Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:01):
Call Zone Media.
Speaker 2 (00:05):
Welcome to Nika Dappan here, a podcast about things falling apart,
how to put them back together again. I am your host,
Mia Wong. Return for the holidays, Returned, rejuvenated, returned, refreshed,
Return to do something a little bit different. In the
coming weeks. We're going to be doing a lot of
nitty gritty analysis of the coming wave of fascism. But
what we haven't really been doing as much. What I
(00:27):
want to take some time to do today is to
talk about fascism atic sort of macro level and what
it looks like right now, and also talk about an
extremely cooked guy who blew himself up.
Speaker 3 (00:40):
In a cut side of Trump Building with me to
talk about this is writer, organizer, agitator, doer of so
many different things that like, I don't know someone's going
to write a great biography in like one hundred years.
It is the one and only Vicky Oshtawhile.
Speaker 4 (01:02):
Thank you. Sorry, I couldn't keep the giggle down long
enough for you to get to the intro before you're
you find people could hear me.
Speaker 2 (01:11):
Oh, I'm glad to have you here. And part part
of this the initial thing that was like okay, we
need to do this was I I saw you called
all of this the years of lead paint, and that
is just it has stuck in my mind every every
single second of every day since then.
Speaker 4 (01:29):
Yeah. Yeah, I was writing for the journal that I
am working and fundraising for CA Go take us Out,
But I wrote a piece about how unpleasant the cyberpunk
dystopia is in the face of you know, that sort
of that image of the cyber truck on fire outside
the Trump Hotel. Then about you know, as we were
about to talk about Matthew Livelsburger, I think is how
it's pronounced, who's the green beret? Then big Trump fan
(01:52):
who thought blowing up a cyber trunk outside of the
Trump Hotel would start not a race war, but like
the purging of democratic politicians? Is that we think his.
Speaker 2 (02:01):
Yeah, version that seems to be it like politicians and
like it's it's kind of an evolution of the like
purge the deep state thing where he wants democrats gone
from like the army and right right, you know, so
it's the kind of more generic version of like the
sort of Nazi fantasy of the day of the rope
from the Turner Diaries is kind of like metastasized into
(02:21):
all this right wing culture where they have their own
sort of like less race worry or like less antisemitic
versions of it. Yes, and that's apparently what this guy
was trying to start off by exactly flowing himself up
with a truck full of fireworks in front of a Trump.
Speaker 4 (02:39):
So basically, this guy spaping a Green Beret, which, like
say what you will, arguably some of the most trained
and experienced murderers in the world, you know, whatever else
you saying about.
Speaker 2 (02:49):
Them, And this is important, you know, like I'm not
sure there's any capacity drop in the world that is
greater than the drop from like green Beret to like
former Green Beret. This guy was active duty.
Speaker 4 (03:00):
So like right, yes, yes, yes, exactly.
Speaker 2 (03:03):
This wasn't even like a cooked vet. This is a
guy who is like in the shit.
Speaker 4 (03:07):
And we know that he was drinking the kool aid
because he used chat GPT. He've just turned out today
to help plan his attack. But unfortunately, despite his murder expertise,
which undeniable, cyber truck, like all Tesla's, is designed mostly
to endanger the people inside it because they won't sue
Tesla because they're already huge super fans, And what I
(03:29):
really mean, of course, is that they have terrible safety protocols.
And the cyber truck, which is like a twelve year
old's idea of a good idea, which is an incredibly
incredibly firm, stainless steel body which does not crumple and
does not take damage, which means that your frail human
body inside it in an accident bashes against a wall
of steel metal. It's very dangerous to be inside. But
(03:52):
the car doesn't take damage, and that means that if
you leave a bomb in it, the sides of the
car were fine, so the explosion went straight up right,
so it did no damage to the hotel. It's not
clear if he intended that, but it seems like he
probably wanted to do a little damage at the hotel.
Most people who are doing suicide bombings want that, I
would imagine. So anyway, all this is to say, you
(04:15):
know this guy who's like an active duty green Beret
who believes for some reason that attacking a Trump hotel
in an elon musk car will somehow lead to the
murder of Democrats. But he's so tech pilled that he
takes a cyber truck which doesn't even work as a
bomb and dies in it and just leaves this like
horrible image. And I mean, you know, I'm being flippant
(04:35):
about this, like it's awful thing obviously, but no one
else was hurt except himself. I mean, the image was
everywhere on social media for like the last three days
of that, of that cyber truck on fire outside the
Trump towers. Yeah, it was the perfect image of a
thing I had already been thinking of as the years
of lead paint. So I wrote an essay around that basically.
Speaker 2 (04:52):
Yeah, so I want to start talking about this by
getting a little bit into what the years of lead are,
because I imagine it's some of you. There's probably, like
I don't know, there's probably several thousand of you who
are obsessive nerds about the years of lead and like
know the name of every single guy he was implicated
for these car bombings, but for everyone else who's normal.
(05:12):
And I caught myself among the non normal people because
I did. I spent about two years going down the
years a lead rabbit hole and destroyed my brain. But
the years of lead were this thing in roughly the
seventies and the eighties in Italy, where as a response
to the sort of rising power of the left through
the sixties, and like the giant uprising is ninety sixty eight.
And Italy is kind of different from the rest of
(05:33):
Europe because in Italy, you know, like in France, for example,
France has this huge up rising in May sixty eight,
like they nearly knock off the government, like workers councils
have seized control of the factories, like they lose this
star bottle, Like there's you know, the president's like fleeing
at a helicopter. But then after that, like they kind
of never seriously threatened the French government. Again in Italy,
(05:53):
that is not true, like sixty eight. In Italy, there's
a very similar thing going on, but like the seizure
of the factories has been going on since like I mean,
stuff like this has been happening since the fifties, and
it really only stops in nineteen seventy seven, when like
they have one last big push uprising and it fails.
So as a way to contain this, the Italian government
develops this strategy of backing right wing terror groups and
(06:15):
then also orchestrating left wing terror groups and by terror groups.
I mean, like the most famous thing in this is
called the Bologna train bombing in nineteen eighty. It kills
eighty five people, wounds like two hundred and ninety. Like
it's a really really horrific attack, and it's immediately blamed
that an anarchist group. It turns out it's not an
anarchist group. It is a state back like fascist group.
And yeah, like there are other ones I will pass
(06:37):
overy to VICTI you talk about like the other terrible
shit that they did.
Speaker 4 (06:41):
Well, that bombing kind of ends in some ways ends
the years of lad you could end it there. It's
sort of the last big terrorist month. The first thing,
the event that like sort of after sixty eight kind
of starts at as this thing called the Piazza Fontana
bombing in Milan, which is like an agriculture bank, I
think is what it's called. It's just like but seventeen
people are killed, almost one hundred people are wounded, and
(07:02):
the first thing that the police do is they blame
anarchists in sixty eight as well, and there's a famous
there's a famous case of this anarchist organizer named Pinelli
who is arrested and then while he is under interrogation,
falls out of the window of the police department to
his death. Yep, it has still never been proven that
he was pushed. The police claimed he've jumped out after
(07:24):
they interrogated him really hard.
Speaker 2 (07:25):
Yeah. Sure.
Speaker 4 (07:26):
Oh like here's a very famous Italian play about it
by Dario Foe called the Death of an Anarchist. So anyways,
they blame the anarchists, they literally murder a leading anarchist
printer and organizer, and then of course it turns out
that it was this terrorist group called ordinay Nuovo, who was,
you know, this neo fascist group that had let's say
significant overlap with parts of the Italian state. And I
think like one way of understanding the years of lead,
(07:48):
I think that might be easy for people who aren't
familiar with it, is that it's it's like a very
low level civil war. It's it's I think the closest
thing we can maybe think of is the troubles in
Northern Ireland. And the reason those were a little different
was because a there's attacks were happening in England, whereas
like the you know, the movement was in Ireland. But
this is very similar, which is like there's these armed wings,
(08:08):
both on the right and the left. They're like both
meeting in combat and sort of fighting each other. But
in this instance, rather than a colonial occupation that they're
fighting against, the Italian government was literally both paying for
arming the fascists and instructing them to frame the left
for these attacks.
Speaker 2 (08:25):
Yeah, and there's I mean, there's other stuff too. We're
not going to get into the kidnapping of Aldo Moro here.
I have explained this on the show at some point.
Speaker 4 (08:32):
I think it's in.
Speaker 2 (08:33):
I think it's in if you go to the Hall
of Weed episode we did where we talked about conspiracies.
I've explained that whole thing. But like the goal of this, right,
the reason that you know, they're they're giving all of
these weapons to these like stay behind networks, so it
was designed to like fight a Soviet invasion and like
and having all these bombings was specifically something they call
the strategy of tension, which is a strategy of promoting
(08:53):
sort of mass violence and promoting terror as a strategy
to drive people back towards the state. Because the idea
was this, and this seems to have worked. You know,
you scare people enough by the fact that there's you know,
there's bombs going off all the time, people are getting killed,
people are getting kidnapped, There's all of this just like
horror happening, and the goal is to get people to
turn to the state for you know, sort of order
(09:15):
insecurity and like stop doing all of this uprising stuff
because we need you know, we need to sort of
terror to end. And it was extremely effective, and the
sort of knowledge of this has I guess proliferated through
the American left in the last like decade, and that
has led to a lot of I think kind of
unhelpful comparisons. You will hear people sometimes talk about like
(09:38):
American Gladio, which is Gladio is those those stay behind
networks that were armed by the Italian state and used
as sort of the basis of these neo fascist groups,
and like to refer to this sort of like I
don't like what's happening in the US, and that's not
really what's happening. And this is where I want to
pass it to VICKI to talk about sort of the
characteristics of what we'recalling the years of Lead Paint and
how they're sort of different from the Italian ones.
Speaker 4 (10:00):
Yeah, in classic American fashion. Everything is more chaotic and autonomous, yes,
and widely proliferated and also widely proliferated all over America
products and services. Did I do again?
Speaker 2 (10:11):
Let's support this podcast that we are back, all right,
years of Blood Paint.
Speaker 4 (10:28):
Let's go, yes, Right, So I actually think, you know,
as you were saying that, I think actually a thing
that might be the closest to Gladio And it's not Gladio,
because that was very conscious and it was like these
stay behind networks are organized explicitly but the US state
defense of the Second Amendment and of like assault rifle
availability and making the US the sort of home for
(10:49):
military surplus because obviously, like the military industrial complex sells
lots of guns. It's a very helpful thing that producing
a rain of mass shooters who also operate in a
sort of Years of Lead terroristic sort of strategy of tension. Way,
I think might actually be close. But you can tell
that that's very disorganized. Yeah, it's very distributed through the
social it's done by you know, volunteers, right.
Speaker 3 (11:11):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (11:11):
And also the people who are doing the Years of
Lead are unbelievably cynical about it, right, Like they don't
they don't believe any of this shit, right, Yes, yes,
no exactly, we're second amendmic guys like that stuff is
driven a lot by sort of like hardline true believers
who aren't trying to sort of like fuel a bunch
of mass shooting to push people in towards extreme like
increasingly right wing politics. That's sort of like not what
(11:34):
they were trying to do, but that's sort of you know,
that's the net effect of a lot of the stuff.
Speaker 4 (11:38):
Yeah, it wasn't it wasn't a conscious effort at all.
But that's also not the years of lead paint. That's
just like a similar thing, the years of lead paint,
which is obviously like which is a joke about. There's
this big reactionary myth from like the freakonomics guys. I think, yeah,
like the rise and crime is like correlated to like
the use of lead paint in children's bedrooms.
Speaker 2 (11:57):
Which is really funny because for the freakonomics guy that
say down right left wing theory standard.
Speaker 4 (12:03):
Yeah exactly, or maybe it was a dude directing it.
I don't even remember now anyway, So it became it
became a meme to like talk about sort of boomers
and Generation X people, you know, having the bled paint
in their gasoline and in their walls cause all this stuff.
Obviously I'm not advocating that kind of like ablest insult
when I talk about this, and is a memetic way
(12:24):
of making fun of that concept. But all of that
to say, they have completely drunk the kool aid, right,
the fascists, as you're saying, Yeah, they knew what they
were doing. They knew they were framing the left. They
were like making it up. But like a lot of
people on the right in Italy, yeah, yeah, in Italy,
excuse me, in Italy in the sixties and in the
actual years of lead, years of lead paint, you've got
(12:46):
people genuinely probably believing that January sixth was Antifa, like
people whose friends were there, you know, yea like stuff
like you And and the other thing that the reason
this is years of lead pain and not the first
Trump administration is because during the first Trump administration there
was actually pretty pretty well organized on the ground fascist
movements and they could certainly come back in the US
(13:08):
right now. There's no reason they couldn't.
Speaker 2 (13:10):
Yeah, and it's also worth talking about. We'll be covering
this on the show, like at some point in the
future when we've had time to go through the documents.
But there was recently a massive from distributed to Nile Secrets,
a massive drop of stuff on the militia movements from
a guy who infiltrated it. It's a very good Republic
of story talking about the guy that will link in
the show notes. So, like, the militia movement has survived,
(13:33):
but the kind of stuff that like we saw in
like twenty seventeen, twenty eighteen, twenty twenty, like is not.
Speaker 4 (13:38):
Yeah, the Proud Boys QAnon, the folks who made up
J six and the folks who made up the alt right,
you know, broadly were largely defeated by anti fascists in
the street. And then the people who remained QAnon folks
who were I think, you know, some of those people
were pretty hardcore neo Nazis, obviously, but a lot of
those folks were confused Internet boomers, right, and like those
(14:01):
people mostly got discouraged by the repression. The repression I
think successfully sort of put the ends to that organized
q stuff.
Speaker 2 (14:07):
Yeah. Well, and also and I also we've talked about
on this show the other thing they put an end
to that was that the Daily Wire figured out that
you could use the literally the exact same structure of
Q and ompany make it about trans people. Yes, and
that has been unbelievably effective.
Speaker 4 (14:20):
Now the strategy as a media strategy has continued. Yeah,
but as an on the ground organizing principle, it's not
that functional. Yeah, it's not, which is very lucky. But
what that means is that Trump has come to power
without a ground movement in the same way that he
had in twenty fifteen, twenty sixteen, Like that was a
real movement. His rallies were really well attended. His rallies
this election. People left early, you know it. It was
(14:42):
like going to see a losing team and their last
home game of the season. You know, was the vibe
at those rallies.
Speaker 2 (14:48):
Yeah, to do a very specific example, it's like the
vibe is like the last games of the Oakland Athletics
before they were fucking run out for their owner moved
from the last bag exactly where like they've had it
incredibly disappoin season, like deliberately by the owner who decided
to make who made a bad team so people wouldn't
fight him, Like moving the team to la like it's
like that kind of shit.
Speaker 4 (15:08):
Yeah, those are the vibes. And yet of course the Democrats,
in their infinite infinite capacities, lost the election. And so
what that means, though, is that is that you have
this moment where actually the right has as much power
in the federal government as it's ever had. You know,
the resistance is you know, they you know, they're very
proud of legally handing power to the man and ending
(15:30):
all of his charges or whatever. But the street movement
is disorganized. So you have this gap between the two
where there's this really powerful media apparatus Fox News, Truth,
Social X, the Everything app you know, all of these
like all these places where the fascists you know, and
I guess Meta has now just officially announced they're like
going to remove all content restrictions or whatever today. I mean,
(15:52):
you know, when we're recording this. So it's it's just
there's this huge, spectacular apparatus, but there isn't this on
the ground organizing. So you get people like this Green
Beret who has been really radicalized, made angry, desperate, and
like is blowing not even the Trump hotel up, which
would be a nonsensical thing to do, but like literally
(16:14):
failing to blow the Trump Hotel up in an attempt
to start the race war by getting Democrats hung. So
it's still kind of strategy of tension stuff, right, the
imagination of as you said, the Turner Diaries or this
sort of like you know, the right wing terror networks
in the US. You know, there's a reason they're obsessed
with attacking electrical power grits, right. They think if you
(16:35):
cause enough chaos, like you will return everything to the
hobbsy and world of all against all, and you'll get
a race war and everything will fall apart. Whatever it's
you know, it's step one, kill my family, step two,
question mark, question marks, step three, white supremacist revolution. It's horrifying.
I mean, it's a horrifying, horrifying idea, But that's happening
in these groups that have really really they believe I
(16:55):
think genuinely that, Like I think the right does not
understand the difference between like Nancy Pelosi and Asada Shakur,
Like they see them both as equally dangerous.
Speaker 1 (17:04):
Right.
Speaker 4 (17:05):
They hate Liz Cheney. Yeah, Like in the final days
of the election, she was the person they were saying,
we're gonna go after her, like Liz Cheney like.
Speaker 2 (17:11):
Really like yeah, it's like like the closest parallel. Can
think of this as like there was a faction of
people during the Cold War who thought that, like the
Sino Soviet split between Russia and China was like faked,
and like they were literally guys murdering each other, like
Chinese and Russian troops were firing artillery at each other
like on the border like in sixty nine, right, like
(17:32):
and there were people who were convinced for the entire
Cold War, even as like as China is invading Vietnam,
are completely convinced that the entire thing is a ploy
and that like and that's the secretly like the USSR
and the Pierce are working together, and these are not
like you know some random guys like these are These
are like the guys that like like the peak of
conservative power are absolutely convinced that this is true. And
(17:55):
this is I think, yeah, like this this is the
kind of thing we're in now with just like these
people are completely cooked. They they don't have any analytical
building whatsoever. They just they actually have drunk their own
kool aid.
Speaker 4 (18:05):
There was just a scoop, sorry, the drop is real quick.
There was a scoop right before we got on to
record that Heritage Foundation. You know, authors have probably twenty
day five. Their new big plan is to go after Wikipedia.
They want to take down Wikipedia, like because because that's
a place you can verify facts at right, They've already
got the Post, They've got the Times, Like, what are
they gonna do? They gotta go af to Wikipedia. This
is the kind of like level of unreality they're trying
(18:28):
to build.
Speaker 2 (18:28):
Yeah, and do you know what else builds a world
of unreality and that attempts to sell it to you?
Speaker 4 (18:33):
Ooh, proxy services.
Speaker 2 (18:34):
That's a fourth this podcast. Yes we are back. I'm
very proud of that one. That that's one of the
best ones I've ever done. And I just completely off
the top of my head, I just came back better
(18:55):
than ever. She's never been so bad. So I want
to move a little bit from from the just what
does the state look like? How pilled are these people
kind of thing to I want to talk a bit
about the sort of macro thing that's going on here,
because I think part of what's what's happening here and
it's become kind of unfashionable in academic to talk about
(19:16):
neoliberalism because everyone got obsessed with like the Chips Act
and like the capacity of the state or whatever. But
I think, actually, if you want to understand what's going
on here, a good place to go is like going
back to here David Graver, and he has this line
talking about neoliberalism. I think this might God, I should
have actually looked up where this quote is from before
(19:37):
I quote it. I think it might be from the
Shock of Victory. But he has this line about how neoliberalism,
when given a choice between making their system actually work
and making it seem like any alternative, the neoliberalism is impossible.
It will always choose making the alternatives seem impossible, because
that's what neoliberalism is, right. This is, you know, the
sort of maxim of Margaret Thatchery is the no alternative.
(20:01):
It is a system that is designed to destroy all
alternatives in the you know, and this includes the possibility
of a future and the goal of this and this
is I think that the sort of dominant affect of
the years of lead paint is this induced helplessness. Yeah,
this is some thing thicky. I would ask you about
the sort of like induced helplessness of this moment.
Speaker 4 (20:21):
Yeah, yeah, I was sort of vibing with what you're saying.
But yeah, I think a lot of people online have
accepted sort of you know, don't give in an advance, right.
But like, I think one big thing that has been
part of the Biden like strategy of counter revolution and
part of what's been going on over the last four years,
but indeed over the last four decades as well as
sort of part of neoliberalism, is like the idea that
you actually really can't do stuff yourself. You need a market,
(20:45):
you need assistance, you need a professional, you need an
expert to make a choice right, and any choice made otherwise,
you know, is dooms to failure. Right. And I think
part of why Trump feels like to people, some people
like he's resisting the old is because he's like, no, no, no,
I don't listen to experts. I don't listen to anyone
except my gut. I just do what I want. The
(21:07):
incredibly exhausting and miserablest strategy of the previous thirty years
of politics, which is you get a ton of expert
reviews and then you do a political change that moves
things like twelve percent one way, you know, nudge politics
as like Barack Obama loved or whatever. Right, So that's
sort of like there's there's that sense. But then on
the individual sense, it's also about distributing the workplaces and
(21:29):
breaking down the possibility of labor solidarity, right, because part
of what the sixties was and the reason the sixties
lasted so long in Italy is because Italy had the
biggest factories and had the like the last in Western Europe.
They had the last folks still becoming proletarians from peasantry,
like coming up from Sicily. So they had this like massive,
massive factories that had these like crazy strikes over and
(21:49):
over again. So the distribution of labor, you know, with globalization,
neol liberalism and blah blah blah, breaking down labor workforce. Like,
we also are very helpless individually in our workplaces, right,
and like we go to the HR department to get help,
right where we sort of get self care. We like
work on ourselves. We get therapy, you know that our
boss offers us you know, thoughts and prayers right when
(22:11):
when things are hard. But like there's a big attempt
to allow people to define themselves sort of the carrot.
The carrot of the sixties was like, you know, you
get to like have an identity, like, Okay, we won't
be officially racist, yeah, quote unquote, you know, okay, we
won't be officially sexist. And they claim, okay, whatever, none
of that's true, but they but they sort of sell that,
(22:33):
and then they say, but in return, you have to
like do all of the self work. You have to
be an identity in the marketplace. So basically you get
exhausted because like even choosing what shoes to wear becomes
like both an identity defining question and an exhausting slog
through debt structures and infinite market places, right, like, and
(22:55):
so that in you know, spoony world, we call that
sort of choice paralysis, right, And I think that's probably
accepted as well, that like you have so much choice
that you feel absolutely helpless on the face of it.
You can't do anything, and so that produces a craving
for authoritarianism, for authority, right, That's another thing people want,
is like someone else decide for me. I'm sick of
thinking about this.
Speaker 2 (23:15):
Yeah, And that's I think been one of the most
important aspects of everything that's been happening right now, is
this sort of strategy of exhaustion and this demand for
someone else to make choices for you to free you
from this just like this endless nightmare of like trying
to figure out which healthcare plan you're supposed to buy
and shit like that, and oh my god, you know,
and the right has a bunch of alternatives here right
(23:35):
with like this is the fantasy of what treadwives is.
It's like what if someone else did your thinking for you.
It's also the entire logic behind AI right and be
trying this sort of AI agent's thing that they're like
pushing right now to go listen to our and see
US coverage and here a much about it is like
what if someone just like planned your life for you?
Speaker 1 (23:52):
Right?
Speaker 2 (23:52):
What if you could talk to a machine and it
would plan all your trips and it would tell you
what to eat, and we would tell you how to live.
And this is you know, this is also the structure
of cults work Like this is why colts have been
able to attract people that, like, I think the media
conception of cults you wouldn't think would be in them,
as why there's so many engineers in cults, because there's
like a once of people who have to make choices constantly,
and the cult is like, hey, what if I just
(24:14):
like made all of these choices for you? And this
is ultimately, you know, we talked about this a little
bit before. This is ultimately part of what's going on
with like trump Ism, right, because Trump is also to
some extent like if you're in this movement, like you
no longer have to choose anymore. You just you know,
here is the guy. The guy is going to do
the thing for you. This is also if you go
back to your original sort of conceptions of fascism, right,
(24:36):
it's about the sort of populace delegates their will into
the single heroic individual, and the single heroic individual like
acts outside of the bonds of the system in order
to preserve it and like does all this stuff for you?
And I think there's a combination of that with this
sort of paralysis and exhaustion, particularly like exhaustion and anxiety
(24:56):
also and this something that is very well documented that
you know, when are going to get in to a
full here. But all the stuff we've been talking about
about the information space, where there's just constant deluge of
just nonsense that's designed specifically not even necessarily to convince
you that something is true, but to convince you that
it's impossible to figure out what is happening, and to
make you just give up. And when you're refusing to
make a choice between like was there a gas attack
(25:20):
in Syria or was it like staged by the rebels
as the fallse flag, right, you're refusing to make the choice,
has the effect of legitimizing both of them and also
removes you from sort of the field of play of action.
And this has been a really important part of this
to sort of demobilize the left. Like it's part of
what the sort of Tulsi gabberd gambit was right, was
that you could take a bunch of this sort of
like rising nominally anti imperialist thing and you could just
(25:43):
do this shit to them. And you know, now, Tulsi
Gabbert is like one of the big people in Trump world.
Speaker 4 (25:49):
Right, I think, what's his name? I disrespect him by
not remembering his name, but I should. For the podcast,
Steve Bannon put it well when he said, just flood
the zone with shit, right, that's sort of the strategy.
You just release so much terrible information that it doesn't
matter and This is how Trump also like kept ahead
of his you know, many scandals, as he would just
like say the next most outrageous thing, and you know,
(26:10):
you'd have to commit to responding to one, but he
was already the next thing. And it was just a
sort of like amplifying, amplifying wave of like chaos and
nonsense that you eventually, yeah, you get bowled over by it,
you get exhausted. And I think, you know, you mentioned
healthcare markets, and I think, like that's really that's really
telling too, because we've just like lived through a pandemic.
We're in the midst of a pandemic. Covids is in
(26:32):
another wave that like no one has named right now,
and no one even mentioned healthcare, let alone the pandemic
during the election of twenty twenty four.
Speaker 3 (26:41):
Yeah.
Speaker 4 (26:41):
So part of what's been going on too is that
there has been this mass push by the Biden administration
of the Democrats to make us forget what happened in
twenty twenty in terms of the uprising. Yeah, and then
make us forget the pandemic, which is so unpopular and
which continuing to actually prevent would have done significant damage
to the economy. Right. It was already pretty bad for it,
(27:02):
and it would have continued to get worse. So everyone
had to be forced back to work. How do you
force people back to work who evidently care about each
other and their own safety. You lied to them, You
confuse them about what's actually going on. Right, So there's
been this huge priming of the pump for this strategy
by Biden and the Democrats, and by our own exhaustion
over the pandemic and the fact that we had to
(27:23):
go back to work, so we had to get over
the cognitive dissonance of that. So all of these factors
together have produced a psychic stew culturally in which people
are very susceptible to just throwing up their hands and going,
I don't know whatever.
Speaker 2 (27:39):
Yeah. But on the other hand, the strategy of the
Years of Lead was a strategy born of strength, right,
the Years of Lead paint This is not a strategy
built by people who have an incredibly solid grasp on power. Right.
The actual base that put Trump in power, right, and
their actual political base is incredibly brittle. Right, they are
about to tank the entire global economy like through by
(28:02):
by putting like fifty percent tariff from like every single
country in the world. They Okay, let's let's be accurate
here that on on on Chinese, Mexican and Canadian goods,
which is like, okay, like I'm gonna I'm gonna ask
you as an exercise to the reader to go look
up the places that the US imports things from. Right, So, like,
you know, this is how you resist. This is this
(28:23):
how you resist. Here you're learned helplessness is by going
and research and things for yourself. But you know they're
about to annihilate the entire economy when the thing that
brought into power was fury at rising prices. Right, these
fucking arrogant bastards have sown the winds and they are
going to reap the fucking whirlwind. The basis of this
fucking of this entire strategy, you know, And I ask
you this, like, dear listener, do you think these people
(28:45):
can hold three hundred and thirty million people in line
by sheer force? No, of course not. There's no fucking way.
This is the most heavily armed population that has ever
existed in human history. Right. This strategy is the strategy
that is built around getting your compliance, Yes, and if
they can't get your compliance by you agreeing with them.
They're going to attempt to get your compliance by just
(29:07):
taking you out of the equation. Right. They need you scared,
They need you confused, They need you completely convinced of
your own helplessness. They need you to forget that, as
the old song says, in your hands is placed to
power greater than their hoarded gold, greater than the might
of armies magnified a thousandfold. They need you to forget
the next line of the song, which goes, we can
bring to birth a new world from the ashes of
(29:29):
the old when the union makes us strong. And this
is the entire fucking thing, right, If these people were
actually strong, they would not need an entire strategy that
was based around political demobilization.
Speaker 4 (29:41):
Yeah, exactly.
Speaker 2 (29:43):
And the thing is right, The thing about this moment
is that basically everyone is incredibly disorganized. However, comma that
means that you just literally any random person can just
take the things that you know how to do and
start organizing. The system is designed, I mean to make
sure that you don't do that. And guess what, it's
not very hard for you to pick up the things
(30:06):
that you know how to do. For you to use
the relationships in people you know in your life to
get together with them and to go do things. And
they are fucking terrified of this. Yes, their entire strategies
to make sure that you simply do not do this.
And every single one of you has the power to
do this. And I know this because I also was
just some random dipshit Like I was just literally a
(30:27):
random college student, right, Like, I was just some asshole,
and I just started doing things right and I got
together with my friends and we fucking we made a
tendance union and we did anti I stuff, and we
did all of this shit. And it wasn't that like
any of us are any different than you. We just
you know, decided one day we were going to do it.
And it happens to return one last time to David Graeber.
One of one of his most famous quotes is the
(30:49):
ultimate hidden truth of this world is that it is
something that we make and could just as easily make differently.
And everyone who is in power right now is absolutely
terrified of the idea of you making this world differently,
and together we can do that.
Speaker 4 (31:03):
Yes, that's exactly right. And another thing that I think
is really powerful about getting started in that way is
that all of those false choices they become so much
less important. And actually, when you have a real goal
that you and your friends have made together that you're
building towards, it's actually a lot easier to make choices
as to make decisions. Yeah, because you would know what
you need for the next step, or you'll have an
(31:24):
idea of it. You might make a mistake, you might
be wrong, but each step along that way, like, it's
an easier way to do this and to feel the
power of real choices rather than the false choices of
like do you want your AI from Grock or do
you want it from CHATGBT right, and obviously like that's
a joke, but it's true that they aren't offering us
(31:47):
anything anymore. They have decided, they have decided that what
we get is stomped We get stomped on. That's what
they've agreed to give us. Is like getting stomped on. Like, okay,
that was always what they wanted to give us in
the past, but they might learn very very quickly and
reaping the whirlwind that the reason that a century of
(32:07):
American politicians have tipped their hat to democratic norms and
have tried really hard to preserve the niceties of the
government is because they have a slightly fresher memory of
the French Revolution and the guillotines, which haunts them, or
the Haitian Revolution, which is the real fear lurking behind
the fear of the French. Yeah, when the slaves rose
(32:28):
up and destroyed the sugar plantation of Heiti, and it
has been punished ever since. The point being that these
things that they are overwhelming, This flooding the zone was shit,
as MIAs says, is from a position of weakness, because
when they were strong, when they were strong, they had
Obama was a sign of strength. We can elect a
(32:48):
black person, a black man in this racist country and
we and he can just go on hope like and
he can actually make very few changes and still be
incredibly popular, like even through a huge economic collapse. Right,
that was a sort of strong gesture. Trump is a
sign of real senescence. Then I use the phrase advisably.
And there are a lot of holes. And they have
(33:10):
drunk the kool aid. The right has drunk the kool aid.
They don't know the difference between democrats and anarchists. Not really,
They genuinely don't really know the difference. Some of them do,
their philosophers do, but the main ones on the street
have no idea about the difference. That gives us a
lot of space to move, That gives us a lot
of space to take action, to build things that are
(33:31):
invisible to them, and that might be invisible to social media,
which is a place built around reinforcing our helplessness. In
many ways. The strategies we have to take will be
less visible in many ways, I think, than they were
in previous times, and they're going to have to be
of necessity because maga is basically you know, it's the
eye of sore on and if it lands on you,
(33:52):
you're in trouble. But if it doesn't, like, you can
just kind of move, and if you don't you run
into any any trouble like, you can get a lot done.
I think that's as much as I'll say about that.
But there's a lot to do, and there's a lot
of movements to make and a lot of building to
do that will both give you a sense of power
and solve these big problems for you and your community.
(34:13):
And if enough people start doing that, then they will
take away all their power.
Speaker 1 (34:20):
It could Happen Here is a production of cool Zone Media.
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