It Could Happen Here Weekly 166
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Hey everybody, Robert Evans here, and I wanted to let you know this is a compilation episode. So every episode of the week that just happened is here in one convenient and with somewhat less ads package for you to listen to in a long stretch if you want. If you've been listening to the episodes every day this week, there's going to be nothing new here for you, but you can make your own decisions.

Neither snow, nor rain, nor heat, nor darkness can stop the Persian courier service. Welcome to Dick and Affin' here, a podcast about postal services where we ask the question, can the American capitalist class finally stop the American post office? I'm your host, Mia Wong, and with me to talk about what is going on with the post office, what's going on with the post office unions, and...

Yeah, how things are going downhill for the noble people who carry your mail is Tommy Espinoza, who's a union steward for the National Association of Letter Carriers. Tommy, welcome to the show. Thank you so much for having me. Thank you so much for giving us the mail carriers a platform to stand on. Yeah, I'm really happy to, and I'm really happy to get to talk to you about this.

So I think the place we should start is with a bunch of very, very weird stuff in how labor law works. So, OK, for most people in the United States, you have a federally protected right to strike if you have a union. That is not true for federal employees. It is especially not true for members of the post office.

And that is a real issue because the government has decided that like, yeah, no, all these people who do a vital service are not allowed to go on strike. And it absolutely sucks. Yeah. And so I think this this gets into sort of.

Where I want to start, which is with the sort of history of the National Association of Letters Carriers, a union that is not allowed to strike and how sort of weird that is. So, yeah, I was wondering if you could talk a bit about sort of the origins of the union and what effect that has had on how organizing works or doesn't work.

Yeah, the right to strike has been a rather divisive topic. I'm sure you're familiar with unions and just generally people on our side of our side of politics to be infighting a lot. I shouldn't come to a surprise. But yeah.

So in 1969, just over 50 years ago, the salary for postal workers was under $2 an hour. People were working months straight with no days off. And those were close to 12-hour days. And so these postal workers at the time qualified for welfare and decided in 1970 to

to go on strike despite it being illegal. This conversation is not new. It was illegal then, it's illegal now. And I do want to be crystal clear here. I am not advocating for a strike that would also be against the law. And we don't advocate for anything that's against the law. What I do want to advocate for is the right to strike because being quasi-federal

There's a lot of limitations in what the NALC and the general postal unions are able to do. In total, there are nine bargaining agreements and seven unions within the post office, some of which are the managers union. So take that as it is. Yeah.

Yeah. On top of not being able to strike, none of our money that we collect as union dues can be used for lobbying purposes. So they can't support a single candidate or any of the parties involved. We have a separate fund for that with the NALC called the Letter Carriers Political Fund to try and circumvent the restrictions that are put on there. And as a result of that, it's like we're fighting with our hands tied behind our back. We are...

unable to organize effectively. Our union leadership seems to be afraid of protests and picketing for fear that it'll be misconstrued or labeled as a strike. And they're, I think, generally afraid of public opinion. Yeah, that's a debilitating set of conditions because you've effectively taken away sort of the two major tools that

So unions of basically across all political stripes use, right? You've taken away the ability to strike. You've taken away the ability to use your dues money to influence elections. So this immediately means you've taken away the tool that sort of militant unions use, which is strikes, and you've taken away the tools that more conservative unions use, which is attempting to buy politicians.

And then also your leadership is like, we can't strike us. I mean, we can't protest because someone might think it's a strike or the public might come at us. And it's like that that doesn't seem I don't know. It really seems like it's like it's not only if you tied both hands behind your back, you've like tied them behind your back to your legs. You're now rolling around on the ground and.

Right. And so talk about what happens when we push past all of these barriers and just do it anyways. You know, in March 1970, 210,000 postal workers defied law, defied the general leadership of the time. And it all started in New York where people clocked in and at nine o'clock they just walked out. Soon, let's see, it was...

Cleveland, Chicago, Los Angeles, the nation joined very shortly after once it broke the news that they were calling for a national strike. Nixon called in the National Guard to try and deliver mail. The National Guard had no idea what they were doing. There's an amazing video that I'll try and send you afterwards. It's just the National Guard at our cases where we sort the mail and the

an interviewer is asking him, do you think that you're doing a good job? It's just like, no, it's just some kid, you know? And don't get me wrong, I'm just some guy, but you need the training, you need to know what you're doing. And it's not something that anyone can pick up in a day, but it's a job that anyone can do. But yeah, for the first time,

the mail had stopped. And that won us collective bargaining, binding arbitration, which is a process that I think most people within unions know what they mean. But to explain it, arbitration is what happens when our parties cannot agree on a settlement for a grievance. And eventually we call in a third party, an arbitrator,

to decide for us. And those are generally lawyers. On top of binding arbitration, it gave us a new pay scale and set in motion, I think over, it's got to be hundreds of raises between the colas and the new pay table. It used to be 21 years for you to reach the top pay scale, which is absolutely ridiculous. And now I think it's about eight. Yeah.

So the post office was forced to reorganize and so was the union. This is where the American Postal Workers Union was born. And from this strike, we were able to settle on the national agreement. So there's the national agreement, which is our binding contract.

There's the JCAM, which is the Joint Contract Administration Manual, which is what the post office and the union use as the interpretation of the contract. That way we are not arguing and spending time about what the contract could mean. We can just focus on whether or not someone broke our agreement. So after this, one would imagine that

That a quasi-federal institution would honor the contract that was created, bargain in good faith, and treat their employees fairly. Isn't that right? Yeah, I know. Spoken like someone who has never watched a federal government in action. Yeah, absolutely not. Before we get into issues that we face today, I do want to say that one of the main goals of...

our contract negotiations or of this episode really is to create public knowledge of how our contract is not being adhered to. If there was one main goal that I'd have in mind is just to have the post office honor what they signed and agreed to do. Yeah. I mean, it's something that, that,

it's a part of being in a union that doesn't get talked about very much, which is that the contract doesn't mean anything unless the union enforces it. Because the moment the contract happens, the bosses will attempt to not abide by it. And this is what a lot of union militancy back in the sort of heyday of militancy was. I mean, like, you know, if you look at like

How the UAW worked in the 60s, right? They'd have a guy with a whistle standing on the line. And if someone did a contract violation, he would blow the whistle and everyone would just sit down. And you'd immediately have a strike, right? And that level of militancy, you don't need to be at that level to enforce a contract, but you have to actually be willing to do stuff and to fight management over it. And if you're not willing to do that, your contract is effectively meaningless, right?

And that's a real issue with a lot of unions. Which just kind of circles back to one of the big issues that we face is that if we were to do that, that would be a willingful delay of mail and we could be charged for it just for trying to enforce the contract. Yep.

Yeah. Which I, the thing I think is really interesting just to circle back to the 1970s strike is that, so the strike was illegal, right? Nixon brings in the army and the national guard to break it and the strike still wins. And not only does it, if it, you know, I mean, you could argue whether it achieved total victory, but not a single person who walked off the line got arrested, even though all of them technically committed a crime. And that's something that like, you know, I think, um,

Okay, the enforcement of laws depends on sort of the depends on a set of relative balance of forces and whether people care about enforcing the law, which is how, like, for example, if you pirate like seven movies and you get you get three copyright strikes, you go to prison, basically.

But, you know, like the Sam Altman or whatever, like AI company can literally steal everything on the entire Internet and get money for it. And no one will ever prosecute him. Right. And so so, you know, whether or not something is illegal is to a large extent or the difference between something being illegal and you going to prison for it.

largely has to do with the balance of forces involved. And that's something that you should keep in mind when, and this is, this is the thing that, that cuts the other way a lot too, right? Like a lot, like employers just do illegal actions literally all the time. And it doesn't matter because the state doesn't care.

Yeah, by and large, labor laws in America are set up in favor of the businesses, of the employers. If you're familiar with workers' comp or any of the systems involved in the Federal Employees Compensation Act, it's not enforced. We have cases that are pending arbitration where the

Someone's been run over by a worker, has been run over by a postal vehicle. While they were working, the post office effectively takes them off of payroll to increase the damage done to the individual. Eventually, the Department of Labor says, yes, we will pay this individual and the post office is liable to pay them.

But now they are off the rolls, which means there's a greater period of time before this individual gets their money. And there's a certain form that within the post office, the managers need to fill out. I believe it's an 8130 or, you know, all these forms have some numbers associated with them that they just refuse to fill out. And there's no recourse. There's no path for us to take to fill.

make them hurry or make them get this individual the money that they're owed. And some people, this doesn't ruin their lives and they've already paid off their house or whatever. But I imagine for many, many working Americans, that's their livelihood immediately down the drain. Unfortunately, we need to go to ads for a little bit because unfortunately,

My boss's boss's boss's livelihood depends on these ads. Mine technically does too, but like, Lord knows I don't see that money. So ads. We are back. And yeah, I guess that leads into the next place you want to go to, which is talking about what are the specific grievances today that y'all are dealing with and the union is not dealing with? Right. So, yeah.

In terms of grievances within the union and our negotiation, a lot of it does have to do with the aforementioned workers' compensation. Employees are simply not getting paid. I think the biggest problem is

with the union and the grievance procedure today is that management has figured out this really effective strategy. If they don't settle on the lower levels and it gets pushed up to arbitration, then we have a massive backlog of cases pending arbitration, which could be scheduled years out. Yeah. I think if you do the math for...

Our current rate of handling these cases and how many cases we have, it'll take around 15 years to get through them all. Jesus Christ. And that's assuming there's no new ones. Yeah, yeah. That's like when you go to a restaurant and there's that little stanchion out there that says it's a five-hour wait from this point. That's the point that we're at. Anything beyond today will be further along. Jesus Christ. And so I think that...

is just a major problem for us, clearly. Yeah. Management just not complying with any of this, and it makes it so that our employees have to wait. Something I do want to talk about that's outside of the grievance procedure, if we can, is just what's going on with the post office and the postmaster general. Yeah. Right, so...

I want to go at this from the customer perspective first, because I think that's the best way to relate to people. I think by and large, people are losing faith in the post office. Either you have no idea what's going on or you don't care. And that's fine. I'd say before I joined, I didn't think of them at all. And, you know, they're just the guy that shows up at my house every morning. A lot of people seem to think that the post office is going out of business.

And our customers are facing increasingly long lines, misdelivered or lost mail, and an increase in postage for a service that is getting worse. People are paying more for worse service. And it's easy to point out those issues from the outside and be rightfully upset at them. I do feel like we're doing a disservice to our customers. And I'm really not trying to attack them when I say that they're uninformed or clueless to

the inner workings of the post office. I do directly want to attack Congress and say that when they had pushed forward a bill called the Postal Accountability and Enhancement Act in 2006, which required the post office to pre-fund 100% of its retiree health benefits and liabilities 75 years into the future. What? So overnight,

the post office was handed a $5.5 billion burden. That's where the whole, I don't know if you remember, I certainly wasn't conscious of it at the time,

The Save Our Post Office stickers that were being sold and trying to fund the post office. And really, that's where the rhetoric of the post office is going under comes from. The other thing I want to point out is that we are quasi-federal. We actually accept nothing from taxpayer monies. It says it's a service, but really the post office is ran as a business. We don't even get subsidized because they don't need to.

My local union president loves to remind us that the post office is a business that has a revenue of $78.2 billion. And he'll want me to stress that the 0.2 is extremely important because 0.2 of a billion is 20 million. They are not in jeopardy. We are not going out of business. And the postmaster general, Louis DeJoy,

He's the second highest paid public servant in America, just underneath the president of the United States. He's played warden Clarence Thomas. Wow. Yeah, I think it was like $380,000 a year or something like that. DeJoy was appointed by Donald Trump. I'm assuming this is kind of a baseless assumption, so forgive me on not doing my research here, but I'm assuming that they're buddies because DeJoy has no idea.

Yeah, wasn't she the guy that Trump brought in specifically to destroy the post office as part of the campaign to steal the election? Yeah, so there's been a lot about DeJoy defrauding the election process. I wasn't part of the post office to see the inner workings of it, so it's kind of hard for me to say if it was hearsay or not. But I believe it because DeJoy has no idea how to run a post office. He's never...

been involved with this kind of business. He is in the same way that Trump is a businessman, a horrible businessman. And his Delivering for America plan could really be redefined as consolidation efforts for a business. So what they're doing is they're consolidating infrastructure and the workforce, which means closing post offices in order to save money and shoving three installations into one building. That's why...

That's why the lines are getting longer. It also means that from dispatch, the employees have to drive an extra mile or two into their working zone, which of course means that we're going to go into overtime. And this just throws a wrench in the mail handling process. He has single-handedly made the service a lot more reliable. And I do think that you're right. Unreliable. Yeah, sorry, more unreliable. Yeah.

And I do think that you're right. He wants to destroy the post office, not only for the election, but to the point where it makes more sense to go private. Now is the time to point out that DeJoy is a major shareholder in FedEx. Oh, Jesus Christ. Which is a subcontractor for the USPS. And he has millions of dollars in equity involved. He's got skin in the game. I love open corruption.

So great. And so on the local level, on what's going on in my office, I actually have one of the better offices that I've seen or heard about. I have been sent to other offices and I have experienced firsthand the bullying and harassment from management pushing us to go faster. But even at one of the better offices,

I work 60-hour weeks. I don't have set days off. It's not even a rotation. When I get home, I'm spent, and my commute isn't that bad. I think I'm about 15 minutes each way. I really can't imagine driving two hours after an 11-hour shift just to eat and come back and do it again. I mean, that's just unsafe. Like, that's...

Yeah, it would be illegal, but since it's in the contract, it's not illegal. Oh my God. So the sacrifice that you make when you're joining the post office, well, I guess I should explain. When you join as a letter carrier, the first 90 days they can fire you for any reason. And you're something called either a CCA or a PTF. And that means part-time flexible or city carrier assistant officer.

You are only guaranteed four hours for showing up for work. You're not guaranteed to be scheduled. So if they don't like you, they just will schedule you once a week for an unknown amount of time until you quit. And if you're in a busy place, then that just means that they're going to work you to death. So when you join the workforce immediately, you lose time with your family. You lose time with your loved ones and your friends.

And I myself am so fortunate that all my loved ones have been beyond understanding. But every time I talk about it, I get asked the same thing. Why don't you quit? Yeah. And the truth is, this job is awesome. I love it. I want to work it. I just want it to make sense and be livable. And I'm not going to give up just because...

We haven't reached the point where it is, you know, if you walk away now, it doesn't get better. I'm sure someone would take my place, but it helps to have people stick around. That's actually a pretty common. I mean, this is one of Amazon's strategies, right? Through their warehouses, they intentionally want to cycle through people because the more new people you have continuously cycling through, the less organized and the less sort of like

less knowledge they have unless you have to pay them etc etc etc and so if you can just cause high turnover rates on purpose that's that's a thing that a lot of these sort of business ghoul like nightmare factory people like love in their workforces and makes everyone else's life just a living hell but you know they're getting they're still getting paid

Right. And so I try and hold that in mind when I've been overworked and I'm at the end of one of my major shifts because I had to carry part of another route because someone else called out. I really have to stop and think to myself that this other person who called out is just as exhausted as I am. Yeah. Is...

Probably going to get a letter of warning for calling out. That's another issue. They don't want you to use your leave. Jesus Christ. I'm going to file an unfair labor practice because they've been doing that a lot at my office as well. It reminds me a lot, our issues of your recent episode. I think it was you about the nurses union, the shift change episode. Yeah.

their members are dealing with a lot of the same things where the unions are so big that

that they become detached from the membership and we are finding out afterwards what our bargaining agreements are, what our strategy was. Everything's after the contract has been signed. And that's just not how unions were meant to be. They're meant to be from the bottom up by the workers for the workers. But it really does feel like it's like national as its own entity.

And so I guess that would bring us to talking about the union and the future of the union. Yeah, let's get into that. So I got to be careful here because Brian Renfro, he's our national leader of the union. He's been struggling with problems in his personal life. And I don't feel like I'm ousting him as it's public knowledge, at least within the post office, it's public knowledge. He's dealing with substance abuse, with alcoholism and alcoholism.

That's something that hits very close to home within my family. And I really don't want to demonize that he's struggling. But what I do want to say is when you're going through something like that and you've accepted a position on the national level like this, you really need to either step down or appoint someone to handle things in your place. As negotiations started over a year ago, he kind of went missing.

And it was later revealed that he was an inpatient, which is fine. Get your help. But there was nothing left, no notes left for us to strategize with. And our membership is just in the dark. And beyond that, the leadership has gone missing. It's very dark times for the NALC. Well, and that's also just sort of like an organizational issue.

Right. Like if, if you're, if your organization is set up in such a way that a small number of people being incapacitated means total paralysis and no one has any idea what's going on, that's just a bad way to run something. Yeah.

And especially it's a terrible way to run a union because the union's power is supposed to be from its organization and from the collective power of a large organization of people who can make decisions for themselves. And if that's not happening and you get to the point where these decisions are being made by a very small number of people who can just sort of vanish, like that's – for whatever – literally whatever reason that is, right? It could just be you get sick. It could just be like whatever happens happens.

That's just a terrible way to organize things. And I guess it's also like, I want to make take like a little tiny tangent to be like, if you're doing any organizing project, your goal is to organize yourself out of a job. Like you're like, ideally, if you were in an organization, it should be able to function without you. There should not be having an indispensable person is a fiasco. Don't do that. This is true of both like your tiny local mutual aid group, as much as is true of your giant national union organization.

This has been Mia talking about the indispensable person don't have. Well, yeah, that's kind of the funny thing about joining a union from an anarchist perspective. It gets a little funky how hierarchical they typically are and the problems that we know we are going to face when you have a system that's built like a pyramid. Yeah. Oh, yeah. And so I was saying we're in dark times, but there's

Such a bright future that I can see for us. Branch 9 of the NALC, and namely this individual, Tyler Vassar, who when I had originally posted on Reddit asking for attention, he's the one that I thought would be great for this interview. His branch, Branch 9, has passed a resolution to form an open bargaining strategy for contract negotiations.

And I hope this sweeps the nation. We're not allowed to strike, as I've mentioned, and our leadership is so shy when it comes to activism or mobilization of the workforce. They don't want to touch the topic. The closest thing we have to it is a rally that is Enough is Enough that's being held in Baltimore soon about the violence that's being done to...

postal workers were being robbed and we're being harassed. But even then, we're missing a large chunk of the danger that is posed to postal workers. Because yes, we're being robbed on the streets, but we're also being bullied and harassed inside of our workplaces by management, by the people who are supposed to empower us to do the job effectively. And so we're

They don't want to touch the topic of a strike, I think, for fear of retaliation. But to me, pushing for the right to strike is a... I'm not sure how to word this. It is such an important part of the NILC's identity, the postal strike of 1970, that it seems silly to ignore it today and pretend like it didn't happen. So for the future...

I think that activism is our key to success. I think that the old heads that lead our union come from a time where unions were frowned upon, where activism was frowned upon. But I think that public opinion will be largely in our favor and that public opinion can really put pressure on the legislative branch, on Congress, and

If we are transparent about our union, what we're asking for, the issues that we're facing, I think that the public would be on our side. If the people in America knew that management was falsifying time records or training records and interfering with workers' comps claim and back pay...

or that they're not paying the settlements that they've agreed to pay, that they're not scheduling arbitration sessions, big or small, that they would care and that they would join us in the streets. One major thing that happened, I think it was last year in the summer,

We had a letter carrier. His name is Eugene Gates, who died in the Texas heat. Jesus, yeah. Because management told him not to take as many breaks or he would face discipline. Jesus. These pressures that we face when you're threatened that you will lose your job if you don't listen to us, you will push yourself to the point of exhaustion and further. I think that the post office...

Mr. Gates. And there wasn't as much outcry or anger behind the movement. I often find myself thinking that while I don't have the answers, I do know that we need to care more. And it's hard to care when you're exhausted. I acknowledge that.

Yeah, well, I think there's two things about that. One, I mean, I don't, and this is something I've gotten to with a lot of the sort of interviews that I've done on this show, is that I think a lot of very, very basic jobs have labor conditions that are unimaginably appalling, that people just don't know about.

And I think people are very sympathetic to once they actually understand what's happening in the kind of just horror show stuff that's happening in these workplaces. And the second thing I think that's sort of important in terms of getting people to, you know, like try trying to actually do like mass mobilizations, even just to get people to understand what's going on is that I think a lot of people who are facing these kinds of conditions think that they're alone.

And think that it's just something that happens to them or they've been in them for so long, they think that it's sort of normal. And having a bunch of people go, no, like, A, this happens and B, it shouldn't happen is extraordinarily powerful because, you know, like that, that feeling of isolation is, is the thing that all of that, you know, your, that your bosses depend on.

to make sure that you just keep going along with these conditions, even though they are just objectively horrific. And I think any strategy that's not based on that is just not going to go anywhere.

Right. And one of the strategies that I really want to push forward as I grow within the union, and don't get me wrong, I want to stay a steward. I think that educating our members and being part of the workforce is my place in the union. But what I want to push is for union solidarity. I want the NALC to hire organizers, specifically organizers to work

try and get the public mobilized and as well as the workforce so that we can put pressure on Congress so that we can show our bargaining teams that we support them and so that we can have clearly defined bargaining terms and

Yeah, I think that having solidarity between unions and reaching out to the other movements in a time where union support is higher than ever is such a clear path that we are just ignoring for whatever reason, because people are afraid to speak out against the post office.

And so I'm really not sure what's going to happen with our current contract. But I do know that the fight never ends and that while we stand on the shoulders of giants, we have to pay respect to these giants by not giving up now. And I'm a relatively new employee and steward.

But I'm really walking in the footsteps of some warriors. The branch president I mentioned, Ken Lurch, has given me so much support and education and has done so much hard work over the years that I don't have to reinvent the wheel. None of us do. We just have to continue the struggle. Yeah, and I think that's a great place to end, unless you have anything else that you want to make sure we get to?

Um, no, uh, nothing, nothing on this topic. Yeah. So how can, how can people support you and postal workers just in general, if there's a specific place you want them to go? Um, in general, there is on the NALC site, uh, which is just NALC.com. There is a section where you put in your address and it,

It'll give you the email addresses, the phone numbers for your representatives so that you can make some noise. Again, we're amazingly limited in what we can do, so there's not really anything that you can donate to to help us.

including the letter carrier political fund. But yeah, just pay attention to us. Maybe leave a bottle of water out in your front door. It says for the postal worker, you know, there's nothing better that you can do than talking about it. Word of mouth is the best advertisement. Well, yeah, we will, we will, we will put that in the show notes. I hope you all win. And I don't, I don't think I've ever said this genuinely in my life, but thank you for your service.

I appreciate that. Yeah, I never imagined myself to become a federal employee. And it is just as bad as I imagined. So I do want to shout out actually, it's a little meta, I guess, but I do want to shout out some

important episodes of It Could Happen Here that hit me very closely, if I can. Yeah, yeah, go for it. Because a lot of the people listening will be postal workers that have been pointed in this direction. Please,

look at the Myanmar episodes, the Burmese Revolution, and look at the work that Mia, I believe you've done the same work as James with border kindness. Those are two topics that I think you all hit really well and that really touched me as a person. Sometimes I'll re-listen to those episodes when I'm having a hard day just to remind myself that it's all the same.

It's all the same fight. Yeah, it absolutely is. And I mean, I think that's sort of the beauty. I mean, it's both the beauty and the horror of this world is that on the one hand, all of us are being crushed by the same sets of forces. But on the other hand, it means that whatever fight that you're taking is also a part of the larger fight for get all of us free. Yeah, exactly. So just fight the burnout and stay in the fight. Yeah.

Yeah, this has been Nick Adapa here. Go make trouble for people who suck. Lately on the NPR Politics Podcast, we're talking about a big question.

How much can one guy change? They want change. What will change look like for energy? Drill, baby, drill. Schools. Take the Department of Education, close it. Health care. Better and less expensive. Follow coverage of a changing country. Promises made, promises kept. We're going to keep our promises. On the NPR Politics Podcast. Listen on the iHeartRadio app or wherever you get your podcasts.

Snakes, zombies, sharks, heights, speaking in public. The list of fears is endless. But while you're clutching your blanket in the dark, wondering if that sound in the hall was actually a footstep, the real danger is in your hand when you're behind the wheel. And while you might think a great white shark is scary, what's really terrifying and even deadly is distracted driving. Eyes forward. Don't drive distracted. Brought to you by NHTSA and the Ad Council.

John Stewart is back at The Daily Show, and he's bringing his signature wit and insight straight to your ears with The Daily Show Ears Edition podcast. Dive into John's unique take on the biggest topics in politics, entertainment, sports, and more. Joined by the sharp voices of the show's correspondents and contributors. And with extended interviews and exclusive weekly headline roundups, this podcast gives you content you won't find anywhere else.

Ready to laugh and stay informed? Listen on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. We want to speak out, we want to raise awareness, and we want this to stop. Wow, very powerful.

I'm Ellie Flynn and I'm an investigative journalist. When a group of models from the UK wanted my help, I went on a journey deep into the heart of the adult entertainment industry. I really wanted to be a playboy model. Lingerie, topless. I said, yes, please. Because at the centre of this murky world is an alleged predator.

You know who he is because of his pattern of behavior. He's just spinning the web for you to get trapped in it. He's everywhere and has been everywhere. It's so much worse and so much more widespread than I had anticipated. Together, we're going to expose him and the rotten industry he works in. It's not just me. We're an army in comparison to him. Listen to The Bunny Trap on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

Robert Evans here, and this is It Could Happen Here, and boy, it sure is.

Now, I don't know where we go from this point, and neither does anyone else. On the moment before I wrote this, I woke up groggy from my chemically-assisted sleep to a barrage of horror. Donald Trump signing anti-trans legislation into law. Elon Musk giving a double-fascist salute. Donald Trump saluting and dancing with the village people. Proud Boys tramping through the streets of our nation's capital, reveling in their newfound impunity.

The dark days have come again because they never really left. All the battles and street fighting and organizing from 2017 to 2020 brought us four years of badly negotiated peace while the rot continued unabated.

Rot. It's a term I see a lot these days. My colleague and friend Ed Zitron refers to the hell our tech oligarchs continue to force upon us as the rot economy. Charlie Angus, a member of the Canadian Parliament, used the term rage rot to refer to now-President Trump's Christmas Day message suggesting Canada should become the 51st state.

Over the last year, I've seen a slew of articles bemoaning democratic decay, the rot plaguing democracy, and the deep rot at the heart of our political system.

One thing I have done over the last four years is learn how to efficiently process the carcasses of wild animals. Some I hunt or raise and slaughter, but many are roadkill, harvested from the side of the road. My family comes from rural Oklahoma, so perhaps there's some epigenetic hillbilly memory that makes this so satisfying to me. But it's also changed the way I understand the word rot.

Rot starts from the bone. If you look at the back leg of an animal that's been hit by a truck, you'll see it spreading, a deep black bruise from the ball and socket joint out. If your goal is to preserve good meat, then the key is to remove those limbs from the body and then the meat from the bone, sooner rather than later. When I think of rot and how to arrest it, I think of dismemberment.

This seems to be the one thing that almost every political person in the country agrees with. The United States as it is must be dismembered, disassembled, sliced from the rotten bone and changed into something more palatable for whoever holds the knife. Joe Biden and the Democratic Party failed primarily because they refused to start cutting. Their successors will not make the same mistake.

On the opposing side of the aisle today, I see a lot of angry people arguing about what the knife ought to be cutting and how much better they'd use it if it passed into their hands. That doesn't help any of us right now. Migrants are dying of thirst while vigilantes destroy water drops left by activists who themselves will likely be criminalized in the near future. Homeless Americans trying not to freeze to death at night may soon find themselves arrested, forced into camps where they'll be made to labor for pennies.

Neo-Nazis cheer as the billionaire behind the throne makes fascist salutes from the White House with smirking impunity. The knife is so far away from our hands, I find myself distrusting anyone who wastes time bemoaning how it ought to be used. Where does that leave us, though? Is there anything to do in this deep winter besides listen to the jackals howling outside our doors?

I have an answer to this question. Yes, now is the time to try, to test the boundaries of our collective cage. Now is the time to experiment. Since the time of the Founding Fathers, this country and its system have been referred to as the American Experiment. One could see the very term as narcissistic, yet another solipsistic gasp of American exceptionalism.

But I tend to think the appellation is one we've earned. This country is and always has been a test tube for new, often bad ideas about how a society ought to run. American civilization's only core value is throw shit at the wall and see what sticks. That also happens to be the only real way to fight back against authoritarianism.

There's a scientific paper I bring up often, The Evolution of Overconfidence, which set out to explain why people so often badly overestimate their own abilities. The authors pondered, quote, Overconfidence also leads to faulty assessments, unrealistic expectations, and hazardous decisions, so it remains a puzzle how such a false belief could evolve or remain stable in a population of competing strategies that include accurate, unbiased beliefs.

Now, the conclusion these researchers came to was that when significant resources are contested between two organisms, the organism most willing to try to take said resources, even if it is not the strongest, tends to succeed often enough to make overconfidence evolutionarily beneficial. This is the most basic explanation for how fascist movements continue to arise and improbably take power. Put simply, they always go for it.

January 6th provides us with a fine example. It was a ludicrous, idiotic, reckless burst of stupidity mocked for years by everyone except the perpetrators, who, four years later, find themselves with ultimate power.

They didn't win because they were the strongest. They won because they kept trying. And the people who should have stopped them feared bad press, the pushback of looking unfair, and so stood back while the fascists made smaller grabs, gobbling up bits of the media, local school boards, and narrative oxygen around issues like immigration. And now, well, we're here. And we'll continue to talk about here after these ads. We're back.

The coming days will be ugly, yet I feel it's my job to remind you that bad as this is, we are not Weimar Germany, and this is not 1933. Trump and his lieutenants aren't battle-hardened trench fighters. They're Elon Musk and a coterie of half-enthusiastic, half-frightened billionaires who got rich gambling on apps to let you rate your classmates' tits. Their foot soldiers are used car salesmen from Encino, not Fricor.

The United States is not starving to death, crippled by war. It's irritated, anxious, because its working people have been robbed blind by the same billionaires standing behind Trump now. The one thing we do have in common with Weimar is that our fascists now find themselves at the head of a state that capitulated to them, not out of enthusiastic consent, but exhaustion, cowardice, and above all, a feeling that it didn't really matter.

That last one, the feeling that nothing matters, the system is fucked, there's no point in engaging or organizing, that is the most powerful weapon they have right now. Because that feeling stops you and everyone else from opposing them, from interrupting as they reach out yet again to take something you love or need. But there's a danger here too. In moments of stress and anger, the desire to do something, anything, can be intense.

And when we're swept up in that mood, the natural tendency is defaulting to the things we know best, the things we've done before, the marches and chants and poster boards we've been walking and shouting and carrying all century long. Going back to those tactics without iteration or acknowledgement of their limitations and failures is a road to more failure.

I've been to a lot of protests, starting at Zuccotti Park in 2011 and ending last year in Chicago at the DNC. One of the most dispiriting moments of my life was listening to young anti-genocide activists bow to shut down the DNC to, quote, make it great like 68.

This was a reference to the 1968 Democratic Convention. Mass protests were ignited there when the favorite anti-war candidate, Eugene McCarthy, was rat-fucked by Democratic Party insiders in favor of Vice President Hubert Humphrey. The protests were quashed violently with tear gas and truncheons. Protesters chanted, "...the whole world is watching," and it's been a chant ever since.

The world may have been watching then, but the war went on. Nixon won election, then re-election, and then finally pulled U.S. troops out of Vietnam after dropping enough bombs on Southeast Asia to have ended several Third Reichs. In 2024, a new batch of anti-war protesters chanted, the whole world is watching, and I can say unequivocally, it was not. The only people watching were me, several other journalists, and of course, some people on Twitter.

The police, as they kettled, maced, and arrested members of the crowd, barely seemed to care. The DNC didn't shut down. Kamala Harris was made the nominee. There wasn't even a real anti-war candidate for party insiders to ratfuck in her favor. Garrison Davis, my colleague and friend, remarked to me afterwards that the DNC had been somehow much more depressing than its Republican counterpart a month earlier. He was right.

On the stage floor, all the Democrats had to present were aging celebrities and Bill goddamn Clinton, drooling out the same platitudes that led us to the Trump era in the first place and doing their best to ignore delegates who walked out and slept in front of the convention center to protest the genocide in Gaza.

Meanwhile, in the streets, a lot of very nice, earnest people, alongside a handful of grifters, did the only thing they could think of doing after months of imbibing footage of war crimes. They walked around and shouted. The police and the city largely let them, because they knew none of it was going to change a goddamn thing.

I felt tremendous optimism right after Joe Biden resigned. Not because I loved Kamala, but because it was something shocking, an upset, an experiment. Or at least it seemed that way at first. The DNC made it clear that Biden's advisors and consiglieres, the powers behind the throne, still ran the show and would not allow any real change. The rot had spread too far, spoiling the meat, spoiling everything.

It was my accurate belief in 2020 that the Democratic Party, broken as it was, had the numbers and the organizational capacity to slow the spread of fascism for a short time. It was my inaccurate belief in 2024 that this might still be the case. I had a hope because I'd lost any sense of actual productive optimism.

We lean on hope when we have no ideas to brace ourselves against. Hope, as George Miller reminded us, is a mistake. If you don't fix what's broken, you'll go crazy.

And that's where we are now, going crazy. Committed Democrats, the decent, regular people who fill the party, not the soulless shoggoths of capital running things, are going crazy because we returned a normal, decent politician to office. He kept the economy humming along and everyone still hated him. Leftists are crazy for a different reason. In 2020, this country saw the largest sustained uprising of its modern history and nothing fundamentally changed.

In its aftermath, the oligarchs who control social media set to tweaking, buying, or outright inverting their algorithms to ensure no similar movement would ever gain that kind of steam again. Their efforts have largely been successful. And yet many organizers, be they progressive social democrats, communists, anarchists, whatever, they're all still stuck in the same loops. Behind each march to nowhere and tired chant is an equally tired hope.

The Social Democrats dream of a giant continent-sized Denmark with cyclists replacing Ford trucks, universal health care, good schools, and a bevy of other lovely things both political parties will fight tooth and nail to prevent. The Communists dream of a new October revolution, but this one will work and not just create a new kind of dictatorship that ages and dies inside the space of a single human lifetime.

Anarchists tend to be very good at seeing the flaws and the logic and futility of the hopes of the two previous groups, but they are just as bereft of ideas for how to stop what's coming.

Some tendencies dream of collapse, maybe even accelerationism, an end to industrial society, and then either living in the woods eating berries or some kind of solar punk daydream, wildflowers spouting from rubble. I sympathize, but try offering either future to a single mom who can't afford her five-year-old's insulin and see how excited she gets.

On the other side of the anarchist coin, you've got the helpers, the people who cheerfully admit they don't know how to solve the big problem, but they do know how to provide free eye exams to homeless people once a month or do water drops down at the border so migrants don't die of dehydration or make it more expensive for the state to bulldoze a forest and build a police training facility.

If you are where we all are right now, bereft of ideas, staring down the barrel of a nightmare, those are good folks to know. Like everyone else, they're defaulting to what they've been doing. But at least what they've been doing helps people.

The larger solutions to our common woes, if they ever arrive, will be something new. Something we haven't tried yet. I feel very confident that they won't take the form of another march or involve everyone finally agreeing to be the same kind of communist or anarchist or whatever. Sean Fain, chief of the United Auto Workers Union, has called for a general strike in 2028, and so far that is the only clear plan I have heard from anyone that feels like it has a ghost of a chance.

It is audacious, and I recommend reading what Sean's laid out about it. But half of why I support the idea is because it's audacious. The religious right got to where they are right now in this country by being bold. As I laid out earlier, fascists win because they try, and this is something we need to copy. Shit can be different, but not unless you're willing to try different shit.

Many pundits and columnists were shocked and horrified by the massive and instant support for Luigi Mangione when he assassinated the CEO of UnitedHealthcare. Both the tutting gatekeepers of traditional media and the actually sweating oligarchs characterized this as evidence of bloodthirstiness. Some leftists did the same and interpreted support for Luigi as proof that the body politic did indeed have energy for an uprising. I saw something a bit different.

More than the actual killing itself, I think people were excited to see someone try something new. Luigi adopted a novel tactic. He carried it out in a novel way, and in doing so, he did more to punish one of the oligarchs bleeding us dry than the entire Occupy movement.

Novelty is the one thing that ties Donald Trump and Luigi Mangione together. The enthusiastic public response to both men's actions and the simultaneous revulsion of traditional elites are mirrors of themselves. In 2024, Trump still had enough novelty to convince people that he might upset the apple cart in a way that benefited them. He rode a global anti-incumbent wave back to the White House.

The consequence of this is that he and his are now on their way to becoming the new establishment. This is the downside of the fact that most legacy media outlets have started moderating their coverage of Trump, if not embracing him outright. He is being normalized. His toadies, Musk chief among them, are now our legitimate powers. What novelty remains will fade rapidly.

I suspect the same thing will be true of the copycats who follow in Luigi Mangione's footsteps. Most of his plagiarists won't be good at what they do. At best, newly heightened security will see these people dropped before they get to pull a trigger. At worst, innocent folks will be killed or maimed by bullets and bombs that fail to hit their intended targets, or do, but with a lot of collateral damage.

So I don't know what the next new thing to actually work will be. But between Trump and Luigi, there aren't many old norms left to shatter. We are in a time of enormous potential. Many new things are about to be tried, and as awful and bloody as the fallout from some of them will be, we all have no choice but to strap in and roll some dice of our own. The present is ugly. The future unwritten.

But the only way we'll make it a better one is if we embrace boldness, creativity, and perhaps a little overconfidence of our own. And this is not the end of the episode. We've got something else for you folks. But first, here's another ad break.

Okay, everybody, we're back. And obviously what you just listened to is an essay I wrote about my thoughts and feelings today, the first day of the new Trump administration. I felt like that wasn't quite enough. And the first thing I actually came across this morning when I woke up before I started subjecting myself to a barrage of horrible news was a poem written by a friend of mine, Emily Gorchinsky. It's called The Time of Cowards. And I think it's a very useful thing

thing for you to hear right now. I think it's a good companion to what I wrote. So I'm going to let Emily take it away. Before I do that, if you want to read the poem in text form or find her other work, you can go to emilygorchenski.com. That's emilygorchenski.com. Here it is, The Time of Cowards.

It is the time of the coward. It is the age of the liar and greed and avarice and lost boys and a dopamine hit and fractals and velocity and velocity and velocity and go, go, go. Don't stop. Don't stop to realize the indecency, the disloyalty, the dishonor, the discredited ability, the parsimony, the hordes hoarded behind the gates, the gatekeepers keep.

This is the dawn of masculine energy, not the energy your father taught you about measuring twice and cutting once, but picking yourself up and how the sting of hydrogen peroxide means it's working. Or your grandfather, who spent the days you spent smoking weed behind a 7-Eleven serving on a torpedo boat waiting for the sharks, who never failed to stop to lend a hand to those in need or say grace before dinner.

or to help you with your math homework, or teach you not to wear a necktie at a lathe. This is the year of cutting once and never measuring. Pencil in the blueprints with whatever comes out. It's faster that way. The season of hypocrites and not of confidence, but confidence men. The masculine energy of the con, the scam, the bamboozle, the fraud. The pulling of the rug and the begging of the question.

Now is the killing hour. The clock hands float over the blood in the streets, and the rage and the rage and the uncorked hatred overflows. The minutes of impotence expanding, overflowing, fizzling. Deception gives way to more deception. Not a single promise is kept. Rapaciousness and rape and abandonment and the cutting of corners and KPIs. A newborn died in a baby box in Italy because the alarm sensor didn't work. It is an honorless time, a time of only one question.

Not how, or may, or can, or if, or whether, but when, how soon. No legacy, no history, no reputation. Build the factories, then abandon them. The soil keeps the memory. And the burn scars, and the floodwaters, and the clear windshields where the splatters of bug guts used to be, and the images in the 20-year-old magazines still in the rack in the guest bathrooms never used, that showed how children used to go sledding, and maybe the house is too big, no one comes by.

I shoveled the neighbor's walk in the snow and salted it so he didn't slip on the ice and could receive his mail. He's an old man, one of the few black men left living in this neighborhood that was theirs once. He sent me a letter. It went all the way to Richmond to come to my door. He's the last man with dignity. In the letter, he told me he has a new toy, a laptop, which makes him happy because he's a big lover of history and he can go online and read about it.

And I weep for this last dignified man who proudly wears a cap honoring his service. Because this is the era of synthesis and generation and revision and content, content, content, and inverifiability and manipulation. This is the pseudo-scene. I bought a bottle of wine from a centuries-old vineyard destroyed in a devastating flood. An unsellable bottle in the retail market, a fundraiser souvenir. I kept it as a memento mori of our changing world.

A mud-covered reminder of how we all must work little by little to give the world forward. It broke when I tried to move it home on my 72nd flight of the year. It is the decade of hypocrisy, even for those who can see hypocrisy. They made me a vice president, and with every title change, I moved farther from God, a God I never believed in. I was raised in New England towns named for biblical places by people who thought working the rocky soil brought them closer to God. The only holy men left are those in the fields.

Basra and Lebanon and Gilead and Hebron. The people who named those towns committed a genocide to name them. And 400 years later, in their namesakes, the same. It is the epoch of cadavering. It is the night of bonfires and feuillet-spouches, the twilight of stories that dared and poems and albums. And I tried to sell a book and I learned that there's only interest in a book when you put yourself into it to be consumed.

words are calories measured in the amount of heat they give a flame i walked over the westminster bridge one night with a journalist who told me that they can't publish two good stories at a time because if one goes viral it punishes the other the arcane footfalls of the algorithm dance it is the sunset of craft and skills handed down and heritage

the waxing of a crass and pandering moon of pantomime a frictionless night a night where nothing dared nothing gained a night of shutters and locks these are the dark ages ages of embarrassing the future there is a shame here that penance cannot satisfy the sturdy empty shelves the blue hyperlinks to nowhere and a generation lost must be lost because profit cannot be taken from an idea

I think of the mimeograph machines stuck under the floorboards of the Solidarnosc houses, and the punks and the whores who copied radical zines in the public library Xerox machines, and the Yugoslavian Galaxia, and the novels now considered some of the greatest of all time once banned for obscenity. In Ceaușescu's house, the original TV remains. The revolutionaries didn't bother to steal it because there were only 30 minutes of broadcast TV each day.

In the crepuscular light, birds dare to sing even though they know the cats hunt below. In Vilnius there is a tile and a square. They say if you make a wish and spin around it three times, your wish will come true. At this tile a human chain formed and spanned three countries and they sang. At Hadrakim, on the right day, the morning light filters in over the lonesome island of Vilfla and fills a hole drilled in the sandstone 5,000 years ago and has done so unfailingly over the millennia that have seen countless empires rise and fall.

and the solstice of retribution will come again. Lately on the NPR Politics Podcast, we're talking about a big question.

How much can one guy change? They want change. What will change look like for energy? Drill, baby, drill. Schools. Take the Department of Education, close it. Health care. Better and less expensive. Follow coverage of a changing country. Promises made, promises kept. We're going to keep our promises. On the NPR Politics Podcast. Listen on the iHeartRadio app or wherever you get your podcasts.

Snakes, zombies, sharks, heights, speaking in public. The list of fears is endless. But while you're clutching your blanket in the dark, wondering if that sound in the hall was actually a footstep, the real danger is in your hand when you're behind the wheel. And while you might think a great white shark is scary, what's really terrifying and even deadly is distracted driving. Eyes forward. Don't drive distracted. Brought to you by NHTSA and the Ad Council.

Catch Jon Stewart back in action on The Daily Show and in your ears with The Daily Show Ears Edition podcast. From his hilarious satirical takes on today's politics and entertainment to the unique voices of correspondents and contributors, it's your perfect companion to stay on top of what's happening now. Plus, you'll get special content just for podcast listeners.

like in-depth interviews and a roundup of the week's top headlines. Listen on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. We want to speak out, we want to raise awareness, and we want this to stop. Wow, very powerful.

I'm Ellie Flynn and I'm an investigative journalist. When a group of models from the UK wanted my help, I went on a journey deep into the heart of the adult entertainment industry. I really wanted to be a playboy model. Lingerie, topless. I said, yes, please. Because at the centre of this murky world is an alleged predator.

You know who he is because of his pattern of behavior. He's just spinning the web for you to get trapped in it. He's everywhere and has been everywhere. It's so much worse and so much more widespread than I had anticipated. Together, we're going to expose him and the rotten industry he works in. It's not just me. We're an army in comparison to him. Listen to The Bunny Trap on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

Hi everyone and welcome to the podcast. I was going to go for a really Robert Evans intro there, but I bottled it. I am a coward and I couldn't do it. I hate all of you. It's Margaret Killjoy, everyone. Here to spread the good news. I was trying to Robert Evans it. Oh, okay. Yeah. And doesn't he only hate a certain percentage of them? Oh, right. Statistically speaking, he likes some of you. Yeah. Because I know some nice people that Zinda Robert likes. Maybe it's you. Maybe it's not. You'll never know.

So today, we're not here to talk about who Robert Evans likes, but we are here to talk about what to do if your house is going to burn down or you have to leave because they think it might burn down.

This is obviously a topic that is front of mind for people in Southern California currently, given the massive wildfires that have engulfed whole neighborhoods of Los Angeles. There are fires in Ventura and Oxtar as well now. The whole of East County, San Diego is under a red flag warning. Fire conditions continue because climate change continues, and we have decided as a society not to do anything about that. And so,

So this shit is going to be the rest of our lives. If you're on the East Coast or somewhere else and you're like, oh, I'm fine. I'm not on the West Coast.

I have bad news for you. You're not fine. Slowly, more and more, the East Coast, including the Northeast, is being seen as a fire-prone area. And we're seeing an increase in fire out East as well. Yeah. The United Kingdom has wildfires now, a thing that did not exist. Do you all even have wild over there?

Yeah, we have land owned by the monarch fires. We have parks and protected land. We have commons to a degree, but not public land like the US does. When I was a kid, we used to burn the stubble in straw fields. That's how few fucks we gave about fires. We'd just burn it and then plough it back in. And air quality, I guess. That is not a thing that people engage in anymore. That's probably for the best. Fire...

It's coming for you. It's happening everywhere. Hooray. Hooray. Yeah. Lucky you. The cleansing fire. I feel like there's a John Betjeman poem I could go off with here, but I'll spare you. All right. So if you are in a place where you are very likely to have to evacuate your home soonish for a fire, here are some things that you may wish to consider doing. I've harvested these from mutual aid groups in LA and from the CAL FIRE website where they give you advice on what to do if you're evacuating.

The first thing that you'll want to do is turn off your gas. For those of you who are not familiar, this is a flammable substance and your gas pipe rupturing and then catching on fire would be bad, would be sad. It's pretty easy to do this. Normally you should have a valve near the meter. Some places will have what's called an earthquake shutoff or an earthquake valve where you won't need a tool. I'm not sure that, in fact, I'm pretty certain those are not mandatory, even in California because I've lived places that don't have them.

Then again, there are things that are mandatory that landlords just aren't doing. I think we all know that. Yeah, or like grandfathered into or whatever. Yeah, yeah. Given that people outside of California are listening and the earthquakes are fortunately not coming for us all just yet, I would just suggest that you try and find where your gas shutoff is now. It's often where the gas comes into the property, like if there's a gas meter. And normally you're going to need some kind of tool to turn that. What I've used normally is just like an adjustable spanner.

or wrench, for those of you in the United States. The people in California that you're talking to? Yeah, yes, yeah. Hi, fellow Californians. You can turn that valve so it turns parallel with the pipe, and that's going to shut off the gas coming into your house. Do you mean perpendicular to the pipe? I'm curious. I think parallel is shut off. Interesting. With water, you turn it off by moving it perpendicular. I've never messed with a gas line. I've

weird and off-grid instead. Yeah. Let me have a look. I'm checking now. Yeah, sorry. It wants to be at 90 degrees to the pipe. Yeah. So it should be in line with the pipe when you start at 90 degrees to the pipe when you turn it off. Which you can just kind of imagine as like when it's in line, you can imagine like, oh, that's how the gas and water can flow through. And then when it's to the side, it's like, oh, now it's blocking it.

That's how I remember it. That's much easier visually if you imagine the hole in the valve lining up with the handle thing on there. Yeah. So you want to turn that off. I've seen some suggestions that you want to turn water off. Generally, the advice is not to turn your water off and to hook up your outdoor hoses to your outdoor taps such that they can be used if they need to be used.

I have seen some suggestions to turn water off because I guess people's pipes are bursting, which is decreasing water pressure. And it seems like that's probably a like city versus rural or like city to city kind of divide. You should listen to your local authorities around this kind of thing. Right. Like in the case of California, you can go to Cal Fire, right? There will be evacuation advice on the Cal Fire website. There might even be on your city website. Some of it is useful. This is a useful thing.

If you do need to turn off your water, again,

Water shutoffs could be in a variety of places, so it kind of depends. Especially if you're on a well, you're probably rural. If you're rural, you're probably going to be leaving it on. Yeah, you're probably going to turn it off your water. Yeah. But if you do need to, it's just a pipe going into your basement that you turn the valve on. It can sometimes be at the side of your house. You might need to give this a little bit of WD-40. Sometimes there's a little plastic box as well, and the little plastic box has a little hole, and you kind of have to shove a screwdriver in that hole and pop it open. Right.

We're now talking about city water again, right? Municipal water. Yes. Yeah, that's city water. Yeah. That's where if you have a water meter box and the shutoffs in there. Familiarize yourself with that stuff now so that you're not doing it in a panic later and

That's kind of where a lot of what we're talking about today is important. It's if you do it now, you don't have to dash about your house grabbing, thinking, is this important? Do I need this? Do I need that? Right. Because like I've evacuated for a while. I was living in California a few times and,

I like to think I have it pretty down now, but definitely the first time I was, you know, freshly minted European migrant, it was not familiar with this stuff and definitely just ran around grabbing things. So it turned out to be the wrong things. It's like, cool, I've got three bicycles here. Let me go to the shelter.

And you can get something called a water key or a silcock key. And I have a thing. I have not personally used it. I have a thing called an eight-way key. Sometimes they're called four-way keys. Depends on how many little wrenches are on them. And these are just cheap things that have basically all of the weird wrench-style things that you would never otherwise use. All the weird triangle things. They can get you into the...

boxes on a subway car and they can turn on and off water. Like I carry one in case you know you're in the apocalypse and you need to turn on the water at a rest area.

You know, that kind of thing. I first learned about these from squatters who would just move into houses and then turn the water on. And they're built in specialized ways to try and prevent squatters from doing exactly what I'm describing. Yeah, so you couldn't use your standard socket set or what have you. That's why you need these specialized keys. Yeah, and they're not very expensive. You can buy them online. They're also not very high quality. This isn't the kind of thing you're going to want to use over and over again. They're usually cast and they break. Yeah, it's like pot metal. Yeah, exactly. But they're all right.

As far as I can tell. Yeah. And you're hopefully not going to need to use them very much. Other things that you should turn on or off, turn off your air conditioning. No one's in the house anyway. You don't need it. I would consider leaving your exterior lights on. This is just going to help firefighters see things and see your house in the event that your house is still there. You can close your windows and doors. It's amazing how much difference closed doors even internally make in fire spread. Yeah.

There are plenty of videos you can watch about this online, but it's amazing how much different it makes having those closed. But you don't want to lock your front door. You're going to see a lot of stuff about looting. I will tell you right now that the people who are looting from wildfire survivors are the landlords who are charging 150% of the rent that they were a month ago for people to find a place to live.

Also, if my house is about to burn down and you go steal all my stuff, good. Have it. Yeah, yeah. Lucky you. I hope you don't get burned. Yeah. Compared to if a firefighter needs to enter that house to prevent it burning down, it takes a meaningful amount of time to break down a door. Yeah. And you can save that time by leaving it open. So yeah, that is something that I think you will get the wrong impression of if you're watching too much corporate news.

If you can, close metal shutters on your windows, but remove curtains. Flammable things near windows, generally not a good idea, right? That makes sense. So if you've got fabric curtains, I know they look nice, but take them down. Or you could just live like me and never purchase curtains and just, I don't have the sun in your face. Yeah.

What is happening to me right now? We're going to start a whole interior design thing when I teach James interior design. Where you hang your curtains. Yeah, James is effectively squatting in a house that he actually rents. You should also move flammable items into the middle of the room. Again, right? That's where the fire is not. And then before you go...

choose an outfit that covers your legs and arms, right? And you'll want to wear some sturdy shoes as well. Something that's comfortable, something you could potentially sleep in and wear for a few days and not be uncomfortable. Shoes that you could walk in, right? We saw a lot of people in LA weren't able to take their vehicles as far as they had expected to be able to. And so having a pair of shoes that you're comfortable in, your nice comfy walking shoes is definitely a useful thing to have and something to think about.

I hope you're not listening to this dashing around your house. If you are, best of luck. Yeah, good luck to you. Yeah, yeah. But you know, you can prepare all this stuff now.

For the outside of your house, flammable stuff that might catch outside your house is best either bought inside, inside your shed, if you have a shed or a garage or something. Or in a particularly California piece of advice, Cal Fire suggests chucking your patio furniture in the pool. So that is a thing that you can do. That makes some sense. It does. Have you seen the picture of this lady in the 90s who put all her fine china in her swimming pool before evacuating in a wildfire?

Oh, that's amazing. Yeah. It's very like of the time, like it was a time when people could afford swimming pools and also people had China that they cared about, which is something that our generation generally does not. Unless they inherited it from their parents. And in which case they still also, yeah. Right. They have like one plate. Yes. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Apparently it's a big issue with people like inheriting China and not wanting it and just dumping it on Goodwills. Um,

Yeah, I believe it. Yeah, I can see that. So yeah, you can put stuff in your pool if you don't want it to burn, if it is possible for you to do that. You had something you mentioned, Margaret, about your fence, right? Living in a more rural setting. Yeah. Can I actually just kind of like really quickly run through some, if you fire protecting your house, there's two things you're going to do. One is the, oh, I'm going to run away now version. And then there's the ahead of time version. The really quick basic version of the ahead of time is that, and this

and this is more applicable rurally, but you want to have a defensible space. Everyone's going to give you a different number, but like 100 feet from your house, you don't want densely packed trees, especially conifers. And you're going to want, you know, the one tree is okay as long as it's a little bit further from the other. You're going to want to clear out yard debris. Even though leaving leaves on the ground is overall good, you kind of want to create this space where there's not a lot of leaf litter and things like that.

directly under your house so that the eaves don't catch you want to make sure that you don't keep a lot of flammable stuff there and if like if i was fleeing my house in a hurry i would be pulling all the stuff away from under the eaves that i should have pulled away from under the eaves months ago if i were to design my house better there would be a basically a three foot like gravel line around the edge of my house right of landscaping yeah but the

The other things that you're going to want to do is you're going to want to look for how embers can get in through the vents and stuff, like in your roof area or under wherever. And you're going to want to basically make sure, and it might already have that, but you want to make sure that there's tighter than chicken wire. I think you want quarter inch mesh.

covering those things. Yeah, like construction netting. Yeah, well, metal, but... Yeah, it's metal. It's just the name of it. Oh, okay. It's what they put into concrete, I think. I use it to build chicken runs for similar reasons. Well, because raccoon hands can't get through it, and raccoons, they're bastards, as it turns out. Yeah, that makes sense.

If your porch is wooden, you have a porch, you don't want fire to get underneath it. And so you can keep your wooden porch, but you want to screen off underneath of it to keep flaming debris from going under there. And then if you have a wooden fence, consider...

having the first 10 feet or so of the fence be brick or something like that, I can't afford this. But imagine you can. Then you would want the first chunk of it to be that way. If you have gates, you open them. The deal with fences and everything is that you don't want a wick that brings fire to your house. So if the forest around you is burning, you don't want it to catch your fence and have that go right up to under the eaves, catch the eaves on fire, and now you have a structure fire. So what you're going to do

As you open the gates if you're leaving and then for example my plan because I have a wooden fence that goes all the way up to my house is that if I have more than like five minutes to flee a fire if I have a half an hour to flee a fire I am taking the chainsaw and I am cutting down about 10 feet of that wooden fence before I leave and that should dramatically increase the chances that my house will survive a fire. Yeah, smart move. And

And then the other thing with the pool thing, and it's a thing I've like read about, but I've never, there's no version of my life where I'm ever going to have a pool. If you live in a fire prone area, they actually make pumps that are designed to pump your pool water into a fire hose. And they have saved a lot of rural areas and probably city areas too, by having that accessible to firefighters immediately. Your pool can become a resource for the people who are coming in to try and keep your house intact.

Yeah. Amusingly, we used one of those when I was a kid. We had a horse that liked to get out. And one day she got out. We all went looking for her, of course. There were some wealthy people who like...

Well, they didn't live in the village that we lived in. They owned it because Britain has never moved on from the feudal era. And they had a pool and that was where our horse was. And so the fire brigade came and they used one of those things, just pumped out the water and just like hoes down the surrounding garden. And then we came with the tractor and we put some different straw bales of different sizes and made a set of stairs and got her out.

That's the least relatable story I've ever heard about England. It's amazing. Yeah, just like rural people living the dream. Yeah. She was a good horse. Misty. Yeah. We had a lot of horses that like we had access to land and not a great deal of finances. So we inherited problematic horses, I think, for people who had like who had the means to purchase. That is relatable to the American state.

Yeah, okay. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Any people find themselves in this situation, I'm sure. Yeah, horse poor is a whole thing. Yeah, it is. Yeah, yeah. It's the rich people who buy fancy horses and then find that horse not to their liking and can afford to discard a living thing that they spent more than a car is worth on. Well, and also being horse poor is you have a horse but you don't have any money and you're like...

You're partly poor because you have the horse, because horses are incredibly expensive to maintain. Yes, they are. Vets cost a lot. Yeah. Anyway. So, yeah, make sure, not quite in horse relation, but if you are more of a horseless carriage transport person, if you are...

This is a very American thing. In possession of an electric garage door opener. It is a good idea to work out how to open your garage without that. Because you don't want to be in a situation where you can't use your vehicle because you can't open your garage. Or you don't want to be dashing around going, where's the bloody cord?

Not the time. So work out how to do it. Now, also your front gate. Hopefully you don't live in a gated community. It's not the way to live. But if you do, for whatever reason, you know, know how to open the gates. Or if you have an electric front gate to your drive, I suppose, know how to open that. Margaret, now will be a good time for us to pause for ads. I wonder if we will get an advert for electric garage doors. Or electric horses. Oh yeah, maybe. Do they dream of electric hay? We'll find out in this advertising break.

All right. We are back. And we're continuing on the theme of animals because they are our little friends. Yeah. So if you have animals inside your house, pets. We had farm animals inside my house growing up. So I guess it's not exclusive to pets. We used to bring the lambs in when it was cold. Little orphan lambs. Again, this is turning into like James story time. It's okay. It's okay.

It's cute stories. People are in possession of a range, like a big cooking. If you have a very old house in the UK, or again, if you're rich, you have these coal-burning or oil-burning ovens. So they stay at a temperature and they have a number of doors. The coldest one, you can put a lamb in there in the wintertime and you can keep it warm that way. Like an alive one.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Well, I mean, any of them. You can put a dead one in if you felt the need. But this is no way to cook it. I see what you're saying. Okay, yeah, yeah. Yeah, no. Yeah, yeah, yeah. If you're looking to take care of the animal, you put him in there and keep him warm. So if you have pets in your house, things to do before you evacuate would be make sure they have a collar on, which has your name and your contact information. Yeah. I'm a big fan of the breakaway collars, especially for dogs. We never had collars on our dogs growing up because our dogs were...

Boys out in the fields going through hedges and stuff and you don't want them to get caught up. And so I'm a big fan of those, especially in a situation where your pet's going to be scared. God forbid that your pet goes running for a bit. You don't want them to get caught up by their neck.

You also probably want to chip your dog also. Chip your pets. Yes. Yeah. I was going to say now is a good time where you have the time to chip your pets, to make sure you have a carrier, make sure you have their vaccination records, all that stuff. And also particularly the, particularly rabies vaccination is like the thing that you need to make sure that you have with you. There's a lot of places you can't go with a pet like Canada unless you have rabies.

Yeah, yeah. Hopefully you and your pet will be fine and you'll come home in a few days. But keeping that stuff is important. If you have a cat, you can buy those little mobile litter boxes. If you're in danger of having to evacuate, just buy one and chuck it in your vehicle now. Of course, any medications that your pet has, right? You'll want to have a supply of those and those will want to be in your little go bag. It's also nice to have some familiar toys and things that smell like home. So consider putting them in the carrier now and then they'll just be there and you won't have to look for them.

They have advice if you have to leave your pet, which would be a pretty heartbreaking situation, to be honest. I...

Yeah. I think that choosing to be in charge of an animal's entire life is a pretty solemn vow. Yes, I would agree. And I don't think I would leave them to burn, I think. Yeah, but I guess there's probably... I mean, you see, for example, I know we're going to talk about livestock in a second, but people have had to let loose some of their horses because they can only personally escort so many horses or whatever, right? Yeah, a few years ago,

My friend and I were in a situation where a stables had more horses than it did vehicles. Yeah. And we were able to go in a vehicle with a tow truck and just help, like they would load them up and just be like, go to the evacuation point with these horses. Yeah. And so having a plan for that is good. But yeah, I don't know. I struggle because even of leaving pets, I grew up with dogs and like they were part

part of my family. Yeah. I suppose there's some situation I am not imagining where it is literally a necessity, but I struggle to. Yeah. I heard about people in LA who were forced to leave relatives who were not mobile, which is just fucking heartbreaking. Just, you know, one of the worst things I could imagine happening.

Which is literally why I actually think that your evacuation plans, I'm not trying to blame those people that we're talking about, but I believe that your evacuation plans need to include people with disabilities who are in your area, not just in your house, but elsewhere. Yeah, 100%. If you have someone who can only travel by a wheelchair, then you should be considering for your only vehicle a wheelchair-accessible vehicle. Like, this is the kind of thing that I think that, like,

Plans need to include people who are at different levels of ability. Yeah, yeah. If you have older people in your neighborhood, people who might not have their cell phone on or on them all the time, they might not get that like beep, beep, buzz, buzz. Yeah, if you have like older folks who live alone in your neighborhood, you should know that, you know? Yeah, yeah. A few years ago, I helped some older neighbors evacuate. You live in a community and you need to take responsibility and take care of one another.

If you have livestock, again, like, you know, I grew up with livestock. I think you're taking responsibility for that animal's life. And that includes situations where you might have to help that animal escape in a way that like, it's not necessarily like lucrative for you. So that might just mean opening your fences, right? Opening your gates. If you're not able to evacuate that animal, at least giving it a chance. You can...

Before, just to avoid having yourself in that situation, you need to make transport arrangements. You should be able to look where large animals' refuges are. Like in San Diego in the big fires maybe 15 years ago, they had them on Fiesta Island for a while. It's a little island out in the bay. Or Del Mar Racecourse is often a place in San Diego where you can take them. You should be able to find that now. If you're in Los Angeles, you can find that now. Again, you're going to want to have your essential documentation. Yes.

I'm not going to want nylon halters for your livestock. I've seen a lot of people have nylon lead ropes for horses. We had more hempy ones when I was younger, just because those are much less likely to melt. I'm not sure that's why we had them in the UK, but we had them because we'd had them for a long time. But plasticky things that can melt, you don't want to put them around your horse's head or near your horse. Okay, that makes some sense. Yeah.

If you have chickens right now, you're going to run into the issue of avian flu, which is a further complication. So this is the scenario of a big chicken shelter where you take them. It's not a good one.

for avian flu reasons, also for chicken dynamics reasons. So that means you should make a plan now. You might have a friend who you're like, hey, I know that you're not normally a poultry person, but would it be cool in the event of us having to evacuate for me and my chickens to come and stay at your house? Making a plan now is going to avoid you being in a very difficult situation of either driving around with your birds in your truck, being like, where the fuck can I go? Or like being turned away from places, right? Yeah.

The last thing I have here, and then we're going to move on to packing your go bag, is insurance. My house flooded when I was a kid. It completely leveled the first floor of the house. Everything was gone. Which, since it's England, is actually the second floor to Americans. Yeah, it's true.

It was actually the ground floor. You had to hide on the first floor. Yeah, I love to go into a lift and be confused in this country after 16 years of living here. Go up and down, up and down, playing this stupid game until I Google what do Americans call their floors. But you can't do it because you're in the lift and your phone doesn't work. It's one of my favorite experiences.

Especially because you try to Google what do American lifts do and they're like, what the fuck is a lift? Yeah, yeah, it's true. Yeah, yeah. An elevator. Yeah, it's not an elevating experience for me. Anyway,

My favorite thing to pick on James Sabat. I don't know why. Yeah, it's true. I'm sure I'm the only person who does it. I'm sure it never comes up. Yeah, it was never an issue when I worked in a building with a lift and would routinely miss my own floor, so much so that I just took the fire escape. So I remember it taking months. The time I was working in construction and what we were doing was for the most part pulling people

wet carpet out of people's homes that have flooded, highly recommend not doing that as a way to make a living if you can. It's not good for the body, not good for the soul. Not good for the lungs, probably. Cleaning out restaurants like a month later, the power had been off for a month, just going into the walk-in. Oh my God. I've never seen so many people vomit like one after the other being like, no, I could do it. I'm a builder. Like, yeah.

pretty horrific. So don't recommend. If you can, go around your house taking a video of your stuff. It will just make it easier. Like this happened to my family in like maybe the early 2000s. It wasn't possible. Well, I mean, I could have got the old like Sony Handycam out, but I didn't. So now, you know, you have a video camera in your pocket, going around your house, taking a video, especially of, you know,

the things that are expensive and hard to move that you're going to rely on insurance to replace. Yeah. And then this is actually a decent regular prepper practice regardless. This isn't a like, oh, I'm just about to have to run out for a fire. This is a like,

Every six months or every year or every time you get a new weird expensive thing that you put in your house, make this video so that it's easier to prove all of the stuff that you had that needs to be replaced. Yeah. If you do that on a regular basis, there's a little bit of like security of like, where do you put it? Do you really want, you know, but it's honestly for almost all people probably totally fine to just have that. Yeah, I'd vomit.

on the cloud. Yeah, I think it... Don't put it on Facebook. Yeah, don't direct the insurance company to your Instagram where you post an interior video of your home every month. That's your thing, I guess. Join us next month for Behind the Podcasts. Yeah, podcast cribs. It's me in my shed. It's me critiquing your interior design. You have... That will be a weekly podcast for some time. Yeah.

Shame James. Anyway, James Shame podcast. Yeah. LA things that I've heard people, things that you will need. If you have a nebulizer, if you're a person who uses a nebulizer to help them breathe, those are in very high demand. You're probably not going to be able to replace it. So bring that with you. If you have medications, ideally...

Grab the meds in the little orange thing and take those with you. That way you've got the RX number and you can easily go to a pharmacy and be like, hey, this is my prescription for me. It has my name and the RX number. Can you issue me an emergency supply? And that's something they should be able to do.

And also if you grab the whole bottle, then you've got, you know, hopefully a decent supply. Hopefully your insurance isn't annoying and only lets you get three weeks at a time. Yeah, that comes up for a lot of people, but yeah. I will not name any companies because I think it is against my contract to do that. I will say that if you have like your important documents, right? Your potentially your deed to your house, if you own one, your car, whatever.

Your passport, your birth certificate is a big one. Yeah, your right to be in this country. Yeah, any green card, visa, that kind of thing, especially those in the after. Well, this will come out in the era of Trump 2.0. So those documents are going to be very important for some people, right? Your DACA registration. Put those in a file.

and grab the whole thing, bring it with you. Do not rely on scanning copies of those, especially your immigration documents. If you're a person who has firearms, records of the serial numbers of those are going to be useful. And again, I would just snap a picture. It's not reasonable or sensible to be taking a lot of firearms with you in a situation like this. You're not going to need them. And there's going to be a lot of places that you won't want to bring them. Yes. I would suggest locking them up and...

like I say, documenting that you've done that. You may have to prove at some point that that firearm no longer exists and that's probably the best way to do that. And being prepared to travel on foot, like I said. Another thing that people have been needing and not having is P100 masks. So that's a particle filter generally in the 3M and I think the Honeywell filters, they're pink masks.

So I'm talking about like a screw-in filter here. Although they do make P100 masks that are more like, they look more like COVID masks. They're just a little bit thicker. Yeah, they're a little bit more sort of burdensome than those masks, but that is what you need if you're in those situations. So if you have one of those masks,

I have ones like when I'm epoxying wood, I have a little half face respirator that I wear for that. We will actually talk about masks, Margaret, after some of the products and services that support the show have talked about themselves. It'd be pretty sick if it's Honeywell. Yeah, that'd be pretty smart. Yep. All right, here we go.

All right, we're back. Thank you, Honeywell. Yeah. For keeping us safe from tear gas. Although I'm kind of a 3M girl, I got to admit. Oh, controversial. Okay. I know. So one of the things I did during 2020 was a lot of testing of protest gear. And if you want to see, I've written up a whole bunch of pieces about exactly everything about masks and body armor and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. But...

In general, when you think about masks, there's sort of three levels that actually matter or are useful. There's the version that we kind of see as a COVID mask. There's a version where it's like you wear it around your face and you make sure you get a rated one. An N95 is better than nothing for smoke, but a P100 is better. And...

Then there is a half mask respirator. Half mask respirators are great. They are probably the sweet spot for this. They are less good for pandemics because they do not filter the exhale. They're better for your daily life because they don't filter the exhale. It's much easier to breathe with a half mask respirator than a fabric mask.

And you can switch out the cartridges, and unfortunately, almost all of them are various proprietary types of filters. Yeah. And the bayonet mount is the 3M style.

There's a NATO version. If something looks more like a gas mask, it's probably the NATO screw-on kind. So you can get a half-mask respirator, or you can get a full-face respirator, which is more or less what looks like a gas mask. But those come in kind of civilian styles that are using the same 3M brand or Honeywell or whatever cartridges. Or you can get the more military style that'll have the NATO style screw-in.

The military style is kind of overkill in terms of it'll position you oddly socially. Yes. Certainly in a fire. Yeah. I think that a thing that is worth everyone having are these respirators, a half mask respirator, or depending on your life, like if you use them a lot or you're going to be protesting or, I don't know, there's a lot of different reasons. You might want a full face one. They make really cheap knockoff ones that you can get imported. Although maybe if you're listening to this in the future, you can't get it imported, but yeah,

They work fairly well. They're just not quite as good. I've tested a whole bunch of them against various impacts and things like that.

I think that half masks are great. I keep a half mask in my truck literally for wildfire smoke because when I'm traveling, if I'm driving out West, I've been around wildfire smoke while traveling before. Another thing, just really quickly, they make these for dogs as well. Oh, cool. They're more like COVID mask style and my dog hates it, you know, but you could train your dog into not hating it. I just haven't. I just keep it around to be like, well, if it really, if we had to sleep in the vehicle in a smoky area, uh,

My dog would hate it and he would put up with it, you know, and he would survive. Yeah. I like masks. Yes. They're great. Yeah, they are good. The half-face respirator is great. Yeah. That's what I use, like I say, when I'm epoxying so I don't get high. That would be bad. Yeah. Oh, and then really quickly about physical stuff like deeds and all of that stuff. Yeah. I'm actually kind of curious because it's like, I see why it matters the most to have the physical originals. Mm-hmm.

For most crises, a lot of people talk about how safety deposit boxes at banks are kind of the way to go for stuff like that you don't need on a regular basis. This wouldn't be your proof of documentation necessarily, but it might be your like birth certificate, maybe like deeds and titles and things at a safe deposit box because then

If your house burns down, it's still fine. LA wildfire kind of disproves this a little bit, right? Because then you're like, well, what if your bank burns down? Yeah, yeah, yeah. And then if it's not on your property, you can't grab it and go. So it's a little bit complicated. I think overall, I think that there's a real advantage to keeping stuff in a safety deposit box off site.

And then also, I just want to shout out that fireproof safes aren't fireproof. Yeah, not for the situation that we're talking about here. Right. They are designed for like, your kitchen catches fire or your bed catches fire and your safe is under your bed. Yeah, and the firefighters come and they get out in 15 minutes, but some stuff gets charred. Right. When there is a structure fire and a structure is destroyed, fireproof safes, like all other safes, are generally not fireproof.

protecting their contents. And that's not the safe fault of the fire safe. It's just they're not designed for that. Google the melting point of steel for this and many other interesting internet things that you can learn. Jet fuel can't melt fireproof safe. Yeah.

Which is why they build buildings out of them. Oh, and one more thing about documents really quick. While the original matters, having copies is better than nothing. 100%. And also just scanning and having them on encrypted USB stick. A little USB stick with all of your stuff is a really pretty good thing to have. It has some advantages too, right? Because sometimes you don't want the originals of your documents. Like,

Like, for example, you probably want a list of all of your bank accounts. Yeah. The bank account numbers, your PINs, your credit card numbers, like all of that stuff that you really don't want someone else to have. But if you lost...

you would be really sad. You probably want digital encrypted copies of that available to you. Yeah, yeah. Also your like master passwords and all that terrible, horrible stuff that's scary to put onto a USB stick. Yeah, that's why you're putting it there and not on the internet. Yeah. So really quickly, Margaret, it's going to be a long one, I guess. You and I talking about Prepper stuff, it went long? Yeah, shocking. GoBags. We've done a whole episode on GoBags. If you're new to the show, hello, welcome. You can go back and listen to Margaret and James talking about GoBags.

We'll try and put a link in the description here for you. What is the super fast speedrun version of what you want to put in your go-bag? Oh, Lord. Change of socks and underwear, your basic toiletries, like the kind of travel toiletries. Because your go-bag is more likely... Sorry, it's not going to be a long tangent. Your go-bag is more likely I have to spend the night in my car than I'm starting a new life somewhere out in the plains. Yeah. And...

So the small little things like bring deodorant, even if you don't have deodorant in your daily life, because you might be crammed into a place with lots of other people. I've seen tons of requests for deodorant in the LA Mutual Aid chat almost every day. Yeah, no, it makes a lot of sense. So basic toiletries and a little bit extra to share. I think whether or not you menstruate, you should have tampons, for example, in your go bag. And so I think that the basic toiletries, basic first aid slash survival stuff, and then like change of clothes. And also like it,

At least one or two morale items. I keep a Nintendo Switch in my go bag. Skyrim is, I need a Skyrim box in order to fight anxiety sometimes. Yeah, yeah. You can get those tiny little Game Boys now, which have like, it looks like a Game Boy, but it's every game ever. Yeah, yeah. I have one of those in there too. Okay, sick. Yeah, those would be a perfect item for one of those.

That actually, I had like almost no electricity at the beginning of COVID. And so the ability to play the Sega Genesis version of Shadowrun from like the 90s was crucial to me because I didn't have enough electricity to run a computer. Yeah, and look, that's fine. And it's probably going to be more important to you than half the shit you see people online putting in their go-backs. Like you don't need a gender affirming hatchet

you will have a lot more fun with your tiny Game Boy. Things that you don't need, I see people hauling a lot of food. Everyone who's evacuated to LA is having a miserable time. They are eating the best they ever have. So many people want to help and food is a way that so many of us express affection and care for one another. So many people are getting fed right now.

thanks to the efforts of mutual aid groups really remarkably doesn't seem to be so much by you'd think LA a city on a major fault line would have some kind of supplies for an earthquake that required feeding lots of people seems like it's more vibes based for the city but you know surprise surprise it's mutual aid groups who are feeding people and they're doing that really well so you don't need to haul a lot of food

Having a little bit of food though, a little bit of shelf stable food. I really recommend bars you don't like as the food that you put in your go bag. Because if you put in bars that you do like, you're going to eat them when you're bored one day. Yeah. And you don't want to go to the store. Highly recommend. I say this, literally all of the bars in all my bags have been eaten in the past week. But that's because there's been like a winter storm. So I haven't been out to the grocery store and I just have been like sugar craving. So I eat even the gross bars. I live in San Diego. I have no excuse. I just do it because I can't be bothered to leave my office and go to my kitchen sometimes. Yeah.

So find the one that you don't like, put it in your bag. Just have a couple. It's not to keep you sustained. It's to keep you from being grouchy. Like, don't think of it as like, I need to put entire meals in my go bag. Think of it as like, I need enough sugar and whatever to keep my like headspace right.

Yeah, I kind of like to layer them in between things. I do this when I'm camping too. I'll get like those little peanut butter packets and just like throw a few in there and then you're like, oh yeah, you know what? I am being cranky. Let me just snarf this and I'm going to be better. Yeah. I do highly recommend peanut butter. I take it when I travel a lot as well. It's like a comfort food for me. It's filling, it's compact, it's not that bad for you. Whenever

When I lived out of a backpack, I kept a plastic jar of peanut butter at the bottom of my pack always because I knew no matter what, I had at least two days worth of calories in the bottom of my bag. Yeah, yeah. It's a wonderful thing, peanut butter. So yeah, put some of that in there. There are things that like you probably don't need shelter, right? But it might be nice to have a little compact blanket. Right. Especially if you're going to have to stay at one of those. One thing, a little comfort item that I always take, I've taken this all over the world is

It's an inflatable pillow. Like there are a lot of hardships that I will endure. I like to sleep on a pillow. And so I take a little inflatable pillow. So it's something that like, you know, you will have comfort items like that, that are things for you. I'll put those in there. I would avoid watching too much go bag content on YouTube because you're going to get anxious about the fact that you don't have like a folding short barrels rifle. And that's because you,

You don't need it. Nor do you need like a... Like I'm sitting next to my bulletproof vest that I've used before for work. I'm not taking it with me. It's staying here. I didn't spend a lot of money on the plate, so I will be claiming those on insurance. But you don't need that stuff. People are taking care of one another. And so pack with the things that will help you be comfortable and consider that you might be spending a while in a hotel room

or a hostel or a refuge or staying with a friend or family members and think what would make that more comfortable for you. I think that's a really good way to put it. It's the get out of town for the weekend bag. It's not the end of the world bag. I think that if you are more rural...

you might want some basic camping stuff. Yeah, yeah, definitely. But the average person probably doesn't. I mostly have this at the like, there's my go bag and then there's the stuff that's kind of always in my truck. Yeah, that's where I'm at too. I like to go camping. So I have my camping stuff in my truck because then it takes me less time to go camping. Yeah.

And so, like, I am almost certainly not bugging out on foot from my house. And if I had to, then I would have to bring a... Not my go bag, I would have to bring a hiking bag, you know? Yeah. Most of the time, if you have access to a car and roads because you're escaping an emergency, you're getting to somewhere with enough civilization that you have...

you can expect some level of shelter and food. Yeah, exactly. But I do, I will say, have some water. Don't go overboard. Like, I think that having like a little bit of like chemical water filtration and a water bottle or a little water filter and a water bottle, you know, no reason not to. Yeah. I will say specifically, like get a soy squeeze. They're tiny. The filtration is better than most other filters that are that size. Get it, put it in your backpack. At

leave it there. They're handy to have. And then yeah, get a little... I like to have, again, this is a little comfort thing. I like to have a stainless steel Nalgene size bottle. It's not made by Nalgene, it's made by Clean Canteen. I like it because I could drink water out of it. I like it because it's not plastic. And I like it because I can use it to heat up water when it's really cold and have it like a little hot water bottle and snuggle with it. So that's a nice thing.

Yeah, I use also like a single wall steel canteen so that you can heat water in it. If you get the double wall ones, then you can't heat them over a fire because they're, you know, vacuum insulated or whatever. But then other people I know are like, well, they want the ability to have like their insulated tea bottle. Yeah, sure. You know? You do you. So...

I will also say battery packs for phones is a big one. Again, you're less likely to need to hunt squirrels with axes and you're more likely to need to keep your phone charged and other people's phones charged. One of those little Hydra charging cables, which breaks water. That's what I was about to say too, yeah. Yeah, get one of those. Get a little wall wart and keep it in there so you can turn a wall socket into a USB socket if you need that to charge your stuff.

Another thing that is surprisingly handy in lots of situations is I like to run a lot. And sometimes you're doing an ultra marathon when you get to the aid station. They just have like big things of water, right? And you fill up your little water bottles you're carrying in your vest. And lots of people have these tiny collapsible cups that are made of like a thin rubber. They're made of the stuff that camelback ladders are made of.

and then they can fill up that cup and they can drink from it and they just keep it attached to their vest, right? And then off they go running along. Oh, interesting. These are very useful and I've started incorporating them in lots of my travel and like, yeah, emergency supplies because if you're in a place where people don't have cups,

But they have big things of water. Now you have a vessel from which to drink. So those are surprisingly handy. Yeah. I also keep one of those. I don't know if it's the same one you're talking about, but it collapses up almost accordion style. It's like the camping ones, but it's way lighter than those. Ah, okay. I have the camping style one and I keep it in there as an emergency dog bowl. Yes, I know. Those are great for that too. And you can drink hot things out of them, which is nice.

Yeah. And another thing that I keep in my go bag is I keep the meds that my dog is on and I keep some of the meds that I take in there. And, you know, it's like my dog only gets the meds once a month. So I go to my bag and I pull out the meds and I give them to my dog from my bag because why not? And if you have, you know, other people, whether they're not fully grown yet or are that you also take care of, you know, you need to make sure you have a little bit of their stuff

in there. Like you keep a dog toy in your go bag. Yeah. If you have a child, keep a child toy. If you need to keep medicines cold, there's a product called Frio, F-R-I-O.

They're not paying me. I've never got one for free. But you dip it in water and it uses evaporative cooling to keep your insulin cold. I have used them a lot. They are very handy. They don't rely on electricity. It's very nice. So yeah, if that's something that you need, then that is hopefully something that will be useful to you. My last thing would be a little torch, a little pocket flashlight, or even better, a headlamp, like a head torch.

Because lots of places in LA lost power, right? And if you're having to go places at night, it's much easier if you can see where you are going. They're not expensive. They're great gifts. Bring a few. Give them to friends. Make new friends.

Hopefully, this has prepared you. The last thing, of course, Margaret, is gold bullion with Ronald Reagan's face on it. Oh, I forgot to mention that. Yeah, you need to trade. Rather than having a system of mutual aid, which we naturally do, instead, we should interject a complicated barter system, ideally on the gold standard. Yeah, in which shiny metal replaces our natural instinct to help one another. Yeah, exactly. That's how it's been. That's humans.

Famously known as species. Just bring a copy of Debt by David Graeber in your book. Yeah, yeah. Bring Atlas Shrugged, and then as you pass the fires, just start ripping that shit off, throwing it in there, let it burn.

Having a paperback book, if you like that, it's not weight efficient, but you know what? Yeah, that's how you like to read. Morale matters. Yeah, yeah. Bring the Dawn of Everything by David Graeber. That'll occupy you through most natural disasters. It's a thick book. It is. It is indeed. If you can't reach something, very handy.

stand on that. He really thought, he did us one final solid, um, RIP David Graeber. Yeah. And, and, and on RIP to David Wengro is a lie. Yeah. Yeah. Shout out to David Wengro, the other David, uh,

The less venerated David who also wrote that book. I always feel bad when I just talk about Graver's stuff and I talk about Don of everything and then I don't talk about the other David. Yeah. Sometimes I'll just say the Davids and then people will look at me and... Yeah, totally. But I know. Yeah. When I'm speaking to Margaret, I can say the Davids. She knows which Davids I mean. That's why we're friends. Yeah. Anyway... Yeah.

It's going to be okay, or it's not, but you know what? You weren't going to survive being alive anyway. And keep your car half full of gas when you're on your way home, and make sure that you fill up if it's less than halfway full. Plug your electric car in. Don't skip plugging your little electric car in at night. Yeah. Because the night that you do is the night that you need it. So you do the little things. Take care of one another. Yeah.

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Oh, welcome back to It Could Happen Here, a show where it's now happening here. A thing that we've said in a joking way a number of times, but now it just is. This is, you know, a podcast. We're having a good time. I'm Robert Garrison Davis, my co-host, colleague, and today we're talking about Trump's inauguration with a good friend of ours who was present at

at the thing itself, Bridget Todd. Bridget, welcome to the program. Thank you for having me. It's actually my first time on It Can Happen Here. I'm like a little like nervous. I hope it goes well. Yeah.

You're an OG guest over on Bastard, so it's about time we had you on here. How are you feeling, Bridget? Just in general, before we get into the specifics, how are you doing in the first full day of this new era? Oh, not great, Bob. Not great, not great, not great. It's so bad. We were talking off mic, like, I need to figure out a self-care plan, and part of the

Part of this is on me that I feel like I am one of those people that has kind of checked out a little bit. And I'm like, oh, who I am. I got to take a step back from this. And now that I'm taking a step back in, I'm like, I need a plan for how I'm going to pace myself and not lose my fucking shit every fucking day. Yeah, it's probably not for the best that like right at the same time as this has all happened, the people who make gas station drugs have figured out how to take drugs.

The chemicals in kratom, which in leaf form is a generally safe drug, and hyper-concentrate them into basically fucking heroin. So I'm just working on staying away from that shit. Too much of the news, you know? That's the way you gotta do it.

I'm also doing dry January and trying to eat healthy. Oh, that's tough. I'm not doing that. So I have no outlets. I can't drink. I'm not, I don't do drugs. I'm fucking eating lentil soup every night. I got nothing. There's nothing I can do to cope. I'm keeping myself okay by just eating venison every single day. But yeah, I'm carrying on our, our Vegas tradition.

And I've moved into gambling. Nice. Oh, you're gambling now, huh? Not actually, but instead of doing something stupid for Inauguration Day, me and my friends got together and all played anarchist poker. So that was fun. I lost about $10 to my friends, so that's fair. How often did you say, I hardly know her? Like about four times. Yeah.

Yeah, that's the right amount of time. But we also got quite drunk. By the time we started our second game, I was also dressed like Data from The Next Generation, complete with silver face paint the entire time, and a poker visor. So that was how I spent yesterday. I'm glad you got to experience the hell that that actor experienced. Bridget, let's talk about the inauguration. Let's do it. All right.

All right. So I kind of coming in firsthand, when did you sort of lock down your plans to actually be there? So initially my plan was to get out of town. Totally. I'm going to go out to the mountains. I don't want to be here. Yeah. I'm going to hide on the mountains with a rifle. Like that, you're joking, but like almost literally that. No, no, no, I'm not joking. Yeah.

I mean, I was in, so I live in D.C. I've lived in D.C. most of my life. I was in D.C. in my apartment when January 6th happened. And I remember being so scared. There was a curfew in D.C. Like, it just, shit got really real really quickly. I remember I was on a wall staff, like, beginning of the year planning work call. And somebody just on the Zoom was like, hey, and, like,

Everybody who lives in D.C. should maybe check the TV. And then the line went dead. That's what I remember the most. So I was planning on getting out of town. And then I thought, fuck it. Why should these people drive me out of my own city? I want to be out on the streets. I want to be out in my community. I want to be connected. And so, yeah, I went out to the People's March protest. I went out as far as I could to inauguration downtown.

just to get a sense of what the vibes were. Yeah. All right. Well, let's get into the vibes. How were they? Weird as hell. This is something that I think people might not really think about a lot. So like being from D.C., living here most of my life, people really obviously think of it as like a seat of national power. And they sometimes forget that there are over 600,000 D.C. residents who just like live here, work here, have their lives here. And so this stuff

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah.

All of this matters for... This is so fucked up. Dude, don't even get me started. Like, I could talk about statehood all day long. That's like such a funny, shitty compromise. Like, you can be there and like talk, but you can't do anything. Like, I'm sorry. That's just so fucked up. It is. And it's like, I mean, like, there are so many reasons why it sucks that DC's not a state. But ultimately, it's like...

We deserve to have political power. We deserve to have a say. We made Wyoming a state. Have you ever fucking been to Wyoming? Good God. And I mean, I could talk all day. When Republican lawmakers get on TV, and I remember they would shit on DC by saying things like,

There's not even loggers who live there. It's not even a real place. Like, as if the only way to actually meaningfully exist in the United States is like, you have to have loggers who live there. Like, it's so infuriating. And none of those motherfuckers know a logger. I know. So all of this background really matters to Trump's kind of tense relationship with D.C., like the district. Trump, as y'all might remember, spent quite a lot of time just

Just talking straight shit about the district and announcing these like big plans to take over D.C. The background is a little bit complicated, but the quick and dirty version is that D.C. has what's called home rule. So that's like the ability for D.C. to govern, like for our local government and leaders to like make decisions about what happens to the district.

And on the campaign trail, Trump was saying he wants to change this, that D.C.'s home rule would be revoked and that the federal government, basically him, would dictate how D.C. is run as a city. Because D.C. is not a state, technically any president could have that authority to interfere with how D.C. is run. So, yeah, any president could, like, take over the police department and take over the powers our mayor, Muriel Bowser, currently has over the city. Right.

Yeah. So I guess first off, like of your friends, how many folks kind of made the same call? Like what was the general decision? Cause I'm, I'm looking at like footage of proud boys marching through fucking DC again for the first time in almost half a decade. And like, yeah, where are the people, you know, on this kind of stuff? I mean this in the most literal sense, no,

Nobody. Zero. I was out there flying solo and I had multiple friends be like, you're crazy to go down there. Like what? Like everybody. Yeah. And I guess that's something else that I wanted to talk a bit about, which is that, you know, the first time around during Trump's inauguration, I was like out on the streets. I was like, it sounds so silly now, but like, I

I mean, almost don't even want to get into it, but the idea of like resist that had not yet become a cliche to me. And in the, you know, aftermath of Trump's first election, I,

I was really clinging to that for like whatever hope or power I didn't know was going to turn out to be like a bunch of grifters and like people saying like hashtag resist and like meaning nothing. At the time, I really clung to that. This time around, total night and day difference. Like, and I think the mood on the street

I think reflected that. I think that D.C. is exhausted. The people that generally I know who are like radicals, who would be out on the street, a lot of those people were like, we're sitting this one out. Yep. Yeah. That was like a refrain I hear from a lot of black and brown organizing folks here in D.C. Like, this is not our fight. We are we are sitting this one out. And I don't blame anybody. Right. Like, it's a lot. We've all been through a lot. Yeah. And that's that's.

I guess if I could get across something and people listen, it would be like, don't just show up because they are right now. They have the cops. They have the courts. If they want you to show up in the street, the best thing to do sometimes, I'm not going to say this is going to be consistently the case, but is like, don't give them what they want.

Don't be where they want you to be. Don't make it simple for them. You know, again, I keep trying to say and I'm not saying this and like I'm so smart. I know what everyone needs to be doing. I don't. But it's like not what we did last time because that that just didn't didn't do it. Exactly.

Didn't do it all. Didn't knock it out of the park. Wasn't a home run. The last time Trump was in office, y'all remember like the Women's March and pussy hats and all of that? I actually staffed the Women's March that time around. I was one of the digital street team folks. So I was like very invested. This time around, they changed the name. They rebranded to the People's March. And they only had a couple of thousand people out there. And so...

You know, I think it really goes back to what you were saying, Robert. Personally, I have a hard time with the idea that what we did then is what we should be doing now, that that that that playbook is still going to work. And frankly, like 69 percent of white women voted for Trump. Right. And so, like, the idea that I would feel safe and feel solidarity with a bunch of women out on the streets, like being like, boo Trump. It's just like.

I understand why the turnout was so low because I feel like solidarity and march on the street is clearly not where we're at. So that is not how we should be meeting this moment. Well, and even last J20, there was like a large, large radical contingent. And those people are similarly sitting out. And when you're looking towards the next few months, looking at like what kind of ice raids are going to happen, looking at what's going to happen for like reproductive health care, transgender health care, people are making the calculation that,

It does not make sense to needlessly throw yourself against the walls of the state when we can stick together and see what happens and prepare for all of those other things that are going to actually impact you and people that you know seriously. And it sucks to be stuck in that reactive position, and there's things you can do proactively, but

going outside and yelling in front of a fence probably isn't going to do any of those things. It's probably not going to help the people who are going to need help in the next few weeks. Yeah. And people are understanding that. And it's leading to people reacting quite differently than what they did, you know, eight years ago. I agree. Yeah. I mean, Garrison, you really said it. And in this moment, personally, I...

I am really wondering like what my role is, like where can I fit in? There was a time where, you know, just being out on the street yelling, like being so frustrated, I have to take to the streets and scream in impotent rage. That would feel like something. And I just think in 2025, I have to figure out like what it is I can contribute and contribute that. And I don't know that it's protest as it, as it used to be. Like I used to be somebody who like protest was my thing. Like,

Sure. I think some of it is that, like, the only meaningful definition of intelligence, right?

really, is the ability to adapt to changing circumstances. And when the circumstances change in the way that they have, and you're like, well, time to do exactly what we tried in 2017, that is not intelligent, right? Like, I'm not trying to be mean. And again, I'm not saying I know what the smart thing is, but it is, we gotta be pivoting. We gotta pivot in a lot of different directions right now. So yes, and I don't know that I see...

some of the institutional powers that be, even people who are like ostensibly like on our side doing that pivot, right? Like I'm very much in this sort of like nonprofit industrial complex. All the organizations who were like, oh, well, where should we put in our money and this and that? The first time around, I just see them doing the same old thing. And it's like, I don't know that that is what's going to save us. And like, don't worry.

Don't get me started on how useless the Democrats are because I'll go all day. But like when Trump announced that he was moving the inauguration inside, they printed little jokey shirts that said snowflake. I'm just so sick of that. Like that sort of like sneering, dunking, snorting.

useless stuff that doesn't translate to meaningful action. I'm just so sick of it. I wanted to gouge my eyes out. Yes. Yeah, I mean, that's what's in part what lost them the election is that general attitude and that conception of them throughout the country. And yeah, getting your little snide remarks during Hegg's confirmation hearing might make you feel good and might generate a good clip for social media. But is that actually going to stop him from getting into the cabinet position?

I've had so many arguments about this with people over the last few days who still insist that, like, well, the fascists can't stand you making fun of them. That's what they hate is you laughing at them. And, like...

I think there was a stage at which that was a valid tactic. And, you know, there may be elements of that in the future. But like, no, they don't care. They're winning. I'm not saying like, don't fucking make jokes with your friends to like keep yourself sane. I'm saying don't mistake dunking on them on social media for doing anything that matters because it doesn't. Well, OK, I'm not even sure. Like, I have so much to say about this.

So I have been saying this for a very long time. And, you know, we were all at the Democratic National Convention. I have to admit that I was there as an influencer. But the thing that annoyed me so much was like that exact sentiment and that exact sentiment fucking lost. And the thing that the thing that.

that pisses me off now is the complete unwillingness to be like, where did we go wrong? Maybe the memes and the jokes and the calling them weird and then this and that, maybe it felt good in the moment, but it actually didn't translate what happened. Unwilling to do that, completely unwilling. You know, you see, I would almost argue that like the weird stuff, I think if they'd stuck with it, there was something there. I think the emphasizing how outside of like the American norm is

these guys were and like what we want to accept in our communities. Like there was something there, but they didn't stick to it. You know, the next big time we saw Tim Walls, he was talking about what, how, how he wanted to be friends with JD Vance on the fucking debate stage, you know? But also I think that's a little different than just like,

calling him fucking orange Mussolini or whatever the fuck. Like, I think there's a point in a messaging tactic. It's like Trump gets mileage out of the names he uses and the way in which that's part of how he got where he is. So I'm not saying that aspects of these tactics can't be used. Well, I'm talking about the way in which people, liberals and folks on the left are continuing to do the fucking like drum shit. That's not getting us anywhere. I,

I could not agree more. And yeah, I mean, I agree. I think the weird stuff could have like had legs. I don't I think that they were kind of like scattershot at that point. And they were like, oh, people seem to like this. Let's lean into this. Oh, this new thing. Let's lean into that. Yeah. The thing that I remember very clearly was when Tim Walz was talking about how, oh, we have a saying in Minnesota. It's mind your own damn business. Yes. Yes. Yeah. So like my partner is from Minnesota and he was like, oh, that is like.

absolutely a Minnesotan thing. Mind your own damn business. Yeah. You can sell that. Yeah. Yeah. So I agree. But yeah, the like calling Elon Elmo, like all these little cutesy things might feel good and like get you a hit of dopamine and get you a few, you know, likes on whatever. But it just it's not going to save us. And I'm so sick of it. I feel like in some ways it's all anyone has to offer right now. And I'm sick of it.

One of the interesting things when like looking back at the last version of Trump's J20 is you did have, you know, these large, large militant groups, you know, what would later probably be dubbed Antifa by the media. But there was there was a presence in the street. And this time around, really the only sizable militant presence in the street was

was like the first return of the proud boys did you stumble across a gaggle of black and yellow clad militants in the street yellow and black not a gaggle i saw one lone one i'm sure it was like i've lost my groove like a little duck i'd help a baby duck get back to its mom last year it was just like that yeah right down to the iq

I have some friends right now who are in the D.C. airport, and it is chud central over there. Oh, fucking bad. It sounds quite bad. I saw a friend posted about all of the Trump merch, and they were sitting next to two individuals debating race science in the airport terminal. Oh, God. So...

That is the vibes of the D.C. airport as of Tuesday, the day after the inauguration. But yeah, the return of the Proud Boys is one of the big things that I think we're going to see these next few weeks is the amount of far-right militias or these more street gang-type groups who have been so emboldened.

by Trump essentially giving them permission to do whatever they want to now, now that they know that they're not going to face any kind of real legal repercussions for carrying out whatever actions they want to against people of color, queer people, etc. And that's going to be interesting to see. This is certainly a sign that suggests some embrace, but I'm kind of wondering...

If we're looking back to the Nazis, the OGs, what the Nazis did was marginalize and actually purge a lot of these guys fairly quickly because the folks that were the best at like rabble rousing and fighting in the streets were also kind of like the least reliable at helping to keep us stable.

system in the city, right? Like after the Nazis took power, one of the big issues they had is like, we still have a lot of people who are kind of like in the middle, including most of the military. And one of the things that keeps scaring them is all these fucking goons running about. And we still want what the goons are doing, which is like certain people beaten and thrown in camps, but we don't want the goons doing it. We want the cops doing it. And I guess kind of, we're all waiting to see

how different or similar what comes next looks to that. And I mean, what do you make of like, I guess I knew it was coming, but when all those J6 goons got pardoned and so like you have like the leader of the Oath Keepers, the leader of the Proud Boys getting released from D.C. jail, like what do you make of that? There's two things. Number one, this is something that he had campaigned on. It's something that there was a lot of support from his base for, you know, like the fact that

In order to kind of protect himself, he had to really heavily embrace the idea that nothing bad happened on January 6th, and if it did, it was the fault of the mean old Biden cops.

And so he kind of had to do it. The degree to which he shows up and is close or actually directly embraces Proud Boys and guys like Tario is going to tell us a lot. And I think we'll be seeing that very soon. If they are kept at arm's length and kind of letting them out is all they do, then I don't know how much we're going to see of these guys. If there's a real embrace and an attempt to use them

as a way to kind of extra legally deal with his enemies, then I think we start seeing them really make inroads and pushes in places like Portland, trying to get people out so that they can do violence to them and then get pardoned or just have the violence ignored and the other people get thrown into prison. And I don't really know which way I think that the state is landing right now,

which is not to say like, I think one is clearly less violent than the other. Cause his other option is he's going to be having his feds do that kind of shit. I think that's where a lot of my anxiety comes from. The not knowing of like, it could go this way or that way. Both are bad, but what flavor are we going to get? Like, that's the thing that is really getting to me right now. Yeah.

Do you want to talk about what the Proud Boys were actually like up to on Monday? Yeah. So as you said, this was the first time that they in mass came to D.C. since January 6th. And they marched through the streets of D.C. holding a banner that said, congratulations, President Trump. And they chanted, whose streets? Our streets. Which I

By the way, that is such like, again, as someone who kind of like came up on like street protest. Yeah. Y'all are doing the chant all late. Like, I hate that. I mean, the situation has continued to be proven correct.

The levels of recuperation for even your diametrically opposed militant enemy side is just fucking crazy. Yes. And I saw this... I mean, speaking of J6 rioters who were all pardoned, I saw this video that really kind of broke my heart. It was a video that some MAGA dipshit took outside of the jail where all those people were being held. And so...

There's a black D.C. elder who clearly is just, like, minding her business, walking down the street in her city, and she gets baited into an on-video screaming match outside of the D.C. jail where this MAGA guy yells, like, oh, we didn't do anything wrong. No crime was committed. And she's like, you all killed a cop. No cops got killed, which is not true. Like, the...

It goes back to what you were saying, Robert, about how there is this need to quickly have it be like something that wasn't that big of a deal. And one, to see that in person in this video was wild to me. But two, seeing like

A DC elder, like, take the bait broke my heart because I wish I could have been in that moment to be like, honey, you don't need to be screaming. This guy wants you to be screaming at him. He wants this video of you screaming at him on the street. This is, like, exactly what he wants. Yeah, I entirely agree. You know, the biggest takeaway from being out was just how...

sparse it was. Like, you know, the first time around, I probably had four different people staying with me, two of whom got arrested during the big anti-Trump protests. This time around, I didn't have anybody. I didn't know anybody who was there. And I do think that reflects kind of where people are at. I think people are exhausted. People have been through a lot. People are maybe pacing themselves and sort of like don't want to

blow their rage wad on the first week, which I totally understand. But I think it really remains to be seen, like whether or not this vibe is going to take us through the next four years. Are people just tuning out? Are we checked out? Are we so exhausted and overstimulated already that we're not going to really be paying attention? And in some ways, like, I feel like that's exactly what authoritarians want. Yes, that's where it's difficult. Or that's one of the many things that is difficult is that like checking out

is not the answer, but you simply can't react to everything that happens. Showing up and burning yourself out in the street. It's like the cops continue to do bad things. And every time a cop does a bad thing, you and your friends throw yourselves at a police station until you all get arrested. Then you won't be able to do anything else because you'll be in jail, you know? And like, these are hard realities, which is why it necessitates people

new kinds of thinking, creativity, you know, it to some extent unsatisfying. And I guess part of what I would say is if people are giving you answers to what we need to do that sound very clear and satisfying, you should maybe not trust that totally. Yeah. Because the responsible answer, in my opinion, is that like, it's very unclear how to get out of this or what the right things to do here are, right?

We just know that what we've been doing hasn't been working. And the first step to wisdom is accepting that. Oof, I love that. Something I know that isn't working is I'm glad that we're not doing... I thought you were going to pivot to ads. Actually, let's pivot to ads. You're so good at ads. Like you could teach a class on it. Oh, yeah. Well, I waited 28 minutes this time to do it, but at least we have the second one in there.

We're back, Bridget. Sorry, where were you going?

Something that I'm glad we are not doing this time around is remember during the first Trump administration, how the Washington Post changed their tagline to democracy dies in darkness. And everybody gave them a shit ton of money because it was like, yeah, we need like good investigative journalism, traditional media. That's going to save us. I'm glad that this time around we've all cut the shit and it's like, no, they're part of it. They're not going to do a goddamn thing. Absolutely not. Yes. They don't give a fuck.

Jake Tapper couldn't roll over fast enough. And like, so even, I mean, I'm sure y'all have talked about this to death and I have been thinking about it nonstop, but Elon's seeing how the traditional press reported on his salute. It's like, Oh man. Oh, what did he do? Like, like the, the way they will contort themselves to not just come out and say it is astonishing to me. Oh,

Yeah, that's one of the scariest things is the degree to which they're trying to memory all stuff happening as it happened. And at the same time, okay, yeah, he did a Nazi salute. He's a Nazi. This is not the first thing that's made that clear. We need to move on knowing he's a Nazi, but we need to move on. I don't know. I don't know what to do other than maybe there's some utility in spreading clips of him next to the fucking guy from American History X, but...

I don't know. I don't know how that's going to help. The fact that he's in this position where he can do something like that on stage and it actually doesn't matter is so much more frightening to me than Elon Musk doing a very low-motor control version of the salute when he's wrapped up in some excitement and he's trying to meme to his fans on 4chan. The fact that he's even just allowed to do that and it doesn't actually matter. This will not affect him in any way.

is more what's interesting to me. Because yes, we've all known that he's been a Nazi for quite a while. He's shared things that are essentially like

Nazi race science on Twitter before. He has engaged with, like, extremely anti-Semitic conspiracy theories before. And, you know, the largest anti-Semitism org in the country has completely capitulated to these people. Oh my god. So, like, they've hollowed out everything that's, like, supposed to be, like, you know, the institutional blockages, whether that's, you know, places like the Washington Post, whether that's literally all of the tech companies, the degree to which, like,

Everyone has cozied up to Trump, which is also very different from 2016. Everyone was fairly united institutionally, was united against Trump. And the same way we don't see people out in the streets rioting or even doing large protests, the actual institutional powers have decided to

instead of actually trying to fight this guy they're going to try to see like how friendly they can be like how much can they get out of this there's this like resignation and i i don't know how long that'll last right like i'm not i'm not sure if like you know once trump becomes the establishment figure that he's been like deriding for the past few years like once he falls back into that zone if we're going to see more resistance to him from like institutional levels but you can't

you can't like count on it. And the degree to which it's, it is like different from 2016 is like worth remembering. Like a phrase me and Robert talk about sometimes is like the forever 2016. Like the fact that it feels like we've never really left 2016. Everyone kind of acts like we're still in 2016. Like this is such a,

load-bearing year on our entire cultural consciousness. But the fact is, we aren't in 2016 anymore. And you can't act like we are. You actually have to move on from that. And we're starting to see more of that in certain corners. You see some of that among some of the radicals, some of the anarchists, as well as the tech companies and the CEOs and the media companies. They're just...

the degree to which they're moving away from their 2016 mode. You actually just gave me a little bit of a silver lining that I had not realized, which is like, it kind of is useful to see so clearly where these institutions and power holders stand. And it's like when, like, I remember watching tech companies like change their logos to Black Lives Matter or post the black square. It's kind of frustrating.

freeing to be like, we don't have to do that shit anymore. Y'all don't have to pretend and we don't have to pretend either. We know where you stand. You've made it very clear. You could not make it, you could not have made it clear where your alliance is. And let's go from there. Like it almost is, it almost is sort of like trimming the fat a little bit. We no longer have to take these, these institutions as serious as allies or something. Yeah, there's going to be a degree to which like

people's masks come off more than usual. I mean, I think certainly this next Pride Month will be interesting to see how people change from Pride Month 2022 or even Pride Month 2017. Yeah. I was at Pride in San Francisco in 2020, and it was very big, very happy, but there was like a rind to it. There was like an edge to it of...

Are we going to be able to keep doing this? You know, there's a dispensary. You know, I don't smoke, but a friend of mine who I stay with when I'm at San Francisco does. And so I was with them at this dispensary and it had like a sign talking about its history, which was that the person who found it, it's a very nice one. It's like an Apple store inside. And the person who like started it and ran it,

did so because when they were younger their partner had AIDS HIV and then AIDS and marijuana reduced some of their symptoms and they had to go buy it in the nearby park which was a lot uglier of a place in a lot like it was it was sketchy like they got robbed a couple of times there's a lot more violent crime and

Just kind of, there are even in a place like San Francisco, which is so like gentrified in such a way. Like when you're talking with like, especially the older members of the queer community, they're not just like rich, out of touch tech people. They are old battle scarred queers who went through some of the ugliest moments of this nation's history and were kind of bracing themselves for it again. So yeah, I'm very interested to see what it's like this year, you know?

But even that, I feel like there's a, I mean, it's grim shit, but there's a kind of hope in it that like we've been, people have been here before, right? Like, you know, there have always been queer people, trans people, black and brown people, immigrants, like we are America. And like, we've always been here, baby. We're always going to be here. And like making our way and like holding on and bracing ourselves and doing what we got to do and enduring, like that is what we fucking do. And so in some ways, as grim as that is, it's kind of hopeful, question mark also, right?

Yep. I'm just on the edge of my seat. Yeah. I mean, certainly, you know, lots of people who I surround myself with are, you know, looking towards ways to take control of like their own bodies and stop relying like wholly on any kind of government, government, like agency or, or,

or model for that as well as doing a lot of a lot of reading on the old like uh anti-deportation anti-ice resistance from like years and years ago not just from like the trump era but from like from the stuff like like way before if we're not going to be out in the streets doing you know slightly mindless protest where you're marching in circles you can use that time to instead like and

educate yourself and build connections with people and, you know, read about these things that may become more and more important to know, at least so you have an understanding of history as the next four years start happening quite quickly. That's so insightful. Yeah, I think when things feel hopeless, reading about how folks

you know, our elders, the folks who came before our ancestors, how they dealt with stuff like this has been really hopeful. And it's like, yeah, I guess I just try to tell myself we've been here before and people found a way to make it through. And, you know, it feels uniquely like,

tragic but in some ways it is not and as scary as that is it can also be sort of like grounding yeah and like the same things won't work but you also need to understand the things that didn't work last time and and it's good to know and it's good to know the things that did like it's it's important to have that understanding so you don't feel like you're having to reinvent the wheel every single time and like that type of like generational knowledge sometimes is really tricky to pass down in these sorts of spaces and it you know it doesn't and it sometimes it didn't

It requires a degree of initiative to actually seek out that information on your own. The internet's great and terrible, but it has a vast catalog of history. Yeah. I want to talk a bit about the speech that that bishop gave at the...

Trump's first church service as president the second time around, because that is of all of like the fucking media people getting clapped at for making fun of, you know, whichever, you know, Hegseth or whoever. Yep. That I think actually did matter a little. At least it was the there was the courage of saying it to their faces in a way where their reactions were had to be filmed. It's also it's also not trying to dunk. It's

It's not trying to create like a viral moment. It's like genuinely upsetting to them to get like reminded of like what it means to be human. Yeah. And like, maybe that's more important than trying to get your like Katie Porter top 10 funniest moments in Congress, like a compilation. Yeah.

Exactly. Yeah. And to be very clear, if you didn't catch this, the right reverend Marianne Budd, B-U-D-D-E, who was the Episcopal Bishop of Washington during a church service where Trump and Vance and basically everybody in the new government.

was sitting, made a direct plea. Quote from, this is from an NBC Washington article, referencing Trump's belief that he was saved by God from assassination. Bud said, you have felt the providential hand of a loving God. In the name of our God, I ask you to have mercy upon the people in our country who are scared now.

And then she referenced specifically transgender people, queer people, people in democratic families, independent families who are frightened right now about what the new administration means, as well as migrants. And she made a point of saying, like, the vast majority of whom are not in any way criminals. And yeah, like, regardless of whether or not they have the right paperwork. Yeah.

There was rage on Vance's face, which is part of why I'm like, that's an act of actual courage. There's been one Republican representative who said that she needed to be deported, Bud. Jesus. Born in New Jersey. So deported back to New Jersey. Yeah. Representative Mike Collins of Georgia. Yeah.

So one of your guys, Gare. Oh, thanks. Are you from Georgia? Well, no, but I live in Georgia. They live there now. And as someone who lives in Georgia, the only people that I think should be deported back to New Jersey are the Costco guy and his kid. Get them out. Send them back. Now, I do think we should be deporting large numbers of people to New Jersey just because my old boss and friend Daniel O'Brien lives there and I want to fuck with him a little bit, make the traffic worse. Like...

See how you deal with that, Danny boy.

No, it was, I think, the most useful thing I've seen yet. It's still, like, largely symbolic, but, like... At least someone took a big public risk, you know? Yeah. Courage. Yeah. I think it's the writer Sarah Kendozer who has this line that I always think of. If you can't be brave, be kind. I think that, like, people who we see doing big acts of bravery right now, like, that's... I mean, it's just, there are so few of them, and...

I think especially when I look at like the tech leaders, they have so much fucking money. Somebody said on Blue Sky, what is the point of having fuck you money if you never say fuck you to anybody? Right. Like the way that these people turned out to be such yellow bellied cowards is wild to me. And so people actually having conviction and actually speaking to power, I think we should be lifting that up wherever it happens.

Yeah, I can think of like one tech guy with a lot of money who's turned out to have any kind of a backbone. And it's the guy who made that fire watching app that everyone in California is using right now. Watch duty, who's basically said stuff along the lines of like, I don't know. I see all these other guys who got rich in tech talking about going to Mars. And I think it's much more useful to try to help people survive on Earth. Something along those lines and has made a critical like it is a critical life saving piece of technology that actually helps.

is what we should hope for from tech, you know? Anyway, Bridget, what else did you want to kind of make sure we got into today? Well, this is going to sound a bit random, but I have to just make sure that this gets in there because, you know, I'm talking about the impact of Trump's inauguration and what the next four years will look like for

you know, not just for people nationally, but folks right here in D.C. where this is happening in our backyard. And I have to give it up for the service industry folks of D.C. the last couple of days because they, oh, my God, I like have heard horror stories. And I just I guess that's what I mean is that don't forget that there are real people who have to like put up with these people's

bullshit and do it with a smile or they might get fired. And, you know, in Adams Morgan, which is like pretty close to where I live, a woman at an Irish bar had to be removed by a staffer because she was screaming white power at the bar. Like these people do not get paid enough to deal with this. And they are like the backbone of our city. So I just wanted to shout them out, especially since, you know, Trump switched up the inauguration because of the cold climate.

question mark. And so a lot more of these people were just sort of wandering around the district on inauguration who otherwise would have been confined to like a very specific neighborhood downtown. And so they were going into our bars, going into our restaurants. And yeah, I just really feel for my industry folks who had to deal with this. You know, they're not paid enough, but they really are the backbone of our city. Hell yeah.

You know, I started this conversation talking about all of the horrible things that Trump has said about D.C. and how he's going to take it over federally. And like, you know, he has said, like, we will take over the horribly run capital of our nation and Washington, clean it up and rebuild the capital. So there's it's no longer a nightmare of murder and crime, but rather hellhole. I know this like hellhole where like people live and raise their families and go to parks and ride bikes and have great times. Yeah. You know, I.

I had a chance to talk to the mayor about this, and I will say our mayor, Muriel Bowser, is not convinced that any of this will happen. She is saying, like, you know, I think that Trump says a lot of things. I think at the end of the day, he is probably not going to mess with D.C.'s home rule. And so I just wanted to say that if you're if you're in D.C. and you're listening and you're thinking like, what does Trump, you know, mean for D.C.? Are all these big threats that he has made going to come true?

All I can tell you is that our mayor does not think it is likely. So if that is useful to you, I hope it brings you some comfort. Oddly enough, one thing that's given me comfort is like Trump has twice in the last day, both when talking about Gaza and when talking about North Korea, weirdly enough, gone under digressions about how good it is a place to build condos and the degree to which he's still focused on like real estate deals as opposed to the broader fascist project.

is hopeful just because like he is a bottleneck through which a lot of this has to cover. And he is clearly not as personally obsessed with every aspect of this as guys like Stephen Miller, right? Like he even makes fun of Miller a little bit for that kind of stuff. So there's a degree to which like, well, his own personal eccentricities, there's aspects of this that might slow down. This motherfucker is not out here trying to genuinely govern. Like, come on. No.

So in some ways that is heartening of like, oh, well, he's going to like do his scams and whatever, whatever. Like if he were to actually take over D.C., that's an incredible amount of work and labor. And I don't think he's got it in him. So maybe in some ways some of these threats will like fly under the radar. I don't know. Yeah. Guess we'll see. Guess we'll see. Bridget, where can people find you?

Well, you can listen to my podcast. There are no girls on the Internet about the intersection of identity and tech. And you can follow me on Instagram at Bridget Marie in D.C. All right. Find Bridget. Follow Bridget. And follow somebody smart. I don't know who they are. Figure that out. Good luck. Godspeed. Fuck them if they can't take a joke. Lately on the NPR Politics Podcast, we're talking about a big question.

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John Stewart is back at The Daily Show, and he's bringing his signature wit and insight straight to your ears with The Daily Show Ears Edition podcast. Dive into John's unique take on the biggest topics in politics, entertainment, sports, and more. Joined by the sharp voices of the show's correspondents and contributors. And with extended interviews and exclusive weekly headline roundups, this podcast gives you content you won't find anywhere else.

Ready to laugh and stay informed? Listen on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. We want to speak out, we want to raise awareness, and we want this to stop. Wow, very powerful.

I'm Ellie Flynn and I'm an investigative journalist. When a group of models from the UK wanted my help, I went on a journey deep into the heart of the adult entertainment industry. I really wanted to be a playboy model. Lingerie, topless. I said, yes, please. Because at the centre of this murky world is an alleged predator.

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The richest man in the world does a Nazi salute while giving a speech at the inauguration of the new president. He does a second one. In another age, it is the most significant event in world history. It's maybe the third most fascist event of the day. NBC re-uploads the address and cuts away from the sig hail it broadcasted live. You refresh your timeline. Everyone is arguing about whether it was even a Nazi salute. You watch the video. It's a Nazi salute.

The second one is a Nazi salute. None of the headlines will say that Elon Musk did a Nazi salute. The articles won't say it either. You can't tell whether they've been cowed to submission by the threat of a defamation lawsuit or if they're already running cover for the new regime. You scroll through your timeline. They made my gender illegal. They tried to repeal the 14th Amendment through executive order to end birthright citizenship. You can't follow it. It's too much.

the world has become a spectacle, and that spectacle is trying to kill you. Welcome to It Could Happen Here, I'm your host, Neil Wong. In societies where modern conditions of production prevail, all of life presents itself as an immense accumulation of spectacles. So wrote the French social theorist Guy Debord in his seminal 1967 work, The Society of the Spectacle.

Debord is typically written off as just another theorist of early mass media, and today his work is generally confined to the art world. Which is, to be fair, largely a demonstration of the fact that nobody who talks about him has ever gotten past the opening paragraphs of the book, and made it to the part where he demands the formation of armed workers' councils. But this is the age of the spectacle, in ways more nightmarish than Debord could ever have predicted.

His elaborate metaphor is rendered thuddingly literal. Quote, "...everything that was directly lived has moved away into representation." And indeed, living has been replaced by the image of living. This phenomena is called Instagram. The spectacle, Society of the Spectacle opens, "...is not a collection of images, but a social relation among people mediated by images."

Today, we literally call the collection of images we use to relate to each other social media. Quote, "...lived reality is materially invaded by the contemplation of the spectacle, while simultaneously absorbing the spectacular order, giving it positive cohesiveness. A reality TV star, the old human symbol of the spectacle, in which everything that was directly lived has been transformed into a representation, is now a president the second time."

Driven by streamers and influencers and podcasters who stand as the new human symbols of the spectacle. They have invaded real society and now rule it directly. In the 1960s, the debate was whether you could ignore the spectacle because it wasn't real. Debord's elegant solution was that contemplating the spectacle makes it real. None of that matters anymore.

You can't ignore the spectacle because it's here. It has physically invaded the world. Donald Trump is the president. The richest man on earth is Nazi saluting Elon Musk. The autonomous force Debord described as a spectacle no longer operates at the abstract level. It is the president of the United States. Everything is rendered thuddingly, transcendently literal.

In DeBoer's usage, the spectacle is the management of society by mediating people's social relations through images. This sounds complicated, but on an intuitive level, you already understand this. You and I relate to each other through the one-way mirror of a podcast app. You relate to others by reacting to their TikTok videos. You watch the bombs fall on Palestine on Twitter. You relate to each other and the world through images. And that relation...

is a system of control. As Debord describes it, that mediation takes you out of the real world, a world that you can actually change with your actions, and thrusts you into the world of the spectacle, a world where reality is, quote, an object of mere contemplation. Today, we call this the discourse. The work that inspired the 1968 revolutions called it the spectacle. Why does it feel like this? The rot, the decay, the

The unreality of the moment that consumes you until one day Donald Trump is president and the next he's president again. DeBoer has a simple answer. It's because the entire political, economic, and technological system is designed to make you isolated, afraid, and alone. Quote, technology is based on isolation and the technical process isolates in turn.

From the automobile to television, all of the goods selected by the spectacular system are also weapons for a constant reinforcement of the condition of isolated, lonely crowds. Later, he writes, what binds the spectators together is no more than an irreversible relation at the very center, which maintains their isolation. The spectacle reunites the separate, but reunites it as separate. This is

is why the world feels like an endless doom scroll. Instagram, TikTok, live streaming, this podcast, they're all based on isolation. Look at what happened to social media during the isolation of the pandemic, how it came to consume even more of our lives with the promise of connection that simply rendered us more and more and more isolated. The spectacle, given technological form in the social media app,

turns us into a mass in which we are all somehow terrifyingly alone. We're not people who form a crowd that could do anything from celebrate a holiday to burn the third precinct. We're spectators. We're listeners. We're viewers. We're chat. Not living, but commenting on the image of living. The spectacle, the app, the image mediates our social relations with each other

and ensures that together in a lonely crowd, we rot in isolation and do only the two things the capitalist system needs us to do, work and consume. Atomized individuals are the ideal subject of capitalism, the basis on which everything is built. You entered into a free contract to live under a state, says a social theorist.

You, the individual, gave up your labor to your boss voluntarily in another free contract between individuals, says the economist. Do not organize with anyone else to get paid more for that labor, or God help you try to create a system where you aren't forced to sell your labor every day. That's cheating, says the politician. Your job is to sell your labor, buy these products, and comment on a world in which someone else is acting.

The isolation of the spectacle ensures that we're incapable of collective action, not only because we're incapable of forming a collective, we're not even engaging in the world in which action can take place. The extent of the advance of the spectacle today is such that the unfolding of the economic system is designed to turn every part of you into a commodity, not just your labor, but your identity, your beliefs.

Everything that you are is sold to everyone else's spectacle. And in turn, everything that defines you becomes the spectacle itself.

In a world where there is no action, just the image of someone else's action somewhere else, a commercialized political identity is much easier to adopt than actually doing politics. You don't have to do politics. You can just put on a red hat and watch the man on TV make the liberals angry. You don't need relations with your family. You have Facebook groups. Your relations to the world are relations to images.

David Graeber wrote that the ultimate hidden truth of the world is that it is something that we make and could just as easily make differently. But the second, slightly less ultimate hidden truth is that almost everything we think of as objects, money, capital, commodities, are really just relations between people abstracted out onto something physical.

We interact with each other by using objects as forms of command. What do you think money is? Instead of having real, equal social relations. And that makes it all the more dire that the social relations that compose this world are no longer even relations with each other at all, but relations with images. The spectacle is a strategy of control. As Debord writes, quote, "...where the real world changes into simple images."

The simple images become real beings and effective motivations of hypnotic behavior. The spectacle is a tendency to make one see the world by various means of specialized mediations. It can no longer be grasped directly. As the spectacle advances, even rebellion is reduced to meaningless attacks on the symbols of power, never touching power itself.

But when the insurgents manage to penetrate parliaments, presidential palaces, and other headquarters of institutions, as in Ukraine, in Libya, or in Wisconsin, it's only to discover empty places, that is, empty of power and furnished without any taste. So wrote the Invisible Committee in the distant Halcyon days of 2014. It could have been written yesterday.

Nine years later, the insurgents, now on the right, produced their masterpiece. Brazil's even more ineffectual cousin of January 6th, known forever as January 8th. On that day in 2023, for reasons that are almost totally incomprehensible to anyone whose mind has not been utterly melted by prolonged and terrible exposure to the spectacle, supporters of defeated President Jair Bolsonaro stormed Brazil's capital.

Bolsonaro, of course, had already fled to Florida. The presidential palace, Congress, and the Supreme Court were literally empty when the protesters took them. There was nothing to be won, nothing to be gained. The protesters' vain hopes that simply seizing the symbols of power would trigger a military coup to remove Lula and restore the Bolsonaro regime evaporated like a morning dew, leaving nothing in their wake.

January 6th, at least, attacked the site of the ritual of power while the ritual was technically in progress. The attack was, of course, designed to stop the certification of the election. Congress was at least in session, even if that attack, too, was the culmination of a series of ineffectual reruns of the Brook Brothers riots in which right-wing political operatives did manage to steal an election by stopping the vote count in Florida in 2000.

On January 8th, no one was even there. So how do we get out? Lashing out at the symbols of power is pointless. You can't ignore them either. Elon's Nazi salute really does represent something. The opening of any solution is to go to the source. Trump and Elon are symptoms, not the disease. The spectacle is born of capitalism.

It's a management strategy designed to suppress any attempt to end or even rearrange the terms of the class system. Trump and Elon were likewise produced by two settler colonies. They are, in their own ways, the manifestation of the evil of colonialism and racism.

DeBoer's solution to these problems, of course, well, the solutions that people bother to read. There is a staggeringly racist section of this work about how time passes in China that I simply cannot recommend. But DeBoer's solution was workers' councils. And he got his wish the next year during the factory occupations of 1968.

It nearly worked, but the last workers' council fell a quarter of a century ago in Argentina, and there's no sign that the workers' council, the definitive fighting form of the working class for over a century, is coming back. In some ways, this is liberating. 170 years ago, Marx wrote this in the 18th premier of Louis Bonaparte.

His own response to a nation's nationalist attempt to restore its former glory by invoking the name of a previous leader. The social revolution of the 19th century cannot take its poetry from the past, but only from the future. It cannot begin with itself before it has stripped away all superstitions about the past. In the days and weeks and months, and God help us all years to come, we're going to have to assemble a new fighting form.

And no one knows what it looks like yet. We could, perhaps, look at the airport protests from the first months of the original Trump administration, where masses of people, including a very young Mia who had not quite realized what gender she was, occupied airports all across the country to stop the implementation of Trump's Muslim ban by physically forcing the government to release the people who had detained in the airports.

The power of those protests was that they directly located the site where power was operating, the airport, and took them. The weakness of those protests was that people went home. And they went home because they had been told time and time and time again by the ACLU and by other legal organizations that the fight was over, that they could leave, and that the Muslim bans would be defeated by the courts.

Most of you lived through it. Some of you remember. The Muslim ban was never defeated by the courts. It could possibly have been defeated in those moments. It wasn't. The contest was taken away from the real side of power and into a domain largely ruled by the ruling class. But we can learn from both January 8th and the airport protests. Marching to a building doesn't guarantee you're actually targeting power.

You must understand how the system is operating before you attempt to go up its works. A thousand miniature January 8th's is no solution at all. You must do the hard work of sifting through the tangle of rumors and lies and attempting to work out the actual structure of repression. It starts with community self-defense. It starts with actually engaging with each other.

instead of the mediated images generated by an algorithm. You want to break out of the spectacle? Talk to the people around you. Talk to the trans people and the immigrants in your life and find out what they actually need. Figure out the concrete steps you can take to organize the people around you and the steps you can take to lift them out of their despair. We're not going to develop a new fighting form glued to our phones, alone, in a digital crowd.

We're going to figure it out by talking to each other, by acting in the real world, not by being rendered passive observers of the spectacle. We're going to do it by finding the real places where power operates and taking them. And above all, we're going to do it together.

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