Navigating the Tensions of Activism, Politics, and Housing in Georgia with Ryan Zickgraf

Can you imagine a city without a police presence? A world where activists face terrorism charges for simply voicing their opinions? This is the reality we explored with our guest, Ryan Zickgraf, as we delved into Georgia's local and state politics, examining the seemingly inconceivable "cop city" scenario and the unsuccessful attempt to make the no-cop city movement the next Standing Rock. The conversation unfolds into a wider discussion on city politics' complexities, affordable housing issues, and the impacts of gentrification.

Our dialogue takes an even deeper turn as we unearth the homelessness crisis in Athens, Georgia. Ryan helps us analyze the opposition to multi-use housing and the destruction caused by Sherman's March to the Sea. We look at the realities of Atlanta, Salt Lake City, and Macon, Georgia, grappling with the need for adequate housing, the cycle of displacement created by gentrification, and the lack of public infrastructure to combat these issues. 

Finally, we voice our frustrations about the American left, "woke politics," and victimhood culture. We delve into the debates surrounding capital flight and reparations, the post-left's attraction to the census, and the dangers of making drag the center of our cultural universe. The episode concludes with an exploration of COVID death rates' correlation with social policy in the United States. Join us for this enlightening talk with Ryan Zickgraf

Musis by Bitterlake, Used with Permission, all rights to Bitterlake

Chapters

• 0:00 Georgia Politics and Activism
• 16:00 Homelessness Crisis and Left's Lack
• 34:25 Challenges and Considerations in Affordable Housing
• 46:39 City Separation, School Funding, and Inequality
• 1:00:59 The Frustrations of the American Left
• 1:10:18 Woke Politics and Victimhood Culture Challenges
• 1:29:44 Capital Flight and Reparations Debates
• 1:39:49 COVID, Policy, and Local Politics
• 1:52:22 Positive Agendas and Economic Issues in Activism
• 2:01:18 Local Politics in National Movements

Transcript

C. Derick Varn: 0:48

Hello and welcome to Varm Vlogging. Today I'm here with Ryan Zickgraf, whose name I have butchered in the past on air, probably many times actually.

Ryan Zickgraf: 0:59

Well, you're not the first or you won't be the last, so I'm not sweating it.

C. Derick Varn: 1:03

All right, ryan, you write for a bunch of people, predominantly, I see, these days in Jackabin. You've been in Compact. You are a co-founder of the now-infantest bellows and yes, and and. Back in the day, way back actually, when you first came in my orbit, I defended the bellows under your tenure, but not afterwards, or your partial tenure. You were not the only founder, but We'll talk about that later, yeah, but you are now in what is effectively my old hood. What part?

Ryan Zickgraf: 2:01

of Georgia. Are you from?

C. Derick Varn: 2:01

I'm from Macon, but I went to school partially in Milledgeville and partially in Atlanta, so so you're now in my stomping grounds, but I have not lived there, oh God, in like 14, 15 years now. So that is kind of how we're gonna start today, because I think exploring how politics is getting weird in Georgia in specific is a very interesting way into the kind of shifting sands of post-Bernie politics. The most obvious thing is happening in Georgia is the cop city scenario. We know about the tragic killing of Tortuga and we have seen the concerts and the various actions around that. We've also seen terrorism charges being increased and thrown at people. How is that going? I mean, it seems like it's a very specific activist cause, but it's not going the way, say, the Floyd case did or anything like that.

Ryan Zickgraf: 3:29

Yeah, you know it's interesting. Not that long ago there was some calls to say that the no-cop city, the stop-cop city movement was going to be the next Standing Rock, and that really hasn't come to fruition. But there has been various actions and movements. I mean there was it in late March, early April. There was like a week of actions that they had and they were trying to rally support here and it was sort of a week where a lot of people came from out of state, a lot of anarchist antiphyotypes came for this music festival for this whole week of action. And I was actually there the day of there was a Sunday, it was like the second day of the music festival and I decided to check it out and I would say there was probably between 500 to 1,000 people scattered. I mean, part of what's interesting about the cop city area right now is that it's mostly park space and it is really huge. I mean they're putting this on something like 270 acres and so in one way there's no one single place to be seen and sort of occupy.

Ryan Zickgraf: 5:05

But yeah, that was sort of a flash point at the time because there was a group that distracted the police, where all of them black and then went to some of the construction area and, through fireworks, set some bulldozers on fire and then the cops swept in and they were sort of looking for blood and so they ended up arresting a bunch of just you know regular music festival goers that just had mud on their shoes and that was like their proof. So that was a big day, but since then it's mostly been quiet. There was also a group recently I think the Intercept did a story about this. They were posting flyers on people's cars and they got arrested and they were denied bail. So I mean, part of it is the state is really really clamping down on speech and these protesters. So you can argue that part of the reason that has been unsuccessful up until this point is that Governor Kemp and the Atlanta police and the Georgia state police have really made sure that it doesn't.

C. Derick Varn: 6:27

That's interesting. So I'm out here in Utah and we've seen a lot of changes in laws around policing speech but not censoring it. So access, limiting children's access, but in ways that require everybody to turn over IDs. A lot of attempts to silence property, damage, protest by throwing the book at people and then often dropping the charges, like once everything settles down, or dramatically amping down the charges, but at first throwing charges that could lead to life in prison for vandalism of an AG's door, and we've seen that here too. So that does seem to be kind of a general trend in red states. I find it interesting because there's a lot of talk about free speech right now and I'm not actually seeing a lot of this stuff at the state level dealt with, and I wonder why that is. I mean one it's not a hot, I mean it doesn't help the GOP very much, but the other it's not just conservatives who aren't talking about it.

Ryan Zickgraf: 7:53

Yeah, no, it is interesting. I mean there is a lot of red states, especially in the South, that I don't know. I've been exercising a lot of power recently and this is a sort of like one arena. I mean you have DeSantis, who has been sort of the number one governor that's been cracking down on speech and sort of targeting leftists. But here in Georgia, like Brian Kemp is almost like a junior version of DeSantis and I mean it's interesting that he has sort of distanced himself from the state GOP because they've been so pro-Trump so he's been carving out his own path, kind of apart from that, but yet he governs mostly like that DeSantis. Oh, what's you know in Arkansas? What's her name? Sanders?

C. Derick Varn: 8:54

Oh, Elizabeth Huckabee Sanders, yeah.

Ryan Zickgraf: 8:56

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

C. Derick Varn: 8:57

That's Sarah Huckabee Sanders.

Ryan Zickgraf: 8:59

Yeah, yeah, she's been kind of doing the same thing and, yeah, like the left here doesn't really know quite how to respond to it, I feel like yeah, but it seems almost because it's a junior partner to DeSantis like they're not going nearly as far.

C. Derick Varn: 9:24

They don't know how to respond because it's like you can't really pin Kemp as going nearly as bat shit as some of DeSantis is going. You can't do that here for Cox and Utah either, but there are laws that are just amping things up. There's a whole lot of local control stuff that's been reversed. This has been a this was an interesting move that started during COVID, where a lot of stuff was actually well, we're going to turn it over to localities oh, the localities don't want to do what we want where. We're going to like centralize it in the state legislature, which is like dominated by rural politicians who are like over-representing like five people.

C. Derick Varn: 10:10

Like you know, I'm only vaguely exaggerating and that Tennessee is not as bad in Georgia as it is in Utah, because Utah has an extremely concentrated population. But it is still a thing in Georgia where you have huge areas that have a lot of representatives, where there really aren't that many people. And I think it's interesting because there's also a way in which the left is talking about Georgia as a purple state because of its congressional and national representation, and I've been trying to push back on that somewhat, because I'm like guys to say like it is just objectively the case that some of the same people that put that Democratic Senator in office also voted for Kemp again and the Tennessee and MacKenzie lost in the Republican election.

Ryan Zickgraf: 11:24

And the state house is just totally locked down here for the Republicans. And, yeah, Kemp has just, you know, with all of Stacey Abrams hype. Kemp was able to expand his lead in the last election. He narrowly won four years ago, but this time, you know, he crushed Abrams. So, yeah, I think that the Democrats are kind of it's a little bit of wishful thinking.

C. Derick Varn: 11:52

Yeah, I've seen that too. I know that there's been a move by the Biden administration to try to put Southern Democratic black voters in specific more in the forefront of the party.

Ryan Zickgraf: 12:08

Well, that's partly Bernie protection. You know they don't want to repeat of what Bernie was able to do in Iowa and New Hampshire. So they're like, oh, we need to put South Carolina first, because you saw what, how they went, you know, in 2019, 2020.

C. Derick Varn: 12:20

Right, we can frame it as racial, but, as I pointed out, like, if you really wanted it to be racial, you could also put it in Chicago or Michigan. I mean like because Detroit and Chicago are also black electorates but they're not actually as moderate in quotation marks as the Southern black congressional caucuses which effectively and I have pointed out for years, but I don't think people have really understood what I meant like took over the Dixie Craddock political machine when a lot of these state house people just changed their Ds to Rs. And that's another thing about Georgia politics at the state level that people don't realize. Incumbency is incredibly powerful in that state. Like, some of these people have been in office like 30, 40 years and they have just changed parties as the political winds have changed. It's like it's not even about the GOP. It's like no, they run this district, you're not getting rid of them. No one even knows who they are half the time. It's an interesting problem.

Ryan Zickgraf: 13:36

The other thing too is interesting is that a lot of the vote, I feel like, is coming down to the Atlanta suburbs and which at some points have been more blue. But then you go a little far, you go a little north, like, say, half an hour north of Atlanta and you're in Marjorie Taylor Green territory.

C. Derick Varn: 13:57

Right, so as you get just past Cummings, yeah, you're in MTG territory, I mean, and one of the things about that like this stuff can be overstated, but I will just point out to people that even some of the blue North Atlanta suburbs North Atlanta suburbs used to be sundown towns like as late as the 1990s, so like it's a much more precarious thing that I think people realize, and seems to have been specifically about national politics, not local politics, and I guess that's the one thing that Kemp has going for him. Is he and actually this actually interestingly also makes a strong case about the weakness of the Democratic Party at the state level is that even though there's Trump's contention against him, he not just won but gained ground, even with Trump coming at him, Like it's actually quite interesting to watch, and so I think that's a and he decided to not even go to the GOP convention.

Ryan Zickgraf: 15:18

He is like I'm forging my own path and there hasn't been a whole lot of political blowback from that. So it's been interesting that he's become like a king of Georgia.

C. Derick Varn: 15:33

Yeah, that's interesting too, and one of the things that you told me you were writing about that is related to Cop City. Actually, although not directly, is this expansion of things like formal homeless encampments. Yeah, what is going on with that? Like that was not a thing when I lived in Georgia.

Ryan Zickgraf: 15:56

Yeah, so it's fairly new. Right now. In Athens, georgia, which is a very liberal college town, during the pandemic, like a lot of cities, there was a huge increase in the homeless population and they were seeing what was going on and say, I think one of their examples was in Gainesville, florida, with the Unions of Florida, where they had their own sort of sanctioned homeless encampment and when I say sanctioned, it means like the state is authorizing it and sort of funding it, setting the rules or whatever. So Athens started it in 2021. And basically there's a tent city placed behind an old segregated grade school that hasn't been in commission for 40 years, across the street from a chicken processing plant, and they're doing this sort of experiment where the homeless yeah, it's a little bit like partly a prison camp and partly a summer camp, depending on who you are, and so they're letting people stay there. They're gonna talk about it again in October to decide whether to keep going with it, but Atlanta and other cities are figuring out whether they wanna adopt it because there has been just.

Ryan Zickgraf: 17:26

I mean, I was walking by, I was walking downtown the other day and there was just a line down the street of tents everywhere. So I know a lot of the homeless. I mean, we had that incident in New York last night and then a lot of West Coast cities are dealing with this homeless issue. But here in Georgia it's an issue and I'm actually speaking tomorrow with they're trying this program in Atlanta where they're doing some sort of like alternative policing. A lot of it have to do with people that just got out of jail and are just homeless. But yeah, the politics of it are pretty interesting. It's not a very straightforward conservative or liberal matter, and even I feel like socialists don't even have a clear plan to deal with the homeless.

C. Derick Varn: 18:26

Now I wanted to talk about this a little bit. We've had the controversies around TYT and Anacaspian and Stink. You were doing their thing and I have disagreed with them on a lot of that because it seems to be car serial but at the same time I have not really heard a plan for how to, for example, deal with the fact that most these municipalities, particularly in the South, don't have enough social workers as it is to do basic things. That infrastructure, even compared to the West, is just lacking in a lot of places like not in Atlanta, not in Savannah, not in Columbus, but in a place like Macon it doesn't exist. Are some of the towns like Dublin and whatnot. In the deeper South of the state there's just not a whole lot of public infrastructure at all, and for the past decade we're talking about places that can't keep hospitals open and stuff like that.

Ryan Zickgraf: 19:45

Yeah, no, even in Atlanta, I mean here they just closed one of the two trauma centers where gunshot victims could go, and I mean Georgia is a state where they didn't have Medicaid expansion. So even in a city like Atlanta, which has gotten richer, like a lot richer over the last 10 or 15 years, yeah, the social services are just not anywhere where you would see, in a lot of Northern and West Coast cities. And in fact, speaking of that camp in Athens, I mean one thing's interesting is that the head of the camp told me that he had sheriffs all over the state trying to just send inmates there, that sort of like well, they have nowhere else to go and there isn't a lot of social services, so throw them in the homeless camp. So he had to say no to a bunch of wardens or sheriffs or whatever.

C. Derick Varn: 20:49

I mean that's, I think, the fact that the left doesn't have not just. I mean, I know what the people are gonna say when we say, oh, the left doesn't have an answer, that's they're going. Well, we need to give them houses, I'm like, okay, but we also need to get them addiction treatment, we need to get them jobs, we need to, in some cases, get people pretty severe mental health care and integrate them back in the community actually in a lot of cases. And we have a shortage of people to do all of that now. Now, yes, some of the more functional people, people who have been temporary homeless and could help on that, you could train them, et cetera, but I'm not hearing a lot of very active plans or proposals for progressive states or progressive cities to do that.

C. Derick Varn: 21:50

And we're at a point where it also looks like we're about to immediately head into a recession, like we're about. I mean, most of the indicators are like well, we've kind of been there for six months anyway, but we're definitely gonna be there soon, and so it just seems to me like the left has been caught kind of flat-footed on this and, at the same time, I don't want people to think that we should be carceral on this stuff, because I'm also like, well, you know we have what? 500 people per 100,000 in prison and only like, even though murders have increased, actually fairly significantly, we're still only dealing with a national average of seven per 100,000. Like so I don't know you can do the math on that, but that's like 492 people who are per 100,000 who aren't in there for a lethal crime. So it's kind of a crazy thing to be dealing with and yet to have no answer for it just looks delegitimizing.

Ryan Zickgraf: 22:55

Yeah, I mean I feel like a lot of leftists talk about. It's sort of like all you can say is housing, and that is a great long-term solution, especially if you're in a city that is able to respond to that, but short-term and medium-term they have no answers. So I used to work for I used to live in Chicago and I used to work for the Chicago Reader, and the reader there recently published this thing that got a lot of attention. That was like oh, what do you do if you see a homeless person in the subway? And the answer is nothing. And they wrote a whole article about how you should do nothing. And I think that a lot of times that is sort of the response in absence of okay, we need to build more housing, which is obvious, but to do nothing is that's a choice too, and I don't think that's solving anything either.

C. Derick Varn: 23:56

No, I, it opens. I mean I you know this is gonna come out about two, three weeks after we recorded it, but it opens itself up to the kind of thing we see in New York, which I do not want to blame on the person, on the poor homeless guy who was more or less murdered or at least manslaughtered. Yeah, it does seem like we're kind of opening ourselves up for this kind of quasi-vigilante engagement when we have no real Answer, help for these people, and then we say we can't do anything about it and we're just going to that's the cost of living in a city is is it's homeless people, as long as it's also a city that's, like, you know, warm enough weather-wise that people don't just freeze to death in the winter, because that is part of what's going on in southern and western cities is like Homelessness problems in Utah are all year round, but them, but people being out in the streets is is seasonal, because you will just freeze to death like it's really kind of that simple.

Ryan Zickgraf: 25:13

But yet there's more West Coast cities that are trying this model of these sanctioned camps, like in Portland Ted Wheeler authorized, because they they set like a camping van and then they're setting up six of these camps, camps of a hundred people, and so they're gonna try this thing where you can't camp but you can go into these homeless encampments. You know, to me it's a very like kind of maybe Halfway half-assed, whatever you want to call it, but it is an attempt at trying something new. Because you know, I think the way the economy is going, I think, and that there are gonna be even more homeless people in the next five or ten years, I don't, I don't see that going away.

C. Derick Varn: 26:00

No me there.

C. Derick Varn: 26:01

I Actually foresee it getting significantly worse, particularly when you think about the fact that we kind of have a time bomb with a lot of provisions post-COVID about to run out and as they're running out also, we seem to be on the back end of a business cycle and While the GOP decided not to blow up the dollar hegemony just to own the libs, they, it does seem like we're seeing Frailty in bank systems.

C. Derick Varn: 26:36

We're seeing commercial real estate start to crash. We're seeing one of the tickets into the, the upper middle class, which Is coding really contract because of a mixture of bad rentier policies ending now that that's not cheap, and Chat, gp, tai making a lot of rote coding unnecessary. So I mean, I just Don't feel like it's a good time to be part of the Working class. But it also seems I don't know how you feel about this, ryan, but I feel like the left blue it's wide like like when things were good and now that things are not great, we seem to be Spending a lot of energy coming up with very elaborate intellectual Justifications for why Biden doesn't suck as bad as we think he does like.

Ryan Zickgraf: 27:38

Yeah, or or that or that, or you know, such as the case of the stop-cop city movement, that you're focused on this one particular issue and kind of Giving up or not really have anything to say about much else. You know.

C. Derick Varn: 27:57

Yeah, so let's talk about cop city a little bit. A lot was made about the racial dynamics of the neighborhood. It was going in. I was, I Was trying to remember I mean, it isn't south Atlanta and I was like, okay, I do remember that being being mostly minority back when, back in the day, but I've also known that in the like what I mentioned a decade and some on since I was gone, that that the dynamics of Atlanta have changed significantly.

C. Derick Varn: 28:29

So what really are like, what's going on in development that's leading to this kind of conflict over the farce? Because one of the things that I was also thinking when they were talking about top Scott, stop, cop city, they were talking about the need to not develop that land and I was like, well, that's not gonna happen. Yes, well, I like I don't know, you guys are not from the south, but you like it either gets developed or it turns to or it gets totally abandoned. It like there's not, there's not a whole lot in between that happens there. So, so it just like I get the specifically blocking this police training complex and I get why that's an issue. I'm not saying that's not valid, but there was a lot of discussion about like saving the wildlife in that area and I'm like really, yeah, and honestly, a lot of that land was part of the old prison farm mm-hmm and it's getting.

Ryan Zickgraf: 29:32

I mean it's getting dark. Should I maybe I'll turn on the light here? It's okay, so it looks so haunting. So yeah, it was an old prison farm and that had been abandoned for years and so a lot of that land is was trees that were sort of invasive species and it wasn't like this pristine, I mean Forest. A lot of it was just land that had been part of this camp and it had just been sitting vacant. And inevitably because Atlanta keeps developing and it keeps spreading out South and and gentrifying, something was gonna happen to it.

C. Derick Varn: 30:19

Well, and I want people to understand what happened to this area in the past. Like South Atlanta Was a suburb, like it was, you know, hip In the 80s to live in there, then the areas around, like South Atlanta, between, say, warner, robbins or Forsythe, and Atlanta, like Mount Zion or whatever, were literally places that they allowed the public infrastructure to collapse as these places became more and more black to the point where, like, schools were being disc, unaccredited and basic services were breaking down and so it. It has always been ironic to me that people don't seem to understand, in these areas in specific, that it does seem to be a choice between bad and worse. Like I get that some of the development issues that they're talking about are not Ideal or bad.

C. Derick Varn: 31:25

Yeah, but I also know From living in that area that when, if it's not gentrification, people like it's literally kind of left, left to be a wasteland, and so it's like what are we? Are we talking about what to do for these communities other than, like I don't know, like stopping this prison development because these, like these areas were Decimated years ago and now they're being gentrified because it went like you can't really move any further, nor fit and it be affordable. So I mean people are who work in Atlanta will live as far down as where I literally make in is. Now one of its industries is opening up Woff apartments and abandoned buildings so that people, you know, so that people who work in Atlanta can live there An hour and a half away. So it's that.

Ryan Zickgraf: 32:27

No, there's a lot of, I feel like, brain dead conversations about gentrification. I Matthew Matt, you're glaciers of all people had a I feel like a tweet the other day that I agreed with and he just talked about Again those conversations about gentrification is like so your alternative is that these people should just have shitty amenities and no redevelopment, like. It's interesting on the left, because there's these conversations about, you know, yinbi ism, but then you know they pick and choose when to become a nimby. You know, something that I've written about recently is the belt line, which I'm not sure how much how familiar you are with that, since it's mostly been an Atlanta project of the last 10 years.

Ryan Zickgraf: 33:11

But it's this trail, like around former rail lines, that kind of circles the city and they've been building it for the last 10 years and there's so many complaints about about gentrification and what it's doing. And yet you know you go, you go to these these paths and people use them and it's like Well, what? What makes them, what raises, pop it, property values around that area is it's in demand, there's a scarcity of these kind of amenities, and so you build them and people like it and it does raise prices, but it doesn't mean that that, like this trail itself, is an area that's not a city. That's not a city, that's not a city, that's not a city, that's not a city, that's not a city itself is inherently white or evil. It's that, you know, a lot of people don't have the resources to live in neighborhoods when property prices go up, so it's sort of like Well, what actually is your alternative to this development? To just say no to everything Because you think that it's going to displace communities is just not a great answer.

C. Derick Varn: 34:25

It's not an answer. Yeah, like you know, if you want to talk about affordable housing, then you have to talk about, like, the policies that would make that so and then how to Deal with that, which means more even than just providing the housing. Frankly, we really have to talk about, um, dealing with all kinds of market pressures and Reinforcing systems, like the way insurance is done and this and the other, to To really start to get to this. And you know I I don't want to be always the guy who says, well, some of this stuff can't be happened until we at least have some transitional program to socialism. But in some ways I'm like some of this stuff can't really happen till you really tough, some transitional program socialism. Um, I don't like. Yeah, like you want to piece mail stuff. That's been one of the most frustrating things for me is like piece mail reforms without thinking about the fact that doing it half-assed Is worse than not doing it at all or is actually defending parts of the status quo. That's actually quite ugly.

C. Derick Varn: 35:40

One of the things about you mentioned the Atlanta Beltline. I was there when it was first proposed and it was fought not on gentrification lines but on keeping the the poor's aka, in this case the brown and blacks out of north Atlanta. That was its original opposition, and so it shifting to be concerns about gentrification is really funny to me, like Because they're like, oh well, we don't want any more light, well, we don't want to extend martha out into Cummings or whatever, because we don't want, you know, these people, uh, from inner city to come. But now Atlanta and it's any city, like most of these bigger cities have become immensely Attractive, um, and so what we have is like what I mentioned about Zion. So you have these suburbs that were built originally, actually is kind of white flight suburbs, who are now black and brown, but only in the past, like 15 years, um, and they don't?

Ryan Zickgraf: 36:45

that's one thing that that really shocked me about when I moved here was just how diverse the suburb, the inner suburbs, are.

C. Derick Varn: 36:54

That's because the city got gentrified. We didn't have it, there was nothing to deal with and they pushed them out into the suburbs. But now we're kind of arguing that we shouldn't do anything to the suburbs because that would gentrify them, but by making them attractive, by making them like not a shitty place to live. And to me, to me, this was a problem, like it was a problem out here in salt lake too. I had to, you know, I had to deal with a lot of activists who are fighting building Multi-use housing because like, oh, we don't want gentrification of our city and I'm like you don't have enough housing units. Right, you, you're talking. You are the same people arguing we need to do something about the homeless and yet you're stopping us building housing units. I realize a lot of these housing units are going to be luxury and shitty I got that but you're stopping us from building any at all. Yeah, like this doesn't make sense.

Ryan Zickgraf: 37:50

It kill, it kills me. Um, there's a piece of uh street art that I walk by all the time. It's about a half mile, it's actually pretty close to the bow line, but it's a mural that says you know, because Atlanta was infamously destroyed during the civil war, uh, sherman's march and um. So it says it has a picture of a phoenix and it says that alana was burned to the ground, only to be burned to the ground again. And they have like a devil who is a developer and a politician or whatever, and he's taking money and it's like no, actually a lot of these neighborhoods were kind of burnt out and were in ruins and, um, building new things, building new things is not burning it back to the ground. That makes no sense to me.

C. Derick Varn: 38:44

So can I ask you who's actually asking for this? Do we know? Is it the communities themselves? I just when I was living in makin and this was a discussion, uh and again, because that long time ago, but it was not the communities themselves arguing against development, like they were kind of hoping that anything would come.

C. Derick Varn: 39:01

It like because that city has been allowed to die like, uh, average incomes dropped to per family 25 000 a year, which is, which you know is like half the national average. Um, half the city's businesses are gone. There's no tax base, like most of the city now is. Either churches are, are um, churches are the hospital, are municipal buildings, so there's no tax base. Even though they've expanded the tax base, they still can't keep stuff there.

C. Derick Varn: 39:36

And and on one hand, I, you know, I've always been kind of in BE on like, okay, let's, let's like do mix development, let's have people come in, let's try to fight off, you know, anybody coming in, dropping property values immediately, uh, you know, by trying to just keep everything Up and providing enough services.

C. Derick Varn: 39:58

But on the other hand, it just what I've seen in georgia was just like things were allowed to go to shit.

C. Derick Varn: 40:03

People would ask for development, um, and, interestingly, it was often upper middle class people who fought it. And then what actually would happen Is, like Mercer University would go and buy the city block, um, and then gentrify it themselves to create a buffer for their students. And I'm, like you know, I was just like, come on, like you know, like this is almost like classic bad faith, like, like I mean, I know it's not the same, it's not the activists who are, who are, who are, you know, mercer University administration, they are often their students, and so I was just confused by like, what do you want? Like, do you want to make these parts of the community better Under capital developments? That's going to make it more expensive, um, unless you provide a glut of housing, which you know I would love for us to do, but there's very little incentive for a city planner to do that because it's going to anger a lot of residents by dropping your property values.

Ryan Zickgraf: 41:18

And you know, I feel like if leftists were smarter we would spend a lot more time On zoning, going to zoning boards, trying to fix city codes and I mean there are so many decisions.

Ryan Zickgraf: 41:32

You know, we're talking about affordable housing, we're talking about what to do with the homeless that because of zoning restrictions, I mean. I talked to an architect here and he said, you know, he's interested in building affordable housing, but because of every hoop that he has to jump through, that, um, it would take him. So the world cup is coming to, uh, atlanta in 2026. He's like there's no way I can get a project done before 2026. So there's been an identification of the problem of that we need to build more housing but, um, the tyranny of zoning makes it really difficult and that's something that I feel like leftists don't really have a handle on.

C. Derick Varn: 42:13

Absolutely not. Um, it's actually interesting because it's one of the few things that, back in the day, libertarians are actually good at. Um, and we haven't been, because I'm like, I'm like I was thinking about Outside of boutique neighborhoods in the inner city where we like we're gonna make it, you know, walkable, which I used to be all about new urbanism, right, and I've lived in places where that are not rich, where this happens kind of organically. Um, cairo cities, for example, this is actually true where like, oh, you have a walkable market, you can live in like a city block, you don't need a car, uh, there's. I mean, even in a country where, like, there is barely any public infrastructure, which everything's still provided in this area.

C. Derick Varn: 43:03

But you know, what Cairo doesn't really have is zoning laws. Um, you know, sometimes that's bad. I mean sometimes like, yeah, there's an industrial slag nearby and, uh, that sucks. Um, but For a lot of stuff I'm like why, why are so many places like, oh, yeah, we're only gonna allow mixed use area downtown, like, um, we're basically forcing people to use cars and Deal with it? So much of this is self-imposed, and, and leftists don't seem to want to study civic design enough to know that, and I don't know. I mean, do you think it's because of where they're from?

Ryan Zickgraf: 43:50

uh, I don't know. I think part of it is just that you know Leftists are can be very bad at really doing focusing on on local issues and municipal issues like you know we all got, you know, with good reason, focused on, you know, the burning campaigns and and things like that.

Ryan Zickgraf: 44:14

And I know dsa does do a lot of of local actions, but again, a lot of them have to do with, say, policing. They don't necessarily uh, or union, you know, like strikes and whatnot, but as far as like, let's think long term about how we can make things better. You know, um zoning affects all of us and so few people care. It is crazy to me. I'm also today I was working on a story about the Atlanta public school budget and and because nobody has really paid attention is so indecipherable and they're able to get away with more because a lot of activists are not paying attention, absolutely.

C. Derick Varn: 45:09

No, like getting activists to paying attention to like one interestingly, I say like Georgia the public school budgets also. Weird, because there's so. For example, during the downturn of 2008, I was a teacher in Georgia and like we had to open schools that we couldn't staff because the funding lines were entirely different. So funding the physical building is a different tax line than funding staffing it. We didn't have the tax base to staff it, but we did have the like two-cent temporary sales tax authorization to build the school. If so facto. Like there you go.

C. Derick Varn: 45:54

I think a lot of that's coming. And the reason why I think a lot of that's coming, it's not going to affect me that much in Utah because, one, we're understaffed anyway to the point of absurdity. We have school classrooms with 50 kids in them. But two, our state ironically because there's so much rural state actually funds classes relatively equally, we're not based solely on our local property tax base, but Georgia is. So one thing that's going to happen pretty soon if this commercial real estate thing actually seems to play off, the way it looks like it's going to is a whole lot of the tax base for the Georgia schools are going to go away again.

Ryan Zickgraf: 46:40

Yeah, You've had cities try to separate themselves, like Buckhead, which is northern part of Atlanta right now. It's very rich and more weight. There was a battle in the state this year. They tried to de-annex and create their own city. It narrowly failed. But there's even interestingly enough, there's a town called South Fulton which was formed in the south part of Fulton County. It's a mostly black city, but part of the idea was that, okay, there's these white areas which are building their own cities and they don't have to contribute to Atlanta. Well, we have to protect what's ours and do the same thing. You had Mabelton, a new town in the county spring, up here a few months ago and it's majority black, but it raises issues of class for sure. But yeah, the school funding in the Atlanta area is a mess.

C. Derick Varn: 47:47

Yeah, one of the things about so Georgia school funding. I mean to get into the weeds here a little bit. I don't think people realize this is county-based, but Atlanta has three counties, but all those counties also have areas outside of Atlanta. So you have, like the Cab, gwynette and Fulton, cob yeah, l? E and Cob. So they have four who are all technically part of the greater Atlanta school system. Since the school system is not consolidated in the city. Anyway, you have four different operating school systems within the city parameters. There are other places that have.

C. Derick Varn: 48:35

Actually, salt Lake has a similarly complicated system, but it's almost impossible to know Sometimes like your school district is not necessarily contiguous with any other of the voting districts. I guess it kind of is. But when you start having these cities start parceling off too, you have these now like Swiss cheese holes in the tax base. It's a nightmare. I get why people do it. It's incentivized in the system the way it is right now, but it also means that basically you have internal to a municipality tax competition to drive all kinds of bizarre funding choices in this school system. It's not like Atlanta schools are known for being amazing in the first place, although some of them are.

Ryan Zickgraf: 49:41

But, it's. Well, they're slowly going to more charter schools. For this budget, they're talking about 20 percent of their resources going to charter. So it's becoming more and more that way.

C. Derick Varn: 49:56

That's interesting to me because Georgia had not been as charterized as some other places. It's also interesting because out West, which is a lot more charterized actually than, say, the South used to be, we've turned the opposite direction, because there's been so many financial scandals and embezzlement schemes and we've had to shut down so many charter schools, even in a state like Utah which is very forgiving on that stuff. It's just you are seeing a pretty big turn against that, but I suspect honestly some of the racial dynamics in politics may be part of why that's happening.

Ryan Zickgraf: 50:40

Yeah, I will say, though it is interesting In the city of Atlanta and I was mentioning this new town called South Fulton, because it's actually the mayor is a leftist. He was like a big Bernie supporter, I can't remember his name is like Camau, I want to say. He's the mayor and he's branding this city as a black. It's in their town slogan like proud to be black, but he wants to make it a Wakanda. He even said that term. He's trying to make Georgia's Wakanda. There is so many fascinating political developments going on. One thing I wanted to say about Atlanta, too, is that part of what's interesting is that recently became the most unequal city in America the most unequal.

C. Derick Varn: 51:40

Even more than California cities.

Ryan Zickgraf: 51:43

Yeah, I was really surprised to see that. But one interesting dynamic is you have all those people that talk about representation. Well, atlanta's leaders are overwhelmingly black. I went to the mayor's state of the city address and I was like kind of amazed at the superintendent. The mayor, the city council is partially black. The school board is all women and half women of color. So you have this incredible amount of racial and sexual representation, but yet it is the most unequal city in the country.

C. Derick Varn: 52:30

Yeah, and specifically I've been looking at Sassam Black poverty in Georgia and it's been largely unchanged since it got worse during the beginning of the Obama administration during the Great Recession.

Ryan Zickgraf: 52:44

And it's been great for the black middle class. I mean, there's a huge black middle class here and I remember oh, what's his name? Charles Blow, the New York Times columnist talking about a few years ago. He was like let's have this exodus, let's have this black middle class exodus to Atlanta. This is like the black metropolis and in some way that actually has come to be. But we've seen how, again, there's a massive class difference. There's a thriving black middle class, but it's not helping the vast number of poor blacks.

C. Derick Varn: 53:21

Yeah, no, I mean that's you know my experience in the south and my experience of actually being an anti-racist activist in the south. That was my first way back when I was a teenager, my first big concern before I kind of became a conservative whole story. Not going to go back into it, but has been. That story is like no, the existence of a black middle class does not actually mean that people's lives have improved if they're black and it does. My experience of that has just made me distrust that narrative. When I see it, it's made me go okay, is this about like making the divisions amongst a dying pie fair for people who have been historically marginalized but also have resources? Like we're not expanding the pie to the vast majority of black people? If you look at the stats, that's exactly backed up and that's across the board too. I mean, like we talked about like oh, colleges have gotten way more diverse, but a lot of it is foreign exchange students.

C. Derick Varn: 54:40

People complain about the Ados movement and I get why they do, and also I don't even disagree with them about a lot of the problems there. But I'm also like, but they have kind of a point, like there's so many people who are coming in under this universal representation idea and then getting nothing for it and a lot of the people who supposedly this is supposed to help it is not helping. And my argument has always been kind of Adolf Reeds is like, look, if you just deal with poverty, you would deal with a lot of the problems. There's a huge wealth gap between even when you factor out the super rich, between black people and white people. But the funny thing is the entirety of that wealth gap can be explained by housing values, the entirety of it.

C. Derick Varn: 55:38

Like it's like pay discrimination, everything. It's like you fix a couple of things and a lot of this goes away. I'm not saying they're easy fixes, because they're not, but you have to know zoning laws, you have to deal with insurance law, you have to be building up public services to everybody, you have to quit. What's the actual problem with gentrification? Like it's not the development, like it's that we're letting these people get displaced. So let's fix that.

Ryan Zickgraf: 56:13

Exactly.

C. Derick Varn: 56:14

Like if we do that. But sometimes I do feel like there's been this way in which a lot of the left response has been I mean, I think it was worse actually around 2016, 2017, but a lot of the left responses basically like, well, we can do like three things men of care for all, free college and, I don't know, housing for poor people. I guess, although we're not going to explain how we're going to do that, it may be abolish the police, yeah, no, but no, I mean we mean to fund the police. Like it's smart to take money away from the people with the guns. Believe them.

Ryan Zickgraf: 57:05

Well, it was living wage, but after that got voted down, you haven't heard much of a peep about that since then.

C. Derick Varn: 57:12

No, you have not. Actually, what have we heard peeps about? Like? Medicare for all has not been on the docket since it's had a pause. I am waiting, though, for it to come back now that it can't get through the house, but we'll see, yeah.

Ryan Zickgraf: 57:34

Well, we need to, because I mean, as you said earlier, with the pandemic protections falling apart, it's going to be devastating once a lot of the rug is pulled for so many people's healthcare.

C. Derick Varn: 57:51

It. When is an interesting place to talk about this, though, Because one of the things I always talk about is like guys, you like leftist, listen to me you live in a federalized country and you want to change a bunch of stuff, but to do that you're going to have to win over rural people. Now, yes, a certain amount of rural people are going to be bigots. A certain amount of people are going to be bigots. Frankly, like a certain amount of people are going to be bigots, I do not think that is an insurmountable barrier to policy. I just don't. I've seen evidence in other places that people get over that once you provide stuff. In fact, there's all kinds of sociological evidence. It's like, say, like stuff like racism goes down if people do not feel like they're in direct competition for work. We actually there's multiple studies that back this up.

C. Derick Varn: 58:50

If you want to deal with both the rural reaction problem and you actually want to, I don't know ever fucking win anything, Because unless you think you're going to insurrect your way against a government with drones that took out rail-trained armies and even though they couldn't win, these areas could definitely kill way more than you have you don't really have a viable plan for an electoral strategy. Unless your electoral strategy is basically like, well, we can just bring all the country to Brooklyn, I don't really think like you do need to deal with this stuff. You need a rural development plan, a real one. You need to start really caring in a systemic way about zoning, about rural hospitals, about getting people back out into those areas to help keep those services up. You need to make that attractive. You would think COVID would have helped with that, because now we have all this remote work but it doesn't seem to have at all.

Ryan Zickgraf: 1:00:12

I spent a lot of time at the State House during this session in Georgia and I spoke with some leftists and some activists that were there, but can you guess what issue? That seemed to be one of the only issues they cared about.

C. Derick Varn: 1:00:27

You guess what it was?

Ryan Zickgraf: 1:00:29

No, Well, it was about the trans issue, and I understand why they're so upset, but it was almost the only thing they could organize, for there was a host of other issues, very important issues like school funding that just sort of slipped through the cracks.

C. Derick Varn: 1:01:00

One thing I think we have to realize about Americans is they're motivated by fear more than most places I've lived. I don't like generalizing about a group of people like that generally, but as an American who's lived 10 years outside of the country, I feel like I can say that A lot of the fear is legitimate and I totally get it. But you can walk in true bubble gum at the same time. Honestly, if you want to win on that issue, you have to win on the others too, because you have to disempower these people. The only way to disempower these people is to prove that you can provide things to a base, yeah, and in doing that, you will also prove that trans people are not a threat to them.

C. Derick Varn: 1:02:02

Now I have been really frustrated about this whole not being able to walk in true bubble gum thing on the left for a long time, because it just feels like we go through I don't want to say fads, but we let the right set our agenda by the right, initiating moral panics and us responding to it. Thus we do not have our own agenda beyond harm reduction. But what is so frustrating about that? We talk about harm reduction. Remember what we all cared about immigration.

Ryan Zickgraf: 1:02:42

Yeah, yeah, it's been a while.

C. Derick Varn: 1:02:44

Yeah, it's been a while since anyone said a word about that.

Ryan Zickgraf: 1:02:47

Biden's sending troops down there and we're like, ah, okay.

C. Derick Varn: 1:02:54

Which you know. It's funny because it proves a lot of things. Because, of course, the Republicans are calling it political theater and I'm like that's what you actually asked for. He's conceded to you. And you're like, where are we going to call it what it is? And I'm like, why is anyone playing this game?

C. Derick Varn: 1:03:11

But also, I mean, I totally get that most of the American political system is hypocritical. It's actually not a bug, its feature. But it is super frustrating to be like we supposedly really cared about kids in cages two years ago, four years ago. Now we kind of care, some of us care. I'm not saying no one cares. Yeah, it is not an agenda item. You're not willing to sacrifice anything for it? Yeah, and okay, people might go. We have this attack right now and I'm like, yeah, but you're also not winning on that either. Like where you already had cultural power, you are winning and, interestingly, public opinion is largely even already with you and you're not winning, yeah. So what are you not understanding? Because this is not about winning hearts and minds. You know, like God.

C. Derick Varn: 1:04:19

I mean you're getting worried about it. It's kind of crazy.

Ryan Zickgraf: 1:04:23

And there's so much energy expended on being like reacting to whatever the right's doing. Okay, now, all of a sudden, I care about what's on a Bud Light, can, or you know you have a lot of all of a sudden. Okay, we're going to have drag shows every day because the right hates it so much. I just feel like there's so much energy expended on these cultural ones and, instead of recognizing I mean you had Steve Bannon putting out on the open that these culture were distract us from economics and we're just like, oh yeah.

C. Derick Varn: 1:05:05

Yeah. So Rob Amari of rep compact, supposedly not our guy, right, yeah, he's not our guy, he's a Catholic theocrat. But but was was one of the people who say like look, these cultural issues when the country's falling apart doesn't make sense, even for, even for conservatives. And I'm like like, okay, that maybe how we start approaching this, like point out the absurdity of this and, light of everything else going on, it might also be a defense for these people. Like I don't know. I mean, I don't want to, I do not want to belittle anyone's moral concerns about this, but we really do have to walk and chew bubblegum at the same fucking time. Like I don't really know how else to phrase it. We have to do multiple things. We can't set one thing down because the right has figured out how to bait us. Are five things down to respond to one thing because it's like, yeah, they're going to do shit and the more we respond to it, the more they seem to do it to, which is not to say that we're responsible for them doing it. I'm not laying the blame, but you do need to know how this is functioning and it's it's very frustrating.

C. Derick Varn: 1:06:33

And it's very frustrating that the left cannot separate itself out from left liberals on these issues in a way that also doesn't feel like it's like tailing the right, like you know. To talk a little bit about that, I guess we can. Your former website magazine is sort of infamous for that, although in your defense, it happened after you were ousted. Why do you think? You know, and we saw a lot of post leftist and initially I was sympathetic to post leftist, even though they annoyed me, because I also get annoyed by some of the same things. But what I started seeing very quickly was that, okay, they go from like there's a lot of like. Well, we need to be better than this and not not concede these issues to the right to leftist pickup right wing talking points.

Ryan Zickgraf: 1:07:45

Oh yeah, that. Well, partly it tends to be very online and online social media and what have you? There's a lot of clickishness and it's like part of it is that they built a click and they built their own bubble and they wanted to react against the worst accesses of the left, which I understand. I mean, that's part of the reason why I started the bellows was because I was annoyed by a lot of the stupid shit. But the thing is, is you don't want to base your whole political project around hating leftists or hating things the leftists do? Because, I mean, we've seen what's happened in the last couple of years is a lot of those post-left people have become like a dissantist or Trump people. I mean, they became what people you know a lot of left liberals accuse them of being.

C. Derick Varn: 1:08:49

Yeah, it was really. You know, I think about Nina Powers, just I'll do all of the name names on this one.

Ryan Zickgraf: 1:08:59

I was listening to the Compact podcast and I do not look, I exchanged emails with her yesterday, but no, I've been talking about it.

C. Derick Varn: 1:09:14

I'm not here to put you on the spot, but I would agree with everything that she says or any of those guys. But I just bring it up because it's interesting, because she was arguing for dissantists like March through the universities and the two conservatives, the two Catholic conservatives over there were the people who were like, yeah, but not those institutions dying anyway and in this, a waste of time. And it was very strange to me because I was like, hmm, you know, like, like, yeah, and to give Nina a little break.

C. Derick Varn: 1:09:59

I don't know where I help publish one of her books, I suppose.

Ryan Zickgraf: 1:10:03

But great name though too Nina power.

C. Derick Varn: 1:10:09

Yeah, it is a great name, but, you know, maybe it's, maybe it's the fact that she's in the UK and doesn't have a skin in the game. I don't know, but it was just. It was like do you really want to grant anything to dissantists like? Look, I think once the nation really sees what he's doing and that he has the, the personality of warm spit parroting Trump, I don't know that you're going to feel good about, because it doesn't seem like a wagon, I would, even if I was a conservative, want to throw my, my, my, my brand behind. At the same time. Um, there is a lot of like liberal elite shenanigans right now that we really do need to start having a better response to. Like, because they're just, it is just cruditing to be linked to it.

Ryan Zickgraf: 1:11:11

Oh yeah, do, do. Do we need drag shows everywhere? Do we need drag shows and shirt? I have a friend, my best friend, you know he he felt weird sending his kids to a summer camp with a bunch of drag shows. It's like let's be a little strategic. Do we need to make drag the center of our cultural universe?

C. Derick Varn: 1:11:33

But I find interesting about that, even from the standpoint of like trans identity, to make drag equivalent to trans safety is itself a a mistake. It is itself to like. A great number of people who participate in drag or not are not, are not trans, are not transgender people. I mean, it's just it's it's. It's confusing to me on a variety of levels. But it's also because we're letting people like we're letting responding to people set our agenda.

Ryan Zickgraf: 1:12:17

Exactly, and that that's. That is a lot of the post love. Because, you know, with the post love, I think part of the reason they have been flocking towards the census is that you know, the census is running on being anti woke and a lot of the post left was like hell. Yes, you know, this is what we've been saying all this time and they enjoy, you know, seeing leftist liberal tears, but there's a sort of nihilistic element to that, you know it's extreme nihilistic.

C. Derick Varn: 1:12:49

I mean, I think about this. The other day I was arguing with my, with my friend, I mean, little Doug Lane, and he shared something by somebody who said, woke, ism was as dangerous, is more dangerous and tolerant as them than fascism or communism. And I was like one bro, why you share something's got explicitly anti communist, anti anti socialist messaging in it already? But, two, can you actually believe that? Like, do you actually think that? Like I don't. I know you, I know you don't really think that what you worry about is government censorship. I think maybe you have a little bit of a too simple understanding of it, but I know this is not what you mean. But why would you even allow something to be framed that way? Right, because you're you're, you're giving aid and sucker to someone that you know All right, we'll, we'll, we'll send to you.

C. Derick Varn: 1:13:48

I mean, the same people he's talking about running because he's got hopes in the wet presentation, a government panel. I'm like dude, these, a lot of these same people also have their names as co sponsors on the restrict act. Like, like, how can you trust any of this? Like, as I mean, I do know we have to work with actual politicians and I think maybe one thing that I say that makes people uncomfortable is like, dude, you have to be willing to work with politicians you hate, like, like. If you're going to mess in like plural politics at all, you have to be utterly mercenary about it, because these parties have no loyalty to you, they don't like and don't try to just I mean like.

C. Derick Varn: 1:14:30

If you're trying to justify it with harm reduction, it seems like part of what goes on there is also finding the harm to which to which you can stay without changing anything, without saying we break, like it just very much seems that way, and also there have been times where where I've been like can we, can we like change the framing to wait to something that is more inclusive of everybody, like like we can make an argument for protecting LGBTQ, t people, ia, whatever.

Ryan Zickgraf: 1:15:15

You gotta say that better. Queer people sound like Justin Trudeau.

C. Derick Varn: 1:15:22

Yeah, I know I do. So I, as a as a side note, I have a stated belief that I'm like I don't even really believe in sexuality as a concept, so which I know like really bothers everybody, and so, like I would, I just want to say, like let's just defend people's autonomy. Read on on on sex and gender, on like freedom of bodily autonomy and freedom of social reproduction, right. Like, yeah, you can do that. That makes this an everybody issue, not an issue of just protecting victims, because protecting victims, in a way, is disempowering to both sides. Like it's an effective, it works as a moral effect to like get people to care about something, but it doesn't actually create a positive political program to do anything with that. And it makes you. It also makes you like you're not empowering people with that either. Like, like you, just like you are setting this up as like well, we have to protect you. This is like our duty. And that, to me, is a fundamentally like liberal rights based framework, and I'm not that kind of liberal, I'm a fucking socialist.

Ryan Zickgraf: 1:16:52

We are. Yeah, and we also don't have to elevate victims into. You know, the role models or the war or the political subject that we need to base our politics around. You know we should have, like you know the left should care about having. You know, active citizens who have good morals. You know, like role models, like we don't need to elevate these certain kinds of people into.

C. Derick Varn: 1:17:32

You know, again, putting victims on a pedestal is Well, for one thing, with a lot of people it's a way to like it feels Unless you are one of these truly treacherous figures who's killed in this stuff. It also feels like we're setting these people up for a fall and it almost is inevitable that that happens. And on the left in particular and I'm just like no, we should there's something about our particular period of social alienation where I know this feels, because I don't just think it's. I will say this I don't just think it's a left-wing problem, like negative partisanship seems to be, it seems to be at least a US problem, but I have like, from talking to people abroad, it seems to actually be kind of a developed West problem.

Ryan Zickgraf: 1:18:34

Oh yeah, and conservatives definitely fall into the victimization, self-victimization, a lot trap themselves, so it's a mutually reinforcing thing.

C. Derick Varn: 1:18:45

Right, I mean, it's actually in this way. It's self-reinforcing. It's also like it really sets up bad incentives. You have a really hard time setting up a positive political program with it.

C. Derick Varn: 1:19:14

And I do think there's a reason why this is attractive to college-educated mostly right-but-not-always middle and upper middle class liberals Like because it is kind of the way schools work. Like what do you mean? Well, because schools are supposed to function as a meritocracy and one of the ways that you do that is that you correct for disadvantages as a way to equalize the merit. That's how these, Particularly in universities, more than secondary and primary schools. That's how you get advantages in the universities, Like, okay, well, you come from a background, we're supposed to be a meritocratic institution, we're gonna give you these additional supports and we're gonna give you this additional access, Right, so you have to compensate for your lack of prior access.

C. Derick Varn: 1:20:14

Now, in reality, in universities this doesn't work, but that is the self-justification of a lot of the way.

C. Derick Varn: 1:20:23

Like we do think I teach a preparation for college course concurrently through university.

C. Derick Varn: 1:20:29

One of the things where I was talking about is like oh, how to advocate for yourself to get your high school IEP, for other concessions for your special needs in university and I'm like that model seems to be part of the model when paired with also 60 civil rights narratives from the standpoint of the way they're taught to you in school, not the way they actually happened. It seems to me what drives this whole framework. But I really do believe you have to be in certain kinds of jobs to believe that as possible in society as a way to fix things. You have to already have shit, Because I just I don't see how that works in society in general and I do think this leads to this inability, to One of the great hypocrisies of this time. For me is like what we talked about earlier. It's like we've made so little gains even on general racial wealth disparities, except, oddly, in the South, and that's because white people have gotten poorer, not because anyone has come up. Why should we be excited about that at all?

Ryan Zickgraf: 1:21:57

Yeah, why should we be excited about Atlanta, the fact that there's an incredible amount of black leadership plus a black upper middle class, and yet the inequality is the biggest in the nation. Why exactly are we celebrating that?

C. Derick Varn: 1:22:19

It's just like it doesn't seem like it's that great for people of color either, and honestly, I think it's why we've seen this increasing trend in the pupils where and this is something I've been arguing with myself, with the Robert If you've read the Robert Brinner dealing Riley's Seventh, thesis's blah, blah, blah piece, if you haven't, don't worry about it, you don't need to. But that's why I've been arguing with it. But it's kind of like, well, the left has misunderstood what class struggle is and so this neo-progressivism is really the best thing we can do, because class struggle has never really been an electoral project. And I'm like, well, kind of, yes, class struggle hasn't been an electoral project. Class politics is separate from that. Although what they call class politics is interesting because their class politics is like not the New Deal, but the precursor to the Great Society and then the civil rights movement. I'm like, ok.

Ryan Zickgraf: 1:23:29

Is this similar to what's his name? He gets published by Compact, who wrote the New Class War.

C. Derick Varn: 1:23:38

It's kind of the seeming marxification of that and honestly I think Michael Linn who wrote the New Class, War whose politics I find scary. But I have to admit some of his political analysis have been better than what I'm seeing.

Ryan Zickgraf: 1:23:59

I don't disagree. I don't disagree.

C. Derick Varn: 1:24:02

But yeah, because Linn has been talking about the neo-progressivism but it's like one of the elites and then the Republicans basically have two-thirds of the old Democrat Party coalition of the petite bourgeois and protectionist-needing rush belt industries and parts of the working class, but no one has all of it, because the working class is largely and Linn's mind kind of dormant and I think actually there's a lot of truth to that to some degree that even in 2016, when you had astronomical for US levels of participation in the election, it still was not.

C. Derick Varn: 1:24:48

If you were to look at, like, and it's hard to talk about the working class in the United States because we don't really keep stats the way that Marxist would define that but if you looked at, say, the working poor, which is something that's a little bit more clear that you could talk about, they still don't vote as much part of it in the Southeast because they can't, because the federal laws and whatnot, but voter participation amongst that class, even though it's higher than it has been in the past, is still relatively low. And as I tell people like, why shouldn't it be? What have you done for them? Like, particularly in non-urban metropole mega areas like New York, la, the big West Coast cities, to some degree Atlanta, because it just like you talk about, like the ex-urban, like you even take a place like Jackson Mississippi, which has a leftist mayor, and what has anyone done for them? Mayor Lamumba is always like fighting every like he can't get much done because he's fighting everybody, including, like all the state legislature, the feds.

Ryan Zickgraf: 1:26:09

Well, yeah, and the state is kind of partially taken over there.

C. Derick Varn: 1:26:12

Right, and you have, in these Southern states, people now that there actually are municipalities that are like being led by more left-wing black politicians, that stuff is being clawed away from city control. Yeah, absolutely. And so it also doesn't seem like this electoral strategy just doesn't really seem to work. Like I'm not and this to me isn't a critique of the mayor Like I actually don't have a problem with that mayor, but that's neither here nor there. There that it's like you're not, you're not launching anything to protect these people either when they actually try to do something like that.

C. Derick Varn: 1:26:58

And these are precisely the areas that, a, you're supposed to care the most about and, b, if you're ever going to be able to like not be beholden to the right in the Democratic party as any sort of strategy, you would have to have the ability to say like, look you know, if we don't help you, like we're going to give a battleground state to the other side, whereas, like, if you're dumping all of your money and our friends in the DSA actually kind of are into areas like, I don't know, new York, you're not actually like the Democrats are going to control that no matter what under current conditions. So what are you going to do and I'm really, I really think like I don't know. I've been, I've been talking a lot, but I really think the left doesn't have like a, a banal agenda, like.

Ryan Zickgraf: 1:28:01

Well, yeah, I mean Chicago just elected Brandon Johnson, who you know and I spent 15 years in Chicago and you know I used to be in the DSA there and the DSA is very excited for Brandon Johnson and I think you know, I think I would have voted for him. I support him, but how much is he going to really get done? What in his agenda is he going to really get done? It's not clear to me. You know what exactly a Brandon Johnson administration is going to do to really change the game for a lot of the you know poverty stricken areas in Chicago. There's a lot of talk I mean, even Lori Lightfoot had talked a good game about helping those areas and you know, then it got funneled into oh, you know, we're going to have, we're going to support artists from that area. You know what I mean. Like the creative class can do pretty good, but you know the vast majority of the working class just gets fucked.

C. Derick Varn: 1:29:04

Right. And maybe I sound too negative, but I mean, my big thing is like, even if I assume absolutely that the mayor has a plan that is viable, he's got to have Prisker and the rest of Illinois on board and I don't think that's going to happen. So like I mean, like that's the thing about basically only having a municipal and a national strategy.

Ryan Zickgraf: 1:29:45

Yeah, because, because capital flight is a real thing, you know, and you know particularly in cities, in cities. Yeah, I mean Chicago has in the last, you know, five years, and during the pandemic there was a lot of capital flight and a flight of population, literal population, and so you could have, you know, the People's Republic of Chicago or San Francisco or whatever. But there can be consequences to that and we live under capitalism and when capital moves, you know what else is there? This is capitalism. You know what I?

C. Derick Varn: 1:30:22

mean yeah, and then you have I mean you mentioned San Francisco and you have things like the San Francisco reparations committee, which in March, put out this thing. That was like you know that the city should give $5 million to every eligible person who met, like, this criterion, but it's an insanely actually restricted criterion too, but it was like so you should basically make 2% of your population millionaires on the backs of what? Now I know, and I think I mean this is what I don't get Like. Maybe they're trying to negotiate from a point of strength, but I'm like, I'm like why is it, even if you believe in reparations, that you think a West Coast city should be the person responsible for doing that? And why do you think a direct cash payment of?

Ryan Zickgraf: 1:31:33

people to vote Democrat. You're going to punish Democrats.

C. Derick Varn: 1:31:41

Like, and how do you think that that would like play out Like? Why would you even suggest that? Because it's also going to be highly divisive in the black community itself, because a whole lot of people are not going to meet the criterion, as in say, most of them.

Ryan Zickgraf: 1:32:01

And you know what would have the potential to do. I worked on this story a few years ago about Native Americans and the fight over identity, because there were so much federal resources that were being devoted to people that qualified as indigenous Well, who decides who's indigenous? That was the question. And there were people that were, like you know, accusing each other of not being white, not really being indigenous. So imagine that. But like escalated because you know we still don't give a lot of resources to Native Americans, but imagine if there's millions and millions of dollars involved.

C. Derick Varn: 1:32:47

Like at a personal household level, that if you qualify for this you'll get $5 million. Okay, like, yeah, like, but that's the suggestion, addition to 100 other things that they suggested as well. And I was like yeah, it's clown show. Okay, just to explain, you know, just playing the economics of this, the United States government could probably do something like that and it not actually be a tax burden or never. They would still figure it as one, but it wouldn't actually well for San Francisco.

C. Derick Varn: 1:33:16

Right, but for San Francisco you have to directly raise taxes to do that.

Ryan Zickgraf: 1:33:23

Yeah.

C. Derick Varn: 1:33:24

That has to come out of the general city fund.

Ryan Zickgraf: 1:33:26

Yeah, and you and you already have companies that are leaving San Francisco. They would really, they would really join Elon in Texas or go to Florida.

C. Derick Varn: 1:33:37

Absolutely that would happen, or just go to fucking San Diego, even. Right, yeah, it's just like. So. Why even suggest that? Because we also. There's no way that the Democrats are going to pass that, so like. Why even suggest that, unless you accept to, I don't know, give right wing media a heyday, like what's the?

Ryan Zickgraf: 1:33:59

point. Well, it's like you know, it's like San Francisco is like the virtue signaling capital of of the country. So you know, a lot of symbolic politics goes on in San Francisco.

C. Derick Varn: 1:34:18

It's. I mean, and yeah, interestingly, san Francisco is one of the areas that has some of the least like partaking in the kind of socialist left, like LA has a lot more people partaking in it. I know this in terms of media and in terms of, like organizational funding. Like San Francisco doesn't contribute to a lot you would like, oh, of course it would. No, it doesn't. Like it's really does not.

C. Derick Varn: 1:34:51

Now, I don't just say that I got interested in this. Actually I'll admit this because I was looking at my own stats and I was like, huh, I have listeners in San Diego and Sacramento and I have a few in San Francisco, but like it's way less than, say, la. The majority of my listeners are in New York, which you know I'm not I'm not going to knock it, but you know, then make me the happiest either but I was like, why is that? What is going on there? Like, so it seems like the symbolic, the symbolic politics, is about an inch deep left at this point. Like also, the DSA is stronger in South California than in the north.

Ryan Zickgraf: 1:35:37

So Well, isn't there. What about Oakland now?

C. Derick Varn: 1:35:43

Oakland is better, but Oakland has been rapidly gentrified, not you know, not again. I hate even thinking about that, but it's just a fact. Like like so, and Oakland is another city that has like a black middle class, but it's it's a highly unequal city now too, and a lot of like, a lot of like working class people in the are and a lot of working like working class and even working profession like like middle class professional people in the Bay Area are now living as far out as like Modesto like.

Ryan Zickgraf: 1:36:24

Well, I'm sure that accelerated during COVID too.

C. Derick Varn: 1:36:26

Right, so it's yeah, it's just. Oh yeah, actually, you know, san Francisco is one of the few places where rents been significantly trending down because people just left.

Ryan Zickgraf: 1:36:37

Yeah Well, the the type of Exodus and they, they, they were the closest thing that we had to China's COVID restrictions in this country. It was in San Francisco.

C. Derick Varn: 1:36:54

So yeah, I guess that we've kind of been all over the place. But one of the things that I have, one of the things that really turned me off during the, the end of the pandemic of the now that we're ever out of COVID, we are out of the pandemic effectively, mission accomplished. We're not going to mention how many people died after Biden took office are we but anyway, or how many policies didn't change. But the, if you, if you looked at the death ratios for COVID, one of the things that I was kind of finding with people is I would hear people on San Francisco and Portland and stuff go like, well, those other people they're, you know, I had someone just apply, they're just too stupid, they're basically animals and they this person called themselves a socialist and I was like how in the fuck did you believe that working class people and the majority of the country are basically animals? Also, like I live in a very red state. We had very cautious and kind of severe COVID restrictions at first. We did not have them.

C. Derick Varn: 1:38:24

Later on I learned a lot about COVID transmission through the schools and it was very interesting because in the United States we were like we just refused to admit that. Like there's a very different virulency ratio, even amongst adults working in schools between elementary school and high school. We just wouldn't talk about it, like we were pretending we had to have the same policies for both, and I'm like it doesn't make any sense. Even like the Nordic countries and both the Sweden and the other ones, they did not do that Like they would like.

C. Derick Varn: 1:39:03

The the criterion for closing high schools was was faster than closing elementary schools, and most middle elementary school stayed open without significant like increased mortality. And I just remember them like just talking about like people in the area where I live as if like they were all just dumb and like one okay, someone in Portland doesn't get to talk about like how dumb the, the, the rest of the people are and claim to be in anti-racist when you're talking about places like I don't know, atlanta, yeah, and then uh to uh. It's also just not true. And, by the way, the COVID death stats are not correlated to the severity of policy or whether or not it was a red and blue state, like it was actually correlated primarily to age, the average age of the state. Utah did not have a very high death rate.

Ryan Zickgraf: 1:40:13

These are very healthy. They don't drink caffeine Like the Mormons around. To something, mitt Romney is going to live to 120.

C. Derick Varn: 1:40:27

But but like in all seriousness, it's like the West. The Western states actually did not have high death rates like the Southern states did, and I'm like a lot of it's age.

Ryan Zickgraf: 1:40:38

Why.

C. Derick Varn: 1:40:39

Obesity and poverty rates, right, and I'm like we, we're a younger state here in Utah, we're we're one of the lowest obesity states and um, uh, and you know what that's social policy too, honestly. Like this is another thing that I like tell people. I'm like like I'm not I'm not for shaming people for health choices, but a lot of this, like the obesity is social policy Like it is, like don't, don't, don't pretend like it doesn't have an effect when it's like a negative effect of bad capitalist planning and like shitty food sources and all that kind of stuff.

Ryan Zickgraf: 1:41:18

Like um, and the and the left has a hard time talking about any of that I mean well, because we want to have our cake and eat it too, on on a lot of stuff.

C. Derick Varn: 1:41:30

Like I actually do not think shaming obese, uh, fat people because that's actually probably the preferred nomenclature now, um is is going to help anything. I don't, I do not think that, uh, but I do think like let's admit that like having some social policy that like encourage this on a like, on a, on a population level, probably would have an effect. I left the country. I lost a hundred pounds. I left the south. I lost a hundred pounds just by leaving, right, I wasn't trying to Um, I wasn't, like you know people, trying to like make like a moral success story. I'm like no, I was in a different context where the health incentives are different.

Ryan Zickgraf: 1:42:18

Like, um, you're, you were probably used to having Chick-fil-A's every other block.

C. Derick Varn: 1:42:26

And uh, yeah, and driving everywhere and um, you know, when I moved to Korea, which had great public transit, like I lost weight because like I walked to the public transit, it was great, I got everywhere, I could go anywhere in the country. That's harder to do in the United States because, besides, the country not going to belittle that difference but we don't even have that regionally and, like you were saying before, a lot of leftists, they don't seem to want to do that either. Like, yeah, they talk about infrastructure, but then when you actually do it and you have to deal with its effect on gentrification, et cetera, then they kind of freak out about it. And then, like you know, like you were talking about YIMBYism, the YIMBY-NIMBY debate drives me out of the wall. Yeah, like it's just, it's like you're not going to fix the systemic problems of capital just by, like inviting some people into your neighborhood, right, right, that like I'm glad you're doing it. I'm not. I think I'm glad you're doing it if you actually do it consistently, which I somehow doubt.

Ryan Zickgraf: 1:43:42

But you know, in a way the YIMBY-NIMBY debate sometimes can just be like the greater, like conservative, liberal reaction, counter reaction, where both sides are in their own world and won't, you know like have a coherent vision of the future. It's just like I hate what the other people are doing and I'll do the exact opposite.

C. Derick Varn: 1:44:08

Yeah, I mean that's and that's different from having, like a positive program or policy or like. If you're going to play electoralism, there has to be, there has to be like. Ok, under certain conditions. If people will do X, I will work with them regardless Like. Or I will work with them as long as as like there's Y and we're not going to accept Y. Right, but that's clearly stated. But if they don't do Y and they're helping us in X, we'll ignore ABCD, like and in American politics. Actually, when I ask you about this, you know you've been a political reporter for a long time now.

Ryan Zickgraf: 1:44:52

Yeah.

C. Derick Varn: 1:44:52

I do you think people seem like incapable of this is because they don't understand local politics and those tradeoffs is like, what do you think is going on there, like why can't they do that anymore Because that's a bipartisan issue?

Ryan Zickgraf: 1:45:06

Yeah, I mean, the localism over the last generation or two has slowly dwindled and, you know, some of it is just a function of we're. We've lost a lot of the community ties that we used to have and between neighbors, community churches, schools, what have you. And we are sort of we're all in this like mass media world where, you know, back in the say 70s and 80s, it became more of a political movement, it became more of like regional and now and then national and now, like you know, globally, it were a part of this spectacle and so that's why, as part of the reason and politics is a national, politics has become an aspect of that, and so there is not a lot of incentive to deal with local politics because it is. It is messy. You know, you have to, you have to go, you go somewhere to go to meetings and you're not going to get social media points for having a stance on, on on local zoning. You're not going to, you're not going to be an influencer in zoning laws. You know what I mean.

C. Derick Varn: 1:46:35

And yeah, but it's interesting to me because we had this Gen X period where, like everybody was super local to like an absurd degree, but basically not local in the participation in local government but like local and communities and coops and anarcho like activist movements for Seattle.

Ryan Zickgraf: 1:46:52

Alternative capitalism Right.

C. Derick Varn: 1:46:54

Yeah, but when I talk to these people who this was my critique of the Bernie movement actually, like from 2016 to 2020, was, like you have to build local infrastructure for this to work, even if you win. Like one of the reasons why people in the South hate government services is because government services are administered shittily on purpose in the South. Why, yes, like it's, it's a feedback loop. To stop that, you would have to have cadres at the local level to work with who have power and who do things like zoning, like the kind of messy, stupid shit of politics, and particularly as long as, like, you do have to deal with shit like capital flight and whatnot. If you are not, we at actually at national level power, like, yeah, I don't think mega corporations going to leave the United States and give a dollar head in Germany, necessarily, but they will definitely move from Chicago to I don't know Memphis or something like our Houston, like for sure.

Ryan Zickgraf: 1:48:16

No, and I believe you know I believe strongly in localism and it's I mean that's part of the reason why I've I haven't been writing as much stuff, for you know, say, jackman, lately I have a full time job. I don't know if I mentioned this. I work for a local news nonprofit, called in a civic circle on the democracy reporter. Because I do, I do believe that we, the left, needs to focus on local first. I think. I do think. I mean you mentioned Bernie and I think Bernie was a little bit of a cheat code. It was trying to bypass all of that hard ass at work to, like you know, build and transform institutions. And you know we got kind of kind of close. Maybe not that close, but it it was cool. But now we can see we're like back at that level.

C. Derick Varn: 1:49:09

You know that pre burning level, the left and boy, yes, I feel like, even though we have the DSA even though socialism is less popular it wasn't 2018, actually, but it's still more popular than it has been in general as work. Yes, in America, except for, like before 1921, like you know, in the 19 teen, socialist can met, commanded like what? Something like 12 to 14% of the vote. So yeah, but but since then, and you know, even still now, we're in this moment and yet I feel not just like we're back before the break, but we're back before the break. So we're in this moment and yet I feel not just like we're back before the burning movement, I feel like we're back before occupy, like that we have gone that far back.

C. Derick Varn: 1:49:59

You have, because what was that? What was the character of occupy? A preoccupied activism, it was all. And even occupy started as this. It was our all like specific issue driven activism and you know that's why I left the left for a long time, like I couldn't stand that shit. Like it was just like the ultra globalization movement, which was bigger but like tended to just get into niche stuff. You have the anti war protests, which I supported, but like they tended to just be about foreign policy. They didn't tie anything in together for a lot of. For most of that period it like we're not in the context of like you know, the Bush years were like. And I also think people forget how bad the early 2000s were Like. If you think jingoism was banned under Trump, it was worse in in 2002.

Ryan Zickgraf: 1:51:05

Yeah, and all we had at the time was fucking John Stewart to yell about it. We didn't really have much of a left media at that time.

C. Derick Varn: 1:51:14

No, I mean, like that was the time like the nation was dying. I guess the ISO had a, had a magazine and that was there was no. Well, there was no podcast for the first half of that. The second half that they were all libertarian. Like it was, yeah, addbusters yeah, yeah, I mean you know addbusters in the in, like the baffler, but it was a very different magazine back then, mother Jones, which was purely, at that point, in adjunct of the Democratic Party and yeah, and I guess you had. You had democracy now on Pacifica Radio. If you live in a big city, yeah, Doug was doing something, I guess.

C. Derick Varn: 1:52:01

Yeah, yeah, doug came. There was like there were three left podcasts and they were actually all Pacifica radio shows. Yeah, it was. That was the time and it feels closer to that now, even though we have an infrastructure, we have the, the remaining burning remains of the burning movement.

Ryan Zickgraf: 1:52:23

But people seem very afraid to actually have a positive agenda and I hate to say it, but the negative agenda only helps Democrats like Well, yeah, I mean, you had you know last night I don't know if anything happened tonight you know you had all these leftist New Yorkers out on the streets about. You know this unfortunate death of this homeless person on the subway, which you know it was a. It was a bad deal and I'm not saying that people shouldn't be out for that or shouldn't be upset. But then you look over at what's happening in France and in Paris and you know I'm jealous about what's going on there.

C. Derick Varn: 1:53:04

Yeah, I think that. I think it's interesting, though, because the other I have said with people like oh, we need to be like in France and I'm like, but we were two years ago.

Ryan Zickgraf: 1:53:17

Yeah, but about way different issues. You know you're not right. In France it's mostly about economics. I mean, the retirement ages is is an economic issue. Where we in the streets for economic issues in America, that's a.

C. Derick Varn: 1:53:35

That's a fair counterpoint. I think we have to ask our actor, ask yourselves a couple questions, like because I actually do think the George, the George Floyd stuff was about a lot more than just police brutality ultimately. But we didn't, we didn't pivot on the on that, we didn't say like okay, like not only do we need this shit to stop, we need this, this, this, this and this. Yeah, like we need to start, we need to. We need to stop letting these fucking left behind Upper Midwest cities just be completely desiccated like and that the only thing you have holding it together to fucking police. We'd like that's what we should have done At that moment. We chose to listen to for a brief period of time. And now people complain about it like, people make fun of even people on the center, like central liberals make fun of Robin the Angelo, but that everyone like bit down on right fragility and on like diversifying television and candy.

C. Derick Varn: 1:54:58

Yeah, and it's just like that didn't change what's going on in those and that into me that happened twice would be a limb because you know, the first time in Ferguson.

C. Derick Varn: 1:55:14

I'm like there's conditions in and these are economic conditions as well as police conditions leading to this shit, specifically where it's at right, which is like these, these X factory cities that have been de industrialized and completely left behind and gutted of most their social services and also our majority black and white.

C. Derick Varn: 1:55:41

These things are directly tied together and when these, like justice movement started, people will talk about that and then that's dropped.

C. Derick Varn: 1:55:53

And you know I also point out that's when this moves from St Louis, minneapolis, even Kenosha, to Seattle, portland, like I don't think that's an accident, I don't think it's on purpose either, but it is a systemic.

C. Derick Varn: 1:56:15

It's showing you like what not tying this stuff into this makes it, which is not to say that people have a legitimate grievances in the city of Portland, but like the conditions there are utterly different than Minneapolis and don't pretend they're not right and so I guess I guess that would be my like both agreeing with you and pushing back a little bit, like there is a real economic issue to what happened in, you know, to the black life matter, particularly the Ferguson one, honestly, because like that's a, that's a long term thing. We never kept it about that, like you, even like what the first black lives matter, what happened, like it moves from. It moves from the streets of poor communities in St Louis and outside of St Louis and Ferguson into St Louis and then stuff in Maryland into college campuses, like, and I'm yeah, I don't want to make a little free, look right, don't make it off, read look right, like.

Ryan Zickgraf: 1:57:19

No, and it is true that black lives matter. You know, at some point on their website had a list of economic demands that you know a lot of it was pretty good, but it really got subsumed by a very narrow focus and, and you know, part of it is the media didn't really want to talk about that part, but it seemed like in a lot of cases, the destruction of, say, confederate statues, especially in the South or things like that, where, or like in universities, where we're taking off slave owners names that really, you know, took a lot of the momentum out of those movements. And in fact, in 2020, I briefly lived in Mobile, alabama, and at that and at that time, I actually was part of a march downtown for BLM, but this, this activist group, disbanded after they took down the statue of the Confederate Admiral, you know, and so there just wasn't a lot enough behind this movement that the energy of the movement was sort of the short term burst of anger and let's tear down some statues and then go home and go back to branch.

C. Derick Varn: 1:58:38

Alright. Well, I mean, we can also talk about what's different between us. In France, like for all of France, is neoliberalization, which is pretty thorough. It does still have pretty strong unions. Who can actually mobilize people like and my, you know, I do believe you know I've said this a lot lately.

C. Derick Varn: 1:59:00

I do believe there is actual worker militants out there. I think it's increased, but let's not pretend that that's actually translated into a revived union movement in America, because it's just the stats do not back that up. So, yeah, unions are popular, but less people are in them as a proportion of the country than before and actually, even if you buy the, the whole like well, more people are back to work, so it's actually grown, but then I point to, it's still less than it was even six years ago. Like, yeah, like even adjusting for the difference in working population. Quit, like, like it's important.

C. Derick Varn: 1:59:46

Even you want to talk about like people not seeing the forest trees. It's important that we support stuff like Starbucks workers. It's important because also, that sector is highly not Not a unionized. It's like something like one or 2% of food workers are unionized, at the same token pretending that farmers were that, that, not farm workers, barista's and food service workers and TAs and adjuncts are able to replace the, the industrial union movement, Even though services are 80% of the economy. This not 80% of the economy. Unionizing like in both cases, you're dealing largely with transitory and temporary workers who are going to have a hard time building organizing skills over a long term and, honestly, there's also perversions centers for the union movements themselves about that, because it's money but it's not competition for union leadership, like we need to be honest about what that is like Well, not only that, but we've been talking a lot about localism tonight and the thing about a lot of the old industrial unions is that they were actually Part of communities and they could help drive the politics of the city.

Ryan Zickgraf: 2:01:19

You know, not just getting together to endorse Bernie, but they were actually helping Change local politics. And, you know, I don't think the Starbucks union is going to do that.

C. Derick Varn: 2:01:32

No, I mean theoretically, amazon United could, but I haven't seen it grow enough outside of New York for it to do that yet. And there is also an incentive for all this to be fought on a national level, particularly with the Democrats. I don't know exactly what that's about with the Democrats tendency to try to turn every local battle national and then also ignore that they did not actually build up the stuff locally to win Aka, the Beto and Cynthia McKinney campaigns, when both those people like we're going to make these people president and I'm like they can't even win their local elections, like, like, and you've already thrown them out as media figures, like and and thus presidential hopefuls. That's, that's absurd.

Ryan Zickgraf: 2:02:29

And I think in the near future Democrats maybe will do some lip service towards unions, but you know, with the economy possibly heading to a recession and you know they've been dealing with issues of like worker shortages in certain areas that they're not going to change a lot of policy to be pro union.

C. Derick Varn: 2:02:53

Absolutely not. I think the railroad stuff actually means that abundantly clear, that like there's a limit and there it is, well, hey, like when it's actually going to maybe affect more than you know some some Like a service, like a service chain no, they're. They're not actually on that side. You know, I don't know, we're just top the red stuff, but I think that point that we talked about in the south is really, you know, maybe the key point here is you do, if you want a national movement, you actually have to work locally. Like you can't do, you can't build the infrastructure, and that means also caring about a lot of unsexy shit.

C. Derick Varn: 2:03:38

Yeah, it doesn't mean you have to drop caring about trans people. I don't think. But yeah, but. But you do have to, like you need to start learning zoning laws. You need to start learning why these hospitals are closing. You need to start, like, figuring out what's smart to do at the local level, what's not. Because like local like, for example, medicare for all in one city is actually a terrible idea, like it's not a good idea. So, like you like by locally I don't mean doing the like oh, let's just I don't know try to carry out these national policies at a local level, because like that's going to go real poorly. But like you do have to do local stuff, you have to like property values, homelessness stuff, housing those are, in the United States, legally local issues.

Ryan Zickgraf: 2:04:33

Oh yeah, there's no, there's no real housing, national housing policy, and if you listen to the presidential debates, they barely, they barely talked about housing. It is 100% like a local issue.

C. Derick Varn: 2:04:46

Like, if you want to make it a national issue, you actually still have to like do enough at the local level to to like start to like yeah, and I think that's a big takeaway. And so anything you like to say in closing and anything like then and then after that, anything you like to plug.

Ryan Zickgraf: 2:05:05

I want to say in closing gosh, I don't know, you know we talked a lot about Atlanta and it is a very fascinating time to live here because I do feel, I mean, even though I don't feel like Georgia is really the, I don't think the future of the 2024 election is is necessarily going to be here, even though some people are talking about with, but you know, between you have this natural figure of Stacey Abrams. You know you had a war knock and awesome election and you know Atlanta in some sense is sort of the. I feel like this center of the country politically in certain ways. So, yeah, it's, it's a fascinating time to be here and and report here.

C. Derick Varn: 2:06:09

Yeah, I do think is if people think, like these are the quote purple states are going to be like, where this, where the like ideological future is going to be hashed out. Because everybody who tells me that California is the future of the United States, I'm like, well, that's a scary thought, yeah.

Ryan Zickgraf: 2:06:29

Yeah.

C. Derick Varn: 2:06:37

Like it's just. It's just like, ok, so we get. We get a lot of virtue signaling and some protections for some people, but also massive impoverishment. Really bizarre incentives like, yes, there's unions, but you, you're also giga, fine everything. I don't really want that future like. But you know. So thank you so much for coming on, and if people want to read you, where can they find your work right now?

Ryan Zickgraf: 2:07:10

Right now I'm mostly working for yeah, the news nonprofit called Lina Civic Circle, but in the meantime I'm still writing occasionally for Jacob in and compact, and you should come to my trivia at the West Side Motor Lounge in Atlanta on Wednesday night to be a chance. I'm a trivia, I'm a trivia host and also a trivia writer right now, so that's a cool side gig Awesome.

C. Derick Varn: 2:07:36

All right. Thank you so much for coming on, ryan, and Thank you for staying up with me. It's a lot later in your coast than it is mine, so yeah, now, it's been a pleasure Appreciate the conversation.

Ryan Zickgraf: 2:07:49

Thank you so much.