Reverend Billy Radio

Like the Hugh Masekela song “Bring Him Back Home,” which helped free Nelson Mandela from 27 years in prison, the Earth needs to be loved and returned to the forefront of our personal lives, our civic decisions, and our hope for Peace. Give the Earth so much Love that the imagination of our home becomes where we live again. With the Earth as our leader, we can hallucinate back to what's real. Imagine our way out of violent products. Yes, the Earth gives us love and asks that we continue life, creating life that, in turn, continues to love and live. Life wants life to live. But the Earth is also powerfully political, giving us Love so that we have natural world's agent of change. Love gives us the power to be radical. And here at the Sixth Extinction, we need to be radical. Oh, do we ever. Radical - right now.

One day, exhausted by sanitized Democrats, we push on that door that Trump points to with his performance of terror. The door swings open, and there before us is a valley full of puzzles, thighs, wa wa pedals, endangered swamp birds, discarded religions, executives in cages… This is chaos. Anything can happen. We move there and live in bliss. WOKELAND! Oh, we know how much power is here. We could stop bombs in mid-air and turn aircraft carriers into climate colleges. But would we want to go back? Do we have the power to go OUT the IN door and IN the OUT?

When we go into the environment where the toxic investments are prepared, and we begin to sing, and invite the bankers to find a way out of the carbon money trap, we feel their sadness. You can't delete the fire and flood; you can't delete whole cities bursting into flames. You walk around in your suit and haircut in the biggest bank in America. You know that you are, year in and year out, the top investor in poison gases and liquids in the world. Exxon is on your board, and your CEO makes $100,000 each business day. And you stand behind the carbon wall, watching the pain and suffering in the distance, shuffling your computer files with the sadness of your lost life. You know, you don't have to do this. Leave the bank with us and sing.

We can only defeat CLIMATE CHANGE ON PURPOSE and RACIST-WARS-EVERYWHERE-ALL-THE-TIME - if we are a lot weirder than our current crop of criminal clowns. There's a good reason that Philip K. Dick, Octavia Butler, and Ursula Le Guin are so popular. Science fiction can glimpse a kind of moral life so strong it can overthrow the ethno-state. The nonfiction of Mussolini & Hitler & Stalin is sobering. But then you add the Sixth Extinction, and you have an update on government by Laugh-and-Cry-Out-Loud-Cruelty. Trump casts desperate people in their role as stateless migrants so he can demonize them and then kill them as they wander the Earth looking for livable, good weather. You and I are way over here on the horizon, pulling weeds from our little garden. We know we must get some serious personal wildness before the sun goes down.

Just a spoonful of shopping makes the bombs go down the bombs go down the bombs go down. War is an active loss of our memory of the Earth. The pilots and crew of bombers are sighting the ordinance into the side of the Earth and losing their Earth Love. But you and I paying for it? What are we losing? Consumerism's wars have saturation advertising on one end of families on fire on the other. The bombing of the Earth breaks our own memory of being within the world of the Earth. Our shopping attacks memory, too, while selling the past as false nostalgia. Stop Shopping, Stop Bombing.

Trump's 2nd Inaugural address, quoted liberally in this episode, is a master class in sustained paranoid surrealism. But while he can run, he can't hide — from the Earth. With the global heatwave in its 24th month, with the worldwide storms and floods and wildfires and starvation and wars….Trump is a comedian falling through space. There will be a moment when nature's apocalypse overwhelms his entertainment, say — three tornadoes hit the White House simultaneously and the Presidential portraits fly away on an atmospheric river out of American air space.

Trump takes over the government. The Earth takes the planet. We join the Earth. Taking risks, stepping out, speaking up. Marching in the ultimate parade. THE EARTH IS ALIVE. Everything we have in us—our resistance, our strength—is given to us by the Earth and is now called forth by the living Earth. She will raise us up to our best selves. The Earth is a living being, and we are living within her. We will join the larger life that calls to us, and we will end toxins and war with fierce Love.

Saturday, did we walk back the Greatness? Saturday, did we march with simple love that the nation saw from a window? Saturday, did 50-person villages walk alongside the beautiful strangers who have been walking for months? Saturday, did our whisper reach the stranded youth facing another false American war? Saturday, did we walk out of the virtual into the actual, out of consumerism into our radical self? Saturday, did honesty appear in broad daylight and walk with us across town? Saturday, did we walk until we fell in love with breathing, singing, and believing? Saturday, did we remember to invite the dead who walked a continent into our conscience? Saturday, did we greet each other with gentleness and the look in the eye when the hand is warm? And in the days after, are we keeping that compassion and rage in us, from a special Saturday in April?

We're not ready for revolution talk, with citizen peace activists being ICEd from their homes. We're in shock. We're staring at Trump. What can we do? The violence against people and the Earth will be stopped. And we, the people, will end it. How? This week on Earth Riot Radio, we remember five heroes who faced the modern corruption of the USA, and they made their move with their bodies and spoken word, with their families and their singing... Sun Ra, Roger Hallam, Asatta Shakur, John Trudell and Edward Snowden. These courageous ones each found a personal, creative response to wage peace against the violence, artists ahead of their time. Now, they are martyred or exiled, but they lived for life.

On the Occasion of Savitri D's Birthday. We get lots of thanks for her direction of the StopShopping Church performances, and - The News from the Natural World, the heart of Earth Riot. She's our leader as we look for a new home for our chxrch, and embark on new music. This past Sunday, at our rehearsal, the choir sang the entire time. What I mean to say is that it was as if we sang one single song the entire two and a half hours, with Josh Kawan Nelson and Phillip Golub on the keyboards... we veered and soared and improvised, a sustained height of emotional outpouring. Savi, how to direct the planet's criers through many moods and smooth rides and then craziness, anger, love...

The corporation isn't pulled from its home and flown to an unknown prison down South. The corporation has more rights than we do. Only the individual who finds a way to be a corporation will have the protection of the Constitution. Only the individual who can masquerade as a crowd of people obediently looking up at their logo... only that individual who persuades the police that each of his hair follicles is a separate person, that he is a walking mass of citizens... Only that individual will pull me from my bed with just a shout, and a gun, and a flag.

Fear is hardening into a major force in the United States. But before Trump it was corporations that put fear in the display window. Fear is the new hot product. And our new cryptocurrency is ATTENTION. We can't look away from the latest hardship or arrest - that's how we buy this product. Our attention is always hunted by Trump and his team on a daily basis. Pay up as you stare! They count on us buying that people in the distance - in any sense - are dangerous. But Trump's flaw is that in the distance is also the Earth, which will soon take all our attention away. Donald! Try to look away from that 3-mile-wide tornado! Look at the flying house! Just like the movie! Oh no! It's the White House!

When there's so much love in me that we cross the property line of a climate criminal called JPMorgan... we know that behind the desks, there is love to light up inside Chase. It took 9 weeks. all the way into March, to figure out a new year's resolution for the Stop Shopping Chxrch. It's the promise that we keep singing: "Can we be Strange Enough to Change Enough?" And we could say "Love Enough," because Love is the agent of the kind of change that we need to evolve in these dangerous days. As toxicity from Big Oil tries to take over our public life, our bodies, our minds.. they won't get our Love! In our love is creativity, the "magic Other," the evolving soul, the strangeness that they ridicule but want for themselves. That is the seed of the future that they will never touch. Love-a-lujah!

How many personality disorders does it take to cancel compassion on a worldwide scale? Is there a permaculture instruction manual that can help us rewild western culture? Is there a practical solution to large-scale soul-lessness? Can we move against the White Nationalist Christian Capitalism with armies of cuddly love, erotic atmospheric rivers? Or am I trying to describe music. Yes, a love song so powerful it puts ear-worms in the rotting ears of the Pure Hate Putz.

Like the survivors of Hurricane Helene, we are bombarded with conspiracy theories, with the news that the super storms are brought to life in test tubes by leftist mad scientists. We know it's time to move into the subway. You have to wonder. Folks are not responding to climate change. And if, like the Blue Ridge people who drowned in a year's worth of rain downpouring in a single day, you actually experience the Sixth Extinction's reality, then ex-marines high on angel dust cappuccinos will hunt you down with bowel-movement-inducing conspiracies. Your tragedy won't be permitted to be real. So, the entire staff of Earth Riot Radio has moved into the F Train. Let the 200 mph winds and boiling ocean waves and biological germ warfare bombs that escaped from the Cold War roll down the streets above…

Trump bulldozes your home then withdraws. Your recovery: You start over with shock and stillness.   You achieve total aloneness. Disorientation that you can own. You lose yourself, like grieving for a friend who set you free. Then turn to the Earth, who knows replenishment and love. The warmth that comes from infinite complexity like a forest floor, which gives you a new basement, a place to begin again. A strongman knocks down your meaning of life.

They put the Con in Conspiracy. They blame the Earth for Cannibal Capitalism. Most investor class people, moving their money mindlessly around from fossil fuel to crypto to hedge — they don't care what they buy and sell. They then disappear into the forested suburbs, nowhere land of the nowhere man. They hide in the Earth's beauty. They are nice guys and gals in the woodsy wealth-burbs, hiding in the very Earth that they otherized, the basis of their racism. But the Earth made them rich by being extracted from, burned, drowned, and poisoned. These nice folks are the ultimate unnatural disaster.

Wounded Knee, Palestine, Jordan Nealy, Transexuals banned from the army, #metoo y Un Violador en Tu Camino, and - Palestine. The freedom-fighters always believed. How could the many lives sacrificed in resistance not be enough to reveal to all of us - the big life that we are all a part of, the Earth? Are the liar politicians & racist cops & the fossil fuel billionaires still in power? The Earth has the power because our communities are strong with love. Do we see the Earth beckoning to us in the distance like a tourist trap? The Earth is here with us, but with all the fire and flood, our love gets lost in the fear. The Earth is everywhere, evolving her justice. Earthalujah!

Something is broken in the relationship between Hurricane Helene and us humans. It's a communication thing. Something is silenced between the Los Angeles fires and you and me. How could we not get the message? How could we not see? Background:  The Earth is a medium.  They are everywhere all the time. (The Earth is non-binary) .... their communicating vibrates through our bodies, like strong singing in the air & water & soil  — it's unconditional everywhere all-the-time. The Earth stops the disaster. Then the Earth waits. Will we blow it again? The Earth keeps waiting for us, making laughing music in the trees. The Earth waits in Altadena & Cherokee & Palisades & Mars Hill & Eaton….  this show is dedicated to Miss Owl-Feathers, Savitri D, who watches our community

This week on Earth Riot Radio, Savitri D guest hosts and leads us through the divine ignition of fire in the cosmos to its modern infernos fueled by greedy executives directing fossil fuel corporations. We confront the flames that shape, sustain, and threaten life. Fire is the sacred, untamed force that births civilizations and scorches fragile life on Earth. Guest host Savitri D speaks about humanity's relationship with combustion—how it lifted us from the caves to community and blazes across modernity in the age of climate crisis. Burn the fossil fuels of destruction; ignite the revolution of love and renewal!

How Do We Feel? Immersed In Worldwide Confusion? None of our activism is working. The hottest 19 months in the last 100,000 years are the last 19 months. How do we talk to the only activist about what to do? We have taken a giant step into the Sixth Extinction. All the national pledges for controlling carbon emissions have failed. Our international climate conferences last year, biodiversity in Colombia, reparations in Azerbaijan, plastics in Korea - were ambushed by corporate saboteurs, marketers and lawyers... And we can't stop our fossil fuel Consumerism! We need to drive the screens out of our brains! Earthalujah!

2024. What the Hell happened?  This was the year that rushed up at us like a freak storm. This year, all the eco-systems were fully committed to the Sixth Extinction, and so are we. 2025. We awake from a deep sleep and change completely. Our bodies are ecosystems, too, knowing the Earth. This is a wild party we can't refuse.  Our clothes are tearing, and the wind is peeling away our walls.  We searched, but we found that our logical thinking was gone.  We must find our love.  Make the Earth's storm more wild?  Nothing can change without our love. The Church of Stop Shopping is directed by Savitri D The Fiery Eagles of Justice are Brendan Burke (drums) & Jason Candler (sax) Most songs by Sunder Ganglani, William Talen, and Savitri D Produced by Reverend Billy Edited by Jason Candler Natural News by Savitri D This show is part of Pantheon Podcasts. Reverend Billy is William Talen. www.revbilly.com

Are you unable to listen to looping Mariah Carey and watch people drag dying trees to their living rooms while the bombs fall on families? Christmas is tawdry and reprehensible. There are live trees in our neighborhood within walking distance. They are the monarchs of an only partially harmed ecosystem, but the natural world is our path to freedom from violent fundamentalism and its religious holidays. It's tough this year with the take-over of our government by hard-right apocalyptic criminal Xtian freaks. The wilderness whistles and moans with power they cannot imagine - now THAT is the birth worth celebrating! A Rewilded Christ!

It is the time to dream, to arrange for protective custody of our souls. The violence against the human and the more-than-human is declared and already in evidence. The species vanish into extinction as the Earth sweeps through the forests and swamps and deserts with wildfire and flood, and the message to us is that we join her in an ultimate freedom. Like Captain Paul Watson and the Whales.

"Revolution makes the Revolutionary." That is a quote in this week's show. The Sixth Evolution will lift nationhood from us. Read me my rights. The tidal wave of Evolution throws us against the Empire State. Oh we ride toxins to the top of the wind. Crouch in a house-fire, waiting for a climate criminal to get into his Mercedes. We are living shock as a way of life. Like doing your yoga during a car accident.

A healthy whale is a big profit-center just swimming out there for the taking. The sea has very little enforceable law. It's all very watery. The Japanese whaling industry wants one of the great earth-defending heroes of our time to go to prison for “throwing a stink-bomb” at a Japanese citizen on one of their massive death ship/factories. The murdered whale is conveyor-belted up into the hold of the ship and the products from the whales body are spit out the other side as consumable items. This is an old COLONIAL HELL and can't happen to a defender of life of the stature of Captain Paul Watson's. We believe that ultimately, the immorality will prove a harpoon-dulling shield for these gangesters.  

Is any resistance to our carbon-based life style gonna happen? For years now screaming doomsayers have predicted these drowning and burning cities, the starvation and drought and disease. Is the Sixth Extinction underway? This week, with music from Common and the Fiery Eagles of Justice and The Stop Shopping Choir and lots of bullfrogs…. We ask: Can We be Strange Enough To Change Enough?  

Trump is trying to build a wall.  The Earth eats walls.  Trump puts fear in dreams.  The Earth puts love in dreams.  The Earth puts love in dreams to keep out the fear.  The Earth is what people are made of, the materials of the Earth and the electricity in a thought and a beating heart and --- We are agents of the Earth.  The Earth is life making life and we are living the lives that the Earth loves.

The Earth is everywhere all the time, it's you and me and the ideas, pixels and bad breath that connect us. The Earth is in charge and what they (the Earth is non-binary, we believe in the Church of Stop Shopping) - what they are working hard at just now is something called the Sixth Extinction. In the Earth Riot Radio world this is what has replaced the nation state, religion and military. It is deep, extreme Evolution. Oh Earthalujah! Spare us! Give us a strange strength we have never known! And may we laugh till we die!

The only way back to radical change is Through justice for all people, and Justice for all living things. One of those living things is  all of life put together, the planet Earth. The only way back to any life at all is Loving the Earth!

Every show rocked with pandemonium at the end. Then people wouldn't leave. Our 12 singers and musicians joined an audience that became a party that became a town hall meeting.  They stayed to talk and listen with such conviction that they impacted the content of the next performance. (We had 3 performances in two days in London.)  The idea that the  Earth is alive, communicating with us; that we are entering a new era of Earth activism; that the Earth is the leading activist and that we should wait for the signs. Standard "Earth Riot Radio preaching" yes, but still, this intensity surprised us. People are looking for radical  change in how they share life with this living Earth. Earthalujah!

We don't know what it will take to stop the climate catastrophe. We haven't found it yet. Let's look everywhere for a way to stop this great machine; there must be a weak link there somewhere. One approach: Pull out and re-direct some part of the machine that they assume can never disobey, like a highway cone, like you and me...

Today's Earth Riot is for you activists. Keep talking to the Earth as you risk arrest, crossing the property-line, of a criminal organization like Chevron. You are both talking to yourself, because you are the Earth, and you are talking to the Earth outside of you. But don't let the Earth be inside you only, you'll lose your place  in the world. And don't let the Earth be outside you only, because then you are a tourist. Let the Earth be inside and outside, and the only analogy that really works is the inside/outside relationship of a lover.

Earth must flood us all and downpour you and I into the valley below when we have built up a false border with our fear. Defeat the religions, militaries, nation states and racial hatred... Borders need to be washed away now, and fear made useless. In this "flying" episode from June of 2023 we flow the borders away with flood and flight. This is the project of love that the Earth is calling for, and the Earth couldn't be clearer as the hurricanes keep coming and all we have to offer is war.

Every Human and More than Human has a song to sing and we have a variety of singers this week, from Nigeria to LA to NYC to Ecuador to South Africa to a swelling wave of Snow Geese... There is an unmistakable swing in institutions from Peace to Violence - you see it in religions, corporations, nation-states. Official fear everywhere. But - the Earth is alive with living beings singing and deep in the melody and beat there is a shout of Peace-a-lujah!

The “repetition” of the song's “melody-tone tempo,” she explains, provides a shared sonic “meeting place” and “stage” where our emotions can temporarily liberate individual identities. What Savitri D calls the “transformational potential” of singing with other people and (we would add), singing with the songs that radiate from the forest at night, a coral reef, an alpine meadow... Your favorite eco-system has a symphony of songs. Sing along and have your action.

In this week's "Earth Riot" we bring in Estonia, where song-power is demonstrated by Estonia's resistance to Stalinism and Nazism with huge concerts starring the whole country! and - Chile, resisting the fascist Pinochet and his killers with the songs of Victor Jara and the womens' chanting dance: "The Rapist in Your Path".  From our own continent we have Sam Cooke believing that "A Change is Gonna Come" and Ojibwai drummers up in their spirit, as your hosts Savitri D and Reverend Billy hold forth with the Earth's soundtrack.  Earthalujah!   

So here we go. I know a theatrical woman named Lois Weaver who says "The Only Way Home Is Through the Show". Well, amended to reflect our current world-wide inferno, we could say "The Only Way Home Is Through the Heat Wave". Or the only way home is through our money-sucking karma, our religious wars, our fetish for forever toxins. But please - I want to preach about how to LOVE.

We are the "Earthchxrch", and for 20 years we were "The Church of Stop Shopping" - and emerging from the lie of virtuality was our thing. But now, with every month a record-breaking nightmare of heat, and the scientists telling us that the computer modeling doesn't work anymore because everything is exploding, we are left alone with the Earth. The Earth gives us the gift of the Unknown, the fabulous Unknown, and we are humble for the first time. What are we to do? Tell us.

The riddle of our time is:  How could we remain so passive, when the violence is so near and so well-known in every way.  We know the perpetrators, their bank accounts, the location and operation of their greed. Every month for the last 14 months has been the hottest on record.  The scientists who reported what weather to expect based on computer models now say that the exponential rate of climate change makes those sophisticated estimates impossible.  They are throwing away the computers and making a run for it.  Thousands of species are disappearing while flood and fire comes roaring up the valley of zombified consumers. We can't escape the prison of convenience.  The thing is, we still have the offer to participate in this apocalypse.  The Earth waits for us.

Like the tour with Neil Young last spring, we are being allowed to celebrate our radical Earth activism in a surprising new setting. In both cases, an opening was provided for us to walk out of our 99-seat storefront and shout Earthalujah! to millions.   

The storms and wildfires and floods are a daily apocalypse that we mistake for sense-surround blockbusters. The Earth's violent insistence on a new realism for its chief predator is beginning to move some of us.  But we are years away from a new "Earth Movement”.  We don't even have the most basic things all successful social movements have: hot music and scathing comedy. 

The necessary revolution is here in this extraordinary moment. Our only task is to live up to it. The Earth's 6th Extinction is not demanding a response within our quiver of desire, or our strategy, or even our reverence. It is happening, that's all. And a new Wisdom must come from us.

The Earth is quickly changing us. Everything everywhere is undergoing unprecedented change and this change sees the surfacing of the once hidden Empress of Secrets.  It is the Earth's gift in this time of apocalypse.  Silicon Valley, the Pentagon and M and M's are camouflaging the surface around us with a thick coat of dullness, but the Earth is peeling off that virtual reality.  Then she turns and looks us in the eye. In that evolution is a geo-genetic hope, the creation of new life. 

The Sunday "Earthchxrch" services remain so fulfilling, the soaring voices with their justice lyrics delivered with the 200 mph wind of recent storms. The choir sings I Go The Mountain and I'm Filled with the Fabulous Unknown from our new album. And we celebrate in this Earth Riot some of our greatest "necessary interruptions": Sister Rosetta Tharp, Elvis Presley and Big Mama Thornton, James Brown and Richard Strauss's Thus Spake Zarathustra. The Earth will rock our world until we don't recognize what we are doing, and then the survivors can begin again. 

Today's Importance Exercise:  What's more important?  Atmospheric rivers over the Pacific, or artificial intelligence in Silicon Valley?  The rise in carbon units per million, or crypto currency market rates?  Suicides among young native Americans or celebrities-on-the-cover-of-PEOPLE who got sober and remarried?  The trillions in profits from toxins by the four dirtiest American Banks - Chase, B of A, Wells and Citi? ...or any point being made in the thousands of pages of their quarterly reports?

Since the Earth's crisis gives us months or maybe years, gradualism is a faster kind of suicide. Every one of our prayers needs to be like an ambulance, flooring it right at the emergency. Scientists say that most of reality is a whirlwind of subatomic particles called Dark Energy. So, we are stranded on a desperate little human island, while Dark Energy rages bafflingly over and through everything. This is the Fabulous Unknown. We trust the deepest space with our wildest imagination and that's our church. Earthalujah!  

Asks Neil to please name his band after the mystic who met George Armstrong Custer at Little BigHorn, and Neil, open your set with Cortez the Killer.  Let in the Earth radicals from where? Who are they? … let the unknown arrestees take the stage to shout for the Earth's life.  Ask dazzling Daryl Hannah, can she please produce the harmonizing tree-huggers from the third row.  As your hits take us to our memories, may nostalgia never be the same again, because only illegal Earth actions will give us a ride home from the concert.

Yet our neighborhoods continue to drift toward a great mono-culture, deadly to play and resistance. The physical characteristics of the city are against the body, against the poor and people of color. We are more aware of the attack on us by the rich since Black Lives Matter, Standing Rock, and Occupy Wall Street. These are the great freedom rides away from the institutions that rope-a-dope the Peaceful ones. We love the Earth and we feel safer in the brave play of healthy communities.  

Dreams of liberation and laughter, freedom and love. When we get up our dreams turn into music and the more-than-human creatures sing in passionate harmonies, preparing to pull our dreams into action in broad daylight. The melody and beats that dreamily echo in our bodies make a common song shared by all living things as we march on the fossil poisoners.

The Earth's every measurement, every single set of numbers we can give to the sky-rocketing heat, the sea-rise and wind-speed of storms and Iowa tornadoes and drowned polynesian islands... all the mass death of wild-life as well as the mass war of humans... it is all deadly-looking. But look we must, and the first thing we see is that many others, including the experts standing behind the pillars of major institutions - are simply ignoring this apocalypse. Well, for them modernity must really be a dazzling, shiny thing.