Hi, this is Against Everyone with Connor Habib, a weekly podcast featuring my conversations with

countercultural figures and presenting complex, philosophical, spiritual, and political ideas in an

engaging and accessible way. Well, friends, hello, before we start this episode about mutual aid

with anarchist, author, and trans liberation activist Dean Spade. It's good to note that it

is the 10th of November today when this episode is coming out, and we are right now in the middle

of an explosion of feeling, an emotion, anxiety, all the accompanying feelings around the

presidential election. If you're listening in a few

weeks or a year from now, hello, I wonder how this all turns out. What I do know is that I found

myself extremely frustrated with a response to Biden and Harris's projected win, and that relates deeply to the

themes that Dean and I talk about on this episode. So let me back up and tell you what that's all

about. Every presidential election year, we get the same conversation going on about process

and voting. So I in 2012 uh with the

election when it's obama and romney everyone said i have to vote you have to vote you have to vote

i lived in san francisco so you could not go anywhere without people talking about fucking voting

because that was what was in the

San Francisco at the time. And I didn't want to vote. I remembered the last time I had voted,

which was for John Kerry, the last time before that, in 2004. And I remembered I felt

nauseated by it. I did not like John Kerry. I did not like his politics, but I felt like,

okay, I've got to try to get Bush, W. Bush out. And I just felt like it was a total compromise.

And I, of my integrity, not just of candidates, I couldn't bring myself to do it again. I just hated it.

It was a disgusting feeling.

So I remember talking to a friend.

...