"We're bringing back coal"

"We're bringing back an industry that was abandoned. With us today are some of the amazing workers who will benefit from these policies." Trump, a liar. 

"For too long, coal has been a dirty word that most are afraid to speak about, but we are still strong. We are still here. And we're still needed in order to make America great again. " Jeff Crowe, a coal mine manager from West Virginia, definitely not wrong about this. /s

https://anthrosource.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1002/nad.70001

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Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:08

Welcome back to Death by Doctrine. I'm MJ, and we have a guest host today. Hello, Elizabeth.

SPEAKER_01 0:14

Hello, everyone. I'm Elizabeth.

SPEAKER_00 0:15

Elizabeth and I host the show Standards, in which we look at all the dangerous deregulation going on in our nightmare of a timeline. Check out her series on Public Health Is For Everyone podcasts, another podcast that I make. And do you want to talk about the inspiration for your guest appearance?

SPEAKER_01 0:32

Well, if you have listened to Standards, you heard our episode where we talked about some of the efforts that are going on to deregulate minds, basically. Where HHS closed down the program within the CDC that runs coal worker black lung surveillance programs. The administration is cutting the taxes which fund health care for coal miners who have black lung or are diagnosed with black lung. And a whole bunch of other things. It keeps going on and on. Basically, the administration is trying to grow coal, and the coal industry is trying to get as much money out of coal as they can. And at the same time, the administration is cutting all the protections or a lot of the protections that are in place to protect the workers. So real happy subject.

SPEAKER_00 1:21

Highly recommend checking out that episode. But as we were discussing this, we can't ignore the reality that coal miners, uh, at least in the last, I want to say two decades or so, vote pretty consistently for Republicans or the conservative side of the US political spectrum. Yep. Which seems counterintuitive because it's against their own best interest. After we did that episode, we just said we have to do a death by doctrine on this because it is the cleanest example of dying because of a belief. Dying because you believe in something so much that you don't care if that belief hurts you.

SPEAKER_01 1:57

Yeah, we actually spent some time, I want to say it was almost an hour after we recorded. Yes. Being like, but why? What is happening? Why are they so faithful to the idea of coal? And we were trying to find some other doctrine, but it really just is coal.

SPEAKER_00 2:13

And by extension, the political party that supports coal, which in this case is the conservative party, the Republican Party.

SPEAKER_01 2:20

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 2:20

So we have to ask the question in this Death by Doctrine episode: why is coal tied with US conservative politics?

SPEAKER_01 2:28

Well, the short answer, and this is kind of a glib answer, it's because Obama wanted to pivot away from coal. Wow. For once is actually Obama. You know, we can't put it all on Obama. It's it's actually the timing. Obama was the face of the Democratic Party at the time when the Democratic Party was pivoting towards other forms of energy and more environmental regulations. And this happened to coincide with the bottom falling out of the coal mining industry. Yeah. So it really became a way of sort of scapegoating the Democratic platform. So the Democrats were promising more environmental regulations, protections for the environment, investing in these alternative energy sources of the future. And that's really a threat to populations whose history, economy, and cultural identity are heavily tied with coal mining.

SPEAKER_00 3:23

I think we can't really dissect this unless we talk a little bit about the history of coal in this country. And we can't really talk about the history of coal in this country without talking about the state that is so central to all of coal in America, and that is West Virginia.

SPEAKER_01 3:39

Yes. Something that I suspect will surprise a lot of people if you haven't been following it. West Virginia was a solidly blue democratic state until 2000. There was a big switch. It was.

SPEAKER_00 4:21

Yes. It makes sense for the people to vote for the political party that is in favor of labor, which generally speaking, obviously Democrats are not perfect. I'm very well aware of that. But generally speaking, that party has been a Democratic Party.

SPEAKER_01 4:33

Yeah. West Virginia, I suspect if you talk to the people there, they would still be very pro-labor. To them, it's not that they have abandoned labor, it's that the Democratic Party has abandoned them. That's how they feel. That is my understanding. To give you an idea of how much this sort of change is, in 96, 1996, which is the last Democratic victory for presidential election in West Virginia, the Democrats or Bill Clinton won 51.5% of the vote. And in our most recent election, 2024, the Democrats won 28% of the vote.

SPEAKER_00 5:12

That's a huge swing. In the realm of US politics, 28% is practically nothing.

SPEAKER_01 5:18

Right. That's over a pretty short period of time. I mean, 20 years. In the grand scheme of things. Yeah. It's a huge change. A lot of this has to do with how West Virginians see their history and see their cultural. And a lot of that is coal mining.

SPEAKER_00 5:34

All right. Tell us about the history of coal in West Virginia.

SPEAKER_01 5:37

So there are 55 counties in West Virginia. Coal seams or coal mines can be found in 53 of those counties. And 43 of those counties actually have mineable coal. So stuff that it's worth taking out of the ground. And coal has been mined in West Virginia since the early 1800s. But honestly, at first, it was mostly for use within the state. And it was not like this big economic driver for the state of West Virginia.

SPEAKER_00 6:03

It was still early. The hunger for energy hasn't hit its peak yet.

SPEAKER_01 6:06

Right. You've sort of spoiled where I'm going with this, but that's fine because I don't think it was much of a spoiler. In the mid-1800s, the Industrial Revolution happened. And with the Industrial Revolution, railroads were built linking West Virginia to the rest of the U.S. And so suddenly all the coal that was in their ground could be dug up and sent to all the corners of the U.S. And it was really sort of the uh the driver behind all of our industrial advancements.

SPEAKER_00 6:35

I would say that. Like West Virginia's coal production was the source of the economic boom because coal was the source of fuel at that time.

SPEAKER_01 6:43

Yeah, in a lot of ways, West Virginia is what powered the industrial revolution in this country. That is a really powerful position to be in. And more importantly, it's a really profitable position to be in.

SPEAKER_00 6:56

Yeah, there we go. Always comes back to money.

SPEAKER_01 6:58

It's always money. So West Virginia providing most of the coal for the country means that there were people in West Virginia making a lot of money. Sure. It was not the coal miners. Of course not.

SPEAKER_00 7:09

It rarely is. It's always the people at the top. We've seen this story again and again.

SPEAKER_01 7:13

I know, right? It's over and over and over again. Yeah, we've got this sort of boom in the economy, but for West Virginia, they saw themselves still as the underdogs because they were the labor class. And they were the ones doing the so-called unskilled labor, the work of going into these mines and digging out this coal. It's highly dangerous. It's physically demanding. But because of those things, it pays really well.

SPEAKER_00 7:39

I would just like to add, there's no such thing as unskilled labor. That term is very much like capitalist propaganda. It is skilled.

SPEAKER_01 7:46

Right. The education needed to learn this skill happened right at the mines. So there's no need for people who grew up around coal mines to leave those coal mines to get additional training. By getting jobs in the mines, they can stay near their family and their community, and they're paid well enough so that they can support themselves. And I think there's also something else that's going on is this whole like mythologizing the miner.

SPEAKER_00 8:11

Like, I think that's appropriate.

SPEAKER_01 8:13

It's a dangerous job. In reality, the miners are sacrificing their lungs, they're sacrificing their bodies, they're sacrificing their safety, possibly their future, in order to make money for the coal mine owners.

SPEAKER_00 8:27

Yes, your term mythologizing is very appropriate because if you remove that aspect, they had a very difficult life. If you don't give the laboring class something to hold on to, in this case, it was an image or like a cultural identity, then they are way more likely to realize that, hey, I actually deserve more compensation or more safety, or this is actually a terrible gig. So the mythologizing, I think, is a very appropriate term.

SPEAKER_01 8:54

Yeah, but even with this mythologizing going on, the miners still were saying, you know, I deserve more.

SPEAKER_00 9:01

Yes, absolutely.

SPEAKER_01 9:02

And by the early 1900s, a huge number of West Virginians were employed in the coal mines, but very few of them were members of unions. So the United Mine Workers Association had been created at this point, but it was created uh elsewhere. I want to say Ohio. Outside of West Virginia. Not West Virginia. And it was actually having a lot of difficulty moving into West Virginia because the coal mine owners were forbidding their employees from joining the union.

SPEAKER_00 9:30

This is not surprising. Ever since unions were a thing, the people who actually own the means of production would not want their workers to join a union because joining a union means labor power, and that obviously cuts into their bottom line. Right. This whole story is played out many times throughout history, so it's not surprising.

SPEAKER_01 9:46

Over and over and over again, right? So you've got this tension between the miners who were digging the coal and the owners. And I don't know if you have actually heard of this period of history, but have you heard of the coal wars or the mine wars?

SPEAKER_00 10:01

Yes, but there have been many books written about this. I didn't read those books, but I am aware of this general concept of this labor struggle.

SPEAKER_01 10:09

Okay, so this is when everything sort of came to a head in West Virginia. 1912 to 1920 is this period that we're talking about. And essentially the miners were demanding better pay, better work conditions, the right to trade wherever they please. So they didn't have to only buy from company-owned stores. And they wanted the United Mine Workers Union to be recognized. Very reasonable asked, in my opinion. Seems reasonable to me. The mining company said no. And they went back and forth and back and forth. And the mining companies actually employed a private detective agency, the Baldwin Feltz Detective Agency, and used them for enforcement activities.

SPEAKER_00 10:53

Classic.

SPEAKER_01 10:54

As strikebreakers. I need you to understand the Baldwin Feltz detectives are not the good guys here.

SPEAKER_00 11:00

Yeah, they are, shall we say, Ice adjacent.

SPEAKER_01 11:03

Yeah, I guess. And one of the things that was going on during this period is that miners were more or less living in company towns and the companies owned the land or the housing. So if a miner was suspected of unionizing or agitating, they would lose their job and their family would be thrown out of the town. And so there were like 3,500 people living in basic coal camps. This is temporary housing, temporary camps set up so that the families that had lost their homes because of suspected union activity had somewhere to stay.

SPEAKER_00 11:44

I think I'll put some links in the episode description, but this era of history, it reads like an epic novel. It really does. Because it truly is one of the most stark examples of class struggles.

SPEAKER_01 11:57

Absolutely. And it wasn't that long ago. There are its grandparents, or I guess great-grandparents at this point. That generation, these are the people who would remember things like growing up in the coal camps, are seeing these sorts of strikes. And it's maybe not surprising, these strikes, there was always the potential for violence.

SPEAKER_00 12:19

I mean, if your conditions are that bad, you sort of have nowhere else to go but violence.

SPEAKER_01 12:23

Right. Right at the beginning of the Cold Wars, there were armed miners that declared that they were going to attack guarded mines, and the governor responded by declaring martial law confiscating weaponry from the miners. And this kind of just kept happening for eight years.

SPEAKER_00 12:39

Again, one of the most intense examples of class struggles imaginable is labor versus whoever owns the means of production.

SPEAKER_01 12:48

And if you are a member of the labor class, being part of this resistance is a great source of pride and it becomes part of your identity. Yes. I think we are seeing that right now.

SPEAKER_00 13:00

In many ways.

SPEAKER_01 13:01

In many ways. Actually, one thing you'll hear people claim is that the term redneck was invented around here. It almost certainly wasn't, but it was definitely adopted as a something to be proud to be because mine workers or the union workers would wear red kerchiefs around their neck, sort of as a symbol of I am with them.

SPEAKER_00 13:21

Class struggle, classic. Yes. And this sort of conflict happened for the next eight years until we reach a boiling point.

SPEAKER_01 13:28

And that boiling point, everyone points it to what's known as the Maitwin Massacre.

SPEAKER_00 13:33

And this is in 1920.

SPEAKER_01 13:35

This is in 1920. The sheriff of one of the mining town of Maitwin, actually. The sheriff, Sid Hatwell, he had arrest warrants for some of the agents. The agents said they had arrest warrants for him. The mayor jumped in and said that the agents, their arrest warrants were fraudulent. And then no one's really sure what happened because there were conflicting reports, but shots were fired, fighting happened, and at the end of it, six of the detectives, two minors, and the mayor of the town of Maitwin were dead.

SPEAKER_00 14:08

Ooh, that's a big wig.

SPEAKER_01 14:09

Yeah, that's a big wig. And people were furious. I mean, no one around this part of West Virginia was really a fan of the um Baldwin Feltz detectives. Again, ICE adjacent. Yeah. The day this happened, they started their day by throwing a woman and her children out into bad weather, evicting them from their house.

SPEAKER_00 14:30

This is actually shockingly close to ice. Now that I'm looking at this, the end of the story is a lot of people are dead and everybody is upset.

SPEAKER_01 14:37

Yes. And West Virginia State Police started stockpiling weaponry after minors were acquitted of killing the Baldwin Feltz agents. One of the owners sent agents to assassinate the sheriff, which they did on the courthouse steps. And that was in, I think it was August.

SPEAKER_00 14:54

That could not have gone down well if they assassinated the sheriff.

SPEAKER_01 14:57

Oh, we really did not. He was one of them, one of the locals. He was sympathetic to the miners. He had grown up there, and they did not take kindly to his death.

SPEAKER_00 15:10

Yeah. Foreign agents assassinating your own sheriff.

SPEAKER_01 15:14

Yes. And the result of this is the Battle of Blair Mountain, which is the largest labor uprising in American history.

SPEAKER_00 15:22

Yeah, I'm always sad that this doesn't get covered as much as it should in American history books. Oh, I know. Because this, in my opinion, is peak America.

SPEAKER_01 15:33

It so is, right?

SPEAKER_00 15:34

This is peak America. And yet we guess stories about, oh, the pilgrims. And I'm like, that's not peak America. Like, this is peak America.

SPEAKER_01 15:41

Yeah, the pilgrims are not nearly as interesting as the Battle of Blair Mountain. For anyone who hasn't heard of the Battle of Blair Mountain, I'm really sorry. It's amazing. You gotta check it out. It's a five-day stretch in 1920, I think it was.

SPEAKER_00 15:57

You said five days. It's definitely not five days.

SPEAKER_01 16:00

No, no, this is true. It's not five days. It starts with 10,000 armed coal miners confronting 3,000 lawmen and strikebreakers who were all backed by the owners of the coal mines. There's pitched battle, and it only ended after the United States Army was sent in by presidential order. Bombs were dropped on the miners, which we know because unexploded bombs were presented as evidence in some of their trials.

SPEAKER_00 16:29

The class struggle doesn't get more obvious than this. It's literally the labor class versus everyone else.

SPEAKER_01 16:35

I would say it's the labor class versus the elites and they're paid for government.

SPEAKER_00 16:41

The government sort of de facto part of the elite class at this point.

SPEAKER_01 16:44

Yes. So the West Virginia National Guard was sent in, and a lot of the miners actually just refused to fire on the U.S. Army. They were themselves veterans, and so they would like through their guns and rifles and fled. And after everything was said and done, there were 985 minors indicted for crimes like murder, conspiracy, accessory, and treason. And a lot of them ended up being acquitted because their cases were tried by very sympathetic juries. Absolutely. And I think I read also that the longest sentence anyone served for this was four years.

SPEAKER_00 17:19

Which in the grand scheme of things is could be a lot longer.

SPEAKER_01 17:22

Right. Even though the miners lost the Battle of Blair Mountain, the sympathy of the populace in West Virginia was very much with them. And West Virginia to this day is really proud of the miners' role in the Cold Wars. And they should be.

SPEAKER_00 17:37

Yeah, rightly so. It's a short-term victory for mining companies because technically they won with the help of the, again, the US Army. Right. But long term, the public were made aware of this struggle. And I want to say that led, at least fed, the upcoming progressive era in the New Deal.

SPEAKER_01 17:55

It 100% did. The United Mine Workers Association really became a very powerful union and was instrumental in setting up like the AFL CIO. And with the New Deal, the coal miners got a lot of protections in place. And it became actually a really good job to have.

SPEAKER_00 18:15

It turns out when you protect your workers, the job's better. What an amazing concept.

SPEAKER_01 18:20

Yeah. And mine workers started getting paid a wage that matched the sort of labor they were doing.

SPEAKER_00 18:25

It's sustainable.

SPEAKER_01 18:26

Yes. It was a great job. Like families and the state of West Virginia were doing pretty well.

SPEAKER_00 18:33

There was a lot of coal to go around, at least at that point. And with these new protections, honestly, compared to today's standards, I'm pretty sure it's like it's not that great. But still, like compared to the battle of Blair Mountain, they actually have an actual career now that doesn't actively kill them within like three months.

SPEAKER_01 18:49

Well, and you know, we talked about this with standards, but protections were increasing. And even black lung disease had been cut down to dozens of cases by the 90s.

SPEAKER_00 19:00

It used to be almost everyone.

SPEAKER_01 19:02

Dozens of cases. Can you believe that?

SPEAKER_00 19:03

Again, turns out protecting your workers is very important. So after the New Deal in the Progressive Era, like what happened to West Virginia then? As we approach maybe the 50s, I want to say.

SPEAKER_01 19:15

Yeah, so things seem to be all right. You look into people from West Virginia talking about their state. And one of the things they'll point out is that there's some really beautiful architecture from the mid-1900s.

SPEAKER_00 19:29

And it's because there was money. Kind of like how the Saudis have a lot of oil money. They got coal money.

SPEAKER_01 19:34

You had all these thriving rural towns, and that actually is where everything went wrong as well. Because coal was great for the state, but the state began relying on it and built what you could kind of call a mono economy, an economy based on one industry, primarily.

SPEAKER_00 19:52

Just like monoculture. Great while it lasts.

SPEAKER_01 19:54

Fantastic while it lasts. And then stuff falls apart and it turns out to be not so great. And that's exactly what's happening with West Virginia. When and how did stuff starting to fall apart? Um, so I think you can definitely pinpoint problems started happening in the 90s. It's arguable, but we can definitively say things started going wrong in the 90s. For one thing, coal is just not as profitable as it used to be. And the coal seams are getting thinner and they're just producing less coal overall. Coal's a finite resource. Yes. And we have discovered other ways to generate electricity that are more efficient. And unfortunately, what this means is that the number of coal jobs that are available have been dropping. For example, in the 1990s, there was an estimate at one point at its height, more than a hundred thousand people in West Virginia were employed by the coal mines. Then you hit the 90s and it's dropped down to about 30,000. And then by 2023, it's dropped down to maybe 12,000 people.

SPEAKER_00 21:00

So a precipitous fall over the decades.

SPEAKER_01 21:03

Yes. I read an estimate that the coal mining jobs dropped by 30% in between 2010 and 2016.

SPEAKER_00 21:10

Yikes.

SPEAKER_01 21:10

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 21:11

Part of it is just the natural shift away from coal as a source of fuel. So this natural decline in the available coal jobs is kind of bad for West Virginia whose entire economy revolved around coal.

SPEAKER_01 21:26

Yeah. If you have an economy with multiple industries supporting it, when one of them fails, it's not as bad as it could be because the other industries are there to sort of pick up the slack, we'll say. But in a mono economy like West Virginia, when the coal industry was healthy, the people employed by the mines had money to pump into the local economy. And that created other jobs within their community. But when the coal money dries up, there's not money to pump into the local community, and the other jobs start drying up as Well. And then suddenly there aren't jobs for people. Then people who are born there leave because they need to find jobs. And so fewer jobs available, and your population is getting older and it's shrinking because the young people are leaving. And that's what we're seeing.

SPEAKER_00 22:16

And this spiral is detrimental to any community when there's no jobs and people are leaving. And unfortunately, something like mining, it's not really easy to pivot because mining is a very specific skill.

SPEAKER_01 22:29

Yes. It can be difficult to transfer those skills. It's particularly difficult to transfer those skills if there's no companies who are hiring, right? People in West Virginia have pivoted and like tourism is an industry that's getting bigger in West Virginia, but it's not filling the whole gap. And there's also a lot of service jobs within the state, and those aren't fully filling the gap, and they tend to pay less anyway. And then West Virginians who are going to college, the two big state schools, one of them is close to DC in Northern Virginia, and there's a lot more jobs there. So they leave and go that way. The other one is on the other side of the state. I'm blanking on what states it's near. But essentially, West Virginia students who are going to the colleges are then being attracted to jobs outside of the states. So they're leaving. And the people who are left behind have poorer prospects overall. And we see this because West Virginia's population has been reliably shrinking.

SPEAKER_00 23:26

And this is happening right around when West Virginia flipped to the Republican Party, right?

SPEAKER_01 23:32

At least that huge drop that I talked about in the jobs. I said that there was a 30% drop between 2010 and 2016. That's happening right at the time when Obama and the uh Democratic Party are talking about other industries and moving away from coal. So it's really poor timing on that part. I don't even want to say it's not poor timing, it's predictable timing. But I'm sure it felt like a slap in the face to the people who are already struggling to hear that the government that they had been supporting basically wanted to just wasn't interested anymore.

SPEAKER_00 24:17

Now that we have covered the history of coal in West Virginia, we must return to the question we posed at the beginning. Why is coal tied with conservative politics now? Like why the switch up?

SPEAKER_01 24:29

Yeah, and I think we've sort of hinted at it. I do think a big part of it is just timing. It just happens to be that the Democrats, the liberals, were in power when the market sort of fell apart.

SPEAKER_00 24:42

Yeah, that definitely made a big part of their reasoning, just to start. Like with any sort of these large societal changes, it's very hard to like pinpoint one specific thing. It's always going to be like a billion factors. All of our analysis take with a grain of salt that we're just doing some general analysis. We're not like academics in this area. No, very much not. But I think you're right. The previous alignment made sense. West Virginia typically aligned with a party that is more aligned with labor because coal miners are a big part of labor, as we've discussed in the history. And then the hard flip from Democrats to Republicans occurred in 2000 when Bush won the presidency. And ever since then, West Virginia has swung to the Republicans, which coincided with the decline of the coal industry in West Virginia. At the same time, the Democrats were pivoting because of the environmental concerns. Al Gore did his inconvenient truth around the same time.

SPEAKER_01 25:33

Oh, yeah, that's right.

SPEAKER_00 25:34

Yeah. And then Democrats were aiming to transition away from coal. It wasn't even transitioning away from fossil fuels. I don't think they were that radical. It was just a recognition that the next fuel was going to be gas and not coal.

SPEAKER_01 25:46

Yeah. So I do think Obama got a lot of pushback from West Virginia and people and places aligned with coal because he explicitly talked about moving away from coal. And at that point, yeah, I think it had become pretty clear that the left side of the political spectrum was going to be aligning itself with what they saw as the future, which is non-fossil fuels, more renewable fuels and not coal. Not coal, not gas, not oil. So the writing was on the wall in 2000. The other thing you mentioned that West Virginia typically aligned with labor. And something that I forget sometimes is that in the late 1990s, I think the Democrats started pushing away from their traditional blue-collar supporters and started trying to capture like suburban middle class or voters who might be centrist conservatives.

SPEAKER_00 26:46

This is the part where I hesitate to say too much commentary on. I think there is definitely a point there. But again, we're not academics in this area, right? We we can't really say much about it.

SPEAKER_01 26:56

No, no, I am parroting what I've heard at this point.

SPEAKER_00 26:59

But I think you're right. Like Clinton very much was catering to some of the centrists. Like his welfare policy was not super progressive. Right. He had a heart tough on crime policy that was not progressive. Like Clinton, as much as he is a quote unquote Democrat, was trying very hard to cater to the centrist. Right. There's that in play as well. The Democrats lost in 2000, and then immediately a giant war, very shortly after Bush was elected, obviously 9-11, and etc. etc. And anytime there's a war, it benefits like the energy industry.

SPEAKER_01 27:30

It does. And it does also tend to benefit the party in power. People sort of rally around.

SPEAKER_00 27:37

Certainly, when there is a war, discussions about renewable energy and the future just doesn't rise to the top of public consciousness. So a lot of it was just the timing was just unfortunate. When the coal industry declined, the people in that industry felt abandoned. And Republicans either saw an opportunity or just by sheer coincidence benefited from this circumstances, and they pushed their conservative agenda, which is returned to a simpler time, but that's their general premise. And that strategy really works on people who feel abandoned and despondent. They promised to keep the coal industry going. And since 2000, the states has voted Republican ever since. And Trump specifically, and I think you've brought this up, he specifically said he's bringing back coal, which perfectly encapsulates this shift.

SPEAKER_01 28:22

Yes.

SPEAKER_00 28:23

The conservative political agenda of back to the good old days really resonate with people who felt like their entire world has collapsed.

SPEAKER_01 28:32

Definitely. I think the mono economy definitely didn't help. It seems like it's made it difficult for West Virginia as a state, the economy to pivot. And it's definitely had some awful impacts on public health measures, which just makes things worse.

SPEAKER_00 28:49

A big part of it is, like you said, timing. The coal industry was declining at the same time that the Democrats and the Republicans were duking it out, and the Republicans capitalize on this coal industry decline and people's frustration by saying we are the party that's going to bring things back. And I think that led to this really interesting thing of the Republican message kind of plays really well with this demographic because their message of government is bad, immigrants are taking your job, the liberals are destroying the traditional way of life as we know it. Like it fit pretty well with people who are in the position that these coal miners are where all they have known has disappeared. So we get this case of what I call cross-contamination. The conservative base is influenced by their voters, but the conservative platform is also influencing their voters. So you start with wanting coal back, but then you end up being kind of homophobic because that's what the Republican platform is. You know, like you started as a coal miner who wants the coal industry to be thriving again, but you end up thinking that immigrants are the reason that coal is dying because that's the GOP platform, right? There's a lot of cross-contamination with these ideas.

SPEAKER_01 29:57

Yeah, it's frighteningly easy to become um radicalized either way.

SPEAKER_00 30:01

This is just one example.

SPEAKER_01 30:02

If you exist in sort of an echo chamber, things just start sounding reasonable after a while. That when you first encountered them, you're like, that's crazy. One of my big fears is actually that I am just going to go off the deep end.

SPEAKER_00 30:17

I think it's important to keep in mind that no one is immune to propaganda. Absolutely not. But I will also say that there's a difference between moderation and an echo chamber.

SPEAKER_01 30:26

Yeah, that's true.

SPEAKER_00 30:27

And I think a lot of people confuse the two. I'm just using blue sky as an example because it's like an easy target for some conservatives. Like, oh, blue sky is an echo chamber because people block people. And I'm like, no, that's moderation. They don't want their online experience to be filled with like people who actively hate them and are insulting them all day, right? There is a difference.

SPEAKER_01 30:46

I feel like that's the perpetual battle with any sort of social media.

SPEAKER_00 30:50

Is it moderation or is it censorship, right? There's always that conversation. But I would argue that moderation is very important.

SPEAKER_01 30:56

I agree.

SPEAKER_00 30:56

There's a difference between me wanting a pleasant experience with how I spend my time in an online space and me being in an echo chamber. And I don't know where that line is, but there is a line. And a lot of people think that any sort of moderation is like cancel culture, which I think is disingenuous. Right. So I think that cross-contamination is a huge piece of the puzzle because it started out as we felt left behind, we felt abandoned, and this political party is saying that we could bring it back. And then it kind of went off the rails from there. Now it's all tied with like identity politics, like mining is now a masculine thing.

SPEAKER_01 31:34

Oh, yeah.

SPEAKER_00 31:35

Do you see? Like there's a lot of identity and gender politics now. And I think a lot of that is that cross-contamination of the voter influenced the party, but the party's platform also influenced the voters.

SPEAKER_01 31:45

Yeah, it's sort of, I mean, that just makes it more complicated too.

SPEAKER_00 31:48

It definitely does.

SPEAKER_01 31:50

It sort of compounds the problem because now it's not just one doctrine that you're dealing with, it's a bunch of doctrines, all of which are having these negative effects.

SPEAKER_00 32:01

But also, I think we can dig a little bit deeper to the root of the problem and look at like the general premise of coal and the coal industry. And I think there's an argument to be made that coal eventually got tied up with conservative politics, is because it's an extractive economy.

SPEAKER_01 32:18

Oh, interesting.

SPEAKER_00 32:19

Because, first of all, we should probably define what an extractive economy is. Uh, do you want to do the honors?

SPEAKER_01 32:25

Okay. So an extractive economy is basically an economy that relies on taking something out of the environment or the group or whatnot. So in this case, it's relying entirely on extracting some sort of good from the earth and then shipping it somewhere else. And these particular economies, they do tend to use what some people might call unskilled labor. Essentially, labor that you learn the skills you need on the job side itself. You don't have to go to a school to learn those skills before you start working.

SPEAKER_00 33:02

The term unskilled labor. I don't like the term. I don't like the term because every labor is skilled. Right. At the end of the day, what you're referring to is the idea that it's not something that you need to acquire higher education. Right. You are trained on the job. It's still skilled. Yeah. I would go even further and say an extractive economy is something that's all about taking. It's not necessarily about sustaining anything, if that makes sense.

SPEAKER_01 33:26

Well, it can't be about the sustaining because an extractive economy is always going to end.

SPEAKER_00 33:30

It has to.

SPEAKER_01 33:31

Eventually, you run out of whatever you're extracting.

SPEAKER_00 33:34

But even more abstractly, you don't need to invest in the sustainability if all you care about is taking things out. You don't need to worry about the community that's there. You don't need to worry about the environment or the people that lives there. It's just here's a resources that we're trying to pull out. And in that case, you kind of don't care if the people there have a future 10 years, 20 years down the line. And I think the purest example of this is ghost towns from Gold Rush.

SPEAKER_01 34:00

Oh, yeah.

SPEAKER_00 34:01

They build a bunch of towns, they extract their gold, and as soon as the gold dries up, what happens to the town? It just dries up, it's gone. And everybody leaves. And I think a gold rush ghost town is like the perfect example of an extractive economy. They're not interested in building a town. They're not interested in living there.

SPEAKER_01 34:16

Right.

SPEAKER_00 34:16

They're interested in being there to extract the gold. And when the gold is gone, obviously the town dies.

SPEAKER_01 34:21

If you don't have the gold miners or the money from that extractive economy to keep that town running, it ends up failing.

SPEAKER_00 34:29

Yeah, that's a good point. An extractive economy creates a dependency because it does not invest in the community, it has no interest in investing in the community. Workers are simply a means to get that resource out of the ground. And as a result, it sets up people in those communities to have somewhat of an unhealthy bond with the very industry that exploits them. When the extractive economy inevitably runs its course, all the executives and shareholders are rich and they can move on to their next exploitation project, but the workers are left with very little because they're just seen as like a means of extracting things out of the ground.

SPEAKER_01 35:05

Right. And there wasn't sort of any future planning.

SPEAKER_00 35:08

No, they don't have to be. You're just trying to pull things out. Why would you plan in the future? It doesn't make sense.

SPEAKER_01 35:13

That's actually a really interesting um thing to consider for these communities. There was a journal article, Julie Shepard Powell. She um did an anthropological study of coal mining towns and the people who live in them in, I think it was Kentucky. I think a lot of what she wrote about is almost certainly applies to the coal mining region of West Virginia as well. And she pointed out that the people there, they have this interesting balance. They support coal, but they also are very aware of what the consequences of living in a region that's been, what she said, environmentally, economically, and socially exploited. They're fully aware that their community and their region has been exploited. And they know that coal mining has become economically unsustainable and it's leaving. And it's not just one man or one administration, but there's still this sort of disconnect because they also still know that while it was there, it brought a lot to the region.

SPEAKER_00 36:15

And I think this is the point with the extractive economy. It's that it creates this unhealthy attachment. It creates a dependency. And therefore, you get this really interesting cognitive dissonance of like, I know they're not investing in the community. This industry is not interested in investing in the long-term health of this community, but also this industry is the only thing that's here.

SPEAKER_01 36:34

Right. One of the things that I really found interesting in Shepard Powell's article was the distinction people made between good coal mining and bad coal mining. Like going into the ground, going into the seams, that's the sort of good coal mining, but fracking is the bad type of coal mining because that's what's happening a lot of the times now, and it has some pretty visible environmental effects. Definitely much more visible than the old style of coal mining.

SPEAKER_00 37:04

Yeah, so it's this spiral that happens where you have an extractive economy, they are exploiting their workers, and they're not interested in developing the community there. They just see people as like a means of extraction. So they don't invest in education, they don't invest in public health infrastructure. And what happens to a population of people that lives in a place without any of those investments? What kind of politics do they believe in in a community that looks like that? That's been chronically underinvested.

SPEAKER_01 37:34

I could see where you would be very resentful of everyone who's abandoned you.

SPEAKER_00 37:39

Resentful of the government, for one, resentful of any sort of threat to your way of life, perhaps immigrants. That narrative becomes very easy to sell to people who have a dependency on this economy or this mono economy. And if you don't invest in education, then the chances are the next generation is less likely to stay because they're looking for other opportunities elsewhere. So you have like a population decline as well. It's like a self-fulfilling prophecy. You feel abandoned because this economy sets people to abandon themselves. So at the end of the day, it's capitalism.

SPEAKER_01 38:10

Yep. Extractive capitalism.

SPEAKER_00 38:12

And when the shareholders and executives are done taking, the people are sort of abandoned, quite literally. Yeah. That becomes a very volatile population for a particular political party to exploit when the timing is right.

SPEAKER_01 38:25

Well, that was cheerful. Thanks, MJ.

SPEAKER_00 38:28

Well, that's how every episode is gonna go. If you're here for the first time, Death by Doctrine never ends on a good note. Um, again, we're not experts on this. This is just observations that we have gleaned from our internet research. I think at the core of this still, it's still just timing. There are a group of people who felt abandoned by one party of the political system, and the other party sort of stepped in and became their focus. The rest is history, as we say. So, how does this doctrine, the doctrine of coal, impact individual and collective health? And how does coal make us live shorter lives? The societal level analysis is rather straightforward, so I'm gonna do that first. Coal is bad for everybody involved. It's bad for the miners, it's bad for the people that live around the coal mines, it's bad for people living around coal power plants, it's bad for the animals, just a terrible thing to burn, releasing things into the air. The nail on the coffin, it doesn't even have the same utility as crude oil. And oil sucks. It just tells you like how bad coal is. It is an inferior compound in every way. The more we stick with coal and not move on to renewable energy, the worse it is for all of us.

SPEAKER_01 39:30

Right. Coal served a purpose, but we have other options.

SPEAKER_00 39:34

We have moved on.

SPEAKER_01 39:35

Yeah, and those options are just better health-wise.

SPEAKER_00 39:38

Yeah, they're just better. On the individual level, things are a little bit more interesting because we need to dig a little bit into the politics of this doctrine. And if you are an individual that believes in this doctrine of coal, that is, you vote for politicians who are pro-coal, Republicans in this case, you inevitably are voting for policies that will render your health and well-being worse. One feature, or perhaps bug, depending on how you view this, of a representative democracy is that you can't really pick and choose which policies a particular political party or politician is enacting. You can't vote for a candidate for one policy, like Cole, and opt out of their other policies like anti-LGBT, anti-trans, anti-immigration, right? You vote for someone or some party, you're voting for their entire platform.

SPEAKER_01 40:26

This is one of those things people say, oh, I'm a single issue voter, and I don't really understand that.

SPEAKER_00 40:31

You're not voting for a single issue.

SPEAKER_01 40:32

Right. I get that there are single issues that are the most important thing for you. I mean, I think we're we all have that.

SPEAKER_00 40:39

Absolutely. Feature or bug. Who knows? Depends on who you ask. But that's the reality that we're living in, and we could spend hours debating on the intricacies of this assumption, right? But the plain consequence is if you vote for a pro coal politician, you're voting for the entire platform that the politician is standing on. In this case, voting pro-coal actively hurts you.

SPEAKER_01 41:01

Voting pro-coal also means that you are voting to gut Medicaid.

SPEAKER_00 41:06

Yes.

SPEAKER_01 41:06

And Medicare.

SPEAKER_00 41:07

You're voting to gut environmental protection, as we talked in the standards episode. You're voting to gut worker protection.

SPEAKER_01 41:13

You are voting to gut the ACA. You're voting to gut your health insurance safety net.

SPEAKER_00 41:18

And in 2025, you're also voting for just a comically incompetent government. Yeah. You're voting to gut CDC, you're voting to gut public health infrastructure, you're voting to gut the EPA. Your belief in coal is quite literally harming you in all sorts of ways. But let's focus on the more direct one. For the most direct stuff, I think I would refer to our standards episode on coal and all the things that the Republican Party are currently repealing. But also in general, Republicans have an awful track record when it comes to occupational health and labor rights. They have never once been on the side of labor. And as a coal miner, that affects you because you are quite literally labor.

SPEAKER_01 41:56

Yes. That is your value to the system, to the extractive capitalist system that's going on. You are labor.

SPEAKER_00 42:05

The Republicans are more interested in the industry and the money that it brings rather than the actual workers who labor in this industry, and they are at their core capitalists. That's what Republicans are. I'm not saying that Democrats aren't capitalists, but you know, let's be realistic here. There's a big difference between the two. Second, the Republicans are deeply tied with the bootstrap mentality, meaning that they are historically against all forms, any forms of welfare or social safety nets. This is, and I cannot stress this enough, horrible for public health. Money, the ability to afford food, basic necessities, and having health insurance, even if you're unemployed, is critical to your health and well-being. And Republicans have, in every step of the way, rejected any attempts on any of this.

SPEAKER_01 42:47

Honestly, having access to health care, preventative health care is enormously beneficial for your quality of life.

SPEAKER_00 42:56

If you believe in the coal doctrine, and right now the Republican Party is the quote unquote coal party, Trump said himself that he's bringing back coal, you are voting for things that are so clearly against your interest. And to go back to the beginning of this episode, the reason why we wanted to do a death by doctrine episode for coal is because after we did standards, we were just so confused is the right word, maybe. I don't know, but we were just so fascinated by why are people voting against their own interest.

SPEAKER_01 43:25

Yeah, we were wondering about that, but the other thing was this has been a community that has been like staunch allies of Trump. And he turned on them at every step of the way. At every step of the way. And so, despite the fact that they went for Trump very strongly and have been pretty loyal voters and supporters, they're not getting any benefit from it.

SPEAKER_00 43:52

No, not at all. Not even a little bit.

SPEAKER_01 43:54

Not even a little bit.

SPEAKER_00 43:55

Yeah. My hypothesis, and feel free to disagree with me, is the cross country. Contamination that I've talked about earlier. It started out as this is the party that's going to save our industry, but the platform and the voter cross-contaminated, and now they feel like their allegiance is tied with the Republican platform in other areas like xenophobia, homophobia, etc. So their loyalty, I think, unfortunately, after 20 years of this, is now beyond the coal industry. That's my theory. I don't know how you feel.

SPEAKER_01 44:25

You know, honestly, I don't think I know enough in order to even offer an opinion. Definitely, they're very strongly supporting him. I mean, one of the governors of West Virginia, Jim Justice, he was a former governor of West Virginia. He actually changed his political affiliation from Democrat to Republican while Trump was in office because he was such a strong supporter of Trump. He's actually now a Republican senator for the state. Wild. It's so wild. And I think it Trump said a lot of things and they trusted that he was going to make their lives better. I don't think they ever thought he would actively make their lives worse the way he has with gutting black lung disease benefits and protections.

SPEAKER_00 45:08

I don't know whether this would break the delusion. Who knows? The reality is these people are very much voting against their interest. And it's kind of a puzzle as to why. And this episode, we offered a look into the history of West Virginia as a proxy and also talked about potentially why, including the timing and the nature of extractive economies. But at the end of the day, I must reiterate, we are not expert in this field, and this is just merely a silly podcast with our conjectures.

SPEAKER_01 45:38

So we're not more speculative than JD Vance.

SPEAKER_00 45:41

That guy is hallucinating with the stuff that he's saying. Good times. Bunch of people voting against their own interests. Good times.

SPEAKER_01 45:48

Good times.