Punditry Without Memory with Sudip Bhattacharya

Start with a word we all hear too much: fascism. Now ask why, with the term everywhere, our understanding keeps getting worse. That’s the puzzle we dig into as Sudip Bhattacharya joins C. Derick Varn to dissect how American punditry flattens history, confuses categories, and protects the status quo with buzzwords instead of analysis. From cable news panels that treat any state action as “authoritarian,” to former neocons who reinvent themselves as respectable anti‑Trump voices while dodging their own records, we map the machinery that makes bad takes inevitable.

The conversation moves from media habits to concrete stakes: Israel‑Palestine as a settler colonial project, the perverse weaponization of antisemitism, and the bizarre spectacle of far‑right figures courting Israel while trafficking in bigotry. We examine how this fog invites real antisemitism to grow and erases anti‑Zionist Jewish voices. Then we turn local: the Cuomo vs. Mamdani showdown in New York, where Islamophobic tropes, AI smear ads, and institutional panic collided with a multiethnic, youth‑driven coalition that showed what organizing can do. The story isn’t about a savior candidate; it’s about constituencies learning to convert movement energy into votes and power.

Along the way, we chart the collapse of elite “competence”—tech barons LARPing masculinity, markets priced on fantasy, and leaders who cannot restore a fading consensus. That might sound bleak, but it’s also an opening. We talk windows of opportunity: shifting public opinion on Palestine, younger voters rejecting old scripts, and the practical tools needed to make fast‑moving crises count—unions, tenant groups, legal defense, and media with memory. Precision beats panic. Structure beats vibes. If punditry sells amnesia, we trade in context: how we got here, what the rails look like, and where to lay new track.

Listen, share with someone who’s tired of vibes without history, and leave a review with the sharpest question this episode raised for you. Your notes shape what we tackle next.

Link Discussed: https://revolpress.substack.com/p/comfortable-lies-how-pundits-enable

Musis by Bitterlake, Used with Permission, all rights to Bitterlake

Chapters

• 0:00 Setting The Table: Punditry’s Problem<br>
• 6:07 Vacuous Uses Of “Fascism” On TV<br>
• 14:32 Neocons Rebranded And Historical Amnesia<br>
• 21:47 TikTok Takes And Authoritarianism Creep<br>
• 29:27 Populism, Elites, And Flattened Labels<br>
• 39:07 Israel, Zionism, And Weaponized Anti‑Semitism<br>
• 49:42 The Cuomo vs. Mamdani Playbook<br>
• 58:57 Media Gatekeeping And “Good” Muslims<br>
• 1:07:27 Dumb Elites, Tech Hubris, And Legitimacy<br>
• 1:18:17 Windows Of Opportunity Amid Crisis<br>
• 1:28:07 Anti‑Intellectualism And The Pundit Class<br>
• 1:32:32 Where To Find Sudeep’s Work & Closing

Transcript

C. Derick Varn: 0:48

Hello and welcome to Varmbog. Today I'm here with Suda Betacharya, and we're talking about punditry broadly. We're gonna start talking about a recent piece you did for Revo Press. I'm just gonna formally announce for conflict of interest reasons, I am under contract with Revo Press to produce a book. Um people just know that. Uh, but actually didn't know you had anything to do with them. Um uh so um ironically, even though I'm under the contract to produce a book, you published on their Substack and I have not. Oh wow, okay. Uh just haven't I haven't written uh anything for that in a while. Um, so I wanted to talk to you about this problem um with the framing of you know, sometimes I like to call this the bullshit democracy industrial complex, um, which is this way in which we talk about authoritarianism and and fascism or post-fashion, whatever you want to call it. I think fascism and post-fascism both probably apply.

SPEAKER_02: 2:00

Right.

C. Derick Varn: 2:01

Um you talk about this uh for some of these people, and then when actually confronted with it in real time, they've suddenly become super uber uber cowards. Um and I also want to talk about this as a way to talk about pantry more general. Even even maybe alternative media punishry and the way it's had a trouble coming to grips with the current moment in a variety of directions. So we'll start with talking about you know the the misunderstandings around Trump as you see them, and then uh move into maybe misunderstandings about uh Mamdani and other key uh up and coming figures on uh the US political stage. So uh how have you seen Sudip uh American pundits really fall down? I I even think maybe even comparison to the first Trump administration um in dealing with what's going on in the federal government.

SPEAKER_00: 3:05

Yeah, I just want to say Sudeep. Uh just that the yeah, it's um fall gone. I mean I'm being quite honest with you. I think it's kind of been more of the same though, because my a my main issue as I talk about in this piece that's on Rovol Press is not so much them not even having issue with Trump, because for the most part, what I've seen aside from even Fox News, which is its own cesspool of just horrible people, I mean explicitly horrible, because a lot of it is horrible people. Um there is room for criticism of Trump among the punditries, pundits, usually, but a lot of the criticisms, even when they're starting to use phrases like fascism, they are rather vacuous and they don't explain well, a they don't know what fascism is, but either way, couple that they don't explain fascism well. Um, they they still blur the line between extremism and fascism of all sides, for example. And then finally, like coupled with Mamdani, there is a sort of essence to everything where it's really about, again, civility and returning to a liberal norm where all sides can be sort of helpfully respected in the discourse rather than what's been happening over the last, not even over Trump, right? It's been going on for 30, 40 years since that little blip that we had of not democracy, but something that was kind of okay enough-ish in the late 60s, and that blip kind of going away rather fast. Um, you know, since then things kind of going to shit. So for me, it's the falling down is a lot to do with still doing a lot of uh vacuous framing that ultimately really serves very little purpose in elucidating anything that's really clear for an average person, even for those of us who have a feeling in our gut that something's wrong, right? So I think that's like CNN, for example. I try my best not to watch all these things, ironically, but CNN, you know, even when they have criticisms of their own pundits, uh, they still offer seven to eight people on some of these shows. I think like Abby Phillips show, and two of whom are spewing some of the worst things you've ever heard. And then you'll have like you'll have Anna Navarro, uh, daughter of I I forget exactly the relationship, but someone who's anti-Sandinista, parenthood, who also gets to then frame themselves as resistance. So in the end, if anyone's able to torture themselves and endure that torture to watch CNN, they learn basically nothing about what's really going on.

C. Derick Varn: 5:49

I definitely seen that. I mean, one of the things that I've seen lately is uh the amount of like former neoconservatives who now vaguely identify with the with um the Democratic Party. Uh throw fascism around like as a word, but also like will completely ignore some cases the active roles they personally played in building the legal framework that enables the current thing to happen. Um uh you know, I mean Bill Kerstal may become woke, but I remember what he did during the Bush administration. So I find this very convenient right now, and I definitely see this on CNN. I also see it in places that are more explicitly uh left liberal adjacent, like MS Now or MSNBC. Oh, okay, yeah, yeah, yeah. Um where increasingly you just see um pundits that that I associate with the right now going on to be uh anti-Trumpers, and they're not even it's not even like the Lincoln Project, it's it's a little bit vaguer than that. Um now I I wanted to ask you, you actually start your discussion but almost by contrasting George Jackson and Timothy Snyder. Oh, yeah. Um but one of the things that I found interesting, because I I don't so much watch uh uh CNN, I I can't or even MSNBC, but I do watch a lot of political TikTok to try to figure out like as an almost anthropological experiment to figure out where people and Gen Z are like uh talking to themselves. And there was this weird moment about six months ago where instead of they they went from calling Trump a fascist without any context to calling him a communist without any context. Um and this was really picked up amongst uh people in the like groups implicated in the like um the uh 1620 project uh and the encorus media, which is kind of a super pack uh downstream of super pack um media project. And I also saw it with a lot of these bulwark former neoconservatives because they're like, oh, Trump's doing state interventionist into the economy. No, no liberals ever done that before. Yeah, um, therefore, Trump is like a communist, was kind of a crazy take. But to me, it seems downstream of like Snyder and the on-tyranny people who just pretend that you know, I mean, it's almost like the way they use totalitarianism in the 60s and 70s as a way to uh equate all these things, is it like um, you know, uh dung to Romania to uh both in the communist and fascist periods, uh to to Albania, to all this just somehow being the exact same thing.

SPEAKER_00: 9:17

It's the Wes Anderson film. I I haven't watched a lot of his, but I remember watching one in pieces. It was called uh what was it called? The Grand Hotel Budapest or something. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah. There's like a it's obvious that some characters in that film are fascist openly, the main villains, but then there's a scene at the end where the Budapest Hotel falls into disrepair anyway, as it enters, you know, the communist phase, it's kind of like hinted. So it's still like not the same because you don't see actual figures as vicious as a fascist. So I guess give credit to this, you know, this amazing individual, Wes Anderson. But at the same time, it's still disrepair, it's gray, there's no sense of like any kind of liberation. So that's what I think of happening now. It's like it's either immense sorrow and horror that fascism truly is, but then it blends very nicely with, but you know, in the end, the real alternative is liberalism versus this gray drab, sort of tortured communist future that comes after, which still also kind of hints at a past. Like communism is just it's not forward-moving, you know. So I feel the same energy with a lot of things going on. Like, I think the authoritarianism thing gets on my nerves because it is very true, like fascism is authoritarianism, but so can be different versions of good things too. You know, it's not like it's it's not that simple to just say, like you said, state intervention, authoritarianism. I mean, I would sure hope that one day we have a state that affords things or takes away, does taxes, for example, and then takes away the wealth of rich people. So that's authoritarianism. Is that fascism? No, but I'm pretty sure with the pundit class, they'll call it such. I mean, this is the same pundit class that also thinks like Latin American ping tide governments are the same as fascist predecessors. So there's something going on here, right? They're all ultimately trying to protect their own social order, however tenuous. But it is funny, like what you're saying is true. Authoritarianism is a phrase that really gets under my skin for those reasons.

C. Derick Varn: 11:21

Um, yeah, I think this is interesting. Uh, Joe Lapore says something I can't believe any historian would actually be this vulgar. Right, right. Um, any analogy to the president can be found in the history of other countries and the whims and cruelties and fantasies and insanities of tyrants of antiquity, Timpot dictators, Latin American Codelios, and modern strongmen. Neil Ostalong, Kim Jong-il, call the historians who write about these guys, please. And I'm like, well, they would tell you that they're not remotely the same thing if you were a serious historian. Right, right, right. Well, even if they're all bad, which I don't even know we all would, like, they're not the same thing.

SPEAKER_00: 11:59

Like, and to give some defense, like I I read the article as much as I could. She was she was having some really interesting points just about like how communication styles differ, how Trump is now having way more mass influence than previous presidencies. And there are still like differences you can find in style in terms of even the founding, the so-called founding founding enslavers, who just like, we don't want a president to have this far reach. That was kind of her main point. But still, when this when this passage is because I was just like looking through the article because I was like, there has to be something new on the New Yorker, and even though I like most of their stuff still, because I'm snobby. Um free access, I guess. But uh, but uh when I saw this piece though, I was like, I did a double take. I was like, What is this really happening? Like, are we really suggesting like you're right, like it's one thing to say there needs to be pr something you can pull from the outside a little bit, because that's that's good analysis. It's another to say that the only way to really understand Trump is to look completely outward, which again goes back into even his first run, right? That's why I said there's like a lot of similarities because the pundit class in his first run, I feel were actually very critical of him for a brief moment until he became the presumptive nominee and they couldn't have enough of him. You know, they every single time he talked, they just gave a, you know, he's gonna say something awful. Let's have the cameras on him. But I remember like, you know, I wrote this in this piece, like Trevanova. I know he's not really that funny, but Trevor Noah, like he had that African dictators thing, and people are like really rah-rah-raying it. But I was also very, it just reminds me of that. It's like, okay, so you're really going out there and saying we cannot, because you're again uh uh not only deflecting, you're in essence uh uh what's the word, preserving an American myth, you know, of governance and civility and you know, good leadership, even if it's flawed. Because you're you're saying anything that's bad is a is a is a disease, it's a foreign intervention. And it's the same thing with how even people view Putin, right? Even though he's not a good guy. Like Putin's, you know, the like even the Democrats do this. Putin, the US one uh Reagan used to be anti-Soviet. What happened now? It's like you know, that same relationship, like they're kind of insinuating that Trump is not following in the true Republican tradition, I guess, of arming right-wing uh mercenary groups in Central America, killing uh priests. But they're basically saying that. They're like, again, they're just conflating Putin's Russia, which has the Russian Orthodox Church really in stow to the USSR. It is also a disservice to the USSR to compare it to. So yeah, that's kind of like another little, yeah, there's so many interesting things happening that kind of makes me both amused, but also, like you said, reading that passage, also confused, being like, I can't believe you think this. Like, there's no way you think this.

C. Derick Varn: 15:02

Yeah, because I mean, there are, I mean, for for a liberal historian in America that's also fairly popular, I mean, I don't think Lepore is like the worst historian in the world. Like, that's the funny thing. And so that's why, like, that's why that that quote in particular, like, I expect David Brooks to be an asshap, but um, I don't really expect Joe Lepore to sound like I don't know, someone like Ann Ampelbaum, who's a devoted anti-communist who's also an ever Trumper, who is constantly pretending as if they're the same thing. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Or even um, I guess this way is another continuity, is like the weird anti-Soviet stuff that emerged around people like um uh the MSNBC crowd when uh what's Rachel Maddow? Well, Rachel Maddow was basically doing the liberal version of right-wing conspiracy talk all the time, yeah. Um and you know, making it sound like Russia somehow stole the Georgia election for noted Trump fan uh Kemp. Yeah, um, and stuff like that. It was just bizarre.

SPEAKER_02: 16:14

Yeah, yeah.

C. Derick Varn: 16:15

Um and I I I I agree, it has this flattening out effect that also just refuses to deal with. And I've I've had I've had liberals on my show who have issues with this. That even if you think Trump is something different from the past, right? It doesn't emerge from nothing or just foreign, it's just not the case, right?

SPEAKER_00: 16:39

No, that's the problem. Like, it's not for me personally, I'm not of the mind to say that somehow like there's a lot of knowns and unknowns. Like, I do think it's a bit much when people try to find the perfect analogy, even within American history, to now. Because I think what we're experiencing is both something new and old. Like, one, eugenics is back, so that's fun. You know, that's a fun time. Stephen Miller's in the house reading Camp of the Saints with his favorite groups, you know, like, hey, and it's funny because I'm Bengali, I'm Indian American, but literally, I think that book is about the Bangladeshi uh refugees going on a raft, who were, I think, were literally called shit eaters by the French author, um, arriving in France, as give a heads up to everyone, and I guess sexually assaulting people, the good French liberals who believed in them. So the moral of the story is uh white European society, uh, don't give in to the liberal side. You have to end these hordes of brown people before they come and hurt you. Um, that's now that's the guy who loves that book is now in power twice over, and this time he's even more effective. So there's eugenics, and but then there's also a lot of unknowns, right? Like, which is yes, there's eugenics, but also weirdly, we have certain spaces where certain things can exist that they couldn't before. So there is an amalgam of weird shit, like American weird, like we don't, I'm still figuring this out. Like, I don't think anyone has a proper hold of this right now because it's so weird. But but but the thing is that there is historical precedent to some of this internally that one cannot let go, like, even in terms of proper structural things, like how could there be an ICE if there was no George W. Bush?

C. Derick Varn: 18:29

Right, without the establishment of DHS, right?

SPEAKER_00: 18:31

Materially, like, I'm not even talking about the rhetoric and the spiritual and the essence of man and humanity. I'm talking about ice existed under the compassionate conservative guy, and drone programs existed before then. And like I point out in the piece, lying, believe it or not, Varn, lying as the president existed before Trump. Like Reagan's whole thing was yeah, it's amazing, it's so it's so crazy to find out that you learn that Reagan was like, oh, yeah, you know, welfare recipients, they're just there. And then when he's pressed on it, he's just like, I remember learning this, you know, in my undergrad and now grad school days, but still it's like you sometimes go into this weird headspace when you listen to the to these uh so-called academics and deep thought people, and you think to yourself, am I being gas-lit? Because I remember a time when even liberals and conservatives were more open about Reagan's lying. Like, yeah, because now he's he's presented as a as a foil sometimes. Like, oh, he was, you know, like he was very professional and respectable and whatever. You mean the guy who's also some of his cabinet uh ventured into Trump's cabinet? And also Dick Cheney. I think uh, you know, Kamala Harris had a uh tweet, you know, talking about his life when he passed. It's like, are we seriously doing this just because he was not completely pro-Trump? Which would be kind of bizarre because I do think he killed more people so far than Trump. So I don't I don't even know how to begin with that. But yeah, the the whole essence of like it just spiraling out of nowhere, but that's the essence of even what uh Lukash has kind of warned about when it comes to certain elements of liberal liberal historiography. Like there's no material basis to it. It's more like things that are wrong with the system. This is this is something I hear in movies sometimes. It's a cyclical human decay. Like every you know, few centuries, we get authoritarianism. Every few centuries, people come back to their base nature. No, no. Fascism as a modern form starts to exist in the early 20th century. We gotta start with something material. It's not the same. Native Americans were not creating death camps in this in any capacity. It's it's also like an F vie to everyone before and after. After who've done different things, you know, and it's also again a way to also kind of let people off the hook. So that's just yeah, anyway. That's my yeah, the whole the whole idea of the train spiraling, like the Walter Benjamin, the train of modernity coming out of nowhere. To me, that's my always my only reaction to these things. Like instead of coming off tracks, it just bursts through a cave that no one expected. And that's that's sometimes what I think of liberal histography. It's like, oh my god, it's a train. It's like, okay, but you're you're kind of you're kind of you're presenting the train that has angel wings, like you're not telling me how the train works, like it came from somewhere, substantive.

C. Derick Varn: 21:24

I mean, well, I mean, the it it's bizarre that maybe people who contributed to the uh ideologies that make fascism possible, like uh, I don't know, uh Jim Crow or uh US Soft Racial Codes. I actually do bristle when people call them fascists, but uh not because I think they're good, not because I don't even think fascists used them because they did. Right, right, right. I'm always like, yeah, but that's when you do that, what you're actually doing is pretending that like there's not some continuity right between the other historical ideologies, primarily liberalism, but even some communism, unfortunately, um, and fascism, like that isn't picking up on certain other things. Uh and that's why I'm like I'm always torn when I try to refer to when I try to refer to like whatever Trumpism is, because I'm like, okay, so yeah, you're right. Um, people who told me uh that this was gonna be a repeat of Trump one in terms of content. I'm like, I don't know, man. Like uh somehow you you got people who are supposedly even on the good team, like every say uh now people believe like Marjorie Taylor Green's somehow gonna be uh just because she's fucking Trump, but also asking get Nick Frontes on like CNN uh is a good thing from the same people who were like mortally terrified of a much less effective uh racial nationalist Richard Spencer just six years ago, and they're just like, Oh, we don't know how this happened, and I'm like, You don't? You you can't see the continuity here.

SPEAKER_00: 23:04

Um Bernie Sanders, not to defend Bernie Sanders because he is uh a Zionist, but uh like the the way that Hillary Clinton maneuvered identity against him to sort of make him sound out of step, you know, not not saying the exact same wordage, I'm not saying that because she's uh she's uh let's say um an amazing wordsmith. But to say to say this, okay. Remember Samantha B, the Canadian comedian? She she uh I remember some I I didn't really watch her show that much. I was a fan. I there was a moment where I was like, oh my god, I gotta absorb all of this amazing content. But I do remember her, I do remember some this this will make sense. There was one time there was one like Daily Show-esque sort of report she did, where in the end there's this white woman, young white woman, who I'll be this to describe her, looks really like she went through a tough life. And I think if I remember correctly, the way that the news report happened was to sort of show this woman as being ridiculous and that town being ridiculous. Like they're like refusing to vote for Hillary or something, something. And then in the end, she does a voiceover where, like, huh, she must be some sort of like nationalist or something weird or something, and then she says, I'm voting for Bernie Sanders or something. So they were like dumping on this girl for choosing Sanders. So I'm just telling you, that's the messaging, right? This same person, Samantha B, while she's dumping on this on this white womb, this young white woman, she goes off and makes friends with Glenn Beck. Remember, she does a whole episode basically saying we can come together because there was a brief moment where he realized that Trump was bad, and now he's back, you know, doing everything to say Trump is, you know, Christian God or whatever. But what I'm saying to your sense, not only were they kind of being alarmist about, well, rightfully so, to be honest, about Richard Pencer, because he's a piece of shit, but they were not just doing that to him, which he deserved. They were kind of suggesting that it's it's bad for social democrats to talk about issues in a certain way because those kind of framing was somehow adjacent to this kind of talk. Now, to what you're saying, Nick Fuentes, though, and not just Nick Fuentes, there's already pundits on CNN. I forgot Kevin Anderson or Kenneth. There's one guy who I think on Twitter I saw recently, I realized who he was on the who talks wild shit. Like when Mamdani, a moderate in any normal country, was running, he was tweeting stuff about Western civilization coming attacked, you know, by quote-unquote Islamist communists, whatever that means. So it's like, no, it's not even just about Richard Spencer who deserved all the shunning in the world, and who himself, of course, began to also say I voted for Democrats, I guess. But Nick, it's not even that. It was like you've had people who are Bernie Sanders, you know, being being uh being told that they were insufficiently a certain thing. Well, now we look ahead, and now Nick Fuentes, who is this anti-Semite, who's this crazy person, you know, uh incel person who's like being feeded by, yeah, you're right, like certain people saying, Hey, you give them a chance, you know, or having weird memes saying, you know, the things you can't say are the things that are the truth or something bizarre, which is also something that Elon Musk liked to say. Like, you can't say certain things, therefore that thing is actually true. It's like, well, uh, not really sure about that one. Uh, I'd like to live in a world where certain things are not said. So yeah, it's kind of uh it's interesting, let's just say, where we've ended up.

C. Derick Varn: 26:45

It is it is actually telling that the flattening of these distinctions, both within the right or also between groups that aren't right. Um, like I remember the equation of populism, which is not something I actually support. I'm I'm noted not a populist, but like same, but like this equation of populism to basically ill-liberalism, aka well, it's fascism-like. And and I'm just like, okay, so so Huey Long and Ernst Nedick and uh um uh Romm and Giovanni Gental and they're all the same, like um uh you know I think it's a book, Elis Elizabeth Sanderson, Roots of Reform.

SPEAKER_00: 27:46

I might be getting the author's name incorrect, but she wrote the book on populism. Uh I read that just a few years ago, actually. And yeah, populism as an actual modern term started with a flawed movement, but a movement that was not fascist, really. It was actually an attempt to do something different. So it is a but also it's weird when they say that because I I think it's Cass Sustine or someone like that, or Cass Muddy Moody. Yeah, I think he he was the one who did he he's the one who um he's a political scientist who constantly uh reinforced that connection. That populism is this flat flattened circle, you know, of of just the like the masses being unwieldy, you know, there's like a mass hysteria fear, like oh the the mob, the mob, right? When it's like, well, one, are you suggesting that technocracy is the only thing then that's good? Because I'm like you, I'm not a populist, I am a Marxist-Lenist. I do think masses can be a bit, like in certain societies like America, can sometimes be very confusing. But I'm also not of the type to say every form of mass engagement is just one step away from fascism or something crazy. It's like, okay, by that regard, then I should never knock on someone's door, because God forbid an old lady will tell me something that I don't like to hear. Like, I don't understand how this is like the same. But I think I remember that 2016 era because people were doing that quite frequently. And I looked up one of his uh presentations back in the day. I couldn't get through it because even I, even though I'm very frustrated with populism, because I don't think that's the angle to take, but I was also doubly annoyed by how he framed the history of populism. I remember this, I think people can look up on YouTube, um, populism, Cast Moody or whatever. And he was doing this like this uh presentation in a dimly lit room. It was actually really nice to look, like the sound quality is beautiful, so he knew. But everyone ended up being very snarky. They were kind of like chuckling because they were chuckling at the people. Like there was points where he said exactly what I just said there, like populism is when the people oh, yeah, the dividing populism is when people, when certain people divide the elites from the people, and I'm like, also that's so broad. That's like that's a broad lane to call populism. So there could be no interrogation of elitism or what elite power might be. So yeah, it's like one little it's not like the Russian dolls revealing themselves, it's the opposite effect. It's like just Russian dolls put on top of each other to obscure more and more of the ball that's inside. That's what I feel like some of these scholars have done. Like in the last 10 years, I really do feel like people think pop fascism is a similar to a lot of other isms, even isms that might be complicated. And furthermore, even in the Trump era, fascism is not revealed to be what it always has been: a class project, a very settler colonial project in America's terms. And in the end, we're left with very bereft ideas, like for a lot of us who are also well-meaning, on how to actually uh resist, right? Like, we like how do you resist something if you don't clarify what that it is, you know? And so, so like again, the reason why I bring up these things about George Bush, it's not to say for me, Trump is is, in my view, a fascist, and I am totally, totally freaked out by everything he's done. Like everything, like I feel extremely suffocated living in America, and I kind of regret in some ways of you know, certain kind of like histories and parent my parents coming here. Like, I kind of have these moments where I'm like, this kind of sucks, like healthcare sucks and everything sucks, and I'm kind of like done being like done, you know, studying these things. This is not really uh conducive to good mental health. But um at the same time, uh yeah, it's like I don't know. I I just feel like it's an interesting moment where I bring up these things not to say that Trump is somehow not a fascist. My point is the conversation about how we got here has to actually include a history and some conversation about the train having emergent having emerged from an actual tunnel. Again, not from like Zeus's head, not from the side of the tunnel, not from like below, all of a sudden whacking you in the face. I'm talking about real tracks. What do those tracks look like, bare minimum, and then we can talk about the future of those tracks, where it's headed, because that's where I can say, hey, we don't know exactly what this is as much as we think, but let me tell you, uh, Trump is not an aberration. It isn't he is not an aberration. Stephen Miller is not an aberration. I mean, John Bolton, for Stephen Miller to run, John Bolton and others had to crawl, you know, like there isn't, you know, whatever.

C. Derick Varn: 32:53

Well, I mean, this is the thing, like uh you know, you had David Duke in the 1980s and 90s, like almost when Republican primaries, you've had you had the Dixie Crats and the Democratic Party, right? And uh just in recent history, like if you want to talk about the pivoting around identity, um if you go back to 2008 and look how Hillary Clinton ran, she ran accusing Barack Obama of basically being an identity-obsessed elite, yes, uh uh pivoted in the complete opposite direction in 2016 against Bernie Sanders, right? And if we think about this with Cuomo versus Mamdani in New York, um Mamdan like Cuomo sounded like a total like lunatic nativist from the Bush era towards the last couple of worst campaigns.

SPEAKER_00: 33:46

It sounded like like he legit like okay, George W. Bush, let's just get he killed more people. Like, that's not the rhetoric is one thing, but to follow the the R Pom Dut, you know, narrative of what fascism look to their records. So I'm not out here trying to say George W. Bush is like this hollowed blessing. He killed a lot of people, he is a horrible man, and uh one day, hopefully, uh he'll be in prison. I doubt that, but hopefully. But um, but he himself actually on rhetoric was slightly more chill than Andrew Fucking Cuomo was in this in this three-month period. Because the AI videos he had were things that even George W. Bush rhetorically wouldn't have done. Like uh Mamdani eating rice with his hand. Like, to me, I was just baffled and losing my mind thinking, what era is this? Like, you're not even doing the standard version of like Western civilization is untacked. You're saying he's Muslim, he eats with his hands, and also, did you know that his mom and dad are Indian or Ugandan or something else? And it's like George W. Bush didn't even do that. Like, he was like, I'm busy happy, happily doing the crusades, you know, and and fumbling here and there, saying that. But one of the first things he did after 9-11, I'm not giving any credit, I'm just saying how bad it's been rhetorically. Not not political.

C. Derick Varn: 35:08

No, but he did he did actually employ uh he actually had a a more diverse cabinet than the first cabinet of Barack Obama.

SPEAKER_00: 35:15

So, like well, also he when the 9-11 attacks happened, he went to a mosque and said, please, like, Muslims are good. Again, this is like very tricky waters we're in because none of us are saying George Louis is again, I'm telling you, he's a bad painter and should also be in prison for that. Like, I'm not arguing about anything to recuperate his image. I don't care how many candies he gets from Michelle Obama, that's not what I'm doing. All I'm saying is Andrew Cuomo is actually worse than the beginning phases of the war and terror rhetoric. He was like like there was a thing that George Bush, like, civilization needs to be defended. But guess what, guys? Muslims, not so bad. Not sure they're civil, they're part of our civilization, but they're here. Let's try, you know, like it's still not good. He was like, Muslims, they all hate Jews, and it was like, what you're Italian, like what are you doing?

C. Derick Varn: 36:05

Yeah, also a guy who like would defend Hikim Gratries, who was famously one of the first Muslim legislators. It was so bizarre.

SPEAKER_00: 36:17

Yeah, that's so true. I forgot about that. It's so bizarre, yeah.

C. Derick Varn: 36:23

Of like the most milk, admittedly, some of the most milked most muslims. Right, right, right, right, right. But but nonetheless, like King Jeffries and Barack Obama are like your key figures, and you're running the most basic ass xenophobic campaign I've seen in Islamophobic, almost to the point of like doing Judeo-Bolshevik conspiracies, except no, that's that was what it was Muslims, like that's what it was.

SPEAKER_00: 36:53

That was what it was. When he when I saw that, that's the first thing I thought was like this. Is why I said the unknown is the unknown is so the known is this. I would really quickly the known is that what's happening is fascism because you have these talking points that are very fascist, they just input different data points. That's how fascism works, right? So at one point it was obviously Jews and Roma. I mean, it still is in many ways, but now it's inputted like, oh, Jews, uh certain kinds of Jews who are pro-Zionists, input formula into like doing the math meme, input formula with Western civilization, you know, the terminology of Judeo-Christian that was coming up during the war and terror. That was happening then, so that's not a new formula, but input the thing even like a like a block that wouldn't fit, like let's cut the block, like force it in now, even more, and then take out other blocks, throw them aside, kick them to the floor, and be like, you're not welcome at all, even even on a rhetorical level. Like, like Samuel Huntington himself would be also confused a little bit by this because he's that raised, but he would also be like, Are you really literally also going to the base element of like he eats he eats rice with his hands? I am Daisy. His Zoran Mamdani, I'm from New York, I'm from Queens. That's where I was also getting a little bit flustered. Like you said, the Judeo Bolsheviks, but it was like Muslim folks, but also I was like, I was also a little bit like but I was also thinking, like, when are they gonna find out half his family is Hindu, too? Like, I'm just waiting for the other shoe that because it's gonna blow their minds, and it did too. Like, remember when he talked about his aunt uh being harassed, and there was like a deep dive about that too, which is also very in effect Judeo-Bolshevism theory, like in a like cultural, like, oh, is he really like a Muslim, even? And I heard that too, so it's like we we've went past, we've gone past the shores of the known. We but we are dragging the known with us. Does it make sense? Like fascism, like this is not out of nowhere, but it's going somewhere, is quite also ill-defined and quite confusing at times. But Cuomo, uh chef's kiss to him uh for doing something that I never thought was possible, running a campaign that is both incredibly racist and infuriating, but also sometimes just confusing and amusing in its confusion of like, am I back in high school again with random jocks or something? Like, and it just happens to be Cuomo, like I'm Italian, immigration, and then he's like, Mom Dani, he eats with eats rice with his hands. Like, what is happening? So, yeah, I'm glad you brought that up because that was the Judah Volsa. That's exactly what I thought. This is just basically just now the Muslims are now doing the communism now, yeah.

C. Derick Varn: 39:39

Anti-Semitic, but the other Semites. Um, right, right. Although that's not true for Mam Dani because he's not Nigger.

SPEAKER_00: 39:47

Yeah, yeah, yeah. But what would they know? What would they know? What would they know? One day, one day he's uh Muslim Brotherhood, next day he's Hamas, the other day he's just this like uh uh I can't believe he's uh is he really from Queens? I mean, uh when I walk through the streets of Queens, there's this brown people, and I'm like, that's Queens, like what are you talking about? Right, that's like 40, 50 years of Queens. Like, I'll give you if it was like 1820s, 1920s, but this is like 2025. Like, that's like what you're talking about is the corner that I grew up on. Like, it's crazy, like, even that rhetoric I feel like was out of step with long-term Queens residents who are not uh uh black or brown. Like, I think it was crazy to me. He was digging so deep into his pockets of incredible levels of of yeah, you're right, anti Semitism, except it's uh yeah, yeah. It's like it's like, is this happening? Like, I was just I was sweating, I was sweating, I was like watching his videos and be like, this can. Be real.

C. Derick Varn: 40:49

I mean it is this weird moment. I mean, the other thing is, I mean, like, if you what the pundits don't want to make of it, like, on one hand, we've seen Israel become more and more I'm frankly fascistic. Uh, you know, um, and we've seen uh anti-Semitism uh be weaponized in a way that makes it meaningless, which I actually think has made, I mean, I really do believe this on the right, it has made um the equation of of anti-Zionism with anti-Semitism has actually made actual anti-Semitism more popular on certain elements of the right, because they can't really fight it on the same grounds that you can on the left. We can say, well, you know, Israel, Israel is uh is a is uh is an imposed settled colonial nation. Yeah, that's so um, you know, like um and um and it's its project has uh you know, despite what the historical left has been on it, which I will admit is historical left has been all over the place in Israel, depending on the time, but um that we we now would definitely see the the Palestinians are engaged in a national liberation movement, blah blah blah. Like um, we would not equate that to like world jewelry, but uh but there's now Islamo, whatever that is, like it's the same thing, right? Um, whereas like on the right now you have this weird sort of talk about like um you got people who are openly acting um with fascistic instincts like uh like um Laura Loomer. Oh now actually talking about the quote right wing Nazi problem, which yes, I will admit, right? All of a sudden you've in in the month of November alone, right, right, there have been four Hitler was good scandals amongst Republican staffers, including someone that Trump tried to appoint to a position that required Senate confirmation. So like it's not that it's not there, but if you just think oh uh latent authoritarianism are well, fascism is just about anti-Semitism, and I'm like, well Yes, yeah, yeah, yeah.

SPEAKER_00: 43:26

No, it's not right, right, right. Well, the the thing about Israel too, so really quickly, yeah, it um I don't want to say the simple way of saying it because you know it's complicated, but Israel is just a settler colonial outpost and has acted as such, especially since I know the Nakbah happened in 48, and previously to that you had the Haggadah and all these different like Israeli uh or pro-Zionist forces killing, maiming, taking land. So the process has always been fascistic. But at least on the American side of things, they've really been the American settler colonial outpost since at least the 60s, when things really coalesced in that way materially, right? Like, you know, the the the past to that is a little bit more complicated. Even the British were a little bit sometimes annoyed, even though they were still being very British about it. Like, we trust this, do your thing because we don't want the Arabs to be involved in anything. Um, but the to put it simply, yeah, they're just a settler colonial empire. There doesn't need to be any other deeper thought than that. The Israeli society has completely become fascistic to its core. Uh, poll after poll shows that, yeah, you know, there's protests here and they're happening, and some good Israelis, however few. But overall, they're polling, even when they're saying I don't agree with Inyahu, their main beef is that he's not doing enough, like of bombing or taking or or moving the process along, you know. So that's Israel. But but and and then the other side of it is I got Palestinian statehood, Palestinian liberation of the entire land. What happened to South Africa needs to happen to Israel. But but what you're saying too is like a mind fuck because Laura Loomer is such a devastatingly fascist figure in her own right. I mean, the thing she said, she has a reason why, or one of the reasons why people from Gaza are not able to come to the US as easily because she raised the alarm of Gazan people coming through the airport looking for help here. So she is a horrible human being. Her only problem is that, like you said, her association of Nazism is only purely strictly and politically through the lens that it's about anti-Jewish hate. But then she but but really importantly, she only talks about anti-Jewish hate in relation to Israel, not in relation to anything that's happening, say Jewish people are anti-Zionists too, who are being called like fake Jews. Like I I forget the comedian's name, I forgot his name. Uh Adam something, maybe he wrote he does has a show uh that's like relatively like popular, um, and he's a comedian. I forgot his name, but um if someone in the chat knows who he is, I think people know he's Jewish, and he had that famous interview with Richie Torres where he was like, dude, oh yeah, yeah, you know what I'm talking about?

C. Derick Varn: 46:15

Adam Freeland.

SPEAKER_00: 46:16

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. I don't watch all his shows, but I'm just saying that was a huge clip for everyone to know. He they know who he is. He was basically, can you just at least identify with me? Like I'm Jewish, I'm kind of freaking out about my identity being being being taken over by this fascistic state that's also inviting, he didn't say this, but inviting actual fascist parties from Europe into Israel because they just hate immigrants, coded Muslim, coded brown. Uh, you know, the who's that guy, the British first guy, uh Tommy Robinson. He was in Israel, yeah. Tommy Robinson. He was an Israel. But oh, I'm saying really quickly, um Adam Freelan was called uh a fake Jew by uh Mario, not Mario Cuomo, uh by uh the former CNN host Cuomo. He was called a fake Jew to his face. Cuomo's not Jewish, calls him a fake Jew. That's not even a tenth of the controversy that Lara Loomer has with everything else. So there's like this weird blend of we've entered we've entered fascism on so many levels, where A, it's no longer say Jews, but it's Muslims overall. Like now Muslims are the puppeteers of every kind of social justice activism. And then finally, yeah, you can still be anti-Jewish, but you have to wait for the ones who are anti-Zionists, and then you can just lean in and be as extremely uh horrible as you can with them. It's like okay.

C. Derick Varn: 47:38

Well, I mean, you see this even in weird places you wouldn't have to see it. Like, um, there's a former Marxist who I actually used even, I was gonna write a book with him when he was a Marxist, and he went through this weird uh he went through this weird uh uh anti like anti anti-woke or anti-PC NYC professor secret identity and got outed for it, and then he became the head of the Vom Mises caucus. His name is Michael Ruttenrock. Well, and uh he started, I mean, like he went from like we need secular stuff to actively pursuing first anti-Muslim and then actually explicitly anti-Jewish polemics. So the thing is if Jews, if you think you're safe, they will come back for you, right? Yeah, like you're not they're not done, right? Uh Gulame Faye to bring this up in Europe. Um, I I I know I follow the European uh new right, which is not neoconservatives, they're mostly post-fascist, um, are they Duganist or whatever. There's a you know those people. Um there are there's this group called uh uh Greca, G-R-E-C-E, capitalized in in in English. It's a French group. Their most uh famous person in America is Alain de Bonois, who uh wrote a bunch of um uh kind of uh Richard Spencer, Richard Spencer uh's uh people used to publish him. Um but anyway, there's a big debate between some of these people on the European new right, between who are the real Semites you should be concerned about. Um is it still Jews or and this was in the Ots. This was like this was 20 years ago. Is it still Jews or is it now Muslims who are the new Jews that are the the outside invaders, right? And that we should support the state of Israel, right? Okay, yeah, yeah, yeah. Partly not be you know, not because we like Jews, right? We hate them, but we hate the other Semites more, yeah.

SPEAKER_00: 49:46

Yep, yep, yep, yep. Like that's the Tommy Robinson factor to a degree, too. Like, well, they're also but they're also bringing in so there is also uh, and this a lot of Palestinians have said this, like Muhammad Al-Kurd, um, a few others have said this very eloquently, more so than me. There's also through Israel uh a real problem of of uh fascism among Jews and Jewish supremacy. Like literally, you have towns being raised to the ground in Gaza and maybe in the West Bank, and one of the first things they do is uh sometimes raise up a menorah, you know, say this is our land. So the association is now with that. And uh I think Mohammed Al-Qurd and a few others have said this more eloquently, but they're like, Yeah, you know, we don't want to always be having to begin our every single conversation about our plight as saying we're not anti-Semite. So it's this weird sort of amalgam of things where there is anti-Semitism, um, and it's bewildering and sometimes difficult to parse out. You have to go through layers of shit to find it, because there's been a lot of work by certain forces to claim the mantle of being we're the true protector of Jews because they hate other groups more in this case. Um, but but honestly, there's also a weird thing happening, which is also not but to the other thing we said, is not surprising when you just think about fascism as a political concept that has to do with certain other principles than just saying anti-Jewish hate, which is obviously in the European context a premier principle for no one's denying that. It's like tier one in many tier one A, tier one B, it's one of those. But at the same time, when you look at like uh Amy Sesare's you know, discourse on colonialism, to bring it back to the essay a little bit, one of the things he said very, very, very uh neatly and nicely is that a lot of the things that fascists were doing on the European continent were simply an extension of what was happening for explicitly colonized, and maybe some people who are Jewish but non-white in the colonized world, right? Like the gulags and such. But yeah, we've entered a space that is again, I keep saying the known is is is certainly creating some steps for us to get to a certain point, and then we're reaching the unknown of like, what is happening exactly? Because now, like, now we're in a space where yeah, Israel, Israel is obviously shown as ass for being what it is, willing, very willing to work with people who happen to hate Muslims more. That's really just it, right? They have conferences in Israel for far-right parties, like, hey, we know you don't like us, and we also know you're from countries that have, you know, an actual Nazi legacy. That is what also baffles me, is that the Palestinians are having to pay for the sins of Europe. Like, nothing gets me more sour and annoyed and pissed off than Germans, the German heads of state, crying about anti-Semitism and then connecting that to Palestine somehow as they're they're they're they're working out of their sins. And I'm like, are you being serious? Like, you are the ones who wiped out your fellow people, and now you're you're you're projecting this onto another group that is now going through the same process. But again, the fascism element, this is what I mean. Like, we we have to remember those of us who know a bit of what we're talking about. We have to keep talking about the principles of fascism beyond what is always being sold by an Anne Applebaum or by whoever's popular on the on the bookshelves, you know.

C. Derick Varn: 53:09

I mean, if we're actually talking about fairness, who should get, you know, like where should the Jewish state have been located? It should have been in fucking Bavaria. Right. Like Jesus Christ. Yeah. Like, um, you know, and and also, you know, there's the Jewish autonomous oblash in the Soviet Union. Um there were places, and and I have uh, I mean, even during the fascist period, Zionists were actually quite weird on how they actually pivoted towards towards uh towards uh Nazism and Fascism. They they were all over the place. But I mean I've actually, you know, I've gotten in trouble with with some left Zionists, I don't really care what they they think about my opinions on this, but I'm like, look, it is obvious to me that in many ways, not only are you encouraging uh anti-Muslim sentiment, you're actually encouraging anti-Jewish sentiment to force us to make a Leah and go back, right? Like right. So you can so you can use a sense of shock troops for this expansionist.

SPEAKER_00: 54:10

Well, also it's weirdly, it's like the same thing about well, you know, again, I like Judaism is you know, I'm Hindu, so it's thousands of years old, but Judaism is also very thousands of years old. Zionism is not thousands of years old.

C. Derick Varn: 54:22

No, Zionism is modern ideology, right?

SPEAKER_00: 54:25

And also at the same time, um, it a lot of Jews when they first heard about it, uh, they were like, I'm European, I'm English, I'm French, I'm this, like I'm not just Jewish. Like, you're also kind of it is this weird sort of uh not to compare it to some authors. Like there's an author, Jumpalari, she's a Bengali author. I am obliged to have read all her work because she's Bengali and I've grown up, but I have deep problems with her work because she always does this thing about identity that is quite right, quite partial, unintentionally, with a very quote-unquote white reading of Americanism. If you follow, like like she's a lot of her characters, some of whom when you when you read these stories for the first time, it's quite moving. But when you read them for the 20th time, you're like, you gotta get you gotta move on to another story archetype. All of them are like, I'm an Indian person. I'm saying this distinctly, like Indian, like I I would describe as Indian American, let's just say Indian or Indian American, growing up in New Jersey, even, but I'm I'm pulled between the two poles of my American side and my Indian side. Now honestly, it's the same thing as Zionism is kind of saying you have a Jewish side and then maybe something else, but it's like no, I've been here, or you know, Jews would say, like, I've been on this continent for thousands and thousands of years. I'm I'm here.

C. Derick Varn: 55:40

I mean, one of the things that's interesting, American Jewish lives in relation to Zionism, even after the even after the Shoah, the um uh Corey Robbins has talked about this, and uh Norm Fingelstein's talked about this too. Uh it took into the middle sixties for Zionism to be so crucial to American Jewish life. Yes. Um, and it took almost to the 1980s for Zionists to take over most American Jewish institutions. Uh it finally alienate the old Yiddishite people and and all that. Um and the and the other thing that you have to like, Zionism initially had a response in Jewish culture that was it was twofold. One, uh, you had semi-assimilationists who was like, Yeah, I'm a Jewish, but I'm here. And the other, you have you also had ultra-orthodox, who many have now become Zionists, but but who actively rejected Zionism as a heretical modern concept. Um, I mean, you still hear that with neutral kartai and some of the Hasidic houses in in New York, right? But like, you know, uh, I don't know, Chabad has gotten over it. Um, and uh I I find this fascinating. I also find it interesting that people aren't talking about um when you know, when everyone's like, oh, you know, it's such a great democracy. It's like if it's such a great democracy, why have there been um a mass exodus voluntarily of liberal Jews into Europe and America in specific in the last 15 years?

SPEAKER_00: 57:14

Yes. Um, mentioned this, like saying about the internal shifting politically has also kind of been uh part of the factor has been this uh fact that some people were like, oh, and now one again, I'm out. Like I don't I don't want to do this, but also democra it's not democracy for the also very simple reason not only is an occupied territory in the formal part, but you were literally having to adjust your politics to leave out uh a majority of the population from having real democracy in still policies that affect them. Like I know people like to say, well, the Israeli army left Gaza, but yeah, I'm pretty sure for a long time you still just they still determine what food got in. Like I think it's pretty important. And then the West Bank side, you know, military tribunals as a Palestinian, whether you're you're a secular, Christian, Jewish, or of course Muslim, you are beholden to that. So there's also that issue, and then Lebanon is not every country is deeply flawed, but I think the most annoying part is also this Western civilization thing of like, well, we're also very, very, you know, women can wear what they want. Uh Lebanon Have you been to Lebanon? Right, what are you talking about?

C. Derick Varn: 58:21

Or even even Egypt. I lived in Egypt for two years. Women can wear what they want, right? Yes, you see people in Nakab, yes, you see people in Burkas, but you actually mostly don't. Right, right. Even see him in hijab.

SPEAKER_00: 58:34

I mean, like there's no state policy asking for that. I've asked the people, yeah. It's like it's been a part of uh even uh Nasser's like laughter. Like I remember watching a clip of him. I know he's you know sometimes all over the place, but one of the clips I watched a long time ago of him in black and white, I found it very funny. Was he just doing like a like a uh a meeting, uh uh it was a public one with a lot of like people in this party, and he was talking about this man, I think for the Muslim Brotherhood at the time before he banned them, coming to him and saying, Hey, we need some real strict laws on women's rights or on what women can wear. And I think he said some of a joke, but he like laughed at him. But what I'm saying is like there's so much of a again, back to history, there's so much a reworking and cutting out and honestly bleaching of history that is required for for us to be here, and then there's so much that we have to do, not for everybody, because again, in in America, there is some bright examples of say Arab Americans, Palestinians, of course, uh with the Mamdani effect, even though he's a moderate, but even the little bit of like resistance he gave to politics around Israel, I am very convinced it did a lot to bring out new voters that other otherwise did not come out. There is a bright spot that way.

C. Derick Varn: 59:47

In the most Jewish city in America, I mean actually. It's just a point.

SPEAKER_00: 59:50

Like it's just like it's like well, everyone's getting sick of this science bullshit. No, it's true. Well, I I would want to also argue like the the the Asian population that came out for him because he's a Queen's, he's a Queens guy. Um he it's frustrating because it's complicated even there. Like, you don't want to give him too much credit because he will disappoint. He is not the panacea. And again, we've been here before in many different ways, and we still need to do certain other things before we get satisfied with any of this. I don't care how big the city. I don't, I mean, we literally had uh, you know, London. Uh, I know the the politicians are different, but we had someone in a similar, not a similar vein, but something similar, like who's Muslim and different and on the left leaning side of things be taken, you know, the the mayor of there, not much has changed. I think Guandani will be better, but still there's a lot of conversations to be had. But he he did something that again represents another node of punditry. Oh, or sorry, another. Note of what Punder Tree misses because in their view of also how to beak back Trumpism, oftentimes it has to do with we just need to we need to talk to that to that lost Cuomo voter, let's just say, you know, the exact who's who's who who feels lost between the Democrats of New and the Republicans of now. And it's like, where does he but it's like you know, Mamdani's like, yeah, no, there's a whole bunch of unmolded people who are either saying, yeah, what you said, are kind of done with Zionism, even if they don't know what to name, they're just done with that something of it being in their face, or tons of people who are South Asian and uh Arab, because I Queens, uh, sorry, New York City is that it's a very Asian heavy city, very South Asian heavy city. And I can tell you with my own family experience, a lot of people were excited. Even those of us who moved on from the city were just like, hey, Mamdani, his mom is his mom is Miranayer, she's uh he's Indian. I was like, sometimes that's all it took, but they were also very like, his dad is uh scholar, some of them knew who he was, you know, that kind of thing. And then the groups involved really quickly, they're not like nobody. They see's rising up and moving is a very grassroots, radical, in the best way, group that is very fundamentally, they they view the essence of their politics as really moving politics beyond electoralism, but they got on board early on when he was still like losing. All that to say the pundits don't give a shit about any of that either, because they don't want to deal with that. Because to them, that's also scary. That's that's how the flattening also takes place. The flattening is actually quite honest, right? It's sincere. They are scared of any kind of uprising, even if it's very, very moderate. It was moderate. They did the people in this election, everything that these pundits would want, which is vote. They voted, and they're still like gotta get out of New York. Like it's non-stop. So, yeah, it's really fascinating that way, too.

C. Derick Varn: 1:02:40

I mean, this is the this is an interesting stat. Like, um, Cuomo lost with more votes than the last two mayors, including uh of New York, De Blasio and Eric Adams, won with um uh because that many people were motivated and came out to vote. It was one of the highest uh vote uh vote count elections in New York history, right? And um, and not just in when I say that, of course, yes, New York has more population in the past, but also like as a percentage of population, right? Right, this was a highly motivated mayoral company. I barely voted mayor. I mean, I do vote for the mayor, but like I don't even out here, I barely think about it. Yes, like like so like I'm like, uh I gotta pick which Democrat sucks the least in the primary, and like and like uh yeah, I care. Um, and you know, usually my guy loses, but um, you know, it is what it is, right? So and people like, oh Varn, you voted, uh yeah. I mean, I don't vote for Democrats at the national level, like right, hardly ever. Um, but I do participate in local politics, and um the Mandami campaign was fascinating to me because on one hand, you know, it it matters on the level of breaking this punditry wall. On the other hand, like New York doesn't actually like the mayor of New York is not actually gonna do a damn thing about US national policy on on wars. Um, yeah, so it's very true.

SPEAKER_00: 1:04:20

It's very true.

C. Derick Varn: 1:04:21

Yeah, so I'm always like, what are you guys even afraid of? And and and uh, you know, I I've said this to someone else. I was arguing with someone like I was like, look, Mamdani is probably gonna do better than most of the progressive right candidates that we've had in the past, but most progressive candidates hit a hard wall with the with the municipal bonds, and I don't see that not being a problem for Mamdani. Right. Um, but my my point is like you guys treated this like like like okay, Brandon Johnson in Chicago, not not endorsed by DSA, admittedly, but actually did I think seek it out. Um maybe, yeah. I can't remember. I I need someone who's actually part of the Chicago DSA chapters to tell me, yeah. But um definitely has tried to make forays with them, that's for sure he's done that. Yes, yes, and uh no one attacked him the way we've attacked Mandani. Um and these are and I I brought out the stuff with Hakeem Jeffries, these are the same people who were celebrating Hakeem Jeffries as the first Islamic legislature during the the the the George W. Bush administration, right? Right. And I find this like fascinating because another thing is like, oh, we need to reach out to the Cuomo to the to the Cuomo voter to win them from Trump. And I'm like, well, Trump endorsed Chromo. Right.

SPEAKER_00: 1:05:49

So what does that even mean? Like well, this is the thing is like it's it's the the leadership of the Democratic Party, the leadership everybody in the GOP pretty much, except for maybe I know you mentioned her before, and she's obviously still like for me, like you know, keep at uh twice arm's length, like Marjorie Taylor Green. She did give some, she did give some credit to to Zoran saying, like, you know, he's America First and whatever. Maybe she's the most honest one of this, you know, of this ilk, but except for a few of her type, uh all these people, uh for me, they were really being very honest if they didn't write quite see it as such. You know, maybe they thought they were being extremely politically maneuver, uh politically tactful, except they were having meltdowns and people knew. But they were being honest on many things, actually. What they fear isn't really just Mamdani, they just fear the constituency that he was beginning to accumulate, like beginning to have. Like the the thing is this some dem, like uh uh Pete Buttigieg, right? Uh the uh oh my god, the the hero we've all waited for. Uh, and some of us call him Mayo Pete because he's uh he's very, very whitebred. But he I remember he was on a podcast and they asked him what he thought. And the first feeling I got is like, who cares what Pete Butajik thinks? But the thing that really the reality when I I sat with it is like why they're even having him on certain podcasts that Mam Dani never will, is because Pete Blucheg, for some people, represents the ideal still, like in honest terms. Like they do, okay. Trump is bad, which is true. So to them, they don't like him. But they don't like him for the same reasons you and I don't like him, which is he's the complete explicit, tortured version of everything we've already hated about American politics. It's more like they don't like him because he is a bumbling, fumbling tycoon of nonsense, typhoon of nonsense that's going to make the whole house of cards fall apart. So that's what they don't like about him. And then, so they want someone to replace him, but no, not Bam Dani, because it's all these brown people, like you know, people like my family or whatever, like people in Queens I know are just oh, they're coming. And to the Hakeem Jeffries part, this is crucial, and this is where Marxist analysis helps and real anti-colonial substantive analysis. Hakeem Jeffries is very APAC-heavy, he is very pro-American empire heavy, whether APAC or not. He is a good Muslim, as uh Zoran's father has made work of the good, bad Muslim dynamic. He is a good Muslim. That is not completely uh unfounded to me. I've come across many good brown people here and there who are just like, hey, you know, I'm accepted. The only thing I had to do was uh not care about everyone else. So Hakeem Jeffries in my book, that's what dovetailed, that's what's the secret sauce. The irony of all ironies is Mamdani is not even that radical. He is a very uh a moderate guy. And already, like recently, he came out in favor of I think Jennifer Tisch returning as NYPD commissioner, you know, the Harris to I think Lowe's Media, yeah, Lowe's theater or Lowe's, yeah, or something like that. Like she's a she's a freaking Neppo baby, and now she's the NYPD commissioner under Eric Adams, and she's just back in. And I think she's a Zionist too. She was very, very pro Destroy the Encampment. So you're right. There's also a little bit of like uh the essence of like confusion on our part because we're also like, do you guys know how to even do this well? But this is what happens when you know Doug Henwood had that amazing article a few years ago about how the elites we have. This is again not like Doug who was not saying uh the elites are so much better back then and we love them. It's just more like capitalism and colonialism, after a certain amount of time, also gives rise to the worst among them. So it's a it's a it's a it's a convergence of of the old stories mixing in with the new dumb people. Because Elon Musk is dumb. Elon Musk is also mad at this. Like he's doing AI videos uh on Twitter that would make Andrew Carnegie cringe if he came back and didn't have a heart attack the moment he stepped out of that you know time machine button.

C. Derick Varn: 1:09:57

Yeah, well, I've actually this is what big theme of my show lately is like our elites, and I don't mean this like our prior elites were good, right? Right, right, but they were competently evil, yes. Um you're right, like a lot of people like Democrats. Democrats are more competent in actually managing the empire, but like Biden did many, many of the same things that Trump did, he just did it within formal channels, but even then, as I pointed out, he couldn't reestablish the old networks and channels, even of the 1990s.

SPEAKER_00: 1:10:35

Well, can I just say one thing? Biden did also, but on Israel, that this is the thing about Biden. This is why I feel a lot of the Silicon Valley types moved to Trump's camp. Biden actually represents the fact that the Democrats with Biden couldn't do that anymore. Because there is like he he went on one of these talk shows and said, said I'm a Zionist. He went on a talk show before he completely had his brain melted through his nose. Like he went on a talk show and said, I'm a Zionist. That also is not something that other presidents have come out and said formally. He did that, and then Trump ran out.

C. Derick Varn: 1:11:13

Yeah, well, here's the crazy thing. I saw Eric Adams talking about he he tried to do he tried to always do right by Israel as a mayor of New York, and I was literally like that's the kind of shit David Duke would falsely accuse people of in the 90s, like like, and you're doing it openly. Um and and I say that because like it just leads to every weird conspiracy thinking, right? Um and it is this weird moment where where I'm with you because I'm like, you know, there's a lot of anger on the right about Israel too, right? Right, right, right. Right. And it could have come out in some weird, you know, anti weird anti-imperialist right wing way that such things have happened in America in the past, um, but they do tend to rhyme strongly with European um xenophobia for obvious reasons, I think. Um and so I'm like, I'll say, are we gonna be in this weird place where like uh you I mean we we saw Nick Fuentes doing this today? Like, we need to reach out to the to the left to form a populist coalition in the fight Israel, and I'm like, I'm like, I've I I've seen this before, yeah, yeah, yeah. But but also like in a in a way that like this is getting airing in a way that it never would have right in the 1990s. And I'm like, this they're like, oh, he's a good communicator. I'm like, yeah, he is a good communicator, but also like like he isn't that impressive. No, yeah, you know, so so why has it happened? I'm like, well, these elites have been protected, and I say elites, I'm not Marxism is not an elite theory, yeah. So I want to be clear on this what I've talked about. Yeah, but the managers of capital have been removed from even internal competition so long, exactly, they are kind of dumb.

SPEAKER_00: 1:13:14

Like their muscles for basic trickery have atrophied. Their muscles for being even a Bill. I know Bill Clinton did not did not get a high vote. He really ran on the coattails on his first try on uh Ross Perot. I get that, right? But even he knew how to play a saxophone, I guess, in that era. But now it's like like Joe Biden, uh you know, like that that that that photo of him with the Rashid Khalidi book under his arm, but it was upside down. Do you remember that? There was a vote. So people were like more confused by that because I was like really in the sauce of this horrible genocide. It was not the previous, like it was not a lead up to it where you could sort of say, Look, I was reading this book, what I'm doing is different. So it's like, yeah, it's like, dude, someone in a different era, not in some ways, I'm very happy about this, right? Like, I'm happy that they're so bad because like even with the Epstein thing, take it away. Do do your magic just like when people are like, Oh, Democrats are gonna be involved. Take it away. Just run with it, be as stupid as you can in covering up the sex crimes that these elites have been doing for decades and decades, probably. So I'm I'm happy with that. I'm happy that Biden was a bumbling, fumbling, stupid idiot because uh a plurality of Democrats who chose not to vote, Democrats, not Republicans or events, they a plurality of them did that because of Palestine. And now you're seeing in the polling data, for Democrats at least, there was still sympathy for Israel like not that long ago. Now it's like maybe I'm giving gracious like plus 10, maybe for Palestine. Like, like, thank you. Thank you for doing it. But to what you're saying, no, also it's kind of amusing because there's times where people ask me questions about like why are they doing this? And I'm like, I don't know. I don't like Nicki Minaj, and I give credit to Black Liberation Media for do for for picking up on this because I was like, I they have an amazing morning show I listen to while I exercise. Uh, like I have a bunch of health conditions, so I have every day I have to exercise. And they they mentioned Nicki Minaj. I had no idea what was happening, so I looked into it. Yeah, she I think went to the UN to talk about the persecution of Christians in Nigeria. Now, now, if George W. Bush, if George W. Bush did this and wanted to do it right, I think he would pick someone, yes, maybe African-American, maybe black, but they would not pick Nicki Minaj. Someone who's maybe popular to this day and try to that, you know, even though she is, of course, very, very like she sold a lot of records, she's concerned. I I just know too much about this. But that was also a huge red flag to me because the the optics of it was so insane. I was like, do you like my partner was like, who, why do this? And I said to her, I actually don't know. Like, I don't know, like I don't understand. Like, there's parts of it, like, oh, I know why they cra I know why they picked this crazy person, like Anna Navarro. Like, I know, because she can speak to the beauty of American democracy and how the Sandinistas were the real terror, even though she annoys me to bits, fine. But now it's like, let me pick this person I've never heard of who's in the bowels of the right wing uh neospace, uh the media space. Name cat turd. Yeah, yeah. Right.

C. Derick Varn: 1:16:25

Um like the fact I have to take people like Cat Turn and Destiny, who still go by those names, furiously in the national discourse.

SPEAKER_00: 1:16:36

I've actually sweat, I forgot about the cat turd. It's like, yeah, oh also to add to that, I forgot about that, and I also don't want to even uh bring it up to my uh like people friends of mine who are more normal than me, because it's also like how do I how do I explain because I don't want to answer, ask, answer questions. I don't know the answer. Like, why did Sadeep? Why did they pick cat turd? It's like I don't know, I don't understand why they did that.

C. Derick Varn: 1:17:01

Well, I mean it's it's just like I you know, I I'm a teacher, I work with like mostly normal, only semi-politicized people. Right, right. We talk about the national discourse, they're like, what is going on? I'm just like, I don't know, man. Like, uh because they're like, you always know all this stuff, and you know I'm just like I you know, and I I I and I follow it, but I can't explain it to you either.

SPEAKER_02: 1:17:31

Right.

C. Derick Varn: 1:17:31

Um uh I mean the president just told someone to shut up, Piggy, on on Mike. Like, I like I maybe we should quit voting uh 80-year-olds and Neppo babies into power, but you know, we uh what do you mean? And I'm like, well, look, even these billion, like these tech billionaires, they're all transparent con men and um and didn't run profitable businesses in the first place, right?

SPEAKER_00: 1:18:01

Also, the uh the what's that guy's name, the Palantir guy, Alex Carp. You know, there's clips of him doing the sword, like dancing with the doing the sword job, you know, with that one woman next to him, awkwardly, like you know, nervously laughing.

C. Derick Varn: 1:18:14

The sword, there's him um talking about like releasing drugs on and like dropping fentanyl on his investors who are who are showing him. And I'm just like, that's totally a way to expire confidence in your investors is to threaten to kill them.

SPEAKER_00: 1:18:30

Like, I forget, yeah, even in my small tiny mind when it comes to economic. I'm just like barely I'm trying to stretch out peanut butter as a snack for myself, and I'm just like, you know, just doing that for a little, and I'm like, I wonder what the brilliant minds have come up next. And he's just like, Yeah, I want to kill my investors, and it's like, whoa, one on one hardcore, hustle. Like, you know, oh my god, Gary Z, come in the room.

C. Derick Varn: 1:18:54

Like, you literally have have a market cap on these companies that is uh a a thousand uh like a hundred years of their projective revenue. This was true for NVIDIA, uh like a hundred years of their projective of revenue would equal their market cap right now. And I'm just like, Y'all are dumb. Like, and I'm not normally, I mean, yes, I yell at people that are stupid, it's normally about beliefs that I don't agree with, but like this is this is not a belief issue. I'm like, as a capitalist, that the fact it's taking you this long to freak out.

SPEAKER_00: 1:19:31

I'm just an English teacher, and I've been like, What are you doing? I freak out on a monthly basis looking at certain things, like you're like, Why aren't you? No, it's true. Like, even when they talk about um yeah, Alex Carp also said, Yeah, his whole thing, like even with Mark Zuckerberg, like they do this whole masculinity dance, like they've been really into now doing MMA fighting or trying to pretend they're into it. I'm like, Ha, okay, maybe for one random weirdo guy amongst his friends, he's like, Dog, I'm into Mark Zuckerberg again. This guy is amazing. But for a lot of other people, like say half the population of women, this is really weird. Like, this is not good investor behavior. Like, they used to be, I don't want to be like a all in the family, kind of like those two white people singing and dancing at the beginning of like all that. But it's like there's like there used to be a genesit qua to the to the to the way they would hold these beliefs sometimes behold behind closed doors, then just like laying it all out there and being Alex Carp, and also with a peep squeak voice, like being like masculinity, guys are just not into like what did it even get from the Democrats, you know, because that's where I am from. Like, he still is harping back to and of like I'm a Democrat. But I'm like, dude, I'm a guy. I'm being honest with you. I view myself as you know, I identify as a dude. Like, I'm being honest, but. I I would like to have healthcare. I would like to have uh more peanut butter, I guess, or like more money to spend on like I'm not concerned about a sword that you have in your stupid office. Like, you can't even pretend a little bit with me, like you can't just like trick me a bit.

C. Derick Varn: 1:21:04

Yeah. It feels like somehow the people that we that uh that ran the DN like like all the D D nerds just took the mask off and became uh it's a it's a wild time, and and the media I will say this the media seems and I actually don't just mean legacy media like CNN, the media by also I mean TikTok and everything else seems completely unable to handle this. Like to bring it back to our original point, like like it's like that it's like they're either whitewashing or they're just they're just as baffled as we are. Yeah, yeah.

SPEAKER_00: 1:21:48

I'm just dude, those are two polls, whitewashing or baffling. Like there are a few, like again, I encourage people to obviously watch this channel, but Black Liberation Media is a great space for these conversations because they always connect those really important dots. But other than these few areas, it is truly that. It's like it's this like uh whitewashing of of previous re previous administrations, which have been uh, I don't know, have killed still more people. And then you also have a baffling of like, sir, you know, like to what to whatever person's in front of them, like a political scientist, maybe who knows something. I'm I'm in a political science field, by the way. For everyone who thinks I'm taking shots at the field, I'm in it. But someone who's like, can you can you explain Andrew Cromo's uh AI decisions or something? And it's like, I don't know. But it's like there is, but that's that's the point. It's like this is what happens to an American US society bereft bereft of a real substantial left that it itself suppressed and killed off for a while and hasn't been able to grow as fast to keep pace with the monsters that that same system has created. Like materialism is what's happening here. I'm not talking about like a very vulgar sense of like everything that a social position of a person tells you how they vote. That's not what I'm talking about. I'm talking about you grow up in a society where materially you're not that likely still to be socialized with a truly communist, Marxist, or left-leaning perspective all your life. So that's what the material lack is. Yeah, exactly. It's it's creeping in with like Mamdani, like again, it's not about him, it's about like all the other factors, like drum and all these groups, but that's not everywhere, it should be everywhere, but it's not still reaching the same p uh pitch as what we need to like. Okay, when like I remember when Biden got elected, people, people I even really looked up to still do, were kind of even saying things about like how this is gonna be the New Deal 2.0.

C. Derick Varn: 1:23:41

Yeah, God, I remember this too. It baffled me.

SPEAKER_00: 1:23:44

And I was thinking about that the other day because I was preparing for this interview, and I was thinking, I was just going through my Rolodix of like trauma, and I was thinking, like, huh, like wonder what wonder what Biden, like, what's Biden's story all about? And I was like, oh my god, like it was like hitting like you know, Vietnam uh veteran like images of like ghosts of like I'm like, oh my god, there was a moment where people like people I trusted said this is gonna be New Deal 2.0, and there was a brief moment of people saying, We're done with neoliberalism. This is it. Yeah, uh oh, uh lo and behold, we had a billionaire uh standing during meetings in the White House saying, I'm I'm gonna get rid of this department. Oh, I made a mistake, it wasn't that department. I'm just watching it on Al Jazeera being like, is this a live? Is this really a live meeting about which department to cancel by a billionaire? Like a capitalist? And and what is happening? Like, what happened to the New Deal 2.0? What happened to any of that? I know that already's a flawed tenor to have because you need to really think beyond it, but still, what happened to any of that? Like, Biden was on the picket lines. I thought that was cool, it was nice, but then it was like, oh, uh, he also lost his mind and wanted to kill all the Palestinians possible for uh whatever vision in his head. So I don't know what happened. So yeah, it's a it's a it's a curdling line, blood curdling uh symptom of of just neoliberalism eating through the fabric of American life to the point that every monster that's spilling out is part of that system and is also creating new horrors along the way.

C. Derick Varn: 1:25:16

Yeah, it's it it does it does I mean what's interesting about this is people think I'm always a doomer about this stuff, but I'm like actually it creates a lot of space, it does create a lot of space to maneuver. Um, it's not easy to know how to maneuver in the light of all this. It's not, I mean, uh but for example, I mean what you brought up Zionism. Um, you know, for all that I you know, we're talking about anti-Semitism, all the craziness around that. Even amongst right wingers, you know, Democrats, it's overwhelmingly uh supportive Palestinian, except for the leadership, right? Um, and then amongst right wingers, it's like 50-50 now, yeah. Which is also unheard of. Yes, like yes, which which would end which I think also it with when as the baby boomers finish dying off, on uh tragically or not, um uh what we're gonna be left with is trying to deal with um because I think like a lot of the Zionists are just gonna go away. Um I see, yes, yes. Like, but because the biggest divide the the biggest divider isn't even ideology on that, it's AIDS. Right, yes, yes, yes. Um it's it's just we're in this strange uh place where we actually have you know, I don't personally want to see um this massive like rebirth of of traditional European anti-Semitism, right? But I also think it's like not a bad thing that uh like me saying like hey Palestinians are also kind of people is is like that's not as controversial with and I'm not talking about amongst leftists, right? Right, right. Like I'm talking about it with normal people at work, right? Right. Like are people who are like, well, you know, I don't know that I like Hamas, but would I do anything differently in their circumstances? No, right, that's actually a common sentiment at my job, right? Like um well, which is different than even five years ago.

SPEAKER_00: 1:27:30

Well, what you're saying, too, like so Palestinian, because it makes me really upset. Like I get quite emotional about this issue because I mean to be quite fair, like a lot of it resonates. So there's a couple of things that happen with my mind when I think about Palestine. One is, you know, uh I've interviewed people about this very early on, learning through them about not just the past struggles, but like very early on, just learning from people how they lose, they've lost entire families during this latest genocide, like overnight, right? I can't even fathom that. Like I've had situations where I've lost people I've really cared about over the last two years or so, uh, a year ago, and um um in a very tragic way, too. And it's not the one-to-one, you know, one is very visibly political, but to lose anyone, one person, one soul in your family overnight is is crazy, right?

C. Derick Varn: 1:28:25

Like, I don't know how you can wake up 12, 13, 14, most of your extended family and your immediate family in one day.

SPEAKER_00: 1:28:34

One day you're maybe like I have this relationship, and plus plus, I have this similar relationship with like how my family still zooms with people or Skypes randomly and forces the phone in my face to talk to an aunt I you know that I love, but I haven't talked to in a while. But to go from that to complete silence, that is untenable to me. I I don't know how you do that. So to me, that's why it's so so symbolic and and yet material. And of course, the colonizing factor. Like again, the story is simple. Palestine is a colonized point. I'm Bengali, I'm Indian American, I'm Bengali, and Bengal has had several famines. The British, you know, who knew were uh terrible uh colonizers and people, and then the British over there, so there's that dividing line. But I want to say that you know what we live in a time where Palestine to be Palestinian, uh the the the uh we live in a time where the media and leading politicians use Palestinian as a slur, right? Which makes it that's why I say it's the known, it's that's why I say we live in a time of horrors and potential, because that's the horror. That is that is worse than even the beginning phase of the war on terror.

C. Derick Varn: 1:29:46

That is go no one was pinpoint Palestinian specifically back then, right?

SPEAKER_00: 1:29:51

No one was saying, oh, Chuck Schumer is a Palestinian, and then no one is also not saying like no one in the leadership saying that's bad. Like someone would have said maybe something, like even John McCain with his lazy ass and him being a complete you know war criminal, he said still was racist, but he said, like, oh no, ma'am, uh Barack Obama's not Arab, which is also still saying Arabs can't be family people. But what I'm saying, the daylight of anything normal is shut in in the in the leadership sense, right? Like Palestinian is being used as a slur. I keep saying this because I cannot, I am brown, but I am not Palestinian. I I cannot fathom what it's like to grow up Palestinian in a society where leading figure that you're supposed to either contend with are literally using your people's identity as a slur. But but on the turnaround effect of what you said, but the people but a lot of people, again, not everyone, a lot of people get that. Including the same constituencies themselves who are Arab or Muslim who are affected by these things, right? So that's the that's the dual logic of this era. There's a there's a sense of, well, there's there's a regression, to say the least. Uh, history is not an eternal flight upward. This is what I tell my students. Like, what makes you what give me evidence as to why you think this era is uh progress. I do tell that to them because I'm like, this is not enough to just tell me the rosy story of racism is because they also bring it up themselves. They contradict themselves when they talk to me in different weeks, right? They're like, yeah, this happened to me or this writing is very real to me. And so I bring this conversation up. But then there is something to be said. I also tell them really pointedly at times when they're getting getting themselves a bit too nihilistic. I say, but listen, if you look at the numbers, even Trump's victory, even though this latest one was more of a majority, uh he won the popular vote, it's not fascism, right-wing authoritarianism is not mass psychosis entirely.

C. Derick Varn: 1:31:43

And it's also not even like what as I always tell people uh about the the Trump victory, yeah, I don't really care about the diehard Trumpers right uh because I don't think that's why he won. Right, right, right, right. I think why he won is a bunch of people felt that the Democrats failed so bad that they should stay home. Yes, and then a bunch of other people were like, Well, the Democrats are lying to us about economics. We for some reason I don't think this a shot, even though they're crazy.

SPEAKER_00: 1:32:16

Yeah, let's give this a shot, right?

C. Derick Varn: 1:32:17

Like, um, and a lot of those constituencies, when everyone's like, I you know, I go on, you know, I I like to go on liberal liberal uh social forums, so I get on Reddit. I write another thing that used to be full of chuds and is now not. Now the things that are not full of chuds is now full of chuds because we're like that as a society. Um so like everyone's complaining about oh, Reddit's so right ring, and if you remember the and the first Trump administration, yeah, yeah, yeah. Where all the liberals hang out to hide from X.

SPEAKER_00: 1:32:46

Oh, I didn't know that. I did not know that actually.

C. Derick Varn: 1:32:48

Yeah, the it it's not it's not like Blue Sky where everyone's still pretending it's 2017 for uh 2017 Twitter. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, yeah. But it is it is well a lot of the young the younger liberals are. Um but uh it's interesting to see uh people will go, oh well the the Trumpers, you know, they're they're they're really stupid, and now this will change, and he can do anything. And people are like, Well, yeah, but all those people who came over during the election, Gen Z Brown people, uh, even a lot of working class white people are like jumping ship. It's only the diehard ideologues who are still really, really dedicated to this, and it's happened very quickly, like like in a month. Yeah, um, and I'm just like these windows of opportunity, you know, and I've often accused of being a doomer, and I think sometimes rightly, but I'm all but I always say this like there's a flip side of this, right? It does mean things are changing fast enough that you can actually act. Yeah, it doesn't mean that the action's gonna go your way, but what I think I was telling someone, I hear from leftists all the time, nothing ever happens. And I'm like, where the hell are you? Well, like if you're saying nothing ever happens right now, like at this moment, yeah, where it looks like I mean, it looks like I'm saying this, this will come out probably in December, early January 2026. We're saying this in the middle, right before uh um in the middle of November of 2025. But it looks like we're about to enter an economic crazy place. And for the left, the only reason I'm gonna say this seriously. The only reason Marxism came back on the the less purview and most of the developed world was the 2007 to 2009 financial crises, and and then that also brought a lot of other things back with it that were kind of gone. I mean, like um if you were if you were coming up and left academia and like humanities programs and the aughts, you're reading Derrida in 2005. Right, it's just a different, and so people like, oh I'm like, no, I'm not saying, but it gets I'm not saying it gets worse before it gets better because it not doesn't necessarily have the opportunity to act. You know, I'm not an immiserationist, I'm not an accelerationist, I'm none of these things, but in some ways it is good that you can now see that the emperors on both sides are wearing no clothes.

SPEAKER_00: 1:35:33

Yeah, no, I I wrote down the windows of opportunity. Um so like even with Palestine, for example, I mean, it goes both ways too. Like, obviously, things have shifted so fast where we are living through a Holocaust. Uh um, but I want to also, you know, since I mentioned Palestinian as a slur, obviously for me, you know, the Palestinian people and to be Palestinian is to be quite the opposite, of course, is like to be brave and to be part of the legacy of real anti-colonial tradition, right? Like, because in the end, also what's happened recently is Israel couldn't completely take over the Gaza Strip. You know, things moved very fast, but also what was revealed very fast as well was that a lot of Gazans did the hard work of creating a certain kind of self-sufficiency where they were able to fight back, right? So that's another thing to think about. You know, like I really do think like that's something I try to tell, like it's very delicate, right? Like what you're describing, like it's a very delicate uh not dance, but it's a very delicate picture you have to draw because one part of it is the truth of like there's a Holocaust and ICE disappearing people and economic craziness is happening and will happen, and who knows, Venezuela, whatever, right? Like, there is a delicate, there is a delicate pink picture where you need to draw that out because that's reality. But there's also a delicate delicate part to all the other things we mentioned, which is Palestine is still here. The Palestinians are not giving up. Like, this is not just you know romanticism of just like, oh, they're not giving up and the struggle is no, they're fighting to win, they're fighting to survive and they're gonna fight to win. They're not gonna give up. Like, it's been decades where the Israelis have tried to kick the Palestinians out of every home they could imagine when it comes to the PLO and whatever, and they're still here, right? And the same thing at home, like you just said, in the last few months, heck, in the last month with the Epstein files, like, come on, like, like there has been a lot of uh, you know, uh, let's say, uh uh hand-wringing in in certain sectors of the right wing, too, about what they have to contend with, with with Trump's what we knew his involvement, but explicit, you know, even though he's denying it. So things are moving at a fast pace. But I think it's very delicate, right? You don't want to either paint a picture that's too optimistic, because then that sort of undermines the need for action, because we also don't want to treat history as inevitability, but you also don't want to paint a picture that is um too dark, because that itself is also not always quite the complete reflection of everything, you know. So it's a very delicate thing, but again, that's the whole problem, too. Because when you're in it, when you're in a timeline, it doesn't make sense. Uh, it's also hard to hold these two wires together at the right distance or angle, because in the end, it does feel like an avalanche of shit is coming down your way. I totally understand when people say that. Like my partner is that way, I have a lot of friends who feel that way, and like you, they ask me questions, what's happening? And sometimes I have to be honest, I don't, I don't understand. But I do try to annoyingly say, hey, remember, this is still happening, or this group of people is still here, or this has happened before, and this this changed. Like Jim Crow, back to our early point. I tell my students that Jim Crow was uh was a was a like, you know, if you're black uh and you wanted to register to vote in some in some states, you were probably risking being disappeared, you know, and that changed. Yeah, that changed. I know it took some time, but it did change. And some liberals and conservatives who are American exceptionalists and wanted to just at least be a little bit more nice for the newly independent Asian African countries, they were going to give up on Jim Crow eventually, but probably by the 70s, maybe, or maybe 80s at their own accord. It still took a lot of brave people to do strategic things right. That's the other thing. It's not just hope and change and a flourishing of new new ideas. It was more like, hey, did we create the right institutions to help us gather funds? Did we do this and this and this? So yeah, I feel the same way as you. It's a very delicate balance of like a delicate art of speaking reality and also speaking a certain sense of truth, even if it comes off as doomer, because to somebody, you need to at least say to them, hey, things move, you need to be aware of how they're moving at the very least, even if parts of it is a bit uncomfortable.

C. Derick Varn: 1:40:04

Right. I only I mean one of the things that I think is actually good, um, and I even though it's in a very ugly way, because one thing I I'm gonna tell you, as a person who's followed Israeli politics and Palestinian and the Palestinian situation since I was in probably my teens, so since the late 90s, um, and who's you know, I've seen Palestine. Like, like uh I lived in Egypt, I've dealt with Palestinians in Egypt, I've you know, the all like I've seen those walls, I've seen those guns, I've seen like it it's it actually does make it very clear to you what the sticks are. And um In some ways, I feel simultaneously more and less hope than I've ever felt because I've been feeling like we've been heading towards right this in a slow way right for 10 years. Whenever I would cover uh Israeli politics on the show, I just feel like are we gonna talk about you know the slow starvation of two million uh Gazans? Like um and most of whom are women and children who are not even old enough to have voted in the in the last election they were allowed to have, right? Right, uh which was over a decade ago, right? Um, you know, I bring all this up for me because in a way I feel devastated by like like I cannot imagine the loss of human life. I know what the official numbers are, I know that Israel's not even really bothering to lie about it anymore, right? Like they're kind of bragging about it sometimes, right? It's just but like you don't get numbers anymore, actually. It's just like and they're um uh but uh and I don't want to make it sound like any of that was worth it.

SPEAKER_00: 1:42:05

I would rather all those people be here 100.

C. Derick Varn: 1:42:08

But at the same token, it's like I never thought I'd live in America where anyone thought Palestinian lives, particularly on the right, were really worth that much, yeah. Yeah, and now they kind of do ish, which is not as much as I would like, but it's way better than it's ever been. Um, and so it let's say ever been, probably since like the 30s, yeah, yeah. Um uh you know, I mean, if you remember, yeah, you probably are old enough to remember this when Jimmy Carter just admitted that like what was going on in uh it in the book, oh yeah, was just apartheid, yeah.

SPEAKER_00: 1:42:52

Yeah, he had the book. I have the book, right? Right.

C. Derick Varn: 1:42:55

It was a it like it's actually a very mild critique of Israel compared to the butt holy shit.

SPEAKER_00: 1:43:03

I remember that my parents got the book because he made that critique, and they appreciate that critique. They liked Jimmy Carter after well, they weren't my grandfather. He was in this country when he was present and he liked him, but I remember I know what you're talking about. I I still it's like flashes of things in the past, like which make you kind of like really take stock of things because you're totally right. Now, when you look at that book, I think I've skimmed it, you're like, damn, this guy was right, but also this is now tepid. Like, this is tepid, yeah, yeah, yeah. I remember that. I remember that, yes. And he got away with some of it because he was an older, older white older white, older red Baptist dude, but he still got called an anti-Semite. Yes, I remember that too. I remember that too. Yes, yes. That's why I forgot about that book. Yes, you're right.

C. Derick Varn: 1:43:47

Yeah, this is in the this was in the middle of the Bush administration. Uh but you know, this is one of the advantages to a being in your 40s and B having unusual for an American along memory, right? Right, right. Um, uh, because the one thing I get frustrated about is I know people in my 40s who like uh many of whom are even like pundits and shit, who seem to have forgotten what even happened three years ago, much less 15 or 20.

SPEAKER_00: 1:44:17

Like, um I mean I I feel the same way sometimes, but most of that for me is just a lot of like real like trauma and like health stuff that I have, but also I think some of it is also conducive to maybe sometimes not to be rude, I think some people don't need to be pundits either.

C. Derick Varn: 1:44:36

Oh no, they a lot of people don't need to be pundits. Yeah, I think I actually would like the that like not I do believe civic discourse is important to democracy, and I do believe that even under socialism, we probably have democratic means blah blah blah blah blah. I don't want pundits to exist, right? Like I said this who as a person who does it as a side gig, right? Right, but and I hate the fact that I'm like, god damn it, I am kind of a pundit, but like like I think that the fact that you can make a living right giving usually terrible political opinions, and I say usually terrible because there's actual studies that indicate that pundits are more wrong more often than the general public. Like I'm not just make saying this like because I dislike it. There are studies of like, no, they're they're more often wrong. Makes sense, like than just asking average people off the street, right? So it's just like you know, other than their ideological apparatus function, why do we need these this as a as a job? Like I it's just crazy to me.

SPEAKER_00: 1:45:49

Also, it's funny because like and this is like the second theme of what I wanted to bring up, because there's weirdly anti punditry that's become extremely, yeah, uh an occupational vocation, uh, a money vocation, an eyes on me vocation, but then there's anti-intellectualism in the same breath. Punditry intellectualism do not go hand in hand. Some pundits or some people who talk politics actually take a lot of stock in the fact that they don't read or know things or want to know things, right? So that's the other thing that I feel very strangely about the last several years, is because even even there's sections of the left. This is where I think some people on the left might be annoyed by me, but I do think there are some sections of the left that I come across who also refuse to know that lived experience is not the totalizing force you think when it comes to knowing how to actually think about politics. And you do need to read something, or if you can't have the time to read it, pick something to read with other people, or just follow the news, or try something if you're intending to do actual activism. Like for me, um, I have experienced a lot of horrible white supremacy and racism, but I can tell you for a fact that that alone would not have led me to some of the positions I have now if I didn't also meet certain writers when I did and certain people when I did who introduced me to certain things about thinking for myself and history, right? And I think that's also something that's kind of interesting in the era we're in. We're living in an America that's deeply anti-intellectual, deeply anti-thought, and yet, like you said, has seven people on shows, you know, two of whom are nice and maybe experts, but then the other six are just either full-on Nazis, you know, in different, you know, like instead of saying Jews control the world, like we've said, Muslims do, or something crazy, or the Muslim Brotherhood is behind everything now. Um you know, we have a world where that exists alongside a world where America, not a world, America, where people don't read enough about things or no things. When I say read, I don't mean they have to put eyes to paper, like you can just do audible, like something when it comes to like stretching out those muscles in your head, about like, oh, the Black Panther Party. I knew that they were interested in this. Oh, it connected to this or this or this. Like, not like sometimes that's also still lacking. And I've come across this in spaces with organizing too, where again, these are not like these are not meant to be like attacks on anyone. Uh, I've met many great organizers who are still better than me, like tenfold in many capacities, but I've also met organizers who, however well-meaning, did not know things about certain traditions, let's just say, certain ideas about like how things have happened. And that to me is also very frustrating and amusing about the timeline we're in, right? Anti-anti-intellectualism alongside the robust pundit class that's kind of emerged over the last uh however long cable news has been around. Right. Yeah, it's it's it's a crazy situation.

C. Derick Varn: 1:48:58

Uh where can people find your work?

SPEAKER_00: 1:49:01

Yeah, they can find it. Um, well, I've written for Black Agenda Report, Protein Magazine, Counterpunch several times. Yeah, if people can just hit me up on Twitter, Resist Run. I'm still on there. I might actually leave. I might be one of the few people who leaves. Um, and I'm on Blue Sky. Uh, same thing, Resist Run. So if people want to read my work, I post them there. I have a Substack, but just follow me on those two things, and then you'll see posts in my Substack that you can read more of my work and more of the things I'm writing about. So, yeah, that's where you can find me. Yeah, and uh thank you so much for coming on.

C. Derick Varn: 1:49:35

Uh, I will put a link in the show notes for the article that we started uh riffing on with Revo Press. Um and uh I'm sure you'll be back soon. If you've been on now, this is your fourth time, so you're officially a regular.

SPEAKER_02: 1:49:50

Oh, nice, I didn't know that.

C. Derick Varn: 1:49:52

So uh it's uh I yeah, it's actually been over a long period of time. Um I think it's been over like three and a half years, but yes, yes, but you average now uh coming on once a year, which means you're a regular.

SPEAKER_00: 1:50:04

So um thank you for coming on. Yeah, yeah. Thank you so much. I appreciate it. Thank you. All right, bye. Have a great day. Me too.

C. Derick Varn: 1:50:12

Bye bye.