Bill Bartholomew interviewed me on his podcast: My transcription

"I think we differ on that then. I do not see it. I do not think Governor McKee is a good person who cares about homeless people."

I sat down with Bill Bartholomew on January 16th to discuss journalism, homelessness, and white nationalism. Here’s my transcript, edited for clarity.

You can listen here.

Bill Bartholomew: Check one, two. Do you mind just saying anything?

Steve Ahlquist: Steve here. I used to be with Uprise, but not anymore.

Bill Bartholomew: I love that description of yourself. You could almost turn that into a t-shirt or some merch.

Steve Alquist is one of my journalistic heroes. It’s a real pleasure to have you back, and right out of the gate, what’s it been like? You were with Uprise, and now, for the last time, it seems like it’s been over a year. You’ve been on Substack, which is so much fun because the delivery method is much more direct.

We were just talking about a story you wrote about Chariho that I haven’t had a chance to read yet. I know about the story because it hits your inbox and your Substack app, and you’re like, okay, that’s appointment reading at some point in the next day.

Steve Ahlquist: Even if you don’t read it, you know something happened in Chariho, right? And I think in the title, I say Louise Dinsmore is now in charge of the Chariho School District, and that changes things. Substack’s nice because it’s all in one, whereas I used to do this with three or four different programs. I had MailChimp, and you’ve got your Blogger. You’ve got everything you’re trying to do, like putting your videos on YouTube. Substack kind of coalesces it all into one place. I do the writing and editing, and I’m done, and it goes out into the world. It’s been very nice.

Bill Bartholomew: When you think about Substack on a macro level, many people think about Matt Taibi, but it’s not Rumble.

Steve Ahlquist: It is not.

Bill Bartholomew: There are a lot of very thoughtful people on there, and a lot of my favorite artists are on there that they release poetry or exclusive things or visual art, and it’s a platform that serves the, for lack of a better term, creator, because like you said, it’s all right there.

Steve Ahlquist: There are some questions at the margins. There is some white supremacist work on there, and people have left Substack because of that. I think on a national level; there are a lot of people doing anti-white supremacist work on the platform as well. And some people I follow on Substack are very helpful to me. Some people do work in trans rights spaces. I should do better at pulling together some of my reading lists and making them available to people. Occasionally, I’ll restack somebody, but I should do better.

Bill Bartholomew: There’s so much you could do, and we could all do better. I feel the same way. I’m always like, man, if I just took an hour a day to go through some of the video or audio, I collect and disseminate it - but where is that hour?

Steve Ahlquist: I don’t know. Honestly, the time I spend driving, working, sleeping, and eating is my whole day. If I’m lucky, at the end of the day, I see my wife for a little bit, and I try to dedicate my Fridays and Saturdays to my relationship because otherwise, I would work every day. And I think I do work every day anyway.

I’m always writing. I have my computer with me everywhere I go, and it probably annoys my family a little bit, but it’s what I do, right?

Bill Bartholomew: It’s the nature of the beast. For anybody who doesn’t know you, your background is really interesting. How did you get into the journalism world? I guess give us the Reader’s Digest version of your journey here.

Steve Ahlquist: Well, I’ve been self-employed on and off for many, many years. I had a comic book store for a while. I’ve written comics. When my comic book store closed, I worked for Borders as a manager for many years. If Borders were still around, I might still be working there because it was a fun, easy job, and I love selling books. But I had a pretty good severance package when that ended because I got laid off two years before Borders ended. So, my severance package gave me time to work on my writing, and I just had ideas about what I wanted to do in journalism that was different from how journalism is traditionally done. Fortunately, Rhode Island Future’s Bob Plain gave me a lot of leeway to experiment, be crazy, and do whatever I wanted. As a result, I was able to hone in on certain ideas of journalism as not necessarily a practice but as an art.

Journalism isn’t a science. Journalism is an art. It’s about looking at the world and asking, “What about the world needs to be recorded?” We are constructing narratives about the everyday world, but what are those narratives? They’re filtered through our perception, and that’s art. I see something in the world. I say, “I want to construct this story.” And I’ve been refining that for going on 12 years now. I’ve realized that much of my work would have been better if I had provided extensive quotes. So I started to do much more with long-form interviews, basically writing down what people are saying and delivering it to people as transcription - a lot of transcription. I’m trying to bring that because I want to bring people’s voices and clarify and understand where people are coming from on every little minor point. So you get these ridiculously long pieces that strain the ability of Substack to contain. “This will not fit in an email,” says Substack.

If you read a transcription, it goes by much faster than video. If you watch some of these old videos, it’s unclear who’s talking, but I do the work of figuring out who’s saying what. What are they saying? Where are they coming from? Who are they? Are they with Moms for Liberty, for instance? Are they Republican or Democrat? All that stuff tells us who they are and what is happening,

Bill Bartholomew: I think where you’re at right now in terms of your coverage has the most depth and breadth, and it’s also the most digestible in a lot of ways because, as you said, if you cover an event and the event is two hours long, that’s a journey for somebody to watch the event in its entirety,

Steve Ahlquist: No one has two hours. The school committee meeting I covered last night was two hours and 50 minutes long. The chunks that I talked about were very short, but they were scattered throughout, and you don’t want to lose track of some of the more interesting points. So rather than just say, okay, here’s the full two hours, or here they’re talking about the budget - which is the most important thing they’re going to do, but it wasn’t the most salient to a statewide audience. If you live in Chariho, watch the video and understand what your school’s doing. But if you’re living in Providence, you might not need to know the ins and outs of a budget dispute, but you do want to know about the politics of how people just took over a committee in [possible] contravention of the law. It turns out there’s no enforcement mechanism for the Chariho Act. There are no fines to be assessed. There’s no remedy in law. You can’t make them redo the first meeting. You can’t make them change their votes. They broke the law, but there’s no penalty.

When you think of crime as a social construct instead of an absolute moral arbiter, it means I can break the Chariho Act with absolutely no repercussions, but if I steal a candy bar, I could go to jail and have plenty of repercussions. One violation seems way more serious. It seems way more serious to violate the trust of a community as an elected official than to steal a candy bar. It is easy to assess a penalty, pay for the candy bar, pay a fine, whatever. There should be a fine, but there isn’t one. So unless the General Assembly decides to give the Chariho Act some teeth, nothing can be done,

I was amazed that the Homeless Bill of Rights also has no enforcement mechanism. Police routinely violate that law. I was hearing about people at a campsite that will be evicted today near Trader Joe’s in Providence, and cops were breaking open tents. They don’t have a right to go through a tent.

Bill Bartholomew: That’s a domicile.

Steve Ahlquist: They don’t have a right to open tents but don’t care. They just do what they want. The cops show up, and they swear at people. They say, get out of your fucking tent. Sorry if I can’t say that...

Bill Bartholomew: Feel free. You have carte blanch.

Steve Ahlquist: I’ll be quoting police officers here, who are happy to say this publicly.

If cops tell you to get out of your effing tent, then you kind of have to do it, especially if you’re homeless, especially if you may or may not have a record. You may or may not have a warrant. You may or may not be carrying illegal drugs or whatever. You’ve got a lot going on in your life and are in danger. So anyway, there’s no way to enforce the Homeless Bill of Rights. It is completely toothless legislation. There are no rights without enforcement. I can tell you you have a right to do anything. You have a right to fly, but gravity will tell you you can’t. The same with the law. You have a right to do things, but there’s no way to ensure you can.

Bill Bartholomew: It’s such an interesting and essential point that we don’t consider it routinely. That’s fundamental to why we would have any of these doctrines in place, but it becomes pointless. You can look at a lot of legislation or legislative ideas. Shoreline access, for example. These laws are in effect. There’s been more enforcement there lately, but for a long time, and even still, there are still property owners that I can think of - for example, in Middletown - where someone’s blocking a public right of way without consequences.

Steve Ahlquist: Unless there’s a big fine for doing that - and if you own that kind of property, you could probably afford to pay a big fine. And if you take down the sign, they’ll just put up another sign. They’ve probably got a garage full of signs ready to wheel out.

Until we devise a proper penalty, the law is not done. When it comes to the Homeless Bill of Rights and moderating police behavior, we can’t even hold police accountable for very big crimes. So we have the Law Enforcement Officer’s Bill of Rights that allows police to have rights that you and I do not have when we’re arrested. If you or I shoot somebody, handcuff somebody, kick ’em, or put our knee on your back - basically torture them - which has happened in Providence - and that police officer faced almost no consequences. I mean, he is getting paid while on leave. That doesn’t happen to you and me. If I get arrested, my job is essentially over and done to the extent that anybody wants to pay me to read my stuff when they know I’m a torturer.

When it comes to the Homeless Bill of Rights if a police officer goes into your tent and you say, “You can’t do that.” Then, all right, let’s have an investigation. You’re suspended with pay for three weeks, and the result is, “Don’t do that again.” It’s like, “Wow, you just gave me a two-week vacation and told me not to do it again.” That sounds like less than a slap on the wrist.

Bill Bartholomew: It’s barely a deterrent.

I feel like journalism is in a huge transition point. You’ve been at the forefront of this for a long time. I think sometimes it gets a little overblown. Some of these podcasters especially say, “Joe Rogan swung the election,” or something like that. I’m sure there’s the role that new journalism is playing in shaping opinion. There’s no question about that. But I think more macro is just the notion of what journalism is. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve changed my Twitter bio in the past to say, “reporter,” and then, actually, no, wait a minute. “I’m a journalist.” Oh, wait a minute. Should I just write “Covering Rhode Island?” Because there’s a preciousness to it and there’s a format to it that seems, as you said, it’s almost like a scientific process, but what I think it is what you said, which is that you’re essentially holding up a mirror to society, filtering it through your own experience, and then putting it back out to people based on what you think is important. That, to me, is journalism. Everything else is sort of industrial.

Somebody at some point in time said, “You got to pretend you’re not biased.” I mean, find me one truly unbiased reporter. Even just in Rhode Island, you won’t do it. They would never admit to it. They present both sides of an issue. There sometimes are more than two sides to an issue, but that doesn’t mean that there’s not a human being behind it. If we lose that and get into AI journalism or whatever it is, that’s even more dangerous.

Steve Ahlquist: You made all these good points, and I’m picking up your last one. I wonder what AI journalism looks like because AI will not attend a school committee meeting to tell you what it means. I don’t think AI is even remotely there yet.

I don’t think AI can handle a big event. It can filter a whole bunch of journalism and tell you something—maybe—about the presidential election, but I don’t know that it can tell you what’s going on in Chariho. I don’t think there’s enough information on Chariho in the world without watching, listening, reading, meeting, and talking to get the full scope of it.

Bill Bartholomew: Absolutely.

Steve Ahlquist: So I’m not worried about AI’s impact on local journalism. And I will say that AI is helpful to me when it comes to transcriptions. I don’t do the transcriptions by listening and writing it down. I run it through a transcription algorithm somewhere, and then I get this crappy transcription, which I then go through and repair it. I make the sentences make sense. Because as you know, when talking to me, we don’t always say our sentences as we should. And if I were transcribing even the things I’m saying now, I would change it to make it better while trying to preserve the meaning, trying to preserve the voice, but also trying to make it more clear - editing for clarity.

That’s what I spend most of my time doing, I think.

Journalism, I think, is the crafting of a story around the events we see. As to journalistic neutrality, I call it false neutrality, and the reason I call it that is because we all have a point of view. The editors and the owners of our newspapers have a point of view. Sinclair owns channel 10, and Channel 12 is Fox News-adjacent. I think a Texas company runs the Journal. If you remember, a few years ago, the ProJo had a story about Nirva LaFortune and the mayoral race, and they put up a terrible picture of her.

Bill Bartholomew: I remember.

Steve Ahlquist: She was offended. She had a press conference for that. It was awful, and it was offensive. And that picture was chosen, not in Rhode Island. The reporter, Amy Russo, was good and had done a decent piece. Yet that picture caused Amy to call Nirva and apologize - not for her actions, but for the actions of a corporation that thought - I dunno what was going through their head. Did they think this was funny, having two relatively white dudes and a Black woman and presenting her like it was a mugshot or something? It was awful.

Bill Bartholomew: Horrendous. Yeah, I remember it.

Steve Ahlquist: It was insulting to her. But that didn’t come from Rhode Island. That wasn’t us here.

I’ll also say that there are excellent reporters at every news corporation I’m mentioning.

Bill Bartholomew: Absolutely

Steve Ahlquist: The Providence Journal has excellent reporters. The disagreements I have with some of them are their politics. My other disagreement is their false both-sides-ism. They call it neutrality, but it is both sides-ism. I think that the idea of neutrality was a corporate invention. It was invented to sell newspapers. We came up with this during the times of yellow journalism, and some people wanted to buy ads, but they weren’t going to put an ad in a paper that was insulting to them. And if we look at what’s going on with the Washington Post right now - cutting stuff out, certain coverage isn’t allowed. An editorial cartoon just got excised - an award-winning editorial cartoonist left because Bezos wouldn’t run a piece critical of media companies kissing Trump’s ass.

That’s not neutrality.

One of the best responses to that was another political cartoon I saw, which shows the Washington Post logo that says, “Democracy dies in Darkness,” and its three panels. The panels get darker and darker until it’s all black at the bottom. It tells you right there that Democracy is dying in that darkness. It’s dying in this fake neutrality or this obsequiousness to power. I sometimes tell people, “Don’t be afraid to criticize the Governor. Don’t be afraid to criticize Senator Whitehouse.” If you notice, most of the people I criticize are Democrats, and it’s because they’re the people in power. If this was a Republican Governor, I’d be on his ass, but right now, a Democratic governor is doing a terrible job. Some people want to preserve their access to the Governor. There are reporters in the State who do not get updates from the Governor because the Governor is mad at them. They don’t do it to me as much, but Governor Raimondo always knocked me off to a press list.

Bill Bartholomew: Oh yeah, I remember this.

Steve Ahlquist: And I would go on Twitter and write, “Hey, Raimondo just knocked me off the press list, and I wasn’t invited to this event. I’d love to have been there, but I don’t know what happened. I was not invited.” Then people would get mad and say, “Governor, why are you knocking, Steve? He’s a real reporter.” And I get that. When I first started, there were questions about whether or not I was a real reporter. I get that I was kind of annoying. “Is he just this weird guy who shows up, films, and writes about it? Or is he trying to do something real?” It takes a bit to understand when someone is trying to do something new.

And to be honest, I was trying to understand what I was doing. I didn’t have a clear-cut mission. I didn’t have a clear-cut plan. That’s also why I talk about it like it’s an art - because I don’t want to sound highfalutin, like, “I’m an artist,” but I want to say that it is much like an art. It’s like any kind of creative writing exercise. You don’t exactly know what it will look like when you start. You have ideas about what it will be, and when you’re done, you’re generally satisfied. And I’ll bet you it’s the same when you’re writing a song,

Bill Bartholomew: Songwriting, podcasts, talk radio. No, we don’t have a script. There’s never been a script. I’ve never sat down with notes and done a show. It’s always “Go out there, collect information, collect opinions, collect perspectives, internalize it, and then just let’s go. Let’s get into that flow State.”

Steve Ahlquist: When you get there, you hopefully get something interesting that serves a bigger purpose. I like to have my stuff out in the world being seen.

Bill Bartholomew: And that’s the biggest difference between you and others, not just here in Rhode Island, but worldwide. The stuff you put forth serves an audience and not even an audience. It serves everybody. It serves the audience in a really meaningful way that I think a lot of other outlets, it’s not that they can’t or won’t cover it, it’s that they don’t even know how to cover it that way.

Steve Ahlquist: One of the terms I dislike is “content creator,” right? I feel like a content creator is like, I don’t know, “What can I put in a bottle so I can sell it?” I don’t care what it is. I want something like Coca-Cola because that sells well, but what can I put in there? I feel like there are really good reporters in the State who are sometimes sidelined into more popular writing,

They’re not doing the deeper dives they could do, the more important work they could do. I understand sometimes you need a break and don't want to be doing the really intense, difficult stuff. Homelessness is a good example of this, but I will say that if I followed the market, I wouldn’t write about homelessness. Over the years, I’ve written about homelessness, and those were always my worst-selling stories. Those were always the lowest hits. It’s a depressing subject. We know solutions are difficult and don’t want to get our heads around them. Many of us are touched by it, or we feel close to it or have a friend in it - and it just feels too big. I get it. I would do these stories, and I would get two-thirds of the audience for a homeless piece that I got if I do something about going after a school committee in the middle of Rhode Island or wherever.

It’s easy to say, “Oh, these Christian Nationalists are doing this or that,” and we can kind of get mad at them. But it’s harder to say, “Oh, these people are homeless through a collection of factors that at its base is probably Capitalism.”

Let’s just say it out loud. People from out of State are buying up all our houses. 25% of all the houses sold in this State were sold to out-of-state corporations last year. And that means people are kicked out of those apartments, or their apartment rent goes up a lot, and then they’re up against it because they’re already paying too much money - on and on and on. I can talk about this all day…

But recently, that has been changing. People are starting to see homelessness. They’re starting to see a “villain” here. There are a bunch of people who are not doing the job about homelessness that they could be doing. Housing building rates are low. How long will it take us to get 24,000 additional units built? And if we build 24,000 additional units, how many will be sold to these out-of-state corporations to turn them into student apartments? Can we protect people? Can we impose rent control, which everybody seems to be against unless you’re paying rent? If you paid rent, you wouldn’t mind having a fixed cost increase over time. I know of a woman whose apartment rent increased by $1,000 in three months.

Bill Bartholomew: Completely insane.

Steve Ahlquist: Insane. No one can do that. No one can. You cannot swallow an additional thousand-dollar monthly payment unless you’re well off. 70% of the State is not well off enough to do that. 70%! And those 30% who can afford it tend to be in seats of power. And even then, if you told Speaker Shekarchi, “You got to pay an extra thousand dollars every month,” he’d be annoyed and have plenty of money.

Bill Bartholomew: That’s right.

Steve Ahlquist: The Governor would be annoyed if somebody said, “Hey, Governor, you got to pay another a thousand dollars a month.” Imagine if the taxes on your house went up a thousand dollars a month. It’s crazy, right? Nobody could do that, right? It would be $12,000 a year!

Bill Bartholomew: Yeah, forget it.

Steve Ahlquist: Forget it. And especially, what am I making? Less than $70k? I may be making $40k. I’m already working three jobs. I’m homeless now, with my kids, and if DCYF finds out I’m homeless with my kids, they take my kids, and they put them into foster care, and then I have to go and find an apartment, get myself back on stable ground, and then get my kids back through a long, lengthy process. My life has turned into nothing but grinding work and trying to get my kids back and my family back together. Life becomes a grind. It doesn’t become a place where there’s any possibility of joy. That’s what they’re stealing from us.

Bill Bartholomew: Wow.

Steve Ahlquist: Yeah, it sucks. And when you’re in it, it can affect you.

I write about homelessness a lot. I talk to many people who are experiencing homelessness. And when I speak to people like the new Housing Secretary, Deborah Gardard, I do not see an awareness in her eyes that she sees this as a problem. I do not see an awareness in the eyes of the Governor that he gives one shit about this problem other than the political implications of it that hurt him. He doesn’t care about the bridge except that it will hurt his chances to be Governor again. I don’t think he cares about Rhode Island Bridges and the data leak, except that it will affect his ability to be re-elected. I don’t think he cared about the independent man about the fall through the State House dome until, “Uh-oh, this looks like a bad thing.” So he tries to turn eggs into scrambled eggs. It’s bad. But in homelessness, I think he looks at this all and says, “These people are not the ones I’m trying to help. I want a better economy, and that will lift all boats.” We all know a better economy is not lifting these people from despair. It’s not going to help.

Bill Bartholomew: That brings us to what we saw Tuesday night at the State House. [The People’s State of the State] I published a lengthy podcast yesterday. Look, I think we’re in a moment where there’s some level of soulfulness. Like I said yesterday on the podcast, I think McKee is a good person and that there’s something that touches his soul - that he knows.

Steve Ahlquist: I think we differ on that then. I do not see it. I do not think Governor McKee is a good person who cares about homeless people.

Bill Bartholomew: Right now, and maybe what I’m waiting to see, is this huge disconnect when you talk about the top 30% or the structures of power and what everybody else is experiencing. The Housing Secretary came on the radio a couple of weeks ago with Dan York. First of all, she was awful on the radio. And if you’re in that role, you need to be able to step up and say what we’re doing. Here’s what we know we can do right now. Here’s what we heard in the community needs to be done, and here’s our action plan. That starts as soon as I hang up the phone instead of, “Well, we’re hoping that we might be able to figure out how to get ECHO Village online at some point, but we’ll figure it out.”

We saw on Tuesday at the State of the State that you had the People’s State of the State. This event was organized primarily by Harrison Tuttle with coordination from other organizations - and by the way, as we were talking offline, not exclusively leftist organizations, many were politically agnostic - but you have this event scheduled to take place in the State House rotunda before the State of the State. Then you find out in the afternoon that the Administration has roped off the rotunda. They’ve put up signage with the Capitol Police insignia that says no one’s allowed to go in this public part of the State House during a public event. They forced the people into the Bell Room, but the event still occurred.

I went into the actual State of the State and, for lack of a better term, attended the Governor’s presentation. We heard about college football and the minor league soccer team that will save Pawtucket. We may have heard more about that than substantive reactions to what’s happening outside in real time. It seems like the structures of power in Rhode Island don’t recognize that people are hurting.

Most people are hurting. How do you not bring that into the chamber and forget everything else? I mean, look, the attendance stuff that he’s done, sure, the Melville School in Jamestown got a hundred percent on the RICasts in math, and kid here or there in Cumberland did great on tests or something like that. It’s true about attendance in school. But hey, lack of attendance is a symptom of a society in decay.

The structures of power that we live in don’t allow for even remotely equal footing. How do you not react to that? Forget the script. If I were the Governor, I would’ve walked in there - and he doesn’t have this skillset - but I would’ve taken the script and said, “Hey, everybody, you hear those people outside? That’s our State right now. That’s the condition of our State. I’m going to react to that right now from my heart.” Instead, it’s a bunch of agitators, and we will force them out.

Meanwhile, we’re not going to allow broadcast cameras, which is a little overblown because I’m in there with an iPhone. I agree with Tim White when he posted, “If you get a senator that stands up and turns his back on McKee, you can’t trust Capitol Television to film that.” For sure. True. And there should have been cameras in there, but there also were people with cell phones. I was sitting next to Nancy Lavin from Rhode Island Current, and we both have our iPhones, so if something happened, we would’ve filmed it a hundred percent. But the point is that I don’t understand how we got to the point where there is such a disconnect between the structures of power and their allies throughout the industry, media, nonprofits, and the rest of the State, which is hurting.

Steve Ahlquist: Who are they serving?

Bill Bartholomew: Well, there’s your answer.

Steve Ahlquist: Who are they? Who is McKee speaking for? If you think about it, he’s speaking for conservative, monied interests who benefit from the system as it is. The stressors there, the 125 or so people, and I counted it individually, so that’s a pretty accurate number. But the 125 people who were crowded into the Bell Room and then marching around the circle until the police told them they couldn’t -

Bill Bartholomew: - which was also an embarrassing moment for the entire structure of power. You could hear that loud and clear in the chambers, and that was real. That was visceral and powerful.

Steve Ahlquist: They were shaking the dome.

Bill Bartholomew: Yes.

Steve Ahlquist: That dome was shaking. They were loud. I was in that room, and they were loud. It was louder than the audio on my iPhone will allow me to let you know because the iPhone mutes it a little bit. It was so loud you could touch the wall and feel it. And that’s a pretty solid building. So here we are. We’re yelling. We’re saying we want a State of emergency. We want to tax to 1%. We don’t want these austerity policies being telegraphed and discussed. And by the way, when I finish here, I’m probably going to go to the State Administration building and listen to the budget presentation because the budget -

Bill Bartholomew: - that’s about to get dropped.

Steve Ahlquist: I’d love to ask a question or two about the budget. Why are we cutting Medicare? If we take a dollar out of the Governor’s salary, that’s one dollar cut out of the budget. If we take a dollar out of Medicare or Medicaid, that’s two or three dollars because we have matching funds from the federal government. So, every dollar you take from certain expenditures is more than a dollar.

I just want to go back to Deborah Goddard.

Bill Bartholomew: The new Acting Secretary of Housing.

Steve Ahlquist: At a meeting at the State House, she was asked a question by a former U.S. Representative David Cicilline about ECHO Village or something, and she said, “I’ve only been in a role for two days, so I don’t have the answer to that.” But she’s been a consultant at Rhode Island Housing from its inception under failed Secretary Josh Saul.

She’s got an inside track on understanding the Department of Housing. That’s one of her selling points. So, given that, telling Cicilline that she doesn’t know because she’s only been on the job for two days sounds a little fishy to me. It sounds like she was avoiding the question. I’m not going to say it’s an outright lie. She might not know the information, but it wasn’t a serious response to a very good question. And feel the way you want about Cicilline, he’s talked to people on Capitol Hill in Washington, some pretty tough customers, and he knows how to ask questions. He also knows when he is getting bullshitted. I think he understood that he was getting bullshitted there.

Bill Bartholomew: Yeah. That was a remarkable video. And that was a couple of weeks ago when he was asking questions as CEO of the Rhode Island Foundation. I hear some of this about ECHO Village daily, including the issues around the fire code and environmental remediation.

You don’t want to wave fire codes and then suddenly find yourself in a situation where there’s an incident that, never mind just from a health and safety standpoint, but I can see an angle being taken of liability. But figure it out. Rewrite the code. The thing that keeps coming up now with the notion of an emergency declaration, the resistance I’ve heard from McKee’s standpoint, is that if we do the emergency declaration, it gives us nothing. Okay. Then why not? Even if it’s perfunctory, why not just do it? Even if there’s one possible way to, as Senator Takoian said on the radio, even if this is just a way to find funding for an electrician to come in and take a look at how we move this project along a little bit, even if it’s just an incremental nudge, what’s the harm?

Steve Ahlquist: Why can’t two members of the National Guard sit in a truck overnight with a truck running, staying nice and warm, staying awake, and if there’s a fire, they can run in, open the door, pull people out, and call the fire department.

Bill Bartholomew: Totally.

Steve Ahlquist: There are other ways to do this. With a State of urgency, you could just say, “Okay, you guys, your job, just sit here and watch and make sure there’s no fires.” And that’s it. That’s the whole job.

Some churches in this State are afraid to open for homelessness because their insurance or the fire codes tell them they can’t. But if they wanted to do a 24-hour rosary bead prayer, they could do that. They can’t have people lying on a church bench sleeping overnight because that would violate the fire code. But if two people are going to sit there and do their rosary and 25 people are sleeping behind them, then it would be potentially legal. You know what I mean? There are nuances here: a State of emergency would allow you to put these people up.

By the way, it’s going to get cold this week. It was colder today than yesterday. If everybody noticed, this week will be cold, and we will be back in the same situation we were in a week ago, where we had to open up emergency shelters. Even though Mayor Smiley and the Governor are saying, there was no need for this because we have all these shelters, In fact, 31 people the first night at this City Hall, 30+ people the next night when they had it at the Da Vinci Center. Then I think it was something closer to 40 the night after that. So, as people became comfortable with this idea, the numbers went up.

Bill Bartholomew: First, I think what counselors Roias and Sanchez did with that was amazing. I called it a punk rock homeless shelter. And I say that with the highest level of respect. It’s like, “Hey, the community needs to solve its issue right now, so get out of the way.”

And that’s exactly what they did. Some of the resistance I got was, well, those 31 people there, how many of them just chose to leave Mathewson Street or Crossroads and come down there, and they would’ve been sheltered otherwise? And to that, I say, ”Who cares?” I mean, number one. But secondly, yes, there is a political, and Miguel Sanchez admitted this on the radio with Tara Granahan. Of course, there’s a political thing happening there. So what? That’s the point. Disruption is fundamental. And you even saw Smiley move on this a little bit, where the next day, after the popup shelter at City Hall, they had the DaVinci Center, and members of the Smiley administration were present at DaVinci Center, working in coordination with those guys and working in coordination with the volunteers.

Steve Ahlquist: Roias first asked for the DaVinci Center and was told no. Then they said, “Okay, we’re just going to do it here at City Hall.” And the people there doing their work knew what they were doing. It wasn’t just a bunch of volunteers. It wasn’t just a bunch of punk rock kids, right? There were professionals there. Miguel Sanchez does this as his job.

His day job is working with the homeless population. There were many, many people there, social workers I know and others who do this every day and who knew how to do the work. Emergency fire personnel were on hand, so if somebody was having trouble or needed Narcan, the Providence Fire Department members were nearby to handle it. There were police present in case something else happened. And I will also say, on all three nights, nothing bad happened.

No one had to be thrown out, and nothing got ruined. I was in both places the day after, and they were both clean as a whistle. It wasn’t like people were puking everywhere. It wasn’t like needles were stuck in the carpet. It was fine.

The fears that people have about this population are overblown. Again, wraparound services for people experiencing homelessness are what save lives. I know Mayor Smiley has said he’s not allowed tent encampments in the City, but barring something like ECHO Village, where else will they go? If you’re going to complain about trash, put in a trash bin. If we’re going to complain about needles, put a Sharps box. If we’re going to complain about poop, put in a restroom. These are things we can do. We do them in picnic areas all the time, right? And if those are your three complaints, guess what?

Bill Bartholomew: They’re pretty solvable.

Steve Ahlquist: They are. And if you want to complain about other things, like, okay, people might be selling or buying drugs, those are issues. But those are solvable issues. People in the throes of addiction are not going to make good choices. That’s just the truth of it. We now know that the best thing we can do is to give them the space to mess up and catch them when they fall. It’s not an easy thing. And anybody out there who’s dealt with alcohol addiction, which is a legal way to get addicted, you may not have given up alcohol the first dozen times you tried. And if you’re sober now, congratulations. But that wasn’t an easy row. And not everybody can just go cold turkey and say, I’m never going to smoke again. I’m never going to drink again. And we know that these other drugs are more difficult.

Bill Bartholomew: Absolutely.

Steve Ahlquist: Give them some space.

Bill Bartholomew: It’s so critical. And it’s, I’ve been kind of depressed about a lot, but this situation is just, I don’t know. I’ve been having a hard time the last couple of weeks, and this has been the icing on the cake. Like, man, what are we trying to do here as a species? How can people be so fundamentally cruel in the power structure to not just say, you know what? Forget the rule book. Forget politics. Let’s just solve problems.

Steve Ahlquist: Right? I don’t get it. I’ll say there are times in the middle of the night when I wake up, go to the bathroom at three in the morning or whatever, and then if it’s really cold or windy or super rainy out, I think about homeless people in a tent. I’ve met people who had tents set up alongside a river and got flooded out. I’ve met people who have lost everything they own because police come in and throw them out. Their tents get picked up while not even there and thrown away.

Bill Bartholomew: Woonsocket comes to mind. And Cranston,

Steve Ahlquist: I interviewed a woman who lost everything she owned and the only picture she had of her son. It was just gone that day.

The thing about homelessness that I don’t think everybody understands because they don’t think about it is that when you lose your apartment or your home, you move whatever is the most important stuff into your car - if you have a car. You drive and end up spending a night alone in a parking lot somewhere running the car when you want to stay warm, wrapped up, surrounded by all your crap, and then when your car inevitably breaks down; you decide what in the car you can pack up and bring with you.

I remember meeting a woman who had all her baking tins with her while living in a tent. She had taken them from her home to her car and tent. And I remember going to the site after Mayor Smiley emptied this particular location, and I saw all her baking tins behind. She had given up on that, too. She did not give up on her life easily. She lost that life piece by piece by piece over months or a year until the point where she was walking out of that encampment with only the stuff on her back.

If I were the Mayor, that would haunt me because I would be the person responsible for doing this to her. And I don’t know how to navigate that. I have a hard time with it, and I am not the guy who did it. I have a hard time navigating this. I think about her. I don’t know where she is because this is the other thing that happens. You lose track of people. They disappear. Or they even die.

Fifty-four people died last year while experiencing homelessness. They didn’t all freeze to death. Some of them overdosed or whatever, but some of them just died. They weren’t on the medications they needed. I’m 62 years old, and I’m on stuff for my high blood pressure or whatever, just like my dad was. And if I didn’t have that pill every day, my blood pressure would be high, and at some point, I’d have a stroke and die, right? It might happen anyway, but it’s less likely now, so that’s pretty good. If you don’t have access to that, if somebody comes, takes your tent, throws it away, and all your medications in there - try to figure out how to pay for lost medication at CVS. It’s very expensive. Sorry, your coverage doesn’t cover this now. So now you’re screwed. It’s so hard.

Bill Bartholomew: No, it’s, I mean, that story of the baking tins, it’s -

Steve Ahlquist: It kills me.

Bill Bartholomew: Wow. I mean,

Steve Ahlquist: Because it’s the life she wants to return to.

Bill Bartholomew: Right. Exactly.

Steve Ahlquist: And that’s the life she’s not going to get back to, ever, maybe. I don’t know what to do with that. When I first thought I would be a writer, this was not what I thought I’d be writing about. I thought I was going to be doing more politics and stuff. But as you look at the world, you have to go where the rubber meets the road, where people are being hurt.

Sometimes, that brings me to places like the Christian Nationalism that’s happening in our school systems right now and the attacks on trans kids that are going to get bigger and bigger in this State; it is incumbent upon us as a State to push back and to do what we can. Whatever you feel about trans issues or trans kids, just know that they’re kids. They’re scared kids, and they’re kids just like yours. They just have different needs and different ideas. And if you can’t make room for that, then who are you?

Bill Bartholomew: Who are you?

Steve Ahlquist: I don’t know what kind of monster does that. I mean, I don’t care. Some people make fun of kids who want to put rabbit ears on their heads or whatever. It’s like, fuck off.

Bill Bartholomew: Yeah. Seriously.

Steve Ahlquist: I cut my hair weirdly as a kid. Whatever. Leave me alone.

Bill Bartholomew: Right, exactly. And when you see a kid with a Tom Brady jersey on, “Oh, he’s pretending that he’s Tom Brady.” You’ll never hear that. It’s completely and utterly cruel. It’s the height of stupidity and ignorance, those types of commentaries. And when I hear them now, there’s nothing to push back on. I just don’t want to be around a person like that. And I hope they can find some level of inner peace and comfort with themselves where they realize that they don’t have to be cruel to other people to get that little adrenaline rush.

Steve Ahlquist: My dream would be that they really meet Jesus.

Bill Bartholomew: Exactly. Right, totally.

Steve Ahlquist: You know what I mean? I think it starts with Jesus slapping them in the back of the head and saying, “What the fuck is wrong with you?”

Bill Bartholomew: You didn’t pay attention to what mattered.

Steve Ahlquist: I had a bunch of easy-to-follow stuff in there. Do unto others? Dude!

Bill Bartholomew: It’s pretty simple.

Steve Ahlquist: It’s not hard. Just give that kid space. They’ll be fine if you let them be, but if you make their life miserable, you become the problem. So anyway, there’s that. I dunno what else to say.

Bill Bartholomew: You’re doing amazing work. It’s SteveAlquist.SubStack.com, and from there, you can subscribe. There are also different ways to support the work you’re doing directly there.

Steve Ahlquist: I subsist entirely on the people who like what I do and give me money. I never insist that people pay. All my stuff is free because it is ridiculous to write about homelessness and then put it behind a paywall.

“Hey, I’d love to interview with you, and if you pay like $8 a month, you can read my stuff.” Uh, no. It’s got to be free. The people who can afford to support me support me. The people who don’t like my work don’t have to support me. They don’t have to read me. I’m not forcing myself on anyone. I’m not even on TV. I might be on this show, and if you don’t like it, you could’ve turned it off 20 minutes ago.

Bill Bartholomew: Absolutely.

Steve Ahlquist: It’s too late now. You’ve listened to almost the whole thing.

Bill Bartholomew: Congratulations to the listener.

Steve Ahlquist: Yeah. To anybody who could get through this crap, congratulations.

Bill Bartholomew: Thanks, man. Appreciate it.

Steve Ahlquist: I appreciate this.

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