They Promised Me a Two-Car Garage. I Chose To Go After Billionaires Instead
The Ruling Class bailed out bankers while families slept in cars. They promised me stability and gave me a burning planet. So I stopped playing their game.
It will surprise absolutely no one to learn that a white boy named Davidson Boswell grew up in the suburbs of the south. I am not a sympathetic character, but I know there are millions like me, so I write this article for them, to tell the story of how I became radicalized and hope it will help you do the same as we fight for a livable planet.
Everything about my existence was planned and my family expected me to follow said plan. I grew up among self-same white-paneled houses in self-same cul-de-sacs with self-same new growth trees that were intended to serve as the barrier between a screaming, broiling world, and our manicured lawns. We would all attend the same schools, take the same swim lessons, marry the same people, drink the same booze, crash the same cars, watch the same movies and we would all have children and they would do the same thing.
That was the plan at least.
But even as a young, angry kid I could not shake the feeling that something ominous was coming. And then, the great hand of the outside started knocking at our doors.
I remember pretending to be sick so I could watch in private from the school infirmary room as the South Tower of the World Trade Center came down. This was the first sign that my manufactured world was fraying at the edges and threatening to come undone. Even when I was twelve, when I saw George Bush say that we were going to war, I couldn’t help but wonder what the point of studied manners were when life was seemingly going to become an endless fight.
Another thing I learned after the invasion of Iraq was that it was time to ‘pick a side’. Would I watch CNN or Fox News? Was I supposed to be scared of Arabs, or REALLY scared of arabs. These men and women in pants suits would be the oracles through which I would understand all the plight and suffering of the world around me that seemed too difficult to parse. The internet was young, but at least I had Anderson Cooper.
Wolf Blitzer or Sean Hannity were there to hammer out reality, flatten it into a shape I could put in my pocket and continue down on my merry way to my two car garage life. Megyn Kelly or Katie Couric could transmute acts of what I now understand as acts of resistance into acts of terrorism and the terrorism into acts of heroism. Tucker Carlson and Van Jones could make the dying planet, the hotter summers, seem somewhat acceptable, as long as I understood that preservation of a nebulous concept like the economy was paramount.
I was told that homeless people had to exist because the alternative was communism, and communism had never worked anywhere it was tried. I was told “Don’t give the poor your money, donate it to a charity, the charity will know what to do with it.”
This was the liberalism I was raised on.
I learned new phrases from the TV: “continued energy security” for when oil spills in the gulf happened and oil drenched seagulls pictures were shown. And “job creators” for when Wall Street detonated a nuke inside the economy, almost bringing down capitalism with it. But the oil leak was plugged and the bonuses to the bankers went out and, at least in my world, those that survived it pretty much went on with new, more diminished lives.
All the world made sense if you never really paused to think. AND if you worked yourself to exhaustion everyday then zoned out in front of NBC’s The Apprentice before heading to bed, you could sort of stumble on.
The dream of stability and fences of new growth trees was attainable, I just needed to continue to ignore the subtext of what I was beginning to read in high school. A life of downers and down comforters awaited me if I could just ignore the themes in those books — the warnings of F. Scott Fitzgerald and Sylvia Plath, that modernity and the worship of capital were hollow and would only lead to spiritual self-harm and communal annihilation.
These warnings from brilliant authors who both lived such short lives were of no concern of mine. I just got my first debit card. These authors didn’t have the same stuff I did, they didn’t have access to the same Coors Light, they never were able to order pizza to their house in 30 minutes and play Halo 3. I could just read these books and not overanalyze why they made me feel so sad.
I would begin to read some philosophy, nothing too difficult, Camus and Voltaire who wrote not too academically but more the way people speak. I heard that was good for law school. Just read philosophy to learn how to argue, but never to digest what the authors wrote about. If I learned how to argue, but never who to argue with, I could be safe and secure.
In the not so distant future there would be days where the sky was orange and I would watch the red sun set from my midtown office and I would know, that I had wasted my life.
And then something happened. It was in my second semester of college, not knowing yet who I was or what I wanted from my directionless life, I had opted to spend what I was always told would be the *best years of my life* the second semester of my Freshman year, as I took classes both boring and fascinating alike at Wofford College in Spartanburg South Carolina. Wofford was an oasis of greenery in an old mill town whose industrial base was gone — sacrificed on the twin pillars of globalization and financialization. The textile mills were but falling down brick husks covered in kudzu. Their insides ripped out long ago as the mass layoffs that helped fuel Wall Street’s meteoric rise began in waves. Gone too was all the heavy machinery — sold off wholesale in the 80s and 90s factories all over Southeast Asia.
This is straight out of the private equity playbook. Buy a company. Load it with debt. Extract millions in *management fees*. Fire the workers. Sell what’s left. Then walk away rich while the town dies. Firms like Bain, KKR, and Blackstone built empires gutting American manufacturing this way.
I spent my days studying through hangovers, the Rodger Milliken science center. Milliken was the one who owned all the aforementioned de-industrialized textile mills. He was a member of the anti-semitic John Birch society, known for its vehement opposition to the civil rights movement. And in those halls I read the writings of Malcolm X and Kwame Toure, men that the Roger Milliken would have hated. The hypocrisy of that that knocked me flat.
The names of racist capitalist emblazoned on liberal arts college’s buildings would be a trend I would continue to notice. It happened the world over. Predatory capitalists like the Sacklers — the architects of the opioid crisis — plastering their names on museums like the Guggenheim. Right wing oil tycoons like Charles and David Koch emblazoning their names on the Lincoln Center and the Natural History museum. It was my first taste of systemic hypocrisy, made all the more rich because I was taking classes on civil rights leaders in the science halls named after men who would have rather seen Malcolm and Martin drawn and quartered than exalted and studied.
And this contradiction made me think about how much more I idolized activism over industry. About how much greater the feeling would be if I could change this ill begotten world than try to adapt my morals and values to the whims of industries helmed by greedy racists.
And, as I studied, hungover, high, and increasingly aware of the fact that material comfort for the middle class was going to continue to winnow down to nothing, until the nation was back to its sweat shop factory, company town-union busting pre New Deal days I saw a nascent movement that shone bright, from the city that I would someday soon call home.
I speak, of course, about Occupy Wall Street.
Obama’s first term, especially the second half of it, was characterized by selling out the grassroots movement that elected him. Not one on Wall Street banker, or federal regulator or loans officers was prosecuted for their crimes — their reckless back room dealing, their predatory lending that demolished the economy and sentenced millions of Americans to the loss of their jobs, home and dignity. In fact, they were exalted and then installed into Obama’s cabinet.
Men like Hank Paulson and Timothy Geithner, former Goldman Sachs execs oversaw Wall Street’s bailout. The men who helped create the crisis, deepened it when they helped their friends retain their bonuses while thousands were evicted and millions were pushed into poverty. Richard S Fuld, the man who bet Lehman Brothers on subprime mortgages, and held a proverbial shotgun to the temple of our economy if the government did not step in with trillions of dollars of tax payer money to shore up his gambling losses still walks free today, a billionaire.
All these men and women, whose actions led to a wave of suicides and drug addiction from citizens who lost everything, who led to a economic downturn that radicalized a generation of working class men to the far right — forever coarsening their hearts and allowing demagogues like Trump to take power — faced no consequences. They are now, all richer than they were back then, sipping martinis, and watching our increasingly amber colored sun rise.
It was at this moment in my personal life, and our nation’s history, that I learned that it was our current system that was rotten, not just the hearts of a few men.
And, in keeping with theme of systemic rot, I would say — more than any single figure of my lifetime — Obama was the most radicalizing of all. By trading on the currency of my idealism and hope, and then instantly betraying it by cozying up to Goldman Sachs, JP Morgan, Exxon Mobile, and Lockheed Martin, he put my hope and my faith in electoral politics through a thresher. A thresher that it would be re-fed through every subsequent election afterward. Eric Holder — Obama’s Attorney General who refused to prosecute the banks — went right back to Covington & Burling, the firm that represented those same banks. Tim Geithner went to Warburg Pincus, a private equity firm.
The revolving door spun. And they all got richer.
And now, in 2025, the same class is back in power. Trump’s cabinet is packed with Wall Street executives, private equity partners, and fossil fuel CEOs. Different administration. Same revolving door. Same class war.
I watched Democrats fail again and again to stop fascism. Where the whims of billionaires were placed above the demands of the people over and over again.
Occupy Wall Street, was a short lived movement from 2011 whose impact reverberated out to the rest of the world. What was so intoxicating about it, was that it was the first movement I found that seemed to actually address the structural inequality in America, and was not afraid to name a villain — the 1%.
Occupy Wall Street fell apart as the movement became distracted by internal divisions and outside agitators. In November 2011, police violently cleared the encampment from Zuccotti Park — a private park in the financial district, literally surrounded by the headquarters of Goldman Sachs, McKinsey, Deloitte, Brookfield, and BlackStone. The same firms that are buying up every single-family home in America. The same firms privatizing daycare and retirement homes. The same firms turning us into a permanent underclass of renters.
Occupy Wall Street changed the conversation around class in the country (it is where the term “the 1%” comes from) and sparked a wave of populism that gave us national candidates like Zohran Mamdani, Bernie Sanders and, unfortunately, Donald Trump too. And in my mind solidified that New York is where I wanted to be, and started to make clear that activism — the almost holy act of rebellion against a system that makes it impossible to envision a future for your children, breathable air, or drinkable water — was the only way forward for me.
When I moved to New York after college to pursue standup comedy, the collective heartbeat of our planet became even more faint. Trump’s election, a global pandemic, skyrocketing inflation, genocides in Gaza and Sudan, and the city I came to love flooding over and over again, necessitated my direct action.
I abandoned all hope of constructing a fake world for myself that was removed from the howls of world by a gated community with an armed guard. I was going to cast my lot in with the 99%. I was not going to play the ruling class’s game any more. I was going to rebel.
And this is how I came to my work with Climate Defiance. This is how I became radicalized.
Next up, it is you.
No matter what your level of comfort, climate breakdown and fascism is coming. Now is not the time to stand idly by. Now is the time to fight back.
TAKE ACTION
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There can be no compromise with a system that monetizes our suffocation. Radicalization creeps in as the return of reason to a world in chaos. Like you’ve said, it all has to break. We have it in our power to begin the world over again, but only if we have the courage to dismantle the one that is killing us.
Thank you for sharing. I love your writing - it is beautiful and inspiring.