the world. You know, he was just like, you got to use like anyone who like, you know, he was berating him and even indirectly in the mass about like the treatment of migrants and immigrants and stuff like that.

And it's like if JD Vance was a real Catholic, he would do what like John Boner did after he met the pope, which was quit his job and started a weed company, quit his job and started weed company to him. But that's the thing, J.D. Vance, not a real Catholic. The pope, like the pope, the palpable authority he's immune to because he's a Protestant. Right. True. It's like you're saying you're not leaving the spook, the. Right, right. True. It's like, I'm just saying. You're right, listen.

You gotta believe in the spooky hierarchy, man. Listen. Yeah, yeah. I'm sorry, it doesn't matter. You could convert to whatever you want to. At the end of your essence, JD Vance, you are a Scotts Irish Protestant. You can't escape it. It just radiates off of you.

And I know because I am one. Well, didn't Marjorie Taylor Greene, man, I wish I could find the tweet right now I wish I'd pulled it up, but didn't she say something like that um That that I guess like not directly referencing the Pope's passing But she says something like God is that hand and like and these are my words like essentially vanquishing You know the evils Yeah, and you know, and even some brought up in the world or something like that

Exactly, and I think it was a is he brain? I guess brought up on Twitter brought up that these people these Protestants don't consider Catholics even Christians, you know Oh, yeah, right. So I just thought that was very interesting. Well while on the one hand you have people that are who are, you know, not lionizing the Pope, but you know, obviously saying, you know, rest in peace and all these like condolences, but they failed to mention his progressive, and they were truly progressive,

sort of, you know, beliefs and things that he said, and it's from the worst people alive. But on the one hand, you have people like Marjorie Taylor taylor green who don't even think that he was a legitimate christian because of those beliefs perhaps you know it's like how israel doesn't think reform jews are jews right exactly exactly right right yeah well i got news for the marjorie taylor greens of the world y'all are satanists actually and not even not even the do what thou wilt kind I mean just like actually the spirit of Antichrist the John Milton based time yeah that's right okay it's like it's just like you're just like kind of more

of a 60s B horror movie type thing right Yeah, right. You worship death literally. Down to the makeup, you know? Right. Yeah, they're making this too easy. Why, this is a question, like what has, what is it about like the current conservative movement that has made them all so obsessed with traditional Catholicism?

It's like, is it, do they think that Protestantism is for the holy poloi? And that in a weird inversion, Catholics used to be viewed as sort of like, poorer people from the parts of Europe that white people didn't like, and now it's inverted and now they see Protestantism as a marker of lower class ignorance and stuff.

You know what I mean? Like what is... It's so weird to me that JD Vance is a tradcath and a lot of their intellectual... What would the word be? Like a lot of the intellectual trough they feed from is Catholicism. It's... I don't know. I'm going to be so real with you. I'm going to be so real with you. I'm going to be so real with you. It's about hating women like, yeah, it's like it's like the number like the biggest like

anti-abortion crusaders are Catholics. Right. Like it's just like it's funny because like the TragCat thing like synthesizes like this kind of like old school like Catholic, you know, cultural warriorism. Yeah. With like with, you know, like quiver full born again kind of lifestyles. Right. Right. It's a completely syncretic like American invention. But also, like on the other side, it's like people seek Catholicism is like this kind of hyper masculine, like aesthetic that is like derived from the Crusades and the manipulation of other medieval symbolism

for white supremacist ends. I mean, this is offensive to me as a famous enjoyer of the Middle Ages. It's like they wanted to make a dog the Pope in the Middle Ages. You guys gotta like calm down. So have a little fun with it. Can I ask you a question then, Kate?

Do you think that partially part of it too, in concert what they're saying is partially part of it too, in concert, what they're saying is that part of it is like this, and forgive me if I'm wrong because I'm a blasphemer, right? I'm not of any faith, particular faith, but part of it is like this asceticism, but also this sort of, the fact that I guess Catholics, and correct me if I'm wrong, I might be wrong here, but Catholics Catholics like man is born in sin, and that they have, they really internalize this idea of a holy war, except now it's sort of mediated, or I guess facilitated through obviously like a race war, or a culture war, or a war against women, you know? I think that's right. That feels like Protestant to me.

right now. That feels like Protestant to me. That feels evangelical. That's evangelical. There are evangelical Catholics though, you know, like born again Catholics and stuff like that. But like it's kind of an American invention. I feel like I mean, it's so weird. It's so weird that Catholicism is like this, this ridiculous like political stunt now because

like what I like go to mass. I started going to mass again after I hit my head because I was like it put the fear of God back in me Once you get your noggin scrambled you're like, you know what? Maybe there is a higher power and I'm sorry. Yeah And anyways, like it's funny because like you go to Catholic mass and this was true in the south where I grew up like I grew up in in a small town in North Carolina. And you know, like, growing up there just wasn't that fire and brimstone shit. Like, it was basically like good Catholics go to mass. You know, they study the Bible. And then you know, they take the cookie. And they believe that the cookie is the body of Christ literally and that the wine is the blood of Christ

Literally and you know, that's that's you know, it's all this Catholic spooky stuff But the thing is is that you know It was mostly the sermons that I grew up with and also the sermons that take place in the church down the street for me Which I don't think is a particularly liberal church are basically, you know, it's just like my neighbor type stuff. It's you know, it's very apolitical, let's say. It really just isn't about like, you have to repent, you have to repent, you have to repent, you have to repent. That just never was my experience of Catholicism. But what was my experience of Catholicism was that in the in like when I was in I don't know like Seventh or eighth grade everything became about sex and abortion. They separated the boys from the girls

We had to like pray we had to like create an imaginary baby and pray that that baby would like not get aborted And you mean like when you was in elementary school and they made you take home like the hamster or the turtle or some shit? For a weekend to keep it alive. Yeah, it was like that. It was like that. I Feel I think I named my dad my not dead baby. I feel like I need him like Vladimir or something You're not dead fake, baby I need him some anime ass name like after some vampire anime. You know the Vegeta. Yeah, exactly. I name like after some vampire anime. You named it Vegeta? Yeah, exactly.

I have a theory. I think that I think part of it is also an anxiety about capitalism. I genuinely think that's oh yeah. I think that's one of JD Vance's things. And I think it's a lot of trad cats think like they have a deep anxiety about capitalism and Catholicism since it predates capitalism is Something that they can try to recuperate which is like Protestantism, which is obviously you don't get Capitalism without a Protestant Reformation and the two are kind of like intricately

tied so it is a kind of revanchism in a way that they want to Try to it's like they want to try to do a shortcut do a shortcut. I've been wrestling with this for like really the last few weeks, but just trying to tease out how committed to this whole capitalism thing they are. And by that I mean they, I mean like the Trump administration, are they really going for broke? Are they trying to do do like in the West? I feel like there's been at least two examples of the bourgeoisie trying to like be like fuck it

We ball like we're going full You know we're going for broke fuck it acceleration is and that was the Confederacy and the Nazis, right? It's just like they sour on the bourgeoisie sours on capitalism It doesn't give them this kind of like spiritual dividends that they invested into it and so they start trying to like accelerate and tear it down in the process and I feel like they're doing something similar now, but they're shit-faced all the time and addicted the Pills and so I don't know if it's gonna work. It didn't work in the previous examples either and it won't work this time like Obviously, but I don't know.

I mean, it's going to cause a lot of suffering. But yes, absolutely. But I mean, I kind of think that this is true, like with a broader miss this is that you see people like and it's not just Christian mysticism and it's not just like millenarianism, which like if you look at the history of like, you know, millenarian Christianity, very intertwined with, like, technological and social change. And even Protestantism and the Reformation was a double edged sword.

Like, look at like Thomas Monser, you know, like, you know, there was it's like the Protestant Reformation, like gave us, you know, the Protestant work ethic, but it also gave us the German peasants war. So like truly a land of contrast. But the but the work ethic side totally defeated the peasant war side. Right. And it's funny because like Catholicism, in a lot of ways, like filled a kind of that kind of like left wing void through like, you know, like especially in Latin

America, you know, Christian socialism like was very, you know, and all of these, you know, liberation theology and all this other stuff. So it's like all of these religions, a total land of contrast, you know. It's like, and it's funny because like we live in a world that is a mediated world. We can pick and choose our beliefs even within like an organized doctrine. It's just like that the tyranny of choice is like completely made Protestantism insane But it's also the thing that lets me keep being Catholic. Yeah, like I you know, right? I like that. I like you know, that's that's my that's where I grew up, you know And I find if I find the mass very comforting but the thing is is that like also an insane religion?

I don't know I deal with this struggle all the time, but I don't really talk about I don't really talk about being Catholic It's like basically right now because all these fuckers make it so embarrassing Yeah, you know what? You know what? It kind of reminds me of a little bit um and maybe maybe I'm wrong here But um you know just like some personal info when my dad had died and you know just none of it made sense to me You know and I started leaning more heavily into like communist theory You know as a way to explain the world like why is it that my father at 70-something years old died from a stroke where someone like Donald fucking Trump, you know, or all these evil

motherfuckers who have all the power and the money in the world, you know, just like these kind of rationalizations for why this happened to my father, you know. And I found, you know, I'd leaned deeper into communism but my mom became a Seventh-day Adventist, you know. And I know this is maybe a moot point to say but that's it for both of us for either of us It was a comforting way to explain the unexplainable right to explain those mysterious gaps in existence in humanity that you can't reconcile any other way than believing in a higher power, right? Whether it be you know a literal a higher powers in God or whether it may be the people, which could also be to some people God, you know?

I mean, it's also just like, for me, socialism and communism are like, not only what I believe politically, but they're also a moral code for with, that I live my life by, you know? Like I wanted, you know, it is like, it is the guiding light of my life. It's a tentative pain.

But Christianity, I think, or at least, you know, the way I experience it, it's just like the stuff that you can't answer. The spooky stuff. The specter. The specter, yeah. But at the same time, like it's really annoying to go to mass. And the thing about Pope Francis, and it made him, like, actually a good pope, is that it got our, like, fucking parish to pray for Palestine because he said you have to do that. You know? Right. Nice. Yeah. Right.

And it's like, you know, you have to pray for, like, people who are wrongfully imprisoned and stuff like that. He got all of these local. You got all of these local priests, except for the insane, like, you know, ones who want to secede from Catholicism, got them to say that because that is what Catholics do. Like the pope is the highest authority. And a lot of times that has been terrible. But in this particular time, it has it has actually like, I think,

made the church more liberal and also forced people to say the word Gaza somewhere that wasn't a left-wing meeting. Yeah, that's a good point. Yeah, the Catholics and the Quakers, about the only ones holding the fort down for Palestine and Christendom, they said. Yeah, unfortunate. Unfortunate. Unfortunate.

Maybe the Universalists, too, the kumbaya people the unit area Yeah, well, I don't really know because I mean my mom wants me to go to church with her when she comes back To Georgia, but um, she's shown me videos like trying to kind of like proselytize me She's shown me videos like from her pastor and her pastor I don't know if Seventh-day Adventism has a strain of like activism or progressivism, but he says some shit where I'm like, you would never hear this. And also this is a church full of Caribbean black people by the way, right? You know, or like African immigrants and I would, I would think that I would never

hear this in a church, even though this is the message that should be preached, you know, so yeah, man. I mean, I guess like you, like you said, Kate, it's a land of contrast, right? Yeah, I mean, it's a land of contrast. And it's like also all the people I go to church with are like bourgeois liberals who hate me. Like they're like the rich people who own all the houses in the neighborhood and like I've driven up the rents and they all work at like fucking, you know, like Salesforce or whatever and have like three beautiful children.

And it's like they I like come alone and like no one talks to me but you know this kind of this kind of makes me a better Christian than I would like to be a little bit more I would agree I would agree God is side-eyeing them maybe a little bit but you know with you he's like yeah thumbs up you got it you know you know I like ritual and ceremony I've my I've only been to a handful of Catholic services one of which was attended by Ed McMahon the He the host of star search For the youngins in the crowd. It's a proto American Idol, but way better, you know

So what the fuck was Ed McMahon there? He was the best friend of the priest growing up so interesting he would pop up, you know, once a year and it just so happened to be the one that I was there for. That's cool. Wait, okay. I kind of like the. No, go ahead. I just kind of like the whole thing of, you know,

everybody go, I was really kind of off beat because you know, you got to do like the kneel and then you take communion and all that Kind of stuff and I'd always heard if you took communion and didn't mean it that you were like going to hell So I can never pass. Yeah, that's a big no no When they were passing out that well it when we did communion we ate crackers and grape juice great I mean dog which is hilarious. We don't literally partake in the body of Christ. We Which is hilarious. We don't literally partake in the body of Christ we

Metaphorically and allegorically take part in the consumption of Christ. You're a great Fanta That is Protestantism it is a abstraction a bizarre like It's like a bizarre abstraction from a tinted of faith. You know what I'm saying? It's like it's like a bizarre abstraction from a tentative faith, you know what I'm saying? It's like. It's like a fat assembly. Well I'm saying like everything is metaphor and allegory. But at the same time it is completely literal.

Like world is 6,000 years old, everything in the Bible is dead letter facts. 6,000 years old, buddy, that's progressive. We were 2 two thousand years. I'm Pentecostal though. So we believed in speaking in tongues and healing the sick and raising the dead and all that stuff. So, you know, we were different kind of spooky.

Insane spooky. Yeah. Thanks. Crazy new saint. Did you guys know about the millennial saint? Computer saints. No. What? Yeah. Was he supposed to? Was he supposed to get like in what's the word inducted I guess yeah

he's canonized yeah and okay so like my parish is named after him they like got on the jump you know in on that early that's what they could be the only one in the United States so Carlos thank Carlo kudos parish so what we say anyway But when you say it, I gotta hear about this. St. Carlos, St. Carlos Cuddas Parish. So when we say, when we say Millennials Saint, how old is he? Is he like, cause you got variations of millennial, like he's like 40, his late 30s, like 47. He was like my age.

Okay, okay. He died in 2015. Did he hack, was he an anonymous? He should have been, no. But like when he was like 11, he created like a website for tracking the Eucharistic miracles of the world It's pretty good

Anyways like anyways like he died of leukemia in 2015. I think he was born in like 89 Oh, yeah, yeah, okay, like early 90s 91 91. He was 91 and anyways like You know, there was this economist article that was about like how, you know, the business of making a new saint and everything like that. And like, they were like, I don't know about this Carlos Akutas guy because he watched American Pie with his friends and it's like, dog. Okay.

That is like a better representation of like modern Catholicism than like if he was just, if he cut his own balls off and then like you know Join the castrata. No, you don't understand. I want a saint that has watched American Well, I've always been a fan of st. Christopher precisely because the Vatican pulled his credentials, you know what I mean? I think we need I think we need some bad boys and some mavericks in the fold You know that includes young computer guys that have watched American Pie. I think we need a saint who's, you know, who has saved them to pimp a butterfly, you know, on Spotify, you know what I'm saying?

Like perhaps we need a saint like hip hop. It's just like what is it's like, but like this is like a modern representation of like what being Catholic is, you know, right? If it's really true that he did all the good shit that he also did, you know the poor and all this other stuff like what does it really matter if he watched American Pie? You know or that his like parents were kind of rich Just like that's pretty common. That isn't common since the Middle Ages that rich people want their kids to be saints It's like why fucking economists acting like this is like a new thing that happened because capitalism is like dog I'm sure

earliest feudalism of all time I'm sure that there are multiple saints who I don't know watched Inquisitors like stretching these guys on the wheel you know what I mean like pulling their little on a quarter to shit like Stuff like playing them alive like they what that's worse than what I think that's at least as bad as watching American Pie I mean that was that was Netflix of the era. You know what I'm saying you couldn't avoid it really Yeah It's like it's like instead of watching movies about guys being hung you're watching guys being hot. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. That's what they pay's maybe a good way to pivot into the things I really wanted to talk about today. Oh yeah, we have to talk about people who need God, the sprawl people.

The sprawl people. Well, okay. And the abundance people, I guess, right? Before we get into that, I wanted to, um, before we get into that, I wanted to bring up a few items. Um, the first is which, uh, the first of which you've written about, Kate, but, um, we've not talked about it on the show, but me and Tom have talked about it privately. like what Trump has done to the White House like Coding everything in like guilt like you're like a gilded gold. You know what I mean like Eagles. Yeah Reese of Garland's it's as you pointed out. It's the Manchinization of the White House right It's like gaudy as fuck.

I call it small dealers, regional car dealership or Coco. Well, I mean, that kind of makes sense though, because you're trying to get people to buy something that one, they probably don't need, you know? Right. Especially like, you know, if you own a modern car from even the fucking nineties, maybe you know the 2000s Right over 2000s, but also too. It's like it seems to be

Like Trump really does feel like a car Salesman like a car dealership salesman truly you know Like once again trying to sell you something that you don't need, but also in this very kind of chintzy, sort of cheap, ostentatious way, you know, that kind of reeks of like, I mean, I don't know, like it's kind of not even just cringey, but it's just kind of like, man, I don't trust you. It's garish. It's like the guy Matilda who like, you know, Matilda, like the movie about the genius girl, her dad is a used car salesman, and there's a scene where he goes into like a car that

has a high mileage and then like attaches a drill to like the my the odometer Adopter to make you guys we could go down. Yeah, was it backwards exactly what trump is basically? But yeah, I mean the McMansion ization of the White House It's like the McMansion was I mean the White House was always kind of like You know pushing it in terms of like Greek revival architecture, whatever, it was always not my favorite house. But the thing is, is that like, there are so many imitation McMansions, like in the United States, most of them are like around McLean, Virginia,

which is, you know, ground zero for blob sickos who have to like, meet out the difference between, you know, fatalities and opportunity costs for the worst weapons manufacturers alive. And so but anyways, like whether you're imitating the White House or you're imitating like, you know, the labor road for cocoa slop that Trump is, because it's not actually from a specific style, the stuff he's putting on the walls, it's like entirely made up by like some manufacturer in China. And that's the thing is like, it's definitely from China.

It's made of the decorations on the wall, which technically if you want to learn something are called margins. That's the, it's like a garland type decoration and this time it hangs from a shell form. But anyways, these are just simulacra, late Baroque, early Rococo type of ornaments. And they're made out of polyurethane and painted fake gold. That's what they make skateboard wheels out of.

You said polyurethane? Yeah. That's like the mid-soles of Air Jordans, brother. You're not even using real materials, you know? No. But the thing is, is that like, you know, there've always been, you know, there was the Rococo, right, which was the period of like, you know, pre-revolutionary France. This was the aesthetic style of the late Bourbon kings the first time

before they got, you know, deposed two times, you know, but then, you know, there was also like the Bourbon restoration that came after, you know, Napoleon and the Bourbon Restoration that came after Napoleon. And the Bourbon Kings then, and you know what's so funny about this is that the Bourbon Restoration was a very illiberal period that was also, it was protectionist and it was kind of exemplified by, you guessed it, high tariffs. And so anyways, an architectural style is basically one of the hardest things to kill off. It's like one of the hardest cultural life forms to kill off. History has unfortunately and repeatedly shown this to be true.

And so the second the Bourbon Kings get back into style, they bring Rococo slot back and they do like a whole Rococo revival that like lasts forever in the 19th century among like the bourgeoisie who are you know waxing nostalgic for you know the days before you know industrial capitalism but also the days when like they ruled the world or whatever but the funny thing is that the petite bourgeoisie you know like who were profiting from like the factories and all this other stuff they like they actually kind of shot themselves in the foot with their love of a Rococo slop because they like found a way to like mass produce it and thus cheapening the entire aesthetic right?

But they've always been like this is like like invoking the rococo has always been a reactionary sentiment There is not a single rococo revival including in postmodernism That has not been reactionary in sentiment because like it is like a kind of way of playing king or whatever It's a radical assessment. It's a like Reaction of these older forms of power right? Yeah. Yeah. Well, it's it's also a weird Again, it's kind of a negation of a negation situation because as I've said before and many people I've said This is a hack point But I think if you dig into it there are some similarities that Trump is a Napoleon-like figure.

And the only reason I say that is because he did have his exile at Elba, but unlike Napoleon, he did return. And so it's almost like the Bouchoir project started by Napoleon is also being ended by another Napoleon Figure right you know 18th brumar type shit right um but like speaking of the bourgeoisie though like something I wanted to point out before we talk about sprawl is I would be Remiss if I didn't point out that you you know, we're coming out of another weekend, another weekend in which we saw a bunch of protests around the country.

That, you know, people getting out in the streets, like, you know, making their voice heard, you know, letting them know that they don't like Trump. But like, what we've also seen is a bunch of op-eds from, well, I guess I have to say it, liberals, centrist. One of which was going around where this guy on Twitter was like, is it time to finally kill the elite? And then he got paid a visit by the civil security. All right, I have to say that this motherfucker,

brother, like Opssec101, don't put, like, you wrote something like that and then you put your actual address and then you got, you were stunned when your landlord asked you to move. Yeah, dude. Opssec101, man. Who would do something like that? Who would make a project in a media thing where they get out there every week and say meds need to roll and put their names on it?

And expect to still live and still live when you live by your landlord. That's crazy. Who would do something like that? Who would do something like that? Global emoji moment. Global emoji moment. You know, it's so funny because like, oh, oh, now it's totally, it's like, it's like you guys for years and years and years you were like totally fine with like

Destabilizing violence in other countries, you know right now it's just like you're just you're just doing it at home now You know, it's like completely ideologically consistent Well, then the other thing though and I think this is more notable in my opinion This is in the New York Times opinion section David Brooks What's happening is not normal America needs an uprising that is not normal You know the libs the libs I just find it funny that the libs are like having one right now You know because like you said Kate like all these things that they've been promoting for the last like you know 20 30 years

But now it's like they've finally had enough. You know I mean they finally they finally had enough but it's it's predicated on partially obviously like the the creeping privatization and the austerity that we're seeing but also too it's like it's like what they've all said about people like Mahmood Khalil right the fact that I might not agree with what he has to say, but he has the right to say it. When the whole entire point of why these people are being persecuted is because of what they're saying, the things that you actually don't agree with, right? So it just seems to be kind of again, like this hollow liberalism that doesn't result

in anything else, but them originally getting what they wanted for people to be silenced completely, right? I mean, I'm kind of fine with David Brooks saying we have nothing to lose but our chains. He did literally say that, by the way. It did literally say that. It's like this to me is just like, again, this is just like postmodern semantic collapse at this point. But anyways, like the, yeah, the, the lib, the thing is that the libs feel threatened in a way they, it's like the Trump is actually like really coming for elite institutions like Harvard, you know? Yeah.

Which is like, it's like, it's like, actually you're not just like targeting, you know, like Brown people, but you are definitely doing that. Like you're also now just like going after Harvard and that's personal. You can't go after Harvard. That's my school. That my school. I went to the University of North Carolina at Greensboro.

But go Spartans. Go Spartans. Spartans forever. Also, massive cuts happening there, unfortunately, that don't need to happen because they're actually operating like within. It's not it's not like under budget anyways. But yeah, I don't know. Like, but it's funny though, because like, this is a different kind of lib hysteria than we saw the first time. Yeah, like, I kind of think that they got all of that this is fascism shit out of their

system at like the wrong time. Yeah. You know, like, we could really use some of that energy right now. This is fascism energy. My husband still doesn't think it's fascism and we fight about it like pretty much He's like no, it's like authoritarian Hungary. No, it's like this is an interesting debate. We've not had on this show I think that it's um, I I I have maintained for a while that I think it is a kind of... If you look at the project of modernity, right? The revolutionary class of that is the bourgeoisie, okay? I think that you can... I think we can at least say accurately that a certain segment or section of that bourgeoisie has sort of really

Because they have become extremely black-pilled about modernity and about everything that is included in that and by that at All of its racial ideologies its mode of production Even it's like religious tenants. I think that across the board they've become extremely cynical and black-pilled about about modernity and and and I think that anytime You have something you would call fascism I think it is usually when the bourgeoisie kind of tries to stage a revolt against its own mode of production And I think so, I don't know if you can call it like Nazi Germany fascism And I don't think you can call it like Confederacy, you know, CSA

Fascism either or Westward expansion fascism But I think there are which we are talking about the same tree or genealogy here. Anyways, like there is Common threads, but that's my take. I don't know. What what do you got? Kate? What do you think? is it I mean, I think I agree with that actually like I Like, I definitely think like your observation about the motor production is really true, because like in this case, the kind of primary vehicles of bourgeois wealth reproduction are financial in nature. It's like these, you know, abstracted markets and things like that. And those Trump is killing those with tax, with tariffs, you know.

It's like people like Bill Ackman are getting hosed in the way that like the Henry Fords of the past would have gotten hosed or actually rich. They would have been enriched, you know, right. And there are other I'm sure there are other parasites in the financial sector who are like doing insider trading and obviously getting rich from all these. Like Trump is pumping, dumping the NASDAQ. You know, is every fucking day. Is Bill Ackman still trusting the process or is he fed up? I'm not going to I don't want to hear about Bill Ackman until I find out that he killed himself.

So, OK, never mind. Never mind. So I didn't say that. Strike that. That's it. That's it. From the minutes. Yeah. But anyway, he's definitely crashing out, you know, 100 percent. He's crashing out. Me too, buddy. It's fine. I crashed out this morning. I was on the floor crying.

I was really going to get out of here. They're going to send me to a camp. I'm going to die. We're going to fucking die because we go to DSA meetings and they're going to rape you. Kill us. And my husband is like, you get off the fucking floor. Please. I have to work.

I feel like, he's like, I love you so much, but you're crashing out. But that's actually a good point that both you, UK, and Terrence have brought up, sort of, that it only feels as if these liberals have finally eaten the its fascism pill sort of well You know because like their pockets are being hurt They they and here's the thing about the Bernie and AOC thing which I don't want to like dismiss out of hand but the reason why I am extremely pessimistic about this is Everybody wants to turn back the clock right and it's notable that that a lot of the people going to the AOC Bernie rallies are boomers. And the reason why is because they want to turn back the clock to what did we have right

before neoliberalism. Both political articulations, they want to exit neoliberalism, but one wants to go back to the 1950s and one wants to go back to like the 1950s and one wants to go back to like the 1850s and it's kind of like like that's why I like both of them keep getting sort of like Shrunk up like they don't really they'll take two steps forward and three steps back or something. You know what I mean? It's like very yeah awkward and it has some it feels like that It feels like they're returning back also and I know we'll probably talk about it maybe with urban sprawl, but the abundance thing that also feels like that returning back also and I know we'll probably talk about it maybe with urban sprawl but the abundance thing that also feels like

this kind of turning back to like a post-war war two or even maybe like previously before that sort of New Deal sort of liberal philosophy you know where it's like just as long as we harness right the productive capacity of the state to provide things for people without actually investigating the political economy underlying that all, then we'll be fine. Then we'll have this utopia, right? This is why Abundance is actually a Clintonite project. Right.

Yeah. 100%. They're not actually interested in restructuring society at any kind of productive capacity. This is most of all a kind of treat us on how to consume. Right. Yeah. You know, we're consuming the resources the wrong way, which, OK, true. But like, you know, like they won't touch actually like anything like, you know, labor, for example, or like anything that actually has like the hot wire of politics,

the live wire of politics, you know, it always has to be like slightly abstracted from that to be again, it's wonk is it's it's policy wonk ism. It's like it's a belief in an abstracted technocratic politics that is also now pretty nostalgic. Well, it's what people got. No, I think it's like nostalgia will kill you. First of all, if there's any kind of cultural facet that will kill you instantly, it is nostalgia. It like it completely paralyzes you. And it also it makes you kind of dumb. It keeps you from seeing any kind of future or imagining any kind of future. And you have you see this all the time with the internet, people just want Neo cities and fucking Neopets again. And then like the internet used to be cool. And like, we need to go back and it's like, we're not going back. There is no going back from this moment. In this historical moment, the damage has been done. I mean, American hegemony has been dismantled, which is a double edged sword because we're American.

But at the same time, this is the moment that people have been waiting for for a long, long time. And there's no going back from that. It's interesting that, and I've pointed this out before, it's interesting that Peter Till is obsessed with ancient prophecies and the apocalypse now. And if you read that article he wrote for the Financial Times, what he's talking about,

like the coming singularity the coming apocalypse is that the internet will finally fulfill its early promise of basically distributing all occluded knowledge like basically you mean you mean the internet day sells me dick pill ads bro like by email like it's it's we're finally going to get the ai slop email. Like it's, it's. You mean that in a day? We're finally gonna get. It's been dusty AI slop. Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's like it's. It's, it's a kind of. We're finally gonna get the arcane wisdom

of the ages vis a vis the internet. The arcane wisdom of the ages will be revealed to us. It is a forward looking vision. It's not trying to go back to a previous version of the internet. It's not nostalgic. But in the same way that all reaction right now is trying to articulate what they think are early divinations, early prophecies, you know, bestowed upon us from like long

ancestors past that like verify all of the, you know, things about natural order and weaklings and you know what I mean, how JD Vance says you're not supposed to be empathetic or sympathetic to those more vulnerable than you they think that like that's what I mean like they are kind of trying to bring forth a sort of apocalypse or singularity with history and In that in that way they do differ very much from the liberals and and that's what's really depresses me about the liberals is like how They like they can't even look forward in that way except in the abundance and sprawl way but even that's not looking forward that's just a rear it's a retread it's a nostalgia well it's a repackaging of neoliberalism essentially right it's like it's like

what it's like what if we had the Star Trek replicators but we didn't go through the atomic wars you know what I'm saying and all the bad shit that happens in the Star Trek universe, the actual, I mean, truly struggle that happens, right, to create that better society. What if we just had that shit immediately without contending with political economy, right? It's completely unrealistic now. Yeah, it's a fantasy.

I mean, I have to say something. Please. Right, right. About abundance. And also about the sprawl article. So maybe we should introduce the sprawl article. Yeah. The sprawl article is in the New York Times. It's called Why America Should Sprawl.

Not just urban sprawl but American sprawl like America should reach out its influence and tentacles across the entire globe until everything is one America. Talking about the houses. I will keep an open mind. across the entire globe until everything is one America Keep an open mind I will keep an open mind. I will need to see some strong paperwork on this Yeah, do you okay we can start reading it if you want or if you want to What if you were gonna say what you're running to say on Ben abundance, we can all say. No, you should introduce it first, and then I'll give you my opinion. Okay, so this is in the New York Times Magazine. It's called Why America Should Sprawl.

The word has become an epithet for garish reckless growth, but to fix the housing crisis, the country needs more of it. This is by Connor Doherty. He's the guy. Yeah, it is. Yeah, it is. Yeah Doherty. He's the author of a book called Golden Gates the housing crisis and a reckoning for the American dream Okay, the way this article starts off is very funny I'll just get into it here the conference room next to Ross Perot Junior's office has a

floor-to-ceiling map of the Dallas-Fort Worth metropolitan area. The map is in black and white with pools of orange and blue shading represented in the various warehouses, office buildings, and housing developments that one of Perot's companies, Hillwood, has splayed across the region since the late 1980s. Perot, whose father made billions in the computer business and used that wealth to fund the outsider presidential campaigns that made him a household name, has amassed his own fortune by becoming one of the largest real estate developers in the country. Okay, so... You're like father like son, brother.

Ross Perot Jr. has amassed his own fortune. That's... I feel like that's a sentence that should never be used unless unless we should like yeah like well and also just as a definitional it's a paradox in terms like if you inherit a fortune you cannot therefore amass your own fortune like no brother you just copied and pasted the fortune you had. And exactly, that's exactly. A Hillwood executive took me on a helicopter tour to see the map in real life, promising that a view from 1500 feet was the only way to understand just how fast fast the city is growing.

The hell. So you can see this thing in descript terms, you know, just as a blob, you know, and blocks and blocks of like you know I'm saying like industrialization, but actually this will actually to you explain exactly what you're looking at no motherfucker We talked about The helicopter made a dusty landing about 40 miles from downtown Dallas in an area where builders were laying down new traffic circles next To pastures grazed by herds of longhorn cattle okay. I was was born in Lubbock, Texas. I've spent a lot of my time in Dallas. I am not afraid to say this. I fucking hate Dallas, Texas. It fucking sucks.

It's literally all concrete. It's miles and miles of just you know hot sun Fucking bouncing off of just a massive concrete sprawl. It's like it sucks so fucking bad I cannot I cannot completely unnatural when I was growing up and Dallas was sort of America's town because they Housed America's team the Dallas Cowboys I had this image of Dallas as a place where everybody wears spurs, you know cowboy boots and like There's like tumbleweeds that roll through while Ennio Morricone plays over the loudspeakers and everybody has a ranch but I was you know, I've spent a fair amount of time in Dallas and Yeah, it's not like that at all turns out

No, dude, you can't walk 20 feet without having to climb or descend some massive concrete like Embankment or canal or you know what I mean it just or most of it's just highway most most of that fucking town is literally Just interstate and like highway. I think I think this sounds like and you could correct me from wrong, but I think this sounds like when people think of like, you know, Soviet era brutalism or they think of like the the concrete, you know, and the the the sort of like inhuman designs and architecture. I think like you're pretty much talking about Dallas.

Well, it would be like that if it was brutalism brought to you by American Airlines. It's not even it's like I'm going to just say it. You know, it is McMansion health. That's why it's hot. You know, it's true. But like, yeah, it's like it's like if you look at McMansions, you know, the worst McMansions in Texas are actually in North Texas, an oil country. But like, if you look, I mean, this is McMansion. This is the McMansion zone.

And if you look at the pictures in the fucking. Very is just like bleak. It's so bleak. It's just like 3000 square foot houses like crammed next to each other on treeless streets, there's not a tree for miles, not even a little fucking stick, not even something like fucking pathetic, you know, like it is just like it is concrete and like houses made out of plastic Yeah, I know wonder why it's like a hundred plus degrees and shit in the summer man Well, and there's no natural okay

You can't build a city like this in Kentucky because you are inhibited by a bunch of hills the topography Just doesn't allow you to build a city and just keep expanding it less like that in Dallas There is nothing stopping you. It's just endless prairie as far as the eye can see it So it's like let's just keep putting concrete as far as the eye can see fuck it. I mean It's endless pavement, but endless pavement man But anyways like the article is like man. But anyways, like the article is like, this is one of those really bad faith articles that people write about housing, many such cases, in fact almost all such cases. But it's interesting to see this kind of bad faith article talking about why sprawl is good. And so anyways, like Anyways, Doherty, who is a housing Twitter troll from olden times,

his argument is basically that zoning and all these other technocratic reforms that people agree are all good to happen in cities are just not going to happen or they're not happening fast enough. And so you just got to build, baby. It's like the drill, baby, drill of housing arguments. Yeah. And so, you know, his targets are pretty like straightforward right wing targets. Like, and you know, there is a mixed bag with this kind of things. Like, yes, it's true that the Sierra Club, like definitely inhibited,

like the building of housing, necessary housing in California. But also, like it's also true that they shouldn't have just built unmitigated sprawl in a fucking fire zone. Right. Yeah. So it's like, you know, it's one of those, it was like environmental groups start to blame and the, of course, you know, like he doesn't even take like the traditional like NIMBY, you know, like argument that like a, like liberals take, which is that like home, the home owning class, which is not a class. It's an asset class, but it's not a class in like the Marxist sense.

Right. You know, would, would, you know, they, because they want their property values to go up, like don't want new development and therefore have like a, you know, financial interest in preventing new housing. He doesn't even like really want to even go into that because it would mean like insulting the single family homeowner. And so he just likes to blame, you know, environmental groups and, you know, people who just like thumb their note liberals who thumb their nose up at sprawl is like being evil, you know, or whatever. It's like, it's really funny.

And so it's like, yeah, the argument is basically build baby bill and we'll figure it out later. And then he offers some SimCity ass logic, literally SimCity logic. You'll just build the thing and then people will do what they will with it. Eventually, because of the process, they'll figure out the infrastructure and then things will densify and XYZ will happen.

Citation needed. Citation needed. That's a thing, Kate, that's very fascinating. You can tell how much the elite across the board liberal conservative like even with Trump and them trying to exit neoliberalism how deeply sort of Propagandized brainwash they are with neoliberal ideology to the extent that they think everything is organic

They literally think if you put tariffs on everything, then the jobs will magically appear. They'll magically relocate the factories to America and then people will have jobs. And it's the same thing with this. Like his argument is that like, the reason there's homelessness is because they don't have enough houses.

We don't build enough houses, that's why there's so much homelessness. It's like that's not, okay, correct me if if I'm wrong but surely that's not the reason right? Surely there's enough houses. You gotta read like Brian Goldstone's book which I was trying to write a review of but no one would take it which was is about like about homeless people who are working. There is no place for us actually working in homeless. I'm looking at it right now. Yeah.

Yeah, you said it to me. I mean, yeah, it's basically it's a I think it's his study is in Atlanta, but like there's like all these stories of people who have jobs and who like, you know, have the, you know, it's not that they don't work. And it's not that they they aren't smart with money or whatever. It's just that the cost of housing has gotten insane because we don't build housing for low income people. We don't have public housing, like truly public housing. We don't even have fake public housing anymore like of like the clintonite variety the hope six type housing Yeah, his his argument is that environmentalism makes owning a home too expensive. That's basically what his argument boils down to

It's like I'm sorry I just I don't think it's good environmental policy to blanket the entire prairie with concrete. Like that's not good. And it's also just like a culture war against urban planners. Like this is just, this is actually just like grievance culture. Like now mapped up onto like urban planners from within like the kind of, but yeah, but within like the kind of NIMBY or YIMBY sphere. You're right. You know, he's like a right.

He's a right. He's a right YIMBY, you know, and so is J.D. Vance. Is also a right YIMBY. So clearly, like in the foot and like or like Gary Tan from Y Combinator is a right wing YIMBY. And like there are I think all YIMBYism is kind of right wing. But like there are like YIMBYs who are basically just following like kind of technocratic, but there are Yimbies who are basically just following technocratic

ideas of basically bottom of the barrel urban planning ideas that are pretty like, you know, we have to build more housing, we have to up some, we have to improve transit. You know, this is just like, this is just stock urban planning 101. And then there are people who are, but a lot of Yimbies hate low income or public housing because it's impossible and unfeasible and you just got to wait for the market to do its job and things to trickle down again, that same organic neoliberal kind of fallacy. But then you have the right EMBs who are like the like Gary Tan who wants to like basically have a police state in San Francisco.

And then it wants the tech industry to basically run San Francisco as like a citadel. And then you have, you know, like JD Vance and, you know, this guy, Connor, what's his face, who want to basically like JD Vance wants to destroy the national park to build like condos for rich people, you know, like there is just like a kind of, there's like, it's like, this is like acceleration is the Yimby is that, you know, it's like now it's malicious. It's just malicious towards the environment I have a question is Connor Doherty. This is my first time encountering him. I've never heard the name before I agree. I don't think i've heard encountered him. Is he a when you say a right wing

Is he like a trump or is he like a kamala harris? Supporter or does that even know I think he's like a kind of like, like paleo, like, like not like a Trumper type conservative. But like there is a publication called City Journal that was also publishing these kinds of like bad right wing takes and urban planning. He's more of like an Aaron M. Wren type guy. If you know who Aaron Wren is, it would be like a compact mag type guy.

Yeah, that's all like compact Somebody who's not even in the club you not even Like the right wing flank of like technocratic urbanism The libertarian front flank of technocratic urbanism And what I wanted to say about all this I I'm having a kind of skit moment in many ways, because I'm crashing out. Like especially about architecture right now and this culture of architecture.

We are recreating right now one for one the architectural culture of the 1990s. Like people don't remember architecture from the 1990s because it was like a kind of weird limbo period between like, you know, goofy, like pastel postmodernism of like the, you know, you know, Instagram accounts that paint that like, like, you know, spam pictures of, you know, neon signs at the mall, that kind of postmodernism, you know, the swiggles. Yeah. And and the marbled, you know, composition notebook type backgrounds with like the Memphis, Milano, you know, pastel, like, like, like plain, like plain seat fabric architecture. You know what I mean? Yeah, exactly.

Exactly. Yeah. Like Disney, Disney architecture, Taco Bell lobby circa 1994. But like the nineties were a really weird time for architecture because in the 80s, you had postmodernism, right? Like you actually had postmodernism since the late 60s. But by the 80s, you had postmodernism. You not only had postmodernism, right? Like as like an as an artistic movement, which is very interesting and very diverse and had

all of this amazing theory that was produced during that time like, I don't know, John Baudrillard. And you had postmodernism, the art movement, and you had postmodernism, the architecture movement, which is actually like the kind of purest distillation of what postmodernism is, which is the synthesis of contemporary means with historical forms. Right.

And architects did this in a really one to one kind of way, which is like, OK, we're going to have pediments on the grocery store now. But they're kind of be abstract and fun. It's fun. It is fun. Most of it is very fun. But the thing is, and very ironical and very clever. But the thing is, is that like by the late 1980s, or really by the mid 1980s, you know,

postmodernism was started out as a populist kind of sentiment, like Robert Venturi, learning from Las Vegas, they were like, we need to embrace the vernacular as like kind of being more indicative of what people want from architecture. People love Las Vegas and we've just been like trashing it forever. And so maybe there's something to learn from, I don't know, show business and mass consumption and stuff like that.

And maybe we should start thinking about architecture from a more populist lens. And of course, there were lots of contradictions in modernism that were really hard to resolve. And so all of these things tumbled into this movement we call postmodernism. But by the mid-1980s, postmodernism had won, basically, like there was no more modernism. People were not building in modernism anymore. And postmodernism, more importantly, became a largely

corporate architecture movement. There's very few postmodern single family houses or like experimental forms. Almost all of like postmodern architecture was was like, you know, corporate in nature. And the biggest corporation that was the patron saint of postmodernism was Disney. modern architecture was was like, you know, corporate in nature and the biggest corporation that was the patron saint of postmodernism was Disney. And so by the 1980s, you had this thing called postmodern neoclassicism, which was just basically like a traditional more traditionalist revival within postmodernism. And you had these guys like Robert A. war that is now like just like one to one being replicated in architecture now is a culture war fundamentally from the 1980s and the participants were like King Charles. just like one to one being replicated in architecture now is a culture war fundamentally from the 1980s.

And the participants were like King Charles, who wanted to fake build a fake George in town called poundbury. But anyways, like, but one thing that has lingered not only just like the trad architecture wars or whatever, and like, you know, the old grievances, like the grievances over Penn station, for example, that Trump is reviving it. That was a fucking 80s culture war in postmodernism. And the thing is, is that like many of the things about the urban planning side of

this. Right. Like almost all of contemporary, like mainstream urbanism has its roots in the 1990s. By the 1990s, postmodernism had gotten completely stale. There's only so much you can do with the whole putting pediments on a grocery store thing. There was a secondary crisis in architecture. It's like, what are we going to do now that postmodern is dead? Of course, AutoCAD comes along and new technical capabilities.

One half of architecture goes ham on doing exploding beer can buildings with deconstructivism because like you have the technology, which is basically just modernism again, which is like technocratic architecture. But then not everyone can afford to do that because it was insanely expensive. And so you just had postmodernism just kind of limping along. And then what was happening at that time was a culture war in urban planning. Like the culture war had shifted from architecture to urban planning. And you had this group called the Congress for the New Urbanism, which was this movement of building cities

in a more sustainable, traditional way, but specifically with traditional architecture. The transit-oriented development, we need to have walkable cities, all that stuff that is now almost a meme in urban planning circles, And I think that's a really good point. I think that's a really good point. I think that's a really good point. I think that's a really good point. I think that's a really good point. I think that's a really good point. I think that's a really good point. I think that's a really good point. I think that's a really good point.

I think that's a really good point. I think that's a really good point. I think that's a really good point. I think that's a really good point. I think that's a really good point. I think that's a really good point. I think that's a really good point. I think that's a really good point.

I think that's a really good point. I think that's a really good point. I think that's a really good point. I think that's a really good point. I think that's a really good point. I think that's a really good point. I think that's a really good point. I think that's a really good point. I think that's a really good point. I think that's a really good point. I think that's a really good point. I think that's a really good point. series of small towns connected by transit was really kind of the model because people believed that like American people really just want like houses with gables on them

and also architects can't be trusted to do their job and so urban planners should just do everything no one knows any better you know whatever but the funny thing is is that like this was the time like all these new urbanist towns a lot of them are funded by Disney. Like they have the town of like Celebration, Florida, which is, which is basically a company town for Disney, but from the consumer side and you have seaside Florida, which is like the Columbus, Indiana, which is like the collection of like famous modernist buildings, but for postmodernism. And anyways, like these are Disney projects. Well, can I just, can I ask, go ahead.

I was just, I just saw a Venturi's fire station number four in Columbus Yeah, and now look at I live just a stone's throw from his Kentucky clinic on the University of Kentucky's campus I'm like my man fell off toward the end Yeah, I mean this is a thing an architecture style hard to kill off But go ahead no no okay. I just want to ask a question Why do you think it's just interesting that you um, I don't know We probably should get to the article too, but I just want to ask question. Why do you think that like Disney? Was foundational in creating this or facilitating this architecture?

I mean, I think about especially now is Disney sort of being this especially now is Disney sort of being this fantastical childlike sort of utopic vision for adults where they can kind of disappear back into childhood or adolescence you know and I think about like Epcot you know which was Disney sort of futuristic you know we're gonna have sea cities you know we're gonna have all this utopian futuristic technology. But it never it was very libertarian in the sense that like, I mean, one, like it was like deregulation, right. And it was like complete, um, um, regulatory capture, right.

But also too, it felt like it harkened back to again, like this very like child likeness that people and this nostalgia that people really enjoyed without creating anything new, but it was familiar enough to make people feel comfortable, you know. likeness that people and this nostalgia that people really enjoyed without creating anything new but it was familiar enough to make people feel comfortable, you know, but the thing is, is that like by the 1990s that Disney was over Disney was dead. Right. The parks started to become sort of cannibalized by different intellectual properties. And like you had things like for example, like Disney Hollywood Studios, which was basically like a simulacra of Hollywood and had all the live shows and all this it became like an entire it stopped being a forward thinking I'm a Yapper, right? I'm a Yapper. I'm a Yapper. I'm a Yapper. I'm a Yapper. I'm a Yapper.

I'm a Yapper. I'm a Yapper. I'm a Yapper. I'm a Yapper. I'm a Yapper. I'm a Yapper. I'm a Yapper. I'm a Yapper.

I'm a Yapper. I'm a Yapper. I'm a Yapper. I'm a Yapper. I'm a Yapper. I'm a Yapper. I'm a Yapper. I'm a Yapper.

I'm a Yapper. I'm a Yapper. I'm a Yapper. I'm a Yapper. I'm a Yapper. And so, but the point I'm getting to here, and I promise there is a point, I, you know, I'm a yapper, right? But the point is, is that like this fusion of like reactionary architectural grievance culture, like culprit, this is the era that had like whole books that said like people like Disney because of walkable urbanism, like we still see that shit all the time.

The reach is so long. Right. That's so true. That's a good point, actually. But people forget like the kind of corporate elements and the reactionary elements of these things. So like it's like, you know, the problem was not sprawl. The problem was that sprawl was done like a little bit wrong. Well, I mean, it should have been nicer

and it should have been connected to a train. Yeah. If I could just add that there was a political economic process that was also laid overlaid on top of this, which was that the fundamental premises of supply side economics, of neoliberal economics basically required an attack on the public sector, defunding of public sector unions, which also entailed deindustrialization. And so that kind of got thrown into the milieu of the debates around integration and school busing and all this. And so you had a situation in the late 70s, early 80s where communities started to deindustrialize. The public sector was coming under assault from Reagan, but also from even from Carter.

You had the Volcker Shock. And you had all these things kind of coming together to make municipal revenue a crisis point. And so the way that a lot of municipalities basically revolutionized their revenue streams and to try to capture taxes yet again was beefing up the carceral state, criminalizing all kinds of survival strategies. And once again, we've talked about this, how this created the opioid epidemic. This also required cutting down the public sector in welfare, but beefing it up in the

militarized police sector. But this also stimulated the rise of the shopping mall. The shopping mall was a product of this time because this is how municipalities tried to capture revenues. And it's why you go to a place like Austin and you drive an I-35 towards San Antonio and you just see like the rings on a tide on a beach or the tree just the successive Yes, yeah, the successive waves of urban sprawl and development where you have you pass multiple You know rings of these dead malls basically you'll pass a dead mall and then another dead mall and then another dead mall

And then maybe it's not a dead mall anymore, but maybe now it's a strip mall now and then another dead mall. And then maybe it's not a dead mall anymore, but maybe now it's a strip mall now. Right, right, right. It's not a, yeah. I live across the street from a dead mall, the Turfler Mall, it's now a combination staples home depot. Well, and so what a lot of these states did in this time

was they made municipal incorporation extremely easy. This did two things. This made it to where you could basically just chase Consumption like in the form of malls through like housing development But it also it also Helped white people get out of the city right it's like oh, we got it. Yeah, they did communities Yes, exactly it helped them it helped them basically resegregate

They didn't want it. They didn't want to be with Mexicans. They didn't wanna be with Mexicans, they didn't wanna be with black people, they just wanted to keep to their own and so it was just like a white flight thing. And like I said, you see the markers of that everywhere. It's also the schools. And the schools, right. So it's like that all gets pushed together, right,

into this, like what you're describing, Kate, like this sort of like crisis in Ideology in Architecture and in urban planning and in urban planning in many ways is constrained by this political economic process So it's like it's like I read this article and he says He talks about like the environmental He talks about like the environmental regulations that are passed. He says similar laws throughout the country have slowed the pace of construction and made housing far more expensive, contributing to one of the worst affordable housing crises

in the nation's history. After two decades of underbuilding, economists estimate the country's housing shortage at somewhere between four million and eight million units. Last year was among the most difficult on record to buy a home. A quarter of tenants now spend more than half their income on rent and utilities, blah, blah, blah. I mean, it's like, there's all these things

that we're describing that feed into this. It's not just because we just didn't build enough homes. It's like the most elementary, juvenile understanding of it. What do you say to this burden this, like burden of environmental regulations? Is he talking about the fact that like, I mean, which I guess was violated. I mean, I don't even know the fact that there's a chemical lab, like, like five miles away from me that like blew up last year. Like, you had been quarantined for several days in the house.

Like I saw like this plume of red and black smoke billowing, you know over my neighborhood and like I had to think to myself Why would they even build homes there? You know what I mean? Like why would you and they're of course black I was gonna say who lives in the homes, right? Poor black people live there. Right. Yeah. I mean that's like that's completely correct. I mean, it's also just like this like this article is reacting to a space. It's like trying to do the culture war thing with with urbanism. It's a it's like deliberately provocative.

It's like actually sprawl is good. Right. Actually, sprawl is necessary. It's like it's doing that classic right wing thing where you take like an extreme position and enforce people to argue with you. Everybody knows that sprawl is fucking bad. Like, you're you're not going to gaslight me to think you will maybe sprawl is necessary. It's like, no, are you fucking stupid? Like if you don't build a bus to go someplace like, you know, like everyone is

going to be in their car and it's just going to be polluted. There's no fucking trees in any of these image like the there's like little tiki tacky soulless boxes where people are alienated and like to the point where they do mass shootings and like, you know, insane, right? Like, I mean, it's this it's just but this is this is a tactic that was adopted at the apex of this crisis that you're talking about. The crisis of neoliberalism starting to come under roost and that sort of interregnum between deindustrialization and the annihilation of retail. It says in the article that it takes 20 minutes or something to get to stores or anything

like that. There isn't even an anchor like a shopping mall anymore. It's just fucking sprawl for sprawls sake There's not even like a pretension to any kind of public space Even if it's like privatized public space, which is what this is why I brought up Disney, right? It's like Disney was one of the first ever literal fucking surveillance states There's a great essay by Michael Sorkin, who was my predecessor at the nation, which is called See You in Disneyland. And there's an image in this essay that is like of the sky over Disneyland, because the whole

fucking park is copyrighted. He can't take a picture of anything in the park because he'll get fucking sued by Disney. You can't take a picture of a physical object. I mean, I think this was in the 90s, you know, it's probably different now that you have fucking smartphones now. But anyways, like Disney World is is run by a system of subterranean metropolis like labor that like runs back and forth in these tunnels to keep up the image of just like consumption without labor. And that's what people do in these kinds of communities where there's no, where there are no stores where there are like, where everything is delivered

by fucking Amazon because it's like, it's just completely insulated from any kind of like real conflict in society or like any kind of like physical or social manifestations of material production. Right. And so it's that same thing. It's like a hyper surveilled and then hyper alienated and then hyper segregated. And not just in the racial sense, but also in just like the class.

You know, you don't have to the class sense. You don't have to see anybody. You know, you don't have to talk to anybody. You just you don't even have to go to the fucking store. You just live in a box. Right. That's the bugs. That's what charter school. I mean I was thinking about that It's just like the push towards charter school is we are just we're we are once again having economic Segregation to where like if you make up above a certain amount of money like you won't ever have to interact with somebody and it further

It further creates this weird disjuncture We're seeing with the bourgeoisie where they are so fucking out of touch like you look at a guy like Elon Musk like they are so disconnected from any real world concerns or struggles like this partially is to explain you know why they are the way they are but like Kate you're talking about this town that it covers in the article called Princeton, Texas, where it's just sprawl for sprawl's sake. There is no, there's no stores.

They have to drive like 20 minutes. They don't even have public infrastructure like sewage and water yet. It's like the old west. It's like the old west with the sprawl, but none of the, like they don't have the amenities like they would in like dead wood But they just have hundreds of thousands of house. Johnny Ringo How you fall about like robin or Roman urban like you know sewage systems and shit like that man by not having any at all

That's in doing it is I mean libertarianism It's libertarianism right poppin? What are they doing for the sewer? Dumping it into the creek? What's going on? I think they just like septic tanks pretty much. This is the long 19th century man.

Just in time for tuberculosis to come back. That's true. We're all gonna get fucking dysentery because RFK. Organ trail ass diseases. This is like, we talk about the expansion of the police in the police state and why there are so many fucking cops, right? It is, because of neoliberalism, it's one of the few ways that municipalities can actually

gather revenue now. I mean, like, me and Tom talked about this the fact that you can you can be fined for not paying your sewage bill and then wind up in jail and you are basically punished for accessing a public service. Like now we're creating these communities where there is no public commons, there is no public area at all, there's not even a public social contract, it's just hundreds of thousands of little tiny Atomic subunits wherever human is in their own little air-conditioned home in the hundred and ten degree desert And they've got their own fucking climate controlled area where everything is heavily policed

But and then like if anybody of color comes into your neighborhood you can just fucking waste them obviously Like something I've been really been thinking of and I hate to get this fucking black pill it's like I was I was talking with some friends about this over the weekend but like when have y'all have y'all looked into the way like how they're picking up immigrants like the criteria that they're deporting them on it's not just like their speech it's like they've got these like criteria like that like the tattoos they have and if they're wearing like Chicago Bulls merchandise that kind of shit have you all seen that like

should sue the shit out of ice by the way I agree I think oh no ahead. Oh, no, I just want to add to I don't think that ice has confirmed this but like several like, you know Legal people that have been trying to like, you know Go after the Trump administration against this have said they've been using AI To implement a lot of these like raids and a lot of these kidnap Well, that's what I was gonna say. I think what it is, because I was wondering, I was like how the fuck do they even know if you have tattoos? Or if you wear a certain shirt on a certain day. To me, it just seems like they are gathering massive quantities of surveillance data, feeding it into, with these fucking cameras that cops put up all over the place.

They feed it into AI programs Very much like that lavender targeting program that Israel uses to decide quote-unquote What houses it was the bomb and then that just spits out like names right and addresses And then I think they just go after those names and addresses like come our Briego Garcia like right like he just wound up because he had a certain tattoo that they thought was MS-13. What I'm trying to say here is they are developing a surveillance state and apparatus that is like,

you're right, it's fully predicated on economic libertarianism, but it has this state power that's very reminiscent of basically how Israel operates in the West Bank and in Gaza. What I'm trying to say is we are trying to turn America into Israel. That is what is kind of been made abundantly clear to me in the last few months. It's like, oh, it all makes sense now. The Imperial Boomerang. It is the Imperial Boomerang.

Like we we are going to turn this country into Israel. That's it. And that includes his racial ideologies It's policing techniques like this is well-trodden territory obviously, but it makes so much more sense like oh like oh now We're even doing tariffs like I mean I know Israel doesn't probably doesn't do tariffs They probably can't afford to do that, but uh But we're trying to isolate ourselves in a way that is also simultaneously expansionist. I don't know, like it's such a, I'm sorry to go there from an article about urban sprawl, but it's such a hilarious like set of arguments about how to kind of like fill the void that

we, the spiritual void that we've sort of found ourselves in as a result of neoliberalism and that various fields like architecture have and urban planning and everything, right? It's like, oh, let's just go back to the past. Let's just like, oh, let's just push our boundaries. Let's expand infinitely. Well, some of those tactics that I was using to round up people is very much, you know, long shadow of the nineties, black men are super predators. If they're wearing a Chicago Bull Starter jacket, round them up, all that kind of, like a lot of these tactics just feel like of that time,

you know, like connect back to what Kate was saying about. They're rounding up like Mayan speakers in Navajo. You know what I mean? Like, you're brown, you know? It's just like, that's it. Right. Right. And it's like, you know, one of those things where, yeah, like the hyper surveillance of

urban space, you know, it's gonna it's it's I was out at the protest on Saturday, you know, and there are some interesting things there, even though it's all living out, you know? But like, one of the interesting things is that like, I saw a lot of like 70 year old fucking blue wave women with like, deny defend to pose signs. Which is like, okay. And I saw like people beating the shit out of an ice-shaped pinata to like huge cheers But there are two things that I noticed Like it's like yeah, that is like those are the positive thing the negative things that I noticed is that I looked up at

The telephone poles in downtown Chicago to see how many surveillance cameras are around Because I start thinking about this now because I'm crashing out, you know, I'm in my skit are around. Because I started thinking about this now because I'm crashing out, you know. I'm in my skit zone. And anyways, like every single fucking pole on every single corner or every single building, there is a camera. There is a camera on every facade above every entrance. And if there's not one on every entrance and there's one, you know, on cell phone like apparatuses that is like, you know, hidden around the corner or whatever. There is nowhere to go in downtown Chicago where your visage is not being recorded.

Oh, dog, even like I think I've told the story on the show before, man, but even the proliferation of next door, right, and ring cameras. Yeah, you said it. I think I told the story one time with a man like, you know, I live with my mom's and she don't like the

fact that I smoke weed, man. So I think I came from school late one night and she was sitting in the living room where she could look through the front look through the glass front door and see a shadow or see somebody approaching the front door and man i just rolled up a joint you know because you don't like i smoke weed so i was just smoking smoking my joint out there man and she called me and i realized that she was staying I looked back and realized her silhouette was in The couch right in the living room so I was like oh shit man So I walked to this gazebo anyway men my she called me and said where are you and I said what do you mean?

Where am I? I'm like, you know, I'm like walking home and she was like Oh a strange shadow of figures is by the front door my neighbor my neighbor I just saw my neighbor just called and said he recorded on camera. I'm like, bro. That's me I just saw my neighbor just called and said he recorded on camera. I'm like, bro, that's me My own god damn neighborhood man, and they were posted by the next door. He had a backpack and here are the images I'm like bro. Luckily I had I'm like that was me but just you know to be just a surveillance You know what? I mean? I gotta be honest. I'm doing that to my birds in my yard right now. I got one of those fucking bird buddy. This is a load bearing institution for my mental health, but that's how ICE is

going to nab me for being a communist. You know, I'm going to fucking walk out of my house in the fucking bird camera. It's going to rat me out. So it's like they talk about the imperial Boomerang coming home to Roos. Literally like a bird. Can't even do any backyard bird watching anymore without us getting involved. They're just gonna show you how atomized we are and how surveilled, like, whether it's a protest or whether it's a fucking suburb or gated community where people are viewed to look at each other's enemies. Everybody's scared to death, man ring cam next door shit Everybody has that

I've not knocked on a strange door that did not have a right or wrong actually actually in five years They try to push it to you. I forgot man. I forgot what fucking company it was man I forgot what me and my mom were doing actually I think we were signing up for like um Internet cable or something like that with not direct TV, but like a like not a kid Yeah spectrum dog and they kept trying to push the ring camera on us They kept saying well you can't enjoy the deals and the promotions if you don't take the ring camera I was like, can you really if you think about it if you think about it? Can you really sit down to enjoy the pit while some marauding shadowy figure could be smoking weed on your front porch

Mr. Thorpe for the low low price of $19.99 you can add it onto your package. I mean the thing is is like this was you know gonna be inevitable this was where all this was gonna go is that everyone gets to be their own fucking rent a cop. Yeah. Yeah. But the thing is also is that like I remember canvassing for Bernie Sanders in 2020. These were the last happy days of my life, by the way. And like you would go, we were in South Carolina. We were in like fucking rural South Carolina too, because you know, there were no, I was, we were walking and there was no sidewalks and you know,

it's all these little houses and like big fields and stuff like that. Did a lot of birding while I was canvassing. But anyways, like they the ring camera had not yet like proliferated, you know, as an institution at that time, this was like something that totally accelerated during the pandemic as a technology. 100 percent. Yeah. Like cheaper. My parents suddenly had one, too. It's made like political canvassing

Extremely difficult because people just see you outside on your fucking camera and won't come to the door Right or not come to the door because they see me. You know say they're like, I'm not gonna put it my fucking door Fuck that. Yeah, let's sit outside hit But it's also just like this is the suburban mindset, you know, this is castle mentality This is the suburban mindset. You know, this is castle mentality. It's like you are in your little fucking keep protecting your little fucking fight them with your fucking gun and your ring camera. This is where it was always going to go because you're completely adamant,

like itemized in your society. And this is what sprawl is. And so it's no wonder that right wingers want sprawl. Yeah, because sprawl is like a social institution that reproduces Their anti-social goals right in this availing state, right? Well and and also that is spot-on and and also For you to have a society you still have to have some degree of a public Service system some sort of society. I guess what I'm saying is infrastructure, okay?

And so the question becomes, who is the infrastructure for? And I think the answer to that is that they just kind of want to blend, mesh, meld together the kind of like elements of the Fortis state where you built out or the New Deal state of like you're building out infrastructure, but it's only for white people or only for settlers or whatever, right? And rich people.

And rich people, right. Mostly that's it. And it's like, we read this article and it's really, and we can start wrapping up here in a second, but like, you know, he writes, Princeton's god-awful traffic and its views of pastures being consumed by track homes are exactly the sorts of scenes of opponents of sprawl have in their heads.

But this is how cities are built through a chaotic and uneven process in which the mix of homes, jobs, and infrastructure is constantly shifting and never quite in balance. And it's like, I don't think that's true. I think you and never quite in balance and it's like I Think I don't think that's true. I think you can bring it in back There's this thing called urban planning Right not urban not planning

Also to it reminds me of something that um that Malcolm Harris I think mentions in his review of the abundance book or whatever. Where he talks about, I think in the early, what is it like the early like 19th century where, you know, people if you live from like, you know, the late 1800s until like the early 1900s, and you saw this transformative technological change of, you know, automobiles, like gas-powered automobiles on the road, of people wearing like rubber sole shoes and riding these bikes, you know, and how Americans enjoyed in that abundance, but didn't really question the labor that went into producing those things. You know what I mean? Like as if we build more of this stuff, everything will fall into place and we don't have to

interrogate the political economy, right? And the exploitation that creates all this shit. Who is building the track homes? It's the people who ICE is fucking abducting off the fucking street. Right. You know? I'm street. Right. Right. You know, like, I'm sorry. Like, OK, yeah, white people build houses in Chicago where there have been Polish immigrants since the 19th century.

But like the vast majority of construction labor is like Hispanic. 100 percent. And it's also like, you know, you know, questionably documented. Right. And it's extremely dangerous labor, you know, and there's like a high rate of workplace injury that's not reported because a lot of the people are undocumented. Right. And it's extremely dangerous labor, you know, and there's like a high rate of workplace injury that's not reported because a lot of the people are undocumented. Right. Like the thing is, is that like architecture is, you know how people say Twitter is real life, which it totally is now, like just confirmed apparently, but like architecture is real life. I mean, at its core architecture is an assemblage of commodities at this point

ever since mass production. That has been true. And, you know, like with the de-skilling of architectural production that happened in the 19th century, like to the point where you can mass produce houses. And that's the thing. We do mass produce shit in this country. The houses we mass produce. OK, the timber and the aluminum might be from Canada. And some of the windows and shit are now mostly from China. But like we do mass produce housing in this country. Like this is a

ridiculous fallacy that we don't make. You know, we do, but it looks like this. Right. But there's a whole system of consumption and production that is like has to be in balance for that to happen. And right now it's not in balance because the Materials are not there because the materials aren't fucking Canada and you know how we're gonna get the materials is gonna cut down Yellowstone by the way And then you know the and the labor is being deported and it's like, okay Connor you want your sprawl Well, the conditions for making that happen. Yeah are completely destabilized and so yeah not conditions for making that happen are completely destabilized. And so it's not. Right. Right. 100%.

That's a great point. Like you're right. Between tariffs, the immigration, like all I mean, or the deportations, all of this, like the basis upon which you would even build these things are also going away. That's why it's a it's a form of cope and denial. Like abundance is this denial. Yimbyism, I even think like natal ism Pro-natal ism is a kind of denial. It's like what you all want is you want endless growth you want endless like

You want capitalism to basically function as you think it does? Which is like unfettered organically without any kind of guidance, but you want that to be endless and infinite. These are not actual demands. Like, it worked for you 70, 80 years ago because of a global arrangement brought on by an awful disastrous war. And all of those chickens have come home to roost now, so you can't you can't turn back the clock You can't like just wish this into existence with idealism and utopianism like you have to actually deal with what the fuck is right In front of you. It's what is it? Me the the denial we've mentioned it We've mentioned a lot before this words come up, but it's a denial and a cope I guess in the denial of entropy

You know yeah like this idea that like everything kind of like degrades to this state where it's come up, but it's a denial and a cope, I guess, in the denial of entropy, you know? Yeah. Like this idea that like everything kind of like degrades to this state, you know what I mean? And they refuse to believe in that. And the cope is that, well, if we just build more of it, you know, everything else will fall into place without actually looking at the economic base that would allow those things to happen, you know?

In the way that you claim you want it. Yeah, these are also all like low-key eugenicists projects 100 100 like trickle down urbanism is a eugenicist project you don't you don't think about poor people because you don't care if they die 100 they can't like you know people can't reproduce themselves as a labor force without housing. And that was actually the reason why we have public housing. It's not because people were nice. One is because people organize for public housing and two, because like people like FDR realize that you're not going to be able to

reproduce the manufacturing reserve army of labor. If you don't have the actual like conditions for reproduction, healthcare is the same education too, right? Yeah. Yeah. But now that we don't have a manufacturing society conditions for reproduction right health care is the same education too right yeah but now that we don't have a manufacturing society now that we have like I don't know AI sloth society or whatever the need for those repertec that you know that kind of like social reproduction is not there I mean it is there but like these people don't care about it because it's not necessary to their project and so they're just fine letting poor people die you know and then and like of, there's some like, like, greater malice, like towards immigrants, and like, you know, towards

women to like they want women to just die in childbirth now. Like, that's not happening to me. But like the, and I want to have a baby, this is like the most fucked up part, you know, but anyways, like the, you know, like, these are you like pro natalism is the eugenicist project. It's like a bunch of silicon, silicon valley accelerationists, half of whom don't even believe humanity should exist because we should all die. You should all become extinct so that I can rule the world or whatever.

And by the way, if you believe this, like you're the first that is going to get hunt down in the coming year. Oh, 100 percent. in the coming Junta. Oh, 100%. And then also, you have these projects, and it's not just eugenicist politics, right? It's also like, it's extensionalism. It's like people who are promoting sprawl, who are promoting this kind of right with me, they just have given up on a livable future on Earth It's on the side and they're just what it is It is it's complete like homicidal at like a global scale It's like the fuck it we ball of like I don't it's like, you know, it's like a white lotus but like explored it Not even not even not even homicidal but on this side. Oh, they want to kill everything. Well, you know, they want to kill My fucking birds they want to kill my fucking birds. They want to kill my words. I was reading

I know we probably need to start wrapping this up, but I was reading the other day that if you looked at the statements from shell and BP and Exxon like 15 years ago, and I remember this distinctly. I remember they started signaling this right around the time that I graduated college, that they were going to go green, that they were gonna start diversifying their portfolios in green energy. I was reading that like in 2021, something about the pandemic did it.

I don't know, you can see it everywhere you look, but in 2021, they all dropped that. They all said, actually, no, we we're not we're not stranding any assets We're going after all of it. We're getting it all we are going to drill this fucking thing to death and they've completely given up on any kind of transition to a Quote-unquote green economy, and I think that like I can tell you Go ahead. I was just gonna say I think that engenders a kind of cynicism What wouldn't you say that engenders a kind of cynicism?

Yeah, I can tell you why it was the pandemic. Yeah, it was the pandemic because we had an opportunity to transform society in a collective way and we showed collective solidarity at the beginning of the pandemic. And then what happened? That was the jumping off point that we could have imagined a different world. And you know what we did? We killed millions of people instead by ending the lockdowns early. 100%.

And that was when it became known to everybody that human beings are disposable and mass death is fine. Right. It's just a fact of like, couldn't happen to me, but like, you know, but like, it's just, that's just how it's going to be. And so when you see things like the genocide in Gaza and stuff like that, like, yes, like young people who live through the trauma of the pandemic and people who like have cared about the Palestinian struggle

since the beginning of their political formations, which is like the camp that I'm in, you know, which I became exposed to Palestine when I was in college. And I was immediately like, yeah, this is fucked up. But the thing is, is that like the these people, you know, are to them like. That the generation that like the generations that have shaped the world to be what it is. Yeah, have now become like all blackpilled or whatever. Yeah. But in the young people, you know, increasingly blackpilled also. But these were the jumping off points that led us to where we are

This was the normalization of mass death without reparations Like, you know, even the fucking Holocaust had reparations But like the pandemic everyone just swept it under the rug and millions of people were allowed to die And then that's when the human the idea that human life matters and that every life is a universe has was irrevocably cheapen Yeah Alongside with truth the truth right like the same way that these people like manipulate the truth like they lie all the time And it's just like as a society. We just like forgot that like yeah lying is bad. You should be fucked up for it

All these norms have been completely the pandemic destroyed these norms in a way that is the scariest thing about contemporary society is the lack of value for human life. Well dude, it's necropolitics, man. It's the furthering of who gets to live and who gets to die. Well, and it makes total sense because neoliberalism as a model of accumulation basically says there is no society and everybody could pretend for 40 years with because we had these like traditions of like liberal multiculturalism and norms and everything we had a Constitution all this everybody could pretend that that was still true but you're right it was it first started to wear away after 9-11 and the Iraq War and

War on Terror and then after COVID we away after 9-11 and the Iraq war and war on terror. And then after COVID, we ripped the bandaid and the mask completely off. It was just that like, Oh, like all the liberal norms and social compact doesn't matter. None of it matters anymore. Think about that shit, the scale of that shit, just from 2001 to the pandemic here, the Iraq war, 2 million people dead. The millions of people that died in COVID and all that stuff and everything in between,

it's just been this, a fucking mass death after mass death after mass death event, just like, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And it's like- Hurricanes. Hurricanes, yeah. Like I said, it verified the underlying philosophical premise of neoliberalism,

which is that like there's no society. We don't have any obligations to one another. You are just castle doctrine. Your own tribe and family are all that matters. And when they demonstrated at a mass scale that yes, you could just kill everybody, that's when everybody, you're right, that's when you get the rise of the ring camera. You get all this stuff because it, yes, it verifies everybody, like, oh, you're right.

But you could even say that, you know, I know we're going to close out, but you could even say that it just reverberates today and like, you know, this erosion of liberal norms and the fact that like, you know, like just the negation of due process, you know, just kidnapping people and saying that you're going to send them to like, you know, an extermination camp in another country. And I just have to add that it's not just the conservatives that are obviously pushing this. I mean, I guess besides Chris Van Hollen, right, which is the only representative that I know, a politician Democrat who went to El Salvador to try

to actually speak, you know, to some to this person who was like, you know, just disappeared and sent to this country. But like you could see that even in the response to liberals, you know, whether it's Hakeem Jeffries or whether it's Chuck Schumer The the fact that they're like, well the republicans in power. It's like they've acquiesced to this future You know what I mean? They've completely acquiesced to it, you know I don't know if it's because that is part of their original project or because like they hate people And sort of organizing like a mass protest against this and using power wielding power when you actually have it

And the way that you can is anathematism. But yeah, it just kind of confirms that everything that we saw and just confirms or reverberates everything we saw from, you know, from the pandemic, you know, and before that even. Go ahead, Kate. I mean, also, like the you have to remember that, like, how is this normalized? The fucking internet has given us all the attention span of like a fucking, I don't know, earthworm. And the thing is, is that like everything,

the internet abstracts everything and it gives you no time to process anything that happens. And it makes people not only insane, but it like inures them to suffering. And it's a self-annihilating system. It is and it's like Every day if you feel something and care about humanity It is a fucking terrible time to be alive Like it is it is fucking

Schizophrenia inducing to see like your friends on vacation at the beach followed by like pictures of like babies getting blown up and fucking palestine Yeah, yeah, you know Babies getting blown up and fucking palace. Yeah, yeah Sane making I think and so everything just becomes like cheapens I think like it's interesting that Peter till sees the internet as a vehicle for apocalypse Right like it's it's like that vision of some sci-fi movie right we're like this you know some Millionaire billionaire like tycoon is going to finally, you know Reach outer space and actually meet God and like in this in the same instance Annihilates himself and his entirely tired people like it's kind of interesting that like it's interesting that Peter till sees the internet as the vehicle

For that apocalypse that singularity because that kind of tells me that like maybe we need to get off that ship. And I know we do this show over the internet and it would be almost impossible to reimagine our lives without like social media, but if there is, I'm thinking like, what is, what is a concrete demand you could ask of the left right now? Cause we've everything protests strikes But we've not tried one thing and that's you're right getting offline and maybe trying to reassert our own humanity Rediscover it read us, you know and try to like it's it's almost like Rediscovering our senses in our limbs in our bodies like actually like understanding what it's like to be in a social nexus with people It's just I don't know. it's something- That's why I rejoined DSA.

Brother, no one was meant to see that amount of information, that vast amount of data and information, and take that in and process it and parcel it out into meaningful sort of like tidbits, you know, that can actually like, I don't know, engender any sort of individual or social action. We weren't meant to see this shit, brother. We weren't meant to see all this shit, man. All it does to me is make me afraid. He's sort of individual social action. We weren't meant to see this shit brother All it does to me is make me afraid and when I'm afraid I can't do shit I can't do anything it's like

Is a is you know a nourishing source but like fear Oh when I'm afraid all I want to do is get under the covers and sleep and never wake up, you know right and it's like the the thing is is that like I you know, I rejoined DSA I'm gonna see what we do But like also the thing that is infuriating is the things that we are doing are not effective Like I went to this huge protest, right and we marched around the fucking block and it was fine But you know where that March stopped it stopped like a block before the ICE office the cops were there You know, everyone was marshaled and everything was legal But what that protest should have done is it should have gotten in front of the fucking ICE office and never left.

Right. Right. Right. It's like because people like nonviolent protests doesn't do anything. It's like, no, that's not true. Look at fucking Serbia and Hungary right now. Look at Serbia. There are 200 there are like 200,000 people marching to Belgrade to demand the end of

the Vucic government. And, you know, the Serbs have fucking bombarded these people. They've run. They have. You know, I saw an article in a Slovenian newspaper that I can read that shit that said that like they were using like, you know, Havana syndrome, sound cannons on protesters, you know, that they're used. They like were running cars into protesters. But the thing is, is that there are 200000 of them and there is no stopping a crowd of that size.

And the strength comes in the collective or nice. But also it's deployed strategically, you know. And the thing is, is that like the it's like 5150, 5050, 501 or whatever fucking protest, they're not deployed strategically. They're just like kind of kumbaya for liberals. Well, it's cathartic. It's what it is. Yeah, it is cathartic. It's fine. Yeah. But I did not feel of kumbayas for liberals. Let's get our cathartic is what it is. Yeah, it is cathartic. It's fine. Yeah, but I did not feel catharsis when I was there. I felt anxiety.

And all I thought was like, we need to be two blocks away in front of ice. We do not need to get a fucking permit for this. Do you think they had a permit for the fucking civil rights march? Right. Right. 100%. You know, it's like this. This is why I'm saying it's like we should be. Why are you know, I'm willing to do it myself, you know, it's like this. This is why I'm saying it's like We should be why are you know, I'm willing to do it myself, you know But like why aren't people in front of the ice offices in their town every single day peacefully protesting? So that like it becomes like a fucking

PR disaster if I you know does anything to these people but also it impedes like their daily activities You know does anything to these people but also it impedes like their daily activities Like why aren't we doing that like do we because everyone has fucking internet brain I think that showing up in a big crowd for pictures is politics Yeah, and it was your fun signs or whatever and it's like it's not it's not Meanwhile, I think like that and I'm sorry. I know we've been trying to close down for 20 minutes, but you know We could just keep going fuck Yeah. I was like. We could just keep going. Fuck it.

I was talking to my friend Chris who was in town this past weekend. He was driving this big box truck with all kinds of camera equipment. He was shooting the Tyler Childers concert that happened here this weekend. And on his way to Greensboro actually for his company's headquarters. He gets stopped somewhere between Asheville and Greensboro and or didn't get didn't get stopped pulled over at a gas station and just two random guys no cops no nothing just two random guys one wearing like a high-vis t-shirt and the other guy I don't know asked him to see inside of his truck and he was just like

You know, I don't know. What's that? What's And he just opened it up for what I was like, bro. You should fucking you know Because brother open that shit But just everyday citizens have deputized themselves to look in shit like that to try to see if they can find the immigrants or something Like that not maybe under the banner of like trying to stop human trafficking or something like that which is like yeah I think that's like you know obviously a bad thing but like it's not that it's like they're trying to see who's like like you know like aiding and abetting like illegal staying in the country that kind of stuff I'd like everybody ice brown shirt yes yes exactly They are that's what they are. Exactly, which is

Yeah, I don't know that's it's all That's it's all crazy. But when he told me that I was like that is actually inside But you see what there's like you've seen, you know ice to has been taking us citizens and holding them You know and it's only when they like for days and so like people like get their documents to show that they're US citizens. It's just like at this point, it's just like an indiscriminate terror campaign. And it's like, yeah, people permit it because it's against brown people. But like you better believe first they come for the socialists. You know, it's like you got to be so fucking stupid to think that anyone is

safe in a system like this. And it drives me. This is the thing that I panic attacks, not that I think I'm going to get sent to ice for like posting the commands or whatever. But like, you know, I like, you know, I have panic attacks about about this because it's like if we don't stop it here, there is no stopping it. Right. You know, I hate to have to sign the Chris Van Hollen apology form. Like I was I was in Baltimore Baltimore DSA for four years. And Chris Van

Holland was like a run of the mill lib who like did who like fucking starved the city of Baltimore resources. Like people the Maryland you know, House and Senate always do because they're racist. But anyways, like so I spent lots of my time in Annapolis being like fuck Chris Van Holland. But the thing is, is that like I spent lots of my time in Annapolis being like, fuck Chris Van Hollen. But the thing is, is that like, I have to fucking eat my hat because Chris Van Hollen is the only person doing some Leo Ryan shit in this era. You know? It's like, yeah.

And you think this is to be an example, but like the gears are slow to move. But like, I can't, I don't know whether I should be blackpilled and just kill myself or like, please don't know whether I should be black-pilled and just kill myself like But like, you know, I but one of the things is is that like I have to Be with other people. That's why this fucking podcast has been going for almost two hours It's because like I'm happy to talk to all of you because I've been living in a hole Crazy that when we get that little bit of like, like, like it feels novel to us and like quaint like, oh, being around people like that, that felt good once upon

a time. You know what I mean? It's like. No, you're right. Like even like a protest or something like that, right? It's like. But you're also meant to feel, I mean, not that I always feel this way, but it's also meant to make you feel weird or alienated for wanting to be with

This is what literally like literally the reason I go to a a meetings I go to a a meetings just to hang around other people engage in a common struggle now that struggle is obviously not the struggle for socialism, but at the same time We're speaking a common language right and like that to me feels like novel it's like holy shit community right it's like right I found myself talking to Jehovah's Witnesses the other day used to I just you know you'd wave them off you know I and honestly I'm curious to know how the proliferation of the ring cam has affected their numbers I should ask them next time they come. Oh, yeah them and Mormon are they going to write the Zora Astrians because

Go the way of black canvassers probably Churches that is offline now nobody at church likes me except for you know, Father Ed But shout out the father in thank you Father Ed the happiest man alive because the spirit is in him I feel like sometimes I just go to church to see a happy guy Smiling big jokes big light jokes somebody believing in the light of Christ, you know the fruit of Islam I of Christ you know or the fruit of Islam you know I I think that's another thing though it's like we we read an article not too long ago like church membership is like plummeting because most people get their church through like Instagram reels now and online streams that's what extremely bleak

right it's like literally says Literally says forsake not the assembling of yourselves together. That's that's well This is why this is kind of this is kind of why I like wonder sometimes And I know this sounds extremely cringe and I said this to Tom the other day and he didn't respond and I was like Well, I hope he I hope this is not extremely cringe And he didn't respond and I was like well. I hope he I hope this is not extremely cringe But I almost kind of wonder if someone needs to write a manifesto Manifesto just for just on the cause of humanity for humanism like That I was driving. I didn't mean to leave you in rain

Look it was pretty cringe, but just genuinely like someone needs to write like a humanist manifesto. Like, you will die one day. You are human. You have physical limitations. Your physical limitations are often dictated by those around you, and you can help others around you. You live in a society. The best that we can do is, like, I put my smartphone sub stack. Like, sit down phone and flu...

I wrote a piece about, like, how online breaks your brain, you're right. How do you phone info? I wrote a piece about about like how online breaks your brain, you know? And I was like, you know, we got to like see people in life and stuff like that. And then it's like that was it. That's an extremely lucrative genre. That's like my most that that piece earned me more money than like any piece I've ever written. I'll be like on top stack because like people want to hear this. I want to be told to go outside, but then they don't go outside. I know I'm class

I'm a fucking perfect example of that Also, I just want to say if Satan is lurking anywhere it is an Instagram reels. Oh, yeah Satan's in your phone for sure. I Don't specifically Instagram reels part of the problem Kate It's like I don't think people know what to do once they get outside myself included When I lived in a rural area, it was pretty obvious I would just go on a hike like it's or go down to the river But if you live in a city like what are you supposed to do it?

And I've struggled with the brother even if you live if you live in a suburb is doubly worse, right? It's completely manufactured to alienate you in the first place. That's why my suburb dog I just sit in my backyard and watch the vultures, the vultures, Keteling. I saw two geese and the three Goslings cross the street. And I nearly cried this morning all the way to Walmart. I was just like, okay, this is, this, just the fact that like nature and I don't know what to say, some semblance of community.

Cause my neighbors are cool, but it also, they shuttle back and forth in their cars. They are high, but they shuttle back. I mean, not, they're not high cause my neighbors are cool, but it also they shuttle back and forth in their cars They hide but they shuttle back. I mean not they not I because my neighbors did profile the actually on the rig camera I called my mom in real time, but I was outside my old goddamn house But like just trying to find these like little um these little kind of like um these these I don't know these bright spots of humanity well incredibly hard if you live in a super dense city Sometimes or if you live in a suburb even worse, you know, I kind of think this is that maybe this is what you're saying earlier Okay, I kind of wonder if like if people are gonna stay in DSA and go that route which I'm agnostic about I don't have any Strong feelings about one way the other but whatever emerges has to articulate some sort of message to the spiritual void and and you

You can do that in a way that doesn't say go back to church for specific sect or whatever I think the way you do it is say like like look Technology has made us inhuman it is abstracted us from ourselves and and from our communities Well, it's not the only thing neoliberalism has And and from our communities well, it's not the only thing neoliberalism as it has abstracted us from our communities But social media and the internet have made it hard to bridge that and I think that like do you have to kind of? It's delicate right like I'm sure a lot of people would have a lot of different takes on this But like let's say if someone made me president tomorrow Like my the way I would I guess I would thread this needle would be like we're gonna ban AI

We're gonna ban social media, but but Harry and Jahad. Yeah, I would I am willing to kill patreon Same here Kate, although I will say I'm a cause II will say I I do think that There could I would let people research AI I do think that there could, I would let people research AI, but it would be under strict, strict oversight. And obviously you can't make it a consumer item, like absolutely fucking not.

Like, and you can't make it like, again, I would be banning the internet though, if I was president, so, you know. Brother, did you see? How to blow up a did you see I sent I sent this to on the group chat man but did you see that there's this company called what is it called clueless I think it is man this new AI company that that promotes I mean it's it's it's very interesting for me for an AI company to

outright promote quote cheating was what they say which is just circumventing whether it's through you know the creation of quote art AI art or whether it's like um faking right like human interaction or interpersonal social skills this new AI company is the the AI app or company for cheating for everything right so you guess you can cheat on resumes I guess you can the way they describe it in the commercial I guess is my guy wearing a guy wearing a pair of smart lenses or glasses that allow him that give him recommendations right on his first date right things that he that he should say that she might like yo anything at all that's what makes you a

person are you serious like a person dude you should look at the fucking ad the commercial it is so dystopian first of all especially because it's based on technology that doesn't even exist like it's expressed as like a hologram kind of thing that he can see but apparently it's supposed to be used by these smart glasses that don't even exist but the whole entire point is that they're no longer saying that well AI will help facilitate A human creation of art and all these things it's straight up saying no you can steal shit and come off as legitimate Yeah, dog. That's what they're fucking selling

They're not even trying to be benign about it anymore man It's fucking it's no but the thing is it's like this is ontological and epistemological collapse like all but the good news Is is that this will kill the internet? But the thing is, it's like this is ontological and epistemological collapse, like all at once. But the good news is, is that this will kill the internet. 100%. If we're thinking about the internet as like a place of like logistical importance, like think of the internet as like, you know, trucking, right? For like other things, like applying for a job.

It's like it is an infrastructure that has, that is becoming just undermined to the point where it's going it's like America's bridges Yeah, it is becoming it is becoming on it will become unusable in my lifetime It's collapsing under its own weight man by market forces for sure But this is but this is also a driving factor in the suburbanization of the internet You know places like patreon, places like Substack, places like Discord, these are the gated communities of the internet. And look, I'm completely complicit in this.

This is how I make 100% of my living. Not 100%, but like 90%. But the thing is, is that these closed systems, these subscription models that we benefit from, this is what Elon Musk is also doing for the defense contractors, is that he's leasing contracts. He's gonna lease contracts to the Pentagon so they won't even own their fucking defense infrastructure. I'm just saying it's all connected,

but also the internet will become unusable. He literally- Except for in those suburban enclaves He I remember he shut off the starlink thing when he didn't get what he wanted They didn't pay subscriptions something like that He shut off the start the starlink system and like Ukrainian forces were just like stranded past it in enemy lines like oh fuck In the Ukrainian war. Like bro we don't got wifi no more yo. We step like a ball outside of like our zone and we don't have wifi anymore man.

Well that's just- It's like you know but the thing is is that the destruction of the internet is going to require a re-skilling that like on levels previously unforeseen. Like the best comparison is like literacy in the 20th century. It's like if you don't have like if Google Maps becomes unusable because I and I'm sure they'll find a way, you know, if like of banking, if any of these things become like, you know, applying for a job, you're going to have to go into the fucking restaurant

and give people your resume. This is like an effort within the next couple of years because like there's no guarantee that what you're talking to or who is like buying or whatever is like a human And as the technology gets more and more sophisticated the more distrustful people are going to be of the internet This is kind of to me. This is to me a kind of good thing. No offense Like I'm not this is the one thing I'm a total accelerationist about It's that like if we destroy the internet in this way Then we are going to be forced to do things in an analog way, right?

Just because like it's the only way to avoid getting fucking scammed. Yeah, it's gonna create some It's gonna be like a gene wolf book though. We're like So many people like people are surrounded by this technology But no one knows how the fuck to make it work or what it does, so they think it's magic. They're like, what the fuck? You know what I mean? Everything's so sophisticated and complex,

but over hundreds of years, our knowledge of it has eroded and degraded so badly that it creates this surreal sort of situation. It's like finding an Egyptian artifact or some Egyptian artifact or something like what is this? You know that's what they find out. That's how to use the white ass of some shit. You know what I'm saying? No, it's like finding finding. It's like it's like how to open PDF I'm gonna be employed forever because I know how to open PDF. No, what's also weird about this is like there are attempts to Open PDF know what's also weird about this is like there are attempts to extend this

Dehumanizing thing into the natural world like with them trying to make like wooly mammoth mouse mice and shit like that like the whole Or the so-called dire wolves, which are not even fucking dire wolves Just bio hacking in general like what they do this with humans, right? like we've talked about that like with their whole like epigenetic signaling like the whole Joe Rogan thing like What but people say when they need a Joe Rogan of the left what they mean is they're trying to articulate that like you need to present a way of Greeting technology and humanity that is normal and not completely Schizophrenic and genocidal

and strange and all over the place. Or like trying to be like a god, like god making essentially. Right, right, right. Socialists used to do this, by the way. Engels wrote, what was it, like the anti-During? Like that whole thing was about how to have a socialist approach or a Marxist approach to science. Now, you can critique it and there was plenty of wrong plenty of things in it

That was wrong, but socialists used to do that. We don't do that anymore. Now. We're like we just want health care We want things to be like they once were it's like Cut it. It's not gonna cut it the one thing I will say about the ESA as as an organization is that the DSA is not the Democratic Party now They put they you know They were in bed with the Democratic Party for like as a kind of like entryist organization and you know The 2010s and that that is a failed political project

It just it just is like dude the guy who's going to El Salvador is not even a OC dog It is a failed political project. That's actually such a good Actually a really good But the thing is about DSA is is that for all of its flaws, it is still a democratic organization that is paid for by dues and run by the members with some staff that help. But it's not a centralized organization where the staff basically dictate party policy or something like that.

DSA is what you make of it. If you don't like the way DSA is, you can join one of 10 million caucuses and organize for your politics. And then you can, it's like that is an actual organization that you can do something with. Like that you can like apply your political acumen to like productive effect. Now, is that a project that is like not going to be easy? And here's the thing. Nothing is easy. You know, like the internet has made us believe that like, if we just post a lot, like people will stop doing genocide. It's like, clearly that is not the case. But the thing is that the internet does reveal, um, I,

I'm not even going to go here. I just think that like, it's not going to be easy and like people go into DSA and they think it's just like, they're going to be told what to do. And maybe that's true. But like you have to want to change some. You can't just be like, I'm going to write it off because like, you know, you you can do something in that organization. That's what separates it from like the Democratic Party is that they are democratically held responsible, which is why, in my opinion, this should be a fucking third party that holds the people they elect Directly democratically responsible not just being like please IOC we help right you right? But like if you fuck up we are fucking destroying you right right or not even just you have to be accountable to us exactly exactly Anyways now is the time to strike at the heart of the necrotic Democratic Party

We should kill we should kill them by doing a real third party, but this is another discussion. Oh my god, we're going Yeah, I have yapping cancer Got on the horn with three other people that do as well We I agree I don't I don't I don't have any Harsh feelings towards DSA and I my my my approach would probably be like show up like tell me what to do because like I would have always struggled with kind of like that because I've always struck what I've always struggled with is like I have a Contrarian nature unfortunately, and that's not good for organizing spaces I think people

would look at that and be like that guy's a wrecker or a fed or something and it's just like I just like I have a question so well I just have an ODD thing that is like I don't like I find it hard to articulate and express what I want and what I think without it's coming across as like I'm trying to lead a crusade or an exodus out of here or something like that It's kind of like the same problem So I like that. Yeah, go ahead turns I was just gonna say like I think it's I think you are correct your your point is correct though that if people really want to

Change something or see their vision kind of come to fruition. That's the vehicle that they have Socialist organization or see their vision kind of come to fruition. That's the vehicle that they have. But the most amount of access to. Socialist organization. It's just like none of them, none of the little Marxist cadre organizations. And I know, like, because like, you know, I know people who have been in those organizations for years and they leave because they're frustrated

because there is no way to democratically change them from the inside and shift priorities and stuff like that. It's just like. I kind of think that all those organizations, like they should just like join, join DSA and be caucuses. But that's my utopian vision, you know, for like a Marxist unity. But anyways. Yeah, well, PSL, you know, PSL assault, all of these like just join DSA I think that's a good question. I think that's a good question. I think that's a good question. I think that's a good question. I think that's a good question.

I think that's a good question. I think that's a good question. I think that's a good question. I think that's a good question. I think that's a good question. I think that's a good question. I think that's a good question. I think that's a good question.

I think that's a good question. I think that's a good question. I think that's a good question. I think that's a good question. I think that's a good question. I think that's a good question. I think that's a good question. I think that's a good question.

I think that's a good question. I think that's a good question. I think that's a good question. I think that's a good question. I think that's a good question. I think that's a good question. I think that's a good question. I think that's a good question. these smaller organizations and like they get burnt out and then. This is just like there's only so many newspapers you can sell. I mean, I'm just saying it's like, I have nothing against any. Like I am friends with people in the in these organizations and they do really good work. And it's like the like, for example, like I think salt showed the like

Kishama sawant like that was like what electoral, socialist electoral politics should have been, which is like, you have somebody, you elect them, and they're held accountable. Right. Because they run as, they don't run as Democrats. They run on like, as independents, or like on a socialist alternative ticket.

And then like, when that project was over, then they did different projects, like with, you know, KCGV and Amazon and all this other stuff and so it's like there are lessons to be learned from some of these organizations. It's just that like time is of the essence and I kind of just think we should all just throw our lot with you know with the biggest one. But again that's that's my pie in the sky like you know good thing I'm not on Twitter anymore because like I you know with the piranhas would come for me. But I also think that there is a decline in that kind of activist culture now. All I see

are op-eds about the end of woke or whatever. People don't want to do that kind of record type discourse warrior politics anymore. Calling people colon because like they voted for AOC. You know, like this is, this is like the problem was, you know, the problem was not with the language. It was how it was used. Right. But like, yeah, I think that like the seriousness of the situation has been a clarifying moment for people and you are not seeing like the total dominance of 2010 thought any more right?

I think what we need is like a tea party for the left The abundance gang that's what they've buttoned in skiing Well, um, we can we can wrap it up I like I think it's we I think we've had a long, we've had a far reaching discussion, a wide discussion of a vast array of topics and issues facing our time and era. Is this our new personal best? Or worst, depending on how you look at it. I did a Thomas Benschen podcast episode that was three and a half hours long so my not my personal record That's your personal Pension book Yeah, I had the tip on that for years advanced

but I didn't say anything out of respect for the man himself because I tried to get him on the show in 2021 and He actually got back to me through his publicist and said that yeah, he said I would love to but I'm working on a new book right now and I was like This motherfucker's a recluse bro. Yeah, you don't talk to nobody I want to be him so badly like I really don't want anyone to know what I look like. I think he just had some plain sight But also I should say before we go I don't know how when this episode is going to air. When is it going to air before? Wednesday? Oh yeah, it'll should be out tonight or tomorrow.

Hmm. Okay. Well, if you're in Kansas City on Wednesday, I'm going to be giving a talk at the Kansas City Public Library about why are there McMansions. And I think it's at 5 p.m. so if you are and it's I think it's free there might be tickets but I don't know but anyways like I'm doing it for a Kansas City Design Week so if you want to hear about why they're McMansions and you're in Kansas City you should check it out oh hell yeah it's it's fun I'll put that on the show notes so you can go check that out I'll put that in the show notes so you can go check that out. Any final thoughts on the abundance agenda, yimbyism, cope, denial, e-feminism?

Abundance of bullshit. Abundance of bullshit indeed. Indeed, 100%. Well, I think we can at least say, don't be a baby. Don't be baby brained. To me, sprawl, like the concept is like,'s just keep sprawling and like we'll just put people there It's like the most baby brain thing you can think of like a three-year-old would think that way Like there's a reason why there's a reason why William Gibson's the Neuromancer

Neuromancer what's a? Mona Lisa overdrive and I forget the third one It's a Mona Lisa overdrive and I forget the third one. But there's a reason why that's termed the sprawl trilogy and it's because he imagined a dystopian future in which there was just endless concrete, endless pavement that was surveilled and controlled by multinational corporations and real estate vultures. So it's not good.

It's not good. No, reject the sprawl. That's the thing. Reject that kind of sprawl indeed. Sprawl bad. Sprawl bad. Also, they're just not sending their best minds here. No.

They're not. It's like, I should have dumb, I should have smarter enemies is how I feel about this. We do deserve better enemies. We do. It's just like you really just mean that, like in the arena of in the marketplace of ideas relating to architecture and urban planning, I have to compete against a guy who is like sprawl good. Not a worthy opponent.

It's like I didn't go to grad school for this. Yeah, I need to joust like the intellectualism is off the charts man it's pretty bad but uh alright well thanks for listening to us everybody please go tell your friends about patreon after we just critiqued it healthily please go tell your friends about this channel anyways I may wind up unlocking this episode for the main feed regardless but Anyways, I hope you've all enjoyed the content

Yeah, go forth be well stay sane We'll see you on the main. Hey, thanks for being with us yet again. Yeah, thank you I guess you're better Wrong thank you for having me after I was insane for like two hours about like Frederick the second the emperor of the holy Oh, no, that was fucking awesome, dude That was a great. That was a great episode someone on YouTube like animated that One of the clips from that episode and like posted it.

Wait, really? Can you send that to me? Yeah, I'll send it to you. Really? I'll send it to you, yeah. People love it when you're on. They always ask us for more Kate Wagner. So.

Oh my God, I love you. Really? I love the Trillbillies, my fellow Southerners. Oh. All right, well thanks again everybody. We'll see you next time The The Thanks for watching!