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Care your platter with Wisconsin White cheddar cheese bites and write a wave of melty goodness. Order ahead at Long John Sobers.com. Fish yeah! Built on 250 years of Kentucky hemp tradition, Cormorant hemp is America's most trusted source for full spectrum CBD products. Sourced exclusively from Kentucky grown hemp flowers co-founded by Jim Higdon author of the Cormorant Bread Mafia. Cormorant hemp is Kentucky proud, family-owned and they offer 30-day satisfaction guarantee on every order. Questions about CBD? Let the experts at Cormorant Hemp take care of you. And exclusively for podcast listeners, enter code podcast.com to check out and get 30% off your first purchase when you visit CormorantHemp.com. And don't worry, it's legal. 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 gonna be nothing new here for you, but you can make your own decisions. Ah, it could happen here is the podcast that you're listening to. I'm Robert Evans, the person that you're listening to and one of the people who does this podcast boy, what a what a glorious introduction that was. Let me also introduce some human beings who you might know. First we have Chris and we have James, our correspondence in the field joining us today also is James's Spanish Civil War, Aramose and the Gaunt. Yep, that's right. Yeah, I'm very happy to join you guys. It's gonna make contributions throughout the yeah, yeah, I'm glad the episode is gonna. It's an antique bolt action rifle served in three world wars. Yeah, that's right. Yeah, and it's about to it's about to kick off. Yeah, this one now, which it might be it might be two in the L column for the most in the gun. Yeah, it's it's it's it's it's had a it's served a mixed bag. Yeah. Anyway, we're recording this the day of the elections. So everybody's having a horrible one. I'm happy to fire. Yeah, yeah, I did. I'm still hoping my my tech nine comes in before. Oregon votes on its next ballot measure. Anyway, today I wanted to talk a little bit about something that I've been thinking about kind of constantly, which is. It's called effective altruism and it's the short end of this is that like it is a style of thinking about charitable giving that Elon Musk in particular has recently highlighted as like how he thinks about things it's very popular with the billionaire set who are who are deeply invested in getting people to think that they're saving the world right. The folks who want to be seen as like looking ahead and and and set protecting the future of mankind and saving the world. But not doing it through things like paying, you know, more taxes and supporting, you know, less money being in politics and all that kind of jazz like not not anything that would would actually harm their their personal ability to exercise power. So it's gotten kind of attacked recently because it's associated with guys like musk and because he is markedly less popular now than he was let's say 10 years ago. But I wanted to talk about it. Yeah, I wanted to talk because effective altruism, which is an actual movement. There's like organizations that espouse this. There's hundreds of millions of dollars in charitable giving that gets handed out under the ages of effective altruism. And as it heads up, like most of it's fine, like most of it's charities to like get lead out of water and stuff. Like it's not like effective altruism is not comprehensively some sort of like scam by the wealthy. It's more of a honest theory about how charitable giving ought to work that has been adopted by the hyper wealthy is justification for fucked up shit and married to something called long termism, which we will be talking about in a little bit. I want to talk about where the concept of effective altruism comes from. If you read articles about this thing, most people who study it will say that it kind of this got started as a modern movement in 1971 with an Australian philosopher named Peter Singer and singer wrote an article titled famine affluence and morality. I think it was actually published in 1972. I don't know one of the two, the 71 or 72 and the essay basically argued that there's no difference morally between your obligation to help a person dying on the street in front of your house. Like if a dude gets hit by a car in front of your house, you are not more morally obligated to help him than you are morally obligated to help people who are dying in Syria. And obviously like there's a version of truth to that, which is that we're all responsible for each other and internationalism is the only actual path away from the nightmare. And when we do things like ignore authoritarians massacring their people, it inevitably comes back to affect us and like fuel the growth of an authoritarian nightmare domestically. That is very true. But also there's a fundamental silliness in it because one reason why there is a moral difference between helping a person dying in the street in front of you and somebody who's in danger in, I don't know, Southern China is that like you can immediately help the person in front of your house. Right. Like if somebody gets hit by you have the ability to immediately render life saving eight. It's actually quite difficult to help somebody who is, for example, getting shot at by the government in Tibet. Right. Like not that you don't don't have a moral responsibility to that person, but your moral responsibility to actually immediately take action when somebody is bleeding out is higher than your responsibility to try to figure out how to help people in distant parts of the globe. This is more nuanced than I think a lot of especially like rich assholes like to, it's more nuanced than like the, I shouldn't say rich assholes. What's the problem with this is that it's the, this is the kind of revelation like when you start talking this way that that feeds really well into a fucking Ted talk. It's a perfect fix for that morality. Whereas the reality is like a lot more nuanced where and number one, it's also like, well, the kind of help that you would render to somebody who's been hit by a car in front of your house is very different and requires really different resources than the kind of help you would give people in say again like Syria who are being murdered by their government. Right. If somebody gets hit by a car in front of your house, you run out with a fucking turn a kit and a bleed kit and you call 911, right. Those are the resources that you can immediately use. If Bashar al-Assad is firing poison gas at protesters in, you know, Aleppo, well, your, your stop the bleed kit is not going to help with that one way or the other, right. So it's, it's foolish to compare them. Anyway, Singer did and his essay was a big hit. It's often called like a sleeper hit for, for young people who were kind of getting into the, you know, the charity industrial complex or at least were considering it. And then I found an interview with one named Julia Wise who currently works at the Center for Effective Altruism. And she was a started out as a social work like to give you an idea of the kind of people who got into this when she read Wises article. She was a social worker. She kind of fell in love with the concept and when it started becoming a thing and like the 70s and 80s, it was as she described, quote, a bunch of philosophers and their friends and nobody had a bunch of money. And then when Singer put it out kind of a way, like a way of people kind of debating how to think about charity, which is, is fine. People should always be like exploring stuff like that. So it's not, I don't want to be like going after singer to well, I do a little bit because singer after kind of his movement has a couple of decades to grow. And then he ends up doing a TED talk and the TED talk winds up kind of electrifying a very specific chunk of the American techno set. And you can see kind of in some of the writing on this like the way in which his talking about sort of the morality of charity has gotten flattened over the years, quote, which is the better thing to do to provide a guide dog to one blind American or cure 2000 people of blindness and developing countries. Which is like, I don't know both there's resources to do both. We again, if you, for example, in the United States, where it attacks the billionaire class and corporations a lot more, you could provide that blind person in the United States with free healthcare and a way that many countries do. And we could also continue or even expand charitable giving. Maybe if we were to do stuff like spend less money on our military again, it's like a false choice like it's worth. But of course it's because the reason this choice is there is because they're thinking about. They're thinking about helping people purely in the form of like nobulous oblige charity, right? They're thinking about periods like rich, like things that get improved when rich people put money into them. So obviously we should help the, you know, one of these groups before the other because it's more effective and yada yada yada. Yeah, well, I think I think that was one of the things that like there's a second way you can look at the original sort of problem of. We have the same ethical responsibility if someone you could sit by a car or somebody's on the other side of the world is that like the other way you can look at that is like I don't care about what's happening is someone on the other side of the world. So I don't have to care about this person to get back car. And that seems like. Yeah, these people are doing it's like well. Yeah, I don't really have to care about this person here because there's something over there. Yeah, I can see like how this lines out with some of these like like bigger like meta ethical kind of perspectives on what equality is and what like your ethical obligations are. But then yeah, it seems to just kind of be like a very clear like very clearly pre-slope to making kind of mouth use you excuses for doing fuck off. Yep, that's that's where the story's heading so good early 2000s. He does like a TED talk, you know the momentum around this idea starts to build. And it really gets a shot in the arm in 2013 with the work of an author named Eric Friedman. Friedman's new book or Friedland's book at the time that was new was called reinventing philanthropy a framework for more effective giving. And he kind of he kind of extends the arguments that singers making one of the things that he does is he he contrasts what St. Jude's children's research hospitals are doing to like research children's medical or like illness is that kids suffer and treatments for them with the malogy provincial hospital in Angola. And he kind of contrasts to patients who are being served at the different hospitals for life threatening conditions and concludes quote I'd probably also be very angry at the donors who are continually funding St. Jude and leaving malogy provincial woefully under resource. Why are the patients of St. Jude so much more worthy of life? Yeah, if we put a ridiculous way to think about it. And that's fucking asses and I and the fact that like many of the people who are doing these fucking TED talks and contributing to this like a global tech class at the same people who are making fucking millions of dollars of the pharmaceutical industry, which continues to neglect the diseases that people like in the colonial periphery suffer from because there's no profit in selling them drugs and instead you're selling boldness girls to be in America right like yes, we can I mean like you you you could if we just if every single person who's been had a who's gotten a TED talk had all of their wealth expropriated tomorrow we could fund both of these hospitals exactly it is yes, yeah, it will be better. It's fundamentally a kind of obscenity to look at pharmaceutical company CEOs making hundreds of millions and billions of dollars selling people often literal poison and jacking up the price of things like insulin to look at these tech CEOs accumulating tens of billions of dollars and to say donations to this children's hospital are robbing an Angolan hospital. Yes, so I wouldn't be paying my taxes. Yeah, why don't you go fuck yourself? Yeah, and anyway, like, but this is like you can see who this appeals to, right? If you've like the kind of people who loved the Frekenomics books, which are bullshit regressive, statistics, can I can I tell you that? Okay, so what are my professors at you Chicago was a political science guy? Or I guess you public policy and there's a thing there's a thing the Frekenomics guy wrote where he was trying to prove that money doesn't actually influence influence like this actually influence the left is what is your bangers. Yeah, and you know what might my professor wrote wrote a paper about that, which is that, you know, again, this is a sort of perfect example of how dumb this guy is that he doesn't this is how Congress think right like they they when they go into a field, they go in thinking they already know everything and they can prove. So remember they want because the thing this guy doesn't understand right is that like, and this is the thing most people in the US do not understand about how Congress works is that like all of the shit that's happening on the floor of Congress, all of those votes that is not that is not real Congress, right, that is fake Congress nothing, nothing important to actually all of the important stuff in Congress happens in committees. And so you can't figure out whether money is doing anything by measuring its effect on like votes on the floor because floor votes are bullshit. Every all of the important stuff has already by the time a floor vote happens all the important political stuff has already happened. And so he did this whole thing where he was you know he had this great I get this great metric called like I got it was called like like the the the the the dairy cow coefficients which is like measuring like how someone should vote versus like how many dairy cows ran it turns out, you know, if you look at what these people do in committee no yeah, hey look it turns out a lot of money is unbelievably effective, but because this fucking guy had like this is something that like like this sort of distinction between Congress like on the floor and Congress in committee like there's a president who's they'm forgetting who has his famous line that like Congress and committee is Congress at work Congress on the floor is Congress at players like that like it's like this is just like basic shit that if you know literally anything about how a field works you know, yeah, if you want to if you want to if you want to a good breakdown of why the Freakonomics guys full of shit Michael Hobbes and Peter Sham Shiri, I think is this last name have a new podcast called if books could kill and they break down with like citations and everything like why everything in that book is horseshit but like the reason why it's the learning I'll disagree with you on Chris is I don't think he's an idiot I think he's very intelligent and I think the thing that he's smart to do is he recognizes that there's a specific type of person and engineers and programmers are very likely to be this type of person who kind of fundamentally like their oppositional defiant if somebody if something if people say like well this is good or this is bad they're going to take the want to take the opposite stance and if you can provide the way to like feel like they're enlightened and smart and actually looking at the data by doing it then they'll take the opposite stance on stuff like it's bad to let people by elections or it's good to fund children's hospitals just because somebody's made them feel smart for being an asshole that's what the Freakonomics guy does Malcolm Gladwell does a subtler version of this as a general rule and that's what that that fucking Freedman is doing in this this book in 2013 I found a good review of it in the Stanford social innovation review that is pretty scathing like surprisingly scathing considering it's it's written by a bunch of like Stanford nerds this approach amounts to little more than charitable imperialism whereby my just causes just to one degree or another is a waste of precious resources this approach is not informed giving and I think that that does a pretty good job of a summarizing what I think is fucked up about it there's another thing that's really messed up which is that one of the conclusions that they gets come that they come to here is that they don't recommend or there's an organization called gilvewell that kind of gets gets formed as a result of the book Freedman rights and they recommend not to like not to donate money to disaster assistance in the wake of the Japanese tsunami and opposed disaster relief donations in general because quote and this is from Freedman most of those killed by disasters could not have been saved by donations which is number one like that's the donations are about like rebuilding communities generally it's not like about the saving lives usually it's about like well all of the structure was destroyed and it must be rebuilt but okay got it's annoying because it's like it's not like there's not good critiques of like specifically what was like the red cross oh it's all fucked up the every single yes I yeah I have but their critique is like the worst possible like yeah the actual critiques are that every single large charitable organization is fucked up and if you go and talk to people on the ground they will bitch like if you go to fucking war zones people bitch more about NGOs than the folks shooting at them half the time yeah like yeah they bitch about it being inefficient about the stuff they're given being like bad quality or like um like nonsense like just being handed out to be handed out which is a thing that happens sometimes and they bitch about well paid aid workers staying in hotels and showing up for a couple of hours to like do a photo op yeah there's also more insensitive like you know that's not to say none of it's useful like for example as many complaints as people have everyone I've known who has been in a place where medicine songs frontier slash doctors without borders has operated while they have complaints about doctors without borders are like it's good that there's more doctors here we fucking need them and you know it's like the UNHCR plenty of things to complain about UNHCR every refugee camp I go to also people have fucking water filters and tents and shit because of UNHCR which isn't nothing it's a damn site more than nothing and it's a damn site more than any of these long termest motherfuckers are doing for people who are I don't know displaced by war yeah and it like I some of the things that they're doing is like this is very strange kind of attempt to calculate and create markets for human life and human suffering right which you see a lot if you work like I've worked in nonprofit I've worked in disaster response I've seen some of these things on the ground and it you see these bizarre fucking decisions being made by by someone in an office who is likely never been on the ground of these situations and it inevitably results in it's within these big organizations like the Red Cross and MSF but I'm also on a governmental level right with people not having the autonomy to respond in a situation to reduce human suffering and instead to be told to do something which is supposedly evidence based based on someone who's looked at the wrong criteria and come to the wrong conclusion hundreds of miles away and it's incredibly fucking yeah it's bureaucrats right and it's like we've we've we've somehow managed to create like the absolute worst possible nightmare system of you have a bunch of government bureaucrats and then you also have a sort of private so we have you have we have like different we're watching a collision of different kinds of private sector bureaucrats like you have you have your sort of NGO bureaucrats you have and then you know and then you have these billionaires who are also just fucking bureaucrats and all of them are just doing box ticking and we get like just the absolute worst nightmare fusion of horrible bureaucracy and capitalism which is a great way to run programs to have people not die and like so much of this comes from what that the whole like Frekenomics thing to me strikes me like we didn't like you said reading the Wikipedia are to the back subject and then applying trying to find out where you can apply a market to it and then posting that as a solution it's stuff we have the episodes were dropping on bastards well the week before this episode will air or about like why the rent is so damn high and one of the complaints I have is that there's a specific class of media people who the only answer they will accept is because there's not enough multifamily zoning which is just a part of why the rent is so damn high and reducing it to just that ignores the price fixing software that tens of millions of Americans like landlords use it ignores shit like Airbnb it ignores like the fucking problems in the construction industry the lingering effects of the 2008 crash it's very frustrating and it's the these kind of like Frekenomics guys like to do the same thing like the the fucking Frekenomics student particular one of the things he got famous for is being like you know the drop in crime in the 90s this unprecedented fallen crime was due to abortion which zero I will say again zero people who are experts on the topic of crime in America agree with what they will say is actually there's a shitload of different things that contributed to the climbing crime and there's a good chance that abortion had an impact a bigger impact was probably getting the lead out of like reducing environmental let although that gets overstated to there's all sorts of different shit including like air conditioning just the fact that like yeah now more people have air conditioning and guess when violence is highest in the summer when people are stuck around each other outside and like all sorts of you to get away computer games to be doing crimes because they go something else to do it's it you want to if you're going to be doing the kind of like if you're going to be doing Ted talk fucking public works philosophy then it helps to just be able to like make one big Malcolm Gladwell style fucking reveal anyway that's how all these people exist and how all of their morality is informed after 2013 freedman is kind of like followed up by this guy named William McCaskill who was currently the he's a Scottish philosopher which God it's easy to get called a philosopher these days and he is he is a personal friend of Elon Musk when a must test messages got released as part of that court filing some of them were with McCaskill who was considering like putting a bunch of money into buying Twitter they and ultimately decided not to I think because they just like it seems like McCaskill just didn't trust that must kind of he sort of plan so he is I will say this not an idiot but he's wrong in ways that are are deeply fucked up and he wrote a book that is currently a bestseller it was published in August called what we owe the future and the gist of this is that like it's merging this kind of effective altruism with what's called long termism which is this argument that morally we have to consider the impact of our actions as not just on people alive to David and future people which is fine there's actually a lot to that idea but the way it always works out is we can't pay attention to problems that people are suffering now we have to we have to work on saving the world from these bigger problems and again it's almost it's almost exclusively used as an argument for guys like Musk to like well we shouldn't tax billionaires out of existence because I you know I see this with clarity the problems that we face and the long term solution is for me to be able to push for these specific things that I think are the only way to save humanity right I'm getting ahead of myself a little bit here let's talk about McCaskill again when he was at Oxford he's an Oxford boy James look at that we've had some bangus yeah he started a group called giving what we can in 2009 and members were supposed to give away 10% of what they earned to the most cost effective charities possible which is fine there's nothing wrong with that idea basically and it was like as supposed to be basically a lifelong promise that like you know we're all because you're soon Oxford people a lot of them are going to wind up making very good money you know as we move into our careers this will be a more and more influential kind of giving but yeah drop the ball if they'd have me there that yeah those meetings might have gone a little bit different living in his car yeah over time though he's kind of moved into he's merged this and again the whole effective altruism movement a lot of it does start reasonably with people being like are these charities were donating to working how can we make sure they're effective like what can we do to make giving work better which is again perfectly fine but very quickly gets married to this kind of long termist thinking and they focus instead of stuff like for example funding hospitals stuff like preventing an artificial intelligence from killing everybody or like sending people to distant planets which are like cool and sci fi and everything but also deeply unrealistic I'll say it right now our our threat is not that an AI kills us all there's certainly a threat that different kind of artificial intelligences are used by authoritarians to make life worse for everybody but by the way Peter Teal is a big backer of effective altruism he's one of the people building that fucking AI this is a guy who wrote that thing about earning to give right like that he was like this is guy who did that yeah okay I'm familiar with this is a promise to never take more than $31,000 or something and then come over the course like of a year in his life and give it to charity he gives all his book profits to charity but he also runs an organization that is spending more and more on keeping its people comfortable because I guess he doesn't have the money personally to spend anyway I think there's some sketchy shit there yeah this whole idea and I'm sure we're going to get to this right like it it it completely overlooks our obligation morally to agitate for structural change right like it says like if you can become a billionaire through whatever bullshit evil fucking exploitative grift you can and they give 90% of that away you're still perpetuating a system in which one grifter gets rich and thousands of people die without fucking clean water but that's okay because you also donated some water filters or whatever like it's not okay yeah it makes me very angry actually yeah yeah it makes me angry too and it's one of those things if you look at like here's all the charities that McCaskell and his organization are putting hundreds of millions of dollars into they're not all bad a lot of them are good and I'm glad that money is going there but there's always this strain of deeply unsettling logic running through it now I want to quote from a time article that I think kind of gets in a very subtle way has this guy's number when I start thinking in practice if you've got if you've got some things that look robustly good in both the short and the long term that definitely makes you feel a lot better about something that is only good from a very long term perspective he says this year for example he personally donated to the let exposure elimination project which aims to end childhood let exposure and the atlas fellowship which supports talented high school students around the world to work on pressing problems not all issues are equally tractable but McCaskell still cares about a range when we met an ox for it he expressed concern for the ongoing political crisis in Sri Lanka though admitted he probably wouldn't tweet about it the answer he believes is to be honest about it in philanthropy big donors typically choose causes based on their personal passions and ultra subjective approach McCaskell says where everything is seemingly justifiable on the basis of doing some good he doesn't think that's tenable if you can save someone from drowning or ten people from dying in a birding building what should you do he proposes it is not a morally appropriate response to say well I'm particularly offended about drowning so I'm going to save one person from drowning rather than the ten people from burning and that's exactly the situation we find ourselves in and like no it is not that is nonsense because among other things if you're a random person and you have a choice between saving someone from drowning or ten people from dying in a burning building well you actually probably don't because saving people from drowning is a really difficult technical skill which is why people usually die when they try to rescue other folks who are drowning the guy the creator of you geo died trying to say the guy from drowning it's really hard and dangerous and also so is rescuing people from a burning building which is why we have firefighters and guess what a lot of firefighters may not be very good at saving people from drowning because they have not trained for that they are different skills these are both problems but they're different skills but what if you instead spend that time buying some Tesla stocks and then you sold them and instead invested in I don't know if something that stops water from from around people it's a nice like the problem we have are are none of the problems I'm going to say right now 0% of the problems we have are the result of some sort of like lifeguard firefighters standing in between a burning building and like a yacht race gone wrong and going oh god no yeah it's like the trade doing the trotty problem and he's just trying to do the trotty problem it's funny that he's talked about Sri Lanka too because it's like this is the perfect example this is the perfect example of a political crisis that is like completely intractable to all of these like none of these people don't any the charities can like do literally anything about that because that's actually you know like this like the crisis of Sri Lanka is a is a is a is a both both is a is both is both a sort of short term crisis of this like you know like utterly horrific genocide of political elite and then also was sort of long to crisis about like the sort of structural position of like specific countries and sort of the like global colonial system this is not something any of these people can solve the only thing the only way any of these people could solve this is if people of Sri Lanka like just expropriated them yeah but you know but he because because these people like because Sri Lankans do not access to this guy and like six guns right yeah there's no there's no way you know he can just sort of sit there in his chair going well it's a crisis I'm going to tweet about it I'm not going to do about it he's not going to be about it I can't read about yeah I was I was simply talked to newspapers about it and so it's weeding what what I would say is that like here's the actual solution to the stupid problem this guy came up with well if we were to tax all of the billionaires to the point that they weren't billionaires and then put that into a massive new like works progress fund that instead of like just building national parks provided like rental assistance to millions of Americans in exchange for them learning how to fight fires and getting basic life scavenger and getting trained in things like that so that they could deal with the consequences of climate change and be able to protect their communities effectively and be incentivized to gain the actual technical skills that would allow them to protect people well then you would have more people capable of saving someone from a burning building or from drowning but anyway whatever that's that's that's my that's my pie in the sky leftist solution to that is use funds taken from the rich in order to incentivize people to gain the skills that will allow them to protect their communities in the event of disasters anyway whatever so over the last decade all of the time he's increasing the given way from a wonky theory on charitable giving by big-hearted guilt ridden millennial kids and that's that's how this guy is always framed in articles McCaskill is he's like in fact I'm in a fucking I'm going to scroll down here to my notes and I'm going to find the section of the article to like show you the way he gets fucking talked about in all of these quote 13 years ago William McCaskill found himself standing in the aisle of a grocery store agonizing over which breakfast cereal to buy if he switched to a cheaper year could he put aside enough money to save someone's life like that's the yeah the sort of so you have where your engagement with global poverty is in the fucking Cheerios isle exactly exactly yeah of weight rows in Oxford I'm sure like no fuck off sorry I'm so fucking angry at this shit yeah and it's it's clearly very clearly I can see that this is going towards an excuse for incredibly wealthy people paying fuck all in taxes because they claim that it's not an efficient way to do things and they completely ignore all these structural things which have to exist for their effective altruism to occur in the first place right yeah it's um anyway this is effectively like over the years given away from this again kind of this wonky theory by guilty millennial kids to this pop philosophy for the FinTech set because that's how these guilt ridden millennial kids wound up making a bunch of money and yeah that time article gives like I just want to read another quote from it about one of the other guys who's involved in putting a lot of money into McCaskill's organization quote Mr. Bankman freed makes his donations through the FTX foundation which is given away 140 million of which 90 million has gone through the group's future fund towards long term causes Mr. McCaskill and Mr. Bankman freeds relationship is an important piece and understanding the community's evolution in recent years the two men first met in 2012 when Mr. Bankman freed was a student at MIT with an interest in utilitarian philosophy over lunch Mr. Bankman freed said that he was interested in working and it's related to animal welfare Mr. McCaskill suggested he might do more good by entering a high earning field and donating money to the cause and by working for it directly Mr. Bankman freed contacted the human league and other charities asking if they would prefer his time or donations based on his expected earnings if he went to work in tech or finance they opted for the money and he embarked on a remunerative career eventually founding the cryptocurrency exchange FTX in 2019. Oh first off that guy absolutely did not call any charities sorry this was a four this was from the Forbes article I use not the time article first off I don't believe that he called but if he did it was something like hey I don't have any skills or training do you want money or do you want me to volunteer and they were like who the fuck is this kid like we don't need another asshole wandering around here trying to touch the cats. Send us your check yeah and so instead of I don't know getting trained as a vet tech or something where he would actually be able to help animals he founded a cryptocurrency exchange and contributed to the burning of massive amounts of carbon that will contribute to mass deforestation and the deaths of animals around the world that's good. I think that there's another aspect of this which I think is sort of under explored which is that utilitarianism is genuinely one of the greatest evils humanity has ever created every bad decision anyone has ever made if you look behind it you can find a digital tearing is like it's the basis of all it's inomics it's horrible it's an engine that in the world. It is a utilitarianism it is an engine that allows rich people to feel good about hurting poor people that's that's what it is but and that's what I think this all makes clear so the actual rhetoric from these people is always like it's especially if you're just kind of encountering it out in the wild it's hard to argue with a lot of the time because they'll be like well look we need to look at what's going to help the most people and that's why we're you know setting up none of this matters if we don't deal with this problem or that problem and it's it's Taylor made to sound profound and again in like a Ted talk or the website for some charitable organization aimed at getting you to like put 10% of your income to long termist causes but again the fucked up shit crusts kind of around the edges for the most part and lines like these from a time profile on the caskall. The first public protest against African American slavery was the 1688 German town Quaker petition. Slavery was only abolished in the British Empire in 1833, decades later in the US and not until 1962 in Saudi Arabia. History encourages McCaskell to favor gradual progress over revolution abolition he says is maybe the single best moral change ever it's certainly up there with feminism and they're extremely incremental they don't seem that way because we enormously shrink the past but it's almost 300 years we're talking about. That wasn't the result of incremental change it was the result against the people who own slaves fighting viciously against any attempts to enslave like yeah it was a it was a battle it was a series of in fact a series of revolutions in a lot of cases including like the Haitian revolution and guys like john brown there were a shit bleeding Kansas there were a shitload of people died fighting in order to enslavery like the civil war dude what do you call that that's not incremental a million people shot each other to death you know and it's so far as we can talk about sort of income of the progress it's stuff like okay so the like the slaves in Haiti freed themselves by means of revolution and then sent a bunch of guns and weapons to people in Latin America so that their armies could march through Latin America and slavery like many revolutions had to occur to in slavery because it was a powerful system at the center of global capital that a lot of entrenched in heavily arm interests were willing to die to maintain which also is fun because I I bet I bet I bet if you look to these people supply chains and this is certainly true of Elon Musk supply chains like protect well be okay must supply chains in China you can have some kind of debate as to whether the kinds of forced labor you're going to be encountering our slavery like I bet if you look to 90% of people who are effective all truth you can find slavery in their supply chains and their arguments will go like well I can't have slavery in my supply chain because I guarantee it they're all in the tech industry and like nobody has a laptop or a phone smartphone without the use of rare earth minerals that are like acquired via slavery it's it's the same thing if you're wearing clothes you have something that slavery was involved in because the garment industry slavery is literally inextricable from it like the company that has tried the hardest to remove slavery from their from their production line Patagonia yeah still fucking continually finds like oh no there's some more yeah they're pretty good calling out but yeah yeah they've loaded money into that shit and they still it is hard yeah anyway I'm gonna read another fun quote from the Forbes article Mr. Bankman Fried said he expected to give away the bulk of his fortune in the next 10 to 20 years if you're worried about existential risks of a really bad pandemic you sort of can't stall on that Mr. Bankman Fried said in an interview that is how his text messages popped up among hundreds of others sent to Mr. Musk Mr. Bankman Fried ultimately did not join Mr. Musk's bid I don't know exactly what Elon's goals are going to be with Twitter Mr. Bankman Fried said in an interview there was go a little bit of ambiguity there he had his hands full in the months that followed as cryptocurrency prices crashed the Twitter deal has been volatile in its own way with Mr. Musk trying to back out before recently announcing his intention to follow through that after all in August Mr. Musk retreated Mr. McCaskel's book announcement to his 108 million followers with the observation worth reading this is a close match to my philosophy so that's that's kind of the surface of where we are now it is not it doesn't quite get it all of the things that are deeply fucked up and for that I wanted to quote from another article I found an a on AE O in it's an essay by a make it the author here because it's it's quite good about long term as an essay called against long termism by Emil Pitores a Ph.B. candidate at a university in Hanover in Germany Leibniz University taught I don't know I feel silly every time I try to say German so I'm not going to try that hard but the article is very good and it kind of gets at how this effective altruism movement has merged with long termism in a way that specifically exists to buoy the interests of wealthy authoritarians around the world quote this has roots in the work of Nick Bostrom who founded the grandiosly named future of humanity institute F.H.I. in 2005 and Nick Bextet a research associated F.H.I. and a program officer at open philanthropy it has been defended most publicly by the F.H.I. philosopher Toby Ord author of the precipice existential risk in the future of humanity long termism is the primary research focus of both the global priorities institute and an F.H.I. linked organization directed by Hillary Griebes and the for thought foundation run by William McCaskill who also holds positions at F.H.I. and GPI adding to the tangle of titles names institutes and acronyms long termism is one of the main cause areas of the so called effective altruism movement which was introduced by Ord in around 2011 and now boasted having a mind-boggling $46 billion in committed funding it is difficult to overstate how influential long termism has become Karl Marx in 1845 declared that the point of philosophy isn't merely to interpret the world but change it and this is exactly what long termists have been doing with extraordinary success consider that Elon Musk who has cited and endorsed Bostrom's work has donated $1.5 million to F.H.I. through its sister organization the even more grandiosly named future of life institute this was co-founded by the multi-millionaire tech entrepreneur Jan Tallinn who as I recently noted doesn't believe that climate change poses an existential threat to humanity because of his adherence to the long termist ideology meanwhile the billionaire libertarian and Donald Trump supporter Peter Teal who once gave the keynote address and an effective altruism conference has donated large sums of money to the machine intelligence research institute whose mission is to save humanity from super intelligent machines and is deeply intertwined with long termist values other organizations such as GPI and the for thought foundation are funding essay contests and scholarships in an effort to draw young people into the community while it's an open secret that the Washington DC base center for security and emerging in emerging technology C set aims to place long termists within high level US government positions to shape national apology in fact C set was established by Jason Mathany a former research assistant in F.H.I who's now the deputy assistant to US president Joe Biden for technology and national security or himself has astonishingly for a philosopher advised the world health organization the world bank the world economic forum the US national intelligence council the UK prime minister's office cabinet office and government office for science and he recently contributed to a report from the secretary general of the United Nations that specifically mentions long termism the short answer is that elevating the fulfillment of humanity's supposed potential above all else could not trivially increase the probability that actual people those alive today in the near future suffer extreme harms even death consider as I noted elsewhere the long termist ideology inclines its adherence to take an ensousian attitude towards climate change why because even if climate change causes island nations to disappear triggers mass migrations and kills millions of people it probably isn't going to compromise our long term potential over the coming trillions of years if one takes a cosmic view of the situation even a climate catastrophe that cuts the human population by 75% for the next two millennia will in the grand scheme of things be nothing more than a small blip the equivalent of a nine-year-old man having stopped his toe when he was two so this is evil right like this is like this is vicious and vile and cruel and it's one of those things there's a book that I've talked about on the show a couple of times that is quite popular called ministry of the future and I think it's a very good book and one of the attitude like the basic premise of it is that climate change is addressed finally and the worst aspects of it are dealt with and like begin to be repaired because of the establishment of an organization called the Ministry of the Future it's this international organization that exists to like look out for the interests of unborn people and animals and plant species and part of how they do this is by murdering billionaires in their beds and blowing up planes to end international air travel which is so there's a verse like again the idea that like we should be thinking about people and and living creatures who have not yet been born is reasonable and the reasonable conclusion of that is and so we should deal with things like climate change and stop like thoughtlessly degrading our environment so that people in the future will be able to live a quality life the argument that these long-termers are making is no that's foolish because in a trillion years none of it will matter and I intend to be alive in a trillion years because I will be an immortal machine man billionaire forever you know it's the thing about these people these people fucking suck is like a thing about this starts me if you believe this the only literally the only thing that you should spend your time doing is trying to dismantle every single nuclear weapon on the planet like you you should be forming your own private armies to like storm military bases to destroy nukes and not as it will ever fucking do this all these people will back candidates who like want to have one nuclear weapons all these people who will back candidates who like like you know I wonder how many people personally supported dropping a nuke in the middle of a rock in 2004 like God yeah I anyway this is probably that's probably enough I wanted to at some point I think we will be doing a more detailed look into some of these people in a more detail look into some maybe maybe is a bastards episode but this is just getting more relevant and I wanted to give people I wanted to connect them with some like some some resources particularly that article on a on about the dangers of long-termism and yeah anyway be be advised this is what the fucking assholes who have spent like think about how many cool things the tech industry is actually made in the last decade it's it's not many right like it's mostly been vaporware like most of the different big apps and stuff have all are in the process of collapsing right now that's why the industry is falling apart very little values as we record this in the metaverse yeah that's right that's right that's right without legs this time you're sitting right next to me James except for you have no laying legs in your mouth is open in an endless wordless scream finally finally anyway that's what these assholes want to do what they've done to the internet sucking the vibrancy and the life and like the freedom out of this this incredible creation and turning it into an engine for sucking your personal data out and marketing things to you and making you angry all the time as much as possible and convincing your parents and grandparents that fucking Joe Biden's been replaced by a lizard man like the people who did that now think that we can't take care of people today because that would distract from our mission to take care of people who have never been born a trillion years from now anyway fuck them football is back and bed MGM is inviting new customers to join the huddle and enjoy the action like never before sign up today using bonus code champion and your first wager is risk free up to $1,000 you'll also have instant access to a variety of parlay selection features player props and boosted odd specials just download the bed MGM app today or go to bedmgm.com and enter bonus code champion and place your first wager risk free up to $1,000 the bed MGM app is the perfect way to experience the excitement of wadering on live sports now and more markets than ever visit bedmgm.com for terms and conditions must be 21 years of age or older to wager virginia only new customer offer all promotions are 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cellular has the exact same coverage as the major carriers with coverage to over 99% of the nation this is all back by their 100% risk free guarantee join the millions of others who have switched go to consumer cellular dot com slash podcast 25 and for a limited time get $25 off when you use promo code podcast 25 that's consumer cellular dot com slash podcast 25 promo code podcast 25 everything's dead wait no sorry it could happen here a podcast about stuff falling apart and today about the fact that things fell less apart than people were worried they were going to fall apart and in some ways got might get better so that's kind of that's kind of nice sure yeah on the whole we're talking about the midterms today and on the whole okay I feel okay yeah made is an excellent description of the terms it's the midterms equivalent of getting like an ounce of of of like mid grade weed for like 50 bucks but you find out later that like kind of in the middle of it was like half of a paper towel roll that they they stuck in there to push up the weight but it's like well least I got weed all right I've introduced the podcast who do we who do we have here today you got me I'm James still that's right yeah yeah I'm garrison I didn't vote look at you wow would have be a would have been anarchist garrison or Canadian same diff democracy on the balance is this what yeah yeah yeah I like putting voter fraud for the democratic party yeah yeah I also decided to not vote for the people who are doing like the war on drugs in California right now no garrison you you continued your your years long tradition of submitting a crude drawing of the premiere of Canada to a to a valid box yeah yeah sure let's true no coming out of a cave who else do we have on with us right now I'm here Christopher Wong and I absolutely despise elections so I brought my friend who actually does like elections excellent token election enjoy pretty branch yes hi I am Jack I am Christopher's token friend as mentioned and I'm here partly because of nepotism for knowing Christopher and partly because as you reminded me before we got started I had a 93% accurate prediction rating for all the elections that I was paying attention to this year so I know some things yeah congratulations I only made one prediction before the selection which was boy doesn't feel like dr. Oz is going to win which which means you did better than a lot of the people who are paid to do this like okay that man that man said the word crude did take in an election in Pennsylvania like there was he was never good the moment that ad came out he was going to lose I see that's much more nuanced than my my political analysis which was the fact that the other guy was much taller than him and also way harder like if they just sell it with a fist fight that I'm taking it yep which that seems good it was fun it was a fun election we all had a good time I enjoy that fucking Marjorie Taylor green and JD Vance are going to be in Congress together that's going to be fun for everybody we're all going to have a good time but I suspect there's probably some stuff we haven't like as you may have noticed listeners we didn't do much in the way of pre midterm content because we all hate it thank you but but now now we're talking about it so what what what should we know about these midterms what what kind of occurred to you as somebody who's like actually has spent a lot more time delving into the nitty gritty and thinking about what was likely to happen so I told Christopher I would say this and in fairness I do genuinely believe it I think the story of these midterms when his stories look back at it will be that the dobs the Supreme Court decision had the same electoral impact in the United States as 9-11 did I think that is going to be like how this plays out over time because when you look at how things were going before dobs and then how things were going after dobs obviously things got a lot worse on the policy front because abortion became illegal in a lot of states but the election essentially flipped overnight from what was going to be a Republican wave to the even split that we got and that makes this one of three post World War two midterms were the incumbent party did well and so this is definitely going to be a midterm that gets lectured about in polycy 101 courses for the next hundred years also one of those one of those three was the 9-11 was the post 9-11 yes it was yeah yeah I actually a really because obviously I was aware just because there was so much coverage saying like this is the best performance from an incumbent party in a midterm since 2002 so I was aware of that fact but for some reason I hadn't put it together in my head that way that like yeah the the this means that like the Supreme Court's decision on the movie weighed had kind of a comparable electoral impact to flying two planes into a pair of skyscraper said the Pentagon three plates I mean I want to be fair whatever to be fair there's a cream court have killed like in terms of the immediate impact the Supreme Court will have killed more people than that by like Thursday or something so yeah yes the other one was was FDOS fast made time right no the other one so that so I said post forward to my back the other the other one was nineteen ninety eight when the American electorate apparently got so mad at Republicans and P team Bill Clinton that they decided to vote for Democrats in a midterm again well that's the other thing Biden can do if it goes out it's good to know their options on the day yeah but I think non zero chance that'll happen anyway I mean I guess we're still waiting for no shake out who knows yeah dark branded I enjoyed from from a an entertainment perspective the like three months of lucidity that we got out of Joe Biden this year we'll see how many more he has in him yeah who knows so yeah like it you so you're suggesting that Dobbs has been like the really pivotal thing here in in swinging a lot of these close races right absolutely and dobs definitely being the number one factor tragically because it's very cringe and I wish this hadn't happened the January six investigation does actually seem to have also swung several important races that's I I mean I'm interested in your thoughts on this but I actually I'm glad that it mattered that they tried to do a coup and they just like I'm glad that people cared about that I'm glad it mattered yeah I just I just think it sucks that because the way they went about the investigation was so incredibly terrible oh yeah there's yes yeah like Mara Garland is going to go down as like one of the most cowardly attorney generals in American history but yeah it's it's pretty clear that in a lot of races like the investigation made a difference I think this is really clear if we're getting it to like very kind of under the hood Democrats ran the table in competitive state level secretary of state races and these are the officials that run elections and not only did Democrats run the table pretty much every single one of those candidates outperformed the top of the ticket so they outperformed governor and Senate candidates yeah so there were a lot of people this is another big story the midterms is that swing voter swing voting is back not swing voting I'm sorry split ticket voting is back there were quite a few there were quite a few millions of voters this year who voted for Republican in the Senate or Republican for governor and then a Democrat to run their state's actual elections that's kind of good it's also that's also like like speaks promisingly of people's like engagement with the political system and education about it and the awareness of what these different things do yes but other like like that other than that but just overall high level dobs was 100% the big one there is a person whose name I'm going to unfortunately mispronounce and that I should have looked up beforehand so right this is a safe place for that thank you but there's a person there's a guy down in Louisiana named John cool on I think is my best guess and he is one of the people who makes money off of like looking at elections and his big thing is that you can predict the outcome of elections just by looking at the nation wide composition of the primary electorate so like if Republicans turn out more voters in their primaries and Democrats to Republicans are going to win the election for the last 30 years or so and he unfortunately got led astray this year because nation wide at the end of the primary season Republicans were up by about like five points and so he was insisting the whole rest of the campaign that obviously not really what happened but if you look at pre-dobs versus post-dobs the primary electorate post-dobs was Democrats plus like up by one point that is the electorate that we got in the midterms so dogs 100% set the tone of like what the midterms were going to be because we are not going to be legalizing abortion nation wide in the next two years because we are going to have a Republican House almost certainly dobs is almost definitely going to be a huge factor in 24 as well. I mean and I guess that like because I the question I had and I think a lot of people had running into this especially people who are not election lovers is like do things matter right like it was dobs going to matter and was the were the constant sort of Republican assaults on on the ability of people to vote was the the fucking attacks on children's hospitals and on trans cases stuff like was all of that going to work like do do things matter still and I you know we'll have to re answer that question in 2024 but it does kind of seem like that's the positive takeout from this is not like you know it's it's probably probably too early to say are we seeing some sort of grand progressive swing or are people coming around on Biden or Biden or whatever things politicians want to take but it does kind of seem that like on a very like ground floor level it mattered that the Republicans were doing awful things. Yes 100% mattered I think Christopher and I have talked about how in his words Leah Thomas cost the Michigan Republican party election. Let's talk about that because I think a lot of people I mean yeah let's talk about that. Okay I'll give the I'll give the meme version of it first the meme version of it basically is that there was okay so there there was a report released by the Republican party in Michigan after the election when they sort of scammed and part of what they're talking about was like okay so the inflation is like 7.7% right now right this is the freest election anyone has ever been handed like in human history like a child could have won this election and the Republicans managed to blow it and what are these things to do with the tech months and they're putting like 25 million dollars specifically on ads about trans like trans kids in sports yeah and everyone in mission was just like what the whole is really not just not just blew it but blew it in a way that they haven't blown it in 40 years because for the first time in 40 years Democrats will have complete control of the Michigan state government. Yeah yeah and it's like it's like the other things it wasn't just in Michigan where this happened right like like quite possibly like one of the ways they're going to lose the Senate is because the like the Republicans like entire sort of apparatus in Nevada was running against the equal rights amendments which and specifically they were they were running against the equal Nevada passing the version of the equal rights amendment like specifically on the grounds of transphobia and the ERA passed by 17 points and Republicans are about to lose that Senate seat and it's just like I the by me version of this is that the Republican Party ran a platform that is like the political equivalent of like a street creature right like that that is the consistency for this it is like they unbelievably hate trans people they like a unbelievably hard line anti abortion position which again like nobody actually likes and you know it turns out like if if if if if your consistency is street creatures like the thing an average person does when they run into a street creature is walked past them and it turns out that's what happened here like they tried to send they got owed about like that's that's the meme version of it. Absolutely I mean that's not just the meme version of it it's essentially what happened in Michigan in Pennsylvania in all of these states where hard blind Christian nationalists won Republican primaries like they went down hard and so as Robert said yeah things actually mattered this election and that's a good thing and I think I know for me as like I went into election night very nervous about my own predictions because when I put together my Google spreadsheet that will never be shown to any of you because of how insane it is and I was picking you know I got more races wrong by the way by picking Republicans to win that Democrats actually won than the other way around because I kept second guessing myself is like no I'm not I'm being too kind to Democrats and then I went too far but when I was making those predictions honestly I just kept thinking about like so I'm adopted my parents are both white and my mom is this like white woman from Appalachia no higher and she is in her upper sixties so she grew up in a world before Roe v Wade and I had never seen my mom so angry about anything in politics because I was very very angry with Trump one she has been very angry she's been very angry about like January 6th she's been angry about a lot of stuff the last several years as is my dad because they're both very normy Democrats but my mom has never been angry or as far as I've seen her then she was angry or about dobs and it wasn't just like my mom I was hearing from friends of mine from across the Midwest who also have like normy white suburban parents and that was kind of the same thing that I was hearing from them to is like my mom is so upset about this my grandmother is so upset about this these women who remembered what it was like to grow up in a world where abortion was not something that they had access to if they needed it and that honestly you know it's it's obviously completely anecdotal it's not database or data driven in any way but that was just what I kept thinking about as I was making predictions about how the midterm was going to go was you know I think that these people are angry enough that they are not going to care about inflation they're not going to care about the fact that our economy is very clearly headed for recession because this is going to matter more to them and it did I kind of want to move on to talking about what what we think this sets us up for in 2024 because I think the the clearest and we talked about this a little earlier but sort of the clearest thing that's positive about this is that we have fewer state secretaries of state and state legislatures in the hands of the Republican party which means more of a chance that like what people actually vote for is going to matter now we're still dealing with the judiciary that is as fucked as it was prior to the midterms and in 2024 probably won't be less fucked in a way that is notable in aggregate we can always hope and pray yeah they can be a couple of very specific car accidents on that point actually so they were I know a bang on about about how the United States deals with its indigenous people a lot but like they slated and we'll do an episode on it but we're trying to do it properly like slated for this Supreme Court session is to look at Iqua right the Indian Child Welfare Act and like the challenge to it challenges a lot of the bases of other tribal law and in places like Arizona right like indigenous people are a large like often like in 2020 they're supposed to be like the swing electorate for like blue Arizona so that could have positive outcomes for Democrats it could they could I don't know how they could go out the way to disenfranchise indigenous people but they find new and exciting ways to do it all the fucking time so like that will be interesting and one thing I wanted to raise is like so I live in California which I think is seen as like the left coast and stuff but we have an alarming amount of really chuddly people going to the house from California and yeah it's becoming increasingly a bit like where like some of you live in Oregon where like you have a very good white state. I mean the far right in California is larger than the population of like many United US states yeah yes and they're increasingly big mad about like small things but yeah like I'm just looking at the districts around the what I'm in and a number of them have sent like anti reproductive rights house representatives back to the house California is a state where the Democratic Party likes to flop its way to victory it's one of it's one of the most incompetent state Democratic parties in the country which is really saying something because they're competing with New York they're competing with Florida like I mean hey Oregon's not didn't do great either like the state Democratic Party in Oregon had their most narrow governors race in a long time and also the DIMs lost their their super majority in the state Congress. They did lose their super majority but Democrats in Oregon do now have the ability to redistrict again so they can take back that seat that Republicans picked up because there was a constitutional amendment that got passed by the voters of Oregon that says that if Republicans do what they have done in the last few years in Oregon which is walk out of the state house anytime that a lot of my past they get banned from running for reelection. But also like without the super majority I don't know that there's as much of an... I mean I will see what happens but yeah it's the as a general rule it seems like when you've got there's no meaningful competition for what party is going to be in control of the state it becomes a haven for like the political equivalent of grifters to suck in huge salaries and do very little. And yeah. Yeah, look on that. Or to just do like a... Like Armer! Look at that! Armer also. Yeah. And she's have a reelection in a few months and we can only hope that she loses. I can't imagine her winning. I mean it could happen immediately. It could happen here. It could happen here. Here's an ad break. Good work, Harrison. Yeah. What a professional. Ah, we're back. And you know what talking about the midterm elections makes me feel like doing smoke in a cigarette. By cigarettes kids, there is good for you as democracy. All right, we're back. In some other interesting news, this is also the... This, this Pesman terms had more LGBTQ candidates win office than ever before in a midterm election. There was a few notable wins specifically with trans people in the Midwest actually, which has been probably a decent sign. It's a good sign. Yeah, those heroes are doing good. Yes. So there has been multiple trans people, particularly quite a few trans women elected to state legislators across the Midwest like in Montana and inside... Controversial....putting Montana in the Midwest. New home. New home. Midwestern. Oh! You're getting really good. Yeah, I got it. You're getting good. Token's Montana Mountain State. I'm calling that out. Yeah. Well, see, the thing is... Montana is the Mountain West. See, well, the thing is I grew up in Saskatchewan, which is like above Montana. And whenever you would drive down, we would always stay in the more Midwesty sections. And everyone talks... It felt very Midwest to me because of where I lived in Saskatchewan. So apologies to people who are Montana mountainers, I guess. Also apologies to the people in South Carolina. No, no, no. We don't need to be a politician. No, no, no. They can farn off. So it's always effort who testified against anti-trans legislation previously is now able to vote against it in Minnesota. Yeah, well, we're talking about that very briefly, which is that like... Sure. Sure. Okay. There are a lot of queer communities in places that people just fucking ignore. Yes. Absolutely. You cannot discount those places. Yeah, like in the States, like, Missoula specifically has a pretty substantive queer community. They do good shit. They're out there. There's this sort of tendency, I think, to look at a state and go, oh, it's a red state. There's whatever the community is. You're just fleeing. And it's like, it's not true. There are a lot of people who are like, have for many years been building a community there and hanging on to an axiously and building it. And also in Missoula, people take notice. Also in Missoula, the first non-binary candidate was elected in, SJ Howell. So two trans people elected there in Missoula. By the way, did Missoula do this for Portland? I mean, this would fall. But Portland's city councils like four fucking people. Yeah, that's true. By the way, this one is pretty conservative. This past election, actually. But we also had in Minnesota, Leah Fink, as the first trans person in state, let us let us later, and in New Hampshire, they elected the first trans man to a US state house. That's good. So yeah. And another good thing is Arizona got a Democratic governor, which means a whole bunch of potential legislation will probably not get signed on. Because Arizona did have some pretty, pretty, pretty bad anti-transition come up in the past few years. I also want to talk about, so the Arizona election was critical. Not just because it's amazing that fucking Kerry Lakes not going to be governor because she is a election denying rule. But fucking nice thing. Blake Blake, Blake masters might be the scariest person who was running for a life. He is the scariest. He is the scariest. He is the scariest. He was hard-core serial killer. Yes, yes. Yeah. He was scary until he was funny. Is the thing. Because like, I, you know, when they fail, they're always funny. Yeah. Christopher and I were talking about this before the podcast. And like during the, during the final debate between Blake masters and Markelli, like, am I allowed to swear on this podcast? Yes. Okay. Yeah. Like, we're allowed to say whatever the hell we want. Perfect. In their final debate between Markelli and Blake masters, Markelli's like final statement, his concluding argument was essentially pointing at Blake masters and going, look at this fucking freak. Yeah. Yeah. It was great. Which is one of the most powerful things he could do in politics. Yeah. Because he was just like monsters. Like the specific thing he did. Because his language was, I think, a lot more nuance than that. Because what he was saying is Blake masters for those who he don't know. Like one of the most famous moments of this campaign is he put out a campaign ad that was just him parking in the desert with a silenced handgun. Mentally too. I mean, there's a 22. Yeah. Coward. Which is a child's gun first off. But anyway, mentioning twice that the gun was German and like, he's too testicle. He's arrested. And then firing it blindly at nothing. And then the ad ends. No, he fired it across a lake. Yeah. We don't see him shoot at something. We don't see him hit a target. He is his stance is dog. She anyway, but it's just him taking a silenced pistol out repeatedly mentioning that the gun is German firing it. And then the ad ends. That's the whole ad. It's 90 seconds of him just fondling this guy. It is badly shooting it. It's worth giving the context that the person he's running against is someone whose wife was shot in the head. Yes. Yeah. Yeah. Because the Sun Kelly's. Yeah, we have the evidence. We have the evidence. Yeah. But it's also just like, look, guns are a big part of American life. A lot of politicians have had, including Democrats, have ads that involve guns. And usually it's like, here is me hunting, you know, or even like here is me at the range with friends engaging in a thing that many Americans do. Masters was just blindly shooting a 22 caliber handgun after repeatedly mentioning that it's German. It was like someone showed an alien like a regular campaign ad of someone shooting a gun and then. Yes. I mean, it's funny that that's the term that you use because that was a term that was flying around like Arizona social media the entire campaign. It was like Blake Baster's looks like an alien. Yeah. This is so that's what happens when you get to with Peter Teal money for. So, so he has this and he has a couple of others like he is. He is on he is a number one he worked with Peter Teal for years. He's doing all sorts of fucking ghoul shit on Twitter like really mask off. Fascist unhinged shit and Mark Kelly in the debate isn't just like look at this freak he's like, hey, we all know guys like this. Talk about how dangerous and how scary they are, but they they've never done anything. It's like weirdos trying to scare you so that you'll think that they're they're powerful and like don't don't fall for it. And it was perfect. And the good news is that Arizona voters did not fall for it because they should. No, they should. You know, not only did Blake Masters lose by the best performing Republicans in Arizona were their house candidates. Like the statewide house popular vote for the for US Congress, not the state house was I think Republicans wanted or going to win it by like five. So, Carl Lake already drastically underperformed that by six because she's going to lose. And then to Blake Masters underperformed his house candidates by like ten or eleven. Unbelievable. It's it's I mean it it really goes to show that whatever most Americans want they don't want a fucking weirdo fascist freak threatening the unasternaught's wife with a gun. No, really, really like also like on this note of all of the Korean Trans candidates who won. I will point out this follows the pattern that has taken shape in the last decade, which is that these supposedly well not supposedly they are but like these red and purple states in the south and the Midwest are sending queer and trans people into the halls of power. A lot faster than deep blue states on the west coast and in the northeast the first non I unfortunately forget their name but the first non binary state legislator in the country was elected in Oklahoma and they're not only non binary they are black and Muslim non binary. So it's like you know these these communities as Christopher's like a these communities you matter we can't forget about them we can't abandon them but also like not just they matter but like as I will happily argue with any political operative from either coast. We are much more likely to see some kind of progressive resurgence in this country led by candidates out of the south or Midwest then either. Yeah, yeah, yeah, like look at like this is one of the everything that the so I have a lot of friends in the like Michigan teachers union right. And you know like right right now what is happening in Michigan like in Michigan is the teacher's union is literally sending lists of laws like to to the governor that are like you need to get rid of this and you know if you look at like almost every other democratic party like in the country is just constantly at where with the teachers unions. And you know and then you look at like you look at what's happening in Wisconsin and it's like and it was happening in Michigan well I also also Wisconsin too was like they have a much more labor friendly like democratic party than like fucking San Francisco or like the ghouls in like like the ghouls in the Chicago machine right lengthen Eric Adams office yeah right like there's there's there's I don't know they're like everyone ignores the Midwest and we're here damn it and we do good things. It's a little bit like I mean it's a little bit of what we were saying earlier that like when you've got these states where because of the population layout the the democratic party doesn't have to struggle to actually win for the most part. You're a hell of a lot number one the party becomes effectively a cartel so they're very good at stopping any like upstart young progressive non binary queer trans people from like getting a hold on in local politics you know we just had the most progressive member of the Portland city council ousted by corporate business interests. And you know it which is very different from the trend that you're seeing in places like Montana and was like Oklahoma with a lot is very progressive you know young candidates and it's because number one maybe the state parties are a little more willing to throw a hail Mary but also just like those individual people the people running in the folks doing their campaign have had to be a lot harder and a lot smarter to survive surrounded by people who hate them. And I think also like there's okay one of the ways that I was pretty sure that this wasn't going to be a red tsunami was so I have some friends I have friends who go to Wheaton College and for people who don't know what Wheaton College is it is like we're sorry that we're about to inform you. Yeah so Wheaton College is one of like I don't know maybe the second behind like bring him young like most right we gave them to college in the US like they they famously it's not as bad as the liberty yeah yeah it's like number three right but like so this is the sort of this is like the intellectual center of like of sort of evangelical politics like I call it a meat make sure I have this right yeah like Billy Graham's family has fun old money into Wheaton College for decades now and okay so like Wheaton is a like broadly speaking like a fucking ferociously hostile place to be anything other than a like a cishead white person right it is like unbelievably homophobic it is really anti-semitic and like a few months ago I was walking like through Wheaton downtown to visit a friend. And in the middle of fucking Wheaton downtown there there like there there was someone who on in there in there like fucking lawn had like had a giant pride flag and like it was like it was like the brown pride flag too right like that was like even like five years ago that would have been unimaginable like you would have been like you would have been fucking chased out of town by a mob like and that it's just there now and I don't know it like they haven't been run out it's still there and no it's literally yes everything that Christopher just said and you know these are people that Christopher Christopher and I grew up with like we literally I was there was a granddaughter of Billy Graham in my high school class and I think you know as much as you know these people are not going to be socialists or progressives anytime soon they are very much like normy moderate Democrats now but there were a lot of suburban white people who got very turned off by Trump from the Republican party and I think the this midterm is the confirmation that barring you know some kind of economic catastrophe that always always throws elections to the out of power party these normy white suburbanites are not going back and we you know when you look at trends across the country you know JB Pritzker one do page county which is the county that Wheaton is in yeah which is like you know this is yeah like this used to be within Christopher and I's lifetimes this used to be a county that Republicans banked on getting 300,000 votes out of on a statewide margin level and now it's being won up and down by Democrats like Democrats flipped the county executive office in DuPage County this year so like Chicago suburbs are trendy are continuing to trend left Atlanta suburbs are continuing to trend left the like Raleigh Durham area North Carolina is trending left the Texas urban areas are trending left and this isn't just like in comparison to 2016 this is in comparison to 2020 two years ago which was a democratic environment so the fact that these counties are swinging left in a year where the country even though the overall results were fine country definitely swung right like these people are not going back and not just these people are not going back but the ones who are staying Republicans a they're moving they're leaving the suburbs and they're establishing their little new white flight outposts in other places and the people who are replacing them are largely people of color like the suburbs today in America are 60% white as compared to in the year 2000 when they were something like 75 to 80% white so this is I think this year was the confirmation we needed that this is a permanent trend that the suburbs from now on are either going to be a wash or even frankly just democratic places where Democrats will net votes and this is all there still is a lot of fear and there still is reason to be very concerned about the ability of the GOP's power to push things in a revanchist direction in an anti-democratic election to remove the ability of people because that is you know we're seeing them talk right now we're seeing guys like Matt Walsh Christopher Rufo talk right now about the need to like stop young people from voting to like crack down on male voting like this is not not to say like all right it's all done this is like I guess the thing that's that's optimistic about this overall is that it is um it's evidence that the the the there was this kind of open question after Trump won in in 2016 and if one thing you could look at you could look at 2018 you could look at 2020 now 2022 and go like well clearly the trend since then has been for the GOP to lose big in most of these elections but that was also anything but clear kind of as a result of of 2020 in the way covid fucked things up and this this does seem to like cement that that like yeah it may it may have in the long run proved to be a major major tactical failure to to have gone for this guy the way that they did oh yeah I mean and we can only hope um yeah I personally from an entertainment factor cannot wait for the dissent as versus Trump primary I will be I will be rooting for Trump because he is funnier online and also I don't think it would make a positive difference uh in whether or not like who would be the nominee because the Santis is just Trump without the charisma yeah um but I think yeah hopefully like we saw the Republican party pay a price for for are you the first time in a long time for their insanity um and it's good to see that that happened uh hopefully it will happen again and I will also note for anyone listening who does you know you care about elections you want to get involved somewhere the next somewhere for you to get involved in is the state of Wisconsin where the there is a state Supreme Court seat up for election in April if Democrats win that seat they will flip the Supreme Court in Wisconsin and that means that the absolutely insane Republican gerrymanders in that state which pretty much render the state of Wisconsin a non democracy uh will likely get overturned if Democrats are able to flip the Wisconsin Supreme Court uh which would mean a lot of good things can happen for a lot of people who live in that state okay there is one other thing that is like basically I'm religious that I want to touch on before we close up which is that the extent to which the Republicans have sort of entered chaos mode now a with with Trump just sort of like going off on the Santis and like the their municipal war happening and then secondly because they they they seem it looks like they've gotten the chaos mode configuration of their house majority yep yes um and you anyone who pays attention to Congress I would encourage you to get very very familiar with the term discharge petition uh which is a mechanism by which if you have a majority of the house is willing to sign a piece of paper that says we should put this bill on the floor no matter what it goes to the floor no matter what um and I think you're probably going to see Democrats successfully put a lot of bills on the house for in the next two years because they're going to get they're going to pick off the Republican moderates in the northeast to sign these these pieces of paper uh we should I think we should explain what exactly the Republican position looks like because it's oh sure so um it's so I I should caveat this with the statement that there is still like I would say a 5% chance that Democrats manage to scrap like scrape their way to a one seat majority um it's not likely by any means but like it is still theoretically on the table mostly because Lauren Bobert managed to put herself into position where she might actually lose um and but default modal outcome I would say is Republicans end up with a three or four house seat majority uh in but what that means is that uh count we get Calvin ball for the next two years essentially uh because Kevin McCarthy as a person um is well A he's like very unintelligent in general and this is like a very common sentiment that you will run into uh in people who pay attention to Congress he is not personally capable of managing a house majority of four this is so widely except that the Nancy Pelosi was willing to go on the record in an interview the other day saying that um and so who knows Kevin McCarthy may not even end up being the speaker we may not have a speaker until March because no one would get 218 votes um but whoever has that job whatever Republican has that job it is going to be the most much of the time of their life that they will suffer through for the next few years because you know the the pundit class and political operatives love to talk about how ideologically diverse the Democratic party is in the house and it's true because like on the left there's a lot of people like Rashida slave and uh ill and Omar and the right wing and you have people like Henry Quayar who tragically survived his primary this year um but uh I think it has gone under the radar that Republicans in the house are arguably more ideologically diverse than Democrats are because the moderates are like your very standard like socially liberal fiscally conservative types that were very popular in like 2010 um like you have like some of these northeastern Republicans who are more than happy to vote for same sex marriage though they would probably vote for uh like to codify row they would probably vote to codify birth control legal like uh theality and on the other end you have marjorie Taylor green and like if MTG yeah if if there is a person on this earth who is capable of managing that caucus um I don't know who they are I don't think anyone knows who they are um and I think that the smartest thing that that person could do is um not take the job and let someone else take the fall for what is going to be two years of chaos that will most likely hurt the Republican brand a lot in the next two years yeah that's like one of the things that actually makes me like slightly optimistic is that like the the Republican party like is it is it like a diverse coalition and it being held together sort of but like by Trump and now Trump's not on Twitter anymore and Twitter may not exist by like the time we need to be speaker oh yeah well it's also I think I might add Chris it's not just by Trump and a part of why Trump was able to get the position it is it's it's a mix of Trump and owning the lives right like that's that's a huge part of why the most visible members of this caucus are where they are like there's no there's no marjorie Taylor green right without the way that particular social reinforcement there's social reinforcement pattern works and um yeah I think that like that's not like number one if Twitter goes away which could have happened by the time you listen to this episode that really gets gets in the way of their ability to own the lives but also if they're just getting their asses kicked up and down the country they're no longer owning the lives the lives have not been owned no they have not and I think the other you know the other consideration here is that um we like to talk a lot in this country because it's true about neither party ever puts forth a substantive policy agenda um and there are a lot of Republican political operatives who are running around right now complaining and saying that Republicans lost because they failed to offer a viable alternative except that's not true Republicans did offer a policy agenda in this midterm and that policy agenda was Christian nationalism and American voters took one look at that and said are you fucking for real yeah yeah like that's the thing that like everyone like like people like if all the fucking New York times columnist like people don't understand that like there's maybe 30% of the population who actually likes that shit and everyone else in the country is like what the fuck yeah and you know but you know like the the the like the actual sort of median person in the US is so much less like that than the median person that every pun in imagines that like the version of reality that exists and sort of like the minds of the media class like it's not true but yeah it's they've created like incredible sandcastles in their mind now the types like washing them away I don't know if the types washing them away I think we can we can only hope that the New York Times gets washed out to see but I think you know I sorry go for it no no please I was just going to say like you know obviously the next two years are going to be the next two years and no one can predict the future anyone who anyone who tells you in literally the next 18 months that they know how the 2024 elections are going to go is lying to you and you should block them and perhaps to report them to like whatever like non-retributive forms of authority exists in your local area but my you know based on how this what if the same trends play out for the next two years which would be suburbs continue swinging left Democrats continue to rack up problems with my already voters but like not to the extent that we're going to like lose urban seats anytime soon and Republicans continue racking up margins in the states and like the seats that they're already winning by 80 points which helps them on a statewide level but does not help them in the US house my I would say like assuming the current trends continue the trends we've had since 2016 that would mean Democrats flip back the house in 2024 it would also mean that we are once again in like the fight of our lives for the Senate as we likely will be for every single cycle for the next 10 years so you know just kind of get used to that while you can well you have the breather but yeah like we had an okay in term that was literally a year ago looking like it was going to be possibly the worst midterm wipe out possibly the end of the republic as a literally yes yes so you know 24 might be good I think the responsible thing to do now is to close out by each giving one of our unhinged predictions for what we're going to see in 2024 and I'm going to start I think we're going to see musk and McConaughey via for the governor of Texas once reg Abbott is forced out from a sex scandal that's my that's my call prove to me show show when when it happens everybody everybody alone me yeah some french fries oh god it's going to happen calling it now Tom Brady I reckon Tom Brady's going to Tom Brady's going to take a swing at it at Texas no no one of those states up in where it's called rental the time oh yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah I assume he's from broadly speaking Illinois to Wisconsin he is he would be running in New England please do not pin that on us yeah yeah yeah I mean yeah probably not that kind of cold like yeah just just gray not like like miserable cold like you will have on there yeah Tom Brady running in a place where you can't grow tomatoes is yeah it's my prediction that feels good after his massive success selling the the the hit crypto platform FTX what one can't Tom Brady do who knows don't insect don't ask that could have put that out there probably in games for the book and years yeah yeah to the origin Germany yeah survive eating what any normal human being would eat on a given day uh garrison I don't know I don't I don't care about this type of thing very much the perfect reason to make a prediction unhinged prediction yeah I don't know I think one of the funniest things is that in earlier this year there's this big Bitcoin account who said that if things continue Bitcoin's going to be a major factor in the midterms which is really funny so I'm not wrong so I'm saying that what's a what's what's even double cryptocurrency um doge would be I was thinking of dogecoin's going to be a significant factor in the 2024 election yeah yeah uh all right we still want to go mine is that mine is that okay we're pritzker's going to bring back like the old school Democratic machine and bite by Biden is gonna fall on a window like Kamala Harris is going to sort of like turn up like that they're gonna drain a dam in 30 years and find your body and to take that by this in a run again oh yeah Oh no he will because he won't have fallen out of a building that year the end of 2020 like the end in about 2023 okay Chris Chris I'm going to take over there Chris in that's your prediction that Definite will fall out of a window No, it's not. Yeah, it's the first defeneration of Prague. Yeah, we all think that the threat to bourgeois democracy comes from the Republicans. It's not. It's Pritzker. Pritzker is going to coup the fucking country and probably 60 percent of the population is going to be completely on board because he's going to be less insane than like everyone that's been like in charge of this country for the last 50 years. Yep, and you know who's going to save democracy then? That would be a con. Okay. Yeah. Okay. That leaves me. What is my unhinged prediction? I don't think I'm going to top Christopher's prediction about JB Pritzker. I, you know, I think my unhinged prediction will be that Taylor Swift runs for Senate in Tennessee. Oh, God. Oh, she could do it. Yeah. Yeah, don't, don't. Oh, look, if she brings on, if she brings on the head of her fan club who went to jail in Israel for music to serve in the idea, I think that she actually might get some progressive votes. Yeah. Yeah, it may have been untrue, sadly, the, the Swiftie refusal. But maybe not really. Really? Why, why do you even introduce it? Why would you, why would you say that to me? Yeah, because not all these beautiful things we believe in can be true. But Taylor Swift running for Tennessee, she would almost certainly be better than whoever is a Tennessee senator now, right? Yeah. It's now Colonel Sanders or someone, basically, the same as Colonel Sanders. I imagine. Colonel Sanders was a Kentucky Blackburner. That's Kentucky. Yeah, come on, come on, British James. Right. Colonel Sanders is Kentucky. Oh, it's called Kentucky Fried Chicken. James, that was basically a slur. That's it. No, I, there is a type of guy epitomized by Colonel Sanders who also occupies all the Senate seats south to the Mason Dixon line. That's not true. That's that's my, that's my, that's my stance and I'm sticking to it. I am pushing back on this. No, well, I'm going to watch a foghorned leghorn video because that's, that's who I'm thinking of now, James. All right, everybody. Yep. That's been the episode. Go vote Swift. Yeah, vote another couple of times. Just make sure. Yeah, look, the old Chicago model vote early vote often. Yeah. Or pay for a few mules, everyone go to Colorado and first I can't slow it from pop up. Yeah, literally seven of you, whatever can swing this. Remove to Colorado. We can't deal with it anymore. Fund rays in order to purchase a huge number of drones and drop ballots over wherever it is in Colorado. They count votes. I assume Denver. Yeah. Like it, Denver in your ballots and stop listening to podcasts. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. You work hard for your money. So why not switch to a wireless provider that could save you up to half on your bill? Switch to consumer cellular today and get unlimited talk in text with a flexible data plan starting at just $20 a month. 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Also find extra savings on select soft goods like sheets, pillowcases and weighted blankets. Join over two million happy sleepers and save up to $800 on mattresses when you shop at Casper. ExclusionSupply Visit Casper.com slash promo. Legal disclaimer. Okay, it's actually me, not the legal disclaimer guy from medical advert. We just wanted to mention that both of our guests today are members of UAW, but they do not speak on behalf of UAW. Okay, enjoy the podcast. Music It could happen here. It's its its its its podcast. It's podcast. We're doing a podcast. It's a podcast. It's podcast with me. I'm James and I'm joined by Chris and I'm joined by a couple of grad students from UC San Diego. Today, we're going to talk about grad student strikes. We're going to talk about the grad student strike vote that's coming up at UC San Diego and some other grad student strikes said that Chris and I have been part of back in the middle ages. Okay, so I'm joined today by Alex. Alex, you're you're studying. I'm trying to get this correct. Cancer genomics at UCSD. Is that correct? That is correct. Thanks for having me. Yeah, you're welcome. And Tyler Bell as well and Tyler, you're a postdoc and you're doing Alzheimer's research. Is that right? Yes. And you're both members of UAW? Yes, that's correct. I've been a member for at least two years. But yeah. Yeah. And I'm a member of the actual, the subset of UAW that just formed representing student researchers in completing their PhDs. So we'll explain all the details of that of course, start going forward. Yeah, I think maybe we should start there and explain kind of the economic relationship of PhD and postdoc students to the university. Like what work they do and the, I guess as we were talking about beforehand, people might not even be familiar with the fact that you get paid by the university in many of these positions, right? So can you explain like how that works? Yeah, definitely. So yeah, as you mentioned, we do in our various roles as graduate students, teachers and postdocs, we do a lot of work, majority of the work in fact that is critical for the university to function as it does. And we do that in a few different roles. Some of us are paid to teach or TA classes. We call those academic student employees who are represented by one of our unions, UAW 2865. The render of PhD students are actually paid directly to do their research and this is usually funded up grants or other money that the university has at your march for research. So as we are progressing towards our degrees, we are doing work that is productive in our labs to get papers out, get grant funding coming in and we receive a stipend to perform that work. Those students are known as graduate student researchers or GSRs who are represented by a new union that just formed because it actually only became recently legal to form such a union in the state of California. We are represented by SRU bargaining for our first contract and then we have the postdocs which Tyler can probably talk more about who are students who have completed their, I'm sorry, I should, we haven't really clarified who are students, they are employees of the university who have completed their degrees so are no longer students and are doing research work in labs usually driving their own projects forward under supervision of professors. So they are represented by a third union that's part of this sort of collective organizing called UWA-5810. What you have postdocs unions? Yeah, that's so cool. I think the one here at UC is actually the biggest and one of the first ones that formed. I remember I was on a Wikipedia page which I shouldn't use as an academic but I totally saw a song there and I was like holy. I'm in a game away. It's fascinating because there are all these memes that you'll see as a graduate student and then when you finish your PhD where you always think that you're going to get off for the grind, like you're like oh, I'll do my MA and then I'll get off and then I'll do my PhD and then the people will respect me and I'll be compensated for the massive amount of work I do and then I'll just finish this postdoc and then you're like oh, 55, you know, like it's all of those positions are heavily exploited by universities and make a metric should turn money from these people who as you said do most of the work that keeps the university running. So perhaps we could talk about the issues at stake that are leading to this strike authorization vote and maybe if we could go through a little bit of a timeline as well, that would be great. Yes, maybe Tyler, maybe you could like explain the 5810 timeline and I can talk a little bit about this or you and I guess kind of put it to 5. Yeah, so chronologically the postdocs were up for their contract negotiation which that's just to set our wages, benefits and workplace safety and other type of protections we want. And that actually came up, I think in September of 2021 and I could be wrong with the date specifically, so much has changed but we initially back in 2021 started actually asking people what did they want it to see in their new contract like our members because the union isn't like like, if I didn't care about the union or no one else cared what exists, like it's the postdocs and we have to take out like a couple of hours a week to do this thing and sometimes it's 20 hours top of our research which is 40 hours and so during that time we surveyed everyone got the demands that people wanted and the top two issues that people asked for that they want it changed was our wages and also the housing we wanted affordable housing because right now you know over 70% of academic workers including the postdocs who you would think you know you have a PhD this is the time you can finally have affordable housing and you don't have to worry about food scarcity and all these other things that you've worried about as a graduate student. So just take this in the context of like we're postdocs we're supposed to be like the most paid or at least a better off because we have our PhD think about like what that means for the graduate students and those that aren't yet at that stage yet and so when we went forward with our proposals we created a lot of other things that we thought were important including things like transit bargaining demands to make public transit like affordable for postdocs because currently we don't get any kind of like free pass for that they don't even consider it in fact you know they they probably think we all have cars which isn't true because a lot of postdocs are international scholars we were also asking for childcare support because currently like a good bit of you know our postdocs have children which is normal because this is a normal like family creation time or whatever you want to call it but it can be one of the only times as an academic when it when it really sort of doesn't massively disadvantage your career to have staff for me right. Exactly and like postdocs like the whole preposition of a postdoc was you know there's on a faculty spots for once you get a PhD and postdocs now can last five if not longer like five years or longer and there's a new position called an academic researcher which is a type of like title that you get when you can no longer be a postdoc but it's also because there's just not enough faculty so they put into a different title to do research and collectively both us postdocs and people that are academic researchers we don't get any affordable childcare we don't have affordable housing and our wages are below the cost of living and currently we went through the proposals back then and we over time a year and a half have not really made any leeway on these proposals that actually changed the material conditions for postdocs like the university has been you know bargaining and bad faith that we have multiple unfair labor practice lawsuits against from our public relations board for the employers and three of those have been sorry let me get those numbers right multiple of those have actually been successfully have complaints filed against the university some of the things that the university has done in particularly while we've been bargaining is one not bringing the information to the table that we request like denying our request for information they have also refused to bring the people that can make the type of decisions that we need to the table and they've also been making Udderlateral changes to things like bullying policies and other workplace issues without even being at the bargaining table and the last thing that they've been doing during this process is serving members of our union outside of like the bargaining process like we we don't know about it I mean we did find out about it and then we followed the the complaint and so right now we're at a point where we've gotten a lot of things you know kind of like moved on in terms of things that aren't compensation in terms of our bargaining like things that we won such as bullying protections that was something that we actually had to like have a big action for to actually get that on the table to move so currently we won protections against bullying and which is kind of like pretty enormous because in academia university says we're against bullying and that they have all these resources for you but the resources always end at we're right or wrong and now we have something in our contracts not just for that postdocs and economic researchers but also for the other bargaining units to actually protect us in a process that like we could grieve it as you know unripe presented workers and so right now the reason that we had to authorize the strike especially for our group as postdocs and economic researchers because they started bargaining kind of like maybe um further along in that year with us but they're kind of at the same place of like back in the same type of responses and um we just want them to actually come to the table bring the people that can make the decisions so that we can have you know affordable housing spare wages to actually do the research that we do here and I just want to say that we bring a lot of value to the university through grants in particular as postdocs so we do most of the writing of research papers conducting the experiments um people think that if people think that faculty sit there and run a wet lab and actually do the what you know the work of the wet labs um you know that would be an amazing faculty person but they're really busy in terms of like having to write grants themselves we do the bulk of the work and actually making the research happen um we do a bulk of the training in terms of the graduate students and the undergrad that are in the lab and so we provide an enormous value to the university but at the same time while we provide these values um the university doesn't want to give us a fair living condition or affordable housing and the last thing I'll say and then I'll let Alex talk about the other units um is that you know we bring a ton of value to the university because of these grants and for every hundred dollars of that grant that is um given to the university the university charges things like the NIH you know um you know fifty eight dollars in indirects so this is a ghost money that we don't know where it goes our PIs don't get to have a say over and that's money that usually goes to things that capital projects that could go back to keeping you know um the postdocs actually living in uh in okay living situation. We just explain what capital projects are. Uh so capital projects are things like you know um planning out building buildings that they want and other things things that aren't really like compensation based or employee based you know because the university like you see as the biggest landowner and so they obviously we want more or more things that they can develop or lands that they can buy um and that's kind of what they kind of focus many of these indirects on and I really don't know the clear picture on indirects and that's kind of the problem is that we don't know where all this money kind of goes. It's they if people obviously lots of our listeners aren't in San Diego the scale of construction at UCSD is incredible like I've been here for fifteen years now and I swear every time I go back there's a new building like it and they can turn to student housing. Look it's nearly all student housing I think that they've built but yeah and if I can jump in about one of those which relates a lot to why graduate students have become more active on this campus um three or four of those extraordinarily large buildings you're talking about we're actually intended to be built as subsidized graduate student housing where you would be you know you get on a wait list you're guaranteed once you get off the wait list you can live there for two years and pay below market rent. That lasted for a little bit of time but the university just a couple of years ago or so almost doubled the price for those units they tried to hide it behind saying that their capacity increases but what they're saying is for the same prices before you can live with two people in a very small square footage studio apartment but really that studio is now just double. So that is one of the things certainly that we are concerned about is that yeah money of what significant portion of the university's budget does go into these capital improvement projects which are nominally intended for student and postdoc benefit but which tend to come back and and not be quite as helpful in the long run. Yeah I mean it seems like they're just doing real estate speculation and then doing rent extraction from it which yeah and this is something they've done like they did this this is a very very similar thing in what like 2009 like like again like they built what I built into your building it was affordable for sure period of time and then it suddenly became completely unaffordable and they've really consistently extracted rent from the people that they are underpaying. Yeah and those buildings were actually this this incident even got a lot of faculty on our side because those buildings were a major draw for how we were able to recruit new people to come and do research with us as we were saying yeah the cost of living here is really high you're not going to get a huge stipend or salary but we do have the subsidized housing and people had actually already committed to do their PhD here in labs of the university and then the rent increase came out that April or May and people said well no and then they a bunch of people decommitted from programs so it was a it was a significant issue here but they have not backed off of that. Yeah and the problem with like the university being one of the biggest landlords is that when they increase the rents for these even grad housing it affects everyone else so like the prices like my current rent I live maybe a mile away from campus my rent was you know 1700 which was eating up most of mine and come anyway and it went up to 2500 and you know this is directly tied to like the university setting a higher market rate which then allows them to hurt everyone else that lives you know not just in around UCSD but also in San Diego generally. Yeah one of the big things about that we're trying to get the university to understand and one of the reasons I'm proud of the demands that we're making in this round of bargaining is the effect we have on the local economy and of people who aren't even affiliated with the university have their lives affected based on the rent and based on the cost of things because the economic footprint that we have and as Tyler mentioned one of our demands is some more subsidized transit passes. The university already subsidizes and it's significant amount of transit but it's not enough and it's not enough to actually really make a difference in terms of emissions in our region so we're trying to raise both our own working conditions as well as as make meaningful changes in the university's impact in the region and in response to that the university released in part a very funny statement the other day that accused us and used transit as an example accused us of having a quote social justice agenda so I wasn't quite sure if the university or Ron DeSantis wrote that particular test release but it was it was quite funny. You know, okay, the more I'm thinking about this, this is a public university. Why are they even charging rent? They own the land, right? Why are they even charging rent in the first place? What is, oh my god. Well, the housing example I brought up was funded through what they very proudly refer to as a public private partnership. Oh, so that's where the money is going. Oh, great. It's going to investors. And recently for the postdocs their solution to our housing crisis was they obtained some building in downtown San Diego which is, you know, 12 or more miles away from campus and the building starts at like rents of $3,000 or more. But like I said, it's building. Yeah, with the one with the creepy bed and the closet that comes out and kills your cat but. No, what? It has like a closet that folds out. Oh, good. It's that they're extended downtown. Yeah, I've been trying to PRA and a bunch of stuff about that building and they've been quite reticent to hand it over. And oddly, so Alex, is there any more context you wanted to add from your side about like is about sort of what is driving people to ask for a strike authorization vote? Yeah, definitely. I mean, our concerns as graduate students are certainly very similar to a lot of the concerns that postdoctoral students have. Except that we make even less money than they do. So certainly urgent on the compensation side. Our units are demanding a minimum graduate student stipend of $54,000 a year. Whereas none of us make more than 33 or 34 right now and that's very dependent on the program and very dependent on your source of funding. So most make quite less than that. We also have a number of other issues that have come up and cost problems for students that we want to be able to have a union in order to rectify. I mentioned that our student research is United Union. It actually knew we're bargaining for our first contract. And we think we're going to be able to get a lot of practical benefits out of that, not just in terms of a contract, but actually something where we can have some parity and some organization to come to back for us when the university creates issues. For example, the university has known this for a long time, but the payroll system that manages graduate student stipends and fellowships and stipend disbursements is a bit unreliable for reasons that they can't quite explain. Oh boy. Yeah. Yeah. So I wasn't a grad student, but I was an undergrad when you should call those grad students when I was strike. And that was a big thing of like people would get paid. The university would sometimes they wouldn't get paid enough. They wouldn't get paid at all. There was another times where they accidentally get overpaid and the university wouldn't tell them and then they just take all the money out of their bank account. Yeah. And you would say, catastrophe. Yeah. Is it similar things here? Very much so. Yeah. I got paid and then I got paid once. Yeah. At least my personal story with this is pretty much ever since. So I apply for and received an NIH individual fellowship for all the other nerds out there. I got it. It's an F31 NIH fellowship, but essentially what that says is the NIH likes my research proposal and they are going to fund a portion of the rest of my PhD. So in a sense, I've offset the cost of my labor by bringing an extra few tens of thousands of dollars to the university. However, they processing for that has not been smooth and there are months where I simply have to remind them to pay me. And when that paycheck doesn't come through my very hard working program coordinator, it's not her fault, but she has been open support tickets. She has to go through 10 different levels of bureaucracy to find out where the holdup is. And so what that results in is people often that times not getting significant portions of their stipend can tell well into the beginning of the first or second week of the month. I personally have been lucky enough to build up some savings living here, but many students especially our first years coming right out of college have not been able to do that. And a lot of times at the first of the month, we have people, you know, people will come to me and say they just didn't, I don't know why my stipend check didn't work. I can't pay rents or I can't get groceries. And these issues have been going on. This has not been one time things or sporadic things. These are things that have been continuously going on for years. And what we're really hoping for is that with the creation of this student researchers union that we will be able to sit not just, you know, send polite emails and say, hi, can you pay me if you get a chance? We will actually have a literal international union that will be sending those emails and say, you know, you fix this or by the terms of the contract, we get x, y, and z damages. And we're hoping that that leads to improvements in the system as a whole because it will go expensive. So yeah, that is certainly one of the reasons we formed SRU and are after a brief vote to strike for recognition because the university ignored the employee relationship of Port of California. Which resulted in some very spicy press releases from Purb, which is great. But we did eventually get recognition and now hopefully in a couple of a month or so we'll have a contract. Yeah. To explain for people as well who want familiar, if you're teaching, right, you may not have been paid over the summer in some positions. Like I know I was in mind. So like a late payment in September or even waiting to October, like is, you're already at the bottom of your savings. Like there were, there were four quarters that quarters at UCSD where I lived in my car because it didn't make it all the way through the summer on the savings I had. You know, so it really is. And I'm sure there are a lot of still like unhoused graduates, students at UCSD because of the cost of living and the, the wages are so divergent. Yeah. Hey, Chris, you know what won't make you live in your car? Oh, God. There's no way. Yeah. Yeah. It's going to be the washers, however patrol again. The same thing in your piece of apartment, while you were in your apartment. Yeah. No, no. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. We look at the top 10, which is actually the biggest, the biggest thing in our budget. You know, we're probably really looking for a way to get people to understand that. So maybe if it makes sense to start with this 2020 Wildcat strike, we can start there. If you want to stop further back, then we can start further back too. You know, 2020 is probably about the extent of my, how far my experience goes back, but I can tell kind of the story of that. A little bit. Yeah. There was a movement that we referred to as COLA, which stands for a cost of living adjustment and convenient. has very convenient acronym, which resulted in people coming to protest with empty bottles coke on a stick, and that was a really common science, fantastic. But that was a movement that started at University of California, Santa Cruz. One of the, as for people who aren't familiar with you see, it is really actually many campuses together in one system, and this particular one started at our campus in Santa Cruz. And it was what is called a wildcat strike, which is general fellow unions, that is, at least in America, there are very careful rules that you have to follow of when exactly you are allowed to call a legally protected strike, and that's often dependent on your contract or the label laws of your state. But it is possible for workers to get together without the explicit approval of their union and take the added risk that that involves to hold a labor stoppage. So I'm not sure of the exact number, but somewhere between 50 and 100 or 200 or so TAs, so teaching assistants at the Santa Cruz campus decided to withhold teaching and also final exam and semester or sorry quarter grades for a quarter in, I believe this would have been fall or fall of 2019, and they held, they held essentially daily pickets and protests at their central entrance of their campus. And this resulted in quite an extreme response from Santa Cruz administration, University of Santa Cruz administration. They called in the California Highway Patrol. Also there's, I will, I've asked, I'll send this to, to, to, to, to James put in the footnotes, but there is a vice article where someone did a lot of public records request and found out that the FBI was also involved or at least FBI provided technology was involved. There may have been sort of counterterrorism units involved in the state in interesting ways, but essentially there was a highly militarized response to what was essentially if you grad students not doing grades. So this response, the images that came out of this people getting arrested for being in the street and such, started to actually provoke sympathy actions across the rest of the campus. And there was really a campus wide or a system wide movement starting to build and then March of 2020 happened. And almost all of us are labs shut down, the campuses shut down, those of us who work from home could, those of us who couldn't often had, you know, many other struggles to deal with and that kind of killed, pandemic essentially killed that movement. At the same time, you know, these, you know, the UWA 265 and UWA could get 10 already existed. SRE was starting to get formed at this time. We actually managed to get car check recognition during the pandemic where no one could actually go to one central point and get cards. So I'm quite proud of that. Hell yeah. So we sort of rebuilt off of kind of sort of the ashes of that movement and even though it was not, and I personally supported, but even though it was not a university sort of excuse me, certainly not university supported. Union supported movement. I think it really helped a kind of plant seeds for graduate students and postdocs having some, you know, some degree of labor consciousness. When I was doing walkthroughs to get people signed up for the union, get people to quote on the strike, they would say, you know, they haven't obviously been keeping track of all the bargaining, but they say, oh yeah, I remember, is this like in Santa Cruz? I remember what they did and people would be ready, you know, to get involved. So it was a deferred kind of benefit given the pandemic, but I think it helped get a lot of the energy that we have today. Yeah. That's great to see actually because I know we really struggled with sort of political consciousness on the among the grad students in my time at UCSD. And yeah, I guess it makes us like that. I remember like ever talking to some people who were sort of involved with it and like watching the videos coming out of you. But that was I think like probably the most intense military response of ever, I think I've ever seen to a strike in the US. It was wild. Like I, yeah. The university chancellor, a chancellor of Santa Cruz at that time, uh, bragged or I don't know if it was bragged or complained that they were spending $300,000 a day on that response. Yeah, they went incredibly hard. I want to kind of get into why like the universities really, really strongly, just like strikes and partly because they rely heavily on underpaid graduate student labor, right? And they're increasingly relying heavily on underpaid adjunct labor as well to take the place of these expensive tenure track positions. So can we talk about a little bit about like what it means to strike as a grad student because it's not the same to strike as a grad student as it is to strike it if you work on a production line. Right? Like it really can make a serious impact on your whole career and it can make a serious impact on your relationship, uh, perhaps with your, with your supervisor or advisor or mentor. And so can you, can you, well, one of your, both of you explained a little bit about the repercussions that come from striking as a graduate student? Yeah, I'm happy to share my thoughts and then, and then, um, and Tyler, you can maybe talk about what the, what postdocs are thinking. Um, from the, uh, TA perspective, I think I don't want it. I'm not currently, I'm currently a student researcher, so I'm not currently teaching. I think in that sense, it makes, there's a little more cut and dry. It's you're not going to teach your discussion section. You're not going to grade your exams. Those are very concrete things. You can do that are sort of separate from your research work. Uh, for those of us paid to do research, it's a little bit, um, a hard to figure out where exactly you're sometimes your labor for the university is and, and where you're, um, uh, uh, kind of research and, and, and not wanting to sort of harm yourself. Like I know people who have planned their advancements to candidacy during this time. And I think they're still going through with that because we, you know, well, that's more academic, that's more your personal, uh, kind of progress, um, in life. And, and so those sort of things will continue. Um, uh, but, but I think it's, uh, one of the things, um, that, that sort of, um, uh, important is, is, um, sort of your day to day work in the lab. Um, and not necessarily just like your research project, but on just sort of maintaining things, answering questions, communicating with collaborators, sharing your results with people, helping, uh, undergraduates in the lab, helping, um, you know, prepare figures or prepare text for your advisor to submit grants and all these other things that are not necessarily like I am doing this particular, you know, thing for my degree. Um, so I know a lot of people are worried about, especially because in, in the life sciences, we have situations where we have experiments that go on for months and they cost tens of thousands of dollars to run. And if you miss a time point on that, we're throwing months of your life and out of the window in that, it hurts yourself really more than the university. So it's been a, I, I think, especially because organizing grad student researchers is something new, at least in America. Um, I think it's something that in the coming years will be kind of considered more and people will kind of, I think, I hope what I hope is people learn from our, whatever our experience happens to be next week when we walk out and start to kind of calibrate what does it look like? What is what is an effective work stoppage for a researcher look like? Um, and I think people are, are, we've had a lot of discussions and we've had program meetings, so a bunch of students from my program got together and talked about this. Um, and I think it might end up looking different for different people, but really, what we're trying to communicate is, is don't do something that's going to, um, you know, damage yourself, um, and, but, but, but do what you can to disrupt normal operations, show up at the picket, um, uh, and, and make sure you, you communicate, you know, to everyone and around you while you're leaving and, and, and, and, you know, cause as much disruption as you can, that's kind of what our, our thinking is at the moment. Yeah. Anything else you want to add, Tad? Yeah, so I wanted to add that, um, so for this one, this strike, I mean, the reason that we're doing it is because they're not coming to the table in good faith. So I was going to correct my number. So we had 27, um, complaints that we followed with the California public, um, employment relations board and six of those were, um, actually official complaints to the University of California. And so this strike is a little different because it's, you know, it's, um, interesting to have to explain to other people why this is so important, um, especially in such a short time frame. And so for postdocs, like on a day to day basis, we do so much research that every day, the matters and our employment schedules aren't very long. So I say that postdocs are generally in there for five years, but PIs don't want to keep a postdoc for a year, um, or two or longer, um, especially like I've noticed a pattern here in academia in general that postdocs, it's, some people prefer to keep them a year and two years because by the time you ask for pay raises or the time you ask for occurred development and to get to your next stage, you're not worth it to them anymore and they change you out. So when I come in as a postdoc, each position I've come in every day matter and setting up my research experiments, setting up my papers, setting up what I was going to do for the job search because you don't have them much time. It takes, you know, six to eight months to get, get even an initial interview for a faculty job. Um, and that's a rare thing that you would get anyway. I think about two percent of postdocs become faculty at this point. And so we're giving up a lot of, yeah, it's really bleak. And so like right now, I think the fact that we authorize a strike based on the, um, bad faith bargaining, we did that because like things are so important, but we know what we're going to lose. So if you have to strike for weeks, that is lost experiments that's lost time to do our publications, be competitive for this competitive job field. Um, and also we're going to let down a lot of people because we're kind of anchors in our lab for, uh, the undergraduates and the under, uh, and the graduate students and also the, the text in our lab. And so if we're gone, the lab just kind of dies, especially if the grad students walk out too. Um, but I think we know that the value that I would get personally at for my career, um, it isn't worth it if I see not only myself suffering each year, not being able to make my rent and able to feed myself, like eating one mill a day is not really great. And being able to afford one wardrobe is entire two years when employment is not great either. Um, and I'm a postdoc and I see the graduate students who I was a graduate student two years ago, there's not a real border there. Um, and seeing them suffer, you know, most of us postdocs don't want to see anyone else have to go through that. So it's worth the lost time and it's kind of incalculable, but I could say what we would lose because grants are, um, so up in the air, but you know, we're talking millions of dollars for a grant cycle being lost if a postdoc can't, you know, submit the application. We're talking, you know, uh, what Alex said helps, offensive, disequipment, and experiments are in these big labs, um, in biology and engineering. So it's really immeasurable. And I think it's on the UC to come to the table and good faith and say, hey, let's not do this. And that's not ruined their research and they're teaching because that's the thing that we're here to support. Um, and I just want to say that overall we're only less than 1% of UC's total budget. So what is it to give us a fair wage and a good housing so we can continue to not, um, to continue to continue to our research and teaching and not have to go on strike and lose all of this. Yeah, yeah, I think it's very fair. Uh, you know what else I only pays out 1% of their income to employees. This is the Washington State Highway Patrol. No, it's not. They pay shit. No, yeah. Yeah, yeah. It's disappointing, isn't it? Yeah, we're back. Yeah. So I think you've done a really excellent job of explaining, uh, sort of what's at stake and what, uh, people can stand to lose. I know it can be very confusing. Also as a teacher, I will add like what do you do when you're not supposed to communicate, right? Like so like what, what about when your students email you, that could be very difficult or, uh, especially if it comes towards the time when you're writing application letters or you're writing letters of support for your, your BA students who want to go into an MA or PhD program. Like you don't want like a many of us teach as much out of vocation as for the 30-odd grand a year we can make it a place where the cost of living is insane. And so like we want to help those people because we care about our students and, and so it can be very hard for us to, uh, to go on strike. I will say that we're very fortunate in the community college district here, which is a different system for people who aren't aware. Um, it's a entirely different university system. Uh, we have a very strong union. And as a result, our ijunct faculty here are, I believe some of the best paid in the country and the teacher to community college sometime. And that's exclusively thanks to a strong union and faculty being willing to back up that union. So like it does work, which is nice to see. But let's talk about some of the actions that have been taken already. I understand it as some folks occupied like a very busy intersection earlier this year in the spring. Right. Do you want to talk about that? Yeah, that was um, the action that we had back in April, um, to sort of raise awareness of the, you know, issues with bargaining and some of the other things that were going out at that time. Um, and I was really impressed with how well it went actually, um, in terms of the number of students who came out, number who actually willing to participate in that. But yeah, we got a several hundred people all together. Marked down to, um, the intersection for our San Diego listeners. That's via La Jolla and La Jolla Village Drive. Just you can get a picture of how important it had been in the intersection. This was those of you who know it. Um, and did not allow any cars to get an intersection for an entire rush hour, uh, which, uh, was fantastic. Um, and, if I hold food, it's a real, we did. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, it took, uh, uh, I hope that, um, San Diego PD build UCSD for that because they had about 50 officers controlling traffic to helicopters. Um, it was quite a response. I talked to an undercover cop on the bridge over the highway. They had, he was upset that he was missing something, some baseball game or something. I don't know. Uh, could have had a real job. I'm actually staring at that intersection right now. If I could tell you how busy it is, like, I, we were terrified of what, like, safety was the most important thing. And I think we did a good job. I'm sure everyone was safe, but like, it's busy. It's, it is a heart line over in La Jolla. Yeah. My first day in America, I was walking with another grad student to try and find some food and, uh, we tried to cross that road, go stuck in the middle, go to Jay walking ticket and, uh, right. I knew I'd made a great choice in coming to California at that time. Yeah. That is that road takes like, if you want to cross all three ways, because it's one of our, one of our stupid California roads, we can only cross an intersection on three sides. So if we want to go all the way around, that's going to be like five, six, seven minutes waiting at crosswalks. It's, it's, it's, but that's, that's for maybe a different podcast about transportation. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Um, I think there's just one other action that we had that I would really want to highlight and, and, and this was about, you know, related to a postdoc. So maybe, maybe Tyler can kind of film the details, um, about the, um, the action we had for, um, for the, uh, postdocs, I can't, I'm, I'm blanking on your name, but Tyler, do you, do you, maybe able to talk about? There's been so many postdocs and actions. So this is a really horrible case where someone who, you know, had brought up that there was data, uh, ethics issues in their lab, which obviously has any postdoc or graduate student telling her boss that they're doing something wrong. Never goes well. Um, but this person was bringing up this issue. This person also was, um, was pregnant. And, um, at that point, the person, once they found out that this person was pregnant, um, had decided, oh, well, you need to leave by the end of the year. Um, which would make the, make it to where the person would get deported, because this was an international scholar, um, in their third trimester, um, you know, in, in January. And so, it was a more, more insurance during her third trimester. Yeah. And so Alex, if you have a good memory of the action, I'll let you speak about it, because it was pretty awesome. Yeah, it was pretty great. We got a ton of people to Rally, uh, in the, uh, in the health sciences area of campus. Um, people, uh, essentially set up little mini-pickets of, uh, the relevant buildings, um, basically, not blocking the insurance, but making sure everyone who went in knew exactly, you know, why we were there and what the issue was and they were eventually, uh, towards the end of the day, I was, I wasn't there at that point, but they were able to actually get up to, um, uh, where, um, the chair for department's office in Labwara. Um, and I, I, there was nothing threatening that went on, but I do believe the cops were called them, nonetheless. Um, and, and my understanding was, uh, this is just rumor, but he told someone that he really needed them to leave because he had to get to the bathroom and didn't want to talk to the students. So that was a funny, uh, part of the story. Um, but they did get him on video because they eventually were able to talk to the chair of the department and got him on video saying, I think this person deserves an extension of their contract. And they are two later, uh, UCSD did actually award, uh, this postdoc, um, an extension of her contract. But yeah, that, this is an incident that, you know, never would have seen the light of day, um, unless this had been raised, uh, unless we hadn't already had this kind of activist kind of consciousness going on because of the ongoing bargaining and the union was able to postdoc union was able to win kind of, I think, out of a really terrible situation, I think salvage probably one of the best outcome, uh, she'll be able to have her child here, um, and look for new jobs, uh, in the meantime to, um, you know, whatever her family wants to do, extend the visa or, or go back, to their, um, original country, but they essentially they have security, uh, some measure of security now, um, which wouldn't have happened about, uh, raising, uh, uh, quite a disruption over it. And I also want to say that this was a postdoc in the grad students came out to protect a postdoc. So all these invisible lines at the university draws, like obviously there were postdocs there too, but if you think about the number of graduate students, like, they are the immune system that has come out and saved a bunch of postdocs through these actions. There was another action with someone that was, um, being let go within four months of their employment, um, in an inappropriate way, this person was kind of using their lab as that research mill I talked about, only really hired women postdocs and really did not treat them well, um, despite doing research and women's health. And, um, the grad students also came out for that and we got to save that person from getting immediately fired and they're better off. Oh yeah. Yeah, it's great. I think that sort of there are two super important and it's bad. Yeah. Is the only thing that stops university from just ramping and exploiting everyone apart from like 150 people at a very top? Yeah. Actually, on that note, can I ask have you all been working with like, I guess, what's the technical name for them? Like, uh, like the, like the, like the, the, the, the other non-student unions on campus? Oh, it's like AFT. Employee unions. Yeah, yeah, like yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. They, um, unfortunately most of the unions don't have sympathy strike or, uh, uh, those sorts of things in their contract. If they, they cannot do an official strike if they're under contract, but yeah, they've definitely been helping in terms of kind of raising consciousness and awareness. I know uh, the ones that have the ability to, um, you know, maybe cancel their classes or use class time to teach about the strike or, you know, do things like that, um, have been, um, uh, they, they're, they're planning to do that. Um, what's nice as well as I did, this isn't really a union, but there's kind of a non-university affiliated sort of group of faculty, uh, who, you know, advocate for, for changes across the entire campus and they're organizing a very large petition and letter writing campaign from faculty members supporting, um, our action, which I think is, is really critical because, um, yeah, the university won't listen to us, but they may listen to, if you get to a critical mass of, of professors supporting what we're doing. Um, so there's been, you know, not universal certainly, but, but there's been a great deal of solidarity, but even coming from, uh, some of the people who, who the university, I think, is relied on to be more on their side, which is the, the professors last. Yeah. And if, like, the faculty association, I think that's pretty awesome because you could imagine that UC doesn't want them to ever unionize, but, um, they obviously see the leaky pipeline where grad students are, you know, either not staying in their programs or postdocs aren't coming. And you just, you know, what you happen to have at the end of that is people that have generational wealth, um, at the end of it who happen to stay in these programs. And I think that's what really motivated the faculty to come out and say something because like UC says, oh, we support equity university, but then they have seen constantly the university not do anything to really change that. Yeah. Yeah. It's good. It's good to see the faculty showing up. Um, and again, that's the sort of, that's how we fix these things, right? Is by sticking together with sort of the reality with organizing. So maybe to finish up, if we talk about what next week's going to look like, like, or what next week might look like, I guess, or I guess it'll, it'll be this week by the time this comes out. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So what can people look for on the, on the timeline from UCSD? Uh, from the university or from from from from from the from the strike. Yeah. From the strike. Yeah. We'll have a number of uh, tickets throughout campus, um, mostly kind of trying to keep them geographically oriented. So everyone from the surrounding buildings just go to, you know, one, one specific spot we've, we're doing, you know, signups, organizing strike pay, all of those sorts of typical things, uh, been going on this week. Um, and the walk out begins November 14th, for across, you know, not just UCSD, but all the campuses. So that's, uh, our total, um, um, bargaining unit membership across three unions is 48,000 people of those 75% voted on our strike off vote 98% voted yes. So we're expecting a pretty significant turnout of that entire membership. Uh, to be on the picket line. Um, so that will, uh, there will be, um, you know, those TAs who are walking out will be the, that'll be the first disruption university fields before they feel the research disruption. They will very clearly see the teaching disruption and exams not taking place grades not being entered. Uh, sections not being taught across every single campus. And, um, and that will certainly be, um, uh, something that they will, um, have to deal with and, and hopefully the, the size of the disruption in the first few days will convince them, uh, to, uh, come to the bargaining table in a, uh, a reasonable way. Um, and if not, we are prepared, uh, to continue until they do. Yeah, and the other interesting part about what's going to happen next week is that this is, um, a picket line that is going to be not just including, you know, uh, researchers and instructors, but also people that support us. So there's a big conference downtown for a lot of neuroscientists. And, um, it's, it's called SFN. I can't remember what that stands for. Um, but a lot of them are actually coming to the picket line to support us. Um, that may be. Yeah, that's awesome. I didn't know about that. That's great. Yeah. Yeah, it's, I think that's pretty exciting. I didn't know it was in San Diego, but, um, they're going to be here and also, you know, vouch for us, um, because UC does like, we're all the leading research group and we contribute to a lot of the research that are at these meetings anyway. Um, there's also going to be, it's a child friendly picket line. And for people with access needs, we're going to have, um, you know, virtual picketing. And you'll see what that looks like. Um, it's still being developed, but I think that's pretty exciting as someone, you know, with a disability myself is exciting that other people can contribute to that. Yeah, it's very cool. Have you guys could do that? It's very cool. All right. How can people help? How can people support you? How can people find you on the internet? Yeah. So I think if you want to keep up with the strike news, there's three Twitter accounts, the S-R-U-U-A-W-U-A-W-W-F-E-A-10 and U-A-W-W-2-E-6-5. I think they kind of share a lot of the same content sometimes because we're all kind of doing this together, but that's a good place to keep track of the news. I know there is a link to, um, there's a, they've set up a hardship strike fund. Um, I don't have that link off top of my head. Yeah, I'll put it in. If you can put that in the notes, I guess. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And if you go to fairucnow.org, it'll have all the information about what's happening, but also those type of links too. So if you want some context, so it's pretty good. Absolutely. Yeah. And then how about YouTube personally? Would you like to share your personal Twitter? So do you just want to stick with the, the organizational ones? Um, I would love to. I promise I'm not that fun, but minus the Tyler Bell PhD. That's my tag. Yeah. And I'm Alex T. Winsle on Twitter. I, once this is over, I'll probably go back to tweeting entirely about my work and pictures of buses. I love your Twitter Alex. Yeah. Yeah. Alex is a high value follower. Oh, thank you. Yeah. Alex gives live updates about transit and I was exciting. You'd see a train. It's all good. Yeah. It's pretty like it's like five year old child. We have pretty much pluses in San Diego now. What can I say? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. All right. Thank you so much for your time. Both of you. I really appreciate it. Best of luck. I think it's week. Maybe I'll come up and bring you some soup or like, like a oil can that we can start firing on campus or something. I love it. Have one here. Let's do it. I'm undown. All right. Yeah. Best of luck. And we'll look forward to hearing what happens. Thank you so much for thanks so much for talking to us. Hello podcast fans. I know you got to the end of the episode and you were thinking not enough James, not enough strikes, not enough UCSD. So lucky you. I've been up to send UC San Diego today and I've recorded with Tyler and Alex at the strike and we got some audio of the strike going on as well. It was really amazing, really incredible to see that many people out. Never thought I'd see that at UCSD. So without further ado, here's my interview with them. All right. So here with Tyler and Alex again, this time with more background noise. We're at the strike now. How many people are here? Roughly. Oh man, somewhere probably around at least a couple thousand right now. Definitely a couple thousand people out here. I read to UCSD if you haven't picked that up yet and like we did not get this many people even when like people started hanging newses around campus. I don't think I've just got this big. So this again, this is genuinely very impressive and how have things gone so far? What's been happening? I think things have gone really well so far. This is day two as we're recording this that we've been on strike. There has been some progress with bargaining table that I've heard but we do know that UC is going to try to drag this out. They think that they can outlast our momentum but so far as you can really hear from the noise behind us and see all the different thousands of people converging from all the picket locations across campus that they've been at since eight in the morning. I think our energy is going strong. What do you think Tyler? Yeah, so I think the energy is really strong here today. The UC did not expect us to come on day two which we know because at bargaining they cancelled our meetings for today because they didn't expect us to show up but somehow magically a meeting emerged around two o'clock today and it may be due to the fact that two thousand people are out here pretty pissed and want to fare a contract but yeah I think the momentum is pretty high. We actually did more disruption today going directly talking to the deans and the faculty and screaming in their offices as he's that really comfy but I was going to say yeah first floor seminars didn't go I'll put it that way. All right and there was something that I know you've posted about like intimidation and unfair labor practices and you come to talk to you and even if they turn to yeah I can talk to generalities there's well the labor law that governs us is a little bit complicated because some of us also receive course credit for the work that we do that is protected under activity that protects our strike activity which is a little bit of an anti-labor practice in and of itself there's no reason I have to sign up for 12 credits of just existing doing work that doesn't make any particular sense but it's the way the university runs things so there has been some emails that are sent out that are our questionable legal correctness as to whether we can be hurt in terms of our academic standing for participating on the strike that is definitely not true as we are if the is activity that's governed under the what our union is representing us for so we know we've had some issues with that Tyler I guess you could talk about maybe some other examples that have come out on the post-doc side right now the university has released like an FAQ of sorts in an email where it says oh well you have to tell the NIH that your post-docs aren't doing research and that they are funding needs to get pulled but that's kind of a joke there's no like reporting mechanism for that it's more like a stipend for a living so we're telling people just to stay strong and people see kind of past like the threat that they're making and a lot of faculty see through it too is that okay and we just intercepted you when you're going somewhere else do you like to introduce yourself all right so I'm with them post-doc I'm pretty new in UCSC I joined in April and I came here having already done another post-doc and a PhD in Europe I joined the union almost instantly when I came here since I've I was basically horrified for lack of a better way to put it so I studied in the EU for 10 years and my experience of academia is what I experienced there which was decent working conditions being able to save money not having to spend 50% of your salary on rent so when I came here and experienced post-doc life I couldn't believe it so I believe I met Tyler when I came here for the first time and we did this orientation that was awesome and awesome horrifying at the same time sorry it was awesome to meet you because I realized it was then that I learned how the labor union worked my knowledge of labor unions was minimal up until the point that I moved here so minimal that I didn't even know what labor unions in the EU functioned like until I came here and realized oh my god we are actually lucky to have a union that supports post-docs and this is not the case in a lot of places in the US yeah yeah that's true and so how is the strike action gone so far um it's been crazy um we've been planning this for so long it's a bit surreal to be part of it I think it's been going great it's been very energizing and it's been intense yes all right none of us really want to be out here and strike and the fact that so many people are putting work on hold just speaks to the intensity and seriousness of the problem and what we're striking for yeah yeah yeah I think that's very true it's really impressive how many people here I can't over it so yeah yeah yeah yeah very impressive so what see you guys know how the bargaining has gone and what we can expect from here well what we would like would be for the UC to meet us at the bargaining table and give us the fair contract but um repeating that add infinitum while we withhold labor is the plan thus far but what's actually been happening is the UC just hasn't been paying fair as you know yeah it's been it's been infuriating for me it makes me very angry it's very surreal especially I think if you're used to a sort of more sane labor context to see them just like gaslighting and doing what on the face for it is illegal stuff it's just respectful is what I feel yeah and maybe illustrate sort of what they see post-oxagraphdue as economic trends yeah as a workforce whose rights are not to be valued to do a bulk of the work it's it's very disrespectful yeah no I think it it certainly speaks to like I said earlier they're trying to outlast us and they think that we will reach a certain point where we we no longer feel like we can avoid our work that we can stay out here and I think you would think that with that's their strategy we realize that we are in a point of desperation we are in a point of precarity where we really need wages and compensation and and workplace protections that meet the current economic situation that we live in because right now that's not what we have and currently at the bargaining table they're kind of putting a lot of our labor reps into like something that looks like like Jal like Jigsaw like type trap rooms where they have only for less than lighting and no windows and then them not knowing whether or not they are going to have to get a flight back because they're not going to meet with them that day them saying that they haven't reserved rooms even though that you know they have so much power who's who's taking up a room from them to meet with them and actually come up with some proposals I got an update that admin wasn't bargaining because they couldn't reserve a room what does that mean there's 48,000 people on strike the entire system isn't working we mean it's your rooms also you own the rooms I'm I was I bet that was a fascinating update I'm sorry I just had to mention something about that so that's just all we have to know right now is that they keep canceling meetings adding meetings they're kind of just waiting us out to see how long we're actually beyond strike and whether or not we actually care about our contracts which I think you being here today you see how many people are out no one's going to leave this picket line throughout the week so yeah yeah I think that's basically it people aren't going to leave the picket line and the energy is awesome because people are fed up people are fed up people are fed up of being poor and homeless and this is not why we come to grad school right I mean I was very fortunate to have a good grad school experience and that's why I'm still in academia but a majority of the people who come to the university spending savings I know people with student loans back from India who are here to do a masters and are T.A.ing doing research killing themselves because they had a dream they literally moved across the world to come here following a dream and our ending of being broke and that's just heartbreaking from a university as big as this nobody deserves to be treated this way and I think everybody here is feeling it if you go to fairucnow.org there's a link to a strike fund right now a hardship fund and people can donate to that any amount they want to and there's also we're taking donations to actually feed people out here so people have questions about that they can just email the links at that website yeah can people show up to picket to help too like would you like people to people are very very welcome to show up to the picket line to come help all help is appreciated you want to join us you want to chant you want to bring supplies we'll be there this is across all 10 UC campuses if you're near a picket line if you want to show support and solidarity come join us yeah the virtual picketing is still happening and what they've been actually doing is making sure people get here nowhere to go since the picketing is so transient like we're literally moving building to building as it's needed and they're doing the calls for us and directing us so which is a wild thing but also the other thing is just people retweeting everything that we post make sure that no one can silence us because that's what you see once thank you so much for coming thanks for giving us this platform the awareness is really critical to make sure the UC can ignore us so thank you so much for coming at Long John Sobers feature seat tooth with a fish and trim platter two heavyweights of the high seas dipped in our signature batter and fried to golden perfection care your platter with Wisconsin white cheddar cheese bites and ride a wave of melty goodness order ahead at long john sovers.com fish yeah you work hard for your money so why not switch to a wireless provider that could save you up to half on your bill switch to consumer cellular today and get unlimited talk in text with a flexible data plan starting at just $20 a month plus you can add a family member to your plan for just $15 a month per line their award winning customer support team makes switching easy you can keep your phone and number and activation is free never worry about drop calls consumer cellular has the exact same coverage as the major carriers with coverage to over 99% of the nation this is all back by their 100% risk-free guarantee join the millions of others who have switched go to consumer cellular dot com slash podcast 25 and for a limited time get $25 off when you use promo code podcast 25 that's consumer cellular dot com slash podcast 25 promo code podcast 25 this year escape the holiday stress and get the sleep you need with Casper sleeps best offer ever right now save up to $800 on our supportive cozy mattresses like the original hybrid our highest rated mattress and our wave hybrid snow mattress that helps you sleep six degrees cooler you'll also find extra savings on select soft goods like sheets pillowcases and weighted blankets join over two million happy sleepers and save up to $800 on mattresses when you shop at Casper exclution supply visit Casper dot com slash promo it's the podcast it's it could happen here it is about something that could happen here very specifically um yeah i'm i'm Christopher Wong i'm here with James Stout and garrison Davis hello hello to you both hello we all joined the sum call that that did happen here and that did show everybody all right okay so that's the thing that that did happen here and now we're going to talk about something that could happen here and okay that specific thing is uh uh a call by two Harvard academics to hire 500 thousand more cops nope so okay uh the the like uh i don't i don't know when this is going to go up but sometime in the past there was a piece that went viral by civil rights lawyer and antipresent activist turned media critic alette karek atonis about a pair of Harvard academics yet who wrote this article calling for 500 thousand more cops and this is okay like the fact that we have academics writing position papers basically that are calling for 500 thousand more cops is terrifying in and of itself but but crime is is is is that a record high garrison you're about to see shit oh yeah you're about to see you're about to see in here shit that is going to make your fucking ears bleed because it's not shit like okay normally these are Harvard academics right so you're assuming these are like right wing that's at ghouls right are like the equivalent in in in this sort of like yeah you know these are not this was written by a socialist and when i say a socialist right like i i don't mean a sort of like one of the sort of like terminally online desperate cranks trying to hold together like a Maoist micro sect i'm talking about people who are incredibly well connected inside the mainstream socialist left so the authors of this call for 500 thousand more cops are Christopher Lewis who is a Harvard law professor who makes be embarrassed to have my own name and more interestingly Harvard sociology professor Audiner Usami so who is Audiner Usami um he is on the board is only editorial board of catalyst which is a a Marxist man okay do you do you do you do you know what catalyst is yeah yeah besides the sequel to the mere is edge of a original game now i don't yeah okay so the there are a Marxist magazine there's supposed to be a more sort of theoretical Marxist like magazine founded by a guy named viva chiber who's a pretty influential sort of like soak dem Marxist who could be found literally in any to any of the last like five decades you can find him yelling about the cultural turd in academia and calling for a return of political economy ha ha ha he's not a yes yes yeah I was just been he's been yelling about this for decades longer I think he's been yelling about this for longer than i've been alive oh god like that's how log this is going on people have definitely been like fetching about the cultural turn for longer than any of us have been alive yeah and and they've been wrong for that entire time yeah and oh okay chiber is like one of the guys who trained Usami in the first place Now, Catalyst's other major founder is much more famous and that's someone you probably have heard of who is one Bosch Carson Cara, who is the current president of the nation and also the founder of Jacopin, where, and this is where it gets funded. Usami also on the editorial board of Jacopin. This is the guy carrying for 500,000 more cops, right? This isn't coming from the usable sort of like rabid reactionaries. This is coming from people who have serious credentials in the mainstream socialists left. And okay, so, all right, I want to talk about what's actually in the paper. And the first thing I need everyone to understand about this from the get-go is that this is maybe the worst paper I've ever read. Like if I had tried to turn this paper into my, like, freshman, into like my, an undergrad lit class, I would have failed. Like when I was in my freshman year in college, I had to read biblical analysis written by a freshman Ted Cruz supporter who was arguing that there was a problem in the Bible where there was no way for God to talk to people. This is worse than that. Let me teach you to the Quran. How is that worse, Chris? Okay, so let's just start off, right? I'm going to start off with a random part in the middle so you understand how just my numbingly atrocious this is. Okay, so I'm going to read this. This is an article called, and I'm not kidding about the title of this quote, the injustice of under-policing in America. Uh, yeah. So many people are saying this. We're starting off great. We're starting off great. Yeah. It's like the Vembray. Sorry, I think. So before we get into the actual main argument, I'm just going to read this quote, which is, all right. Let's hear it. Here's even if our answers prove unsound. We hope that the combination of empirical social science and analytic moral and political philosophy we can contribute can help eliminate what alternative answers to those questions might have to look like to be sound, which first off, terrible writing science of Marxist Leninism. This is awful. Like, say this right. Terrible. Sit it back to editor, give them a decade. They'll come back with it. Second off, I literally cannot imagine two disciplines. I would rather less apply to the problem of mass incarceration than those. Like these authors have dared ask the question, what if we combined the bone rattling stupidity of analytic philosophy with the sociologist complete inability to do statistics? And the answer is this. And what I say complete inability to do statistics, right? I need people to understand how bad this article is. Right. Like I like I like this really needs you to understand. So here is here is a quote. Here's another section of the article. But while firearm availability, no doubt has some impact on the level of violence. We think the effect is likely to be small. A large effect would be difficult to square with other patterns across place, persons, and time. Consider for example, that while the United States has 10 times as many guns as El Salvador, the homicide rate there is roughly 10 times higher than it is here. Now stats, knowers, think for a second about what they just compared, right? The United States has 10 times as many guns, the homicide rate in El Salvador is 10 times higher, right? Think about this as a similar population. Yeah, yeah, yeah, okay. What does the US have more of that El Salvador? Guns. That's it. That's it. No, no, we have more guns. We have 50 times the population. The US has 331 million people, El Salvador is 6.5 million people, which means, again, if you're looking at this in terms of guns per capita, right? Yeah. El Salvador's guns per capita is actually five times higher than ours. Oh wow, that's quite impressive. Yeah, from the financial perspective, because we have a low gun. Yeah, right, and you know, okay. Again, if you're going to do basic statistics, right? You would think that these professors at Harvard University would know the difference between a rate of gun ownership and the pure owner of ship of guns. They do not. They do not. Do they not or have they decided that they're going to pretend they don't? I don't. Okay, here's the thing. Going into this, right? I assume this was just sort of pure hack shit. And I think a lot of it is, I think they also are genuinely this dumb. Like, genuine, it's really incredible. Like, I mean, again, like, the thing, like, the thing they've actually demonstrated with their own numbers is precisely the opposite of what they're arguing. The thing they've demonstrated with the numbers, they have given us, is that there is a correlation between gun ownership rates and the homicide rate, right? Like, they're trying to, this entire section is about proving that they're, that the number of guns doesn't, and like, this isn't even like, this isn't me, like, like, I don't like, this is not like me yelling about gun control or whatever, like, this is just to get you to understand the level of statistics these people are on. And also, I should point this out. I tracked down their citation because I wanted to make sure I didn't, I wasn't misunderstanding their argument, right? So I tracked down their citation on these numbers, and I went to the paper they cited, and the thing they cited does not have gun ownership numbers for El Salvador. So I have no idea whether they're getting any of these numbers. They've apparently, quite possibly, have pulled this out of their ass completely because apparently, apparently nobody checked if their citations actually contained the things that they're supposed to do. This is what I wanted to talk about. There is a thing that happens when you get tenure or you become a professor at the various establishes university, and that thing is you just say shit and people trust you. Like, we've seen this time and again in the academy, right? That like peer review is not serving its function because like the status hierarchy of people in academia is more important to both the peer reviewers and the people doing the writing than the actual process of peer review. Yeah, like their citations are, this is an interesting, this is, I don't know, they've made the capital letters lighter. They use a small arms survey, I guess, for the obviously. But it doesn't have those numbers. It's amazing. Oh, okay, so we've established that these people are absolute hacks whose work would have gotten me failed out of an undergrad course. Don't to be fair. Maybe it's technically possible that University of Chicago just holds its students to more rigorous standards than Harvard or MIT whose journal published this. Does their intellectuals? So, you know, I, we never knew. This is also, I never use Jacobin as a source on the show. Also because they pay 50 bucks per article and that shit is crazy. Yeah, Jacobin, not a cool publication actually, not mega based. Yeah, pay your workers if you're pretending to be socialist. Yeah, if you're trying to be like a labor. I mean, you're totally, yeah. But, Wash Car said, Kara is on the record talking about the quote, his quote, petite bourgeois hustle talking about how we made Jacobin. So, you know, okay, we'll get back to the class aspect of all of this next episode. But, okay, let's go back to this paper and let's take a second to look at what they're actually arguing. All right. And the first thing I need you to understand about their argument is that they're entire, the entire substantive arguments of this paper hinges on an absolutely enormous lie. Let me quote this lie. Yet it also illustrates the much less well-known fact that America is not in all an outlier in its rate of policing. The United States has around 212 police officers for every 100,000 total residents, which ranks it in the 41st percentile of today's developed world. Now, as Alitcare Katana points out, they've deliberately picked the lowest number of cops. They can find any, like the lowest reported number of cops in the USA can find anywhere. So, they picked 697,000 from, basically, like it's, they picked this number from an FBI reporting thing. But the FBI also says that they don't have all the cops there because it's like, it's basically like a voluntary reporting thing. So, there's a bunch of cops that aren't there. And then, Piers from Kara Katana, who's a piece about this quote, the professors then admitted privately over email that the US Census Count is actually 1,227,788 police. That's 76% higher for the number they chose to use in their public article. What is the significance of this? Using this number they admitted to me, the United States truthfully has 1.1 times the median rated rich countries. So, they've been over email that they have this whole article is based on them lying about how many cops there are in the US. And it's actually way worse than this because as he points out, right, this number, the number that they're using, only tracks public police. So, they doesn't count private police. And if you count private police, that number doubles again. It's not like this private police is there a mayor in America? No, there's no private cops, right? And the other thing is, this, the other thing is, doesn't count. Is this counts zero federal agencies? I was gonna say, but it doesn't count federal agencies. Does it count like state police even? Okay. Sheriff's deputies. I think you, I actually, I don't know if it counts sheriff's. It might. Is there not police? The deputies are different. Highway patrol? I mean, who's to say? Who's to say? I wasn't really to show into this. Sure is the thing. There's new things anyway. Yeah, we respect more time on this than they have already. Yeah, right, right. Okay, like to get it to get it to get it to sending you this, even if you exclude the feds entirely, right? And again, and this is actually a bad idea because we have like a fucking trillion federal agencies. For example, ice in the border patrol, who again, run just another police state inside of the American police state, right? We have that. And obviously, okay, so he's comparing our level of policing to policing in like European countries, right? And okay, I don't want to minimize how many border cops European countries have, but the US has way fucking more border calls. It's insane. It is not comparable at all. They do horrible things. I will yell at the end of time about how every friend text member needs to be like redacted, et cetera, et cetera, parody. But like, no, great. But even if you cut that out, right? The actual number of cops in the US is three times higher than the number they've given us. Actually, it might be, yeah. Yeah, so okay. I feel like there's anything that we can agree on as a nation is that America kind of has a lot of police. That's like what everyone kind of knows. That's like people, like, this will be a real problem. Yeah, there are just the police with like the really, like it like really militarized and heavy policing. Yeah, like a person who moved to America, it is shocking how many cops there are, how many different cops there are and how there are cops everywhere all the time. It is the thing that is very different about America. Oh, God. Okay. So I have used a tester to get that number. Quite possible. Yeah. Yeah. This is the most average. This is the most average. Shit. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I would absolutely, if one of my students in community got us to this, we'd have a talk. Okay. Okay. So do you know what else is based on the myth if under policing? These adverts for private cogs. Yes. Mm-hmm. Federal protective service. Get some. All right. We're back. Okay. So, all right. We've established that this argument is built on a pile of lies. However, the actual content of the argument is also really funny and completely incomprehensible. So their argument is that somehow, if the US had more cops, right? And if the ratio of cops to people like that the US had was like in line with the European countries, that somehow, and they never have a mechanism for how this would happen, this would somehow lower the incarceration rate. I think the mechanism is line. Right. Red line. That's what everyone says. Yeah. And you have more police that lowers incarceration rates. Yeah. Yeah. The entire argument here is what if the US was like Sweden, then there would be 500,000 more cops, but somehow also less, also 1.9 billion less prisoners. So, okay. Well, there's anything different between us and Sweden is cops. They have more cops. Oh, God. Okay. So, why are socialists pushing for this? And especially socialists. And again, as these are people who in their article admit that they think the best way to deal with poverty and with crime is welfare programs, not mass incarceration. So, okay. So why are they pushing for this? And the initial answer is that they think they can reduce crime specifically homicides by increasing policing. And they think they did it. Which to be fair is an opinion that I would say at this point, probably the majority of Americans have. Maybe. I don't know if I buy that. I don't know if that's true. I think you may be a little bit further out of the over 10 window. Maybe a majority of Americans, I think, do believe that if there's a few more cops, maybe we'll have a few less murders. I don't know. We'll see about that. But okay, the other thing though, that's sort of like amazing about this, right? Is that they think, okay, so they think they can cut the homicide rape by hiring more police. They also think that hiring more police will solve the problem with policing because the problem with police is that the police don't do enough. And so we need more of them. I mean, and then also, this will make them less violent. I mean, this is something, this is even the whole like a Joe Biden, like, we have to, we can't defund the police. We have to funnel the police. We have to give them resources because if they also made this, if they have less resources, then that means they don't have to use more violence. And it's that style of arguments. It's a nearly bro talking point. Yeah, but what's interesting about this again is that these people nominally are socialists. And so, yeah, in order to justify this, right, they argue that while being in prison is bad, and then they list a bunch of consequences of being in prison, being in a neighborhood is with high crime is also as bad for the same reason. They are literally arguing that being in a place with crime is basically the same as being in prison. Yeah, big time prison, I understand this, he owed a lot of taxes. Like I look, okay, I, I, I, there are, there are very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very few people I would ever say this to, You didn't plan up to go in garrison. Look, I hope these people get a due ethnography of this one day. Like I, I hope I hope they get to go study what the inside of prison is like a participant observation. Yeah, I hope they get to go do this. Like you, like, there are, there are lines in this article. Like, here, here, here is a random line I've pulled from this article, they say at one point, quote, in fact, black people seem to be underrepresented among those, who report ever having been arrested in their lifetimes. What that cake? All right, yeah, all right, hold that. That isn't your right quote. So citation didn't, what is it? Yeah, what are they? They've done some absolutely insane, I'm not, I'm not, I'm not actually going to dignify them by laying out the stats bullshit that they, they, they've, they've had time to justify this. Like we have already seen what their stats look like, right? They're, they're stats are trying to compare a rate to the false. Yeah, it's insane. It's completely nuts. Like, that's the one thing that, that's the one thing that even like racist like Republicans, like no, is like, yeah, they'll be like, yeah, there's more because, because I don't like black people and you're like, that's not why, but whatever. Yeah, I'm just reading this paragraph now and it is actually, it is, it's, yeah, pretty bad. So, okay, I, okay, so we have established this is bullshit, right? I, I, I want to read a, a kind of long section that I think gives the game away as to why they're arguing this. Well, we think in the long run, a significant expansion of social policy will be reduced crime by addressing its root causes and in turn, reduce the need and demand for both policing and imprisonment. Okay. It's other work on, yeah, that's true. I would say probably, probably true. Yeah. In other work, we argue that any coherent conception of distributive justice or economic efficiency entails that the United States should expand its social policy. But a significant expansion of social policy requires significant redistribution from rich to poor. Redisribution of this magnitude would require the poor to wield some kind of leverage over the rich. Given the collapse of the American labor movement and the electoral fracturing of the American working class, we doubt we will see anything like this soon. Who are aim in this essay is to say something useful about what should be done in the non-ideal world in which we live, not just in the ideal world in which we would like to live. To say something. Hold on, hold on. Wait, let me read this next sentence. It gets worse. Okay. To say something about that question, we limit ourselves to options that are revenue neutral. These are socialists. I think they may have walked outside of the day. They've just given up. Yeah, they've, you know, okay, so there's actually more of this that is also like, it keeps going. We can never have a better world. You know what that means is that we should instead just have more police. Here is their defense of this. But why consider only prisons and police? Why couldn't the government redistribute the existing pool of money from prisons and police to social programs? So true. As many reformers have demanded, we argue in what's wrong with mass incarceration, which is a book that they're going to release that I hope nobody buys. I don't trust them. I hope gets arrested. Make a book like that. I'm asking for a surgery now. This is because social policy is be deviled by what we call the efficiency feasibility paradox to address the root causes of crime would be meaningfully to change the opportunity structure for the most disadvantaged people in America. To do this by expanding untargeted universal social programs, we require significant resources since the vast majority of beneficiaries are not America's most disadvantaged people. Because penal spending is hyper targeted in a way that social spending is not. It costs about $300 billion a year to run the world's most extensive penal state, something like $3 trillion to run its most dynamic welfare state. We admit there are significant, this is a slightly related paragraph. We admit there are significant obstacles to changing the balance that state and local government strike between the arms of law enforcement. There are, after all, reasons that the United States has involved in the present-day penal balance. But our view is that the first world balance, so the first world balance is the thing they're talking about that supposedly no way has or some shit where they have more cops but like per capita but less people incarcerated. But our view is that then first world balance is nonetheless substantially more feasible than any of the kinds of things that reformers tend to demand today. In the highly unequal oligarchic America which we live at present, calls to reallocate a fixed pool of revenue will meet with less powerful opposition that calls to tax the rich. That is why we assume it is infeasible to expect the United States to build a generous welfare state in the mold of the Scandinavian social democracies. People also use hyper-targeted social policy to adjust the root causes of crime are similarly infeasible as we have argued to be efficient a social policy intervention must meaningfully transform the opportunity structures of those most likely to commit crime. I mean, an intervention that transforms the structure of opportunity only in only those in this position will upend the ineffective and set structure of unequal societies. Thus, gumming up the economy and eliciting political opposition. I mean, here's the thing is that in some ways I agree that the United States won't get better by making social policies within my lifetime. But my solution to this is illegalist lifestyleism not hiring more cops. Well, don't worry. There is a significant section of this where they shit on anarchism. Oh, yeah. We'll get to that. We'll get to that. Okay. Okay. Good. Yeah. This is what fucking happens when all your friends are also Harvard professors. You can also. Yeah. Real fucking people because you don't fucking talk to them. And they're like, oh, we deliver. It's obviously written by somebody who's currently like well off. Like, they're currently doing well, which is why because they, because they don't think the world's going to turn into a socialist utopia, but they're personally doing okay. The way to make the world feel better for them is maybe more police will make you feel safer. Like that's what that's what they're doing is because they're already well off and they're like, well, social change isn't coming. I want to live a happier life. Maybe police will keep the bad people away from me. Yeah, because they see poverty of an issue of poverty is upstream of crime. And crime is a fucking annoyance to them because someone might steal their fucking BMW. Well, again, crime living in a place with crime is the same as being in prison. Because you cannot conceive because it's socialism without fucking empathy or experience of fucking poverty, right? So you can make these ludicrous statements and all your friends in the smoking room at Harvard will agree with you. Go home. Yes. Yeah. Ah, ah, and I mean, I mean, this is the thing. Very frustrating. Like, they, they fundamentally like when Bernie lost the election, these people gave up on politics. Right. Like, that's what's happening. They're arguing that like not even is not even just like the classroom goes as unwinnable. They're arguing that basic liberal politics is impossible, right? Taxing the rich is a thing that that's not like a radical thing. That's like like the basic, that's like a basic democratic party thing. And they're arguing that it's so impossible that anyone who has a plan to change anything has to pre means test it to be compliant with a non-existent balance budget amendment to get the right to support it. Like Liz trust you shit. This is what this was written by one of the people on the editorial board of Jacobin. Yeah, well, that doesn't shock me. But it is very funny to look at their citations, which are like 80% people being like this article is horse shit. And then like cop publications. Yeah. Yeah, let's go. So okay. So having actually, well, okay, so before we do, we should do another. It's a bad thing. Do you know what a who else has completely abandoned the idea that there's any possibility of social change in the world? The conservative party and Eunice Party have quit Britain and North Ireland. Yeah, do they sponsor something by I guess now. Right. I'm going to take the money and get it at us. Yep. Yep, that thank you. Richie Sunack. And, okay, we're back. So having abandoned politics in favor of complete capitulation to the forces of reaction, They turn towards a cost benefit analysis of having more cops. The benefit they argue is less crime, and this is bullshit. There is no statistical evidence to having more cops reduces crime. I have done, like, there are other reasons why this is bullshit. I have done entire series about. There is a lot of writing on this topic and how this correlation is not actually effective. It's also like a very important thing here. This is a thing that's about what kind of crime you care about, right? Like, I have written an entire series about why the times when my police department was literally being run by multiple drug cartels at the same time when they strapped us to fucking radiators and acid balls, the car batteries. They shot children to the street. They disappeared people to be tortured into fucking black sites, and then they went to fucking Iraq, it's a CIA, how to do it? Like, these people, the cops, they are rapists, they are kidnappers, they are extortionists, they are thieves, they are torturers, they are murderers. A lot of them are in literal neo-Nazi gangs who run their own serial killer competitions. None of this applies, like appears in any of the analysis that these dipshits have compiled. And it's- You don't want neo-cultural turn to get involved. You just want to look at the material conditions here. Yeah, yeah, the mature conditions, apparently, are cop, go up, crime, go down, which- Yep, it's actually important. Like, I think it's important to note that there's a really good article, I think it was my impulse one called Raise the Crime Rate. From, this is from like 2006, but they have this point, which is that like, the reductions in the crime weight that we like see insofar as they happen are not actually reductions in the amount of crime going on. Like, what's happening is that, like, we put people in prison and then the crime happens to them there, right? Like, even if you reduce the homicide rate outside of prison, there's still the homicide rate inside of prison, which nobody fucking gives a shit about. And, you know, because again, this crime doesn't go away. All that happens is that it gets, you know, intensified and inflicted on group of people, the American public doesn't give a shit about. So, all of the violence, all of the rape, all of the fucking murder, all of the theft, all of the shit we normally throw people in prison for, in theory, is just happening to people inside of prisons, is just that academics can stop pretending to give a shit about it when they don't have to see it. Yeah, I like where I live, right? We just re-elected a sheriff who was overseen, like 19 deaths in jail this year. Yep. In San Diego, right? But that is not seen as an issue of evidently to the people who voted for it, to the Democratic party who endorsed her. And instead, like, they would much rather have that because they're presumably worried that the person who ran against her in the primaries would be too soft on crime, and therefore, that test list might get keyed. Yeah. So, okay, let's look at the supposed benefits. Let's, I guess. I started, those are the benefits. Let's look at the costs. Quote, finally, consider the cost of policing. On the one hand, a world of more policing would perhaps unsurprisingly be a world of more arrests. Based on recent work by Chaplin, our best guess is that the first world balance would be a world of almost 7.8 million arrests. On the other hand, for some, okay, this is a direct quote, by the way, I need everyone to understand, I am directly quoting them when I say this. On the other hand, for the somewhat speculative reasons we gave earlier, we guessed that a world of more policing would be one of less police violence, about 900 fewer people killed by the police. Based on what? AmeriCorps. That's how James AmeriCorps. More cops than do less violence. Yep. Yeah, it makes me... This, you know, if you were, for example, a social scientist, right, at all, you could look at all of the other times the US has gotten more cops and tried to see if that, like increased or decreased the amount of violence the police do. Not bad. You know, put the data down. They've drawn a line. They've drawn a line. It's all good. I do want to do attention to figure one, where they have exactly one data point. Yeah. And that they've just drawn a line to it. It's so easy to say to the data point. Yeah, I mean. Line, we've got a line. Like, this whole thing is just sort of like, like, you know, okay, so even if somehow, right, by some miracle, this occurred and less people were killed by the police, like we're killed by police violence because there was more cops, which this is the kind of thing that for the purposes of this thought experiment, right? We are allowing people to believe this, like for the same reason that we allowed children to believe in the Easter Bunny. I assume this is what I pulled up. I, kids don't believe in the Easter Bunny. I, I have met kids who believed in the Easter Bunny. I understand believing in Santa, but do people actually believe in the Easter Bunny? Not many. Not many, but also, also, also, most people don't believe the police will be more violent if you have, if there will be less violent if you have more of them. How about the truth fairy? The truth fairy, was that? Yeah, let's, let's, let's, let's let them believe this, right? This entire argument hinges on the theory that incarceration and arrest are distinct outcomes of policing, right? They're arguing that there's gonna be more arrest, but that's okay because there will be less people in prison. Now, there is one tidy problem here that you may have seen, which is that when you arrest people, it leads to people going to prison. Nowhere in this entire article have these two Harvard professors at any point considered the fact that when you arrest someone, they sometimes go to prison and that arresting more people will mean more people go to prison because that's what happens when you arrest someone. They've never considered this. And in fact, in fact, not only have they never considered this, they seem to believe that there is an inverse correlation between the number of people getting arrested and how many people go to prison. They think that 7,800,000 more arrests will somehow lead to 1.2 million people less in prison. It's, yeah, even though, fuck. What? People in this country die in between arrest and their hearing, right? Like in between arrested and having a fair trial. Like, yeah, to ignore that, it's not just like, ah, it's not just wrong, it's callously cruel. Also, like they appear to have not looked at any point at the opportunity cost of having all these cops, right? Like, we pay cops a metric shit ton of money because the only unions that apparently the state cares about, and like, we could do something useful with that money, right? Like, what does it think? The thing they claim they're doing is that they're gonna fund less prisons and fund more cops. And this relates to less people being in prison. Now, if this doesn't make any sense to you, that's because it doesn't make any sense at all. And again, we have to come back to the question. What do you think happens to people who get arrested? Like do these people think they can send off occasions to Heaty? Like, I know none of these people, none of the people riding this have been arrested, but like, you can't be this stupid. Like there's no way. And, ah. Oh, god. So, okay, I'm gonna close on some stuff here. Which I'm gonna close on the sort of anarchist stuff that they're ranting about. I'm gonna read another quote from this. Some civil libertarians might prefer radical decarceration without any increase or perhaps even some reduction in police force size on the grounds that state imposed violence or harm is morally different from and worse than interpersonal violence committed by private individuals. An extreme version of this position would hold that no amount of interpersonal violence could ever justify the use of coercive force by the state. But any state completely lacking in coercive power would be unable to enforce tax law on policy and thus unable to collect revenue. Without revenue, the government could not provide public goods or a social safety net. Which also, by the way, I wanna stop here and like, point out that like, they, like, in any other context, none of these people believe this because like, these people are all deal charred lists, like that they're all NMT people. And so they don't actually believe that money, that they, they, they, in any other context, except this one, they understand that money is something created by the state. Except here. When they have to justify police, without revenue, governments cannot provide public goods or a social safety net. So this extreme version of libertarian, a civil libertarian is essentially a kind of political anarchism. And we doubt many are in fact committed to this brand of anarchism. So, okay, well, let's unpack this again. When they say civil libertarianism here, what they say is that anyone who proposes to defund the police or reduce a number of people in prison, right? In the next paragraph, they argue that anyone who wants to do those things is actually in favor of increasing the homicide rate, because when there's less cops, then quote, serious crime runs unchecked in poor neighborhoods, which leaves you with two choices, right? You can be an anarch, quote unquote, anarchist and let the crime happen because you supported decreasing the number of cops or you could support having more cops. Yeah, it's just an absurd extrapolation of a position in the like, but it's not just that. They've, what they're doing here is they're giving their entire gateway, right? What they've admitted is that their ideal society requires and this is what they are saying about the state's need for coercive power, right? With their own arguments, they, the coercive power they need is the police. And so what they are saying is that their politics requires an entire class of rapist neo-Nazi murderers to, you know, like to enforce their vision of the welfare state. Like, in order for there to be a welfare state, you have to be a bunch of people who can fucking walk into your door and shoot you, right? There have to be a group of people who can fucking stand there, grab your child, smash their head into a wall 15 times and then fucking grab you and throw you through a window, right? This is what they are arguing. And this plays the question, okay, so why do these people want more cops? And, you know, the caricature they offer up is that without cops, everyone would just murder each other and so we need neo-Nazi death squads to stop us off murdering each other. But, okay, that's stupid, right? Like, self-evidently, police are only like, police are not that old. They've only been around for like 200 years. So we know that's not true. So why do they actually want more cops? And, you know, something that's very interesting given that this is an article about the police that is written by people who are on the editorial board of Socialist magazines. No where in this article does it mention the fact that the cops exist to protect private property? Right? This is a huge part of what their existence, right? Their job is to ensure that there is one class of people who owns the factories into fields and the grocery stores and the fast food chains and the fucking card dealerships and that there is another class who was forced to work for them and have their labor still on every day of their lives. And, of course, they sort of like faux pro cop, they's pro cop like, faux social democrats will never mention it, right? But, these people's version of quote-unquote socialism is one in which all that shit, all the stuff that makes things like all the businesses, all the corporations, all of that, all that shit is owned by capitalists and not the working class. They need those cops specifically to protect the property of the ruling class from you, right? Like that is ultimately what this is about. The specter of crime and this is true whether it's coming from socialist or whether it's coming from the most like unbelievably deranged blue lies matter cop freak. It is about stopping you from taking what is yours. And that's the end of part one. In part two, we're gonna look at the whole sort of background ideology. That's running all of this. And it also sucks. So, yay, come back tomorrow for more great news. Love it. You work hard for your money, so why not switch to a wireless provider that could save you up to half on your bill? Switch to consumer cellular today and get unlimited talk and text with a flexible data plan starting at just $20 a month. And customer support team makes switching easy. You can keep your phone and number and activation is free. Never worry about drop calls. Consumer cellular has the exact same coverage as the major carriers with coverage to over 99% of the nation. This is all backed by their 100% risk-free guarantee. Join the millions of others who have switched. Go to consumercellular.com slash podcast25. And for a limited time, get $25 off when you use promo code podcast25. That's consumercellular.com slash podcast25. promo code podcast25. The main record is on the stop side of the tracks. Report of mail drive on late 20s to beer injuries. Copy that. Can you see the vehicle? No, it's way up there. I heard a witness say the stop arm was down, but he tried to beat the train anyway. Too many drivers are killed crossing railroad tracks, even though they know a train is approaching. What they don't know is even after it breaks, a train can take up to a mile to stop. Requesting ambulance stretcher to show a press victim back to the road. Copy. Stop. Trains canned. Paid for by Nitsa. Podcasting. Oh, I love it. I love talking to microfilms of people. Listen. Yay. Good for them. It's going to outlive micro-blogging. Apparently. Yeah. Okay. Who could have asked? We've won, guys. We are the last medium standing. I do think the majority of people on this call got this job. Because of micro-blogging. It's such a small part because of micro-blogging. 100% because of micro-blogging. Yeah, it's true. Look at where our posts have bought us. That's right. Here. To this moment on the podcast, it could happen here. The podcast where we don't explain what the podcast is. That's right. Nope. Yep. And yeah, the podcast also contains me, Christopher Wong, contains Garrison Davis, it contains James Stout. And allegedly Robert Evans says, however, Robert Evans is. I think he's legitimately actually busy right now. He is recording something else or something. Yeah. He's doing a marathon thing. But if you look at the eye, how I pay to Tony Robot. We have a lot of podcasts on the cool zone media. Yeah, on the cool zone media, that's right. So speaking of podcasts we've done on the cool zone media, we did one that came out the one before this one. What was it about? It was about how about a socialist want 500,000 more cops? That's disappointing. Or is it disappointing? That's disappointing. Yeah. So, okay. I asked myself the question when I read this. Why do they want this? How did we get here? Because they're rich and they're scared. Yes. So this is true. There's also sort of deeper roots to what's happening here. And okay. So it is true that there's been a whole wave of people who were sort of nominally progressive or socialist in 2016 or 2017 who turned right in the past few years, particularly over racial issues like leaf, fang, green, green wall. Like more recent to the TYT people like Boshar Sikaras, we're doing crime wave shit like kind of recently, which was actually really funny. He had this tweet about how like, oh, the crime race is not actually down. There's specific neighborhoods where the crime where people are poor where the crime is up and then you look at the data and that's exactly the opposite of what's happening. But okay. So, but this entire push for sort of more police is part of a broader political project that Don Aruse me and his sort of allies in Jockeban and etc. I've been pushing for years now and this sort of like political project is the class side of what's called the class versus race or the race versus class debate. So for people who weren't either weren't here for this or have like blissfully forgotten this, the race class debate was basically an argument about sort of the role of race in leftist organizing. The argument was basically like, okay, should we understand race is like a structural force in the US that requires its own specific organizing around racial justice and like liberation movements or should we attempt to put class first and attempt to solve racism by appealing to like the interest of the entire working class and only doing class based organizing? There are probably like three types of class first people and really we're going to see two of them here. There are a very small number of very committed and very radical Marxists and like a small number of anarchists who think that like, well, race was a product of class anyways and so if you end the class system in abolished private property, that's the sort of like actual central like mechanism of oppression in society. And if you do that like, you know, race will sort of fall apart and so you know, you should have class. Yeah, whatever. Sure. So it's a false consciousness anyway. Yeah. Like these people are wrong. I think they're less dangerous than the other kind of two people, but we're also going to see one of these guys later. So there's the people like called the like class with like a K people who are just straight up like racists like they are they are they are class with a KKK. Yeah, right. Like they, you know, the groups of socialists I've compared them to are like the socialists who came to the US after 1848 and were like, oh shit, who cares like slave like we don't care about slavery. The actual thing that like is good for the working class is stealing more land for indigenous people. And this is how we're going to solve the labor question. Oh yeah. Also, the sort of like like the people who were in the Knights of labor like the 1880s who were like, all right, we need to we need to defend labor. Where we're going to defend labor is by ethnically cleansing the entire west coast of Chinese people. Like these are basically these guys right there. They're just straight up racist to what unions and healthcare. Um, they used to be a real faction in the DSA, um, formed around this like absolutely dog shit subreddit called stupid poll. Um, they used to be a bunch of them in Philadelphia and these kind of people like they were like red scares initial base. And so by, you know, this is like the 2017 2018, by now like in 2022, these people are almost entirely deranged tradcaps who spent literally their entire time deep throwing Peter Thiel's boot. So they're kind of mostly like they're just right wingers now like that. That's what's happened to these people. Um, good riddance. Fuck him. I yeah. And then there are people like, Adonarius to be in Bosch Carson, Cara who don't really want to end capitalism and think that socialism is just sort of like welfare states and some unions. And also, and they also, and this is sort of critical, tend to think that racial justice organizing is a distraction from their main goal of achieving socialism. And by achieving socialism, I mean, electoralism and by electoralism, I mean getting these people elected to office. Yeah. Yeah. I hate these people. They're politics sucks. I've been fighting them for a bit like since I became a leftist, I have been at war with these people and to get a sense of how we got from, you know, what was legitimately in a lot of cases, what was at least legitimately arguing about how to deal with racism to a bunch of socialists going, what do you have 500,000 more cops? I want to take a look at a piece, uh, Adonarius, me wrote in catalysts with David Zachariah called the class path, the racial liberation. And I want to take a quote from its opening to give it a sense of people of like how awful this politics is. This is like like one of this sort of like opening statements about what what there's why they're taking the class side in the debate. We argue that the class race debate should center on one principle domain, the distribution of material resources. Now, okay, at first glance, this seems kind of reasonable enough, but there's another incredibly important aspect of any attempt to grapple with race in class that isomene is ignoring entirely. And that's violence, right? Race race is not just a measure of economic inequality, it's an index of violence. And you know, racialization increases your risk of interpersonal violence, increases your risk of sexual violence, increases your risk of mass communal violence, a lot of lynchings or sort of ethnic cleansing campaigns. And maybe most importantly for this whole argument, like being racialized dramatically increases the risk of suffering state violence. And this is a real problem for the sort of class first people because you know, it's something sort of multiple like multi racial working class electoral project won't do shit to prevent people from experiencing state violence just because there's welfare programs. We talked about this, what this looks like in our Brazil episodes, right? You actually have like legitimately a sort of united multi racial working class at Alexa social democratic government. And they enact anti poverty before performs and increases the size of the welfare state. And while this is happening, they also increase incarceration, the incarcerated population by 620% and created a rate of police killing that is 11 times higher than it is in the US, right? And this is the thing these people really don't want anyone to think about, which is that race is actually more complicated than economic inequality, which this entire politics is dedicated to not seeing because class first politics, like a lot of what it really is about amounts to a theoretical framework that gives you a way to argue that race is not an explanatory framework for literally anything so you don't have to talk about it. And anyone who talks about it is dividing the working class or some shit and it yeah, class straight to yeah, it fucking sucks. And you know, like one of the big sort of political violence things is mass incarceration. And one of sort of a donner's like political projects is arguing that mass incarceration isn't about race at all, but it's actually about class, which so we're going to see some more bullshit. He wrote, he wrote an article in Catalyst called the economic origin of the mass incarceration alongside you Chicago professor John Clegg and I have like, I have an enormous special contempt for John Clegg for two reasons here. One because, you know, a donner's like an irredeemable jock of been like soaked in some hack, right? Clegg is normally was part of the sort of the anglophone Marxist like ultra left, right? Like he was one of the contributors to the sort of to the ultra left theory journal, like ultra left of Marxist, communism journal end notes, which you know, like that influenced me a lot when I was like a tiny baby leftist. And he I also have an incredible amount of contempt here because he's a Harper Schmidt fellow at the University of Chicago. And here's the thing, okay, I don't know what Harvard is like, right? I've never been there. I don't know what their campus is like. I don't know what it's like to be on campus at Harvard. I know what you should call the you Chicago campuses like. I know what there's a cop on every fucking corner. I know that the surveillance campus literally everywhere. I know that they locked down the entire fucking campus. Well hundreds of heavily armed cops storm through every building in every courtyard of the area, every single time a kid steals something from a gaming store and runs for it until they've hunted them the fuck down. And I know that, you know, I know that the cops almost fucking killed me while I was there during a police chase. I know that John Clegg was on fucking campus when the you Chicago police department shot a kid who was having a mental health crisis. And to watch this shit every single fucking day and to make this kind of argument is just fucking unforgettable. It is fucking atrocious. I guess I should explain this a little bit for people who don't understand this. So the University of Chicago is like in the middle of the south side of Chicago. If like most neighborhoods around it are like 80% black. And then there is just this fucking university they planted in the middle of it. And this college has the world's largest private police force. There's the also the regular fucking CPDs around there. There are like for like blocks and like like like through other neighborhoods. There were just you Chicago police officers there. There are fucking CPD cops everywhere. It is a fucking militarized hellhole. And yeah, I need all like it is a place where like the way that race functions in the US is blindingly fucking obvious. You can immediately understand it by looking like you walk outside your fucking dorm. You look at the cop and you look at how the cop treats people depending on what the race is. Right. It is so unbelievably obvious. However, comma in this article, Kleg and I said to me, I'm going to argue that mass incarceration is actually a product of class policy resulting from a lack of social democracy and underdevelopment resulting from a transition from an agrarian economy to an industrial economy in the 20th century. And the social democracy and the people are saying this and the social democracy and the people north like what kind of agrarian economy we have to ask. Yeah. Like he was doing the labor in a great economy. How much would they pay? It's like the basic argument that they're going to make is that like well, so there were a bunch of people who had been slaves and then they became not slaves and then a bunch of those started by grading north. Because there was this mass migration, all these people showed up to these like showed up to these cities where there was no infrastructure. And then so there was a bunch of crime and then because of the crime, there was mass incarceration which is okay, we're going to get some more into this. But before we go into the subject, we have to be the reactionary part of this article. Right. You have to understand that when these people say that this is a like a class based policy, like class here does not mean the same thing that it means for like, you know, a regular person who thinks about class or like, you know, a Marxist, which again, both these people nominally are. Here's from the journal specter, which is a really good sort of critique of this whole absolutely dog shit article quote, plug in. Usami's claim that class is essential to understanding mass incarceration amounts to a repackaging of a widely understood fact as revelatory insight. And while they titled their article quote, the economic origins of mass incarceration, they never delphurther in jaclas and a Marxist or even critical sense. Instead they use educational attainment data as a proxy. They note that a large portion of people who are imprisoned have low levels of education and attainment. And I, I, I, I'm glad to know that everyone on this call who does the exact same job as me, we're all from different classes. Congratulations, James. You are now the bourgeoisie. Congratulations, Garrison. You are not proletariat. I might guess the labor aristocracy. I'm glad to know why I'm here to expropriate the surplus value from your labor. Yep. Yeah. I like if you get to prison, it's, it's my fault. Yeah, like I just, okay. So like, what an asshole. What a ridiculous fucking claim. Yeah. And it's like like these, okay. So like, like, it was some of these like the jock of in people do this all the time. Right. They have this, they made this famous study about the people who vote for Trump. That was like, oh, it's people, people who voted for Trump did it in like working class areas. And again, working class was by education data. And then also they didn't go because it turns out like this is actually true, right? There are a lot of people who voted for Trump from working class areas. It turns out who those people are, are the small business owners in working class areas. And they didn't fucking go grand ear enough. And also that you know, they do this shit all the time, right? And this is the kind of analysis that like like, yeah, using shit as a proxy for class is like a classic, fallacious thing. Yeah. Like, like, what's his name? Nicholas Christoff. Yeah. He did this too. Also, like, like, this is, this is, this is, we are getting fucking Christoff level analysis out of these supposed in Marxist. And like, okay. So. All right. The curious thing here is that Clegg, at least on an intellectual level, knows better than this, right? Like he wrote for end notes and notes has a very sophisticated class analysis. But if you're actually interested in the sweeping arc of the history of the proletariat, you can't make the kinds of arguments that Clegg is making in this thing. And so, you know, because he's trying to make this argument he's reduced to this like, like just absolute like, like seventh rate, like fucking New York Times pundit level analysis. Yeah. Right. It's like, okay. And you know, like, this is really sad because for actual Marxists and not sort of like liberal bourgeois hacks doing like fucking New York Times bullshit, you know, class is about ownership, right? It's about who owns the means of production and who's forced to work for them. And, you know, okay, so you have this, you have the proletariat or like the working class who are the people who own nothing and are thus forced to sell their labor for people who do, who do own stuff, right? But this also presents a problem for this entire argument because if you actually want to do class analysis, you have to understand that race plays a major role in who even gets to become part of the regular proletariat in the first place. Because most does a lot of people through the development of the course of capitalism, who fucking never even got to become wage laborers because they were enslaved, they were exterminated, they were turned to debt peons. And oh, wait, guess who fucking got that shit? Oh yeah, it wasn't white people. And you know, if you're good or right, if you're going to be writing arguments and like explaining the rise of like a mass system of enslavement, you might want to think about this, but no. Okay, so do you know what else is responsible for a mass series, a mass system of enslavement? The advertising and how they affect our brains. Yeah, no one. I was going to go with Stalin, but you also, well, same to have, honestly, yeah, Stalin, first mass marketer. So true. Famously, yeah, Stalin, I'll send you a mail, okay, if you ask him. Okay, we're back and we're back to talk about the other argument of the economic origin of mass incarceration, which is that the argument that mass incarceration happened because people were legitimately scared about crime. Like seriously, this is their argument. Their argument is that crime went up, people demanded less crime, and then the government did it. Like, wait, did they did a given analysis of the class of people? Yeah, what's this? Okay, they make this fun argument that both black and white people were demanding the end of crime, which is sort of true. You know, if you look at what like, like, yeah, like obviously, this is a thing, right? Like, you can find people of any race who can take basically any political position. And so if you go looking for like black people who are tough on crime, you can find it, right? There are black politicians who are like tough on crime, right? But that's also not the reason why mass incarceration happened. Like, I'm sorry. And also like, you know, if you, and you know, there was, there was also, there were people who like weren't tough on crime people who were like talking about, who were talking about trying to end like, sort of like, like violence spikes. But if you look at what they were saying, it was stuff like, we want the police to like respect human rights instead of property rights. And, you know, okay. So I, yeah, this is sort of silly, right? Yeah, but, but the point of this is that this is basically, this is their full on broadsighting as abolitionism as like a body of work, right? It's sort of modern abolitionism. It's directly criticizing Michelle Alexander's, the New Dream Crow mass incarceration of the age of colorblindness. And it's also like a volley basically against anyone who's trying to explain mass incarceration through race. And so what they argue is that crime increased because there wasn't a strong labor movement to solve the problem that like cause, solve the problems that caused crime with economic like redistribution, so the state turned to like a cheaper option, which is prisons. And the, is it the cheaper option? Well, okay. So they're, they're, they're not wrong in this, like there is some truth here, right? Which is that there is a reason the mass incarceration started spiking when capitalism went into crisis in the 70s and 80s. And it is actually, it is actually genuinely cheaper for, for, for the bourgeoisie to run a prison state than it is to run a welfare state. But, and this is the important part, right? Both the welfare state and the prison complex are different forms of kind of insurgency. It used to be, who is a social democrat is ideologically incapable of understanding this, his entire ideology is that like, it is based on the fact that the welfare state is the endpoint of socialism. But this is completely backwards, right? The welfare state and, and social democracy were first implemented by Bismarck, like specifically as a way to buy workers off to start them from carrying out a social revolution and actually seizing the pro, like seizing the property of the ruling class and using the production for the benefit of mankind and not profit. That is why the ship, the welfare state was invented. Like that was the first time it was put into practice. If you go back to Edmund Burke, right? And the French Revolution reformed to preserve the idea that like we have to give people these little, these little slices here and there, like give them a treat and then, then then they will never come and take the cake. And if you read these people, they're really explicit about this. Like they will just openly say we're buying off the working class. But these absolute clowns have like somehow convinced themselves that this is what socialism actually is. Yep. 20 treats. So yeah. 20 treats. Socialism is when, socialism is when you, you confuse tables, graphs for treats. Yeah. And you know, and this, this, this comes to sort of the other thing that these, that, that these people can't understand, which is that social democracy was a class compromise, right? There was a deal that the capitalist and the working class agreed to. And when I say they agreed to this, right? Like, this isn't just sort of like an, like it kind of is an abstract deal. But there are also very literal deals, right? There's this thing called the Treaty of Detroit, which is this massive, basically set of negotiations and then art, like agreements that are made between the US government, like, like a huge portion of organized labor in the auto industry and the auto companies, right? Which, which basically, like the, the, the, the substance of the Treaty of Detroit was like, if you give us all of this welfare, shit and benefits, shit, right? We want, we will stop constantly going on strike. These are the explicit deals. They're explicitly being negotiated between these massive trade unions and, and like the, the, the, the capitalist who own companies by the American government. And so they get this deal. The deal is you get unions and pension and a vacation and like healthcare as long as you don't like seize control of factories and run them for themselves. Yeah. And this held from sort of like the 50s through the 70s. But partially this held because also the US specifically, which is really, really rich, as economy was growing really fast. But you know, but by the, by the, by the 1970s, suddenly the rate of profit is starting to collapse. And suddenly it does actually become possible to both pay for the welfare state and have capital turn into more capital at the same time. And you know, what happens is this is, is full on class war over the course of 70s and the 80s and the, you know, the, the, the capitalist win the class war. And the product of this, and this is true, not just in the US, but in, in, like, a lot of other neoliberal countries too, is that there is a massive military that the state is sort of stripped down to nothing in terms of like providing services. But there's this massive build up of the military and police and also prisons. And so, you know, this, this isn't some sense of, like, if you want a class-based explanation of mass incarceration, like this is part of what, like, that's a big part of what's going on. It's also true that in the US, insofar as there was sort of a revolutionary force, it was black people doing, like, like, doing the panthers, doing, like, the, like, blanket on it, doing the black liberation army. And this meant that sort of the, the sort of kind of revolution to this was specifically about deploying the sort of, like, like, deploying the state against these people because, yeah, like, this movement is, is actively trying to destroy capitalism by destroying the race of, like, police apparatus. And this is, this is, folks too, I guess, at the same time period, like, aim, for instance. Yeah. And, you know, so the ruling class started to lose their minds and this is, this is also, this is also part of what's happening here. But the problem is the sort of Jacobin cop freaks, like, indeed, the police for their, like, social democratic hell world that they want to build. And so, they can't have any, like, it is, it is incredibly structurally dangerous for them for people to be arguing that, like, the police are inherently a force of, like, systemic racial oppression because they want them around. Yeah. And so they do all this, keep playing 50 bucks for article. Yeah. And, you know, Craig, meanwhile, as best I can tell, just doesn't want to use race as like an explanation for shit. Like, they literally argue in this thing, like, in this, in this article that white flight was actually just capital flight and wasn't about racism. Good. And they just, they're doing this entire thing about right, this, this are political economy of, of, of the city. And they just, they never mentioned, they're so ruthlessly committed to their program of not talking about races, but don't even mention redlining. It's like, like, they've managed to go to the right of like the libertarian party on race. It's like, yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. They would have us believe that such tactics are simply quote, cas-based remedies of exclusion and that quote, such strategies were rational, even if suboptimal in the long run, effectively rationalizing and apologizing for racism. So this is great. And then they, they kept this off with this giant, like, swelling crescendo with an argument about how the left can't d'agdor crime. And you know, okay. So this is an argument with political consequences, right? And you can see those consequences in that in the 500,000 cops article we were talking about yesterday. Um, here's a quote from that article. This figure shows the same prisoner in police data as shown in figure one, but this time denominated by the level of homicide rather than the population. America's outlying incarceration rate looks normal given the level of serious crime. And now the level of policing in the United States appears exceptionally low compared to other countries. So okay, you can see the line of argument here, right? It goes like mass incarceration isn't about race. It's actually about class and actually it's really about crime. And then it goes from the crime to, oh, well, this is about crime to we need to actually do something about crime. And then that turns into the only thing we could do about crime is have more cops. You know, yeah. And the other part of this right, it goes back to the thing about like, okay, the thing about like the, you know, and this is something that Gary's going to talk about yesterday, right? Like the way in which you can only think the level of policing in the US is exceptionally low is if you've never interacted with a cop. And yes, this is a deliberate thing, right? The sort of jock of encodre of like faux Marxists, like their entire political project was originally was driving off the anarchist you'd found it occupied, you know, during, like, and driving the people into the political wilderness, it is placed it with their sort of bureaucratic cop socialism, right? Like what one of the first like big jock of an article was a giant thing about why the zapatistas aren't a model for the American left because, right? Like you know, something. This is, these people have been anti anarchists like to their core and make it because they need cops. They need to get rid of the people who hate the cops. Like again, the people who were actually on the streets to read occupy who have seen shit like, for example, the bloody stains on the wall outside of police holding pens with the cops smash the heads into of like every single person they arrested, a thing that happened constantly, drain occupy, right? And these people who, you know, have seen the police shoot their friends eyes out like are incredibly inconvenient if you're trying to put yourself on top of a police state. And you know, so of course, our abolitionists, which means you also need to sign like them. And these are, this, you know, this sort of strategy is an old entrenched like position of these people. And in 2018, Jeremy Gong, who was like the one time basically like the dictator of DSA East Bay, was caught in secret documents saying, quote, we are not in cap, this is by the way, in his capital letters, not for abolition of prisons. I would go further 90% of black people want more police in their neighborhoods. Really? All right. Yeah. Jeremy Gong, by the way, Asian dude, not black. Fuck you. Eat shit. I hope you're having fun. Like, well, I don't have, I don't hope you're having fun. I hope you're having a bad time losing another election by getting 3% of the vote or some shit. Like fuck you. Eat shit. Yeah. And I should mention this also like, it's a very obvious thing to say, but it like it should be pointed out that like everyone is making this argument like specifically these arguments about cops and about the stuff in about crime. These people are all either wider Asian. And I genuinely think that plays a pretty big role in why they're doing this. It is just a breathtaking position to take in 2021 to, you know, as a white person, like I'm, I'm looking at the Anna Gasparry, which she wrote for Newsweek. A great source of unbiased content on the left about how we need to stop gaslighting, progress is need to stop gaslighting people on crime. And two, as a white person in 2022, like take the stand with the platform that has been given to you with all the privileges that you have had. And gaslight, black folks about the importance of race, it is just like breath takingly lacking in like context or self awareness or like have you not been fucking paying attention? Like at least for the last two years, if not for the last 20 years, you know. Yeah. And I mean, like this is a whole thing, right? Like they have this whole sort of political project that's like, like makes talking up, like their goal is to make talking about this shit sound cringe because, you know, they and they have to, right? And this is also sort of class based survival strategy, right? Because like, these people couldn't fucking hack it as abolitionist scholars. They have no fucking idea what they're talking about, right? If they, if they have to actually intellectually like be in the same sphere as like someone like Ruth Gomer Wilson, they are going to get fucking bloat. Like these people are like, this is like a fucking battle cruiser going to war against a speedboat, right? Like they can't fucking hack it. And so they have to sort of like do all of this shit to convince people that like, no, no, no, it's actually really not about race. It's actually about class. This thing that I can very easily pretend to care about for academia in a way that I can't with, you know, pretending to care about race because like I can't even fucking fake it, right? And you know, I was in this like back in 2018, right? Like Jeremy Gong and his allies are very careful to frame their view in terms of like, well, we want to end mass incarceration and police violence, but we have to be tactical about how we do it and the tactical about how we do it is black people want more cops, right? But that was their internal documents. Their external, their external statements were like, well, some police abolitionists and stuff looks like more cops anyways, but you know, internally they were always saying this. And now with the, you know, these people think that there's a political right turn coming and they think that, you know, they can fucking take their mask off and just say what they really mean, which is 500,000 more fucking cops. And you know, and part of what's going on here, right? Is like, the reason this is happening is because when the uprising happened, these people were just caught with their pants down because they're a tire political project for like fucking how, how many years were they doing this? Like seven years was elect Bernie Sanders. And then he lost back to back, successively to like Hillary Clinton, who was maybe the least popular candidate ever has ever run ever. And Joe Biden, who is a fucking senile rapist, who like again was all like, they, they they lost his election to a man who couldn't remember who, who he had been vice president under and they couldn't beat him, right? Like so these people were completely discredited. And then you know, the uprising happened and people were caught with their pants down because they've spent their entire fucking time arguing that like there's no path of liberation through race, like race, any kind of race like politics at all, intersectionality's bullshit, like we just had to focus on class, just to focus on class. And they're fucking pure class. And then the general campaign failed in, oh, hey, guess what, it failed in the south, like wow damn, I wonder why this politics fucking got swept by Joe Biden. Okay. And then, you know, and then the up, the uprising starts. And the uprising is, you know, the uprising is about anti-racism. It is about people looking at the violence like of the police against black people and going fuck this. And they have nothing, right? Like the whole intellectual leadership here, like all these people are fucking calling for the world cops, Bernie Sanders is arguing for more cops, right? Like, Trump was fucking, Trump was literally making the same arguments that my fucking mayor made while she was raising the fucking draw bridges, stop protesters from being able to get back into the middle of Chicago, which is that actually like cops becoming a cop is actually one of the few ways that a non-white people can join the middle class. Right. I was like, I think Amber made that argument, right? So you know, they have nothing. Right. You know, okay. And the uprising eventually gets suppressed, which the best thing that ever happened to these people because if the uprising has to see these people were done, right? But all of this has enormous consequences, right? Which is the failure of the working class to appear at the ballot box and like, Paul Bernie's Sanders over the line against Joe Biden revealed something that was like patently obvious to anyone who'd been watching how the working class is moving worldwide for the past 20 years, which is that the only thing that can actually unify, though, if you care about class politics, the only thing that can unify the working class and pull it together as a coherent political force to do a thing is their hatred of the police. If you look at what the working class politics in the 21st century, the working class finds its historical unity exactly and only on the barricade. It appears undivided literally nowhere else. It is impossible. You can't do it. The only thing that does it is fighting the police. More broadly in like means of state violence, right? Like if we look at the popular front in Spain, it's a, you even get like, cops who are installed by a socialist Republican government joining the working class to fight the military. But yeah, instead, we're going to be like, have the working class will be united in this op-ed at Newsweek.com. Yeah. Or in this talking electoral thing, right? And it's like, no, and I think that like this is partially about this. People not understanding the sort of broad arc of the last decade, decade and a half, which is that like, this was the actual meaning behind the people want to follow the regime, right? This was what was going on in the last decade of uprisings in street movements. Across the world, right? Is that that was the thing that could unify the working class. But of course, and this is the sort of secret of all of this, right? Like these people don't want to unify the working class. They only want to unify it if it's under their control. The eruption of, you know, like actually the working class standing side by side together fighting the cops on barricades in 2020 was the worst thing that could possibly happen to them because it, you know, it pointed to another way of doing politics that they, like in the, in the street that they thought they'd, you know, crushed after the feet of Occupy. And, yeah. And, you know, they were, they were, they were incredibly scared by this. They were pissed off by this. And, you know, I, I, I, I mentioned the last episode that I was going to talk about the sort of class politics that's at work here because, you know, these demands for more cops, like they don't come from the working class, right? Like in Sephora, there's ever been a referendum on the police as an institution. It was 2020. And, you know, we know what that looked like, right? It was a bunch of fucking working class kids went into the streets and, you know, and fought like lions against the fucking cops. And even the sort of liberal, like the liberal middle and professional classes, like eventually turned against them, you know, as sort of 2020 rolled on, right? And, you know, like those people still hung on for months and months and months, you know, like refusing to leave the streets even after the fucking federal marshal started literally assassinating people openly in the streets, right? Like the whole demand for more cops, like a harsher crackdown on crime, all of this stuff comes from precisely the opposite direction, right? It's entirely generated by the by by by basically the media class, right? It's, it's class base is a combination of these sort of like faux progressive, like media outlets. And originally this starts with New York Times and Washington Post and then booze left, nominally left, right? And when it hits like the fucking two IT and all of their like bullshit, right? And then, you know, and then at that point having having one to the media people, right? It starts running through these pseudo radical academics like Christopher Lewis and Audor Nauru Sommi. And then the last group of people who are backing this is a very weird one. But there's a collection of paid union staffers who like for their jobs because they're in the big unions work on police and prison guard contracts. This is actually, this is been a huge problem the DSA in in in was a 2016, no 2015, 2015, 2016, one of the the NPC elections they had for the national political committee, which is like the DSA's big major body like governing body, right? They accident people accidentally elected a police union organizer because he was like they knew he was a union organizer. They didn't know that he organized police unions and then he he fucking refute like nothing was going to happen. And then basically what happened is everyone on the left of the organization bullied him out. And so he resigned. But like, yeah, there's a lot of those people, right? And those people's class incentives are incredibly obvious, right? But didn't the AFL CIO even in 2020 like refuse to reject police unions right now? But like, no, people, if I remember, if I remember, I think I think someone threw a ball tov like into the headquarters, they have to know because of it. Like, yeah, like this, this is a whole fucking thing. And you know, like this sucks cops are not fucking workers. Jesus Christ. Like they're, they're just not, if you look at what they actually do, they're, they're they're, they're, they're basically minor fetal lords in that they extract rent from everyone by fucking walking on people and robbing them. And then they also extract rent directly from us by, by stealing just like enormous, increasingly large amounts of city funds under basically the threat of extortion and violence. Yeah, it'll, uh, dime years. Yeah. It's, it's, it's shit. I want to come back to sort of left media outlets, right? Because what we've been seeing here is that as, as these little left media outlets get larger, right? They, they increasingly adopt like insane small business tyrant politics because that's, that's your, they're becoming, right? The UIT notoriously tried to bust its own union staff. Yeah. Because it turns out as journalists become bosses and capitals, they have, they have their own class issues to look out for, right? Yeah. And they will continue producing this class discourse, which serves as nothing other than like, uh, best like a safety sort of steam valve, right? For people who are frustrated by the class situation, they're working. If, if not like an outright sort of disinformation campaign about what class is. Yeah. And, you know, and, and there's, I think there's another thing going on here too, which is that like, okay, if, if you're like a sort of like media outlet and your thing is that you hate liberals and that you're on the left, right? There's, there's kind of a cap to your audience base, and specifically use a cap to the kind of audience you could have that actually has money because, you know, you can, you can get a broke base of sort of progressive workers, you can get some college students, right? But at some point, like, those, those are not people that have a large amount of money. Yeah. At some point, the right offers a listener base that has a bunch of money. And this gives you a revenue base for sort of would be like media tech who's hitting the limits of their original base. And this is responsible for things like, like Max Blumenthal and ex like two, I two reported Jimmy door, like the Sunday gets just full on COVID denialism and conspiracy. I mean, you know, it's, it's not like these people were doing good before, but like, you know, full on right wing, like, like, like Max Blumenthal going from being like the most pro CCP guy the world has ever seen to literally writing articles about how social credit is coming to the US in a form of COVID restrictions. Like this kind of shit. And you know, so like that, that's part of the class politics going on here. Like, there's another thing which is like, okay, there's the Harvard academics. I don't think we need to say anything complicated about their class loyalties except that like none of these dipshit so every beat and half the death by a cop. Yeah, I mean, we talked about the union bureaucrats, right? Um, they're slightly more complicated. But again, like in class terms, you get people who are either driven by purely by sort of the revenue that copy is bringing in. And then you get people who are opposed to political organizations like the DSA taking firm sands against police union organizers because it would affect their own ability to win off like win elections inside the DSA. I think that has happened so many times. It's great. It's it's very funny that they chose classes and they chose like education level as their proxy for class. And we are discussing this in the same week that we released an episode about a grad student strike at the largest university in the country because grad students are unhoused because they can't afford to pay their rent and feed themselves. Yeah. It is it is a trosus shit. Like I just yeah. I hate these people. Yeah. So I want to close off by talking about something, which is that there's also a political angle to all of this, right? These people, all of these people doing this fucking tough on crime bullshit, all these people fucking going right, all of these people calculated that a right turn in American politics was coming, right? That's why T.Y.T endorsed a fucking literally a Republican in California who was also an insane tough on crime guy. This is why they had a no no, a Rick Caruso. Caruso, yeah, who was a Republican who changes party affiliations. We could run the Democratic thing who fucking sucks ass. That's why they do it. That's why they had Matt quote alleged pedophile gates on their show on fucking election night. They had Larry Elder on their show as well. Like election denial is Larry Elder. Yeah. Like this wasn't just a pure product of these people going insane watching videos of like people looting grocery stores and turning it to like tough on crime reactionaries. This was a political calculation and. What big stuff but yeah, but but they fucked up, right? These people fundamentally don't understand what this country is. They're scared. They've given up. They saw a single homeless person on the street and turned into a fascist and they think that the American people are just hopelessly reactivating the only thing that's left to do is solve the situation by selling out and they're from. And they're hoping smart. They don't think they don't credit people with having like compassionate empathy or intelligence either. Yeah. So the direction they're stupid grift show points. Yeah. And they're wrong. They're incredibly wrong. This is a country that in the name of fighting racism and the police in the name of solidarity with people who are not their fucking cells, people who they will literally never beat put on a mass picked up a brick and wage war against the best funded police force in human history. And for like a week and a half, those same fucking Americans who the entire political spectrum had written off as hopelessly beaten down and passive and right wing and like people, people who will take any amount of abuse and never say anything back. Rect the fucking wrecked the cop shit so hard they lost control over the centers of made multiple major American cities and had to call in the fucking national guard who interned got their shit wrecked so hard that they had to rely on liberal civil society to calm the protest down and even then the president would have fucking deployed the army against them if he'd actually been physically able to and the only reason that these people weren't fighting the fucking army in the streets was that was that the fucking American generals refused to go along with it, right? Like that is who the US is that that is who generation is this generation is forever the generation that burned a third precinct and the fucking ex left is running right just don't fucking get it, right? They think the entire clock has been around back. They think that like those that like the people who did that have already been destroyed. They don't matter. The only thing left, you know, you can do is join the right and mitigate the damage and they're fucking wrong. They are wrong. They can't see it. They cannot see that there is no way to turn the clock back to before the uprising happened. They can't see that like this entire country that the American working class that parts of the people who are not part of the American working class have been fundamentally changed and yeah, they just they just can't see it. And because they can't see it, the only thing that they're ever going to feel is the way to there is the only thing they can feel is a way to their ignorance and the only thing they're going to feel on top of that is them getting fucking buried by the way of a history that has left them behind because fuck these people. Fuck the cops. Fuck the people who support the cops. These people will be down but will be fucking drowned by the tide of history they thought didn't fucking exist. Fuck them. Okay, this is what yeah, I you could probably tell I wrote this really, really pissed off at five in the fucking morning because Jesus Christ. Yeah, I agree with you. Pick up a brick, put down the young Turks. Yeah, don't fucking support more cops. Every, every, everyone will hate you. Your coworkers will hate you. Your friends will hate you. Your family will hate you. The guy, the guy at the fucking quarter store will hate you. Yeah, if you find your fucking left hero standing the people who murdered George Floyd or stood around and watched George Floyd being murdered, then they are not a leftist anymore. It's okay to tell them to fuck off and die. Yeah, I mean, like, and we can go back to the first episode, right? Like, the reason these people are calling for 500,000 more cops is that they've given up entirely, right? They literally do not think it is possible for anything to ever improve in the US. And they are wrong. They are wrong. Yeah, and I think that they're okay with the way that our police behave and there if that makes him feel comfortable and safe, then they don't mind. I mean, cops, people die to hands of the police. Cops protect rich people. These people have got wealthy enough to have the cops now benefit them. It's, it's that simple. Like, that's, that's, it's, it's, I think that really is the, the, the, the, the drive, the drive, the motivator here. Yeah. And I look, like, I will say this to like, if, if we ever get to a point where we start fucking doing this, like, take us down to, like, this, this is just a sort of like, we're trying to build our business or whatever. I don't, like, I don't fucking care. I, I, I would, I would rather fucking go broke in the streets. I would rather fucking die than be a person whose job it is to say we need more cops. Fuck these people. Like, oh, God. Fuck them all. Yeah. Mm-hmm. They blocked me on Twitter, so I can't say that. You were, yeah. Get off to them. Podcast fans. Oh, God. We are not inside a harassment campaign instead. No, no, no. No, no. No, no. Yeah. Don't waste it. Don't waste your time doing discourse with people who exist to create bullshit discourse. They're just a distraction. Go and help someone needs your fucking help. It's called it's where it's wintertime and there are unhoused people who are shivering on the street. So don't fuck with the young Turks to signal them that point is useless. Yeah. Go, go, go, go out there and fucking build the socialism that these people think is impossible. Because we can do it and we will. And then we will fucking laugh at them because, yeah, we've done it and they are fucking bullshit. Yeah. That's the episode. Hey, we'll be back Monday with more episodes every week from now until the heat death of the universe. It could happen here as a production of CoolZone Media. For more podcast from CoolZone Media, visit our website coolzonemedia.com or check us out on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts or wherever you listen to podcasts. You can find sources for it could happen here updated monthly at coolzonemedia.com slash sources. Thanks for listening. Hey, I'm Joel Stein. I want you to close your eyes and imagine a pocket watch. It's moving from side to side. You're getting very sleepy. Great. Now that I've hypnotized you against your will, you're going to start liking long form journalism. Like so much. You're going to listen to a podcast where the host interviews a writer about their long form story every week. I'm that host. Listen to the story of the week on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts. I'm Danish Ward's host of Stealing Superman, a new iHeart original podcast about the most unlikely art heist of all time. It was Nick Cage's own personal national treasure. With a 1999 New Year's Eve party, someone snatched Cage's priceless comments. But who? Listen to Stealing Superman on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts or wherever you find your favorite shows. Hi, I'm Ophira Eisenberg. I'm a comedian and a parent of the absurdity of telling jokes late at night and then waking up early with a small child in the morning. I have a new podcast called Parenting is a joke. I'll talk to other funny people who are also parents. 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