Watch on: Instagram, Facebook, TikTok, and Youtube.

Longer Video Script:

The photographic evidence in the Epstein files really did it for me.

You don’t need to go through all three million documents. Reach into the bag, pull out just two of them. That should be enough. I think.

The first is a letter from a law firm to the US District Attorney. It contains photographic evidence of a prepubescent child being abused, horrifically, by multiple men.

The men are redacted.

“Abuse” doesn’t really cover what’s happening. I’ll put the description from the letter on screen. Trigger warning. Pause if you want to.

Content warning: graphic description of child abuse.

That’s one survivor. One document out of three million.

Put it back in the bag. Pull out document two.

These are court documents from 2007. Another child survivor names people who knew about the abuse and the finances of the operation. She says she brought in around 50 other girls like herself.

The people she names run our government and our economy. At the very best, they knew and did nothing.

Two documents. Three million released. An unknown number still withheld… for some reason.

There are over 1,200 survivors, and only two people have gone to jail for this?

I find it hard to believe they were all trafficked to one guy…

(stage whisper) especially when the photos show multiple men.

This is not left versus right. Not Democrat versus Republican. It’s the Epstein Class versus everyone else.

The names in these files are the power elite. CEOs. Wall Street people invested in everything around you right now. Cabinet members from the Trump administration, the Obama administration, and the Bush administration. Billionaire and millionaire donors from both parties.

These are the people who decide what your life actually looks like. Your healthcare. Wages. Retirement. War and peace. Down to how many potholes are on your street.

And when they email each other, they don’t really like us that much!

Peter Thiel is in there hating on democracy. There are emails about getting rid of the poor altogether. A top Obama official is hating on the unwashed masses while she chums it up with Epstein to advance her career years after his conviction.

Perpetrator names: lots redacted. Survivor names and pictures: some not redacted.

What’s that mean?

Multiple administrations had these documents for years. And did nothing.

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Other countries have arrested royalty over this. Literally, the brother of the King of England.

Over here, worse than silence, we kinda have a cover-up going on.

If nothing happens after what we already know, then the idea that this country works by the people should be dead, if it isn’t already. I don’t know what else could kill it.

If investigations do happen, we’re told by powerful people that it could collapse the whole system, that the people in these files are so embedded in how our economy and politics function that pulling on this thread brings everything down.

Either way, there’s no going back.

If you’re still seeing this as a partisan story, I think you’re looking at it wrong.

This isn’t Republicans versus Democrats.

It’s people who have to go to work tomorrow versus people who were on that island, or wanted to be, or knew someone who was and did business with them anyway.

That’s the actual divide. The only one that matters right now.

The candidates you’re going to be stuck with in November are being chosen right now in primaries happening from March through June. Every congressional seat is up. That means yours.

Find whoever’s running and ask them:

What are you going to do about this?

The answer should be justice, like anyone else would face, and taking power away from this criminal elite.

Because at this point, “move on” is not an answer.

I’ve seen enough. You should, too.

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Post Caption:

3 million Epstein Files. You only need these 2.

We already know enough to react. The evidence is in the documents: a child abused by multiple men, 1,200+ survivors, only two people in jail, and a lawless bipartisan ruling elite that knew for decades and kept the party going anyway.

The matter now is investigations and accountability. Other countries have arrested royalty. What will we do?

The Republicans in power are showing us their plan right now. It’s a cover-up, and their guy is all over the files.

So what will the Democrats, and the candidates they send to Washington in November, do?

Every congressional seat is up in 2026. The primaries are happening right now. And there is one question that should disqualify any candidate who can’t answer it:

Will you investigate and hold accountable members of your own party who are in these files, even if they’re major donors?

Reid Hoffman. Top Obama officials. Key Kamala donors. The money that runs the Democratic Party has names in these files. Any candidate who won’t say out loud that they’ll go after their own donors isn’t running against the Epstein Class.

It’s Democratic Tea Party Time. Give us candidates who run hard against this entrenched, bipartisan criminal elite and mean it. Power back to people who weren’t on the island and have to go to work tomorrow.

The longer version and further reading is in my newsletter. Link in bio.

#epsteinfiles #epstein #news #politics #elections

More Stuff For You:

1. This Reddit thread from Congressman Maxwell Frost (D- FL 10). Maxwell Frost is currently the youngest member of Congress and the first member elected from Gen Z. He asked the Reddit community which Epstein files they’d like him to review unredacted as part of his official duties on the House Oversight Committee. The comments are a smorgasbord of depravity from the files.

2. The source documents for the photographic evidence mentioned in the video (EFTA00078204). Content warning: graphic descriptions of child abuse.

3. The court documents where a survivor names the people who knew the nature and finances of the abuse in 2007 (EFTA00727684).

4. Gifts and soup from ‘Uncle Jeffrey’: The Epstein ties that ended Kathy Ruemmler’s run at Goldman. AP News. Feb 13, 2026. Here we have Kathy Ruemmler, formerly General Council at Goldman Sachs, once considered for Attorney General by Obama, chumming it up with Epstein years after his child sex abuse conviction.

5. Jeffrey Epstein victimized 1,000 women and children. His survivors have a message. USA Today. Nov 20, 2025. The survivor network is extensive. It’s hard to believe they were trafficked to one man. Congressman Ro Khanna, principal on the Epstein Files Transparency Act, puts the number of survivors above 1,200.

6. Channel 5 interview with Congressman Ro Khanna. Feb 21, 2026.

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Watch on: Instagram, Facebook, TikTok.

Video Transcript:

Trump supporters, ICE will come for you, too. Maybe you’re last on the list, but you’re on it. Hear me out.

What if ICE isn’t about crime? What if ICE is a tool for the 1%, being used to get one half of working people to hate the other half, while billionaires (and Epstein people) protect themselves and take total control?

The super-rich and their politicians built ICE, funded ICE, and sent it into communities where it killed people who have the same problems you do.

Then they watch you fight your neighbors about it. And I’m sure they laugh, because you let them into power based on a story they just made up.

If the super-rich were honest about what they want, I don’t think anybody would let them run the country. They want you to work forever, rent everything, and be too desperate to step off the hamster wheel and change anything.

That is by design, and it’s working well: 6 in 10 people in the richest country ever are paycheck to paycheck.

And that prints money for the rich because while everyone is trying to survive, they BOUGHT the stock market. 93% of stock market wealth belongs to the top ten percent. That means you go to work, and they make the BIG money.

But if you focused on that, the rich probably wouldn’t stay in power. So they made up a story for you to believe. They said the problem is: immigrants, trans people, woke, DEI, CRT — anyone but the rich and their greed.

Then they said, “ We’re gonna make ICE and go fight those monsters that we told you about. These liberal pussies are gonna cry about it. And you’re gonna love it.”

But no one is buttering your bread, man. The people ICE is killing and terrorizing are locked out of power, just like you, just like me.

And as it gets harder for you or your kids to “live the American Dream”, you’ll do one of two things. Either shut up and wave the flag as it gets really ugly, or you might hit the streets…

Where you will learn that this standing army, that plays by its own rules, that answers to the president (who answers to billionaires), was actually for you too. The story they made up was bullshit. And you bought it.

Don’t find out the hard way that you’re on the list, too. If any part of you didn’t like what you saw in Minneapolis, really ask yourself if the rich people controlling ICE give a shit about your life. I promise you they don’t.

Further Information:

1. On ICE detaining people with no criminal record: Immigrants with no criminal record now largest group in Ice detention: Government data shows 16,523 people with no record, versus 15,725 with a record and 13,767 with pending charges. The Guardian. September 2025.

2. On ICE detaining U.S. Citizens: We Found That More Than 170 U.S. Citizens Have Been Held by Immigration Agents. They’ve Been Kicked, Dragged and Detained for Days. Pro-Publica. October 2025.

3. On ICE killing and injuring people: A Running Count of How Many People ICE Has Killed and Injured. ICE doesn’t share its violent incidents with the public. So here’s our list. The American Prospect. January 2026.

4. On immigrants abiding by the law more than US-born people: Law-abiding immigrants: The incarceration gap between immigrants and the US-born 1970-2020. Stanford University. July 2023.

   1. “As a group, immigrants have had lower incarceration rates than the US-born for 150 years. Moreover, relative to the US-born, immigrants’ incarceration rates have declined since 1960: immigrants today are 60% less likely to be incarcerated (30% relative to US-born whites).”

5. On Epstein meeting with the guy who founded the place where Q ANON swirled together and blamed the elite pedophile ring on… not Epstein and his friends: The New Epstein Files Are Reopening the Pizzagate Box. Vanity Fair. February 2026.

6. On Marjory Taylor Greene saying the quiet part out loud: MAGA is a lie.

Housekeeping:

OGs on this rag know I’m not the most consistent when it comes to publishing. That one’s on me! So here’s a quick rewind and a few updates.

I started The Holler in 2021 while bartending for a day job, soon after moving back home to Appalachia. The goal remains the same: talk plainly about the balance of power and how we can make it better for ordinary people.

A lot has happened since then. And fast! Not long after launching this newsletter, I found an audience on TikTok. In 2023, I got steady freelance work with More Perfect Union and hung up the bar towel. Last summer, I joined MPU part-time as a field reporter, which has been genuinely great. That collaboration led to an Emmy nomination in 2023 and an Emmy win in 2025.

All of that has been lovely, fruitful, intense labor. It’s also meant that I never quite locked in a good balance here. I’m hoping to do that. The Holler is an evolving project with a few ideas in the works. So, stay tuned!

In the meantime, I’ve updated the About page with the current vibe and direction. To those of you who’ve been supporting it for years: the biggest hell yeah, and thank you! Really.

If you need to manage your subscription, you can do that here.

When the big picture feels overwhelming, the small details stick. The burn fades from mind, and reality floods back in. I’m driving Bernie Sanders through coal country on another stop of his Fighting Oligarchy tour.

Thank you to Josh Hirschfeld-Kroen (Editor), Braiden Maddox and Clara Haizlett (Cinematographers), Meg Herschlein and Chai Dingari (Supervising Producers), and the entire team at More Perfect Union.

This isn’t Bernie’s first trip to West Virginia, or the state’s first clash with oligarchy.

In 2016, he swept all 55 counties in the Democratic primary, just as Trump did in the general. After Clinton dispatched him and then lost to Trump, Sanders returned to the coalfields in 2017, drawing renewed interest for his connection to working people.

Now, he buckles up beside me and politely declines snacks. At 84, Bernie is here to test whether his message still resonates, and whether the ember of class rage that once fueled West Virginia’s labor wars still burns. With the past behind us and the future uncertain, we set out for Bloody Mingo County to find out.

It’s a time of crisis, both immediate and structural.

Under Donald Trump, the U.S. military occupies major cities. Judges are arrested. Court orders ignored. Extrajudicial killings abroad serve as a pretext for war. Checks and balances are reduced to empty words. A bipartisan, two-year genocide streams on our screens 24/7. Political assassinations. The list goes on.

But beneath all of it is a deeper, bipartisan crisis: an economic system—capitalism—that eats itself. And it is absolutely chowing down right now.

Work, consume, repeat. Try not to let the dumpster fire swallow you whole. Billionaires hoard fortunes beyond comprehension. Republicans want more of that. Democrats long for the “normal” that produced Trump, his minions, and for-profit healthcare. Since 1975, $79 trillion has been transferred from workers to elites. The headlines forecast what’s next: “Elon Musk, World’s First Trillionaire.”

And what about it trickling down?

America has a cartel problem. Not the kind we’re taught to fear, but the corporate kind. Six companies control 90% of U.S. media. Three firms—BlackRock, Vanguard, and State Street—are the top investors in every single S&P 500 company. Tech giants, landlords, and pharmaceutical companies dominate daily life like cartels. Everything you touch, the particles in the air you breathe, is tied to them in some way. And they control politics, too. It’s oligarchy, folks. Big time.

West Virginia has known oligarchy since its founding in 1863. Trillions in coal, timber, and gas have been pulled from its hills by its people, yet it remains among the poorest states. Where did the money go?

In 1921, it hit the fan at the Battle of Blair Mountain, still the largest labor uprising in U.S. history. Ten thousand striking miners of all races wore red bandanas around their necks as they fought and died for respect and a voice. They clashed with 3,000 company-backed forces: deputies, strikebreakers, law enforcement, and eventually 27,000 federal troops.

The miners lost the battle. The setback was devastating. But their struggle became the foundation for the New Deal and the closest thing this country has had to shared prosperity (though mostly for whites).

Though West Virginia appears firmly red today, it was strongly blue for around 80 years. That ember of class solidarity from the mine wars, strong enough to sustain the New Deal coalition, is baked into the state’s DNA.

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Bernie came here to see if it can burn again. He’s spent fifty years fighting the class war and side-stepping the culture war. Both he and Trump swept the state in different elections. That strange yin-yang reveals West Virginia’s contradictions: populist rage at elites, channeled in opposite directions.

Now, slumping in my passenger seat, Bernie heads once again into Trump country. He’s drawing crowds with a simple message: it doesn’t have to be this way. Trillions have been stolen, but people can still decide they want nice things: healthcare, wages that support families, a livable future. If one man can hoard a trillion dollars, is it any less absurd to demand that everyone have enough?

We live in an era of shattered myths. Checks and balances. The American Dream. Government for the people. They may have been illusions all along, just enough to keep us politely going to work. Now elites loot in the open, convinced they’ve secured too much power for us to fight back. But history rhymes: the miners lost at Blair Mountain, then won the war a decade later with the New Deal.

People here are angry. You’ll hear it in this video: Alicia’s mom gone to pills, a young mother crying in the grocery aisle, Kristen buying $300 worth of shoes made in sweatshops for the kids. That anger could go sideways at scapegoats, or upward at those with real power. Bernie’s visit begs the question: Can we get it right before it’s much worse?

As bleak as politics can feel right now, I know we can. That gives me hope. Smaller, poorer countries do better by their people all the time. Some have as many guns as we do, but nowhere near our gun deaths. Why? Maybe because they’ve reigned in the greed and brutal edges of a society that drives people to fear and desperation. Nothing stops us from doing the same—except the will to do it, to get angry at the right villains, and to demand a society with nice things for everyone.

Elections might look different if more leaders carried Bernie’s torch instead of parroting Chuck Schumer’s hollow centrism. People don’t resonate with visionless platitudes. They respond to class politics. They always have.

In Bernie’s brief visit, the lone lion still carrying the banner of class politics, I caught a glimpse of what a new labor movement might look like. The raw materials are lying right here from the last time people rose up against all odds.

Where we go from here is up to us.

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How has this political moment changed you? (or comment anything else on your mind)

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We kick off this week with some real backsliding democracy stuff — the arrest of Judge (yes, a judge) Hannah Dugan by the FBI under the watch of political zealot and full-blown lunatic Kash Patel. We drag the DNC’s “neutrality” fight with modest reformer David Hogg into the daylight. We break down the difference between real populism and fascism through the lens of Sith Lord Steve Bannon (I still haven’t watched Star Wars). And we talk about why the political moment is ripe for a hostile takeover of the only other major political party — one that, while captured by performatively progressive war-horny corporate overlords, still isn’t completely in the clutches of tyrannical, fragile, fascistic idiots! Get in loser, we’re gunning for the good life!

Please rate and review the show and share it with a friend. It’s the best way to support us for free! And now,

They’re eating the laws. They’re arresting the judges.

Trump’s FBI arrested a sitting judge.

This story will spin out in a bunch of directions. What is ICE doing in courtrooms without warrants? What was the intention of the judge? Who is this person they’re after anyway?

The threads will be endless and almost certainly buried by a fresh onslaught of even more unbelievable headlines in another action-packed week of What the Hell Is Going On in America?

But let’s not miss the forest for the trees. There’s a trend here:

• Crush due process — the keystone of the Constitution they claim to love (spoiler: they don’t)

• Attack press freedom

• Punish political enemies

• Ignore Supreme Court rulings

• (Screw the people you’re claiming to save)

• And now? Arrest judges

The full apparatus of the post-9/11 security state, the one Edward Snowden exposed 11 years ago, is now in the hands of people like Patel and Trump’s Counterterrorism Czar, Seb Gorka.

And it’s aimed squarely at “the enemy within” – whoever they decide that is.

So, who are these guys? What do they believe? Let’s look at the receipts:

Here’s Gorka:

“There’s a line that divides us. Do you love America, or do you hate America?… You have to ask yourself, are they technically aiding and abetting [criminals and terrorists]? Because aiding and abetting criminals and terrorists is a crime in federal statute.”

Not to be outdone, Kash Patel, director of the FBI:

“We will go out and find the conspirators — not just in government, but in the media… Whether it’s criminally or civilly, we’ll figure that out. But yeah, we’re putting you all on notice.”

They’re not subtle. They’re broadcasting it.

This isn’t just another crazy headline. We’re the frog, and the water is coming to a boil. It’s time to start asking yourself: How involved are you ready to be? What’s your plan?

Get comfy with the idea of strike action. Educate yourself on actions that aren’t just voting every couple of years. Update the kind of candidates you’re willing to back, because if they don’t match the moment with a clear diagnosis of the problem and a vision to solve it, they won’t be much use. The country and the crisis look different now than ever, and 9 out of 10 people in Congress are living far, far in the past.

They’re telling us exactly what’s coming. And just like every corporation that swears it cares about more than a dollar, they’ll go as far as we let them.

What is a “Populist Nationalist,” and is it Steve Bannon?

No. Steve Bannon is a classic fascist. A guy who sells performative masculine fantasy to working people as a pacifier while robbing them blind.

Steve is seen here cautioning the country about where things might go. He lays out three paths: Bernie and AOC, himself and the pack of loathsome losers he calls “populist nationalists”, or, more ominously – Luigi.

But let’s not forget how regular people reacted to Luigi. They didn’t recoil in fear. And unless you run a conglomerate that only profits by denying life-saving medical care, why would you?

No, a significant chunk of the public leaned in. Grannies (and non-grannies) on Facebook called him handsome. The internet flew into a Robin Hood-coded meme frenzy. Normies frequently whisper to me in interviews that while they don’t celebrate violence, they can understand why it happens.

ALL CIRCUS NO BREAD

What we’re seeing here is Steve Bannon doing his job. It’s a specific job that he does well. He might be the only guy besides Trump who excels at it: bringing the working class behind an elite agenda that’s of, by, and for billionaires.

I’ve always had a problem with Bannon and his crew calling themselves “populists.” Populism is William Jennings Bryan, Cross of Gold-type stuff — delivering material benefits for the people. Bannon and Trump don’t deliver bread. They deliver fantasy – All circus. No bread.

They sell masculine myths about hierarchy, racial and gender order, greatness, strength – all wrapped in patriotic cosplay, while ripping all of us off. Right now, they’re:

• Gutting your health care

• Coming for your Social Security

• Killing the regulations that keep rats out of your food and your kids out of factories

• Selling off public services to giant corporations that charge you for the right to survive

That’s not populism. That’s a con. It’s fascism — a slick pitch selling a billionaire dictatorship wrapped in working-class drag.

He is right to reference Bernie and AOC. They’re a threat to this whole game because they offer people something real. But a large factor in what gave Steve Bannon power in the first place wasn’t some genius strategy — it was today's Democratic Party.

Every fascist needs a straw man. And the corporate Democrats play the role perfectly. If the opposition can’t fight its way out of a wet paper bag, much less deliver the bread, the fascists win. Instead of looking like a combination sex offender/plastic surgery convention, they appear as a real alternative.

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And because of that, we’re allowed to say that 400 of the richest people in history are running humanity into the ground to preserve levels of private wealth that make the United States defense budget look like a piss ant. Try saying that on CNN.

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People are showing up to Bernie and AOC rallies in record numbers because they feel what we all feel: we’re sliding into total control by the dumbest, greediest people in America.

And while our winner-take-all elections shoehorn a country of 340 million people into two viable political parties, let’s be real – in many states and districts, the corporate Democrats are third-party spoilers to compelling independents.

Look at 2024. There were 33 Senate races across the country. Democrats underperformed the last Democrat that ran in 29 of those races. They only broke even in 3 races. The only meaningful overperformance, and by these standards it was huge, was Dan Osborn. He was a labor leader in Nebraska running as an independent with no Democrat in the race. He outpaced the last Democrat by 8 points in a ruby red state. 8 points. The next closest races were the three that broke even.

How many states and districts are as red or redder than Nebraska? Plenty. In all of them, you could argue that a Democrat is the third-party spoiler to a compelling independent running on a working-class agenda and personal freedom for all people.

The truth is simple.

The Democratic party is ripe for a hostile takeover – just like Trump did to the GOP. Don’t confuse this with a “reform the Democrats from the inside” plan. That’s not what I’m talking about.

I’m talking about a Trump-style takeover – a movement that sweeps through the only viable party left for people who aren’t down with how things are going. A movement made up of people who have to work to survive, tapping into the clear appetite for real economic populism that Bernie and AOC are proving through their record rallies. An appetite that cuts across the left-right divide. Trump supporters are hungry for it. They’ve been telling me for years.

But in the absence of a real political movement offering the goods, they’re chowing down on lies from a dude running a bait-and-switch for billionaires.

This is why Democrats need to look inward. The call is coming from inside the house. If you’re swapping real material gains – stuff that goes above and beyond the New Deal – for more means-tested corporate crap, you’re doing more to empower MAGA than most.

So, take it over. The bums won’t throw themselves out. Primaries where the party is viable. Labor independents where it’s not. Put the corporate core of the party out of business. Let them start podcasts with The Bulwark. Let them run cute ads with the Lincoln project in harmless obscurity.

Let a new generation of real-deal economic populists deliver the goods that Trump can only lie about.

The DNC’s “Neutrality” Scam Is Back. David Hogg and his Modest Reforms are the Target.

Ken Martin is beefing with David Hogg.

Martin, the newly elected chair of the Democratic National Committee, is notable for defending the idea of “good billionaires” during his campaign for the seat. David Hogg, the 25-year-old reformer and Parkland shooting survivor, was elected as one of five DNC vice chairs in 2025.

Here’s what Hogg said after winning:

“I want to build a Democratic Party that is authentic, relatable, earns people’s trust, and wins again — and that stops apologizing for being who we are. We don’t need to be cowards. We need to be bold, aggressive, and fight.

The reason people should vote for us isn’t just because we’re not Republicans — it’s because we’re damn Democrats.”

Hogg recently unveiled plans to spend $20 million through his group, Leaders We Deserve, to run primaries against do-nothing Democrats in seats with no danger of flipping Republicans.

He’s also tried to extend an olive branch, saying:

“It isn’t necessarily just out with the old and in with the new. I would say it’s out with the ineffective and in with the effective.”

In response, Ken Martin said he’s drafting bylaw changes to require DNC officers to stay “neutral” in all Democratic primaries.

New names. Same old game. A corporate establishment, now fronted by Ken Martin, is trying to push out a young, moderate reformer by making the debate about “neutrality.”

Let’s get into that. And let’s start by calling “neutrality” what it’s always been — an act.

This is politics, baby. Centrists always pull the same move: Oh, civility! Unity! Neutrality! But it’s just branding. It’s a way to paint any movement away from their grip on power as chaotic, biased, or dangerous. They’re not neutral. They’re just trying to look like the adults in the room while maintaining a death grip on power as everything falls apart.

The only thing in the middle of the road is yellow lines and roadkill. Politics is never neutral, nor is the DNC. Best proof? 2016.

Leaked emails showed DNC officials plotting to use Bernie Sanders’ faith against him in the South, drafting talking points for Hillary Clinton, and treating the Clinton campaign like the default. No surprise. Most DNC staff were Clinton-era loyalists.

Debbie Wasserman Schultz had to resign. Donna Brazile took over and later confirmed that Hillary’s campaign had taken operational control of the DNC before the primary even ended – thanks to a fundraising agreement that gave them power over staffing, messaging, and the budget.

So yeah – not neutral.

After the fallout, they slapped together the “Unity Reform Commission.” It made some marginal changes, like reducing the power of superdelegates, but it didn’t fix the norm. State parties are still little fiefdoms of backstabbing and corporate control.

Then came 2020.

Biden finished fourth in Iowa, fifth in New Hampshire, second in Nevada (where Bernie blew everyone out with 40%) – and then magically, the entire centrist apparatus moved heaven and earth to rescue him in South Carolina and shut Bernie down a second time.

Yes, people voted. But let’s not insult anyone’s intelligence by pretending “neutrality” had anything to do with what goes on behind the scenes when the chips are down.

The same play is now being run on David Hogg, a DNC member whose crime is wanting to primary dead weight Democrats in safe seats. And here’s the wild part: David Hogg isn’t some far-left radical. His reforms are modest. He’s not even close to Bernie (who, by European standards, is center-left).

If David Hogg is “too much” for the Democratic Party, then it’s properly screwed. Because what this reveals, in a surpise to few, is that the DNC will go to any length to stop even the mildest reforms. Even after a second Trump loss. Even with historically low Democratic popularity.

They’ll still cling to decaying, corporate, legacy-seat politicians whose biggest recent accomplishments are racking up medical incidents instead of thwarting fascists or delivering for working people.

There is but one viable party to face all that’s before us. It is the task of people of good conscious to drive out the menace currently neutering its ability to respond to our problems.

These people will put corporate profits over a livable planet. They won’t deliver real wins. And they will lose to Trump again – maybe in 2028. I condemn Ken Martin, the DNC, and this tired power play in the strongest possible terms. The Democratic Party will either be taken over Trump-style, or continue down the path of leaving itself and all of us behind… I guess there’s a third option: some purgatory hell where Gavin Newsom runs a half dozen times as things continue to crumble.

But who’s got time for that? We got a world to win dammit.

A Little Note About a Big Strike: Get Familiar with what a General Strike Really Means.

Up until now, the idea of a general strike has mostly lived on the internet, popping up every time things get bad. It’s always felt a little like the people who threaten to move to Canada at any point during the right-wing nose dive we’ve been on since Toby Keith started singing about cramming a boot in the world’s ass after 9/11.

But the political moment we’re surviving gives us a new lens to look through.

A real general strike means enough of society withholding their labor and participation in the way things work — for long enough — to shut it down, make clear demands, and force real change.

You might’ve seen this “3.5%” idea floating around the internet lately. It comes from political scientists Erica Chenoweth and Maria J. Stephan, who studied 323 major resistance campaigns between 1900 and 2006. Their finding? Every campaign that successfully mobilized 3.5% of the population achieved its goals.

But pay attention to the fine print: Mobilized. Campaigns. Goals.

Not just vibes. Not just outrage.

As Anand Giridharadas put it when interviewing labor dynamo Sara Nelson:

“This isn’t Ferris Bueller’s Day Off.”

In other words, a general strike isn’t just getting 11 million Americans to call in sick one day. That would already be an organizing miracle in this country, but it wouldn’t be enough on its own.

We’re talking about real, organized campaigns: leadership structures, strategy, tactics, timelines, clear demands, total commitment from 3.5% of the population (again, about 11 million people).

We haven’t seen anything like that in America in my lifetime. And it’s not something to take lightly, or to think signing up at generalstrikeus.com is going to magically solve. Only a real movement, with all of the above, can do that. But signing up, educating yourself, and starting to organize right now is the first step. It has to happen before anything else can.

So sign up here. I did.

We’re in a pickle – to put it lightly. And we need to start thinking of ourselves as the only ones who can save us. Pick your poison, the problems are endless. But as Sara Nelson, a woman the Democratic Party (and everyone) should be taking notes from, puts it:

“You have to define the problem, set your demands, and back it up with what you’re willing to do.”

It’s time for each of us to answer the questions: What do we want? And what are we willing to do to get it?

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“Alright, your turn: What’s one real change you want to see, and one thing you’re willing to do for it?”

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Eye on the Ball — A Constant Reminder of What’s in Reach

A dope-ass world where we’re all good.

There’s no good reason why less rich nations can provide their citizens with healthcare, retirement, good wages, union protections, excellent public schools, clean air and water – an entire menu of public services that make the good life easy to live – while we’re told it’s somehow out of reach here.

Whatever excuse the ruling class feeds us is obvious bullshit, and I think that’s important to remember.

They have to tell these lies to justify the mess we’re living in, and to keep up their sociopathic wealth hoarding at everyone else’s expense.

Don’t forget it. There’s an entire world to win – whenever we’re ready to win it.

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And it’s not just puffy-jacket ski bums showing up. They pulled 11,000 in Greeley, Colorado — a cowboy-coded town that smells faintly of meat year-round. 12,000 in Idaho, deep in Ruby Ridge territory. 20,000 in Utah, land of Mormon modesty. Not exactly the drum circle scene. And no offense to any of that — I’m writing this from West Virginia.

But the real story isn’t the size. It’s who is showing up.

Half the people in Denver weren’t even on Bernie’s list. They’re new. And that’s the case at stop after stop on the Fight the Oligarchy tour.

This ain’t a traveling band of Grateful Dead-style superfans. These crowds are full of people from every walk of life — left, right, and confused — showing up to try something different as familiar things crumble around us.

The ground is shifting

I travel the country with More Perfect Union reporting on our political fault lines, and I’m telling you — the tectonic plates are moving.

Everywhere I go, people are whispering the same things, even if they don’t know each other. Working-class Trump voters. Urban liberals with fancy coffee. Corporate middle manager types. It’s not uncommon for very normie people to lean in and share their understanding of the reaction to Luigi Mangione. They’ve all seen the same horror show: health care denials, price-gouged groceries, broken systems rigged for billionaires. They know the big boys are making out like bandits. And they’re looking for someone who will name it and fight it.

We are living through a political realignment. The right already had theirs — it brought us Trump. Now the tectonic energy is hitting the Democratic Party.

In moments like this, parties adapt or die. And we’re about to watch the Democrats make their choice.

Ten progressives ain’t enough

At the Denver rally, you could feel the symbolic torch pass from Bernie to AOC. And maybe to the remaining Squad members and new-age progressives who haven’t been taken out by AIPAC’s bazooka of corporate money.

But here’s the risk: we bottle all this protest and rally energy and hand it to 10 or so known progressives. That’s not a movement. That’s a hit list. There’s a great chance that right-wing PACs will label, lie, divide, and crush them. It’s what the money machine was built for.

What we need now is a cattle call.

1,000 completely new and different candidates, called up from pockets of the country where they’re living through this mess. For Congress. For statehouse. For the thousand down-ballot seats Democrats lost during the Obama years. Take a lesson from the right’s political takeover and flood the zone. Force the billionaires to play defense in 1,000 places at once.

A decentralized, working-class wave is harder to squash than 10 polished progressives that everyone already knows.

Run the Ambers

Amber is a nurse I interviewed at the Denver rally. She’s working two jobs and raising autistic twins. Shortly after introducing herself, she cut right to the point.

“Fuck all the oligarchs trying to run this country. You’re not it. You’re not the country. We are.”

No polish, no focus groups — just crystal-clear rage and the moral authority that comes from living inside a broken system.

She sees the profit motives behind health care denials. She works through hospital staffing shortages driven by union busting. She’s fed up with a ridiculous system where we feed our lives into a machine that only prints money for a handful of robotic, creepy Batman villains.

And she’s the kind of person who belongs on the ballot.

There are thousands more like her — in unions, in crowd lines, in church basements and break rooms across the country. The most talented people you’ve never heard of are sinking their time into jobs that increasingly benefit oligarchs.

They don’t need a consultant. They need a challenge, some support, and a shot at running things. That’s the whole idea behind this country. On paper, anyway.

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Meanwhile, the MAGA machine is on the move

While the non-right is figuring things out, Trump and his dipshit ghouls are sprinting.

It’s impossible to concisely list the depravities of Donald Trump and any of his administrations, but the first 100 days of this one have seen:

• ICE teaming up with the IRS to weaponize tax information for immigration roundups.

• A flood of constitution-shredding attacks on free speech, due process, and press freedom.

• A proposed budget extending tax breaks for billionaires by making drastic cuts to public services like an $880 billion slash to Medicaid, and eliminating the Department of Education. (BTW, spending is higher after all these cuts, and billionaires continue to pay lower true tax rates than working families.)

• A bipartisan continuation of support for the internationally-wanted Netanyahu government and their slaughter of Gazans, of course, but also this heinous AI-video suggesting a Trump casino be built on the rubble.

All while Trump and Melania hawk meme coins to his followers and set up a likely rug-pull to walk off with the cash. This is the president. This is his family. This is our government being auctioned off in public.

He’s got cronies like Elon Musk writing million-dollar cartoon checks in state Supreme Court races, and freaks like Seb Gorka fantasizing about using the surveillance state against political enemies.

They’re not hiding it. They’re building the infrastructure of a billionaire-run autocracy — and we’re only three months in.

The old world is dying. The new one is fighting to get born.

Wave goodbye to the status quo. It’s dead either way.

Climate change has guaranteed a future of massive disruption. At this point, we’re locked in for at least 1.5 degrees of warming – the worst case scenario of the past is the best case scenario right now. The smart money on Wall Street is already planning for 3 degrees. That’s collapse territory. That’s nothing-looks-like-it-used-to territory.

If we don’t act, we get unimaginable disruption.

Action to hold warming where it is now would, in itself, be a massive disruption.

And if we did that, the warming already baked in from what we’ve dumped into the sky would, you guessed it, massively disrupt things.

Either way, big changes are coming down the pike.

The only question left is: who benefits? Who’s in control when the dust settles?

The billionaires are building their plan. Private bunker companies are thriving. AI robo-cop dogs are hitting the streets. They’re listening to Curtis Yarvin who envisions American Monarchy where metropolitan areas are governed by CEO kings.

It’s not red vs. blue, it’s billionaires vs. you. We need to build our plan, and fast.

This is the moment Bernie has been calling for.

Bernie’s been laying the groundwork for his entire career. AOC has brought it into a new generation.

Now they need to go all in. The call for candidates to run any way that wins, including as independents, was a start. Now we need the call that matches the moment.

We don’t need a coronation of 10 known progressives. We need the 10 known progressives AND 1,000 new torch-bearers carrying the working people’s agenda in their own words:

• National healthcare

• Guaranteed social security that’s not a starvation ration

• Living wages and unions for all

• Tax away the kingdom of billionaires

• Bust the monopolies and unleash small community businesses

• Excellent public schools, roads, internet, and water systems

• Public ownership of AI and automation

• An economy and government of, by, and for all of us

That’s the platform for the moment. Now we need the call.

Bernie. AOC. Say it. Put out the challenge. Call up the Ambers. Run them as independents where the party is dead. Run them in primaries where the brand is alive. Build the political machine around them. America will meet you there. Or it won’t, but now’s the moment to try.

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And for dessert…

• So You Want To Be A Radical: Don't define yourself by what you hate, define yourself by what you do about it

• Monopoly Round-Up Monopolies and Fascism: Centralization of economic power facilitates centralization of political power. That was once a hard-won lesson, and it's a lesson we must relearn. Plus, the end of big box tyranny.

AND! Listen to the Jess and John Pod wherever you get your podcasts!

I write this like I’m talking to my friends at a bar. There are typos and occasional embellishments, but no lies. If you’re a lawyer, do not take this seriously… unless that helps.

Damn. A year will really sneak up on you, especially when your work takes off and your country gets hijacked by a cabal of billionaires and their dancing clown. That’s how long it’s been since I last wrote to y’all here. A lot has happened. But we’re back, warts and all.

Hi, I’m John.

A lot of you found me after a speech I gave at the DNC.

Read: The Speech That Brought The Class War To The DNC

My work has evolved, and this newsletter will too. The OGs will remember this as a place where I posted transcripts and sources for the political TikToks I was cranking out while tending bar in the Ohio Valley.

I did that long enough that More Perfect Union and their star team took me under their wing and turned us loose on a bunch of stories (see below). Shoutout to ride-or-dies Nehemiah Stark, Court Fuller, Josh Hirschfeld-Kroen, Josh Miller-Lewis, Meg Herschlein, and the many others I’ve worked with at MPU.

The pace picked up, and in the chaos, I dropped this project for a year. I’m still a freelancer by choice. Those of you living in the wild west of the gig economy (where you can now finance a DoorDash order with something called Klarna) know the feeling—piecing things together, one gig at a time. Jump starting this rag is part of a new balance, and I’m pumped to be back.

To the roughly 250 of you beautiful newsletter pirates who kept your paid subscriptions going through the silence: you made all of the work below possible. I’m eternally grateful. If, for whatever reason, you’re feeling shortchanged, fill out this form and I’ll reach out personally.

What’s next?

This newsletter is changing. But the throughline is still the same: I’ll be writing and commenting on the work I’m doing—

• Short documentaries with More Perfect Union

• Podcasts with Jessica Burbank on The Jess and John Pod

• One-off videos and essays

• And the work closest to my heart: organizing in Wheeling, WV, so that if (when) things fall apart, we’ve got something to fall back on.

I’m a political organizer who frequently commits acts of serious journalism. It’s a weird lane. But hey – Elon Musk and Donald Trump occupy the Oval Office (for now), so smoke ’em if you got ’em.

We’re here to talk about what’s happening to us, who’s doing it, and how we fight back for our fat slice of that pie in the sky. This isn’t sober “objectivity.” We’re proudly biased for the working class. “Objectivity” is too often a fancy way of saying “Let’s not get crazy, things are good how they are.”

I’ll take my best stab at truth and fairness. The conversation will be informal, like it’s at the bar.

So here’s everything I’ve been up to since the last time this landed in your inbox. Drop a comment if there’s something you want to see more of… or for whatever's on your mind.

More Perfect Union:

1. April 3, 2024 - Who REALLY Brought Jobs Back to America? Blue Oval City and first time union workers in the south with More Perfect Union.

2. April 9th, 2024 - We Went to America's Biggest Copper Mine: The Corruption Will Shock You.

3. April 19th, 2024 - How Volkswagen Workers in Tennessee Won a Union

4. April 23, 2024 - How Workers Are Winning the Class War with Shawn Fain

5. April 25th, 2024 - Baltimore Port Workers Are Reeling. Will Anyone Listen?

6. May 14th, 2024 - You Need To Be Paying Attention To This

7. July 3rd, 2024 - The Billionaire Family Ruining NASCAR

8. July 24th - How Oil Barons Steal From Their Truckers

9. August 22nd, 2024 - John Russell Addresses the DNC

10. August 27th, 2024 - We Talked To Real Swing Voters: What They Told Us Will Shock You.

11. September 26th, 2024 - News and Documentary Emmy Nomination for We Went to East Palestine: What We Saw Will Shock You.

12. October 9th, 2024 - Who Do Trump Voters Blame For America's Problems? It's Not Who You Think

13. October 22nd, 2024 - You Won't Believe What We Found Hidden In This Small Ohio Town

14. February 6th, 2025 - “Deport Them All” — Who’s to Blame for Springfield’s Immigrant Crisis?

15. March 14th, 2025 - MEDIA BLACKOUT: America’s Poorest Counties Devastated By Catastrophic Flooding

16. COMING THURSDAY APRIL 10th (ish??) - The Bernie/AOC Interview at the Denver Rally.

17. COMING SOON AFTER THAT - Trump’s first 100 days with More Perfect Union.

I was lucky enough to join forces with Jessica Burbank to form the Jess and John Pod:

18. November 10, 2024 - Politics for the POLITICALLY HOMELESS: Jess & John Pod

19. December 3rd, 2024 - Is Bernie Sanders Starting A 3rd Party? Kamala Harris Resurfaces, Pod Save America Reaction

20. December 11th, 2024 - Luigi Mangione CHARGED? Jessica Burbank and John Russell React

21. December 12th, 2024 - Publishing Luigi Mangione's Manifesto: A Conversation with Ken Klippenstein

22. January 21st, 2025 - TikTok Talk

23. January 24th, 2025 - Elon Musk’s “Nazi” Salute Reaction + Q&A

24. January 31st, 2025 - Pardon Steven Donziger

25. February 12th, 2025 - Why the 2024 Election Should Be Audited and Debunking Right-wing Rumors

26. March 10th, 2025 - How Biden opened the door for the GOP’s anti-worker budget cuts with Stephen Semler

27. March 15th, 2025 - Schumer CAVES on GOP budget, even NORMIE Democrats outraged

28. March 25th, 2025 - Trump officials hilariously add a journalist to their war plan group chat by accident

29. April 4th, 2025 - Did Trump Use ChatGPT For His Tariff Policy?!

Other news appearances:

30. January 20th, 2024 Trump vs. Labor: The Coming Clash Over Class Power, w/ John Russell

JJ Pod Latest Episode: Did Trump Use ChatGPT For His Tariff Policy?!

New Episodes Fridays before noon!

AND! Most of the things I’ve said and done on the internet:

@heyjohnrussell LinkTree

I write this like I’m talking to my friends at a bar. There are typos and occasional embellishments, but no lies. If you’re a lawyer, do not take this seriously… unless that helps.

When you sit down to pay your power bill, you don’t expect to be shelling out money for political corruption. Yet that might be the case if you’re a customer of First Energy or one of its subsidiaries. 

I learned as much when I visited an elderly couple at their home in southern West Virginia. 

Al and Mary Arnette live on a fixed income and are worried sick about paying ever-increasing electric bills. They’re not alone. West Virginia, despite being an energy-rich state, has seen its residential energy bills increase 90% over the last 15 years. That’s the largest increase of any state in the country except one. 

Al could only take so many increases before he had to do something. He wrote a letter to the West Virginia Public Service Commission with the hope that some public official would get to the bottom of it. 

I learned about Al’s letter through the tenacious reporting of Sam Black, a journalist with whom I enjoy working at More Perfect Union. He’s the kind of person you don’t want digging into your business if you’re up to no good. 

Sam’s investigation into the skyrocketing bills that were making West Virginia’s cute old people sweat led back to one notorious corporation: First Energy. 

First Energy is one of the private corporations we entrust with a monopoly to supply electricity to the public in this part of the country. Most of us have a company like First Energy in our lives because, for some reason, we let greedy private businesses handle matters of public interest all the time. 

In exchange for every customer in a market, First Energy and other private utilities are regulated by our government… in theory. This means that they’re supposed to ask the government nicely before they raise everyone’s rates, for example. 

A few years back, First Energy had some financial woes. Their nuclear plants were losing money, and their aging, dirty coal plants weren’t the cash cows they had been in the good ol’ days, thanks to competition from methane and renewables. But rather than change with the times, First Energy hatched a plan to get out of a bind the old-fashioned way – straight-up political corruption. 

The plan was simple: bail out these failing nuclear assets and aging coal plants by sticking over a billion dollars worth of additional charges onto the bills of their customers. Regulatory approval for such a scheme was a non-starter even for the bottom-feeders of Ohio energy regulatory politics. So First Energy opted for another workaround in the form of an exciting new law, House Bill 6. HB6, when passed, would greenlight the bailout scheme *and* kill renewable energy incentives that were fueling the competition. 

First Energy just needed the votes to pass it, but there weren’t quite enough. 

So they set aside 60 million dollars to buy the votes. The money was put in the control of Larry Householder, an Ohio politician who deployed it in the 2018 cycle to elect loyalists across the state to serve in the Ohio House of Representatives, who then helped elect him as Speaker of that same body. In 2019, Householder’s House passed HB6. It was signed by Governor Mike DeWine the same day. 

And they would have gotten away with it if it weren’t for those damned federal agents. The Feds rained on the parade in 2020. Householder and four others were charged with racketeering for the scheme. Householder is currently serving a 20-year prison term. The former chair of the Ohio GOP got 5. Two others are cooperating with investigators and awaiting their sentence. The last of the men charged, well-known Ohio lobbyist Neil Clark, committed suicide while wearing a t-shirt that said “DeWine for Governor.” Take a second and ponder that not-so-subtle message. 

The US Attorney described the fiasco as "likely the largest bribery, money laundering scheme ever perpetrated against the people of the state of Ohio." 

When I moved to West Virginia from Ohio last year, I thought I had left this garbage back across the river. Turns out, maybe I didn’t. 

In 2021, First Energy was fined $230 million for its role in the scandal. Shortly after, First Energy subsidiaries started asking regulators in several states for major rate hikes: $207 million in West Virginia, $185 million in New Jersey, and $40 million in Maryland. All of it begged the question: were rate-payers in these other states paying for the political corruption that First Energy committed in Ohio? 

An Ohio prosecutor thinks so. 

And so do Al and Mary Arnette. In January, I sat on their couch listening to their plan to deal with the direct consequences of political corruption. A growing share of their fixed retirement income was being demanded by Mon Power, their First Energy-owned electric provider, in the form of rate hikes. They did about the only thing any of us could do. They wrote a letter to government regulators on the West Virginia Public Service Commission begging them not to approve the requested rate hike. 

If the world worked like the movie “Mr. Smith Goes To Washington,” that’s all we would have to do. Regulators would take in appeals from the public and boldly defend their interests against corporate greed. 

In our current world, the public interest might as well crawl into an artificially subsidized coal-fired power plant and die. And that’s essentially what happens on the regular. 

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In West Virginia, like other industrial states, the coal industry and the government are two different terms that describe the same thing. 

The state’s governor, Jim Justice, made his fortune in coal. He appointed all three current members of the Public Service Commission—the body that received Al Arnett’s letter and decides on these rate hike cases. One member of the Commission served as president of the West Virginia Coal Association for nearly 30 years. The president of the Public Service Commission was formerly a lobbyist for… you guessed it… First Energy. 

These are the people tasked with representing the public interest against the coal industry: A coal baron, appointing people who spent their careers working for the coal industry, to make rules about the coal industry. 

They’ve done the job exactly as you would expect them to. At the same time that First Energy was pulling off the bribery scheme in Ohio, these guys were running another one across the river. 

The Pleasants Power Station was another failing West Virginia coal-fired power plant. As in Ohio, First Energy hatched a scheme to make their customers pay for their business failure. The plan was scoffed at by Federal regulators, but supported by the West Virginia Public Service Commission, and ultimately ended up hidden in a last-minute bailout deal, pushed by Governor Jim Justice, that stuck West Virginia taxpayers with a 12 million dollar bill. 

Those 12 million dollars are just a fraction of the price we pay when the foxes guard the hen house. On the other side of the coin, the fines First Energy pays for its corruption are just a fraction of the cost of doing business. But as we’ve already seen, it’s not only West Virginians who are forced to pick up the tab. This is the corporate playbook that affects all of us as Americans. 

Just think of the scandals we accept as being normal. PFOA, Dupont’s class of cancer-causing chemicals, is in the blood of nearly everyone on earth, yet no one from Dupont is in jail, and its spin-off companies are wildly profitable. Sit with that for a minute. 

Boeing’s planes are falling apart after they replaced engineers with finance bros, and the most we get from the New York Times is this headline: “Boeing Faces Tricky Balance Between Safety and Financial Performance.” Oh, and pay no attention to that dead whistle-blower. 

The Sackler family made a product they knew was addictive and deadly and sold it anyway, claiming nearly 10 times as many lives as the Vietnam War. They made billions, and it goes without saying, are not in jail. 

The financial crisis threw gas on the fire already consuming the middle class, and gave the big boys an insurance policy dubbed “too big to fail.” Suspiciously, 50 trillion dollars once held by the bottom 90% is now held by the top 1%. Makes you wonder.

An employee of the notorious Koch Enterprises brought up concerns about corroding pipelines that may lead to further injury or death after similar negligence claimed the life of another employee Danielle Smalley. They were told that it was “cheaper to pay off damages from a lawsuit than make repairs.”

In every case, it’s a similar story to the rate hikes being forced on West Virginians. 

By the time I’m done writing any one of these pieces for the newsletter, I always come to the same conclusion. We’re run by brazen selfish corporations and it will stay that way until enough of us decide that we want to change it. How are we gonna do that? I guess that’s what I’m trying to figure out with all of you.

If you liked this work, please kick in $5/mo (or any amount…) to keep it going. Thanks!

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I write this like I’m talking to my friends at a bar. There are typos and occasional embellishments, but no lies. If you’re a lawyer, do not take this seriously… unless that helps.

I took a Spirit Airlines red-eye from LAX to Baltimore recently. It was out of character. I haven’t flown in years and avoid it at all costs. 

We boarded at midnight and then sat on the tarmac for thirty minutes while the pilot explained, with calm authority, that a flap related to the shitters was being “taped down” for aerodynamics. Cue the sweating. 

Such things are expected from Spirit Airlines, a brand launched to match consumers on a budget with planes built on a budget. My seatmate said simply, “They’ll get you there, and that’s all you need to worry about.” “Will they?” I wanted to ask. He dug out a bag of pills, ate some, and then drooled on me all the way to Baltimore. No neck pillow. No nothing. A true Spirit traveler. 

At 2 AM on Christmas morning, I was ready to press “book” on an Alaskan Airlines 737 Max out of LAX on January 4th. Then I recalled how the Boeing 737 Max had earned a reputation for nose-diving out of the sky, with two fatal crashes months apart in 2018 and 2019. 

No, thank you. I felt a little ridiculous, but I abandoned my Alaska Airlines cart and used an alternate flight tracker to find an airplane less notorious for smoking itself into the ground despite protestation by highly trained pilots. 

Turns out it was a good call. My Baltimore friends woke me from a jet-lagged slumber the next day with news that a large hole had blown out of the fuselage of an Alaskan Airlines 737 Max at 16,000 feet flying out of Portland. It wasn’t the exact plane I’d have been on, but close enough for a nervous flyer.

And sure, flying may be statistically one of the safer ways to travel, but what’s the appropriate tolerance for catastrophe in the sky? I’d say zero. Yet, incidents and near misses on the runway are at all-time highs. 

My flight was part of a larger (mostly) road trip around the country. Pittsburgh to Cleveland on a Greyhound bus. Cleveland to Oakland, California in a VW golf I dubbed the “Roller Skate.” Oakland to LA with the help of a rental car. The red eye to Baltimore. Finally, an assortment of friends carted me back to West Virginia on the scenic route. 

The journey reminded me of some depressing truths.

As a country, we have some good stuff going for us, but it’s hard to overlook that America is being stripped for parts everywhere you turn. There wasn’t a single roll of toilet paper or any hand soap to be found in the Greyhound bus infrastructure between two major cities. Legroom on flights seems to be under constant assault. The tray tables are the size of credit cards. The seats don’t recline. And sometimes, the friggin’ doors blow off midflight. 

Things are getting shittier as they become more expensive and less convenient. And we act like this is normal. Is this the innovation that free market hawks are talking about? It feels hollow when you realize there's no TP in the Cleveland bus terminal after it’s too late.

Welcome to public transit in America, dear citizens. Hope you packed baby wipes and buckled your seat belt on that 737 Max. 

There’s a common denominator here: shareholder capitalism. The corporate playbook controlling everything in our lives that was written by dudes like Jack Welch. It’s why everything that sucks, sucks. 

The playbook is to bank the most profit in the shortest time, by any means necessary. Layoffs, union busting, misclassifying employees as independent contractors, cutting costs and corners, off-shoring jobs to countries with low wages and no environmental laws, using profits for stock buy-backs, and buying out competitors as aggressively as you buy off Congress. 

This is our religion. Money for shareholders at the expense of *everything* else. We’ve been at it since the 80s (well… the 1600’s, really).

The shareholder capitalism playbook has extended its domain across the entire globe, to the point that it’s the only thing we know. Above all, it cannot tolerate an interruption to the flow of commerce. Because that’s the money tap, and we go to ridiculous lengths to keep it running. 

Take Yemen. If you don’t know, Yemen controls water passages through the Red Sea that greatly reduce the shipping time for products to travel around the globe. Houthi fighters have been stopping ships, without killing anyone, to resist the erasure of millions of people in Gaza who are currently starving if they’re not actively being blown to pieces by bombs paid for with our tax dollars (and signed by our former Vice President).

But time is money for shareholder capitalism, and this passage is vital. So, we’re bombing Yemen (not the first time) to keep the commerce flowing. 

The White House made it nice and clear, “I will not hesitate to direct further measures to protect our people and the free flow of international commerce as necessary.” 

Thanks to American military might, Jeff Bezos will continue to make 7.9 million dollars per hour by streamlining a river of cheap plastic crap into our homes anytime we press a button on our phones. When we’re done with the cheap plastic crap that arrived to us promptly on the wings of the military-industrial complex, we’ll throw it away. The best monument to this cycle is probably in Hamilton County Ohio, where the tallest geographical point is a pile of trash dubbed Rumpke Mountain. There’s even a bluegrass band named after it. 

And here we are again. American bombs falling on the Middle East. I can hear the Marine recruiters at the pull-up bar in my Appalachian high school lunchroom daring the football players to pull 10 clean. If you sign up, you’ll be able to buy a new Mustang. They’re making electric ones now, you know. What else are you gonna do in a town where “free trade” killed the mills? Dollar general? 

Maybe it’s a stretch to say that these are related, or crass to draw lines between ethnic cleansing and uncomfortable airline seats. But I can’t help but see a connection. And it’s hard to unsee how naked the emperor has become. 

What do you think? Tell me in the comments.

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OffJaWaggon Ya Heard?

My good buddies @off_jawaggon and Taylor with the Let Them Eat Toast podcast had me on their pod to talk about that old-fashioned rural populist union gospel. Take a listen and give a share would ya?

Life’s been a mess recently so this is a little delayed, but better late than never, eh?

I write this like I’m talking to my friends at a bar. There are typos and occasional embellishments, but no lies. If you’re a lawyer, do not take this seriously… unless that helps.

Alright y’all. Been a while. 

I’m putting out this quick and dirty update to get things back on track. Lots of good things have been happening over my way, but they’ve upset the regular schedule around here. 

I hopped the Ohio River to the West Virginia side, bought the place I was renting (time well spent, but lots of time spent), traveled to DC to work on another project, got halfway unpacked, and then broke my undefeated streak on Covid by coming down with it last week. 

Things are moving along though, and I’m excited to water the roots that I never really ripped out of the Ohio Valley. It’s a good home base to make media for…. Whatever the hell we’re all marching into as a society. 

Alas, the show goes on. 

Many of you are new here from the last podcast I went on. Leigh McGowan, The Politics Girl herself, was kind enough to have me on her show a couple of weeks ago. It was a great conversation about how solidarity and the new labor movement are having a moment. And indeed they are. A few weeks after our talk, the UAW ratified the first of three historic agreements with Detroit automakers. 

Give it a watch here: 

Or a listen here: 

And follow Leigh here. 

About that solidarity and the moment it’s having

Big business answers to almost no one.

The big three automakers represent the world’s most elite financial firepower. Ford is number 19 on the Fortune 500. GM is 21. Stellantis is larger than both, but not on the list because of its foreign acquisition. 

Their CEOs are today’s captains of global industry. Each of them pulls down double-digit millions in pay every single year. Their armies of lawyers and lobbyists own our government. We’ve covered a nation nearly the size of the European continent in highways. We pound that pavement with ever larger gas guzzlers. Why? Because the big three automakers say so, and if you don’t like it - tough.

Our country is of, by, and for the bottom line. Nowhere is that more on display than America’s Fortune 500 - a whose who of financial might in the country famous for holding a gun to the world’s head for the sake of… Democracy financial might.  

What I’m saying is, one does not simply march up to the largest global corporations and tell them how to run their business….

Until this dork from Kokomo, Indiana, with exactly 0 college degrees did just that. 

Shawn Fain is an autoworker of 29 years and the new leader of the United Auto Workers. He won leadership of the 145,000+ member UAW on a margin of less than 500 votes. Rank and file organizing from thousands of ordinary workers fed up with corrupt leadership and decades of concessionary deals got his faction there.

They wasted no time picking a fight with the most powerful business interests on earth.

The big three automakers booked $250 billion in profits over a ten-year period. As their CEOs each made double-digit millions yearly, their lowest-paid workers were on par with many fast-food franchises. 

With Shawn Fain at the helm, members of the UAW stood up, made demands, and won. Contracts at each of the big three automakers were ratified by UAW members this week. In sum, the new deals are worth more than the last four contracts combined.

There’s a lot more to say on this, but check out some of the UAW graphics on their deals: 

This is a quick and dirty update so I’ll wrap it here. 

Let’s be real. The march of global financial capital has brought us to the brink of being unable to survive on earth anymore. You can count, on one hand, the number of men who own more wealth than half of all Americans combined. And by all accounts, we’re not only staying on this path, we’re stomping on the gas. 

To state the obvious, our government serves the interest of the super-rich. Policies that are overwhelmingly popular with the public never come to pass for this reason. Nothing has come close to stopping the march of tycoon-level business interests or changing their course in recent memory. Not elections. Or the President. Or the courts. Or anything within reach of someone reading this. 

But for the labor movement.

Where the political arena has failed to deliver wins for working-class Americans, the new labor movement has stepped up. And the best part of all is that the solution currently working where so many others have failed is the simplest and most accessible - working-class solidarity.

The movement that confronted global corporate superpowers and delivered real monetary benefits to ordinary folks was organized and led by people who are no different than you.

And don’t mistake these wins as just being about money. They’re about power. In all of the recent union wins, organized workers built enough power to change the direction of the most powerful companies on earth.

Solving the thorniest problems in front of us demands nothing less than that.

If you’re jazzed about all this and ready to educate yourself, read this.

Unlike most labor how-to material, this guide was written by someone (in their 20s??) who went from knowing nothing about unions, to successfully unionizing their workplace. It’s funny, simple, informative, and straight out of the American tradition of radical pamphlets that could lead to seismic change. Kudos @howtounionize

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I write this like I’m talking to my friends at a bar. There are typos and occasional embellishments, but no lies. If you’re a lawyer, do not take this seriously… unless that helps.

I was having a tough time finding striking autoworkers at Donald Trump’s Detroit rally for…. striking autoworkers. We were on several picket lines earlier that day and the autoworkers we talked to hadn’t heard much about Donald Trump’s rally to support them. One lady holding a picket sign volunteered simply that the whole bit “sucks ass”. 

The venue was an interesting choice. It was a non-union parts supplier, that was not on strike and was located miles away from the nearest picket where autoworkers were… in need of support. 

We drove out any way to see what was up on the off chance that Donald Trump was a man of his word. It was a Trump Rally for sure - floats, random drumming, a carnival of patriot swag, shouting, but very few picket signs or identifiable autoworkers. 

We hopped out of the truck and started yelling “Is anyone here an autoworker!” We were met with polite shrugs and well-intentioned, but ultimately fruitless directions to where some of the supposed 500 past and present UAW autoworkers advertised might be. 

I was talking with a doofy cop on his third or fourth version of “I don’t even know who the autoworkers are” when a black SUV screeched to a halt over my shoulder and a ruckus flared up. Turns out it was Rick What’s His Nuts from the History Channel hit - Pawn Stars. 

He wasn’t an autoworker. 

We shouted questions and chased him down the street, but the only useful answer we pried out of the Cromagnon Pawn King was that you needed tickets to get into the event. That wasn’t significant until five minutes later. 

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It was getting dark and rain was blowing in. Trump’s motorcade arrived with a sea of whirling red and blue lights as we hunted for autoworkers. We were about to wrap it up when some guy mumbled “Who are you looking for? Yeah... I was a UAW autoworker for 30 years.” 

He and his wife were standing in the grass getting rained on as the last taillights of the passing motorcade lit them up a bit. They were die-hard Trump supporters from generations of UAW autoworkers and they were trying to figure out why Rick-Whats-His-Nuts from Pawn Stars got into the rally and they didn’t. Alex Press wrote about the answer to that question. Spoiler alert, the rally was a PR stunt that, sadly, worked. 

Before the rally, The New York Times ran a misleading article with the headline, “Trump to Woo Striking Union Members in Detroit, Skipping 2nd GOP Debate.” Other outlets followed suit, leaving the public misinformed about the reality of this phony, anti-union Trump party.

But there was one group of folks whom the PR stunt may not have worked on: actual autoworkers.

Tony Monteleone built Ford trucks for most of his life and is proud of it. In our interview, I started a question by mentioning how taxpayers had bailed out the now phenomenally profitable Big Three automakers. He instantly corrected me, “They didn’t bail out Ford.” It was a short sentence about a long story that evoked pride in your work and a sense of shared prosperity that seems to be in question these days. 

It’s all up for grabs on the Detroit picket lines. The Big Three automakers, Ford, GM, and Stellantis (formerly Chrysler, Fiat, and maybe even Abercrombie & Fitch/Hollister… who knows?) have amassed $250,000,000,000 in profits over the last ten years.

Compare that to several autoworkers on the picket line who told us that the job once revered as the American middle-class meal ticket was now “a high-paid McDonald’s gig.” Starting pay for Stellantis temporary workers is $15.78 per hour — less than some fast food restaurants — and caps out at $19.28 after four years.

“Record profits, record contracts” is the chant on the UAW picket lines, and it’s backed up by genuine faith in a bold new union president, Shawn Fain. Just a few years ago, the UAW suffered under corrupt leadership, known infamously for dropping $13,000 of members’ dues, in one day, on cigars. Worst than the stogies were the years of concessions brokered by union leadership that seemed more focused on emulating greedy CEOs than delivering meaningful wins for membership. 

The corrupt leaders were deposed in a photo-finish election by Shawn Fain and the rank-and-file organizing that propelled him to victory. Shawn is from Kokomo, but not the one former UAW presidents may have scoped out for vacation homes - Kokomo, Indiana. He skipped the college degree and went straight to the assembly line. There were times were his family survived on food stamps.

You might expect caution from a new leader fresh off a close election. No such luck. Shawn Fain is drawing lines, planting his feet, and brawling for the working class. And his members are into it, big time. 

Tony Monteleone voted for Shawn. His hardline pro-working-class stance was a breath of fresh air. It’s the same reason why Tony said he voted for Donald Trump and plans to again in 2024. But now, standing outside of Donald Trump’s party that was supposed to be for people like him, watching D-list celebrities from the History Channel walk inside, an age-old question is on Tony’s mind - which side are you on? 

Our video with the whole story is below.

This video is the third in a collaboration with a core team at More Perfect Union, Court Fuller, Josh Hirschfeld-Kroen, and Nehemiah Stark. Subscribe to More Perfect Union across all social media for more excellent working-class-centered media.

And the clip where we hunted for autoworkers and only found a Cromagnun Pawn King is here.

@moreperfectunionWe went to Trump's "rally for autoworkers"... at a non-union company 20 miles from the nearest picket line. #uaw #labormovement #labor #workersrights #strike #leftist #protest #leftisttiktok

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Hello From West Virginia

A lot has happened since the last time I blasted one of these out into the ether. I made the 10-minute move across state lines to become an honest-to-goodness Mountaineer, cleaning and moving a total of three houses in the process. 

We were supposed to rent the new house, but a week into that I decided to buy it. The two weeks I was supposed to take off from the newsletter to help the move turned into a month. Sorry about that and thanks for your continued support! 

Things are still in boxes, and a new smorgasbord of to-do list items has entered my life on the back of home ownership. But I have new roots in the area where both sides of my family go back generations. I plan on this newsletter sticking around for a while, and the only reason why that’s possible is because of people who fund the media they want to see. 

Thank you.

Speaking of West Virginia…

An eviction order for a homeless encampment in Wheeling was set to begin today. It was paused due to a well-organized protest by community members and those affected. The eviction and soon-to-be proposed ban on “urban camping” is part of a similar effort in other communities like Parkersburg and mirrors the callous treatment of homeless people across the country.

I’ll stop here because a great Wheeling newsletter run by Justice Hudson has the story firsthand. Subscribe to Justice’s newsletter here. And follow their newsletter for coverage on the forthcoming urban camping ban.

The Hudson Editorial

'Hurt, Confused, Upset' - Residents of East Wheeling Camp Respond to Looming Eviction

Listen now (27 mins) | For a year now, people experiencing homelessness in Wheeling have been directed by city employees to the East Wheeling hillside to seek shelter. They were shocked on September 29 when those same city employees came, with four police officers, to serve them an eviction notice…

Listen now

3 years ago · 3 likes · Justice Hudson

Even more things about West Virginia…

This is a live look from where I’m posting this newsletter at Camp Solidarity in Matewan, WV as a project of the West Virginia Mine Wars Museum. Cool people support what their doing, and you can be cool here.

This is where I hastily scribble about what’s going on. May include righteous anger and typos.

Hey Y’all,

I’m hopping the Ohio River and moving to a new apartment in West By God Virginia as soon as I press send.

Merely saying it out loud makes me want to expire at the thought of packing all my crap. But be warned that this punky little newsletter will likely be on a two-week hiatus as I move and get settled in. I expect to be settled and cookin’ by the end of the month or the beginning of October. Lots of content in the works, especially as election season ramps up.

BTW if you haven’t seen our collaboration with More Perfect Union at Trump rallies, take a gander.

This week’s content is a deep dive into the straight-up shocking wealth inequality we’re all putting up with right now. You can watch, listen, read, and always share below.

Thanks for being here. Love u,

JR

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And because of that, we’re allowed to say that 400 of the richest people in history are running humanity into the ground to preserve levels of private wealth that make the United States defense budget look like a piss ant. Try saying that on CNN.

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@heyjohnrussellWealth distribution in the United States is SHOCKING. There’s the super rich, and everyone else. #workingclass #leftist #politics #news #unions #billionaires #solidarity #ohiovalley #wealth #appalachia #eattherich #yallternative #yallidarity #wva #304

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Listen to this video as a mini Podcast

Video Script

I usually share a verbatim transcript. This is the script I used to film the piece with sources included.

The people getting rich without doing work are the 1% and this is a deep dive about it because there is So. Much. Misplaced. Blame. On. Welfare.

So let’s pretend that you just inherited *loads* of money. 

1.7 million dollars is the average inheritance for a child of 1% parents. We’re gonna be that child today. And we want to never hold any job, ever. We don’t want to start or run a business. But we do want to live in luxury and also, make our inheritance into a huge fortune. 

Here’s how. 

We use our investment calculator on the World Wide Web to put our 1.7 million inheritance in the stock market. We don’t touch it for 40 years. And we bank on a 10% average return over the long run. 

The market goes up and down, but over 40 years, you can expect a 10% average. 

Let’s make a fortune. Bang. 1.7 million in, nearly 77 million out.

Ya see that? Crazy right? 

Let’s do a million in, over one year, at a 10% return. 

There’s the magic. You get your million back, plus $100,000, in other words, 10%. And all you have to do is not shit… Except inherit money, and then multiply it with other people’s labor. 

What was that? Other people’s labor? 

Yeah. Money doesn’t grow on trees. Someone has to work to make the money, and that someone is the worker at the company whose stock you hold. But they don’t get all the money their work creates. They get the lowest wage the company can get away with paying them. And the rest goes to shareholders. 

And that’s the whole game. That’s what all this is!

The lower the wages the companies pay, the more profit they keep, the better their numbers are for Wall Street, the more valuable their stock is, and so on. And there you go! It’s a free money-printing machine for the already rich that’s powered by people working more hours for crap pay. Story of America right now. 

*BUT WAIT THERE’S MORE*

The super-rich are SUPER rich. There are multiple individuals with hundreds of billions of dollars riding this gravy train. The average billionaire makes $14 million every day. 

So let’s get back to welfare and look at how much we spend on that compared to the wealth gains of the 1% over one year, 2021. 

Here’s a chart. $30.3 billion is how much we spent on direct cash welfare in 2021 for the whole country. It’s called TANF, Temporary Assistance for Needy Families. That is included in the SNAP (Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program) budget otherwise known as food stamps. SNAP also includes every dime we spend on farm subsidies. The total spent for SNAP in 2021 was $113.8 billion. 

Now watch this. The 1% gained $6.5 trillion dollars in new wealth in 2021, thanks to everything we talked about today. There it is to scale. See how it dwarfs welfare spending? 

Keep in mind these gains are not from running a business, they’re from holding stock that entitles you to gains created by people doing work that makes the stock valuable. 

And get this! The gains of the 1% are just shy of the ENTIRE federal budget in 2021 -Defense spending, Social Security, Medicare, Welfare, ALL of it. 

Oh yeah, making money this way is called capital gains, and rich people made it so capital gains are taxed at half the rate of your wages when they’re taxed at all because the super-rich evade taxes all the time and stick you with the bill! 

They try to say people at the bottom are dragging us down, but the real theft is at the top because if their gains were your wages, you, watching this video, would be so much richer. 

This is why, and this is one of my favorites, wealth distribution in the United States looks like this: 

Pretty bad as is right? Except this graph doesn’t even have the 1% on it. It stops at 99%. And the scale here is in millions. Ya ready to add the 1%? 

This is what we’re living with right now. All of the money is at the top. All of it. There is no distribution.

And can you imagine what they do with all that money? 

How they build media networks to make sure you stay mad at poor people instead of thinking about…. this? 

How they break all kinds of laws that would land you in jail? 

How they bust unions so an entire class of people never gets the power to do anything about… this? 

How they buy off the government, and keep lackeys, who are passing away on live TV, in there to do their bidding? 

And especially how… (video loops to start)

This is where I hastily scribble about what’s going on. May include righteous anger and typos.

Three weeks ago, no one had heard of Oliver Anthony. Then he wrote a song about working-class woes, posted it on the internet, and rocketed into the public discussion. 

Rich Men North of Richmond gained more than 46 million views on YouTube, topped the Billboard Hot 100, and was brought up in the first few minutes of the Republican presidential debate last week in addition to smashing all kinds of records. 

Lots of people have a take on it. Mine is below with a transcript. The Nation published one piece, and then a different perspective that quotes me:

I asked John Russell for his take on the song. Russell is a bartender in West Virginia with a Substack about class politics called The Holler. Coincidentally, Russell, like Anthony, got famous a couple of weeks ago, after he went to a Trump rally in Erie, Pa., to see if he could overcome what he calls the “engineered division” of the working class into right and left. To the amazement of many liberals, he got Trump rally-goers talking about monopolies, corruption, and corporate greed.

Russell cautions liberals against throwing the baby out with the bathwater just because some of the lyrics assign misplaced blame. “The working class’s reaction is a big fat ‘yes,’ and everyone who wants a working-class movement should pay attention to it,” he told me. Were he in command of the Democratic Party, he’d make sure candidates show up in all the forgotten places and keep reminding folks that it’s the rich men north of Richmond who are ruining their lives.

Well-to-do liberal pundits say it blames the poor for what the super-rich did. They’re right. But instead of assigning blame more accurately, or trying to understand the genuine working class approval of the song, they stopped at the familiar pompous finger-wagging. Right-wing elites tripped over themselves trying to grab the coattails of the song in their increasingly desperate attempts to hide the fact that their agenda only benefits about 1,000 of the most disgustingly rich people on earth. 

Oliver Anthony took to the internet after the spectacle to put a pox on both houses. From the cab of a truck, he said his song criticized “corporate-owned D.C. politicians on both sides. … It’s knocking the system collectively.” And that, “It was funny seeing my song … at the presidential debate because it’s like I wrote that song about those people, you know, so for them to have to sit there and have to listen to that, that cracks me up.” Lastly, “It’s aggravating seeing people on conservative news try to identify with me, like I’m one of them.” 

Nice. I’ll take it.

You can’t blame conservative news figures for thinking they had a friend in Anthony. He penned a song about obese people gorging themselves on government-funded fudge rounds while the virtuous working class can’t get ahead no matter how hard they grind. Whether intentional or not, it was a pitch-perfect ode to the song Fox News has sung since before Oliver Anthony was born. Most importantly, it let the real villains off the hook - something Fox News was designed to do that Oliver Anthony may have repeated unintentionally (to give the benefit of doubt).   

That’s the genius of right-wing propaganda. It gives us people to be mad at when we want to be mad.

All day long it whirs away, manufacturing scapegoats to stock the screens and broadcasts all around us. It’s insurance against social change in the internet era so that when some red-bearded bard in the Virginia woods picks up a guitar to sing the late-stage capitalism blues, the easiest group to blame, the one that the masses know, the one that fits in a hit song, is the one that right-wing media made for us - the welfare queen. 

Never mind that people with little power have little power to ruin your life. If you say something enough times, it becomes true.

Winners write the stories and the stories we hear most are written by the super-rich. In a parallel universe free from a half-century of billionaire-funded propaganda, we may have heard a song about how the Sacklers pumped 5 million pills they knew were addictive into a town of 400 people in Kermit, WVA. Or how Dupont knowingly poisoned the blood of 99.7% of people on Earth. Ludlow, Matewan, and Homestead would be household names. Our overnight stars might breathe life into an inclusive working-class movement for dignity and respect rather than the cheap self-worth that comes from knowing someone is lower than you. 

I think Oliver Anthony used what was lying around him to make a song - a guitar, a lot of pain caused by late-stage capitalism, and a familiar story about the undeserving. It was a smash with the broad working class, and the political left should take it as a sign that people are ready for a movement to right the wrongs of the Rich Men North of Richmond.

The wonders of the World Wide Web catapulted Oliver Anthony into the public discussion and it can help us tell a truer story with more deserving villains.

Oh and P.S. - if you’re a country music fan or even country curious, check out my playlist on Spotify “Country for Commies”

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Video and Transcript

@heyjohnrussell@Oliver Anthony Rich Men North of Richmond Reaction. #workingclass #bluecollar #leftist #appalachia #countrymusic #politics #news #yallternative #unions #304 #billionaires #solidarity #ohiovalley #wealth

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There's a baby floating around in the bathwater around this song but let's start with the...

0:08

“And the obese milkin' welfare. God if you're five foot three, and you're 300 pounds, taxes ought not to pay for your bags of fudge rounds.”

0:20

The bathwater.

People have dragged this and they should, because A. punching down is not cool, especially not when it's against the working class that you're in, and it's the least cool when your downward punches land you a shit pot of money.

B. It just don't make no damn sense. People with little power have little power to ruin your life.

But the thing that chaps my butt about the song and the liberal response to it in most big media is that there are so many good villains... there are so many villains... and we just let them off the hook!

The villains are overpopulated bud. It's not catch-and-release. You can play for keeps. And they go un-named both in the song and most of the liberal responses in big media to the song. There's finger-wagging about punching down and blaming the poor as there should be, but why stop there? Why? Why not name the villains they're right in front of us.

You gave us a smash title and lines like:

1:15

I've been selling my soul, working all day, overtime hours, for bullshit pay. These rich men north of richmond lord knows they all just wanna have total control.

1:29

Right here baby. We are ready for the justice.

I say it a lot. I'll say it again: name the Sacklers. They pumped 5 million pills into one town of 400 people in Kermit, West Virginia. They knew it was addictive. They made all the money, no jail. Name them.

Blame DuPont. The chemical they invented is in the blood of 99.7% of people on Earth. It's in your blood, in my blood, in Walmart Tyler Childers blood, it's in all of our blood. And we found it out in Parkersburg, West Virginia! Put it in the song.

Tech CEOs. They're unelected government. They know more about you than you.

The billionaires that paid a lower tax rate than the whole working class in 2018. Thank you, Donald Trump.

Giant banks and Wall Street, always.

But you missed all of that and punched the people eating government snacks. It'd be a hilarious whiff but it's not funny. It's sad. It's really sad.

Alright, let's talk about the baby in all of this bath water. The song is a smash and it's a sign to me, you're lovable labor leftist, that people across the political spectrum are ready for a working-class movement to rein in the rich.

Yeah, took a gross turn when one member of the working class missed all the billionaires and punched people eating fudge rounds, but that's the oldest trope in the book. We have had 50 years of unanswered right-wing propaganda 24/7 on every single device, financed by billionaires, and and precision-engineered to keep the eyes of the working class off of the ball and onto the fudge rounds.

Was this dude thinking about all of that when he wrote the song? Probably not. But it's a good time to start.

And people will say "but it's true John, I work my ass off and I see people in the grocery store abusing welfare all the time."

Who cares? Who cares? Get a better cause. You know what you don't see? The middle class. Because it doesn't exist anymore. And weirdly, the wealth that used to be in the middle class is now in the hands of billionaires. What the [REDACTED] right?

"But John, people on welfare are living high on the hog off of other people's hard work." That is what a billionaire does. That's what a billionaire does. Their stocks multiply exponentially without them doing any work because you do that work. But you don't get any of the wealth. Which is weird, right?

Write a song about it, especially you Dollar General Tyler Childers.

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This is where I hastily scribble about what’s going on. May include righteous anger and typos.

Hello new people! 

Welcome to not quite journalism. The rules around here are loose and the management is poor at best, but here’s the deal. 

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Every week, roughly, I send one of these out with a crop of recent content. Sometimes is a short TikTok with a transcript including sources and other readings, other times it’s a round-up of shows we went on like today, or…. whatever’s laying around the content kitchen.

Uhhh, what else?

It’s my birthday today! So that will be short and sweet. If you don’t know me, hi. I’m John Russell. I grew up on a farm outside a tiny rust belt town in the Ohio Valley. My politics took their first left turn back then. I farmed for seven seasons, worked/volunteered for a baker’s dozen political campaigns, and ran for office twice. Those last two were crushing defeats, but hey… builds character. I moved back to the valley after about ten years away. Wheeling, WV is the soon-to-be headquarters. And I bartend twice a week to help pay for this media habit! Want to see this stick around? 

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We had a video go big about a week ago. I went up to a Trump rally in Erie, PA to talk leftist politics with people in line. It went well. 

The video was a collaboration with More Perfect Union, whom you should definitely follow right now. I work with a small and absolutely wonderful team at MPU - all-star Co-producer/cameraman Nehemiah Stark, Co-producer and vibe captain Court Fuller, and Editor/Wizard Guy Josh Hirschfeld-Kroen.

If you haven’t seen it yet, check out the latest piece from the Trump Rally here, and my write-up here! 

This week is a press clip round-up while we work on more pieces for the next round! 

And now,

Press Clips

Breaking Points

TYT with Ana Kasparian

Hasan Piker

Cartier Family

Secular Talk with Kyle Kulinsky and Krystal Ball

Devin Gibson

Bonus points for this dude being a right-wing flag/cross/thin blue line all on one t-shirt guy.

As Goes Wisconsin with Kristin Brey

This is where I hastily scribble about what’s going on. May include righteous anger and typos.

I’m proud of this one y’all.

We worked with More Perfect Union to produce the first video of having organizing conversations with people in line at Trump rallies. It went viral immediately, gaining 300,000 views on YouTube in the first four hours.

What’s clear is that class solidarity and labor-left politics hold political appeal across the spectrum, and should be the center of our political conversations. I wrote more about the experience below.

The team at More Perfect Union is filling a critical void in media right now. They’re one of precious few outlets that are laser-focused on lifting up working-class stories and perspectives. I highly suggest using the following links to subscribe to their Substack, YouTube, TikTok, Instagram, and Facebook.

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The Holler started in May of 2021. The goal was to make working-class-centered media that could help bend our political conversation toward class solidarity and worker power. This piece is another case study of that. It joins the East Palestine report and a bevy of TikToks that add up to nearly 20 million views yearly.

More Perfect Union is currently a freelance gig that pays well per piece. But that relationship would not have been possible, and NONE of this would have been possible, without the 250 paid subscribers to this newsletter.

It’s working. You paid for the media you want to see, and it’s reaching millions of people. Help it reach more. Become a paid independent media sustainer today for only $5/mo ($60/year).

AND THANK YOU!

JR

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I went to the Trump Rally in Erie, PA to talk class politics. Here’s how it went.

Take a second to imagine what you’d hear if you went to a Trump rally right now and started talking to people in line. 

Would you expect to hear about how anti-trust laws were used to break up the telephone monopoly, Bell Systems, in the 80s and that it might be time to dust them off again? Or about small businesses being squeezed out by corporate consolidation? Or how the world’s largest asset managers, Blackrock and Vanguard, command nearly $20 trillion dollars of wealth?

I went to the Trump rally in Erie, Pennsylvania, and heard all of this and more from people waiting in line. 

It’s not surprising to me. I poured drinks in a rust belt dive bar for the last year where plenty of the Trump faithful slaked their thirst. When your county votes for Trump by 71% and the bartender is me, a white guy with a mullet, most people assume you’re on the same page. When they find out that I’m a card-carrying labor leftist, there’s always shock that we occasionally *are* on the same page.

All of us live in a petri dish of engineered division. If the working class on the left and right ever united on things like reining in billionaire power, ending forever wars that enrich the already wealthy, breaking up corporate power structures, and unionizing major industries, the world would look a lot different than it is, and the ruling class would have far to fall. 

We live in unbelievable times and are reacting in our own ways. Elon Musk recently lost $200 billion dollars, the most of anyone in recorded history, yet somehow remained the world’s second richest man. And he bought Twitter, the place journalists flocked to after Facebook killed the news. All of it happened as half the country would plunge into financial ruin with an unexpected trip to the hospital. 

Pick any industry: food, healthcare, transportation, media, banking, communications, they’re all run by a gaggle of oligarchs. Two oligarchs are dominating headlines with the prospect of them literally grappling in a cage match. Oh, and the CEO-to-worker pay ratio has climbed from 20:1 in 1965 to 399:1 today. 

For millions of Americans, a sensible reaction to this reality is to walk into a raucous rally where their hero may do anything, literally. The point is no one knows and it’s all live. To them, it’s a sure sign that this billionaire is not like the others. He doesn’t fit in with the polite society that’s handed down so much painful stagnation over the last forty years. 

If you’re part of the millions for whom an authoritarian carnival is not your bag, you might turn on the news where you can watch Mitch McConnell or Dianne Feinstein expire on live television before your very eyes and hope that Joe Biden has one more feeble win left in him. Never mind the existential problems bearing down, like the incineration of our only livable planet. Let’s all just get past 2024, right? Maybe it’ll be nice by then. 

That’s about how it goes in the political arena nowadays. But the political arena is focused, by the wealth that commands it, on generating division. For example, people may have heard any number of outlandish claims about “critical race theory” or trans kids in sports, but few we talked to had heard about 300,000 UPS workers uniting to win 30 billion dollars in their contract negotiations. The Trump voters we talked to were all for working-class solidarity. Some expressed hope that Trump would visit a picket line. Someone come get me when that happens, I’ll be in Hell selling ice water. 

There’s always strength in numbers. Millions of people standing with Donald Trump are empowering an agenda that will eventually come for all of us, starting with the powerless first. But the same people hold beliefs that the labor-left can work with. We only spoke to a few people at one Trump rally, but even then it wasn’t hard to find people who agreed that politicians should reject the donations of billionaires, break up massive monopolies, end forever wars, and join workers on the picket line. 

These are the raw materials from which working-class solidarity can be forged. And solidarity, by definition, is inclusive of all people. West Virginia miners joining the UMWA in the early 1900s swore an oath to “never discriminate against a fellow worker on account of creed, or color, or nationality, [and] to defend on all occasions and to the extent of my ability, the members of our organization.” Multiracial groups of workers in the Farm Equipment (FE) union in Kentucky marched to integrate the towns where they worked twenty years before Dr. King marched on Washington. This promise of class unity won us the weekend and the 40-hour week among other modern benefits we don’t think twice about.

And the seeds of it were alive and well at the Trump rally in Erie, PA. There are political chips being left on the table that are capable of changing our world overnight. If that’s true, it should have huge implications for this upcoming presidential election. So let’s try a thought experiment. 

What would it look like if, for this one presidential election, we had conversations like the ones I had in Erie, where we focused on the needs of the working class?

What would the debates be about? What would candidates’ policies look like? Who would ultimately win, and how would they be forced to deliver?

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This is where I hastily scribble about what’s going on. May include righteous anger and typos.

Have you heard of More Perfect Union? I collaborated with them on the East Palestine report and a bevy of TikToks.

Do yourself a favor and subscribe to their YouTube channel. Their whole bag is “media with a mission to put power back in the hands of working people”.

We dig it. Today’s newsletter is a collarboration with MPU. They did some original reporting on Ultium Cells in Lordstown, Ohio that I happily hosted for the video below.

I have another project in the works with MPU. We went to a Trump rally in Erie, PA last weekend to talk old-timey worker power with the rally goers. We left enough room in the conversation to get away from the white hot culture wars, and dive deeper where the political affilation is more fluid and less reactionary.

The results were surprising. I think you’ll like it. Stay tuned around the middle of August for that!

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The wages of the future are being set now in Lordstown, Ohio

Will we save ourselves from creating a permanent under class or further cement it in stone? This is the question being answered right now as the future of electric vehicles unfolds in Lordstown, Ohio.

For six decades, General Motors was the leading employer in town. Generations of families buttered their bread at the Lordstown plant. Then it closed in 2019, putting out 1,300 workers and adding another dark milestone to the wiki pages of the Rust Belt. 

A year later, GM went big on electricity and created mass demand for batteries. Biden and the Democrats scrounged up 2.5 billion dollars, thanks to their climate legislation, and loaned it out to Ultium - the new partnership between GM and LG that will manufacture GM’s batteries at three plants that employ 11,000 workers. 

One of them is in Lordstown, but the new boss isn’t quite the same as the old.  

Rather than make the batteries under GM/UAW labor contracts that helped build the middle class, Ultium was formed as a new company in part to skirt the old contracts with high wages and start the power struggle fresh with the new industry. Workers at Ultium, where everyone is “family”, start at $16.50/hr. 

The work is fast and dangerous, a trend reflected elsewhere in the economy as the balance of power between workers and bosses has tipped firmly in capital’s favor. Workers at Ultium have reported minimal training, exposure to hazardous chemicals, and electrocutions. Twenty two injuries were reported in just the first five months of operation at Ultium. Whistleblowers reporting dangerous conditions have been suspended without pay. 

Ultium workers unionized with the UAW in 2022 and are now in the bargaining process. The company says publicly that they’re committed to the bargaining process, while offering cheap deals to the workers that come nowhere close to the prior GM/UAW standard. 

All of this involves your money. 2.5 billion federal dollars made this industry possible, and this industry is making it impossible for their workers to get ahead. Will this be the standard for the future? 

The President, you know, working class Scranton Joe, talks a lot about being the most pro-union president ever, and how his administration is creating jobs with dignity that rebuild the middle class. But the loan he made possible for Ultium came without mandates for good middle class wages. 

The federal government could enforce wage standards as they do in other industries, the question is, will they?

This is where I hastily scribble about what’s going on. May include righteous anger and typos.

Are Employee Stock Ownership Plans (ESOPs) socialist?

I don’t know. Some socialists think so. Ronald Reagan thought they’d be great for stopping socialism in its tracks. Neocons in the 90s were sure they would lead to serfdom. That’s for the coffee shop theory bros to sort out.

What I do know is that 175 millionaires work at an ice cream stand that sells gas, Stewart's Shops of Upstate New York and Vermont, and that most of them started hourly and a third still are.

What gives?

You’re not supposed to become a millionaire by working at a gas station. Gas station employment is right up there with “you want fries with that?” in the Hall of Fame of regrettable phrases designed to put down working-class people while scaring 18-year-olds into six figures of student loan debt to avoid such a fate.

Well, more than 1,000 employees at this ice cream stand turned gas station have over $100,000 in their accounts, and I know a lot more college grads with more than $100,000 of debt.

175 Stewart’s employees are millionaires because Stewart’s is an ESOP with 40% employee ownership. There seems to be something to this whole “workers owning the means of production” thing. Call it socialism, or don’t, but it’s making millionaires in upstate New York.

Good enough for me.

I grew up in Redneck Rust Belt Appalachia. I live there now. Writing positively about socialism comes about as naturally as walking outside without clothes on. It’s just not something you do around here to make friends.

But what else are you going to do? I can’t think of another job where a cashier can legitimately expect to become a millionaire if they just stick with it. Worker ownership is making that happen. It works. We should go with what works.

Younger John would not have humped anything close to socialism so publically. I was prom king. I know what’s popular and what makes you sit at the front of the bus with the substitute gym teacher.

Looking back, most of my aversion was because I couldn’t imagine anything other than the capitalism we inherited. I didn’t have the vocabulary or framework for an alternative. Capitalism is synonymous with America. Most of us learn this early on and file it under “the way things are” like the fish asking “What’s water?”

Best not to worry about it.

Now’s the time to worry though. Our capitalism has done what it’s supposed to - bestow a handful of people with unimaginable wealth and power. The rest of the country is on its own. Most people would have trouble swinging a minor unplanned medical expense. Forget about a dignified retirement. That smoke and heat you can’t escape? Be thankful for it now. It’ll be much worst in the years to come. It’s all a natural outcome of late-stage capitalism.

The anti-dote is worker power. And it’s doing what everyone was told capitalism would do.

For more reading on this, I highly recommend checking out New Means by my friend Josh.

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Video Transcript

You get more millionaires with socialism guys. I said it. Socialism is better and making normal people rich. And I say that because there is a gas station where 175 millionaires work.

The gas station is Stewart's. It's in upstate New York and Vermont. And 175 of their employees are millionaires because Stewart's is an employee stock ownership plan. The workers actually own the company. And if that sounds familiar, that is because it's the socialism. The workers own those freakin' means of production. You know what I'm saying?

Some people say that an ESOP is not socialism. And to those people, I say, "Whatever, dude."

There are 3000 active employees across 345 stores. 40% of Stewart's is owned by the employees, which means there's a big bucket of company stock that, instead of being pushed around and gobbled up by Titans on Wall Street, nom nom, nom, nom, nom, nom, it is owned by the humble ice cream scooper. And 175 of them are millionaires because they own the damn scooper.

75% of the millionaires started out hourly at Stewart's and a third of them still are hourly. Back in 2018, over 1,000 of those workers had more than $100,000 in their retirement accounts which begs the question, do you have that much money in your account? Because the median retirement savings in America is $65,000, dude.

Stack, after stack, after stack, has been racked by these workers. Whatever it is you're doing in the god lovin' free market out there, is it stacking like this is? Because the people humpin' and pumpin' down at your local commie gas station have got that bag.

That's what this is all about right? Getting rich. Drinkin' beers. Rippin' shit on a badass Jetski. That's the dream. And that dream's a reality at your local commie gas station.

In 2019 there was double-digit growth on the employee stock and a 17.5 million dollar ESOP contribution. In 2022, double-digit growth and a 19.5 million dollar contribution. You get in the program by working 1000 hours and after you work there six years, there's usually a whole years freakin' paycheck in the bank, thank you very much.

You guys. This is a freakin' gas station. It's not engineering, or banking, or pharma. Right, Sophie? No six-figure degrees. No magic. It's a freakin' commie gas station with ice cream. And they're dishing out millionaires. Scope by freakin' scoop.

Does your job do that? Can you become a millionaire by doing what you're doing right now? Be honest. Do you have more money saved than somebody who works at this gas station? You could but you got to own those means bud.

This is where I hastily scribble about what’s going on. May include righteous anger and typos.

By the time you read this, I’ll be at a wedding, nearly in Canada. Speaking of Canada….

It’s uhhh, on fire. My window in the Ohio Valley is filled with rolling hills. Most of them are obscured by smoke right now. It burns your eyes while you lay awake in bed at night.

My apartment is 100 yards from Interstate 70. Main Street separates my apartment from the highway. 30,000 cars pass down Main daily (in a town of 1,500).

There’s a small bakery on Main right outside my window. A girl and her dad stood outside selling lemonade to no one. We were the third sale in a few hours.

It was as Norman Rockwell as it was Blade Runner.

So uh, hear me out - we should all quit our jobs… or at least slow down a whole lot… or something. I mean it sounds ridiculous, but you should hear what happens if we stay the course. Here’s an outlook from six years ago.

And it’s not like there aren’t plenty of things to do that don’t torch the only rock we can live on.

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Video Transcript and Sources

Reality is so much stranger than conspiracy theories, and it's what drives me nuts about RFK Jr, and QAnon, and Joe Rogan and his "free thinking" audience.

They are so close. They're like...

"There's a group of the richest most powerful people in the world. They're concentrating their power, buying off politicians, and working together to.... track you using tiny computers in the vaccine."

Oh!!!!!!!!!!! (so close)

Y'all know about Dupont?

They put a chemical in your blood that causes six diseases, mostly cancer, and it's in the blood of 99.7% of people on Earth. They invented this chemical. They put it in their worker’s cigarettes and found out that it was really bad. They knew it never breaks down in nature. They saw other companies stop producing it, and they kept going. And, they dumped millions of pounds of it into the Ohio River. Into the drinking water.

And now it's in your blood! Now it's in everybody's blood.

Did anyone go to jail for this?

No. No. Actually, DuPont still exists, which is wild. That's wild.

And it's incredibly profitable. They made $6 billion last year in profits.

Opioid companies!

The family that made Oxycontin raked in $10 billion off of it. One family, one company, one drug $10 billion in profit, and they knew it was addictive. They knew it was killing people.

Opioid overdoses killed 71,238 Americans last year, which is 22,000 more Americans than died in Vietnam and nobody's gone to jail. Real story. No imagination required.

Big Tobacco! They knew it was addictive and killed people. They hired doctors and scientists to say that it wasn't and it didn't.

Killed millions. Made billions. No jail. And do you know how profitable Big Tobacco is today?

More profitable than Coca-Cola, PepsiCo, Nestle, General Mills, and Starbucks combined. True story.

People are cooking under a record heat dome in Texas and choking on smoke in the Midwest from Canada being on fire. Canada. Being on fire.

Exxon knew its products would cause this in the 70s. They hired scientists to deny it, bought politicians... we know more about it today than ever and we're approving drilling permits at record paces. Real story. Didn't have to make it up.

But millions of people pass all of that shit up and choose to believe that the world's most powerful people gather bi-weekly at the DoubleTree to consume the blood of children.

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Just the news for this edition. If you need me over the weekend, no you don’t!

Video Transcript

Big news today. New evidence indicates Norfolk Southern may not have had to blow up the rail cars in East Palestine – and they likely knew that at the time.

The rail cars of vinyl chloride were cooling down hours before the vent and burn and had leveled off in temperature by the time of the detonation. 

You’ll remember the rush to burn these chemicals. We were told at the time that the threat of an uncontrolled explosion due to “runaway polymerization”, where the cars uncontrollably heat themselves from a chemical reaction, was imminent. 

The urgency was real at the time.

Here’s a temperature graph of the most concerning car. The time span is from the evening of Sunday the 5th, to the vent and burn on the evening of Monday the 6th. Notice how the temperature leveled off by early Monday morning. 

That’s also when four additional cars of vinyl chloride were added to the list just hours before the burn, bringing the total vinyl chloride burned to 885,000 pounds. The four cars added never did reach a concerning temperature threshold, but were burned anyway. 

Mike DeWine: “The railroad has a serious concern which they can express to you about an explosion with one or more of these cars. They describe an explosion as potentially catastrophic.”

Testimony shows how insistent Norfolk Southern was that the cars be detonated to avoid a runaway reaction. 

Randy Padfield, Director, Pennsylvania Emergency Management Agency: “We asked the rail company, Norfolk Southern has their individuals there, what other alternative plans have you thought through at that point in time?

We were told by Norfolk Southern that they are the experts. They have over 200 years of experience on the scene in their personnel doing this, and this is the only option.

But it turns out that the vinyl chloride manufacturer, Oxy Vinyls, LP, penned a letter cautioning against jumping to conclusions about polymerization (source: Group D, Exhibit 13) explaining that:

“Based on the information available to Oxy Vinyls to date, the VCM railcars did not exhibit these conditions, and we have seen no information that would confirm that runaway polymerization was taking place.” 

We also know that officials were talking to the chemical company before the burn. 

This data, that shows the cars cooling, and well under the threshold of a runaway reaction according to the company that made them, is the same data they had when they came up with the plan to vent and burn the cars.

Mike DeWine: “we've also been in consultation with the manufacturer of the product.”

It undercuts the only reason we were told that these cars must be blown up. It undercuts the only reason that East Palestine made the news. And it leaves a gigantic void in the story. 

If the cars weren’t close to exploding, then why was East Palestine put through all this? 

Keeping the heat on corporations that blow trains up in sleepy Appalachian villages is a lot more fun with a little coin. Help a guy out yeah? Sub now for only $5/mo ($60/yr)

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Y’all.

This one is going to be the quickest and dirtiest.

First of all, thank you so much to the paid subs of this newsletter. If you’ve noticed I’ve been gone for a while, it’s because of several major life events happening all at once (in a good way), but mainly because I fell down a rabbit hole of about twenty hours worth of hearings and testimony about the Norfolk Southern disaster in East Palestine.

This is a quick update that I wanted to get out before the NTSB hearings tomorrow. There’s still so much we don’t know, but more questions pop up around the official story each day. It’s time to tune back in for a bit.

Give the video a watch for a sub-5-minute recap on what we know about the vent and burn, and stay tuned for the next couple of weeks as we get more answers from the NTSB investigation.

Love ya bye.

Video Transcript

00:00:00:00 - 00:00:03:19

Speaker 1

We’re about to find out more on the Norfolk Southern disaster in East Palestine.

00:00:03:19 - 00:00:11:20

Speaker 1

The NTSB is holding hearings in town tomorrow and Friday. So we're going to recap what we know and what the public deserves to know from hearings like this.

00:00:11:20 - 00:00:14:15

Speaker 1

There’s a lot to tackle. So this video is going to be about the vent and burn.

00:00:14:15 - 00:00:15:10

Speaker 1

Norfolk Southern’s story so far is that there was no other choice but to

00:00:18:11 - 00:00:22:01

Speaker 1

detonate five cars of vinyl chloride. And here's why they say that

00:00:22:01 - 00:00:39:03

Speaker 1

vinyl chloride is unstable. It needs to remain cool during transport. If it heats up, it starts to polymerize. That's a chemical reaction that happens because of heat and that generates more heat. So at a certain point, the reaction generates enough of its own heat to keep reacting and run away.

00:00:39:10 - 00:00:47:05

Speaker 1

And at that point, explosion is a risk. And that's why Norfolk Southern says that the only option was to blow up the cars before they blew themselves up.

00:00:47:05 - 00:01:00:00

Speaker 1

But how do we know that all five cars were heating up in at risk of explosion? Right now, Norfolk Southern's word is all that we have and the testimony from experts and the timeline doesn't look good for their story.

00:01:00:00 - 00:01:15:17

Speaker 1

The temperature inside one of the tank cars was increasing, which could result in a catastrophic explosion. The critical point is 180 degrees. And at the time one of the cars was reading 140 degrees.

00:01:15:17 - 00:01:20:01

Speaker 1

That's Jennifer Homendy, Chair of the NTSB, with the strongest point in Norfolk Southern's favor.

00:01:20:01 - 00:01:30:08

Speaker 1

They learned that a single car was heating up on the evening of Sunday, the fifth after the fire that broke out on the third was put out. But what about the other four cars that were detonated?

00:01:30:08 - 00:01:46:10

Speaker 9

there's some increasing pressure on that car that they're concerned about, potentially increasing temperature on that car. There are four other cars. One has a a higher temperature. But the pressure or the pressure relief device is working as it should?

00:01:46:12 - 00:02:11:03

Speaker 9

And there are three other cars that we are told that are between 60 and 70 degrees Fahrenheit. There is no signs that they are polymerizing. There's nothing else that is concerning at that point in time. The game plan at that point in time that is relayed to us and the plan of action is that if the car does not, catalysts officially fail overnight that at 12:00 the following day they will conduct a vent and burn operation on that one car.

00:02:11:03 - 00:02:19:15

Speaker 1

That's Randy Padfield. He's a 9/11 first responder who's now the director of the Pennsylvania Emergency Management Agency. And he was in the room as it all unfolded

00:02:19:15 - 00:02:27:07

Speaker 1

on Sunday night, the fifth. The plan was to only burn one car because the others were either venting properly or not heating up.

00:02:27:07 - 00:02:39:01

Speaker 1

Then the day of the burn arrives. Monday, the sixth. And everything changes. Hours before the plan to burn a single car. Norfolk Southern suddenly insists on burning all five.

00:02:39:01 - 00:02:48:27

Speaker 1

the decision to go from the one tank car to the five was jaw dropping. And that impact just because of the impact it had.

00:02:48:27 - 00:02:57:09

Speaker 9

we're trying to figure out what changed overnight that we went from one car to five cars and why the abrupt change?

00:02:57:09 - 00:03:13:02

Speaker 9

because the way it was presented to him is that all five cars could catastrophically fail. So we ask the rail company Norfolk Southern has their individuals, their say what other alternative plans have you thought through at that point in time?

00:03:13:02 - 00:03:23:14

Speaker 9

We are told by Norfolk Southern that they are the experts. They have over 200 years of experience on the scene in their personnel doing this, and this is the only option.

00:03:23:14 - 00:03:29:20

Speaker 1

The new plan creates chaos and takes unified command back to square one. Hours before the burn,

00:03:29:20 - 00:03:41:07

Speaker 1

Ohio's National Guard was modeling the burn. They recommended reconsidering the modeling and evacuation zone for the now 885,000 pounds of vinyl chloride to be burned.

00:03:41:09 - 00:03:50:16

Speaker 1

But ultimately, everything stayed the same, and nearly 1,000,000 pounds of vinyl chloride went up in smoke. And that doesn't sit well with some experts.

00:03:50:16 - 00:03:58:05

Speaker 2

if I were a railroad and I was looking for the quickest way to clean up a mess and get my rail back together, I got burning some chemicals into the air.

00:03:58:05 - 00:04:11:17

Speaker 2

Certainly seems like it's going to be the quickest avenue to do that. Not accusing them of anything at this point. But what I'm saying is, if you're going to take the fastest rail and they proved that they were in a hurry to get their tracks back up and running, you burn that chemical off.

00:04:11:17 - 00:04:17:11

Speaker 1

The public deserves to know why Norfolk Southern made the decision to blow up all five cars.

00:04:17:11 - 00:04:21:24

Speaker 1

Show me. Prove it to me. I think we all need to be in Missouri mode. Prove it,

This is where I hastily scribble about what’s going on. May include righteous anger and typos.

Hi,

Here’s a short TikTok for you to get back into the swing of things around here. The transcript and some fun links are below.

In America, it’s an article of faith that hard work is the way to riches. The problem is that it’s not true. Donald Trump would be richer right now if he invested his inheritance in the stock market forty years ago and done no work at all.

In that scenario, he would have started off with around $200 million of inheritance money, and through the discipline of not working (even a little bit), would have transformed himself, with grit and vigor, into a multi-billionaire.

He did not do that. He tried very hard. There were highs and lows. We all, unfortunately, were subjected to it. And after all the toil, he now has less money than he would have if he simply did not work.

This is just one high-profile example of an underacknowledged American reality - that our system prints obscene amounts of money for people with obscene amounts of money. The bigger the pile of money you start with, the bigger the pile of money you end up with. That is, if you don’t do something foolish like use your pile of money to do anything resembling honest work.

The most hilarious and enraging part is that you can’t even give away money faster than our system prints it for the super-rich.

MacKenzie Scott divorced Jeff Bezos and walked away with $38 billion dollars. Then she decided to give most of her wealth away (which, ironically, is one of the best ways to stay rich). To date, Scott has given away over $14 billion dollars, yet her current net worth is hovering around $32 billion dollars. Amazon stock, which makes up most of Scott’s net worth, has slumped down to near its pre-covid level. When the stock was surging in 2021, Scott’s net worth was growing faster than she could give it away.

Just to recap, the “work” that this person was doing, was giving away money full-time as fast as possible. Giving away your money as your full-time job as fast as possible is not typically on the list of ways to stay rich, but that is the system we live in.

Why are we so obsessed with work if it isn’t buttering the bread like it’s supposed to? Because millions of people clocking into work and hoping for the best is *why* this system prints money for the super-rich in the first place. Somebody actually has to pack the Amazon boxes and create all that value. Might as well be you!

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Video Transcript

It blows my tiny little brain.

Donald Trump would be richer today if he invested his inheritance in the stock market and done no work at all. He would have more billions if he invested, did no work and just waited it out.

All that stuff he did - The Apprentice, the real estate, being president - whatever made him a business genius in the minds of millions of Americans...

He'd have more money if he did less work.

But how? How is that possible? You can have more money by doing less work. You don't become a billionaire without doing work.

Oh No, no, no, no, no. That's not how it works. See, the big secret is that work isn't related to wealth at all. Getting super duper rich has nothing to do with how hard you work. That's the huge secret.

The best way to make a fortune is to own a piece of paper *a stock* that entitles you to the value other people work to create. They do the work and you take the money because you have a piece of stock that entitles you to do that. And that's what's happening. Allllll around us. All around us.

Piles of money just multiply themselves. They don't actually do that. You multiply the pile of money for somebody who owns that value stock. That's how it works. And you can do it too! If you put $1,000 into Amazon stock in 2008, you would have nearly $20,000 right now, (I made a mistake in the video. You’d have closer to $36,788 now) courtesy of all the underpaid workers who make Amazon everything that it is today.

So if somebody dies and leaves you $200 million, exactly what happened to Donald Trump, you can be even more of a business genius by sticking it in an index fund and letting other poor bastards multiply it for you. And literally fucking off for 40 years. And that is how every single rich person is getting super rich.

They all tell us, oh, they're better than us, they're smarter, they're innovative, they're they work harder. It's the grind culture. It's just that they're built different. But that's all bullshit that they tell you so that you and everybody else who's living in this shitty system don't get super duper mad at how this all works.