It Could Happen Here Weekly 166

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Call Zone Media. Hey, everybody.
Robert Evans here, and I wanted to let you know this is a compilation episode. So every episode of the week that just happened is here in one convenient and with somewhat less ads package for you to listen to in a long stretch if you want.
If you've been listening to the episodes every day this week, there's going to be nothing new here for you, but you can make your own decisions. Neither snow nor rain nor heat nor darkness can stop the Persian courier service.
Welcome to Nick and Appen here, a podcast about postal services where we ask the question, can the American capitalist class finally stop the American post office? I'm your host, Mia Wong. And with me to talk about what is going on with the post office, what's going on with the post office unions and yeah, how things are going downhill for the noble people who carry your mail is Tommy Espinoza, who's a union steward for the National Association of Letter Carriers.
Tommy, welcome to the show. Thank you so much for having me.
Thank you so much for giving us the mail carriers, the mail carriers, a platform to stand on. Yeah, I'm really happy to, and I'm really happy to get to talk to you about this.
So, I think the place we should start is with a bunch of very, very weird stuff in how labor law works so okay for like most people in the united states you have a federally protected right to strike if you have a union that is not true for federal employees that is especially not true for members of the post office and that is a real issue because the government has decided that like yeah no all these people who do a vital service are not allowed to go on strike and it absolutely sucks yeah and so i i think this this gets into sort of where i want to start which is with the sort of history of national association letters carriers a union that is not allowed to strike and how sort of weird that is. So yeah, I was wondering if you could talk a bit about sort of the origins of the union and what effect that has had on how organizing works or doesn't work.
Yeah, the right to strike has been a rather divisive topic. I'm sure you're familiar with unions and just generally people on our side of politics to be infighting a lot.
It shouldn't come to a surprise. So in 1969, just over 50 years ago, the salary for postal workers was under $2 an hour.
People were working months straight with no days off. And those were close to 12-hour days.
And so these postal workers at the time qualified for welfare and decided in 1970 to go on strike, despite it being illegal. This conversation is not new.
It was illegal then. It's illegal now.
And I do want to be crystal clear here. I am not advocating for a strike.
That would also be against the law. And we don't advocate for anything that's against the law.
What I do want to advocate for is the right to strike, because being quasi-federal, there's a lot of limitations in what the NALC and the general postal unions are able to do. In total, there are nine bargaining agreements and seven unions within the post office, some of which are the manager's union.
So take that as it is. Yeah.
On top of not being able to strike, none of our money that we collect as union dues can be used for lobbying purposes. So they can't support a single candidate or any of the parties involved.
We have a separate fund for that with the NALC called the Letter Carriers Political Fund to try and circumvent the restrictions that are put on there. And as a result of that, it's like we're fighting with our hands tied behind our back.
We are unable to organize effectively. Our union leadership seems to be afraid of protests and picketing for fear that it'll be misconstrued or labeled as a strike.
And they're, I think, generally afraid of public opinion. Yeah, that's a debilitating set of conditions because you've effectively taken away sort of the two major tools that you know i mean unions of basically across all political stripes use right you've taken away the ability to strike you've taken away the ability to uh use your dues money to influence elections so this immediately means you've taken away the tool that sort of militant unions use which is strikes and you've taken away the tools that more conservative unions use which is buying paul attempting to buy politicians and then also your leadership is like we can't strike us i mean we can't protest because someone might think it's a strike or the public might commend us and it's like that that doesn't seem i don't know it really seems like like, it's not only if you tied both hands behind your back, you've like tied them behind your back to your legs and you're now rolling around on the ground.
Right. And so talk about what happens when we push past all of these barriers and just do it anyways.
You know, in March, 1970, 210,000 postal workers defied law, defied the general leadership of the time. And it all started in New York where people clocked in.
And at nine o'clock, they just walked out. Soon, let's see, it was Cleveland, Chicago, Los Angeles.
the nation joined very shortly after, once it broke the news, that they were calling for a national strike. Nixon called in the National Guard to try and deliver mail.
And the National Guard had no idea what they were doing. There's an amazing video that I'll try and send you afterwards.
It's just the National Guard at our cases where we sort the mail. And an interviewer is asking him, do you think that you're doing a good job? He's just like, no, it's just some kid, you know? And don't get me wrong, I'm just some guy.
But you need the training, you need to know what you're doing, and it's not something that anyone can pick up in a day, but it's a job that anyone can do.

But yeah, for the first time, the mail had stopped.

And that won us collective bargaining, binding arbitration, which is a process that I think most people within unions know what they mean.

But to explain it, arbitration is what happens when our parties cannot agree on a settlement for a grievance, and eventually we call in a third party, an arbitrator, to decide for us, and those are generally lawyers. On top of binding arbitration, it gave us a new pay scale and set in motion, I think over, it's got to be hundreds of raises between the colas and the new pay table.
It used to be 21 years for you to reach the top pay scale, which is absolutely ridiculous. And now I think it's about eight.
Yeah. So the post office was forced to reorganize and so was the union.
This is where the American Postal Workers Union was born. And from this strike, we were able to settle on the national agreement.
So there's the national agreement, which is our binding contract. There's the JCAM, which is the Joint Contract Administration Manual, which is what the post office and the union use as the interpretation of the contract.
That way we are not arguing and spending time about what the contract could mean. We can just focus on whether or not someone broke our agreement.

So after this,

one would imagine that a quasi federal institution would honor the contract that was created,

bargain in good faith and treat their employees fairly.

Isn't that right?

Yeah,

no, it's spoken like someone who has never watched a federal government in action. in good faith and treat their employees fairly.
Isn't that right? Yeah, I know.

Spoken like someone who has never watched a federal government in action.

Yeah, absolutely not.

Before we get into issues that we face today, I do want to say that one of the main goals

of our contract negotiations or of this episode really is to create public knowledge of how our contract is not being adhered to if there was one main goal that i'd have in mind is just to have the post office honor what they signed and agreed to do um yeah i mean this is something that it's a part of being in a union that doesn't get talked about very much which is that the contract doesn't mean anything unless the union enforces it because the moment the contract happens the bosses will attempt to not abide by it and this is what a lot of union militancy back in the sort of heyday of militancy was i mean like you know if you look at like how how the uaw worked in like the 60s right they'd have a guy with a whistle standing on the line and if someone did a contract violation he would blow the whistle and everyone would just sit down and you'd immediately have a strike right and it you know in like that level of militancy you don't need to like be at that level enforce a contract, but you have to actually be willing to do stuff and to fight management over it. And if you're not willing to do that, your contract is effectively meaningless.
And that's a real issue with a lot of unions. Which just kind of circles back to one of the big issues that we face is that if we were to do that that would be a willingful delay of mail and we could be charged for it just for trying to enforce the contract yep yeah which i the thing i think is really interesting just to circle back to the 1970s strike is that so the strike was illegal right nixon brings in the army and the national guard to break it and the strike still wins and not only does it if it you know i mean you could argue whether it achieved total victory but not a single person who walked off the line got arrested even though all of them technically committed a crime and that's something that like you know i i think okay the the enforcement of laws depends on sort of the the the depends on a set of relative balance of forces and whether people care about enforcing the law which is how like for example like if you pirate like

seven movies and you get you get three copyright strikes you go to prison but you know like the

sam altman or whatever like ai company can literally steal everything on the entire internet

and get money for it and no one will ever prosecute them right and so so you know whether

or not something is illegal is to a large extent or the difference between something being illegal

and prosecute him right and so so you know whether or not something is illegal is to a large extent or the difference between something being illegal and you going to prison for it largely has to do with the balance of forces involved and that's something that you should keep in mind when and this is this is the thing this is the thing that that cuts the other way a lot too right like a lot like employers do illegal actions literally all the time, and it doesn't matter because the state doesn't care. Yeah, by and large, labor laws in America are set up in favor of the businesses, of the employers.
If you're familiar with Workers' Comp or any of the systems involved in the Federal Employees' Compensation Act, it's not enforced. We have cases that are pending arbitration where a worker has been run over by a postal vehicle while they were working.
The post office effectively takes them off of payroll to increase the damage done to the individual. Eventually, the Department of Labor says, yes, we will pay this individual and the post office is liable to pay them.
But now they are off the rolls, which means there's a greater period of time before this individual gets their money. And there's a certain form that within the

post office, the managers need to fill out. I believe it's an 8130 or, you know, all these

forms have some numbers associated with them that they just refuse to fill out. And there's no

recourse there's no path for us to

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make a take to make them hurry or make them get this individual the money that they're owed and some people um this doesn't ruin their lives and they've already paid off their house or whatever but i imagine for many many working americans that Americans that's their livelihood immediately down the drain yeah unfortunately we need to go to ads for a little bit because unfortunately my boss's boss's boss's livelihood depends on these ads mine technically does too but like lord knows i don't see that money so ads and we are back and yeah i guess that leads into the the next place you want to go to, which is talking about what are the specific grievances today that you all are dealing with and the union is not dealing with? Right. So in terms of grievances within the union and our negotiation, a lot of it does have to do with the aforementioned workers' compensation.
Employees are just simply not getting paid. I think the biggest problem with the union and the grievance procedure today is that management has figured out this really effective strategy.
If they don't settle on the lower levels and it gets pushed up to arbitration, then we have a massive backlog of cases pending arbitration, which could be scheduled years out. Yeah.
I think if you do the math for our current rate of handling these cases and how many cases we have, it'll take around 15 years to get through the law. Jesus Christ.
And that's assuming there's no new ones. Yeah, yeah.
That's like when you go to a restaurant and there's that little stanchion out there that says it's a five-hour wait from this point. That's the point that we're at.
Anything beyond today will be further along. Jesus Christ.
And so I think that is just a major problem for us, clearly. Yeah.
Management just not complying with any of this, and it makes it so that our employees have to wait. Something I do want to talk about that's outside of the grievance procedure, if we can, is just what's going on with the post office and the postmaster general.
Yeah. All right.
So I want to go at this from the customer perspective first, because I think that's the best way to relate to people. I think by and large, people are losing faith in the post office.
Either you have no idea what's going on, or you don't care, and that's fine. I'd say before I joined, I didn't think of them at all.
They're just the guy that shows up at my house every morning. A lot of people seem to think that the post office is going out of business and our customers are facing increasingly long lines, misdelivered or lost mail, and an increase in postage for a service that is getting worse.
People are paying more for worse service. And it's easy to point out those issues from the outside and be rightfully upset at them.
I do feel like we're doing a disservice to our customers and I'm really not trying to attack them when I say that they're uninformed or clueless to the inner workings of the post office. I do directly want to attack Congress and say that when they posted, they had pushed forward a bill called the Postal Accountability and Enhancement Act in 2006, which required the post office to pre-fund 100% of its retiree health benefits and liabilities 75 years into the future.
What? So overnight, the post office was handed a $5.5 billion burden. And that's where the whole, I don't know if you remember, I certainly wasn't conscious of it at the time, the Save Our Post Office stickers that were being sold and trying to fund the post office.
And really, that's where the rhetoric of the post office is going under comes from. The other thing I want to point out is that we are quasi-federal.
We actually accept nothing from taxpayer monies. It says it's a service, but really, the post office is ran as a business.
We don't even get subsidized because they don't need to. My local union president loves to remind us that the post

office is a business that has a revenue of 78.2 billion dollars and he'll want me to stress that the 0.2 is extremely important because 0.2 of a billion is 20 million. They are not in jeopardy.
we are not going out of business and the post Postmaster General, Louis DeJoy, he's the second highest paid public servant in America, just underneath the President of the United States. He's played Warden Clarence Thomas.
Wow. Yeah, I think it was like $380,000 a year or something like that.
DeJoy was appointed by Donald Trump. I'm assuming this is kind of a baseless assumption.
So forgive me on not doing my research here, but I'm assuming that they're buddies because DeJoy has no idea. Yeah.
Wasn't wasn't he the guy that Trump brought in like specifically to destroy the post office as part of the campaign to steal the election? Yeah, so there's been a lot about DeJoy defrauding the election process. I wasn't part of the post office to see the inner workings of it, so it's kind of hard for me to say if it was hearsay or not.
But I'd believe it, because DeJoy has no idea how to run a post office. He's never been involved with this kind of business.
He is in the same way that Trump is a businessman, a horrible businessman, and his Delivering for America plan could really be redefined as consolidation efforts for a business. So what they're doing is they're consolidating infrastructure and the workforce, which means closing post offices in order to save money and shoving three installations into one building.
That's why the lines are getting longer. It also means that from dispatch, the employees have to drive an extra mile or two into their working zone, which of course means that we're going to go into overtime.
And this just throws a wrench in the mail handling process. He has single-handedly made the service a lot more reliable.
And I do think that you're right. Unreliable.
Yeah. Sorry, more unreliable.
And I do think that you're right. He wants to destroy the post office, not only for the election, but to the point where it makes more sense to go private.
Now's the time to point out that DeJoy is a major shareholder in FedEx. which is a subcontractor for the USPS

and he has millions of dollars in equity involved.

He's got skin in the game I love open corruption so great and so on the local level on what's going on in my office I actually have one of the better offices that I've seen or heard about. I have been sent to other offices, and I have experienced firsthand the bullying and harassment from management pushing us to go faster.
But even at one of the better offices, I work 60-hour weeks. I don't have set days off.
It's not even a rotation. When I home i'm spent and my commute isn't that bad i think i'm about 15 minutes uh each way and i really can't imagine driving two hours after an 11 hour shift just to eat and come back and do it again i mean that's just unsafe like that's uh yeah uh it be illegal, but since it's in the contract, it's not illegal.
Oh my God. So the sacrifice that you make when you're joining the post office...
Well, I guess I should explain. When you join as a letter carrier, the first 90 days, they can fire you for any reason.
And you something uh called either a cca or a ptf and that means a part-time flexible or city carrier assistant you are only guaranteed four hours for showing up for work um you're not guaranteed to be scheduled so if they don't like you they just will schedule schedule you once a week for an unknown amount of time until you quit. And if you're in a busy place, then that just means that they're going to work you to death.
So when you join the workforce, immediately you lose time with your family. You lose time with your loved ones and your friends.
And I myself am so fortunate that all my loved ones have been beyond understanding. But every time I talk about it, I get asked the same thing.
Why don't you quit? Yeah. And the truth is, this job is awesome.
I love it. I want to work it.
I just want it to make sense and be livable. And I'm not going to give up just because we haven't reached the point where it is.
You know, if you walk away now, it doesn't get better. I'm sure someone would take my place, but it helps to have people stick around.
That's actually a pretty common. mean this is one of amazon's strategy right through their warehouses they intentionally want to cycle through people because the more the more new people you have continuously cycling through the less organized and the less sort of like less knowledge they have less you have to pay them etc etc etc and so if you can just cause high turnover rates on purpose that's that's a thing that a lot of these sort of business ghoul like nightmare factory people like love in their workforces and makes everyone else's life just a living hell but But, you know, they're still getting paid.

Right.

And so I try and hold that in mind when I've been overworked and I'm at the end of one of my major shifts because I had to carry part of another route because someone else called out.

I really have to stop and think to myself that this other person who called out is just as exhausted as I am, is probably going to get a letter of warning for calling out. That's another issue.
They don't want you to use your leave. Jesus Christ.
I'm going to file an unfair labor practice because they've been doing that a lot at my office as well.

It reminds me a lot, our issues of your recent episode. I think it was you about the nurses union, the shift change episode.
Their members are dealing with a lot of the same things where the unions are so big that they become detached from the membership. and we are finding out afterwards what our bargaining agreements are, what our strategy was.
Everything's after the contract has been signed. And that's just not how unions were meant to be.
They're meant to be from the bottom up by the workers, for the workers. But it really does feel like it's like national is its own entity and so I guess that would bring us to talking about the union and the future of the union yeah let's get into that so I I gotta be careful here because Brian Renfro he's our national leader of the union he's been struggling problems in his personal life.
And I don't feel like I'm ousting him as it's public knowledge, at least within the post office, it's public knowledge. He's dealing with substance abuse, with alcoholism.
And that's something that hits very close to home within my family. And I really don't want to demonize that he's struggling.

But what I do want to say is when you're going through something like that, and you've accepted

a position on the national level like this, you really need to either step down or appoint someone

to handle things in your place. As negotiations started over a year ago, he kind of went missing.
And it was later revealed that he was an inpatient, which is fine. Get your help.
But there was nothing left, no notes left for us to strategize with. And our membership is just in the dark.
And beyond that, the leadership has gone missing. It's very dark times for the NALC.
Well, and that's also just sort of like an organizational problem, right? If your organization is set up in such a way that a small number of people being incapacitated means total paralysis and no one has any idea what's going on, that's just a bad way to run something. And especially, it's a terrible way to run a union because the union's power is supposed to be from its organization and from the collective power of a large organization for people who can make decisions for themselves.
And if that's not happening and you get to the point where these decisions are being made by a very small number of people who can just sort of vanish, that's for whatever, literally whatever reason that is, right? It could just be you get sick. It could just be whatever happens.
That's just a terrible way to organize organize things and i guess it's also like i want to make take like a little tiny tangent to be like if you're doing any organizing project your goal is to organize yourself out of a job like you're like ideally if you were in an organization it should be able to function without you there should not having an indispensable person is a fiasco don't do that this is true of both like your tiny local mutual aid group as much as is true of your giant national union so this this has been this has been mia talking about the indispensable person don't have well yeah that's kind of the funny thing about joining a union from an anarchist perspective, it gets a little funky how hierarchical they typically are and the problems that we know we are going to face when you have a system that's built like a pyramid. Yeah.
Oh, yeah. And so I was saying we're in dark times, but there's such a bright future that I can see for us.
Branch 9 of the NALC and namely this individual, Tyler Vassar, who when I had originally posted on Reddit asking for attention, he's the one that I thought would be great for this interview. his branch, Branch 9, has passed a resolution to form an open bargaining strategy for contract negotiations.
And I hope this sweeps the nation. We're not allowed to strike, as I've mentioned.
And our leadership is so shy when it comes to activism or mobilization of the workforce. They don't want to touch the topic.
The closest thing we have to it is a rally that is Enough is Enough that's being held in Baltimore soon about the violence that's being done to postal workers. We're being robbed and being harassed.
But even then, we're missing a large chunk of the danger that is posed to postal workers. Because yes, we're being robbed on the streets, but we're also being bullied and harassed inside of our workplaces by management, by the people who are supposed to empower us to do the job effectively.

And so they don't want to touch the topic of a strike, I think, for fear of retaliation. But to me, pushing for the right to strike is a, I'm not sure how to word this, it is such an important part of the NALC's identity, the postal strike of 1970, that it seems silly to ignore it today and pretend like it didn't happen.
So for the future, I think that activism is our key to success. I think that the old heads that lead our union come from a time where unions were frowned upon,

where activists were frowned upon, where activism was frowned upon. But I think that public opinion will be largely in our favor and that public opinion can really put pressure on the legislative branch, on Congress.
And if we are transparent about our union, what we're asking for, the issues that we're facing, I think that the public would be on our side. If the people in America knew that management was falsifying time records or training records and interfering with workers' comps claim and back pay, or that they're not paying the settlements that they've agreed to pay, that they're not scheduling arbitration sessions, big or small, that they would care and that they would join us in the streets.
One major thing that happened, I think it was last year in the summer, we had a letter carrier, his name is Eugene Gates, who died in the Texas heat. Jesus, yeah.
Because management told him not to take as many breaks or he would face discipline. Jesus.
these pressures that we face when when you're threatened that you will lose your job if you don't listen to us, you will push yourself to the point of exhaustion and further. Yeah.
I think that the post office killed Mr. Gates.
And there wasn't as much outcry or anger behind the movement. I often find myself thinking that while I don't have the answers, I do know that we need to care more.
Yeah. And it's hard to care when you're exhausted.
I acknowledge that.

yeah well i think there's two things about that one i mean i don't and this is something i've

i've gotten to with a lot of the sort of interviews that i've done on this show is that

i think a lot of very very basic jobs have labor conditions that are unimaginably appalling

that people just don't know about and i think people are very sympathetic to once they actually

understand

Thank you. jobs have labor conditions that are unimaginably appalling that people just don't know about.
And I think people are very sympathetic to once they actually understand what's happening and the kind of just horror show stuff that's happening in these workplaces. And the second thing I think that's sort of important in terms of getting people to, you know, like trying to actually do like mass mobilizations, even just to get people to understand what's going on is that I think a lot of people who are facing these kind of conditions think that they're alone and think that it's just something that happens to them or they've been in them for so long.
They think that it's sort of normal and having a bunch of people go, no, like, A, this happens and B, it shouldn't happen is extraordinarily powerful because you know like that that feeling of isolation is is the thing that all of that you know your that your bosses depend on to make sure that you know you you just keep going along with these conditions even though they are just objectively horrific and i think any strategy that's not based on that is just not going to go anywhere. Right.
And one of the strategies that I really want to push forward as I grow within the union, and don't get me wrong, I want to stay a steward. I think that educating our members and being part of the workforce is my place in the union.
But what I want to push is for union solidarity, I want the NALC to hire organizers, specifically organizers, to try and get the public mobilized and as well as the workforce, so that we can put pressure on Congress so that we can show our bargaining teams that we support them and so that we can have clearly defined bargaining terms. And yeah, I think that having solidarity between unions and reaching out to the other movements in a time where union support is higher than ever is such a clear path that we are just ignoring for whatever reason, because people are afraid to speak out against the post office.
and so I'm really not sure what's going to happen with our current contract but I do know that the fight never ends and that while we stand on the shoulders of giants we have to pay respect to

these giants by not giving up now. And I'm a relatively new employee and steward, but I'm really walking in the footsteps of some warriors.
The branch president I mentioned, Ken Lurch, has given me so much support and education and has done so much hard work over the years. The branch president I mentioned, Ken Lurch, has given me so much support and education and has done so much hard work over the years that I don't have to reinvent the wheel.
None of us do. We just have to continue the struggle.
Yeah, and I think that's a great place to end, unless you have anything else that you want to make sure we get to? No, nothing on this topic. Yeah, so how can people support you and postal workers, just in general, if there's a specific place you want them to go? In general, there is, on the NALC site, which is just NALC.com, there is a section where you put in your address and it it'll give you the email addresses, the phone numbers for your representatives so that you can make some noise.
Again, we're amazingly limited in what we can do. So there's not really anything that you can donate to to help us including the letter carrier political fund.
But yeah, just pay attention to us. Maybe leave a bottle of water out in your front door.
It says for the postal worker. There's nothing better that you can do than talking about it.
Word of mouth is the best advertisement. Well, yeah, we will, we will, we will put that in the show notes.
I hope you all win. And I don't, I don't think I've ever said this genuinely in my life, but thank you for your service.
I appreciate that. Yeah.
I never imagined myself to become a federal employee and it is just as bad as I imagined. Yeah.
So I do want to shout out, actually, it's a little meta, I guess, but I do want to shout out some important episodes of It Could Happen Here that hit me very closely if I can. Yeah, yeah, go for it.
Because a lot of the people listening will be postal workers that have been pointed in this direction. Please look at the Myanmar episodes, the Free Burma, the Burmese Revolution, and look at the work that, Mia, I believe you've done the same work as James with Kindness.
Those are two topics that I think y'all hit really well, and that really touched me as a person. Sometimes I'll re-listen to those episodes when I'm having a hard day just to remind myself that it's all the same.
It's all the same fight. Yeah, it absolutely is.
And I mean, that's that's sort of the beauty i mean it's it's both the beauty and the horror of of this world is that on the one hand all of us are being crushed by the same sets of forces but on the other hand it means that whatever fight that you're taking is also a part of the larger fight for get all of us free yeah uh exactly so just fight the

burnout and stay in the fight yeah yeah this has been nick it up here uh go make trouble for people

who suck Imagine you're scrolling through TikTok.

You come across a video of a teenage girl

and then a photo of the person suspected of killing her.

And I was like, what?

Like, it was him? I was like, oh my God. It was shocking.
It was very shocking. I'm Jen Swan.
I'm a journalist in Los Angeles, and I've spent the past few years investigating the story behind the viral posts and the extraordinary events that followed. I started investing my time to get her justice.
They put out something on social media, so I'd get calls in the middle of the night all the time. It's like, how do you think you're going to get away with something like this? Like, you killed somebody.
It's the story of how and why a group of teenagers turned to social media to help track down their friend's killer. This is their story.
This is my friend, Daisy. Listen to my friend,

Daisy on the iHeartRadio app, Apple. Well, John, that's because it's Dumpin' Week, and this user writes, my partner told me when we first got together that he has cancer.
He's currently living with his mom while he is in recovery, so that it takes the pressure off me caring for both him and her baby until he's well enough to move into our new home with us. Is he good so far? Well, last week, we had attempted break-in.
I asked my husband, who was supposed to be at his mom's, to come over and change locks, but he wouldn't. Then his mom told me he wasn't with her.
I went to Facebook and it took me less than an hour to find the first two women he was cheating on me with. Oh, what else is he lying about? Well, one thing my paranoia just wouldn't let up was about the cancer and his treatments.
I asked his mom about it who told me he doesn't have cancer. She also informed me he was in rehab, not the hospital.
He suffered from addiction and was trying to recover for me and our baby. Did she leave him? Well, to find out how the story ends, listen and follow the OK Storytime podcast on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
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That's myfico.com slash free. Robert Evans here, and this is It Could Happen Here, and boy, it sure is.
Now, I don't know where we go from this point, and neither does anyone else. On the moment before I wrote this, I woke up groggy from my chemically-assisted sleep to a barrage of horror.
Donald Trump signing anti-trans legislation into law. Elon Musk giving a double fascist salute.
Donald Trump saluting and dancing with the village people. Proud Boys tramping through the streets of our nation's capital, reveling in their newfound impunity.
The dark days have come again because they never really left. All the battles and street fighting and organizing from 2017 to 2020 brought us four years of badly negotiated peace, while the rot continued unabated.
Rot. It's a term I see a lot these days.
My colleague and friend Ed Zitron refers to the hell our tech oligarchs continue to force upon us as the rot economy. Charlie Angus, a member of the Canadian Parliament, used the term rage rot to refer to now-President Trump's Christmas Day message, suggesting Canada should become the 51st state.
Over the last year, I've seen a slew of articles bemoaning democratic decay, the rot plaguing democracy, and the deep rot at the heart of our political system. One thing I have done over the last four years is learn how to efficiently process the carcasses of wild animals.
Some I hunt or raise and slaughter, but many are roadkill, harvested from the side of the road. My family comes from rural Oklahoma, so perhaps there's some epigenetic hillbilly memory that makes this so satisfying to me.
But it's also changed the way I understand the word rot. Rot starts from the bone.
If you look at the back leg of an animal that's been hit by a truck, you'll see it spreading a deep black bruise from the ball and socket joint out. If your goal is to preserve good meat, then the key is to remove those limbs from the body, and then the meat from the bone, sooner rather than later.
When I think of rot and how to arrest it, I think of dismemberment. This seems to be the one thing that almost every political person in the country agrees with.
The United States, as it is, must be dismembered, disassembled, sliced from the rotten bone, and changed into something more palatable for whoever holds the knife. Joe Biden and the Democratic Party failed primarily because they refused to start cutting.
Their successors will not make the same mistake. On the opposing side of the aisle today, I see a lot of angry people arguing about what the knife ought to be cutting and how much better they'd use it if it passed into their hands.
That doesn't help any of us right now. Migrants are dying of thirst while vigilantes destroy water drops left by activists who themselves will likely be criminalized in the near future.
Homeless Americans, trying not to freeze to death at night, may soon find themselves arrested, forced into camps where they'll be made to labor for pennies. Neo-Nazis cheer as the billionaire behind the throne makes fascist salutes from the White House with smirking impunity.
The knife is so far away from our hands, I find myself distrusting anyone who wastes time bemoaning how it ought to be used. Where does that leave us, though? Is there anything to do in this deep winter besides listen to the jackals howling outside our doors? I have an answer to this question.
Yes, now is the time to try, to test the boundaries of our collective cage. Now is the time to experiment.
Since the time of the Founding Fathers, this country and its system have been referred to as the American Experiment. One could see the very term as narcissistic, yet another solipsistic gasp of American exceptionalism.
But I tend to think the appellation is one we've earned. This country is and always has been a test for new, often bad ideas about how a society ought to run.
American civilization's only core value is throw shit at the wall and see what sticks. That also happens to be the only real way to fight back against authoritarianism.
There's a scientific paper I bring up often, The Evolution of Overconfidence, which set out to explain why people so often badly overestimate their own abilities. The authors pondered, quote, Overconfidence also leads to faulty assessments, unrealistic expectations, and hazardous decisions, so it remains a puzzle how such a false belief could evolve or remain stable in a population of competing strategies that include accurate, unbiased beliefs.
Now, the conclusion these researchers came to was that, when significant resources are contested between two organisms, the organism most willing to try to take said resources, even if it is not the strongest, tends to succeed, often enough to make overconfidence evolutionarily beneficial. This is the most basic explanation for how fascist movements continue to arise and, improbably, take power.
Put simply, they always go for it. January 6th provides us with a fine example.
It was a ludicrous, idiotic, reckless burst of stupidity, mocked for years by everyone except the perpetrators, who, four years later, find themselves with ultimate power. They didn't win because they were the strongest.
They won because they kept trying. And the people who should have stopped them feared bad press, the pushback of looking unfair, and so stood back while the fascists made smaller grabs,

gobbling up bits of the media, local school boards, and narrative oxygen around issues like immigration.

And now, well, we're here.

And we'll continue to talk about here after these ads. We're back.
The coming days will be ugly, yet I feel it's my job to remind you that bad as this is, we are not Weimar Germany, and this is not 1933. Trump and his lieutenants aren't battle-hardened trench fighters.
They're Elon Musk and a coterie of half-enthusiastic, half-frightened billionaires who got rich gambling on apps to let you rate your classmates' tits. Their foot soldiers are used car salesmen from Encino, not Fry Corps.
The United States is not starving to death, crippled by war. It's irritated, anxious, because its working people have been robbed blind by the same billionaires standing behind Trump now.
The one thing we do have in common with Weimar is that our fascists now find themselves at the head of a state that capitulated to them, not out of enthusiastic consent, but exhaustion, cowardice, and above all, a feeling that it didn't really matter. That last one, the feeling that nothing matters, the system is fucked, there's no point in engaging or organizing, that is the most powerful weapon they have right now.
Because that feeling stops you and everyone else from opposing them, from interrupting as they reach out yet again to take something you love or need.

But there's a danger here too. In moments of stress and anger, the desire to do something, anything, can be intense.
And when we're swept up in that mood, the natural tendency is defaulting to the things we know best, the things we've done before, the marches and chants and poster boards we've been walking and shouting and carrying all century long. Going back to those tactics without iteration or acknowledgement of their limitations and failures is a road to more failure.
I've been to a lot of protests, starting at Zuccotti Park in 2011 and ending last year in Chicago at the DNC. One of the most dispiriting moments of my life was listening to young anti-genocide activists bow to shut down the DNC to, quote, make it great like 68.
This was a reference to the 1968 Democratic Convention. Mass protests were ignited there when the favored anti-war candidate, Eugene McCarthy, was rat-fucked by Democratic Party insiders in favor of Vice President Hubert Humphrey.
The protests were quashed violently with tear gas and truncheons. Protesters chanted, the whole world is watching, and it's been a chant ever since.
The world may have been watching then, but the war went on. Nixon won election, then re-election, and then finally pulled U.S.
troops out of Vietnam after dropping enough bombs on Southeast Asia to have ended several Third Reichs. In 2024, a new batch of anti-war protesters chanted, the whole world is watching, and I can say, unequivocally, it was not.
The only people watching were me, several other journalists, and of course, some people on Twitter. The police, as they kettled, maced, and arrested members of the crowd, barely seemed to care.
The DNC didn't shut down. Kamala Harris was made the nominee.
There wasn't even a real anti-war candidate for party insiders to rat-fuck in her favor. Garrison Davis, my colleague and friend, remarked to me afterwards that the DNC had been somehow much more depressing than its Republican counterpart a month earlier.
He was right. On the stage floor, all the Democrats had to present were aging celebrities and Bill goddamn Clinton, drooling out the same platitudes that led us to the Trump era in the first place and doing their best to ignore delegates who walked out and slept in front of the convention center to protest the genocide in Gaza.
Meanwhile, in the streets, a lot of very nice, earnest people, alongside a handful of grifters, did the only thing they could think of doing after months of imbibing footage of war crimes. They walked around and shouted.
The police and the city largely let them, because they knew none of it was going to change a goddamn thing. I felt tremendous optimism right after Joe Biden resigned.
Not because I loved Kamala, but because it was something shocking. An upset.
An experiment. Or at least, it seemed that way at first.
The DNC made it clear that Biden's advisors and consigliaries, the powers behind the throne, still ran the show and would not allow any real change. The rot had spread too far, spoiling the meat, spoiling everything.
It was my accurate belief in 2020 that the Democratic Party, broken as it was, had the numbers and the organizational capacity to slow the spread of fascism for a short time. It was my inaccurate belief in 2024 that this might still be the case.
I had a hope because I'd lost any sense of actual productive optimism. We lean on hope when we have no ideas to brace ourselves against.
Hope, as George Miller reminded us, is a mistake. If you don't fix what's broken, you'll go crazy.
And that's where we are now, going crazy. Committed Democrats, the decent, regular people who fill the party, not the soulless shoggoths of capital running things, are going crazy because we returned a normal, decent politician to office.
He kept the economy humming along and everyone still hated him. Leftists are crazy for a different reason.
In 2020, this country saw the largest sustained uprising of its modern history and nothing fundamentally changed. In its aftermath, the oligarchs who control social media set to tweaking, buying, or outright inverting their algorithms

to ensure no similar movement would ever gain that kind of steam again.

Their efforts have largely been successful.

And yet many organizers, be they progressive social democrats,

communists, anarchists, whatever,

they're all still stuck in the same loops. Behind each march to nowhere and tired chant is an equally tired hope.
The Social Democrats dream of a giant continent-sized Denmark with cyclists replacing Ford trucks, universal healthcare, good schools, and a bevy of other lovely things both political parties will fight tooth and nail to prevent. The communists dream of a new October revolution,

but this one will work and not just create a new kind of dictatorship

that ages and dies inside the space of a single human lifetime.

Anarchists tend to be very good at seeing the flaws and the logic and futility

of the hopes of the two previous groups,

but they are just as bereft of ideas for how to stop what's coming.

Some tendencies dream of collapse, maybe even accelerationism,

an end to industrial society,

and then either living in the woods eating berries,

or some kind of solar punk daydream, wildflowers spouting from rubble.

I sympathize, but try offering either future to a single mom who can't afford her five-year-old's insulin and see how excited she gets. On the other side of the anarchist coin, you've got the helpers, the people who cheerfully admit they don't know how to solve the big problem, but they do know how to provide free eye exams to homeless people once a month or do water drops down at the border so migrants don't die of dehydration or make it more expensive for the state to bulldoze a forest and build a police training facility.
If you are where we all are right now, bereft of ideas, staring down the barrel of a nightmare, those are good folks to know. Like everyone else, they're defaulting to what they've been doing, but at least what they've been doing helps people.
The larger solutions to our common woes, if they ever arrive, will be something new, something we haven't tried yet. I feel very confident that they won't take the form of another march or involve everyone finally agreeing to be the same kind of communist or anarchist or whatever.
Sean Fain, Chief of the United Auto Workers Union, has called for a general strike in 2028, and so far that is the only clear plan I have heard from anyone that feels like it has a ghost of a chance. It is audacious, and I recommend reading what Sean's laid out about it.
But half of why I support the idea is because it's audacious. The religious right got to where they are right now in this country by being bold.
As I laid out earlier, fascists win because they try, and this is something we need to copy. Shit can be different, but not unless you're willing to try different shit.
Many pundits and columnists were shocked and horrified by the massive and instant support for Luigi Mangione when he assassinated the CEO of UnitedHealthcare. Both the tutting gatekeepers are...
I saw something a bit different. More than the actual killing itself, I think people were excited to see someone try something new.
Luigi adopted a novel tactic. He carried it out in a novel way, and in doing so, he did more to punish one of the oligarchs bleeding us dry than the entire Occupy movement.
Novelty is the one thing that ties Donald Trump and Luigi Mangione together. The enthusiastic public response to both men's actions and the simultaneous revulsion of traditional elites are mirrors of themselves.
In 2024, Trump still had enough novelty to convince people that he might upset the apple cart in a way that benefited them. He rode a global anti-incumbent wave back to the White House.
The consequence of this is that he and his are now on their way to becoming the new establishment. This is the downside of the fact that most legacy media outlets have started moderating their coverage of Trump, if not embracing him outright.
He is being normalized. His toadies, Musk chief among them, are now our legitimate powers.
What novelty remains will fade rapidly. I suspect the same thing will be true of the copycats who follow in Luigi Mangione's footsteps.
Most of his plagiarists won't be good at what they do. At best, newly heightened security will see these people dropped before they get to pull a trigger.
At worst, innocent folks will be killed or maimed by bullets and bombs that fail to hit their intended targets, or do, but with a lot of collateral damage. So I don't know what the next new thing to actually work will be, but between Trump and Luigi, there aren't many old norms left to shatter.
We are in a time of enormous potential. Many new things are about to be tried, and as awful and bloody as the fallout from some of them will be, we all have no choice but to strap in and roll some dice of our own.
The present is ugly, the future unwritten But the only way we'll make it a better one

Is if we embrace boldness strap in, and roll some dice of our own. The present is ugly, the future unwritten,

but the only way we'll make it a better one

is if we embrace boldness, creativity,

and perhaps a little overconfidence of our own.

And this is not the end of the episode.

We've got something else for you folks,

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

So I'm going to let Emily take it away. Before I do that, if you want to read the poem in text form

or find her other work, you can go to Emily Gorchinski, G-O-R-C-E-N-S-K-I dot com. That's

Emily G-O-R-C-E-N-S-K-I dot com. Here it is, The Time of Cowards.
It is the time of the coward. It is the age of the liar and greed and avarice and lost boys and a dopamine hit and fractals.
And velocity and velocity and velocity and go, go, go, don't stop. Don't stop to realize the indecency, the disloyalty, the dishonor, the discreditability, the parsimony, the hordes hoarded behind the gates the gatekeepers keep.
This is the dawn of masculine energy, not the energy your father taught you about measuring twice and cutting once, but picking yourself up and how the sting of hydrogen peroxide means it's working. Or your grandfather, who spent the days you spent smoking weed behind a 7-Eleven serving on a torpedo boat waiting for the sharks.
Who never failed to stop to lend a hand to those in need, or say grace before dinner, or to help you with your math homework, or teach you not to wear a necktie at a lathe. This is the year of cutting once and never measuring.
Pencil in the blueprints with whatever comes out. It's faster that way.
The season of hypocrites and not of confidence, but confidence men. The masculine energy of the con, the scam, the bamboozle, the fraud.
The pulling of the rug and the begging of the question. Now is the killing hour.
The clock hands float over the blood in the streets, and the rage and the rage and the uncorked hatred overflows. The minutes of impotence expanding, overflowing, fizzling.
Deception gives way to more deception. Not a single promise is kept.
Rapaciousness and rape and abandonment and the cutting of corners and KPIs. A newborn died in a baby box in Italy because the alarm sensor didn't work.
It is an honorless time, a time of only one question. Not how or may or can or if or whether, but when.
How soon. No legacy, no history, no reputation.
Build the factories, then abandon them. The soil keeps the memory.
And the burn scars, and the floodwaters, and the clear windshields where the splatters of bug guts used to be, and the images in the 20-year-old magazines still in the rack in the guest bathrooms never used, that showed how children used to go sleddingding and maybe the house is too big. No one comes by.
I shoveled the neighbor's walk in the snow and salted it so he didn't slip on the ice and could receive his mail. He's an old man.
One of the few black men left living in this neighborhood that was theirs once. He sent me a letter.
It went all the way to Richmond to come to my door. He's the last man with dignity.
In the letter he told me he has a new toy, a laptop which makes him happy because he's a big lover of history, and he can go online and read about it. And I weep for this last dignified man who proudly wears a cap honoring his service, because this is the era of synthesis and generation and revision and content, content, content, and inverifiability and manipulation, this is the pseudo-scene.
I bought a bottle of wine from a centuries-old vineyard destroyed in a devastating flood. An unsellable bottle in the retail market, a fundraiser souvenir, I kept it as a memento mori of our changing world, a mud-covered reminder of how we all must work little by little to give the world forward.
It broke when I tried to move at home on my 72nd flight of the year. It is the decade of hypocrisy, even for those who can see hypocrisy.
They made me a vice president, and with every title change, I moved farther from God, a God I never believed in. I was raised in New England towns named for biblical places by people who thought working the rocky soil brought them closer to God.
The only holy men left are those in the fields. Basra and Lebanon and Gilead and Hebron.
The people who named those towns committed a genocide to name them, and 400 years later, in their namesakes, the same. It is the epoch of cadavering.
It is the night of bonfires and feuierspüche, the twilight of stories that dared in poems and albums, and I tried to sell a book and I learned that there's only interest in a book when you put yourself into it to be consumed. Words are calories measured in the amount of heat they give aflame.
I walked over the Westminster Bridge one night with a journalist who told me that they can't publish two good stories at a time, because if one goes viral, it punishes the other, the arcane footfalls of the algorithm dance. It is the sunset of craft and skills handed down and heritage, the waxing of a crass and pandering moon, of pantomime, a frictionless night, a night where nothing dared, nothing gained, a night of shutters and locks.
These are the dark ages, ages of embarrassing the future. There is a shame here that penance cannot satisfy.
The sturdy, empty shelves, the blue hyperlinks to nowhere, and a generation lost must be lost because profit cannot be taken from an idea. I think of the mimeograph machines stuck under the floorboards of the Solidarność houses, and the punks and the whores who copied radical zines in the public library Xerox machines, and the Yugoslavian Galaxia, and the novels now considered some of the greatest of all time once banned for obscenity.
In Ceaușescu's house, the original TV remains. The revolutionaries didn't bother to steal it, because there were only 30 minutes of broadcast TV each day.
In the crepuscular light, birds dare to sing, even though they know the cats hunt below. In Vilnius, there is a tile and a square.
They say if you make a wish and spin around it three times, your wish will come true.

At this tile, a human chain formed and spanned three countries, and they sang.

At Hadra Kim, on the right day, the morning light filters in over the lonesome island of Filflah

and fills a hole drilled in the sandstone 5,000 years ago,

and has done so unfailingly over the millennia that have seen countless empires

rise and fall, and the solstice of retribution will come again. The End It's Margaret Kiljoy, everyone, here to spread the good news.
I was trying to Robert Evans it. Oh, okay, yeah.
And doesn't he only hate a certain percentage of them? Oh, right. Statistically speaking, he likes some of you.
Yeah. Because I know some nice people listen to Robert Likes.
Maybe it's you, maybe it's not. You'll never know.
Today, we're not here to talk about who Robert Evans likes, but we are here to talk about what to do if your house is going to burn down or you have to leave because they think it might burn down. This is obviously a topic that is front of mind for people in Southern California currently, given the massive wildfires that have engulfed whole neighborhoods of Los Angeles.
There are fires in Ventura and Oxford as well now the whole of east county san diego is under a red flag warning fire conditions continue because climate change continues and we have decided as a society not to do anything about that and so this shit is going to be the rest of our lives if you're on the east coast or somewhere else and you're like oh i'm fine i'm not on the west coast i have bad news for you you're not fine slowly more and more the east coast including the northeast is being seen as a fire prone area and we're seeing an increase in fire out east as well yep the united kingdom has wildfires now a thing uh did not exist do you all even have wild over there yeah well we have like land owned by the monarch fires okay we have like parks and protected land uh we don't really have we have commons to a degree but not not like public land like the u.s does like when i was a kid we used to burn the stubble in in straw fields like that's how how few fucks we gave about fires we just burn it and plow it back in and air quality i guess yeah that is not a thing that people engage in anymore that's probably for the best fire it's coming for you uh it's happening everywhere hooray hooray yeah lucky you the cleansing fire i feel like there's a john betteman poem i could go off with here but i'll spare you all right so if you are in a place where you are very likely to have to evacuate your home soonish for a fire here are some things that you may wish to consider doing i've harvested these from mutual aid groups in la and from the cal fire website where they give you advice on what to do if you're evacuating. The first thing that you'll want to do is turn off your gas.
For those of you who are not familiar, this is a flammable substance and your gas pipe rupturing and then catching on fire would be bad, would be sad. It's pretty easy to do this.
Normally you should have a valve near the meter. Some places will have what's called an earthquake shutoff or an earthquake valve where you won't need a tool.
I'm not sure that, in fact, I'm pretty certain those are not mandatory, even in California, because I've lived places that don't have them. Then again, there are things that are mandatory that landlords just aren't doing.
I think we all know that. Yeah.
Or like grandfathered into or whatever. Yeah.
Yeah. Given that people outside of California are listening and the earthquakes are fortunately not coming for us all just yet i would just suggest that you try and find where your gas shut off is now it's often where the gas comes into the property like there's a gas meter and normally you're going to need some kind of tool to turn that what i've used normally is just like an adjustable spanner or wrench for those of you in the united states the people in california that you're talking to yeah yes yeah hi fellow californians you can turn that valve so it turns parallel with the pipe and that's going to shut off uh the the gas coming into your house do you mean perpendicular to the pipe i'm curious i think parallel is shut off interesting with water you turn it off by moving it perpendicular i've never messed with a gas line i've lived weird and off-grid instead yeah um let me have a look i'm checking now yeah sorry it wants to be at 90 degrees to the pipe yeah so it should be in line with the pipe when you start 90 degrees to the pipe when you turn it off which you can just kind of imagine as like when it's in line you can imagine like oh that's how the gas and water can flow through and then when it's to the side it's like oh now it's blocking it that's how i remember that that's much easier visually if you imagine like the hole in the valve lining up with the handle thing on there yeah so you want to turn that off i've seen some suggestions that you want to turn water off generally the advice is not to turn your water off and to hook up your outdoor hoses to your outdoor taps such that they can be used if they need to be used.
I have seen some suggestions to turn water off because I guess people's pipes are bursting, which is decreasing water pressure. And it seems like that's probably a city versus rural or city to city kind of divide.
You should listen to your local authorities around this kind of thing. Right.
the case of california you can go to cal fire right and there will be evacuation advice on the cal fire website there might even be on your city website some of it is useful this is a useful thing if you do need to turn off your water again water shutoffs could be in a variety of places so it kind of of depends, especially if you're on a well, you're probably rural.

And if you're rural, you're probably going to be leaving it on.

Yeah, you're probably going to turn it off your water.

But if you do need to, it's just a pipe going into your basement that you turn the valve on.

It can sometimes be at the side of your house.

You might need to give this a little bit of WD-40.

Sometimes there's a little plastic box as well.

And a little plastic box has a little hole.

And you kind of have to shove a screwdriver in that hole and pop it open. We're now talking about city water again, right? Municipal water.
Yes, yeah, that's city water, yeah. That's where if you have a water meter box and the shutoffs in there.
Familiarize yourself with that stuff now so that you're not doing it in a panic later. And that's kind of where a lot of what we're talking about today is important.
If you do it now, you don't have to dash about your house, grabbing, thinking, is this important? Do I need this? Do I need that? Because I've evacuated for a while. I was living in California a few times.
I like to think I have it pretty down now. But definitely the first time I was a freshly minted European migrant, I was was not familiar with this stuff and definitely just ran around grabbing things it turned out to be the wrong things just like cool i've got three bicycles here let me let me go to the shelter and you can get something called a water key or a silcock key and i have a thing i have not personally used it i have a thing called an eight-way key sometimes they're called four-way keys depends on how many little wrenches on them are on them and these are just cheap things that have like basically all of the weird wrench style things that you would never otherwise use like all the weird like triangle things they can get you you into the boxes on a

subway car and they can turn on

and off water. I carry one

in case you're in the apocalypse and you need to

turn on the water at a rest area.

That kind of thing.

I first learned about these from squatters who would just move

into houses and then turn the water on.

They're built in specialized

ways to try and prevent squatters from doing

exactly what I'm describing. You couldn't use your standard socket set or or what happened yeah that's where you need these specialized keys yeah and they're not very expensive you can buy them online they're also not very high quality this isn't the kind of thing you're going to want to use over and over again they're usually cast and like they break yeah it's like pot metal yeah exactly yeah but they're all right as far as i can tell yeah and you're hopefully not going to need to use them very much other things that you should turn on or off turn off your air conditioning no one's in the house anyway don't need it i would consider leaving your exterior lights on this is just going to help firefighters see things and see your house in the event that your house is still there you can close your windows and doors it's amazing how much difference closed doors even internally make in fire spread there are plenty of videos you can watch about

this online but like it's amazing how much difference it makes having those closed but

you don't want to lock your front door like you're going to see a lot of stuff about looting i will

tell you right now that the people who are looting from wildfire survivors are the landlords who are

charging 150 of the rent that they were a month ago for people to find a place place to live

Thank you. about looting i will tell you right now that the people who are looting from wildfire survivors are the landlords who are charging 150 of the rent that they were a month ago for people to find a place place to live also if my house is about to burn down and you go steal all my stuff good have it yeah yeah lucky you like i hope you don't get burned like yeah yeah compared to if a firefighter needs to enter that house to prevent it burning down it takes a meaningful amount of time to break down a door yeah and you can save that time by leaving it open so yeah that is something that i think you will get the wrong impression of if you're watching too much corporate news if you can close metal shutters on your windows but remove curtains flammable things near windows generally not a good idea right that makes sense so if you've got fabric curtains i know they look nice but take them down or you could just live like like like me and never purchase curtains and just uh i don't have to have the sun in your face uh what is happening to me right now yeah we're going to start a whole interior design thing and when i teach james interior design where you hang your curtains yeah james is effectively squatting in a house that he actually rents you should also move flammable items into the middle of the room again right that's that's where the uh the fire is not and then before you go choose an outfit that covers your legs and arms right and and you want to wear some sturdy shoes as well something that's comfortable something you could potentially sleep in and wear for a few days and not be uncomfortable shoes that you could walk in right we saw a lot of people in la weren't able to take their vehicles as far as they had expected to be able to and so having a pair of shoes that you're comfortable in your nice comfy walking shoes is definitely a useful thing to have something to something to think about I hope you're not listening to this dashing around your house if you are best of luck yeah yeah but you know you can prepare all this stuff now for the outside of house, flammable stuff that might catch outside your house is best either bought inside, inside your shed, if you have a shed or a garage or something.
Or in a particularly California piece of advice, Cal Fire suggests chucking your patio of furniture in the pool. So that is the thing that you can do.
That makes some sense. It does.
Have you seen the picture of this lady in the 90s who put all her fine china in her swimming pool before evacuating in a wildfire? Oh, that's amazing. Yeah, it's very like of the time.
Like it was a time when people could afford swimming pools and also people had china that they cared about, which is something that our generation generally does not. Unless they inherited it from their parents and in which case they still also yeah right they have like one plate yes yeah yeah yeah apparently it's a big issue with people like inheriting china and not wanting it and just dumping it on goodwills um yeah i believe it yeah i can see that so uh yeah you can put stuff in your pool if you don't want it to burn if it is uh possible for you to do that you had something you mentioned margaret about your fence right living in a more rural setting yeah can i actually just kind of like really quickly run through some if you yes fire protecting your house there's two things you're going to do one is the oh i'm going to run away now version and then there's the ahead of time version the really quick basic version of the ahead of time is that and this is more applicable rurallyurally, but you want to have a defensible space.
You know, everyone's going to give you a different number, but like 100 feet from your house, you don't want densely packed trees, especially conifers. And you're going to want, you know, the one tree is okay as long as it's a little bit further from the other.
You're going to want to clear out yard debris. Even though leaving leaves on the ground is overall good, you kind of want to create this space where there's not a lot of leaf litter and things like that directly under your house so that the eaves don't catch you want to make sure that you don't keep a lot of flammable stuff there and if like if I was fleeing my house in a hurry I would be pulling all the stuff away from under the eaves that I should have pulled away from under the eaves months ago if i were to design my house better there would be a basically a three foot like gravel line around the edge of my house right of landscaping yeah but the other things that you're going to want to do is you're going to want to look for how embers can get in through the vents and stuff like in your roof area or under wherever and you're going to want to basically make sure and it might already have that but you want to make sure that there's um tighter than chicken wire i think it's i think you want quarter inch mesh covering those things yeah like construction netting yeah well metal but um yeah it's it's metal um that's just the name of it oh okay it's what they put into concrete i think i use it to build chicken oh yeah runs for similar reasons.
Well, because raccoon hands can't get through it, and raccoons, they're bastards, as it turns out. Yeah, that makes sense.
If your porch is wooden, you have a porch, you don't want fire to get underneath it. And so you can keep your wooden porch, but you want to screen off underneath of it to keep flaming debris from going under there.
And then if you have a wooden fence, consider having the like first 10 feet or so of the fence, a brick or something like that. I can't afford this, but imagine you can, then you would want the first chunk of it to be that way.
If you have gates, you open them. The deal with fences and everything is that you don't want like a wick that brings fire to your house so if if the forest around you is burning you don't want it to catch your fence and have that go right up to under the eaves catch the eaves on fire and now you have a structure fire so what you're going to do is you open the gates if you're leaving and then for example my plan because i have a wooden fence that goes all the way up to my house is that if i have more than like five minutes to flee a fire, if I have a half an hour to flee a fire, I am taking the chainsaw and I am cutting down about 10 feet of that wooden fence before I leave.
And that should dramatically increase the chances that my house will survive a fire. Yeah, smart move.
And then another thing with the pool thing, and it's a thing I've like read about, but I've never,

there's no version of my life where I'm ever going to have a pool.

If you live in a fire prone area,

they actually make pumps that are designed

to pump your pool water into a fire hose.

And they have saved a lot of rural areas

and probably city areas too

by having that accessible to firefighters immediately.

Your pool can become a resource for the people who are coming and try and keep your house intact. Yeah.
Amusingly, we used one of those when I was a kid. We had a horse that liked to get out.
And one day she got out. We all went looking for her, of course.
There were some wealthy people who, like, well, they didn't live in the village that we lived in. They owned it because Britain has never moved on from the feudal era.
And they had a pool and that was where our horse was. And so the fire brigade came and they used one of those things, just pumped out the water and just like hoves down the surrounding garden.
And then we came with the tractor and we put some different straw bales of different sizes and made a set of stairs and got her out yeah that's the least relatable story i've ever heard about england yeah just like rural people living the dream uh yeah yeah she was a good horse misty yeah we had a lot of horses that like we had access to land and not a great deal of finances so we inherited problematic horses i think for people who had like okay who had the means to purchase that is relatable to the americans yeah okay yeah yeah yeah any people find themselves in this situation i'm sure yeah horse poor is a whole thing yeah it is yeah yeah it's uh it's the rich people who buy fancy horses and then like find that horse not to their liking and can afford to discard a living thing that they spent more than a car is worth on one and also being horse poor is you have a horse but you don't have any money and you're like you're partly poor because you have the horse because horses are incredibly expensive to yeah maintain yes they are vets cost a lot yeah anyway so yeah make sure not quite in horse relation but if you are you know more of a horseless carriage transport person, if you are, this is a very American thing, in possession of an electric garage door opener, it is a good idea to work out how to open your garage without that. Because you don't want to be in a situation where you can't use your vehicle because you can't open your garage.
Or you don't want to be dashing around going, where's the bloody cord? Not the time. So work out how to do it.
Now, also your front gate. Hopefully you don't live in a gated community.
It's not the way to live. But if you do, for whatever reason, you know, know how to open the gates.
Or if you have an electric front gate to your drive, I suppose, know how to open that. Margaret, now will be a good time for us to pause for ads.
I wonder if we will get an advert for electric garage doors. Or electric horses.
maybe do they dream of electric hay we'll find out in this advertising break all right we are back and we're continuing on the theme of animals because they are our little friends. Yeah.
So if you have animals inside your house, pets. We had farm animals inside my house growing up, so I guess it's not exclusive to pets.
We used to bring the lambs in when it was cold. Little orphan lambs.
Again, this is turning into like James story time. It's okay.
It's cute stories. People are in possession of a range, like a big cooking.
If you have a very old house in the UK, or again, if you're rich, you have these like coal burning or oil burning ovens. So they stay at a temperature and they have a number of doors.
The coldest one, you can put a lamb in there in the wintertime. And you can keep it warm that way.
Like an alive one? Yeah, yeah, yeah. Well, I mean, any of them, you can put a dead one in if you felt the need.
But this isn't a way of cooking. I see what you're saying.
Okay, yeah, yeah. Yeah, no, yeah, yeah.
If you're looking to take care of the animal, you put him in there and keep him warm. So if you have pets in your house, things to do before you evacuate would be make sure they have a collar on, which has your name and your contact information i'm a big fan of the breakaway collars especially for dogs we never had collars on our dogs growing up because the dogs were always out in the fields right and going through hedges and stuff and you don't want them to get caught up yeah and and so i'm a big fan of those especially in a situation where your pet's going to be scared you know um god forbid that you lose your pet goes running for a bit yeah you don't want them to get caught up by their neck you also probably want to chip your dog also your chip your pets yes yeah because i was going to say now is a good time where you have the time to chip your pets to make sure you have a carrier make sure you have their vaccination records all that stuff and also particularly the particularly rabies vaccination is like the thing that you need to make sure that you have with you there's a lot of places you can't go with a pet like canada unless you have yeah yeah hopefully you and your pet will be fine you'll come home in a few days but keeping that stuff is important if you have a cat having a so what you can buy those little mobile litter boxes if you're in danger of having to evacuate just buy one and check it in your vehicle now of course any medications that your pet has right you'll want to have a supply of those and those will want to be in your little go bag.
It's also nice to have some familiar toys and things that smell like home. Yeah.
So consider putting them in the carrier now and then they'll just be there and you won't have to look for them. They have advice if you have to leave your pet, which would be a pretty heartbreaking situation, to be honest.
I, yeah. I think that choosing to be in charge of an animal's entire life is a pretty solemn vow yes i would agree and i don't think i would leave them to burn i think yeah but i i guess there's probably i mean you see like for example i know we're gonna talk about livestock in a second but like you know people have had to like let loose some of their horses because they can only personally escort so many horses or whatever right yeah a few years ago my friend and i were in a situation where a stables had more horses than it did vehicles yeah and we were able to go in a vehicle with a tow truck and just help like they would load them up and just be like go to the evacuation point with these horses yeah and so having a plan for that is good but yeah i know i struggle conceive of of leaving pets like i grew up with dogs and like they were part of my family yeah i i suppose there's some situation i am not imagining where it is literally a necessity but i i struggle to yeah i heard about people in la who were forced to leave relatives who were who were not which is just fucking heartbreaking.
Just, you know, one of the worst things I could imagine happening. Which is literally why I actually think that your evacuation plans, I'm not trying to blame those people that we're talking about, but I believe that your evacuation plans need to include people with disabilities who are in your area, not just in your house, but elsewhere.
Yeah like yeah 100 if you have someone who can only travel by a wheelchair then you should be considering for your only vehicle a wheelchair accessible vehicle like this is the kind of thing that i think that like plans need to include people who are at different levels of ability yeah yeah if you have older people in your neighborhood people who might not have their cell phone on or on them all the time they might not get that like beep beep buzz buzz yeah if you have older people in your neighborhood, people who might not have their cell phone on or on them all the time, they might not get that like beep, beep, buzz, buzz. Yeah, if you have like older folks who live alone in your neighborhood, you should know that, you know? Yeah, yeah, a few years ago I helped some older neighbors evacuate.
You live in a community and you need to take responsibility and take care of one another. If you have livestock, again, like, you know, I grew up with livestock um i think you're taking responsibility for that animal's life and that includes situations where you might have to help that animal escape uh in a way that like it's not necessarily like lucrative for you right so that might just mean opening your fences right opening your gates if you're not able to evacuate the animal, at least giving it a chance.
You can, before, just to avoid having yourself in that situation, need to make transport arrangements. You should be able to look where large animals' refuges are.
Like in San Diego, in the big fires maybe 15 years ago, they had them on Fiesta Island for a while. It's a little island out in the bay.
Or Del Mar Racecourse is often a place in San Diego where you can take them. You should be able to find that now.
If you're in Los Angeles, you can find that now. Again, you're going to want to have your essential documentation.
You are not going to want nylon halters for your livestock. I've seen a lot of people have nylon lead ropes for horses.
We had more hempy ones when I was younger, just because those are much less likely to melt right i'm not sure that's why we had them in the uk but we had them because we'd had them for a long time but uh plasticky things that can melt you don't want to put them around your horse's head or or near your horse okay that makes some sense yeah if you have chickens right now you're gonna run into the issue of avian flu oh yeah which is a further complication so like this is the scenario of like a big chicken shelter where you take them it's not a good one for avian flu reasons also for like chicken dynamics reasons so that means you should make a plan now you might have a friend who you're like hey i know that you're not normally a poultry person but would it be cool in the event of us having to evacuate for me and my chickens to come and stay at your house making a plan now it's going to avoid you being in a very difficult situation of either driving around with your birds in your in your truck being like where the fuck can i go or like being turned away from places right yeah the last thing i have here and then we're going to move on to packing your go bag is insurance my house flooded when i was a kid like it completely leveled the first floor of the house. Everything was gone.
Which, since it's England, is actually the second floor to Americans. Yeah, it's true.
It was actually the ground floor. You had to hide on the first floor.
Yeah, yeah. I love to go into a lift and be confused in this country after 16 years of living here, go up and down, up and down, playing this stupid game until i google what do american call the floors but you can't do it you're in the lift and your phone doesn't work it's one of my favorite experiences especially because you try google what do american lifts do and they're like what the fuck is a lift yeah yeah yeah it's true yeah yeah an elevator yeah it's not an elevating experience anyway uh my favorite thing don't know why.
Yeah, it's true. I'm sure I'm the only person who does it.
I'm sure it never comes up. Yeah, it never happens to me.
Yeah, it was never an issue when I worked in a building with a lift and would routinely miss my own floor, so much so that I just took a fire escape. So I remember it taking months.
The time I was working in construction, and what were doing was for the most part pulling wet carpet out of people's homes that had flooded. Highly recommend not doing that as a way to make a living if you can.
It's not good for the body, not good for the soul. Not good for the lungs probably.
Cleaning out restaurants like a month later, the power had been off for a month, just going the walk-in oh my god i've never seen so many people vomit like one after the other being like no i could do it i'm a builder like yeah pretty horrific so don't recommend if you can go around your house taking a video of your yeah stuffs it will just make it easier like this happened to my family in like maybe you know the early 2000s it wasn't possible well i mean i could have got the old like sony handycam out but i didn't so now you know you have a video camera in your pocket going around your house taking a video especially of you know the things that are expensive and hard to move that you're going to rely on insurance to replace yeah and then this is actually a decent regular prepper practice regardless this isn't a like oh i'm just about to have to run out for a fire this is a like every six months or every year or every time you get a new weird expensive thing that you put in your house make this video so that it's easier to prove all of the stuff that you had that needs to be replaced. Yeah.
If you do that on a regular basis, there's a little bit of like security of like, where do you put it? Do you really want, you know, but it's honestly for almost all people probably totally fine to just have that. Yeah.
On the cloud. Yeah.
Yeah. I think, I think it did.
Don't put it on Facebook, but like. Yeah.
Don't direct the insurance company to your Instagram where you post an interior video of your home every month yeah that's your thing i guess join us next month for behind the podcasts yeah good podcast cribs it's just me in my shed it's me critiquing your uh interior design you have uh that will be a weekly podcast for some time shame James James shame podcast

LA things that I've heard people, things that you will need. If you have a nebulizer, if you're a person who uses a nebulizer to help them breathe, those are in very high demands.
You're probably not going to be able to replace it. So bring that with you.
If you have medications, ideally grab the meds in the little orange thing and take those with you that way you've got the rx number and you can easily go to a pharmacy and be like hey this is my prescription for me it has my name and the rx number can you issue me an emergency supply and that's something they should be able to do and also if you grab the whole bottle then you've got you know hopefully a decent supply hopefully your insurance isn't annoying and only lets you get three weeks at a time. Yeah, that comes up for a lot of people.
But yeah. I will not name any companies because I think it is against my contract to do that.
I will say that if you have like your important documents, right? potentially your deed to your house if you own one, your car, your passport, your birth certificate is a big one. Yeah, your right to be in this country.
Yeah, any green card, visa, that kind of thing, especially those in the after. Well, this will come out in the era of Trump 2.0.
So those documents are going to be very important for some people, right? Your DACA registration. Put those in a file and grab the whole thing.
Bring it with you. Do not rely on scanning copies of those, especially your immigration documents.
If you're a person who has firearms, records of the serial numbers of those are going to be useful. And again, I would just snap a picture.
It's not reasonable or sensible to be taking a lot of firearms with you in a situation like this. You're not going to need them.
And there's gonna be a lot of places that you won't want to bring them. Yes.
I would suggest locking them up and like I say, documenting that you've done that. You may have to prove at some point that that firearm no longer exists and that's probably the best way to do that.
And being prepared to travel on foot, like I said. Another thing that people have been needing and not having is P100 masks.
So it's a particle filter generally in the 3M. And I think the Honeywell filters, they're pink.
So I'm talking about like a screw-in filter here. Although they do make P100 masks that are more like, they look more like covid masks yeah they're just a little bit thicker and um yeah yeah they're a little bit more sort of burdensome than those masks but that is what you need if you're in those situations yeah so if you have one of those i have ones like when i'm when i'm epoxying wood i have a little little half face uh respirator i wear for that we will actually talk about masks, Margaret, after some of the products and services that support the show have talked about themselves.
It'd be pretty sick if it's Honeywell. Yeah, that'd be pretty smart.
Yep. All right, here we go.
All right, we're back. Thank you, Honeywell.
well yeah keeping us safe from tear gas although i'm kind of a 3m girl i got to admit oh controversial okay i know so one of the things i did during 2020 was a lot of testing of protest gear and if you want to see i've written up a whole bunch of pieces about exactly everything about masks and body armor and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.

But in general, when you think about masks, there's sort of three levels that actually matter or useful.

There's the version that we kind of see as a COVID mask.

There's a version where it's like you wear it around your face and you make sure you get a rated one.

An N95 is better than nothing for smoke, but a P100 is better.

And then there is a half-mask respirator. Half-mas mask respirators are great.
They are probably the sweet spot for this. They are less good for pandemics because they do not filter the exhale.
They're better for your daily life because they don't filter the exhale. It's much easier to breathe with a half mask respirator than a fabric mask.
And you switch out the cartridges and unfortunately almost all of them are various proprietary types of filters yeah and the the bayonet mount is the the 3m style there's a nato version if something looks more like a gas mask it's probably the nato screw-on kind so you can get a half mask respirator you can get a full-face respirator, which is more or less what looks like a gas mask. But those come in kind of civilian styles that are using the same 3M brand or Honeywell or whatever cartridges, or you can get the more military style that'll have the NATO-style screw in.
The military style is kind of overkill in terms of it'll position you oddly socially. certainly in a fire yeah i think that a thing that is worth everyone having are these respirators a half mask respirator or depending on your life like if you use them a lot or you're going to be protesting or i don't know there's a lot of different reasons you might want a full face one they make really cheap knockoff ones that you can get imported.
Although maybe if you're listening to this in the future, you can't get it imported, but they work fairly well. They're just not quite as good.
I've tested a whole bunch of them against various impacts and things like that. I think that half masks are great.
I keep a half mask in my truck, literally for wildfire smoke. Because when I'm traveling, if I'm driving out West, I've been around wildfire smoke while traveling before another thing just really quickly they make these for dogs as well oh cool they're more like covid mask style and my dog hates it yeah you know but you could train your dog into not hating it i just haven't i just keep it around to be like well if it really if we had to sleep in the vehicle in a smoky area my dog would hate it and he would put up with it you know and he would survive yeah yeah i like masks yes they're great yeah they are good the half face respirator is great yeah that's what uh i used like i say when i'm epoxying so i don't get high because that would be bad yeah oh and then really quickly about physical stuff like deeds and all of that stuff yeah i'm actually kind of curious because it's like i see why it matters the most to have the physical originals.
For most crises, a lot of people talk about how safety deposit boxes at banks are kind of the way to go. For stuff like that you don't need on a regular basis, this wouldn't be your proof of documentation necessarily.
But it might be your like birth certificate, maybe like deeds and titles and things. Add a safe deposit box because then if your house burns down, it's still fine.
L fine. LA wildfire kind of disproves this a little bit, right? Because then you're like, well, what if your bank burns down? Yeah, yeah, yeah.
And then if it's not on your property, you can't grab it and go. So it's a little bit complicated.
I think overall, I think that there's a real advantage to keeping stuff in a safety deposit box offsite. And then also I just want to shout out that fireproof safes aren't fireproof yeah not for the situation that we're talking about here right they are designed for like your kitchen catches fire or your bed catches fire and your safe is under your bed yeah and the fire fighters come and they get out in 15 minutes but some stuff gets charred right When there is a structure fire and a structure is destroyed, fireproof safes, like all other safes, are generally not protecting their contents.
And that's not the safe fault of the fire safe. It's just they're not designed for that.
Google the melting point of steel for this and many other interesting internet things that you can learn. Jet fuel can't melt fireproof safe yeah which is why they build buildings out of them oh and one more thing about documents really quick while the original matters having copies is like better than nothing 100 and also just like scanning and having them on encrypted hard like a cryptid usb stick a little usb stick with all of your stuff is a really pretty good thing to have.
It has some advantages too, right? Because sometimes you don't want the originals of your documents. Like, for example, you probably want a list of all of your bank accounts, the bank account numbers, your pins or your credit card numbers, like all of that stuff that you really don't want someone else to have.
But if you lost, you would be really sad. You probably want digital encrypted copies of that available to you yeah yeah also your like master passwords and all that terrible horrible stuff that's scary to put onto a usb stick yeah but uh that's why you're putting it there and not on the internet yeah so really quickly margaret uh it's gonna be a long one i guess you and i talk about prepper stuff it went long yeah shocking go bags we've done a whole episode on Go Backs.
If new to the show hello welcome you can go back and listen to margaret and james talking about go bags we'll try and put a link in the description here for you but what is the like super fast speed run version of what you want to put in your go bag oh lord uh change of socks and underwear your basic toiletries like the kind of like travel toiletries because your go bag is like more like sorry it's not a long tangent your go bag is like more likely i have to spend the night in my car than like i'm starting a new life somewhere out in the plains yeah and so the small little things like bring deodorant even if you don't have deodorant in your daily life because you might be crammed into a place with lots of other people i've seen tons of requests for deodorant in the la mutual aid chat almost every day yeah no it makes a lot of sense yeah so basic toiletries and a little bit extra to share i think whether or not you menstruate you should have tampons for example in your go bag yeah and so i think that the basic toiletries basic first aid slash survival stuff and then like change of clothes and also like at least one or two morale items i keep a nintendo switch in my go bag it uh skyrim is i need a skyrim box in order to fight anxiety sometimes yeah yeah you can get those tiny little game boys now which have like uh it looks like a game boy but every game every game ever yeah yeah i have one of those in there too okay sick yeah those would be a perfect item for one of those that I had like almost no electricity at the beginning of COVID. And so the ability to play the Sega Genesis version of Shadowrun from like the 90s was crucial to me because I didn't have enough electricity to run a computer.
Yeah, and look, that's fine. And it's probably going to be more important to you than half the shit you see people online putting in their go-backs.
Like you don't need a gender affirming hatchet. You will have a lot more fun with with your tiny game boy things that you don't need that i see people i see people hauling a lot of food everyone who's evacuated in la is having a miserable time they are eating the best they ever have so many people want to help and food is a way that so many of us express affection and care for one another so many people are getting getting fed right now.
Thanks for the efforts of mutual aid groups, really.

Remarkably, it doesn't seem to be so much by...

You'd think LA, a city on a major fault line,

would have some kind of supplies for an earthquake

that required feeding lots of people.

Seems like it's more vibes-based for the city.

But, you know, surprise, surprise,

it's mutual aid groups who are feeding people,

and they're doing that really well.

So you don't need to haul a lot of food.

Having a little bit of food, though. A little bit of shelf-st they're doing that really well so you don't need to haul a lot of food having a little bit of food though a little bit of shelf stable food i really recommend bars you don't like as the food that you put in your go bag because if you put in bars that you do like you're going to eat them when you're bored one day yeah and you don't want to go to the store highly recommend i say this literally all of the bars in all my bags have been eaten yeah last week but that's because there's been like a winter storm so i haven't been out to the grocery store and i just have been like sugar craving so i eat even the gross bars i live in san diego i have no excuse i just do it because i can't be bothered to leave my office and go to my kitchen sometimes yeah so find the one that you don't like put it in your bag just have a couple it's it's it's not to keep you sustained it's to keep you from being grouchy like don't think of it as like i need to put entire meals in my go bag think of it as like i need enough sugar and whatever to keep my like headspace right yeah i kind of like to layer them in between things i do this when i'm camping too i'll get like those little peanut butter packets yeah and just like just throw a few in there and then you're like oh yeah you know what i am being cranky let me just snuff this and i'm gonna be better yeah i do highly recommend peanut butter I take it when i travel a lot as well it's like a comfort food for me it's filling it's compact it's it's not that bad for you you know when i lived out of a backpack i kept a plastic jar of peanut butter at the bottom of my pack always because i knew no matter what i had at least two days worth of calories in the bottom of my bag yeah yeah it's uh it's a wonderful thing peanut butter so yeah put some of that in there there are things that like you probably don't need shelter right but it might be nice to have a little compact blanket right especially if you're gonna have to stay one of those one thing a little comfort item that i always take i've taken this all over the world is an inflatable pillow like there are a lot of hardships that i will endure i like to sleep on a pillow and so i take a little inflatable pillow so it's something that like you know you will have comfort items like that that are things for you i'll put those in there i would avoid watching too much go bag content on youtube because you're going to get anxious about the fact that you don't have like a folding short barrels rifle and and that's because you don't need it uh nor do you need like a like i'm sitting next to my bulletproof vest that i've used before for work i'm not taking it with me uh it's staying here yeah i didn't spend a lot of money on the plate so i will be claiming those on insurance but you don't need that stuff people yeah are taking care of one another and so pack with the things that will help you be comfortable and consider that you might be spending a while in a hotel or a hostel or a refuge or staying with a friend or family members yeah and think what would make that more comfortable for you i think that that's a really good way to put it it's the get out of town for the weekend bag that's not the end of the world bag i.
I think that if you are more rural, you might want some basic camping stuff. Yeah, definitely.
But the average person probably doesn't. I mostly have this at the like, there's my go bag and then there's the stuff that's kind of always in my truck.
Yeah, that's where I'm at too. I like to go camping.
So I have my camping stuff in my truck because then it takes me less time to go camping. Yeah.
And so like I am almost certainly not bugging out on foot from my house. And if I had to, then I would have to bring a, not my go bag, I would have to bring a hiking bag, you know? Yeah.
Most of the time, if you have access to a car and roads because you're escaping an emergency, you're getting to somewhere with enough civilization that you have, you can expect some level of shelter and food.

Yeah, exactly.

But I do, I will say, have some water.

Don't go overboard.

I think that having a little bit of chemical water filtration and a water bottle, or a little water filter and a water bottle, no reason not to.

Yeah, I will say specifically, get a soy squeeze.

They're tiny.

The filtration is better than most other filters that are that size get it put it in your backpack leave it there they're handy to have and then yeah get a little uh i like to have again this is a little comfort thing i like to have a stainless steel nalgene size bottle it's not made by nalgy it's made by clean canteen i like it because i could drink water out of it i like it because it's not plastic and i like it because i can use it to heat up water when it's really cold and have it like a little hot water bottle and snuggle with it um yeah so that's a nice thing yeah i use also like a single wall steel canteen so that you can heat water in it if you get the double wall ones then you can't heat them over a fire because they're you know vacuum insulated or whatever but then other people i know are like well they want the ability to have like and they're insulated tea bottle yeah you know you do you so i will also say battery packs for phones is a big one again you're less likely to need to hunt squirrels with axes and you're more likely need to keep your phone charged and other people's phones charged one of those little hydra charging cables which you know, you know, breaks water. That's what I was about to say too, yeah.
Yeah, get one of those. Get a little wall wart and keep it in there so you can turn a wall socket into a USB socket if you need that to charge your stuff.
Another thing that is surprisingly handy in lots of situations is I like to run a lot, and sometimes you're doing an ultramarathon. When you get to the station they just have like big things of water right and you fill up your little water bottles you're carrying in your vest and lots of people have these tiny collapsible cups that are made of like a thin rubber they're made of the stuff that camelback bladders are made of and then they can fill up that cup and they can drink from it and they just keep it attached to their vest right and then off they go running along oh These are very useful, and I've started incorporating them in lots of my travel and emergency supplies, because if you're in a place where people don't have cups, but they have big things of water, now you have a vessel from which to drink.
So those are surprisingly handy. Yeah.
I also keep one of those. I don't know if it's the same one you're talking about, but it collapses up almost like accordion style.
Yeah. It's's like, it's like the camping ones, but even it's way, it's way lighter than those.
Ah, okay. I have the camping style one and I keep it in there as a like emergency dog bowl.
Yes, I know. Yeah.
Those are great for that too. And you can, you can drink hot things out of them, which is nice.
Yeah. And another thing that I keep in my go bag is I keep the meds that my dog is on and I keep some of the meds that I take in there.
And you know, it's like my dog only gets the meds once a month. So I go to my bag and I pull out the meds and I give them to my dog from my bag because why not? And if you have, you know, other people, whether they're not fully grown yet or are that you also take care of, you know, you need to make sure you have a little bit of their stuff in there.
Like you keep a dog toy in your go bag yeah yeah if you have a child keep a child toy if you need to keep medicines cold there's a product called frio f-r-i-o they're not paying me i've never got one for free but you dip it in water and it uses evaporative cooling to keep your insulin cold i have used them up oh cool they are very handy they don are very handy. They don't rely on electricity.
It's very nice. So yeah, if that's something that you need, then that is hopefully something useful to you.
My last thing would be a little torch, a little pocket flashlight, or even better, a headlamp, like a head torch, because lots of places in LA lost power, right? And if you're having to go places at night, it's much easier if you can see where you are going. they're not expensive they're great gifts bring a few give them to friends make new friends hopefully this has repaired you the last thing of course margaret is uh gold bullion with ronald reagan's face on it oh i forgot to mention that yeah you need to trade rather than having a system of mutual aid which we.
Instead, we should interject a complicated barter system,

ideally on the gold standard.

Yeah, in which shiny metal replaces our natural instinct

to help one another.

Yeah, exactly.

That's how it's been.

That's humans.

Famously, not a species.

Just bring a copy of Debt by David Graeber into your...

Yeah, yeah.

Bring Atlas Shrugs, and then as you pass the fires, just ripping that shit off throwing it in there let it burn uh having a paperback book if you like that it's not weight efficient but you know what like yeah that's how you like morale matters yeah yeah yeah bring the dawn of everything by david graber that'll occupy you through most natural disasters it It's a thick book. It is.
It is indeed. If you can't reach something, very handy.
Stand on that. He really thought.
He did us one final solid RIP David Graeber. Yeah.
And on RIP to David Wengroh is a lot. Yes.
Yeah, yeah. Shout out to David Wengroh.
The other David, the less venerated David, who also wrote that book. I always feel bad when I just talk about Graver stuff and I talk about Dawn of Everything and then I don't talk about the other David.
Yeah, sometimes I'll just say the Davids and then people will look at me and... Yeah, totally.
It's a level. But I know.
Yeah, when I'm speaking to Margaret, I can say the Davids. She knows which Davids I mean.
That's why we're friends. Yeah.
Anyway, it's gonna be okay okay or it's not but you know what you weren't going to survive being alive anyway and keep your car half full of gas like when you're on your way home make sure that you fill up if it's less than halfway full plug your electric car in don't skip plugging your little electric car in at night because the night that you do is the night that you need it. So you do the little things.

Take care of one another.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah. Thank you.
Oh, welcome back to It Could Happen Here, a show where it's now happening here. A thing that we've said in a joking way a number of times, but now it just is.
This is, you know, a podcast. We're having a good time.
I'm Robert Garrison Davis, my co-host, colleague, and today we're talking about Trump's inauguration with a good friend of ours who was present at The Thing itself, Bridget Todd. Bridget, welcome to the program.
Thank you for having me. It's actually my first time on It Can Happen Here.
I'm like a little like nervous. I hope it goes well.
Yeah. You're an OG guest over on Bastard.
So it's about time we had you on here. How are you feeling Bridget? Just in general, before we get into the specifics, how are you doing in the first full day of this new era? Oh, not great, Bob.
Not great. Not great.
Not great. Yeah.
It's so bad. Like we were talking off mic like, I need to figure out a self-care plan.

And part of this is on me that I feel like I am one of those people that has kind of checked out a little bit. And I'm like, ugh, who? Like, I gotta take a step back from this.
And now that I'm taking a step back in, I'm like, I need a plan for how I'm going to pace myself and not lose my fucking shit every fucking day. Yeah, it's probably not for the best that, like, right at the same time as this

has all happened, the people who make

gas station drugs have figured out how to take

the chemicals in Kratom,

which, you know, in leaf form is a generally safe

drug, and hyper-concentrate them

into basically fucking heroin.

So I'm just working

on staying away from that shit.

Too much of the news, you know? That's the way you gotta

do it. I'm also doing dry January and trying to That's the way you gotta do it.
I'm also

doing dry January and trying

to eat healthy. Ooh, that's tough.
I'm not doing that.

So, I have no

outlets. I can't drink.
I'm not,

I don't do drugs. I'm fucking

eating lentil soup every night.

I got nothing. There's nothing I can do to cope.

I'm keeping myself okay by just eating

venison every single day.

Smart. But, yeah.

I'm carrying on our Vegas tradition eating venison every single day. Smart.
But yeah. I'm carrying on our Vegas tradition, and I've moved into gambling.
Nice. Oh, you're gambling now, huh? Not actually, but instead of doing something stupid for Inauguration Day, me and my friends got together and all played anarchist poker.
So that was fun. I lost about $10 to my friends, so that it that's fair how often did you say i hardly know her like about about four times yeah that's that's the right amount of time but we also got quite drunk by the time we started our second game i was also dressed like data from the next generation complete with uh silver face paint the entire time and a poker visor so that was was how I spent yesterday.
I'm glad you got to experience the hell that that actor experienced. Bridget, let's talk about the inauguration.
Let's do it. All right.
So I kind of coming in firsthand, when did you sort of lock down your plans to actually be there? So initially, my plan was to get out of town. Totally.
I'm going to go out to the mountains. I don't want to be here.
Yeah. I'm going to hide on the mountains with a rifle.
Like, you're joking, but like almost literally that. No, no, no, I'm not joking.
And I was in, so I live in D.C., I've lived in D.C. most of my life.
I was in D.C. in my apartment when January 6th happened.
And I remember being so scared. There was a curfew in D.C.
Like it just shit got really, real, really quickly. I remember I was on a all staff beginning of the year planning work call.
And somebody just on the Zoom was like, hey, something's happening. And everybody who lives in D.C.
should maybe check the TV. And then the line went dead.
That's what I remember the most. So I was planning on getting out of town.
And then I thought, fuck it. Why should these people drive me out of my own city? I want to be out on the streets.
I want to be out in my community. I want to be connected.
And so, yeah, I went out to the people's March protest. I went out as far as I could to inauguration downtown just to get a sense of what the vibes were.
Yeah. All right.
Well, let's let's get into the vibes. How were they? Weird as hell.
This is something that I think people might not really think about a lot. So like being from D.C., living here most of my life, people really obviously think of it as like a seat of national power.
And they sometimes forget that there are over 600,000 D.C. residents who just like live here, work here, have their lives here.
And so this stuff all plays out like practically in our backyards while arguably we have less electoral political power and less agency in some ways because D.C. is not a state.
Yeah, yeah, yeah. Our congressional representative, Eleanor Holmes Norton, she can like vote in committees and introduce legislation and stuff like that, but she can't vote.
And so all of this matters for... It's so fucked up.
It's... Dude, don't even get me started.
Like, I could talk about statehood all day long. That's like such a funny, shitty compromise.
Like you can, you can be there and like talk, but you can't do anything. Like, I'm sorry.
That's just so fucked up. It is.
And it's like, I mean, like, there are so many reasons why it sucks that DC is not a state, but ultimately it's like, we deserve to have political power. We deserve to have a state.
We made Wyoming like Wyoming estate have you ever fucking been to Wyoming good god like and I mean I could talk all day when Republican lawmakers got get on TV and I remember they would shit on DC by saying things like there's not even loggers who live there it's not even a real place like as if the only way to actually meaningfully exist in the United States. It's like, you have to have loggers who live there.
It's not even a real place. Like, as if the only way to actually meaningfully exist in the United States is like, you have to have loggers who live there.
Like, it's so infuriating. And none of those motherfuckers know a logger.
I know. So all of this background really matters to Trump's kind of tense relationship with DC, like the district.
Trump, as y'all might remember, spent quite a lot of time just talking straight shit about the district and announcing these like big plans to take over D.C. The background is a little bit complicated, but the quick and dirty version is that D.C.
has what's called Home Rule. So that's like the ability for D.C.
to govern, like for our local government and leaders to like make decisions about what happens to the district. And on the campaign trail, Trump was saying he wants to change this, that D.C.'s home rule would be revoked and that the federal government, basically him, would dictate how D.C.
is run as a city. Because D.C.
is not a state, technically any president could have that authority to interfere with how D.C. is run.
So, yeah president could like take over the police department and take over the powers. Our mayor, Muriel Bowser currently has over the city.
Yeah. So I guess first off, like of your friends, how many folks kind of made the same call? Like what was the general decision? Cause I'm, I'm looking at like footage of proud boys marching through fucking DC again for the first time time in almost half a decade and like yeah where are the people you know on this kind of stuff i mean this in the most literal sense nobody zero i was out there flying solo and i had multiple friends be like you're crazy to go down there like what like everybody yeah and i guess that's something else that i wanted to talk a bit about, which is that, you know, the first time around during Trump's inauguration, I was like out on the streets.
I was like, it sounds so silly now, but like, I mean, almost don't even want to get into it.

But the idea of like resist that had not yet become a cliche to me.

And in the aftermath of Trump's first election, I was really clinging to that for like whatever

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

I think that DC is exhausted.

The people that generally i know who are like radicals who would be out on the street a lot of those people were like we're sitting this one out yep yeah that was like a refrain i hear from a lot of black and brown organizing folks here in dc like this is not our fight we are we are sitting this one out. And I don't blame anybody.
Right. Like, it's a lot.
We've all been through a lot. Yeah.
And that's that's I guess if I could get across something and people listen, it would be like, don't just show up because they are right now. They have the cops.
They have the courts. If they want you to show up in the street, the best thing to do sometimes I I'm not going to say this is going to be consistently the case, but it's like, don't give them what they want.
Don't be where they want you to be. Don't make it simple for them.
Again, I keep trying to say, and I'm not saying this in like, I'm so smart. I know what everyone needs to be doing.
I don't, but it's like not what we did last time because that that just didn't didn't do it. Exactly.
Didn't do it all. Didn't knock it out of the park.
Wasn't a home run. The last time Trump was in office, y'all remember like the Women's March and pussy hats and all of that.
I actually staffed the Women's March that time around. I was one of the digital street team folks.
So I was like very invested. This time around, they changed the name.
They rebranded to the People's March and they only had a couple of thousand people out there. And so, you know, I think it really goes back to what you were saying, Robert.
Personally, I have a hard time with the idea that what we did then is what we should be doing now, that that playbook is still going to work. And frankly, like 69 percent of white women voted for Trump.
Right. And so like the idea that I would feel safe and feel solidarity with a bunch of women out on the streets, like being like, boo, Trump.
It's just like it's I understand why the turnout was so low, because I feel like solidarity and march on the street is clearly not where we're at. So that is not how we should be meeting this moment.
Well, and even last J20, there was like a large, large radical contingent. And those people are similarly sitting out.
And when you're looking towards the next few months, looking at like what kind of ice rates are going to happen, looking at what's going to happen for like reproductive health care transgender health care people are making the calculation that it does not make sense to like needlessly throw yourself against the walls of the state when we can stick together and see and see what happens and prepare for for all of those other things that are going to actually impact you and people that you know seriously. And it sucks to

be stuck in that reactive position. And there's things that you can do proactively.
But going outside and yelling in front of a fence probably isn't going to do any of those things. It's probably not going to help the people who are going to need help in the next few weeks.
And people are understanding that. And it's leading to people reacting quite differently than what they did, you know, eight years ago.

I agree.

Yeah, I mean, Garrison, you really said it. And in this moment, personally, I am really wondering, like, what my role is.
Like, where can I fit in? There was a time where, you know, just being out on the street yelling, like being so frustrated, I have to take to the streets and scream in impotent rage. That would feel like something.
And I just think in 2025, I have to figure out like what it is I can contribute and contribute that. And I don't know that it's protest as it used to be.
Like I used to be somebody who like protest was my thing. Like, you know, I really got my start in the anti-war movement when I was in college.
And like that felt like something. I don't think that that's what it is for me anymore.
Maybe it's just age to you age out of it or something. Sure.
I think some of it is that like the only meaningful definition of intelligence really is the ability to adapt to changing circumstances. And when the circumstances change in the way that they have and you're like, well, time to do exactly what we tried in 2017, that is not intelligent, right? Like, I'm not trying to be mean.
And again, I'm not saying I know what the smart thing is, but it is, we gotta be pivoting. We gotta pivot in a lot of different directions right now.
So yes, and I don't know that I see some of the institutional powers that be, even people who are like ostensibly like on our side doing that pivot, right? Like I'm very much in this sort of like nonprofit industrial complex, all the organizations who were like, oh, well, where should we be putting our money and this and that the first time around, I just see them doing the same old thing. And it's like, I don't know that that is what's going to save us.
And like, don't get me started on how useless the Democrats are, because I'll go all day. But like, when Trump announced that he was moving the inauguration inside, they printed little jokey shirts that said snowflake.
I'm just so sick of that. Like, that sort of like sneering, dunking, useless stuff that doesn't translate to meaningful action.
I'm just so sick of it. I wanted to gouge my eyes out.
Yes. Yeah.
I mean, that's what's in part what lost the election is that is that general attitude and that conception of them throughout the country. And yeah, getting your little like snide remarks during Hegg's confirmation hearing might make you feel good and might generate a good clip for social media, but is that actually going to stop him from getting into the cabinet position? I've had so many arguments about this with people over the last few days who still insist that, like, well, the fascists can't stand you making fun of them.
That's what they hate, is you laughing at them. And, like, I think there was a stage at which that was a valid tactic, and, you know, there may be elements of that in the future.
But, like, no, they don't care. They're winning.
I'm not saying, like, don't fucking make jokes with your friends to, like, keep yourself sane. I'm saying don't mistake dunking on them on social media for doing anything that matters because it doesn't.
Ugh. Okay.
I'm not even sure, like, I don't have so much to say about this. So I have been saying this for a very long time.
And we were all at the Democratic National Convention. I have to admit that I was there as an influencer.
But the thing that annoyed me so much was that exact sentiment. And that exact sentiment fucking lost.
And the thing that pisses me off now is the complete unwillingness to be like where did we go wrong maybe the memes and the jokes and the calling them weird than this and that that maybe it felt good in the moment but it actually didn't translate what happened unwilling to do that completely unwilling you know you see i would almost argue that like the weird think, if they'd stuck with it, there was something there. I think the emphasizing how outside of, like, the American norm these guys were and, like, what we want to accept in our communities, like, there was something there, but they didn't stick to it.
You know, the next big time we saw Tim Walz, he was talking about how he wanted to be friends with J.D. Vance on the fucking debate stage.
Yes, yes. You know? But also, I think that's a little different than just, like, calling him fucking Orange Mussolini or whatever the fuck.
Oh, my gosh. I think there's a point in a messaging tactic.
It's like Trump gets mileage out of the names he uses and the way in which that's part of how he got where he is. So I'm not saying that aspects of these tactics can't be used well.
I'm talking about the way in which people, liberals and folks on the left are continuing to do the fucking like drum shit. That's not getting us anywhere.
I could not agree more. And yeah, I mean, I agree.
I think the weird stuff could have like had legs. I think that they were kind of like scattershot at that point and they were like, oh, people seem this let's lean into this oh this new thing let's lean into that yeah the thing that i remember very clearly was when tim waltz was talking about how oh we have a saying in minnesota it's mind your own damn business yes yes yeah so like my partner is from minnesota and he was like oh that is like absolutely a minnesotan thing mind your own damn business yeah you can sell that yeah so I agree but yeah the like calling

Eli That is like absolutely a Minnesotan thing. Mind your own damn business.
Yeah.

You can sell that.

Yeah.

So I agree.

But yeah, the like calling Elon, Elmo,

like all these little cutesy things might feel good and like get you a hit of dopamine

and get you a few, you know, likes on whatever.

But it just, it's not going to save us.

And I'm so sick of it.

I feel like in some ways it's all anyone has to offer right now and I'm sick of it. One of the interesting things when like looking back at the last version of Trump's J20 is you did have, you know, these large, large militant groups, you groups, what would later probably be dubbed Antifa by the media, but there was a presence in the street.
And this time around, really the only sizable militant presence in the street was the first return of the Proud Boys. Did you stumble across a gaggle of black and yellow clad militants in the streets? Yellow and black Not a gaggle I saw one lone one I'm sure was like, I've lost my groove Like a little duck I'd help a baby duck get back to its mom last year It was just like that Yeah Right down to the IQ I have some friends right now who are in the DC airport And it is chud central over there.
Oh, fucking bad. It sounds quite bad.
I, I, I saw a friend posted about like all of the Trump merch and, uh, they were sitting next to two individuals debating race science, uh, in the airport terminal. So that is the vibes of the DC airport as of, as of Tuesday, the day after the inauguration.
But yeah, like the return of the Proud Boys is like one, one of like the big things that I think we're going to, we're going to see these next few weeks is the amount of far right militias or, or these, you know, more like street gang type groups who've been so emboldened by, by Trump essentially giving them permission to do whatever they want to now, now that they know that they're not going to face any kind of like real legal repercussions for, you know, carrying out whatever actions they want to against people of color, queer people, etc. And that's going to be interesting to see.
Like, this is certainly a sign that suggests some embrace, but I'm kind of wondering, if we're looking back to the Nazis, the OGs, what the Nazis did was marginalize and actually purge a lot of these guys fairly quickly because the folks that were the best at like rabble rousing and fighting in the streets were also kind of like the least reliable at helping to keep a stable system in the city, right? Like after the Nazis took power, one of the big issues they had is like, we still have a lot of people who are kind of like, in the middle, including most of the military. And one of the things that keeps scaring them is all these fucking goons running about.
And we still want what the goons are doing, which is like certain people beaten and thrown in camps. But we don't want the goons doing it.
We want the cops doing it. And I guess kind of, we're all waiting to see how different or similar what comes next looks to that.
And I mean, what do you make of like, I guess I knew it was coming, but when all those J6 goons got pardoned and so like you have like the leader of the Oath Keepers, the leader of the Proud Boys getting released from D.C. jail, like what do you make of that? There's two things.
Number one, this is something that he had campaigned on. It's something that there was a lot of support from his base for, you know, like the fact that it in order to kind of protect himself, he had to really heavily embrace the idea that nothing bad happened on January 6th.
And if it did, it was the fault of, you know, the mean old Biden cops. And so he kind of had to do it.
The degree to which he shows up and is close or actually directly embraces Proud Boys and guys like Tarrio is going to tell us a lot. And I think we'll be seeing that very soon.
If they are kept at arm's length and kind of letting them out is all they do, then I don't know how much we're going to see of these guys. If there's a real embrace and an attempt to use them as a way to kind of extra legally deal with his enemies, then I think we start seeing them really make inroads and pushes in places like Portland, trying to get people out so that they can do violence to them and then, you know, get pardoned or just have the violence ignored and the other people get thrown into prison.
And I don't really know which way I think that the state is landing right now, which is not to say, like, I think one is clearly less violent than the other, because his other option is he's going to be having his feds do that kind of shit. I think that's where a lot of my anxiety comes from.
The not knowing of like, it could go this way or that way. Both are bad, but what flavor are we going to get? Like, that's the thing that is really getting to me right now.
Yeah. Do you want to talk about what the Proud Boys were actually like up to on Monday? Yeah.
So as you said, this was the first time that they in mass came to DC since January 6th and they marched through the streets the streets of dc holding a banner that said congratulations president trump and they chanted who streets our streets which by the way that is such like again as someone who kind of like came up on like street protest yeah y'all are doing the chant all late like i i hate that i mean the situation has continued to be proven correct the levels of recuperation for even like you're like diametrically opposed like militant enemy side is just fucking crazy yes and i thought this i mean speaking of j6 writers who were all you know pardoned i saw this video that really kind of broke my heart it was a video that some MAGA dipshit took

outside of the jail

where all those people were being held.

And so there's a black DC elder

who clearly is just like minding her business,

walking down the street in her city.

And she gets baited into an on-video screaming match

outside of the DC jail

where this MAGA guy yells like,

like, oh, we didn't do anything wrong.

No crime was committed.

And she's like, you all killed a cop.

Thank you. the D.C.
jail where this MAGA guy yells like, like, like, oh, we didn't do anything wrong.

No crime was committed. And she's like, you all killed a cop.
No cops got killed, which is not true. Like, it goes back to what you were saying, Robert, about how there is this need to quickly have it be like something that wasn't that big of a deal.
And one, to see that in person in this video was was wild me. But two, seeing like a DC elder, like take the bait broke my heart because I wish I could have been in that moment to be like, honey, you don't need to be screaming.
This guy wants you to be screaming at him. He wants this video of you screaming at him on the street.
This is like exactly what he wants. Yeah, I entirely agree.
You know, the biggest takeaway from being out was just how sparse it was. Like, you know, the first time around, I probably had four different people staying with me, two of whom got arrested during the big anti-Trump protests.
This time around, I didn't have anybody. I didn't know anybody who was there.
And I do think that reflects kind of where people are at. I think people are exhausted.
People have been through a lot. People are maybe pacing themselves and sort of like don't want to blow their rage wad on the first week, which I totally understand.
But I think it really remains to be seen. Whether or not this vibe is going to take us through the next four years.
Are people just tuning out? Are we checked out? Are we so exhausted and overstimulated already that we're not going to really be paying attention? And in some ways, like, I feel like that's exactly what authoritarians want. Yes, that's where it's difficult.
Or that's one of the many things that is difficult is that like checking out is not the answer. But you simply can't react to everything that happens.

Showing up and burning yourself out in the street, it's like the cops continue to do bad things. If every time a cop does a bad thing, you and your friends throw yourselves at a police station until you all get arrested, then you won't be able to do anything else because you'll be in jail, you know? And like, these are hard realities, which is why it necessitates new kinds of thinking, creativity, you know, it to some extent unsatisfying.
And I guess part of what I would say is if people are giving you answers to what we need to do, that sound very clear and satisfying, you should maybe not trust that totally. Yeah, Because the responsible answer, in my opinion, is that it's very unclear how to get out of this or what the right things to do here are.
We just know that what we've been doing hasn't been working. And the first step to wisdom is accepting that.
Oof, I love that. Something I know that isn't working is I'm glad that we're not doing...
I thought you were going to pivot to ads. Actually, let's pivot to ads.

You're so good at ads. You could teach a class on it.
Oh, yeah. Well,

I waited 28 minutes this time to do it, but at least we have the second one in there. We're back, Bridget.
Sorry, where were you going? Something that I'm glad we are not doing this time around is, remember during the first Trump administration, how the Washington Post changed their tagline to democracy dies in darkness and everybody gave them a shit ton of money because it was like, yeah, we need good investigative journalism, traditional media, that's going to save us. I'm glad that this time around we've all cut the shit and it's like, no, they're part of it.
They're not going to do a goddamn thing. Absolutely not.
Yes. They don't give a fuck.
Fuckingake tapper couldn't roll over fast enough and like so even i mean i'm sure y'all have talked about this to death and i have been thinking about it non-stop but elon's seeing how the traditional press reported on his salute it's like oh man oh what did he do like like the the way they will contort themselves to not just come out and say it is astonishing to me. Yeah, that's, I mean, that's one of, like, the scariest things is the degree to which they're trying to memory all stuff happening as it happened.
And at the same time, okay, yeah, he did a Nazi salute. He's a Nazi.
This is not the first thing that's made that clear. We need to move on knowing he's a Nazi, but we need to move on.
You know, like that's, I don't know. I don't know what to do other than, you know, maybe there's some utility in spreading clips of him next to the fucking guy from American History X, but I don't know.
I don't know how that's going to help. The fact that he's in this position where he can do something like that on stage and it actually doesn't matter is like so much more frightening to me than like than like

elon musk like doing like a very like low mortar control like version of the salute when he's like

wrapped up in some like excitement that he's trying to like meme to like his like fans on 4chan the

fact that like he's even just allowed to do that and like it doesn't actually matter like this will

not affect him in any way is more what's interesting to me because yes we've all known that he's even just allowed to do that, and it doesn't actually matter. This will not affect him in any way, is more what's interesting to me.
Because yes, we've all known that he's been a Nazi for quite a while. He's shared things that are essentially Nazi race science on Twitter before.
He has engaged with extremely anti-Semitic conspiracy theories before. And the largest anti-Semitism org in the country has completely capitulated to these people.
So like they've hollowed out everything that's like supposed to be like, you know, the institutional blockages, whether that's, you know, places like the Washington Post, whether that's literally all of the tech companies, the degree to which like everyone has cozied up to Trump, which is like also like very different from 2016. fairly united, institutionally, was united against Trump.
And the same way we don't see people out in the streets, rioting or even doing large protests, the actual institutional powers have decided to, instead of actually trying to fight this guy, they're going to try to see how friendly they can be. How much can they get out of this? There's this resignation.
And I don't know how long that'll last. I'm not sure if once Trump becomes the establishment figure that he's been deriding for the past few years, once he falls back into that zone, if we're going to see more resistance to him from institutional levels.
But you can't count on it. And the degree to which it is different from 2016 is worth remembering.
A phrase me and Robert talk about sometimes is the forever 2016. The fact that it feels like we've never really left 2016.
Everyone acts like we're still in 2016. This is such a load-bearing year on our entire cultural consciousness.
But the fact is, we aren't in 2016 anymore. And you can't act like we are.
You actually have to move on from that. And we're starting to see more of that in certain corners.
You see some of that among some of the radicals, some of the anarchists, as well as, you know, the tech companies and the CEOs and the media companies. They're just, you know, changing the degree to which they're moving away from their 2016

mode.

You actually just gave me a little bit of a silver lining that I had not realized, which

is like, it kind of is useful to see so clearly where these institutions and power holders

stand.

And it's like when, like, I remember watching tech companies, like, change their logos to Black Lives Matter or post the Black Square. It's kind of freeing to be like, we don't have to do that shit anymore.
Y'all don't have to pretend and we don't have to pretend either. We know where you stand.
You've made it very clear. You could not make it, you could not have made it clear where your alliance is.
And let's go from there. Like, it almost is, it almost is sort of like trimming the fat a little bit.
We no longer have to take these institutions as serious as allies or something. Yeah, there's going to be a degree to which people's masks come off more than usual.
I mean, I think certainly this next Pride Month will be interesting to see how people change from Pride Month 2022 or even Pride Month 2017. Yeah.
I was at Pride in San Francisco in 2020, and it was very big, very happy, but there was like a rind to it. There was like an edge to it of, are we going to be able to keep doing this? There's a dispensary.
You know, I don't smoke, but a friend of mine who I stay with when I'm at San Francisco does. And so I was with them at this dispensary and it had like a sign talking about its history, which was that the person who found it, it's a very nice one.
It's like an Apple store inside. And the person who like started it and ran it did so because when they were younger, their partner had AIDS, HIV and then AIDS, and marijuana reduced some of their symptoms.
And they had to go buy it in the nearby park, which was a lot uglier of a place and a lot like, it was sketchy. They got robbed a couple of times.
There's a lot more violent crime. And just kind of, there are, even in a place like San Francisco, which is so gentrified in such a way, when you're talking with especially the older members of the queer community, they're not just rich, out-of-touch tech people.
They are old battle-scarred queers who went through some of the ugliest moments of this nation's history and were kind of bracing themselves for it again. So yeah, I'm very interested to see what it's like this year.
But even that, I feel like there's a, I mean, it's grim shit, but there's a kind of hope in it that like we've been, people have been here before, right? Like, you know, there have always been queer people, trans people, black and brown people, immigrants. Like, we are America.

And, like, we've always been here, baby.

We're always going to be here.

And, like, making our way and, like, holding on and bracing ourselves and doing what we got to do and enduring.

Like, that is what we fucking do.

And so, in some ways, as grim as that is, it's kind of hopeful, question mark, also.

Yep.

I'm just on the edge of my seat.

Yeah.

I mean, certainly, you know, lots of people who I surround myself with are, you know, looking towards ways to take control of like their own bodies and stop relying like wholly on any kind of government, government like agency or, or model for that, as well as doing a lot of a lot of reading on the old like anti deportation, anti ice resistance from like years and years ago, not just from the Trump era, but from the stuff way before. If we're not going to be out in the streets doing slightly mindless protests where you're marching in circles, you can use that time to instead educate yourself and build connections with people and read about these things that may become more and more important to know, at least so you have an understanding of history as the next four

years to start happening quite quickly. That's so insightful.
Yeah. I think when things feel

hopeless, reading about how folks, you know, our elders, the folks who came before our ancestors,

how they dealt with stuff like this has been really hopeful. And it's like,

yeah, I guess I just try to tell myself we've been here before and people found a way to make it through and you know it feels uniquely tragic but in some ways it is not and as scary as that is it can also be sort of like grounding yeah and like the same things won't work, but you also need to understand

the things that didn't work last time.

And it's good to know,

and it's good to know the things that did.

Like it's important to have that understanding

so you don't feel like you're having to

reinvent the wheel every single time.

And like that type of like generational knowledge

sometimes is really tricky to pass down

in these sorts of spaces.

And it, you know, it doesn't.

And it sometimes it requires a degree of initiative

to actually like seek out that information on your own. The internet's great and terrible.
But it has a vast catalog of history. Yeah.
I want to talk a bit about the speech that that bishop gave at Trump's first church service as president the second time around. because that is of all of like the fucking

media people getting clapped at for making fun of you know whichever you know hegseth or whoever

yep that i think actually did matter a little at least it was the there was the courage of saying

it to their faces in a way where their reactions were had to be filmed it's also it's also not

trying to dunk it's not trying to create like a viral moment it's like genuinely upsetting to them

Thank you. where their reactions were, had to be filmed.
It's also not trying to dunk. It's not trying to create a viral moment.
It's genuinely upsetting to them to get reminded of what it means to be human. Yeah.
And maybe that's more important than trying to get your Katie Porter top 10 funniest moments in Congress compilation. Exactly.
Yeah, and to be very clear, if you didn't catch this, the reverend Marianne Budd, B-U-D-D-E, who was the Episcopal Bishop of Washington during a church service where Trump and Vance and basically everybody in the new government was sitting, made a direct plea, quote from, this is from an NBC Washington article, referencing Trump's belief that he was saved by God from assassination. Budd said, you have the providential hand of a loving God in the name of our God.
I ask you to have mercy on the upon the people in our country who are scared now. And then she referenced specifically transgender people, queer people, people in democratic families, independent families who are frightened right now about what the new administration means as well as migrants.
And she made a saying, like, the vast majority of whom are not in any way criminals. And...

Regardless of whether or not they have the right

paperwork. Yeah.
There was rage

on Vance's face, which is

part of why I'm like, that's an act of actual

courage. There's been one Republican

representative who said that she needed to be

deported, Bud. Jesus.
Born in New

Jersey. So deported back to New

Jersey? Yeah. Representative Mike Collins of Georgia.
So one of your guys gare oh thanks thanks are you from georgia well no but i i live in georgia live there now and as someone who lives in georgia the only people that i think should be deported back to new jersey are the costco guy and his kid get them out send them back Now, I do think we should be deporting large numbers of people to New Jersey just because my old boss and friend Daniel O'Brien lives there, and I want to fuck with him a little bit, make the traffic worse. Like, see how you deal with that, Danny boy.
No, it was, I think, the most useful thing I've seen yet. It's still largely symbolic, but like...
At least someone took a big public risk, you know? Yeah. Courage.
Yeah. I think it's the writer Sarah Kendozer who has this line that I always think of, if you can't be brave, be kind.
I think that people who we see doing big acts of bravery right now, that's...'s i mean it's just there are so few of them

and i think especially when i look at like the tech leaders they have so much fucking money somebody said on talusky what is the point of having fuck you money if you never say fuck you to anybody right like the way that these people turned out to be such yellow-bellied cowards is wild to me and so people actually having conviction and actually speaking truth to power i think we should be lifting that up wherever it happens.

Yeah, I can think of

one tech guy with a lot of... wild to me.
And so people actually having conviction and actually speaking to power, I think we should be lifting that up wherever it happens.

Yeah, I can think of like one tech guy with a lot of money who's turned out to have any kind

of a backbone. And it's the guy who made that fire watching app that everyone in California

is using right now. Watch Duty, who's basically said stuff along the lines of like, I don't know,

I see all these other guys who got rich in tech talking about going to Mars. And I think it's

much more useful to try to help people survive on Earth, something along those lines. And has made a critical, like it is a critical, life-saving piece of technology that actually is what we should hope for from tech, you know? Anyway.
Bridget, what else did you want to kind of make sure we got into today? Well, this is going to sound a bit random, but I have to just make sure that this gets in there because, you know, I'm talking about the impact of Trump's inauguration and what the next four years will look like for, you know, not just for people nationally, but folks right here in D.C. where this is happening in our backyard.
And I have to give it up for the service industry folks of D.C. the last couple of days.

Oh, my God.

I, like, have heard horror stories.

And I just, I guess that's what I mean is that don't forget that there are real people who have to like put up with these people's bullshit and do it with a smile or they might get fired. And you know, in Adams Morgan, which is like pretty close to where I live, a woman at a, an Irish bar had to be removed by a staffer because she was screaming white power at the bar.
Like these people do not get paid enough to deal with this. And they are like the backbone of our city.
So I just wanted to shout them out, especially since, you know, Trump switched up the inauguration because of the cold question mark. And so a lot more of these people were just sort of wandering around the district on inauguration who otherwise would have been confined to like a very specific neighborhood downtown.
And so they were going into our bars, going into our restaurants. And yeah, I just really feel for my industry folks who had to deal with this.
You know, they're not paid enough, but they really are the backbone of our city. Hell yeah.
You know, I started this conversation talking about all the horrible things that Trump has said about D.C. and how he's going to take it over federally.
And like, you know, he has said, like, we will take over the horribly run capital of our nation and Washington, clean it up and rebuild the capital. So there's it's no longer a nightmare of murder and crime, but rather hell hole.
I know this like hell hole where like people live and raise their families and go to parks and ride bikes and have great times. Yeah.
You know, I had a chance to talk to the mayor about this and I will say our mayor Muriel Bowser is not convinced that any of this will happen. She is saying like, you know, I think that Trump says a lot of things.
I think at the end of the day, he is probably not going to mess with D.C.'s home rule. And so I just wanted to say that if you're if you're in D.C.
and you're listening and you're thinking like, what does Trump, you know, mean for D.C.? Are all these big threats that he has made going to come true? All I can tell you is that our mayor does not think it is likely. So if that is useful to you, I hope it brings you some comfort.
Oddly enough, one thing that's given me comfort is like Trump has twice in the last day, both when talking about Gaza and when talking about North Korea, weirdly enough, gone under digressions about how good it is a place to build condos. And the degree to which he's still focused on like real estate deals as opposed to the broader fascist project is hopeful just because like he is a bottleneck through which a lot of this has to cover and he is clearly not as personally obsessed with every aspect of this as guys like Stephen Miller right like he even makes fun of Miller a little bit for that kind of stuff so there's a degree to which like well his own personal eccentricities there's aspects of this it might slow down this motherfucker is not out here trying to genuinely govern like come on no so in some ways that is heartening of like oh well he's gonna like do his scams and whatever whatever like if he were to actually take over dc that's an incredible amount of work and labor and i don't't think he's got it in him.
So maybe in some ways, some of these threats will like fly under the radar. I don't know.
Yeah. Guess we'll see.
Guess we'll see. Bridget, where can people find you? Well, you can listen to my podcast.
There are no girls on the internet about the intersection of identity and tech. And you can follow me on Instagram at BridgetMarie in DC.
All right.

Find Bridget, follow Bridget,

and follow somebody smart.

I don't know who they are.

Figure that out.

Good luck.

Godspeed.

Fuck them if they can't take a joke. The richest man in the world does a Nazi salute while giving a speech at the inauguration of the new president.
He does a second one. In another age, it is the most significant event in world history.
It's maybe the third most fascist event of the day. NBC re-uploads the address and cuts away from the Sighail it broadcasted live.
You refresh your timeline. Everyone is arguing about whether it was even a Nazi salute.
You watch the video.

It's a Nazi salute.

The second one is a Nazi salute.

None of the headlines will say that Elon Musk did a Nazi salute.

The articles won't say it either.

You can't tell whether they've been cowed to submission by the threat of a defamation lawsuit,

or if they're already running cover for the new regime.

You scroll through your timeline.

They made my gender illegal.

They tried to repeal the 14th Amendment through executive order

to end birthright citizenship.

You can't follow it.

It's too much.

The world has become a spectacle.

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

Debord is typically written off as just another theorist of early mass media, and today his work is generally confined to the art world.

Which is, to be fair, largely a demonstration of the fact that nobody who talks about him has ever gotten past the opening paragraphs of the book and made it to the part where he demands the formation of armed workers' councils. But this is the age of the spectacle, in ways when nightmarish that Debord could ever have predicted.
His elaborate metaphor is rendered thuddingly literal. Quote, everything that was directly lived has moved away into representation.
And indeed, living has been replaced by the image of living. This phenomena is called Instagram.
The spectacle, Society of the Spectacle opens, is not a collection of images, but a social relation among people mediated by images. Today, we literally call the collection of images we use to relate to each other social media.
Lived reality is materially invaded by the contemplation of the spectacle, while simultaneously absorbing the spectacular order, giving it positive cohesiveness. A reality TV star, the old human symbol of the spectacle, in which everything that was directly lived has been transformed into a representation, is now a president the second time, driven by streamers and influencers and podcasters who stand as the new human symbols of the spectacle.
They have invaded real society and now rule it directly. In the 1960s, the debate was whether you could ignore the spectacle because it wasn't real.
The board's elegant solution was that contemplating the spectacle makes it real. None of that matters anymore.
You can't ignore the spectacle because it's here. It has physically invaded the world.
Donald Trump is the president. The richest man on earth is Nazi saluting Elon Musk.
The autonomous force DeBoer described as a spectacle no longer operates at the abstract level. It is the president of the United States.
Everything is rendered thuddingly, transcendently literal. In DeBoer's usage, the spectacle is the management of society by mediating people's social relations through images.
This sounds complicated, but on an intuitive level, you already understand this. You and I relate to each other through the one-way mirror of a podcast app.
You relate to others by reacting to their TikTok videos. You watch the bombs fall on Palestine on Twitter.
You relate to each other and the world through images, and that relation is a system of control. As DeBoard describes it, that mediation takes you out of the real world, a world that you can actually change with your actions and thrusts you into the world of the spectacle, a world where reality is, quote, an object of mere contemplation.
Today, we call this the discourse. The work that inspired the 1968 revolutions called it the spectacle.
Why does it feel like this? The rot, the decay, the unreality of the moment that consumes you until one day, Donald Trump is president, and the next, he's president again. Debord has a simple answer.
It's because the entire political, economic, and technological system is designed to make you isolated, afraid, and alone. Quote, technology is based on isolation, and the technical process isolates in turn.
From the automobile to television, all of the goods selected by the spectacular system are also weapons for a constant reinforcement of the condition of isolated, lonely crowds. Later, he writes, what binds the spectators together is no more than an irreversible relation at the very center which maintains their isolation.
The spectacle reunites the separate, but reunites it as separate. This is why the world feels like an endless doom scroll.
Instagram, TikTok, live streaming, this podcast, they're all based on isolation. Look at what happened to social media during the isolation of the pandemic.
How it came to consume even more of our lives with the promise of connection that simply rendered us more and more and more isolated. The spectacle, given technological form in the social media app, turns us into a mass in which we are all somehow terrifyingly alone.

We're not people who form a crowd that could do anything from celebrate a holiday

to burn to third precinct.

We're spectators.

We're listeners.

We're viewers.

We're chat.

Not living, but commenting on the image of living.

Spectacle, the app, the image,

mediates our social relations with each other

and ensures that together in a lonely crowd,

we rot in isolation

and do only the two things the capitalist system needs us to do,

work and consume.

Atomized individuals are the ideal subject of capitalism the basis on which everything is built you entered into a free contract to live under a state says a social theorist you the individual gave up your labor to your boss voluntarily in another free contract between individuals says the economist economist. Do not organize with anyone else

to get paid more for that labor, or God help you try to create a system where you aren't forced to sell your labor every day. That's cheating, says the politician.
Your job is to sell your labor, buy these products, and comment on a world in which someone else is acting. the isolation of the spectacle

ensures that we're incapable

of collective action, not only because we're incapable of forming a collective, we're not even engaging in the world in which action can take place. The extent of the advance of the spectacle today is such that the unfolding of the economic system

is designed to turn every part of you into a commodity. Not just your labor, but your identity, your beliefs.
Everything that you are is sold to everyone else's spectacle. And in turn, everything that defines you becomes the spectacle itself.
in a world where there is no action

just the image of someone else's action somewhere else, a commercialized political identity is much easier to adopt than actually doing politics. You don't have to do politics.
You can just put on a red hat and watch the man on TV make the liberals angry. You don't need relations with your family.
You have Facebook groups. Relations to the world are relations to images.
David Graeber wrote that the ultimate hidden truth of the world is that it is something that we make and could just as easily make differently. But the second, slightly less ultimate hidden truth is that almost everything we think of as objects, money, capital, commodities, are really just relations between people abstracted out onto something physical.
We interact with each other by using objects as forms of command. What do you think money is? Instead of having real, equal social relations.

And that makes it all the more dire that the social relations that compose this world

are no longer even relations with each other at all, but relations with images.

The spectacle is a strategy of control. As DeBoard writes, Where the real world changes into simple images, the simple images become real beings and effective motivations of hypnotic behavior.
The spectacle is a tendency to make one see the world by various means of specialized mediations. It can no longer be grasped directly.
As the spectacle advances, even rebellion is reduced to meaningless attacks on the symbols of power, never touching power itself. Quote, but when the insurgents managed to penetrate parliaments, presidential palaces, and other headquarters of institutions, as in Ukraine, in Libya, or in Wisconsin, it's only to discover empty places, that is, empty of power and furnished without any taste.
So wrote the Invisible Committee in the distant Halcyon Days of 2014 it could have been written yesterday nine years later the insurgents now on the right produced their masterpiece brazil's even more ineffectual cousin of january 6th known forever as january 8th on that day in 2023 for reasons that are almost totally incomprehensible to anyone whose mind has not been utterly melted by prolonged and terrible exposure to the spectacle,

supporters of defeated President Jair Bolsonaro stormed Brazil's capital.

Bolsonaro, of course, had already fled to Florida. The presidential palace,

Congress, and the Supreme

Court were literally empty when the protesters took them. There was nothing to be won, nothing to be gained.
The protesters' vain hopes that simply seizing the symbols of power would trigger a military coup to remove Lula and restore the Bolsonaro regime evaporated like a morning dew,

leaving nothing in their wake.

January! remove Lula, and restore the Bolsonaro regime, evaporated like a morning dew, leaving nothing in their wake. January 6th, at least, attacked the site of the ritual of power, while the ritual was technically in progress.
The attack was, of course, designed to stop the certification of the election. Congress was at least in session, even if that attack too was the culmination of a series of ineffectual reruns of the Brook Brothers riots in which right-wing political operatives did manage to steal an election by stopping the vote count in Florida in 2000.
On January 8th, no one was even there. So how do we get out?

Lashing out at the symbols of power is pointless.

You can't ignore them either.

Elon's Nazi salute really does represent something.

The opening of any solution is to go to the source.

Trump and Elon are symptoms, not the disease. The spectacle is born of capitalism.
It's a management strategy designed to suppress any attempt to end or even rearrange the terms of the class system. Trump and Elon were likewise produced by two settler colonies.
They are, in their own ways, the manifestation of the evil of colonialism and racism. DeBoard's solution to these problems, of course, well, the solutions that people bother to read, there is a staggeringly racist section of this work about how time passes in China that I simply cannot recommend.
But DeBoard's solution was workers' councils, and he got his wish the next year during the factory occupations of 1968. It nearly worked, but the last workers' council fell a quarter of a century ago in Argentina, and there's no sign that the workers' council, the definitive fighting form of the working class for over a century, is back.
In some ways, this is liberating. 170 years ago, Marx wrote this in the 18th premier of Louis Bonaparte, his own response to a nation's nationalist attempt to restore its former glory by invoking the name of a previous leader.
The social revolution of the 19th century cannot take

its poetry from the past, but only from the future. It cannot begin with itself before it has stripped away all superstitions about the past.
In the days and weeks and months, and God help us all years to come, we're going to have to assemble a new fighting form. and no one knows what it looks like yet.

We could, perhaps, look at the airport protests from the first months of the original Trump administration, where masses of people, including a very young Mia who had not quite realized what gender she was, occupied airports all across the country to stop the implementation of Trump's Muslim ban by physically forcing the government to release the people who had detained in the airports. The power of those protests was that they directly located the site where power was operating, the airport, and took them.
The weakness of those protests was that people went home, and they went home because they had been told time and time and time again by the ACLU and by other legal organizations that the fight was over, that they could leave, and that the Muslim bans would be defeated by the courts. Most of you lived through it.
Some of you remember the Muslim ban was never never defeated by the courts. It could, possibly, have been defeated in those moments.
It wasn't. The contest was taken away from the real side of power and into a domain largely ruled by the ruling class.
But we can learn from both January 8th and the airport protests. Marching to a building doesn't guarantee you're actually targeting power.
You must understand how the system is operating before you attempt to go up its works. A thousand miniature January 8ths is no solution at all.
You must do the hard work of sifting through the tangle of rumors and lies and attempting to work out the actual structure of repression it starts with community self-defense it starts with actually engaging with each other instead of the mediated images generated by an algorithm you want to break out of the spectacle? Talk to the people around you. Talk

to the trans people and the immigrants in your life and find out what they actually need.

Figure out the concrete steps you can take to organize the people around you

and the steps you can take to lift them out of their despair.

We're not going to develop a new fighting form glued to our phones alone in a digital crowd. We're going to figure it out by talking to each other, by acting in the real world, not by being rendered passive observers of the spectacle.
We're going to do it by finding the real places where power operates and taking them.

And above all, we're going to do it together.

Hey, we'll be back Monday with more episodes every week from now until the heat death of the

universe. It Could Happen Here is a production of Cool Zone Media.
For more podcasts from Cool Zone

Media, visit our website, coolzonemedia.com, or check us out on the iHeartRadio app,

Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts. You can now find sources for It

Could Happen Here listed directly in episode descriptions. Thanks for listening.