Yesterday, a couple minutes into "The Check-In" with Jared Yates Sexton and Danielle Moodie, Part 1, Danielle says:
"On top of the lettuce, you can't eat. On top of the jalapenos, you can't eat. The guacamole, you can't eat. The salsa, you can't eat. The peppers that you can't eat. The eggs that are recalled. They recalled 30,000 tons of of raw beef from Argentina.
Why did that happen? Oh, oops, because it didn't go through a second inspection when it came into the United States and was distributed to Texas and I forget the other state...you don't have any inspectors anymore because, when Elon Musk came in, you fired all of them because Taylor Farms can pay off Donald Trump with a million dollars. All of these other Big Food, Big Ag can pay off so that they get rid of the inspectors, they get rid of the regulations, and you, you get to sit on a toilet or potentially end up in a fucking ICU for weeks on end. Because this is what it's like to live in an underdeveloped country...to sit down and eat a bowl of lettuce, to sit down and eat a bowl of perfectly ripe tomatoes shouldn't be a fucking luxury.
But now it is, because they're not concerned with what you and I are eating in the U.S. because they have their organic farms. Their kids are getting their vaccinations from private doctors. They're getting all of the things that they need done...You and I, however, unless you have a few bucks, unless you want to roll the dice, you're pretty much fucked...The country that is known for its obesity, hypertension and diabetes, we can't now have fucking salad."
Jared talks about the ICE electric gloves and says he's been saying for a long time:
"whenever fascism comes around, you have three choices:
One is to put on the armband and possibly get some spoils.
Second is to close your door and hope that it never knocks on your door and don't say anything.
And third is to fight it and risk being destroyed.
Well, guess what? That question, it's not asked in a vacuum. Eventually, we're going to reach a point where we're not going to have anything. We're not going to have any conditions that are conducive to living a life of dignity and longevity...If you suddenly have...total censorship and criminal of dissident critiques, all of a sudden that question becomes very clear, especially in this new era with digital surveillance, especially now."
A couple minutes into Part 2, there's a discussion of how this results from what I call chainsaw conservatism:
Danielle: "You can't, your kids can't get vaccinations. A majority of people are now out of work. Are they connecting the dots back to the cause of this, or is the way that it's being narrated, as if this is all just an anomaly, kind of the way that they talk about wildfires and the fucking climate, it being 100 degrees, like in Europe, it's like, Oh, well, isn't that just weird? No, it's not fucking weird. Like, it's the product of what happens when you deny climate science. Like, it's not just weird that you can't have lettuce and tomatoes and jalapenos and beef. Those things are not just happening. They are the product of what happens when you dismantle agencies, fire inspectors, and have no one minding the fucking store or the health of 330 million Americans...I guess my curiosity is, like, Do people get it? Are they connecting these things or are they just thinking it's like whack-a-mole and it's just coming out of nowhere?"
Jared: "I think the answer is complicated, and I think that there are some people who do understand it. I think there are other people who intuit it, but they lack the information to articulate it, largely because they are consistently given a narrative that doesn't have anything to do with it."
It did not come from nowhere.
