(Bonus) Boundless and Bottomless Seas : Unpacking Dugin's Influence and Global Political Dynamics with Jules Taylor

This audio episode is available on the youtube channel and was made available to patrons a month ago.  Embark on an intellectual voyage with Jules Taylor, the esteemed podcast host and producer, as we dissect the enigmatic ideologies shaping our world. From the radical traditionalism of Alexander Dugin to the complexities of red-brown alliances, we navigate through the murky waters of political thought and their palpable effects on global affairs. With Jules's keen insights, we peel back the layers of geopolitical strategies, the seductive narratives against US hegemony, and the intricate dance of ideologies within the conservative and leftist spheres.

As we scrutinize the intricacies of Dugin's Eurasianism and its ripple effects across the political landscape, Jules and I untangle the web of philosophical manipulations and the stark realities of modern criminology. We illuminate the vulnerabilities within political recruitment tactics and confront the contradictions that thread through various political theories. This episode is an unflinching examination of the ideological battlegrounds that continue to shape our political realities, inviting listeners to reflect on the quest for spirituality in an increasingly secular society and the underestimated power of leftist thought.

The conversation culminates in a poignant exploration of global solidarity, the urgency of collective action against exploitation, and the multifaceted nature of Dugin's political narratives. With Jules Taylor's depth of knowledge and our engaging dialogue, we offer a profound exchange of ideas that could redefine your understanding of the forces at play in today's ever-evolving political landscape. Join us for an episode that promises not just to inform but to challenge and inspire every listener who takes part in this critical discourse.

Chapters

• 2:04 Podcast Producer Talks Ideologies and Politics
• 15:15 Exploring Red-Brown Alliances in Politics
• 32:24 Discussion on Dugin, Geopolitics, and Multipolarity
• 40:06 US Imperialism and Global Strategy
• 51:47 Discussion on Dugan's Eurasianist Ideology
• 1:05:24 Duganism and Political Extremism
• 1:13:06 Discussion on Right-Wing Ideologies
• 1:27:26 Critique of Modern Criminology and Ideology
• 1:33:55 Contradictions and Extremisms in Political Theory
• 1:43:24 Understanding Class Dynamics and Worker Consciousness
• 1:55:52 Geopolitics, Feudalism, and Modernity
• 2:02:58 Exploring the Search for Spirituality
• 2:12:07 Reflections on Leftist Power and Duganism
• 2:22:48 Journey From Right-Wing to Leftist
• 2:30:09 Lost Hope and Political Shifts
• 2:39:47 Reflections on Leftist Power and Strategy
• 2:51:03 Political Analysis on International Conflict
• 3:07:46 Discussion on Marxism and Global Solidarity
• 3:14:00 Vulnerabilities in Recruitment Tactics

Transcript

Speaker 1: 2:05

Thank you for watching. Hello and welcome here to Boundless and Bottomless Sees Extra. I think I've called these supplementary episodes five different things. We'll see which one sticks episodes five different things. We'll we'll see which one sticks um. And today I'm talking to jules taylor, um host slash, producer of the noisy answers podcast, producer of a lot of podcasts. What are you producing these days, jules?

Speaker 2: 2:28

I got I think I got five uh, so I've got no easy answers uh which has been around the longest that I've done. And then got working people. When I work with uh max alvarez on like weekly shows. I've started this new thing called the Corpus Christi Songwriter Podcast, which is some in real life friends that are musicians and we hang out and talk about songwriting. We have other guest songwriters on, and so there's some. There's some surprisingly sort of philosophical stuff that comes up during the course of those conversations, and it's quickly become one of my favorite things to do is just have conversations with songwriters.

Speaker 2: 3:02

And the other two that I have the most recent unveiling is something I'm doing with Anders Lee of the Pod Damn America podcast called the Vanquished, and it's about ex-presidential candidates. And I also have something that I'm really proud of with Judy Gearhart called the Labor Link, and we just did a couple episodes on South Asia. She traveled to Indonesia, cambodia and Thailand to gather interviews with exploited migrant fisher workers and fisher worker organizers there, and that's all on LaborLinkPodcastorg. So that's, that's five, and that's too many and I'm making it work, you know. So, yeah, thanks for asking about all five of those, or asking how many I do because it's where I get to mention all of them. Uh, as well, you know yeah, it's uh.

Speaker 1: 3:52

uh, it's funny how, how a lot of our projects like overlap but don't get brought up. Um, yeah, as a person who uh works, I mean I named my podcast after my own name so I could do whatever the fuck I wanted to with it, which was a tricky little thing on my part. Um, and it's really easy to remember my, because it's a four-letter word, which is appropriate. So you know, today we're talking about Alexander Dugan, who unfortunately, or fortunately, has been in my world for too fucking long. I've known about Dugan since about 2007, 2008. When I left the paleo-conservative world, which was adjacent to what was then called radical traditionalism. Later on, a splinter part of that would become the alt-right and then another splinter part of that would become the fourth political position, vaguely aligned with Greca and the European new right, in France in particular, but also in Spain and Germany.

Speaker 1: 5:17

Dugan's a hard figure to get your brain around because he was important in the Russian academic scene. He seems to have been very recently courted again by a Russian university, so he might be back on the ascent within Russian academia. I don't know what that means exactly. The ascent within Russian academia. I don't know what that means exactly. However, he's also in some ways a coffeehouse post-fascist, to put it in that he was hanging out with Mark Limanoff back in the day. He used to hang out with a bunch of occultists and I knew him from these occultists who hung around paleo-conservatives in the aughts and aught-teens. Then he came back up for me during the end of the Obama administration when there were a bunch of people coming in from the right trying to do entryism into the radical left sphere of anti-imperialism Um, because you know we sound similar and people around like our coast press everyone's favorite weird post-fascist press out of India run by an American and a New Zealand ex-Nazi um uh. Zealand ex-nazi um started printing his stuff, uh, in english with mark shibobda uh, who is a. I think it was his assistant at university of moscow before he got canned in 2013.

Speaker 1: 6:54

I was also a guy in the Russia Today slash Gray Zone. Frankly, orbit I also know personally and is a person who used to reach out to leftists, but he got kicked out of some paleo conservative groups for being too anti-gay and too anti-immigrant Wow. So when people see this guy talking left podcast, they should know that about him, right, um, uh. So that was my, you know, two steps removed from the world of alexander dugan. I remember calling out that when caleb maupin was still the head of the of the workers world party, the WWP, of which the PSL is a split Um just so people get their orientation here Um Maupin was hanging around a lot of people around Shabobda and when he got caught at that conference and then went MAGA communism, it was the least surprising thing ever. You know, I was seeing him develop in that direction as early as 2011, 2012.

Speaker 1: 8:08

So over 10 years ago, and I wanted to talk to you about that Cause I haven't. You know, I've talked, I've hinted at some of this stuff in public, but I haven't really talked about it explicitly, directly, because I've never known what to make of it. When you encounter these people, it can make you feel like you're involved in a bigger conspiracy. This liberal tendency to make Dugan more than he was, particularly during the Trump administration, meant that it was very hard to talk about him Because I was like dude, this guy may or may not be trying to infiltrate a bunch of different things In an episode that I haven't released by the time we're recording this, but I will release before this comes out.

Speaker 1: 8:59

The time of recording this but I will release before this comes out. I actually talk explicitly in chapter two of fourth political theory, where he says he's going to use um marxist, leninist as a fifth column because of mythic structure they have, of their mythic anti-americanism um, and so when people like vox and the and you know the russiagate crowd come out and and scream this, it actually hurts to talk about it because it's like no, he said this explicitly. This is not a russiagate conspiracy, this is a stated tactic in the book um and one that hadn't really worked until very recently.

Speaker 1: 9:36

and in the proliferation of Dugan esque, talking points, even from people who don't know that's where it's coming from on the left has been sort of start startling to me, even though at the same time I've been trying to remind people hey, there are more important Russian thinkers.

Speaker 2: 10:04

They're just not often translated into English and they're not aimed at a foreign audience, the way Dugan is. So what do you make of that? How did you get involved in genealogy and through like someone like a Frank Meyer who was like an apartheid for the Communist Party, I want to say in the 40s, and he ended up reading the Road to Serfdom by Hayek and slowly, this sort of like turned his ideology away from the Communist Party, which was like, I think at this point this was like during the boudarism age, you know, of cp, usa, um, but frank meyer eventually just basically turned the other side of the political spectrum, embraced rightism, ended up being like really chummy and writing articles with william buckley and uh, and he, and so part of like what I've done in my own studies has been like, hey, you know, I had an episode with rob larson where you know he wrote a book with rebuttal against the road to serfdom. It's like what are these arguments? Why? Why was someone like frank weyer, uh, finding these arguments compelling and and that thread sort of pulled me into thinking about how maybe there are many roads into soliciting Otherwise what we think of. I mean it's startling because we think of these comrades, as we say, comrades, right, but we think of them as principled thinkers that are somehow convinced by these. I mean, I'm on this end of I'm in a left media bubble because I've heard the arguments on the other side and I think they're all bullshit. And so one of these arguments makes its way in, either via the avenue of anti-capitalism, the avenue of anti-Americanism, the avenue of anti-imperialism, which seems to be the avenue that gains Douganists the most. Results right and just like why these arguments pull people to the other side, and it makes you feel like they never they never believed in the principles to begin with. And so it's startling and it's, I guess, what I've learned out of.

Speaker 2: 12:07

You know I, you know I feel like I speak a lot on politics, but I'm also somewhat of a. I only really got into politics around 2015-ish. You know, like that's not a very long time You've been in this game for a very long time to have gone through ideologies and settled into who you are and your politics and your philosophy and your outlooks on the world. And so I'm in the practice of always looking at my own ideology and taking a battle axe or a pickaxe to it and really trying to sharpen my own ideological blade in a way, because I want to be a staunch defender of the words I speak and the things I believe, and it's our own personal duty I feel like to do that.

Speaker 2: 13:02

Asked me about how I got into duganism, it was really through understanding that, like, if you're in left politics, there seems to always be an attrition of like otherwise valuable, principled comrades that will just be siphoned from the other side through shitty arguments, uh, that otherwise, I mean, I'm sitting over here feeling like I've I've heard these arguments, these are old hat, someone else hasn't and someone else just that argument got them, you know, and that sucks. And so when I started to, before I was researching Dugan, I was feeling this sort of attrition of people that, and being someone who was kind of new to organizing around 2019, 2020, you know, I started to see people in in like my, like in real life, who all of a sudden were like, went from organizing like tenant unions to like refuting Thomas Malthus. You know, like, like to just like, all of a sudden it's about the population. You know, like to just like, all of a sudden it's about the population. You know it's about the Malthusians who want to eliminate part of the population and it's a battle against wokeness, and a lot of these topics come up within sort of Duganist circles as well.

Speaker 2: 14:15

There's, like you know it's, it's almost like, like I've heard dugan described as what he's trying to, to orchestrate. It's like a sort of ecumenical genocide, I'm sorry, ecumenical jihad. Uh, in the way that, like he, he wants to gather all the disparate sort of uh, you know, ideologies that aren't strong enough on their own to combat liberalism and bring them all together. And uh, and then you know, going back to, like caleb mop, and when he says shit like, uh, you know, I don't care if you're for abortion or against it, but I'll, I will organize with you or something, and and people see that as a calling card to invite fascists into a movement. Uh, it's. It's the same thing with dugan and this ecumenical jihad thing. It's a very similar concept in that and my thought process is like hey, I don't think America deserves to exist, but it's for very, very different reasons.

Speaker 2: 15:15

Yeah, and yeah, you know, and and and and so, like how someone like dugan can a assuage, like you know, comrades and pull them into shit, like through avenues of anti-imperialism or, uh, avenues of anti-capitalism or whatever. That was one thing, uh, and and the other thing was, just like this constant attrition that's going to happen and watching these things happen in real time. Uh, you know, I I don't that doesn't answer the question completely, but it seemed like what I, when I read benjamin teitelbaum's book, uh, it kind of became clear how. I mean it didn't become all clear at once. It took a lot of research to understand who Dugan is and how he sees the world. In order's like this, I mean, he really twists ideologies and that itself was compelling to find out how he could take like an anti-imperialist and and make them champion, uh, the russian invasion of ukraine, you know.

Speaker 2: 16:31

So all this stuff was like seemingly very confusing and I needed to figure it out because, you know, like you said, like people are spouting this stuff without realizing where these talking points are coming from, uh, they're not realizing what language they're using and and you know what, where that originates from, and and to what ends, who profits from their usage of that kind of terminology and language and perspectives and so, yeah, I mean I, there's a lot there. Man, I don't know if I answered any of those questions. And the duke and jessica I was watching comrades fucking fall man and I was like who, what the fuck is this man?

Speaker 1: 17:08

so well not to pick on you too hard, but marxist leninists have this tendency I've discovered, right, yeah, you know, and, and, and.

Speaker 2: 17:19

As I've been a marxist, leninist, I've had to sort of distance myself from some of this shit. Has this gone down? Because it's like it's? It's a lot of deutianism in there. There's a lot of weird, uh, sorelianism, uh, this stuff kind of pops up and and uh wish I had kind of been giving a heads up about this instead of having to discover it in real time.

Speaker 1: 17:40

But you know, Well, one thing I'll say the history of fascism is a history of liberalism in crisis in the broad sense, and I will, you know, point that out.

Speaker 1: 17:52

There's a continuity. Reason why it's hard to talk about what fascism was um is that if you look at liberal politics or even social democratic politics, the right wing of liberalism, the right wing of social democracy, the right wing of blood and soil conservatism, all play a part in the creation of fascism. But one thing that marxists tend to avoid and it's, and it's the what's what I like to call we all avoid it because of stupid Jonah Gerberg arguments, you know 20 years ago, or whatever is the liberal fascism where one the left and liberals are conflated together. But I read the Apprentice's Sorcerer, which is a great book, but I kept on wanting to throw Z of Stern Hall at its face, and that is the fact that Marxist by and large, while they do not come from the same class orientation as fascist and post-fascist and other reactionary groups, meaning that our class base tends to be working class and, frankly, lumpen, theirs tend to be lumpen and the working but non-wage earning poor. So they're related classes but they're not the same of.

Speaker 1: 19:15

The fascist movement by and large, has a disproportionate calling card of either national bolsheviks or former marxists, and that goes all the way back to mussolini himself yeah and that misrecognition is super common, like, for example, car reddick in the 1930s really got himself in some deep shit supporting some, uh, some national so not national socialists, and I hear I don't mean nazis, but they ended up being nazis anyway, but they weren't nazis yet. Who, um, who later on, as soon as he was endorsing them as part of, like, this view of a broad front under zinoviev, ended up and um and it may have been that this was the 20s, not the 30s, excuse me, um ended up killing communists. All right, like this is a habit of misrecognition that we have, because people will throw socialism up in our face and people will throw all the way back to og fascism. It is not new um. Now, the the interesting thing about this, though, is like we need to recognize that this is not like a natural deviation of marxism. In my point of view, it's a tendency that can emerge. When we get frustrated, um, with the working class, are we try to adopt statist or class collaborationist views. And you know and by status here I'm not, I'm not an anarchist, I don't think we can overthrow the state tomorrow, but like um, uh, when we, when we start seeing that that's just the goal in and of itself that we just have to take power and stop there and then we provide some kind of social well-being for the working class and stop there. It's class collaboration, it's politics, and in America that can sound really good, honestly, because we have so little. The joke my friend used to say is like Marxists always have to fight trade union consciousness, except in the United States where they're just hoping to get even that. It's kind of a sad truth. Dugan's interesting to me and other people like him. Keith Preston, the right-wing anarchist, used to run this thing called Attack. The System was adjacent to the alt-right.

Speaker 1: 21:45

There have been a long series of people who really tried to do red-brown stuff. The problem that I've had in trying to talk about this is one, the people who become red-brown chasers tend to end up working for liberals or even the state department, um, and two, they always cast their net way, way too wide. So you know they might include me in their red brown stuff because I come from a right-wing background and I know these people and I'm like three step removed from some, and in the case of Dugan I'm literally two steps removed, um, from some of these people. Uh, and so if you draw on your little like oh, this guy knows this guy, this guy on the on the chart, you can get a lot of people who knew defectors are defectors from the other side and just throw them in with, um, the red Brown menace. Uh, and I also do think to a large degree liberals vastly overstate the red Brown spread, but the thing is, it's not not a threat.

Speaker 1: 22:55

I remember, uh, donald Parkinson of Cosman and I used to argue back and forth about how serious we should take the red brown stuff and then then he realized that larouchism was going to be a problem and it was coming back. And then he became more sympathetic to my view that, while the red brown stuff is not the main enemy at all, I mean, the main enemy still is in capitalism. Uh, since I'm a classical Marxist, that goes first, then imperialism that goes second, because I see that as an epiphenomenon of capitalism. If you're a Maoist you reverse the two, but nonetheless that's where our worldview really is right. I think all of marxism can go this way. So when I I made fun of marxist, linearist but trotskyist can easily become neoconservatives and other things that's not made up.

Speaker 1: 23:51

Um, maoist are all over the place in the ways that they've deviated, uh, particularly in response to the sino-soviet split, but also this a lot of former maoist ended up in the ways that they've deviated, particularly in response to the Sino-Soviet split. But also a lot of former Maoists ended up in the right wing of French politics. If you know that history, david Horowitz was a Maoist at one point too, I mean. So, like you know, make of that what you will, sockdoms. Well, I mean the vast majority of defectors to fascism were the right wing of social democracy as early as the Frye Corps. So they can't get out of it. There's no tendency in anarchism. Well, the National Syndicalist Movement is one of the basest for fascism in the first place, which does have a direct relationship to anarchism. You can't get around that. There is no left tendency that does not get touched by these kinds of movements.

Speaker 1: 24:47

And in America, I think the other problematic legacy that we have is we have to admit uncomfortably that, unlike in Europe, where anti-imperialism was almost explicitly a liberal and our left-wing thing, in the United States the right has been split on imperialism from moment one, going back to the fucking Confederates. There was one section of the Confederates who were filibusters who were trying to exploit, you know, try to do Imperial Confederate expansion even after the civil war. And there's another thread of ex-Confederates who decided that imperialism was a mistake, that put all the people of color in their countries in the first place and that we shouldn't expand, because you know brown people. And so, for example, some of the opposition to the mexican-american war you know, came from people who would later be in the confederacy and also people who would be in the anti-imperialist league on the right, so that history in the united states is very real. I mean, if you look at who opposed world war ii, you get like John Dewey and then a bunch of like Parafascists, like the silver shirts, and sit. So it's. It's really, it's a really mixed, really odd group of people.

Speaker 1: 26:10

Dugan seems to have concocted a really heady ideology that if you don't read it, one it can feel like popular frontism. Now, I am not a popular frontist because I tend to be a classical Marxist and I think the united front is defendable. The popular front isn't. But that's a fine distinction. I mean, basically the distinction in Europe is that you won't sit in a government and you won't empower a government that has bourgeois parties in it, but you might work with them on specific things, while you wouldn't sit in them in like a government cabinet or whatever. That's part of the difference. There's two forms of un frontism.

Speaker 1: 27:00

To you know, these words kind of don't mean much anymore. And the other problem is they don't like when Marxist-Leninist or Trotskyist or Maoist try to bring them into the United States. The problem is those strategies both United and Popular Front, are not designed for a constitutional system like the United States. They're designed for a parliamentary mixed government system. So we just don't know what to do with them. So we throw those words around, but they don't really mean much. A popular front in the United States means you subordinate yourself to the Democratic Party. A united front means I don't know. A united front means I don't know. I think it means like you work with non-communist unions and you'll work with activist groups and you might aid the Democrats in a particular action, but you're never gonna like endorse them. But again, we're not in a country that has a fluid party system and mixed in a proportional representational government. So those questions are somewhat just not relevant here.

Speaker 1: 28:07

Dugan, really the anti-imperialism thing is is interesting because multipolarity, which isn't invented by Dugan I want to also make that very clear. Multipolarity is like actually early 20th century British geopolitics. That was picked up and people forget this by center and right-wing critics of neoconservatives in the mid-aughts. They're like, hey, we're heading to a multipolar world, you just have to accept it. Fareed Zakaria was actually the first time I saw that in a major book, dugan, who was writing his book actually in that framework. I mean, we have to remember that he's writing it 2006, 2007, 2008. It's published in Russia, maybe 2009. We get it in 2012. It kind of takes almost 10 years to really permeate, um, and one of the things that seemed to help it permeate was liberals trying to pretend that dugan was somehow putin's resputin. That actually seemed to have helped dugan um in a very real way.

Speaker 1: 29:16

And then the ukraine russia war, where NATO pulled some shit. I'm not going to lie, I do not support the Russian invasion, but I also, from a crude, realist geopolitical standpoint, I completely understand why it happened. Right, and I do think Us imperial nonsense in regards to it, taking advantage of chaos in ukraine from probably 2004 onward, is what led us here. Um, also our actions in georgia and moldova and during the yugoslav wars, um. So there's a long history there of which, you know, some of the stuff coming out of fans of Putin is pretty legitimate. You know, however, as I've said to other people, that if you really believe the Russian invasion was justifiable, you also kind of actually have to believe that the invasion of Iraq was justifiable because it's a preemptive strike.

Speaker 2: 30:22

Yeah.

Speaker 1: 30:23

And that's the logic.

Speaker 2: 30:25

Yeah, I mean going back to what you said about like all of every left tendency is susceptible to this stuff. You know, it's like I feel, like you know, know, I did some research on cults for a bit and and it's kind of like I don't think anyone becomes a dooginist overnight, in the same way that I don't think like sane, rational, sound-minded individuals join a cult in one day, right, it's like a slow, drip process of uh, it has to do with maybe like some media diet stuff, some unwitting agents of this stuff, and at some point Dugan pops on your radar a little bit and he checks a few of these boxes. And and you know, I think you've said before on, like on an episode that I believe you said something like there's so many ideologies in the world and none of them do a good job at explaining the world or deciphering the way it is. And so there's part of me that doesn't really hold these people in contempt for finding an ideology they feel explains the world to them in a way that I don't know as they feel is most adequate or something or that is the most functional working model for them. But I, but I also think that, like you know, marxists, we don't do a good job of acknowledging the stuff Right, like you know, and in the same way that, like, liberals don't really do a good job of acknowledging the things that Dugan points out, like the sort of Schmittian totalitarian lurking behind the shadows of that that liberalism is always yearning for. You know, the uh, the, the totalitarianism via, uh, presupposing universalisms, right Of like, human rights and things that way of like this is, you know, and then this comes down to the enmity of first principle disagreements of what constitutes the good life.

Speaker 2: 32:25

And so, when I got into Dugan and I was doing research on him, part of what compelled me to continue reading about him and learning more was that Dugan was reading and quoting some of the same philosophers that I revered, but he was taking ideas towards fascistic ends from these same writings that I had read. And it was so greatly offensive to me that, like, even, like, I'm hesitant to even give Dugan any sort of verbal credit on any ideas that may be interesting or useful, or what have you within his writings? Uh, because I just, I'm just dead set against like, not beautifying any of the guy's work or what he's done and, um, I don't think his ideas are things that, like the left, or Marxism or Marxists, have to to take up and use for themselves. Like, I don't see him as that kind of writer. I see him as someone who is taking our own weapons and using them against us. And while it's useful to examine him in the same way that one might read Heidegger not in the way that you're trying to take Heideggerianism and you're not trying to pull a Marcuse here and start using that language and start really adopting Heideggerianism, but you're, but you're simply learning from this technique so that you can better be equipped to, you know, using your own organizing, like in here, and to avoid these sort of entrapments that that inevitably will snag some of us, you know, because we're all susceptible to it, and you know, and it doesn't happen overnight, it's a slow drip of of talking points and pithy things that that maybe have to do with the media diet or something.

Speaker 2: 34:09

Um. So you know, and and I also think that, like part of this has to do with, uh, you know, there's some like, there's some false sort of Russian history mixed in here that makes up this whole concept of like a uniting of a lot of people. There's, like the, the, the Charles Clover book really highlights a lot of the stuff, like the Lev Gamiliov guy who wrote a lot of the Slavic history while in prison and not having access to notebooks and stuff, you know, which is a crazy interesting character to read about to. You know they survived the, the, the founding of the ussr, and uh was an activist against his whole life and then, you know, wept when the ussr fell in 91. It's just a bizarre wild story to read about that way.

Speaker 2: 34:59

But I would say that, like you know, duganism kind of plugs and plays a lot of different ideologies with him. You know, whether you're a Marxist-Leninist and you're anti-United States and anti-imperialist, you can plug and play within sort of his outlook, sort of his outlook. You know you can pick up Eurasianism as part of that too, and it kind of, you know, is congruent with feelings of wishing for the United States downfall, for multipolarity, for, and as a Marxist I mean, I feel like you know the United States is the greatest purveyor of war and death and arms across the entire world and in many ways I feel like the United States has to fall for the world to get to a better place. So I'm partly sympathetic with these arguments as well, like just and not just turn the horse blinders on and be like, no, no, this actually isn't Russian expansionism. No, no, this isn't, you know, russian fascism. No, no, like you have to. You actually have to like be blind to that shit or turn that shit off or not acknowledge it, or be an extreme bad faith and not understand that once you get far enough into the stuff, like that's what this is.

Speaker 2: 36:28

It's all a vehicle for russian expansion, which was part of why, you know, in reading foundations of geopolitics and for pt um, in the original episode I made about this, which I was very hesitant to and we've talked about how, like talking about this stuff was very harmful at one point. Just talking about it fed the entire problem and, uh, so I didn't feel like it was necessary to really be forthright with a lot of the stuff I had read about until the invasion of Ukraine happened and during that episode, you know, I said that that Russia would expand out further west than just Ukraine and I did take some slack on it. I mentioned the country of Poland and, and you know, like as I've, it's been a couple years now since that episode's out and dugan has kind of you know, there was that whole episode with his, his car bomb and his daughter dying and uh, there is a lot has happened since then, but at its core, I feel like this is still I feel like Russia will take advantage of any opportunity to expand out, given that there are so many tracks within NATO's armor, given the latest things that have happened between Iran and Israel and you know, when I listen to someone like Norm Finkelstein say that, like for once, the you know that the world felt like the US or Israel was not undefeatable, like the life could have been taken down by David. Part of me takes that statement and understands that, like the Russians are watching the situation too, and Dugin is well aware of this stuff are watching this situation too, and Dugin is well aware of this stuff, and as far back as 97 and foundation of geopolitics, he was like yo.

Speaker 2: 38:04

We need to encourage the US to stoke divisions along racial and class lines. We need the UK to leave the EU, and he's talking about all these soft power techniques that we've seen happen in various degrees. You know whether it's Trump talking about getting out of NATO, whether it's Boris talking about getting out of the EU, and all these chinks in the armor will be opportunities for further sort of uh affronts on american hegemony, on on liberal hegemony, um. So I so I think we're at the start of a huge wave here, and I don't, I don't think we're even at a point where, like when I said about poland, that like I think that could still happen, man, um, and anything could happen, but I, I think that's not out of the realm of possibilities, further expansion that way, because ultimately all this stuff seems like just a vehicle for that so, to pick up on what you said, I want to talk about, like, the implications of the multi-polarity for a minute.

Speaker 1: 39:13

I am a multipolarista in the sense that since 2005, 2006, 2007, I've thought that the American empire was born out of hubris in 1992. That, um, while I didn't buy stuff like malice third worldism because their schemas don't make a lot of sense to me, uh, you know, I had a friend of the show, uh, kevin, regrettable century, come on recently and say, uh, here's a third worldist because you know the the um social democracy bought off the working class and and, uh, we needed the third world to rise up and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And I pointed out to him that. Well, the weird part about that is, if that were true, it makes no sense the time frame, because the 1950s was the beginning of the US empire and it was not in a unipolar world, it was in a bipolar world, one where a lot of the social democratic stuff actually came as a buy-off for potential workers movements within the us, because russia had proved it was possible right um, uh.

Speaker 1: 40:34

Now they were bought off, but I don't think they were bought off just off of the profits of the third world, because trade with the third world, development of the third world, actually declined in the 20th century, with the exception of China, which I do not think you can actually say is still part of the periphery of the planet. You might agree with Wallerstein that the semi-periphery are like me, that it's basically core. Now I don't see how you're not core when you're one of the largest three economies on the planet, both in productivity and in terms of wealth. The issue that I have I guess that's similar to yours is while NATO expansion is a given and its failure is a given, I think NATO's hit its its nadir. In fact, I've been arguing now for five years that what a lot of what we're seeing about the incoherence in us politics is. There's a faction of the U? S imperial establishment and it's probably actually a dominant faction in the army. It was around mad dog Mateus and people like him who want to hadrians all off the empire. Like they're not going to be soft on iran. They're not going to be soft on. You know a certain thing, uh, on even certain things trump wanted to be soft on. They definitely weren't anti-nato, but they had learned from 2001 to 2006 that the empire just can't. Um. Interestingly, today that faction seems to be represented in the popular media by liberal, uh realists such as, uh, peter zion um, who are like yeah, you know, china's are not my primary enemy, but we don't have to go to war with china, we just have to, like, step back and let their demographic crisis do the work for us. Um, and we're just not going to maintain the global, the global deep border trade lines anymore and the rest of the world's fucked. But since there's no belt and road initiative anymore and that's actually kind of russia's fault um, then we don't have to do much. We just have to step back, help Ukraine, not lose and not even win, just not lose. And I mean the implication in Peter Zion's things is they were totally willing to sacrifice Ukraine to like have a bleeding Afghanistan a la 1987 in Europe. That's implied in what they're saying, but that's all they have to do. The other side that's a Hadrian's Wall side but is different is the Mersheimer School of Realists who want detente with Russia, who are generally soft on, are not pro-war, but they want a war with China and the way they see as a way to get the war with China is to spin off the tensions between Russia and China, particularly over some of the results of the Belt and Road Initiative collapsing under the rate of Russia's actions, and using that as leverage to turn Russia against China and moving forward from there. India's already in an interesting place India's pro-Russia anti-China. India's already in an interesting place India's pro-Russia anti-China. That goes back a long time, all the way back to the tensions between Zhou Enlai and the Congress Party in the Bundang period. So these fields, I think is interesting.

Speaker 1: 44:16

Dugan's interesting to me because he seems to actually be pretty clueless about certain aspects of the United States, but really believe what the online left said at the time of 2008-2009. He repeats them as facts in his books, which is kind of funny. He actually doesn't have that great of a read on US culture, but what he does have is a pretty good read on the fraction and fracturing factination within, let's say, the transatlantic super state, the imperial core. You know the core. Use whatever system you want, but he's aware of these tensions like and I and I I remember telling people in 2016 that, like you guys, think trump is the beginning of a wave, but for me he's actually the end of it like this. He is a figure that we have seen emerge in a lot of places, a kind of Codillo like Bonapartist like, but not a true Bonapart they're not really able to pull off actual Bonapartism figure that comes out of a populist right-wing movement rejecting parts of the right. Well, we saw this all over Europe in the the aughts, um and duken was watching that and he watched even the further stuff the rebirth of national bolshevism in europe as a real viable movement. Now is it actually in danger of taking over most of europe? No, but it has influence on people who are such as le pen and if, if, macron cannot hold out, I do not see the victor being meloche on, I see it being le pen and which puts us in a weird position, because none of us should actually want the eu to survive, none of us should want nato to survive.

Speaker 1: 46:16

You know you talk about the united states. I mean, I think all these institutions, um, as governments and polities, are totally reprobate, like um, and in that sense, you know when I first encountered dugan in 2008, 2009 and when um, and then in 2011, uh, when shabobda and and people were in my orbit and I was abroad. Um, I was in south korea at the time and working on left stuff, but mainly through blogging. I was not yet a podcaster. Um, I actually could see the appeal.

Speaker 1: 46:57

Coming from a paleo conservative background, I have been an anti-imperialist as a right winger Right, this is my own background and I am still fans of certain conservative ish small C conservative anti-imperialist such as Andrew Bacevich over there at the Quincy Institute, et cetera. You know he's a paleo, he's a paleo, he's a paleo conservatism. Who's like gotten slightly more woke on race in the last 20 years? Um, redskill books uh, you know, if you were in that milieu, that also created people like jimmy and whatnot. It's a very gen x against the the center um mentality and what I find interesting about it and I'm gonna throw this at you and then we can talk about some of the other places where dugan has influence it's wild, I mean, yeah, um is that it made it feel to me like the financial crisis and the impending re this view of the left dealing with domestic affairs.

Speaker 1: 48:07

During the entirety of my childhood, in the aughts, in my 20s, the left sole focus, since it had no effect on domestic affairs was international affairs right, where it also had no effect. But it could be loud and no one really held it accountable for being wrong or whatever. Like it's just, you know you can take a good moral stance and uh, and since it had no domestic you actual implications, you could be on the side of the angels with Pat Buchanan and also, you know, a Boba Bacon and all those people you know and nascent in Kuwait way. Frenemy of the show, chris Catrone, one of my Bet Nor slash mentors. I have a very complicated relationship with Chris, but pointed out that the 2008 crisis actually made class in domestic economy something that the left in the United States cared about and focused on. But what is interesting about that is, for some fucking reason, we can't walk into bubble gum at the same time, and there, and also our allegiance with the Democrats meant that we ignored, with very few exceptions, the extent of the fact that, after Bush, the empire was still pushing along pretty damn well.

Speaker 1: 49:39

Libya happened woke some people up. There are some people who were woken up by the. You know some, even liberal-ish people, like Gary Wills, who were woken up by Obama's refusal to do anything but escalate in Afghanistan, which, by the way, shouldn't have surprised anybody. That's what he actually said, but yet people were surprised by it. But outside of those things, and then during the Trump administration, since Trump did not really have a bellicose foreign policy, this did not come back up. We turned away from international anything.

Speaker 1: 50:16

All right of the rebirth of an American social democratic left was that it emerged at a time where we went from being all oriented towards the international to not oriented towards the international at all. We just ignored it. We let empire go on because it seemed like maybe it was ramping itself down but we weren't really paying that much attention. Let's be because it seemed like maybe it was ramping itself down but we weren't really paying that much attention. Let's be honest, you know Trump kills Iranian general, people kill again. But in general the left wasn't aware of you and those who were particularly aligned to the Democrats took a weirdly pro-NATO stance and a weirdly.

Speaker 1: 51:04

I remember people getting really mad about Trump making forays with peace with North Korea and I'd be like what do you want? If Trump does this, this will be a net good for the world. This is bad. Like you know the isolation. Like I don't love the DPRK regime I'm not generally a DPRK defensist, but, like, my stance is, no needs to leave it alone and that if, actually, if it didn't have a constant foreign threat, some stuff would probably be worked out that would not be as reactionary as it currently seems to in the dprk. So you know, these are my stances. They've kind of been my stances for a long time. Um, and I see the, I see the appeal of dugan. Where I'm, where I'm with you, though, jules, I don't want to give, like I on my panel. Uh, jason wants give Dugan a lot of credit and I tend not to, and I think part of it is because I actually know what Dugan's pulling from more. I'm more familiar with right-wing literature, so I know that, like I haven't found an idea in there that's unique to Dugan.

Speaker 1: 52:15

Right the weird, the weird of just bizarro shit, shit he throws at you from 80 different sources at once. Now he does it quite intelligently. He's an intelligent synthesizer and I will give him credit for that. But, like you know, um even some of his really weird arguments, like his, like, he has a broader definition of racism than Robin D'Angelo.

Speaker 2: 52:40

Like, as I point I point out in a recent episode this is like I was telling you before we got on here. I listened to a lot of your stuff and Daniel taught and I it's occurred to me that like there's a through line from like Nietzsche to Evola to Dugan, taken straight from this stuff, in terms of like trying to do what Evola failed to do, which was reinvigorate fascism with a booster shot of spirituality in a more Mussolinian sort of form of spiritual racism. You know, in a way that like it's wild to me because you read this stuff in 4PT and you're right, there's not original ideas. The novel part of this is the way he quilts these disparate ideas together to form a slightly coherent. It's more of like it's a very heady ideology, you know. I think Daniel called it like it's.

Speaker 1: 53:45

It reads like a work of like Heideggerian messianicism or something like that is what he said. You know, yeah, I would say, in the second, in the second and third chapter of the book there's like Heidegger. I mean the one thing. My big thing, though, when, when I say Dugan's a post-fascist, I put, I put, I put emphasis though that it's, it's not a total rejection, because his favorite heidegger is not the period heidegger is the lost heidegger that no one talks about, for whatever reason, I have no idea.

Speaker 1: 54:14

yeah, um, there's also things that dugan does, and maybe he's trying to get past Russian censors because you can't legally be a Nazi in Russia, but some of it, I think, is sincere. I think he does not like Nazi racism. Well, partly because it was aimed at Slavs you know, not just Jews, you know, not just Jews and partly because he realizes the multipolar world. One of the things people ignore about it is that it's still an imperial world. It is an inter imperial world. You have multiple empires. When you're trying to maintain what is effectively the former Russian world and the sphere of influence of the Russian Empire, which is the orthodox, slash, shiite, muslim, slash Buddhist world of the 19th century, russian Empire is not copacetic with racism, all right. Now he does seem to be sincerely anti-universalist, but one of the things I pointed out I was like well, it's interesting to me, however, that he's not like advocating for, like, a pan-Europeanism in an answer. You know, in a bloc that's separate from the Eurasian bloc, he wants the Europeans to adopt national Bolshevism, which would fragment them. Right.

Speaker 2: 55:44

I think also he wants to like I mean, there's plans for like European domination through the foundation of geopolitics, and I know that he even states in there like these are like kind of just a dream. We can aspire to do this one day, you know. But you know, when I surf the internet and find memes of like europe doesn't exist, it's actually just an asian peninsula, it's hard for me to think that like these thoughts and these sort of you know the, the way that those memes bounce around in your head, if that's not like ultimately, some idea that was like that's a Eurasianist sort of thing. You know, like uh Teitelbaum wrote about uh Dugan meeting with Steve Bannon and Steve Bannon trying to convince Dugan to abandon uh sort of I don't know like whatever praise he has for Iran or as an allyship or something. But you know Dugan in his traditionalism really sees like the epit something.

Speaker 2: 56:39

But you know Dugan in his traditionalism really sees like the epitome of like you know sort of a truth, beauty and insight achieved through a government that ideally looks something like Iran, like a sort of you know a theocracy. And he says he affirms this so much when he says, like what does the West care if our president is sacred, much when he says, like, what is it? What does the west care? If our president is sacred, you know, like there is this infusion of religion that he's, you know, and this is why the the sort of christofascist you know, love russia. Um, it's, it's. He's attempting to do what evola failed to do, which is, uh, bring fascism which, as he says, is more a more consistent fascist fascism or a borderless and red fascism. But I think he's trying to do this in an Evolian sort of way, by bringing Christianity and spirituality, theocracy sort of aspects into this sort of modern version of Russian revanchism.

Speaker 1: 57:39

Yeah, and that's not you, I mean that of Russian revanchism. Yeah, and that's not new, I mean that's older than fascism. I pointed out that, like I was saying, he also pretends that certain people who he calls revolutionary conservatives there were revolutionary conservatives in Germany, there were revolutionary conservatives in Germany, erzsinger, I've done a whole show on them and they were anti-fascist. They were also fascistic in many ways, but they were anti-fascist. They hated Hitler, they hated his modernism and his biologism, if nothing else. But I will note that Dugan will hide actual fascists in that group, so he'll mention Smith as one of these conservative revolutionaries. Smith was not a conservative revolutionary, he's a fascist explicitly. So whenever he encounters a fascist that he wants to use, that's a German fascist, explicitly so whenever he encounters a fascist that he wants to use, it's a German fascist. Because, again, I think A Nazism is illegal in Russia. Still, into the whole. Um, you know, he, he does. Racism seems to bother him. But I want to point out that there's stuff in there and his view of anti-racism that's based on, like the human biodiversity movement and whatnot, which is still like racial purist movements. It's just like separate but acknowledged, except for europe, which which they really want and while, yes, I also call Europe the dangly bits of Asia, I'm not a Eurasianist.

Speaker 1: 59:27

One of the interesting things about the Eurasian vision is I don't see how eventually it doesn't come into direct conflict with China, because they would almost have to. And there's this undercurrent in the current like detente and I say detente between russia and china because in russia and china official statements they never say anything bad about each other. But I pointed out that during the beginning of the ukraine war, china did not suppress anti-russian um uh protest and they also didn't suppress pro-Russian protest. It was pretty clear that the government took a moderately pro-Russia stance but did not go so far as to suppress internal dissent about it, which they had even done during the second Iraq war. Clearly, parts of this created tensions for China and Russia. One of the things I think is that, geopolitically, china thought it was going to be able to spin Europe away from the US's orbit and closer to it. The Russia-Ukraine war has made sure that's not going to happen for 50 to 100 years.

Speaker 1: 1:00:42

Like, macron will occasionally throw China a bone, but like right now, like and I know it's hard for Americans to see, but anti-Russian sentiment in Europe is probably way higher than anti-Russian sentiment in the United States and in some ways it's because there's actual fear there. There's a fear of returning to the cold war. There's a fear of, uh, russian, russian expansionism. There's a fear that europe is just less and less relevant to the, to the world, and I know many europeans will be, will probably balk at that, some will agree with me. But just in general, as germany's become more of an economic basket pace, the eu is just not as important. In the grand scheme of things. Um, it increasingly looks like india, china, the united states as the aging, as the aging, you know, not unilateral hegemon, but like the first hegemon amongst not quite equals.

Speaker 1: 1:01:44

Uh, in russia, which is somewhat consolidated, although it's having a lot of economic, like russia during the war has gone in and out of economic problems. The thing is, none of those economic problems have looked anything like what the sanctions regime promises on the west would have indicated. Yeah, which I don't know why anyone thought it would. If you've ever looked at sanctions, they don't do what liberals say. They've never done what liberals say they're going to do. They actually tend to consolidate an internal economy and then like get people to do war, keynesianism, but. But it also, like, opens up trade problems, it leads to highly unstable currency uh, depending on the cycles of trade, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera, and that's what we've seen in Russia. Um, but but you know, and Russia has interestingly gone from like trying to do the Western high tech war stuff to it's just now just doing old fashioned artillery. You know, to do the western high-tech war stuff to it's just now just doing old-fashioned artillery. You know, it's funny how ultimately it often comes to that um, and of course it can outproduce ukraine and even probably the west, because the west is not trying to do a massive artillery, uh, infrastructure build up, um, so we're gonna see a lot of that stuff play out. I think.

Speaker 1: 1:03:03

You know, a friend of mine says, whenever you meet a Marxist you always have to ask yourself are they dreaming about anti-imperialism because they want workers to be free? Are they dreaming about anti-imperialism because they want a different empire in charge? And that has got to be the. Are they dreaming about anti-imperialism because they want a different empire in charge? And that has got to be the question that guides you on this question, like, on these questions, like, like I generally support loosely national liberation from imperial powers.

Speaker 1: 1:03:32

I generally support loosely decolonization, although I will say decolonization ultimately ended up with the elites of the of the developing world shaking hands with parts of the elites that developed. It's a fact, particularly after 1992, when the ussr was no longer there to really support the developmental regimes that it helped establish and, um, that's, that's a problem, all right. Well, dugendo picks up on that resentment. And another thing that you pointed out to me, and this is what's wild okay, so you have Marxist-Leninists who are who will defend China's anti-Islamist policies in regards to the Uyghurs right, and that's a complicated and I know, I know there's going to people call me cowards on both sides. That's actually a very complicated thing that I don't feel super comfortable making broad pronouncements about.

Speaker 1: 1:04:30

I do think China went a little too far, but I understand. I also understand some of the concerns that the Chinese government had about, like Islamism and refusing you know, refusing modernization, etc. My, what I find funny, though, is some of these people have picked up Dugan as talking points, and yet Dugan's other major outreach group, other than like disaffected marxist, leninist and christian, you know, in christian rightist is islamist, and that's you know. You you've spoken about this, uh, at length on your on your show about a year ago you did a whole episode on this. But can you go into to that, because that's something I knew about but you know more about than me well, you know my, so I I guess the episode you're talking about is I have a friend.

Speaker 2: 1:05:25

He lives in australia, his name is waheed azal and uh waheed lived in berlin, uh, with his wife and child and he was. He and his wife were activists and mostly through ecological justice and time at post-9-11, so there was a lot of anti-Muslim sentiment in Europe and so he was a particular target and so there were some people that came around brown and the red that were using Marxist language trying to infiltrate his group. But, uh, but his wife being German, uh was familiar with this sort of technique. As he says that there are that's just kind of a thing that they know about this in Germany Browning the red and um and what, what he claims, and I believe him and this is what we spoke about on his podcast, was that? Or on that episode, was that? Uh, he believes the Duganist in Berlin. Uh poisoned his wife and is responsible for her death and that's why he lives in Australia, and so you know he brought it to my attention that there's entryways through Islamism or Islam faith and stuff, and so that's pretty much the extent of what I know about that, but I would say that I think a lot of the same kind of rules apply, like disaffected Marxists that turn to third worldism or turn to anti-United States sentiment and become frustrated and start looking for you know sort of advancements on Marxist thought. And you know it's, maybe it has to do with, like I don't know, some kind of like, you know, you know, loyalty to historical materialism. And looking around at the conditions that you're in and saying like, well, marxism says, use the conditions that are around me to build whatever is there. And so they end up grafting these ideas from Dugan onto stuff and they lead them into these strange ideological perspectives. But yeah, like, from what I've understood, duganism has their entryways through the online left, mostly through anti-imperialism.

Speaker 2: 1:07:32

There is some stuff through that Waheed has brought to light and shown to me and uh, but that's about, that's about what, what I know about Dugan uh, coming through Islam or entryways through there, um, but yeah, he's, it's, it's an ecumenical Jihad man. I mean it's, it's wild that he can. It's an ecumenical jihad man. I mean it's wild that he can. And there are clips of him talking about how it's difficult. He finds it difficult to bring these sort of disparate parts of the political spectrum together. But you know, he's also a guy who has said that Francis Fukuyama was wrong and that Samuel Huntington was right and that the next wars will be wars over ideology.

Speaker 2: 1:08:17

And so I, you know, I can see how you know he's got a point I can give him credit to say that he's got a point that there is like an ideological sort of first principle just enmity between you know the particulars and universalism just enmity between you know the particulars and and universalism and uh, and so I'm kind of losing my train of thought on that, um, but I but I would say, yeah, it's, it's, there's entryways through through anti-imperialism, through all that stuff, man, and uh, the the methods of recruitment to the online left I think we even see this in the town some of the bots through like haas and these people that were affiliated around.

Speaker 2: 1:08:52

You know that that whole group of people, I mean you look at it now with like, I mean that I think jackson hinkle just had like a new york times fucking piece on him, man, which is like how do you, how do you get that if you're not like a fed sort of thing? You know, like it's, it's it the people around that we've that, I've that, we've noticed that. We've said that we thought it was maybe feeding into it and making the problem worse by speaking about it. I mean, I think we're accurate with all that stuff. It's just. It's just kind of wild that all this at least now we can talk about it openly and it doesn't seem like it's feeding the issue of the problem as much as it was, uh, in years past oh yeah, no, from 2015 to 2020, I basically didn't talk about dugan.

Speaker 1: 1:09:34

Whenever I did talk about doing and have people yelling at me that I was like missing the wrong enemy or whatever. Now, admittedly, one of the people yelling at me is one of the people I know from when I was a conservative, um, so you know who's also rediscovered leftism and the Jimmy Dorvain. I'm not sure that I believe this person's actually a leftist, but nonetheless I mean, you know, and I had, I had expatriate Russia. You know expatriates from Russia who came back with during the Russian war, a lot of Americans who were living in Russia have left. A few have stayed. They're married to someone you know and they're away from Moscow or whatever. And I have Russian fans and audience to this day. I mean, you know not a ton, but I do have them. And one of the things I wanted to you know, what I've seen is that the Russian and the Russian expats always tell me that Dugan's a joke, but people in Europe and in the Middle East tend to take Dugan more seriously, which leads me to believe that, in some ways, dugan knows his project isn't for Russians, it's for people outside of Russia to create a space for Russian movement, like Eurasianism and the talking points around Eurasianism all over, like you hear that all over Putin, when people are like, oh, maybe Dugan's having an influence on Putin, I'm like no, eurasianists are having an influence on both of them. That's what that is. I'm sure Putin knows who Dugan is and the multipolar stuff that's really come out and that's even come out in certain parts of China, bipolar stuff that's really come out and that's even come out in certain parts of china. You know, but, um, I think you know. For me, the reason why we can talk about this is this is now back on the table and what's also happened is we you know.

Speaker 1: 1:11:44

As far as the left is concerned and how to talk specifically about why this may be appealing to the left, white nationalism is never going to be a broad-based movement in the United States, even amongst white people. If white nationalism is one of those things that in the United States works when no one is aware that that's what they're doing, explicit white nationalism calls too much attention to itself, like white supremacy likes to be quieter than that. So people who? But the other thing is, it's not really a demographically viable project and even Sam Francis, the kind of one of the four four runners of what we might call the alt-right admitted that in his book Leviathan and Its Enemies that, like white nationalism, is a non-starter in the United States. Even in the 1990s you could see that demographically, like middle-class white people were not going to be a big enough, you know, even expanding the categories and whatnot, to actually ever be completely and totally in charge, completely on their own and exclude everybody else. That was a weird fascist pipe dream. Francis actually kind of argued that you needed a coalition of people against the center who spoke out against resentment politics.

Speaker 1: 1:13:07

And that's the funny thing about the Nietzsche part of this. I think Tutte's right. Uh, the nichi part of this. I think tut's right about the reactionary nature of nichi. But I've always found it funny that what these people pick up on is the resentment part. And I told tut this like, uh, you know the the funny thing about right-wing nichians is there's some most resentful people you'll ever meet. So like that's, uh, you know that part of Nietzsche didn't come, yeah, yeah. And so this resentment against the center which you know, this isn't just Dugan.

Speaker 1: 1:13:41

You could read Paul Gottfried in the 90s. He was trying to do this and Gottfried, you know, gottfried is another one of these people who comes out of. I don't think he was ever leftist but Godfrey was a student of Marcuse. He was, and he encouraged, for example, richard Spencer, when Richard Spencer was doing his graduate studies, to write an Adorno. So they came out of this Greca, which is sort of a precursor to fourth positionism, that's the European new right around Desbenois and Goulamé Fay, who's dead now and split with Desbenois. But these sort of like radical traditionalist people also get published by Octos Press most of the time. Radical traditionalist people also get published by Octo's Press most of the time. They also have been really hitting at this left-white coalition thing for much longer and they at one point took over Telios magazine, the magazine of the successors to the Frankfurt School. They had a whole issue dedicated to left-right togetherness in the 1990s.

Speaker 1: 1:14:55

None of this is new. What makes it more effective now is that one, I think the Russian-Ukraine war. And I don't know how you feel about the popular front. I know amongst Marxist-Leninists that this is the popular front. Part of Marxist-Leninism is like divisive even amongst them, but I do think this is also an effect of a popular front to get Bernie elected. That liquidated into Bidenism, because a lot of us came to this against, you know, to Marxist politics, by being betrayed by a similar coalition with Obama a decade ago, like so that happening again with the people who literally started their political career critiquing the Obama movement.

Speaker 1: 1:15:48

You know, people forget this in some ways, but, like the dirt bag left, which is already a term that seems remarkably dated, was itself a critique of centrist Democrats, but in a very real way it's been pretty much obvious to everybody. Something that I've been afraid of since about 2016,. Since Trump started, was that our fear of the right would lead us to empower the center without realizing it, thinking we were empowering the left. That would make other kinds of right-wing thought more effective because they looked more counter-systemic, and thus now dugan has all these things going for it. Now, if you actually read the foundations of geopolitics uh, putin versus putin, um, uh, the fourth political position you will see insane shit in there and also the stuff that you know people will say, oh, that's a liberal conspiracy theory.

Speaker 2: 1:16:46

You know, it's stated outright it's, it's, it's there, it's there.

Speaker 1: 1:16:51

It's not in code. Yeah, some of the fascist and post-fascist stuff is in code. That stuff isn't like um the whole. Like we can use Marxism as a Surrealian myth to help us establish a theocracy. That's it. That's not hidden, that's explicitly stated. And um, and I think, weirdly, social democratic marxists and whatnot, being unable to establish an identity that's truly separate from the democrats is part of what makes that appealing. And um, and then what the people do, well, to try to establish something separate from the Democrats, they tail right instead of independent. Like you know, you start getting the stuff like you talked about, like, oh, I don't care about abortion, you know, you know a Stalin banned abortion. We're not going to talk about how much, how bad that failed and how quickly they undid it, but you know Stalin banned abortion. Stalin did stuff to.

Speaker 1: 1:17:53

You know, the Marxist-Leninist parties in the 40s and 50s all took what modern people would consider reactionary stances towards queer people and non-standard relationships, ignoring that that was a reversal of historical positions prior, reversal of historic of historical positions prior. Um, and you know because, uh, in 1917, um, the literally the most liberal marriage law the world had ever known was in the ussr. Uh, including decriminalization of homosexuality, which was unheard of even in the united states. Um, you know, we didn't get people forget that, we didn't get that kids. When I was a kid, homosexuality was still illegal in 20 states yeah like just to remind you uh, I'm from georgia, you're from texas.

Speaker 1: 1:18:45

Your state I'm pointing down your stateules is the state that went so far in their anti-gay laws that it actually got the anti-gay laws thrown out off of privacy.

Speaker 2: 1:19:01

Well, this is like part of what I think is like part of the magnetism of Dugan is constituent is like so, like it's not just a political pull man, it's's like take someone who's apolitical, who like sees the sort of fracturing of the family unit and takes like kind of a I don't know like a a defensive stance against uh blurring the lines of gender or alternative. You know family unit arrangements right um, someone like dugan has something for that person too. I mean, if you've heard dugan talk about anti-feminism in the way that he uh frames it as something inherently anti-human, as in like gender studies wishing to dissolve the final difference between men and women and impose an even more broad universalism of human beings, and so he frames all of this as anti-human. And if you have a guy that's like already reactionary time to listen to Dugan talk about trans people being anti-human, trying to resolve the differences between us, dugan's got something for that guy too. So it's not just like the political people that he's pulling in, you know. I mean in some ways that same guy we're talking about that could be taking the defensive stance against trans people and family unit, maybe someone that is a Christian, that feels like maybe he's an evangelical or something Right.

Speaker 2: 1:20:25

So like the Christo fascist movement in this, in this country is not like, when I looked at January 6th man, I looked around, I didn't see anybody with like a political grievance. It was all like cultural sort of resentment, grievances of like a sort of an erosion of perceived privilege or something that caused these people to be in an uproar at the Capitol. And the great sort of question to me was like how do you take non-political things like spirituality and turn that into a political forward issue? And so for someone who's who we're talking about, like someone who's taking this defensive stance, who's just like maybe just a bigot, right, like there is something appealing within the movement of Christofascism to restore some sort of I don't know traditional more. You know that infringes upon the visibility of, you know, lgbt communities, trans people. That brings things back to the 50s, so to say. You know, like Dugan has something for those guys too. And so I, when I listen to, to dugan speak, I just I, you talk about these conservatives casting a wide net. I mean, dugan's net is really wide to me with who he can pick up, and we've talked about several avenues, uh, of this today.

Speaker 2: 1:21:42

But I but I'll tell you that, like you know, one of the big red flags with me man was like I was reading about dugan and I had read title bombs book and I hadn't. I wasn't at the stage where I wanted to speak publicly about this stuff, but I picked up Ronald Beaner's book dangerous minds and I read that and then I interviewed him and during the course of this interview I just in real time discovered like I was like oh shit, this Ronald Beaner was on, he was one of the professors that was on the dissertation panel for Michael Millerman and and when I discovered that suddenly the time I was like that that's a big red flag for me, you know, um, so yeah, I, I had mistaken for so.

Speaker 1: 1:22:39

For a long time, um, uh, I was the popular likeJ, the J Cal of Velvet Underground, of left-wing podcasters, but one of my dubious claims to fame before 2019 was that right-wingers tended to like me because I would call out liberal bullshit. And this was even more true back in the early aughts when I did this blog called the disloyal opposition to modernity, which, uh, which was a which I just would on. I would go and interview, like, uh, like pagans and weird spiritual people and leftists of various types, and so I garnered an audience of, frankly, a mixture of, uh, very smart people and reactionary weirdos, and I've also seen a lot of leftist turn or semi heel turn. Um, mark Fisher's turned to social democracy, uh, from whatever the fuck that you know, weird, autonomous, less stuff. He was in the aughts, in the 90s. Um, well, he, he actually threw some people into an even further right orbit and I knew them and some of them were the people who literally helped me commission the original vampire castle essay.

Speaker 1: 1:24:05

So I was aware that this was a possibility. We'd seen it a lot and I I attract, you know, as a scholar, christopher lash, uh, you know, scholar here being autodidactic, but still as a uh, a person who has, you know, I remember amy terese, for example, before she went full, you know, uh, full bore, right wing reactionary, citing influences and me going, she stole my reading list because it was like, uh, daniel bell, chris for lash board, a gun and panic cook, and I'm like one I don't believe you really read that and two, like who else knows both left communism and like conservatism? That's me. She's never once, uh, therese never fought me. She does not, as far as I know, know who I am. Um, she, she did know who doug lane was and fought him, so I suppose that maybe that came through there, uh, but nonetheless, I've seen this before and I've had these people around like, uh, I had to block mark shabobda from my facebook, um, so you, you know.

Speaker 2: 1:25:11

Did he do the original translations of 4PT as well?

Speaker 1: 1:25:14

Yes, he did. He did the OG one before Milliman cleaned it up. And he one time offered me to write for Attack the System, keith Preston's blog, with some nebulous exchange of favors and access that was never defined. Um uh to uh to translate some of dugan's stuff that was anti-imperial, and I I refuse to um uh. But I also remember being in, like, being confused, because I knew dugan from his prior national bolshevik shit that, like if I didn't know what he actually believed, that I would have been convinced by those articles too. Like if I didn't know, like, if I didn't know who american fourth position was and and all this stuff, I would have been convinced by this.

Speaker 1: 1:26:09

The, my, my inoculate, you know, my uh kind of vaccine against this, to use a unfortunate metaphor, uh, was the fact that I was a rightist first, like, and so I recognized all the moves, I recognized the tradition, I knew the history, I knew the history of the people you talked about. I mean we, we talk about a more famous one. Fucking Whitaker Chambers was a communist at one point, you know. I mean I could go through Arthur Koestler. I could go through the whole Communist to anti-communist During the 20s and 30s, both to the liberal centrist version, koestler Popper, etc. And the and the centrist version, kostler Popper, etc. And the more conservative version, chambers, and then the reactionary version of which there is a ton, and Dugan seems to have specially created an ideology and maybe it would help if I understood the context of like what he's trying to get to happen off of what's going on in russia, because that's still, I will admit that, even having friends in russia and having a fair like for an american, a good sense of russian history, I do not actually understand what's going on on the ground in russia. Like I don't really know, um, uh, it's hard for, and whenever I hear people trying to play modern criminologist, I'm like you don't know, I don't know, no one knows. Yeah, like for fuck, for I can tell from talking to russians most russians don't know. Like it's not clear, uh, where this stuff is all coming from. And the my fear when I first, you other than I didn't want to make this more popular because it wasn't the only time.

Speaker 1: 1:27:55

I mean, you know a lot of people love Alex Coburn, but Coburn got soft in this shit towards the end of his life. You can see this in what Counterpunch? Counterpunch is kind of overcorrected and become like kind of too pro-NATO and stuff. Now counterpunch is kind of over corrected and become like kind of too pro nato and stuff now, but like um, you can see this in the stuff they were publishing when they were publishing samir amin and people who were like explicitly russian ops like, who were like trying to bring back pole pot defense, which has now come back anyway. But um, uh, that was the thing that they were running on counterpunch in the early aughts, right before Coburn died, and Coburn was also, you know, talking about American fascism but like talking about how maybe Marine Le Pen wasn't so bad and that kind of stuff when Coburn died was whitewashed out of his late life. It's just no one talked about it because everybody was like a lot of people, including people like Friendly to Show and fellow Texid griscom um, you know they got their introduction to left-wing politics was like coburn to michael brooks. I mean you know that's, that was their pathway.

Speaker 1: 1:29:02

And for me to go like, well, you know, coburn was amazingly on in a lot of ways. I mean he was good at calling bernie out back in a day for Bernie's, you know, even before his presidential runs, for his like milquetoast stances on foreign policy and shit like that. I don't want to like erase Coburn's virtues, but he was soft on this shit Explicitly. I mean, paul Craig Roberts and a bunch of paleo-conservatives worked for him at certain points and also worked for rt and stuff like that.

Speaker 1: 1:29:33

And when liberals started picking up this anti-russian stuff in 2015, uh 20, uh 2016, I dropped it all because I didn't want to contribute to west gate bullshit like yeah, I mean, and that put us in. That put me in a very weird position because, on one hand, I'm like this isn't nothing and, on the other hand, these liberals are fucking exaggerating the threat, making it seem like there's like these russian professors secretly controlling everybody. And I don't think dugan has that kind of influence, but I also think of the people who try to convince me they have, none are just wrong, like um he. He seems to be. Frankly, I think his aim is outside of russia. I think his aim is at us.

Speaker 2: 1:30:18

Um oh, he says as much as he says russia should be the staging ground of an anti-united states revolution and, and you know, foundations of geopolitics. So I, you know, ultimately I feel like his goal is the destruction of modernity, modernity being the united states, western, sort of uh, you know, ultimately I feel like his goal is the destruction of modernity, modernity being the United States, western, sort of uh, you know, and the way that he disputes that, that, uh, that Western culture even has like a metaphysics that they've, you know, he says that they've based their entire sort of outlook on materialism. Um, like that, it's a poverty stricken sort of ideology, uh, and you can see some of this sort of, you know, I, I think there's a kernel to be kind of pulled at in the way that he uh, well, I don't know that that dougan himself has like criticisms of catholicism, but I know traditionalists in general don't think as highly of Catholicism as they do of Sufi Islam or Hinduism.

Speaker 1: 1:31:19

Yeah, traditionalists tend to. I mean, if you look at René Guillaume.

Speaker 2: 1:31:22

Yeah.

Speaker 1: 1:31:24

René Guillaume is like a Volo without the politics. That traditionalism was quietist. It was like, okay, we're out, we might be reactionest. It was like, okay, we're out, we're. We might be reactionaries, fuck, but we're reactionary without politics. We're just gonna like, do our spiritual shit. And you know what I I'm gonna say something. Maybe, as a marxist, I don't fuck with those guys like I. Just I just leave them alone yeah, yeah like it's like you know you want to be your ron dryer head out into the desert.

Speaker 1: 1:31:53

My time Mars's answer is just like fucking, let them yeah you know that's, that's kind of unpopular for being like, if they want to do that, then they're just out of our hair and we're both happy. You know, we don't have to impose our way of life, uh, on them. And but you know it's interesting that you say that, uh, dugan says that fukuyama is wrong because I think he's, I think he, I think he's right that ideology keeps on rearing its ugly head. But the part of fukuyama that that I think hearts haunts fukuyama not just you know us is him saying that liberalism has become just the freedom of individualism and while this, you know, has some good effects and has universal appeal because everyone can see themselves as an animalized individual in some sense, it doesn't actually, like you know, people forget about the end of history and the last man, part of that title, it's like, basically, he thinks that, like you know, this is actually kind of bad, that this is a future without vision, etc. Without vision, um, etc.

Speaker 1: 1:33:15

And one of the things I find interesting about that is basically dugan's critique of liberalism is fukuyama is that liberalism lost all of its other virtues because it's universalistic, it's inherently racist, which, okay, actually, and so depending Okay, actually, depending on how you interpret universalism. Somewhat true, although, like I said, dugan's definition of racism is wild. It is any idea that sets itself up as a cultural bias without scientific proof or something is racist. So, like any judgment of any other culture at all, that is not uh. And actually, since he doesn't really believe in science, that scientific caveat, it's also kind of funny that he puts it in there, cause he can't believe it?

Speaker 2: 1:34:01

Yeah, he's. He's talked about how he doesn't see a doctor and he like believes in like if, like, your eye gets sick, then stab out your eye, kind of stuff. And you know, yeah, he doesn't believe in science, but he is full of contradictions, as you know.

Speaker 1: 1:34:13

yeah, yeah, I mean he's, he's an irrationalist. I mean, the other thing about him is he's a christophascist who's anti you know, anti-satanic supposedly, who also was a satanofascist at a different point of his life, and that weird occult traditionalist stuff that is yeah, that is not orthodox at all is also run through like an orthodox christian trying to do something with a vola.

Speaker 1: 1:34:46

That's wild, like yeah, um, you know, mean it is not that. We haven't seen such contradiction before. How many Christians we know who are all in the Nietzsche, which is also itself like dude, hated you. Dude. Dude thinks that Nietzsche's problem with the left is that it was too Christian Right.

Speaker 1: 1:35:09

Incredible man christian right, right, like incredible man, like you know. Are you know for the american examples back in in our youths? Uh, you and I are about the same age. Um, I'm a little older than you, I think, but I'm 40 yeah, so uh, ann rand and the amount of christians that loved her, which was always like baffling to me too, I'm like have you read any of the objections?

Speaker 2: 1:35:31

Have you read this stuff?

Speaker 1: 1:35:33

I mean, it's elitism for idiots.

Speaker 2: 1:35:36

But like it's not explicitly anti-religious.

Speaker 2: 1:35:39

It's like Levaeanism is just Ayn Rand with candles, you know, sort of thing. Right, yeah, you know, I think it's really interesting that he ran in these sort of occult circles when he was younger and now, I mean, it just seems like it's one more instance of like being on one end of the spectrum and coming all the way to the other side. You know, at one point he was supportive of the Communist Party. After he was like very anti. He was speaking out against like soviet sort of control society and stuff. In his younger rebellious ages, but I think it's, his father was some sort of like.

Speaker 2: 1:36:18

There's some speculation in charles clover's book that his father was some sort of important guy in the soviet government and so dugan was allowed to be rambunctious and do crazy shit and his dad get him out of trouble, uh, so it just speaks to what you're talking about. Like the some of the uh reactionaries that are the leaders in the reactionary movements are petty bourgeois stuff, you know, um, yeah, it's uh that he that he ran in these satanic circles, uh, when he was younger. Uh, I I don't. I don't even know what to make of that Like at this stage now and how it's relevant, other than just adding to the overall weirdness of and maybe lending some like. The syncretism of all of this shit is what is wild to me too, like how are you anti-universalist and a Christian?

Speaker 2: 1:37:08

Just, I mean just right there, yeah, yeah, I mean yeah, universalist and a christian, just, I mean just right, just right there, yeah, yeah, I mean yeah, and I mean how are you anti-west if you're a christian when, like, the purportedly western values are in line with christianity as well? Like, I mean, it's so yeah, there's, there's amazing sort of contradictions within this shit. Um, but I think as and I question now, like how much relevance dugan has at this point like the last thing I've heard about dugan was the incident with the car bomb, and then there was a state funeral for his daughter and there were a lot of what I understand to be like russian, you know, political agents there at the funeral.

Speaker 1: 1:37:45

So, yeah, there seems to have been. I just someone showed me an article, uh, from russia that there's like a university in in Russia courting him again so he might go out of being the intelligent Alex Jones wing of Russian media back into being some kind of foreign policy academic. But then again, do you make someone relevant by making them an academic? It tends to be no, so it's hard for me to say what his trajectory actually is. Um, I also think, uh, as far as, like the, the, the marxist, leninist world you know we were talking about this where duganisms come in, I think there's a lot of other right-wing stuff coming in simultaneously, like the, the post-left social democracy stuff. Most of those guys have just either depoliticized or gone conservative outright. A lot of the left populists have given up the left. Part of that I think you know. We in general.

Speaker 1: 1:38:50

One thing I would say about Dugan is a particularly weird and fascinating form of this and one that, like you and I, can go back and forth, and I go back and forth for myself about how I'm like when I was asked to do this series and they said that you know, start with Dugan, and I was like, on one hand, it doesn't seem dangerous right now to talk about Dugan. And there are clearly quote left wing factions like MAGA, communism and people adjacent to it who are, who have been influenced by it either directly. I mean in the case of of MAGA and patriotic and the patriotic communist movement and all that. They was explicit very early and the patriotic communist movement and all that they was explicit very early. Yeah, um, uh. But you know also larouche ism in there, the return of larouche ism, which is wild.

Speaker 2: 1:39:39

I mean, that's like that's wilder than the schiller, the schiller institute, having, like a, a candidate for congress or something as well at one point you know like what the fuck yeah.

Speaker 1: 1:39:55

And like LaRouche pack, the split between the Schiller Institute and the Roos pack is funny, but like LaRouche pack, going all in on the stop the steel stuff. It was just like what in the world is going on? What is happening? Yeah, but in another sense I think we have to just admit we are in a moment where the failures of the left in general have led people to turn to right wing options, even people who don't think they're doing that. I mean, how many people have become standard bog fuck Democrats, which, from me, is a shift to the right, like becoming a progressive from a socialist. It's a. It's a movement to the right, like and you know, it might be a concession to reality, it might be you finally got your boomer parents money, I don't know, um, but nonetheless, we've seen a lot of this shit lately and we've seen a ton of it.

Speaker 1: 1:40:46

I thought that when we, when the other thing was happening concurrent to this, like weird boom of doing ism, like a year or two years ago, was also all the social Democrats jumping on the Biden train at the moment, that it seemed to me that it was about the crash, like you just seeing all these people talk about, like Biden, the most progressive president since FDR, but we mean it as a, as a critique of the other presidents. I'm like, well, motherfuckers, when he wasn't more progressive than lyndon johnson, um which, you know, lyndon johnson was a warmonger and a shit in a shit store, but he actually did believe in helping the fucking poor. Um. And two, uh, this is a right-wing concessionism, it is, you know. It's just not as far to the right as something like do again or are, um, you know, the all against the center mentality, um. Another thing, though I think what we have to deal with is like that ecumenical jihad and popular frontism. They're very similar very similar yeah, they're very similar.

Speaker 1: 1:41:51

Um and as. Yeah, they're very similar. And as I always point out about the problem with popular frontism, even in national liberation movement, is it will immediately descend into a civil war Immediately.

Speaker 2: 1:42:01

Yeah Well, popularism is also like a tharzy gathered around a floating signifier that'll disappear or just become something else instantly. You know we saw this with kind of I mean the vaccine and liberty and these ideas and not anything that was like going to withstand, just the standard sort of vaporizing of a floating signifier man. It wasn't a strong enough sort of conjoining issue and movement and and it's an extremely temporary movement, not that I support.

Speaker 1: 1:42:52

I know I had some leftist friends who supported the Trudeau administration's actions on it. I kind of didn't. I was like it's not really that much of a threat, it's just annoying. And this is I don't know. You know you, you've gotten into left politics since 2015. I've been in left politics since 2008. Yeah, but you and I both can kind of see that like. There's also these weird tailest moments where left wingers like, okay, we got to jump on the trucker convoy. I mean like, cause, that's a working class thing.

Speaker 2: 1:43:34

Well, it's a failure of distinction of who is actually working class.

Speaker 2: 1:43:38

It's like how are you just so visually impaired that you can't see your fellow workers here? You mistake these petty bourgeois people that own their trucking rigs. They're distinct from the operators that don't own their stuff. That are distinct from, like, the operators that don't own their stuff, and we see this several times, including these weird sort of like, this sort of I don't know man, how like suddenly, everyone who took this shift to the right hates people to work at Starbucks like hates people to make your coffee and are intent on making them not part of the working class.

Speaker 1: 1:44:11

Yeah, because they pretend that they're like somehow, that they're blue hair pmc because they're cultural affectations. Yeah, yeah, dude, it's uh, I mean, so it's wild some of the ideas that we see spawn out of this stuff I mean that was, I think, the discourse this year ago where, like korean business owners, proletariat, but blue-haired starbucks reese says not proletariat. I used to call it barista gate.

Speaker 1: 1:44:30

Barista gate yeah, it was just. I'm like, come on, and the person's like, well, productivism, I'm like one. I want you to go back to your theories of surplus value, because Marx actually does not make being part of the proletariat dependent solely on being productive. Productivity is productivity towards capital, not towards social value.

Speaker 1: 1:44:50

Anyway, but two, that's a great point but yeah yeah, um, but two beyond that, even if you assume that, uh, I mean, you're acting like these petite bourgeois are are the industrial proletariat, which they're not. Also, the industrial proletariat as you classically understand it, uh, as in like workers and factories, is all of like 13 of the population, uh, at this point, and declining so because of automation.

Speaker 2: 1:45:22

Good fucking luck trying to run a revolution with that yeah, some of these dumbasses were like well, let's go out for the brick layers. They're the people that I'm like what go after the brick layers how many? They're the people that I'm like what Go out for the bricklayers, how many? Bricklayers are left. What are we talking about? Yeah, like, yeah, yeah I mean for one.

Speaker 1: 1:45:38

A lot of these people are contractors and like, look like, I actually do think Marxists need a better answer to how to handle the petite bourgeois than fuck them. But you know, like, in in the sense that even marx admitted early on, artisans in the very small end of the bourgeoisie do culturally and productively overlap with the proletariat. Where they are different is that their incentives are different because they're not wage earners and, uh, you know, with the trucker stuff, I actually even I I talked to someone about it I'm like, look like, if you're a trucker, some of these restrictions on on movement or whatever hamper you and you're actually, since you're a solo employee in a truck, you're actually not that at risk for covid, but you are a transmission vector, so, like you feel you know and it sucks, but I pointed out the people before, like, if you think truckers are the manifestation of the working class, I hate to tell you, but trucker strikes have been historically used against other workers by right-wingers since the 1960s in chile and the 70s in the United States.

Speaker 1: 1:46:52

The trucker convoy that wasn't even the first one. Like, does that mean that truckers don't deserve representation? No, I mean they do, and some of them are proletariat, some of them are not. All of them own their rigs, but nonetheless you're taking a tiny portion of the working class and extrapolating all the interests of the entire working class based off of a part of it that has radically different incentives than everything else. And you see this stuff everywhere with this popular movement.

Speaker 1: 1:47:26

I keep on emphasizing like, look, I do think at one point popularism was progressive in the sense that it helped us towards socialism in the 19th century, because you had all these agrarian workers that were not quite peasants and not quite agrarian wage earners, yet they were basically sharecroppers and the children of sharecroppers and they needed a movement, and that movement was aligned with the workers in the 19th century. Absolutely, you don't live in the 19th century, motherfucker. Like um it, like that's not true, it's, it's actually I, similarly to me. I got people like about like peasants wars in in north america and I'm like malice stance on peasantry has no place here.

Speaker 2: 1:48:09

It we don't have fucking peasants, so like I think a lot of this man, like a lot of this, boils down to an inadequate world view by the left like I. When I say world view like it's like we, at least in the west, it was like for a while it was like what are we fighting for? Communism is not free college y'all like this is this seems to be the apotheosis of where our vision is leading us. Is like a free college y'all like this is this seems to be the apotheosis of where our vision is leading us.

Speaker 1: 1:48:33

Is like a free college and health care.

Speaker 2: 1:48:35

We call it health care and then we sit on that for a while and you know what every other major capitalist power and developer got, except for us, yeah yeah, so it's like we're you know, so just maybe get the worker consciousness, you know, and maybe we can get to broader social welfare, but like, yeah, so like.

Speaker 2: 1:48:59

But also that limited scope of vision also has to do with the way that this country does not have a labor party, and so I feel like all of us within this political spectrum engaging in politics the United States are somewhat disoriented in the way that we do not have a labor party that represents us and labor is relegated to a small faction of the progressives or something within the Democratic Party that will never have the power that it purports to have at times.

Speaker 1: 1:49:22

Weirdly right-wingers like Michael. I mean he's a center rightist but Michael Lind is actually more accurate in describing the class dynamics of what made up the Democratic Party and its concessions to labor. It was like, well, it was Sunbelt industrialists like small business, petty bourgeois and workers who work for them, and then the broad, you know, the workers of the broad industrial movements as opposed to finance capital or whatever, broad industrial movements as opposed to finance capital or whatever, and lynn's like. And the interesting thing is basically in the 20th century, by the end of the 20th century, that coalition's reversed. But you know what I pointed out, I'm like none of them are actually workers. Coalitions, workers are caught up in them and even in lynn's model he lynned and turchin and all those people see the working class as essentially a static thing that will glom on to different elites but has none of its own agency and interest. So like if you look at the Lin model of class conflict in the new class war, he basically sees this as an inter-elite division with the overclass which he doesn't say who it is.

Speaker 1: 1:50:29

I think he means bourgeoisie, but he's not going to give Marx that much credit. Are letting the petite bourgeois and the professionals fight right and the working class sides with one or the other depending on their interests. That is kind of how things work right now. But the thing is like that model is based off the idea that the working class do not ever manifest in their own interest. Their their own interests are actually just manifesting whatever their local bourgeoisie wants, because that's going to keep their jobs. And I'm like, well, that's the poverty of not having them, like a marxist view of classes being able to have their own agency. And weirdly, you're focusing on the classes that that they can't have their own, which is why they're politically dependent. That's the petite bourgeois and the professionals. I mean and I'm also say I am not a PMC theorist I actually think a good portion of professionals are labor aristocratic proles, to be frank, but nonetheless, by that I mean they're wage earners in credential fields. But they're wage earners in credential fields.

Speaker 2: 1:51:31

But they're wage earners.

Speaker 1: 1:51:32

And in fact one of the Kristen Parenti of all people writing about the PNC actually pointed out that one of the interesting things in the 20th century is that the professional managerial class went from being petit bourgeois to being actually proletarianized.

Speaker 1: 1:51:49

In a lot of ways it's elite proletarianized, it has a lot of elite patronage and so higher wages and shit, but it's now dependent on the wage fund. It is no longer directly getting its own profits and that's missed in a lot of these discussions. Eric Owen Wright not one of my favorite Marxists, but he actually did point out the reason why a lot of workers hate their manager more than their owner of the business is the person who dominates you is more as a closer proximity to you than the person who exploits you, which is largely hidden. And a lot of these right wingers know how to zero in on the domination thing, to hide the exploitation thing, so they get too mad at the manager so you forget the manager works for a goddamn owner, um, or for structural capital if it's a publicly traded firm yeah you know, yeah, like that, to play the middle man to hide the actual ruler is one of the oldest fucking internal book.

Speaker 1: 1:52:52

Right and right wingers know this shit and I think Dugan knows it too. Like everyone fucking hates the American empire, like you know, like like even most Americans at this point, hey, the American empire, let's be honest, like like we don't even like it anymore. I mean, like you know, I, I, we don't even like it anymore. I mean, like you know, I remember saying someone for, for, for, supposedly be proletarian in a country that got sold out. It is weird to me that you know we sold out the entire world and yet somehow we don't even have the basic shit that Europeans and fucking Asians do in capitalism. I feel like we got screwed over our labor aristocracy somehow, you know, like I got, I get really passionate about this because, just yeah, it's like we're, we're, we're. The court doesn't even get shit.

Speaker 2: 1:53:38

Well, you, know, this is like you know, this is like, when I go back and look at like marcusi, I'm like I can understand why this guy started looking for alternative subjects. Right for like For like, looking for why people were like, hey, maybe the historical subject is the student. You know the frustration that led to Marcuse sort of, like you know, looking for alternative subjects. I mean, I'm a fan of this thought process, of like Heideggerian Marxism that, like, the working class must discover that it is the historical subject and achieve its own Dasein of seasoned means of control, like, like I, I I'm a fan of what Marcuse did there, you know, um and and attributing an agency towards the working classes.

Speaker 2: 1:54:26

Yeah, I mean to think of the masses of people as not having agency is like a hugely flawed sort of analysis that, like I don't know what are you just ignoring? History, like all of modern society is founded on the beheading of a tyrant. This is, this is what happens when the masses are ignored. The masses are ignored, and so you know, I think that, like you know, there's a lot there within Duganism for anyone that feels a sort of Nietzschean resentment, you know, and that resentment is kind of easy to stumble across in, whoever you are in, whatever society.

Speaker 2: 1:55:10

You know, if you hate the USs empire, if you're an anti-feminist, if you are an anti-imperialist, that's following a marxist line. Uh, this shit is sticky. You know, and, uh, and you said yourself you had like an inoculation to it through formerly being a right-winger. So you recognize these sort of rhetorical patterns that are common sort of moves that they make you know, um, but there's also the thought, the concept that, like, I mean, if we talk about the flip side of this too, like foundations, the geopolitics published around the same time as the grand chessboard, you know, and and, uh, and these are not things that, like, we're saying, only Russia does. We have our own sort of foundations of geopolitics that Brzezinski wrote you know, and we have our own plan for it, Brzezinski.

Speaker 1: 1:55:58

I mean Huntington is a foundation of geopolitics.

Speaker 2: 1:56:02

Yeah, yeah.

Speaker 1: 1:56:03

I mean we have our own evil overlords, we have our own oligarchs. I mean, this is one of the things that I I I have been very much like, you know let's not just talk about our russian oligarchs.

Speaker 2: 1:56:13

let's talk about our tech oligarchs here, because they are well, yeah yeah, like you know, um yeah, I mean I'm with you on this in the whole.

Speaker 2: 1:56:22

Uh, you know techno-feudalism concept and you know the money is in the hand of a few tech overlords and the rest of us are just sort of within their dominion here, and that makes total sense to me, and it makes sense in terms of a Marxist framework of like having a kernel of feudalism contained within capitalism or late capitalism, whatever you want to call it. That all makes sense to me, and it's one more subject that one could be resentful about as well, you know. And so maybe if you're you're a deep cat and you read Dugan and you kind of latch onto his philosophical frameworks here.

Speaker 2: 1:56:54

I mean he would tell you that modernity is nothing more than the death of God and rendering the individual subject as the sole arbiter of the good. And within this sort of untethered framework, it's like being free in a vacuum. It's like you can go anywhere but there's nowhere to go and there's nothing to see. Uh, and he longs for this sort of like anchor, which is somewhat of like a caste system, of a role within, like if you are, if you are a merchant, then that is your role and life is fulfilling based upon the fulfillment of your role. And so, but this is the argument from traditionalists that the golden age of truth, beauty and insight that is best for human beings and society was at an earlier stage, where we were all born into the roles to be played.

Speaker 1: 1:57:54

And so was at an earlier stage, where we were all born into the roles to be played, and so so you notice, the traditionalists usually fetish the aristocrats and not the peasants, even though I might say, oh, it's better for the peasants too. But like yeah and like yeah, I mean, yeah, the working day was better for some peasants, uh, but also, being randomly raped by a lord or just killed by a knight who didn't get sent off to crusade because he had nothing better to do that day is not something you want to be subject to. Now one, I will admit, there's a tendency in modernity to make the past worse than it probably was. The past is pretty bad, don't get me wrong, but there's this tendency to make it sound like it was all bad. Then modernity happened and everything was great, the Steven Pinker worldview, whereas I definitely think, like you know, whether or not I'm still a classical Hegelian, you know, or Marxist Hegelian, is a question even to me, but I do sort of think that, like I think of progress in spirals, regress in spirals.

Speaker 1: 1:58:56

But I think one of the interesting things to me about, say, elite socialism and traditionalism is they both favor people who don't have to work, imagining how great it would be to be had unalienated labor, except that, you know, we're going to ignore the fact that it's based off of binding people not just to their position but to certain land and limiting who they can marry, and also, they're basically all I mean. Serfs are all but slaves. They start as slaves and, you know, just romanticizing that. That's not that different to me than, like, these people in the South and then in the 1850s, the guy who invented the term sociology in English actually, who were, who were talking about how, you know, slavery was good, anti-capitalism, which you know, you know, despite the fact that they were, like, doing internal to capitalism itself, some of the most raw accumulation we'd ever seen in the human history of the world. But that's how they romanticize their role in that was that. Oh, we are more, you know, we are more like these traditional societies. You and I are Southerners. We know about the agrarians who, while they didn't, while they weren't mostly outright neo-Confederates, they had this hankering for the agrarian, diffused life as the real life of the human being, which ignores the fact that they needed tons of servants and mostly they were romanticizing a planter class of people who didn't fucking work.

Speaker 1: 2:00:31

I get it like I've lived, I, you know, I, I have lived in places in close proximity to peasants, uh, in, like central america, and you know what I, I've told people I'd rather be poor in a peasant village than I would in a city in mexico, hands down, but I'd rather not be poor Either way. Yes, dugan is right. Some of these Let me rephrase that Dugan is seizing on something that is correct, that certain pre-modern, unalienated forms of community Are somewhat resilient and do give you something Psychologically To hang on to, to in tough times that modern people largely lack, although we haven't lacked it all the time. There have been times where we had proxies for these things, the party, even earlier times with church. What I find interesting today and I'm not know, I'm not a Robert Putnam head, I don't I think that there's something missing in the bowling alone picture other than just modernity, that there's some kind of relation of production and reproduction that we're not seeing in that picture, because there must have been something enabling these mass moves to happen in the past, other than just technology, is why they don't happen now.

Speaker 1: 2:01:59

I just can't believe that it's just facebook, um, uh, but I do think we have to be honest that, um, you know, we had organizations, uh, that that met a lot of these functions, and today, even the religious ones don't seem to be able to do that, and I've always been a person saying, look, I don't think we never do what religious organizations do. The left is not a church, but you know what we could learn from church, but I'm also seeing churches are dying too. Religious affiliation today is something that you mean about, just like your politics or anything else, like how many of these track caps you see on. You know, uh, on in in dime square, posting on twitter. Now that muslims in charge, uh, are actually going to church on the weekend, I, I imagine a lot, um, uh, and the attendance rates would back that up. So you know there's something hollowed out about this. Then I can see that appeal. Right, you're right, it's definitely there. Dugan's going to speak to that.

Speaker 2: 2:03:00

A lot of things will speak to that, honestly, I mean I think you might be talking about something that I've thought about. Sorry, interrupt, uh good, like this sort of like latent thirst for the spiritual, like this sort of weird like like society seems to have something left for wanting. And I don't know if it's exactly a lack of community which sparks this. I don't know if it's a lack of meaning, I don't know if it's a general fatigue in like a young troll Han sort of sense, that like we've expelled the other through sameness, you know. But there is something profoundly sort of like like a malnutrition of the soul kind of thing. And I don't want to get like into sort of the speaking about like the ills of modernity or something in like a in like a anti modernist sort of speaking about like the ills of modernity or something in like a in like a anti modernist sort of perspective. But I mean, we see this in society to where like and this is an argument that comes from some of the traditionalists that I've read that's like that you can't eliminate the sacred, you can only transfer the sacred, and part of that I saw Hence for the sacred. And part of that I saw, which was remarkable, was in thinking about how, on January 6th, when they described the, the founding father's mythology, and the way they looked like the athenian greeks in their monuments and the, the ways that documents are sacred and the way that flags have burial rights and uh and it just you know. So what I, what you're getting getting at, is like from this lack of third places, lack of community, this overly fatigue and exhaustion, sort of another Byung-Chul Hong thing, like the violence of positivity, that everything is saturated and exhausted. Um, you know, like so. So it's hard for me to speak about this, but I think we know what we're talking about, cause there's like something there around there which has created what I've just referred to as like a latent thirst for the spiritual, like people like what do you get out of Bernie that you, what do you get out of Trump that you don't get out of Bernie back in 2016? Well, it's like Trump kind of.

Speaker 2: 2:05:33

I mean, that seemed like a historical movement and you had to be a part of a movement with that. So people are looking for, like a restoration of this sort of role, that that I spoke about earlier. Whereas, like you know, you were the sole arbiter of the good, you are a containerized, individual subject and you can go anywhere and do anything but there's nothing to do and there's nothing to see. But maybe maybe within a political movement like Trump, you got to feel like you were a part of a moving portion of history and so maybe that was in terms of fulfillment or meaningfulness for the average person who has a lack of these things in their life. Maybe there was some fulfillment to that degree on that end. But yeah, I wonder if anything out of that, if there's something there, because I I've thought about this a lot and I've not really. I don't ever really do a good job of wording and I hope I've done a good job of describing what I'm trying to get at.

Speaker 2: 2:06:21

Yeah.

Speaker 1: 2:06:22

I always consider so I'm going to pick a fight with Bolcho Han stands, but I've always seen Bolcho Han as like vaguely hinting at something real but not actually fleshing it out enough for me to actually use them.

Speaker 2: 2:06:35

I'm probably doing the same thing there, yeah, yeah.

Speaker 1: 2:06:36

Yeah, but I want to, I want to. I want to pick up on something that I think is important, one for all of my methodological materialism and I consider myself a methodological materialist I am not actually a raw materialist in the like, in like the Fierabacchian sense of the term, like. I don't think that. I don't think that that's actually a very satisfying metaphysics, even from the standpoint of explaining the existence of being so. I tend to be very careful about how I word this, but there's a reason why Matt Chrisman, for all the you know, is one of the most popular leftists, despite the fact that a lot of what he says is both insightful and yet incoherent, and a more lefty way than Dugan, but he actually shares. That is because he talks like a fucking prophet, all right. And a more lefty way than dugan, but he actually shares. That is because he talks like a fucking prophet, all right. Um, now I think the traditionalists get on us. They offer a melange, a strange view of incoherent spiritual paths, ideologies and politics. I mean, the one thing I would say is like, like you know, my, my, my warning about this great ecumenical jihad is the moment jihad's over. The next person you fight is your comrade, it has to be necessarily, you know. So there is that. But I do think, until we speak to this need for a third thing, this need for a mediation, all right, that that people have, even if it's a civic religion, all right. There's a reason why a lot of the civic rituals of the united states or of russia, or whatever those symbols, those things, uh, still matter to people, even when they don't even fucking believe in the country that instantiated them anymore, or they think it's so fallen that it's so fallen away that all these things are kind of hauled out, and yet those things still have meaning. That to me, you know, it's a, it's a, it's a blind spot of Marxism. I'm not saying that Marxist, uh, you know, we, if we just incorporated spirituality, we'd have a perfect ideology. I don't know, that's true. Um, I, I tend to think the marxist tend towards explaining things in material terms tends to actually be much more helpful. But we do have to look at the mediating power of these ideas and this idea of a third thing. Um, uh, I, I'm always at war with david graber, but david graber and Marshall Sons In their book on kings talk about meta persons and like fake kings, so often In egalitarian societies, there will be a projection Of an unegalitarian figure that's not a person but acts like a person in your head.

Speaker 1: 2:09:26

So you have like the great king in heaven or whatever, but they're far fucking way In heaven and we're equal here. And I think so you have like the great king and heaven or whatever, but they're far fucking way in heaven and we're equal here. And I think there is something to that mediation of these contradictory impulses in the human person that religion and spirituality get to. The problem that you have is that religion almost, almost always requires class mediated power to be maintainable, which is why, uh, people tend to go for you know what I tend to be to think of as otherwise vibish, garbage, gook of spirituality. But because there's, uh, there is a kind of correct that the average person has a correct view that, like well, religion's trying to get some me subordinate to somebody a lot of the time. Um, and while these doctrines may make sense or am I believe in them, I'm often part of this hierarchy that I don't really want to be a part of. So there's a class relationship here and fuck that shit. Um, and a lot of people, even a lot of religious mystics, like grok this some way, like they feel this somewhere, and so that tensions in religious thinking.

Speaker 1: 2:10:38

I tend to think that we have to kind of get into the world of like and it's funny because we're talking about a Russian and I'm going to go to other Russians but like Bogdanov or Bakhtin are people who really thought about what would a proletarian or a post-class, even more than proletarian, because remember the gold communism, just the victory of the proletariat, it's the abolition of class altogether.

Speaker 1: 2:11:02

What would that look like if we're not making shit up Like what is God building or whatever? You know what does it mean to have an imminent metaphysics? It also respects materialist reality and I think that is a want for a third thing, the thing that mitigates and mediates. Marxists tend to distrust the third thing, rightly, because we see most people using it to fool us the fet fetish. The fetish is the third thing and it hides, but it also binds and we know that too. And so when we're faced with Dugan, if we don't try to deal with the mediation, we're going to fucking lose, and I think we are, because, like, I don't think we're losing to Duganism, I think we're losing to Duganism. I think we're losing to. I think we're losing to ourselves actually that like in this kind of like material.

Speaker 2: 2:12:02

We don't even have enough power to lose to ourselves, bro.

Speaker 1: 2:12:07

Well, here's where I might disagree with you.

Speaker 2: 2:12:09

Yeah.

Speaker 1: 2:12:10

I think a lot of us on the left downplay our own power. Sure, because it actually has really negative implications about what we did. The scarier thing to me is this idea, which I think is partly true we never had enough power to take over society, but we had a lot more power than we thought. And you know what we did? We just gave it to the fucking Democrats. We just gave it to them, yeah, like we didn't even ask for that much for it, like, like we were just like oh, trump scary, please take scary man way. Like um, and and as much as I don't love giving platypus affiliated society credit for much, I'll give them credit for this. Um, they are right that in some ways, the right not just the dugan right, the trump right, even the fucking neoconservative right understood the crises of post-neoliberalism better than us, because we thought, we still thought we were fighting neoliberalism and they'd already moved on. And and if, if it, if it kind of gets you that we're fighting like this.

Speaker 1: 2:13:17

You were talking about this beast, you dougan, who seems so relevant now, but really all his major ideas are from 2005 to 2009. He hasn't really had a lot of new ideas since then and even then, like we said, they weren't his ideas, he was just synthesizing them. But he hasn't done like. I've read some of his later work and it's not nearly as vital and innovative in the way it's synthesizing. So in a way, all this, the present and the past, are catching up to each other and it's because I think in this turning in that I mentioned early on with the left in this turning into our national identities and whatever, not just the United States. I think in this turning in that I mentioned early on with the left in this turning into our national identities and whatever, not just the United States. I think it happened in a lot of places. We really let the ball drop on a lot of stuff and when we lost that stuff that we left the ball drop became obvious because we also didn't get anything domestically. So then it became very clear what we lost, both by changing our focus and what we didn't achieve when we did. And that's, you know, and people are going to take advantage of that. I mean Dugan's one manifestation of it, but I think in American terms we're going to see a lot of weird, weird shit coming. I think there's national conservatism. It seems to be slowing down right now, but it's slowing down because basically it might win the next election.

Speaker 1: 2:14:42

If you look at conservatism today I was talking to someone about this Rene Girard and all these Girard wouldn't even have thought of himself as a conservative, but another one of these weird iconoclastic thinkers from the middle of the 20th century. These were people that you read if you were on, like the paleo conservative right, or if you were on the left, a kind of nineties post-structural left right. Those people are now dominating conservative reading lists and stuff. If you look at how, like the encyclopedia for who counts as a conservative has changed, you see more of those thinkers, more reactionary thinkers and less neoliberals and less milton friedman and, like I said, I see a vola now listed on conservatism's page. That was never the case in the 19, like in in a wikipedia article in the in the aughts. That wouldn't have happened.

Speaker 1: 2:15:35

So it tells you that there's been a shift in general and I think Dugan is as much a symptom of it as a cause and that mainline traditionalism still seems too weird for most American conservatives to take directly. Still seems too weird for most American conservatives to take directly. But things that rhyme with it are things that are vulgarized versions of it, like the Alex Jones Tucker Carlson index of the world, tucker being the smart half of that, jones being the idiot half of that. But nonetheless that you're going to see a lot more of that and they're going to go back to appealing to leftists and we have to remember that Jones, for example, in the aughts and even in the late 90s, also tried to do this. Oh, the liberal left is terrible. They're all globalists. You know, lizard people? I mean it wasn't a lizard person conspiracy, but you know what I mean. He did host that guy, david.

Speaker 2: 2:16:36

Lizard people, I mean it wasn't a lizard person, conspiracies, but you know what I mean. Um, he did host, uh, that guy, uh, david, uh yeah, he's.

Speaker 1: 2:16:41

Yeah, they used to be enemies and now they're all shit.

Speaker 2: 2:16:46

Yeah, um, that was part of my how I you know my entryway is into anti-capitalism were through alex jones and that entire milieu. I mean, I, I used to listen to a lot of Alex Jones and, uh, you know, before I was ever into left politics I feel like I was probably just really conspiratorial. Um so it. But it was through listening to like left media, left and left ecosystem, and reading history and a bunch of Marxism stuff. You know, I felt like eventually you figure out like, oh, wait, a second, these guys are. You know that, like eventually you figure out like, oh, wait, a second, these guys are.

Speaker 2: 2:17:19

You know there's several different ways to be like anti-capitalist and not all of them lead to, like you know, a moral position that one can live with. Not all of them, you know, some of them are just anti-Semitic. You know trails that are more obvious than others and all conspiracies at their base or some kind of anti-Semitism and so. But I say all that because, like you know, alex Jones, probably I mean there's probably, I mean I know a lot of leftists who are very familiar with Alex Jones. At one point he didn't seem like he was harmful, he seemed like he was sort of like an Art Bell type of figure where you listen to him and whether you were listening about the Illuminati and lizard people or about space aliens, it was just like out of the realm of what was relevant, you know.

Speaker 2: 2:18:02

And then one day, like so many of us, we have an incident in our life. We're, like we're I don't know, sitting at a bar and somebody is discussing, you know, the Illuminati and Jewish conspiracies or something, and it became a bigger problem than like, than we anticipated. And in the same way, I think we can take those lessons and apply them towards dugan and azil of like. These are things that, on their surface, seem incoherent and seem like bullshit and don't seem like they're going to be a problem and seem like even if they do become a problem, they're not going to be a very large problem, but they're a problem. And and we've seen this now with Dugan. So when you offer how you were inoculated to this stuff, I was similarly through, having gone to the Alex Jones channel and come out of that stuff, you know I picked up a lot of, because that is core too. It's like. I mean, dugan is profoundly anti-Semitic as much as he disavows racism and all that stuff.

Speaker 1: 2:18:56

I mean uh, Jews are fine as long as they're in Israel.

Speaker 2: 2:19:00

Right, Right, Like yeah it's just the reification of strong borders, you know, and uh yeah. So go ahead yeah.

Speaker 1: 2:19:08

No, no, I. Well, it's interesting that we talk about the Jones world. I was never part of that world. But I will tell you what I was part of. Um, uh, in the 90s. Um, I got scooped up in and two things one, uh, I, I was in the zine world. I was a little like pro kid who fucked around with zines and I actually ended up like uh, homeless, fucking around with that stuff and not having a a good job. I was homeless off and on a lot in my upper teens, but really homeless, street homeless, not McKinney Vento, living on people's houses and that turned me off on that weird gutter punk voluntary scene.

Speaker 1: 2:19:51

Just because of what happened to me and also the one political excursion I did when I was 18 years old is we drove to the battles for Seattle. We'd heard about it in the zine stuff. We were Southern kids. We had no idea. We knew we didn't like Clinton and we knew we didn't really like what's his face oh God is an ancient Republican, bob Dole. We knew we didn't like either one of those fuckers and we knew that what the America was probably doing to the rest of the world was kind of bad, all right. So we drove up to the Battlefriade and we saw this anarchist carnival-esque thing and people declared that they won. I heard I saw you didn't win shit. That was my inertial thought, you gaggle of Trotskyists and anarchists. And two, that Pat Buchanan guy who was there sounds the most serious. And then the other thing was I was involved in Rage Against the Machine forums on email when I would go to the library at my high school, and Rage Against the Machine was like Rage Against Everything If you go black.

Speaker 1: 2:20:58

That, that book, that was that picture of books on the back of the second Rage Against the Machine album, which was my introduction to leftist literature. Like I read it's like the first time I encountered Christopher Lashley. In retrospect, that was the most incoherent leftist reading list that's ever been made. But you know, like it was there, I read it. It was, it was there, I read it. It was interesting. I read a lot of stuff from that time. Angela Davis I learned her. I learned about Momia, both Jamal and all that stuff. Leon Peltier, all that stuff through that. One thing I will say, though, is we were also around the anti-Waco, anti-ruby.

Speaker 2: 2:21:44

Ridge stuff.

Speaker 1: 2:21:52

And I still think when leftists or liberals start talking about the Clinton administration as if trying to justify what happened at Ruby Ridge, I still think it's fucked up, like it was like Nope, nope, nope, nope, it's not defendable, but that got me in that world, because I'm like, yeah, that's fucked up, like it's also fucked up what happened to these black people. It's also what fucked up what happened to these indigenous people. But if I mean, I don't, you know, that guy may have been a right nationalist, but his baby didn't deserve to get shot. So like, yeah, um, and that guy.

Speaker 2: 2:22:20

It was a fed that brought him in. It was a fed that got him, that sold him a sawed-off shotgun or something like that it was entrapped.

Speaker 1: 2:22:26

Yeah, it was trapped yeah, um, and I've recently, you know, gone back and forth about what you know. I've I've done a lot of studies of the weavers and all this and I'm now I'm still not sure that they were actually white nationalists. I don't know like they had. They were adjacent, but I don't know that they would themselves were. Uh, but even if they were, it doesn't actually justify what the adf did.

Speaker 1: 2:22:48

But my point is that outrage got me listening to pat buchanan, that got me in that world, and and then what really solidified this was I was dealing with the anti-Iraq War protests in 2001 and 2002. And during 2001, there was the protests at Sea Island and we were going to protest because this was also the G8. This was basically supposed to be the alter globalization movement, part two. And, uh, I dealt with the international answer and they seemed like a joke. And I dealt with people from anti-warcom and libertarian party and they didn't, and that's how I got sucked into that world.

Speaker 1: 2:23:35

And so I knew a lot of people from Alex Jones' world and I remember, like Jones back then was very much doing the. We all need to fight the neocons. We'll get the left in if we have to too, even though the left, like he would also like on the. If you really paid attention to what he was saying, he was saying that the neocons were the real left and, like you know, it was pretty cynical, a la the way we talked about Dugan earlier. But if you were, just superficially, it very much seemed like left and right against the fucking neoconservatives center right, and I saw myself as on the right wing of that coalition until about 2005 when I realized, for a variety of reasons, like you know how you tell yourself that there's one thing that's really like it's overdetermined, there's like 50 things.

Speaker 2: 2:24:23

Yeah.

Speaker 1: 2:24:23

But, uh, I, you know, I started corresponding with, with people who would eventually be around, richard Spencer. I led to a letter that I shared with Richard Acker. I left the right, um, uh, I started like noticing this human biodiversity movement and all these weird racialists and I just never could abide by racialists, even while I was the right winger. And then I think Pat Buchanan wrote like this book. That was like you know, maybe we shouldn't have fought war, war two, and maybe it would have been okay if the Nazis killed you had killed off the communist, more or less, you know, and yeah, and I was like you know, um, and yeah, yeah, and I was like you know what I'm out, like that was that way. And then the then I, then I predicted the recession, that to come, and I was like, okay, marxists have a better understanding of recession. So that's where I went um, but but you know, it took me four years to like reorient, you know.

Speaker 1: 2:25:18

I even like I worked on the the Mike Gravel uh campaign in Georgia. I then jumped over for the Obama campaign when Gravel uh lost um, and the Obama campaign solidified me as a leftist, because the moment he appointed his cabinet I was like fuck no. In his cabinet. I was like fuck no, um uh, but for me, um. I say all this because I think that that you and I come out of this world where we know this, but it helps that we're southern.

Speaker 1: 2:25:47

I mean it really does like yeah, um, it helps that you and I. I think the thing about me is I do not. For the vast majority of my life until very recently, now that I live in a major city, I did not move amongst leftists and progressives. In the majority of my life I moved amongst depoliticized proles who didn't really have a politics whatsoever, or right wingers that's who was around. Are right wingers, that's who was around like. And so I know that world pretty intimately and I know when someone's trying to shell it, weird shit. And that world is full of weird shit like.

Speaker 1: 2:26:26

There's another thing that people underestimate about the right. I remember in the in the aughts and the aught teens it was like oh, the right wing is so unified they're so you know, and I'm like have you ever been in in like South? It's not unified. There's tons of snake oil salesmen and grifters. It's madness out there.

Speaker 1: 2:26:44

For me, in some ways, dugan is both a smart form of that, but from a different context, that we don't recognize it. Americans don't recognize it because it's Russia. Like if it was coming from an American professor or from a media figure a la Alex Jones, we would have more immunities to it, and I think that's something we have to like think about. Another thing I think a lot of about maybe this will be my last thought and I'll hand it over to you is, like a lot of America's most effective reactionaries are not American. Like who's the reactionary thought leaders? They're usually from fucking Canada or something Like it's it's, and that's because they speak in a way that doesn't trigger a lot of our immediate responses to, like our uncle who's a reactionary shit bag or whatever. Like we, we don't have the immune responses for it.

Speaker 2: 2:27:43

I think it is helpful. Being a southerner, I've always really aspired to be a good southern Marxist. I've got a little fireplace going on with a worn out copy of what is to be done, sawed off shotgun, sitting there with a pair of boots, like what is to be done, and sawed off shotguns, sitting there with a pair of boots. It's like that thought process was always like appealing to me. Like southern marxists were the marxists that were like you know, like I, yeah. It is helpful because the people that are around me are not going to side with anything that I would state explicitly like, hey, you want to eliminate class, I'd be like, fuck you right. But if you say like, hey, you know your boss has dominion over your life, fuck your boss, right. What are we doing about our boss? Shouldn't we do something about that?

Speaker 2: 2:28:26

You get a lot more sympathetic reception to that sort of thing and that's part of why I moved back to Texas is like you know, when I was in New York I helped organize the Hudson Valley CPUSA club and it felt a little too easy.

Speaker 2: 2:28:41

It felt like this is supposed to be more difficult. But these people are already kind of leaning in this direction. We're already in agreement about a lot of things, but I know that if I went back to Texas, there would not only be, you know, the depoliticized proles like you mentioned or the people that are just you know, spouting the things their fathers said, which are more than likely conservative, republican talking points, but there's geography that sets you apart from like-minded individuals. You know, like being like the at-large organizer in Texas. At times it's like you know what are you supposed to do with a guy that's in Cuero, texas, when you're in Corpus Christi and there's one other guy in something like Alpine, texas or something there's like hundreds of miles. You're not going to get these three people in a room once a month. That's just not going to happen.

Speaker 2: 2:29:32

And the conversations that need to happen here are more difficult and require more tact to happen here are more difficult and require more tact, and so maybe it's through being familiar with how one needs to move in this incredibly hostile terrain, how one brings up these topics in conversation. It's like I'm already, you know, schooled with a lot of these tricks, just like, you know, I got to do the same thing. I got to talk to people about this shit and, you know, I got to do it in a way that's not going to make them think automatically that I'm out to, you know, starve 500,000 people or something. You know that's where they go, with you bringing out the C word. So, yeah, dugan, he's got a lot of rhetorical tricks and he also speaks a number of different languages and he codeswitches very seamlessly, depending on what audience he's speaking to.

Speaker 1: 2:30:21

Yeah, that's becoming clear to me as I read the book, like like the people who are skilled enough and the different, because I'm like he speaks post-structuralism, yeah, one thing like like, uh, he speaks uh aughts and aughts teams, geopolitics, even in the West. Like he speaks internet leftist, even from the aughts. I mean like not so much modern leftism, but he speaks that word. He's very familiar with fascism in ways that most Western non-fascist scholars are not and cannot cite. I mean so much so that I know he's being misleading on certain things, because sometimes he'll present fascism and it's like, oh, it's just racialist, that's its real sin.

Speaker 1: 2:31:04

And I'm like that's a liberal standpoint and he knows better. And I know he knows better because I know who he's citing. So that's a dishonest punch. But if you don't know, and who fucking knows? You basically have to be a humanities major who also was a right winger at one point of his life and is familiar with the far left. And also it helps if you know a little bit something about russian marxism well, it's also, yeah, like, it's also like title bomb dude.

Speaker 2: 2:31:30

The only reason why he wrote his book and brought all this shit to attention is because he was paying attention to a bannon speech where Bannon mentioned the phrase that Trump was a man in time, and he caught that out of a phrase from Savitri Devi and then so he decided to speak to Bannon. He has 20 on the hour or on the record hours of interviews with Bannon and he brought that up and he saw that Bannon was familiar with Evola and with Savitri Devi, and even at the end of his book he posits that Bannon is what he calls an esoteric Hitlerist, following the teachings of Savitri Devi. And I know, that's wild, it's wild, but that's basically what he throws up in the air Like hey, did we have an esoteric Hitlerist that was like believing in the Kali Yuga and the destruction of end days and you know, was he really like an accelerationist, like that's what you know Teitelbaum says in his book is really what happened.

Speaker 1: 2:32:39

That's where he leaves it hanging. You know, if people want to read on radical traditionalism from from scholars, uh, the title bomb book is good. Uh, the two, uh, mark sedgwick books, uh, the, the against the modern world and traditionalism. And then he's got a book of essays. It's written by a bunch of people. Those are good, um and uh, I don't know um right wing.

Speaker 1: 2:32:58

Consider critics of American conservatism is a book that is not written by leftists. It's not written. Uh, I can't remember, it's off or off the top of my head. It's actually very good because it documents all of these movements and includes libertarianism as one of them. But, um, it documents neo-reactionaryism, the alt-right, the various forms of paleo-conservatism, esoteric Hitlerisms in there, a little bit as part of neo-reaction.

Speaker 1: 2:33:27

Like there's these movements, and what I find interesting is when the conservative establishment was stronger, they kept that stuff out. I mean, you know what did buckley do? Anyone who got near that. It wasn't that buckley was an anti-racist, uh, but william buckley knew that anyone who got near, um, you know, francis yaki or anything like that, like joe sobrin or, uh, sam francis, he was gonna kick out because it made like it, made it too obvious, like you know, um, uh, so, and when the with, with and I think people under still are not they still don't really understand how, particularly now that liberals have kind of re, have kind of softened bush, like this great softening of Bush that's happened in the past during the Trump administration.

Speaker 1: 2:34:21

I will never forgive a lot of liberals for that because I still am like Bush's body counts higher than Trump's. I don't care. But in a very real sense, though, the Bush administration was a failure for conservatism. That was actually kind of world historical In so much that from the late 1970s until the Bush administration, all American politics was reacting to movement conservatism. They were setting the tone.

Speaker 1: 2:34:53

After 2007, that is not true anymore. The Tea Party is its own weird thing, and now you get liberals who are nostalgic for that old movement conservatism because this other shit's weirder. But yeah, um, but in a way like they also have gone through their crisis, and I think you see it in the in the house of representatives. Right now they're fucking way more like. As much as the Democrats were completely dysfunctional during the Biden administration, which they were, uh, the, the house Republicans with their various whatever's, even the reactionary parts of it, cannot agree on a goddamn thing. It's true. It shows you how fractured this all is right now and it shows you why it feels like a moment where some outsider who has it's a conservatism that we wouldn't recognize. As I always say, leftists are often bad at not recognizing conservatism from another culture.

Speaker 2: 2:35:46

We just don't know what it is um, you know, I I want to bring up that. Do you remember madison cawthorne? Uh, he was a right. That dude was brought to Russia, was he? He went to Russia at one point and I want to say that the Republicans sort of booted him out by exposing pictures of him, like having just blackmail material on him, uh, and so like there was for as much dysfunction as we talk about within what's going on house of representatives like they still know how to get someone out of their party.

Speaker 2: 2:36:27

You know which is like you think about someone like the democrats can't even get past a fucking parliamentarian, you know. Or like a joe mansion type of character. You know they have this revolving door of a bad guy that prevents any substantive policy, uh, holding true promises, like their constituents, right, and it's just anyway. So I just thought I would first. You know, I think there's some russia shit going on there too with like madison that way.

Speaker 1: 2:36:51

So yeah, oh yeah, I mean. Uh. One thing I'll say, though, about the democrats is, I mean not to sound like jimmy dore, or but to be okay with something like jimmy dore, just on this one issue? Yeah, I sometimes think that their strategic inability to deal with their own parliamentarian is actually like on purpose on purpose, yeah yeah, yeah, like, like, but like, uh, like.

Speaker 1: 2:37:16

You also see this with the squad, like the squad that actually believes what it says either comes from, like, mostly immigrant communities where they're going to be protected by that that's Rashida Tlaib and Ilhan Omar also to the squad members that I don't totally hate or they're going to be. Are they're going toaried to shit him back like cory bush, who's just probably gonna lose? Um, are they? Uh, kiss the ring like aoc did immediately? So it's. It is like it is the definition of a control opposition. And then you have this other control opposition that like, well, you know, joe manchin won't let us do this, uh, even though he's gonna fuck you anyway and like, throw a state to a Republican anyhow. So you might as well primary to him, but you know you don't do that, for whatever reason. And I will say this you are right, the House Republicans would have primary to his ass and for good and ill. For good and ill. I mean, I think this, you know, leads us into an interesting spot. We can wrap up here.

Speaker 1: 2:38:25

We've been talking for about two and a half hours, but I wanted to ask you like you know, I'm going to have you back on the show on the main show, to talk more about, like, where your politics are right now, because you've been on a kind of journey for the last year, particularly going back to Texas, um, but I wanted to ask you, like, where do you do you also feel like we're in a moment and I don't just mean about this Dugan stuff, just in general where most of the left has kind of lost hope and moved right wing for various reasons and a lot of it. I would actually say a lot of these people would not recognize that they've moved right. I would also say that, like they wouldn't know they wouldn't, they wouldn't know it, they're not. Like they might be pretty far along before they admit to themselves that they've, like, given up a lot of their prior beliefs. How do you think we should handle that, given that this is, we are likely to see this go back on pause if trump wins the next election, where everyone I don't think it's going to look like the resistance did from 2016 to 2020, because that's exhausted, but people are going to go back into that opposition mode and it's going to freeze us again and a lot of people are going to, like you know, go counter-cyclic to the president, that's how a lot of this politics works, but that's going to give people kind of a false like.

Speaker 1: 2:39:48

My fear during the Trump administration is the resistance to Trump created a false feeling that the left had a lot more power than it did Because we were actually out there really opposing Trump, whereas the liberals kind of were.

Speaker 2: 2:40:01

I mean, a lot of this depends on if the liberals wake up again, you know, because if, like, that's what gives us this false impression that we have the numbers, when those numbers go dormant the moment, there's not bad men in charge, you know, and and so, yeah, like, are we at a point where some of us have moved right? Yeah, I mean there's a lot of us that have kind of lost focus and are. I mean, there's the clown shoes left, which never had focus Right, but there's, you know, there's, there are powerful. Yeah, tell me.

Speaker 1: 2:40:35

No, no, I would also say maybe, maybe. One thing I'll add is there's a lot of us move right and there's a lot of us who just drop the fuck out, like I was thinking about max l bomb's book on revolution is the air and what happened with the new communist movement and I'm not a fan of a lot of new communist movement but I'm always fascinated by we never talk about what happened all.

Speaker 1: 2:40:51

they didn't die like like they were in their 20s, they just did. They did A lot of them. A lot of them became good Democrats, some became reactionaries, but most of them just went away, just like, went into private life man.

Speaker 2: 2:41:06

You know, politics is the house of the lonely man. It's like you come to politics because you feel like you have experienced some kind of injustice, some kind of injustice and uh, and so you fight back against that and maybe politics for some people is only as far as their own grievance. It requires a resolve, requires some sort of resolution. You know, like you know, I feel like 2008 is like, uh, the housing crisis is like a big scar on the american psyche that we never really fully addressed. Uh, we never, you know, went through like national counseling on what it was like to have, you know, the american dream sort of, you know, put a dagger in it, basically, if it wasn't dead already, right, so homes taken away from people. Max has his whole life's work, arguably based on, like you know, max alvarez, the guy that I produced for the real news network man, like his whole thing came out of the housing crisis in 2008 and, um, so our people have the opposite housing crisis, but it's actually still a result of the old one yeah, yeah it's.

Speaker 2: 2:42:15

And I was saying two years ago I felt like 2008 again. And you know what is going on. Man, tiktok had all these videos about how there's an impending housing crisis and now that's gone. You know there's nobody talking about an impending housing crisis right now, but there's still a gigantic cost of living and housing crisis. And you know all these like Zillow and private companies are buying up rental shit. Now I mean it's bad shape, man. I think that the way we should handle this, I mean I hate to.

Speaker 2: 2:42:45

I'm not like a Naomi Klein fan or anything, but she had a line in a book that said something like Our ecological situation has turned what we think of as Marxist, as ideological preferences. Why has that not turned our mindset into having them be existential necessities? And that has always sat with me in a certain way. That's like you know what I, the vision that I have in terms of my politics, and I think I always aspire to do what Norman Finkelstein says is like there's not a contradiction between my politics and reality and like Chuck LeVar saying there's no, it's not my fault, reality is Marxist. You know, I, yeah, we some of us have had our own personal grievances resolved. Some of us got our boomer parents money uh and um, and some of us are just fucking discouraged no, a lot of people just given up because they didn't get anything yeah, and you know, yeah, a lot of people just given up, right.

Speaker 2: 2:43:53

But also, like, what are you, what are you doing if you're a Marxist and you join a party? What help is that? I mean, look, man, part of like in organizing. What kind of grinds my gears and is irritating to me is this need for like, fraternization and socialization and camaraderie building. Not that I'm against camaraderie building or hanging out, but God, god damn it, the planet is dying and we are fucked up right now and I don't really have time to sit around and like make more comrade friends purely in the spirit of building friendship. Because, like you know, first of all, like I don't. I mean, dude, what is that? What is cpu usa doing right now? What, what, what, what power that we don't have a labor party? We don't have, like it's like we join this party. We know it's feeble anyway, right, we know we don't have all the power in the world, you know bankrupt as we're talking right right, so like oh yeah yeah.

Speaker 2: 2:44:51

So it's like you know one point. I thought, hell yeah, I'll join a party, I'll fucking make a club and we'll organize and we'll do. You know, dude, like you know and this is part of why I I've been listening to a lot of um, when I started reading some biancho han and I got some critiques of the dude too, right, but like part of what got me, the train that I've been on recently has been more like marshall mcle Herbert Marcuse, because if the media is the massage, if we're in this hypermedia ecosystem, everything's mediated. If you have a platform, you need to speak out.

Speaker 2: 2:45:32

People listen to things that I say Somehow that is true. People listen to things that I say I I somehow made somehow that that is true. People listen to things that I say I can create a podcast episode, publish it and people will listen to it, and I think that's awesome, um, but I also think that that's far more effective than going to hang out with some comrade friends and build, build camaraderie or whatever the fuck that. You know like I don't have time for that shit. Man's like I. I help other people get their messages out that are in support of the working class. There's a one-to-many relationship there.

Speaker 2: 2:46:05

Uh, I talk to people like you and other people and publish it on my podcast for you. People listen to that. I, you know, I thought a lot about what you said in one of our first interviews, where you said you take content creation and marxism being a marxist is two separate questions, right? Uh, yeah, totally get that. And um, and I'm not even saying that I've made some, I haven't made mistakes, like I've done shit where I I feel I interviewed grover for at one point, dude, you know, like, dude, like yeah, uh, you know, I, I'm willing you know you forgive me on that, but it's only because I've come around to understanding this stuff now, after a greater amount of reading and talking to people and stuff like that, you know.

Speaker 2: 2:46:44

So, yeah, we are at a point where where you know, like, the people that were major voices in this or not some of them, we lost some of them to being, you know, russia supporters in this whole fucking thing, I stopped paying attention to anybody who was championing russia's uh, imperial quest in in ukraine. I just was like no, I'm just not gonna. You know, like, if you, if you are holding yourself up as an anti-imperialist and then you take the side of an imperialist conquest, I will pay. I will stop paying attention to what you have to say yeah, I I like to quote.

Speaker 1: 2:47:14

when people talk to me about revolutionary defeatism in this, I like to remind them that it was a defeat of both imperial parties that was required for for Lenin and that he actually made like yes, in a different time we would support Serbia, but at this moment we can't do so without strengthening one imperial power against another. We don't want either one of them to win. So like by the way, though, conversely, if you become, if somehow third campism for you ends up being, you end up being a NATO stand, you're also not my friend.

Speaker 2: 2:48:02

Yeah.

Speaker 1: 2:48:03

Like you know, and I want it to be said, is I don't have a hostility towards Russian people or any of that shit. I can't stand when we like conflatelate, because I don't like it when it happens to me. For one thing, when you conflate, uh, someone's like the culture that they were born in with the government that they happen to live under, like it's it is, uh, you know, like, for example, uh, I used to get a lot of shit for being an American, interestingly, when I was in Korea. But in Mexico I always use a joke where, where you know the anger at America, the American government is actually much higher. There was a clear like well, you know, you might be a dumb American, but you're not to blame for your fucking government. And and I feel that way, not to say that the Russian invasion is unpopular in Russia or anything like that either, I'm not going to project something, that's not true. But you know, I don't know.

Speaker 1: 2:49:09

Man, talking about geopolitics with the sufficient nuance is really hard. I mean literally. The exception is Israel-Palestine, because what's happening in Palestine is just fucking genocide and it's very clear what it is. But even there, the one thing I'll say is most of the left, answers to the problem aren't answers Like you're going to wait for what A regional war to break out are are, uh, I mean the you know you're gonna kick out the settlers. How? Again, with what army? Because you know the countries that could help them do that uh, russia and china and india. They aren't like, um, so, uh, yeah, actually was telling someone like, oh so multi-polarity is going to be good for all these people, right, and like Israel can take a hit, right? Well then, why isn't Russia, you know, arming the Palestinians right now? Yeah, I just want to point that out to you, and there are geopolitical reasons for it, one of which is Israel also realizes it's in a multipolar world that's made its technology kind of important to all the major powers, not just the United States. So there have been tensions between Russia and Israel emerging because of Russia's geostrategic interest in Iran. But beyond that, you know the one state that got around a lot of the sanctions legally in the Western bloc that was trading with Russia. They weren't trading weapons and technology, but other stuff was Israel. Right block, that was trading with Russia. They weren't trading weapons and technology, but other stuff was Israel. So this is something that I want to tell people to look at when we go into this world.

Speaker 1: 2:51:04

Because the other thing I think about a lot of Marxists. You know why you mentioned the Sorelianism right. The myth of us having a good guy that we could support, I hate to tell from most people is a fucking myth, and if you don't get that through your goddamn skull you are going to be someone's useful idiot. We are not in the cold war. This is not the ussr, like um. You know I'm a defensist towards China, but even there I'm not uncritical.

Speaker 1: 2:51:44

So it is this time. And yet you know we need a ceasefire right. So, like, how are you going to get that? And unfortunately, right now that's going to require, like, require putting pressure on conventional politics again. And is that going to help create communism? No, actually it's not. And that's not why we do it, because I would like to believe that we realize that some massacres are worth stopping, even if they aren't going to directly lead to the communist future. But but nonetheless, and I think I think for a lot of people, palestine has been clarifying for a lot of Marxists, but but it's also been. I mean, it's been this weird point I guess this is my last thought of where the powerlessness of our politics. You know I said that leftists have more power, but on this we have none. Popular opinion, even on the fucking right right now, is with us.

Speaker 2: 2:52:49

Yeah, it's wild, it's wild and we have no effect.

Speaker 1: 2:52:56

So I keep on telling people. Quit thinking. This is a hearts and minds game. The general population, even on the right, is now with us. They think that the slaughter of the Palestinians Is too fucking much. And yet we can't Do that much to do anything about it. Like you know, it's yeah. Bideniden will occasionally seemingly step in to kind of slowly wag his finger and be like hey, don't start global nuclear war please.

Speaker 2: 2:53:28

In your slaughtering of these women and children in gaza did they bomb gaza while they were in, like, uh, a meeting to determine how they're going to retaliate against iran. Yeah, which is, like you know and I would love to have a separate conversation with you at some point uh, vis-a-vis like christopher lash culture of narcissism stuff, because I feel like I mean, this is getting a little afield man, but I've done a lot of research on narcissism and I've looked at some of the stuff that lash has written, pointing to the rise of this within American culture. You know some of the standard sort of psychological attributes of this stuff, whether like entitlement, self-importance, always being right, always evading responsibility, splitting with all bad or all good. You know lots of cognitive distortions.

Speaker 2: 2:54:35

But like there's this whole concept of lash, I think bleeds into some of the Byung-Chul Han stuff in that like and it also points to like, it kind of includes some of Dugan's criticisms of the West and that like consumerism, materialism and sort of the, the, the poverty of American culture, western culture, as he would would point out as developed, a sort of self-eating, rampant individualism. So I think about all that in terms of what other nation would get retaliated against by Iran? Have the US be like hey, dude, we'll help you, shoot these rockets down, but we're not going to engage with you in a joint fight. Retaliation yeah, I guess it's okay if you continue bombing you know, gaza while you determine a sort of really bad idea of a retaliation that could start World War 3, like this is all sorts of crazy geopolitical enabling that is like far beyond, I think, anything we've ever seen. Really, I can't name any other time.

Speaker 1: 2:55:43

No, I mean well, for those people from 2019 to 2021, it's like, oh, what about the international rules-based order? I'm like whew One. We destroyed that in 2003.

Speaker 2: 2:55:55

Let's be honest, yeah, yeah.

Speaker 1: 2:55:58

Two, we clearly don't give a shit.

Speaker 2: 2:56:01

Um we we do care about starting a massive global nuclear war, but that's really really it and um well, you imagine if, like, if the soviet union allowed finland to like, just fuck around and create like a whole new world war or something? I mean, I just the analogy seemed ridiculous, but I kind of feel like that's, that's the closest thing I can think of, you know well it's.

Speaker 1: 2:56:25

it's wild to me that, for example, reagan could raise the phone call in 1983 but biden can't do it now, despite the fact that the fact that it might cause him to lose I mean, trump and him are so close and look as a communist I would like to say I actually don't have huge stakes in who wins this. I think it's bad either way. I'm going to be unhappy with either president, but not to say that they're exactly. I know I'm gonna get no.

Speaker 2: 2:57:00

no, you're equivocating them whatever, I don't want to play that game, yeah um, but uh, in a very real sense, like I was.

Speaker 1: 2:57:12

I actually said something the other day. I was looking at someone and I was like look man, the idfs on fucking tiktok has made wiki leaks irrelevant because it'd be like if the us military was putting its atrocities on tiktok itself, yeah, and then being like why is everyone mad at us? We're just laughing at shooting children.

Speaker 1: 2:57:31

Um, I mean like it's yeah, yeah it actually makes the brazenness of American empire seem not that brazen, like I was, sort of like my God, like Israel's kind of made the U S empire look terrible Cause we're backing them, but also like we were not. That like fucking, like just grotesquely obvious about it.

Speaker 2: 2:57:59

Yeah, this is also part of going back to this shit. There's a scene in no Country for Old Men where the dude kills somebody and then he has a glass of milk in their front room. It's just all the more disturbing that the killer kind of settled and made that his domain for a second and I kind of feel like that's. It's kind of like not only can we kill you, we can be ostentatious about the way we celebrate this shit in like a very sort of silly serial killer establishing dominant, sort of awful way you know. But yeah, you're absolutely right. Like I couldn't imagine, like what do you think would happen in this day and age of like United States soldier overseas kill the child and posted it on Tik TOK? Do you think like we'd have all sorts of people in our policy or political institutions being pissed off about that? Or is this like? Is this is like something I've talked about with my of people?

Speaker 1: 2:58:57

in our political institutions being pissed off about that Absolutely.

Speaker 2: 2:59:00

This is like something I've talked about with my friend, david Parsons. He said that in his career of being a professor, 2001, it became quite a shock at Abu Ghraib that we were torturing people, and students at that point were like no way.

Speaker 2: 2:59:13

That's terrible. They took all sorts of stances against it, right, but 2020 comes around. Hey, do you know that we torture American? Or we torture prisoners of war? And students are like, yeah, of course we do. What the fuck you know? Yeah, so like this sort of instantiation of the IDF doing this on TikTok? I mean, I know we're worried about, like you know, you mentioned international rules, order and how we destroyed that in 2003. And we're all like, oh no, israel has destroyed part of that by bombing an embassy.

Speaker 1: 2:59:50

But what kind of precedent does this set with broadcasting shit on TikTok for this stuff, man? Well, what it does is it means we're back at World War II levels of being obvious about it, and we're also at World War II levels of death. So you know, as I like to say, suck it, steven Pinker, you're just wrong. This whole like we're all just getting better in a Whiggish history is bullshit, and this proves it, because this is a fucking slaughter and uh, I mean the thing is, I think it's really hard to look at, because because there's not like we want to believe that oh yeah, there'll be a palestinian revolution tomorrow, but the odds, without international intervention, are really low that uh, there's anybody, there's anything anyone can do, um, and uh, the incentives aren't there either. I mean, that's the other thing. I mean like, so it's, it's gonna get ugly man. I mean, um, I, if I had a prediction, I think we might see this ramp down.

Speaker 1: 3:00:59

I'm very hesitant to predict warship, though, because I've been wrong a lot on warship, because I always assume people are going to be more rational than they are Like I'm always like no one, like this is obviously a bad deal. People are like nope, I'm wrong, people are going to do the thing thing. I mean, the only time that I have been right is like, uh, mad. Even though the general public has forgotten it has not left the minds of our warlords like they do realize that nuclear armed states will destroy each other. That is clear. That is still like the one thing that's keeping us from just all-out barbarism in a very fucked up way. But, and you know, I get that, I mean I get, and I get like to bring it back to Dugan.

Speaker 1: 3:01:46

Seeing that shit, like you want to decide with anybody who'll stop that shit, like, like you know, like what is some, some like Palestinian 15 yearold ever done to me? Nothing, no, I mean, look, we can get into the larger problems of Palestine. If it did have an independence, is it a viable state? Blah, blah, blah. Yeah, those are huge problems. They're not here to answer today. I can't answer them for anyone but um, but I will just say like, uh, the apartheid before october 7th was un-fucking, uh, unconscionable, and the fact that we, you know just the kind of like, yes, when israel would do something obvious or world would protest about it, but then we kind of forget, um, uh, post october 7th, it's like the entire world.

Speaker 1: 3:02:47

You know it's got to be one thing. It's got to be weird. To be a palestinian is like the world is not watching and go. Yes, they are and they might, and like the, the general public's actually kind of on our side and yet it it's not stopping us from getting killed. That's got to be like I I I can't imagine what that does to your psyche. Like to be like even the fucking world finally seeing us for what we are and they don't hate us anymore and we're, and yet it doesn't matter like, like and uh, in some ways, for me, that's why we're in the darkest timeline. It's just like that and that's why this right-wing shit's gonna come up. Because, um, a friend of mine put it to me in another way when people give up hope, they go to pragmatism, and when they are afraid, they become conservative, like temperamentally I don't necessarily mean ideologically, but temperamentally. You add those two things together, you're going to get a reactionary politics. You just are.

Speaker 2: 3:03:47

As we continue to see the US shut down and the Red Sea or something by the Houthis yeah, you know, they take these sort of like L's from the Middle East and Iran firing at their vassal state now and the impending election coming through the chaos. You know, as this all continues, I think we're going to see more aggravated sort of.

Speaker 1: 3:04:11

You know what I think about the current thing with it, with with israel. I think what us is afraid of, and why they're enabling it so much, is that they're afraid that they don't actually have a vassal fate, that they're not actually really in control. Um, like, I think they're afraid, even though the chance of netanyahu actually doing this is still really small. But then netanyahu might just go no, like yeah, we said we have enough bombs to kill it out. Do you forget you gave us a nuke? Like um, like, I like, like that's the thing that makes me. That makes me wonder what's going through their head. If I'm modeling what they're thinking, I'm like, yeah, it's a vast state, but like the us empire has never wanted to be this blatant before, like and how much do the injuries to the united states affect that perception that they have a vassal state right, so like that?

Speaker 2: 3:05:05

the united states is going through political tumult right now and they seem their navy's been shut down by the houthis in a way. You know it's like uh, how much does that contribute towards netanyahu's willingness to go rogue away from out of step with what the United States wants to?

Speaker 1: 3:05:20

Who knows A ton. I mean, the one thing I will say about the current moment and this is one of the results of multipolarity in a real sense is, like cards are off the table about where people may go and elijah and alliances are going to get fucking weird. Yeah, like the middle east is a prime example of this, because, outside of everybody being pissed off about what israel is doing, like syria, which is also pretty fucking bloody uh, like who's siding with whom on syria on any given day? It is hard to keep up with in the Middle East. Like it's changing all the goddamn time and I mean I make a morbid joke, but that, like everyone in the Middle East, just uses Syria as a pin cushion for bombs, depending on who's pinning on pissing them off that day.

Speaker 1: 3:06:11

Like you want to fuck with the Kurds, you can do it in Syria. You want to fuck with the, with the allies, you can do it in Syria. The Kurds, you can do it in Syria. You want to fuck with the Alawites, you can do it in Syria. You want to fuck with the Shia, you can do it in Syria. You want to fuck with the Sunni, you can do it in Syria. It's just oh yeah, are you both Sunni? But you're a different kind of Sunni. Are you a Qatari Sunni? Are you a Saudi Sunni? Well, you can fuck with each other in syria, like it. It's crazy.

Speaker 1: 3:06:38

Um, and I mean that's when I talk about the multipolar world and this will be my last point and I'll turn it back over to you I think it's important that we think about what that multipolarity will be, because, historically speaking, having multiple great empires is a bunch of fucking war. Yeah, like that's what it is. Uh, unipolar world also a bunch of fucking war, because they just kind of trample over everybody. The bipolar world was stable until and honestly, until the so until the sign of soviet split fucked it up like it was stable. Um, and I don't want to get like I.

Speaker 2: 3:07:24

Yeah, I know we're now relitigated. We're over three hours and I want to fuck you in that, but like it was.

Speaker 1: 3:07:29

Now this is stable, good, no, actually, I don't want to like, like for working classness, the, the bipolar world, was actually not great, right, like um, it created an illusion that we could actually win through, like cooperating, which you know. Uh, that led to fordism, and what is neoliberalism. But fordism when you take the stool out from the working class and let them fall, like um, and that was. That was a great illusion of that time period, right, but like uh, yeah, and I just think we're gonna cut right wing. We've been all over the. And that was the great illusion of that time period. Right, but like, yeah, and I just think we're going to cut right wing. We've been all over the place. What's your last word, jules? You're going to be back on the show soon. Anyway, I'll be back on, man.

Speaker 2: 3:08:06

Thank you for the invite again, man. It's always good talking to you, derek man, you know, I think, as a last thought, you know, I think you know a lot of us. I say, you know, maybe myself included Like my show took a bit of a hiatus just because I was like I had a ton of other projects going on. I managed to shoot a film somewhere in there too that I'm still working towards finishing. It's been a lot of creativity. I wrote like 25 songs in the month of January. It's like something absurd. It's been like levels of prolificity that I have not ever encroached before and the show is kind of backish. I'm out of like I'm out of secret projects to reveal at this point, like I got nothing in the back pocket and but yeah, I mean let's do good stuff I'm really happy to. I mean I'm not I wouldn't say I'm really happy to talk about it with you. I happy is not the line with our total project ball. If we had a more adequate worldview for what the scope and intentions are for Marxism in terms of a global perspective that eclipses this. You know, sort of like very cursory sort of aspirations of just free college and healthcare. It needs to be a global sort of perspective on like we're going to end exploitation. We're going to do that by uniting the global South. Whatever perspective you want to put in there, right, but just something more than free college and healthcare and maybe a labor party or something like.

Speaker 2: 3:10:15

And I think that the failure to think through that and and to to hold that is partly why comrades uh, get frustrated, lose hope, get assuaged to other ideologies and uh, but you know, I'm also kind of blackmailed too, man, just like what does it fucking matter? We're gonna die of climate change. You know, it's like I don't have a kid right now because I well, first of all, I didn't want to have kids, is I? For whatever reasons? But if I had a kid and be like you, have fun growing old and watching the oceans almost boil hopefully your kids will get to watch the oceans boil or something. You know it's like it's a really grim outlook down there in the world right now and uh, so part of part of me is, uh is thinking that the moment that we're in, like I said earlier, it needs to take what feels like ideological preferences and turn them into existential necessities, um, and and part of me knows that the people that are mostly responsible for this are have names and addresses, and uh, there's a meme floating around recently that says you know, not everything can be decolonized. Some shit's got to burn.

Speaker 2: 3:11:22

And that's kind of where I'm at with this stuff too, and I don't know that I have a whole lot of hope towards, like the completion of a, or like. I'm not in the school of thought of like inevitability on any of this stuff. You know, I'm also not in the school of thought of men being acorns in history, being oak trees, and it's not a linear progress and we can regress and we are regressing. It's looking more like barbarism than socialism right now, but while we're here, we have to contribute towards planting the seeds of trees of shade that we'll never sit in. And it's not a, it's a protracted people's war, uh, that is across generations, and the only thing we can hope to do is forward that. And uh, you know, regretfully, I find that maybe one of the most effective means I have towards forwarding this shit is talking on a podcast. You know, and nothing against podcasts, I just wish that it was more, I don't know, more substantial than that, but it's meter offerings of one person at this point and I say I'm just like trying to. You know, and part of me also thought like dude there are scholars and historians and learned people in the world that write books that never get a single reader and they all contribute towards, like. In the same way that musicians contribute towards, like the Spotify streaming digital ether of albums that are never listened to and shit, so do scholars and learned people everywhere contribute to this stuff, right? So do scholars and learning people everywhere contribute to this stuff, right? So I think all of us need to get past whatever imposter syndrome we have and pick up a mic and start blasting out in the podcast world in a one-to-many sort of way, Because I think part of class consciousness comes through recognition, and the more we can, I mean.

Speaker 2: 3:13:19

I hope it, you know. I hope recognition somehow turns what we're discussing with the Palestinian people how world opinion is on their side, but it's not really doing anything for them. I hope that we can get some sort of elevated recognition as a collective that we're all feeling the same way, we're all mostly in agreement and have more of the ties together than it sets us apart, and we just need to come together and demand what we are due, what we are owed, what we deserve and that's that's where my focus is is on a sort of working class classical Marxism, like you said. I think I'm kind of done being an anti-imperialist first over. You said I think I'm kind of done being an anti-imperialist first over a class-based Marxist. I've found that, like you said, the epiphenomenal part of our conditions. It's slippery. Now People like Dugin come in and recruit you, and before Dugin was recruiting out of anti-imperialism, I'm sure there were others doing the same thing. That seems to be a vulnerable entryway into all this stuff.

Speaker 1: 3:14:16

Francis Shockey et cetera. All right, Thank you so much, Jules.

Speaker 2: 3:14:54

And we'll end there for today. Sounds good, thank you.