 Hi there, my name is Jerry Mikulski and it is two days before the 2016 general election on November 8th by the time I get this out it'll be tonight, so it'll really be one day before the election and Clearly we're in front of a really remarkable moment, and I'd like to take a Moment to try to explain. Why did Trump rise? Why did this all happen right now? And what might we do now? I'll do this by talking about why people are supporting Trump Why this all is of the moment right now and what we might actually do and if you're a conservative listening to this I'm clearly tilting the other way Please hang in there because I think you'll find in find things in here that resonate with with your thinking So let's dive in the TLDR the too long didn't read answer is that this is really complicated So this is not a three-minute video. In fact, it'll take considerably longer to get through these issues Let's start with why people support Trump and I'm going to quote Hilary's Deplorables comment. I'm going to say that some part of the human population in some part of the US population is xenophobes and Islamophobes and the KKK and neo-nazis and nativists and There's a blurry line because there's racism and sexism and homophobia in a much larger piece of the population And I don't mean that everybody who has sexism is a deplorable But I mean that the hardcore racists who are really pushing this are in fact deplorables I'm foreshadowing on the left. It says see ghosts. What I mean is there's a section coming up Where I say that we haven't really dealt with our ghosts Donald Trump has ripped open the Overton window. He has brought deplorables into mainstream discourse The Overton window is basically the window of what's okay to talk about So acceptable discourse. There's kind of like well We do this, but we don't name names or we don't insult people Trump has just shredded this Overton window And what he's done is he's opened a wide enough space for These deplorables to step in and become part of mainstream discourse There's also a bunch of gullibles and I'm sorry I'm just going to call them gullibles because after 30 years of very careful training by the conservative machine They believe that Hilary will take our guns that Hilary is going to open all the borders that Hilary is a criminal That Hilary and Obama are Satan all those kinds of things and I just have to tell you She's pretty much not gonna take down the Second Amendment She's no I'd no desire to throw open all the borders and and she and Obama don't smell like sulfur They really aren't Satan you can all calm down a little bit But you're also gullible and that you believe that Trump is the best businessman and in retrospect I have to say that you know several years of the apprentice and celebrity apprentice is Genius strategy to tell the American public that you are the best businessman even though Trump's business affairs are a train wreck a continuous and ongoing train wreck in particular Shafting everybody he's dealt with it's insane And ending up with less money even though he's a billionaire Ending up with less money at this point Then if he had just invested the stuff that his dad gave him when he started so Trump has the best businessman You're pretty gullible too that the economy is a shambles No, there are some people in the population who are suffering I'm with you on that and I'll get to that but the economy is far from a shambles crime is not at all-time highs It's in fact close to all-time lows Nobody respects America Maybe because we're contemplating electing Donald Trump, but actually respect for America is pretty damn high and oh We're gonna get internment camps in the US. They're the country's run by lizard people Come on people get a grip. You're gullible and you need to sort of wake up and read around now I'm looking ahead a little bit here because Conservatives in some sense are reaping what they sowed over the last 30 years and I'll get I'll get to that history in just a second There's other reasons why one might support Trump. Hey, he's really not such a threat. He's he's all talk no bluster Well, you know what his record doesn't indicate that his record indicates that he is a hip shooter He is happy to aim high and try for stuff. He will do pretty much anything Scott Adams has taken a kind of a peculiar approach. This is the the author of Dilbert He's taken a very peculiar approach of shifting his support from Hillary to To Trump in particular because Trump seems to be a master of persuasion and here Robert Cialdini and sort of the dark arts of Persuasion rise to the fore and what Adams is saying is that we need the best salesman possible and that happens to be Donald Trump Because nobody can touch him on selling these sorts of ideas and I think that logic is completely wet I do admire Trump's sales strategy. We'll get to that. I think it's one of his core skills But I don't think what we need is an unprincipled sales guy You might be voting for Trump out of spite or to scare the system or just to roll the dice I mean I kind of get that but really when the stakes are this high You don't want to be just trying to scare the system You might think we need a real authoritarian and boy, I've seen that plot come a couple times I grew up in South America and I watched Argentine Dictatorships sort of come and go That doesn't go well and then and this is not the first time I'm going and not the last time I'm going to mention Adolf Hitler, but you know Hitler won an election. He ran against democracy When he was running he said look at this crap. It was the middle of the Great Depression 1933-34 and he said look at what's happening in Democratic countries. They are falling apart They have riots in the streets. You need somebody who knows how to control things and only I can do that sound familiar You may also believe all the conspiracy theories that I alluded to a moment ago that that you know There's there's murders and giant conspiracies Most of those are false There's a little bit of people behind the scenes doing things and I'll get to that a lot of it Send the conservative side or you may be Russian or in some other way wishing that America were weaker on the global stage And you know Trump's great for Russia. In fact if Trump gets elected, I'm pretty sure Putin's gonna go for Estonia Latvia Lithuania, maybe Poland. Who knows whether Hungary Hungary's already got a far right Guy in charge. So who knows that might actually work There's a bunch of conservatives who are holding their noses and voting for Donald because and it's often one issue The one the main issue I think is that right now there is an empty seat on the Supreme Court There will very likely be over the next four or eight years the next one or two administrations Maybe three seats open which means whoever the person is who gets to nominate those people if they pass Will actually tilt the court substantially. It'll either swing very far right or maybe not far left I think if Donald gets in power, he'll try everything he can to go far right But if Hillary comes in I don't think anybody's gonna let her swing far left So I think it's going to be pretty moderate moderate like garland right now Or maybe it's reproductive rights, and you're a one-issue voter about abortion should be illegal and so forth Maybe more. It's party loyalty. I always vote Republican. I'm just gonna vote the party line and hold my nose You're holding your nose because things really stink. I'll get there in a sec You may also believe that any democratic success and we're going to be out of power forever And I'll say that this has been a note in the background for 30 years I'll talk in a moment about the GOP's scorched earth strategies and what's been happening But but the idea that a democratic president might achieve something is anathema to conservatives because that might mean that one Democrat might succeed another might succeed another and then we'd look back and say hey look at this record of success our our electoral system our Political system is set up so that nobody really wants the other party to succeed Which means everybody's really working against the interests of the country And that's kind of this last point is that a lot of conservatives may see that their job Security is more important than our national security that having a stalemate in government that Putting in some guy who might actually push the button on nukes that whatever it is that might happen But would keep them in their nice cozy power seat is much more important than those outcomes And I've got to say I would hold my nose talking to you because that's a pretty Unprincipled pretty unethical stance to take so it's it's amazing to me that that Donald Trump at this moment has more than 40% Of the country backing him at least that's what polls say if you believe any polls given his Absolutely proven misogyny and assaults on women and I don't mean just that he's out of fairs I mean Newt Gingrich has had affairs Bill Clinton is out of fairs I mean that he seriously seems to think of women as nothing more than objects to fuck and He's just dive. He's gone straight into that over and over again, and I don't think it's just an act I think in fact he is deep down like nice into the core a misogynist his continuous Incredible lying. I don't mean just sort of lying a little like fudging the truth Hillary fudges the truth because the truth is beat around the head before you know things things have landed on the Clintons really hard But when Donald just yesterday says hey, you should have seen how Obama dealt with that heckler that that Trump supported guy who showed up at the at their talk He was screaming at him. It was awful. I'm totally ashamed if you actually watch the video of Obama handling the heckler you will see somebody who is principled and polite and respectful and saying this person Is ex-military is older and and has a different opinion and we live in a democracy and for these reasons we should respect so Good God like like Donald has the big brassy balls to lie all the time and to Manufacture his own reality. We'll get to that in a little bit, too. He is a narcissist everything He does is self-serving. He is ignorant and doesn't have any curiosity There's some very good articles about his total lack of a moral center or a moral compass He does not listen or apologize to anyone for anything He might have listened a little bit in this last little period to people saying hey use the teleprompter and stop running off message so much and if you think his apology about the Grabbed them by the whatever Comments was really an apology just listen to it for a second. He said gosh I'm really sorry for that thing that Hillary started etc. etc so He really doesn't know how to apologize and he's doing this in the middle of and a world of insane double standards I mean the things that Hillary has to live up to and the things she gets bashed for Compared to the things that Donald Trump has done repetitively and Endlessly are unbelievable and this this sets up a world of false equivalents where things seem to be similar all the time There's a lovely cartoon, which is you know Donald Trump did this and that and then the next slide is and Hillary Clinton has a Spinach in her teeth and then the reporters were saying well well Obviously these two things are the same and they're not but maybe Trump Maybe people love that Trump tells everyone to fuck off that he is his own man and that he didn't get this far On his own. I mean he did get this far on his own and it kind of is a miracle I don't think there's a big room of genius is pulling Donald Trump strings I think he's probably got ties to Putin and whoever else And and organized crime, but he he did get this far on his own Which is both an indictment of media and politics and as we will see in a moment the way our society is set up But it's pretty impressive. So maybe you like that and you're like well, let's give this guy a thing Above all, I think Trump's level of support says speaks loudly that there is a deep-seated anger and sense of betrayal in the United States of America and and it runs very very deep and The Democrats have not been able to lance that boil They have not been able to credibly address those things for a variety of reasons part of which is they've been demonized Part of which is they don't have great policies, but compared to the threats that are sort of on deck Mediocre policies and a continuation of Clinton Obama to a new Clinton doesn't seem bad whatsoever So here are the most reasonable reasons why one might support Trump The first one is called they're cutting in line an early Russell Hock child a sociologist Has written a book and several really interesting pieces about this notion that that normal working people feel like they're They're standing in line up the hill to success that at the top is the American dream But the line is kind of stalled and they haven't really made any progress yet If anything, they're slipping and people seem to be cutting in line Affirmative action any kind of benefits for other sorts of people or the closing of opportunities for them are Some way of losing a spot and I'm not going to read this quote, but just hit pause or come back to it But Arleigh talks about this. This is sort of the metaphor that's going on Second point is loss of privilege and here I mean mostly white male privilege and I'm one of those I'm a white guy and there's really I think as we modernize and as progress happens And we realize that everybody is equal and we ought to make a society where we treat everybody as equal whether they are disabled Whatever their love preferences, etc. You know color gender White males are going to feel like all of that is a loss. They don't see diversity as a win They don't see equality as a win. They kind of have to but many don't So when I say reasonable reasons, I don't mean I'm agreeing that that's there's a loss of privilege I mean that there's that very definitely a sense of loss of privilege a Different point is that nobody has been speaking for me and nobody else says the things that Donald Trump says out loud He is the only one who's calling out stuff and I hate to say this But every now and then Donald Trump says some says something that I agree with that nobody else has the courage to say For example, he said that President Bush w of 43 took us into the Iraq war On purpose and that it was a huge mistake. There was a problem and there are very few other politicians Who will say anything like that never mind whether Donald was in favor or against the war beforehand separate issue But he during this campaign has said that out loud And I think that takes some courage if not just sort of a reckless disregard for for outcomes But I think there's a lot of people for whom he's saying things some of whom Are the deplorables some of whom are saying well shit I've felt this way about those damned immigrants and everybody else for all these years finally We can talk about that and man that is that is really problematic when When the door is open or the windows the Overtown window is opened enough for everybody to just crawl in and say hey This is legitimate. Let's go do it because it really is not legitimate discourse I'm happy to talk with people about biases and prejudices, but we really need to aim higher And then a separate reason here the system is broken and needs to be shattered and here's a place I also agree and there was that famous flowchart at the beginning of the electoral cycle about Bernie Sandler's and you know shit is broken and fucked up was kind of the The system is broken was the first decision point and Bernie and Trump were on the yes It's broken side and Hillary and the rest of the Democrats were on the nope It's not broken. We're just gonna do you know business as usual side and here's the fellow from Occupy And I actually agree for reasons that I'll this goes a lot more in a moment when I described this idea called the relationship economy Globalization has sucked for US workers. In fact kind of the the middle wage laborers have really suffered We've had some rise in wages and wealthy people have gotten way way wealthier But the ability to just move work anywhere in the world hasn't worked well Capitalism does shaft workers. So that's totally legitimate. I'll talk a bit more about that in just a second Then there's a bunch of other people the people I've met who were like this are in conservative sometimes very religious communities and They would tell you we've been holding the country together and nobody seems to care We take care of our elderly. We watch our kids. We don't have to leave our you know We don't lock our doors We leave the keys in the car our communities are in pretty good shape And we look outside at the world and the world is falling apart and nobody cares what we're doing In fact, they're against us in different ways So that might be a reason to stay conservative Even though man, you'd really have to hold your nose If you're principled on the on the kinds of ways I just told you you'd really have to hold your nose to vote for Trump then the last one which I think is a is a super duper strong one if I don't support Trump I will lose my support my community my identity my job my whatever I will lose everything around me that kind of matters I'm going to cover this in many different ways from scorched earth strategy to the consumerization of our world To holding our noses, but this is very very real people fall in line over time because This is about their identity their community all the different things that hold them in place and Stepping outside of that is a very risky sort of proposition and Partly what I'm asking those of you who fall in this category to think about for a moment Just to consider is that it might take an act of courage to go do that and remember the ballot is secret The ballot goes into a box people can't tell how you voted So why did all this happen now? Why is Trump so of the moment? Why does he feel like good God almost inevitable at this second? First I think Conservatives are reaping what they sowed over the last 30 years after the Civil Rights Act of 1964 the Berry Goldwater Election cycle a lot of Goldwater lost in a big way and a lot of Conservatives were completely disenchanted and they started picking out the ideas of Leo Strauss and Hayek and a bunch of other ideas They then over the years built a patiently in with a bunch of investment from a very conservative people like Richard Mellon scape and and Hauser-Busch and sorry Coors The Coors family and a bunch of others they then built an echo chamber that worked really really well Fox News with until recently Roger Ailes in charge Ailes who was a political operative for the Republicans forever And Ailes fashioned a very very capable Ratings winning news service that was in fact creating that the very thing we're staring at right now It was it was caught it was sort of emulated and echoed by conservative blogs conservative talk radio Conservatives in fact own talk radio pretty much Think tanks that were created American Enterprise Institute heritage foundation is a whole bunch of very conservative think tanks that were ginning up white papers to explain Why trickle down economics is going to work? Well, it doesn't why this why that and also the religious right which has been around for a very long time and has a complicated relationship with The Republican Party but but has almost always been on board and then most recently the alt-right and the alt-right isn't just Sort of a bunch of these people under a new label the alt-right really is an umbrella for the deplorables It really is the people that I I would have a hard time hanging out with the people who are you know Down and dirty racists and bigots and other sorts of things And they're now in the echo chamber and this echo chamber is very very functional I Date some of this back to the gingrich revolution So the conservators basically decided that They were gonna do a scorched earth strategy that they needed to destroy the Democratic Party because anytime the Democrats would come into party if they achieved anything they might stay in power as I said earlier So back under gingrich in 94 gingrich becomes speaker of the house And we also have the midterm elections in the US big Republican victory They're called the republican revolution based on something called the contract with America and they had Signatories to the contract which were a bunch of people and all of a sudden Republicans were separated from Democrats and You may have proof otherwise, but as far as I understand it before this moment Republicans and Democrats used to rent apartments together near the Capitol and they would sort of share rooms They used to dine together in the same dining halls They used to work out together that it was okay for them to sit and talk in the hallways After the gingrich revolution it was not Your money was going to be taken away You wouldn't you were not going to pass your next primary which on the Republican side is the important thing to do is to Doing your primary and going off message was penalized with being cut off. It was really draconian You are not to talk to the other side. You're not to compromise You are not to allow for any Democratic victories and just look at the history of Obamacare going through There have been more than a dozen extremely tough efforts by Conservatives to take down to first to prevent then to take down and now still to reverse Obamacare And of course Trump's first pledge when he went if and when he's elected is to reverse Obamacare So just watch how hard one any Democratic victories actually are So this has become a land of obstructionism, which I think really is on the Republican side Republicans held the country hostage and shut down the government all these sorts of things and guess what obstructionism is in fact a self-fulfilling Prophecy which ironically is playing out for Donald Trump right now because what happens is it gives you a Non-functioning Congress it gives you deadlock in other sorts of places if you won't approve an even an odd numbered Supreme Court justice then you'll get deadlocks in the Supreme Court So all of this the party of no has done such a great job with this that we are now kind of in in these dangerous quarters So there have been many different movements on the conservative side from something called movement conservatives to the neocons That gave us the contract with America then the Tea Party sprung up and kind of scared everybody and changed the nature of primaries More recently the House Freedom Caucus has been doing this scorched earth strategy There will brook no compromise and now the alt-right is in the mix There's a good article on Vox the Republicans wage the three decade war on government. They got Trump. I highly recommend you read it So the strategy is hey, let's shut down discourse. In fact, there's a strategy I called denial a tactic I called denial of discourse attacks Which is just flood the media with so many stupid comments and so many accusations and so much that it's impossible to actually have a conversation Separate everyone from each other create reasons for doubt also so so so doubt Demonize the opposition. Don't just say the opposition, you know has a different opinion and here's how we do how we disagree but in fact say the opposition is Satan the opposition is evil the opposition is criminal do that Disable the media and fog the facts so make sure that the media is no longer a useful tool and The one of the ways to do that is to fog the facts ignore the facts right over the facts change the facts I remember there was a Bob Schieffer interview with Ted Cruz and Schieffer was basically basically saying so when and I'm going to paraphrase poorly so when you shut down the government When you did the sort of the government sequestration shut down all that blah blah blah and Ted Cruz says oh, I didn't do that The Democrats did that and you can watch Schaefer do a double-take and a triple-take And then he goes back and asked the question and he's incredulous that Ted Cruz would be rewriting history like this and Cruz was the leader of the shutdown It's insane. So this is happening all the time Now in these kinds of battles in scorched earth strategies the player that cares the least about losing often wins That's the problem is that if you're trying to hold together discourse if you're trying to be fair about Conversations if you're trying to promote democracy It's really hard to go up against all this crap as a side note Dick Cheney was a big fan of a guy named Robert Boyd a Colonel a Marine Colonel who was a crazy brilliant guy and Invented something called the OODA loop observe orient decide act and if you're using the OODA loop you can outmaneuver your adversaries and back in Bush Gore Sorry Bush carry I think that the Republicans understood this very deeply and they basically blew carry out of the water by using the OODA loop over and over again Now it seems like both sides understand the OODA loop and they're sort of trading blows in the arena That's just a side side note if you'd like to see an ironic An ironic way to read what's happened here read the poem home to roost by K Ryan Here it is. You can come back to it. I'm not going to read it out loud But boy, that's what's happened to the Republicans and they have lost control of their party So Trump Managed to hack the media. He's been brilliant at it. The day I really realized this was the day that Trump rolled over Mitt Romney Remember the day when Mitt Romney stood up and said, you know, don't vote for Trump. He's a hideous He's he's terrible, you know, things are good. This is going to end badly and then Then I watched as CNN Held two-thirds of their camera for an hour saying Trump to respond and it was just an empty stage with flags behind it And on the bottom was the banner Trump to respond and on the one-third on the left was a you know Whoever was speaking the talking heads. He's about to talk. He's about to talk And then they gave Trump an entire hour of free airtime Trump was a master of getting free airtime During which Trump basically rambled on did his not only did a plug for his hotel and his usual campaign crap but denigrated Denigrated Mitt Romney in a variety of ways and effectively rolled over Mitt like he was a little bump on the road And I thought to myself. Wow. What do you do in this case? If you were running CNN? Maybe what you do is you stop the cameras and you step in front of the camera yourself and you say I Apologize Donald Trump appears to we've been hacked. I don't mean that Russians or Chinese have broken into our servers I mean that this man Donald Trump has figured out how to use us Against you and for the moment, we're just going to turn off the cameras and we don't know exactly what we're going to do With this we could use your help on this I wish that had happened, but Jeff sucker behind the scenes at CNN seems to be a bit of a Trump fan So things like that have definitely not been happening. In fact, the opposite has So Trump has really flourished in our broken media industry and the media itself has become infotainment It's um, we don't really have a news business the way we used to have news that had kind of principles think back To Walter Cronkite think back to our famous journalists and the kinds of principles they seem to stand on Edward R. Murrow So I've already talked about it's amazing that Trump has greater than 40 percent. I put it in here as well on the media, but his skills Are not to be taken lightly. So one is black belt media hacking He absolutely knows how to say things to stay in the public eye. All attention is good attention for him If it happens to be bad news, but they're talking about him 24 7 he seems to really love that He is fantastic at deflecting So everybody who tries to say no, no, you actually said that tries to fact check him. Nope. Nope. Nope Uh, I've never heard of David Duke. Uh, what do you mean? I don't even understand what white white supremacists are Uh, despite his meetings with duke before and his support for them, blah, blah, blah He's a fantastic Bullier. In fact, if you read up on the tactics of abuse between spouses between people and intimate relationships Gaslighting which is denial of what happened projecting Which is accusing the other person of the thing that you in fact are doing a favorite trump tactic Denigration of other people and there's a long long list here. I won't even go into it Trump in fact is a textbook master of all these things and I just have to ask you people who are holding your nose And you people who are gullible Is this the kind of thing you want in the white house running? Arguably to this point the most powerful nation on earth The the beacon of democracy and free really So I did a video that I'm not going to play here, but it's down below about trump's favorite tactics What is his playbook so you can you can play that elsewhere? So here's here's the stuff I think I might be bringing to the conversation because everything I've said so far You've probably heard someplace before Um, and the thing I've I'm holding is an idea that we're entering a relationship economy that consumer mass marketing capitalism Is broken That we consumerized Everything in our lives and consumerization Includes industrialization automation standardization Commodization, which means turning non-monetary things into monetary things commodification Which is basically when you make things so cheap that you can make a lot of them Capitalism globalization all those things are sort of behind the curtain of consumerization In front of the curtain is do you want the Cheerios or the cocoa puffs? Do you want The trump or the hillary right and I think you can see that the electoral process has become a consumer mass marketing exercise plus media hacking so What happened was we actually consumerized every sector of our lives we consumerized our our housing and how we build cities We consumerized our educational system. We consumerized our electoral process We consumerized money finance how we see our homes All these different things have turned into mere consumer exercises In the process when you treat us as mere consumers and not as whole people We break trust. We lose community. We lose society We lose the responsibility for the task at hand My only job in the educational system is to absorb the next the material for the next test and Barf it back out for the test and then flush the buffers because I'm not actually I don't have enough time to learn for meaning and to learn for context You've sort of put me in a military institution that drills me and and has deadlines at every turn So I don't have the responsibility to learn In cities with with governments and all that I don't have the responsibility to take care of my neighbor because We have institutions for all that we institutionalized all this stuff away It's all sort of part of the consumer economy All of this took away our sense of agency all of this took away our ability to perform critical thinking And all of this went to our educational system as well If you'd like to learn more about this whole thing, I did a ted talk back a tedx talk back in 2012 You can find it if you search for what if we trusted you on youtube and I'll put the links to all these things at in the YouTube comment field When I publish this So by consumerizing everything we replaced citizenship With voting and I gotta tell you voting is not really democracy voting is a pale substitute for actual Democracy where people are sort of debating and and figuring things out. We also threw in pro sports. So for example Go Niners. Thank god for the cubbies finally winning the world series Having some team to root for that feels like your city is a nifty substitute for actually being a citizen And being involved in governing your city We substituted happiness with consumerism. You can buy your way to happiness The american dream have your own house with its own picket fence and cocker spaniel and and suv We substituted community with pseudo community on tv the shows like cheers and friends We took the commons which we used to live on and take care of together scroll back far enough in history With natural resources which corporations are it's okay for them to plunder unless we sort of over regulate them We substituted cooperation with competition and I actually think humans are naturally cooperative and social They're not naturally selfish and competitive. You may disagree with that. These are just points of view but but That point of view has taken me down this path of logic So consumerization has given us alienation apathy anger amnesia We have people who are angry in in part because they've been treated as consumers There's a bunch of other good reasons. They've lost jobs. They've been ignored whatever else might be happening But other effects other more specific effects of consumerization We ended up militarizing our police So instead of having relationships with communities, which a few cities are rediscovering including los angeles Um, we militarized it and all the surplus equipment that came out of ascanis and iraq got bought up by cities across the country Most cities have swat teams and we militarized our schools things that used to be something where the kid got Sent to the principal are not things where the police or the swat team come in and then the news business basically Lost its ad base from the internet lost its subscriberships and suddenly became eyeball seeking infotainment and can't hold up its end of the bargain All of this means that consumerization of our society, which happened We didn't actively go do it, but it happened around us to us We were kind of complicit in some ways depending what you were doing during the time But we've we've sort of been born into this Consumerization prepped us for a donald trump and trump was the perfect dude to come along and do this In the same way and forgive me here. If you hate hitler analogies. I'm invoking godwin's rule, I guess But alice miller a psychotherapist from switzerland wrote a bunch of great books including The drama of the gifted child, which is her most famous one But in the book for your own good she analyzes hitler And she talks about poisonous pedagogy in germany austria switzerland And she refers to a book called struvo peter among other things and struvo peter says on the fly leaf I wish I'd remembered to put that into the prezi here, but i'm thinking of it now It says on the fly leaf only good little boys and girls will get to see the contents of this book You turn the page little tommy suck his thumbs didn't wouldn't stop sucking his thumb You turn the page and there's a giant ogre with giant shears that has cut off tommy's thumb And it's gouting blood and like that it's basically object lessons for kids This is poisonous pedagogy basically trying to scare kids straight so they'll behave Alice miller argues that this kind of pedagogy including the german the prussian military education system Which we later imported prepared germans to be really obedient and to look for an authoritative leader like hitler Paved the way for him so that when he came in he was hailed as the solution He was in fact a different kind of solution So that's the long way around on how we consumerized everything If you want to learn more about consumerization and this perspective go to the prezi link That's at the bottom of the circle Let's move on to capitalism, which i'm just going to get to scratch the surface of Capitalism as it's currently instantiated in particular in the us is carnivorous It really is kind of the giant vampire squid Partly because the market forces that make everybody do really short-termist things and really get in the way Of long-term thinking of taking care of the commons of doing any other sorts of things unregulated Corporations habitually over and over again destroy society the environment and our future You can go to many periods in history where we had to do trust busting We had to come in and do regulation We had to do a bunch of different things to stop that from happening The industrial revolution gets really dark and nasty pretty quickly Uh, I can show you a bunch of history on this if you'd like Corporations really had few compunctions about moving their work to cheaper countries They really felt no responsibility for retraining the employees that they cut off There were no social pressures really besides local communities in distress To make them care There were plenty of media distractions that that wasn't getting that much attention And they were under insane pressure to behave this way from markets investors even the media So go on MSNBC Go read fortune magazine or Forbes and you'll see that hey all we really care about You know is is making money Under weak regulation capitalism always overreaches and breaks things the problem here is not capitalism as a whole Which I think can be healed and fixed But it's the consumer mass market capitalism that we're in is really cruel We've managed to cut away most of the safety net. We've managed to make Poverty a cruel and dismal trap. We've done a whole bunch of different things And if you look back again over history capitalism has pretty much always taken advantage of some kind of population It it basically ate this country and took it away from the locals It imported slaves and had a An economy almost entirely predicated on slavery a bunch of different things and currently we have wage slaves We have people who don't make enough money to actually leave their situation Who are stuck in the three or four d jobs dirty dangerous disgusting and dull Um, and that's what they get to do all the time So more on this in just a second when I talk about the ghosts we haven't dealt with And and one bright light is that four benefit corporations? And I don't mean specifically b-corps, but I mean also special purpose corporations L3c's there's a bunch of different governance models here But four benefit corporations can at least let give companies the the breathing room to focus on social Benefit role models here are companies like Patagonia There's a company in brazil called semco, which has a workplace democracy that's really fantastic If you want to dive deeper into capitalism and its critiques This is a screenshot of my brain go to jerry's brain.com And you can circle through and search for a thought each note is called a thought called critiques of capitalism Each of those icons below links to if it's a little a it's an amazon It's a book on amazon if it's an s the big red s It's probably a salon article if it's a little red triangle. It's a youtube video, etc If it's a little w it's a wikipedia video But there's a whole bunch of materials that i've been collecting about this and everything else that i've been telling you about in my brain So Part of our problem this minute is that we haven't dealt with our ghosts And we keep rejecting this conversation and it's funny I thought of this notion that we haven't dealt with our ghosts and then it suddenly dawned on me Why am I saying ghosts? Well, there's two books that I read over the last decade both of which really stayed with me One is called king leopold's ghost about king leopold the second of belgium Who basically took over what is now the democratic republic of belgium and turned it into a rubber plantation With the most insane working conditions for anybody and when I say working conditions, I really mean slavery If somebody didn't meet their rubber quota, they would have their hands cut off So there were you know There are portraits of lots and lots of people with their hands cut off because they couldn't meet their rubber quota Anyway dark history for for congo and we wonder why things are you know still dark in the congo And then the ghosts of spain where it talks about how they started discovering 2012 2014 mass graves that dated back to the franco era And how the fact that that spain had never had a truth and reconciliation moment that spain had never sort of admitted to What happened and had the conversation Part of the deal when franco turns things over to king juan carlos Part of the deal is that there won't be prosecutions. Nobody really talk about it But juan carlos doesn't do what franco thought he would do He actually reinstates congress and turns things back over to a democratic republic Um, which franco would have like gone crazy about but except he was dead If you want to see more about this and understand more how our prosperity was built on the backs of a lot of people read Howard zinn's very famous a people's history of the united states and just read it with an open mind And if you're a white guy like me, uh, don't feel assaulted read up the rules of how to be a good ally and understand that It isn't all about you and sometimes it is a little bit about you And you've got to sort of be graceful about how this works But in our country, uh, we haven't dealt with these things and the 800 pound gorilla in the room is misogyny and hillary is a woman And there appear to be a whole series of people including a bunch of women who don't want to see a woman in charge of this country, even though, uh, there've been tons of women leaders, uh, across the world in many different places Even though she's insanely capable and overqualified, et cetera, et cetera Misogyny is still a big front and center and i'm not going to go too deep into that Instead i'll talk a little bit about how we've treated first nations There's a reason why right now there are protests at Standing Rock and there's the no Dakota pipeline movement going on, uh, if you want to see more about this, uh, go see erin huys tex talk about the treaties We've aggregated with the natives. He is a photographer. He went, uh, to To the the Lakota Sioux reservations, uh, Pine Ridge and took photographs But then tells you the story of how we drove them off the land and into the worst pieces of real estate and haven't recognized any of this By the way in vancouver at a at an anthropology museum There are apology letters from the canadian government the catholic arch diocese the royal canadian mounted police and someone else That are beautiful to say We fucked up You were valuable. We did this to you. We're trying to make amends. We don't do that in america. We We hate it when obama or clinton or somebody goes and apologizes for something. We actually did in some other country Um, we need to we need to buck up and look at history Slavery man if this is if this is not also the the yawning chasm I i just finished reading, uh, the american slave coast because i met the authors, uh, husband and wife Uh at a speech recently at a conference and I have to say that I I already thought I knew a lot of american history And was pretty jaded american slave coast blew my mind In particular in this notion that there was an organized american slave breeding industry And that it was inhuman in ways. We don't even think about, uh, you know, never mind the fancy movies We make to try to depict this it was worse than what you think But the american economy was so dependent on it that they say our revolutionary war When we broke away from england was actually a successful civil war So that our founding fathers wouldn't have to drop slavery because they couldn't imagine Nobody could see how the american economy would work without slavery. Nobody not the north not the south Then i'm now watching this documentary The 13th about the 13th amendment and about how the old plantation and slave system has been replaced by First it was replaced by jim crow, but now it's been replaced by mass incarceration That that has kind of taken its place. No wonder we have a black lives matter movement going on We militarized our cities and we have this this bias That we can't seem to talk about can't seem to fix we can't seem to diffuse these these conflicts So of course we have a lot of a fight going on my favorite saying about Many of these topics is that the privilege of privilege is not noticing the privilege I don't know whom to attribute it to I heard it years ago and all I know is that when I Go outside and drive around the block I'm not worried about being randomly pulled over and maybe shot and killed because i'm black When I walk down the block, I don't worry about crossing over to the other side of the street because some tough looking guys coming down And i'm a woman. I don't notice those things and I at least I realized that I don't notice those things so When conservatives complain about political correctness and about microaggressions and all this kind of stuff You know Some of trying to get the the scales tipped back a little bit may sound like persnickettiness or overcompensation But it's not these are people who have historic beefs that are systematically ingrained in our culture today Because we haven't surfaced them and dealt with them So that's all kind of bad news and there's a little bit of good news. Uh, it's been worse before Back just before the civil war. Remember our country tore itself apart over slavery and had a civil war in which like some 400 000 people americans were killed so the democratic The democratic representative from south carolina preston brooks Almost beat republican senator charles somner to death on the floor of the senate with a walking cane Because somner had given a really eloquent speech against slavery. Hmm against slavery So shit was bad back then and fell apart. Also, the democrats aren't innocent There's been plenty of stuff going on on the democratic side But I just have to say If you kind of look at it objectively, there's strategies pale in comparison the things they've done pale in comparison and some of the things they've done like linden johnson escalating the the the vietnam war or what have you or jfk, you know, approving the bay of pigs invasion or clinton Basically starting the mass incarceration acceleration, etc. Etc. We're in political reaction. We're whatever but but I gotta say There wasn't this politics of no lbj in fact famously was the guy if you read caro's caro's books on him Was busy trying to you know figure out how to how to wrangle people and how to get some kind of compromise The bad news is that all of this shit can easily get worse that we are not at the end of this This stuff can easily get much worse So what do we do now? I'm going to divide this up into the next day so before election day and then after election day there's two outcomes I guess uh, and you know not saying that there won't be a fight over the win But at some point hillary wins or trump wins Uh, so i'll talk about it in in kind of that direction and you'll see there's two circles in the middle between Hillary and trump victories which are two sets of things that just need to happen whoever wins whatever's going on so first It's really late We're a day away. There isn't some of you have been out canvassing and making calls and writing beautiful pieces Which i've been reading and cataloging. Thank you for that Van jones has been visiting conservatives in gettysburg and doing a beautiful job of it Seriously a moving job of at least having a conversation that we have managed to close off because For some people not having the conversation suits their message and their goals Which they're putting ahead of the country as far as I can tell so ordinary citizens are under unbearable pressures right now people are breaking up friendships because Hey, I can't believe you're you're supporting trump and and this whole video i'm recording It's my way of saying please don't vote for trump. This is you know I can't believe you would still do that even though I think I understand most of your reasons and if i've missed your reason Write me on twitter and send me what your reason is and i'll add it in But people are under unbearable pressures in particular all those conservatives who are holding their noses and still voting trump Dudes and dudettes Don't do it Step up to principle. Remember which side of history you want to end up on and do the opposite vote for hillary Don't hold your vote back. Don't vote for steiner johnson vote for hillary because we actually need We actually need a landslide which we're probably not going to get it's kind of crazy We can't reverse the consumerization of the world overnight The problem is as big as I described it happens slowly over decades But the good news is that it's being punctured and fixed all over the place in movements like restorative justice and traffic calming and open space meetings and Civic civic participation and so forth all over the place The best thing you can do for the next little period is actually listen Really listen to people who are on the other side and about to vote for trump and talk these things through have a conversation Take people by the hand to vote make sure everybody gets out and vote And in case it's not obvious enough. I had to add this late in the process vote for hillary. Please do The dangers if this goes the wrong way And I don't think i'm being chicken little here I I'm of this of the side that doesn't think that trump has just been talking and he's going to be really different And he's going to come around I think trump is trump and his whole record. I mean trump might be sort of a secretly trying to Punk us and say ha made you look look you even elected me president But I wasn't serious and look what I've done. I've exposed all these deplorables I've made you all hate each other and whack each other Look at what I did I managed to turn this country into a dumpster when it was kind of doing pretty well So the dangers here are that we actually continue to lose civil discourse that we lose even the notion of facts We've already shredded trust already with corporate trust governmental trust Media trust every institution is really not trusted very much And that things fall apart further with a little nod to chino achebe We could easily see much worse things happen. This could be the tipping into another civil war or a world war or whatever else I I don't see that those things are off off the table right now So one of the two things that need to happen regardless who wins First the media the news really need to sort this out Funny thing is i'm not sure fox news survives this cycle I think what happens is whether trump wins or loses we're going to see a trump tv network and The one entity that should be most worried about trump tv is fox uh now ailes is already advising Advising trump. So maybe ailes is in charge. Maybe hannah to be in charge I don't know But the the the three syllables that must scare everybody at fox news right now would be trump tv And this is a trivial item in the larger scale of things But but it's kind of a fun. It's sort of a fun thing to think about trump managed to weaponize the media against us he managed to turn tv radio print whatever else against us because tv in particular was so hungry for audience and the news was so divorced from actual journalism and so close to how many eyeballs Are we getting and can we get paid more that they were unable to turn off that eye when things got bad And trump knew that and took constant advantage of it He also knew that media attention is short. It's little scallops It has a very very short attention span because the media segments, you know an eight minute segment is a luxury three minutes Is more typical so if you can wait things out by avoiding dodging denying They won't stick to it and the few people, you know jake tapper now and then A few others here and there i've seen i've seen a couple journalists try to stick to it and still not be able to land the Blow of you've been lying. You haven't just been lying. You've been manipulating So stuck in this business model the news has not figured out how to respond And worse now discourse is broken. In fact seem powerless It could be done but you need to get your shit together for the state You need to sort this out and figure out how to reconnect with the rest of us and earn your trust back Second we need to return to civil discourse. We need to dissolve the scorched earth system One of my mentors was russ a cough one of the people who invented systems thinking and he used to say It's better not to try to solve a problem. It's better to dissolve it and he gave a lot of examples He would call a cost fables one example of dissolving the this this sort of chasm between us Our van jones's conversations with conservatives another lovely example Is nc dd.org here and here come too many syllables the national coalition for dialogue and deliberation Which is a terrific group that involves facilitators and other kinds of of conveners who host conversations about legislative input about peacemaking about all sorts of things that have to do with Dialogue and deliberation and discourse. They're lovely. So join that conversation and learn from them how to actually have a conversation We need to come back into community. We need to rediscover our sense of agency taken away by consumerism There's a lot of work actually to rebuild the fabric of worldwide society There's a reason we use the metaphor of social fabric in that all these little threads The little connections and interdependencies between us are the things that bind us into society And we have been systematically cutting and shredding and tearing them Including the tearing of discourse, which trump has done right now, but but not limited to that There's a whole bunch of this that's happened. So we need to make our way back to civil discourse then What's going to happen uh to the gop. So what are the what are the repercussions if trump wins? What happens to the gop because it seems like 80 percent of the gop is is backing trump And there's 20 percent of conservatives who are either holding their noses or Going elsewhere One can only hope but they might need to have a party and they might not want to stay in this particular party I already talked about fox news of survival or Does this just go further down into trumpistan and do the conservatives go fascist on us? So there needs to be a call to conscience for true conservatives here to figure out What what does it actually mean to be a conservative and can we do that again? Or and i'm just going to put this in here It might be the entire subject of other people's pieces We'll trump defy all of our expectations including most of what i've said here and do well Will he say hey, i've been punking you and uh, you know, I just wanted to to have some leeway to act and look I'm going to do good things And I I just don't think so You know, I just don't think so. It's really likely to be bleak If trump wins the supreme court will likely be deeply conservative for about three decades Because that's sort of how the life cycles go We are very likely to fall into military adventures and mistakes He seems to think that a strongman posture is the way to go And you can't bluff too long with strongman posture You actually have to send people out to die in your name And just because he's had five deferments and uh was happy that somebody gifted him a purple heart I'm just remembering that now and I just can't believe How painful it is that an award given to people who've lost limbs and shed blood for war Was given to a guy who's avoided war and would happily take a Do you see why i'm doing this? We might also lose our global allies except we might be a lot closer to the rising far right So let's see. Poland, Hungary, Turkey, Erdogan There's a whole bunch of countries that are surprisingly swinging to the right Uh, England just voted for the brexit France might be having a frexit and uh marine le pen is very very happy and the sidelines hoping to take her country further to the right There is a lot of right word movement We need to be concerned about and then just loss of progressive progress So all the things that got more equality whether it's marriage equality or other sorts of things will probably be rolled back in In these kinds of administrations Never mind and here I come to the one point that I haven't mentioned so far that doesn't get brought up in debates That is some people's sole issue that really really matters and i'm sorry to give it such short shrift but The earth is not doing very well. The seas are dying. We've killed off most of the most of the fish species The every part of the environment is facing calamitous catastrophe including of course climate change and and For somebody to be running the country who doesn't believe in it and will roll things back I mean ironically when ronald reagan moved into the white house one of the first things he did Was he removed he removed the solar panels that jimmy carter had installed on the roof of the white house removed them Paid somebody money to go up on the roof and take down something that was saving them money and making energy He was just trying to make a point of course But I think what's likely to happen under trump is much much worse than that So that's kind of the picture What happens if hillary wins well Very likely she'll be governing in gridlock because there have already been promises to not approve any supreme court nominees As long as she's in office, which is crazy and undemocratic Who knows what happens or Maybe we have to get adjusted to a new new normal that hatred and racism are now mainstream that we don't have facts How do you operate in there? So we need to figure out how to fix both the democratic party and democracy And then I'd love To affect some real change and this is where I liked some of the things that bernie was saying And just go back to what I was saying about the consumerization of everything If we actually trust one another and build institutions based on trust instead of mistrust Good things happen and we can start to fix a lot of these things That will take us down the road of healing rebuilding trust reconnecting with neighbors and colleagues Coping with the future together because one thing I haven't mentioned this whole time Automation is coming and it is a flesh eating bacterium that loves to gobble up tasks and work And we don't have social policies in place where that's okay because when your job gets automated It's not like you get a congratulations email that says hey You get to go work on the farm now and raise beats and goats and you'll be fine. Don't worry about it No, no, no, what happens is you've just lost your job and you don't know what to retrain for Because the time it'll take you to retrain is probably the time it'll take somebody back behind the scenes tapping away To automate that task. So where do you go? We're in a really dangerous place where we need to be working with one another Here's the collection of beautiful nicknames. I've discovered for trump He's the the rug wearing thunder nugget the short fingered vulgarian one that really gets under his skin The giant orange twitter egg the cheeto jesus The vulgar talking yam All these things are these are linked back to the articles and the people who who brought them to us in most cases These nicknames didn't show up just because the media is biased and people are hating on donald trump They showed up because this man Down deep in his little tiny core think grinch here Is an asshole and he's out for himself and he's just about to win he's right on the cusp of winning and God willing i think hillary's lead holds but you know what people thought the brexit was going to To fail and it passed so Think about somebody who has earned these names. Do you really want to vote for them? So that's my picture why trump why now what now i'm sorry it took so long I think you might understand why it took so long It's really complicated stuff and then a little bit of framing First thank you very much for listening. I am not a historian or a political theorist This stuff is just i've stuff i found and i believe and i'm telling it to you You can find the prezi i'm showing you prezi is this zoomable whiteboardy kind of thing You can find the whole presentation at the link i've got here, which i will put in the comments on the youtube video If you're in the prezi hit escape and then you can zoom around and you can go play the videos i've embedded here And i will in fact add the videos to the end of the prezi tour So if you play through the prezi and keep going it'll autoplay the five six seven videos that i've embedded here I've missed a lot of stuff. This is sort of my take on things suggest improvements at its changes and i will do those I will also if i have if i have the time break up this recording into multiples But i just wanted to do it once all the way through Uh, you're welcome to reuse and remix this material. I would love a little attribution So this is under creative commons by attribution and all of the things i've talked about The resources the articles backing up why i think what i think are in my brain Which is this concept this strange little concept mapping tool that i've been using since 1998 You can find it at jerry's brain.com or look in the app store for an app actually called jerry's brain I will warn you now though that my brain online is out of date by eight or nine months And a lot of the really great resources the juicy resources about this particular race are not in there, but Tweet to me and we can figure that out. Thank you very very much. Uh vote vote once Vote for hillary and make sure that everybody you know goes out and votes this really really important right now Thank you very much