Become a Creator today!Start creating today - Share your story with the world!
Start for free
00:00:00
00:00:01
People Hit the Streets As Trump's Trade War Heats Up
214 Plays2 days ago
Welcome back to The Beautiful Idea! We're excited to bring you a jam-packed show today and we have some amazing content planned, so be sure to subscribe to the show and follow us on Mastodon and BlueSky.
In today's episode, we feature:
- An interview with an organizer for the recent Florida Abolitionist Gathering.
- A participant in the Imaginary Crimes Tour which is already underway, about how people are fighting back against state repression against the Stop Cop City Movement.
- Present an audio version of a call for events and gatherings on May Day.
- Unpack Trump's escalating trade war.
Extended show notes can be found at https://thebeautifulidea.show/people-hit-the-streets-as-trumps-trade-war-heats-up/
Recommended
Transcript
Introduction to The Beautiful Idea Podcast
00:00:09
Speaker
Hello. You're listening to The Beautiful Idea, a podcast from a collective of several anarchist and autonomous media producers scattered around the world. We're bringing you interviews and stories from the front lines of autonomous social movements and struggles, as well as original commentary and analysis.
00:00:25
Speaker
Follow us on Mastodon and at thebeautifulidea.show. Thanks for listening.
Overview of Episode Topics
00:00:44
Speaker
Welcome back to The Beautiful Idea. We're excited to bring you a jam-packed show today and we have some amazing content planned. So be sure to subscribe to the show and follow us on Macedon and Blue Sky.
00:00:57
Speaker
On today's episode, we'll first speak with an organizer for the recent Florida Abolitionist Gathering, as well as a participant in the Imaginary Crimes Tour, which is already underway. It's about how people are fighting back against state repression against the Stop Cop City movement.
00:01:12
Speaker
We'll also hear about a call for events and gatherings on May Day. and then we hit the Nerd Overdrive button and unpack Trump's escalating trade war and the tariffs. But first, let's get to the news.
Trump's Constitutional Crisis and Economic Impact
00:01:27
Speaker
We are now over two months into the second Trump administration, and already the regime has created a constitutional crisis and begun to defy some court orders. Openly calling for judges to be impeached and issuing executive orders against law firms, while Trump moves to enrich himself and his cohorts, even performing a grotesque infomercial on the White House lawn for Tesla.
00:01:50
Speaker
This has also been coupled with sweeping ramp-ups for mass deportations, slashing social safety net programs, reorganizing cultural and educational institutions across the country, firing swaths of federal workers, and attacking labor unions and collective bargaining rights. Vicki Osterweil made some important observations recently, writing, If we look at the current state of the fascist coup in the U.S., it clear that they are making significant material progress while simultaneously losing more and more political and popular ground.
00:02:22
Speaker
The tariffs are a particularly extreme example of this contradiction. Trump has successfully claimed economic power over the entire globe exclusively to his person. Let Congress, the people, his allies, even his cabinet be damned.
00:02:35
Speaker
But stock markets are in freefall. He's hemorrhaging support from the Kappa's class, and even his own people have started beefing against him. But this contradiction has been visible in almost all of his moves, as he successfully wields powers, constitutionally and legally unavailable to the executives, but all the while popular discontent, protests, and fury build at a rapid pace.
Republican Economic Policies and Social Consequences
00:02:59
Speaker
This contradiction will only lead to accelerating confrontations and until it is resolved. They really only had this two-pronged strategy, control the media and purge the government while robbing the till as fast as possible.
00:03:12
Speaker
But they attacked everyone at once, as though they had much broader control of the situation. The splits maximized popular resistance while actively demoralizing their base and their street forces.
00:03:24
Speaker
In Congress, Republicans pushed forward on their proposed budget package, which would mean drastic tax cuts for billionaires and corporations, $1 trillion for the Pentagon and for war, $45 billion to expand ICE detention prisons, while also cutting much-needed medical and food programs and throwing basic social safety nets like Social Security into chaos.
00:03:45
Speaker
Meanwhile, the economy stands on the verge of a possible recession as uncertainty in the markets grow and Trump continues to push through with tariffs, escalating a growing trade war with China.
00:03:56
Speaker
How this will play out for poor and working class people in the U.S. remains to be seen, so be sure to listen later in the episode for more discussion on where this is all heading and the dystopian project underlying this push.
00:04:07
Speaker
And, as a recession lies on the horizon, the Trump administration continues to push for increased repression and authoritarian attacks on growing segments of society. Multiple international students living inside the U.S. s legally have been abducted from their homes and disappeared, as the state has moved to revoke the visas of international students.
00:04:26
Speaker
Even more horrifically, the Trump administration has invoked the Alien Enemies Act of the late 1700s as justification for sending hundreds of Venezuelan migrants to a supermax anti-terrorist prison in El Salvador.
00:04:40
Speaker
in exchange for several million dollars from the far-right dictator of that country. Those sent to the prison, which is known for human rights abuses, will be used as slave labor. Recent investigations have found the vast majority of those sent have no criminal records, including a man whose only evidence of his membership in a gang turned out to be a tattoo that celebrated literally autism awareness.
00:05:03
Speaker
Another person sent to the El Salvadorian prison, Kilmar Garcia, a union member living in Maryland, that even the Trump administration admits was deported due to an error has sparked widespread anger, protests, and calls for his release.
Protests Against Immigration and Labor Policies
00:05:17
Speaker
As it's going down reported in its column In Contempt, protest demonstrations in solidarity with Mohammed Khalil, and others targeted by the Trump administration are spreading.
00:05:27
Speaker
Labor unions, which several targeted students belong to, have launched campaigns and organized rallies in solidarity. Trump Tower in New York was flooded by demonstrators with Jewish Voice for Peace, who shut down the lobby of the building, demanded freedom for Khalil, and denouncing fascist attacks on Palestinian solidarity activists.
00:05:45
Speaker
Protests in solidarity with targeted students have been organized across the country, mobilizing thousands in rallies and marches on campuses and in city centers. Students have organized walkouts on campus and at Columbia University in New York, Jewish students carried out a lockdown and rallied to demand freedom for Khalil.
00:06:02
Speaker
Demonstrations and protests continue across the U.S. against ICE as well. Students have organized walkouts against attacks on migrants. Communities are banding together to denounce ICE raids.
00:06:13
Speaker
And rallies call for the closure of ICE prisons and to denounce collaboration with law enforcement. In Tacoma, Washington, hundreds turned out to demonstrate against ICE and to call for the release of several union organizers picked up and attacked by ice The Tacoma Branch of the Industrial Workers of the World, or IWW, reported,
00:06:31
Speaker
today we attended the rally at the northwest detention center right here in tacoma support all immigrants detained at the immigrant detention prison the labor movement showed up in force multiple laboring unions community members and organizations demanded the release of several immigrant union members and leaders, including a member of SEIU Local 925 and union leader Alfredo Lalo Juarez.
00:06:56
Speaker
We know that these attacks against immigrants in undocumented communities, as well as labor unions by the capitalist class, have been happening for decades, even centuries at this point. They are systematic and structural and part of the root causes, capitalism, imperialism, and colonialism.
00:07:10
Speaker
We will continue the fight. Most recently in New York, a mother and and three children who were taken into custody by ICE agents as part of a sweep in the tiny hometown of Trump's border czar, Tom Homan, have been released following days of protests and outcry from community figures and advocates.
00:07:29
Speaker
Over the weekend, about 1,000 protesters marched outside of Homan's home in the small New York village, demanding their release. Resistance continues to bubble across the social terrain, with literally millions of people across the U.S. taking part in mass demonstrations over the past month against both Elon Musk and the Trump regime.
00:07:48
Speaker
One of the largest expressions of popular outrage at Elon Musk in the Trump administration has been the explosion of the Tesla takedown movement, which has held demonstrations and rallies outside of Tesla showrooms across the country since Trump came to power.
00:08:03
Speaker
On March 29th, thousands of people rallied outside of Tesla showrooms across the U.S. in a day of action. As it's going down, reported, over the past two months, Tesla stock has tanked, costing Elon Musk billions of dollars.
00:08:16
Speaker
Trade-ins of Tesla vehicles have skyrocketed, meanwhile, and boycotts in places like Germany, where Musk came out in support of the neo-fascist AFD party, has led to a massive decline in sales.
00:08:27
Speaker
Despite politicians and influencers rushing to encourage the MAGA faithful to buy Tesla vehicles, as Business Insider reported, quote, Tesla has lost so much in value in such a short period of time that JPMorgan analysts said that they couldn't think of another example comparable.
00:08:44
Speaker
to any moment in automotive history. Trump officials have also pushed to demonize a growing chorus of sabotage, graffiti, and property destruction against Tesla vehicles, labeling it domestic terrorism while predictively echoing far-right conspiracies that such acts are being funded, as Trump even floated the idea that anti-Tesla protesters would be sent to prisons in El Salvador, and Musk has claimed that the Trump administration would, quote, go after vocal critics of his company.
00:09:12
Speaker
Increased authoritarian rhetoric from Trump, Musk, and pundits on Fox News has galvanized a small section of the far-right, neo-Nazis, and Republican groups to mobilize in public support of Musk and his increasingly unpopular attacks on working-class Americans in attempt to intimidate anti-Musk protesters.
00:09:30
Speaker
Already in Florida, a Trump supporter was arrested last week after driving his car onto a sidewalk in an apparent attempt to injure anti-Tesla protesters. In Berkeley, California, far-right influenced their clash with demonstrators after he pulled a weapon on the crowd.
00:09:45
Speaker
Despite the far-right coming out in support of Musk, the number of anti-Tesla demonstrations only continues to increase, with protests continuing to take place at hundreds of locations on March 29th.
00:09:57
Speaker
Calls for counter-protests by Trump supporters, and neo-Nazis, and Proud Boys also failed to stop or intimidate anti-Tesla demonstrators, and generally far-right rally-goers were vastly outnumbered when counter-protests did take place.
00:10:10
Speaker
More anti-Tesla demonstrations are planned in the coming weeks as Tesla stock continues to tank. Meanwhile, acts of targeted vandalism against Tesla show no signs of slowing down as Tesla cars in various cities have been set aflame and damages are reported in a growing number of incidents.
00:10:26
Speaker
The state is also ramping up calls to charge those arrested for vandalism with domestic terrorism.
Global May Day Events and Grassroots Movements
00:10:32
Speaker
On April fifth various progressive organizations aligned largely with the Democratic Party held massive hands-off demonstrations in over a thousand cities and towns across the U.S., mobilizing upwards of millions of people.
00:10:45
Speaker
While the protests are certainly a temperature check that Trump's policies are largely unpopular, as many have pointed out, the attempt to hurt us back into the Democratic Party is a dead end. As the anarchist author Peter Gelderluse wrote,
00:10:58
Speaker
It is insanely delusional to believe the Democratic Party is capable of changing in a meaningful way. is insanely delusional to trust them. They are guilty of genocide, mass murder, mass incarceration, impoverishment, bloody wars, and oppressive politics.
00:11:12
Speaker
The system they uphold, the system they promise, can be reformed if we trust them one more time. as condemn this generation and the next one and the next one to a future of unimaginable suffering, danger, and poverty.
00:11:24
Speaker
Occupations of campus buildings to demand divestment from Israel took place in Maine and at Columbia University in New York, where students occupied a building to protest the expulsion of pro-Palestinian students.
00:11:35
Speaker
At UCLA, hundreds of students rallied and took over a building and dropped banners during a demonstration against the UC Board of Regents. In anti-fascist news, Proud Boys were confronted in the Pacific Northwest and Neo-Nazis of Patriot Front were chased away by anti-Trump protesters in Rhode Island when they tried to hold a counter-rally.
00:11:55
Speaker
Demonstrations against MAGA fascists with Turning Point USA continue across the country. communities holding counter demonstrations in Memphis, Tennessee against Kyle Rittenhouse, and anti-trans grifter Riley Gaines in various cities.
00:12:09
Speaker
In Davis, California, over 30 mass demonstrators confronted and tore down a Turning Point USA booth at UC Davis. In the Bay Area, residents organized a protest following a far-right rally on a freeway overpass.
00:12:22
Speaker
In Colorado Springs, demonstrators rallied against a speaking event featuring MAGA fascist Steve Bannon. Also in Colorado, hundreds rallied in protest against white supremacist Jared Taylor, who was invited to speak on a local campus by a Turning Point USA activist. Finally, in Green Bay, Wisconsin, hundreds rallied against an appearance by Elon Musk.
00:12:42
Speaker
In repression news in California, several protesters who occupied a building at Stanford in solidarity with Palestine last year have now been charged with felonies. There's also an update on political prisoner Casey Gunan, which you can read linked in our show notes.
00:12:57
Speaker
Sam Beard, an activist in the movement to stop Cop City and a host to the Party Girls podcast and also a spokesperson for the defense fund for Luigi Mangione, issued a statement that they were visited by two FBI agents who were part of the Joint Terrorism Task Force, or JTTF, hours before Beard appeared on News Nation speaking about the ongoing case of Luigi Mangione, who was accused of assassinating the CEO of UnitedHealthcare.
00:13:23
Speaker
In a statement posted to Social Media, Beard stated, the task force targeted me not for anything I've done, but for what I've said. And now for some shoutouts and updates. Dugout Podcast, which is now part of the Channel Zero Anarchist Network, has been putting out a stream of amazing shows and content, so be sure to check them out.
00:13:40
Speaker
There's a new podcast, Outlaw, which looks at state repression of social movements, so don't miss it. A new media and publishing project, Heatwave, has been launched, so check out a link for it in our show notes.
00:13:51
Speaker
The long-running Anarchist Media Project Submedia is getting ready to release their new video project, Enter Rebellion, so check out the trailer linked in our show notes. CrimeThink has published a call for events on Mayday, so tune in later in this episode to hear an audio version of it.
00:14:05
Speaker
Also be sure to check out KAW, or Collective of Anarchist Writers, worker-run collaborative which is producing high-quality writing and content featuring anarchist analysis and opinion. And finally, as stated previously, the Imaginary Crimes Tour is hitting the road, speaking with communities across the U.S. about the fight against repression of Stop Cop City activists and beyond.
00:14:24
Speaker
Tune in later on this show to hear an interview about the tour and check out a link in our show notes for a list of tour stops happening near you. And finally for some upcoming events, on May 1st is May Day with events and demonstrations happening all over the globe.
00:14:40
Speaker
On May 15th through the 21st is the Constellation Anarchist Festival in Montreal, Quebec. On May 17th through the 18th is the Los Angeles Book Fair in Los Angeles, California.
00:14:51
Speaker
On May 17th is the DMV Anarchist Book Fair in Washington, D.C., followed by the Heart of the Valley Anti-Capitalist Book Fair in Corvallis, Oregon on May 23rd through the 25th.
00:15:04
Speaker
And finally, looking ahead on June 7th is the Inland Empire Anarchist Book Fair in the Inland Empire of California. That's going to do it for us. Enjoy the interviews coming up, and we will see you soon.
00:15:32
Speaker
Mayday means resistance. A call to action on May 1st. This May Day, gather in defiance of tyranny and oppression, gather to create communities based in solidarity and mutual aid, gather with everyone who wants a better life, gather to honor those who fought before us, gather to show that another world is possible.
00:15:51
Speaker
As May Day 2025 approaches, we face an increasingly grim situation. Donald Trump and his s lackeys are restructuring the state. redirecting even more resources towards repression and filling their pockets along the way.
00:16:04
Speaker
They are already deporting students on the basis of their political views, and they've made it clear that they intend to escalate to deporting US citizens as well. All the while, the ecological damage, climate disasters, wars, and genocides that were already in progress are only intensifying. While some are lying low, hoping that the tide will turn, that is a terrible mistake. How far this nightmare can go will be determined by what people do now to build movements of resistance.
00:16:27
Speaker
The more time passes, the firmer Trump's grip on the institutions will be, and the better positions he will be to expand and intensify repression. Even if Trump's ill-thought-out policies alone suffice to turn the majority of the population against him, that will not answer the question of how to push him out of power.
00:16:42
Speaker
He has already shown that he will not leave office willingly. It also will not ensure that what comes after will be any better. Remember, we ended up in this situation because of the catastrophic reign of the Biden administration.
00:16:53
Speaker
There's no way around it. We have to build powerful grassroots movements through which to defend each other and popularize a radical analysis of what we're up against. Mayday offers a perfect occasion for this.
00:17:04
Speaker
For nearly a century and a half, anarchists and other revolutionaries have... observed it as a day of celebration and resistance. Tapping into the long-standing tradition offers many reference points for what we can do right now.
00:17:15
Speaker
Wherever you are, you can do something for Mayday. Better yet, organize a week of events, including education, mutual aid, arts, and entertainment, and a march or demonstration.
00:17:26
Speaker
We've prepared a poster design to support your organizing and promoting events in your community. You can find this at crimethink.com. Most of the suggestions that follow here are things you can do with two dozen people.
00:17:37
Speaker
Organizing doesn't have to involve massive numbers to be worthwhile. Even in movements that do involve massive numbers, the best way to ensure that they will be resilient and effective is to make sure that people are in the habit of talking, making decisions, and taking action in small groups so as to maximize the agency of the participants.
00:17:53
Speaker
In Washington, D.C., an ad hoc group is calling for an occupation of the National Mall. Quote, Our strategy is to establish a 24-7 legal nonviolent demonstration on the National Mall, calling on Congress to take the only logical step in this crisis, impeach and remove Donald Trump.
00:18:08
Speaker
Elsewhere around the country, from Seattle and Eugene to Minneapolis, longstanding groups are also planning events. People Auburn in Washington are planning a whole day of activities the preceding weekend just to get things started. But don't leave everything to them.
00:18:21
Speaker
If anything really exciting is going to happen, it's up to you. Outreach. Spring is in the air. It's a good time to make new connections. Even if you are already organizing in a tight-knit community of anarchists, this is a chance to reach out to people you don't know yet.
00:18:35
Speaker
Invite them to events. Talk to them about their concerns. Propose ideas for what you could do together. Even if you are completely isolated and cannot organize events with other humans, you can order stickers from municipal adhesives and, sure, from us as well.
00:18:49
Speaker
Us in this situation being crime thing. And bring... and bring the bus stops and electrical boxes of your neighborhood to life. Pocket a paint marker and add ice to every stop sign in your county. Cut a stencil design to the bottom of a thick paper shopping bag and walk around your neighborhood with a can of spray paint in the bag, leaving a little trail of messages everywhere you go.
00:19:07
Speaker
If you are not a gifted artist, Municipal Heatsives mails out stencils too. Download and print posters, make wheat paste or obtain wallpaper paste, and go out putting up posters. You could do all of these things even if you're the only sentient life form within 100 On the other hand, if you're not the only sentient lifeform within 100 miles, you could also print or order some zines and set up a literature table at a punk show, a campus, a farmer's market, or failing all else at the bus stop where you put up your first sticker.
00:19:32
Speaker
Education. For Mayday, you could organize a reading group around a text engaging with the history of Mayday. You could host a presentation on anarchism or the history of resistance in your local community.
00:19:43
Speaker
You could call for a discussion connecting one of those themes to the various attacks that the Trump administration is currently carrying out, with an eye to strategizing a response. You could also announce a gathering at a public location at which people read aloud the final statements of the Haymarket Martyrs, the ones whose sacrifice for the labor movement gave rise to May Day as we know it today.
00:20:01
Speaker
Likewise, you could read one of the speeches of lifelong anarchist organizer Lucy Parsons, whose husband was among the murdered. As the Trump administration smashes and loots the infrastructure of state-sponsored education, it's important to be building up our own educational models.
00:20:15
Speaker
Organizing. You could call for an assembly. Bringing together different people affected by or working on an issue such as ice deportations or environmental damage at which to coordinate resistance.
00:20:27
Speaker
Even if the administration has not targeted your community yet, you should do this now in order to be prepared. For example, you could come up with a plan and get all the resources in place to respond as soon as they take a given action.
00:20:39
Speaker
Arts and entertainment. The May Day Parade is a time-honored tradition, especially in places like Minneapolis. If there's already something like that happening near you, great. All you have to do is organize a contingent for it.
00:20:51
Speaker
But if there's not, a May Day Parade in your area, that is also great. It means you can organize one according to your own preferences. Don't neglect to prepare banners, giant puppets, or other artistic elements. In 2017, anarchists in Portland made giant spiders for their Mayday Parade.
00:21:06
Speaker
For later in the evening or over the weekend, you could book a benefit show featuring local bands. For extra credit, you could host a show in a subversive location, such as under an overpass or in an abandoned warehouse.
00:21:16
Speaker
In the night with a dance party. Mutual aid. For the occasion, you could host a really, really free market, a potluck, or a workday at a community garden or social center. taking the offensive.
00:21:29
Speaker
All of this will be of little use if we can't also go on the attack. Limiting ourselves to attempting to manage the details of our survival in a non-hierarchical way, while the state inflicts brutal violence on more and more people, means accepting defeat in advance.
00:21:44
Speaker
We should respond to their offenses, but it is crucial that we pick the time and place of our own. Thus far, one solid example of this is the Tesla protests, which have opened up a new front of conflict, distracting the attention of Elon Musk and Donald Trump, and laying bare their vulnerabilities.
00:22:00
Speaker
But there are many other ways to take the fight to the oppressors. Recall the ICE occupations of 2018. Identify a target and call for a protest or some other form of action there. If there is no obvious target available, you can still organize a public demonstration for the purposes of getting people used to moving together and engaging in collective expression, however symbolic.
00:22:19
Speaker
A smaller group of people preserving the element of surprise could also take action, sending up a signal flare to let others know that they are not alone in their rage. Remember, at any demonstration that could be subject to repression, leave your phone at home and dress to preserve your anonymity.
00:22:34
Speaker
You can find more resources about taking action at Crimethink.com.
Abolitionist Organizing in Florida
00:23:00
Speaker
We're joined with an organizer from the Florida Abolitionist Gathering, which was a weekend of workshops, film, food, ritual, and protest in Florida from February 28th to March 2nd. Welcome to the podcast, and would you mind introducing yourself?
00:23:15
Speaker
hi thanks for having me. I am an organizer from the Florida Abolitionist Gathering. Just for repeating your intro sounds good to me. So what what are we kind of...
00:23:26
Speaker
briefly talked about what it was, but what was sort of the impetus? Like, why did you feel it was important to put on something like this at this moment? Well, I think, like, repression and fascist ideology is expanding rapidly before our eyes, and especially in the context of Florida. And as a person that focuses a lot of their time on, like, anti-carceral abolitionist organizing having a event a gathering that like both inspires that for people and also brings people together that are doing that so we can share skills and grow together felt like an important thing to do right now awesome yeah i think a lot of people are familiar obviously with the national context but in florida specifically does it feel important to sort of like fight where you stand even with like increasing i don't know conservative and reactionary like
00:24:13
Speaker
sentiment in the area that you're at? Yeah, always. I don't know that that's any different in the present moment than it has been for me for many years. think the South is an important place for radical ideas and dreams to be. And it exists and it's often not seen by the rest of the country. But there's lots of folks in the South all over doing really rad stuff.
00:24:38
Speaker
and And just having that be you know, acknowledged and highlighted through like a weekend of anarchist abolitionist discussion seemed like an important thing, but it's always been important, you know, not just ah not just now.
00:24:51
Speaker
Yeah, that makes sense. I think on that note, where do you see like the importance of like inside outside organizing in general? And why is it so key to remember people that are locked up and fight alongside them or whatever?
00:25:03
Speaker
I mean, that's like the key to everything, I think. Like the people that are directly experiencing that sort of isolation and being engaged and just like not being connected to people on the outside is central to constant. I'm constantly focusing on how to make sure those voices are connected to the outside struggle. we have conversations. endless resources outside in the free world to expand and like broaden our minds and those resources are so limited and constantly being removed from inside prisons so having that connection to people directly is an important thing but also like it's mutual you know like we're in solidarity with them and they're in solidarity with us and it's ah like a mutual relationship where we expand together is what it feels like
00:25:49
Speaker
It's important to know that a lot of these struggles are already happening and ongoing. And I was wondering if you wanted to talk about like some of the existing groups, both inside and outside, that you sort of connected with to help make this weekend possible.
00:25:59
Speaker
Yeah. um In Gainesville, there's a couple of groups. There's the Florida Prisoner Solidarity Network that used to be a Gainesville IWALK chapter from an Incarcerated Workers Organizing Committee. They disaffiliated a couple years ago and now just focus inside-outside organizing with folks across Florida.
00:26:19
Speaker
And then there's Gainesville Books to Prisoners as well here in this area of Florida. And then there's a group from South Florida that came called CHIP, the Community. i think it's Community Hotline for Incarcerated People. They formed out of COVID doing a hotline at the Broward County Jail and kind of have expanded since then.
00:26:38
Speaker
And create like one of the presentations that they did was on how to start a jail hotline. Another one was on this album that they've created with people that have been incarcerated and like but did recordings over like prison phone lines and jail phone lines is pretty cool.
00:26:52
Speaker
There's this other group called Root Legal that came. This is just like Florida folks that um are coming to mind. But Root Legal out of Miami is trying to like get involved in the ah criminal legal process by intervening and representing victims who are being you know, forced to kind of work with the state to prosecute. So trying to like intervene in that legal process at that point. So, cause it's pretty coercive if you don't want to be involved in that.
00:27:19
Speaker
That's what comes to mind at least right now. Yeah. I think a lot of people often get kind of overwhelmed by the idea of reinventing the wheel and then even highlighting how there's groups in other places already doing the stuff that you can link up with might be helpful for some listening. Yeah.
00:27:34
Speaker
Yeah. I'm also noticing like at this weekend, there was a lot of space for, you know, grief and ritual. And and that's something that I haven't necessarily seen at like a lot of, you know, conferences and meetups. And I'm wondering if you would like to talk about like where the role of ritual for you comes in or like why that was seen as important in these moments.
00:27:52
Speaker
Yeah. For that, for, I mean, me and like some of the other organizers is, was really important. We've like many other people have lost too many comrades and it kind of feels important to acknowledge those losses. as we move forward and build together, those folks come to mind every day for me and they're important to everything that I do. And so having that be a collective thing that we did with people so we could learn more people or, you know, just kind of hold space with each other seemed really important to any revolutionary politic. um And it was a really beautiful gathering where we like invited people to bring things for an altar that we collectively built.
00:28:31
Speaker
And then everybody offered names and of people that they've lost or insights or you know it's just a it's like a ah ah was important for us to do that at the beginning so that we held grief had a moment with us the whole weekend you know but there was so there was a part of it and then the altar was there the whole weekend too that people could you know spend time with or interact with however they felt best awesome yeah i've seen that yeah It kind of seems like a simple thing to do in certain situations, but I feel like there's a lot of i don't know generative stuff that can come out of really thinking that and holding space for that.
00:29:07
Speaker
Was there any other like moments that you would want to highlight from the weekend that we haven't touched on yet? I mean, it was a really full weekend. I think in retrospect of like as a person that was involved in organizing it, we maybe be overpacked it.
00:29:20
Speaker
There's just so much to do and so much to learn. And like, you don't have to go to everything, but you want to go to everything kind of vibe. We had ah some film screenings at the end of the night. And it was just kind of like every minute there was a thing that could happen, which was good and productive and generative, but also...
00:29:38
Speaker
maybe didn't allow for enough space for people to kind of build their own. i think one of my favorite parts was having it be a space that felt calm and welcoming, which I've gone to another number of other gatherings and it doesn't feel like that. Where like this space feels like kind of cold and or like too spread out maybe or like people getting into it conflict and fights, which just like is inevitable. But that's that we were lucky that that wasn't what the focus was this weekend.
00:30:06
Speaker
Hmm. Yeah. Kind of on that line a little bit. Is there anything that you would do differently? And this can also be like a joke answer, like something funny could have happened. But yeah, I think this is like maybe important to think about other people putting on events. If you have any like lessons that you learned from putting this on.
00:30:22
Speaker
I think that the first thing that comes to mind is what like kind of what I just mentioned was just like maybe doing too much. one of the We had a ah debrief, like a collective debrief at the end on the Sunday night of the gathering to be specific, try to get feedback about the gathering. it kind of like Also, but thought of that was to hold space for if something did happen that needed to be processed during the weekend. I think that maybe That should be at every gathering, honestly. i don't I don't think I've ever been to one that has had a debrief time like allotted already. But I think that was it was also like really tight evening schedule stuff. So maybe having like more loose end stuff at the end of the day has felt more important.
00:31:02
Speaker
I think that, and don't know, there's just like so much good and so much like also growth that can always happen. I mean, I think it it was a really great weekend and there's definitely points that I would like address differently if I am ever involved in doing one like like this again. But it was, don't know, it was better than other ones I've been to at least. And that feels good to walk away with, you know?
00:31:26
Speaker
Yeah, totally. I guess, yeah, also, so the the Florida Abolitionist Gathering, the name... spells out a particular word, and I'm wondering if you want to talk about like the kind of unabashed queerness of the event and your thinking around that or like the impact of that.
00:31:40
Speaker
yeah Yeah, I think that there's an importance to specifically inviting what you want to see. And we wanted to see fags and faggotry and queers and trans people the space.
00:31:53
Speaker
so We are those people, you know? And, like, I want to have that intersection be named all the time, especially in, like, abolitionist organizing, because it is such a big intersection that's constantly there. Like, the people...
00:32:07
Speaker
that I work with inside know that queers are the people showing up for them. And it's like a conversation that's not taboo and it needs to be discussed, but also like that's who's being targeted by, you know, the current climate of the political world right now, I guess, prisoners and queer people, the queers show out, you know, liberation, our liberations are all in your tide.
00:32:32
Speaker
Yeah. It feels particularly important in this sort of backswing of reactionary normality or whatever. Yeah, let's see. Trying to think. Yeah, there was also, you know, I think in the contemporary, a lot of people are familiar with like, you know, fundraising efforts and pen pal efforts. I'm wondering if there's any other forms of solidarity with prisoners that, you know, sort of were highlighted during this event or that like you would want to highlight at this moment.
00:32:58
Speaker
Yeah, we ended each night with like some sort of fundraiser, like an event. Like Friday night was a benefit show. Saturday night was a rave. Sunday night was like a karaoke sort of thing, just like a way to like have some sort of like...
00:33:14
Speaker
fun, joyous collective thing, but also use it as a way to like raise money for mutual aid. so and so So each benefit was like you know Florida Prisoner Solidarity, the local group, or Books to Prisoners, or the mutual aid efforts in Sudan and Gaza. And that was important because you have all of these people that care about stuff like that coming to one space And through that, we were able to raise lots of money for all those ah those groups in northern Gaza. We were able to help fund a water well that is now helping get like water, drinking water to like 300 families. So it's it wasn't just a ah weekend of talk, you know, which felt great.
00:33:56
Speaker
I'm also curious if you have something to say about the importance of like giving a space for incarcerated voices or recently incarcerated voices and like how that played out. Yeah, we ah there was a session that I was involved in that had one of the Florida Prisoner Solidarity's Inside members who was newly released. He got out February 3rd after doing nearly 20 years. And so we've known him since the 2016 national strikes.
00:34:23
Speaker
And this is our like first time meeting him in person. And that was so important. And it felt really great. And it's so rare. Like people that we organize with that are doing prison time here in Florida, them getting out.
00:34:38
Speaker
is rare. It's not, you know, people here are doing life without parole oftentimes, like at least the folks that are like involved in a lot of the inside organizing, because what's why not risk it all at that point, you know? Yeah. So we had a session saturday and he came and spoke in front of everybody about like what the political isolation of being inside feels like and how that like what that connection is organizing with people on the outside. And it was just a very moving conversation because, well, one, while we were in it, a friend of ours came a little late and they like were able to like meet for the first time in front of all these people. It's like a ah thing to see. ah And also,
00:35:25
Speaker
There was like a point where i asked him what he thinks the outside organizing efforts should, how they should evolve to like combat the like increasing repression of how to like share information and like how prisons are censoring things more or like, you know, what tactics you need to evolve?
00:35:44
Speaker
and And he responded, but he also was like, well, I'm on the outside now, so how this is how we need to evolve. it is just like It's just small things like that that are just really impactful and meaningful. But yeah, I know there was lots of folks that have been incarcerated that we had come that weekend, like you know more than usual, at least. and i'd say it was really a beautiful piece of the whole weekend. Yeah.
00:36:12
Speaker
It's just like so many people we got to meet for the first time. Okay. that I mean, that kind of does it for my list of questions that I had. do you have anything else you want to add? Is there ways that people can keep up with your organizing efforts or activities or resources you want to plug right now?
Regional Gatherings and Abolitionist Movements
00:36:30
Speaker
Well, we bought too many shirts, so people should contact us to like buy these shirts off of us. that would be great. Awesome. The Instagram at For gathering.
00:36:46
Speaker
Yeah, there's a there's not necessarily a known like idea of doing it again. and don't see why not. But, you know, organizing an event is not just an easy thing that takes, you know, a little bit of your life.
00:36:59
Speaker
um It took a long time, but we would love to see. you know, regional gatherings happen and like sharing the load kind of vibe of this in the South, you know, gag. We welcome Georgia abolitionists to do gag next.
00:37:14
Speaker
Lag. There's just so many, so much potential, you know? Yeah. So yeah, but like people should definitely connect and reach out and there's no time to begin your engagement in the movement besides now.
00:37:28
Speaker
We'll close out this conversation with two recordings clipped from longer conversations that were played at Florida abolitionist gathering from incarcerated organizers. The first one being from Heyru, who was a longtime incarcerated organizer, kind of talking about the limits of reform, his radicalization, and the second being from a trans woman who, like all trans women incarcerated in Florida, is incarcerated in a men's prison.
00:37:51
Speaker
and kind of just talking about her experience of incarceration being alienating and how political work has sort of helped break through that little and you can write to these people by using the addresses provided in the show notes the podcast description without further ado here's hey ru they want to like politicians they want to put better politicians in office right and i'm like yeah y'all got the numbers to do that but what really going to change.
00:38:15
Speaker
They want me to explain to them. And I'm like, yeah, I'll participate because there's a reforming. We could use reform as small victories for bigger, more room to fight, more fighting room. But if you're not going against the system, these people that you're going to put in office, they're not going to get in office unless they are down with the system.
00:38:33
Speaker
and it doesn't matter who's in office. If the economic substructure is still capitalist, you're not getting no change. It don't matter if it's a Republican or a Democrat or even an Independent. There's no way you can tell me you live in the richest country in the world and you work and you can't pay your bills and feed your children at the same time. Do other things. Basic needs are not being met by the people who are doing the biggest work.
00:38:56
Speaker
The laborers are not getting their fair share for their labor. And their children have to go out in the streets and hustle and do that and then come to jail. And when they come to jail, now they got to, these parents got to support their children.
00:39:07
Speaker
from the streets and they basically support in DLC because all the money they send it to their children or their loved ones in prisons is going to DLC. You got the canteen, which is now i think Trinity or one of them is paying DLC a dollar plus a day per prison.
00:39:25
Speaker
For every prison at DLC get a dollar a day. If you got a hundred thousand prison, that's a hundred thousand dollars a day. And the profits of that is being used to buy gas to spray you, paper spray to spray you, handcuffs to cuff you up, bullets to shoot you, guns to shoot you.
00:39:39
Speaker
I mean, what radicalized me was the reality for one. As a black man, I had to learn black history. So when I started learning black history, it was like, this what brought me to study in the Panthers and all of that. It's just going down the line in black history, coming down to here. I started off learning about Africa. And um when I got to here, slavery, of course, can't learn black history without slavery.
00:40:02
Speaker
And then I got into the political scene, the labor movements and all of that. That's what really politicized me when I really got to the see that nothing has changed. You know We're just in a new time and new people, and we're just going along with the same issues. You know what mean? The same issues that they were fighting for back in the days, we're still fighting for them.
00:40:22
Speaker
And here is the clip with Rainn. For me, a big part of ah the insidiousness of being in here is that it separates you from the world, creates the illusion that you are irrevocably separated from the world.
00:40:38
Speaker
And efforts of organizations like ART, like yours, you know, give us an opportunity to be free of of that that mentality. You know, we don't feel so disconnected so long as we're engaging in something that can make a real difference, in my experience.
00:40:58
Speaker
You're saying that, like, practicing politics, you know, or, like, living to your ideals is what's saving you a little bit from that isolation. Absolutely. There's nothing worse than feeling like you have no meaning.
00:41:10
Speaker
Nothing that you're doing... makes a difference anymore, that you're no longer ah participant in in the world. And when you have an opportunity to put your writing out there, or even better, your voice out there, and share something of yourself with the world, and, you know, the world responds, you feel like you're part of it again. That's probably a gross oversimplification, but...
00:41:37
Speaker
I know it's for me, that speech that I told you about that I knowing that people out there were able hear my speech and respond to it, that made a difference for me.
00:41:48
Speaker
That made me feel like my voice, you know, mattered outside of ah context of prisons. I know that whenever i have an opportunity to do any writing or inside organizing or you know, even just when something's going on and I know I can help people do something like complete their grievances so that they can participate in ongoing litigation, such as with the recent transgender issues, that also makes me feel like I'm making a difference.
00:42:39
Speaker
Hi, thanks for joining the Beautiful Idea to talk about the upcoming Imaginary Crimes Tour.
RICO Charges Against Stop Cop City Activists
00:42:44
Speaker
Could you introduce yourself to listeners really the quick? Hi, my name is Ruth in this conversation and I am one of the organizers for the Stop Cop City Imaginary Crimes Tour.
00:42:57
Speaker
Amazing. And we'll get right into what the tour, what the Imaginary Crimes Tour is in just a second. But for context, 61 people are facing RICO trials in Atlanta for alleged involvement in resistance the construction of Cop City, which as many of our listeners probably already know, is a massive militarized police training compound slated to be built over forest land in Southeast Atlanta, Georgia.
00:43:22
Speaker
To kick us off, can you let us know, what can you explain what is what is RICO? Yeah, great question. I think plenty of people have Maybe and idea of what RICO is based on like television or the movies.
00:43:37
Speaker
Oftentimes it's connected with the idea of organized crime or specifically the mafia. The actual definition is the racketeering influence and corrupt organization charge. Allegedly, this criminal charge was created because prosecutors had petitioned for the creation of this law on the federal level because they had insisted that these corrupt organizations were just too too sophisticated in their existence to simply charge them with the host of criminal charges that already exist and that they needed more power to be able to connect seemingly unconnected individuals
00:44:17
Speaker
to a central organization, a crypto organization. And more or less that was where RICO has been birthed out of, which unsurprisingly has then been used and abused over what has now been roughly 55 years since its inception.
00:44:33
Speaker
There's the federal statutes. There's also many state statutes, as well as the ability to bring civil RICO charges against individuals. Also, unsurprisingly, the Georgia standard for RICO, which is what the folks in this struggle are being charged with, is more broad than the federal statute.
00:44:53
Speaker
And it allows for greater leniency in terms of connecting individuals to a corrupt organization. i think one thing that's important to keep in mind as it relates to RICO is that there has to be two overt acts that connect you or that connect your activity to the criminal organization.
00:45:13
Speaker
These overt acts do not necessarily have to be inherently illegal, but they are supporting the criminal organization in question. And I'm sure plenty of your listeners have maybe decided to read the criminal indictment that was dropped in September of 2023, the very beginning. It's kind of on the line between August and September. And some of the things that people were alleged to have done that connected to this criminal organization include buying glue or writing ACAB or things that are kind of like silly.
00:45:43
Speaker
like that and or receiving reimbursements for an organization to buy art supplies. But anyone that has been paying attention to this fight knows that the Deputy Attorney General John Fowler has a wild imagination that includes saying things that Well, we know that they said that they were reimbursed for art supplies, but they clearly were making bombs.
00:46:07
Speaker
And this has been said in open court with no evidence or follow-up, just he really believes it deep down in his heart. And that seemingly is enough. And, you know, for many of us, we've been shocked and horrified and slightly amused by all the things that we've seen go go before us.
00:46:23
Speaker
But something that's also interesting to me is that while this is being charged with the AG's office, Fulton County is one of the most prominent counties in the entire United States for bringing RICO charges against individuals.
00:46:35
Speaker
Two very famous and impactful RICO cases that have been going on or were going on include the YSL trial, they include Young Thug, and then also actually Donald Trump as it relates to their abuse of the electors in the 2020 election. And while those are two very prominent cases, RICO is often used to just cast an extremely wide net to bring in entire communities and criminalize any connections, despite the fact that someone supposedly knows that they're attached to a criminal organization or what their specific role is, it doesn't really matter to these prosecutors, so long as they're putting more and more people in some of the most deadliest prisons in the United States.
00:47:17
Speaker
and to continue to increase control. So it's not surprising that the RICO statute has been used against this movement and how vibrant it's been, but its specific application, especially when you look at the indictment and how detail-oriented and how much it just resembles an undergraduate's essay on the history of anarchy specifically, that is a little shocking. It sounds sort of like ChatGPT wrote it.
00:47:40
Speaker
Oh, absolutely.
00:47:43
Speaker
Another reason why I'm not surprised that they've applied the RICO charges it' because something that I'm personally inspired by, by the Stop Cop City movement in general, is that it's an incredibly strong movement. It's inspired folks, not even locally, but also globally to an extent to see the fact how hard that people are fighting back and the diversity of tactics that have been used to fight back against this militarization of the police.
00:48:07
Speaker
But the fact that with the diversity of tactics that have have been employed, not one organization within all this coalition building has been willing to throw anyone else under the bus. And I think because the prosecutor in the state knows, specifically attorney Chris Carr, knows that people will not be afraid and people understand that they have a common goal of stopping the construction of this cop city in the Southeast Atlanta forest, in the Weilani forest, that they had to do whatever they could to try to cut off the more radical arm of the movement there in Atlanta.
00:48:38
Speaker
But as we've seen, especially considering that they've decided to include the Atlanta Solidarity Fund in this conspiracy, that the community has completely surrounded our people that have surrounded these RICO defendants and have protected them and have fought back and have decided and have said that this is illegitimate and that it's not It's a waste of taxpayer dollars.
00:48:59
Speaker
And that we believe that these trials, obviously, as they are so often, is punishment by prosecution and that they will not produce anything. But nonetheless, I guess now it's going on two years later. People's lives have been completely uprooted. People have lost their jobs. People been deplatformed. People have lost access to bank accounts. People have lost grants and awards that they've gotten from the government and from other institutions because of their connection and the charges that have resulted from this prosecution. And...
00:49:25
Speaker
we are fighting back because we know that while the state is constantly in a battle for legitimacy, that we know that we stand on a higher moral ground. What is the Imaginary Crimes Tour and why did you decide to call it that?
Imaginary Crimes Tour and Activist Solidarity
00:49:40
Speaker
Yeah, so the Imaginary Crimes Tour is a national speaking tour to talk about the RICO charges and the DT charges and other major charges that participants or movement participants in the Stop Cop City movement have been charged with and to talk about the state of repression and also movement resiliency that we're currently in. We began planning this tour just to talk about the charges nearly a year ago. And now I think the time is ripe as ever to be engaging with folks across different movements who are also facing extreme repression and to have an opportunity to connect and to reflect and to build stronger and deeper relationships.
00:50:21
Speaker
The idea of the imaginary crimes tour is the idea that when we read the indictment, it's very obvious that the state of Georgia is trying to criminalize essentially freedom of association and the idea that we can live in a more libertatory world.
00:50:38
Speaker
and that we have the power to actually dictate how our communities should function. And if hundreds of thousands of people are rising up saying that they don't want a cop city, that we are able to imagine a better world that we want to live in.
00:50:52
Speaker
i think it's also like funny to think about it on the flip side of the coin. anyone that has listened in to any of the hearings or has maybe written the criminal indictment, I'm sure it brings to mind that one meme from Always Sunny where they're standing in front of the board with the red string because that's essentially, it's like the more you listen, it's just like they can't believe what they're saying. They know that they can't believe what they're saying, but they just keep on spouting out more ideas, hoping that it makes sense. The state is Charlie, yeah.
00:51:25
Speaker
yeah Yeah, I really want to see a meme of John Fowler's face on Charlie's body. Because it's the longer you sit around, you're like, this can't this can't be real. they can't they these are not Despite the fact that they have the one of the highest offices in Georgia, these are not serious people.
00:51:43
Speaker
These are political actors. Chris Carr is trying to run for governor and he wants to show that he's tough on crime. and to be coded and read by Fox News as, oh, look, he's taking down land defenders and water protectors and the woke left and Antifa and whatever else, at the expense of everyone else's lives, at the expense of the forest, the expense of Tortiguita, the expense of everyone else that's been connected to this fight, is for their own political gains. These are not serious people, despite the fact that they are power hungry and abusive.
00:52:14
Speaker
So this is sort of like a slap suit, right? Like a strategic lawsuit against public participation. i don't know if people have made that comparison before. And i think you've already said this, but the the title is sort of calling to mind how this state likes to use imaginary associations of crimes framed as RICO as a means to break solidarity and momentum, specifically when movements are strong.
00:52:38
Speaker
And so anti-repression is a response that uses an alternative imagination to strengthen solidarity and resistance, I think is how it's framed in some of some of the promotional materials about this tour. And I think that's a really cool sort of duality there that people organizing this tour are trying to call to mind.
00:52:58
Speaker
So I think you've already spoken to the goals of the tour, but how can people support the Atlanta 61 if they would like to? and then I have a few more questions about where people can find more information and learn about tour stops near them.
00:53:12
Speaker
Yeah, great question. So the easiest way to connect for the time being is to find us on Instagram. Our handle is SCC Imaginary Crimes Tour, where we'll be posting all of our updates.
00:53:25
Speaker
Our bio also has a link tree. The link tree actually has the individual fundraisers for the co-defendants who are asking for financial support. There eventually will be a larger co-defendant fund to support all of those folks who are going to trial.
00:53:40
Speaker
But that information is forthcoming. Obviously, if you know if you're listening to this and one of your friends or someone who's a friend of a friend is a co-defendant, we always encourage people to ideally reach out to them. Oftentimes people need financial support.
00:53:53
Speaker
want helping with fundraisers. And also, we would encourage you to come to one of our tour stops and to engage with people in person and to have conversations about what are the needs and what are exciting ways to continue to build this movement while we're in this rest period, while we're in this lull. Great.
00:54:08
Speaker
Finally, is there anything else that you'd like to share with listeners before we log off? Well, please like check out our tour list. Please come to one of our stops. We would love to have you. I'm sure if you're listening to this podcast, you also dream and imagine of a better world. And what better time than now is to engage in these conversations and to do it in person.
00:54:27
Speaker
Great. Thank you so much. Really appreciate you coming on to to give us this info. Yeah, absolutely. Thank you for having us.
Trump's Tariffs and Economic Nationalism
00:54:45
Speaker
Okay, we are back. We have a lot to talk about, of course. We're going to start by talking about the tariffs. This is being recorded after Trump has announced these like sweeping tariffs. He held up that weird sort of, ah look like ah almost like a giant smartphone with all this stuff that included islands that only penguins live on, which a lot of liberals have gone to town on with witty signs and stuff like that.
00:55:06
Speaker
I think it's important for us to tease out sort of a couple of things. How this will actually play out, like what does this actually mean? What does this mean for us and working class people? Like how will this affect our lives?
00:55:18
Speaker
And how is this sort of exposing the tensions within ruling elite circles, different billionaires and even people within Donald Trump's own camp? Like Elon Musk has sort of come out against this various village billionaires that are associated with Trump.
00:55:31
Speaker
have sort of, you know, put out cautionary statements. There's been a lot of, you know, fluctuation. The the market is ah is a bear market now, whatever that means. It's not it's not doing well.
00:55:42
Speaker
There's an open question if we're going to see another recession sort of along the lines of what we saw in 2008. So we're going to try to tease all that out. So let's just start out by talking about like,
00:55:53
Speaker
This is not something that Trump kind of put out there as like, we're just going to use this as a negotiating tactic. Like he really believes this. He believes that this will lead to some sort of new gilded age.
00:56:07
Speaker
Let's talk about what is the project that he's putting out there? Because I think it's also important for us to understand what it is because there is some like economic nationalist narrative of bringing jobs back to the S and having manufacturing here that, you know, some people on the left would say like, well, that's part of what we're talking about.
00:56:29
Speaker
Yeah. So and to understand what's going on here, I think we have to trace it back to kind of two intellectual tendencies that one of the past and one of the present that are kind of fusing together in this sort of vision.
00:56:43
Speaker
So the idea of an isolationist America returning back to a gilded age is an idea which emerged out of the paleo conservative movement sort of in the 1960s and 70s.
00:56:57
Speaker
A lot of those people, people like Pat Buchanan ended up working for Richard Nixon and then later Reagan. And their basic idea was, you know, America to them in their in their language was great in you know the nineteen twenty s Like it was really awesome.
00:57:11
Speaker
And the reason that was is that we had crazy high trade tariffs. And so what that meant is that like everybody had to produce everything here. And that meant the American economy was strong because we weren't dependent on anybody else.
00:57:23
Speaker
And like, there's a lot loaded into that claim. There's a lot of levels in which that claim is just factually wrong. But there's a lot loaded into that claim as far as things like racism and xenophobia and sort of narratives of cultural cleanliness and things like this that also come along with all of that. So...
00:57:44
Speaker
There is this idea of latent in the paleoconservative movement. It's not particularly well articulated, but this concept that if the United States can become an economy that is national again, right, that we make and produce and consume our own stuff, then we will like somehow magically of return back to this wonderful age of the 1920s or something like this. This is this is literally the vision they put forward.
00:58:14
Speaker
It's strange, but this is why they talk about the Gilded Age so much is that is it's sort of a proto utopian moment in their narrative. And so Trump comes out of a certain like East Coast kind of wealthy paleo conservative circle, which very deeply believes that kind of idea and has been isolationist for a very long time.
00:58:37
Speaker
The second element, though, and this is an idea Richard Seymour talks about disaster nationalism, which I think is and just getting into it really, really good. But one of the things that he's talking about is you're seeing this revival of nationalism, but nationalism that's different than as it appeared during the age of imperialism. So like the British imperial states, those nationalists, those like advocates of the British Empire were advocating a very different thing.
00:59:07
Speaker
Than most British nationalists from like the British National Party are today. Right. That the British National Party are isolationists and they're talking about making an isolated and strong England.
00:59:18
Speaker
Right. Just like Trump is an isolationist. Right. and they're talking about making an isolated and strong America. It is a form of. national strength politics that doesn't involve international expansion necessarily.
00:59:31
Speaker
It involves this kind of world of competition over international spheres of influence, but not necessarily the control of territories. Right. Some of that is because what we've really seen in the last 40 years, right, 30 years since the collapse the Soviet Union has really been kind of the end of what traditionally would have been considered a sustainable model of imperialism.
00:59:55
Speaker
Right. That it still does exist. There's still remnants of this. But the idea that one invades a place... occupies that place, extracts everything out of that place, enslaves the population.
01:00:07
Speaker
That is a concept of statehood, which has become less and less and less and less and less common since the British Empire collapsed, since the Iraq War went sideways for the United States, since the Russian invasion of Ukraine went sideways.
01:00:21
Speaker
Right. We've really seen this kind of world in which states can't just project power wherever they want to without consequence anymore. And so when we look at those realities put together, what we see is this.
01:00:35
Speaker
And so it's a kind of national strength politics, which is deeply grounded in ah notion of sort of American supremacy. This idea that America is like special and unique and that if we just did everything for ourselves, then we would just like be super special and unique.
01:00:54
Speaker
Right. Like that. That's the underlying ideological idea. Yeah, like they've tried to put a bunch of veneers of economics on top of it, which we we should talk about.
01:01:06
Speaker
But those veneers of economics are veneers. The arguments that they're putting forward don't make any sense when put together. And so a lot of what is happening here is that there is an attempt to sell what is a deeply nationalist and racist ideological project as a sort of economic restructuring plan.
01:01:29
Speaker
Right. And what that the part of the consequence of that is that the material consequences of what they're doing are almost secondary to the social consequences of what they'll generate in the future.
01:01:42
Speaker
Right. And that's a really dangerous place for us to be. Pull that out, because, I mean, I think the next question is like, what does this actually mean for us? Like, how will we experience these tariffs? Yeah. Well, OK, so there's two questions. There's how we experience the tariffs and what is the weird future that these people have envisioned for us?
01:01:59
Speaker
Right. Start with the weird vision of the future. So a journalist asked Howard Blutnick, the Commerce Secretary, you know, what is going to happen? You know, like a lot of what makes American life cost what it does is that Americans exploit people all over the world for very cheap labor to make things like clothes and stuff and then buy them at Walmart.
01:02:21
Speaker
Right. Are you expecting Americans to also work in textile factories for very little money in order to still purchase things at Walmart very cheaply? And he goes, well, no, of course not. That would be ridiculous.
01:02:34
Speaker
What I want to do is I want to make a country of engineers and HVAC technicians and computer scientists who will maintain all the machines that do our job.
01:02:46
Speaker
So let's think about that for a second, because there's like over 250 million eligible workers in the United States. OK, just in the US. We've already seen in the automotive industry what happens when that kind of a process goes into place. We've seen this in the warehouse industry, too.
01:03:02
Speaker
Right. You end up with 100 workers instead of 3000 in a car factory. You end up with workers who are overtired.
01:03:13
Speaker
kept to mechanized pacing, prevented from taking bathroom breaks because the machines don't take breaks in Amazon warehouses all over the country. Right. That's the future they have envisioned for us. And that's not a future with enough jobs for everybody. Right. In my other life, you know, I hang out in hacker circles. And so I have I have a tendency to gravitate towards like analogies from cyberpunk. But it is hard to see what is happening is other than that.
01:03:41
Speaker
They're trying to privatize everything that's not security function. They're trying to increase the ability of corporations to do their own security without consequences. Right. They're trying to create an economy where we are stuck to working generally mechanized jobs all the time for companies which reap in ridiculous profits while a massive underclass continues to grow because there's not enough work.
01:04:03
Speaker
And the planet dies. Like, that's our future. That's the future that they view. That is the utopia that their ideology is trying to reach us to right now.
01:04:15
Speaker
Because one of the things about Trumpism is Trumpism has become a utopian movement. And what they are doing now is every bit as authoritarian and insidious as the use of state power to try and social engineer an entire society of people that has ever happened in any other circumstance.
01:04:36
Speaker
Because that's what this is. This is a massive act of social engineering being carried out by billionaires on our lives. That's what's happening right now. Yeah, I just want to quote from an economic journal that just put out an article about that interview that you were talking about.
01:04:54
Speaker
In a recent interview, a senior Trump official acknowledged that the highly publicized tariff strategy aimed at reshoring U.S. manufacturing would not revive the traditional factory jobs many had hoped for.
01:05:04
Speaker
Instead, the future of U.S. manufacturing would be dominated by automation, leaving human workers sidelined. Again, like this is just a worse version of what already exists, and they're talking about moving that here. I mean, like the the current arrangement is not good either.
01:05:22
Speaker
And I think that we should be clear when we critique what's happening, that we are not defending the neoliberal order like a lot of liberals are. I think this is this is a really important point, right? Like one of the things that that is happening and you see it in Argentina with Malay.
01:05:41
Speaker
And I think that he's a really interesting model to look at increasingly because they increasingly are using the same rhetoric he uses. Right. that This has been developing over the course of maybe a month and a half. But. All of his politics.
01:05:52
Speaker
Right. Are grounded in this kind of like double speed. Right. That they're all talking about freeing workers and freeing people from the fetters of governments and blah, blah, blah, blah. blah But if you really look at what it is, it's extreme neoliberalism.
01:06:09
Speaker
Right. Like Milton Friedman, for those of you that really want to sort of like dig into the theory of neoliberalism, like you have to read Milton Friedman. Milton Friedman talks about neoliberalism as a structure in which the role of the state is to guarantee the smooth and continued and predictable functioning of the market economy.
01:06:30
Speaker
OK, so their job is to stop strikes from happening, to stop protests from happening, to repress union organizing, to repress students, to do things like that, to generally privatize everything that the state has and sell it off for next to nothing. So companies can make a profit on it and reduce the state down to the point in which all they are doing is engaging in an increasingly all expansive form of policing.
01:06:57
Speaker
That's the world here. That's the world that they envision. That is why the things that they are cutting are the things that they consider to be, quote, waste, like the Department of Education. So what we're watching here is not so much a shift in the underlying mentality of the American state.
01:07:14
Speaker
What we're watching here is we're watching the underlying mentality of the American state come out. We're watching the fetters get torn off. We're watching the limitations other politicians had imposed on themselves because they were worried about political support just fall away completely as if they never existed.
01:07:32
Speaker
Right. Like that's what's happening here. It's an expansion. It's an acceleration of the things that already make our lives miserable. Right. I mean, again, from that same article I just quoted, says, lutnik the person you were talking about who himself is a billionaire reassured cbs host that automation would be beneficial in the long term suggesting that the u s would see an explosion of opportunities in mid-level trade professions such as mechanics and hvac technician to support the new automated facilities however this would not bring back the kind of unionized working- class factory jobs that once were the backbone of american industry
01:08:07
Speaker
it's automated factories lu blednick acknowledged admitting the shift towards robotics in industries like iphone assembly would replace large swaths of the labor force Again, I mean, this is this is more of the same. This is what we're seeing in the Rust Belt. This is what we're seeing in cities where everybody works at massive Amazon facilities.
01:08:27
Speaker
It's low-level service jobs. You know, filling in the roles where people cannot be replaced in the supply chain by automation. Those are low paid jobs.
01:08:38
Speaker
They're jobs where they're constantly trying to destroy unions and any sort of working class self activity. You know, this is not ah return to post World War two nineteen fifty s Everybody's moving on up into the middle class. No. Well, we have to remember that world not only was still based on segregation, but it was also incredibly heavily subsidized by the government.
01:08:59
Speaker
Right. Incredibly heavily subsidized by the government. Most of the growth of American infrastructure was. And so we're watching this kind of and I am not being hyperbolic when I say that what happened just now, if there's not an attempt to pull it back relatively quickly, will be paradigm shifting.
01:09:25
Speaker
That what ended not in the. good way, right? In the way in which the world is now more oppressive and more capitalist. But what ended was the sort of era of globalization that started in the 1940s, in which trade barriers were coming down, in which there was an attempt to internationalize production and internationalize foreign policy and internationalize, you know, relief operations and things like this. Like that era is over now.
01:09:55
Speaker
Like that, that is, that is what this is indicating. If this is if there's not a pullback very, very quickly. So just just to give you all an idea, we buy.
01:10:06
Speaker
i mean, how much of our electronics from China? Right. Many. Most. Before Trump got into office, there was a 34 percent tariff on electronics from China and products that were under, I think, was eight hundred dollars were able to be shipped into the United States without a tariff.
01:10:24
Speaker
This is how like TAMU and AliExpress and Banggood and all these stores online work is they ship low cost items under the tariff limit. And that's how it gets into the United States.
01:10:35
Speaker
OK, that's how our economy has worked for the better part of 20 years. And increasingly so for the better part of 20 years, not just ours, but everyone else's too.
01:10:46
Speaker
Even if we're talking about something as simple as like, let's take a circuit board on a car that is manufactured in America, right? Let's say the entire circuit board is manufactured in America.
01:11:00
Speaker
Those components aren't, right? Chances are the board isn't either. So now that board, which before could get shipped back and forth from China without a tariff, now is subject to initially a 34% tariff and now a 54% tariff.
01:11:17
Speaker
And then if China doesn't take the retaliatory tariffs away in three days from now, a 104% tariff. So my phone, right, which, you know, let's say it was $500, it's going to be like a thousand bucks now, more.
01:11:33
Speaker
That's the initial, that's the initial cost. That's just the initial cost. That doesn't keep that doesn't take into a account the fact that many of the things are manufactured in the United States are, you know, high technology things which are exported.
01:11:50
Speaker
Right. A lot of our exports are high tech. A lot of our exports are services. Right. Things that we won't be able to do because of retaliation. Now we're going to be dealing with retaliatory tariffs that are going to drive our exports.
01:12:03
Speaker
costs up dramatically and cut those markets off for us while the rest of the world happily sits there, signs trade deals and isolates the United States. Because I think what the Trump administration and what a lot of Americans don't quite get is that the United States is very important to the way that the world functions.
01:12:25
Speaker
But that it could also just do that without the United States. Perfectly happily. And what we're watching now is we're watching. The European Union negotiate trade deals with China directly.
01:12:38
Speaker
We're watching Brazil negotiate trade deals with Canada. Like we're watching all of the dynamics of globalization that were terrible happen still just without the United States.
01:12:50
Speaker
Right. And we've been reduced down to this like whining child in the corner throwing a temper tantrum. And what that means, I mean, think about this from. Again, long-term effects of the tariffs, right?
01:13:03
Speaker
this This is Marx. I mean, this is out of Capital. For those of you that want to look, when Marx is talking about the projection of temporality in the construct of commodities, right? That when I make something in a capitalist economy, I am making it for the purpose of its sale, right? Like I'm making it for the purpose of extracting exchange value from it.
01:13:23
Speaker
And what I am doing in that process is I am projecting a future, in which that object will be sold. But not just which ah object will be sold, but that money will be worth something.
01:13:35
Speaker
That the government will function, that police will stop my workers from striking, that I'll be able to go to the store in a week and use that money to buy something else. And that the store is going to accept that money because they also are going to assume that that money is going to be worth something two to three weeks from that.
01:13:50
Speaker
Right? What just happened blows all of that up completely. You can't project anything anymore. Like, not only You know, but the the Treasury Department has been going around telling companies like, hey, it's time to get rich now. There's no regulations in America. It's come to America and produce things.
01:14:08
Speaker
And all of these companies not only are not announcing new plants, open facilities in the U.S., they're pulling back on the ones that they had because they can't predict what the situation is going to be. Like the entire underpinning of capitalist investment is undermined when something like this happens.
01:14:26
Speaker
Because the reality is, is like Wall Street didn't believe him. Right. They didn't believe him. They were like, oh, it's a negotiating tactic. It's a negotiating tactic. The reality is, is this is so profoundly stupid from the level of economics, from the level of of capitalist economics. This is so unthinkably dumb.
01:14:45
Speaker
That no one thought that he would actually do it. And then he did it. And now there's no question about there's no as to how far is he going to go? What's he going to do?
01:14:55
Speaker
How far are these going to go? When are they going to go away? When are new ones going to get? at No one can tell anything anymore, good or bad or indifferent. I just want to make one other point. I mean, I think we also cannot disconnect the push for automation here, you know, under the guise of, you know, ending offshoring sort of this like cloak of anti globalization rhetoric, which is all just a smokescreen.
01:15:18
Speaker
from this push towards artificial intelligence as well. I think the two are very wedded to each other. And of course, as everybody knows, like that's not something that, that is like making a bunch of, you know, as the article I quoted stated, like a bunch of unionized blue collar jobs where just thousands of people are going to, you know, have careers that they're going to retire on and put kids through college in or something, know, whatever the fantasy is. That's not, that's not what this is.
01:15:46
Speaker
And it's also about bringing all of these people and companies to heal under Trump and making them subservient to the regime, punishing different industries and capitalists that Trump sees as not on his team.
01:15:59
Speaker
So I think the next question, though, is that will this, I mean, because you're saying that this is a make or break moment essentially for the economy. We're we're deciding right now sort of what the contours of exploitation and work and capitalist economy looks like over the next period.
01:16:17
Speaker
So is it, are we going to see a crash? Also, is that, is that what they want? Like, do they want to have a 2008 style crash so they can kind of put the pieces back together? And is that what we're going to see? Because it seems to be headed in that direction.
01:16:33
Speaker
If, if there's a crash, it's going to be much more fundamental than 2008. 2008 was a crash about ah single market and the unpredictability of a single market in the wake of the job and wage crisis in the United States, right?
01:16:48
Speaker
That cascaded outwards into a bigger crisis. If this were to trigger a crisis, it would start as a massive crisis, not as a crisis of a company, but we'd be looking at more of a 1929 style.
01:17:02
Speaker
Everyone loses faith in the market and gets out. And the reality is, is we're already watching that happen. You know, I investors are not economists and that's important to keep in mind, but also sometimes they do interesting and relevant things. And one of the things that is incredibly relevant over the last month is that Warren in Buffett has been quietly cashing out.
01:17:25
Speaker
Warren Buffett, one of the wealthiest investors in America, who's been an investor since the mid 1960s through every economic crisis. is cashing out, is selling Berkshire Hathaway real estate, is selling all of his investments, is getting out.
01:17:41
Speaker
Not buying new ones, not buying bonds. just He's doing the billionaire version of take money, shove in mattress. Literally. I'm serious. So what you're saying, people are looking at, or they will increasingly, look at the stock market being like, the money that I have in my 401k that I have in my account is going to disappear.
01:18:01
Speaker
So I better take it and put it into liquid cash, basically, and take that out of the system. Essentially a ah run on the... run on the bank so to speak like in 1929 okay yeah and it's not that's going to disappear it's that you have no idea whether it will or not trump might wake up and like eat something he didn't like for breakfast and be like there's 70 percent more tariffs on china and the entire market could crash right like you just you don't know there's no way to do the basic calculations marx talks about in the structure of commodities right
01:18:34
Speaker
You can't project what's going to happen in the future.
Economic Uncertainty and Historical Comparisons
01:18:37
Speaker
And so in the service of this mission in which they are trying to, like, reduce the state down to a market stabilization mechanism, they're throwing the whole thing into chaos.
01:18:46
Speaker
Like, that's the astonishing part. That's the astonishing part. And what you know, and this has been said, we have said this a number of Republican like consultants have said this.
01:18:56
Speaker
They could have done all of these things more slowly and more deliberately gotten roughly the same results with none of the chaos. right but they didn't do that so do you foresee 1929 style crash then or do you think that's still up in the air we we have mechanisms to stop that happening in the same way for example we have the fdic so the federal deposit insurance corporation all of you that have a bank account at a bank not a credit union but a bank credit unions have their own version of this forget what it's called but if you have a ah
01:19:28
Speaker
bank account up to two hundred and fifty thousand dollars, which I would imagine most of the people listening to the show don't have up to two hundred and fifty thousand dollars. If your bank crashes, you still get your money back. Now, after two hundred and fifty thousand dollars, you don't necessarily get your money back. You might if there's leftover money in the FDIC fund, get your money back.
01:19:47
Speaker
But you might not. Right. And so. What happened in 1929 is people went to the bank and banks didn't have money. They had lent out so much of the money that people had deposited in the banks. And when people went back to get their money physically out, there physically was not money in the vaults.
01:20:05
Speaker
And that caused a run on the banks. People started rushing to the banks to pull their money out. That caused the banks to call all their debts in from people that borrowed money from them, which caused this cascade of bankruptcies.
01:20:16
Speaker
right But a lot of that had to do with the fact that people were worried about losing all their money. And you still that would happen. There'd be runs on the bank because getting money out of FDIC is not easy and getting all your money taken away by the bank definitely sucks.
01:20:30
Speaker
So it wouldn't be a not crisis. Right. But it wouldn't have the same impacts. What would be impactful, though, is, again, in 1929, we were looking at a very different economy.
01:20:41
Speaker
Like the American American economy today 70 percent based on consumption and services. Right. Many of the things that we consume. come from overseas. Many of the things that we produce get sold overseas.
01:20:55
Speaker
So when Trump is talking about something like a trade deficit, what a trade deficit actually means is so say the two of us are in business and you're in country A and I am in country B and you buy $10 worth of tools for me and I sell them to you and you make stuff that I then buy for $100. paper, now have a $90 trade deficit.
01:21:21
Speaker
Now, of course, I've turned around and sold that stuff and made money. Right. So it's not an actual deficit. It's not a debt. Trump interprets it as a debt. So when he's saying I need to take trade deficits down to nothing.
01:21:35
Speaker
What he literally means is everybody needs to buy as much stuff from us as we buy from them. And if that doesn't even out them, something's wrong. To do that. Is essentially taking a torch to the entire postwar economy.
01:21:50
Speaker
An economy that didn't exist in 1929.
01:21:53
Speaker
And that very much is the underpinning of like how we get pretty much everything today, not just in the US. That economy didn't exist in 1929. And so.
01:22:06
Speaker
Disrupting the entire global economy like this. On this level, this abruptly with this level of unpredictability has the ability of causing basic Tensions within capitalism to really come to a head, namely the tension between this idea of producing a thing now to predict your outcome in the future.
01:22:30
Speaker
Right. This notion that you somehow have to guarantee that intermediary period of time and the whole future after that in order to do investment. Right. That can't happen right now.
01:22:42
Speaker
And if that can't happen right now. It just becomes a question of how long it takes. for markets to start to degrade as investors pull their money out and literally shove it under mattresses or in their bunkers that they are building increasingly.
01:22:57
Speaker
Which again, the billionaires are building bunkers. They didn't do that 25 years ago. Right. These are all things we should be looking at with a lot of attention. You know, when someone like Warren Buffett liquidates billions of dollars of investments in a very short period of time, which is something he has never done before, have to look at that and go,
01:23:18
Speaker
OK, whatever you think of him as a person, he is a person who has understood how stock markets work and generally has been right about them and is getting out completely, not putting money in gold, not putting it in trust fund that's going to get invested and, so you know, sovereign debt funds or some.
01:23:34
Speaker
No, it's just literally taking it out, making it cash like the tax burden alone from that is massive. OK, so it sounds like you would more or less agree with some of the economic journals saying 50 50 chance, essentially.
01:23:47
Speaker
Oh, I mean, the the rates I've seen today are even higher. Oh, wow. um Yeah. JPMorgan Chase was putting it up at 60. I've seen rates as high as 75, 80 percent chance.
01:23:57
Speaker
No one has come out with the full 100 yet because no economist will ever you say that. But 80 percent is pretty high. Because I was going to say very concerning. What I remember from the 2008 crash is that you know obviously a lot of people lost their jobs, but it you know it was it was very much like the economy contracted and really slowed down, you know stagflation, I guess. i mean So like if you were in construction, for instance, you probably got laid off because nobody wanted to build anything. There wasn't enough money. There wasn't capital to put into that.
01:24:29
Speaker
And then a lot of people lost their homes. So it was this cascade effect where it's like people are losing their jobs, People can't afford to make their mortgage payments. They are foreclosed on. you know A lot of corporations like bought up a lot of properties that got foreclosed on and then flipped them, turned them into rentals. This is what sort of produced the housing crisis that we all experience now where everybody's paying up the butt for like all these you know high rents because they're all owned by a few hand of corporations.
Automation and Worker Consumption in Capitalism
01:24:59
Speaker
Again, but it sounds like something you're talking about might be a little more closer to like the image of the bread lines that we saw, you know, in the financial crash of 2029. I mean, that sounds a little more intense.
01:25:13
Speaker
So there was one number that I came across, which I found really interesting. I'm not going to remember the number exactly, but the jobs report, which just came out, which showed that the U.S. economy had added 200,000 jobs.
01:25:26
Speaker
Right. Which, of course, the administration held up as like this big thing. Somebody dug into the numbers and found out they only listed 5000 federal employees as having lost their jobs that month.
01:25:38
Speaker
Everyone like, but we know that's not right. It was four hundred and seventy five thousand. And what they did was they classified every single person still receiving a severance check as employed, which is not accurate.
01:25:49
Speaker
And so the jobs report was 400000 jobs off just in government employees. That's bad. That's bad.
01:26:00
Speaker
That's really, really bad. i mean, we have to think about, again, you know, I hate citing Marx because Marxists annoy me a lot of the time, not all of you, some of you, but you know, one of the other things that Marx talks about in capital is the fundamental importance of consumption for the continuation of capitalism and how this creates this kind of tension in the way that capital has to accumulate.
01:26:26
Speaker
So if you pay your workers nothing, then no one can buy anything, obviously. Right. If you pay your workers a little bit, you make less profit. But overall, the economy can function.
01:26:38
Speaker
If you pay your workers more, you make even less profit. but Overall, the economy can function. Right. If all of a sudden you don't need any workers. Because you've automated their jobs away.
01:26:49
Speaker
Well, that makes the number of people that can buy things shrink. I mean, this is not complicated math. Right. Then that means that people down at the grocery store get fired. Then there's even less people to buy stuff.
01:27:00
Speaker
Then people down at the store where everyone buys their clothes gets fired because there's even less people buy stuff. And it cascades down and the cascades down and it cascades down. This is what we are facing. We're seeing the beginning points of that cascading happening already.
01:27:15
Speaker
It's already happened. You know, like literally as we're talking about this, they're saying like the Social Security website is not working. It's having all these issues. I've personally heard from people that they're having problems getting their checks. You know, the Republicans, they're pushing for massive tax cuts on the wealthy and corporations that will have to come with cuts to Medicare and Medicaid. So, I mean, it seems like a recipe for all the worst things that just benefit the top 1% of people, if we want to use that. like until Until the food
Ideological Motivations Behind Economic Policies
01:27:43
Speaker
riots start. I mean, like, this is like this is one of the this is one of the things about how they're doing this, right?
01:27:49
Speaker
If they were capable of doing the thing that they want to do, Right. If they had the resources and the support to do the things that they want to do and make their like utopian world come into being, that's one thing. But that's also like impossible and weird and a massive act of social engineering and deeply, deeply, deeply, deeply authoritarian and not what's happening.
01:28:09
Speaker
And so instead of them having this like MAGA utopia where everyone goes happily to work in the morning with their robots or whatever, what they've ended up with is this kind of like degraded post-capitalism in which we will not have any jobs here because they'll I'll be taken by robots, but we also won't be able to afford it.
01:28:28
Speaker
Right. That we're starting to hit a point in which and this has already been true for some time in the United States. Right. Since the 1970s, wages have been falling In relation to cost of living, like what's what's referred to in economics as real wages.
01:28:42
Speaker
Have been falling since 1970s. Right. And that's still true. That is still happening. And so our cost of living keeps going up for wages in relation to that keep going down for a cost of living keeps going up.
01:28:54
Speaker
That has to all come from somewhere. Right. And that money comes from debt. But if people don't have jobs, they can't pay for things on credit cards. They can't pay back the debt they already have.
01:29:06
Speaker
but This is how something like firing 400,000 government employees becomes a banking crisis. You know, they're they're one of the things that is absolutely astonishing about this process so far is how little they understand or have thought through downstream effects.
01:29:20
Speaker
And so, you know, just as a simple example, like USAID has done all kinds of like not great stuff. Right. But one of the roles of USAID in the United States is that it is a farm subsidy program like they buy all that wheat and corn from somewhere.
01:29:35
Speaker
to send all over the world. Right. And they've been buying surplus grain off American farmers since they were sending grain to the Soviet Union in the late 1920s. Right. This has been like a long standing U.S. s government program that had been moved under USAID.
01:29:51
Speaker
So if you cancel USAID, now all of a sudden you've pushed down all the grain prices in the United States because there's a grain surplus. Well, one of the other things they did is they also shut down the office in the USDA that works with workers to get low interest loans to be able to afford equipment and seed and fertilizer for the growing season.
01:30:11
Speaker
So now all these farmers are have to take higher interest loans out to meet the contracts they have already signed and they will be selling their their crops for less money.
01:30:22
Speaker
That's how we got the farming crisis in the nineteen thirty That was like what the food exporting program was meant to help alleviate was literally that exact situation.
01:30:34
Speaker
And all the ingredients are there to produce it again. They're just all right because they didn't think three levels down the chain. What is the downstream effect of this? If I do this plus this, what is the downstream effect of those two things converge?
01:30:48
Speaker
Yeah, well, it seems like they've convinced themselves that like to do that would be like to be woke or something, or you know that's what the deep state wants. I mean, it seems like these people are so blind to their ideology, they don't really understand how stuff works. And I think that that's sort of the reality that's been exposed by this, is that yes, it's true that Trump has shrouded himself with sycophants that like are yes people to his larger project, but what that also means is that there's just not a lot of adults in the room that like understand how the sausage actually gets made and they're just sort of you know running around you know it's a very maggie and project if i can use that term with a straight face like it is about manufacturing consent of the people that are on the team and everybody else if they cry about it then that's even better
01:31:40
Speaker
And it's just about sort of like going out into the world and being like, hell yeah, Trump is doing that. And he's he's a smart guy. And, you know, it's all going to work out. And like if you if you think this is bad, then you're just a cuck and a woke and whatever. Yeah.
01:31:55
Speaker
Yeah. And they're essentially saying that. They're like, oh, yeah, you know things are going to get hard for a while. You know, and what I resent about that, you know, maybe maybe this is my like. working class Rust Belt self coming out. But like the thing I resent about that so much isn't the fact that it's going to make us broke.
01:32:14
Speaker
That sucks bad enough. It's the fact that there are people that think that they have that kind of power over my life.
Administration's Social Engineering and Authoritarianism
01:32:20
Speaker
Like that's the thing that just really gets the hair standing up on my back.
01:32:27
Speaker
That just really makes me furious. Like these people live seven hours <unk> away from where I am. And they're sitting here thinking that thinking that they can play around with their little ideological project while my life is the material that they're playing around with. Yeah, no, thank you.
01:32:46
Speaker
No, didn't sign for their utopian project. Yeah. You know, and I'm not particularly thrilled that they're trying to make us all participate in it. Like, that is something we all have to really talk about.
01:32:57
Speaker
Because one of the things that's happening here is it's not authoritarianism in the traditional sense, in the way that people came to understand it in the 30s. But it that doesn't make it any less authoritarian. And that doesn't make it any less an act of mass social engineering. And that is deeply important for us to understand.
01:33:12
Speaker
Like, we have to understand that that's what's going on. They're trying to create a new kind of country, a new kind of person, a new kind of American. Right. Like that is deeply disturbing stuff.
01:33:25
Speaker
And they're using state force to do it. Yeah, I mean, it's it's bizarre. I mean, this is this could be its whole other conversation, but like you know a lot of us saw that weird Milo tweet that was like, yeah, white American men are going to love working in an iPhone factory because it's so manly and all this stuff. And, you know, as we're saying, like it seemed it that is not even what they're proposing. They're saying like,
01:33:49
Speaker
No, the jobs that are going to be be created are these like mid-level technicians that manage automation, which, as we've talked about, is not going to be that many jobs. But this sort of MAGA bedtime story that like by bringing manufacturing back, that that's going to make people more manly or we're going to socialize people in this way. It reminds me of the Hitler quote, like, we can socialize factories. Why can't we socialize human beings?
01:34:15
Speaker
Which again, like i I don't see how... i mean, none of this stuff seems to be very popular and there's already a lot of viral clips of a lot of MAGA influencers that have lost a lot of money that are going viral right now.
01:34:28
Speaker
I don't see how people's 401ks getting destroyed and small business owners and farmers, I mean, going under is going to be popular. These are people that are a large part of the MAGA base. I understand that this is part of a wider project. I just don't see how these people, especially how disorganized and stupid they are are, going to come out of this as a net gain, especially as it seems like it would take years for a lot of this stuff to really sort of come to fruition. And like you said, the at all yeah if it happens at all, like you said, it seems to be much more intelligent if they would have done this in a long-term project, which, I mean, again, as we've
01:35:11
Speaker
you know, in our interview with Jamie Merchant, like Biden and the Democrats were already on board for targeted tariffs. Like they continued that they were pushing to like build factories for semiconductors in certain spaces. So, I mean, like this project has already been sort of taken up and pushed.
01:35:30
Speaker
I just think they are just rushing um, hit the button, which again, i think begs the question, like, is, is this collapse somehow part of a grand design? i don't really like to get into the idea that they're playing 4G chess. I don't think they're it's that complicated for
Internal Political Rifts Over Economic Policies
01:35:45
Speaker
them. I just think they're, they think like we've said before that they're on a very short timeline if they've just got to go, go, go, go. go and And they increasingly believe their own rhetoric.
01:35:56
Speaker
So a person to watch right now, There's person I generally say don't pay any attention to because he's an idiot, but he's actually really influential right now is Peter Navarro. So Peter Navarro and Elon Musk have been getting into it on social media because Musk doesn't like the tariffs.
01:36:12
Speaker
Because, you know, most of the even though Tesla's get assembled in the US, most of those components are not made in the US. Right. They're made somewhere else and they're shipped here and they're put together into car form in a car plant somewhere in the somewhere in the United States. Right.
01:36:29
Speaker
So Musk is very against tariffs. He's been like posting, you know, videos of Milton Friedman and talking. And Peter Navarro has been like going back at him on Twitter or or something like that.
01:36:40
Speaker
But the thing is, is Peter Navarro does believe this. he He believes, legitimately believes that. that if they do this this way, that magically manufacturing will just show up on American shores again within, as he said, one year.
01:36:59
Speaker
You can't even make the the factory equipment to do that in a year. You definitely can't retrain an entire workforce in the middle of an economic crisis in a year.
01:37:13
Speaker
Yeah, this is some like Mao backyard steel No, it is. there There is a deeply Stalinist kind of five year plan element to this in which they have decided that there's going to be a specific outcome and they are just going to bludgeon us until it happens.
01:37:29
Speaker
Navarro's the guy they found on Amazon, right? That just wrote a yeah dumb book. and That's the guy that Jerry Fishner found on Amazon, who was advocating like 80% tariffs on China and an actual, not trade, but actual real shooting war with China because they, quote, stole our jobs.
01:37:48
Speaker
Right, of course. yeah um Well, I guess you know the the fact that him and Musk are getting into it begs the last question I want to talk about before we switch to talking about the recent protests is What does this mean for this sort of rift that's developed within ruling circles, elites, and billionaires?
01:38:07
Speaker
Yeah, you have Musk coming out he was out. He actually gave a talk to some far-right quasi-fascist party in Italy, and he was saying, ah what we need is we need a free trade zone between the US and Europe.
01:38:19
Speaker
you know You have different billionaires coming out, even ones that have supported Trump being like, this is not the way forward, this is bad, It seems like some of the tech people are starting to have cold feet about this. Like you said, I think a lot of people in elite circles, various capitalists are thinking like, oh, this was just a negotiation strategy. And then they're finding out like, oh, he's actually really, really serious.
01:38:43
Speaker
Really serious. So what does that mean? Because in theory also, too, you know, like we saw Ted Cruz has come out and saying like, look, this is bad. The Democrats are going to slaughter us in the midterms.
01:38:56
Speaker
if this If this gets really bad, like people are going to turn against the the Republican Party. you know In theory, they could, and there's already been some movement on this. The Republicans could say, like we're going to block the tariffs through the Congress if they wanted to.
01:39:11
Speaker
so i mean It seems like there is a risk that there might be some rebellion within the Republican Party if this gets really bad. I think right now they're going to kind of see how bad it gets because they're kind of unwilling to hold Trump to account.
01:39:26
Speaker
But what does it mean that these cracks are starting to form? Maybe we said it on our previous iteration of of the show in November. Right. Late November.
01:39:37
Speaker
There is a part of Trump's agenda which is not good for business that is international. Right. That's just inherently true, especially if you're something like Bill Ackman, the Zionist billionaire investor who, like, makes his money on stock investments.
01:39:54
Speaker
You know, not being able to trade it internationally is really bad for a person like that. And at some point, there was going to be a moment in which we were going to see who was really dedicated this project, that the contours of the project were going to become clear, that at some point an ideological faction was going to win out.
01:40:15
Speaker
And everybody else that was holding on with the attempts, with the hope that they could get their way through a Trump administration is going to have to figure out what to do. And that's the moment we're at.
01:40:26
Speaker
Trump hasn't talked about AI in months. Howard Lutnick talks about it, but Trump hasn't talked about AI and his big new data center in a very long time. He's not interested anymore. Musk is old news.
01:40:40
Speaker
He's a burden. He's a weight now. you know like Trump used all of those Silicon Valley people. like He played them super hard. They all thought that they were so smart.
01:40:52
Speaker
Andreessen Horowitz even released an entire techno utopian futurist manifesto like last fall, which I just heard about. And I read recently about how they were going to create this like new world of like AI automated factories and stuff and that the Trump administration was going to be their vehicle to do that.
01:41:12
Speaker
Right. The problem always has been and we've been saying this from the beginning is that. The Trump administration is many political projects with one common goal.
01:41:25
Speaker
And the common goal is this consolidation of state power. Outside of that, why they are doing it, what they want to do with it, what they hope their goals are going to be, and therefore what it means to even consolidate state power.
01:41:40
Speaker
All of of that, there are massive disagreements about within this administration. Something like Stephen Miller's immigration policies are absolutely horrible. for international business.
01:41:52
Speaker
Like horrible. I mean, it's just the agricultural economy alone in the United States is freaking out because of that. And so you have this moment in which capitalism and capitalists that made their money in the globalized economy ended up becoming the people that funded a campaign whose goal it was, was to end with the globalized economy.
01:42:16
Speaker
And then they went, wait a minute, you were serious about that? I thought I was going to be able to talk to you, talk you into like building me a new AI data center or something like that. I didn't think you were actually going to crash the entire globalization order.
01:42:29
Speaker
And that's that's what you did. And again, not in a good way, not the like, yay, we're all a lot more free because we don't have to engage in like wage labor anymore. Capitalism is gone. Like, no, no, it's in the like cyberpunk dystopia kind of way.
01:42:45
Speaker
Right. But that's what we're looking at. And so all these people like Marc Andreessen, people like this who have a certain vision, that's not the vision that's happening now. And I think you're going to watch those people drop out. You're gonna watch those people drop back because they weren't committed to the MAGA project.
01:43:03
Speaker
In the way that Trump understands what that is, they were trying to squeeze their project into that container. in order to be able to capitalize on the people and the energy and the resources that exist within that world.
01:43:19
Speaker
Because people in Silicon Valley, most Americans don't like them. Most people don't even know Marc Andreessen is. he is like not only one of the wealthiest investors in the world, he also helped to write the first browser.
01:43:33
Speaker
but Most people don't even know who this guy is.
Congressional Action and Democratic Strategy
01:43:35
Speaker
right They don't have the ability to take power on their own. What they need is they need existing political movements that they can sort of latch themselves onto and try and ride into power. And they tried to do that this time and they got almost all the way there.
01:43:51
Speaker
They got right up to the apex. And then Trump did a bunch of stuff that they don't like. That's contrary to their vision. So do you see Musk and Trump breaking over this?
01:44:03
Speaker
I could see that being I could see not necessarily a public break. I could definitely see Musk drifting back into the background more using his I have to go back to my businesses as an excuse and sort of drifting back out of the public eye a little bit.
01:44:16
Speaker
I could definitely see him doing that. I think where you're really going to see this fight play out is you're going to see this fight play out between Congress and the executive branch. There are enough Republican House members that are unhappy about this to get a bill through the House.
01:44:31
Speaker
And so if Congress is asserts its ability to govern tariffs again, Now we're going to be in for a, you know, a legal fight that will define a political era. Because I also think it's very realistic that there's a lot of people that if they are opposed to this, they want Trump to own it.
01:44:50
Speaker
Like they don't want to come out and be like, you know, oh, Trump bad. they want things to get so bad, they can kind of come in and be like, whoa, whoa, whoa. But will it be too late at that point? I mean, will the, you know, I think there is, ah in terms of the electoral aspect of this, I mean, I think there is an argument to be made that they'll have to own it as well. They're allowing all this to happen.
01:45:09
Speaker
You know, they're going to be wedded to whatever disaster happens. So should they move now? I don't know. I mean, I think we're kind of asking ourselves questions that, you know, we don't know the answers to, but.
01:45:20
Speaker
Yeah, well, and, you know, to kind of pivot a bit into the next discussion about the protests, like what I'm seeing around where I'm at, which is a deeply, deeply, deeply Democratic area, is the Democratic Party really woke up in like the last two weeks.
01:45:34
Speaker
Like the rally on the 5th was huge. That was mostly Democratic Party aligned organizations. The unions have gotten really loud all of a sudden. we're starting to see billboards all over the place. We're starting to see people registering voters again.
01:45:46
Speaker
you know, they're kind of ramping into campaign mode. even though we're a solid year and almost a year and a half out from the actual midterms, they're ramping into campaign already.
01:46:00
Speaker
And what their messaging is, is the thing that Trump says about workers getting screwed over is right. But look at what he's doing. He's hanging out with these billionaires and firing everyone and like crashing the economy. And you're the ones that are going to pay for this billionaire's attempt to rebuild, restructure your life.
01:46:19
Speaker
And there's this like deep sense of restful resentment that's kind of like wrapped into that whole way of talking about it. But there is this deep resentment of the social engineering components of this, almost regardless of the outcomes.
01:46:35
Speaker
Just a deep resentment. Now, of course, what the Democrats don't talk about is they themselves are a party of social engineering, right? Like they themselves have tried to use the mechanisms of the state to rebuild society.
01:46:47
Speaker
Like the Republicans are not alone in this. It's just Trump is doing it very overtly and in very sort of abrupt ways. And the people that he's surrounded himself to do it with come from a very specific class composition.
01:47:01
Speaker
And that's really noticeable. And so what I'm seeing a lot is I'm starting to see ah Democratic Party that is positioning itself to be able to benefit from the discontent that gets generated By what Trump is doing and what they did on April 5th was the beginning of their attempt to sort of be like to get out ahead of the protest movements and go, OK, cool, we're going to get out ahead of this and then we're going to steer right back into the electoral system. So everyone go focus on the midterms.
01:47:32
Speaker
Right. And that was the tone of a lot of those rallies. It was very electoral. It was very basic. Getting out to vote and knocking on doors was like one of the things that was said at the rally around here a lot.
01:47:43
Speaker
And like there were elected officials at it and and stuff like this. It was an acceptable opposition. It was an acceptable opposition because what the Democrats, I think, have realized is that. All the way back to the anti-war movement, they've been behind us.
01:47:59
Speaker
That we're always out there first. We're always on the front and then they have to like scurry behind us. and try and like you know get rid of the radicals on the street and come to a compromise and try and gain legitimacy that way and try and like suck up all the moderates in the process.
01:48:16
Speaker
right like This is their m MO. They've been doing this since the labor movement. This is how the Democratic Party works. Instead of doing that this time, it looks like they're trying to get out ahead of it. They're trying to essentially create dynamics that...
01:48:29
Speaker
I don't want to say are like the Tea Party, but aren't entirely dissimilar in the sense that there are a small number of large organizations that are involved in coordinating many local actions. And then treating that as the resistance, not one elements of what's going on, not as one approach to what's happening, but as the resistance.
01:48:50
Speaker
Right. Because during the first Trump years, the Democratic Party really lagged behind us. And all the way up through 2020, they were fighting us about
Genuine Resistance Beyond Protests
01:48:59
Speaker
stuff. And what they saw happen was they saw themselves lose a lot of legitimacy with younger people in the process of doing that.
01:49:06
Speaker
And so what I think they're trying to do now is they're trying to get out ahead of protests. They're trying to say, look, we're here, we're doing this, and we're going to be the ones that organize the protests. If you want to come to the protests, you've got to come to ours.
01:49:18
Speaker
By the way, here's our nonviolence guideline. Right. Like that was the tone I picked up. But that tone is different than the tone that they had like four weeks ago. And so I'm noticing this kind of shift in the way that they're starting to approach things. But the demonstrations on April 5th, I think we have to be somewhat like careful. if I mean, it's great that there are a lot of people out there. like Don't get me wrong.
01:49:42
Speaker
You know, my mom was there. bunch of people I knew were there. Like, don't get me wrong. was great a bunch of people were there. But we have to be incredibly careful and intentional to make sure that that is not understood as what resistance is.
01:49:55
Speaker
Like that was a chance to hang out in a park with bunch of people that think the same thing you do. That's not what a resistance movement looks like. And so if we're going to participate in those kinds of things, that's great. But we have to recognize that that is always going to be fundamentally insufficient for the moment that we are facing.
01:50:11
Speaker
And the moment that we're facing is one of material conflict with the state, not like just in the way that we tend to understand that at protests, but in the sense that we are now in a conflict with the state. We don't get a choice about things like operational security and, you know, direct action. and Like these are how we have to operate because the state is trying to wage a declared conflict against us.
01:50:35
Speaker
Right. Like we are in an era of repression that is important to understand as well as the stakes of what's going on. So like while April 5th might not meet that, I think what it does show is like there is this attempt by the Democratic Party to get out ahead of it.
01:50:48
Speaker
And we have to be both attentive to that and also incredibly cautious of that at the same time, you know, while that's happening. Yeah, i think people should be aware that like the group Indivisible, which is sort of like a progressive Democratic aligned groups. I think it's grassroots. I'm sure it has lots of funding. It's grassroots in the sense that like most of the organizers are just people that sign up. And I know they've had a huge influx of people joining the group and setting up chapters since Trump came into power.
01:51:16
Speaker
They were monumental in like flipping the house blue in 2018. Sure. That's the plan to do it now. Yeah, I agree that it really does have a progressive Tea Party feel to it.
01:51:30
Speaker
I think that like the Tesla protest, its limitations are sort of made up in the makeup of the people that are out there. And I feel like ah one of those key limitations is there's almost a certain sort of conservative nature to it in that a lot of this is hearkening back to like we want to return sort of to the Biden era, you know, hands off social security. We basically just want to go back to the way things were, which I think is really a mistake. And we should be.
01:52:01
Speaker
critical of that. you know We want to push back, and I'm not saying, of course, we want to like cheerlead social security being ravaged or privatized or anything. Of course, we want to like defend what exists in terms of protections for poor and working people, but we should be clear that we want to get rid of the old neoliberal order as well and want something totally different, even if we understand that Trump is not you know an alternative But yeah, i think I think there's a question of like how much we can engage or you know build at these demonstrations. I think they're, like everything, I think they're sort of a litmus test for where we're at, which is that a lot of...
01:52:45
Speaker
you know the sort of demographics that are very, that are coming out to these demonstrations, largely white, largely sort of progressive democratic aligned folks that are angry about the doge cuts that are personally impacted. I mean, obviously they're very animated by this. I think this is sort of a different sort of feel than the people that were coming out to say like the George Floyd protests or even the Palestine stuff.
01:53:12
Speaker
which were more downly mobile young people, zoomers and millennials that were upset about, you know, structural things happening and pushing back against that.
01:53:24
Speaker
And i think, but I, I mean, I do think like these things are good, obviously like the, they, they show that there's mass disaffection with, things that are going on. i mean, it's harder now for the media and other people to be like, you know where are the protests? Like they're literally happening all over. I mean, every time you look around, there's an ICE protest, there's a Tesla protest, there's a hands-off protest, there's unions are protesting now. Unions are actually really stepping up.
01:53:51
Speaker
and demanding that these people that have been disappeared, many of them are union members. The guy that was sent to El Salvador over an administrative error, according to the Trump administration, he was a member of a union.
01:54:03
Speaker
His union's coming out against that. So, I mean, more and more people are standing up. There's demonstrations happening all over. i think it's ah a question of us finding a way to interact with people and share skills that people have and also just involve them in organizing. So things don't turn into just people turning out for these big events. And I think that's like kind of what we're seeing with the Bernie rallies is that they're set up in the sense that they sort of have this feel of a social movement, like something is happening. There's thousands of people.
01:54:37
Speaker
But then of course the question is what do we do with that? Is it actually going to be something that challenges the state's power and actually leverages the power of all these people, like through strikes, through protests,
01:54:51
Speaker
blockades through mass protests, or is it just going to be like, we're just going to basically hype people up and then get, get them ready to vote. And I think that the thing that we need to remind ourselves is like you said, they're really getting in front of this thing is that we actually have the power to steer where things are going. I mean, people are organizing this.
01:55:11
Speaker
People are taking action. And I think people, this is a time when people can experiment and do things, and meet the moment where they're at. like And especially if like you said, the economy gets worse. I mean, I think that we'll see another wave of mutual aid projects take off, just like we saw during the COVID-19 pandemic, the start of it. I think that it's very possible that you know anarchists and other autonomous activists could have a key role in doing that.
01:55:41
Speaker
you know I can totally see that spreading and across the social terrain. Yeah, I mean, it's it's it's a wild time. i think, you know, what's so so crazy about this moment is that, you know, if we understand the Trump administration to be this authoritarian project, which obviously it is, its authoritarian nature derives not from like, you know, groups of Proud Boys going across and, you know, neighborhood to neighborhood or even like, you know, military tanks on the streets, but it's just from the weaponization of the bureaucracy and politicizing them.
01:56:13
Speaker
But also just in like this, what I've been calling like bureaucratic refusal. It's like, oh, we sent this guy to El Salvador because like the government paid us millions of dollars and now he's just there and we're just refusing to go get him.
01:56:25
Speaker
So it's like the barbarism is within just the the sheer inertia and bureaucracy of these institutions themselves and just their decisions that they're making.
01:56:37
Speaker
Which is very terrifying in a lot of ways, because, I mean, this is a massive bureaucratic fucked up system, you know? Yeah. Well, and what's what that means is that it plays out in microaggressions, you know, and that's really important for us to recognize that.
Building Resilient Communities and Local Activism
01:56:54
Speaker
What are we watching with students getting detained and deported? It's not that they're showing up at a group meeting and rounding up 20 people and putting them in vans and driving them off to the airport.
01:57:05
Speaker
It's that they're kidnapping individual students off the street. Right. They're losing, quote, losing the paperwork. Like there's a soldier who for the veteran of the Iraq war is also in the prison in El Salvador because he had applied for citizenship after getting out of the army in 2006 and they gave him temporary status.
01:57:25
Speaker
And then lost his paperwork. And then he got arrested and put in prison because he had a PTSD attack and shot up a porch full of people. So his paperwork was just lost in the system.
01:57:35
Speaker
He got out of prison two months ago, got detained when he got out. And deported. That is just that's a random microaggression that could have been any number of hundreds of people.
01:57:49
Speaker
that are in a similar situation that that could have happened to. And it didn't happen to any of the rest of them, just one. That's what makes it so arbitrary and unpredictable. And that's what makes it so effective, is it creates a sort of ambient fear and anxiety and waiting.
01:58:04
Speaker
But we can't do that. We can't do that. You know I've been doing these things for long enough that I know that when we fall into that mindset in which we can't trust anything, then we end up destroying ourselves.
01:58:17
Speaker
Right. Turn on each other. In reality, what we have to do is we have to make our political relationships in these moments not superficial. Right. It's not about share this opinion with someone.
01:58:30
Speaker
Right. We have to find the people that we want to be around. We have to hold those people tight. like This is a moment where we really have to have each other's back, not just people in our club or like, you know, on the cool kid team or whatever, but like the dude who lives up the street from your social center.
01:58:47
Speaker
You know, the kids who, you know, have broken down shoes, who run past every day after school, you know, the people who like can't get enough food to eat.
01:58:59
Speaker
Like these are the people that we have to hold close. There's nothing else. All of the survival mechanisms to make capitalism palatable gone. Right. Like they're disappearing. You know, where I'm at, food that was going to go to the food bank that would have fed Like 500,000 people over the course of the next month just didn't show up because some bureaucrat in D.C. canceled a grant.
01:59:21
Speaker
Right. This is the Rust Belt. Like a lot of those people just won't eat. You know that those kinds of microaggressions, those kinds of harms. Right. They're invisible. Right. They're invisible.
01:59:32
Speaker
And again, you know, with the the food bank example you you raise, I think this, again, is a real opportunity i mean I hate to you know frame it as such because it's it's terrible, but i mean it is an opportunity for us to step up and not only organize around that and do something about it, which people like us have you know muscle memory, so to speak, of doing things like that, but also call out you know the old saying, you know only anarchists can say what anarchists can say, you know to call out the crisis of the state in capitalism and that this is not an alternative
02:00:07
Speaker
to you know the decades of neoliberalism and unfettered capitalism that people have been experiencing and i think again you know one of and i think this has kind of been on a slow boil but i think a lot of the one of the things that i'm hopeful about about the sort of hands-off tesla stuff is it's people coming together and doing things together and i think One of the things that we should be cautious about, especially like the Democrats kind of coming in and trying to kind of put their hands on everything, is that they will push people away from doing that and they will herd them into the elections.
02:00:44
Speaker
And I think that it's important that we remember โ the best things about moments like this is they get people to come together, organize, like even these like town halls and and unions doing stuff are an opportunity for people to build those relationships.
02:00:59
Speaker
And we've really got to push in that direction to do that. And I think that a lot of people right now are just so overwhelmed by the weight of the moment. They're not,
02:01:10
Speaker
experimenting enough and trying to bring people together, you know, not only just people like ourselves, but just our neighbors and people in the area. Cause a lot of people are freaking out right now. mean, if the protests show anything, it's that a large section of the population is upset, scared. And that's just, I mean, who knows by the time that you hear this, you know, what the economic situation will be like, but it doesn't look great.
02:01:33
Speaker
So I think I encourage people listening to this to like hold events, hold assemblies, hold, Start a mutual aid project, like do something, you know, try get out there, do it.
02:01:45
Speaker
You know, now is the time to really experiment and and do stuff. Well, and start to think about what the needs in your area are and how they're not getting fulfilled. Right. I mean, where I'm at, those needs are everywhere.
02:02:00
Speaker
But one of the things that a lot of friends of mine from out of town will notice when they walk in is there's like free everything when you walk in. There's free COVID tests. There's free masks. There's free condoms. There's free gloves. There's free hand sanitizers. Free hand castabines. There's free this. there's free you know like There's free everything because there's a lot of need.
02:02:18
Speaker
And these are all things that we've heard that people need and we've found out ways to get in enough quantity to give out. And so... You know, really, the thing I just want to encourage everyone to do more than anything, you know, in in moments like this, there's this tendency for us to abstract our resistance heavily to to think about it as us fighting against this abstract state about these abstract issues.
02:02:44
Speaker
Right. But I think this moment needs to remind all of us that at the end of all of that, there's real people who are really suffering. who live in the neighborhood where we run our social centers, who live in the neighborhoods where we have our collective houses, who live in the places where we make our lives.
02:03:03
Speaker
You know, we need to become a part of these places because these spaces now have become the terrain of the conflict. I would argue that they always are. But it's become incredibly obvious that it is now the microaggression, the five ICE agents that storm into the taqueria up the street and cart away half the kitchen staff and try and deport them.
02:03:22
Speaker
The kids that are getting cut off from child care, the doctors at the research hospital that don't have jobs anymore because all their grants got canceled. Right. Those kinds of things.
02:03:33
Speaker
We need to know when those things are happening in our spaces. We need to know when those things are happening in the areas of our homes that we operate in. Right.
02:03:43
Speaker
And we need to be able to respond to those things. What that means is that we have to.
Future of Resistance Movements and Sustainability
02:03:50
Speaker
Not respond to every outrage, not respond to everything by immediately just knee york organizing a protest or going to one or something like that. That's great.
02:04:03
Speaker
But if there's something that we can do that has longevity. That gives us capacity. That gives us resiliency. That gives us the ability to stand up to the repression that is going to come.
02:04:18
Speaker
Or the world that is already collapsing. Those are the things that we should be putting our energy. Those are the things that allow us to make the actions that are taken outside of those spaces impact us less and less.
02:04:33
Speaker
Right. Because we're not at a moment where asking them to stop or asking them to change direction matters. They're not going to. Us getting together at protests is about people meeting each other and building networks and getting energy together.
02:04:46
Speaker
But it's not going to convince them to change direction. Right. What will. Is an inability to operate and impose their agenda, which will get them to change direction, but it will also make that direction matter less and open actual resistance.
02:05:01
Speaker
And so, yeah, people should go to these things. You know, you should go. You should talk to people, out zines, just like be a human at a protest, you know, and just like talk to whoever's next to you.
02:05:13
Speaker
But really go there with an eye towards getting a sense of where the kind of like mainstreamed resistance is. Right. That the sort of like astroturfed, vaguely astroturfed kind of, you know, party aligned resistance is going to be because wherever that direction is, we need to be looking at that very critically and finding spaces adjacent to it.
02:05:37
Speaker
Right. Not that we askew it directly, but that we we ourselves move in different spaces. Right. Anarchists in the United States are incredibly good. Right. At logistics and local organizing and mutual aid and things like this. Right. And this is a time for us to really embrace the idea that the fight sometimes also looks like a potluck.
02:06:01
Speaker
And it sometimes looks like rioting. And it sometimes looks like things on fire. That sometimes looks like garden planting and all of that. is about creating the space for new ways to live and then figuring out new ways to live.
02:06:15
Speaker
Right. That's the point that we're at. We're at the point in which we are just we just have to do that. It's not a question of asking anymore or even fighting for the space. It's a question of asserting that our space is there by driving the state out and then creating new ways to live.
02:06:29
Speaker
But we need communities resilient enough and strong enough with enough capacity to be able to do that. And that doesn't happen just overnight. And that doesn't happen because there's a lot of numbers of people in the street.
02:06:41
Speaker
That happens because of trust. That happens because of real relationships. That happens because of people having a stake in each other's lives, looking out for one another, making sure that everyone comes back.
02:06:53
Speaker
Right. That you leave nobody behind. Right. These are the things that kept the anarchist community in the United States strong to round after round after round after round after round of repression.
02:07:04
Speaker
That's a strong but growing. Like we know how to do this. and We know how to do this. Done it before. We need to recognize that we have this basis, that we're not lost.
02:07:17
Speaker
But what we have to do is we have to move in ways that are unlike ways that we have moved before. And we have to move in ways that are unlike the ways that the big organizations are trying to push everybody in.
02:07:29
Speaker
Right. And a lot of that is going to involve. Us establishing what home is for us wherever we want to post up and recognizing that that's the place that we operate in and getting to know it as well as we humanly can.
02:07:43
Speaker
Right. That is how we are going to have an advantage in this fight. And it is going to be ah struggle coming forward, not just because the state is going to get repressive, but the condition in which we are going to be fighting in is going to be one that is degrading.
02:07:58
Speaker
And that's going to be incredibly difficult to do. So we need to have the communities that can hold us up while we're doing that, that can support people when they lose their jobs, that can make sure that people have housing. Right.
02:08:09
Speaker
We need to do that because if we can't feed ourselves and we can't house ourselves, we can't have the energy to fight. Right. Like that is our task. Our task is to build a resistance movement, not a protest. And sometimes that looks like going to protests, but oftentimes it looks like doing a lot of other things with going to protests being a relatively small part of what we're doing.
02:08:35
Speaker
Thanks for listening to today's episode of The Beautiful Idea, news and analysis from the front lines of anarchist and autonomous struggles everywhere. Catch you next time.