This episode of It's the End of the World as we Know it and I Feel Fine was made possible by contributions from slaves like you. Spank you very much! I-I am paying you. You-you work for me-- You're trying to run my life here! Wallace, Wallace, Wallace... You are paying me to make you a new life! Politics! And in order for me to do that, I gotta be in charge of all the elements that go into it. It's the only way I work. That means, framing the overall strategy as well as deciding all the specifics. The look of the campaign the look of the billboards. Bumper stickers what colors they're going to be? It means the polling, it means the ads, radio, TV, newspapers. It means coordinating every piece of information out of this office to make sure it fits with what our polling tells us the people out there are worrying about. Or what they're feeling good about! Goooooooooood morning slaves, and welcome to another sedition of It's the End of the World as we Know it and I Feel Fine the show where the only peeps “feelin' the Bern” are the motherfuckin pigs. I'm Bernie Sanders and I approve this message. I am your host the Stimulator, and despite what your racist uncle says, I know he's crazy, but Donald Trump sure makes a lot of sense about those immigrants. being a so-called "illegal immigrant" isn't all it’s cracked up to be. While the right-wing media often depicts undocumented migrants as lazy free-loaders in the real fucking world, they make up some of the hardest working, and most ruthlessly exploited members of society. Many have risked their fucking lives to cross heavily militarized, yet entirely make-believe fucking borders, all in an attempt to escape horrific wars, or just provide a slightly more secure and dignified life for their families and loved ones back home. And even if they manage to cross the border, land a job that pays less than minimum wage, and stay two steps ahead of the immigration officials looking to deport their ass... We're here today because we're going to take you into custody and put you into deportation proceedings. These people still have to deal with being yelled at, spat on, and violently attacked by racist fucking dipshits, who are too fucking ignorant to realize it’s their own government, and their rich corporate backers that are ultimately to blame for the fact that they’re broke, scared and confused. First the money started goin'... and now everyone's gettin laid off work! They took our joooobs! For months now, a toxic fucking brew of Islamophobia, and generalized anti-immigrant sentiment has been boiling over in Europe and in the United Snakes. They're bringing drugs... they're bringing crime... they're rapists. Last summer there was a brief moment of collective reflection and human fucking decency in the west, as millions of people were genuinely moved upon seeing the heart-wrenching photos of 3 year old Alan Kurdi's drowned body, washed up on a Turkish beach. Buuuuuuuuuuuuuut it seems like that moment has passed. Mass shootings in Paris and San Bernadino California, combined with state mismanagement of the refugee crisis and mutual distrust between European nations have helped create a self-perpetuating cycle of human misery, and reactionary racist violence. Refugees are not animals. We are people... we are Muslim. We want to go to the UK... ... not live in Calais Jungle. Just outside the French port city Calais a sprawling makeshift refugee camp known as the Jungle, has become one of the flashpoints for this growing unrest. The camp, largely populated by migrants from Iraq, Syria, Afghanistan, Sudan and Eritrea, has now swelled to around 6,000 peeps, with similar camps popping up along France's northern coast. Many of these residents have endured months of traveling through numerous European cities, in hopes of reaching the UK. Now, with their long awaited destination finally in view, they find themselves blocked by French riot cops. The UK's prim and proper PM, David Cameron, for his part, has made it clear that his government will do everything it can to keep migrants from reaching Britain. We need to protect our borders by working hand in glove with our neighbours, the French. "Yo Stim… isn't that the guy who once skull-fucked a dead pig?" Indeed he is, Agitator. Indeed he is. That's exactly the point... to make love to a pig. The French government's solution to this clusterfuck has been to announce the construction of temporary housing for 1,500 people made out of re-purposed shipping containers and the eviction and destruction of the current camp. Migrants seeking to access these glorified garbage bins, will first need to submit to biometric testing and fingerprinting, and many are wary to go live in something that they say looks and feels like a prison. The razing of the Jungle has been proceeding apace for weeks now, and has produced a barren security zone ringed with mounds of dirt and razor wire fencing, that looks like something out of a dystopian science fiction movie. On January 23rd residents of the Calais Jungle were joined by hundreds of anarchists and other shit-disturbers from Britain and other surrounding countries who heeded the call to support residents resisting the eviction. A demonstration of 2000 peeps quickly escalated into a riot, and around 1000 migrants and supporters rushed the nearby port, and occupied a ferry, aptly named “the spirit of Britain”. During the fracas, a statue of France's venerated war criminal Charles De Gaulle was vandalized, causing an uproar in the right-wing UK and French press. SAY IT LOUD... SAY IT CLEAR REFUGEES ARE WELCOME HERE! Meanwhile, on the other side of the Channel in the English port city of Dover, violent street clashes broke out on January 30th when British anti-fascists attacked an anti-immigrant demo organized by a the resurgent fascist group National Front. These ugly scenes, reminiscent of the social turbulence of the 1920s and 1930s, are going to become much more common occurrence in the coming months and years. And if we're going to avoid a recap of what happened last time around, the motherfuckin' resistance is gonna have to up our game. As the media-fueled spectacle of election season heats up in the United Snakes many anarchist and anti-authoritarian comrades are experiencing a serious case of deja-fucking-vu. We're gonna start with that upset... that took place in Iowa. Donald Trump losing to Ted Cruz in this year's caucuses. With presumptives showing... Hillary Clinton in a deadlock with Bernie Sanders. Once again, we find ourselves engaging in the same stupid fucking debates with liberals, so-called “progressives” and other fair-weather radicals about the pitfalls of electoral politics all while being talked down to as though we're just naive contrarian ideologues, who don't know what the fuck we're talking about. What you're describing is anarchy. Are you an anarchist? If I can be real with y'all… this is seriously fucking annoying to keep having to do despite being repeatedly proven right. Time and time again once politicians get into office, they inevitably reveal themselves to be the capitalist meat-puppets they truly are. When the money's coming your way you don't ask any questions. Buuuuuuuut rather than learn their fucking lesson, the cheerleaders of revolution by the ballot box always manage to find a new leftist rockstar to root for, I love being a part of this. This is what it's all about... the political revolution. It's a trap! And the whole fucking cycle begins again. But that Bernie Sanders was able to tie Clinton... So… despite the fact that it pains me to do so I'm gonna have to break it down for y'all one more time. Anarchists are against the state, and elections are intentionally designed by the powers that be to channel peeps' anger into reinforcing state power. What makes representative democracy such an efficient system of social control is the fact that it’s highly dynamic meaning that it allows the state to constantly reinvent itself Fuck Ronald Reagan! in order to adjust to changes in the political environment. Under capitalism, this is generally a euphemism for class war and other associated tensions, such as nationalism, anti-colonial resistance, religious and ethnic sectarianism, and struggles against patriarchy, heterosexism and white fucking supremacy. Basically representative democracy works like a complex system of pressure valves. When shit is popping off calling an election is often the easiest, and most effective way of chilling peeps the fuck out. Often, those in power will just roll out a shiny new puppet, or pick a leader from the social movements who can be counted on to do their dirt. This new puppet can then claim that if elected, they will use political power to fight on behalf of the peeps in the street. I will introduce legislation that will make every public college and public university tuition free. There is something so familiar about this This moves struggles out of the real world and into the realm of electoral politics, which can then be more easily managed by corporate and state media outlets, PR firms, and greasy fucking campaign managers. "But, aside from the campaign themes I want to address some of my long-term plans!" "Yes, I'm sure they're great... but they're not important. See, my job is to get you in. Once you're there, you do whatever your conscience tells you to do." Elections give peeps the illusion of control over the direction of society Because I'm voting for pizza too! It's unanimous! When in fact the whole fucking system is rigged. The B-52 bomber has a piece of it made in every single state to make sure that if you ever tried to phase that project out you will get howls from among the most liberal members of congress. No matter who wins an election the real winner is the state. And individual states exist within the incredibly powerful and all-consuming matrix of globalized capitalism. The United Snakes is the world leader in running this con… which shouldn't be a surprise, since they fucking invented it. Despite American politicians constantly preaching democracy abroad state institutions like the CIA, the NSA, and the US fucking military are always ready to intervene anywhere in the world to make sure that said democracy doesn't threaten the interests of the multinational corporations who fund their campaigns. Gangsta-capitalists use their political pets to launch wars trade embargoes, assassinations, and coup d'etats abroad and yet peeps still cling to the belief that these same evil fucks would ever allow their control over the state apparatus that they use to maintain their domination, to be challenged by something as random as a vote? Who's fucking naive now? Anyway… to get a bit more perspective on why peeps keep falling for this shit, I recently caught up with scott crow, an American anarchist from Austin, Texas, and author of Emergency Hearts, Molotov Dreams. Hey scot, how the fuck are ya? Man, I'm actually really good. The 2016 election is starting to heat up. So… are you voting for Bernie, or Hillary? I'm actually voting for us - the people. Because electoral politics is just a bunch of pomp and circumstance. It always has been.... and I've been within the system and outside of the system for many decades. And it really is just a pageantry that distracts us from the real work and the real problems and real solutions that we might come up with in the United States for at least two years before an election happens. Up here in Klanada, electoral politics are a serious fucking problem for radical movements, but elections themselves only last a few weeks. In the United Snakes, y'all spend motherfuckin years on picking a new president. What's up with that? Well, because it's just spectacle, right? It's like watching reality TV. The Kardashians... it's the Clintons, it's the Bushes... It's like these dynasty things. It's all spectacle, right? And I think we actually try to take it seriously, just like people take seriously the Bachelor TV show, or that stupid show that Trump was on. And I think that it gives us a distraction from really dealing with the things... the fact that we have drones that are killing children and families all around the world, the fact that immigrants are being denied access... that... you know, that are fleeing war-torn countries, the fact that schools are crumbling in this country. Because it's a spectacle, and everybody wants to be a part of it. It's like sports teams, where everybody gets to vote on something. So their team can win: blue team, red team... But there's a lot of it for those who hold power, right? The culture makers, the media... the politicos. Lots of peeps have been following the elections because of Donald Trump. Are you worried about what a Trump presidency would look like? And why do you think it is that he's been doing so well in the polls? Well I think that Trump is doing so well because he has hit a nerve. You know, racism, misogyny.. all of these things run undercurrents in the United States, all the time. But what he's done, is he's just pieced the veil. I think having a Black president for 8 years, even if he is totally part of the establishment, to many white men in this country, Trump and Obama represent two polar opposites to them even if they are more on the same page than they realize in some ways. I think that he's just really struck a nerve with a lot of people. There's a lot of discontent, and just like in Germany in the 20s and 30s, when fascism was rising, he is tapping into something... this anger and resentment of failures of electoral systems, failures of cultural systems and political and economic systems of many people - not just in the United States but around the world. But he's tapping it in this reactionary way instead of a way of, like, "how can we solve these problems together" because he wants to be a dictator. After Syriza pissed in the face of leftists worldwide, siding with the so-called Troika over the clear demands of peeps in Greece, you'd think that those calling for an an electoral solution to neoliberal capitalism would have learned their fucking lesson. Yet lots of these same people have just moved on to supporting Syriza-like parties such as Podemos in Spain, and candidates like Jeremy Corbyn in the UK and Bernie Sanders in the US. What the fuck? I don't fault people for that. The truth is, it's familiar. It's what we're all raised in. It's what we are known. It's like, indoctrination to a degree. And I don't even like to use that word, because I think it's more cultural. It's in there. And familiarity is the place we jump from. When we start talking about ideas of anarchy and collective liberation, these are abstracts to many people because they don't even know what it is. We have to realize our own powers as individuals first, then our regional power - our collective power like in our neighbourhood, and our communities ... and then begin to build from that. But electoral politics is easy to fall in. In the past, you have talked about how radicals need to focus on building dual power. What exactly do you mean by that? I mean an anarchist interpretation of dual power - which is that we resist on one hand. We resist exploitation on one hand, which is what we do in radical, anarchist, and leftist communities a lot. But at the same time, we must build our own power, from below. My individual power... our collective power... our organizational power.... and recognize that we have it. We have to do these both at the same time. So, to me it's irrelevant who get elected or if there's policing, or police systems and things like that... except in the way that we want to resist them. At the same time, we need to open spaces and like the Zapatistas say, we need to open the crack in history to ask "what is it that we can do to build our power from below?" And I think dual power is a framework to think about that. And so, any action that we would engage in should not be taken, unless it has this framework of resisting and building and creating at the same time. Thanks scot, and that about does it for this sedition of It's the End of the World as we Know it and I Feel Fine. To hear my entire interview with scot crow or for your chance to win a subMedia.tv T-shirt, just visit my fuckin website: I also wanna give a quick shout-out to a good friend and comrade of the show. An antifa troublemaker who's set to be released from the clink any fuckin day now. Welcome back Kimbo... No Pasaran mothafucka. With that said, this show is made entirely from small donations from slaves like you. This month, the following workers shared the fruits of the labour with me, to keep shitting on elections. So, merci beaucoup to Jonathan, Etienne, Max, Martin, John, Chris, Jennifer, Gregory, Sarah, Primadasi, Scott, Joseph, Mason, Chris, Andrew, Ricky, Tavish, Alexandria, Yvan, Sebastien, Treto, Dylan, Jeremy, Thomas, Renzo, Gerrard, Willy, Gavin, Kirk, Michael, Phillip, Joseph, Marisol, Lauren, and Andrew. Nopales! I also would like to welcome the newest members of the Taconspiracy: Jack Squat and Sebastien. Guajalotes! And finally, a quote from American anarchist Emma Goldman: If voting changed anything.... they'd make it illegal. See you next time suckers!