"No one's coming to save us"
EDM anarchist Tommie Sunshine on the interconnectedness of all oppression and the importance of nurturing your own sphere of influence
Tommie Sunshine was there for the birth of house music. He came of age in Chicago in the '80s, and his time attending Midwest raves and clubs in Chi-town and New York would shape his future as a producer, DJ and remixer, a career that has spanned 32 years. He was a central player in Brooklyn electroclash scene in the mid '00s, working with artists such as Felix da Housecat and Miss Kittin on seminal tracks such as "Silver Screen (Shower Scene)" and collaborating with the likes of DJ Hell, James Murphy, Tomcraft and Marc Romboy. Tommie would later pivot to EDM, remixing artists including (prime era) Katy Perry, Amanda Lear and Yoko Ono, and DJing at festivals such as Ultra, EDC, and Mysteryland. It's not a notoriously progressive corner of the scene, and yet Tommie is one of the most vocally anti-establishment artists in electronic music. This dates back to the early '80s when a formative encounter with a hippie relative and colleague of Chicago Seven member Abbie Hoffman set him on a countercultural path that would shape his politics for the rest of his life.
You said you came down pretty hard after COVID. I know you went on a big nine month touring stint in late 2021, and then it took you about two years to recover from the burnout.
Yeah. It was just the culmination of things, like, what am I doing? Is this what I want to do? What is my legacy? But then I was like, well, hang on a second. I’ve been doing this for a really long time, more than most. I've lived through so many incarnations of electronic music, a shocking amount of them. And if none of the other shit that has happened has sidelined this scene, why would COVID? Anybody in this country who survived the RAVE [Reducing Americans’ Vulnerable to Ecstasy] Act — everything else was a piece of cake. There was a party in every major city in the country one weekend and the next weekend, the RAVE Act effectively shut all of them down. Disco Donnie used to throw these parties at the State House Theater in New Orleans, and they were among the craziest parties I've ever seen, like 5000-6000 kids just strewn all over this old theater. It was a real rave, and it was awesome. In the late ‘90s, that was unusual, things had gotten pretty washed out by that point. One night the ATF, the FBI and the DEA came in and shut the whole party down. Seized drugs from all the kids and charged tons of them. Donnie was facing 20 years in jail. They started the first GoFundMe that I knew of and we were all just chucking money into this thing so that he could fight this case. While all of that was going on, Biden, ironically enough, and co-sponsor Hillary Clinton were trying to get this [RAVE Act] bill passed, and it kept failing. They ended up tacking it onto the Amber Alert bill, which no one was going to vote against.
Wait, when you say Amber Alert, you mean when your phone sounds off this crazy alarm because there’s a missing kid in your area?
Yep, so they tacked it onto the end of that bill and of course it passed, the Amber Alert is protecting kids, who’s going to object to that? That’s how things used to get through. Back then, everything was unchecked, nobody knew what was going on. We were gleefully ignorant. There was also the crack house law [literally, the Crack is Whack Act] that was passed in the ‘80s saying that if they wanted to raid a building, they could charge everyone in it with anything that was found on the premises. So if you were to throw a party and it was to get busted, the promoter, the owner of the building, the sound people, the lighting people, the DJs, everybody would get a crazy fine and face jail time. It completely nuked the American rave scene. It was gone in one weekend.
What year was this?
This was 2003.
So not too long after 9/11.
Yes. And of course, that fueled it as well.
Right. What a bleak time.
You’re telling me. Then out of necessity came electroclash. I mean, here in New York, that's what we did. It was a way to throw a party without it getting busted as a rave. Larry [Tee] and Spencer [Product] started throwing a queer party in Williamsburg, and off it went.
How long was the RAVE Act in place for? And how long did it take for raves to come back?
I mean, they never came back the way they were because electroclash gave way to bloghouse and bloghouse gave way to EDM. All of those scenes were in nightclubs. Those weren't illegal parties, we weren't having house parties. Before, if you didn't want to be in a nightclub with smarmy people, you could go to an underground with thousands of kids. Well, that got completely taken off the table until underground parties started back up as a response to EDM. Wolf and Lamb started doing afterhours in New York and it was so not my scene, and I wasn't really welcomed in that scene, because I was in the EDM scene. So I was like a pariah to those people.
I wanted to talk to you about this because you come from a house and electroclash background. Then you moved into EDM, which is funny to me, because I don't think a lot of people in that scene share your worldview. How do you reconcile being part of that scene with your politics? You despise Burning Man (valid), but what about fucking EDC?
I mean, I rant about EDC too. It's not exclusive to Burning Man, but you know, I started going out in Chicago in '86. Can you imagine what I saw in Chicago? We didn't even call it house music at that point, we were just going dancing. The only way that we got to know anything about the people that were making music in Chicago was through buying The Face and NME and Melody Maker and I-D and reading interviews with Fast Eddie and Armando and Farley [“Jackmaster” Funk]. There were no interviews with those people in the press in Chicago, Chicago didn't care about them. This music has always been compartmentalized and restricted. And in a way, kind of repressed. They say that EDM commercialized dance music, but it just commercialized a certain kind of dance music, and now nothing's sacred. You have Marea [The Blessed Madonna] playing with Kylie Minogue at Pikes. You have Charli XCX doing Boiler Room in Ibiza and Katy Perry shooting a music video there. This was the most magical place in the world, and it’s been destroyed. It's musical colonization in the most traditional textbook way, literally taken from people who don't look like you or me and completely robbed and twisted upside down and redefined and washed out. And as we've come to learn, it's the people with the money who get to tell the story.
Did you ever go to Ibiza in the late ‘90s?
I wish. I grew up a very scared young person.
In what sense?
I was not adventurous. I just didn't have it in me to go to a place where I didn't know anybody. I didn't do stuff like that.
That’s interesting, because you strike me as being quite an adventurous and outgoing person.
But I was on my own turf, you know what I mean? Don't get it twisted, l was living like Hunter S. Thompson. I definitely have a guardian angel, because there's no logical reason why nothing ever happened to me then. The amount of times I did eight hour drives on acid, driving home from raves in the Midwest, I should have been in jail. I could have been dead, and that was every weekend. When I got sober, which was 2005, I felt like there was an impasse where I was going to have to stop doing what I was doing because it had become the entire foundation of my life. When I moved to New York in 2003, I had been coming back and forth for about 18 months playing shows, opening for everybody. I was hitting my head on the ceiling in Chicago. There was nothing more to do there. My friends there, Derrick Carter and all those people, they just encouraged me to leave. They said, you’ve got bigger things to do there. So I moved to New York with $37 in my pocket.
And look at you now. You made it but you still live by your values, which I respect.
Most people, when they start to make money, their politics change because they want to keep their money, they don't want to give it to people who don't “deserve” it. But honestly, this goes beyond politics. This whole moment in history, it’s like, how do you see yourself in juxtaposition to others? Do you feel superior? Do you think you deserve more than other people? If the answer is yes, you are one way, and if the answer is no, you're the other way. It’s got nothing to do with red, blue, Harris, Trump bullshit. My favorite is when people say, “Oh, you liberals.” Do not call me that. That is the worst thing you could call me. I'm essentially an anarchist. Do not call me a liberal.
These past few years have been a real learning curve for me. You obviously knew a lot more earlier on, but I didn't anticipate hating Joe Biden like this and now I'm ready to join the democratic socialists like, this is not where I was a few years ago. It’s been an interesting ride.
I mean, it's deeply upsetting to me that anybody thinks that you need an abundance of things to survive or be happy. None of that means anything. And yes, my wife and I live in this very nice building. I've worked really hard to get here. We still go out with a big bag full of food and go feed people. We don't post it on social media. We don't talk about it. We try to do it once a month. We do mutual aid in Washington Square Park, and we feed people, give them clean socks and underwear, you know, you just do the things that you can. You can have these lofty ideas of changing the world. But the most effective thing you can do in moments like this is to take care of the people who are closest to you. You make sure their heads are right, and then when you have the means, you help as many other people as you can. To an American, that's probably the most radical thing you could possibly do, because that means that you have to unplug from all of these other things that you were taught — literally in school. Everything is framed around money. Yes, you're a talented artist, but what are you going to do for money? I remember having that conversation with a guidance counselor. I was like, what? That is not the driving force of what I want to do with my life. I think the most eye opening thing was when I went to Europe for the first time. If somebody in America says they're a filmmaker, you interpret that as a person who is getting films made. In the Netherlands, that could mean that you own a camera and it's no more complicated than that. Like, you woke up one day and decided you wanted to make movies, and you never pursued it further. No one looks down at you because of that. It’s such a different way of thinking.
At what point did you become a lot more outwardly and publicly political?
The real pull was Occupy Wall Street. That's when it really started, 2011, and that was right when EDM was at its peak. I was feeling a little disgusted at what was happening in music. So when Occupy came along, I was like, oh, this is a nice perspective. This is a different way of looking at business and how these things work. I went down there a bunch of times and spent some time with the people there and learned a lot. One night my wife and I were sitting in our pyjamas watching Jimmy Fallon and across the top of the TV it said, police have entered Zuccotti Park. I looked at her and I said, you don't have to come with me if you don't want to. And she's like, no, I'm coming. We got dressed immediately. This happened at 1am. And we were in the financial district in a march twenty minutes later, we got there that fast. As we were driving into the financial district, for dozens of blocks leading up to the park, there were ambulances, fire trucks, police. It was the first time I ever saw that kind of might and show of strength. And I was like, this is not good. That was the eye opening moment where I was like, oh, maybe these things that we take for granted are not really great. We were marching through the streets of the city until about 5:30 in the morning, and I was a changed person from that. I'd never seen anything like that before, the cops were throwing flash bangs and stuff into the crowd. Time’s Person of the Year was the protester, Shepard Fairey did the cover, it was this moment. It was very hopeful. And then everything disappeared and it went into hibernation until Trayvon Martin and we got pulled back out into the streets for that. But it didn't really kick in until Mike Brown and Ferguson, that's when there was a profound change in the way I understood media and understood my place in the world, because it made me realize that from a position of influence — in a much smaller way — but also coming from a place of privilege, that I can do something.
Another big, profound moment was in 2021 when there was that conflict that went on for like 11 days in Palestine, and I went to a march outside the Israel consulate in the city. It was at noon, and I was in this march until like 8pm and it was like thousands of kids, but I was probably one of half a dozen non-Palestinian people there. I was fascinated by the passion and the intensity and the dedication of these kids. I was like, wow, these kids are fighting for something, and they've got nothing to lose. Crazy beats strong any day of the week. You saw the two massive protests outside the gates of Columbia when the kids went back to school recently. Police came, beat the crap out of everybody, arrested dozens of people, all students and the big Alma Mater sculpture was drenched in blood. This is how they started the school year. This was day one. They were like, oh yeah, don't think we forgot about what we're doing, we've had a whole summer reading and training for this. These kids don't give a fuck. I'm like, this is great. Someone has to hold someone accountable, right?
But so few are doing it. I mean, apart from the kids, so few people are. You’re one of the most vocal artists I follow, and I know you’ve received some nasty messages from strangers. What’s the response been like from friends and colleagues of yours?
Probably about three months ago, I stopped reading the messages in my other folder. If I open that, it's either going to be an offer for crypto or somebody threatening to kill my wife. It’s insane and you there’s no point reporting that stuff because nothing happens. So I'm just gonna deal with the people who actually follow me. But I've lost friends I've had for 30 years over this. I don't understand the government stance that we stand unequivocally by the side of Israel, like, make it make sense to me. I don't think we would do that for Canada, and they're our neighbors, so this leads you to dig deeper and realize that this has never been about anything other than what we wanted to happen. This is not circumstantial.We're not aiding and abetting anything. This is our creation.
What do you mean by that?
I mean that in 1948 there wasn't a single person involved in the transfer of that land that did not fully understand that they were opening a military base in the Middle East.
I thought it was more just a fairly universal reaction of anti-semitism where most countries didn’t want to take in Jewish refugees, so they were forced to create their own country.
I mean, that was part of it too. But the real benefit was that Europe and the United States had no foothold whatsoever in the Middle East, and now we do. Every single day it gets bigger and bigger, and that's been by design.
You think you're going into something that's a good deal, and one side has half and the other side has half, but then the other side that has the real power continues to take and take and take, and then all of a sudden you've got next to nothing. It was the UK that facilitated the creation of Israel initially, but until that moment in 1947 Christians and Jews and Muslims lived very happily together in Palestine. There's Christian churches in Palestine, there's mosques in Palestine. There were temples in Palestine. Nobody had any problem with any of that until it was made to be a problem. And if this country is good at anything, it's creating problems. But Europe does it too, and especially the UK. On the 4th of July someone posted, thank you to the United Kingdom, who are single-handedly responsible for most Independence Days around the world. I just think about how all that stuff was taught to me about the Dutch East Indies and the conquests of England and France and the Netherlands. We were taught that they were powerful and did all these great things. It’s like, yeah, no.
How optimistic are you about the potential for change?
When people come together for powerful reasons, whether that's hedonistic like a rave, or political like a protest, there's a collective energy that is very important. We don't get to feel that a lot in our lives and the bigger these things are, the more powerful they have the potential to be. There's going to be a point, which I very much look forward to, when the amount of people and the amount of energy are going to become bigger than what is used to suppress it, and that will be a very beautiful day.
I do not think that this is a time to feel bad about things. There is a potential for change here. It's not going to be easy. Revolutions are not easy, they're bloody. People will die, that's how it works.
Well that’s already happening.
Exactly. Nothing in history ever changed without great violence, sadly. But if people really do want change — and this is where the concept of liberalism comes in, because liberals want change, but they're not willing to do anything for it. They're not willing to give up any of their comforts. People are going to have to sacrifice a lot if they really want things to change. The best example of this in the current world is how the media has deplatformed Greta Thunberg. And it happened for a singular reason, because she got old enough and connected the dots and came out and said that the specific reason for the climate apocalypse is capitalism. The minute she said that, she was a ghost, they took it all away. She's on a new rise now. The people that are going to get behind her this time around are not going to be the media, and it's not going to be corporations, it's going to be people. So I look forward to her new ascent, because she's in exactly the right place and she's got people listening.
How do you feel about the upcoming election?
There are people who will make a million compartmentalized excuses because they just want a woman president.
I wish it was something to celebrate but unfortunately, it's fucking not.
I mean, Obama wasn't either.
I thought he was, but I was young and dumb.
But see, he evoked hope. Coming out of eight years of Bush and 9/11 and mass surveillance, all of those things, that was like a vacation. We were like, oh, thank god.
But it was a seduction. We were tricked. I mean, he ran as a progressive and he barely passed any progressive legislation in his eight years of being president. He killed so many fucking kids with drones in the Middle East and he started the situation at the border, that's all him, it was him and Biden. Even when Trump was president, people were lobbing all that shit at him for the kids in the cages at the border. I'm like, this is Obama’s doing. I got so much shit for that. People were like, oh, you're a Trump guy. I'm like, no, but facts are facts. This shit was going on years ago. People tune in and they tune out at the times that they want to, and that's fine, but we've reached this dangerous point in conjecture with people, where people love to get really passionate about these singular issues, ignorant of their causes, ignorant of why we're here. This is kind of the underlying theme of this whole thing with Palestine. This didn't start on October 7, this has been going on since 1948. This is an omnipresent, neverending thing. I was ready to watch Kamala’s interview on CNN, the first one she did. And I saw the clip of her talking about the rapes on October 7, and I was like, this is a talking point that has been completely debunked. This is the first interview that she's doing as a candidate, and she's parroting a lie. I was like, I can't watch this.
Why were we fed these lies about mass rapes and beheaded babies? It's called atrocity propaganda. They lie about atrocities in order to incite emotions, hatred and violence. Why? Because they are the ones planning to commit atrocities themselves. To do this, they need to convince you that Palestinians are barbaric animals that torture people and behead babies. This is a war of information. There's no reason to believe the war machines’ account of these events. War makes governments and big business lots of money, these warmongering “leaders” will tell people anything to get them to believe that peace is not possible and we need to “defend ourselves” from whoever the convenient boogeyman is in that moment. Think for yourself, question authority, resist the urge to believe any sort of media at face value. The biggest news sources in the world ran with unchecked lies and I lost friends posting about this shit.
Up until around 2020, I (naively) believed in The New York Times. I thought they were one of the most reliable sources of news out there. And the last few years and this past year especially has just completely crushed that belief. There’s still great feature writing there, but I can’t trust the reporting now, especially when it comes to foreign policy.
It's bad, it's really bad. You have to know when to walk away from this stuff in real time because if I thought about this 24 hours a day, I’d never leave the house. Last time that happened was during COVID, I did not walk out of my apartment for 67 days. You know what got me out of the apartment? George Floyd. I went from nothing to being in the streets every day for five months in a screaming, intense protest. I remember walking out the front door, I felt like a baby deer. I was like, can I still walk? We went straight to a protest in Flatbush, where the cops were. The memory of this one woman, a police officer, will be burned into my brain for the rest of my life. She was running up to people in protest and spraying them with pepper spray and laughing hysterically at them. I've been in a gazillion protests in the city and there was something fiendish about that that I'd never seen before. Now I can't not see it. But as I learned in 2021 from those Palestinian kids, when no one was talking about this, that's when we found out that the IDF was training the NYPD and the Chicago Police Department and the LA Police Department, and these tactics came from them. I talked about that at the time, and people were like, I don't know. Maybe you can explain to me why there’s an NYPD liaison in Tel Aviv. What do you think that's for? How does that make any fucking sense at all?
I read that the violent crackdown on Columbia students was led by a Columbia professor who also happens to be head of the NYPD’s counter-terrorism bureau.
Do you know who was the biggest driving force in the Columbia crackdown here? Doug Emhoff [Kamala Harris’ partner]. He made a phone call to Jewish leaders at Columbia, and was like, make this stop right now. This stuff is so fucking nuts and it runs so deep, not only in the current sense, but historically. It’s fucking twisted, really dark shit. This is why you cannot depend on the government for anything, you just have to create your own world. I live in my own universe. That's probably not great for my mental health either, but I've had to, out of necessity. No one else is gonna fucking take care of us. I've only really come to terms with it over the last decade. I had this really hard conversation with Daniela when we came out of the Bernie campaign the first time, and it was like, okay, we cannot believe in this stuff anymore. We just put our lives into this. For six months we were on the fucking campaign trail. We sacrificed everything. She lost a job, we went full in on this stuff, and afterwards we had to literally divorce ourselves from it and disconnect and figure out a different way, because if we don't, we're gonna get fucking steamrolled, and we're not going to be ready for it. We’ve been preparing, I am 53 years old, it is hard for me to lose weight, and I'm on fucking Wegovy. I'm losing tons of weight and I'm working out for the first time in my life, because we understand that we have to get in fighting shape. We have to be ready for whatever comes.
My in-laws live in Venice, Italy, and they're amazing. They're like, just come here, and we're like, no, you don't get it. We haven't been doing all of this for 15 years so that we can get on a plane and leave. It would go against everything I believe in to pull some privileged shit like that. And Europe doesn't seem like a very tasty place to go to. They're all talking about how fucked up the United States are. I'm like, yo, Germany and France are not doing great either and neither is England. This is not a United States problem. It’s not a red/blue problem. It's not a fascists versus the left problem. It's all connected, as it always is. That’s why I love what these kids are doing. When I was 21 years old, I could see the future. Kids who are 21 now, they don't see a future. They see glaciers melting. They see wildfires. They see genocides. So if these kids who are going to a $40,000 a year school want to rebel against literally everything, their parents included, they're going to park their ass on the grass and fucking scream about Palestine.
How hard is it to maintain this stance in the EDM spaces that you operate in though, where practically no one is screaming and shouting about the same things you are?
I think that politics, activism, all of these things, they're personal choices. There are plenty of people who feel very strongly politically one way or the other and they never talk about it. That's not a talking point to them. Is that better than making noise about it? It’s not my place to have an opinion. I know how I feel. I know how I want to share it, and I know what I'm going to do about it, but if you don't like it, don't listen. Change the channel. Every musician that I've ever had real respect for was insanely political, obnoxiously outspoken. Lennon Marley, Cobain, Rage Against the Machine, Public Enemy. Michael Stipe, REM, Bono… I know he’s mutated into a monster. But there was a time when all of these people made no qualms about taking every opportunity in interviews to talk about these things. You would think that there would be someone out there now…
I mean, who would have thought it would be fucking Macklemore.
God bless. If you had given me a list of 300 hip-hop acts that were going to take the mic, he would have been at the absolute bottom of that list. But here’s the thing that everyone I just mentioned understood, and that next to nobody understands now. It is all one struggle. The Black Panthers knew it. Malcolm X went to Palestine multiple times. They were like, oh, yeah this is the same thing. Somebody said it on Twitter today, if you understand oppression and being othered, then you relate to Palestine. If you are on a drunken quest for power and believe in empire, you’re on the side of Israel.
If it’s an issue of equality, it doesn't matter if you are Black, Indigenous, a person of color, queer, female, Palestinian, it's all the same struggle. The root that's behind the oppression is the same for all of those things. There is a vested interest in the status quo, because the status quo works for the people who it needs to work for, and it harms the people it's supposed to. And everyone likes it that way, and they'll do whatever they need to do to keep it that way. They roll out the puppet show every four years to make everybody feel like they can sway things one way or the other, which they can't. There's one political party in this country and their opposition is the people, we get in their way. They're not working for us, they don't do anything for us. That's where the idea of mutual aid and the concept of organizing comes into play because we know no one's coming to save us. If we can't get it together on our own, we're just going to get steamrolled.
As bad as things are, I do think it could get a lot worse under Trump.
No, I don’t believe that.
You don't think so?
Not at all.
You don't think that he'll accelerate the genocide?
We continue to send bombs, we continue to send money. How can it be sped up? The only way it could be sped up is if we send soldiers there.
[Sighs]. You’re right, you’re right. You don’t think it could get worse for trans kids under Trump though?
Yes, of course. But I also don't think it’ll be that different. Everyone’s saying, oh, it'll be so bad for women's reproductive health. It’s like, what are you talking about? Roe was already overturned. So what are you going to do about it? Don't worry about who's the bigger boogeyman in November, the problem is what's happening right now. Nobody wants to deal with that because it's too hard. You can put all your energy into demonizing one side or the other and that doesn't solve anything.
So what do we do?
This is why I think it's so important to take care of the sphere of influence that you have and for me, that actually extends to social media. I haven’t worked for 32 years at this so that I can plug my new hot jam. That does not seem like reasonable behavior for a 53 year old man, I would feel like a buffoon doing that. I'll still post about it and stuff, but I don't want that to be the driving force of my humanity. I don't know another way to be. I don't see another option. This seems very clear in my eyes that this is the right thing to do.
I enjoyed your Burning Man roasts recently. Have you always hated it as an idea?
Yes. And the reason why I feel this way is that I was lucky enough to experience the Rainbow Gathering, a precursor to Burning Man. It was obviously purer, less big, very underground, much more subculture, much more anti-establishment. Burning Man is not anti-establishment. Do you know what the turning point for Burning Man was?
When Diplo played it the first time?
Exactly. I remember seeing a photo of Major Lazer getting off a helicopter at Burning Man in black bomber jackets with the Major Lazer logo on the back and I was like, that's it. That's the end right there. This will never continue the way that it was. you cannot tell me there is a single experience that is available at Burning Man that I did not experience at Rainbow Gathering, early ‘90s raves, or at Grateful Dead shows, all three of which I participated in, and all Burning Man is is some sort of weird amusement park trying to revive the experiences of those three things. But you can't do that when you have air-conditioned trailers for billionaires. I’ve never been, I don't want to be dancing to someone's sunrise set and get into a conversation with some Silicon Valley fuck-knuckle. The reason why I have such disdain for it is that it’s even more of an aggression towards ravers than EDM is. EDM is just taking the music, Burning Man is offensive to the fucking culture.
I mean they both are, are they not?
No. You can't have a rave experience at a fucking corporate festival. That's not a rave. You can't play on the 7up stage at a rave.
Right, but there are no corporate sponsors at Burning Man
Not that you know of. Burning Man is a non-profit — for who? They treat the people who work for them like trash.
But how can they call themselves a non-profit when tickets are like $600? DJs don’t get paid to play there, where’s all that money going?
Welcome to America. CEOs of non-profits like the World Wildlife Fund and Human Rights Watch earn upwards of a million dollars every year. That's how all of that works. You don't need corporate sponsors at that juncture. Burning Man is a corporation. You can paint it however you want to paint it and you can tell yourself whatever you need to tell yourself about going, but it's a corporation.
And Black people make up like 2% of attendees.
Exactly. And this whole moneyless thing they do…
The gift economy?
Yeah. They call it that, but you still have to fly into Reno, there's so much money that goes into just getting there. And then you see the videos of the dumpsters full of camping gear and crap at the end. It’s not exclusive to Burning Man, entertainment of any kind has become classist in this country. If you don't have money, you can’t go to concerts. So not only are you withholding health care from them, now you're cutting them off from entertainment. Well, as the kids say, fuck around and find out. When you make it so that these people can't even get a break, something's gonna happen, right? Bring it on.
Great interview!