Today
and I recorded episode five of Morning Tinto. Here are edited excerpts and links to all five, starting with the most recent.The problem is that there are people who vote for Trump. There are people who think the Democrats are the left, and so then they judge the left by the standards of the Democrats. And so then they say, “We don't want the status quo anymore”, and the only one promising some kind of big change is Trump. …
In Up from Under the Rulers H Peter Steeves talks about how the whole spectrum is a form of liberalism. And I don't mean liberals, but liberalism and so it's about people acting in isolated ways, in selfish ways, like, in terms of a social contract. So the left is more like: “The state should be providing health care. The state should do more, should care more about people and do more for people.” And then the right is more libertarian: “We should let people do what they want and not interfere.” Of course, even people that say that they want those things don't follow through because of, like, the heavy subsidies we see from the right into technology and bailing out, like, socialism for rich people. Steeves says that it's an illusion of choices. “Oh, we get to choose between this really narrow spectrum.” It's not a real choice. Most people know that because that's why they don't vote. They know there's no real choice between them, and that the system is rigged and it's for the wealthy. And Steeves says, and I agree, and lots of people have said that, in some ways, the Democrats are worse because they put the pride flag on the military equipment. They try to come across as woke or better, but they're still doing so many of the same things, genocide being one of them. Even Trump supposedly got a ceasefire, but it's all so murky and yucky. Their motives: he wants to put Trump hotels on the beaches of Gaza. It’s so dystopian. What's going on? Did you want that, or did you want the Biden genocide?
So, for me, stepping away from the spectrum, it's about saying, “No, we're not gonna give up what it means to be human and in relationship with each other, to these big institutions, to people who make decisions on our behalf.” It's not a democracy to be voting for one person that's going to have the power that Trump or Biden has, because they're not representing us if we didn't vote for them, and then, even if you did vote for them, you're not actually saying what's the list of things I agree with? Everything on that list that you're going to do? That's just not democracy. We're not getting our voices heard. That's why I'm a communitarian anarchist, because I want us to flourish as humans, and that means that we participate fully in everything that affects us, and it's impossible to do that with capitalism. It's impossible to do it with states dominating and deciding and the borders that are violent. We need to be free to go out wherever we want in the world and build community and build relationships, and we're not allowed to do that, and I think that that's why I'm not on the spectrum of left and right.
The book I want to refer to is called Joyful Militancy. Joyful Militancy is the antidote to something called rigid radicalism. We're talking about movements and activist spaces. Although people might be finding each other now in the US to come together to fight some things, and so they're in a kind of relationship with each other, I want people to explore those relationships. Are they real relationships, or are they based on something external, based on panic, fear, overwhelm? I don't live in the United States, so I don't know what's going on there in terms of how people are interacting with each other, in the face of the past— has it only been three weeks?? Are people doing the whole in-group, out-group? “Are you the kind of person I'm willing to work with?” Are they doing kind of some gate keeping? Are they working from a sense of urgency that puts aside care, that puts aside thinking about inclusion? Are we trying to be saviours? Are we listening to the people most impacted? It's a great opportunity for people to work on how to be in relationship with each other. How to be flexible and humble and listen. And those kinds of words don't really feel like what's happening in the moment. I get breaking news all the time. What's Trump doing now? “Hey, we're going to center flexibility, humility and care!” “No, there's no time for that. We have to stop them. We have to go complain to the Democrats. Why aren't they doing this? We have to do this!”
…In the book Joyful Militancy, they talk about transformative joy. How do we go from those feelings of separation, like, “Where were you when we were pro Palestinian? And now you want to do this!?” There's two ways I would answer that. One is, if we're talking about any old organisation that has a sense of urgency, which most do. And then the other side is if we're talking about the moment where we are at.
For the moment where we are at, I would say, and the book says, too, “Remember who the enemy is. The enemy is the system. It's capitalism, it's Empire, it's colonialism. It's not the person who gets sucked into something. It's not the person who was attracted to certain ideas.” We have to think about what we have in common with people. And, as the memes say, we have way more in common with people in China than we do with Musk or Trump. And so the people who go into the comments of Trump supporters who are surprised and disappointed— it can feel satisfying to do that.
And there's actually, in the book, they say there's something called paranoid reading, where you look for fault in everything. You get a sense of satisfaction because you belong to the good guys. You were on the right side the whole time. That is separating us from people when we actually do have a lot in common with these people.
Instead, if we used that time that we're devoting to going into the comment section, if we use that time to say, “Welcome! Welcome to seeing whose interests they really had at heart all this time.” A bit like a certain thing that happened on the 4th of December that brought a lot of people together, thinking, “Oh, we have a common enemy that doesn't care about our health.” And so there's that.
And then when we look at organisations and their sense of urgency, what I work with folks on is how not taking the time to listen and get good feedback and consult with the people who are impacted by decisions will lead you to a poor service, poor product. You end up having to clean up messes. You get high turnover, you get dissatisfaction.
I was just doing a training with a very large organisation yesterday, and they were going on and on about how the computer system had been set up without checking with the people who actually would be using it to input data and all of the wasted time when they are trying to serve vulnerable people in the community. They're not able to focus on that, because they have to deal with all this other stuff.
I think in both those senses, it's not very strategic. You're kind of wasting your time, like laughing at Trump supporters, wasting your time developing programmes and infrastructure, without taking into account who’s using it.
We need to get better about being in relationship with people, the people in our organisation, the people we serve, the people in movements, people who are joining the movement for the first time, or could potentially. There's that transformative potential there, but we're shutting it down by making fun of them and going in with this paranoid reading.
I'm reading Being Numerous: Essays on a Nonfascist Life by Natasha Lennard. I'm thinking about how it seems like there's a consensus that the party of opposition is not doing anything. Their role is to oppose and they're not doing a good job. The book posits that liberals tend to prioritise order over justice. But in order to face and undermine fascism, it's going to look a little disorderly. Imagining Democrats/Labour getting really disruptive is hard. It's hard to imagine that because they're the party of “we do things by the book, the rule of law”. Supposedly. We know that there's a lot of stuff going on behind the scenes, but this sense of liberals who want the Democrats to do something, they probably are very uncomfortable with what actually would need to be done.
And it's interesting. There's a lot of talk around how Trump supporters, MAGA, Make America Great Again, they're starting to get a bit uneasy about what's going on, because it's not what they voted for: the state interference, the foreign interference. Like what's happening in South Africa, for example. Trump is now following— Musk wants something to happen, so they're gonna punish South Africa. I'm pretty sure MAGA folks are, like, “What are you doing talking about South Africa? America First!” And then the idea that USA states are supposed to be autonomous, and yet Musk and his federal gang are going into states and doing stuff that affects states. So that feels really… I mean, if you're gonna start upsetting the MAGA supporters, they're the ones who are armed. You're gonna get into a Waco situation or something, because there's a big clash of world views. When you put Musk with Trump, that's kind of what's on my mind.
… Last week, we named our episode after a chapter of Timothy Snyder's pamphlet On Tyranny. And four years ago, I read his book called The Road to Unfreedom. It was about Russia and Putin; it relates so as well to things like Trump. Snyder said that an important way to counter fascism is through local journalism, because we don't know what's going on concretely, on the ground. Only looking at these big stories, headlines, we're not really getting a sense. And I was listening to a podcast yesterday where they were talking about how we don't even know the extent nonprofits are losing their funding right now, because the national media isn't covering it. They're not going around and asking, “What's happening with you?” The Democrats aren't doing anything. They did a protest, I think, outside something or whatever. But they they aren't even doing a good job of making themselves known as the opposition.
Local journalism would mean that people would get a sense of what the impact is like. I was hearing stories of charities that provide dialysis, and there are these nonprofits that get their funding through grants, but they're not given the grant completely upfront. So, if there's a freeze, which there was and continues to be for some people, then you would normally say, “Okay, I've got someone who needs dialysis tomorrow”, whatever, and then the money's released. And if the money's not there to be released, I mean, this is affecting people's lives. I know I talked about AIDS last week, but if we don't know what's going on locally, then we can't connect the dots. We can't have solidarity with people around us if we don't know what's going on. And so he was really making a very strong case for local journalism to return, because we know it's been bought out. I don't even know the statistics in the United States of the couple of people who own all of the media in the United States, all sources of news.
I would love to see us fighting fascism through an educated way, a way where we know what's going on. And liberals need to come around to the idea that you don't fight fascism with reason. The Lennard book was saying how the first principles of fascism are power and domination. So that's what you're up against. You're not up against reason and liberal values. You're up against illiberalism, which is why antifascism, she says, is an illiberal intervention. That's what we have to be, she calls it, antifascisting, even though we might not be able to do it perfectly, but any place where we see domination and oppression, we need to be working against it.
I want to read the beginning of a pamphlet that was written by Timothy Snyder, and the pamphlet’s called On Tyranny. And page one, which is Lesson One is, Do Not Obey in Advance. And it says: Most of the power of authoritarianism is freely given. In times like these, individuals think ahead about what a more repressive government will want and then offer themselves without being asked. A citizen who adapts in this way is teaching power what it can do.
And so I say that because it's one thing, which we talked about last week, to have funding pulled from EDI by the federal government. We're seeing on LinkedIn the fallout. It's horrible. And then it's another thing for people, like the media and multinational companies to be like, “Oh, well, we don't want to get on the wrong side of the US.” Or, like, Trump specifically. When it comes to the media, maybe because they're scared that he's going to retaliate.
Or look what happened to Colombia this week. The US was, is deporting, masses of people, documented and undocumented. And there were plane loads of Colombians, and the Colombian president refused to accept these US military planes, because he said it was degrading to have people in handcuffs being sent on a military plane back to this country. Immediately Trump said, “Fine. 25% tariff on all Colombian imports, going up to 50% in a week.” Now, of course, that's a huge impact on the Colombian economy. And then President Petro said, “Fine, we're going to make sure that all Americans are regularized in their immigration, and we will do the same with tariffs.” And then they came to some agreement, where Colombians being deported could come on Colombian government aircraft, with more dignity was the idea. I'm not really sure if there was capitulation.
I'm not really sure about what happened there, but the point being that people are afraid of what Trump will do if they don't do what he says. And I fear that it's not just federal agencies or it's whole countries worrying about tariffs. Maybe there are multinational companies thinking, “If we do something that the Trump administration doesn't like, they will not let us work in that country anymore. We will lose our entire, that part of the business in the US or some kind of sanction.” So this kind of preempting is just like exactly what Timothy Snyder says: it's teaching power what it can do. This just empowers Trump, because he's like, “Look, I say, ‘Jump!’ and they jump. Or I don't even have to say ‘jump’ and they think I'm gonna say ‘jump’, and so they jump anyway.”
I'm so furious. I was watching the Robert F Kennedy Jr confirmation hearing, just before we started recording. It was actually quite refreshing to hear these Democrats like really going at them, caring about vaccines, caring about mental health issues of people United States, AIDS medication programs for people with AIDS in Africa. Talking about all of those issues and saying to him, “Do you assure me that you're going to continue with this?” It's, like, Oh, my God. Look at everything that's happening. I don't even live in the United States. I live in Colombia and so I'm here to support people in the United States, but I already feel so stressed out, and I'm not even living there, and not even, like, too much, directly impacted. Maybe these multinational companies are going to capitulate, and that could affect some of my income.
While you were talking, I got a text message from an international colleague, just so that we're clear the effect that this is having internationally, that AIDS medications have been stopped in clinics outside of the United States because of the USAID funding. And so what they're working on is a legal challenge immediately. And I don't know if you've ever watched Sense8, the TV series, but one of the story lines takes place in Kenya, and the guy's mom has AIDS, and there's a storyline around medication being doctored, doesn't work because they're just trying to make money off of it, that kind of thing. So what came to my mind reading this message was, people need this medication, like, today. In fact, my anti thyroid medication on Saturday, when I was running out, I phoned the pharmacy and they said, we ran out, we can't find any. And I was like, “What? What is that going to do to my health, to not have this?” And then the very good pharmacist eventually found some. But look at this. Look at this, people with AIDS can’t wait for a court to let them have their medication. I mean, this is outrageous, and this is like affecting a very close colleague who needed to cancel our meeting today because he has to work on this legal challenge. This person isn't from the United States. This person doesn't work with the United States directly. And look at the knock-on effects, because the USAID has its kind of tentacles everywhere, which makes everyone in the world vulnerable to the whim of the current administration.
Let me just swing back to what you were saying about specific harms and, rather than being abstract when we're talking about EDI. I did do a small piece of work for a very well known company, and it was DEI work, and they just gave me a PowerPoint and told me what to do, and I could do a little bit of Q&A, but that was about it. This is in contrast to work that I've done with a very large charity in the UK over many years, and I've been working with their white managers on racism, and it's not a two-hour workshop or a webinar. It's weeks and weeks and weeks. And what I do is, I, with permission, with the consent of these non-white people, people who work there, who are targeted by racism, they share stories with me and then I share them with the white managers. Rather than hearing me talk about abstract racism that can happen, or look for stories on the BBC, or look for whatever, these are actual colleagues being targeted by racism inside and outside workplaces. This impacts people because it's people they know, or could know, and they have time to talk about it with each other and with me and process it and ask questions. And so that creates that kind of motivation for change and continuing change. And of course, this organisation has nothing to do, like, overtly with diversity, like its purpose, mission, and so there's limited amount of time that we have, and it's not perfect at all. But even what we're doing is really time consuming, and what they need to do is embed it more, make it so that it's, like, weekly people should be coming together and saying, “What's been going on?” Where can they improve? What do they need to learn? Who do they need to listen to. And then it's about relationship building. So part of that is my bringing together the non-white staff with the white staff to build relationships so that there can be allyship, etc. And the corporatisation of EDI doesn't allow for those kinds of long, intense programs.
In terms of what's going to happen to people now: Something you and I are working on is creating spaces for people to support each other and to respond appropriately to what's going on. So people being targeted, they're going to need spaces that where they can talk about this and people can think about the antifascist actions that need to take place to defend and protect people being targeted, not just DEI people, but trans folks, migrants. And that's all on the ground work. It's not some kind of over tpublic movement. And I don't think it's protest marches anymore. I think people's energy needs to be more covert, a need to save energy for doing that grassroots organizing of keeping each other safe.
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