Speaker 1: Call Zone Media.
Speaker 2: Welcome to Nika Dappan here, a podcast about things falling apart,
Speaker 2: how to put them back together again. I am your host,
Speaker 2: Mia Wong. Return for the holidays, Returned, rejuvenated, returned, refreshed,
Speaker 2: Return to do something a little bit different. In the
Speaker 2: coming weeks. We're going to be doing a lot of
Speaker 2: nitty gritty analysis of the coming wave of fascism. But
Speaker 2: what we haven't really been doing as much. What I
Speaker 2: want to take some time to do today is to
Speaker 2: talk about fascism atic sort of macro level and what
Speaker 2: it looks like right now, and also talk about an
Speaker 2: extremely cooked guy who blew himself up.
Speaker 3: In a cut side of Trump Building with me to
Speaker 3: talk about this is writer, organizer, agitator, doer of so
Speaker 3: many different things that like, I don't know someone's going
Speaker 3: to write a great biography in like one hundred years.
Speaker 3: It is the one and only Vicky Oshtawhile.
Speaker 4: Thank you. Sorry, I couldn't keep the giggle down long
Speaker 4: enough for you to get to the intro before you're
Speaker 4: you find people could hear me.
Speaker 2: Oh, I'm glad to have you here. And part part
Speaker 2: of this the initial thing that was like okay, we
Speaker 2: need to do this was I I saw you called
Speaker 2: all of this the years of lead paint, and that
Speaker 2: is just it has stuck in my mind every every
Speaker 2: single second of every day since then.
Speaker 4: Yeah. Yeah, I was writing for the journal that I
Speaker 4: am working and fundraising for CA Go take us Out,
Speaker 4: But I wrote a piece about how unpleasant the cyberpunk
Speaker 4: dystopia is in the face of you know, that sort
Speaker 4: of that image of the cyber truck on fire outside
Speaker 4: the Trump Hotel. Then about you know, as we were
Speaker 4: about to talk about Matthew Livelsburger, I think is how
Speaker 4: it's pronounced, who's the green beret? Then big Trump fan
Speaker 4: who thought blowing up a cyber trunk outside of the
Speaker 4: Trump Hotel would start not a race war, but like
Speaker 4: the purging of democratic politicians? Is that we think his.
Speaker 2: Yeah, version that seems to be it like politicians and
Speaker 2: like it's it's kind of an evolution of the like
Speaker 2: purge the deep state thing where he wants democrats gone
Speaker 2: from like the army and right right, you know, so
Speaker 2: it's the kind of more generic version of like the
Speaker 2: sort of Nazi fantasy of the day of the rope
Speaker 2: from the Turner Diaries is kind of like metastasized into
Speaker 2: all this right wing culture where they have their own
Speaker 2: sort of like less race worry or like less antisemitic
Speaker 2: versions of it. Yes, and that's apparently what this guy
Speaker 2: was trying to start off by exactly flowing himself up
Speaker 2: with a truck full of fireworks in front of a Trump.
Speaker 4: So basically, this guy spaping a Green Beret, which, like
Speaker 4: say what you will, arguably some of the most trained
Speaker 4: and experienced murderers in the world, you know, whatever else
Speaker 4: you saying about.
Speaker 2: Them, And this is important, you know, like I'm not
Speaker 2: sure there's any capacity drop in the world that is
Speaker 2: greater than the drop from like green Beret to like
Speaker 2: former Green Beret. This guy was active duty.
Speaker 4: So like right, yes, yes, yes, exactly.
Speaker 2: This wasn't even like a cooked vet. This is a
Speaker 2: guy who is like in the shit.
Speaker 4: And we know that he was drinking the kool aid
Speaker 4: because he used chat GPT. He've just turned out today
Speaker 4: to help plan his attack. But unfortunately, despite his murder expertise,
Speaker 4: which undeniable, cyber truck, like all Tesla's, is designed mostly
Speaker 4: to endanger the people inside it because they won't sue
Speaker 4: Tesla because they're already huge super fans, And what I
Speaker 4: really mean, of course, is that they have terrible safety protocols.
Speaker 4: And the cyber truck, which is like a twelve year
Speaker 4: old's idea of a good idea, which is an incredibly
Speaker 4: incredibly firm, stainless steel body which does not crumple and
Speaker 4: does not take damage, which means that your frail human
Speaker 4: body inside it in an accident bashes against a wall
Speaker 4: of steel metal. It's very dangerous to be inside. But
Speaker 4: the car doesn't take damage, and that means that if
Speaker 4: you leave a bomb in it, the sides of the
Speaker 4: car were fine, so the explosion went straight up right,
Speaker 4: so it did no damage to the hotel. It's not
Speaker 4: clear if he intended that, but it seems like he
Speaker 4: probably wanted to do a little damage at the hotel.
Speaker 4: Most people who are doing suicide bombings want that, I
Speaker 4: would imagine. So anyway, all this is to say, you
Speaker 4: know this guy who's like an active duty green Beret
Speaker 4: who believes for some reason that attacking a Trump hotel
Speaker 4: in an elon musk car will somehow lead to the
Speaker 4: murder of Democrats. But he's so tech pilled that he
Speaker 4: takes a cyber truck which doesn't even work as a
Speaker 4: bomb and dies in it and just leaves this like
Speaker 4: horrible image. And I mean, you know, I'm being flippant
Speaker 4: about this, like it's awful thing obviously, but no one
Speaker 4: else was hurt except himself. I mean, the image was
Speaker 4: everywhere on social media for like the last three days
Speaker 4: of that, of that cyber truck on fire outside the
Speaker 4: Trump towers. Yeah, it was the perfect image of a
Speaker 4: thing I had already been thinking of as the years
Speaker 4: of lead paint. So I wrote an essay around that basically.
Speaker 2: Yeah, so I want to start talking about this by
Speaker 2: getting a little bit into what the years of lead are,
Speaker 2: because I imagine it's some of you. There's probably, like
Speaker 2: I don't know, there's probably several thousand of you who
Speaker 2: are obsessive nerds about the years of lead and like
Speaker 2: know the name of every single guy he was implicated
Speaker 2: for these car bombings, but for everyone else who's normal.
Speaker 2: And I caught myself among the non normal people because
Speaker 2: I did. I spent about two years going down the
Speaker 2: years a lead rabbit hole and destroyed my brain. But
Speaker 2: the years of lead were this thing in roughly the
Speaker 2: seventies and the eighties in Italy, where as a response
Speaker 2: to the sort of rising power of the left through
Speaker 2: the sixties, and like the giant uprising is ninety sixty eight.
Speaker 2: And Italy is kind of different from the rest of
Speaker 2: Europe because in Italy, you know, like in France, for example,
Speaker 2: France has this huge up rising in May sixty eight,
Speaker 2: like they nearly knock off the government, like workers councils
Speaker 2: have seized control of the factories, like they lose this
Speaker 2: star bottle, Like there's you know, the president's like fleeing
Speaker 2: at a helicopter. But then after that, like they kind
Speaker 2: of never seriously threatened the French government. Again in Italy,
Speaker 2: that is not true, like sixty eight. In Italy, there's
Speaker 2: a very similar thing going on, but like the seizure
Speaker 2: of the factories has been going on since like I mean,
Speaker 2: stuff like this has been happening since the fifties, and
Speaker 2: it really only stops in nineteen seventy seven, when like
Speaker 2: they have one last big push uprising and it fails.
Speaker 2: So as a way to contain this, the Italian government
Speaker 2: develops this strategy of backing right wing terror groups and
Speaker 2: then also orchestrating left wing terror groups and by terror groups.
Speaker 2: I mean, like the most famous thing in this is
Speaker 2: called the Bologna train bombing in nineteen eighty. It kills
Speaker 2: eighty five people, wounds like two hundred and ninety. Like
Speaker 2: it's a really really horrific attack, and it's immediately blamed
Speaker 2: that an anarchist group. It turns out it's not an
Speaker 2: anarchist group. It is a state back like fascist group.
Speaker 2: And yeah, like there are other ones I will pass
Speaker 2: overy to VICTI you talk about like the other terrible
Speaker 2: shit that they did.
Speaker 4: Well, that bombing kind of ends in some ways ends
Speaker 4: the years of lad you could end it there. It's
Speaker 4: sort of the last big terrorist month. The first thing,
Speaker 4: the event that like sort of after sixty eight kind
Speaker 4: of starts at as this thing called the Piazza Fontana
Speaker 4: bombing in Milan, which is like an agriculture bank, I
Speaker 4: think is what it's called. It's just like but seventeen
Speaker 4: people are killed, almost one hundred people are wounded, and
Speaker 4: the first thing that the police do is they blame
Speaker 4: anarchists in sixty eight as well, and there's a famous
Speaker 4: there's a famous case of this anarchist organizer named Pinelli
Speaker 4: who is arrested and then while he is under interrogation,
Speaker 4: falls out of the window of the police department to
Speaker 4: his death. Yep, it has still never been proven that
Speaker 4: he was pushed. The police claimed he've jumped out after
Speaker 4: they interrogated him really hard.
Speaker 2: Yeah. Sure.
Speaker 4: Oh like here's a very famous Italian play about it
Speaker 4: by Dario Foe called the Death of an Anarchist. So anyways,
Speaker 4: they blame the anarchists, they literally murder a leading anarchist
Speaker 4: printer and organizer, and then of course it turns out
Speaker 4: that it was this terrorist group called ordinay Nuovo, who was,
Speaker 4: you know, this neo fascist group that had let's say
Speaker 4: significant overlap with parts of the Italian state. And I
Speaker 4: think like one way of understanding the years of lead,
Speaker 4: I think that might be easy for people who aren't
Speaker 4: familiar with it, is that it's it's like a very
Speaker 4: low level civil war. It's it's I think the closest
Speaker 4: thing we can maybe think of is the troubles in
Speaker 4: Northern Ireland. And the reason those were a little different
Speaker 4: was because a there's attacks were happening in England, whereas
Speaker 4: like the you know, the movement was in Ireland. But
Speaker 4: this is very similar, which is like there's these armed wings,
Speaker 4: both on the right and the left. They're like both
Speaker 4: meeting in combat and sort of fighting each other. But
Speaker 4: in this instance, rather than a colonial occupation that they're
Speaker 4: fighting against, the Italian government was literally both paying for
Speaker 4: arming the fascists and instructing them to frame the left
Speaker 4: for these attacks.
Speaker 2: Yeah, and there's I mean, there's other stuff too. We're
Speaker 2: not going to get into the kidnapping of Aldo Moro here.
Speaker 2: I have explained this on the show at some point.
Speaker 4: I think it's in.
Speaker 2: I think it's in if you go to the Hall
Speaker 2: of Weed episode we did where we talked about conspiracies.
Speaker 2: I've explained that whole thing. But like the goal of this, right,
Speaker 2: the reason that you know, they're they're giving all of
Speaker 2: these weapons to these like stay behind networks, so it
Speaker 2: was designed to like fight a Soviet invasion and like
Speaker 2: and having all these bombings was specifically something they call
Speaker 2: the strategy of tension, which is a strategy of promoting
Speaker 2: sort of mass violence and promoting terror as a strategy
Speaker 2: to drive people back towards the state. Because the idea
Speaker 2: was this, and this seems to have worked. You know,
Speaker 2: you scare people enough by the fact that there's you know,
Speaker 2: there's bombs going off all the time, people are getting killed,
Speaker 2: people are getting kidnapped, There's all of this just like
Speaker 2: horror happening, and the goal is to get people to
Speaker 2: turn to the state for you know, sort of order
Speaker 2: insecurity and like stop doing all of this uprising stuff
Speaker 2: because we need you know, we need to sort of
Speaker 2: terror to end. And it was extremely effective, and the
Speaker 2: sort of knowledge of this has I guess proliferated through
Speaker 2: the American left in the last like decade, and that
Speaker 2: has led to a lot of I think kind of
Speaker 2: unhelpful comparisons. You will hear people sometimes talk about like
Speaker 2: American Gladio, which is Gladio is those those stay behind
Speaker 2: networks that were armed by the Italian state and used
Speaker 2: as sort of the basis of these neo fascist groups,
Speaker 2: and like to refer to this sort of like I
Speaker 2: don't like what's happening in the US, and that's not
Speaker 2: really what's happening. And this is where I want to
Speaker 2: pass it to VICKI to talk about sort of the
Speaker 2: characteristics of what we'recalling the years of Lead Paint and
Speaker 2: how they're sort of different from the Italian ones.
Speaker 4: Yeah, in classic American fashion. Everything is more chaotic and autonomous, yes,
Speaker 4: and widely proliferated and also widely proliferated all over America
Speaker 4: products and services. Did I do again?
Speaker 2: Let's support this podcast that we are back, all right,
Speaker 2: years of Blood Paint.
Speaker 4: Let's go, yes, Right, So I actually think, you know,
Speaker 4: as you were saying that, I think actually a thing
Speaker 4: that might be the closest to Gladio And it's not Gladio,
Speaker 4: because that was very conscious and it was like these
Speaker 4: stay behind networks are organized explicitly but the US state
Speaker 4: defense of the Second Amendment and of like assault rifle
Speaker 4: availability and making the US the sort of home for
Speaker 4: military surplus because obviously, like the military industrial complex sells
Speaker 4: lots of guns. It's a very helpful thing that producing
Speaker 4: a rain of mass shooters who also operate in a
Speaker 4: sort of Years of Lead terroristic sort of strategy of tension. Way,
Speaker 4: I think might actually be close. But you can tell
Speaker 4: that that's very disorganized. Yeah, it's very distributed through the
Speaker 4: social it's done by you know, volunteers, right.
Speaker 3: Yeah.
Speaker 2: And also the people who are doing the Years of
Speaker 2: Lead are unbelievably cynical about it, right, Like they don't
Speaker 2: they don't believe any of this shit, right, Yes, yes,
Speaker 2: no exactly, we're second amendmic guys like that stuff is
Speaker 2: driven a lot by sort of like hardline true believers
Speaker 2: who aren't trying to sort of like fuel a bunch
Speaker 2: of mass shooting to push people in towards extreme like
Speaker 2: increasingly right wing politics. That's sort of like not what
Speaker 2: they were trying to do, but that's sort of you know,
Speaker 2: that's the net effect of a lot of the stuff.
Speaker 4: Yeah, it wasn't it wasn't a conscious effort at all.
Speaker 4: But that's also not the years of lead paint. That's
Speaker 4: just like a similar thing, the years of lead paint,
Speaker 4: which is obviously like which is a joke about. There's
Speaker 4: this big reactionary myth from like the freakonomics guys. I think, yeah,
Speaker 4: like the rise and crime is like correlated to like
Speaker 4: the use of lead paint in children's bedrooms.
Speaker 2: Which is really funny because for the freakonomics guy that
Speaker 2: say down right left wing theory standard.
Speaker 4: Yeah exactly, or maybe it was a dude directing it.
Speaker 4: I don't even remember now anyway, So it became it
Speaker 4: became a meme to like talk about sort of boomers
Speaker 4: and Generation X people, you know, having the bled paint
Speaker 4: in their gasoline and in their walls cause all this stuff.
Speaker 4: Obviously I'm not advocating that kind of like ablest insult
Speaker 4: when I talk about this, and is a memetic way
Speaker 4: of making fun of that concept. But all of that
Speaker 4: to say, they have completely drunk the kool aid, right,
Speaker 4: the fascists, as you're saying, Yeah, they knew what they
Speaker 4: were doing. They knew they were framing the left. They
Speaker 4: were like making it up. But like a lot of
Speaker 4: people on the right in Italy, yeah, yeah, in Italy,
Speaker 4: excuse me, in Italy in the sixties and in the
Speaker 4: actual years of lead, years of lead paint, you've got
Speaker 4: people genuinely probably believing that January sixth was Antifa, like
Speaker 4: people whose friends were there, you know, yea like stuff
Speaker 4: like you And and the other thing that the reason
Speaker 4: this is years of lead pain and not the first
Speaker 4: Trump administration is because during the first Trump administration there
Speaker 4: was actually pretty pretty well organized on the ground fascist
Speaker 4: movements and they could certainly come back in the US
Speaker 4: right now. There's no reason they couldn't.
Speaker 2: Yeah, and it's also worth talking about. We'll be covering
Speaker 2: this on the show, like at some point in the
Speaker 2: future when we've had time to go through the documents.
Speaker 2: But there was recently a massive from distributed to Nile Secrets,
Speaker 2: a massive drop of stuff on the militia movements from
Speaker 2: a guy who infiltrated it. It's a very good Republic
Speaker 2: of story talking about the guy that will link in
Speaker 2: the show notes. So, like, the militia movement has survived,
Speaker 2: but the kind of stuff that like we saw in
Speaker 2: like twenty seventeen, twenty eighteen, twenty twenty, like is not.
Speaker 4: Yeah, the Proud Boys QAnon, the folks who made up
Speaker 4: J six and the folks who made up the alt right,
Speaker 4: you know, broadly were largely defeated by anti fascists in
Speaker 4: the street. And then the people who remained QAnon folks
Speaker 4: who were I think, you know, some of those people
Speaker 4: were pretty hardcore neo Nazis, obviously, but a lot of
Speaker 4: those folks were confused Internet boomers, right, and like those
Speaker 4: people mostly got discouraged by the repression. The repression I
Speaker 4: think successfully sort of put the ends to that organized
Speaker 4: q stuff.
Speaker 2: Yeah. Well, and also and I also we've talked about
Speaker 2: on this show the other thing they put an end
Speaker 2: to that was that the Daily Wire figured out that
Speaker 2: you could use the literally the exact same structure of
Speaker 2: Q and ompany make it about trans people. Yes, and
Speaker 2: that has been unbelievably effective.
Speaker 4: Now the strategy as a media strategy has continued. Yeah,
Speaker 4: but as an on the ground organizing principle, it's not
Speaker 4: that functional. Yeah, it's not, which is very lucky. But
Speaker 4: what that means is that Trump has come to power
Speaker 4: without a ground movement in the same way that he
Speaker 4: had in twenty fifteen, twenty sixteen, Like that was a
Speaker 4: real movement. His rallies were really well attended. His rallies
Speaker 4: this election. People left early, you know it. It was
Speaker 4: like going to see a losing team and their last
Speaker 4: home game of the season. You know, was the vibe
Speaker 4: at those rallies.
Speaker 2: Yeah, to do a very specific example, it's like the
Speaker 2: vibe is like the last games of the Oakland Athletics
Speaker 2: before they were fucking run out for their owner moved
Speaker 2: from the last bag exactly where like they've had it
Speaker 2: incredibly disappoin season, like deliberately by the owner who decided
Speaker 2: to make who made a bad team so people wouldn't
Speaker 2: fight him, Like moving the team to la like it's
Speaker 2: like that kind of shit.
Speaker 4: Yeah, those are the vibes. And yet of course the Democrats,
Speaker 4: in their infinite infinite capacities, lost the election. And so
Speaker 4: what that means, though, is that is that you have
Speaker 4: this moment where actually the right has as much power
Speaker 4: in the federal government as it's ever had. You know,
Speaker 4: the resistance is you know, they you know, they're very
Speaker 4: proud of legally handing power to the man and ending
Speaker 4: all of his charges or whatever. But the street movement
Speaker 4: is disorganized. So you have this gap between the two
Speaker 4: where there's this really powerful media apparatus Fox News, Truth,
Speaker 4: Social X, the Everything app you know, all of these
Speaker 4: like all these places where the fascists you know, and
Speaker 4: I guess Meta has now just officially announced they're like
Speaker 4: going to remove all content restrictions or whatever today. I mean,
Speaker 4: you know, when we're recording this. So it's it's just
Speaker 4: there's this huge, spectacular apparatus, but there isn't this on
Speaker 4: the ground organizing. So you get people like this Green
Speaker 4: Beret who has been really radicalized, made angry, desperate, and
Speaker 4: like is blowing not even the Trump hotel up, which
Speaker 4: would be a nonsensical thing to do, but like literally
Speaker 4: failing to blow the Trump Hotel up in an attempt
Speaker 4: to start the race war by getting Democrats hung. So
Speaker 4: it's still kind of strategy of tension stuff, right, the
Speaker 4: imagination of as you said, the Turner Diaries or this
Speaker 4: sort of like you know, the right wing terror networks
Speaker 4: in the US. You know, there's a reason they're obsessed
Speaker 4: with attacking electrical power grits, right. They think if you
Speaker 4: cause enough chaos, like you will return everything to the
Speaker 4: hobbsy and world of all against all, and you'll get
Speaker 4: a race war and everything will fall apart. Whatever it's
Speaker 4: you know, it's step one, kill my family, step two,
Speaker 4: question mark, question marks, step three, white supremacist revolution. It's horrifying.
Speaker 4: I mean, it's a horrifying, horrifying idea, But that's happening
Speaker 4: in these groups that have really really they believe I
Speaker 4: think genuinely that, Like I think the right does not
Speaker 4: understand the difference between like Nancy Pelosi and Asada Shakur,
Speaker 4: Like they see them both as equally dangerous.
Speaker 1: Right.
Speaker 4: They hate Liz Cheney. Yeah, Like in the final days
Speaker 4: of the election, she was the person they were saying,
Speaker 4: we're gonna go after her, like Liz Cheney like.
Speaker 2: Really like yeah, it's like like the closest parallel. Can
Speaker 2: think of this as like there was a faction of
Speaker 2: people during the Cold War who thought that, like the
Speaker 2: Sino Soviet split between Russia and China was like faked,
Speaker 2: and like they were literally guys murdering each other, like
Speaker 2: Chinese and Russian troops were firing artillery at each other
Speaker 2: like on the border like in sixty nine, right, like
Speaker 2: and there were people who were convinced for the entire
Speaker 2: Cold War, even as like as China is invading Vietnam,
Speaker 2: are completely convinced that the entire thing is a ploy
Speaker 2: and that like and that's the secretly like the USSR
Speaker 2: and the Pierce are working together, and these are not
Speaker 2: like you know some random guys like these are These
Speaker 2: are like the guys that like like the peak of
Speaker 2: conservative power are absolutely convinced that this is true. And
Speaker 2: this is I think, yeah, like this this is the
Speaker 2: kind of thing we're in now with just like these
Speaker 2: people are completely cooked. They they don't have any analytical
Speaker 2: building whatsoever. They just they actually have drunk their own
Speaker 2: kool aid.
Speaker 4: There was just a scoop, sorry, the drop is real quick.
Speaker 4: There was a scoop right before we got on to
Speaker 4: record that Heritage Foundation. You know, authors have probably twenty
Speaker 4: day five. Their new big plan is to go after Wikipedia.
Speaker 4: They want to take down Wikipedia, like because because that's
Speaker 4: a place you can verify facts at right, They've already
Speaker 4: got the Post, They've got the Times, Like, what are
Speaker 4: they gonna do? They gotta go af to Wikipedia. This
Speaker 4: is the kind of like level of unreality they're trying
Speaker 4: to build.
Speaker 2: Yeah, and do you know what else builds a world
Speaker 2: of unreality and that attempts to sell it to you?
Speaker 4: Ooh, proxy services.
Speaker 2: That's a fourth this podcast. Yes we are back. I'm
Speaker 2: very proud of that one. That that's one of the
Speaker 2: best ones I've ever done. And I just completely off
Speaker 2: the top of my head, I just came back better
Speaker 2: than ever. She's never been so bad. So I want
Speaker 2: to move a little bit from from the just what
Speaker 2: does the state look like? How pilled are these people
Speaker 2: kind of thing to I want to talk a bit
Speaker 2: about the sort of macro thing that's going on here,
Speaker 2: because I think part of what's what's happening here and
Speaker 2: it's become kind of unfashionable in academic to talk about
Speaker 2: neoliberalism because everyone got obsessed with like the Chips Act
Speaker 2: and like the capacity of the state or whatever. But
Speaker 2: I think, actually, if you want to understand what's going
Speaker 2: on here, a good place to go is like going
Speaker 2: back to here David Graver, and he has this line
Speaker 2: talking about neoliberalism. I think this might God, I should
Speaker 2: have actually looked up where this quote is from before
Speaker 2: I quote it. I think it might be from the
Speaker 2: Shock of Victory. But he has this line about how neoliberalism,
Speaker 2: when given a choice between making their system actually work
Speaker 2: and making it seem like any alternative, the neoliberalism is impossible.
Speaker 2: It will always choose making the alternatives seem impossible, because
Speaker 2: that's what neoliberalism is, right. This is, you know, the
Speaker 2: sort of maxim of Margaret Thatchery is the no alternative.
Speaker 2: It is a system that is designed to destroy all
Speaker 2: alternatives in the you know, and this includes the possibility
Speaker 2: of a future and the goal of this and this
Speaker 2: is I think that the sort of dominant affect of
Speaker 2: the years of lead paint is this induced helplessness. Yeah,
Speaker 2: this is some thing thicky. I would ask you about
Speaker 2: the sort of like induced helplessness of this moment.
Speaker 4: Yeah, yeah, I was sort of vibing with what you're saying.
Speaker 4: But yeah, I think a lot of people online have
Speaker 4: accepted sort of you know, don't give in an advance, right.
Speaker 4: But like, I think one big thing that has been
Speaker 4: part of the Biden like strategy of counter revolution and
Speaker 4: part of what's been going on over the last four years,
Speaker 4: but indeed over the last four decades as well as
Speaker 4: sort of part of neoliberalism, is like the idea that
Speaker 4: you actually really can't do stuff yourself. You need a market,
Speaker 4: you need assistance, you need a professional, you need an
Speaker 4: expert to make a choice right, and any choice made otherwise,
Speaker 4: you know, is dooms to failure. Right. And I think
Speaker 4: part of why Trump feels like to people, some people
Speaker 4: like he's resisting the old is because he's like, no, no, no,
Speaker 4: I don't listen to experts. I don't listen to anyone
Speaker 4: except my gut. I just do what I want. The
Speaker 4: incredibly exhausting and miserablest strategy of the previous thirty years
Speaker 4: of politics, which is you get a ton of expert
Speaker 4: reviews and then you do a political change that moves
Speaker 4: things like twelve percent one way, you know, nudge politics
Speaker 4: as like Barack Obama loved or whatever. Right, So that's
Speaker 4: sort of like there's there's that sense. But then on
Speaker 4: the individual sense, it's also about distributing the workplaces and
Speaker 4: breaking down the possibility of labor solidarity, right, because part
Speaker 4: of what the sixties was and the reason the sixties
Speaker 4: lasted so long in Italy is because Italy had the
Speaker 4: biggest factories and had the like the last in Western Europe.
Speaker 4: They had the last folks still becoming proletarians from peasantry,
Speaker 4: like coming up from Sicily. So they had this like massive,
Speaker 4: massive factories that had these like crazy strikes over and
Speaker 4: over again. So the distribution of labor, you know, with globalization,
Speaker 4: neol liberalism and blah blah blah, breaking down labor workforce. Like,
Speaker 4: we also are very helpless individually in our workplaces, right,
Speaker 4: and like we go to the HR department to get help,
Speaker 4: right where we sort of get self care. We like
Speaker 4: work on ourselves. We get therapy, you know that our
Speaker 4: boss offers us you know, thoughts and prayers right when
Speaker 4: when things are hard. But like there's a big attempt
Speaker 4: to allow people to define themselves sort of the carrot.
Speaker 4: The carrot of the sixties was like, you know, you
Speaker 4: get to like have an identity, like, Okay, we won't
Speaker 4: be officially racist, yeah, quote unquote, you know, okay, we
Speaker 4: won't be officially sexist. And they claim, okay, whatever, none
Speaker 4: of that's true, but they but they sort of sell that,
Speaker 4: and then they say, but in return, you have to
Speaker 4: like do all of the self work. You have to
Speaker 4: be an identity in the marketplace. So basically you get
Speaker 4: exhausted because like even choosing what shoes to wear becomes
Speaker 4: like both an identity defining question and an exhausting slog
Speaker 4: through debt structures and infinite market places, right, like, and
Speaker 4: so that in you know, spoony world, we call that
Speaker 4: sort of choice paralysis, right, And I think that's probably
Speaker 4: accepted as well, that like you have so much choice
Speaker 4: that you feel absolutely helpless on the face of it.
Speaker 4: You can't do anything, and so that produces a craving
Speaker 4: for authoritarianism, for authority, right, That's another thing people want,
Speaker 4: is like someone else decide for me. I'm sick of
Speaker 4: thinking about this.
Speaker 2: Yeah, And that's I think been one of the most
Speaker 2: important aspects of everything that's been happening right now, is
Speaker 2: this sort of strategy of exhaustion and this demand for
Speaker 2: someone else to make choices for you to free you
Speaker 2: from this just like this endless nightmare of like trying
Speaker 2: to figure out which healthcare plan you're supposed to buy
Speaker 2: and shit like that, and oh my god, you know,
Speaker 2: and the right has a bunch of alternatives here right
Speaker 2: with like this is the fantasy of what treadwives is.
Speaker 2: It's like what if someone else did your thinking for you.
Speaker 2: It's also the entire logic behind AI right and be
Speaker 2: trying this sort of AI agent's thing that they're like
Speaker 2: pushing right now to go listen to our and see
Speaker 2: US coverage and here a much about it is like
Speaker 2: what if someone just like planned your life for you?
Speaker 1: Right?
Speaker 2: What if you could talk to a machine and it
Speaker 2: would plan all your trips and it would tell you
Speaker 2: what to eat, and we would tell you how to live.
Speaker 2: And this is you know, this is also the structure
Speaker 2: of cults work Like this is why colts have been
Speaker 2: able to attract people that, like, I think the media
Speaker 2: conception of cults you wouldn't think would be in them,
Speaker 2: as why there's so many engineers in cults, because there's
Speaker 2: like a once of people who have to make choices constantly,
Speaker 2: and the cult is like, hey, what if I just
Speaker 2: like made all of these choices for you? And this
Speaker 2: is ultimately, you know, we talked about this a little
Speaker 2: bit before. This is ultimately part of what's going on
Speaker 2: with like trump Ism, right, because Trump is also to
Speaker 2: some extent like if you're in this movement, like you
Speaker 2: no longer have to choose anymore. You just you know,
Speaker 2: here is the guy. The guy is going to do
Speaker 2: the thing for you. This is also if you go
Speaker 2: back to your original sort of conceptions of fascism, right,
Speaker 2: it's about the sort of populace delegates their will into
Speaker 2: the single heroic individual, and the single heroic individual like
Speaker 2: acts outside of the bonds of the system in order
Speaker 2: to preserve it and like does all this stuff for you?
Speaker 2: And I think there's a combination of that with this
Speaker 2: sort of paralysis and exhaustion, particularly like exhaustion and anxiety
Speaker 2: also and this something that is very well documented that
Speaker 2: you know, when are going to get in to a
Speaker 2: full here. But all the stuff we've been talking about
Speaker 2: about the information space, where there's just constant deluge of
Speaker 2: just nonsense that's designed specifically not even necessarily to convince
Speaker 2: you that something is true, but to convince you that
Speaker 2: it's impossible to figure out what is happening, and to
Speaker 2: make you just give up. And when you're refusing to
Speaker 2: make a choice between like was there a gas attack
Speaker 2: in Syria or was it like staged by the rebels
Speaker 2: as the fallse flag, right, you're refusing to make the choice,
Speaker 2: has the effect of legitimizing both of them and also
Speaker 2: removes you from sort of the field of play of action.
Speaker 2: And this has been a really important part of this
Speaker 2: to sort of demobilize the left. Like it's part of
Speaker 2: what the sort of Tulsi gabberd gambit was right, was
Speaker 2: that you could take a bunch of this sort of
Speaker 2: like rising nominally anti imperialist thing and you could just
Speaker 2: do this shit to them. And you know, now, Tulsi
Speaker 2: Gabbert is like one of the big people in Trump world.
Speaker 4: Right, I think, what's his name? I disrespect him by
Speaker 4: not remembering his name, but I should. For the podcast,
Speaker 4: Steve Bannon put it well when he said, just flood
Speaker 4: the zone with shit, right, that's sort of the strategy.
Speaker 4: You just release so much terrible information that it doesn't
Speaker 4: matter and This is how Trump also like kept ahead
Speaker 4: of his you know, many scandals, as he would just
Speaker 4: like say the next most outrageous thing, and you know,
Speaker 4: you'd have to commit to responding to one, but he
Speaker 4: was already the next thing. And it was just a
Speaker 4: sort of like amplifying, amplifying wave of like chaos and
Speaker 4: nonsense that you eventually, yeah, you get bowled over by it,
Speaker 4: you get exhausted. And I think, you know, you mentioned
Speaker 4: healthcare markets, and I think, like that's really that's really
Speaker 4: telling too, because we've just like lived through a pandemic.
Speaker 4: We're in the midst of a pandemic. Covids is in
Speaker 4: another wave that like no one has named right now,
Speaker 4: and no one even mentioned healthcare, let alone the pandemic
Speaker 4: during the election of twenty twenty four.
Speaker 3: Yeah.
Speaker 4: So part of what's been going on too is that
Speaker 4: there has been this mass push by the Biden administration
Speaker 4: of the Democrats to make us forget what happened in
Speaker 4: twenty twenty in terms of the uprising. Yeah, and then
Speaker 4: make us forget the pandemic, which is so unpopular and
Speaker 4: which continuing to actually prevent would have done significant damage
Speaker 4: to the economy. Right. It was already pretty bad for it,
Speaker 4: and it would have continued to get worse. So everyone
Speaker 4: had to be forced back to work. How do you
Speaker 4: force people back to work who evidently care about each
Speaker 4: other and their own safety. You lied to them, You
Speaker 4: confuse them about what's actually going on. Right, So there's
Speaker 4: been this huge priming of the pump for this strategy
Speaker 4: by Biden and the Democrats, and by our own exhaustion
Speaker 4: over the pandemic and the fact that we had to
Speaker 4: go back to work, so we had to get over
Speaker 4: the cognitive dissonance of that. So all of these factors
Speaker 4: together have produced a psychic stew culturally in which people
Speaker 4: are very susceptible to just throwing up their hands and going,
Speaker 4: I don't know whatever.
Speaker 2: Yeah. But on the other hand, the strategy of the
Speaker 2: Years of Lead was a strategy born of strength, right,
Speaker 2: the Years of Lead paint This is not a strategy
Speaker 2: built by people who have an incredibly solid grasp on power. Right.
Speaker 2: The actual base that put Trump in power, right, and
Speaker 2: their actual political base is incredibly brittle. Right, they are
Speaker 2: about to tank the entire global economy like through by
Speaker 2: by putting like fifty percent tariff from like every single
Speaker 2: country in the world. They Okay, let's let's be accurate
Speaker 2: here that on on on Chinese, Mexican and Canadian goods,
Speaker 2: which is like, okay, like I'm gonna I'm gonna ask
Speaker 2: you as an exercise to the reader to go look
Speaker 2: up the places that the US imports things from. Right, So, like,
Speaker 2: you know, this is how you resist. This is this
Speaker 2: how you resist. Here you're learned helplessness is by going
Speaker 2: and research and things for yourself. But you know they're
Speaker 2: about to annihilate the entire economy when the thing that
Speaker 2: brought into power was fury at rising prices. Right, these
Speaker 2: fucking arrogant bastards have sown the winds and they are
Speaker 2: going to reap the fucking whirlwind. The basis of this
Speaker 2: fucking of this entire strategy, you know, And I ask
Speaker 2: you this, like, dear listener, do you think these people
Speaker 2: can hold three hundred and thirty million people in line
Speaker 2: by sheer force? No, of course not. There's no fucking way.
Speaker 2: This is the most heavily armed population that has ever
Speaker 2: existed in human history. Right. This strategy is the strategy
Speaker 2: that is built around getting your compliance, Yes, and if
Speaker 2: they can't get your compliance by you agreeing with them.
Speaker 2: They're going to attempt to get your compliance by just
Speaker 2: taking you out of the equation. Right. They need you scared,
Speaker 2: They need you confused, They need you completely convinced of
Speaker 2: your own helplessness. They need you to forget that, as
Speaker 2: the old song says, in your hands is placed to
Speaker 2: power greater than their hoarded gold, greater than the might
Speaker 2: of armies magnified a thousandfold. They need you to forget
Speaker 2: the next line of the song, which goes, we can
Speaker 2: bring to birth a new world from the ashes of
Speaker 2: the old when the union makes us strong. And this
Speaker 2: is the entire fucking thing, right, If these people were
Speaker 2: actually strong, they would not need an entire strategy that
Speaker 2: was based around political demobilization.
Speaker 4: Yeah, exactly.
Speaker 2: And the thing is right, The thing about this moment
Speaker 2: is that basically everyone is incredibly disorganized. However, comma that
Speaker 2: means that you just literally any random person can just
Speaker 2: take the things that you know how to do and
Speaker 2: start organizing. The system is designed, I mean to make
Speaker 2: sure that you don't do that. And guess what, it's
Speaker 2: not very hard for you to pick up the things
Speaker 2: that you know how to do. For you to use
Speaker 2: the relationships in people you know in your life to
Speaker 2: get together with them and to go do things. And
Speaker 2: they are fucking terrified of this. Yes, their entire strategies
Speaker 2: to make sure that you simply do not do this.
Speaker 2: And every single one of you has the power to
Speaker 2: do this. And I know this because I also was
Speaker 2: just some random dipshit Like I was just literally a
Speaker 2: random college student, right, Like, I was just some asshole,
Speaker 2: and I just started doing things right and I got
Speaker 2: together with my friends and we fucking we made a
Speaker 2: tendance union and we did anti I stuff, and we
Speaker 2: did all of this shit. And it wasn't that like
Speaker 2: any of us are any different than you. We just
Speaker 2: you know, decided one day we were going to do it.
Speaker 2: And it happens to return one last time to David Graeber.
Speaker 2: One of one of his most famous quotes is the
Speaker 2: ultimate hidden truth of this world is that it is
Speaker 2: something that we make and could just as easily make differently.
Speaker 2: And everyone who is in power right now is absolutely
Speaker 2: terrified of the idea of you making this world differently,
Speaker 2: and together we can do that.
Speaker 4: Yes, that's exactly right. And another thing that I think
Speaker 4: is really powerful about getting started in that way is
Speaker 4: that all of those false choices they become so much
Speaker 4: less important. And actually, when you have a real goal
Speaker 4: that you and your friends have made together that you're
Speaker 4: building towards, it's actually a lot easier to make choices
Speaker 4: as to make decisions. Yeah, because you would know what
Speaker 4: you need for the next step, or you'll have an
Speaker 4: idea of it. You might make a mistake, you might
Speaker 4: be wrong, but each step along that way, like, it's
Speaker 4: an easier way to do this and to feel the
Speaker 4: power of real choices rather than the false choices of
Speaker 4: like do you want your AI from Grock or do
Speaker 4: you want it from CHATGBT right, and obviously like that's
Speaker 4: a joke, but it's true that they aren't offering us
Speaker 4: anything anymore. They have decided, they have decided that what
Speaker 4: we get is stomped We get stomped on. That's what
Speaker 4: they've agreed to give us. Is like getting stomped on. Like, okay,
Speaker 4: that was always what they wanted to give us in
Speaker 4: the past, but they might learn very very quickly and
Speaker 4: reaping the whirlwind that the reason that a century of
Speaker 4: American politicians have tipped their hat to democratic norms and
Speaker 4: have tried really hard to preserve the niceties of the
Speaker 4: government is because they have a slightly fresher memory of
Speaker 4: the French Revolution and the guillotines, which haunts them, or
Speaker 4: the Haitian Revolution, which is the real fear lurking behind
Speaker 4: the fear of the French. Yeah, when the slaves rose
Speaker 4: up and destroyed the sugar plantation of Heiti, and it
Speaker 4: has been punished ever since. The point being that these
Speaker 4: things that they are overwhelming, This flooding the zone was shit,
Speaker 4: as MIAs says, is from a position of weakness, because
Speaker 4: when they were strong, when they were strong, they had
Speaker 4: Obama was a sign of strength. We can elect a
Speaker 4: black person, a black man in this racist country and
Speaker 4: we and he can just go on hope like and
Speaker 4: he can actually make very few changes and still be
Speaker 4: incredibly popular, like even through a huge economic collapse. Right,
Speaker 4: that was a sort of strong gesture. Trump is a
Speaker 4: sign of real senescence. Then I use the phrase advisably.
Speaker 4: And there are a lot of holes. And they have
Speaker 4: drunk the kool aid. The right has drunk the kool aid.
Speaker 4: They don't know the difference between democrats and anarchists. Not really,
Speaker 4: They genuinely don't really know the difference. Some of them do,
Speaker 4: their philosophers do, but the main ones on the street
Speaker 4: have no idea about the difference. That gives us a
Speaker 4: lot of space to move, That gives us a lot
Speaker 4: of space to take action, to build things that are
Speaker 4: invisible to them, and that might be invisible to social media,
Speaker 4: which is a place built around reinforcing our helplessness. In
Speaker 4: many ways. The strategies we have to take will be
Speaker 4: less visible in many ways, I think, than they were
Speaker 4: in previous times, and they're going to have to be
Speaker 4: of necessity because maga is basically you know, it's the
Speaker 4: eye of sore on and if it lands on you,
Speaker 4: you're in trouble. But if it doesn't, like, you can
Speaker 4: just kind of move, and if you don't you run
Speaker 4: into any any trouble like, you can get a lot done.
Speaker 4: I think that's as much as I'll say about that.
Speaker 4: But there's a lot to do, and there's a lot
Speaker 4: of movements to make and a lot of building to
Speaker 4: do that will both give you a sense of power
Speaker 4: and solve these big problems for you and your community.
Speaker 4: And if enough people start doing that, then they will
Speaker 4: take away all their power.
Speaker 1: It could Happen Here is a production of cool Zone Media.
Speaker 1: For more podcasts from cool Zone Media, visit our website
Speaker 1: coolzonemedia dot com, or check us out on the iHeartRadio app,
Speaker 1: Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts. You can
Speaker 1: now find sources for it could happen here listed directly
Speaker 1: in episode descriptions. Thanks for listening.