Ramble On: Devour Feculence, Chuck Schumer (video)

Morning thoughts on the appropriations bill, Schumer negotiating with terrorists, Newsom platforming Nazis, and the blood moon. Plus: Claudia Black returns to the podcast!

The PREVAIL podcast is back! My friend Claudia Black—actor, trauma coach, and Somatic Experiencing specialist—returns to discuss the causes of trauma, how to heal from it, emotional aid, and what we can do to regulate ourselves. If you’re feeling emotionally off kilter—and who among us isn’t?—you will not want to miss this episode. I’m grateful to her for sharing her wisdom with us.

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Here is today’s ramble:

And here is the transcript, edited for clarity:

It’s 1:30 in the morning on Friday, March 14th. I was out looking at the blood moon, which doesn’t look like much of a blood moon. I did see a little bit of a shadow over the moon, which I guess is caused by the lunar eclipse. I don’t know, lots of energy being released.

Certainly in Washington, energy is being released. Maybe not in the best possible way. I’ve got two words for Chuck Schumer and the words are from Severance and they are devour feculence. That’s it. That’s what I want them to do. The Dems in the leadership positions are not up for the fight. We know this now; it’s clear.

They’re going to vote now for a bill. They’re going to vote to allow it to come to a vote, which is what has to happen. That’s where the Republicans need the Democratic votes. Not to pass the bill, but to get the bill to the floor in order to be voted on in the first place—which is how McConnell has thrown sand in the gears for so many years. Schumer has had a front row seat and watched as McConnell has done these things. He knows what to do. He’s just not doing it.

And I get that he’s afraid that if the government shuts down, bad things will happen. Bad things will happen if the government shuts down. Yes, Chuck, that’s true. But if we pass the bill, bad things are going to happen and they’re going to be law. And there’s going to be no way of revisiting it or changing it.

There’s a lot of things in the bill that are terrible. I mean, the House Appropriations Committee released a long statement of stuff that they’re going to cut and that are going to be in trouble. Some of the things that popped out at me: the Social Security Administration, it “allows Musk and Trump to fire thousands of employees at the SSA, which would result in closures of Social Security offices, increased wait times for the 800 number and unacceptable backlogs for Social Security beneficiaries trying to access their earned benefits.” That’s like widows and widowers, you know? Obviously they don’t care about these people. They don’t care about people that are going to get thrown out of their homes because of the rent cuts. The SEC, they certainly don’t want anybody there doing anything.

One of the things apparently buried in this bill is that the FAA, which is the Aviation Administration, basically gets a blank check of $4 billion, which will just go to SpaceX. So I can go on and on. You can read it on the site and I’ll link to it, but this is just giving them money. You know, this is a handout to Musk. That’s what it is.

Schumer thinks that, you know, If we give him just this, maybe he’ll leave us alone next time. And that’s not how it works with these people. You don’t appease them. Appeasement doesn’t work.

There’s two things that the Democrats in leadership positions have to keep in mind. Two principles.

The first one is: Don’t negotiate with terrorists. I know we say that in movies, to try to act all tough. “We don’t negotiate with terrorists.” What I mean by that is, we don’t negotiate with liars who we know will go back on their word—which is what Zelenskyy was trying to explain to Dipshit Number One and Dipshit Number Two in the Oval Office that day: Putin already agreed to a ceasefire. He just did what he wanted anyway.

And that’s what the MAGA Republicans are and what they will do. We can negotiate. They’re going to do what they want anyway. And you have to play hardball with that stuff. Nobody wants the government to get shut down. I mean, I guess, you know, Putin does and his allies in the White House, maybe. But I think even for them, it’s not helpful, public opinion-wise. So that’s the one card that we have to play and Schumer’s just given it away. Just given it away. He must be a terrible poker player. He must be terrible at negotiating prices for cars.

Don’t negotiate with terrorists.

The other precept—Gavin Newsom, who I’ve never really fully trusted, has a podcast now for some reason, not sure why, where he’s been talking to these alt-right figures like Charlie Kirk and Steve Bannon. It’s Steve Bannon on his podcast. And I understand the argument for that. “Well, you know, we need to engage with their ideas.”

Don’t platform Nazis! We don’t have to engage with their ideas! They’re Nazis. Don’t engage with it. There’s nothing to be learned from Nazis that we can’t already learn from reading books about the Second World War. And maybe we should learn more about the Second World War and how it ended, and what became of the Nazis—how the Allies handled the Nazis in the end, and were able to get rid of them. Maybe that’s something that we should probably spend a little more time reading up about or talking about on podcasts rather than inviting Nazis onto the podcasts and platforming them. Not only platforming them, but giving them new audiences. I don’t know who listens to this shit, this Newsome podcast, but most likely the people listening to it are not gonna be, you know, big fans of The War Room, which is Bannon’s podcast. Maybe they’ll decide they like it. You know, that’s why you don’t platform Nazis. Don’t do it. Don’t give them attention.

So I’m not really thrilled about where this is heading. We’ll see. We’ll see. You know, maybe Schumer has another trick up his sleeve. And he certainly seemed to be passionate arguing about how what Trump really wants is to shut the government down because then they can do whatever they want without any checks or balances. The problem with that argument is that there are already no checks and balances. Where’s the checks and balances? They’re doing whatever they want anyway. You know, the judicial branch, the judges are pushing back a little bit. Congress hasn’t seemed to be doing enough. It took them a long time to wake up.

I don’t know how I knew and you knew watching this and people in our orbit knew what they were going to do when they came to power, but Chuck Schumer and the Democratic leadership seem to have no idea. Devour feculence, I say.

Now, this is a great week to have my friend Claudia Black come back on the podcast. She is, as you know, she was on the show three years ago, almost exactly three years ago. She’s a trauma coach, among other things. She’s a trauma coach and she has a lot of helpful tips to not lose your frickin’ mind with all the stuff that’s going on.

One of the many things she said that was interesting in the interview is that, When we humans get in these positions where we get mad or angry or enraged, you know, when emotions get the better of us, we go into fight or flight response. And that’s kind of in the primal part of the brain. And that’s where the MAGA want us to be, right? It’s where they want us to be because we can’t make good decisions when we’re in that state, that fight or flight state. That’s where they want us to be. And they’re deliberately trying to put us in that state constantly. And that’s something to be aware of.

I remember, years ago now, when LB and I wrote our series about Brett Kavanaugh, that was one of the points that we made, really that she made, that shifting the focus from the money to the Dr. Ford allegations—not even allegations, what happened to Dr. Ford. As horrible as that was, it generated so much emotion, anger and rage, that it put us all in fight or flight and that state of mind where we weren’t as able to focus objectively.

And that’s what they want. That’s where they want us to be. The communications that they have—you know, Trump on the lawn with the Tes-lerrrr, that’s all designed to make us enraged.

And, you know, that doesn’t mean that I’m not going to be enraged. I’m often enraged. But it’s helpful, I think, to keep in mind that this is what they want and what their objective is.

We’ll see how this showdown goes. I don’t know what’s going to happen. It’s now 1:45. Between now and when you listen to this on Friday morning, hopefully there’ll be some deus ex machina coming to our aid. And maybe there will be. People are mad. A lot of people are mad. I think…I think people are starting to wake up. And that’s the thing that makes me the most hopeful and makes me the most angry at Schumer for capitulating so quickly and so predictably.

So again, I say to Schumer: devour feculence. And to the rest of you, I say enjoy the blood moon and enjoy the weekend insofar as that’s possible.

We shall prevail.

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TODAY’S PREVAIL PODCAST

The Ocean Is Inside the Drop: Navigating the Overwhelm (with Claudia Black)

The Overwhelm: Trump, Musk, stupidity, banality, artlessness, lack of decency, betrayal by our leadership, rage, fear, grief from what we’ve lost. We are living through a period of national, if not global, trauma. Actor and trauma coach Claudia Black returns to PREVAIL to talk about the causes of trauma, how to heal from it, emotional aid, and what we can do to regulate ourselves.

Claudia’s website is here.

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