#812: Jeff Sharlet Returns
Today, Jordan continues his thought-provoking conversation with Jeff Sharlet. Be sure to check out Jeff's book, The Undertow: Scenes From A Slow Civil War.
May 31, 2023 - Knowledge Fight
01:38:50
Participants
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| Speaker | Time | Text |
|---|---|---|
| I'm sick of them posing as if they're the good guys saying we are the bad guys. | ||
|
unidentified
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Knowledge fight. | |
| Dan and Jordan. | ||
| Knowledge fight. | ||
|
unidentified
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Need money. | |
| Andy in Kansas. | ||
| Andy in Kansas. | ||
|
unidentified
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Stop it. | |
| Andy in Kansas. | ||
| Andy in Kansas. | ||
| It's time to pray. | ||
|
unidentified
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Andy in Kansas. | |
| You're on the air. | ||
| I love you. | ||
| Hello, everybody. | ||
| Welcome back to Knowledge Fight. | ||
| I am Jordan, and once again, I am alone without Dan. | ||
| However, I am joined by Jeff Charlotte once more to complete the two-part series that we agreed to a while back. | ||
| Jeff, welcome back to the show. | ||
| How are you? | ||
|
unidentified
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Hi, Jordan. | |
| Good, good. | ||
| Good to be back with you. | ||
| Good, good. | ||
| Wonderful. | ||
| I mean, I suppose let's start with the first question, of course. | ||
| What's your bright spot today? | ||
| Oh, that's right. | ||
| That's right. | ||
| That trick question. | ||
| That's our trick. | ||
| There are no bright spots! | ||
| My bright spot today. | ||
| My bright spot today is... | ||
| Well, you know... | ||
| Okay. | ||
|
unidentified
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All right. | |
| I got one. | ||
| I teach writing. | ||
| That's a day job. | ||
| I teach writing at Dartmouth College. | ||
| And I'm coming to you directly from a meeting with a student. | ||
| And I got to tell you, it is thrilling to me, not just as a teacher, but as a person and these frightening times when you see a student. | ||
| It's nonfiction. | ||
| I teach the same kind of writing that I try to do. | ||
| When you see a student. | ||
| writing about connections and the connections suddenly starting to make. | ||
| This is a person trying to write about sex trafficking in our region where we are, right? | ||
| And talking about the stories that we tell ourselves in order to live, like that famous Joan Didion line and the scary narratives and the Christian nationalists who come in with stories about that too and putting all this together. | ||
| And that's a lot of ugliness for a bright spot. | ||
| But when you see a young person discovering that they have the power... | ||
| To put these things together, to juxtapose them on the page and to make a story that brings clarity to someone else and that this is what they want to do and they're going to keep going with this. | ||
| You're like, oh, thank God, right? | ||
| It's always thrilling when you encounter someone else learning to tell stories because it's cheesy, but you feel less alone, right? | ||
| Because my story alone is not going to do it, but we have this great cacophony choir, and good. | ||
| Come into the choir, and when you see someone coming into the choir and joining this sort of storytelling world, you have some faith that, you know what, if I miss it, if I screw it up, that's all right. | ||
| Someone else will get it right. | ||
| Sure, sure. | ||
| Yeah, you're part of a larger tapestry of effort and goal, right? | ||
|
unidentified
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Yeah. | |
| My bright spot is the movie Renfield. | ||
| Starring Nicolas Cage. | ||
| Alright, now we can move on. | ||
| You're not going to say anything about it? | ||
| It's really good? | ||
| No, I haven't actually seen it yet. | ||
| We're recording this earlier than normal, and I just found it on the internet in a totally 100% legal way. | ||
| And so I'm looking forward to it because Alex describes many people as Renfields. | ||
| They're the big vampires. | ||
| The globalist vampires who drink all the blood, and then there are all the Renfields, of whom can be different every single day. | ||
| Some people were a Renfield two years ago, and now they're the king. | ||
| You know, it's random. | ||
| Do you think Alex Jones fans are going to go see this Nicolas Cage movie? | ||
| Because they're going to think, wow, this is great. | ||
| I mean, probably, they love movies. | ||
| Most of their reality is based on movies. | ||
| So they might go into this thinking, I can't wait to see this great documentary. | ||
| It was directed by David Icke. | ||
| I mean, most of our reality is, right, so there's a segue, right? | ||
| Most of their reality is based on movies. | ||
| And, you know, I write a lot about movies in this book. | ||
| Yes, you do. | ||
| Because the people I'm talking to are basing their reality on movies, and they're not weird. | ||
| I, too, draw on this, right? | ||
| Like, we draw on stories. | ||
| These stories, we have a way of telling things. | ||
| We're always looking for these metaphors. | ||
| It is the primary granary of metaphor from which we draw. | ||
| So, you know, but draw carefully, I guess I would say, the Renfield thing. | ||
| Right. | ||
| Don't go whole hog. | ||
| Well, that is actually where I wanted to start. | ||
| You know, we went through a lot of the content of the book on our last interview. | ||
| So I think the one thing that I really want to start with is, well, I mean, kind of what we were just talking about. | ||
| Ashley Babbitt as martyr. | ||
| When I read the book, I feel a certain ambivalence about Ashley Babbitt as martyr because, to a certain extent, Their martyrdom of her is completely fictional, right? | ||
| But there is also a very real martyrdom that she went through. | ||
| So I'd like you to kind of talk about your feelings on that. | ||
| Well, I mean, this is a thing that I get pushed back on a lot. | ||
| Like, Ashley Babbitt's not a martyr, but we don't get to choose the martyrs of other movements, right? | ||
| You know, if you're a Roman... | ||
| A couple thousand years ago, don't tell me about the Christian martyrs. | ||
| They're not martyrs, they're assholes. | ||
| We got a good thing going here. | ||
| We got sewage. | ||
| We got everything. | ||
| It's great. | ||
| There's some voting. | ||
| It's not perfect. | ||
| It's not the ideal democracy, but we're getting there. | ||
| And then look at these assholes, and they're talking about someone rising from the dead. | ||
| Now, that's absolutely ridiculous. | ||
| That's not a martyr. | ||
| That's delusional, right? | ||
| Martyr, of course, and you know this, means witness. | ||
| And Ashley Babbitt did die a witness to her cause. | ||
| She's a martyr. | ||
| I mean, she's a martyr by any definition. | ||
| Her cause is false and fake makes it no less true. | ||
| And if we want to do that, then we basically get rid of the word martyr altogether. | ||
| The problem is when we assume that martyr is a good thing, right? | ||
| Sure. | ||
| Martyr is a politically agnostic term. | ||
| It is what you make of it. | ||
| And what I was fascinated by, Ashley, You know, when you say the completely sort of fictional martyrdom, and I'm like, what's the non-fictional martyrdom? | ||
| She was murdered by the cops, you know, to a certain extent. | ||
| Oh, okay. | ||
| Yeah, right. | ||
| You know, your book is covered with her weapon, a knife, and she was shot. | ||
| So I don't see too much, you know, there is a difference between people who were shot by the cops. | ||
| For sure. | ||
| There is a difference in murder, but they were still murdered by the cops. | ||
| So I do think that there's something to be said about that. | ||
| Yeah, and I think that's actually the key point, right, for understanding what's, to me, the key point to understand what's going on in the Trump scene. | ||
| So I think last time we talked about, like, there's the prosperity gospel of 2016, the bastardized Gnostic gospel of 2020. | ||
| The American fundamentalists, yeah. | ||
| Yeah, and then January 6, 2021, we enter this age of martyrs, and Ashley becomes the first martyr, and she's an ideal martyr for that movement, partly because she's a white woman and a vet. | ||
| So she's gendered both, right? | ||
| The veteran is stabbed in the back, a male, but she's a white woman who they instantly start aging backwards. | ||
| If she were on 30 Rocks, she'd be called a twofer, if you will. | ||
| Yes, right, right. | ||
| And she's not 35. She's in her 20s. | ||
| She's 16. She's just a little white girl. | ||
| And the man who shoots her is an ever larger black. | ||
| Right. | ||
| And so this is the old lynching story, the old white, innocent white woman. | ||
| And this goes all the way back to Virginia Dare, the first white girl born in North America, who gives her name, the Dare, to an alley prominent right wing site. | ||
| So there's that element of martyrdom. | ||
| And I think the fiction versus nonfiction, because what's fascinating to me is that opens the door for martyrdom. | ||
| And I think of her as essentially a placeholder on the cross until Trump could, you know. | ||
| push her aside and take his place. | ||
| Just what you know, once these indictments started coming down, he starts sending out emails. | ||
| Friends, this may be the last time I talk to you for some time. | ||
| Right. | ||
|
unidentified
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And the email I'm going to send you in half hour. | |
| Right. | ||
|
unidentified
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She takes the nails and he gets the money. | |
| Yeah. | ||
|
unidentified
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Yeah. | |
| But the martyrdom gets extended. | ||
| Right. | ||
|
unidentified
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And so she opens the door to the fundamental narrative of white, white power, that grievance. | |
| So now you can be a martyr if you get shot by the cops. | ||
| Be a martyr if you get indicted for illegal payoffs to your mistress. | ||
| You can be a martyr if you're at the January 6th choir singing your song. | ||
| Everybody, it's now an age of martyrs. | ||
| This is the theological frame. | ||
| You know, I wore my Trump hat to work, and I noticed my co-workers giving me side eye. | ||
| I have been persecuted for my faith. | ||
| I'm like Ashley Babbitt. | ||
| I, too, am a martyr. | ||
| So, right, in that fictional sense, Ashley Babbitt actually was killed. | ||
| And historically, that's what a martyr means. | ||
| But now, martyr means anyone who suffers for the cause, which in Trumpism, in the Trumpist imagination, is anyone who believes in the cause. | ||
| To believe in the cause is to suffer for the cause, is to have a Soros-backed... | ||
| D.A. or maybe, you know, a Soros-backed coach on your son's baseball team who's not putting him in. | ||
| You know, what's that about, right? | ||
| Sure. | ||
| Being martyred for our beliefs. | ||
| That coach is a liberal. | ||
| Well, I mean, let me ask you to follow up on that. | ||
| I think it's suddenly far less impressive to become a martyr if everybody else you know is also a martyr. | ||
| Do you know what I mean? | ||
| So is that not lessening the power of your Ashley Babbitt, who was actually, you know, if everybody's taking some sort of stolen valor of martyrdom from her death, doesn't that make her death far less meaningful? | ||
| I think in normal times, yes. | ||
| And I think we've been through enough, you know, the folks I would talk to would talk about this. | ||
| There were some who would see her as the first death of this new American Revolution. | ||
| She is our Crispus Attucks, killed in 1776. | ||
| And, of course, Crispus Attucks is a black Wampanoag man killed, I think, in 1771. | ||
| But, you know, don't get caught up on those details. | ||
| Yeah, yeah, yeah. | ||
| And then there's others who would sort of see her as another entry. | ||
| Calendar sort of already crowded with martyrs. | ||
| Vicki Weaver from the Ruby Ridge standoff where Knowledge Fight listeners probably know what that is. | ||
| I bet. | ||
| Oh, you better believe it. | ||
| Don't talk about it. | ||
|
unidentified
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Yeah. | |
| It's so nice. | ||
| And there's a conspiracy and there's a Nazi. | ||
| You better believe we know about it. | ||
| We know about it. | ||
| It's so nice to talk to folks to whom I don't have to explain conspiracy theories. | ||
| Nope. | ||
| Or Waco, obviously. | ||
| And of course, now I think everyone knows Waco now because Trump put it back into the national consciousness. | ||
| And, you know, there's other folks. | ||
| And what's interesting to me is actually traveling around is there are regional variations of this. | ||
| You'll find, like, somebody who was killed by cops in a standoff maybe because they didn't pay their taxes or something and there was a foreclosure and so on. | ||
| This doesn't become national news. | ||
| But in this region... | ||
| You got Crispus Addicts, you got Ashley Babby, you got Vicki Weaver and Joe X, who's our local martyr, right? | ||
| And normally Joe X goes the way of Vicki Weaver, which is to say, and Vicki Weaver, you could argue, pretty legitimate martyr. | ||
| I mean, that is kind of where we get into the ambivalence part, right? | ||
| She could not have been killed! | ||
| They create a fictionalized version of a real martyr, and I think almost part of that is to avoid from actually having to deal with the real reason that the martyr was created. | ||
| Let me detour on that for a second. | ||
| I want to talk about the proliferation of martyrs and why I think they're not becoming devalued in this current moment. | ||
| Please do! | ||
| But let me just sort of say about that, I mean, there's a section in this book that I think, and I'm so glad that people aren't attacking me for it, but I thought they would. | ||
| One, I thought people would say, you're humanizing Ashley Babbitt. | ||
| I can't. | ||
| She's human. | ||
| You can't humanize anybody. | ||
| She is human, and so am I. And so I want to understand how she comes to this place, not as some kind of common ground bullshit, but because... | ||
| Because, look, that's her knife on the cover and she was there in the Capitol. | ||
| But then there's the killing. | ||
| And I have done a lot of reporting on police killings and have helped bring some to light and have learned a lot about where that law is, why that law is fucked up. | ||
| You know, with Kyle Rittenhouse, people say it's a travesty that he was acquitted. | ||
| It's not a travesty that he was acquitted. | ||
| It's a travesty that the law was written such that there was nothing to do but acquit him, right? | ||
| He was within the law. | ||
| I mean, it's a travesty that he's a murderer. | ||
| I think that's the place we start with. | ||
| That the child became a murderer because of bullshit. | ||
| You know, I mean, that's fascinating. | ||
| That's the first travesty. | ||
| But then the law is written. | ||
| And now the law is written such that people say, well, Ashley Babbitt, of course he had to kill her. | ||
| She was breaking into the Capitol. | ||
| And this drives me nuts. | ||
| Because no, that was not probably... | ||
| We'll never know, because there was no real investigation. | ||
| That was probably not a legitimate killing. | ||
| I talked to a man named Seth Stoughton, literally wrote the book on police use of force. | ||
| A former cop became a law scholar. | ||
| Former cop, well, of course, he's on their side. | ||
| He was the expert witness in the conviction of Derek Chauvin. | ||
| He was the guy who said, let me explain to you in every little nuanced way why this was not legitimate use of force. | ||
| That's usually the side he is on. | ||
| He is usually testifying as an expert witness in trials against cops saying, no, they crossed the line. | ||
| He looks at the video and he says, look, this isn't a court. | ||
| We can't do this. | ||
| But yeah, this does not look legitimate. | ||
| And people say, but she was breaking into the Capitol. | ||
| Do we want to live in a world where cops can shoot to kill anybody who breaks into a house? | ||
| No, stand your ground does not apply to cops. | ||
| And it shouldn't. | ||
| In fact, cops, cops legally. | ||
| And they have to evaluate on three criteria, right? | ||
| I can't even remember them all. | ||
| Ashley Babbitt does not meet all three, right? | ||
| We don't know. | ||
| She might have a weapon. | ||
| The weapon's not visible. | ||
| But she's not in a place because she cannot get over this barrier. | ||
| He had other means of stopping her before she got to that, right? | ||
| So he shoots her. | ||
| Now, here's the complicated part. | ||
| Well, I mean, he could have just fucking left. | ||
| They all could have just fucking left. | ||
| And by the time he shot her as her family's lawyer, who is a police violence lawyer, he's not some right-wing fascist lawyer. | ||
| He's a lawyer who represents people who've been brutalized by police. | ||
|
unidentified
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Right. | |
| So this is not to say, look, Ashley Babbitt is... | ||
| I said, Stoughton, I said, are you saying she's not a domestic terrorist? | ||
| And he says, no, yeah, she's a domestic terrorist. | ||
| And so people say, don't we get to shoot domestic terrorists? | ||
| No! | ||
| No! | ||
| We arrest them! | ||
| We arrest them and try them. | ||
| And if there's nothing else and it's the last incident and someone is about to be harmed, then we currently, under our law, say the police have the right to use violent force. | ||
| This guy would have been indicted if it had happened anywhere but in the Capitol. | ||
| Which is this very weird gray area of law. | ||
| And it's almost sort of like this gray area where criminal law doesn't quite apply, right? | ||
| So he was found not guilty. | ||
| He was just found like, we can't be sure that he wasn't afraid for his life. | ||
| And so we can't be sure that he had malice based on a civil rights violation. | ||
| If you had passed the George Floyd police reform law, that guy would have been indicted. | ||
|
unidentified
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Right. | |
| So the Republicans have said, how come there's not justice for Ashley? | ||
| Because they rigged the laws so that there can't be. | ||
| Right. | ||
| They rigged the laws to protect the police. | ||
| Right. | ||
| I mean, and this is sort of a long, wonky detour, but I think when you talk about the real, like, just the way you said it, like, that they... | ||
| Well, she's murdered. | ||
| They don't want to talk about the real ones. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| Yeah, yeah, yeah. | ||
| Well, I mean, that is kind of it. | ||
| And it is something that I think is quite funny to me, just... | ||
| The way that we think about things is that assumption. | ||
| I don't think there's anything morally wrong with invading the Capitol. | ||
| It's our fucking building. | ||
| That's a point of view that we keep avoiding. | ||
| It is not inherently a bad thing. | ||
| It's not. | ||
| No, I mean, I think about, like, my lefty friends in Wisconsin. | ||
| And because remember, when Scott Walker was trying to break the unions and trying to, he did. | ||
| He did, yeah. | ||
| In Wisconsin. | ||
| And the last stand of organized labor and all its allies was a sit-in at the Capitol, right? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| The same logic that leads some liberals to say, I wish they had just opened fire on Ashley Babbitt and all of them, is the same logic by which, oh, that's true. | ||
|
unidentified
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They do? | |
| What? | ||
| Who is saying that shit? | ||
| Oh, my God. | ||
| What kind of lunatics are out there? | ||
| This is so, I'll tell you what, if go back and look in that early, like, say, Washington Post coverage of Ashley Babbitt and read the comments. | ||
| You want some blood? | ||
| Read the comments. | ||
| And now here's an interesting thing. | ||
| And then you see, for a while, there was these sort of fake accounts mocking Ashley Babbitt. | ||
| And they would always say, and I'm going to quote here, some variation, some paraphrase of, I'm glad they shot the bitch. | ||
| And the bitch is not accidental. | ||
| The misogynistic language that would come into this, right? | ||
| This was sort of giving some liberals license to feel that anger. | ||
| And hey, and look, it's a witch side. | ||
| Look, I'm not going to argue. | ||
| This is not a main argument in my book. | ||
| Like, Ashley Babbitt shouldn't have been shot. | ||
| I don't think she should have been. | ||
| But I do think she should have been arrested. | ||
| And I think they should have, you know, I'm not an abolitionist of the justice system. | ||
| I think she should have been arrested and put in jail. | ||
| And same with the J6ers. | ||
| about to stab that cop, then yeah, then I think it would have been a legitimate shooting. | ||
| But that's not where it was. | ||
| Right. | ||
|
unidentified
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But I think that I'll stop there because that that suddenly jogged my memory about something that I wanted to talk to you about is you recently did a salon interview and there the the interviewer. | |
| He said a few things that I... | ||
| Dr. DeVega, really great writer. | ||
| Yeah, I was a little bit blown away by it. | ||
| Yeah, knowledge by listeners would like Chauncey DeVega, and I feel like the conversation is a little bit like the conversation I've had with you, and Chauncey is like one of those journalists out there who is not bullshitting about it. | ||
| Right, right. | ||
| Well, one thing he said was that Trump and Republican fascists are doing exactly what I would do if I were in their situation, and then he's talking about liberals and the like, and he's saying they're lucky I'm not on the other side. | ||
| Now, your... | ||
| Your response to that is, when you boil it down, is that America is going to have to experience and go through fascism. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| You didn't say, like, maybe. | ||
| You didn't say it's possible or the future or etc. | ||
| You are saying, definitively, that is going to happen. | ||
| No, I'm going to say, go further than that. | ||
| Definitively, it is happening. | ||
| And I think we talked last time, I can't remember, about the F word, fascism, which I don't use lightly. | ||
| I can't stand the way, you know, I'm a lefty, but, you know, every fucking president you dislike is fascist. | ||
| On the one hand, yes, there's always been fascism in America. | ||
| And as I write in the book, you know, I mean, you go, I say, I say, fascism is multiculturalism now. | ||
| Gravitational pull with which is able to pull in people of color into a white supremacist movement. | ||
| That's his latest contribution to fascism. | ||
| The earliest contribution, you know, you had the Nazis studying Jim Crow laws. | ||
| And then, this is actually true, Nazi jurists. | ||
| Looking at Jim Crow laws in one drop of blood and saying, that's a little too much. | ||
| We can't go that far. | ||
| It seemed extreme to them. | ||
| One of the congressional reports says that Alexander Hamilton is one of the underpinnings of the ideological Nazis. | ||
| His writing. | ||
| So it's been there from the jump. | ||
| It's always been there, right? | ||
| But it has not been dominant, right? | ||
| And it has not been... | ||
| You could find counties that were under fascist control. | ||
| We could look at the segregation itself and see elements of fascist control. | ||
| We still don't have a full fascist regime. | ||
| And I think a lot of liberals are doing this thing of saying, yeah, but America is not like Nazi Germany. | ||
| No, it's not. | ||
| Because there was not just in power... | ||
| But consolidated in power. | ||
| And that we may not go through. | ||
| But we're going through the fascism right now in the sense that I think of, you know, queer and trans folks being criminalized in 20 states. | ||
| You have people moving for basic health care. | ||
| You have all these casualties of this slow civil war. | ||
| You have that fear. | ||
| In New Hampshire, where my kids go to school, there's a snitch line you can call. | ||
| You don't like something that the teacher is saying? | ||
| You can report them. | ||
| And teachers know that. | ||
| And teachers are towing the ground and shaping their lessons. | ||
| And what am I going to say about the past? | ||
| And did the past even really happen? | ||
| People have got... | ||
| That's not like fascism. | ||
| That is fascism. | ||
| It's not a fascist regime. | ||
| New Hampshire is not a fascist regime. | ||
| But it is a fascist movement that is growing power. | ||
| And I think that's where Chauncey and I come down. | ||
| I think maybe Knowledge Fight folks are in the same way of sort of saying like... | ||
| Well, you've got your bright spot, but, like, let's not do the thing of, like, well, let's look on the bright side. | ||
| Yeah, you know. | ||
| Oh, no, Nero. | ||
| The reason we do the bright spot is because we're relentlessly and horrifically terrible. | ||
| Right. | ||
| There is a corner of liberalism that wants to keep sort of saying, like, the center will hold. | ||
|
unidentified
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The center won't hold. | |
| The center didn't hold, right? | ||
| The center is gone. | ||
| Well, I mean, the system is... | ||
| The system is there, but the center is gone, right? | ||
| And part of the difference is, the center is... | ||
| The right-wingers I've written about for years and years would support these fascists overseas. | ||
| Saharto in Indonesia, Sadbar in Somalia. | ||
| I mean, these real... | ||
| And they knew what they were, right? | ||
| They weren't deluded about these. | ||
| These were elite American congressmen and so on. | ||
| Mike Pence supporting, arming up the Sri Lankan government that would then use it to slaughter its own people that hurt it onto a beach. | ||
| He knew... | ||
| That they were doing this, right? | ||
| But there was a way in which they somehow drew the strange line. | ||
| They wanted power in America, but no, not until Trump comes down that golden escalator in 2015, bringing with him the fascist aesthetic. | ||
| Does the creation of a full fascist movement become powerful and do they embrace that? | ||
| There's enough of those folks now that the center is what... | ||
| Led them to believe, I can't quite let that in the door. | ||
| Not quite that. | ||
| Reagan maybe, but not that. | ||
| Sure. | ||
| System now has room for that in the space, right? | ||
| And I think that that's that. | ||
| So the center, the center is gone. | ||
| The system is still there, but the system is now up for grabs. | ||
| Right. | ||
| Well, I mean, I feel like when we talk about that. | ||
| That's an important thing to put in a historical context. | ||
| So if you say to me, we're going through fascism, we're in this place where we don't have a fascist regime yet, are you telling me that we're the German commies and the liberals unable to get together to vote out the Nazis? | ||
| Where are we in that scenario? | ||
| I mean, there sure are echoes of that. | ||
| There's a terrific book called Ernst Bloch. | ||
| What's the name? | ||
| It's got a terrible title, a collection of essays. | ||
| It's got a terrible title. | ||
| Oh, I'm just like, I can never remember the title of a book that's got a terrible title, you know? | ||
| Sure. | ||
| It's called Heritage of Our Times. | ||
| Right. | ||
| Bad title. | ||
| Heritage of Our Times. | ||
| It is a bad title. | ||
| And it sounds like a Nazi book. | ||
| Ernst Bloch was a great radical German journalist in the 1930s, but also he became actually a prominent American scholar after the war. | ||
| Operation Paperclip? | ||
| No, no. | ||
| He's a good guy. | ||
|
unidentified
|
He's a good guy. | |
| And unlike so many of the German radicals at that time, he was a real student of religious studies. | ||
| And so he was always looking at In ways that some of which seems obvious to us now, fascism's mobilization of the mythological and so on. | ||
| And some of it, when I read this book, it's astonishing to me because partly it's also granular detail. | ||
| He's talking about what's happening in one smaller German city because these are essays that are written in the moment before the regime is fully in power. | ||
| You see so many resonances and you realize, I mean, it's from reading that book that I realized like, oh, the Trump rallies certainly never ended. | ||
| And how did I miss this? | ||
| I remember in 2016, I wrote a little essay trying to encourage my lefty friends. | ||
| All right, let's vote for Hillary. | ||
| And the problem isn't just Trump. | ||
| It's the million little Trumps that are going to be unleashed. | ||
| Well, now we have Trump rallies. | ||
| We just had one in New Hampshire. | ||
| You want to go to a Trump rally? | ||
| No problem. | ||
| Go to your school board meeting. | ||
| Go to many city hall meetings. | ||
| You've got a million little Trumps. | ||
| Not all the same charisma, but the same rhetoric. | ||
| The Montana state legislature, that's a Trump rally. | ||
| The Tennessee state legislature, that's a Trump rally. | ||
| And when I say it's a rally, it means that they're no longer interested in, you know, even the veneer of governing. | ||
| It's the performative rejection. | ||
| Of the other. | ||
| The black legislators in Tennessee, the trans legislators in Montana. | ||
| And I think there's another one in Iowa has been silenced. | ||
| I think a mother of a trans person, I think it's in Iowa, has been silenced. | ||
| And I want to say also, we hear about those national stories. | ||
| There's more. | ||
| There's always more. | ||
| Every journalist knows this, right? | ||
| The stories that somehow catch the national eye. | ||
| I mean, I suppose where I get into trouble here is if what you are saying is true, right? | ||
| If we are doing these things, then what is now justified? | ||
| If we're there, if we're in this situation, you know, you've said it's in or out time on multiple occasions. | ||
| There are... | ||
| It's criminal. | ||
| To exist if you are a trans person in some places. | ||
| Once that happens, why care about any laws? | ||
| It is against the law for you to live. | ||
| So at what point do we just say that there's no point? | ||
| There's no law. | ||
| I guess that's a personal decision, Jordan. | ||
| That's a personal decision. | ||
| But that's what I mean whenever I talk about you saying it's in or out time. | ||
| Yeah, because it is time to take place. | ||
| It is time to make that decision. | ||
| And look, I mean, I opened the book with Harry Belfani, who dies last week at 96. And he's the bright spot of the book. | ||
| And it's a pretty bitter bright spot. | ||
| He's a man who died angry, right? | ||
| He hated the Hollywoodization of the civil rights movement. | ||
| He spoke to Martin Luther King, who was his, you know, he was really, many people don't realize how close they were and how instrumental they were to each other. | ||
| He speaks to him, when I was spending time with him, in the present tense. | ||
| And he's haunted by him. | ||
| And he's not saying, oh, MLK, what a great American. | ||
| He's like, this was lost. | ||
| This was bitter, right? | ||
| Right. | ||
|
unidentified
|
And El Fonny was not a nonviolent man. | |
| And that's actually part of why he's in the beginning. | ||
| Like he, he, uh, uh, well, I'm going to push back real quick on that. | ||
| I think that it's going to be easy to assume that when I'm talking about in or out time, action time, or anything like that, that I'm instantly talking about violence. | ||
| I'm talking more about something that needs to be done. | ||
| That we can't say in or out time without then taking an action. | ||
| In that regard, if that makes sense to you. | ||
| Do you understand? | ||
| Yes. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| But I'm also, I mean, another lesson we can draw from the 1930s and the fact that the United States didn't get a fascist regime and people don't realize that it was much closer to that potential. | ||
| Oh, it was right there. | ||
| Yeah, it was right there. | ||
| And what did the United States have that Germany didn't have? | ||
| All kinds of complicated things. | ||
| But one thing was on the left, something called the Popular Front. | ||
| The popular front was all hands on deck, people that I do not agree with. | ||
| What's making fascism powerful now? | ||
| Proud Boys working with pious evangelicals, right-wing Catholics working with right-wing Protestants. | ||
| These are people who don't normally talk to one another. | ||
| Joe Rogan fans lining up with the Family Research Council. | ||
| A convergence of movements, right? | ||
| To fight back, you have the popular front. | ||
| So in that sense, when I say it's all in, look, if... | ||
| I'm not going to tell if someone says like, hey, we're going to have a drag show and we know the Proud Boys are going to show up with their guns. | ||
| So we're going to show up with our guns. | ||
| I'm not going to tell them not to do that. | ||
| If someone says, I am going to go and campaign for my senator, Maggie Hassan in New Hampshire, who is completely inadequate as a Democratic senator. | ||
| I'm not going to tell them not to do that. | ||
| Oh, I'm voting for Feinstein for president in 2024. | ||
| That's my plan. | ||
| Yeah, it's all hands on deck. | ||
| And that was the popular front, which was communist-led because it was a different time in the 1930s. | ||
| But they were working with Democrats. | ||
| They were working with people of conscience and all these kinds of things. | ||
| So, yeah, it's all in. | ||
| It's all in for me, which is sort of why I'm writing this book. | ||
| I've been writing about right-wing movements for 20 years. | ||
| I thought I was done. | ||
| I've done a bunch of books and so on, but I had other projects I want to do. | ||
| This is what... | ||
| I can do. | ||
| There's kids in the book that we meet in Wisconsin, these wonderful kids. | ||
| Black River Falls, Wisconsin, which is not hipster Wisconsin. | ||
| It's not Madison. | ||
| It's not Milwaukee. | ||
| It's a small little town. | ||
| And I pull in right after Dobbs, the fall of Roe, and there's this woman, very small, under five feet tall, standing on the bridge by herself, holding a sign that says, your misogyny is showing. | ||
| And I circle around, and now there's a couple other kids. | ||
| They're high school kids, young college kids, not... | ||
| The town radicals. | ||
| These are the student body presidents. | ||
| There's a cheerleader named Peyton holding a sign that says, fuck off. | ||
| And I ask what it means, right? | ||
| And she's like, it means fuck off. | ||
| It means, I'm quoting her. | ||
| I mean, you ain't getting no pussy. | ||
| You ain't getting anything. | ||
| If you're going to do this, it means rage. | ||
| She means... | ||
| Sex strike. | ||
| She means I'm not being part of this world in which there's a gender expectation of me if my rights are not going to be protected by those who are older, right? | ||
| Right. | ||
| Now, these kids, who I love, what courage they have. | ||
| I talked to them later that night. | ||
| I said, you know, a lot of these folks in the right are talking about civil war, and I think this is going to horrify them. | ||
| Instead, they're like, bring it on. | ||
| Well, I mean, I believe the quote is from Theta. | ||
| Is that the way? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| It is. | ||
| You know, it's either we fight against them, we possibly get killed in a civil war, or we suffer like this, a right stripped away from us minute by minute. | ||
| And I don't know if that's a life worth living. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And that's the right heart. | ||
| Now, Theta, they were all... | ||
| This whole gang of sweet little kids loading up on carbs and waffles late at night at Perkins, which is where you can go in the small town. | ||
| They were all Wisconsinized. | ||
| They all knew how to use guns, except Theta. | ||
| Theta was an archer. | ||
| And now there's a clue here, right? | ||
| Theta's an archer like Katniss and Hunger Games. | ||
| Sure, sure. | ||
| You remember that these are kids, right? | ||
| And that their imagination of civil war is just that, an imagination shaped by movies, right? | ||
| And so as it is... | ||
| For the militiamen in Marinette, Wisconsin, who, his imagination of civil war, and he's got plenty of guns and so on, is shaped by Red Dawn movies, or 300 movies, right? | ||
| These stories that people are telling themselves about the world. | ||
| The difference is, though, what I took heart from those kids, and why they're a bright spot, even though I do not want them shooting anybody, and I don't think that will win. | ||
| I mean, just practically. | ||
| Right, right, right. | ||
| That's just going to continue the endless cycle. | ||
| It's not even going to continue. | ||
| Going to get squashed. | ||
| That's a romanticism, right? | ||
| Sure. | ||
| There's 393 million guns in civilian hands in America and lefties. | ||
| And I just was talking to some graduate students who's like, it's time for the left to arm up. | ||
| I'm like, if you want to go down that path. | ||
| That time was about 150 years ago. | ||
| And you're really not going to catch up. | ||
| Yeah, the Reconstruction era really was where it all went wrong. | ||
| Right, right. | ||
| You laid down your guns! | ||
| Whoops! | ||
| But you can't catch up. | ||
| But I take great heart from them because, right, Theta is thinking, I think, in the correct terms, right? | ||
| You know, it's time to fight. | ||
| The protest sign is not give me my rights, it's fuck off. | ||
| Right. | ||
| It's, you have failed. | ||
| And when I say you, I mean you, Jordan, and me, because we're older than them, right? | ||
| We have failed. | ||
| That's what these kids are saying. | ||
| I think, too, what's interesting to me, did you see this thing yesterday? | ||
| And I'm just free associating, so you should just cut me off. | ||
| But did you see Dee Snider of Twisted Sister? | ||
| No. | ||
| You don't follow Dee Snider? | ||
| I'm not on social media. | ||
| Oh, that's right. | ||
| I'm nowhere. | ||
| You cannot find me. | ||
| But it's a real fascinating move. | ||
| So Dee Snider, Twisted Sister, that 80s rock band. | ||
| Remember, we're not... | ||
| Oh, I'm well aware of Twisted Sister. | ||
| Yes, indeed. | ||
| We're not going to take it. | ||
| And has, in the Trump years, sort of emerged as a surprising kind of left ally, partly because so many Trumpists assume that, like, 80s metal was all in for them. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Sure. | |
| A fair amount of it turned out to be, but not Dean Snyder. | ||
| Until yesterday, when Paul Stanley of KISS puts out a thing, says like, look, I love dressing up and so on, and adults should be allowed to transition. | ||
| You see where this is going. | ||
| It's the turf lawn, right? | ||
| But young people, you know, parents making a game or just acting as if transitioning is just fun and games and so on. | ||
| And Dean Snyder breaks my heart. | ||
| He says, you know, when I was young, I felt pretty too. | ||
| Thank God, you know, my parents didn't. | ||
| You know, as if, like, cut off his dick, right? | ||
| We're all gonna lick boots! | ||
| Yes! | ||
| We're all gonna lick boots! | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah! | |
| I like it. | ||
| That's a good song. | ||
| I don't know if it'll sell as well, but I don't think it's bad. | ||
| But, uh... | ||
| The point of it was, I'm looking at this, I'm like, here's a guy, Snyder, who has actually become this weird kind of prominent ally in the way so many of these old celebrities like George Takei have, right? | ||
| And then he split off. | ||
| And I look at the way fascism works, which is it finds a story that can sort of sliver liberals like that and say, like, well... | ||
| I'm certainly not against trans people, but... | ||
| And now here you are. | ||
| And now this movement... | ||
| And so then you get some 16-year-old trans kids saying, fuck off Dee Snider, just the way he would have when he was 16, and being more extreme, right? | ||
| Sure. | ||
| And we can say, hey, some of those kids are going to cross the line. | ||
| Like, you know... | ||
| There's people who are going to say stupid things. | ||
| 16-year-olds saying stupid things? | ||
| Amazing. | ||
| How could it happen, right? | ||
| And then the right then takes those stupid things and feeds them to people like Dee Snider and says, you know what? | ||
| The trans movement is entirely people who want to cut off their dicks for fun and games. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Sure. | |
| Which is just false. | ||
| But Snider says, that sounds horrible! | ||
| Well, you know. | ||
| I mean, have you ever met a trans person who was, like, just in this for fun and games? | ||
| I think I will go through this incredibly difficult medical procedure and make myself visible as part of the most targeted community in the United States right now so that the guns will be aimed at me. | ||
| That'll be fun and games. | ||
| Nobody does that. | ||
| I mean, you know, sometimes you get to around Tuesday at 3 and you're like, I gotta do something today and I can't take another shower, so. | ||
| But that's that slivering, and I see, I mean, this is happening in a very sort of accelerating way right now, and that's why I talk about all hands on deck. | ||
| That's why I talk about the popular front, right? | ||
| The answer to that is the old labor song, and I write about it in the book, Which Side Are You On? | ||
|
unidentified
|
1930s, Harlan County. | |
| People don't realize that one of the very first uses of air power in the United States, by the United States, was strafing striking miners. | ||
| Air power in the United States develops with planes flying over Tulsa, Oklahoma, strafing black folks, bombing black folks, and strafing miners in Kentucky. | ||
| And there's a mine widow, Florence Reese, who sings the song, Which Side Are You On? | ||
| They're shooting us. | ||
| So if you're like, well, it's complicated. | ||
|
unidentified
|
I support labor, but I don't know. | |
| Which side are you on? | ||
| There's the AR-15. | ||
| The men with AR-15s outside the library or the school. | ||
| And there's kids inside. | ||
| Which side are you on? | ||
| It is a which side are you on moment. | ||
| And that's, I think, what you were getting to. | ||
| It's a which side are you on moment. | ||
| You have to decide which side are you on. | ||
| But then... | ||
| You're right. | ||
| It's not necessarily violence. | ||
| I'm there with the kids inside. | ||
| What are you doing? | ||
| Maybe you're the person who says, I'm going to bring my gun and I'm going to stand facing off with these guys. | ||
| Or maybe you're the one who's in there and saying, I'm going to be in drag reading a story to kids. | ||
| Well, maybe we need an underground railroad to get... | ||
| Trans and LGBTQ people out of these horrible places without... | ||
| Oh, that's already happened. | ||
| Exactly. | ||
| That's what I'm saying. | ||
| It doesn't need to be a violent response. | ||
| It needs to be one that is aware of the moment. | ||
| And if we're in a historical context, we can kind of guess what's going to happen next. | ||
| So if we prepare as opposed to just being like, let's hope it doesn't happen this time. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| No, no. | ||
| It is happening now. | ||
| You're in Missouri, right? | ||
| Where they've now just outlawed trans healthcare for not just kids. | ||
| How dare you say I'm from Missouri? | ||
| No, no, no, no. | ||
| One is in Missouri. | ||
| One is in Missouri. | ||
| It still stands. | ||
| How dare you say I'm from Missouri? | ||
| No, Dan's from Missouri. | ||
| But, you know, I mean, you've got to think about your future. | ||
| I mean, this is sort of like I want... | ||
| The book is called The Scenes from the Slow Civil War, right? | ||
| Because... | ||
| I'm going around trying to get folks to realize this. | ||
| I'm fascinated. | ||
| And a story I'm going to speak a little bit out of school, but I'm not going to give too many details. | ||
| An acquaintance happens to know Paul Ryan. | ||
| And the acquaintance is friendly with Paul Ryan, but not a fascist. | ||
| Ryan is not a fascist. | ||
| He enabled it, but he's not. | ||
| There, right? | ||
| I mean, that's denying your in or out time conversation right there. | ||
| No, well, no. | ||
| Wait, wait. | ||
| Because of in or out time. | ||
| Especially with Paul fucking Ryan. | ||
| He's out, and here's why. | ||
| This guy is saying to him, you know, Paul, you understand, you're never getting back into politics. | ||
| And he's like, yeah, Paul gets that. | ||
| He says, but I think it's important to maintain a place in the room. | ||
| And with guys, it's like, Paul doesn't understand. | ||
| If he's in the room, it's not the room, right? | ||
| This is what I mean about the center not holding. | ||
| These old establishment guys, they're not maintaining a place in the room. | ||
| If they're in the room, now they're a fascist. | ||
| Paul Ryan, they're not going to let him in that room. | ||
| So whatever room he's in, he's looking around, this is not the room of power anymore, right? | ||
| You don't get access, Paul Ryan, to that room. | ||
| Yeah, they get rid of people who are useless very quickly. | ||
| It turns out they're not very loyal. | ||
| Weird about fascists. | ||
| Right, right, right. | ||
| But, you know, or like I think of, well, and then I get into sort of wonky political stuff. | ||
| I'll stop there. | ||
| But I think that like that in and out. | ||
| Our fans are literally called policy walks. | ||
|
unidentified
|
All right. | |
| So Governor Chris DiNuno in New Hampshire, right? | ||
| Running for president. | ||
| Who knows why. | ||
| And he's the moderate lane and so on. | ||
| Although he has said he will vote for Trump if Trump is the nominee. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Okay. | |
| All right. | ||
| I'm a moderate Nazi. | ||
| Right. | ||
| Right. | ||
| He's chosen which side he's on, right? | ||
| And he wasn't always on that side. | ||
| And I think, but that's also, part of the which side are you on thing, and I think it's very tempting to the left, is this kind of essentialism to assume, like, well, if that person's chosen, that's what they always were. | ||
| If only it was that simple and that safe. | ||
| The reality is, he looked at this situation, and he was sort of standing in the middle. | ||
| He figured out that it was untenable. | ||
| And he chose that side. | ||
| And that's the story of Ashley Babbitt. | ||
| Ashley Babbitt was not always a fascist. | ||
| A lot of the people who celebrate her killing just like, you know, and usually in very misogynistic terms say she was always that. | ||
| Ashley Babbitt, and that's why I'm sort of interested in this. | ||
| So we want to pay attention to the movement, right? | ||
| Undertow is a movement metaphor. | ||
| It's pulling us out to sea, right? | ||
| But it's also, what do you choose to do with that undertone? | ||
| I think for so many people like Ashley Babbitt, they're sort of resisting it their whole lives. | ||
| They're trying to be a good person. | ||
| You know, she's like a liberal Democrat, very proud of Obama, loves Obama, second favorite president after Trump. | ||
| And some people say, well, that just means she's stupid. | ||
| Well, no, it means... | ||
| There's emotional affect that's going in all sorts of different ways. | ||
| After she died 14 years in the Air Force, a lot of people mocked the fact that she had not gotten very far and said, that just goes to show you the kind of person who invades the Capitol. | ||
| An idiot was so bad that they can't. | ||
| Why did she not get very far in the Air Force? | ||
| Because time and time again, she was a person who would stand up. | ||
| She's like, you know, a little person, but not afraid. | ||
| An officer, there's plenty of officers who are assholes, would be berating somebody, and Ashley would get in the middle. | ||
| She would choose which side she was on, right? | ||
| She's like, I'm on the side, like, I don't care about chain of command. | ||
| I'm like, that's wrong what you're saying to that person. | ||
| So she'd just get, you know, bump down and rank again and again and again. | ||
| She was the person who she literally did. | ||
| There was a, I think it was a purse snatcher. | ||
| Ashley sprints down the street and Right. | ||
| And she tries to be a good person. | ||
| And I think of this sort of turning point, I think, and of course she's not alive, so we can't know, but it comes up in some of her writing and videos. | ||
| And so at this point, she lives in Southern California, very blue Southern California. | ||
| She's gone in for Trump. | ||
| No one's really followed her, her husband and her girlfriend, because she's both. | ||
| They are a throuple. | ||
| They're kind of a queer throuple. | ||
| There's videos they make of Ashley watching Trump rallies. | ||
| They just think it's her weird thing, right? | ||
| They're like, let's go to the beach, Ashley. | ||
| And, you know, we don't really follow that. | ||
| But there's a point, houselessness is a huge problem in Southern California. | ||
| And it's growing, right? | ||
| And that has all kinds of structural issues, right? | ||
| Ashley tries to remember that and tries to be compassionate. | ||
| And one day a guy shits on her lawn and she just gives up, goes, leans back into the undertow. | ||
| You know, I'm not paddling. | ||
| I'm not trying to be the better person. | ||
| I'm not trying to see the larger problem. | ||
| I just want to fucking hate this dude who shat in my lawn. | ||
| And Trump comes along and he tells me it's okay. | ||
| And not only am I not a bad person for hating that. | ||
| I'm a good person. | ||
| I'm a victim, right? | ||
| Hashtag love. | ||
| That's her first tweet on behalf of Trump, right? | ||
| Sure. | ||
| To choose the side. | ||
| That's movement. | ||
| Chris Zununu, he has governed as a moderate, in fact, until now, was actually sort of pushing back against our very... | ||
| Occasionally far-right legislature in New Hampshire. | ||
| Not anymore. | ||
| All that's stopping. | ||
| He's choosing a side. | ||
| We've got to pay attention to that strategically because that means powerful people who aren't stupid but are selfish are saying, huh, which side am I on? | ||
| I think I better go over on that side, right? | ||
| That's why I keep going back to Ashley Babbitt with you. | ||
| I mean, when you say that it was the houseless person that shat on her lawn, I mean, to me, that's an insane thing to say. | ||
| What it was is an entire lifetime of institutionalized misogyny kicking her ass left and right until finally something like that happens. | ||
| And then my question to you from there is this. | ||
| Why do people choose to go with Trump? | ||
| It's that kind of in or out level. | ||
| What is it that the left is not providing that would be an option for her? | ||
| Because she wasn't getting any options from the left. | ||
| No, she was getting a kind of a neoliberal governance system that wasn't taking care of homeless people. | ||
| Weird that her favorite president was Obama. | ||
| She was getting a neoliberal government system that wasn't regulating banking so that she could get... | ||
| A loan because she didn't know what she's trying to do for her pool business. | ||
| It would suddenly put her in incredible interest that there's literally, I mean, it's a mafia loan. | ||
| There's no way for her ever to pay. | ||
| She was getting, yeah, misogyny all the way through. | ||
| She was getting, you know, she saw 9-11 and decided to join the Air Force at 17, convinced her parents. | ||
| To let her go down and join early. | ||
| And like so many people in the Trump world, and I think the right... | ||
| I mean, you can talk to folks in the Trump world, and they sound like they've just come from a screening of Democracy Now!, right? | ||
| They will talk about blood for oil and what they lost in the Iraq war and how bitter they are and how that war was for Halliburton. | ||
| That diagnosis is fairly accurate. | ||
| And then... | ||
| And that is why I support Trump, right? | ||
| Partly, right? | ||
| And, like, when you say that, when I say the man who shits on the lawn, right, that's not, that's the, this, this is the narrative, right? | ||
| No, I understand, I understand, yes. | ||
| And I sort of write in the book about, like, what is it? | ||
| And, like, to name any one thing, like, is it, she gives into her racism, too. | ||
| And the racism has always been there, and it's always been there, right? | ||
| Is this race, or is this class, or is this misogyny? | ||
| Yes. | ||
| Yes, yes. | ||
| That's called intersectionality. | ||
| And it's a million other little things. | ||
| It is the disappointments of life. | ||
| It's a marriage that didn't work. | ||
| It's the shame she feels. | ||
| So many people made this a lot of the fact that she, I think in 2016, the man she ended up marrying, Aaron Babbitt. | ||
| It was a complicated transition. | ||
| Who knows if there was some cheating or whatever involved. | ||
| And Ashley Babbitt loses her temper and allegedly, although is found not guilty later, rams the other woman's car. | ||
| That's fucking horrible. | ||
| What a fucking horrible thing to do. | ||
| This is also... | ||
| She's not proud of that! | ||
| You know, people are like, look at that. | ||
| That's the way that person is. | ||
| Well, we on the left, on the liberation side, we are the ones who are supposed to own the idea that you are not defined by your worst act, right? | ||
| This is why we oppose the carceral state, which is why we oppose the essentialism of American caste, right? | ||
| And yet she is. | ||
| And I think, why does she choose Trump? | ||
| You're right. | ||
| There's an absence. | ||
| There's an absence. | ||
| It's there on the left, but you have to go looking. | ||
| It's not as visible. | ||
| Trump is more visible. | ||
| I think about this in a previous book of mine, Sweet Hand When I Die. | ||
| I wrote about a movement called Battle Cry. | ||
| And what Battle Cry would do in the early 2000s is they would have these three-day rock festivals for evangelical teens, 70,000 folks. | ||
| They would go out there, and I remember there was one schtick they would have. | ||
| They would have a cattle hide, and they would talk about, and they'd be projecting on the screen. | ||
| They said, you know what corporations are doing to you? | ||
| They're branding you. | ||
| They would brand the hide, and they would put up on the screen Oakley or Coca-Cola. | ||
| They're branding you. | ||
| They're branding you. | ||
| They're branding you, right? | ||
| This could be ad busters. | ||
| This is a leftist critique. | ||
| And yet then they swoop them up. | ||
| And Battlecry, you can hear it in the name, Some of the other stage, the one thing they did is they'd bring a mannequin on, and each part of the mannequin would be labeled like pornography or some other thing that they didn't. | ||
| And then they would take this biblical story about a concubine who was given by a figure to the mob to be torn up, and that this is somehow the good thing. | ||
| Which story was that? | ||
| There's too many of those. | ||
| But they lead the thousands of kids in chanting... | ||
| Tear up the concubine. | ||
| Tear up the concubine. | ||
| And they rip an arm off and throw it to the crowd. | ||
| And the kids are all screaming. | ||
| And who wants, you know, I want a hand. | ||
| I want this and so on. | ||
| This is fascism. | ||
| This is it. | ||
| I love people who think that we didn't evolve behaving exactly like a giant shit ton of apes. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yes. | |
| But this is fascism. | ||
| But look at what they've just done. | ||
| They've taken like, hey, kids, I bet you hate that you're fucking corporate branded. | ||
| And they do. | ||
| And the left isn't saying that, right? | ||
| Not at that time. | ||
| There is a left that's saying that, but it's not visible enough. | ||
| Adbusters is saying it, but these kids in Texas aren't getting adbusters. | ||
| They're getting battle cry, right? | ||
| And they're becoming Trumpers. | ||
| Well, the story on the left is an offer of slow, incremental change to people, as you know, who have recognized that the center doesn't exist anymore. | ||
| So there is no slow, incremental change. | ||
| There is. | ||
| I'm going to disagree with you there. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| No, no, no. | ||
| I'm not saying that from my point of view. | ||
| I'm saying that from the story that they are getting is if you go with Trump, we can do it now. | ||
| We can do it fast. | ||
| Yeah, we can do it now. | ||
| And if you go with fucking Joe Biden, Jesus Christ. | ||
| Nobody can sell Joe Biden on you. | ||
| That's not going to happen, you know? | ||
| Democracy is dull. | ||
| We know this, right? | ||
| I mean, it's why there's a chapter in the book called The Great Acceleration. | ||
| And let me find this passage. | ||
| So accelerationism. | ||
| Speaking of which, I was going to ask you if you were a closet accelerationist. | ||
| So we'll get there eventually. | ||
| There's my elegant answer. | ||
| No, I'm a closet liberal. | ||
| Like, I'm a closet slow incremental change. | ||
| That's why Harry Belfani. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Boo! | |
| Boo! | ||
|
unidentified
|
Sorry. | |
| The long struggle, man. | ||
| The long struggle. | ||
| The struggle is long, right? | ||
| Sure. | ||
| And it's why I reject the language of crisis. | ||
| And you, with your religious background, understand the eschatological nature of that. | ||
| It's the crisis of democracy. | ||
| It's the crisis of climate. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Sure. | |
| It's the final battle, as Trump says, right? | ||
| This is it. | ||
| You're all in or all out for a long struggle. | ||
| Because we are going to go through fascism. | ||
| And I don't know if it's going to be a fascist regime, but if we're like, God damn, I'm going to fight so hard! | ||
| We didn't win. | ||
| What's the point? | ||
| Harry Belfani stayed in the struggle for 96 years. | ||
| A stronger soul than me, yes. | ||
| But one who had also many more temptations than most of us. | ||
| As a superstar, easy for him to walk away. | ||
| He stayed fully, 100% in the struggle. | ||
| He stayed in the anger. | ||
| For 96 years. | ||
| That's the long struggle, right? | ||
| That's the struggle against fascism. | ||
| That's the struggle for the democracy we have not yet enjoyed. | ||
| And the accelerationists who say it's time to give up democracy doesn't do enough. | ||
| What fools? | ||
| We haven't had it yet. | ||
| Wouldn't it be something? | ||
| That's why there's a chapter in the book about Occupy, too. | ||
| And the pleasures of physical democracy, as one person describes it, of the democracy of we're going to sleep together in the park. | ||
| We're going to cook together. | ||
| We're going to make a library together. | ||
| We're going to have really clunky, boring, slow consensus meetings. | ||
| And consensus meetings are fucking boring. | ||
| They are not as thrilling as the strongman. | ||
| And accelerationism says... | ||
| Accelerationism says, though. | ||
| Let me find this little accelerationist passage. | ||
| Take your time. | ||
| I'll edit this part out and it'll look like you opened the book to the right page. | ||
| It'll be beautiful. | ||
| So there's in Waukesha, Milwaukee. | ||
| Waukesha, Milwaukee. | ||
| So Milwaukee is a very blue city. | ||
| In a purple state, and Waukesha is one of the counties that used to be the most right-wing counties in America. | ||
| It is the purest white flight. | ||
| And yet it has been giving up on some of that conservative over the years. | ||
| As it does, though, the fight gets sharper. | ||
| And in Waukesha now, there's a, I mean, the school board, we have school board people there saying we should just not teach science. | ||
| Science is of the devil. | ||
| You know, I mean, it's really... | ||
| Oh, yeah, I think they... | ||
| I think the Waukesha School Board, there was a little scandal recently. | ||
| There was Somewhere Over the Rainbow that we can't sing that. | ||
| It's gay! | ||
| But I get to Waukesha. | ||
| And Waukesha is also this place that I think is sort of useful because it is this place of kind of mythological violence. | ||
| It's where, in 2021, a man who called himself Math Boy Fly, he plows through a Christmas parade. | ||
| Remember? | ||
| The Christmas parade and six people were dancing grannies, right? | ||
| And this looms so large on the right. | ||
| They say, you want to talk about Carl Rittenhouse? | ||
| Let's talk about Math Boy Fly. | ||
| He's essentially an asshole, right? | ||
| But he's an asshole of his times. | ||
| And sometimes he talks online about Black Lives Matter and so on. | ||
| So they conclude that he is doing this for Black Lives Matter. | ||
| In fact, this man lacks any ideological principle. | ||
| He is a domestic violence guy and he's fleeing from the cops. | ||
| And he's just like, he is the absolute narcissism. | ||
| People are my way. | ||
| I'm driving through them and he kills them, right? | ||
| Waukesha is also, and I think even maybe more important, where In 2014, we have the Slender Man attempted murder. | ||
| And this is a sort of looming story, too. | ||
| This is great, by the way. | ||
| People want to go and look for it. | ||
| Alex Marr in a magazine called VQR writes a piece called Out Came the Girls. | ||
| And it's so relevant, actually, to understanding the martyrdom cults and innocence of girlhood, the alleged innocence of girlhood. | ||
| Two 12-year-old girls lure their third friend into the woods to kill her. | ||
| For Slenderman, who they have read about online. | ||
| I mean, this is Alex Jones' territory, right? | ||
| And it's swirling around. | ||
| It's swirling around both the conspiracy myth of Slenderman and then the conspiracy myth of sort of liberal anxiety, which is that the internet is, in fact, Slenderman, the boogeyman that's going to take our kids. | ||
| And it will happen sometimes. | ||
| That's the thing. | ||
| That happened there. | ||
| Weirdly, most kids on the internet have not... | ||
| Attempted to sacrifice anyone to Slenderman, right? | ||
| Sure, sure. | ||
| But that one incident looms so large. | ||
| And so I get to this town and... | ||
| You know, you get off the highway and where there's normally like, you know, the champion baseball team signs, there's just this, and I can't show it on here, but there's just like this photograph in the book. | ||
| The entire hillside is covered with fascist billboards. | ||
| Some of them make sense. | ||
| Some of them don't. | ||
| Some of them are about Obama. | ||
| Some of them... | ||
| Some are about Biden. | ||
| Some of them are about COVID. | ||
| Here I'm reading one that says, group morality goes to orgy giving you, and then the rest is cut off by grass. | ||
| Tony the taxer, the Democratic governor. | ||
| It's just, I mean, literally dozens and dozens of boards. | ||
| And it's, I think about it in this terms of sort of this overflow of... | ||
| Of all the signs I've been seeing around the country, the Let's Go Brandon signs, the Fuck Joe Biden signs, the AR-15 signs, people making totem poles to celebrate Trump, painting silos, the vast outburst of very dark and frightening creativity, but it is creativity, right? | ||
| Versus pride flags. | ||
| Sure. | ||
| I mean, I assume in, like, 40 years people will collect those the same way they did Soviet-era posters. | ||
| A friend of mine is a Smithsonian curator, and he's already on it. | ||
| He says this is fascist folk. | ||
| This is fascist folk art. | ||
| I mean, he was on it in January 6th. | ||
| He was like, we got to get, for the Smithsonian, we got to get the shattered Nancy Pelosi. | ||
| Now the Smithsonian is filled with dank memes. | ||
| Dank memes, right. | ||
| But, you know, our mind is filled with dank memes, right? | ||
| And so this is where I start to, this is where we get around to accelerationism, right? | ||
| Sorry, I'm not going to be able to get over. | ||
| Our mind is filled with take memes for a while. | ||
| Man, I sound so much like Alex Jones. | ||
| And, you know, I'd like to show you, Jordan, I've got this Zevia zero calorie drink. | ||
| And if you drink this and you can order directly from me, I'm, you know. | ||
| Yes, yeah, I got you. | ||
| You're all right. | ||
| It's a lame joke. | ||
| I'm not the comedian, man. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Sorry. | |
| I was genuinely interested in your soda for a second. | ||
| Oh, it's good soda. | ||
| No, it's Zevia. | ||
| Zero sugar, but without that chemical stuff. | ||
| It's delicious. | ||
| Cream soda, yeah. | ||
| That's good stuff. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| But I'm starting to look at these sort of killings, and if there's a killing that has already faded, Bobby Crimo III, who kills a bunch of people in Highland Park, Illinois, Chicago, right? | ||
| Seven people who once attended a Trump rally dressed as Waldo of Where's Waldo fame, and who may or may not have been truly aware of politics. | ||
| And that's got to be in quotes. | ||
| As such at all, in the same way that we're talking about Jack Teixeira, the airman, and it's blowing my mind, the New York Times to say, well, he posted a lot of memes about hating the deep state and about Jews and racists and about he called Ukrainians pigs, but I guess we'll just never know why he did what he did, you know? | ||
| Yes, he may be a 21-year-old fool, but this is sort of the poison that's in the air, and so it was for Bobby Crimo, right? | ||
| His online life rippled with right-wing hatreds, but he dedicated the panicked days before his crime to a sped-up aesthetic of images and ideologies crashing into one another, sometimes called schizo-wave. | ||
| It's a vile term, a grotesque romanticization of mental illness. | ||
| An awful metaphor for the quickening of our fragmentation, the great acceleration, a simultaneous explosion and collapse of meaning, right? | ||
| So like schizowave in its verb form, schizoposting, accelerationism is a relatively recent term allegedly coined or at least brought into contemporary use in 2013 by two Marxist political scientists via the influence of a two-volume work of 1970s French theory called Capitalism and Schizophrenia. | ||
| And this wonky audience might even know Deleuze and Guattari, right? | ||
| While crisis gathers force and speed, politics withers and retreats. | ||
| The political scientist's hashtag Accelerate Manifesto for an acceleration is politics announced. | ||
| And the overwhelming privileging of democracy as process needs to be left behind. | ||
| It was a rejection of the slow, small work of solidarity in favor of a, quote, future more modern. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yes, said the fascist intellectuals. | |
| Adapting the concept to their own ends. | ||
| Yes, let's leave democracy behind. | ||
| The new fascists like the idea of hastening the end of a liberal order, right? | ||
| Sure. | ||
| And that's accelerationism. | ||
| And so, no, am I a closet accelerationist? | ||
| Democracy is processed. | ||
| Well, I mean, I feel like what you just explained was the... | ||
| Non-ideological nature of accelerationism. | ||
| It's not owned by an ideology. | ||
| Like, let me ask you a question. | ||
| What do you say to somebody who is 16 about slow incremental change as they're looking down the barrel of climate change? | ||
| Like, nobody's done anything. | ||
| You know, when we talk about slow incremental progress, we were like, okay, well, we can't elect Bernie Sanders because that would make rich people mad. | ||
| So we'll get Joe Biden in there, and he's going to help us with the climate, and then he sells more land to oil. | ||
| You know, like, what do you say to them as far as slow incremental change go? | ||
| I'd say everything shrinks in the wash. | ||
| So you go and throw some paint on a painting and you go and blockade a road and you do all this kind of stuff. | ||
| You occupy something with a sit-in and so on. | ||
| You do all that so that you can get slow incremental change. | ||
| I wouldn't say now, hey, hey, hey, don't block the road. | ||
| Don't worry. | ||
| We're going to have an election. | ||
| I wouldn't say that. | ||
| Everything shrinks in the wash. | ||
| You make the biggest push you can, and it will only go so far. | ||
| That's Harry Belfont. | ||
| He put his life on the line, literally on the line, chased by the Klan again and again and again. | ||
| Oh, well, and the civil rights movement was a great success, right? | ||
| Hell no. | ||
| He doesn't think so. | ||
| You put everything, you put your life on the line, and you accept that the movement will be slow because revolution, the idea of the overnight, which is right now the Trumpist idea, is... | ||
| That's a romance. | ||
| The Romance of American Communists, Vivian Gornick's great book, coming out of that world. | ||
| But I think that you said, right, accelerationism depends on what you do with it. | ||
| This is what the left has failed to understand. | ||
| It's all politically agnostic, right? | ||
| Solidarity? | ||
| I love solidarity. | ||
| Not so much when it's between Proud Boys and megachurches. | ||
| The left imagines that we own these terms. | ||
| The left imagines that we own imagination. | ||
| The right is filled with imagination right now. | ||
| The left seeds terms. | ||
| We let the right have freedom. | ||
| Now, the left doesn't even struggle for freedom, right? | ||
| We still have freedom dreams. | ||
| But you pay attention to the migration of language and you start to see the patterns. | ||
| So I don't say, when I say slow incremental change, it's not because I believe that that's the way to go. | ||
| It's because I recognize that that is what happens. | ||
| And that only happens if you go all in, right? | ||
| And so that's why I love these kids in Wisconsin who are ready to fight, right? | ||
| Right. | ||
| We are ready to fight. | ||
| Now, okay, they've got their guns. | ||
| Well, the kids in Wisconsin got their guns. | ||
| We'll probably get reproductive rights back tomorrow. | ||
| No. | ||
| That commitment. | ||
| It's necessary, and now that's going to be the long struggle. | ||
| Let's look at how they took Roe down, right? | ||
| Roe, which was always inadequate to begin with, but let's see how they took it. | ||
| They organized for 50 years, and they killed a lot of people along the way, and they bombed a lot of things along the way, and they hurt a lot of things along the way, and it took them 50 years, and they stayed in their struggle, and they won. | ||
| And at no point did the Susan B. Anthony List or any of these other right-wing groups Say, to the army of God, well, you blew up your 200th abortion clinic, and we still have it, so what's the point? | ||
| They're like, nope, we're just going to keep fighting. | ||
| Now, I'm not saying that's the model, because I'm not into blowing things up. | ||
| Well, I mean, in a certain way, you've described all of the different ways that the left has failed, and then you described the way that the right succeeded. | ||
| So there's a little bit of an argument. | ||
| No, the last chapter of the book is called The Good Fight is the One You Lose. | ||
| The Good Fight is the One You Lose. | ||
| And I'm writing about Lee Hayes, and nobody knows who Lee Hayes is. | ||
| But even the last line of the book is, I always knew it was going to be the first line, for a while it was possible not to be scared even. | ||
| And this is Lee Hayes. | ||
| Lee Hayes who wrote If I Had a Hammer. | ||
| And I got interested in If I Had a Hammer because I grew up in this little all-white town in our elementary school in our music class. | ||
|
unidentified
|
We sing, If I Had a Hammer, a hammer in the morning. | |
| And this is a sweet little song. | ||
| And then you go and you discover Peter, Paul, and Mary. | ||
| Singing it. | ||
| It's like, if I had a hammer, it's like, I'd build a treehouse and we'd make love and be sweet and everything. | ||
| But the first performance of If I Had a Hammer in 1949, first public performance, is at a concert in Peekskill, New York, where Pete Seeger lived. | ||
| Peekskill, New York. | ||
| Paul Robeson is the headliner, the so-called Russia-loving Negro baritone, as the local newspaper puts it. | ||
| They try to have it. | ||
| The concert twice. | ||
| First time, the townspeople shut it down because they think these are communists. | ||
| And why do they think they're communists? | ||
| Because they're communists. | ||
| But they don't want any communists. | ||
| And they shut it down and they burn crosses. | ||
| The second time, they come prepared. | ||
| 3,000 union members come as security. | ||
| They managed to sing the song, time to get the hell out. | ||
| But the town has organized as well. | ||
| 5,000 people organized with piles of rocks and strategic places with air power from the New York State Police, not keeping the peace, protecting the attack on Lee Hayes and Pete Seeger and Woody Guthrie and so on, right? | ||
| Lee Hayes. | ||
| That's a guy who put his life on the line. | ||
| I mean, don't go and say, don't call Lee Hayes a liberal, right? | ||
| And that wasn't the first or the last time he would do it. | ||
| In the end, he was broken. | ||
| He was called before the House Un-American Affairs Committee. | ||
| He was a gay man. | ||
| He had things to hide. | ||
| Wait, what are you laughing at? | ||
| I'm sorry, you just, you were like, oh, okay, no. | ||
| Okay, Jordan, you just said that I described all the way that the left loses and that the right won. | ||
| Now I'm going to tell you an incredibly depressing story about how the left loses all the time. | ||
| No, no, no, I'm not. | ||
| But I'm not going to give you cheap grace. | ||
| I'm not going to give you cheap grace. | ||
| I don't want it. | ||
| I don't want it. | ||
| Which is, oh, the left wins. | ||
| Powers in the barrel of a gun. | ||
| That worked out for fucking Mao. | ||
| The left didn't win there. | ||
| The left didn't win in the Soviet Union. | ||
| It didn't win. | ||
| We haven't won yet, right? | ||
| This is the long struggle. | ||
| We haven't. | ||
| We've won in places. | ||
| But we haven't won yet. | ||
| So if the idea is that you look at Lee getting broken and you say, well, I might as well just take up my arms or some of their equivalent thereof, as opposed to saying, like, what can I learn from this man who was brave in the struggle, who put himself on the line more than most of us have? | ||
| It's that line. | ||
| For a while, it was possible not to be scared even. | ||
| And Lee is describing he's in Arkansas, where he's from. | ||
| And he's riding with a group of union organizers in what he calls a rump sprung car, a beat up old car. | ||
| And gun thugs are on their tail. | ||
| And they are singing. | ||
| And what they would do back then is they would take, they were all raised in the church. | ||
| They would sing hymns, but they would turn them into labor songs. | ||
| But that night, he says, we sang the old hymns, right? | ||
| Not because they're going back to conservative, but they're drawing on the deep struggle, right? | ||
| And he says, for a while, it was possible not to be scared even. | ||
| For a while, it was possible not to be scared even. | ||
| Now, let me put this in the context of why the good fight is the one you lose, the struggle that he fought. | ||
| That's the fight to be in. | ||
| Years ago, and I'm going to do this from memory, and I'm probably going to get a little bit wrong. | ||
| I met an amazing activist, also from Arkansas, named Suzanne Farr. | ||
| And we were doing a thing where we were talking to young journalists and activists. | ||
| I was the journalist. | ||
| She was the activist part. | ||
| Radicals. | ||
| Very radical. | ||
| Not liberal. | ||
| Not TV. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Sure, sure, sure. | |
| I gotcha. | ||
| I gotcha. | ||
| And Suzanne Farr had been part of a queer women's commune in rural, I think, rural Arkansas in the 70s and 80s. | ||
| And they just wanted to live by themselves. | ||
| But pretty soon, local women... | ||
| And cishet women in need of help fleeing violent relationships come to them, right? | ||
| And so they decide which side are they on and they let them in, right? | ||
| Now, the men come after that too, right? | ||
| And this is a rural area. | ||
| The police there are not going to be coming out to help the lesbian commune, right? | ||
| And I can't remember if Suzanne and her comrades armed up, but they definitely stood their ground. | ||
| They stood their ground. | ||
| And they protected those places. | ||
| Now, there was a young radical activist who says to Suzanne, and Suzanne by this point is, although as radical as can be, has just, if you think sweet Southern grandmother, you got the right picture. | ||
| White-haired, very gentle voice, just really just lovely and gentle and so on. | ||
| And this young radical activist says, that's so amazing that you build a safe space. | ||
| And Suzanne says, oh, honey. | ||
|
unidentified
|
There are no fucking safe spaces. | |
| That wasn't a safe space. | ||
| It was a safe moment. | ||
| And it was made. | ||
| A safe space is inner. | ||
| It's just there, right? | ||
| A safe moment. | ||
| For a while, it's possible not to be scared even. | ||
| That is the hope. | ||
| That's the best that we have right now. | ||
| We can create these safe moments actively and hold on to them and remember them. | ||
| And instead of saying, that's just a goddamn failure, say, hey, wait a minute. | ||
| Look at that. | ||
| Lee Hayes. | ||
| Have you created a moment where it was possible not to be scared even? | ||
| Probably you have. | ||
| This show has. | ||
| I try to, right? | ||
| We try to do that. | ||
| Count the victories. | ||
| Count the small victories and don't... | ||
| Embrace the nihilism of we have not won. | ||
| Because that's the eschatological, that's the big final battle bullshit that fascism wants us to believe in. | ||
| I mean, I agree with you a lot, and yet at the same time, we celebrate a violent revolution every single year. | ||
| Well, you do. | ||
| I mean, I don't, personally. | ||
| What do you mean we, you know? | ||
| Yeah, no, no, no, absolutely not. | ||
| But it is why you and I have a comfortable life. | ||
| As compared to a lot of other people, by which I would argue is 90% of people or something along those lines. | ||
| So I keep coming back to this idea of what do you tell somebody who is young, staring down the barrel of climate change, who just watched people almost successfully overthrow the United States government, and celebrates a violent revolution every year? | ||
| I don't tell them what to do because they're young. | ||
| I'm not asking you. | ||
| Again, I'm not telling you that you have to do something. | ||
| I'm asking you. | ||
| I mean, no, but I did. | ||
| What I did, what I know how to do is make this book, right? | ||
| And so I'm scared for my kids, and so I go and I make this book. | ||
| This is what I know how to do. | ||
| But in the end of the beginning, which is called Our Condition, and it's against the crisis. | ||
| Climate is our condition, right? | ||
| What are we going to do with the climate? | ||
|
unidentified
|
It's going to go bad. | |
| No, the climate is bad. | ||
| And there's nothing you can do to bring back those glaciers, right? | ||
| There's very little we can even do right now to slow shit down. | ||
| This is a condition we are going to have to learn to live with. | ||
| And this is the metaphor of the book, partly because I keep running into these fascists. | ||
| I had hit the genetic jackpot lottery, two heart attacks at 44, and you meet a fascist and, oh, you got heart trouble, I got heart trouble. | ||
| And suddenly we're talking because you understand when that happens. | ||
| People say, oh, don't worry, your heart's going to grow back. | ||
| Your heart's going to grow back. | ||
| What the? | ||
| What kind of biology class did you go to? | ||
| No. | ||
| There's a dead wall in your heart. | ||
| It's not going to grow back. | ||
| Glaciers aren't going to come back. | ||
| The assumption of normality. | ||
| Joe Biden's not going to bring it back. | ||
| We're not going back, right? | ||
| We're going to have to get into the space. | ||
| But I don't have those answers. | ||
| What do I say to a young person? | ||
| I said, we will need new songs if we are to make it through what is to come, what is already here. | ||
| I am not the one to write them. | ||
| My hope is less than that. | ||
| Only that this book may reveal fault lines within our fears, in which others will find the better words our children may one day sing. | ||
| It's why, you know, I mean, in the same flip side, when I do liberal interviews, people ask me about those Wisconsin kids with their guns. | ||
|
unidentified
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They say, well, now, did you tell them that that's not the way? | |
| I'm like, no. | ||
| I didn't tell them that's not the way. | ||
| When I go into Sacramento and there's a brawl between Proud Boys and Antifa and it's the dumbest brawl I've ever seen because they all know each other and it's like rules of engagement. | ||
| They know where they can't have weapons on the Capitol and so on. | ||
| And look, Antifa are being assholes too. | ||
| Antifa's yelling faggot and Proud Boys are yelling scum and boom, boom, boom, right? | ||
| I'm not going to tell those Antifa. | ||
| This is not the way, young people. | ||
| How could I say that? | ||
| How could any of us say that we know the way, right? | ||
| All I can do is I can write a book. | ||
| You can have a podcast. | ||
| They can brawl on the streets. | ||
| Theta can practice with her bow and hold up a sign that says, fuck off. | ||
| And who knows what else she's going to do? | ||
| And I mean that literally. | ||
| Who knows what else she's going to do? | ||
| I think there's some dumb shit. | ||
| I mean, I'm in Wisconsin. | ||
| There was great... | ||
| My favorite review of the book is in the Washington Examiner, a right-wing paper. | ||
| And I'm trying to remember the line. | ||
| It says, like, this book is the purest distillation of leftism. | ||
| It does not mean it as a compliment at all. | ||
| No, of course not. | ||
| I mean, I know plenty of leftists who would say it's a little wobbly. | ||
| It's just like, he doesn't talk at all about the history of leftist violence. | ||
| I'm like, no, that's true. | ||
| This is a book. | ||
| Did you see? | ||
| This is a book about this thing. | ||
| It's like, in my book, I don't talk at all about elephants. | ||
| But there is, I do talk a chapter about John Brown in there. | ||
| I'm just throwing that out there. | ||
| Or I could have mentioned, as I did, the assholes who bombed the Army math recruiting building in Wisconsin. | ||
| 1971 or two or something, which led to the creation of this book called Wisconsin Death Trip, which I carried with me through Wisconsin by my mentor in thinking about the struggle as long. | ||
| The violence had been there. | ||
| Stupid moves have been made. | ||
| They were going to do this in a way that nobody gets killed. | ||
| Well, they kill a young physicist. | ||
| They had a plane that they were dropping bombs from. | ||
| I'm not big about dropping bombs from planes, even if you believe in violence. | ||
| That's just not for me. | ||
| They were fools, the ones who blew up the building. | ||
| I mean, there's a lot of killing. | ||
| On the other hand, there's a lot of killing. | ||
| I've written elsewhere about the Vietnam GI movement. | ||
| I'm named Jeff Charlotte because my uncle was one of the founders of that movement, and it was a mutiny movement by GIs, and they were in mutiny against their commanders, and they sometimes killed commanders. | ||
| This is what we call treason, and I'm not going to say it was wrong. | ||
| No, it's totally right. | ||
| The American Revolution, I'm not going to say that was wrong. | ||
| World War II, I'm definitely not going to say that was wrong. | ||
| And World War II, there wasn't a single government. | ||
| In World War II that I would admire, including FDRs, right? | ||
| Oh, of course. | ||
| Which side are you on, right? | ||
| You know, I mean, and then you sift it later. | ||
| So to the young person, right, I say, I guess the one thing I would say to them is, which side are you on? | ||
| And I think they know that, right? | ||
| But now look around and figure out who else is on that side and figure out who is moving to that side. | ||
| And aim, my... | ||
| Aim your fire, rhetorical or artistic, or if you must, violence at the other side, please. | ||
| That would help. | ||
| But if you must, if you must police the nuances of language on the left and the failures there, okay, that's fine. | ||
| It's not my project now. | ||
| I'm not in the project. | ||
| Why don't you write an article about what a jerk Chuck Schumer is? | ||
| Sure, sure. | ||
| I will get to that. | ||
| It's on the list of things to do. | ||
| Sure. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| But I'm worried more about the guns literally aimed at people I love right now. | ||
|
unidentified
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Mm-hmm. | |
| Yeah, I mean, aren't we all? | ||
| I mean, that is kind of the situation there, is when we talk about war in this context, you're bringing up war to describe what's going on right now. | ||
| It's kind of hard to accept people saying that the flow of violence can flow from the state to the people without any pushback whatsoever. | ||
| I think it's hard to accept those clear lines about state and people and those terms, which are terms from another world that we are no longer in. | ||
| The fascism of the moment has affinities with the fascism of the past, but it is of its own time, right? | ||
| That's a good question. | ||
| That's a good question. | ||
| I'm interested in that. | ||
| Is it? | ||
| I think of the Know Nothing Party right before the first Civil War. | ||
| I think of the Know Nothing Party, and I think of the way that went. | ||
| I think of how John Wilkes Booth was a big Know Nothinger. | ||
| Affinities, affinities, affinities, yes. | ||
| And here's the definitive thing. | ||
| And this is where the American left is as guilty as the American right. | ||
| And yes, motherfuckers, I am both sides in this. | ||
| The American exceptionalism of believing that this is somehow a uniquely American thing, as if there is not a Trump of Turkey named Erdogan, a Trump of Brazil named Bolsonaro, and Myanmar, a self-described trunk of Myanmar, a Buddhist monk who leads... | ||
| A genocidal mob of Buddhist monks to massacre the Rohingya Muslims, as if there are not the Philippines, as if there is not Indonesia, which has been fascist since the American-supported coup in the 1960s, which to this day celebrates its genocide. | ||
| Fascism is a global moment, and what is different now than in the past is in the 1930s, you had contending powers. | ||
| Right now, what have you got? | ||
| China is a fascist regime. | ||
| Fuck this state, communism, whatever. | ||
| It's a cult of reality around Xi. | ||
| It wasn't always, but it has become one. | ||
| Russia is. | ||
| And we can quibble over details, but Russia is. | ||
| And I would say they are fascist regimes of the moment, right? | ||
| So people say, this is how it is different than Germany. | ||
|
unidentified
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Right. | |
| Because it's called Russia. | ||
| And it's 2023, not 1926. | ||
| That's why, you're right, it is different. | ||
| Fascism like everything else. | ||
| We have all that. | ||
| We have European countries sort of toppling. | ||
| We have the great victory of Lula in Brazil, but let's see how long that lasts. | ||
| We have a lot of fascist regimes in Africa right now. | ||
| Uganda is a fascist regime. | ||
| Sudan is... | ||
| Tell me that Sudan's going to come out looking pretty from this one. | ||
| Came out of a fascist regime. | ||
| And it struggled. | ||
| The long struggle. | ||
| So do young Sudanese people say, holy shit, we overthrew Omar... | ||
| What's his name? | ||
| Omar Bashir. | ||
| We overthrow this guy. | ||
| We did it. | ||
| We did it. | ||
| And we even muted the military and got them to be on our side. | ||
| And then just a few years later, look at this. | ||
| Well, can't join them. | ||
| Can't beat him. | ||
| Might as well join him. | ||
| I guess I might as well just go for authoritarian rule. | ||
| That's Chris Sununu deciding which side is he on. | ||
| No, we lost. | ||
| The good fight is the one you lose. | ||
| The good fight that the Sudanese who overthrew that dictator, they fought the good fight. | ||
| The Egyptians who overthrew Mubarak and now suffer under al-Sisi, they fought the good fight. | ||
| The Arab Spring was the good fight, right? | ||
| So there's all these kinds of struggles. | ||
| And I think that the state versus... | ||
| This is where fascism is different now because there are no contending powers, right? | ||
| There's no Soviet Union. | ||
| And there's no... | ||
| There's an America. | ||
| Or America's... | ||
| No, we're not fully given in. | ||
| We are not as given in as Russia or Hungary. | ||
| We are still contending. | ||
| And one of the mistakes that the left has made, and I'm writing from the right for a long time, the left is terrible at recognizing the ground that it occupies. | ||
|
unidentified
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Right? | |
| The ground that it owns. | ||
| And I think about this for so many years, liberals would say the universities were neutral. | ||
| No, they're not biased. | ||
| And leftists would say, no, bullshit, they're just right-wing tools, right? | ||
| And the right-wingers I read about, the guys who founded Liberty University and Regent University and Oral Roberts University and Hillsdale College, which is now giving its curriculum to public schools all over the country, they understood. | ||
| That these crappy elitist universities, nonetheless, they were part of the center that was holding. | ||
| It wasn't a very good center, but they were part of that. | ||
| I have colleagues now who think that fighting our administration at Dartmouth, where the full spectrum of political views is kind of like, are you a Bernie Democrat or maybe more of an establishment Democrat, right? | ||
| That's what you get. | ||
| And that's fine. | ||
| That's fine. | ||
| I'm not like, there should be intellectual diversity. | ||
| Whatever you think, right? | ||
| But they think that fighting that administration puts them on the front lines, the bulwark of the battle, right? | ||
| No, that's not the battle, right? | ||
| This is Dartmouth College, super problematic institution. | ||
| Students should struggle for it, and so on. | ||
| But the front line right now is in teachers in New Hampshire. | ||
| Afraid for their jobs. | ||
| In some cases, afraid for their lives just because they're teaching the history of slavery. | ||
| And some people are going to say, well, if we can't address these other issues, when? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Right? | |
| When the gun is not... | ||
| Anyone who's asking that is someone who's never had a gun pointed at them, right? | ||
|
unidentified
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Sure. | |
| When you have a gun pointed at you, you don't say, well, there's some structural... | ||
| In Omaha, Nebraska, in this book, right? | ||
| And they bring out the gunmen. | ||
| I didn't want to say, well, let's talk about the ways in which your church... | ||
| You know, you're pointing a gun at me. | ||
| Right. | ||
| I've got to do something about that, right? | ||
| And so I think that state violence, like, I am not as opposed to the state right now. | ||
| And I think we need to look at this right now because it's who owns the state capitalism. | ||
| But capitalism leads to fascism. | ||
| But it is not the same thing. | ||
| Biden is not the same as DeSantis. | ||
| And if we come to the real fear that I think is there, and that you're seeing generals say, and, you know, not all generals, but right. | ||
| The military is not monolithic. | ||
| If we come to a real chain of command dispute in 2024, the fear is not the militias and the resistance is not the John Brown gun club. | ||
| It's an Air Force base in one state that believes that Trump is president and an Air Force base in another state that believes that Biden is president and follows the orders. | ||
| The chain of command rules from whomever gets whomever. | ||
| And at this point, the John Brown Gun Club is going to look as ridiculous as the Proud Boys with their AR-15s. | ||
| And that is on the table. | ||
| And the military is talking about that internally, right? | ||
| They're saying this is a real issue. | ||
| We need to figure this out. | ||
| It's what General Milley did in 2021 when he said, don't take orders from anyone but me. | ||
| Sure, sure. | ||
| A mutinous act. | ||
| Hey, you can go all the way back to Smedley Butler. | ||
| Why not? | ||
| Let's have fun with that one. | ||
| There's a long history of this stuff. | ||
| So I think like that state, the state and the people, those terms meant something at one time and we should recognize that they mean something now because of fascism is different now. | ||
| And the key difference is it is a global movement without a significant countervailing force. | ||
| And when by significant, I don't mean like the people. | ||
| I mean like the industrial base. | ||
| Of the United States or the Soviet Union, right? | ||
| Well, you know, boy, that is probably why we are bad at telling a good story for the Ashley Babbitts, you know? | ||
| If our story is the good fight is one you lose, that's not going to bring Ashley Babbitt over. | ||
| Do you know what I mean? | ||
| Yeah, no, I disagree. | ||
| It is kind of strange for the story to be so different. | ||
| I disagree. | ||
| I disagree. | ||
| And I think about just looking at the death of Harry Belfont, which has been very moving to hear all the people. | ||
| Harry Belfont brought a whole lot of people over. | ||
| Because the story he tells, the story he tells is Dale, right? | ||
| Daylight comes, I want to come home. | ||
| The banana boat song. | ||
| They use it in Beetlejuice, right? | ||
| It's just a fun, goofy song. | ||
| No, it's a freedom song. | ||
| It's a work song. | ||
| He learned it on the docks in Jamaica. | ||
| He learns it from, come Mr. Tallyman, Tallyman the banana. | ||
| That's called capitalism. | ||
| That's the boss. | ||
| Harry knew that. | ||
| He's like, I want you to enjoy this song. | ||
| The deep pleasure of... | ||
| Describing present-day evil. | ||
| Taliban is bad, right? | ||
| Cornel West, who I have great affinity for, great affection for. | ||
| In this book, there's a lot of right-wingers talking about prophecy, right? | ||
| And Cornel also, his first book, Prophesy Deliverance. | ||
| Prophecy, he says, is to describe concrete evils. | ||
| Prophecy is democratic. | ||
| It's available to everyone. | ||
| You don't have to be a mystical pastor, right? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Sure, sure. | |
| You have to keep your eyes open to describe mystical evils, everyday evil, concrete evil, real life evil, the structural system, right? | ||
| Come Mr. Tallyman, Tallyman Banana. | ||
| Daylight come and we want to go home, right? | ||
| I want to go home. | ||
| I want to get out from under. | ||
| That's a good damn story, right? | ||
| That's a beautiful story. | ||
| And that story has moved a lot of people and has put people on the line. | ||
| And if I have to choose between that story, between Deo and Donald Trump, it's easy for me. | ||
| Now, it gets complicated, and that's why the second section of the book is named after a song you hear at Trump rallies, Dream On by Aerosmith, right? | ||
| Sure, sure. | ||
| Which I think is a great song. | ||
| I'm going to put... | ||
| I grew up in upstate New York, classic rock, right? | ||
| Aerosmith, Dream On. | ||
| It's an awesome arena rock song. | ||
| And at Trump rallies, people spin in circles. | ||
| And I call this the section on vanity, right? | ||
| It's the vanity of arena rock. | ||
| It can be gorgeous and beautiful, right? | ||
| But it can also be vain. | ||
| And it's okay to be vain, right? | ||
| Pride. | ||
| Pride is a rebel in our beauty, right? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Right. | |
| You're saying that these people probably think the song is about them. | ||
| Did you mean to do that? | ||
| Yes, of course I did. | ||
| You're a professional comedian. | ||
| Thank you. | ||
| Thank you very much. | ||
| Lapsed and failed. | ||
| So, there you go. | ||
| My nine-year-old has gotten that song into his head and just sings it. | ||
| What did you do to that nine-year-old? | ||
| He just heard it. | ||
| He just heard it. | ||
| And it was like, that's it. | ||
| That's bad parenting. | ||
| You let him hear that song too soon. | ||
| Too soon! | ||
| I'm not... | ||
| You know, my dad showed me Apocalypse Now when I was nine, so it just wasn't... | ||
| Never too young to learn. | ||
| Mr. Kurtz. | ||
| Oh, no, I mean Colonel Kurtz. | ||
| Well, I mean... | ||
| Respect the rank, man. | ||
| Yeah, exactly. | ||
| My bad. | ||
| I was going off the original Heart of Darkness. | ||
| No, I think talking about Harry, you know, it was... | ||
| It was so strange. | ||
| He died so shortly after we spoke, and you taught me so much about him that it hit so much harder, and it was a lot more difficult to reconcile the way that... | ||
| You can remember him being portrayed as like so many other people, you know, like watered down. | ||
| He's just this entertainer. | ||
| He's somebody who has rubbed elbows with civil rights icons in the past. | ||
| And then to hear about his truth, his true life, you know, that spending your life on the front lines, as you said, that's the most inspiring story in your book. | ||
| Maybe that I've heard in a long, long time. | ||
| That's the best stage there is, as Harry puts it, right? | ||
| Like he's talking about the march from Selma to Montgomery. | ||
| And the first march had ended in violence. | ||
| And then they come back, just like in Peekskill, they come back with more and they march out. | ||
| And there's George Wallace, the little segregationist troll governor. | ||
| And he's afraid to come out of his capital. | ||
| And Harry and Joan Baez and Mary from Peter, Paul and Mary, they get up there and they sing. | ||
| And you can see some old CBS footage of this. | ||
| They sing so badly because they're exhausted. | ||
| They lost it because they've been marching, because there's been guns aimed at them, but they sing their song, and he says, "That's the most beautiful stage there is. | ||
| For a while, it's possible not to be scared, even. | ||
| Is that stage a safe space? | ||
| Hell no." And right after that stage, right after that march, he notes, you know, one of the protesters was killed. | ||
| He says, "Every time." Harry Bell finally never forgets. | ||
| You know, the violence is there. | ||
| But I think, like, I'll say his death at 96. I didn't experience it as hard, and I don't think that's the good fight is the one you lose, right? | ||
| 96 years, right? | ||
| Sure, sure, sure. | ||
| I mean, what a life. | ||
| And then he never, never, never gave up for a second. | ||
| Here's how much Harry Belfani scares the right, believe it or not, even now. | ||
| That Washington, the one right-wing review of the book I get, Washington Examiner, and trashing the book, you know, the fascism of the left and so on. | ||
| Who do they focus on? | ||
| Harry Belfonti. | ||
| The whole damn review is about Harry Belfonti, right? | ||
| Sure. | ||
| And that's fascinating, too, to know that, hey, the other side, they know which side they're on, and they know which side Harry's on. | ||
| They know he's not on their side, right? | ||
| It'll take another 40 years before they start naming streets after him and pretending that he was not a revolutionary at all. | ||
| Oh no, that'll happen. | ||
| You're always going to try and sweeten it up and smooth it over and sand it down and so on. | ||
| But the other thing to remember is that you can then go back, like I do with If I Had a Hammer. | ||
| Wait a minute, this is a radical song. | ||
| Dale, this is a radical song. | ||
| The struggle is not just on the horizontal axis, right? | ||
| Forward. | ||
| I mean, the forward is important, right? | ||
| What do we do next? | ||
| The struggle is vertical, too. | ||
| We draw from the deep well, right? | ||
| We draw from the time. | ||
| Like, the good fight is the one you lose, but it wasn't always lost. | ||
| It was these moments of victory. | ||
| And you hold on to those and let them inform strategically, psychologically, spiritually, right? | ||
| You let them inform you as you go forward. | ||
| I mean, this is why, like, no one's going to believe this, but this book, which really reads like a doom scroll, doesn't not. | ||
| It's a hope book. | ||
| It's a hope book. | ||
| I swear to God. | ||
| But you've got to dig for it. | ||
| It's not going to give you hope in the same way that you're not going to have democracy, right? | ||
| It's going to be something you do, right? | ||
| We're going to see these folks. | ||
| We're going to find these beautiful little moments even within these fascist spaces. | ||
| And so I'm not going to give you hope. | ||
| You can use this to manufacture your own, right? | ||
| That's wonderful. | ||
| I mean, I don't think there's a better place to end on. | ||
| I mean, we've already gone for almost an hour and 45 already, so I don't think there's any better place to end. | ||
| I won't keep you too much longer. | ||
| Jeff, thank you so much for coming back on. | ||
| The book is The Undertow. | ||
| It's out now. | ||
| I'm very grateful. | ||
| Well, thank you, Jordan. | ||
| I mean, this is one of the best and most honest conversations about the book I've had, so... | ||
| Well, I don't have a boss. | ||
| I don't have a boss. | ||
| That helps. | ||
| But you're pushing me to ask these questions, and you're challenging, and we're thinking about the book not just as an object, but as this thing that's in this moment that we're all living through, and that I really appreciate, so thank you. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Of course. | |
| That's the best way to do it. | ||
| Well, thank you so much, and hopefully we'll see you again for your next book. | ||
| Andy in Kansas, you're on the air. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Thanks for holding. | |
| Hello, Alex. | ||
| I'm a first-time caller. | ||
|
unidentified
|
I'm a huge fan. | |
| I love your work. |
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