Deeply, Deeply Diseased

The Trillbilly Worker’s Party podcast was started in 2017 by three, radical and left-leaning friends in Whitesburg, Kentucky. Tarence Ray, Tom Sexton, and Tanya Turner talk politics  (lambasting folks on both sides of the aisle), religion, sex, class, and money, and they don't hold back. They are self-avowed propagandists, offering a distinctive anticapitalist voice with a sense of humor and a Southern twang — though your nana might want to wash their mouths out with soap!

Story by Cy Brown | Photographs by Natasha Raichel

July 28, 2020

Tom Sexton, Tanya Turner, and Tarence Ray are the hosts of the Trillbilly Worker’s Party Podcast. Using the South — and Appalachia, specifically — as a lens, the Trillbillies zero in on the failures of late-capitalism and the importance of class in American society.

Slowly and steadily, in the years since their 2017 launch, the Trillbillies have cultivated a strong following. They release two episodes: one free to the masses on Thursday and another for paying Patreon subscribers on Sunday. In their time on the air, they’ve interviewed luminaries such as Sturgill Simpson, Nick Offerman, and any number of leftist thinkers. They’ve also presented some of the most intelligent, biting pontification on national and regional politics the South has to offer as well as plenty of uproarious, brain-smoothening gags, in the best possible sense, along the way. Using the South — and Appalachia, specifically — as a lens, the Trillbillies zero in on the failures of late-capitalism and the importance of class in American society.

“Our show is a good sneak peek into what younger and cusping on not-so-young people’s lives are like under late-capitalism, but in a specific context,” Sexton said.

Sanders went on to win the Nevada Caucus, and his lane to the nomination seemed wide open at the time. Single-payer healthcare, an expanded welfare state, an end to the Forever Wars, meaningful policy that addresses the coming climate disaster, a more egalitarian society and plenty of other ideas the Trillbillies and other like-minded folks had long been propagating seemed within reach.

But that was the high point of the Sanders campaign, and a week later, everything came crashing down. With Sanders surging, the powers that be in the Democratic Party coalesced around Joe Biden the night before the South Carolina primary and that was that. Sanders stayed in the race for a few more weeks, but his presence was perfunctory. The race was over, and the young leftist movement that had rallied around Sanders was defeated.

Had that been the only thing that happened, this story would have been much different than the one I initially set out to write. But, as we all know, that wasn’t the only thing that happened.

A few weeks later, the coronavirus, which had been known by most Americans only as a word in a headline on Twitter, became a full-fledged pandemic. We retreated to our hovels and watched helplessly as the world changed  before our eyes.

Sanders dropped out in early April, about a month after the country began to shut down, and COVID-19 swept across the nation. The cruel irony of it is that the need for policies that Sanders and leftists such as the Trillbillies have called for came into stark relief as thousands got sick or died and millions lost their jobs.

“It’s reinforced a lot of what we’ve been saying,” Turner said. “The system is a fucking house of cards. It’s built on complete bullshit. The violence of capitalism is laid so bare right now.”

There is no intro to a Trillbillies episode. Occasionally, you’ll get a spontaneous rendition of something like “Down on the Farm” by Tim McGraw as a sort of impromptu sound check, but that’s as close as you’ll ever get to a formal introduction. They just start talking like old friends. 

When you hear the Trillbillies talk, there is zero doubt about which side of the Mason-Dixon they’re from. Ray, who hails from New Mexico, has a considerably more neutral accent than either of his co-hosts, but Sexton’s deep drawl and Turner’s twang are unmistakably eastern Kentucky.

Hearing the Trillbillies off-mic is similar to hearing them on-mic. There’s a bit more shorthand and dropping of proper nouns, names of people and places you’d only know if you’re in their circle, but there’s plenty of that on the show, too.

As an episode begins, the topics of discussion are rarely serious. A recent example would be an extended riff on Bob Dylan giving the birds-and-bees talk to his son, Wallflowers singer Jakob Dylan, complete with passable impressions of both. It’s the kind of inane joke that only works when all involved are at total ease around each other.

But episodes also provide plenty of substance. Ray provides the research for each episode, which usually consists of a few articles or news stories they can give their perspectives on. Those, however, are just jumping off points for wider, free-flowing conversations that often lead back to the same end roads: the failures of capitalism and the importance of class.

“You can’t grow up in eastern Kentucky and not hear union stories and not know about some type of labor history,” Turner said. “That class consciousness is in the water.”

Both Sexton and Turner come from southeastern Kentucky counties, Letcher and Bell, respectively, which flank the more famous Harlan County on either side. They both describe themselves as “trailer trash” and were raised by single mothers. But they each arrived at their class analysis of the world in different ways.

Sexton grew up in Section 8 housing in Whitesburg, which put class dynamics on full display from an early age. In a literal other-side-of-tracks scenario of a basketball court shared by the kids from the projects and the kids from a more affluent neighborhood across the road, he saw class dynamics play out in real time.

“Growing up in that context, with all the trappings of poverty in this country, gave me a sense of the importance of how everyone should have a dignified life, and no one should worry about their healthcare or their housing or what they’re gonna eat.”

Before that, though, he had the importance of labor and class laid out to him through his family.

“We had always been social democrats,” Sexton said. “My grandad was a UMWA (United Mine Workers of America) miner and that commitment and premium we put on the importance of labor and the dignity of labor was imparted on me from a young age.”

Turner took a bit longer to stumble upon her class analysis of the world. A first-generation college student in a family of 30 cousins on her mother’s side, she attended Eastern Kentucky University, where she originally planned to study to be a teacher because, “if you grow up around here and you’re a girl, you’re either gonna be a nurse or a teacher.”

After a while, though, she realized that while she loved learning, she didn’t much care for school and would be miserable in a classroom the rest of her life. So she changed majors to sociology, mainly because enough of her credits would transfer over and still allow her to graduate on time; but she also found a passion for the subject matter. With help from some radical professors, including a Marxist, she began rethinking a lot about her upbringing, specifically what she thought about coal mining.

“People that I knew — my uncles, my cousins, people I went to school with — the sacrifices that they were making had really not occurred to me,” she said. “And the more you learn about union history, the darker it gets to think about what people had to go through just to live and not live very well at that.”

Ray, who grew up in West Texas and New Mexico oil country, had a childhood that crossed class lines. When Ray was young, his father worked at an oil field supply store as a yard hand. Over the years, he worked his way up to sales, then middle management, eventually becoming the manager of the store. With that, came a move from a small house with a yard full of “car parts and other shit” to a considerably larger house in a more affluent neighborhood when Ray reached high school.

“They literally moved up class, from lower middle class to upper middle class,” he said. “Any time you cross class lines like that, it’s going to change how you see the world.”

Ray was sick throughout his childhood. He had bad asthma as well as kidney stones that forced him into an extended hospital stay during high school and almost led to a kidney transplant. During this time, he also “really got into Christianity.” Although he’s no longer a Christian, much of what he learned and believed led to his adoption of socialism as the cornerstone of his political beliefs.

“From a young age, the whole Christianity thing was supposed to be about working toward a better world, because that was the teachings of Jesus,” he said. “And I took that seriously.”

Whitesburg, Kentucky, was “ground zero for the anti-strip mining movement,” as Sexton describes it. The roots of that stem back to 1956, when Tom and Pat Gish purchased The Mountain Eagle, Whitesburg’s local newspaper. Under the Gish’s leadership, The Mountain Eagle became the first paper in the area that was adversarial to the coal industry by reporting on the environmental damage caused by strip mining. Over the years, activists, nonprofit organizations and federal programs took root in Whitesburg, transforming it into the epicenter of environmental activism in Appalachia. 

It was in Whitesburg that the Trillbillies began. Turner has been there for the past 10 years, settling there after some post-college bumping around. Sexton returned in 2012 to run for city council after hearing Bill Clinton give a speech at the Clinton Presidential Library, where he was working at the time. Sexton eventually won that race on a literal coin toss of a Sacagawea dollar. Around that same time, Ray made the big move from Austin, Texas, to eastern Kentucky after joining the Americorp VISTA program and getting a job for a local nonprofit.

Like in any small town where everyone knows everyone, it’s well-nigh impossible for three young townies with similar political leanings not to cross paths and strike up friendships. Eventually, the three began working together for local community radio station WMMT, which is operated by Appalshop.

In 2014, Ray and Sexton began hosting “Digital Bedroom,” a quasi-precursor to the Trillbillies. Each of the trio featured on and hosted an assortment of shows on the station over the next few years. Most notably, they were part of a rotating cast of DJs for “Hip-Hop from the Hilltop” and “Calls from Home,” a show that broadcasts messages from family and friends to the people incarcerated in more than seven prisons in the station’s footprint. 

“The point of the show [is] to give people free communication in and outside of the prison to better connect people,” Turner said. “But it was also to change the narrative about who was locked up. The dominant media frame is, ‘There are guilty, evil maniacs locked up in jails. We need jails.’ That’s just a complete lie. Most people in jail were never even convicted. They were convinced to do some fucking plea deal and never even went to trial.”

It was their time with “Calls from Home” that served as the spark that would eventually lead the three to an even greater political awakening.

There had long been rumors about a prison coming to Letcher County, almost to the point where it had become a running joke to locals. But the jokes disappeared when U.S. Rep. Hal Rogers finally got money allocated for his pet project in 2016. But instead of letting the prison get built without any pushback, Ray, Sexton, Turner, and some other like-minded locals got together and formed the Letcher Governance Project (LGP) to put a stop to it.

“At the time, it sat at the intersection of a lot of things. It had obviously been going on all the time, but we were seeing people murdered by police in a way that we hadn’t before,” Sexton said. “It also sat at the intersection of the environmental movement, that our town was ground zero for in a lot of ways. They wanted to build these prisons on these old strip mines, and it just becomes a human rights issue. These guys have to live up there, they have to drink that water, they have to breathe that air, and they have no autonomy in the matter.”

“America’s very good at obscuring all the ways in which we are oppressed, but our show is trying to lift that veil and articulate all the various ways in which you are being held down,” Tarence Ray said. “And that’s true whether you’re in Brooklyn or you’re in rural Kentucky or wherever. It may look a little different, but the broad strokes match up."

The trio had long worked for various nonprofits — Sexton and Turner still do — but that work had cast some doubt over the efficacy of nonprofit work in some areas. The LGP was created as a decidedly not-for-profit organization, which would function more akin to a local chapter of the Democratic Socialists of America. Which is to say, no paid organizers, all volunteers.

After building an organization to stop the prison, the LGP had to decide on the tactics it would use to meet their goals. The killing of Mike Brown in Ferguson, Missouri, and the Black Lives Matter movment that grew with more publicity around the murder of Black people by police was the “animating force” behind the LGP, according to Ray. 

“This was a racial issue,” he said. “Incarceration affects the Black community far more disproportionately than any other group.

“We didn’t want to reinforce the narrative that poor white people, to facilitate their own upward mobility, were overwhelmingly supportive of locking up a disproportionately [large] number of Black folks,” Sexton said.

The LGP pursued many avenues to stall the prison and were effective in doing just that. Eventually, in an ironic twist of fate, Trump was elected president and removed funding for the prison from his first budget.

“When that happened, we felt the only thing to do here was the legal option. Stall and sue. And we felt like we weren’t really needed for that,” Ray said. “We were organizers, not lawyers. And if people wanted to continue in LGP, working with the lawyers and suing things, they were more than welcome to.”

The trio left the LGP radicalized. Coupled with their disillusionment toward a nonprofit vision of change that touted things such as microloans and small business incubation as the best avenues to lift impoverished peple out of poverty, their discussions on political, social and economic machinations affecting their town throughout 2016 imparted a new perspective on them — one more in favor of class consciousness and mass movements. 

Although the three had this new perspective and a lot they wanted to say, both the FCC and institutional limitations kept them from getting their point across over the radio. Buoyed by their experience in radio and inspired by leftist shows such as Chapo Trap House that formed in the buildup to the 2016 election, they launched the Trillbilly Worker’s Party podcast in February 2017. 

“You can’t talk politics on the radio. I mean, you can talk about things that happen, but you can’t say, ‘Go out and vote for X’ or ‘What X is doing is good or bad.’ Then we saw other people doing that,” Ray said. “It was a natural progression in some ways.”

At the risk of overgeneralization, there are two types of Trillbilly listeners: folks from the South who want the South explained for them, and folks not from the South who want the South explained to them.

While that may be true, it’s also important to note that the Trillbillies don’t, and have never, claimed to speak for anyone but themselves.

“We’ve tried hard not to speak for anybody or represent anybody else,” Turner said. “But we can’t necessarily control what people do with our message once we shit it out there.”

But as someone around the same age and from a similar background to the Trillbillies — a small town white guy who didn’t come from means — it’s hard not to see some of myself in them, especially when they articulate ideas I’ve had difficulty putting a finger on in a vernacular that’s familiar. 

Like myself and others in our generation, the Trillbillies have watched America crumble around them as they came of age through economic collapses, the Forever Wars, the rise of the police state and a pandemic.

“We just talk about what we know about or what we think and react authentically and honestly, in real time, usually, unedited, to what’s happening in the world,” Turner said. “It’s our particular view on things, and it just so happens that a lot of people feel this way and like to hear it reflected back to them.”

What sets the Trillbillies apart from many who have observed the problems that beset small towns and rural areas of America is that they don’t direct their ire only at conservatives whose policies have, undoubtedly, caused immense pain and suffering. They also save plenty of it for liberals whose policies are part and parcel of these problems despite marketing themselves as the problem solvers.

“There has been a set of — call them ‘gatekeepers’ or whatever — activists who have positioned themselves at the forefront of how the story of Appalachia gets told,” Ray said. “And I think those people have become complacent and part of the status quo themselves.”

“Malevolent, even.” Sexton adds.

“Yeah, who are even malevolent. Call them liberal, reactionary, if you want.” Ray said. “I think that what we’re doing is trying to topple that hegemonic idea and replace it with something new.”

From the Trillbillies’ viewpoint, the issue with both liberal and conservative solutions to the concerns of rural America is that both sides view the problems through the lens of capitalism. And when you have a hammer, everything begins to look like a nail.

“You can only manage the contradictions of capitalism for so long, and there are real life-or-death consequences for trying to do that,” Sexton said. “You can create 5,000 jobs, but if you only pay them $7.25, you just created 5,000 working poor people.”

The problem with liberal ideology, as Ray sees it, is its refusal to address class as something American society is structured around. 

“Part of the neoliberal project has been intentionally trying to obscure what class is, or that it even exists. Liberals don’t talk about it. The only people who talk about it are conservatives, and conservatives are obsessed with class. Part of what we’ve been trying to recapture is inserting that back into politics.”

It’s not only important to be conscious of class, but also adversarial in your class interests, specifically when it comes to the working class dealing with the wealthy, monied class. In Trillbilly parlance, the rich are referred to as “deeply, deeply diseased.”

It’s a shorthand for referring to how out of touch the rich and wealthy are to the material concerns of working people. The way Ray, who coined the term, sees it, any time the wealthy look to do good, the working class should be wary. Because whether the person is the stereotypical monstrous conservative billionaire or a philanthropic, dyed-in-the-wool liberal, his or her ideas of how to go about doing good often leads to further oppression.

“The rich are not your friends,” Ray said. “They can church it up into all sorts of window dressing, like philanthropy and charity. They can be the nicest people in the world. But at the end of the day, they have a set of material needs that are far different from yours.”

It’s this critique of capitalism that reaches across and bridges the gap for their listeners from the South and those outside it.

“America’s very good at obscuring all the ways in which we are oppressed, but our show is trying to lift that veil and articulate all the various ways in which you are being held down,” Ray said. “And that’s true whether you’re in Brooklyn or you’re in rural Kentucky or wherever. It may look a little different, but the broad strokes match up.”

The success of the podcast and the amount of subscribers they’ve cultivated has allowed the Trillbillies to at least partially sustain themselves through the show. They’ve also toured with the likes of Street Fight Radio and Lee Bains III. Plans for a spring tour were kiboshed by the pandemic, but the Trillbillies plan to do more touring in the future as an additional source of income and the next stage in the evolution of the show.

Although the Trillbillies generally share the same political beliefs, there is not a monolithic Trillbilly worldview. Like any group of friends, each has their own specific beliefs and interests. While sustaining themselves through the podcast is a major goal, something all three brought up as an equally significant goal was the ability to use the podcast as a vehicle to launch other projects that match up with their individual interests. 

Recently, they’ve begun exploring some of those interests through bonus episodes and miniseries. In April, Sexton and Ray did four episodes they called the “Sunday Service.” Both Ray and Sexton come from Christian backgrounds, which they used to craft a pitch-perfect send up of a Southern church service, including organs and the reading of scripture.

Sexton and some of his friends are also developing a serialized podcast on the life of country legend Gary Stewart, who also grew up in Letcher County. 

Ray launched a miniseries called “Year ZERO,” a deep dive into political economy and how capitalism really works. Essentially, a more serious and in-depth dive into theory than you would get in a typical episode. The first “Year ZERO” episode featured a discussion with Sean KB of the Antifada podcast on Giovanni Arrighi’s The Long Twentieth Century. 

Turner released a bonus episode interviewing Shameka Parrish-Wright of the The Bail Project on incarceration and bail reform. She’s also a sex education advocate and launched a sex ed workshop called “Sexy Sex Ed” — or, “Not Your Mamaw’s Sex Ed” in places where the word “sexy” is a bit to risque — to help address the inadequacy of formal reproductive education in Appalachia. It now has over a dozen educators in five states, and Turner hopes to bring some kind of sex-ed discussion or series to the Trillbilly feed.

While the Trillbillies each have their own personal goals for the podcast, there is also the shared goal — also shared with others in the leftist, independent media movement — of advocating for and advancing whatever comes next in America’s burgeoning leftist movement.

“Everybody has their role in building toward a revolution,” Ray says. “I feel that our strength is in communicating ideas in a way that is funny and interesting. That’s why our podcast is moderately successful. All three of us are really good at that. Together we have a very good repartee, as Tom would say. Things like that are rare to find. I feel like it’s incumbent upon us to hold onto that.”

But they also make clear that the work they do on the podcast is not political action. Rather, it’s entertainment, even propaganda.

“One part of organizing is taking a set of facts that don’t make sense and then reformulating them into a  narrative that makes sense. The podcast is the same in that sense. We’re just trying to make sense of things,” Ray said. “But ultimately we make propaganda.”

The Trillbillies have benefited from the proliferation of leftist podcasting over the last half-decade. In the last few years, people with a leftist bent and those interested in socialism have searched out shows that speak on these topics and issues. And the Trillbillies have been waiting as one of the shows those folks can stumble upon while looking. “We spend close to no time thinking about what an audience would want, which is probably to our detriment," Turner said.

Another important factor has been their local perspective. The leftist media ecosystem is strongly centered in New York, more specifically Brooklyn. If you’re a rural person and interested in these ideas, the Trillbillies are one of the only games in town. 

“A lot of national media, and even leftist media that I take in, don’t always explain things, or discuss things, or have an analysis that I’m able to connect to my real world,” Turner said. “It’s a lot of big theory, big picture, big system, because that is the issue. We’re in a systemic fucking crisis of global proportions. But it’s hard to grasp that unless you can apply it and see it through the lens of local shit.”

And for those leftists in New York or other major cities looking for a peek outside their own bubble, the Trillbillies serve that purpose, too. Even if it is a curiosity, at first.

“I think our Southern listeners understand the context better. They see something in themselves that they see in their own experience,” Sexton said. “And the folks outside of it, I think at first they tune in for the novelty of it. To hear someone who sounds like I sound talk about the things they care about. Then they get into the camaraderie we have for one another and the love we have for our community.”

The political discussion and analysis will always be what attracts people to the show initially, but it’s that camaraderie Sexton mentions that keeps them coming back time and time again.

Even when the discussion is on the most serious issues facing our country or the world, the fact that it’s three friends — who seem like they could be your friends, too — talking it out puts the listener at ease. 

“I think the three of us have a natural chemistry that we’re lucky to be able to lean on a lot,” Turner said. “I think people like to hear that. It’s nice to hear people banter in an unfiltered way.”

This seems especially true during the pandemic. For five months now, we’ve all been isolated, separated from friends and family. The need for camaraderie and kinship feels more important now than ever.

On top of that, with most television shows and movies halting production, podcasts have become something of the medium du jour. That’s borne out in the numbers, for the Trillbillies, at least. The podcast has never been more popular than it is right now, and it’s grown exponentially since the pandemic hit America in March.

“You like to watch Cheers — I know it’s 2020, but I still like Cheers — because there’s Norm being Norm and Sam being Sam,” Ray said. “That’s kind of what people do with our show, and I know this because I do it with other shows. People tune in because they like to hear Tom being Tom.”

Many of the topics they’ve been banging the drum on since the podcast's inception in 2017 have become especially prescient in the time of coronavirus. 

Sexton points out that the pandemic has laid bare in real time one of the points that opponents of capitalism have been trying to make for centuries: If capitalism is to work, there has to be losers. There has to be the oppressed and people doing the oppressing.

“You’re seeing this played out in real time in how we talk about front-line workers, folks working at grocery stores, folks working in healthcare,” Sexton said. “We sort of do this lionizing of them. But at the same time we’re praising them as heroes and drawing them as Wonder Woman and Superman, we’re also saying ‘You’re not worthy of being paid well or having a dignified life or having any meaningful healthcare.’”

But throughout this pandemic and whatever happens next, the Trillbillies will be there to help guide listeners through these strange and uncertain times, and they’ll provide you with plenty of laughs along the way.

“As long as we’re alive, we’ll be doing the show in some form or fashion,” Ray said. “I don’t know if we’ll be making money off it, but we’ll still be doing a free show once a week. Because we started doing this show for free. We started doing this show as an outlet for things we’d seen and experienced and were thinking about going forward. 

“The three of us are deeply committed to building a better world. It sounds corny and cringey, but it is true.”

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