Erik Houdini goes for the jugular in this unfiltered, uncensored rant on material conditions, poverty, the lived reality in America and the class divide on the left. It's real talk from a man who's tired of pretending he's not angry.
Fundamentally, everything that is happening to me or has happened to me is happening to millions of other Americans. Okay, this is something I feel like people who engage with what I say—engage with me as an Internet person, maybe, or just engage with the rhetoric we push in our magazine—maybe don't understand.
I am not a college-educated academic who came up through the ranks of the youth DSA or the youth communists or whatever the fuck. I'm not somebody who emerged from that circumstance. I'm somebody who is from South Louisiana. Okay, Louisiana has the fourth worst education system in the country.
There is a city not far from where I'm from called Ville Platte. Okay, to paint a picture of where I'm from: Ville Platte has a median income of $9,000 a year. Majority black, of course. $9,000 a year.
Okay, so what happened with me is I did the right thing. I went and I got experience. Okay? I went and got skills. I got into tech—not coding or software engineering, but grunt-work level tech. Started as a cable trencher, moved to a help desk technician, then back to cable inspector, and then back to the help desk, tier two, and then ultimately, Sys Admin, a little bit of cyber security in there, exploring my career options. Okay, that is essentially my eight-year career as a working adult. Nine-year career as a working adult. Started in Walmart, like most people, started a basic job, okay?
And I worked, and I had all these skills, and I was making like 45k. The most I've ever made from a job was 55k a year—good money, but not like millionaire money, you know what I'm saying. But good money nonetheless.
But then, 2024—end of 2024, beginning of 2025, okay—I'd just gotten back from vacation with my family. I went and saw them. I went and spent a bunch of money on a rental car. Spent most of my savings on this trip because I thought my job was good. I thought we was rock solid. I thought we was grinding. I thought we was hustling. I thought we was getting it like you're supposed to be getting it, you know what I'm saying.
And all the while I've got this side hustle of this magazine, of this cultural brand, whatever you want to call Houdini Magazine. That's what I was doing while I was fully employed. The project was never intended to be a full-time operation.
But I got laid off, and I'm almost certain that the layoff was due to a shift in AI, okay? Because a couple weeks before I got laid off, the company had a big meeting talking about how they're going to be an AI-first company. They're going to be all in on AI. It's a new technology. This is a company that dates back to the .com bubble. They were like, "We're the first people to do X, Y, and Z in that era; we're going to be the first people to do X, Y, and Z in this era."
Come back from the holiday—literally the first day of work of 2025—and I got laid off. They let me go that moment. Okay?
You look at the statistics: most Americans don't have more than $400 in savings. Okay, that's the statistic. Most working Americans cannot afford a $400 emergency expense. My rent was definitely more than $400, let me tell you. I had some savings because I had wanted to move out of Texas. I was thinking Florida at the time. Well, I'm in Florida now, so that definitely ended up playing out, right?
Savings get burned through to pay my rent while I'm looking for another job, okay? Savings are gone. Next thing you know, I'm selling all my material possessions to, again, pay for rent. And then those material possessions run out. And then, an eviction notice hits the door. The eviction notice hits the door, and I've got a couple days to figure out what it is I'm going to do with no savings and no job and no ends.
I was working at Whataburger for $10 an hour. I went from working at a tech company as a system administrator, help desk technician, and phone line operator—basically, if you called their company, you were talking to me every single time. I'm doing all types of issues every day, highly skilled work that I put a lot of time into learning—to go into work at Whataburger for $10 an hour. And they were doing basically the same thing that's being done to me right now at McDonald's, wherein you're only getting scheduled to work two or three days a week, which did nothing for my rent.
So realizing that I'm going to be evicted, going to be on the street, I took it upon myself. And knowing I did not like living in the situation I was already living in, I took it upon myself to move and relocate, believing that there might be better work, believing that there might be better opportunity. I mean, that is a common thing that happens all across the country. When I was growing up, we would move damn near every year for work because, hey, there's more jobs over here. There's more economic opportunity over here. That's what poor people do.
None of this is abnormal. None of this is exceptional. None of this is something that millions of people don't face in this country. It is a common occurrence. Because what happens when you get evicted? You end up living in a cheap motel or on the streets. And because I was blessed to have built out this magazine, because I run the most trafficked, most popular politics site on NeoCities, because I jumped in on that web revival movement, I was able to come into donations from people to support me and to support my work. If I had not had those donations, I would be in a much worse situation, you see what I'm saying?
A lot of people have come at me in ways that insinuate that this magazine or this project is the reason for the struggle. "Right man, if you would just stop worrying about politics, just shut that magazine down, just lock-in, you'd be all right." But in reality, that was what I was already doing before I lost my job. The magazine was always a side hustle, a hobbyist project. I wanted to learn web design. One of the last jobs I worked in tech was me trying to get into web development as a professional, okay? The experience learned through managing a website was directly feeding into my career. These are skills that I went and learned and took upon myself for my career, right?
But this is not exceptional shit. This is not abnormal shit. What is exceptional is the fact that I'm in a position to receive those donations, okay? But the idea of people living in motels? That's normal. That's common in America. That is not something that's, "Oh my god, you got to be the lowest of all. Oh, man, nobody does that." No. There are people in this motel right now who are raising kids, are raising families. Fucking—you got two people, they're married with a kid, and they live in a motel. This is what they can afford because that's what their credit score will allow, because that's what society—the capitalist society—has deemed appropriate for them.
But I feel like because a lot of people are so used to this academically minded, well-connected, parents-paid-for-their-college type of leftist—they got the nice studio, they got the podcast in there, they got the $5,000 camera—that that is what is expected of me to be from. And that is absolutely not the case. That's not the case 100%. I'm from the fucking street. I'm from the fucking street.
There have been many times where the only reason I had food in my stomach was because I went and sold an eighth. I went and sold a quarter. And part of the reason I wanted to do the magazine is to get rid of that element of my life and put that hustle mindset into something that was productive and something that benefits society, you see what I'm saying? Because I had homies that got locked up. I had homies that did mandatory minimums. I had homies tell me stories about how they got shot over drug deals gone bad. I got a friend who had another friend get killed in a drug deal gone bad.
That's the reality. That's the reality of where I'm from. That's the reality of what I came up around. That's the reality of what I've experienced in my life. And I find that there is a disconnect between me and other leftists at times because that life, that economic base, that mode of production, that level of struggle and poverty, is alien to them.
And no wonder—you walk into any of these organizations, they're mostly white. They're 98% white. Almost every fucking person who is in these organizations is college educated.
But what I deal with every day is not abnormal. It is not foreign or alien. It is what the working masses of this country deal with. Oh, you can't get that apartment because your credit score is too low. That's a fucking common thing. How do you think people end up in motels? You end up paying week to week because you got an eviction notice on your fucking record, so regular landlords won't rent to you anymore because your credit score is too low. So when they run that credit check and they want that 650 and you got a 480, man, you ain't getting that apartment. Even if you lie about your pay stubs, you ain't getting that fucking apartment because Equifax has decided you're not deserving of it.
But fundamentally, the read is, there is a reason why our magazine, our website, and our platform, our rhetoric has been able to grow to have some level of reach. And I'm not trying to say that I can compete with these big YouTubers or these big podcasters. Evidently not—my page, our Patreon numbers don't fucking show that we can compete.
But then again, the first year of the project, the Patreon was basically like, "Yeah, we have one. There's nothing on it. There's no reason why you would sign up." People still did, and now we started pushing on it, started actually putting energy into that, and people are starting to sign up. So who knows how this shit might grow?
But the problem is, I never foresaw this being a full-time thing. I never foresaw this being something I was gonna spend all my time on. Why would I want to monetize something I'm doing for free, for the love of the game, as a side hobby, when I got a full-time job that pays my bills, you see what I'm saying? So now the dynamic has shifted. Now I have no choice but to try to make this a full-time thing because the jobs ain't paying and the rent is still simply going up.
But the rent going up is not abnormal. And I really wish that other people on the left—you know, whatever label you want to use, and the label debates always get me because they're so inconsequential to actual praxis, you know what I'm saying? It's so inconsequential to actual movement. It kind of goes back to that: everybody's been to college and everybody likes to debate. I don't like to debate. I like to do shit. So I say I'm an anarcho-communist. I'm gonna just take the two labels and put them together. We gonna take everything we can use. Simple.
But I think that it is hard for the left to understand that, for a lot of people, for millions of people in this country, it is a life or death. It is literally barbarism that they are currently living in, or revolution. So when I come at people with a more radical rhetoric, when I come at people with putting more pressure on them to move beyond electoralism and move beyond hailing the Democrats and moving beyond, you know, running stage for people who protect the police and run a stage for these little fucking nonprofit organizations—when I come at people with that energy, they get upset.
Because one, I'm imposing my own economic perspective. Because for so many people on the left, people who are in my situation—all these people who are living in this motel, the lady who works at the Circle K 20 hours a week and eats nothing but ramen noodles you can steal from the fucking counter—those people are people that are to be studied. They're people to be saved, not people who are supposed to be able to speak for themselves. So when someone says something, you got that angle of your subject that you've been studying starting to talk back to you. That's not a good vibe, right?
Then you got the other angle. You got the other angle where, because I'm in the trenches—the deepest in the trenches you can be, my brother. I'm on the street. I'm on the street. I don't got a bed to sleep in. I've been staying at a motel where the motel money ran out, so we on the street. That's life. That's how this shit works.
And I'm still putting in the work. I'm still showing up. I just joined the DSA, right? And I'm not saying that the DSA is some perfect organization, and I'm not saying that it's got all the answers. I'm saying that I'm a radical. I'm a revolutionary. I'm gonna go to this group and I'm gonna push my revolutionary politics and maybe turn it up a notch, you know what I'm saying?
But I think the fact that I'm someone who is so deep in the struggle, so very much deep in the struggle, but not giving up and still putting in the work—still writing things, still making content, still trying to reach people, still having hard conversations in real life. Man, we started a community pantry at my homie's fucking cafe he works at. Why did we start that shit? Why not push for and start that shit? Because I needed some place to get fucking food from, dog. I did that shit because I have a feeling that mutual aid is good, and because the SNAP ran out, because it was important. But fundamentally, there was a—I needed that shit, and I knew if I needed it, other people needed it too, you see what I'm saying?
And when you see somebody moving with that level of commitment—like, "Damn bro, you about to be homeless and you still ain't giving up"—that pisses some people off. Because then they see themselves, and they see their own comforts, and they see their own fucking lifestyles, and then they go, "Why haven't I done anything?" And then they get mad at me.
And it usually circles back to, "Well, you're not a real leftist because you're not, you know, you ain't even been to college, you live in the struggle." "Communism isn't a cult of poverty, go get a bag!" or the "you're just a lumpenproletariat, you're the enemy of revolution!" from people who still do their laundry at their moms house. Ever washed your clothes in the shower? Motherfucker.
I guess the moral of the story is, there's nothing exceptional about me. There's nothing exceptional about my material circumstances. We are living in an economic collapse. What the fuck do you think that was gonna look like? Is it just gonna be statistics that you can make YouTube videos about? When Second Thought gets on the fucking TV and he's talking about the rents going up, hey, somebody got to speak for the motherfucker who's getting evicted in the video. And not just from a theoretical standpoint, but from a lived experience standpoint, right? And I'm not throwing no shade at nobody. We all got a role to play.
But there ain't nothing exceptional about living in a motel. There's nothing exceptional about losing your job and losing all your material possessions and losing your car and then getting evicted and then fucking being homeless. That is literally how America works. That's how our society is set up. That's why the homeless numbers are skyrocketing. That's why the housing cost is so high. That's why all these little things that these people fucking theorize about, they have committees about, they do their charity work for… we, people like me, people like the people living right next door to me in this motel.
It's my last night in this motel, and I'm on the street. And I'm gonna still keep talking, I'm gonna still keep writing, I'm gonna still keep running this fucking magazine, and I don't give a fuck anymore if somebody wants to say, "You not a real this, you not a real that." I'm a real working-class American, born in a sacrifice zone, and I'm documenting the struggles in real time. And ain't nothing exceptional about me. And the fact that there ain't nothing exceptional about me and my circumstances should tell you that this shit is deeper and more serious than you've been thinking about it.
Because I know that a lot of people on the left have never had to choose between, "I got one packet of ramen noodles left. Do I give it to my dog, or do I have something to eat myself?" And as a dog? Imagine making that choice as a kid after you done walked through a fucking pack. You have three, four people outside, leaned out on the fent. That's where you're raising your fucking kids. That motel parking lot where the junkies gather at night? Same parking lot these kids play in. And those junkies are still humans being failed by this system, too.
This shit is bad out here, and it's going to keep getting worse. And there are going to be real human casualties to that. And all these people who want to sit on a high horse and pontificate from comfort about what revolution is, what revolution can't be, what revolution should be, should probably start listening to people who are living in the worst parts of the struggle.
