Varn Vlog
Abandon all hope ye who subscribe here. Varn Vlog is the pod of C. Derick Varn. We combine the conversation on philosophy, political economy, art, history, culture, anthropology, and geopolitics from a left-wing and culturally informed perspective. We approach the world from a historical lens with an eye for hard truths and structural analysis.
Varn Vlog
From Bern-Out to Burn out With Jules Taylor
What complexities lie beneath the recent shifts in the U.S. left? Join us on Varn Vlog as we sit down with Jules Taylor of the "No Easy Answers" podcast to dissect the nuanced landscape of leftist politics in America. From the financial woes of the DSA to the growing support for Palestinians in Gaza, we break down the major events and miscalculations that have shaped the modern millennial left. We even touch on the resurfacing of figures like Lyndon LaRouche and the state's escalating tactics against student protests.
Moving from New York to Texas, Jules shares the gritty realities of leftist organizing in conservative strongholds. We explore the balance between fostering social camaraderie and pushing for real-world impact, especially within organizations like CPUSA and DSA. This discussion extends to the role of media in shaping collective consciousness, as we question the effectiveness of traditional political actions and debate the practicality and morality of various leftist ideologies.
Finally, we dive into the historical evolution of the American left and its ongoing power dynamics. With reflections on issues ranging from the housing crisis to the humanitarian situation in Gaza, we provide a comprehensive look at the challenges and potential future of leftist activism. This episode is a blend of realism and hope, offering insights that are both critical and aspirational for anyone interested in contemporary political struggles.
Crew:
Host: C. Derick Varn
Intro and Outro Music by Bitter Lake.
Intro Video Design: Jason Myles
Art Design: Corn and C. Derick Varn
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twitter: @varnvlog
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Current Patreon at the Sponsor Tier: Jordan Sheldon, Mark J. Matthews, Lindsay Kimbrough, RedWolf
Hello and welcome to VarmBlog. And we're here with Jules Taylor of the no Easy Answers podcast and the producer for a bunch of shows. We are here talking about Jules' journey on the last couple years to the left and I've, ironically and somewhat darkly, entitled this episode from burnout to burnout. Entitled this episode from burnout to burnout. Um, and for those of you who cannot see the pun, it is B? E R, I mean B E R N out and then B? U R N out and uh, you know, um, these don't ever come out when I record them, but I think my audience knows that. But I'm I'm going to preface what's going on right now because I have a strange feeling it's going to come up.
Speaker 1:Today we have seen the following things happen in the second half of the first term of the Biden administration the DSA has run out of money. I mean, it still has some money, but it's like they're having to lay off staff. They're having trouble making quorum. It seems like their way of accounting for their membership has actually led them to vastly overestimate their funds, which kind of makes sense when you try to run things like a church and keep people in the rules for a lot longer than they're actually paying members for. There has been a swell of solidarity with the Palestinians in Gaza, but it's beginning to take on not just partisan tones. In fact, what's interesting about the Gaza situation is it isn't taking on partisan tones. There's a significant number of the right that's even sympathetic to the Palestinian situation. What is different about it is that the state seems much more concerned about lower levels of protest than even during the Black Lives Matter after George Floyd. Now I'm going to say that with the amount of the they didn't get involved from the state that you hear from people on George Floyd is perhaps overstated. After all, like tear gas canister for flying even in wealthy neighborhoods during the Floyd protest, without a whole lot of concern for wealthy bystanders. And similarly, the tactics that we've seen used at state schools and for non-elite institutions we're actually seeing being used at elite institutions, not for the first time, but at a scale we have not really seen before. Furthermore, there's been some shenanigans, with counter-protesters being violent in the University of California, where it looks like a bunch of Masarahi Jews and other right-wing figures attacked the California encampment and the police did nothing and even maybe kept the ENTs outside of the circle. So they did this thing where they basically let a group bust heads. They'll probably throw some of those people in jail eventually, but not after they've done their dirty work. So we have these kinds of situations at hand.
Speaker 1:We also had a left that predicted two things, and neither happened. So you had a left that predicted that the Biden administration would lead to a resurgence of economic prosperity. I think on our left that was a minority view in 2001. The kinds of MMT light policies that were sort of kind of played with in the beginning were immediately abandoned due to inflation, which I don't actually think has anything to do with those policies, so much as it had to do with price capture. So much as it had to do with price capture, supply chain shifts, competitive advantage of pricing made from the supply chain shifts, etc. Etc. Etc. But there was an increase in the money supply. One thing that has happened, though, is, while wages were going up at the ends of the aughts for the first time for low-end people for a long time and they're still going up they are now massively underperforming inflation, even though inflation's dropped. So all these things is in the context of which I'm talking to you right now, which is a lot, I mean, I'm throwing a ton out here for context, but I think it's important to get to why this is a particular pivot point for the US left.
Speaker 1:I also want to point out that there's been a lot of autopsies on the millennial left and in fact, in some ways, I'm writing one myself. So a lot of people are trying to reflect on what's happened between, let's say, 2007 and 2022 or 2023, which is the end of the Gen X anti-war left, the beginning of the Occupy phase of the left and into the Social Democratic phase and into the Bernie phase one. Then we have resistance to Trump phase, bernie phase two and now this current milieu. We've also seen a clearing out of a lot of the sex so uh, the sectarian organizations, particularly the trotskyist ones, but a lot of them have collapsed during this time period, interestingly, uh. And then some of the weirder ones uh have survived. In fact, we've seen some some deep cuts come back to some kind of weird prominence, such as did you think we'd be talking about lyndon larouche in 2024, like?
Speaker 2:a lot of the stuff was not on my bingo card, man. Um, I didn't have, you know, like may 68 sort of on a bingo card, you know uh, or echoes of you know uh, I was looking at, uh, daniel tutt's post earlier today about, uh, the picture of the kid that became a poet sitting in the dean of the Columbia University's chair smoking a cigar, of that kid sitting in the dean's chair, versus the imagery of a bunch of police, you know, out there that are militarized and are, I mean, it's like the state is much more organized at this point and they learn from history and it seems like they've mobilized and sort of attack these student protests in a way that's much more uh, effective, efficient, sadly, you know there's a lot to it.
Speaker 1:one things I'm going to just say is, like the occupations themselves, even though they're happening in response to things abroad in the, in this calendar of schooling, yeah, to start it just before fucking summer is actually not a great time anyway, because the administrators can wait you out. There's a set time limit and it's coming, yeah, um, but it seems like you know one of the things that I found interesting about this on one hand, the state is stronger and another hand, the state is weaker, and I want to like ask you a little bit about that. Um, and who knows, by the time this is released, from a month when we're recording it, everything may have gone up into smoke again. So I'm going to put that caveat in in case. This is all old news, but so I've noticed the tactics on dealing with the state schools have been thus and I'm saying the state schools, not the elite schools, which is what they've been focusing on in the media, and that was actually by both Democratic and Republican consensus on focusing on places like Columbia and Harvard. They've been doing that for a while, but it really seems to have caught fire at Columbia, and specific partly because it's in New York. But what I find fascinating about this is, on one hand, uh, and in a way that's different from 68, this is an elite affair, and, on the other hand, it's absolutely not. So what do I mean by that? Like, um, it is an elite affair in so much that the schools that we're focused on were elite schools. We are not talking about state schools, we're not talking about kent state, we're talking about columbia, and that's a very different uh scenario.
Speaker 1:On the other hand and there's a lot of people wanted to not a ton of people, but a lot of people want to just dismiss it entirely for that, on the other hand, I think there is this way in which this is happening at a moment where we're also seeing an attempt to remilitarize Remilitarize actually, in terms of this is actually the wrong way to say it Uh, revitalize the uh labor movement as far as, like the UAW and the UAW is like, taking very left wing positions in regards to a lot of this stuff.
Speaker 1:However, they've this contradiction and I want to get into this a little bit with you is that Sean Fain's already kissed the ring of biden in the middle of this, knowing that this was coming up. So, while the uaw and his leadership is supporting a lot of these protests as best they can. Uh, and of course they would, because one of the things about the uaw is people don't know um is that the uaw's membership is probably uh a significant minority of people on universities already, since their major growth strategy during the years before sean fane was not to try to grow the auto unions but to try to get into being the union for um teaching assistants and adjuncts, wow, um, so they have a tie to campuses.
Speaker 1:Wow. But at the same time there's also been this floodgate of like I'm going to gloat a little bit, jules, and you can call me out on it, but people catching up to me on the hey, this great major labor thing that we feel the militancy for, that you guys are saying is happening, it's not fake, but it's not translating into what you hoped it's translated into. It's not translating into increased union density. It's not translating into large shop new unions. It's not translating into the service sector being unionized, even in the kind of anemic ways that we've seen in the Starbucks unions. It's not translating to multiple amazon warehouse unions. We've still only got one and it's still in arbitration.
Speaker 1:Um, and that's several years down the road. So it seems like a lot of the post bernie. Hopes are beginning to get dashed too. And and while I'm with you on 68, the thing we have to remember about 68 is it got recuperated without shots being fired. For the most part.
Speaker 1:In France there were no shots fired, and in the US there were shots fired at Kent State and four actually normie students were killed. They weren't even particularly radical radical and I suspect, when all is said and done, from all this, that yes, we are hearing from radicals who lead a lot of these movements, but a lot of people who are going to get caught up in this dragnet and probably the ones who actually going to end up getting prison time will be normie kids who are you just think that? You know, killing a bunch of palestinians is wrong and maybe we should quit funding it. Um, so I feel like we're in a dark moment. A lot of people seem to think that this will be a time for left revitalization, and this is where I'm going to finally get to you and like, let you talk for a while. Uh, I don't feel that way, but could you tell me where you think the left is and where, where you're at at this moment, jules?
Speaker 2:you think the left is and where, where you're at at this moment, jules. So, man, I want to, I want to stick on like the things aren't translating thread for a second. Um, uh, and you know, man, I know that. You know folks have said that you're kind of blackpilled. You know, um, I, I tend to think of you as like a rather schopenhauerian sort of like approach, whereas, like, if you're deeply skeptical and inherently pessimistic towards your analysis, insofar as that is the way reality truly is, you are that much closer to the truth. You know, it's kind of what Schopenhauer thought about his philosophy of pessimism. And you know I've, because these moments are so dark, I have definitely begun to look at things in a more pessimistic way and, as an example, like you know, like I listeners might know this about me, but I, you know, I moved from upstate New York in 2022, down here 2021, somewhere around there, and I'm a member of CPUSA.
Speaker 2:I helped organize the Hudson Valley Club that was up there and had some success in that and you know, so I was like you know what, man, the things that you know, there were some family things going on, like my mom had a health, you know thing that happened that I had to be here for. But I, you know, in my heart of hearts I was like man, I'm going to Texas, I'm going to try and organize something with CPUSA, because the things that are at the forefront of what I care about, you know, the rights of the undocumented, rights of trans people, you know these things are anti-fascism like. These things are like at the forefront of the battle in Texas. You know, this is where I feel like a lot of the fascist policy goes for. Like a beta testing round is Texas, you know it's like, is it too extreme? Well, texas will volunteer for it. And the conversations are harder down here, jude Raftley, it's more spread out. It just seemed like a more challenging area to organize in and it's proven such too. Yeah, but but like, as far as things not translating, man like I, I came down here looking to try and make an impact and I brought you know projects with me, my no easy answer stuff and continue to work with working people.
Speaker 2:And you know, I think what I've, where I've come out in this is, like you know, in my efforts to try and organize for CPUSA. I've also, like you know, I joined the DSA down here and see what's going on in the local scene. That seems like you know. Wherever you move to, if you want to find a bunch of lefties, they're all going to be hanging out with the DSA. And you go hang out and you meet these people and maybe you join up, maybe you pay some dues, whatever.
Speaker 2:You know, like I got a flyer in the mail from the DSA at one point. That was, you know, the UAW workers promoting their union and I, you know, at first I was like man, whatever. I got a flyer in the mail from DSA. But I was like you know what man Like what did people in other political parties get flyers in the mail from their party, you know?
Speaker 2:And talking about how things don't stick, my mind went from like how things don't translate. It's like my mind went from Well, this is great, I'm glad they're supporting workers, to be like how much of this is translating into real, like spreading of union awareness, if they're just kind of sending this to their own members? I mean, surely most of us are aware of, you know the UAW and their struggles. At least if you're a member of the DSA, hopefully you're taking an interest in labor. But what? How effective is that to send mailers to your own people. You know, is this what dues money is used for?
Speaker 2:Um, you know you've mentioned at the top of this other dsa ran on money and I think we, we, I think we discussed at one point some of the stuff that had gone on between like, I think there was like some sexual harassment stuff that approved some of the internal arbitration methods of dsa to be kind of ineffective and it it, you know, uh, caused a great sort of uh dent in the overall integrity of their uh, of how we looked at them. But uh, you know the moment is dark man. Um, you know, I, I, I question you know how much being a party in any party, psl, CPUSA, like how much? What?
Speaker 1:are we doing?
Speaker 2:What's translating to where? What? What real gains are we, you know, like like part of what I? What I don't appreciate about like and I understand this about like parties in general, is that you need to build camaraderie, and so there's like social events and stuff like that, and I, you know great, you know, meet your comrades, have fun with them. I understand that some of us require that. Not all of us are political animals which can speak incessantly about this stuff and organize and and want to tackle it. So sometimes, like in these parties, you have to have like these social events things and it's like, dude, I that's not what I'm here for, man Like the social event stuff. It's like I wish to organize.
Speaker 2:And it just seems like, even if you join a party we criticize the Democratic Party for, like, what do they do out to people? And and nothing fucking happens and and people don't uh, you know you don't achieve your policy and political goals. For the democrat party, it seems like a place where revolutionary energy just goes to die and uh, you know this is a really pessimistic take man. But like what the fuck is the inherent difference, man, between like joining a party that doesn't do shit or is enfeebled with a lack of power. Uh, you know you can make efforts to build that party up and and surely like it's. You know it's like kind of planting seeds of a tree that you'll never enjoy the shade from, kind of thing. But fuck dude, we don't have time. You know like we're dying to.
Speaker 2:You know climate change, man, the police are militarized and the state is showing how, like even the most privileged sons and daughters of you know people at Columbia University and shit, like they're willing to use this force on them. You know is like every, it seems like every institution is working right now on behalf of Israel's, the continued army of Israel. At this point, like not to get conspiratorial around it, but it's like you look on TikTok and open secrets and the funding of APAC and all that stuff. It's like the entire state. You know it has been bought off and we're, we're funding Israel. We're, we're giving them bombs and we're funding Israel, we're giving them bombs and even with the tie to public opinion in a nonpartisan sort of way, is a total sea change and yet none of us can stop this. And it is a fucking dark moment man, a dark moment man, and and so where I'm at right now is, like you know, I, I, I tend to think and this is I don't I, you know, I, I tend to think like, if you have a platform, that's one to many.
Speaker 2:I mean, I, I, I used to think that podcasting was not like the greatest sort of avenue to do this, and maybe maybe it's like just in some ways like a vanity project or what have you, but like it seems like the ubiquity of mediation in our current days means that we, we have to go through the media in order to, you know, one to many, reach as many people as we can, people as we can, and uh, and this is why I've been, you know, I had a, I've been thinking along the lines of like, if, like marshall mcluhan and herbert marcusa's thought, sort of had a baby or something, where it's like if, uh, if we could, if, if the media is the massage and the whole world is mediated, then we must take up media as the form of getting our voices out there and help achieve class consciousness that way.
Speaker 2:I know that seems like I mean, I'm going to listen back to this and probably hate listening to myself saying that, because it's like, what the fuck impacts are podcasts doing. I'm questioning the impact of flyers sent out by the DSA. You know I'm questioning the impact of everythingers sent out by the DSA. You know I'm questioning the impact of everything, but it seems like you know the only thing that we can rely upon right now. Somebody's going to pick up TikTok and scroll, or somebody's going to put a podcast on at some point, or somebody's going to subscribe to a YouTube channel. It's like all fucking clicks and mediated shit.
Speaker 1:Yeah, it's a tough thing, mediated shit. So yeah, it's it, it's a tough thing. Um, on one hand, I have the deep, uh, distrust of of mediation being a substitute for politics. On the other hand and and I and I mean this very seriously there are two broad tendencies on the left that I have always found a little bit distasteful. One is the collapse, syrian and or communization and or a miseration thesis. So those are different theses, but it's basically like shit will get bad enough. Accelerationism also is this Shit will get bad enough that people have to go our way. And my response is shit will get bad enough that it'll go a bunch of different ways, and you are hoping that it just magically goes the way that you want it to, that if we have enough riots, we'll overthrow capital by practicing communism. If that's the communization way, or if we just hold out enough, we can have a relationship to the Democratic Party until we have the true cadre formation to finally leave dirty break style. But that's infinitely in the future. Apparently, that's another way. There's the please, daddy G, come save us, or please. Third, please, daddy g, come save us, uh, or please, third world workers, come save us.
Speaker 1:Now I have the unpopular opinion that I even find third worldism not only to be just factually not particularly correct. I find it immoral, um, because the idea that you're gonna ask the most oppressed people on the fucking planet to overthrow the most powerful governments on Earth by themselves and it's not going to be just you know, cascades of dead brown bodies at the border that to me is like absurd and morally reprobate, and it also gives you an excuse not to have solidarity with people in your own, in your own sphere of influence, which is not to say that these anti-colonial struggles, in so much as they still exist and that's a big in so much as they still exist aren't worth supporting. They are. But it's to say, like, if you think that's going to be your fighting force to get rid of capital throughout the world, um, I hate to tell you that the most likely outcome of that is just glow as just global nuclear war, and in which case you don't survive anyway. So this is, you know, yeah, I probably sound pretty blackpilled to a lot of people, but the reason why I do.
Speaker 1:I think you're right in that I have a Schopenhauerian pessimism in so much that I think a lot of people have been feeding themselves bullshit for many, many years and they've actually abdicated their own responsibility. So in this sense, I'm not blackpilled at all. I actually think we have to engage in stuff. But engaging stuff means stripping away anything that you have done, that that removes your own agency and your role in this. So, if you know, I don't like when we always talk about where the left doesn't have power and I'm always like, well, why doesn't it?
Speaker 1:We actually have a fair amount of numbers with motherfuckers. We actually have money, even like you have made millionaires off of left media, off of far left media. You have like there's diffuse money out there. No, there's not a mercer family or a coke family for us. You're right. All right, george Soros, despite what the right wing thinks, does not do that. I've never gotten my Soros check. You know there are a few rich patrons of left, of very left wing movements, but they're very small what they patronize, but it's not even a lack of money. I don't even believe that anymore. It's like all of the above and it's a refusal to deal with the realities of power, and I mean this in two ways. So you and I are both in our 40s, right.
Speaker 2:I'm 40, yeah.
Speaker 1:Yeah, you just turned 40. I'm a little bit over. I got a couple of toes into the 40s now.
Speaker 2:Right.
Speaker 1:And I do remember the overly localist left that learned the wrong lessons from the fallout of the 1970s. That set the tone for the left that we never talk about the Gen X left and I know people get mad when I categorize American left by generations, but it's easier to see what's going on when you do that and the Gen X left was very localist and very issue-driven. It had no unified anything, not even a unified stance towards the Democratic Party. It had been sucked up into a Bernie-esque campaign that we have written out of history. We forget that both Jesse Jackson campaigns were Bernie-like campaigns. They were, and this has been largely written out of left-wing history. And the response to that in the 90s was cultural rebellion, localism, et cetera.
Speaker 1:By the time we get through the Iraq War period and the alter-globalization movement morphs through the peace movement into whatever Occupy was, because the recession changed its goals and I do think we have to see that as one continuous thing. The Occupy for me people see as the beginning of the left that we have today and for a lot of us it is. It wasn't for me, but for a lot of people that's their first instantiation. But I said at the time it was actually the end of a different kind of left, that this Graeber Gen X sort of soft anarchist and I say soft anarchist because there's that overhabit of over-blaming anarchists for every problem on the American left emerged in the context of two things happening china seemingly liberalizing and fully doubling down on its favored nation status, with the united states and the ussr not existing any fucking more. So, like um, I actually do like when people like oh, I'm like well, think about why people weren't marxist back then, the only marxist you'd encounter were British trots right who had come in mostly from the UK. Because American Trotskyism had also kind of declined precipitously during the eighties and after 1992, it barely had a reason to exist. Because, again, if I'm not an anti-Trotskyist, I'm not. I also am not a Trotskyist, despite what people in my comments will say.
Speaker 1:But Trotskyism only made sense as a response to the Soviet Union. When the Soviet Union doesn't exist anymore, like the rationale for why Trotskyism is even a thing doesn't actually make sense, like it was kind of on life support for three decades. So that was the left that I came up in, our response to that, as manifested by Occupy, which is the birth of our left but also the death of that Gen X left in a very real way. It's a very real passing of the torch. Uh led to this, this social democratic moment that had a kind of to me both circular and incoherent idea about what we're, what our relationship to democrats were for. So there was more anger at the democrats after the obama years than than people probably in the liberal world expected, um, and that led to the dirtbag left.
Speaker 1:But but what the dirtbag left and the social democratic left could not actually do is say like, okay, you know, the property front may have made sense in the 1930s. I don't think it did. But you know, for our good Marxist-Leninists I'll give that it's at least worth a debate, right, because that is the popular front, is the high point of communist membership in the West, in both the United States, france and Italy. So you know, we can go back and forth about whether or not that was ultimately good, but today I think even most diehard Marxist-Leninist of like you know the have little Stalin in their bedroom poster that even those guys will admit that this is not a popular front moment. All right, but that's what we decided to do, and we decided to do it by inverting the localism and the kind of no demands into oh, let's support a candidate with very specific demands and let's do it within the purview of an inside-outside strategy with the Democratic Party. So this emerges as a critique of the Democrats but ultimately weds us to them, and I think the thing that I think happened that really lost the thread is that in the opposition to Trump, buying into the idea that the Trumpists were true, unreprobate fascists and we had to throw everything at them asterisk, although we didn't really throw everything at them, because punching a Nazi is not what you do. If you actually think Nazis are coming to power, you don't punch them and you can figure out what I think you should do. But let me just say, like, punching is a bit mild actually, um, but so they had this response, um to that that tied us to the resistance, libs, etc. And all of us, even when we were trying to distance ourselves from it, like I was really trying to, we couldn't really do it Like um, and then, uh, 2019 happens, 2020 happens, bernie collapses for the second time and everyone seems to have lost.
Speaker 1:But we've made a lot of people you know, bosh, carson, cara's moved from being like a uh, um, a staff writer for descent magazine to in charge of the Nation Group.
Speaker 1:The left seems to be ascendant culturally after Black Lives Matter gets recuperated and we see ourselves as being able to push biden to the left again. I didn't, but I sure as fuck heard most progressive presidents since fdr over and over and over again those first year, two years of the biden administration, um, and I remember feeling like I was going insane because I'm like I feel like we're actually dying right now and you guys think we've won, like I feel like somehow, between 2016 and 2020, there was a bait and switch and we saved the very people and party we started critiquing in the beginning of all the cycle. That like, in some ways, like it was the energy of the squad and all that shit that gave the Democratic Party the appearance of being a vital force again and luckily or unluckily, that's been removed from us. But now we don't know what to do. And right now, I think this is an interesting moment because I predict that after these Gaza protests on campuses get crushed and you know they haven't been crushed yet, but they're going to be crushed they are being crushed. I mean, like the.
Speaker 1:The encampment here at the U of Utah, I think lasted 20 hours and that was it. The cops went and hit him in the middle of the night.
Speaker 2:It's my understanding. I mean, we're recording this on May 1st, it's about five in the afternoon and people on Twitter have said University of Texas at Austin, like nothing happened today, wasn't really going on. Yeah.
Speaker 1:So they arrested some of the leaders here.
Speaker 1:They're probably I mean, they're not going to charge them, but they can arrest them, hold them for habeas and let them go and to totally disrupt the ability to throw additional protests by taking out the leadership, which you know. I'm actually surprised we haven't done more of that in the past, because you don't even have to charge these people. I mean, although it looks like also right now, as of 4.15 Mountain Time, it looks like Biden's gearing up to incorporate the Department of Homeland Security and start throwing the book at the leadership of these student administrations and handing them federal charges, the way Trump threatened to do to BLM protesters but didn't actually do that much. I mean, they did some, but they didn't do as much as I was afraid of. So, and I find this fascinating because the demands of the Gaza situation in some ways okay, there are certain things that are hard ways okay, there are certain things that are hard like they like immediate, uh, immediate divestment would be illegal right under um and, and formal bds in certain states like yours is illegal, um, but there are other.
Speaker 1:There's other stuff like disinvestment from the west bank. Uh, disinvestment from arms dealing. That wouldn't even be that hard. All right, like that's not something that's even going to hit the fucking trust funds in their pocketbook that hard, and yet we're not even seeing that. So, and I think that's just where it's at.
Speaker 1:And what seems wild to me is if I was going to guess who was going to win the election going into 2023, I would have had a slight incumbent advantage. Too close to call on Biden Now, even if Trump is in prison, I put a slight advantage on Trump. And here's the other thing is I have no idea if either one of those are good for the left at all. I have none, but this should be a passing of the torch moment for us. We should be like the millennial left OK, we didn't get what. We didn't succeed.
Speaker 1:Everything we talked about, from Medicare for all the free colleges, is all just, ironically, at the moment you think that we could actually pressure for it at all completely went away, which tells you how serious that project was. It was an opposition project. Anyone who studies the right would actually know this the brightest. Do this shit all the time, where they promise impossible shit to tea partiers or whatever. And as soon as they come to power, they're like you know impossible shit to tea partiers or whatever. And as soon as they come to power, they're like you know we, we know better, we weren't ever going to do any of that.
Speaker 1:Shut the fuck up. I mean their, their problem that they're having is like they're having the. They're beginning to lose the ability to tell their people that they've made false promises to. To shut the fuck up. You know, even Trump can't seem to do it now. Like you see this, like you see this, you see this incoherence of the gop in congress. Um, so the other thing I think is different and maybe I want to talk to you about this, as in texas, is, I also think, the rights and disarray too, that the entire political spectrum's like, fucking like, has no idea what to do right now. Um, what do you make about that?
Speaker 2:I mean, I I feel like, uh. So first I just want to say that, like you know, I listened to your stuff recently about like hauntology and ghosts of different movements and recognizing how these are just kind of ghosts from the past and, and you know, I think you know what really. I mean there's a lot. I mean, sometimes you, your radicalization, can always get a little invigorated because you watch a random ass documentary and some thought pops in your head. And for me one of those moments was watching a documentary about the AIDS movement and there were people back like before I was alive I was born in 83, people in the early 80s walking down, you know, protesting in New York City with signs asking for Medicare for all, and it was like man that's.
Speaker 2:On the one hand, you know, there's this sort of woo, woo sort of feeling of like, oh man, I'm carrying on the struggle, and sure we all are. I'm carrying on the struggle and sure we all are, but god damn the hopelessness that comes with understanding that people have been requesting this very same thing. You know, and you think about Canada. Canada's got healthcare. Maybe it's not as advanced or maybe you've got to wait in line a little bit. I don't know the status of Canadian healthcare seems like it's a lot better than ours, unless you have certain rare forms of cancer, it's better than ours.
Speaker 1:Until recently, actually, they've been cutting the budget at the provincial level. I mean, one of the things about Canada's thing is it's funded provincially, so it's kind of federalized. So they've been cutting the budget at the provincial level to where things have gotten a lot more dire, like the way the NHS is, and that's led to promoting euthanasia as opposed to helping people. That's becoming a real thing. But in general, I'd still rather, really rather be sick in Canada than the US. Like I said, unless you have a very rare and advanced form of cancer, you're going to be better off there.
Speaker 2:But I wonder how much like the existence of their health care system is due in part to, perhaps, the counterweight of the Soviet Union. You know like, absolutely, you know like, that's why the NHS?
Speaker 1:is this for sure? Yeah, yeah.
Speaker 2:So I mean, I think that we really have like kind of glossed over the way that, you know, the last 30 years we have not had that counterweight to encourage a social welfare system that has real things to show for it. Like you know, canadian health care system things to show for it. Like you know, canadian health care system, um, but you know when, when you watch an old documentary and you see people that were carrying medicare for all signs, uh, before you were even born, uh. Another thing that got me on this was, like you know, I went back and read a soul on ice by eldridge cleaver and you know he's talking about the removal of federal monuments in that book and about how there was like a social debate happening at the time should they remove Confederate monuments, you know? And there's some lines in there about how the entire white race, he says, has woken up to find their heroes as villains and the super villain of all of them is Churchill, and so, like this, these sort of things that I was, you know I, during the George Floyd protest. It's not like I think there were a lot of us that you know are younger that thought, ok, well, the Confederate monuments thing, this is really coming to a head now.
Speaker 2:I said, well, this has been the long it, uh, it was the long eruption, you know, since, uh, the sixties and um and so, for as much as, like, I feel, like, you know, I wish to contribute towards this struggle, and it's like not work that you're obligated to finish, but it's it's work that you can't abandon. Um, you know, man, like, like, what goes back to the, the question of effectiveness and what's translating and and and are we doing anything to contest power? And uh, and you know, there's just times, man, where it's like, like it, how many inflective moments do we have to go through? You know, like how many? I mean, there are times every six months I wake up and I'm like this is a turning point, and it's like, what are we? What are we actually doing? How are we actually, you know, posing problems to power, and I don't think we're doing enough of it. And I don't have the answers either. You know, like, I don't think accelerationism is the answer.
Speaker 2:You know I don't think you know, like, I mean you see the, and as far as the scatteredness you're referring to, man, like you know, you see some of the scatteredness. I think that right wing, you know, people attacking power stations is a symptom of that scatteredness, you know. I think that I mean what the hell just happened in the news recently? What the hell just happened in the news recently? Like there's like, uh, uh, trump's possible, uh, vp candidate murdered her own dog, or something, and it's like, yeah, I mean I think that's symptomatic of like, some scatteredness, of like can you, uh, you understand the voters don't like that sort of thing. And uh, you wrote about it in a memoir. And uh, I just, you know, yeah, I the, the, the far right. I don't really know what to, yeah, and it makes me wonder what's the mentality like on their end like do they think they're contributing to a struggle or something?
Speaker 2:do they just sit back and let the state do shit? I mean, I just don't understand, dude like I don't know what.
Speaker 1:It's hard to say. I think they're actually filled. They also feel in disarray because, um, I can tell you that even that at the time in the aughts and early teens, the one thing I heard all the time was that the right is unified, the left is not right. Right, and I always was laughing at that because I was like, do you realize, during the bush administration there was an entire insurgent right, that kind of won, uh, but it took them a decade and a half to win um, and that is, like you know, the paleo conservative, national conservative, renaissance thing. Like there's a trump really did put them back into history, like, even though Trump wasn't one of them he isn't, he's not that coherent. They're now relevant again in a way that they were absolutely not during the Reagan coalition period. They were the people who lost out of the Reagan coalition, initially in and got increasingly pushed out as neoconservatives gained power.
Speaker 1:Because paleoconservatives are distrustful of war they're not peaceniks, don't confuse it, but they're just trustful of war, um, they're just trustful of free trade, uh, and they have. They're okay with the right kinds of people getting some social welfare if it uh also means that they can maybe eventually go back to the gold standard. I don't. I mean like it's bizarre, but you know, that's where they're at. And in the early teens, I mean, some of those guys were even going so far as to endorse Obama because they were so mad at Trump. I mean, if you go back and read, like the American conservative, you know which, like a couple months ago, published, why not Trump 2028? You know why not Trump forever? Basically, which also indicates to me that it's not just that these people want to end American democracy as we know it, they also don't have a backbench. They don't have a view of social reproduction't have a a a view of social reproduction. But this stuff with columbia made me realize none of the elites do like. If the elites are attacking their own kids in this way, that's an. That's an elite crisis. Uh, it's a. It's a crisis of elite overproduction. But it's also a crisis of their inability to socially reproduce their values as attractive even to their own children of privilege. And that is an interesting scatteredness.
Speaker 1:You think the left and in some ways the left is able to take advantage of this. On this one issue of this, on this one issue, the thing is we're going to run flat into the wall of. Are you really willing to let the democrats lose to do this, because you know that trump's not gonna back down on any of this stuff? You know, in fact, trump would have been like oh, we needed a smaller police response, but we needed it earlier. We should should have arrested these leaders early on.
Speaker 1:And it's hard to know what Trump would do on Israel-Palestine. Because he's not an ideologue. I can't predict what he'd do. Honestly, I'm like he might double down on Netanyahu shit, but he also might not. We don't know. He's actually done both in the past, depending on what's going on. So it's it's.
Speaker 1:It's very hard to say. I mean, one of the things I think you'll start hearing is left critiques of Joe Biden are beginning to penetrate into the right as well, and the the response to Zionism is doing two things. I think it's dividing Catholics and Protestants on the right, so the Catholics and Protestants have largely been on the same side, but Protestants are probably unwilling to give up their Christian Zionism. That said, I'll also say Christian Zionist institutions and whatnot are in free fall. They really are the right not being able to come to a unified position on this and it being divided up amongst religious and ethnic identities amongst themselves and how they should respond to this actually does indicate that they're more deeply fragmented than even probably we know. And yet, and yet it doesn't look like we're going to be able to pivot this into anything. And I'm going to say something that's going to make. It's going to. It's going to be maybe a little hard for people to hear. Pull it here.
Speaker 1:Um, protest, by and large since may 68 have not worked for anything that we've said that they were going to work for. They might have some other purposes like, uh, social solidarity, that kind of thing. There's reasons to do them, but the idea that a protest is going to stop even the funding for a war, much less stop a war, seems to me to just ignore the second half of the 20th century entirely. For a few movements that happened in the context of trying to establish peace right after World War II, when people were being more generous about what they were going to allow because they wanted to maintain peace and not risk another world war. And I think that's kind of being missed here because I have been like okay, so you get these universities to divest, right.
Speaker 1:Who's buying Israeli software? Not so much the Russian government anymore because of sanctions, although they still buy a good bit. The Chinese government, although the Chinese are finally beginning to weigh in on trying to encourage Fatah and Hamas to form some kind of united front. But the Chinese government, they're never going to fully oppose Israel. They buy too much Israeli software for their surveillance technology. The US government the government they're never going to fully oppose Israel. They buy too much Israeli software for their surveillance technology. The US government, the government, particularly the military. It's not like South Africa in that its primary exports are not. Yes, there's a lot of consumer goods that are tied into Israel, but a lot of what Israel's economy is is like military and surveillance software. So that both is a reflection of the kind of you know the state, you know what it is and what it does, I mean.
Speaker 1:And the other thing that makes Israel difficult and this is going to probably be slightly unpopular too, um, is that, despite what the us left seems to think, the vast majority of of israeli citizens do not belong to another state. I think something like 70 of them are israeli. Only, uh, a little over 50 of them are masrahi or sephardic that were kicked out of the Middle Eastern nations during national consolidation, so they're stateless. So, while this is a settler-colonial conflict, it is not something you can model on Algeria, because it's also a settler-colonial conflict where the settler side also doesn't really have another state to go back to, even if it is serving the interest of various other imperial states, which means that the conditions of war are nastier.
Speaker 1:Um, uh, and I don't think people really, I think actually, some right, some right-wing anti-Zionists understand this a lot better than left wing anti-Zionists do, and this is going to be something that's going to be hard to die down. I'm not saying, however, that we shouldn't be dying this shit down, because if we don't start pushing back on some political solution to Israel and Palestine, you're going to see a half million Palestinians dead by the end of the year, like you know. I mean like, which, by the way, will be a fourth of the Gaza population. Like we're already at probably 2% in six months, but the starvation is going to really start kicking in soon, right months, but the starvation is going to really start kicking in soon, right, so, yeah, I mean and so if people wonder why I'm dark lately like, um, uh, we haven't seen atrocities like this since right after world war ii.
Speaker 1:I mean, like, I guess there have been some. I mean, you could talk about cambodia and some other things that have pretty close to this high of population devastation. But even during the war on terror, the only thing that approaches this is a Syrian civil war, and that was worse. But that also has gone on for, you know, over a decade, and you know, I think that's you know, that's a dark place to be, and it's also hard to imagine how you pivot an entire social movement off of this one thing in Gaza, because eventually it's going to get settled one way or the other. And then what do you do, um? And then what do you do? Like, like and I'm.
Speaker 1:I'm also one of these people who who definitely says like. As communists, we should have something to say about what's going on in Israel, gaza, about colonialism, about settlerism, et cetera. But I don't think you can easily pivot back to domestic norms using the same language, um, I just don't think it's easy to do that and also it immediately evaporates the support you might have on Gaza. So we have to ask ourselves a question sometimes when organizing this. And I tell you where I land, but I land on we support the Gazans, even if it doesn't necessarily in the short run, help communism, because it's the right fucking thing to do to stop a massacre. But but does it increase the freedom of the global proletariat? No, it doesn't. And I know people don't like that. They don't like to hear that. Um, because they they have to believe that your politics need to be coherent in that way. But I don't know that this actually actually translates to many victories for the working class worldwide.
Speaker 2:Um, yeah, that's rough man, that's I. I feel that, um, you know I was. I had some thoughts recently about how, uh what the united states uh does not adhere to any of the international criminal court stuff. Right, yeah never, Never right, never right. And we have a law where, even if one of our people is held by the international criminal court, we have authorization to use military force to go retrieve them or something.
Speaker 1:Yeah, what was crazy is that's also early. So we helped draft universal declaration of human rights, which is what the international criminal court supposed to enforce.
Speaker 2:Right.
Speaker 1:Even back then, and I guess it makes sense, because when we put stuff, if you like, look at what, like the FDR administration, through through Eleanor, was putting in the universal declaration of human rights, it was also pretty clear that we never met it, like because yeah yeah, we're writing it in the 40s. Uh, freedom of movement and full enfranchisement are the two of those human rights, jim crow, still fucking going on yeah, so, so, like my thoughts recently upon.
Speaker 2:So I mean, I've been taking a little in a love John Mearsheimer and listening to like the realist school thoughts things and it all kind of just comes down to fucking might makes right and whoever has power is going to use it to enforce it, and that's just the sort of grand political geopolitical poker game where everybody's cheating. And, and it got me to thinking about how, like you know, we had a conversation at some point about how, like communists, at least in the west, have a rather limited world view and don't have a sort of uh, design and purpose for their versions of communism beyond free college and medicare for all and stuff like that. And and and the question of like, does you know the Gaza situation, to do any victories there translate towards anything useful? Or or or a victory for the working class internationally? I mean, I would say that, yeah, I mean, stopping a master would be a victory, but what end towards?
Speaker 2:Like I don't know if we want to call it the proletariat or something like that, I mean it's hard to say, but I would say that I think that maybe an interesting thread to pull would be like, you know what would? What would the world look like with, with every nation state only existing if it submits to an international criminal court, and and and? Is that even something that we could dream of? You know, because it's our country, really, that is like the one, that that is like just the force to be reckoned with, that doesn't comply with it. That is enabling another like we, it's. The problem is much deeper than Netanyahu, you know. The problem is much deeper than Israelrael.
Speaker 1:The problem is the american empire and and so like it's the american empire first and foremost, but I would even go further than that what's that yeah?
Speaker 1:it's also all the empires that are also looming. I mean, like I recently did a video on the history of multipolarity, which is actually which is from the realist school, and I was pointing out how different that vision is from what lenin actually advocated. But I I've also said like there could be something like, uh, a a communist recognition of the reality of multipolarity, because I also think it's like I think multipolar order is actually the default order of the world. What makes it, what makes it complicated, is that while markets have always been kind of global, they really truly are global and nobody including China, vietnam, whatever can actually discipline all of the market. They might be able to discipline their own capitalists, but they're still subsumed to the international market, they still have to operate under international market norms, and attempts to get around that are even established at just another set of market norms, such as the Belt and Road Initiative initiative, have largely collapsed. And so one of the things we have to ask ourselves is, like you know, you mentioned, without the Soviet union, one question that I have and I say this as a person who's kind of defensist on China. So, like you know, like hands off fucking China, like don't start a global nuclear war with China? That's fucking stupid. But even I've sort of been like you. China, that's fucking stupid. Um, but even I've sort of been like you know.
Speaker 1:We have to admit that after the sino-soviet split, that the chinese never establishing anything like an international at all is a, is a world historic failure. Like, and they, they do not seem interested in that, like they still don't seem interested in that, the belt and road initiative, what, what it was, was not an international. It was a Marshall Plan without a war, for setting up an alternative trade network to get around the deep border network of the United States. But that's not really an international. Like, yes, it involves multiple countries, but there's nothing that like this, not about the, the global vision of communism at all like. So we have to ask ourselves, you know, okay, we have. We should be defending certain actually existing communist states within start, within reason, as long as they're not killing communists or whatever.
Speaker 2:Um, I also wonder, like what are they going to reach out to vietnam and laos and cuba, and that's that? I mean, it's like at least the Soviet Union and China. Maybe there's more reason and it's wiser to form international, you know, but China on their own, with forming international with these smaller countries that are, I don't know that it's. I feel like you know Z and his wisdom as a marxist. I mean, maybe he's, maybe that's within his purview and he's just kind of like we'll take care of chinese citizens, bleed out the us through their economy, make them completely reliant upon us and we'll just wait things out, possibly yeah, the problem that they have is that's being undone yeah like uh the, the major us trade partner right now for for global production is mexico.
Speaker 1:It is. It's AMLO's Mexico, it is not Xi's China. That's a shift over an otherwise 30-year norm. It's really slowed down the Chinese economy and both sides have a demographic bomb. Ours is blowing up now, theirs is going to blow up in about five years, and I don't think it's a bit like the peter zions of the world and the you know and the conservatives like, oh, it's going to destroy china. I'm like it.
Speaker 1:We, we don't know what it's going to do. We haven't seen like this will be the first time in history that basically, we're going to see like millions of people just die of old age in a very relatively short amount of time. Like that has not happened for most of human history. Usually there's some catastrophe that doesn't allow that to happen. It's about to happen. All right, we don't know what it means. I don't know what it means either, and so one of the things about, about this gen z left that I, that I've been pushing on a little bit um, is we're doubling down on the past and like, yes, we can learn from the past. Yes, we can learn from Russia. Yes, we can like from, from classical, you know, soviet union from. I think we can also learn from the Mexican revolution, et cetera. At the same token, we are in entirely different conditions, and even though a lot of times I say well, geopolitically right now it's a lot closer to 1870 to 1914 than it is to most of the 20th century, and I still believe that. But let's add the elephant in the room, though, and in the 1870s no one had fucking nukes, and that our drones, our chemical weapons, the killing capacity of these states was a lot, but it is not what it is now, and that completely changes the calculus of what these things look like. And then let's let's flip back to whatever's happening right now.
Speaker 1:I am of the opinion that neoliberalism, as we understood it from, from say, 81 to 2007, has actually been dead. Most of the time the united states uh, most time the united states left has been talking about it, that the moment we started getting into like quantitative reasoning stuff, something had fundamentally shifted. But since it doesn't look like anything familiar to us and it still has a lot of the same bullshit traits of neoliberalism, we also can't, we haven't, periodized it as something separate, um, and that's leading us to not really understand what is happening in regards to the economy, because I don't think any of us. A lot of us saw that, you know, after COVID we were going to head into a pretty big inflation. A lot of us thought that we were heading into an inflation right before COVID. I did, I mean not inflation, a recession, um, that we were heading into a recession, uh go, uh, just before COVID, and that COVID actually probably both exacerbated it, but by exacerbating it also starved it. Also like, basically, we went through the entire business cycle very quickly, hidden in the covid numbers, um.
Speaker 1:But I have also felt like I don't know what's going on economically anymore. I mean, the us is, has the same gdp as china, and yet we're stagnating. Has the same GDP as China, and yet we're stagnating. Because only, yes, every rich Democrat that I know will say, well, the economy is doing good right now and I'm like, okay, well, it is doing good in the sense that it has a relatively high GDP and in fact, we have a high GDP, are slightly higher than China, which is unheard of for most of the end of the 20heard of, for most of the 20, the end of the 20th century and most of the 21st century too. Yet it also very much feels like that's not mattering for the average person at all, even more than it didn't matter during the long recovery after great recession. So, like in the long recovery after great recession, I don't think people started feeling good about their economic situation until like 2017.
Speaker 1:Um, and, and you know, technically, the, the recovery started in 2011. It took that long. Um, and this one I felt like. Well, we all hear all the time the economy is doing good and yet also we all know that, like, food inflation is out of control. Housing inflation is out of control. The things that we used to care about, yes, schooling and healthcare inflation have slowed, but that's because people don't even utilize the services right now, like, for a variety of reasons. Basically, the healthcare scenario is frozen. Variety of reasons. Um, uh, basically, the health care uh scenarios is, uh, frozen. There's been a. There's been something we haven't even been talking about the the biden administration has been decreasing, uh, medicaid and medicare payouts this entire time. Um, so, like, it's getting harder and harder for some of these hospitals to make ends meet with staffing, balancing out Medicare and Medicaid and still paying off the fucking shareholders, which, of course, they have to do.
Speaker 1:There's a lot of fictitious capital around that was. Some of it's been destroyed. But people might wonder what I mean by that. Fictitious capital is capital that like shows up in the valuation of assets but you can't actually asset uh um, access, because if you were actually to put the thing on the market, it wouldn't sell for that. So you can't actually valorize all that capital, so that, so some of that capital is just created by asset valuation and if you're actually to try to sell it, it's not real.
Speaker 1:We're seeing a lot of that, like, uh, lot of that like uh the. The weird exception, though, is housing, because housing's become uh, it's become a safety investment all right, which is a disaster for the average person. So, like, right now you can put a house in the market it'll blue book for for seven, for 700,000, got like a five percent interest rate, and people like, oh, the 5% interest rate is not high, and I'm like, yeah, except that when you guys were taught last time, we had like 10, 11, 12, 13% interest. Housing values were like, on average, $40,000 are less, like you know, 5% of, even adjusting for inflation.
Speaker 2:5% of like seven hundred thousand dollars is a fuck lot more well, adding, adding to the overall don't know what the hell is going on with the economy thing is, uh a um, the guy that self-immolated talking about how cryptocurrency was a like a giant ponzi scheme. I mean, I've given thought to where, like I don't know if this country and its institutions can withstand the, the, the crypto market when it finally does collapse, and how many you know libertarians you're going to turn full-on fascist when that happens.
Speaker 1:Uh, we've already began to see it, I mean because, yeah, we've seen. We've seen minor cracks in it that almost took out whole banks.
Speaker 2:Yeah, and combine that with sports betting. You know the way that, like, even players are getting fined for sports betting now in the NBA and how, like, I feel like sports in general has tried to keep itself distant from betting because of things like that which might jeopardize the integrity of the game. But when you have celebrities advertising cryptocurrency stuff in the middle of the Super Bowl, it was only a matter of time before sports betting came into advertisement within professional sports as well. I just really don't think it's a good sign that part of the economy now is like sports betting and gambling and how maybe we're just seeing the start of this particular disease and it's going to you know, it's going to get worse on that front. But, yeah, like I don't, I don't really. How is the economy doing? Well, I mean, everyone can't afford to live and food inflation is ridiculous and everyone is paying more for everything. It's like I.
Speaker 1:And that inflation is out. Even though it's gone down, it's still outstripping wage increases. So why? We saw a bunch of big wage increases for the lower. So here's what also people didn't notice we saw wage increases for the lower part of the workers, which is good, but you know who? It came off the backs of Lower middle workers, so the people in the 50K range. They have stalled this entire period. This entire period, um, and I mean the other thing is just like the. The inflation is really like the. The consequences of it's really hitting.
Speaker 1:When I like think about, like, uh, in 1982, um, I think forty thousand dollars would today be the equivalent of $170,000. And yet I have a hard time imagining people, even in the $170,000 range, being able to buy a house. Whereas in 1982 or even in the 90s, you could buy a house if you could come up with a down payment on just above minimum wage. If you were working full-time at minimum wage and you had another person in your household working even part-time, you could probably pull off a house. I can't imagine trying to even rent on minimum wage as a single family. It's not possible. Now, on one hand, americans are weird in that we were buying houses. When people in Europe I had Europeans who get mad at me like, oh, you have these giant houses. I'm like we also have more land. Guys Like there's just a lot more, like it's different. I realize this quality of life. It feels pretty extravagant when you're from like a European city and you're used to your flat being two bedrooms and it costing a ridiculous amount of money, a flat being two bedrooms and it costing a ridiculous amount of money. But um, uh, the united states is, uh, housing market now is like not viable. The rent's gotten a little better. Rent inflation has kind of slowed down, but it hasn't gone down because now so few people can buy houses that it's a backstop. So while rent isn't continuing to go up because we're throwing housing stock up as fast as we can in a lot of places, it still is not going to make up like it's. It's still not going to go down because there's still so much more demand because people can't buy houses. They just it's out of the possibility for them.
Speaker 1:The left, however, isn't talking about that at all. I mean like at all, like it's out of the possibility for them. The left, however, isn't talking about that at all. I mean like at all Like it's. I mean, yes, leftist individual are like talking about the economy, but like I haven't seen a plan come out on housing for anybody, like Jackman hasn't done like new housing issue, like it's just not.
Speaker 1:You know, the DSA still like pretended that it cared about medicaid. I mean, I'm sure the individual people cared about medicaid for all, but they like. But when I saw the chunks of money they could throw at it like you know, like oh, we need to control the electives, I'm like you can give an elected seven thousand dollars as a grant, right, right, a city council position in Salt Lake City can run you $200,000 to try to run for. Do you think a grant of $7,000 is going to matter in that scenario, particularly when you consider the DSA's concentration is also the same concentration as a historical. This was funny. I didn't know this until recently.
Speaker 1:Um, while socialists were very popular in the Midwest and actually even in the fifties, the Midwestern colleges were the least affected by the red scare, cause they just wouldn't go all that, they wouldn't go there. Interestingly, um, the concentration of the, of the um, of the communist party, was still primarily in california and new york even in the 40s, which is interesting. I don't know what to make of that because that, like today, it makes sense because of, like, relative population, you know, there's just like 17% of all economic transactions happen in New York or California, like it's. It's quite a bit, but but weirdly, if you think about the 1940s, that was not true. There are still a lot of big cities in other parts of the countries that have not yet declined, and so it is interesting to me that, like, there's a long historical relationship between the two coast and radical politics that I don't really understand, but also seems to indicate that this idea that they were largely working class even in the early 20th century is just not true. Like, um, they weren't mostly university students, because university students before, before the GI bill, were like 2% of the population or something. It was tiny, um, so, yeah.
Speaker 1:So I guess, to take it back to to more black pill stuff, and I'm going to ask your opinion about this uh, one of the interesting things about 68 you know I've been thinking a lot about cycles and how they rhyme and where they don't all right. Yeah, so 68, this looks a lot like 68, foreign foreign intervention, although it's not a war we're directly in, it's a war. We're indirectly in or quasi directly in, but we're not legally directly in it in any capacity. But you know who knows? There is a nightmare scenario where someone shoots the wrong person and all of a sudden American troops are killing Gazans too, and maybe Iranians.
Speaker 2:Well. I mean all of this is like. I mean the student campuses and stuff. I mean we live in a country where there's a mass shooting every day. You know, like it's, like any of this has a potential to just be a be a tinderbox, you know, like it's assassinations we've actually seen since uh, 2020.
Speaker 1:Um, uh, because in a lot of ways, that's another difference between us and 60 and 68, a lot more people were actually dying. Um, yeah, including high, high profile political figures. Um, in the united states, I mean, one of the one of the strange things about the us versus france is we think of france as more radical, but the us fallout from the post-dnc convention was actually way more violent and it led toa spread like there were assassinations for for years after that, like, uh, then there was the entire uh, new left slash, early new communist movement bombing campaigns like, which didn't kill anybody other than themselves. Um, you know, because they were, they were, they were.
Speaker 1:They weren't trying to, they weren't, they were, they were terrorism light, which is always interesting because I was like when in america, when leftists do terrorism, they like blow themselves up and cause a lot of property damage, and when rightists do terrorism, they kill their enemies and maybe some innocent people too, like it always has. Which is not to say that we should be like the right, that's not what I'm saying here. It's just always been interesting me that comparison, because I'm like oh, so, you know, in the 60s, the weathermen like blew up their own cars and caused like did 200 bombings that caused a lot of property damage and then the Klan blew up churches with people in them. It's kind of a different thing when people hear that equated, but we do feel like we're entering days of lead, which is not even a civil war.
Speaker 2:It's like low-key violence, all the time in a highly politically unstable situation, um, where nobody, nobody can really do anything either they other than get at each other like I mean it reminds me of like, uh, christmas day a few years back, there's a bomb in the middle of nashville, a car bomb, a guy that just ignited this bomb, and uh, and you know, it made the news. But a lot of us were just like so we're just going to like, move past this, no one's going to talk about this, you know.
Speaker 1:It was very weird how little discourse there was around that car bomb.
Speaker 2:Yeah. And so when you talk about like just kind of pervasive violence all the time, I mean it's self-immolation is on the rise, what can I say? You know, I mean it's, it's, it's rare that we I mean I think the last one, I remember there was a guy who I think he set himself on fire on the White House lawn or something. Yeah, he did, yeah. And so I mean I take note of these as sort of like canary in the coal mine for society. Note of these is sort of like canary in the coal mine for society, you know, and uh, we have active, you know, aaron bushnell.
Speaker 1:active, uh, military member self-immolating, and he isn't the first one. I mean, there's some during the uh, during the iraq war protest, but again, we've been normalized to it like, um, it's one of the things that I have recently I was on this. Oh well, you know, they suppress Black Lives Matter less than they suppress these student oppressing. And then I went back and actually like looked at it and I'm like it depends on the time period that we're talking about in 2020, on how suppressed BLM was, because there were points where they were just like throwing tear gas even in rich neighborhoods, without caring that it even got rich people tear gas by bystanders, so they weren't that light on it, but it did seem like it took a lot more to get the Dems to turn on that than this.
Speaker 2:Like this was almost immediate, like well, isn't it time for the liberals to wake up? Man, you know, I mean, it seems like you know they went dormant when Biden won. They woke up when Trump's first campaign was a threat and we all knew they'd go back to sleep after Biden won. But it seems like we're missing some characters in the story, right?
Speaker 1:now? Yeah, I got a question for you. It seems like we're missing some characters in the story right now. Yeah, I got a question for you. What are we going to do when the left has to go on its anti-Trump? Is it too exhausted to do that? Is it not going to take the bait this time?
Speaker 1:Like I am already seeing certain young activists in the older Gen Z cohort begin to be like well you know, even though 70% of the population wants third party, it can never happen because it's divided over what it would be. And look at these candidates, we can't vote for them. And I'm always like why do you think that voting for a third party is like something you do tomorrow that you can just go in and do by voting tomorrow? Like you'd have to build the social infrastructure? You got to take time. It's going to require law changes etc, and and, and it's probably going to require like insurrectionary force as well to really like on the state level, to really get states to take it seriously. Um, and that's a long game. I mean, it's not, you know, it's not forever, but it's a long game. Uh, whereas you seem to think that we should just be able to go in and vote for someone and and that's the end, all be all of politics, which which, to me, is like did you miss the lesson of the last four years?
Speaker 2:Like yeah, I mean some people take it as a starting point, some people take it as a very like bare minimum. You know, I I take it as like at this point now, like I I mean I never voted anyway, man, uh, but I'm I'm hearing more and more from people I wouldn't describe as disenfranchised, just as people as like that are kind of like taking just an honest view and assessment of what's going on in the world. And it was like you want me to vote for that. You told me to vote for the guy who designed the prison industrial system, kind of thing. You know. You told me you know to vote for the guy who was going to do better by immigrants.
Speaker 2:You know, I mean you told me the guy that vote for the guy that wasn't going to start wars, but I mean he's effectively responsible for a genocide at this point, and so it just seems like there's a lot the Democratic Party can ask of us, but asking us to continue voting for a guy who's arming a genocide against a population that's half children.
Speaker 2:You know, one of the strongest sort of retorts I found to this was the TikTok video. The guy was like all right, you want me to vote for a Democrat, vote blue. You want me to vote blue in November? Okay, okay, but do something for me, right? Kill your children, like go and kill your children and hold their you know bodies there and then tell me that it was worth it for this vote, that you know just the world's going to end if we don't vote for Biden or something. Essentially, it's like you know saying vote for Biden and the continued murdering of children in Gaza. And you know, I thought it was, you know, obviously a little exaggerated sort of you know metaphor, but it was something that kind of was like yeah, maybe this is a bridge too far, asking Gen Z to vote for. I mean, if you're Gen Z and you vote for biden this year, just you, just I don't even know what to say, man, you know, like at this point, it's funny watching it happen.
Speaker 1:the other thing that's happened is that gen c is less progressive in some ways I'm gonna put a big caveat in some ways by gender also another caveat than the millennials were, because their first experience of politics is a very unpopular democratic president. Right, it's not that they're becoming reactionaries, it's just like they're. They just don't care anymore. Like you know, they might care now that tiktok's being taken away. I know that sounds uh flippant and that sounds flippant and maybe some company will buy it and it'll be okay, but it looks like right now that it's most likely outcome is to be shut down in the United States, which you know they say security. I say it sounds like protectionism to me, but we're all doing that these days sounds like protectionism to me, but we're all doing that these days.
Speaker 2:Well, I mean, I think that perhaps TikTok is largely responsible for the reason why we are all somewhat paying attention, to a degree, to Gaza and that somebody can pick up their phone and actually have an algorithm expose their voice. You know, it's the reason why music artists are all flocking over to TikTok, because everything else has been. I mean, even dating apps at this point are like. You know, you can't really effectively use them unless you pay for them. You know, facebook is like you can't even mention Palestine without it suppressing your stuff. You know, it's like everything has been engineered to not work in the way that you'd expect it to, but TikTok is the only thing left where people actually get exposure.
Speaker 1:Well, here's the funny thing about Facebook, though that shit was outdone by liberal requests, with a lot of the left backing it up.
Speaker 2:That is really funny too. Yeah, but if you're Ben Shapiro, you're still getting millions of hits and your stuff and Facebook is still feeding you, right? No?
Speaker 1:actually, ironically, I've even seen facebook feed me anti-semitic stuff going under the guise of anti-pal, of like pro of anti-palestinian war stuff, but it was, but it was, and it's just come out blatantly, um, and yet, you know, if, yeah, I mean I think about how censored, uh, in some way, like this whole weird way Gen Z has of talking, which is partly around getting around, uh, instagram, youtube and, yes, tick tocks, still censorship functions, like they, like all those weird kind of cutesy things like unalive, ha ha ha. That's all related to talking on the way you have to talk on social media. Now, uh, the the, the, the dark irony is, though, because no one wants and the reason why this is is no one wants to actually put in the man labor to actually moderate shit, like, let's be honest, they use all these algorithms that are really stupid.
Speaker 2:But because, if you get rid of this, you're all going to have to learn how to speak anti-AI or how to speak around or code-wise. I mean at this point now, like I mean, if AI well we have obviously is not the same AI the military has, the police have that you know that we're probably dealing with live transcription. Shit out in protest now, like tools that absolutely are.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:You know, like we have to learn, we're all going to have to learn how to speak and get around this stuff.
Speaker 1:And unfortunately, I will say this, younger millennials and Gen z have been other than this code speak. They've actually been, uh, trained to overshare. Uh, yeah, and I mean in a way that, like compromises, them later on after like, like after protests, are, uh, what sometimes it helps. I mean like, for example, that attack on UC California. It happened yesterday night, you know, by those Zionists. If any of those people are caught it's going to because they put their faces on on openly on things like Instagram, youtube and telegram, but a lot of people just don't seem to grok it anymore.
Speaker 1:Facial recognition is everywhere. Um, your phone is spying on you a hundred percent of time and liberals and this is liberals have normalized. Well, maybe privacy wasn't needed anyway. Like, I hear that from liberals more than conservatives, um, although conservatives have kind of been on that train for a while. The other thing that the left has done that I've been really wary of is like being inconsistent on their stance towards police and encouraging, like I don't know, terror charges and stuff a principally, and I'm like don't do that, that's going to be used on you. And people like, oh, you know, we use the, the, the stuff at, uh, the hand, you know, and I'm like I don't think so, man. I don't think it's gonna. I don't think it's gonna go well for you, um, which is not to say that that I I'm also not one of these people who thinks the center doesn't come down on the right.
Speaker 1:Sometimes they do just go and tell pro all over right-wing organizations. We know that they keep on baiting people and the militias into doing stupid shit. Um, like, uh, but, and we, and we know if they're there, we also know they're here, like I used to joke about you know, uh, you know 10, 15 years ago that we'd know, uh, the left was back when there's co-intel pro again, you know, and, and I don't know that there's COINTELPRO again. But I will not be surprised that in 30, 40 years, when stuff gets declassified, that we find out that some of these parties are of temp feds. It would not surprise me at all. Yeah, I mean, and they might not even be fed people, they may be fed fucking AI scripts. Like that's the thing. Now, you don't like, if you're not interacting with people directly, you don't even know that you're interacting with a fucking person all the time, like I don't think the AI is that good yet, but we're not that far from it.
Speaker 2:So I mean yeah, I mean, I think you know you and I had a conversation once we were talking about, you know, streamers are cheap. Man, you can buy a streamer if you're a country with funding and interested in soft power and shit, and you know we are seeing like very cheap. So, you know, seeing things like I don't know, like Norm Finkelstein not being able to talk because of people like Haas or something, or and Jackson Hinkle out of these protests on campus, you know it's yeah, it's a dark time, dude, it's a really dark time, and I think about these students out there and I, you know, talking of all the things we've talked about today that don't translate into sort of any sort of tangible victories or results. It did, you know, hearten me to see that some Gazans had written like thank you to university students and, who knows, I'm choosing to believe that some gossens had written like thank you to, uh, to university students and, who knows, I'm choosing to believe that's an authentic image. It could be ai, could be something I think it's real.
Speaker 1:Yeah, just like. Just like the, the vietnamese government put, put up a statute to american anti-war protesters, did they matter? Matter? I don't know Right. I've been thinking about this for a while because for me the question has become and I want to get your opinion on this maybe this is another thing that we could talk about a little bit about places that are both dark, but also maybe tell us something that we can take advantage of. I think we all kind of fear that protests don't really work, for what they say on the 10. I don't know any leftist who's like protest.
Speaker 1:Every now and then people will tell me that like BDS worked in South Africa and I'm like, yeah, but so did a lot of other stuff. Like like an armed insurrection, the, the, the Bush senior administration getting, getting the South African government to give up its nuclear weapons, etc. A bunch of stuff had to happen. Also, the Soviet Union was still around, so like there's a bunch of stuff. It does seem interesting to me and I mean this in a way that I said in the beginning that the state seems both stronger and weaker, and the ways it seems stronger is that it's like between the two BLM insurrections over a decade and Occupy and various campus protests and the anti-war movement in the aughts. They've gotten very good at breaking up these kinds of of things without using a lot of hard power. Right, they're using a lot of hard power. They're using a lot of hard power, like so, and they're using the soft power stuff. I mean, I'm sure some of these protests when I receive jail time, but I I can see a lot of the leadership being brought up on federal charges. I can see I can see these universities being punished by denies of of student visas becoming a real thing, which I think is actually maybe a little bit of what's driving in addition to being invested into this stuff. In addition to being invested into this stuff, it was interesting watching these admins speak very wokely a year ago and totally reverse now, and I think that has to do with the fact that they are a hyper invested in this war machines and unlike them stuff.
Speaker 1:This actually requires you to do something. That the weird thing about the blm demands is they were in some ways very specific and in other ways so vague they weren't possible like no one's, no one's defunding all the police. That doesn't make any sense. Um, as a demand. I always like you either go all the way and call for abolishment and re-establishing a whole new police force, or a whole new. You don't call it a police force. Do it what else?
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:Or you don't do it Like, like you go back on to like humane reforms because, like, just taking away their money is like taking away the money from the people with all the fucking guns. And then I'm like but we have your money now and they're like. But we have your money now and they're like, but we have your guns.
Speaker 2:I don't know how that doesn't seem obvious to people why that would be a problem like do you think that, like the, if the goal is divestment or the goal of the you know student protest is like and the genocide right? I mean, is that? Do you think that the goal or the anchor point of that goal serves the protesters well in the articulation of that goal? Like, like, is that something that they like? In the same way you say, go all the way with abolition and reforming something else entirely Like, is it a similar goal that they can work towards or is this just something that you think is kind of along the same lines?
Speaker 1:of vagueness. It's kind of vague. I mean, for one instance, like I've heard people say we want a ceasefire and a global intifada and I'm like you're not getting both.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:Like I'm sorry, no state on Earth is going to be like global intifada. We're putting our guns down now Like, yeah, on earth is going to be like global intifada.
Speaker 2:We're putting our guns down. Now like this is like. You know, I asked this like it goes back to what I was saying about, like what would a world look like where everyone submitted to sort of global order, of something similar to an ICC? You know, I wonder if maybe the answer is I mean, obviously part of it is like in terms of a global vision is you know, I go as far as saying hey, we need to end the US empire.
Speaker 1:You know you say, of course, in the conversations I have, people get very upset well, I mean, I don't think people know what that means, though, because there's all kinds of binds. One, most of the social democratic programs is actually dependent on fairly loose currency, those currencies, depending on people taking that currency. The people taking that currency is dependent on two things productive capacity, which we still have, I know. I know people think we don't, but we really do. But the other big reason is we have a lot of fucking guns. We have more guns than the world has ever seen, and about every way you can talk about it, um, this is the most armed society that's ever existed on the fucking earth um, ever.
Speaker 1:I mean like, like, I don't think people really understand the scale sometimes, and I'm like no, they, the us military, is a military force the likes of which, even adjusting for the size of the population of the world, the world has never seen before. Like there has been no military with that much of of a very rich society's wealth directly invested into it. That wasn't doing direct extraction, um, in this way, and it wasn't a fully militarized society. Because the other thing about us society is really weird. We are not a militarized society. We're a society that's dependent on a giant military, um, which you know, and that puts us in a weird situation like, um, because one of the things about the, the incoherence of of the end of the millennial left was like this, this idea that we could return to normalcy, like and I was like, but normalcy is the US Empire.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:Like that's, you know, and even the warmongers themselves seem to think that at least a faction of them seem to think that it's time to Hadrian's Wall this and be like okay, we got our empire. You know what we're going to accept multi-polarity and we'll even play with the Russians. You know what we're going to accept multi-polarity and we'll even play with the Russians. You know what we're going to play with the Russians so we can fuck the Chinese. That's what we're going to do.
Speaker 2:This isn't even fucking an option, dude. I mean it's like we're not going to be friends with Russia.
Speaker 1:No, that ship has shown.
Speaker 2:That ship is gone dude.
Speaker 1:A lot of conservatives want it. Even Mayor Scheimer wants it.
Speaker 2:Right.
Speaker 1:It's not going to happen. They will never trust us again. To be fair, what reasons have we given them? I'm also with you. I don't necessarily think it would be a progressive for the world for us to be working with Putin over working with g and dividing and like dividing that world up either.
Speaker 1:Like um, uh. I think that what I think has happened with the us left um is the other thing that happened during the the trump years and the Bernie social democratic years is we quit keeping up with what was going on abroad. Like you know, the left in America from the 60s to the 90s was mostly a foreign policy related left, which is also a problem, and I'm not saying that's a good in and of itself, all right, but apparently, since we cannot walk in true bubble gum at the same time is also a problem, and I'm not saying that's a good in and of itself, all right, but apparently, since we cannot walk in true bubble gum at the same time, when we realized that you know that was a problem like, like, how much did you hear about the afghan war during 2016 to 2019?
Speaker 2:hardly anything right this shit disappeared man, yeah it.
Speaker 2:it became the always war, like we were already always in Afghanistan, we were already always waging war, and it became background noise and a way of just operating and existing. And maybe that's just what happens when you spend like 70 years of war, a constant war, and never on the moral end of a war since World War II. I mean, yeah, I mean we of a war since world war ii. I mean, uh, yeah, I mean we are a warring state dude and you know a lot of. It's kind of like my friend, uh david parson, said once that when he was teaching in 2001, when abu grave or around that time happened, it was like students were outraged to learn that the united states were torturing uh, you know, their prisoners of war. 20 years later, you know, students would be like, hey, did you know the us? You know they're prisoners of war. 20 years later, you know, students would be like, hey, did you know the U? S? You know tortures, it's prisoners of war.
Speaker 1:and students were like, yeah, no shit, you know it's been all been normalized now I mean it's all been normalized, yeah, and what's interesting about that is I was thinking about this the other day. I did campaigner I was talking about you know the best, you know how we're winning so many right-wingers. It's not even, it's not what the activists are doing. Honestly. It's uh, it's the idf tiktok like and I said that because I'm like, because we used like wiki leaks would show things and it would be scandalous, right, or? Or I have a great would happen. It'd be scandalous, and it was like show things and it would be scandalous, right, or? Or I would agree what happened, it'd be scandalous and it was like.
Speaker 1:It was like shit that the idf puts on tiktok for itself, yeah, for the whole world. The fuck is he? They don't care anymore, and that. That is different. That is a fundamental change where, like, where it's like you know, yeah, like everything's come to the point of like, like no one's hiding, and in one case, I think it's good that we don't have the naivete about the US government anymore. On the other hand, it's like we've also just sort of accepted that this is the way things are.
Speaker 2:And it's also like yeah, we've accepted, this is the way things are, and we're also a country that doesn't sign on to the International Criminal Court and we uh, we are for all intents and purposes acting like we're in a unipolar, you know, moment and um, and and and, and I think that the normal is. It's different when you have a three bedroom house with air conditioning, when you're looking upon the normalization of grotesque violence perpetrated by the country that you're a part of, upon people that you'll never meet, never see, and it becomes quite easy just to be like no shit.
Speaker 1:The other thing that's happened since the Russia-Ukraine war and maybe even the Syrian civil war and I'm not saying this as a I'm not a fan of any side of any of these wars but like, let's be quite, quite frank here, we're also two steps removed Like it's a lot harder to have a peace movement when the peace movement's like stop this other country from doing a war.
Speaker 1:Yeah, it's, it's so and yes, I think it's interesting that actually, one thing I might say that maybe you might find complicating I don't know how you would feel about it is this idea that we may be in a moment of, maybe in a moment of where we are both acting unipolarly and multipolarly at the same time, and so we're acting, in regards to the international courts and all that, like a unipolar power and effectively we are. I mean, I hate to say this, but in regards to Israel-Palestine, Israel has done such a good job at getting beyond just being our puppet under the Netanyahu regime. They've normalized relations with the Saudis. They've made good until very recently in complications with Iran. They had very good relationships with Russia. They are a major trading partner with China beyond us good relationship with russia. They are a major trading partner with china beyond us, like um that, that in some ways they both need us and don't like. They need our money, they need our, they need, they need our weapon systems um but well, they're not.
Speaker 2:they're kind of individuating as a sort of narcissistic uh you know behavior comportment, portman of Nations, wise narcissistic, I mean, they are not really adhering to what we would like them to do and going rogue in certain ways and not letting us know about their you know, bombing embassies in Damascus.
Speaker 2:It's yeah, it's like they don't and they do. So it's yeah, it's like they don't and they do, but it's kind of like we have this crazy teenager. That's like experimenting to find out how much power they actually have, how much independence they actually have. Yeah, and it's very disruptive yeah.
Speaker 1:Well, and so I'm with you with that. But the other, the one of the things about a multipolar world if you go back and read, like, the literature on this, he points out that, like you just have a fuck ton more proxy wars, yeah, yeah, and in that sense, instead of us going to war ourselves because it's a little bit too dangerous now that we might actually have to condemn with, like OK, we might upset Russia and China and they actually could actually complicate our day, we now go through agents. But it also seems like some of these agents are independent, are strong enough that they can. We can't totally control them anymore. Like I've been, I've been playing with the idea and I don't think it's true. I think Biden's also maybe a diehard Catholic liberal Zionistionist look, I'm not totally sold that he isn't um, but I have been playing with an idea a little bit that is uh, that has uh got me a little bit worried that part of why the U? S empire is so unwilling to like even pull the Reagan in 83 about Lebanon, um, is that it would make it very obvious very quickly Um, if Israel's like you know what, we can still kill a bunch of Palestinians without you. In fact, you know, we can just start dropping megaton bombs or something like. I don't know that they would do that. The reason why I don't think israel would do that is actually because it would make the the silence of the other arab nations really hard to do. But one thing that we've seen now is like the us, like, uh during the covid years, and with the frustrations of masai uh, muhammad bin salman, with the frustrations of Muhammad bin Salman with the United States, like daring to say anything to him.
Speaker 1:There was some four ways made the China with Saudi Arabia, which is why China has kept his mouth shut on Yemen. That seems to be over. Like it seems like the United States and Saudi Arabia are actually on weirdly good terms right now. And it seems like the United States and Saudi Arabia are actually on weirdly good terms right now and it's just trying to figure this out right now, because it's like okay, you're talking about the unipolar world. I have been sort of like well, where is China and Russia right now? I mean, I get Russia is fighting its own war. I get it Like fine, but where's China and Russia right now? I mean I get Russia's fighting his own war. I get it like fine, but where's China? And China's doing some things to try to mitigate this and comment down as a neutral arbiter, but they're not coming down like cleanly.
Speaker 1:Like you know, we are going to support the Palestinians no matter what. Like that is not happening, and so I'm wondering where the left geopolitical narrative is going to go when it's like who do we have supporting us here? Because I will. I will point out that, like the general population of the planet is generally becoming like in of the Palestinians for the most part. There are some exceptions Northern Ireland's Protestants, apparently, are still big fans of the IDF, but in general it's getting harder and harder for people to not feel sympathy Because Gaza's mostly children. That's undeniable. Even if you thought that October 7th was unjustified, in no world does the current response make any sense. Even if you're, you know, kind of a hawk on that, I will say this Liberal Zionism Dead yeah no-transcript.
Speaker 2:Although not by the people they're ethnically cleansing. Yeah, it's wild man, I don't know man. I agree with Christopher H hedges. Uh, not christopher hedges or no?
Speaker 2:I'm thinking, uh, john hitchens, uh, yeah, uh, when he said, you know, israel is a terrible waste of judaism. You know, um, it's, uh, we're, I mean it's. It's not enough that we're living through like the tail end of the, you know, american empire being the richest history in the nation, with the most military guns and all this shit, man. You know, we're also watching sort of the undoing of an historical narrative, or we're watching, I don't know where the left narrative goes at this point. I don't know you as far as you know our effectiveness of methods.
Speaker 2:I don't know as far as what we do after this other than no war, but class war. And yeah, we gotta support the gossens over. I mean, I don't know, like a, you know, certainly, the communist project has always been up in the air man, but it's like, yeah, we support gaza to end the atrocities, you know, to end the massacre, right, um, but yeah, I don't. I don't really know where the left goes from, especially left in the united states. What do we do after 2024 when either trump or biden is still in there, you know um what is it?
Speaker 1:what do we do? Also, like all the people that we were sold as our electives have capitulated to all this, and then we like with the with I'll give Rashida to leave her noble exception. Sure, like, in some ways, she's the exception that proves the rule, though, which it makes it, in some ways, like well, rashida, if you really mean it, you're eventually, you have to resign from your party.
Speaker 2:I'm sorry.
Speaker 1:Like to resign from your party. I'm sorry. Run as an independent. Even fucking Republicans have done that. Aoc's betrayal has been etched in from the first moment on and I was very unpopular for being on the. She's a Ted Kennedy staffer first. Always remember that. Never forget it. You know Christian cinema was was a Green Party candidate tied to occupy. Never forget that. Like Gene Kwan was on the far left faction of the Maoist in the 70s. Never fucking forget it. Like we have produced of our own movement many of these people the current squad is not even the first round of it. People who are clutching pearls about this don't know their history. Like this is a long thing. I don't know why you didn't. This is, this has been my frustration about the American left. Is that like, oh, it learned the history of the new left after it repeated all the dumb shit?
Speaker 2:yeah like it's like okay, you're gonna learn it now, now that you've already done it and it's too late, like oh you know, yeah, I mean, I I think we all need to go back and study the history of this stuff, you know, know, that's why I'm a fan of, like you know, jason's podcast, a readable century and measures taken and stuff like that.
Speaker 1:And I I'm not even saying that I have an adequate knowledge base on that history, I just you know, I think we're stuck between, though, like not knowing a history, and then hauntology where we think we can just revive the history back whole cloth, like and we can just revive the history back whole cloth and we just change what we want to revive. I don't think either of those are pathways.
Speaker 2:I also think that this is something that I preach a bit about, in terms of if I've had a thought, then I know that somebody else has already had that thought and I know somebody has written stuff down about thinking along those lines of that thought, and I can go through the history of ideas and find where people wrote down their thoughts that took it further than I ever thought about, and then that becomes a partner in thinking and why this method isn't applied towards organizing and stuff. Uh, you know, I mean, you know what we do is we look at patriotic socialism. We're like, oh, bauderism 2.0. Pat on the back, da-da-da, tweet about it. You know, point it out. But the shit has, you know, implications. It has effects on our movement.
Speaker 1:Yeah, why is Bauderism 2.0 possible at the same time that J Sakai 2.0 is also possible Obstinately, within the same time that j sakai 2.0 is also possible obstinately, within the same ideological movement, even though those people hate each other, like they're both marxist, leninists in some loose, weird sense, like like um to a lesser degree. And I don't consider these people like defectors or traitors, like patriotic socialists, but like midwestern marx versus like I don't know uh, who's doing more woke stuff on the ml. They used to be more, but like uh. But there's a lot of third worldist and weirdly, right now there's even like third worldist on both sides on the woke, anti-woke debates, which I I've always been like.
Speaker 1:Why? Why are we, as communists, arguing about the terms of acceptable discourse within liberal discourse societies? This is just not. Look, we should care about racism and all that. Even saying all that sounds like I'm diminishing it. It's a super big struggle because it's divided the working class, it's divided the world, it's created haves and have-nots in ways that are hard to deal with. We absolutely have to address it and we should be against it, you know. But at the same time, um, why are we in all this plural pearl clutching about acceptable discourse languages on twitter and in academia. Like what is that really about? That's not I. For me, it's like not our fight.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I mean, I feel like we have to be alert to some kind of discourses, you know so. When, like, patriotic socialism comes up and it's trending on Twitter and that stuff catches on, it's like oh God, we've seen this happen before and we know where it goes, and so stuff like that and a lot of people didn't take that patriotic socialism stuff seriously until it was pretty popular yeah yeah, you know, for me, I mean, at least when these things come up I try to learn from them.
Speaker 2:And you know I, you know, looked at someone like I mentioned before, like a Frank Meyer who you know and I don't know man, I feel like I've got to go and sharpen my own ideological blade from time to time.
Speaker 2:I don't know man, I feel like I've got to go and sharpen my own ideological blade from time to time because you want to make sure that, like because we're all susceptible to some degree or another to ideas, and one has to remain firmly principled in order to reject outright the ideas that will, not in terms of a dogmatic adherence to your ideology, but but to a constantly renewed philosophical commitment towards equality, I would say.
Speaker 2:And your political commitments must be philosophically grounded and morally grounded in such a way that these arguments, when presented to you, like patriotic socialism, they just kind of bounce off of you. You know, and you can see them for what they are. And the disappointment in this comes in seeing comrades that you find and take to be morally and philosophically and politically principled and ultimately they are assuaged much so easily than you know by ideas like patriotic socialism. And and you know, and then, and then they get caught in the confirmation bias thing where, like even when you present facts against you know. And then they get caught in the confirmation bias thing where, like even when you present facts against you know, their stance it doesn't change their mind.
Speaker 1:Now all these things are. All these mediations are particular. Here's the thing yeah, they're all potentially cargo cults. I mean, this is kind of the way, like any of these things, including our ideas.
Speaker 2:I mean like to be honest, like if there was a varnism right now I might have to be like no, um, you know, I mean I like your idea of the, the. You know the not not your idea. But when you mention, you know, classical marcus, marxists were putting class struggle first versus the sort of anti-imperialist first, uh type of marxism that has shown itself to be susceptible to duganism and eurasianism and multipolarity ism, if you can call it that.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I tried to make an ideology out of multipolarity, which is weird to me because I'm like it's not an ideology, it's just like yeah, it doesn't have any political content.
Speaker 2:It's like, yeah, yeah so. So, all that being said, it's like it's it's taken me back towards understanding why classical Marxism is probably the way to to stay. You know, and yeah, I have concern about the third world and must be anti-imperialist and all that. But I think the moment you start substituting in one priority, prioritizing over the classical teachings of Marx and the approach that way, it can become problematic.
Speaker 1:I will admit, on third worldism. The one thing I will say that complicates it is that Marx and Engels are the most unclear on national liberation. Lenin is clear on it, but I don't think Lenin's policies. I don't think I think Lenin's policies in the Soviet Union actually have repercussions that we're still dealing with, which is like encouraging nationalisms where they weren't there and that actually coming back as an anti-Soviet, anti-communist sentiment later on. And you know that's a critique of Lenin that I have. It's a reason why when people ask me if I'm a Leninist or a Marxist Leninist, I'm always like hedging my bets because I'm like well, I think Lenin's probably Lenin's the most important Marxist thinker of the 20th century.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:And also, unlike many other Marxist thinkers, he actually fucking led a revolution. The most successful revolutionary is actually probably Mao. I don't think Mao's necessarily the greatest Marxist thinker in the world. Nonetheless, you have to deal with them, and you have to deal with them honestly and fairly and see what their benefits and hindrances are, and there are also people with their own histories who move around. One thing I don't like about the left tendency to turn things into isms even when we talk about Stalinism is Stalin in 1927 and Stalin in 1936 and Stalin in 1948 and Stalin in 1952 are all very different.
Speaker 1:Give me just a second.
Speaker 2:I'm sorry, man Give me five minutes, I'm sorry, no problem, just a moment. All very different, like give me just a second, I'm sorry. Man give me five minutes, I'm sorry, no problem, that's just a moment.
Speaker 1:So I don't know what you make of that. When I, when I uh, like, uh, when I talk about like these figures, um, I'm obviously a little bit more skeptical of uh, uncle joe, um than probably you are uh well but um, but um.
Speaker 1:I also also think, like there's a vulgar anti-Stalinism also that refuses to actually understand the shifts and changes of those policies and like what different ones led to different things, that there are different conditions, like I've recently done this long piece on on bordiga and bordiga, for example, actually, even though he was kicked out of the party by this time, uh, his position is a position that's adopted by the third period, uh, which is, uh, only popular fronts only allowed from both I mean united fronts only allowed from below, so you can work with non-communist labor unions, but you can't work with non-communist parties, etc. Etc. Etc. Um. So like there's this, this history of of uh and there are other differences between stalin and portuga, but like there's this history where, like you miss the fact that some of these positions are um, fungible. Like, for example, another thing that make uh, marxist linux a little bit uncomfortable, but um, the the cool, the decoologization is actually um, stalin adopting a policy first advocated by trotsky, like it's, which you know, should make trotskyist deeply uncomfortable because they're always attacking stalin the most during that time period, and that's the time period where Stalin is pursuing the policy Trotsky advocated for. So, unless you think like, oh, it just would have been better because of the guy in charge it's going to mislead you on the situation.
Speaker 1:And so I have been very much like we have to like, like I know that Marx recognized all the way back, almost 200 led the English Civil War, were replaying the Bible until they had John Locke and they didn't need to replay the Bible anymore. And you have Locke versus Hobbes as opposed to Protestant versus Catholic. And he also talks about this in the way that the French Republic was basically, when it was first starting LARPing the Roman Republic. Like it's just we do that. So I don't want to chastise the left for doing that, because it's something that they're going to do, because it's something that people do anyway. We look back to the past for models, we dress ourselves in that until we have actually grabbed the future, and then or grabbed the present, and then we start living in the present.
Speaker 1:But at the current, it very much seems to me that the left is kind of in a weird twilight zone where we're, like we said before, we're both stuck in the past but we don't know our history. That's why it's a ghost, because you also don't recognize it. You can't see it in its own context. You see it as something that's free floating in your context, which is wrong. That's not the way you should be looking at that.
Speaker 1:Um and and so you know, I, I get, I'm just I'm not. I'm not here to say left unity, rah, rah, rah, because there's some people we need to kick the fuck out of the movement. But to a certain degree I've always wanted to be like we need to look at the fact that our problems are going to be our problems. They're not just going to be the problems of even 1968. And 1968 is a fuck lot closer to us than, say, 1914 or 1892 or something like that. So I mean, I don't know how you're feeling about that, but you know, I feel torn in both directions because on one hand, I'm always like learn your history, know your history, take it in, internalize it, but don't try to repeat it. You can't repeat it, you can't just like, you don't live in that world.
Speaker 2:I mean, look, don, I'm sitting here watching, like you know, the fall of Kabul, like the fall of Saigon, with some imagery that happened, you know, was that right before May 68 when that happened, right? So it's like history is really rhyming right now and in a way that like it's not even I mean it's some of the high notes that it's rhyming with it, like it's not even I mean it's some of the high notes that it's rhyming with it and uh, I don't know exactly what happened after May 68 that that could correlate towards possible future events. But you know, I I don't know man. I mean I tell people to go back and learn history, and why. So you can sit here and and watch a slow moving train wreck with the rest of us. You know, because people are going to repeat that stuff, play it out. Like you said, I don't know man. I mean I go back and I look at history and this stuff is not surprising to me and it leads you to being framed as black builds. You're like shit, we've read about this stuff already.
Speaker 2:But you know the title of this episode, you know, on the left between burnout and burnout, is like I don't know. I mean Bernie got me the second time around and I thought it was, you know, wise enough to not fall for it, and I got just enough hope to be disappointed again, and you know it's. I don't think we're actually being tricked, I don't think it's actually the same thing, I think it's just we're we're watching this happen in real time and and and it it does correlate, it does rhyme, and uh, I don't think that's entirely lost on the students there either. You know, I mean, I don't think that's that's lost on on a lot of us. Um, I just, I just think that's lost on a lot of us. I just think that we do need to question more of what's actually leading to victories and material wins.
Speaker 2:Like I said, protest, what's that doing for us? If we think about what did George Floyd get us, eric Adams, for the militarization of like, what did you know? Like that's we're live. We have to live to the white lash of it. You know, I'm not saying don't go protest, but like, observe and demarcate truthfully what results of those things you know.
Speaker 1:So.
Speaker 1:So this is going to give us is is black pill. Is is, as I'm often accused of being. I want to end on realistic hope versus unrealistic hope, and I think maybe we can talk about realistic hope here. These protests are going to be crushed. I think we all know that. I think they know it. I think the protesters know it. I think they think they can get some concessions before they're fully crushed and maybe get some stuff done. Nobody in those protests is going to tell you, hey, we're going to be crushed, of course not, but they all know the odds. They have to, and if they don't, they'll learn very quickly.
Speaker 1:That's not the point, though. If you focus on that, you miss the most important stuff. That settled 68 wasn't in 68, it wasn't in the, the dnc convention, it wasn't in in uh, the soborn in france. It was the stuff after right, like um, and the same was true at occupy, by the way, that what mattered for occupy was not the occupations themselves, like that's, it was a beginning of a politics. And we can't even say that Occupy totally failed, because Occupy inspired a left that the Democrats felt they at least needed to co-opt, which is actually different. They hadn't felt that way since the 70s. Like you know, biden now moving away from the left, like that's been the natural democratic impulse for most of our lives. Like there's a brief blip in the second half of the obama administration, um, where that's not true, like um, uh. And then when it's all hands on deck against trump, which which had happened in the new left with with uh, reagan too, I think we forget that because it was it, because it lost and liquidated out so quickly.
Speaker 1:I talk about the Max Ellbaum revolutions in the book. I always tell people to read it. There's caveats about it. I've read some of the left communist critiques of it on my show. I have communist critiques of it on my show, but I will point out that, like, I've always found it interesting that like it at least gets us to ask the question where did all these motherfuckers go in the 1980s? Cause they just seemed to disappear.
Speaker 1:Like it was like, yes, a lot of some of them became bog standard Democrats, but most of the average rank and file people did not. We don't really know what happened to them, except that they depoliticized somewhere. Maybe they voted for reagan, maybe they didn't vote. Probably a lot of them didn't vote anymore like um, we just don't know, and I think we're. We are living through a time where that is a real risk right now. So, as these protests meet the reality of the state and they like a lot of people's delusions about like elite institutions being woke, which they could, which I think they could kind of fool themselves about their uh uh recuperation of, like BLM and me too, rhetoric, um, yeah.
Speaker 1:And I think a lot of this like naivete about supporting the liberals. Uh, use of, like tech, censorship through private means maybe wasn't a great idea. I think there's a lot of cows coming home right now. The thing is, though, if we ask ourselves about these protesting kids, they're 19, 20, 21 years old, 22, 23. They're young I'm literally almost old enough to be their fucking parent, right, and I have been thinking about what our role should be, and I've come to a similar conclusion to you.
Speaker 1:You and I aren't going to build a party. We're just not. We could have. We failed. We tried. I know I tried a couple times. I always pick the wrong dog.
Speaker 1:So, like people, don't listen to me when I tell you what political functions join, cause I'm almost always picking the wrong guy. Um, so listen to me about critique. So listen to me about when I tell you what you should join, um, so, cause I thought the IWW was going to be where we all ended up, not the DSA, but I was wrong. That was a long time ago, um, but nonetheless, uh, I think my job right now is to both teach, but not overly dictate, like, and this is a hard thing I think a lot of new left has struggled with this, because who were our fucking mentors? Our mentors were the youngest members of the new left who were still around when we were in our 20s and 30s. They were the people we read. They were your Mike Davises. They were your David Harveys, they were your Bernie Sanderses. Honestly, um, they were your old crotchety anarchist Indertrot at your meeting that annoyed you.
Speaker 1:Um, uh, old school Stalinist who came up in the seventies and was a member of the CP, usa in the really bad times. Um, you know, like those, those were our mentors, because it was otherwise. You were listening to Democrats, are what was coming on democracy Now? Those were your options, right, and a lot of us even started out in the democracy now world. I mean like, and it, it both pushed me that world pushed me out and pulled me back in, depending on the time period we're talking about. But, um, uh, and then reality happened, the recession happened, and it made us like, really actually pay attention to these people in a way we had not before. History caught up to them in some ways. Um, this is the millennial left as we understand it is. Is we we're going to be doing an autopsy on it ourselves, probably? So this is like weird.
Speaker 1:It's like vivisecting yourself while you're still alive like it's a very weird place to be, um, but, but I think that's what we're gonna have to do. But I also think, like I'm not here to like I'm, I am on team like hey, the kids are not all right, they're more fucked up than you know. There's all kinds of like we have failed them, um, and that's why they're fucked up. It's not, it's not their fault, it's our fault, or even their parents fault. It's like our parents and uncle's fault, uh, etc, etc, etc. But you know, uh, but our role now is to both realize that our job is to teach them, cause they're going to be the people doing the fucking work they are right now, but also not to dictate shit to them, cause who are we to dictate?
Speaker 1:We failed, like you know, like we're basically coming to them and being like, hey, can you not do what we did, which is also a hard pitch, like, listen to me so that you don't make my mistake Um, and that's what to me, why this year is going to be so crucial? Because we have the election coming up. We have the fact I think Joe Biden is. I, it's still. I would feel every election cycle, I'm like it's getting harder and harder for me to call the election, but like I feel like I don't really know what's going to happen. We're still pretty far out, but we know that Trump and Biden somehow felt both hated and inevitable this entire time, like nobody wanted them. Yet no one saw a way around them.
Speaker 2:It's also. I mean, they're both old enough to where it's not out of the realm of possibilities that one of them just dies in natural causes at some point, and that thought to me is Okay, yeah, well, if Biden dies?
Speaker 1:right now. What the fuck happens?
Speaker 2:What happens?
Speaker 1:Because there's no obvious Democratic backbench that's ready to like take over.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:Like if Trump dies, I have even less idea what happens to the GOP at that point. Like because the GOP right now seems to be that dude. Yeah.
Speaker 2:That's a really dangerous situation that could like I mean I feel like a death of either one would put the US electoral system into a total spiral at that point.
Speaker 1:Well, I might Frenemy of the show and a person who I often disagree with, but I think was right about this. Doug Lane told me privately that he says whoever wins this next election, we're likely in a constitutional crisis and I'm like yep.
Speaker 1:Yeah, yeah, like, yeah, like like either way actually, I think we're likely in a constitutional crisis. Um and uh, I mean, my nightmare scenario is somehow trump wins a popular vote and biden runs the electoral college, like, like, like, which would just, you know that would fuck with everybody, but also it would like lead to political instability like crazy, cause you can imagine what the right would be doing with that.
Speaker 2:Um yeah, I also like, I mean, give me some thought towards like maybe like an election every four years is not the best way to go about things.
Speaker 2:Just, you know, like renewing with a different person every four years is not the best way to keep our foreign allies on our side or have any sort of modicum of extended time-based trust.
Speaker 2:You know, um, I don't think that as a population we uh I mean we kind of traumatize every four years, you know, and election season has become so drawn out it starts two years ahead of time where it's like we're constantly in an election season and it seems like the way that our country is to, where like it's so divided. It seems like our electoral system, the way it's designed, it's not divided. It seems like our electoral system, the way it's designed, it's not really meant to function with so many on either side, because like a win on either end is supposed to be like an adequate compromise and it's just not a compromise. It's kind of a zero sum game in many ways. So, yeah, I mean, if one of these guys dies, who knows what the fuck happens? There's still plenty of things that can happen in the meantime that are just legitimate parts of the electoral process. That could send us into a chaotic sort of free fall as well, like you mentioned, with the Electoral College versus the popular vote.
Speaker 1:Are one of the states going rogue and doing something weird by changing its election Right. Is there going to be all?
Speaker 2:sorts of court shenanigans and stuff like that. I mean, are we ready for another election conspiracy?
Speaker 1:Right. We've also. The Democrats have shown that, despite demand for it, they wanted to bury the call to reform the Supreme Court and the judicial system immediately. Oh Like, even three years ago they were talking about that and now it's just like off the table, even though, like, all the shit that we were supposedly worried about has now happened. It's just, it's crazy to me where we are and yet I think you know if I was going to tell people what to do, I'm not.
Speaker 1:I don't know that Gaza by itself is something that the left can reconstitute itself on. For one thing is, I don't think we should and this is going to sound weird. I think there's a left-wing response to this where we can pivot honestly and fairly about what we want and why we want it. But I think trying to just hook ourselves up to this and being like, okay, but God's a liberation, we're all about it. Also, here's our platform that second part's never going to happen. So we have to use this in a way to kind of get right with ourselves about where we are and what we want, because the other thing I will say is like, beyond the ceasefire I mean this is one thing I will, I will say very quickly uh, we don't really have a vision for what happens after this.
Speaker 1:Like, once, once this is, once this is over, I get two state solution not viable. One state solution who's gonna impose it? Uh, what are you gonna do? Like, who you're gonna where you're to move? Like, uh, a couple million mazrahi jews, uh, who don't have a country in europe to go back to.
Speaker 1:Like, like there's, um, there's all you know, and the best case scenario that happens in turn of the, you know, I'll tell you the best case scenario that happens, if israel itself decides, gaza loses a, a third of its land, uh, a tenth of its population, and it's allowed independence, but it's still not really a viable state, um, it's supported by international aid or something, and the west bank and this is what is is recapitulated as a way to get by the international people, to give the west bankers the right to vote. And there you go. Like that's the best case scenario, from from from the political process within israel itself. That's the best you're gonna get all right, uh, so you, you need an outside fix. But like, what outside fix is there?
Speaker 1:Like I was thinking about this the other day. Like, oh, let's say, you actually did the radical thing, so you need an outside fix. But what outside fix is there? I was thinking about this the other day. Let's say you actually did the radical thing. You did from the river to the sea, but you can't resettle all those Jews, so they have to be part of polity, which means you're going to need UN peacekeepers there to oversee a political transition and rights and adjudications for probably a generation. I don't see anyone doing that, yeah.
Speaker 2:You can't fucking Israel bomb the ship, including aid workers, right? It's not even possible in any of these scenarios, with them doing the things that they do with impunity, right?
Speaker 1:so yeah, I mean, uh, uh. Well, I mean here's the other thing that's happened that maybe, maybe the left should be able to say something about a little bit more cogently the international rules-based order is fucking dead, it's dead.
Speaker 2:That's why I keep returning to the concept of, like, all countries sign on to an ICC, sort of thing, because, like, rules-based order being dead. I mean, I think that you know, the rules-based order thing obviously, like Putin doing an old-fashioned land grab was like, not helpful towards this, but we have been the largest purveyor of enabling the rules-based order to fall apart, while simultaneously saying that we uphold them. You know, it's like we're the bad guys in all of this, absolutely, you know, dude, like, and so part of me, I mean I feel like I was half asleep thinking about this, but what would it look like if the Palestinians were atop of the ICC in a way, like put the most, put the suffering on top of the court that holds all nations accountable, sort of thing. And if we could? I mean, I don't know, maybe it's a little too Star Trek-y to think of, you know a little too.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I do think if the common turn was to be anything like again, one of the things that would have to be is like we would be working to establish something like an international arbitration system, because we all know that we're like, even though if our ultimate goal is no nations, you know, like communism, that stuff is not all that relevant Like, but we also know that we don't get there tomorrow, like even if we have the revolution.
Speaker 1:We don't get there tomorrow. And the revolution like, like, do you want it to be global nuclear war? Because no, so, uh, then that leads you to the question of, okay, what the prospects is going to be. How do you, how do you get states to interact? How do you enter gene and it does have to be something like the icc, but for everybody and controlled by proles Like it's gotta be like, because the one thing I've always I have told people and this is maybe a little bit of my own realism is like, just because, even if we had the communist revolution tomorrow and the working class actually won, this idea that we'd all just magically get along, you know, even if the workers were in charge of everything, that's like the idea that the bourgeoisie because they're all bourgeoisie actually magically get along. They only get along when they're opposing us. They don't get along with each other and like I think that's something we'd have to deal with.
Speaker 1:And with the Palestinians. They deserve justice and recompense. After this is all over, they deserve it. This comes from a person who says justice is a fairy tale. We tell the children they deserve justice and recompense. You know, after this is all over, they deserve it. I mean like, and you're, this is coming from a person who says justice is a fairy tale we tell the children, but still, like this is this cannot go unaddressed or it's going to go down as a world historic tragedy. Like you know, it's going to be like at least the armenian genocide, like um and um, maybe worse, and, like you know, it's easy. It's easy to make restitution 100 years later when, like, when everybody's dead, um, but uh, that's not. We don't want that in this scenario.
Speaker 1:And um, the other thing that makes me think about this is, like, okay, once this is all over, however, it settles out, um, where do we go for here? What's? What's the international movement that we're behind? Because I don't see that on the horizon either right now. Like it's not clear to me that there's an obvious force in the world, that the left, not just the Western left, the world left goes. Okay, they're the good guys.
Speaker 1:It's not clear to me at all right now. I mean, china's the closest thing, you got to it, but even then there are different factions and stuff in China that are not which I'm also going to admit as much as I follow Chinese politics. They're not opaque to me. I mean they're not clear to me what they are. So I don't know what that future is.
Speaker 1:But I do think there's hope in that the Gen Zers did watch us fail very quickly and in real time. And why do I think that's a sign of hope and why do I think that's a that's a sign of hope is because I do think it's going to be harder for them to be pushed into making the same tactical mistake concessions that we made, like um. Now I don't know where that goes because I have no idea how you, how you deal with um. You know, feeling like you, you don't have a party. Again, I mean like, uh, there's no, there's nobody that represents you. But the truth of the matter is there's nobody who represented us ever. It was just like we could. We somehow got the wrong impression that maybe we could be representative within one of the two forces with relatively little pushback, and that was wrong.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I mean, I feel like you know, it came as a shocking realization to me years ago when I realized that we don't have a Labour Party and you watch UK politics, they're a Labour Party, it's called Labour and it seems to be a thing that countries do where they form a political party based on the working class and call it Labour. And you know, labour is subjugated to the, you know, progressive wing of the Democratic Party for all intents and purposes and it's not really well represented at all. Anyway, um, but there's, there's not a representative of, there's, not even like. This is why, like I mean, I I admire max.
Speaker 2:He heads up a whole news outlet, the real news network, based on working class politics. News, like what? News relevant to the working class. And, uh, part of the project for him you know, interviewing working people is that the voices of working people are conspicuously absent from most media, given, you know, mainstream media news. It's just you just don't hear their voices. Um, so that there is not a party that represents us. Yeah, that's the way it's always been and has always been this. You know this sort of, uh, this big lie around like the democratic party representing your interest and your, uh, you know, the democratic Party can't even codify Roe v Wade, you know. And the Democratic Party can't even ensure you get a living wage. And the Democratic Party can't even not go to war.
Speaker 1:They can't protect trans rights because they'll farm it out to the state level and the states will be more barbaric.
Speaker 2:And yet they don't do anything about it. Yeah, it's fucking ridiculous dude. There's nothing left to vote for other than an anti-Trump sort of thing, and even that has lost its appeal because Biden has continued on Trump's policies and he's enacting a genocide At this point. He's responsible for it. That's what I was going to say. Trump doesn't have a genocide.
Speaker 2:Under his point, he's responsible, like trump doesn't have a genocide under his belt, right, right, you know, um, so I mean that all this man is like november I. This is grim. This is like I have no idea how I would even go about convincing anybody right now to vote for the democratic party. Uh, based on any sort of firm, you know, policy-based uh argument like there's nothing policy-wise that is redeemable or anything towards any of this stuff. I mean, it's hard to be redeeming towards being complicit in genocide. But, like you know, there's I feel like there's a real roe v wade going out has done a good job of convincing some liberals that like, yeah, they're gonna lie to you and they're not gonna do anything about it, and they're making promises and they're not gonna make it on, and uh yeah, no structural.
Speaker 1:And here's the thing I point out as long as it's federalized, as long as you don't get a federal ban right, in which case then the democrats might actually do something. But as long as it's federalized, as long as you don't get a federal ban right, in which case then the democrats might actually do something. But as long as it's federalized, they have no reason structurally, game, theoretically, to do anything about it, because they can use it to motivate people to finally come out to vote for them. In red states, particularly women and you know, even though in polls that I think it's only showing it like most people only consider it, like 3% of population consider it a really make or break issue right now. I wonder if that's going to change, particularly if you start seeing access to other forms of contraception go away. But it's wild to me that that was a lesson. Yeah, they did nothing. They did nothing about supreme court reform. They took it off the docket. They did nothing about medicare reform or medicaid reform not even medicare, for I mean he's talking about like fixing those programs and do that. Uh, they did very little about climate.
Speaker 1:I saw clinton share something about how trump thing would would, would accelerate us away from the paris accord. And and then it had, like, biden's projections and they were just below Trump's. And I was like you guys don't even see this as a self-owned. Like. You can't even, like, advertise that you're keeping up with Obama's promises in the Paris Accords, like, and you're celebrating this as a world historic. Whatever. You've done nothing about the level of indebtedness in the country. That's all gotten worse. Um, and I don't mean like the I'm not here, I'm not one of these austerity. I don't mean like the public, I mean like, like people have been surviving off credit cards extensively. Data backs us this up for the last year. That's not sustainable. That's going to eventually explode. There's a retail real estate that's going to eventually explode, despite the fact that residential real estate's insane right now. And what's weird to me is Lyft doesn't even have anything to say about most of this. Really, like, we say it's bad, but like, do we have a plan anymore?
Speaker 2:um, and I know it's contradictory, because I'm like well what it's like.
Speaker 2:What's the plan for? Like stopping zillow from buying up all the residential houses and causing a bubble to burst? You like, how do you take action against that? Right, you know what's the action plan for food inflation, when the cost of food is going up and nobody can afford it? And what do we go? Like picket a farm or something. I mean, like what what's?
Speaker 2:You know, so many of these, these, so many of these economic forces are things that we, we don't have any direct at least it seems like we don't have direct control over, um, which is you know why I think, like, maybe that I do have some hope for, like the 2028 general strike that you know uaw sean fane guys mentioned. You know, like that to me is something that, but I mean, I I've been dude, you have to find little glimpses of optimism to hold on to. And I remember over the summer it was like the UPS strike, you know, I thought that was. I mean I remember coming out of understanding that the UMWA, the United Mine Workers Association, was going to lose a 23-month strike with no gains and deliver an unconditional return to work, uh, and out of the devastation of feeling that for those mine workers. You know, the only thing I could really think about was like, dude, just look forward to summer at this point, with, like UPS going on strike and and now I'm kind of thinking, well, let's look forward to 2028 with this general strike possibility. But it's hard to find hope, a realistic hope, out of this. You know, like I was very hesitant to like.
Speaker 2:I saw when, when these university protests erupted, you know I saw when these university protests erupted, you know an array of people on Facebook were like, oh man, the kids are all right. Dude, look, the world's going to be okay, it's in their hands. And it's like no, dude. They said that about every fucking generation. They said that about Occupy. They said that about, you know, housing crisis. I don't know what our role is in this other than to maybe use media to get these points in education and stuff like that out there for consumption. Gen Z is not going to be able to do all this on their own. They're one removed. Like you said, they're a small generation too.
Speaker 1:Compared to the millennials, they're much smaller as far as numbers of population. We have to be fair to that. Honestly, if I'm completely honest, I don't even think we're we're doing this for the Zers anymore. We're doing this so that Gen Z keeps their head on straight, so that, like, the next generation after them can fucking do something which is actually not that far away. It's about 15 years out. But like the thing is, we can't continue Like I'm with you, we can't this. This. The, the strategy of patience has something to be recommended for it, but if your patience is more than five generations out now, you know we're not.
Speaker 2:We're not fucking muscular liberals who think that patience is a virtue and shit. You know, it's like to me it's like when do our ideological preferences become existential necessities? And I think that we're beyond that time at this point. These and I think that we're beyond that time at this point um and uh. So when I look at gen z doing this, I'm, I'm, I'm filled with some hope, but I'm also like my heart is fucking breaking too, because they don't know, they're gonna get crushed. And, and I mean not politics, is what like 99?
Speaker 2:Disappointment, you know, yeah, it's all, just all black belt. Disappointment in terms of aspirational goals that always seem out of reach and small modicums of gains that are, you know, I don't know. Take the victories and celebrate when you can. You're going to have a truck drive through your house soon thereafter anyway. You know, we all celebrated like we did something well for George Floyd, and you know, and, and, and. Now Eric Adams, we had the. You know, all the black lives matter, seem to. It seems like the the the uppers are, are the public opinion is that they were all scammers or something.
Speaker 1:At this point, like they, yeah, I mean the fact that the fact that there were certain organizations that were scammy has not helped. Yeah, and they also. I want to say this the left did not address that. The left hid from that and let the right set the tone, which, of course, meant that, like, one organization got to represent. You know, black Lives Matter was like in my city there's five different Black Lives Matter organizations, often opposed to one another, so it's like it's not one thing and, um, I.
Speaker 1:I also remember I was reading vincent vevin's book because I was pretty harsh on that, but I figured I've been up so I'll read it. Right, like, um, and I've been sort of even with that. I'm like, okay, so you learned that horizontalism doesn't work. But like, your answer is wouldn't it be great if we had a 1914 party, though? And I'm like, okay, so you learned that horizontalism doesn't work. But, like, your answer is wouldn't it be great if we had a 1914 party, though? And I'm like, yeah, we've been saying that shit for 100 years. Like, can you? Yeah, like, like, like that's like, x is fucked up, y missing, missing, missing, world revolution. Like, come on, where's your?
Speaker 2:where's your partner in thinking of this, like where's the history or the thinkers you've read that assist you and guide your thought towards more interesting and useful conclusions? You know, we can all grab the low-hanging fruit and and revolving rabbit. For 100 years, like you said.
Speaker 2:You know um it's not a lot of low-hanging fruit left yeah, yeah, like, and also like all of our small victories are fucking disappearing. Man, I feel like you mentioned the Amazon Labor Union. We have one warehouse and, it's my understanding, there's some things going on internally with ALU that are not voting well for things right now. Right, so it's what? Is it like we're just watching this thing happen to the DSA in a way too? Is it like we're just watching this thing even happen to the dsa in a way too? It's like we're hopeful for them and then, all of a sudden, their own systems of internal arbitration became suspect and, uh, running out of money now and stuff.
Speaker 2:It's like, you know, we have to take care of maintenance around these small victories we get, because if we don't, over time they just kind of fade out. You know, um, and and. But think about amazon too. Amazon's just sitting around waiting for that thing to crumble. The weight of their own existence will do well to crumble. That you know to trust that over time if they just wait it out, um yeah, which is interesting to me.
Speaker 1:I mean, like I guess this goes back to my my thing about the the both strength and weakness of the state, and I guess this is my final point and I'll let you make your final point. But, like, um, I was actually surprised how much they fought some of these labor unions, given how ineffective labor unions are.
Speaker 1:So I was like I was like, I was like man, like they don't want to give it does make me me wonder if there's something we're not understanding about profitability or something, because it's not, it's kind of irrational Like it is, and I mean this in a sense of like this is the kind of like blatant power stuff that makes stuff that breaks things over the long term and one of the great ironies you're talking about losing there's a possibility that the Supreme Court decides in a way I don't know if this has happened yet, I don't think it has that on this Amazon Trader Joe's ACLU lawsuit about the NCLB that actually undoes the Wagner Act or the Wagner Act, which would actually set us back to pre-1930s levels of organizational rights, which is like, if that happens, off the pen of the Supreme court, that will be like well left.
Speaker 1:What do you do now? Because your your last hope just got completely pushed into a non-legal form of activism and I mean I'm not saying unions would be illegal overnight, but they would be suable for like lost profit and ship for work stoppage and stuff and that's. That's basically like the ability to compel you to work, because not only could they compel you from your labor, but they can also punish you for costing them profits, Right, Like it's that be? That'd be wild and that's not. I don't think that's the most likely outcome, but we're not far from it. And these are these are things that I think have kind of been on the table for a while, that we just haven't been looking at very straight. Like you know, like with the Democrats going after Trump, actually, if you go for the king, you actually kind of have to win.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:Like, and we didn't win, and I don't know, I don't want to just sit down and feel bad about it. I do think, like this is a time to learn. This is time to regroup, to think too, and think through this and be like okay, like we don't want to condemn the. We don't want to jump on the liberal bandwagon and condemn these uh protests for being ineffective or whatever. That's not, that's not useful either. Um, what do we do? Well, how do we help? How do we? How do we help beyond? Just like, oh, we're gonna bail them out of prison, you know, on another bail fund. Um, you know, like, yeah, we do that too, but like that's not building a political movement, guys, like that's just, that's just reacting. Anyway, that's my last point. What's your last point?
Speaker 2:Yo, I'm here. How do we help?
Speaker 1:Yeah, how do we help? What's your last point here?
Speaker 2:Yeah, I don't. I don't know that. Have a a great answer on how do we help, you know? I mean, I feel like you know we've gone through the motions of talking about inflation at this point and how everyone's struggling to get by and you know who knows what kind of you know talking about, like like I. I'm sure that students right now are in need of material support in their protests and it would be good to support them materially, but I think we need to look forward to what kind of hopefully what kind of politics this births. You know there's a whole lot of talk about the 99% versus the 1% after Occupy and that still has not left public sentiment and you know that sort of rhetoric was unheard of before Occupy and that still has not left public sentiment. And you know that sort of rhetoric was unheard of before Occupy and I think that we are seeing somewhat of a politics birth out of that now which is related to, like the Israel you know, the Party for Israel, like the funding and buying off of government officials so they uphold Israel's bottom line and their need for weapons and defense and all that stuff and the continued impunity of carrying on genocide. Like that we might be seeing like the birth of a politics that at least incorporates this sort of critical rhetoric towards the behavior of Israel at this point. So how do we help?
Speaker 2:You know, I question a lot of the methodology of taking part in protests. What are they getting us? What are we? You know, I don't know what we do to help, other than read a fucking book and figure out what's been done in the past and figure out the echoes and rhyming of history and at least be here to witness it with all the rest of us who are witnessing the slow motion train wreck like I. I'd much rather be in this position than wondering where this sort of feeling like this is, like a temporal anomaly or something that's happening, like anything that's happening is novel, like that, to me, is when I start feeling like things are novel and it's happening the first time in history, it's like, uh, that's that's not an indication that I'm witnessing history as much as it's something like I'm ignorant of history somewhere. Um, so, yeah, so I don't think any of this stuff is novel. Uh, we, we've always seen the stuff and, yes, I don't think any of this stuff is novel. We've obviously seen this stuff and we know where it goes, and we know that it's not enough.
Speaker 2:So my hope for this stuff, man, is that every Gen Z person who's watching this is getting a little more radicalized, and part of what gives me hope is knowing that radicalization comes from many different areas. It's not just about being oppressed anymore. It's not just about, you know, desperation. You know people are getting radicalized off of TikTok videos and emails. You know, like I have a friend who is not particularly left oriented, who said something a couple of times. You know, when people repeat themselves, it's like kind of an indication of what is going on in their train of thoughts, and one of them was like she was like, oh yeah, I'm calling up to work tomorrow because, you know, I saw this, this video where a person died in their office and the day after an email was sent out and they just spread the work around and said, you know, remember, take your PTO days and work around and said, you know, remember, take your PTO days.
Speaker 2:And but that is a small sort of germination of radicalization that I think that a lot of us have been feeling in society, and and the opportunity for those you know notions to crystallize in the minds of some, you know, is furthered by watching this happen in front of us. I mean, so I'm just. I think that as our days proceed ahead of us, there's going to be more youth that will be radicalized. There's going to be more everyday people who are dismayed by what's going on in the world. And just the same way that we've seen public policy shift around Gaza now which I don't think any of us would have, you know, expected within our lifetime to find such critical rhetoric of Israel at this point being mainstream, with a nonpartisan sort of slant to it, you know, maybe it's been a week when a decade happens.
Speaker 2:I don't know, how do we help? I keep coming back to that question here, as you asked it. I don't really know. I don't have a great answer, dude.
Speaker 2:As for me and what I'm doing, I, just like I said the start of this man, I feel like I've tried to help with the party and I'm still part of the party and I'm still consider myself an activist. I still, you know, I'm contributing towards this work, but I find that I feel like some of the work that I've contributed that's perhaps made any impact at all, or the most impact out of any of it has been the stuff I've done with media has been some of the interviews I've helped publish has been some of the media that's come through me. You know, the interviews I've helped publish has been some of the media that's come through me. You know, and, and I want to continue to do that, because there's not only a residual effect there where, like, these things will be forever in the digital ether, right, you can always find them, they're ingrained in the animals of that digital ether but two, you know it's a one to many approach. It's like having a bullhorn all the time.
Speaker 2:And uh, and I, I, as much as I think that we need to have conversations with our neighbors, it's we need to have conversations with many of our neighbors simultaneously. You know, it's kind of how I feel about it. Um, I mean, that's really all I got other than to say shit's grim, it's dark out there, and uh, hopefully we're closer, insofar as we are pessimistic, and you know that's the way the world really is. Maybe we're that much closer to the truth, hopefully. You know, I would hate to be far off from the truth, being this pessimistic about it.
Speaker 1:You know that would be a real bummer, real bummer. And it's both sad and we're still wrong. Yeah, oh, man. On that note, I think we're going to end the show. Alright, man, I'm laughing at how dark it can possibly get.
Speaker 2:On that note see you guys, see you later.
