Speaker 1: Hey, guys, ready or not, twenty twenty four is here
Speaker 1: and we here at breaking points, are already thinking of
Speaker 1: ways we can up our game for this critical election.
Speaker 1: We rely on our premium subs to expand coverage, upgrade
Speaker 1: the studio ad staff give you, guys, the best independent
Speaker 1: coverage that is possible. If you like what we're all about,
Speaker 1: it just means the absolute world to have your support.
Speaker 1: But enough with that, let's get to the show. Hey, guys,
Speaker 1: just finished recording Crystal conference. Is why I have the
Speaker 1: stone in the background instead of the brick in the background.
Speaker 1: But there is a big piece of breaking news that
Speaker 1: we wanted to share with you as quickly as we
Speaker 1: possibly could if we could put this up on the screen.
Speaker 1: From the New York Times, they have named the alleged
Speaker 1: leaker of that trove of highly classified documents, many of
Speaker 1: which had to do with the US involvement in the
Speaker 1: Ukraine War. These were initially posted to a discord server
Speaker 1: and then eventually leaked to the wider Internet. So what
Speaker 1: the New York Times says here and I'll just read
Speaker 1: directly from their report and then give you a little
Speaker 1: bit of my thoughts on the other side. Leader of
Speaker 1: online group where secret documents leaked is air National Guardsmen.
Speaker 1: Federal investigators are searching for the person who shared top
Speaker 1: secret documents that revealed government secrets about the Ukraine War.
Speaker 1: The article reads, the leader of a small online gaming
Speaker 1: chat group where a trove of classified US intelligence documents
Speaker 1: leaked over the last few months is a twenty one
Speaker 1: year old member of the intelligence wing of the Massachusetts
Speaker 1: Air National Guard. According to interviews and documents reviewed by
Speaker 1: The New York Times, the National guardsmen, whose name is
Speaker 1: Jack Techsara oversaw a private online group called Thugshaker Central,
Speaker 1: where about twenty to thirty people, mostly young men and teenagers,
Speaker 1: came together over a shared love of guns, what they
Speaker 1: describe as racist online memes and video games. Two US
Speaker 1: officials confirmed that investigators want to talk to airman Techsera
Speaker 1: about the leak of the government documents. One official said
Speaker 1: that he might have information relevant to the investigation, and
Speaker 1: of course, federal investigators have been searching for this individual
Speaker 1: who was named in the group. I think they called
Speaker 1: him the OG. The Washington Post had some reporting that
Speaker 1: we brought you on Breaking Points this morning, where they
Speaker 1: had interviewed one of the other members of this group,
Speaker 1: a teenager who had to get permission from his parents
Speaker 1: to speak to the Post. That individual was kept anonymous,
Speaker 1: but he indicated that you know the person who leaked,
Speaker 1: who he referred to as og, that he was either
Speaker 1: in the military or worked on a military base. He
Speaker 1: talked about how his views, he would describe them as
Speaker 1: sort of generally anti government. He named checked Ruby Bridge
Speaker 1: and Waco as some sort of inspirations for his general
Speaker 1: right wing anti government views. According to that young man,
Speaker 1: young teenager, he wasn't didn't model himself as a sort
Speaker 1: of whistleblower. He moore was posting these documents because he
Speaker 1: wanted to show to the group how important he was,
Speaker 1: I guess within the military and what he had access to.
Speaker 1: And then of course was sort of clumsy and some
Speaker 1: of the photographs that he took there were some stuff
Speaker 1: in the background that the Times, the Washington Posts and
Speaker 1: other outlets were able to use in part of their
Speaker 1: effort to find whoever this leaguer was. So listen, is
Speaker 1: it newsworthy who this person is? Sure? Is it interesting?
Speaker 1: You know what their background is? How this all unfolded?
Speaker 1: Absolutely not denying that, but as we talked about this morning.
Speaker 1: It also is extraordinary that these news outlets, they seem
Speaker 1: to have focused most of their journalistic resources not in
Speaker 1: uncovering the many other documents and secrets that he posted
Speaker 1: that no news outlet to our knowledge has access to
Speaker 1: or even in digging to some of the stories that
Speaker 1: we were able to bring you exclusively on breaking points
Speaker 1: simply because the mainstream press didn't cover them. But they
Speaker 1: seemed to have focused most of their journalistic recas sources
Speaker 1: on hunting down this individual and effectively doing the work
Speaker 1: of the US government. On MSNBC, you know, they immediately
Speaker 1: brought on David Ignatius, who used the cherry picked pieces
Speaker 1: that were reported in the mainstream press to call for
Speaker 1: a more hawkish approach towards Ukraine. And they brought on
Speaker 1: their own in house security expert, who is a former
Speaker 1: former CIA to say that, you know, the top priority
Speaker 1: was to quote catch the trader, so Washington Post in
Speaker 1: New York Times assisting in finding this individual, at least
Speaker 1: apparently based on the information that The New York Times
Speaker 1: was able to obtain. They said that, you know, some
Speaker 1: of the details that were in the background they were
Speaker 1: able to match to details of the interior of his
Speaker 1: childhood home that had been posted on social media and
Speaker 1: family photographs. Let me also give you a little bit
Speaker 1: of reaction. They were able to talk to his mother,
Speaker 1: who's named Don, speaking outside her home in Massachusetts on Thursday.
Speaker 1: They say she confirmed that her son was a member
Speaker 1: of their National Guard. Said he had recently been working
Speaker 1: for night shifts at a base on Cape Cod and
Speaker 1: in the last few days he had changed his phone number,
Speaker 1: she said, probably a wise move. Again, federal investigators not
Speaker 1: confirming that they have identified this person as a leaker,
Speaker 1: but saying that they are interested in speaking with him.
Speaker 1: And then the last piece of this report is there
Speaker 1: been questions about who exactly had access to these very
Speaker 1: sensitive materials, and according to The Times, not immediately clear
Speaker 1: if a young Air National guardsman in his position would
Speaker 1: have had direct access to such highly sensitive briefings. So
Speaker 1: still a question of how he obtained the documents. So
Speaker 1: basically that's what we know right now, guys, New York Times,
Speaker 1: Washington Posts. They did the work of the federal government
Speaker 1: making sure they tracked down the leaker, and wish now
Speaker 1: they would spend some more time digging into the documents
Speaker 1: and the important implications thereof of more for you later, guys.
Speaker 1: MSNBC's Jensaki, formerly of the Biden Whitehouse, had an interesting
Speaker 1: new interview. She claimed she is not a state propaganda.
Speaker 1: She actually sees herself as a journalist. Let's take a
Speaker 1: listen to that. Do you consider yourself a journalist? I do,
Speaker 1: because how do you define being a journalist? And I'm
Speaker 1: gonna ask you this question. I don't know. I mean
Speaker 1: I was once told it was an out of work
Speaker 1: newspaper man. But you know, well, here's how I think
Speaker 1: about it. I mean, first of all, journalism has changed dramatically.
Speaker 1: Semaphore is an example of that, right, And even when
Speaker 1: I was in the White House working in government, it
Speaker 1: really was already all on a spectrum. It wasn't just
Speaker 1: the New York Times, what Washington Post, ABC News and
Speaker 1: then everything else wasn't considered part of journalism. It's all
Speaker 1: a big, broad scope of things. And so to me,
Speaker 1: journalism is providing information to the public, helping make things clear,
Speaker 1: explaining things, having conversations with people people want to learn
Speaker 1: more about. And so I think there is a broad
Speaker 1: expansion of what that is. That is a very selective definition,
Speaker 1: which is technical true, but also involves not having government
Speaker 1: actors be involved in said process. I actually think Ken
Speaker 1: Vogel reacted to it, and he said, I look forward
Speaker 1: to Jensaki's expose's about any of her former colleagues and
Speaker 1: funding of democratic apparatus. That's what actual journalism looks like.
Speaker 1: Otherwise you're just a partisan hack who is regurgitating something
Speaker 1: in a media info system. Do not confuse yourself with
Speaker 1: the other things. Well, she does something very clever there
Speaker 1: as the very effective propagandas that she actually is, which
Speaker 1: she seeks to like butter up Ben and the semaphore audience,
Speaker 1: not that I think he's buying, and the semaphore audience
Speaker 1: by being look at all of these platforms, of course,
Speaker 1: the whole range and spectrum. This is all journalism which
Speaker 1: exempts any scrutiny of the individual people who are conducting
Speaker 1: the work at these platforms. And yeah, if you are
Speaker 1: only focused on your quote unquote journalism to serve one side,
Speaker 1: like one portion the stablishment wing of the Democratic Party,
Speaker 1: your former boss, your former colleagues, et cetera, that's not journalism.
Speaker 1: That's continuing to be a partisan operative, basically continuing the
Speaker 1: role that you had at the White House just now
Speaker 1: on a supposed news outlet platform. Yeah. I mean, listen,
Speaker 1: the baseline of journalism you have to be willing to
Speaker 1: hold power to account, whether it's whatever party is in
Speaker 1: wherever you are looking. And she obviously fails that test,
Speaker 1: or at least has so far. So if Ken's hopes
Speaker 1: come true and we see the expose as from Jensaki
Speaker 1: exposing the corruption or whatever within the Biden administration, then
Speaker 1: we will change our tune here. It's bullshit, like it's
Speaker 1: just not going to happen. We all know it's not
Speaker 1: going to happen because we know where our bread is better. Yes,
Speaker 1: this is not someone that you know, some people go
Speaker 1: from journalism into a White House back into the world
Speaker 1: of journalism. That's already incredibly suspect. But this is someone
Speaker 1: who was a political operative her whole career, Like she's
Speaker 1: you know, that is what she does. She is a
Speaker 1: political operative on palf of the Democratic Party. There is
Speaker 1: no reason to that she is not still filling that
Speaker 1: key role over ATMSNBC. Now, absolutely correct, there's a horrific story.
Speaker 1: I don't know if you guys followed this out of
Speaker 1: Newport News Virginia, where a six year old brought a
Speaker 1: gun to school and shot his teacher. You know, my
Speaker 1: first thought was, like, I'm six years old, Like you
Speaker 1: probably didn't really know what he was doing. But apparently
Speaker 1: this kid had a very history of violent, aggressive, threatening
Speaker 1: behavior at the school, to the point where he was
Speaker 1: actually required to have a parent with him every single
Speaker 1: day at school. But there was no parent at school
Speaker 1: that day. A variety of people had warned they thought
Speaker 1: that he had a gun with him on that day.
Speaker 1: The school said they searched his backpack, they didn't find it,
Speaker 1: and then they didn't take any further action and he
Speaker 1: ends up shooting his teacher. Well, now we have an
Speaker 1: update in the case, which is the mother of that
Speaker 1: six year old child has now been indicted. Let's go
Speaker 1: ahead and put this up on the screen. Mother charge
Speaker 1: in case of Virginia six year old who shot teacher
Speaker 1: at school. She's been criminally charged in connection with the case.
Speaker 1: Deja Taylor, twenty five in Newport News is facing one
Speaker 1: count of felony child neglect and one misdemeanor count of
Speaker 1: recklessly leaving a firearm so as to endanger a child.
Speaker 1: The weapon the boy used in the incident belonged to
Speaker 1: the mother Taylor, authorities have said. They went on to
Speaker 1: say the Newport News Commonwealth's Attorney has asked a judge
Speaker 1: to and panel a special grand journey continue to investigate
Speaker 1: any security issues that might have contributed to the shooting,
Speaker 1: suggesting the conduct of administrators or others who allegedly failed
Speaker 1: to act after being warned the boy had a weapon
Speaker 1: would be further scrutinized. In addition to this, the teacher
Speaker 1: who was gravely wounded just spoke down in a recent interview.
Speaker 1: She is also taking action against the school for failing
Speaker 1: to protect her, protect other students and deal appropriately with
Speaker 1: this situation. Let's take a listen to a little of
Speaker 1: what she had to say. Once the firearm went off
Speaker 1: and then I felt some say that shock itself that
Speaker 1: I had been shot. I knew you had been shot. Yeah,
Speaker 1: that was pretty shocking itself, But I just wanted to
Speaker 1: get my babies out of there. What did the kids do? Say?
Speaker 1: They were screaming. I think they knew as well that
Speaker 1: they had to get out of there, but they were
Speaker 1: extremely frightened and screaming. The police chief said, after that,
Speaker 1: you had ensure that the kids got to a safe place,
Speaker 1: said your actions were heroic. Do you remember what were
Speaker 1: the next things that you did? That still kind of
Speaker 1: a blur got them out and I went to get
Speaker 1: help for myself. I knew why didn't not at the
Speaker 1: time that my lung had collapsed, but I started not
Speaker 1: being able to breathe, very rasty breaths, and my visions
Speaker 1: started going out. I remember I went to the office
Speaker 1: and I just passed out. Zwerner's attorney, Diane Tuscano, filed
Speaker 1: a notice of intent to sue school administrators, arguing that
Speaker 1: the Richnick administration failed to take action after it was
Speaker 1: warned three separate times that the boy had a gun
Speaker 1: with him the day that Zerner was shot. And it's
Speaker 1: not only that, let's put this Washington Post piece up
Speaker 1: on the screen. So on that day there seemed to
Speaker 1: have been failures to heed the warnings. It's in the
Speaker 1: Washing Posts they say how Rechnick Elementary failed to stop
Speaker 1: a six year old from shooting his teacher. They say,
Speaker 1: Abigail's Warner. That's the teacher was frustrated. It was January fourth,
Speaker 1: a six year old in her first grade class at
Speaker 1: rich Neck Elementary School had stolen her phone slammed it
Speaker 1: to the floor, apparently upset over a schedule change. According
Speaker 1: to text messages That's Warner sent to a friend, administrator,
Speaker 1: she wrote were faulting her for the situation. The six
Speaker 1: year old took my phone and smashed it on the ground,
Speaker 1: as Werner wrote in a text message obtained by The
Speaker 1: Washington Post, and the administration is blaming me. Two days later,
Speaker 1: the six year old told classmates at recon he was
Speaker 1: going to shoot Zwerner, show them a gun and its
Speaker 1: clip tucked into his jacket pocket, and threatened to kill
Speaker 1: them if they told anyone. According to an attorney for
Speaker 1: the family of a student who witnessed the threat, that afternoon,
Speaker 1: the six year old did as he promised, firing a
Speaker 1: bullet through Zerner's upraised hand and into her chest as
Speaker 1: she was midway through teaching a lesson. In addition, there
Speaker 1: were previous incidents that have been reported where he strangled someone,
Speaker 1: Where a girl that fell on the playground or dress
Speaker 1: came up, he was touching her and appropriately using throwing furniture,
Speaker 1: using furniture to bar that. I mean, this kid was
Speaker 1: a menace. I mean, I don't know what was going
Speaker 1: on with him, and the parents were supposed to be
Speaker 1: there at school and no one was there on that. Well, look,
Speaker 1: it's no six year old is born like that. You
Speaker 1: learn it from They don't get this behavior out of nowhere. Now,
Speaker 1: I don't doubt that the kid is disturbed as hell,
Speaker 1: maybe yeah, but you know, you also get disturbed a
Speaker 1: certain way, and almost certainly like a lot, especially when
Speaker 1: you hear about like really small children doing stuff that's
Speaker 1: really in a appropriate they almost always get it from home.
Speaker 1: So anyway, and that's based on long standing amounts of
Speaker 1: research in terms of child behavioral patterns. Also, clearly I
Speaker 1: think it's exactly the right charge to go after the mother, Yeah,
Speaker 1: because they're going after for reckless endangerment, for recklessly not
Speaker 1: handling a weapon properly. Be is a six year old child.
Speaker 1: Like at the end of the day, it's like your
Speaker 1: responsibility to care for all any gun owner, it is
Speaker 1: driven into your head. It's like the safety of this firearm,
Speaker 1: everything that happens to it is your responsibility as owner
Speaker 1: of this gun. And if you don't take responsibility for that,
Speaker 1: you will suffer the consequences. She deserves one hundred percent
Speaker 1: to suffer the consequences for what happened here and also
Speaker 1: the school. You're right, I mean, clearly they didn't take
Speaker 1: action in this way that they needed to, and they
Speaker 1: should have either had suspension or gone to great lengths
Speaker 1: to get in contact with the parents of the child
Speaker 1: to see why exactly this was happening. Refer for some
Speaker 1: sort of behavioral therapy or something. So yeah, it's a
Speaker 1: mess all the way around. Yeah, I agree with you,
Speaker 1: though charges of the mother here are entirely I'm glad
Speaker 1: to see it. Yeah, she absolutely deserves me held accountable
Speaker 1: for what she did. All right, guys, we'll see you soon.
Speaker 1: Very excited to be joined by Norman Finkelstein. He has
Speaker 1: authored a new book called I'll Burn that Bridge When
Speaker 1: I get to it. Heretical thoughts on identity, politics, cancel culture,
Speaker 1: and academic freedom. Let's get to it. Professer, welcome, great
Speaker 1: to have you. Thanks so much for having me. You
Speaker 1: were my you were my obsession during the burning campaign.
Speaker 1: Well that is easy there, fellow, very flattering intellectual and
Speaker 1: political obsession. I thought you were on the ball and
Speaker 1: you were the best during that period. It was very invigorating,
Speaker 1: energizing to watch your commentary during that period, and I
Speaker 1: should give it the form recognition. Of course, when I
Speaker 1: first heard your name, I thought, okay, she's got to
Speaker 1: be a flake, Crystal. You judge me prematurely, sir, that's correct,
Speaker 1: That's correct. And I start to watch the program and
Speaker 1: I started to tell everybody, you really have to watch
Speaker 1: Crystal Bolk, She's just the best. Well, thank you. That's
Speaker 1: unbelievably flattering. I really it means a lot to me
Speaker 1: coming from such an intellect as yourself, And the Bernie
Speaker 1: campaign is actually a good place to start with, Like,
Speaker 1: what do you make of his two successive campaigns? What
Speaker 1: do you make of the relative success of those campaigns
Speaker 1: given me, you know, utter decimation of the left in
Speaker 1: you know, most of my political lifetime. And what do
Speaker 1: you think are the particular rocks that it crashed into. Well,
Speaker 1: that's actually a big question. I'm going to try to
Speaker 1: summarize it briefly, and then you can pursue any line
Speaker 1: that seems relevant to you. The most important thing, excuse me,
Speaker 1: the most important aspect of the Berni campaign, in my opinion,
Speaker 1: is that it brought to a surface of political possibility
Speaker 1: that rarely that with rare exceptions, anybody thought was really
Speaker 1: a plausible political campaign. When I say almost rarely, with
Speaker 1: rare exceptions, that includes Bernie Sanders. When Bernie Sanders went
Speaker 1: out in twenty sixteen, his expectation was he was just
Speaker 1: going to do some stump speeches for his socialist agenda
Speaker 1: and then retire back into his home. And then he
Speaker 1: was totally shocked, as he said many times, that suddenly,
Speaker 1: like mushrooms after arranged, the huge numbers of people started
Speaker 1: to show up. And so what Bernie Sanders campaign demonstrate
Speaker 1: was that there's this huge potential out there for building
Speaker 1: a class based or class struggle political campaign and agenda.
Speaker 1: Bernie did a lot of I should say firstly about
Speaker 1: Bernie himself, as many people said, Bernie for fifty years
Speaker 1: has been saying the same thing, and of course there
Speaker 1: was a lot of truth to them. The thing was,
Speaker 1: it's not that Bernie caught up with the times. It
Speaker 1: was at the times caught up with Bernie Sanders. That
Speaker 1: is to say, in the nineteen seventies, the Bernie style
Speaker 1: politics had very relatively little resonance in the United States
Speaker 1: for the simple reason that the economy for most people,
Speaker 1: I would say for the overwhelming majority of people, the
Speaker 1: economy was functioning. Functioning meant that each generation had a
Speaker 1: reasonable expectation that it would live a better life than
Speaker 1: the generation that preceded it, And so Bernie espoused a
Speaker 1: socialist aquasi socialist agenda, but the times were not yet
Speaker 1: ripe for it. And if you go back to my generation,
Speaker 1: even in the Marxist writings of the time, you'll be surprised.
Speaker 1: I know you majored in economics, but I don't know
Speaker 1: how much you know about the history of Marxism in
Speaker 1: general or in US. In the United States, the main
Speaker 1: writings in the nineteen sixties about Marxism by the Mark
Speaker 1: just Left were about Marx's concept of alienation, meaning alienated
Speaker 1: from your job. The assumption was you would have a job.
Speaker 1: The assumption was you would have a nine to five job,
Speaker 1: five days a week, forty hours a week. You would
Speaker 1: get a pension, you would get vacation and self work.
Speaker 1: That was the assumption for our generation. The problem was
Speaker 1: most people felt alienated from their job. Most people felt
Speaker 1: unfulfilled by their job. Most people who were looking for
Speaker 1: meaningful work. So at that point people turned back to
Speaker 1: what was called the young marks not. The contrast was
Speaker 1: between the young marks and the mature marks. The young
Speaker 1: marks talked about alienation, alienation, so it resonated. But the
Speaker 1: marks that talked about capitalist crises, the marks that talked
Speaker 1: about the polarization of wealth, that had very very little resonance.
Speaker 1: Now beginning in the nineteen eighties, over a very long term,
Speaker 1: but nonetheless beginning in the Reagan era, a stagnation in
Speaker 1: wages set in and simultaneously a polarization of wealth. And
Speaker 1: so come twenty twenty, when Bernie sets out on the
Speaker 1: campaign trail, suddenly those tendencies which began in the early
Speaker 1: nineteen eighties, those tendencies had reached a critical point, critical mess,
Speaker 1: and people started resonating to the Bernie campaign. It took
Speaker 1: a while for those tendencies to unfold, but once they had, Bernie,
Speaker 1: as I said, his main importance, in my opinion, was
Speaker 1: he brought to the surface a class based agenda which
Speaker 1: now its time had come. I would say Bernie was
Speaker 1: quite sharp, acute in having clearly defined and these are
Speaker 1: not easy things. When I've been reading a lot of
Speaker 1: the old Marxist literature from the beginning of the twentieth
Speaker 1: century and one thing that's very striking when you read
Speaker 1: the literature is the difficulty in defining a political slogan. Now,
Speaker 1: it may seem to you perfectly obvious what a political
Speaker 1: slogan should be at any particular moment, but in fact
Speaker 1: that's one of the most difficult things in politics, to
Speaker 1: define the right slogan for the right moment, which will advance.
Speaker 1: Because and Bernie, it took him time, but he came
Speaker 1: up with the right slogans. It was very simple. Was
Speaker 1: Medicare for all, abolished student tuition, abolished student debt, a
Speaker 1: Green New Deal, and I think those for with the
Speaker 1: main There was one other, but it just slipped my mind,
Speaker 1: and so it was hugely successful. Now, I don't want
Speaker 1: to take up all your time, even though I said
Speaker 1: that question was brought. I want to just get to
Speaker 1: the second, the the second part, namely what went wrong.
Speaker 1: And I think first of all, we ought not to forget.
Speaker 1: And you, Crystal, will know better than anybody else because
Speaker 1: I watched you religiously during the Bernie campaign. You know
Speaker 1: more than anyone else will know how close Bernie came.
Speaker 1: In twenty twenty, I think that's all completely forgotten. Yeah,
Speaker 1: up until South Carolina. Up until South Carolina, it looked
Speaker 1: like he was going to win. People like James Carville
Speaker 1: and Chris Matthews were, you know, they were decomposing on
Speaker 1: screen in real time. They were becoming positively hysterical at
Speaker 1: the prospect of this Bernie victory. So were it not
Speaker 1: for South Carolina, now, I don't think South Carolina was inevitable,
Speaker 1: and I'm telling you things I know. You know, in
Speaker 1: the last week before that South Carolina primary, poles were
Speaker 1: showing that Bernie would win in South Carolina. It was
Speaker 1: at that point that the screws were turned on Jim Clyburn,
Speaker 1: who up to that point said he would sit out
Speaker 1: recommending any endorsing anyone in the South Carolina primary. The
Speaker 1: screws were turned on him. He endorsed Biden, and at
Speaker 1: that point, the exit polls right after the primary show
Speaker 1: that sixty percent of Blacks were influenced by that Clyburn endorsement.
Speaker 1: And then, as you know, right afterwards, Obama entered the
Speaker 1: same turned the screws on Pete Budachig and probably also
Speaker 1: any Klobynshar and so to speak, the rest is history.
Speaker 1: Had Bernie won in South Carolina, and as I said,
Speaker 1: it was kind of just the fluke that he lost.
Speaker 1: Had he one, then it was clear he would win
Speaker 1: Super Tuesday, and he had the nomination in his bag.
Speaker 1: And then you can go on to say, I think
Speaker 1: he probably would have destroyed Trump in the debates, and
Speaker 1: instead of between twenty sixteen and twenty twenty we sat
Speaker 1: through a Donald Trump presidency, it was pretty close that
Speaker 1: we would have sat through a Bernie Sanders presidency. Now
Speaker 1: I recognize that the moment he got the nomination, the
Speaker 1: whole ruling elite would have coordinated collaborate to stop Bernie,
Speaker 1: and that would have been a very big hurdle to pass. Question,
Speaker 1: they were good, The prospects were quite good for the
Speaker 1: Bernie campaign. Now, let me just get to the last part.
Speaker 1: What went wrong? My opinion, the main thing that went
Speaker 1: wrong is Bernie did not follow through on what he promised.
Speaker 1: Bernie was repeatedly asked during the campaign a simple question,
Speaker 1: mister Sanders, you possibly believe that you can get your
Speaker 1: agenda through Congress? And that was obviously a reasonable question,
Speaker 1: and Bernie always answered the same way. I thought his
Speaker 1: response was reasonable. He said, of course I can't get
Speaker 1: through it, get my agenda through Congress. The way Congress
Speaker 1: is currently structured, The only way I can get it
Speaker 1: through is I bring masses of people into the street.
Speaker 1: That you have to organize, educate people, and bring them
Speaker 1: out into the street. Just like during the Civil rights movement.
Speaker 1: You know, you have to commit civil disobedience, you have
Speaker 1: to be willing to go to jail. I think there
Speaker 1: were the young people, those who turned up for those
Speaker 1: twenty five thousand person rallies in all the major cities.
Speaker 1: I think the young people would have done it. You know,
Speaker 1: their future is at stake. They were ready for that,
Speaker 1: they were primed for that. But what happened once Bernie
Speaker 1: lost the campaign, He became what he had been for
Speaker 1: forty years. He became the gadfly in Congress again. He
Speaker 1: had to make a choice. The choice was very simple.
Speaker 1: It was the choice was if he wanted to have
Speaker 1: Biden's ear. If he wanted to have Biden's ear, he
Speaker 1: had to drop the idea of bringing young people into
Speaker 1: the streets, or people in general, but in particularly young
Speaker 1: people into the streets, because he knew Biden would then say,
Speaker 1: what the hell are you doing? What's doing with your revolution?
Speaker 1: This is Congress, what are you talking about? And so
Speaker 1: he had to make a choice between trying to influence
Speaker 1: as much as possible Biden behind closed doors, or using
Speaker 1: his platform in Congress with a Biden presidency to bring
Speaker 1: masses of people into the street and try to push
Speaker 1: through a radical agenda. He chose the first, and from
Speaker 1: there on in I think it was pretty much a disaster,
Speaker 1: and I think I'm deply disappointed in burning now, sometimes
Speaker 1: to the point of real visceral anger, the way he's
Speaker 1: conducted himself, say on the question of Ukraine, saying things
Speaker 1: like I trust Biden? Why would you trust Biden? Can
Speaker 1: you tell me something about his career in foreign policy
Speaker 1: that would cause you to trust him on foreign policy?
Speaker 1: What was he so great in the war in Vietnam?
Speaker 1: Was he great in the war in the wreck? Is
Speaker 1: his judgment so good? Was he was he great on Blincoln?
Speaker 1: And the fact that now Biden, excuse me, Bernie dismisses
Speaker 1: anybody who criticizes and he says, quote, who's paying you?
Speaker 1: What you have to be paid to be critical of
Speaker 1: the war in Ukraine? You have to be paid for saying, hey,
Speaker 1: sending over a hundred billion dollars to Ukraine without no checks,
Speaker 1: no balances, no oversight. There might be a problem there.
Speaker 1: You have to be paid to say, you have to
Speaker 1: be paid to think that. Well, maybe a lot of
Speaker 1: people who are quite conservative normally, like Johnniersheimer over at
Speaker 1: University of Chicago or Jeffrey Sachs. Okay, Jeffery sax is
Speaker 1: a liberal. But many people who are quite conservative say
Speaker 1: the United States provoked the war. Let me ask you this,
Speaker 1: let me hey, norm let me cut you off there,
Speaker 1: let me ask you this. Why couldn't Bernie have done
Speaker 1: both of those things? So, for example, one of the
Speaker 1: arguments I made is that when push came to shove
Speaker 1: and it looked like Bernie was going to drop out,
Speaker 1: he sat down with Joe Biden and it looked like
Speaker 1: he did a hostage video where he was endorsing Joe
Speaker 1: and saying, Joe, do you support Medica? Do you support
Speaker 1: fifteen dollar minimum wage? And Biden was like, yeah, oh yeah.
Speaker 1: Bernie asked for fifteen dominimum wage. This seemed very contrived,
Speaker 1: very fake. But why couldn't he have basically tried to
Speaker 1: have the ear of Joe Biden talked to him reasonably,
Speaker 1: say look here, my demands. If you want my endorsement,
Speaker 1: this is what you have to do. Here's like a
Speaker 1: list of executive orders or whatever, and give Joe Biden
Speaker 1: a chance, and then if he doesn't follow through, that's
Speaker 1: when you effectively call your people up to put some
Speaker 1: bodies in the streets. I feel like it's a little
Speaker 1: bit of a false choice to say he either could
Speaker 1: choose one or choose the other. I think he could
Speaker 1: have done both. I think you could have effectively tried
Speaker 1: to navigate within the system, and then if you don't
Speaker 1: get the results by wheeling and dealing and talking to
Speaker 1: Joe and making agreements, if you can't get the result,
Speaker 1: then you put the bodies in the streets. Don't you
Speaker 1: view that third option as a real possibility. Depend Look,
Speaker 1: I'm not a mind reader. Unlet sure I read. I
Speaker 1: don't bring on body language readers to figure out what's
Speaker 1: going on in people's heads. My assumption is that if
Speaker 1: that had been a real option for Bernie Sanders, and
Speaker 1: since he kept referring to our Revolution, and he titled
Speaker 1: his book on the campaign Our Revolution, and he raised
Speaker 1: young people in particular their expectations very high, I have
Speaker 1: to assume that unless he was a liar, which I
Speaker 1: find completely implausible. I have to assume that he weighed
Speaker 1: in his mind the possibility of bringing people into the
Speaker 1: street and how President Biden would react to that. And
Speaker 1: President Biden, he's a man who works in Congress. He's
Speaker 1: a person who has a very conventional approach to politics.
Speaker 1: He has obviously his allegiances to elites. And I think
Speaker 1: Bernie reached the conclusion, but I can't prove it. I
Speaker 1: just say, based on what one appeared, can deduce from
Speaker 1: his track record that he was an honest guy, he
Speaker 1: was a decent guy, and he is an honest guy
Speaker 1: and a decent guy. But he didn't think there was
Speaker 1: that third adoption. Otherwise, I can't, for the life of me,
Speaker 1: figure out why he didn't exercise that their adoption, especially
Speaker 1: since in the course of the campaign he kept saying,
Speaker 1: that's what I'm gonna do, you know, Arctic push through
Speaker 1: my agenda. I'm going to bring people into the streets. Now,
Speaker 1: you could say that was all rhetoric, that was all talk.
Speaker 1: He never intended to do it. Okay, that's a possibility,
Speaker 1: But assuming as I do, that he was speaking in
Speaker 1: good faith, my view was that he must have you know,
Speaker 1: got that. He used the expression I used earlier joining
Speaker 1: our pre pre conversation. He must have gotten that vibe.
Speaker 1: And he knows Biden. Biden's a personal family friend, as
Speaker 1: you know, he got that vibe. This is not going
Speaker 1: to work with Biden, and so he did. You know,
Speaker 1: Bernie has quite impressive levels of energy, and I'm sure
Speaker 1: behind the scenes he's doing everything he can to sway Biden.
Speaker 1: But in my view, that's very limited. It's very limited
Speaker 1: what you can do. There's a see I mean, we've
Speaker 1: really seen how limited that has been. In you know,
Speaker 1: you had build back Better. A lot of that was
Speaker 1: architect architected by Bernie to start with, and then there's
Speaker 1: like every week they would shoot some other critical piece
Speaker 1: of it in the in the head until Joe Manchin
Speaker 1: just says, no, we're going to kill the whole thing,
Speaker 1: and then everyone is delighted when you get anything through
Speaker 1: the Inflation Reduction Act. But I think we've seen very
Speaker 1: clearly the limits of the tactics that have been chosen
Speaker 1: for whatever reason they've been chosen. I want to get
Speaker 1: to some of the core of your book here, and
Speaker 1: you know, there's been this whole discussion. Lately. You mentioned
Speaker 1: you're on with Brionna Joy Gray partly sparked by a
Speaker 1: viral incident on her show where someone who was on
Speaker 1: the program to talk about how the left and their
Speaker 1: wokeism is destroying our children or families or something like that,
Speaker 1: and she was unable to define this term wokism, which
Speaker 1: has come to be the sort of umbrella term for
Speaker 1: the right wing to dispatch with anything that they don't like.
Speaker 1: You know, they blamed the Silicon Valley Bank collapse on
Speaker 1: wokism because they had like a gay person on the
Speaker 1: board or something like that. So I wonder if you
Speaker 1: could contrast the right wing obsession and use of the
Speaker 1: word woke and their own critique of identity politics with
Speaker 1: the critique of identity politics that you have. Well, I
Speaker 1: watched that, or at least I watched the reruns of
Speaker 1: that incident with Rihanna Joy Gray. In my opinion, she
Speaker 1: probably did act in good faith. Wasn't a gotcha moment,
Speaker 1: Oh no, she was just trying to define the term.
Speaker 1: I was a very very simple, straightforward question. You know,
Speaker 1: try to do that multiple times with multiple guests too,
Speaker 1: who people bring up wokeness. She's like, just tell me
Speaker 1: first what you mean by wokeness. That's totally sincere. Yeah. Oh,
Speaker 1: Brianna Joy Gray is a former corporate lawyer, so she
Speaker 1: goes defining terms. Is the first, you know, the first
Speaker 1: aspect of conversation or briefs. You have to define the terms. Okay.
Speaker 1: When that incident happened, it did cause me to reflect
Speaker 1: because a lot of the book was written in a
Speaker 1: manner of self discovery. I can't say I came into
Speaker 1: the book with a big concept and I was going
Speaker 1: to lay out the argument that had already been pre
Speaker 1: formulated in my mind. I worked through the argument as
Speaker 1: I was writing the book, and so when that question
Speaker 1: came up, I had to ask myself what do I
Speaker 1: mean by wokes Because I do use the term. Maybe
Speaker 1: the far right uses it also, But you'll remember, in
Speaker 1: my generation it was the left that coined the term
Speaker 1: political correctness or PC. It was a kind of self mockery.
Speaker 1: But then that PC was appropriated by the right. In
Speaker 1: this case, even if the right uses the term weocism,
Speaker 1: I'm perfectly at ease with it. But what do I
Speaker 1: mean by it? I would say wocism is basically three things.
Speaker 1: Number one, Wocism is the attempt by the Democratic Party
Speaker 1: to create a new base with the mass defection exiting
Speaker 1: of the white working class. In my generation, the base
Speaker 1: of the Democratic Party were white workers. It was the
Speaker 1: trade unions which were the real core of the Democratic Party,
Speaker 1: and the white working class in general, which had prospered
Speaker 1: in administrations beginning with FDR the New Deal, and so
Speaker 1: they were quite loyal, very loyal, not quite loyal, very
Speaker 1: loyal to the Democratic Party, even to the point. My
Speaker 1: brother tells a story that my father, who was a
Speaker 1: factory worker, my father once whispered into my brother, my
Speaker 1: elder brother's here, he said, always vote Democrat. Republicans off
Speaker 1: for rich people or Democrats for working people. That was
Speaker 1: the scene qua non of the Democratic Party, that the
Speaker 1: white working class bill. That changed, and a change actually
Speaker 1: quite quickly. If you ever had the chance, you should
Speaker 1: sit down and go and google Mario Cuomo, the father
Speaker 1: of Andrew Romo. Mario Cuomo, nineteen eighty four Democratic Party
Speaker 1: Convention and Cuomo's feat which was very famous. It was
Speaker 1: actually elegantly delivered, elegantly written and elegantly delivered. Wasn't this
Speaker 1: whole pay in to the working class the white working class,
Speaker 1: and that the Republicans with a party of the rich
Speaker 1: the leisure class. Well, that's obviously changed. There's been mass
Speaker 1: affections of the white working class from the Democratic Party,
Speaker 1: and the Democratic Party had to create a new base.
Speaker 1: And the base that chose was the identity politics space.
Speaker 1: If you look at the I watched closely on YouTube
Speaker 1: the Democratic Party convention in twenty sixteen and twenty twenty,
Speaker 1: and if you watch it, the working class is just
Speaker 1: barely mentioned. The only one who mentions the burly working
Speaker 1: class is AOC I think the second day of the convention,
Speaker 1: and that was about it. It was all taken up
Speaker 1: with various identities, biological identities. Who was the core and
Speaker 1: saw With Biden, he chooses a black female vice PRESI
Speaker 1: mention candate defens is, I'm going to nominate a black
Speaker 1: female Supreme Court justice. Then he chooses a black female,
Speaker 1: lesbian press secretary. That's where they're going, though. Biden is
Speaker 1: an interesting case. He's a more ambiguous case because clearly
Speaker 1: from the last State of the Union address, he's clearly
Speaker 1: trying to pitch his campaign, his next campaign to try
Speaker 1: to win some of that white working class. So the
Speaker 1: first aspect of wealth politics is the replacement of the
Speaker 1: white working class by the identity politics class or groups,
Speaker 1: not class groups. And number two, walth politics is the
Speaker 1: Democratic Party instrumentalizing identity politics in order to derail any
Speaker 1: class struggle or class based campaign. That's not speculative, that's
Speaker 1: not theoretical, that's factual. So if you take the high
Speaker 1: priests and high priestesses of identity politics, there is Tannahisi
Speaker 1: Coats attacking Bernie Sanders to being quote weak on the
Speaker 1: black reparations question. Then you have Angela Davis saying that
Speaker 1: Bernie is weak in conceptualizing racism. Then you have Kimberly
Speaker 1: Crenshaw telling The New York Times that the real action
Speaker 1: is not with these old white Jewish schmucks like Bernie Sanders.
Speaker 1: The real action is the corporations. It's Amazon, which now
Speaker 1: is honoring Black Lives Matter as honoring gay pride. That's
Speaker 1: where the revolutionary action now is, says Kimberly Crenshaw. And
Speaker 1: then you saw this very strange phenomenon, not strange, i
Speaker 1: should say, but very indicative fuck phenomenon. The New York
Speaker 1: Times is now the most woke institution on God's Earth.
Speaker 1: The characteristics that most the saline characteristics of New York
Speaker 1: Times during those campaign years where number one hyper hyper
Speaker 1: woke and number two hyper hyper anti Bernie as you
Speaker 1: were call Crystal. With the first half of the second campaign,
Speaker 1: Bernie was whited out of the Times, and then when
Speaker 1: he gained too much momentum despite the whiting out, then
Speaker 1: they start to go at him with a vengeance. Now
Speaker 1: that to me is a very telling fact. The most
Speaker 1: woke institution in the United States was also the most
Speaker 1: anti Bernie institution. Then you go to MSNBC, another hyper
Speaker 1: woke media outlet, which is also hyper anti Bernie, much
Speaker 1: more anti Bernie, incidentally than Fox News, which gave him
Speaker 1: a very warm kind reception. You had joy Read, as
Speaker 1: I mentioned earlier, bringing on a body language reader to
Speaker 1: prove that Bernie is a congenital liar. Then you have
Speaker 1: hyper hyper woke the view. And who's the hyper hyper
Speaker 1: hyper presence on the view. It's Whoopy Goldberg. And what
Speaker 1: does Whoopy do? She snarls at Bernie? When are you
Speaker 1: getting out of this race? Already? That was the moment
Speaker 1: of truth. All of these super woke radicals, the moment
Speaker 1: of truth. They all joined the Democratic Party to stop
Speaker 1: the Bernie locomotives. And that's number two. The identity politics
Speaker 1: has been weaponized to stop dead in its tracks, a
Speaker 1: class based politics. And number three three wokeness is a
Speaker 1: very convenient way for rich white liberals to have their
Speaker 1: cake and eat it. That is to say, to show
Speaker 1: how radical they are, to show how cutting edge they
Speaker 1: are without having to sacrifice any privilege, without having to
Speaker 1: pay any price. So everybody at Matha's vineyard, they all
Speaker 1: want Angela Davis to speak there so they can show
Speaker 1: how down with the hood they are. They're rubbing shoulders
Speaker 1: with Angela Davis. If you go to the web, you
Speaker 1: see a lecture that Angela Davis gave at the University
Speaker 1: of South Carolina. I was curious because Angela Davis was
Speaker 1: a real inspiration for me in my youth, so I
Speaker 1: tuned it in. What she's saying. Now, she's introduced by
Speaker 1: this southern bell with this beautiful shock of blonde hair,
Speaker 1: who is the second richest billionaire in South Carolina and
Speaker 1: the second richest billionaire only half jokingly gives a talk
Speaker 1: about how she and Angela have so much in common. Well,
Speaker 1: that's true, how she and Angela have so much in common.
Speaker 1: That's these woke people who get to pretend to be
Speaker 1: so radical and cutting edge without having to make any sacrifice.
Speaker 1: Now you will not remember unless you have a memory
Speaker 1: reaching back to before conception. In the most literal sense.
Speaker 1: There was a famous incident in the nineteen sixties when
Speaker 1: the Black Panthers were being hounded by the government. Leonard Bernstein,
Speaker 1: who was a kind of Martha's Vineyard liberal, invites the
Speaker 1: Black Panthers to his home, and all the famous people
Speaker 1: on the left, what we called back then the radical Sheikh,
Speaker 1: attended this sore at Bernstein's home, and then along came
Speaker 1: this journalist named Tom wolf He attended the event. Wolfe
Speaker 1: was on the right end of the spectrum, and he
Speaker 1: wrote this absolutely scathing send up of that soiree, and
Speaker 1: it really was so humiliating to those who attended, not
Speaker 1: least mister Bernstein, and I personally have to say, when
Speaker 1: you read Tom Wolfe's book, it's to use a word
Speaker 1: from your generation, it's really cringe powerful. Leonard Bernstein giving
Speaker 1: the high fire to the Panthers. But you could say,
Speaker 1: in defense of Bernstein, that was an unpopular thing to do,
Speaker 1: getting him in trouble. But now when they're rich and
Speaker 1: the famous in Martha's vineyard, they hang out with Angela.
Speaker 1: Is there any price paid? Is there any sacrifice? Now?
Speaker 1: You might say to me, okay, norm we're not martyrs.
Speaker 1: We on the left. We don't, you know, have any
Speaker 1: kind of desire to be nailed to the cross. So
Speaker 1: I don't accept your standard, to which I say, I
Speaker 1: don't agree. I think part of being on the left
Speaker 1: has always been, until recently, it's always been willingness to
Speaker 1: make a sacrifice. I was just reading last night Rose
Speaker 1: of Luxembourg's letters. So Rose of Luxemburg, who was a
Speaker 1: Titanic personality, probably the most impressive personality and the whole
Speaker 1: history of mar to socialism. She spent many times in jail,
Speaker 1: and actually she spent almost the whole of World War
Speaker 1: One in jail. And at one point she's given the
Speaker 1: jail sentence and she's out on her own recognizance, and
Speaker 1: some people say, you know, maybe, Rosa, you should jump
Speaker 1: out and get the hell out of there, you know,
Speaker 1: because you've been in jail enough. And she was a
Speaker 1: physically very frail woman. And she replied to one correspondent,
Speaker 1: if you allow me to just read it's just one
Speaker 1: paragraph that there are comrades who can assume I would
Speaker 1: flee Germany because of the prison sentence. I could be
Speaker 1: quite amused by that if it were not at the
Speaker 1: same time rather saddening. Dear young friend, she's talking to
Speaker 1: a young man or correspondent. Dear young friend, I assure
Speaker 1: you that I would not flee even if I were
Speaker 1: threatened by the gallows. And that is so for the
Speaker 1: simple reason that I consider it absolutely necessary to accustom
Speaker 1: our party to the idea that sacrifices are part of
Speaker 1: a socialist work in life, that they are simply a
Speaker 1: matter of course. You are right, long live the struggle
Speaker 1: that was the inspiration from my generation. And then when
Speaker 1: I see, on the one hand, all of these you know,
Speaker 1: phony identity politics radicals, Judith Butler announces in twenty twenty,
Speaker 1: as if it were the Paris Commune, as if it
Speaker 1: were the Bolshevik Revolution, as if it were the Chinese Revolution,
Speaker 1: as though it were the civil rights movement. She announces,
Speaker 1: I am here with changing my pronouns to they them.
Speaker 1: You know, I was talking about the difference between how
Speaker 1: leftists have a critique of identity politics or wocism versus
Speaker 1: the right wing critique. And oftentimes, you know, the way
Speaker 1: I see it is very similar to how you see it.
Speaker 1: You won't be surprised to learn, which is that this
Speaker 1: is sort of like a roadblock thrown up in the
Speaker 1: way of any sort of more fundamental or class based change.
Speaker 1: The right portrays it as actually, in and of itself,
Speaker 1: this very radical transformation, and they like to claim that
Speaker 1: this is a next evolution of Marxism. They'll explicitly tie
Speaker 1: it in with Marxist thought. And I wonder what your
Speaker 1: view of that is. Well, the most obvious reason it's not. Actually,
Speaker 1: it's just the reverse of Marxist thought. I don't want
Speaker 1: to make a fetish of Marxist thought. To be perfectly candid,
Speaker 1: and I see no reason why not to be perfectly candid.
Speaker 1: I've read very little of marx in the last thirty years.
Speaker 1: I read voraciously as a young man, but I passed
Speaker 1: that stage for bever or or for worse, and I've
Speaker 1: read very little of it. But one thing you could
Speaker 1: say for certain a marx analysis always began, or essential
Speaker 1: aspect of it was class. Now, Marxism was never indifferent
Speaker 1: or unaware of non class issues. When you read the
Speaker 1: literature from back then, I'm talking about the late nineteenth
Speaker 1: to the mid part of the twentieth century, there was
Speaker 1: a rich debate about what was called the woman question,
Speaker 1: what was called the Negro question, what was called the
Speaker 1: Jewish question. Within the Marxist movement or Socialist movement. Forget
Speaker 1: about Marxim now Socialist movement, there was always a recognition
Speaker 1: that there were certain questions women, Blacks, Jews that was
Speaker 1: not reducible to class, that they had aspects it had,
Speaker 1: they had aspects which were in over that went past class,
Speaker 1: overflowed class, over flowed class. However, if you considered yourself
Speaker 1: a person of the left, there was a recognition that
Speaker 1: class was the fundamental political issue, not the only one,
Speaker 1: but the fundamental issue. Now you look at the identity politics.
Speaker 1: What identity politics did was it appropriated the questions, the
Speaker 1: women question, the Negro question, the Jewish question. It appropriated
Speaker 1: the questions and the locked off the class. If you
Speaker 1: read Abram x. Kendy, there are a couple of passing phrases,
Speaker 1: a couple of passing phrases referring to class. If you
Speaker 1: read Robin DeAngelo, a couple of stray fragments pertaining to class.
Speaker 1: Class has been locked off except in one critical sense,
Speaker 1: and probably for the exponents of identity politics the most
Speaker 1: or close to their heart sense. They want to be
Speaker 1: part of, to use the language of, to use the
Speaker 1: language of the one percent. They want that one percent
Speaker 1: to include a proportional representation of, for example, women of
Speaker 1: African Americans. They want to have their seat at the
Speaker 1: ruling class table. That's the aspect of class which they're
Speaker 1: very cognizant of. And so and now to tell you something,
Speaker 1: Crystal and Kyle, it's actually a realistic expectation. You know,
Speaker 1: because of this huge chasm that's opened up between the
Speaker 1: so called ninety nine percent and the one percent in
Speaker 1: terms of income, it's very possible for the ruling elites
Speaker 1: to bring in, absorb some numbers of these identities and
Speaker 1: basically pay them off in huge sums. I mean, we're
Speaker 1: talking about lots of money. Jeff Bezos, as you recall,
Speaker 1: he gave Obama one hundred million dollars. He gave Van
Speaker 1: Jones one hundred million dollars. Jack Dorsey gave Ebram x
Speaker 1: Kendy ten million dollars. That's not small change. You know,
Speaker 1: in my day, there used to be a programmer, a
Speaker 1: drama and drama series on TV was called The Millionaire.
Speaker 1: And the conceit of this weekly drama was there's this
Speaker 1: very very rich philanthropist as they're called, we called them,
Speaker 1: you know, capitalist pigs, but okay, philanthropists. And each week
Speaker 1: he would give out to some do gooding, nondescript person
Speaker 1: a million dollars. There's this guy, Mark Anthony in the film,
Speaker 1: his name was in the series, and he had this
Speaker 1: white envelope and the last scene in each of the
Speaker 1: weekly dramas of this weekly drama series, he would take
Speaker 1: out the white envelope from the folder and give it
Speaker 1: to this recipient, this very decent recipient. And we watched
Speaker 1: that series in our hearts left a million dollars. A
Speaker 1: million dollars. A million dollars was like going to Pluto
Speaker 1: and back. It was an uninconceivable skill, an inconceivable sum. Now,
Speaker 1: I admit for inflation, as I said, I know you've
Speaker 1: got your degree in economics, so I'll admit for inflation,
Speaker 1: but one hundred million dollars is something altogether different, correct,
Speaker 1: But they can hand out that money now because of
Speaker 1: this fantastic polarization of wealth in our society. They can
Speaker 1: hand out one hundred million here, ten million here, and
Speaker 1: then they just bring all these people on board. Does
Speaker 1: it rock the boat? Well, nobody or very few people
Speaker 1: bite the hand that feeds them. Why is Pizos giving
Speaker 1: out that money? You know why? It's called a life
Speaker 1: insurance policy? Because Bezos is smart enough to know at
Speaker 1: some point there's going to be a national option by
Speaker 1: Amazon workers. It may not be this week, it may
Speaker 1: not be next week, it may not be next month,
Speaker 1: but it seems pretty much inevitable. And so I'll ask
Speaker 1: you to guests, on which side will Obama be when
Speaker 1: there's a general strike of Amazon workers? On which side?
Speaker 1: On which side will Van Jones be? On which side
Speaker 1: will Abram X can they be? I think that's pretty obvious. Yeah.
Speaker 1: To sum your point up, you need organizational and structural change.
Speaker 1: You don't want to like welcome a diverse flow of
Speaker 1: people into the top one percent. The point is to
Speaker 1: take power away from the top one percent. And when
Speaker 1: you were talking, it reminded me of MSNBC. I remember
Speaker 1: them celebrating the diversification of the military industrial complex, where
Speaker 1: they were bragging that like this new CEO of Raythian
Speaker 1: or whatever was a woman, and it was like all
Speaker 1: female leaders for the terry industrial coll and they're celebrating
Speaker 1: that fact is if that's anything to celebrate, It's like,
Speaker 1: we don't care about the faces you put on the
Speaker 1: death machine makers. We just don't want you to use
Speaker 1: the death machines to kill like you many babies. But
Speaker 1: to get back to one of the main points you
Speaker 1: were talking about there, I feel like we're having two
Speaker 1: separate conversations. On the one hand, there's the conversation about
Speaker 1: define woke, what is woke, what's a right wing critique
Speaker 1: of wocism versus a left wing critique of wokeism. And
Speaker 1: then a lot of our conversation thus far has been
Speaker 1: focused on identity politics, which I view as a slightly
Speaker 1: different thing. My definition of wokeism is authoritarianism in service
Speaker 1: of perceived social justice. So, for example, you got some
Speaker 1: conservative speaker going to give you a speech out on
Speaker 1: a college campus, Ben Shapiro, whoever it might be, and
Speaker 1: then you have a bunch of people who protest and say,
Speaker 1: you know, you're not going to give your speech here
Speaker 1: because you're a fascist or whatever. You sort of deplatform somebody.
Speaker 1: When I think of wokeness, that's what I think. I
Speaker 1: think of things along along those lines, authoritarianism in service
Speaker 1: of perceived social justice. But how do we I feel
Speaker 1: like in today's day and age, as you know, and
Speaker 1: I'm a very strong critic of wokeness myself, But at
Speaker 1: the same time I want to sort of balance that
Speaker 1: with the fact that the right does call everything they
Speaker 1: don't like woke and they wage a war against it.
Speaker 1: And then also you do have a massive increase in
Speaker 1: recent years, led by Ron de Santis in Florida and
Speaker 1: in you know, many other red states across the country,
Speaker 1: this massive rise hundreds of like anti trans bills, for example,
Speaker 1: the bird not burning excuse me, the banning of books.
Speaker 1: There's been eight hundred books that have been banned in Texas,
Speaker 1: six hundred books that have been banned in Florida. And
Speaker 1: so what you see there is I would categorize it
Speaker 1: as like a right wing version of wokeness. It's like
Speaker 1: right wing authoritarianism where they're doing authoritarianism in service of
Speaker 1: their perceived social justice needs. Right like, they think it's
Speaker 1: social justice to get rid of the books they don't like.
Speaker 1: You know what I'm saying. So how do we balance
Speaker 1: number one, doing a genuine left wing critique of wokeness
Speaker 1: to say, hey, guys, we should focus on class consciousness
Speaker 1: first and foremost, like do that while also not feed
Speaker 1: into the framework of the right and like accidentally assist
Speaker 1: them in their totally disingenuous crusade against wokeness by which
Speaker 1: they define it as everything they don't like. Well, you
Speaker 1: know what, Kyle, that's an excellent question, and I don't
Speaker 1: think there's an easy answer to it. Obviously, morality evolves,
Speaker 1: social morase evolves, and that there's going to inevitably be
Speaker 1: a resistance to what, in retrospect was clearly a necessary
Speaker 1: evolution and transformation in social values and morals in general.
Speaker 1: I'm old enough to remember when, up until nineteen seventy three,
Speaker 1: almost sexuality was defined by the American Psychological as Association
Speaker 1: as a mental disorder. I'm old enough to remember that
Speaker 1: a woman who aspired to a large number of jobs.
Speaker 1: These are all memories which you know, maybe for you
Speaker 1: they sound strange, but they're vivid for me. In the
Speaker 1: employment sections of the newspapers. In the employment sections of
Speaker 1: the newspapers, the headings were women men. There was no
Speaker 1: consciousness of that being odd or aberrant, let alone retrograde.
Speaker 1: There were specific jobs allotted for on the employment page
Speaker 1: to women and to men. And I'm not going to
Speaker 1: bore you by going through the ten thousand ways in
Speaker 1: which our society has evolved, and I think through what
Speaker 1: consensus is, with marginal exceptions, it has evolved for the better.
Speaker 1: So to the extent that what you quote right wing
Speaker 1: wocism or the right wing right wing denunciation of wocism
Speaker 1: is acting as an impediment to the positive transformation of
Speaker 1: our society, I of course agree it has to be
Speaker 1: resisted and foot the problem as I see it is
Speaker 1: twofold number one. A lot of these questions that have
Speaker 1: come up are not clear cut. In my opinion that
Speaker 1: if you examine, for example, if you examine closely as
Speaker 1: I have, and I write about it some length in
Speaker 1: the book, if you examine the abortion question, I do
Speaker 1: not believe that the question of abortion is as clear
Speaker 1: cut as liberals woke people the New York Times Matha's
Speaker 1: Vineyar type would make it out to be. And I
Speaker 1: do not believe it's correct to write off anybody who
Speaker 1: might have qualms on that question as being some right
Speaker 1: winged yahoo, religious fanatic or bigot. Well, certainly, just to
Speaker 1: cut you off for a sec there, certainly there's some
Speaker 1: gray area, but there are some things that go way
Speaker 1: too far correct, like Mike Pence talking about a national
Speaker 1: abortion ban, you know, or some states they just tried
Speaker 1: to ban the abortion pill, which would even hurt women
Speaker 1: who get miscarriages for example. I agree with you that
Speaker 1: there's some gray area, but some positions are far too
Speaker 1: extreme right, like overturning Roe versus Wad for example. Listen,
Speaker 1: I totally agree, but I wish that your opinion could
Speaker 1: be articulate in the form that acknowledges the gray areas
Speaker 1: and not writing everybody who disagrees with you as being
Speaker 1: some sort of antidiluvian in the So. Yeah, but I
Speaker 1: didn't do I didn't call them Similarly. I think there
Speaker 1: are legitimate questions about the the trans issue I'm gonna
Speaker 1: speak about in very broad terms. Now, let me be clear.
Speaker 1: Let me be clear. I am with Chairman Mau Sudung
Speaker 1: who famously said in his report on the uprising in
Speaker 1: Hunan Province, which I'm shocked that you don't know that
Speaker 1: chairman wrote, no investigation, no right to speak, that is
Speaker 1: to say, to translate into current language, which I hope
Speaker 1: you can err in this program. If you don't know
Speaker 1: what the fuck you're talking about, then shut the fuck up.
Speaker 1: So I admit I'm not knowledgeable because I think it
Speaker 1: requires a deep knowledge of science, biology, and medicine to
Speaker 1: speak on these subjects like the trans phenomenon. But I
Speaker 1: find it deeply troubling when people who have no medical
Speaker 1: knowledge whatsoever, no scientific knowledge whatsoever at most took high
Speaker 1: school biology speak. It's such authority on these subjects, as
Speaker 1: if anybody who disagrees has to be some sort of
Speaker 1: redneck or Yahoo. But those are the people trying to
Speaker 1: ban it right. Those are the ones who are making
Speaker 1: claims that they have no idea what they're talking about.
Speaker 1: I think when I hear people speak authoritatively about gender
Speaker 1: fluidity about there aren't two sexes, or to listen to
Speaker 1: Amy Goodman speak about people who get pregnant, or listen
Speaker 1: to AOC say people who menstruweight, well, I think reasonable
Speaker 1: people can say that says a ridiculous statement, as saying
Speaker 1: there hasn't been climate change. It falls into the same
Speaker 1: lunatic but who's actually legislating, who's legislating this stuff. You
Speaker 1: have people trying to ban of treatment up till age
Speaker 1: twenty six. That seems like it's an overstep. Some people
Speaker 1: might use some goofy language, but at least they're not
Speaker 1: trying to legislate, you know, trans people out of existence,
Speaker 1: whereas you do see that from the right. I will,
Speaker 1: for the moment, I'm not talking about the legislation, legislative issue,
Speaker 1: I'm talking that's what matters well, But I'm talking about
Speaker 1: the public conversation, which dismisses. You refer to the authoritarian
Speaker 1: tendency among woke people the real I'm I'm saying the
Speaker 1: liberal left book, okay, not the right wing vote. You
Speaker 1: refer to authoritarian tendencies, and I think one of those
Speaker 1: authoritarian tendencies is to pretenden is if these questions are
Speaker 1: black and white, transparent, if you don't agree with us,
Speaker 1: and you're some sort of yahoo or redneck, I don't
Speaker 1: think that's true. Now, I fell admit because I lived
Speaker 1: through it. I lived through it. I fully admit that
Speaker 1: many beliefs which we took for granted when I was
Speaker 1: growing up, of which I illustrate just a couple of
Speaker 1: moments ago, those beliefs were completely overturned. I recognize that.
Speaker 1: Remember in my generation, I mean this literally literally L
Speaker 1: T E R A L Y. Literally, you couldn't imagine
Speaker 1: gay marriage. It was not a concept that could even
Speaker 1: be conceived, let alone legislating. It was a concept that
Speaker 1: was not You couldn't process an idea like that. So
Speaker 1: I recognize that many ideas which are controversial today may
Speaker 1: turn out to be uncontroversial in the future. However, I
Speaker 1: would enter this stipulation since you talked about the issue
Speaker 1: of legislating in the nineteen twenties, a century ago, all
Speaker 1: progressives and radicals, among all progressives and radicals really bar none.
Speaker 1: You know, it was all the rage. All the rage
Speaker 1: was eugenics. Eugenics the scientific application to human breeding. And
Speaker 1: listen to this. Do you know who was the only
Speaker 1: one who opposed this idea of eugenics, the only one?
Speaker 1: It was deeply religious Catholics and Christians who believed that
Speaker 1: every child was born in God's image and that we
Speaker 1: should be equally loving and caring of all of God's children.
Speaker 1: So eugenics was the cause of progressives and radicals even
Speaker 1: on the Supreme Court. As you might know, the famous
Speaker 1: case was Buck v. What was the Buck case but v.
Speaker 1: Company the bookcase where a woman was she heard they
Speaker 1: said her mother was mentally defective, and they said her
Speaker 1: children were mentally defective. And there was the issue of
Speaker 1: tying her tubes, not allowing her to have any more
Speaker 1: children in the name of eugenics. On our Supreme Court,
Speaker 1: every judge, every judge, justice, every justice except one, every
Speaker 1: justice voted for uh tying her tubes. The famous verdict
Speaker 1: delivered by Oliver It was Buck Buckley Bell, Buckley Bell.
Speaker 1: The famous verdict delivered by Oliver Wendell Holmes, which I
Speaker 1: suspect you have heard, you're aware of, was three generations
Speaker 1: of imbeciles are enough. Three generations of imbeciles are enough.
Speaker 1: That verdict was endorsed by the most liberal member of
Speaker 1: the court, Lewis Brandeis. Yeah, scientific race was used by
Speaker 1: the right and the left. It was the common perspective
Speaker 1: at the time, and it was dead wrong. And by
Speaker 1: the way that eugenics and scientific racism, it wasn't scientific
Speaker 1: at all, that helped birth the Nazi movement. So I
Speaker 1: take your point, but hold on my point is the
Speaker 1: right does that cock sureness too on these social issues
Speaker 1: like trans things or whatever, and they legislate against whole
Speaker 1: groups of people, whereas on the left, Yeah, they might
Speaker 1: have some goofy language sometimes, but at least they're saying
Speaker 1: live and let live, and they're not trying to pass
Speaker 1: legislation banning transphobes, for example, or banning you know, outdated language.
Speaker 1: I don't see a parody here. I see the right
Speaker 1: actually cracking down legislatively on whole groups of people, and
Speaker 1: I see the left sometimes being a little silly, dyeing
Speaker 1: their hair purple and using some silly language. I can
Speaker 1: quite agree with you, the ar Kyle. Look, well, where
Speaker 1: am I wrong? Okay, I'm going to get to that,
Speaker 1: and I'm gonna say I'm speaking good faith because I
Speaker 1: could see you quite obviously are speaking in good faith.
Speaker 1: So I want to have a amicable exchange of opinions
Speaker 1: and we can also end up agreeing to disagree on
Speaker 1: college campuses, which have become strong calls of this wocism.
Speaker 1: There is a lot of taboos now on what you
Speaker 1: can and can say. There are a lot of taboos
Speaker 1: about uses of pronouns. There are a lot of taboos
Speaker 1: about what can now that's legislated. Admittedly it's legislate at
Speaker 1: a college level and not at a federal or state level.
Speaker 1: But there is a lot of stifling, suffocating speech discourse
Speaker 1: on college campuses right now. I, for one, I'll be
Speaker 1: honest with you, I will not call a person. They
Speaker 1: then I will not. I refuse. You want to call
Speaker 1: you by your name? Fine, but they then that's a
Speaker 1: bridge too far from me. I'm not going there now.
Speaker 1: I'm sure Crystal's thinking, well, you know, no, I mean
Speaker 1: you're around in another hundred years, which obviously you won't be.
Speaker 1: Everybody might be referred to as Day. Then yeah, that's
Speaker 1: a possibility, And I say, I have to be open
Speaker 1: to that possibility, but I'm not doing it. And there
Speaker 1: are a lot of things. There is a very serious,
Speaker 1: a very seriously stifling atmosphere on university and college campuses now,
Speaker 1: and I think it's disingenuous. And I'm not saying you're
Speaker 1: being disingenuous because you limited yourself to legislation, but I
Speaker 1: think it is very disingenuous. Allow me, allow me one
Speaker 1: last year, during the Katanji Brown Jackson hearing, at one
Speaker 1: point Ted Cruz who's a kind of you know, psycho
Speaker 1: pervert head. Cruise picks up. He starts denouncing Ibrahim X
Speaker 1: Candy's book Anti Racism, you know how to raise an
Speaker 1: anti racist baby? And I'll tell you I've gone through
Speaker 1: Abrahm x Candy in my current book. You'll know I
Speaker 1: devote a hundred pages to his books. They're really comics.
Speaker 1: But let's go in books. I go through it line
Speaker 1: by line. I'm with Ted Kruz there, he's a complete idiot,
Speaker 1: He's an embecile. I don't think that should be taught
Speaker 1: in college. I don't think that you be taught in
Speaker 1: grade school, high school, college. No, that to me, That
Speaker 1: to me is a complete corruption. It's a corruption of language,
Speaker 1: it's a corruption of thought. And I'm old fashioned enough
Speaker 1: to believe in brace yourself standards because I respect my students.
Speaker 1: You know what respect my students means. I want them
Speaker 1: to be able to compete on the level playing field
Speaker 1: out in the real world. I want them to have
Speaker 1: a chance in life. Close this garbage on them. You
Speaker 1: are diminishing their chances to compete out there in the
Speaker 1: real world. So it is it's not my view that
Speaker 1: I'll just speak for myself, it's not my view that
Speaker 1: you know, the woke vein on the left liberal side
Speaker 1: has been inconsequential or you know, irrelevant. I think it's
Speaker 1: been incredibly I think it has stifled descent. I think
Speaker 1: everything you're speaking to there is real. But what I
Speaker 1: do get concerned about, especially recently, is that when there's
Speaker 1: only a discussion of the authoritarian tendencies on the left,
Speaker 1: it sort of masks some of the even more aggressive
Speaker 1: legislative authoritarian tactics on the right. And so that was
Speaker 1: the piece that I was interested in teasing out here
Speaker 1: because you know, when you have And the other thing
Speaker 1: I would say is liberal tendencies dominate university spaces and
Speaker 1: a lot of news organization. I don't think there's any
Speaker 1: doubt about that. But I think there are similar codes
Speaker 1: of conduct and things you're allowed to say or not say,
Speaker 1: and sort of you know, authoritary crackdowns and speech in
Speaker 1: conservative environments as well in right wing environments where they're
Speaker 1: you know, for example, you can't acknowledge that Joe Biden
Speaker 1: won the election of some basic facts of you know,
Speaker 1: things about COVID might be off limits. So I'm not
Speaker 1: sure that that it's a phenomenon that's exclusively on the
Speaker 1: left either. It's just that the liberal liberal control of
Speaker 1: universities is almost universal. Look, I agree with both of you.
Speaker 1: I don't want there to be any misconstrued at the
Speaker 1: end of this interview that you're not raising real issues
Speaker 1: and you're not making coaching solid points. I agree with
Speaker 1: the both of you. Let me just then read. Let
Speaker 1: me then just state I wrote the book for the left.
Speaker 1: I wrote the book because I wanted to make a
Speaker 1: statement to the new generations about what's you know, which
Speaker 1: way to go forward? Yeah, and I have enough experience
Speaker 1: from the nineteen sixties where I did a lot of
Speaker 1: very stupid things. Well, that's actually I want to ask
Speaker 1: you about that piece. Just want to say, Yeah, I
Speaker 1: didn't write the book about the right, and I don't
Speaker 1: even claim I was making a comprehensive picture. I was
Speaker 1: writing the book as a person of the left. Yeah,
Speaker 1: who starting concern about certain tendencies which King rolls to
Speaker 1: the surface in a very striking way during the two
Speaker 1: Bernie Sanders campaigns, where I saw a lot of hope,
Speaker 1: a lot of promise, and I saw a lot of sabotage,
Speaker 1: and I saw a lot of sabotage and the book
Speaker 1: is about the sabotage. Well, yeah, the last thing I
Speaker 1: wanted to get from you, and Kyle can close with
Speaker 1: whatever he wants, is are you actually hopeful? Because you
Speaker 1: do teach young people and interact with them all the time,
Speaker 1: and you know, wanted to write the book for to
Speaker 1: sort of lay on some of the pitfalls that you
Speaker 1: see ahead. Are you hopeful that the zoomers may actually
Speaker 1: take up the mandle mantle of class politics because they're
Speaker 1: economic opportunities been really stifled. You see, you know, you
Speaker 1: see pronouns, and you see plenty of woke stuff in
Speaker 1: gen Z as well, but you also see the Starbucks
Speaker 1: labor movement, and you also see the Amazon labor union,
Speaker 1: and you see support for candidates like Bernie Sanders. So
Speaker 1: what direction do you see that generation going in right now? Look,
Speaker 1: there's a lot of grounds for hope. I was in
Speaker 1: the nineteen sixties and I passed through the Bernie campaign.
Speaker 1: I took the bus rides, as I said, every six months,
Speaker 1: we went to Washington, joined the war anti war movement. Well,
Speaker 1: part of joining the Bernie campaign was I went on
Speaker 1: the buses out of state to knock on doors and
Speaker 1: try to recruit people to vote for Bernie. You know
Speaker 1: what struck me. What struck me was this new generation
Speaker 1: was much more serious than my own. First of all,
Speaker 1: on the buses. In my generation, everybody's passing around the
Speaker 1: joints and there was it was a highly sexualized atmosphere
Speaker 1: on the bus. Not this time. People were so sober.
Speaker 1: You know, those burning recruiters, half of whom were women.
Speaker 1: Actually probably at sixty percent were women. That's why the
Speaker 1: comment by Glorious Stein, it was so disgusting. She's a
Speaker 1: sack of shit, she always was. But to say that
Speaker 1: the women only went to the demonstrations for the boys,
Speaker 1: I mean, you have to be a real you have
Speaker 1: to be you know, in the old world, you have
Speaker 1: to be a real airhead to make a comment like that,
Speaker 1: she's an airhead. And so there was a lot of
Speaker 1: seriousness during the George Floyd demonstrations. I went. I was
Speaker 1: the only one over thirty, literally literally the only one.
Speaker 1: Why because it was in the middle of COVID, so
Speaker 1: older people were afraid to go and join the crowds.
Speaker 1: I didn't give it them. I went. I joined the crowd.
Speaker 1: I went every day to the point where some of
Speaker 1: the young people would say, yeah, you don't hear again,
Speaker 1: and I said, I'm here every night. I was usually
Speaker 1: seven o'clock at Barkley Center in Brooklyn. We went in
Speaker 1: any case. What struck me was the naturalness, the authenticity
Speaker 1: of the relations between the white and black people who
Speaker 1: were between white and black demonstras. In my day, if
Speaker 1: you were white and you went to a demonstration and
Speaker 1: sport of the Black Panthers or something like that, it
Speaker 1: was always tinged with the nobless oblige because we really
Speaker 1: were privileged, we were white. It was a good era
Speaker 1: to live financially economically, or was the radical chic you know,
Speaker 1: these white young women saying my brothers and sisters. You know,
Speaker 1: it was all just so crap. It was like at
Speaker 1: Robin DeAngelo, you know. But nowadays, because there has been
Speaker 1: a relative homogenization of the working class, relative homogenization, well,
Speaker 1: whites are doing White young people, if they're coming out
Speaker 1: of the public university system, they're doing one notch better
Speaker 1: than blacks economically. They're living together. That was unthinkable my day.
Speaker 1: You know. Nowadays I talk to young people their roommates,
Speaker 1: one roommate, if it's a white person, one roommate is black,
Speaker 1: one roommate to lesbian. One room is this that or
Speaker 1: the other. You know, they're because housing is you know,
Speaker 1: it's difficult to find housing, so beggars can't be choosers.
Speaker 1: And if you have three people and you need a
Speaker 1: fourth to make that month's rent, you're gonna take anybody
Speaker 1: who comes along, So they know each other personally, and
Speaker 1: that's real warmth. As I said, one of the wonderful
Speaker 1: things about teaching now in Cuny. The classes consist of
Speaker 1: all working class kids and first gener generation immigrant kids
Speaker 1: in the Cuney system. So it is really it's the
Speaker 1: rainbow coalition in that class, you know, and the warmth,
Speaker 1: the solidarity, and it's natural. It's not like I'm putting
Speaker 1: on the show. Look at me, Look how liberal I am,
Speaker 1: which is my generation. It's authentic, it's real, it's real,
Speaker 1: it's deeply moving, and you see the progress. You know.
Speaker 1: The progress, of course came at the expense of the
Speaker 1: polarization of wealth in our society and the homogenization of
Speaker 1: the working class. But it's real. So there's every ground
Speaker 1: to be hopeful. And as I said, I think the
Speaker 1: young people were prepared for real sacrifices. Had Bernie tell
Speaker 1: them time to get arrested, time to you know, not
Speaker 1: just talk the talk, but walk the walk. I think
Speaker 1: people were ready for it. I saw them board those
Speaker 1: buses to go out of town, which wasn't easy, you know.
Speaker 1: And if your young person nowadays, you're so shortened time
Speaker 1: because you have two jobs and they have to take
Speaker 1: care of your parents, and you know, the whole thing.
Speaker 1: So on that ground, as beyond and joy Gray told me,
Speaker 1: and I kept the line. When I was interviewed by
Speaker 1: her a few weeks ago, she said with a certain
Speaker 1: amount of pride, and the pride was deserved. She said,
Speaker 1: you know, Bernie won every demographic under thirty, that is
Speaker 1: to say, male, female, Latino, black, every demographic on the ferry.
Speaker 1: That's the future. If you want to know what the
Speaker 1: future is, look at that one stark fact. Bernie Bernie
Speaker 1: the most uncharismatic candidate in history, a septutioninarian Jew from Brooklyn.
Speaker 1: He managed to gavin eyes all these young people on
Speaker 1: the class struggle platform and wins every demographic. So there's
Speaker 1: every reason to be hopeful and optimistic. But any movement
Speaker 1: needs two things. It needs leadership and the needs organization.
Speaker 1: The Black Lives Matter turned into a disaster, a catastrophe
Speaker 1: a because it couldn't come up with the right slogan
Speaker 1: and to fill the void the most quote unquote radical
Speaker 1: which means critically irrelevant slogan defund the police. It filled
Speaker 1: the void, which was a disaster. It became clear over
Speaker 1: time what a catastrophe it was. And second of all,
Speaker 1: the ruling class did what it always does. It bought
Speaker 1: off these leaders like you know, Patrice Coolers and that type,
Speaker 1: gave them lots of money, and of course they helped
Speaker 1: themselves to a lot of money. And these leaders were
Speaker 1: so crooked, so corrupt, these alleged leaders, these ruling class
Speaker 1: appointed leaders, were so crooked and so corrupt that it
Speaker 1: makes young people who are hopeful, h and willing to
Speaker 1: put their you know, put themselves on the line, make
Speaker 1: the sacrifices that a Rosa Luxembourg talked about. It makes
Speaker 1: them sin about politics, that's true. I think those are
Speaker 1: all right points, all right, nor I had a couple
Speaker 1: more questions when we've run out of time, norm So
Speaker 1: thank you so much for joining us. Tell everybody where
Speaker 1: they can follow you, and tell everybody where they can
Speaker 1: get your book. Uh, you can get my book from
Speaker 1: sublation s U B l A t ioland don't ask
Speaker 1: me what that means. I don't know separation dot Com
Speaker 1: or from Amazon, and you just google my name. I
Speaker 1: have a I have a presence, and you'll figure it
Speaker 1: out if you can. At the end of the show,
Speaker 1: I'll send you a link for the access to book. Otherwise,
Speaker 1: I want to say I totally enjoyed it, and I'm
Speaker 1: glad that both of you, but Kyle in particular, the
Speaker 1: certain point you know, articulate your real differences with me,
Speaker 1: and I hope even if I didn't convince you that
Speaker 1: I convey the fact I recognize those are real problems.
Speaker 1: I recognize you know the issues you raise are real.
Speaker 1: And I also recognize that a lot of my beliefs
Speaker 1: now may at some point prove to be behind the curve.
Speaker 1: I recognize that. On the other hand, I think we
Speaker 1: have to have a certain amount of humility, a certain
Speaker 1: amount of recognition that nobody has monopoly untruth, and that
Speaker 1: we shouldn't go around carrying on as if these questions
Speaker 1: have been resolved once and for all. And if you disagree,
Speaker 1: then you're some sort of you know, backward religious fanatic
Speaker 1: or whatever. I don't agree. That's how I was as
Speaker 1: a young man. And I realize it's not that I
Speaker 1: grew up or I grew conservative. I realize I maintain,
Speaker 1: I preserve my radical convictions and presumably will go to
Speaker 1: my grade with them. But I realized I was roomed.
Speaker 1: I made errors, And I know, you know what Muhammad
Speaker 1: Ali said the boxer. He said, if you think the
Speaker 1: same thing as four at forty that you think at twenty,
Speaker 1: then you've wasted twenty years in your life. And there's
Speaker 1: something to be said about that. That life experience should
Speaker 1: at some point influence you in some ways. Otherwise, what's
Speaker 1: the point of life experience? But I never gave up
Speaker 1: my core beliefs. I remained exactly who I in terms
Speaker 1: of my core beliefs, on the side of the oppressed,
Speaker 1: on the side of the victims, on the side of
Speaker 1: the heart down and out, on the side of the victims.
Speaker 1: That's why I was at sixteen, and that's why I'll be,
Speaker 1: you know, til my dying, till my last breath. I
Speaker 1: didn't pay the sacrifices. I didn't make the sacrifices that
Speaker 1: Rosa did when she got out of jail the last
Speaker 1: time during World War One. When she was released, she
Speaker 1: was already an older woman. She was forty seven. By
Speaker 1: our standards, that would be like fifty seven or even more.
Speaker 1: She had in the years in jail. She had a
Speaker 1: thick shock of hair. It all turned white. People were
Speaker 1: shocked when they saw her when she emerged from jail.
Speaker 1: She went right from the jail without missing a breath,
Speaker 1: without the missing a beat. She went right into the revolution.
Speaker 1: There was a worker's uprising. People said, Rose would be
Speaker 1: careful their you down. They're gonna hunt you down. They're
Speaker 1: gonna hunt you down. She said. They said you need bodyguard.
Speaker 1: She said, I go where I tell other people to go.
Speaker 1: And of course she was hunted down. She was tortured,
Speaker 1: Her skull was smashed. She was then thrown into the RC.
Speaker 1: Her body was washed up three months ago. Those are
Speaker 1: the inspirations for me, and I didn't pay that kind
Speaker 1: of price. I didn't come close to paying that kind
Speaker 1: of price. But I think I could say, without fear
Speaker 1: of being contradicted or accused of self pity, I did
Speaker 1: pay a price for my beliefs. And I remained true
Speaker 1: to those beliefs that animated me as a youth. But
Speaker 1: with the caveat, I learned something from life. Didn't turn
Speaker 1: me into a reactionary. But I made errors. I was
Speaker 1: the type. I mean, it's not as if it's some
Speaker 1: foggy memory. I deplatformed any people on the right in college.
Speaker 1: We blocked the doors. We blocked the doors because in
Speaker 1: my day we claim that we knew the science. The
Speaker 1: science was Marxism Leninism, and the science was the truth.
Speaker 1: And anyone who disagreed is, you know, some sort of
Speaker 1: bourgeois or petty bourgeois. I was part of that. I
Speaker 1: wasn't even a small part of that. It's a big
Speaker 1: part of that. I was a maoist that was wrong.
Speaker 1: I made errors, and a large part of the book
Speaker 1: is trying to make sense of what I did right
Speaker 1: in my life. And also, you know, I have a
Speaker 1: page in the book just has the people who inspired me,
Speaker 1: and like Paul Robeson Rose of Luxembourg, and the number
Speaker 1: of others, and also a page to a picture. These
Speaker 1: are pictures of Non Chomsky and his wife, who were
Speaker 1: very close to me for about forty years. I would
Speaker 1: say Yeah, it was about no thirty years, thirty five years.
Speaker 1: So a large part of the book is trying to
Speaker 1: convey what was good from my life's involvement in politics,
Speaker 1: and what was problematic and what was dead wrong, and
Speaker 1: to say, try to avoid making the mistakes I make.
Speaker 1: There's certainly a lot that we can get from the book,
Speaker 1: and we are incredibly grateful for your willingness to talk
Speaker 1: to us and also for the debate. So thank you
Speaker 1: so much, sir, have a great day. Okay, thank you
Speaker 1: both so much.