The Biden Administration is floating a rollback of taxes to their pre-Trump levels, possibly leading to more revenue and investment in things like education, healthcare, and infrastructure. Jared Yates Sexton and Nick Hauselman discuss the attacks to come from the Right and get into the history of how Republicans engineered our economy to serve the interests of the wealthy and powerful and forget everybody else. Then, Jared talks to Davis Parsons of the Nostalgia Trap podcast about the new Adam Curtis documentary "Can't Get You Outta My Head," the decline of American culture, and the need for a real reconsideration of history. To support the podcast, and access exclusive bonus content, become a patron at http://patreon.com/muckrakepodcast
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And yeah, let's get to the show.
And then to pick Independence Day as the day where he says he might allow people to gather is just so un-American and just, you know, Joe Biden doesn't get to tell me when I can have a barbecue in my backyard.
The way you get upper income people to pay more in taxes is lower their tax rate.
Not only will they have investment incentives, they will also have no tax avoidance.
Hey everybody, welcome to the Muckrake Podcast.
I'm Jared Yates Sexton here with Nick Halseman.
We got a really good interview today.
I had a chance to sit down with David Parsons, the host of the podcast Nostalgia Trap.
We had a talk about the new Adam Curtis documentary, can't get you out of my head, but a larger conversation about American cultural decline and deep politics or sort of the search for what's actually happening in politics.
Stay tuned for that later on in the episode.
But before we get there, Nick, I don't know.
I found this thing.
We've got the COVID relief bill that obviously has been passed.
Some of that relief money, hopefully, by the time our listeners have heard this, they've started to get their checks deposited in their accounts.
Don't forget to become a patron over at patreon.com slash muckrakepodcast.
I think that's That's part of this whole thing.
But we have a development in terms of the Biden administration and where they're going next.
And it looks like and I don't know, man, I've been a critic of some of the things that just happened with Joe Biden.
But this thing is music to my ears, which is the first major tax hike since 1993, since the Clinton administration.
And it looks like What we're looking at out of the barn here.
Is the possibility of the corporate tax rate being heightened from 21% to 28%, which, by the way, go higher!
Just, just, just go!
Just, just, just see what happens.
Just go more.
And a tax rate for people making $400,000 per year or more, it looks like over the next decade this could bring in a couple of trillion dollars.
I think this is good news, but it wouldn't be the Montcregge Podcast if we didn't talk about Why this needs to happen, but also who is going to be fighting back against this, and of course, how they're going to fight back against it.
I think that the key here is it doesn't need to be looked at as a tax hike.
This could be looked at as a rollback of these ridiculous tax cuts that were put in by Trump to begin with.
And I think in the macro sense, you know, even going to 28 percent on that specific tax is nothing.
You know, people who were wealthy back when America was great, when they think America was great, paid exorbitant amounts of tax, much higher than we've ever.
I can remember one of my best friends fathers who was a money manager in the you know his whole career from the 70s through the you know 2000s would complain I remember he was complaining in 1992 maybe 93 after Clinton took over complaining about how he had to work half the year before he can make any money because of the taxes when in reality The Clinton tax brackets that he had put into place were as low as they had been for decades and decades.
And it was such a dishonest argument to have even back then.
And now, look at it this way.
They got four years of an amazing, you know, tax break and they could do whatever.
It's now going to swing a little bit more to being, you know, a normal thing where it'll balance out a little bit more over the next, you know, next four years.
Still undertaxed.
Yeah.
Still undertaxed.
For sure.
And you know, like, if you actually go back to someone like a Dwight D. Eisenhower, that leftist liberal president.
Commie Pinco.
Commie Pinco.
Well, I mean, if you listen to the Bircher Society, I mean, that was actually what they what they believe.
But if you went back and looked at the presidency of General Dwight D. Eisenhower, which, by the way, Nick, if I'm not mistaken, That was one of those times when America was great to these people.
These days are ours, then I'm free.
Oh, have you guys?
That's right.
And it was like some of the wealthiest Americans were paying like 90% of their income taxes.
Yeah.
Yeah.
And on top of that, they were paying it in part because they had to fund the military industrial complex to fight the Cold War and to continue war footing.
And the last I checked, We still have basically a giant military industrial complex that the United States of America continues to fund and put forward and to throw out for the rest of the world on a constant war footing.
So to even bring it back to a third of what that used to be, and by the way, I'm so glad that you corrected me on that tax hike thing, because the linguistics of this are very important.
It's not really tax hike.
It's a revocation of all of these giveaways that the Trump administration put forward.
And I hate how the Republican Party and the corporatists that they serve Have so hijacked rhetoric and the linguistic battlefield of all of this that even people who study it, like myself, still fall into that trap.
It's almost impossible not to talk about this stuff and not to feel towards taxes the way that they want you to for their advantage.
To put a button on the defense spending as part of this because it's all connected, the amount that the United States spends per capita, there's a crazy stat out there.
We spend more per capita than the next three or four countries combined or something crazy like that where we continue to waste money in a situation where we could easily have a much more pared down military that's much more cutting edge technologically.
And we don't need to be having these huge mobilized forces to be able to spring into action at any one time the way wars are going to be prosecuted going forward.
I'll even take it a step further and say that we don't need special operations taking place in hundreds of countries around the world.
Like, we don't need those massive armies, and we don't need those special ops, and we don't need to control everything that happens in the world.
We can go ahead and pare back on the military and save money and invest in human projects.
After all, what are all these wars for?
And what is American hegemony for if you're not going to pass the savings and pass the benefits on to the American people?
This is one of the problems, is it's the lie that American militarism is going to make the world better Especially for Americans, which we've seen is a complete and utter lie.
For sure, and also, like, this is some sort of arms race where we need to keep up with our enemies.
Like, who is our biggest enemy still in the world today?
White terrorists.
Oh, sorry.
I'm sorry, I jumped the gun on that one.
We'll just consider it outside of the country, you know, another country.
Domestic white terrorism, but yes, that is true.
Go ahead.
So is it, I get, we can still say it's Russia, right?
Is Russia still the one big power out there that we have to be careful about?
I think the burgeoning new Cold War with China would like to have a talk with you.
Because I actually, if you actually pay attention to this, and this is important by the way, and we haven't, we haven't had a chance to talk about this because our shows have been pretty jam-packed and we've had to like focus on stuff.
There have been groups left and right that are being paid by, I can't remember which Koch brother is the survivor, who is the inheritor of the entire, like the highlander of the Koch brothers, I'm not sure which one of them has survived, whichever one it is, I don't know, carries on their evil legacy.
Yeah, Mr. Koch.
Mr. Koch, the Koch-funded think tanks have all been pushing really, really hard the idea that we're not
like adversarial with Russia anymore and tell me if this sounds familiar from the Republican Party and what they've been pushing over the past couple years and what polls keep showing us that we need to align with Russia and we need to pay more attention to what we have in common with Russia like our cultures and by the way for anyone who is listening at home or driving around I'm talking about white people is what they're saying is white evangelicals is what we're talking about in the oppression of people of color and LGBTQ people Exactly, exactly.
I have some numbers out here.
I'm looking at the Wikipedia of the expenditure per capita for each country on the military.
Beautiful.
I love this talk.
If you call up Russia, because there's a lot of countries on here, what they spend per capita on the military is $446 per capita per each.
The United States spends $22,223.
So it's about five times more, four times more.
If you look at China, though, it's way less.
It's like $100 per capita versus $2,200.
So it's like 10 times more than we're spending on China.
So don't you think that we could maybe cut, I don't know, a billion dollars a year on the military and still be so far ahead of everybody else that we wouldn't have to worry about the fact that we're limiting our military somehow?
Nick, I would like to answer that by quoting a beloved character from 1999's film Election.
Tracy Flick, who by the way went on to become Marjorie Taylor Greene, adjacent probably.
In whatever world Election took place in, I mean Tracy Flick is part of the alt-right.
Let's just be real about that, right?
But here is a quote from Tracy Fleck from Election.
Yeah, but you know, Coca-Cola is by far the world's number one soft drink, and they spend more money than anybody on advertising.
I mean, we have to quadruple the defense budgets of all these people, right?
By the way, let's just point out something real fast.
We're even having a conversation that doesn't even enter into the realm of the conversation about the tax.
I almost said hikes again.
See?
The resettlement of taxes.
I see that.
That's the thing.
They get in your head linguistically.
Wait, but I gotta quote Charles Grodin from the movie Dave then.
Wonderful.
Where he says, who does these books?
Because that's the other thing.
Remember, he goes through the tax code basically.
Oh, that's a great scene.
It's the best scene of all time, for sure.
I like Dave.
I like Dave a lot.
There's weird, problematic parts of Dave.
I like that movie.
It's a good movie.
Aaron Sorkin.
Is that true?
He wrote it.
Wait, is that true?
No, that's the American president, Nick.
Oh, it is?
Yeah, you're probably right.
It doesn't have that Coke-fueled manic background.
Alright, never mind.
So, the other thing about it is that A lot of this is not actually about raising money for our military.
It's about even, like, making people pay their fair share in general, right?
It's not even about, like, booming up towards a Cold War.
And we're going to talk in a second about how we've arrived at this place, how taxes have become what they are, and how the economy has been completely transformed to the favor of the people that we're talking about right now.
And again, how they're going to defend it, how they're going to tear it down, and how they're going to attack it.
But before we do, like, these corporations who use our roads, they depend on welfare that makes sure that they don't have to pay their employees decent wages, that they don't have to give them benefits, that they don't have to take care of them, use the roads, use the resources, use all the stuff that the government and the people have created for them.
Most of them have figured out every way in the book in order to avoid their fair share.
And what has happened in this country because of that?
Our schools have started to fall apart.
Our infrastructure is literally crumbling.
I mean, like, right now, like, driving on a bridge somewhere in America, it's like, it's like rolling the dice on a craps table, man, you know?
And on top of that, we just got done with the, well, we're not even done with the coronavirus pandemic.
It was made so much worse.
Because healthcare in America sucks.
Healthcare in America sucks on ice and it was done intentionally to make sure that people weren't able to access this stuff and that they weren't able to like increase their quality of life.
These things that we're talking about, raising that money, It needs to be put into human projects that have been completely thrown overboard in the favor of corporate dominance and the ascendance and redistribution of wealth toward the wealthy and powerful in this country.
And one of the reasons why people were willing in the 50s to pay such high taxes is because they recognized the value that they were getting back.
Now in the 50s is when they did the huge highway programs across the country.
There was visible tangible evidence that our taxpayer money was going to work if 70 years!
effectively to help people and create a whole new economy based on the fact that we can travel across the country a lot easier.
That's really smart.
And, of course, that's the last time we actually did any kind of major improvements to the roads, it seems like, versus just throwing some asphalt on it and calling it a day.
Seventy years.
Yeah.
Seventy years.
Seventy years.
So that was the smart part about government is when you do, if you raise taxes and people feel like they have to pay them, you need to have very visible, tangible things to see in front of your face permanently that will indicate that is where my money went.
That's why you saw during TARP in 2009, they would have these really big signs out.
I'm sure you saw them across the country in LA, they're everywhere.
This, you know, project is being funded by TARP.
Your money, hard work.
Comrade Obama has been here.
Yes, the Republic of Obama, yes.
So that was really important to be able to see that and actually feel good, have some pride about it, whatever.
Here's the thing I find interesting though.
One thing you need to be very careful about is, and listen for it, I suspect we're gonna now start to hear that same trope where the Republicans start to say, well you know, 50% of the country doesn't even pay income tax.
Oh yeah, yep.
And it's a really big tell, because it's the ideology that, well, why am I carrying half of the country, 40% of the country, who don't even pay income tax, these freeloaders, you know?
Meanwhile, you know, the answer is, is that any kind of sales tax they pay, based on the fact that they don't make a lot of money to begin with, is such a burden on them infinitely as much as any kind of income tax would be, because they don't make hardly any money.
But that doesn't mean anything to them.
They have to see it as completely free and fair to everybody, no matter what.
I'm going to make half a million dollars a year.
I better pay the same amount of income tax as some guy making 25 and with four kids and, you know, one job.
Well, one of the reasons we're talking about this is our listeners are going to be inundated with this really, really soon.
We're taping this a month out from tax day, right?
Like, let me tell you what.
Taxes aren't fun.
The older I get, the more that I hate taxes.
And one of the reasons that I hate taxes is because American culture does everything that it possibly can because of the wealthiest 1% and their PR front, the Republican Party, tells us all the time, you shouldn't want to pay taxes.
You know what I mean?
It's theft from you.
That's your money.
It shouldn't be going to the government.
They don't even know what to do with it anyway.
It's been a generation upon generation propaganda scam.
Right?
Telling us over and over, you shouldn't trust the government, you shouldn't allow them to use your money, yada yada yada.
The closer that we get to April 15th, the more we're going to hear about this.
And what are they going to do?
They're going to go on Fox News, and this is going to be one of the drumbeats.
We're going to hear cultural warfare, obviously, but it's going to be, Joe Biden's going to raise taxes.
Period.
Right.
And that's it.
It's not going to be about who is getting taxes raised on them.
It's going to be Joe Biden's going to raise taxes.
Joe Biden's going to raise taxes.
Joe Biden's going to raise taxes.
This is exactly what's going to happen.
They're going to talk about despotic takeovers.
They're going to talk about businesses leaving.
They're going to talk about gas prices rising, products costing more, which we know is bullshit, that those costs aren't going to necessarily be large or unmanageable.
And on top of that, by the way, the rhetoric and conversation around that should be like, Fuck these corporations for pushing the costs over to us.
If you all are making a little bit less, you're not losing out in the race.
It is your depraved desire and hunger for ever-increasing profits that causes this problem.
So, fuck those people.
Well, and here's why that should backfire, is every indication I can wrap my head around would seem to indicate that the economy is going to boom once we get out of COVID completely.
Maybe.
And real fast, I want to point this out because this is why people listen to the podcast.
They want to hear what's coming and where things are going.
Last night, and before this came out today, before it started really making the rounds, last night Lehman Brothers was burning up the phone and internet lines telling everyone who would listen that their forecast for the economy They had been a conservative forecast, and now they were like, everything's going to lose its mind, our economy's going to boom, everything's going to grow, unemployment's going to plummet.
And why did they do that, Nick?
So that they could get out ahead of this thing.
And they could say, you don't want to touch the economy.
I mean, it's the most stable, beautiful thing in the world.
It's a wonderful instrument.
But I mean, this motherfucker blows up all the time.
Like, you don't want to spook it, Nick.
You don't want to talk about raising taxes on anybody or rolling back tax cuts on anybody.
Like, you don't want to do that.
Which is their game.
It's always their game.
And you're exactly right.
The economy is going to boom.
For a lot of reasons, which we've been on this beat for a while, which was the pandemic allowed a lot of people to lay off a lot of people without the PR flack or the plunging stock market.
And what we saw now is that they are in a place to exploit and to ask for lower wages from people.
So of course it's going to boom, but they're going to try and take that boom and use that as a reason to go against something that is just a modest tax reform.
Do those people like somebody who's named Reagan?
They like him, right?
They think he was pretty cool?
They're currently standing in their boardrooms with their hand over their hearts listening to Lee Greenwood getting all misty-eyed about the Gipper on a horse.
Yeah, with a picture of him on the wall.
Whoa!
You're done, my heart!
I would only remind them that the moment that Reagan raised taxes in 1982 was when his Reaganomics Suddenly started the boom.
Now, we can't make a direct correlation between those two things, but the argument is that raising taxes then does not impair the economy at all from having this kind of a boom.
And those two things happened, and they hold this up as another one of those Make America Great Again moments in 82 through 90, whatever that was, 88.
Before the recession, so there is no basis for reality in them arguing against the taxes.
Sorry, raising, I don't want to say it, rolling back the tax cuts that were put into place horribly.
Because remember, we now know the math is in.
The numbers have come in and it's clear that the only people that really benefited from those tax cuts were the extremely wealthy and huge corporations.
And whenever tax day in April comes around it's in 17 18 19 Everyone was always complaining like where I'm not paying any less in taxes.
I'm paying more.
I'm paying the same.
It's worse My refund is almost is zero when I used to get always get a refund every year That's what you would hear a whole lot across the board for the last four years So there's no question that that's not going to have an effect When the economy begins to boom once everything opens up completely Yeah, we have to address a couple of fictions that have completely changed not just America and America's economy, but the world and reality as we know it.
First and foremost, every time that something like this happens, more or less, it's sort of a standoff.
You know what I mean?
Where we talk about either raising rates or something, and then all of these corporations and all the wealthy are like, Well, I don't know if now's the time to do it.
I think you might spook the economy, and we really need to focus on the economy.
It's a matter of who blinks first.
Because let me tell you something about corporations and wealthy people.
They're not going to just stop.
They're not going to just stop making money.
Because that's not who they are.
The Ayn Rand, John Galt thing, and for anybody who hasn't read that, total bullshit.
Like the wealthy and the powerful one day will be like, you know what?
I was ambitious and money hungry.
This is too much.
I'm done.
I'm going to back away from this.
That never happens.
They will figure out how to work within that system.
And they will fight tooth and nail to try and take it down, but then they will fight tooth and nail to make money within it.
The second fiction goes back to Reagan.
And Reagan created a system of hyper-capitalism after the 1970s, where the idea of the government working to limit the economy, or to sort of keep an eye on the economy, or use a regulator on it, that sort of reached a moment of crisis.
And so they moved over into what we now call Reaganomics, which is a complete and utter fiction.
I mean, one of the things that this works on, of course, is the Laffer curve.
Arthur Laffer created this bullshit chart that didn't mean anything, and he sketched it on a cocktail napkin and showed it to Dick Cheney in Rumsfeld.
And then suddenly they were like, yeah, absolutely, go and do that.
That's perfect.
It didn't work.
It never, ever worked.
What helped the economy at that point wasn't just tax raises.
It was the fact that Reagan like threw us full bore into a new Cold War, a new episode of the Cold War and then redistributed wealth towards the military industrial complex because that's what all of the think tanks and foundations told him to do.
And so it just overheated the economy.
It moved everything in the direction of the wealthy and the powerful.
And now they're like they're like bodiless, nationless beings who decide, you know, decide everything for us and they supersede government.
Like, we have to be able to raise some money for education and infrastructure and healthcare.
And if we don't start now, I'm sorry, the door is going to close on government being able to do anything ever again.
And those fictions are a large part of the foundation that has made all of this possible.
You know, I was just thinking about this as part of the vicious cycle of, you know, the rich people didn't suffer at all from the pandemic, right?
We see an explosion of billionaires since the pandemic hit and how many there are.
Well, you know, part of this cycle is that, you know, during the run up, let's say in the 80s, You're making a lot of money and the economy is going great and then as it starts to crest and go down, because you've already amassed a lot of wealth, you can get out of a lot of your positions, you can be very patient because you have a lot of money in the bank, and then it crashes, and then you can get in again at much better positions that are very low, and then it starts all over again.
But what that screws people out of, and this is why the economy is changing, is that everybody who's been working middle class, lower class, and been struggling month to month, they never are ever in a position To capitalize on the markets going up or the economy doing so well.
So all they deal with is the suffering when it does crash and they never catch up.
Oh, but their money unconsciously, and a lot of them don't understand that their retirements are used as injections in the market to go ahead and drive it up and drive it up and drive it up until it reaches a crest where it can't possibly do it.
And then the people who have the most money in it, they get bailed out.
Right.
And then everybody else Good luck pounding sand, my man.
I'm sorry about your retirement.
I'm sorry about everything you thought that you did.
Yeah, or then the unions get browbeaten into having to renegotiate their positions to take less than they did when it was at the height.
It's just an endless cycle here that needs to be broken.
And this is the one thing that's exciting about a thing like Robinhood, is that finally there is an entree to normal people To instantaneously be able to trade and have positions on the market like you can do, like these big guys used to only be able to do.
So there is a little bit of movement there.
But, you know, the only thing I want to talk about, I think, before I forget, would be the notion that raising taxes or increasing the part of the Laffer curve or part of the overall ideology out of the Reaganomics thing was that the economy would be decimated when you raise the price of running your business too much.
Right?
As if the businesses will just collapse.
Small businesses, you hear that all the time.
They're gonna collapse if we raise taxes or we do these things or make them, you know, pay for more health care, all these different things.
Can you imagine?
I'm so disgusted, Nick.
It just makes my stomach hurt thinking about making businesses pay for their employees to have decent lives.
Jared, have you ever ran a business?
You can say no.
It's okay.
Well, we kind of run a business right now.
Okay.
All right.
Well, let's just play this out.
Wait, are we role-playing here?
You're the CEO of Muckrake Productions.
Muckrake.
Wow.
I just got a promotion.
Can't wait to put that on my CV.
And so, you know, you have all these expenses, you have people that are working for you, and all of a sudden you realize that the thing that you rely on, that you need to buy every month to make your business work, goes up by 10%.
Do you just close your business and say, oh, sorry, we can't go any longer?
I lay off everybody and I'm just like, I'm sorry, everyone.
The numbers just didn't compute.
It wasn't worth it to make.
A little bit less money.
Right.
Well, no, that's not even what you have to do.
You don't need to make a little bit less money.
You know, let's say you're making French fries and hamburgers.
You charge 30 cents more for each of those things.
Maybe.
Yeah.
Maybe.
That's maybe more than all you have to do.
And then you cover that cost by increasing the cost of your product just a little bit that no one really notices or cares too much about.
And guess why?
If you're going to raise the minimum wage, let's just say that that's what we're talking about here.
Then the people who are now making that minimum wage have a little bit more money to come buy that product that you're going to sell for a little bit more.
And everybody gets lifted up.
It's really an amazing concept.
But to hear the Republicans talk about it, to a man and a woman and a child on the Republican side, they will refuse to acknowledge that you could possibly raise the cost of a product that you're making to offset any kind of increased expense that you might have based on what the government says.
It's crazy.
Listen, uh, this might be a hot take.
I fucking hate the Republican child pundits.
I hate them.
Like, I am just, just, just, just, I hate, I hate their little faces.
I hate, I hate how, how they just think they know everything.
I might still stop a Republican child from being bullied in the playground if I saw that, but other than that, I don't have any sympathy.
The crazy thing about that is they literally live in a world of black and white, and because that's who they are.
It's really just white.
Yeah, it's just white.
It's one of those things where they truly believe, or at least they peddle, that if taxes were rolled back even a percentage to where they used to be, it's the apocalypse.
That's it.
Because everything now has been turned up to 100%, right?
Everything that Biden could possibly ever propose, or the Democratic Party could ever possibly propose.
And it goes back, this recent iteration of it was Particularly with Newt Gingrich and with somebody like a Bill Kristol, who's like, we could never possibly give health care to people or allow Democrats to even reform health care a little bit.
But Newt Gingrich would tell everybody like, I'm the one person standing between you and Auschwitz, right?
That's who he was.
That's who he believed that he was.
And that's how he taught Republicans to frame every single battle.
Right now, we could never possibly even try and find a consensus on rolling tax cuts back, because that would suddenly lead to a despotic takeover.
And obviously, here in the next couple of weeks, you're going to see from not only the Republicans, you're going to see from PACs that are being funded by corporations, by lobbying groups, you're definitely going to see the Chamber of Commerce doing stuff like this.
You're going to see every Republican think tank just pumping out bullshit numbers and memos.
It's going to be the cause celebre.
And that's if this thing moves forward at all.
And the entire point that they're going to push is this is going to destroy the economy.
This will destroy the economy.
And meanwhile, what you just said is exactly right and astute.
We have reached the point of hypercapitalism.
Where the domination of the economy by the wealthiest people and the corporations has created a contradiction in an economy, which by the way, people have been talking about this for centuries.
If you don't pay the people enough money, they can't buy your products.
It doesn't matter how much you exploit them.
It doesn't matter how much production you get out of them.
It doesn't matter how much you master extraction.
They have to be able to buy your products.
And if you create serfdoms, They can't buy your products.
And by the way, the next step, what we're talking about right now is like, that's that's 101 level stuff.
The next step with all of these wise asses is going to be company towns, indentured servitude.
It's going to be basically coming in and, you know, paying Tesla bucks for Tesla food.
And it's just going to continue down that line.
We can go ahead and stay away from that.
We can move away from that and we can start to Regain a semblance of decency, but they're gonna fight tooth and nail on this thing.
It's gonna be bloody if it goes forward.
Yeah, we haven't properly exhoriated the Republican Party for turning these arguments into, like, hell, fire, and brimstone.
The only alternative to what we are proposing is, you know, you're going to be in a heap of ash with your house dogs living together, mass hysteria.
Yes, it is true.
This man is a dick.
Absolutely.
Oh, no, I'm sorry.
He has no dick.
That's right.
That's what it was.
Till dickless over here started getting in our way.
Five people just really enjoyed that exchange.
The rest have no idea what's going on.
People know Ghostbusters.
I hope!
By the way, Ghostbusters is a Reagan movie.
That is a Reagan-esque movie.
We might have to watch that.
By the way, we missed out.
You know what COVID did to us?
It robbed us of this Paul Rudd movie, basically a sequel to Ghostbusters.
Which was supposed to come out, and I was so excited about it, and I don't think it ever did because they shut down the movie theaters.
You haven't seen the preview for this from a year ago?
No.
He's like, hey, that's a really cool replica.
And they find one of the packs where they shoot whatever it goes.
They're like, oh, really?
And he looks at it more closely.
He realizes it's real, and it turns out everything we saw on Ghostbusters actually happened, and people had forgotten about it 35 years later.
Anyway, it sounds like a really great high-concept idea.
But we haven't fully, just to get back to that point, This notion that they're framing this argument is so disgusting.
It's not Christian, and it's not American, and it's all these things that are just the evil damnation.
There's no place in politics for that, and yet we've allowed that to be the norm now, and it's really disgusting.
And the only thing I can hope for is that more people get repulsed by that as we get further and further along in our history.
But I don't know.
There's a lot of those, you know, Well, we have to be honest that, again, the right has dominated the argument on this, like they have on so much.
I mean, one of the things that you can say for the right is that they have an incredibly Incredible intuitive understanding of rhetoric and divisive rhetoric and figuring out how to win linguistic battles They're very good at that and they always have I mean it was like I was screaming about this a while back whenever it started coming up at Donald Trump and you know not like not paid taxes for God knows how many years right and it was just the numbers and
And right now, by the way, if you turn on your TV, you can't escape an H&R Block commercial.
And each H&R Block commercial is like, we'll get you the biggest refund, and we'll get you the biggest amount of money off of your taxes as possible.
Be smart!
Don't pay those taxes!
And meanwhile, all of us are like, oh my God, if I can get out of taxes.
And it comes out that Trump hasn't paid taxes, and like he said, Not paying taxes means I'm smart.
And instead of framing it as how many schools didn't get funded, how many roads didn't get repaired or built, how many people could have gotten health care because Donald Trump paid his taxes, instead it's just a number.
It's almost like the amount of points that you score in a game, you know?
It's like the larger number is actually really impressive at that point.
And we have to work to fight against that.
And Hillary blew it in the debate when he said that.
I can't remember if she addressed when he said, that's because I'm smart, because it was an aside.
But she should have dressed him down immediately after he said that and laid it out just like you did.
Not that it would change anything, but certainly that needs to be out there a lot more.
Because again, you look at all the different places where the wealthy people can shield all their extra taxes, which they should rightfully be paying.
I mean, you know, Malcolm Gladwell had a really great podcast years ago about this, where there's a golf course near me in Brentwood, and because they replace members with new members, they're able to kind of keep the same tax code they had from the 70s.
And it's like, imagine the infrastructure you could do, the schools that could benefit from that, the things that this country needs and has needed, which they haven't been able to do.
Now, here's the biggest problem with that, is that when the Republicans will always say, well, I don't want to pay taxes because my money isn't gonna get spent right.
Have you ever noticed that the Republicans only care about government perfection when the Democrats are in power?
Oh, they turn into deficit hawks.
They turn into just reformers.
It's incredible.
But it's the expectations, the way they frame their arguments, as if government needs to run absolutely perfectly with no trace of waste ever, only when the Democrats are in power.
And that's the thing that's so frustrating when you talk about it, because that's why they're so good at the language in these things, because they're not dealing on a level playing field here.
They're only going to make these arguments when the Democrats are in power, and it's hard to argue.
Listen, there's government waste.
This new bill that we're going to spend $1.9 trillion, there's going to be a lot of waste.
A lot of things aren't going to work properly, but a lot of things are, and there already are by getting $1,400 checks to people directly in their bank accounts.
That's going to be the biggest issue we have anyway, the biggest benefit from this.
But it's hard to argue with someone who's like, well, yeah, well, they wasted $10 million over here on this thing.
Okay, obviously it's a bad bill then.
Oh, but here's the motherlode.
They're all taking credit for it!
Yes, exactly.
They're all taking credit for the bill they didn't vote for.
Just well done.
It's amazing.
Just pick a pal, all of you.
This is why we do this podcast together, because you knew exactly where I was going with that one.
I've been sitting around, and I have to tell you, I don't know how you feel about this.
I'm getting older.
I'm on the cusp of 40.
I'm getting ready to enter a new decade.
Maybe it's growth.
Maybe it's therapy.
Maybe it's experience, Nick.
I feel like the old guy in the pickup game at the rack who, like, maybe I'm not as fast as I used to be.
Maybe I can't jump as high as I used to be, but I know the angles.
Yeah.
I know the passes, you know.
I know how to distribute.
I know how to, like, help people become better.
I don't even get surprised by it anymore.
And I don't totally get angry about it anymore.
There's like a new gear that I have where it's like, that's who they are.
You know what I mean?
Like it's the shamelessness of it.
And at times you just have to be like, oh man, that shamelessness, the bullshit they're capable of peddling.
It's absolutely incredible.
Like they are just such malevolent actors that it's impressive sometimes.
I know.
I've been saying that for since we started this podcast, how it's refreshing and whatever, but impressive.
It's not, but we needed some new words here.
It's an event in English language to cover that.
We've entered a new territory that I don't know that we have words for yet.
Right?
Because on one hand, they're like hurting people.
So it's not like refreshing.
But on the other hand, it is something new and it's like a level of nihilistic Malevolent bullshit.
That is just, it's incredible, really.
There's no question that German probably has several words that we could use for this somehow.
You know what it's like?
You know, it just occurred to me and it just broke to me.
You know those videos of like the Boston Scientific animals and robots?
The robot animals?
Yeah, yeah, yeah, that was really freaky.
Right.
And it's like they'll like hit him with a sledgehammer and they'll fall and they'll come back up.
Or it's like the dog, the robot dog, will like run on the side of a wall.
And on one hand, you're like, oh, that thing is probably going to be what kills me.
Right.
When a dictatorship unleashes them, you know, in a technological dystopia, that will be the last thing I see before I die.
But on the other hand, you're like, man, they're making these things like incredibly at this point.
Yes.
I mean, nightmare fuel to me when you see because it's the way they move.
It's the way they move too.
It's almost like when Anton Chigurh shows up at your house and you're like, Ooh, this is, this is new.
Okay.
All right, well let's talk about old stuff.
I've got an interview here with David Parsons of Nostalgia Trap.
Again, we're going to be talking for a couple minutes about Adam Curtis's Can't Get You Out of My Head, but mainly we're going to be talking about how America's culture has declined and our ideas for the future have sort of ceased.
We're going to talk about deep politics and discovering what is actually happening in politics.
A quick viewer note, I was so excited to talk to him and I'm also so bad with technology, Nick.
That I forgot to hit record at the very beginning.
So we got we got a couple of minutes in.
I had to stop him.
But again, this is David Parsons, the host of Nostalgia Trap.
Really, really good guy.
You should check him out and his podcast.
For anybody who is listening to this, I was so excited about having our guest here and talking about this subject.
I didn't even hit record, which is the most rookie of rookie mistakes.
We're here with David Parsons, as you all know.
We are talking about the new Adam Curtis documentary, Can't Get You Out of My Head, the experience of watching Adam Curtis, the effect that he has had, how his voice and leftist thinking is almost inescapable at this point.
And of course, what we thought about this, this modern iteration.
And we're talking about the tropes, the ticks.
Then something strange happened.
And then dark forces arose.
These things that we've gotten so used to at this point.
Yeah, I think the nugget that I'd want to get back out that we missed there is that, you know, Adam Curtis, as a political filmmaker, feels like Radiohead.
Whereas Michael Moore feels like Bruce Springsteen.
And what I mean by that is Michael Moore's got this sort of rootsy, blue-collar, working-class kind of attitude about capitalism.
Whereas Adam Curtis is trying to get into really sort of like the metaphysics of it almost.
And I think that's what part of what makes his movies so seductive and so overwhelming and mind-blowing for the certain set of people that get really into them is because he sort of hints at reality underneath the reality.
It's sort of like watching The Matrix or something like that.
But he's describing that there are forces underneath our world that we're not recognizing.
He has a way of, I think, very almost romantically capturing these forces and projecting them back to us in what are essentially like filmic essays.
I think of Curtis as writing essays about our moment and then matching them to all these different I don't think I've ever seen him really touch on it outside of China buying US debt.
I mean, this latest one spends a lot of time on China, which I thought was really, really interesting.
Because I don't know how much time he has spent on China in his previous films.
I don't think I've ever seen him really touch on it outside of China buying U.S. debt.
And that's about it.
Right.
Yeah.
But, you know, I think one of the through lines for Curtis to me is he has sort of what attracts me as a sort of like nostalgia trap type person of the 20th century is he has an obsession with 20th century history and the sort of ghosts of that history, particularly World War II, particularly Nazism.
And for him sort of locating a continuity between that intense evil moment in human history and and the moments that we're living through now and everything that's happened since.
I mean, he has, he has a theory, he has a sort of picture he's giving us.
And as a story, it's, it's hard to turn away from.
I think his stuff is really, really hypnotic.
I think it's only later that I begin to sort of critique a little bit of the of the of the kind of claims he's making, because he is it's much like Michael Moore in the sense that he is making big claims, you know, and he's using evidence and he's sort of, you know, I think using the power of the visual medium to communicate those claims.
But they can be picked apart.
Some of them are kind of like rolling.
So there's a few of them I roll my eyes at.
I'm like, this is this is, you know, he's really good.
He's really good at sort of like giving us something really juicy.
I think that's part of his success as a as a filmmaker.
Well, you know, I first and foremost, one of my favorite things about watching Curtis is later on in doing my own research, my own research, I'll come across a nugget of something and I'll realize that it's something that Curtis was sort of using as the foundation of a claim or a larger sweeping narrative.
And then I'm like, oh, there's a lot more to this.
Like, it's very distilled down, but it's also I think the appeal is hidden knowledge.
And not just hidden knowledge, it's the actual truth of the matter.
And I will say that one of the things I appreciate about your work and your project over at Nostalgia Trap, and one of the things that I kind of think is my jam, because it's like when Curtis comes out.
When it comes out, like, I don't get excited about that many bands anymore.
You know, most of them are, like, too old.
They've got their entire, like, actual output behind them.
I can count on one hand the number of movies I get excited about in a year.
I was pumped about this.
And I was pumped about this because I think the idea of deep politics or the actual story behind what is going on in the world, where power lies and how it manufactures itself and protects itself, and how these narratives and mythologies and how these narratives and mythologies that sort of form the skin that hides the organ proper of how politics actually works.
That is, that's my jam.
That's what I love.
I like going out there and finding that and getting the actual research.
Which, you know, people like yourself who are historians and academics, they know about.
You know, they've studied it.
They've read the books that a lot of the rest of us don't even know exist out there.
I was wondering if you could talk a little bit, just on a personal note, where did you start chasing that high?
Where did you start looking for deep history and deep politics?
God, that's a, that's a good question.
I think that, um, it was that my historical experience is my, is my nostalgia trap answer, which is that, you know, I, I grew up in the late nineties going to high school and college during that time.
And, and it was sort of looking back this, this end of history moment in which it felt like, you know, everything was settled.
All the big questions were settled.
I think I bring up a lot, you know, in movies like Fight Club, you know, Brad Pitt's character is saying, you know, we have no Great Depression, we have no World Wars.
When's the last time you watched that?
Oh, I don't know, a couple years ago, I would say.
I've seen it a lot.
Fight Club is a weird repeat viewing.
Oh, for sure, yeah.
Because, of course, you've got the alt-right thing, you've got the rising fascism thing.
I mean, Bannon is all over that.
But then on top of it, Fight Club takes place in a world where everything is settled and everything is fine and you actually have to find something to live for because everything is so settled.
It's like a Philip K. Dick transmission from an alternate universe at this point.
Yeah.
In fact, I just did an episode about the movie American Beauty, which came out the same year, 1999, which is a similar film where everything is settled and the problem is just you're bored with your job.
You're bored with your suburban house.
But in terms of material comfort and everything, there's just it just seems like, yeah, everything is is settled and they just have to wait it out.
And it just doesn't feel like that movie would resonate in quite the same way in 2021 when it feels like history is is back.
You know, we're in a chaotic historical moment.
It does feel like we can spin in many different directions.
And to answer your question about deep politics and conspiracy theories and things like that, you know, it's funny to live through the Trump era and watch the whole conspiracy theory stuff, you know, turn into this politicized thing that, you know, for a lot of for a long time, the words conspiracy theory were used to sort of, you know, were used to sort the words conspiracy theory were used to sort of, you know, were used to sort of delegitimize real real analysis of the types of things you're talking about, the types of things Adam Curtis talks about, the types of things that
I remember, and I think that in terms of deep politics, it was You just took me back man.
That is a visceral physical memory right there.
Looking for like bootlegs of old Oasis concerts at that point.
Yeah, and not only that, but they were all, they all were 60s oriented.
You know, they had tie dye.
I mean, I'm from Southern California, so I think they're more present here, but tie dye, Jimi Hendrix, the Beatles, Led Zeppelin, all that sort of culture.
And I really, I mean, the 90s and 60s were connected in so many ways.
You look at Lollapalooza, it's like a bunch of hippies.
But either way, this head shop in my town had a bunch of tapes
Noam Chomsky lectures and those tapes it was like they had this little radical political section and that always drew my attention it was part is actually the radical politics were part of the undercurrent of things going on in the world and finding that sort of stuff and beginning to listen to Chomsky talk about Latin American politics or US policy in Israel I mean all of it was the exactly what you're talking about a sort of very
Um, a rabbit hole that was endlessly intriguing and compelling.
And so, in other words, to fast forward to the Trump era, in which now we're talking about anti-vaxxers and, you know, the, I mean, Trump himself talking about, you know, the vote being stolen, the election being stolen, all those sorts of like bullshit conspiracy theories.
It really, that part of Adam Curtis's film, the new one, really resonated with me when he describes how The real conspiracy theories got mashed up with all the fake stuff, and now it's all thrown out, you know, and we just kind of like, we don't want to go into this direction of investigating what's underneath.
That underneath is still there, right?
All that stuff like MKUltra, the things that we uncovered that the U.S.
government was doing in the 60s and 70s, those things really happened.
They're still part of our history.
They're still very much active as part of what our political reality is.
But at the same time, we have a reality, a social reality, in which Americans have gone off the deep end into believing all sorts of nonsense.
And it's a really tricky thing to unpack.
It feels like almost impossible, actually.
Well, I'm a proud Midwesterner, so I am not a stranger to being in denial about personal crises and problems that go undiagnosed or unexamined and then caterwaul into bigger, giant, more problems, particularly when they turn into anger and projection and paranoia.
And I have to tell you that all the people in my family who live sort of this life where they suppress that stuff, I mean, right now I could get on here and find you some QAnon shit that would make your hair curl, you know?
And it is this really amazing thing where America is so in denial about not just what it is, but what it has been.
And I always find this conversation, and it's weird what has now become sinister.
Like, I'll never forget the last 4th of July, turning on the TV and seeing Donald Trump at Mount Rushmore in front of flags and before some fireworks.
And like any other year, that would have just been par for course.
You know what I mean?
But it was like during the pandemic, it was Donald Trump, there was rising fascism in the background.
And all of a sudden, it's like talking about our great legacy.
All of a sudden, you can't have that conversation without talking about coups and overthrowing of governments.
You can't talk about that without getting into... I mean, MKUltra is one of the craziest things when you actually talk about it.
And for those who are listening who don't know about it, pause.
Go look up MKUltra.
Look at the fact that intelligence agencies were experimenting on American citizens, dosing them.
Are you getting chaos out?
Is that what this is?
By the way, I was really excited when I saw you post a picture of Chaos, because I wanted to talk about that for a second, too.
Well, MKUltra is going to enter the conversation.
You've got to have that conversation.
That's a recommendation, by the way, for people who have some time on their hands and they really want to go down the rabbit hole and come out the other side.
But all of this stuff is not Wild-eyed tinfoil hat bullshit.
It's the actual history of America.
And for me, I felt like I didn't begin to discover it until like 2003 when I was in college.
Which, you know, it coincides with all that, obviously.
But, you know, I reached this point where I was like, this is obviously such an illegal, awful, Thing.
Somebody has to do something about this, obviously.
And then one by one, the people that I voted for or supported in politics went ahead and voted for it and encouraged it, stood by it.
And suddenly I realized there was more to the story.
I think what Curtis does incredibly well is he sort of welcomes you in to that sort of shadow world, but by showing you the most mundane things Like dancing, balls, just boring clips of town meetings and stuff.
And then suddenly there's blood.
Suddenly there's like something really, really disconcerting.
And it starts to kind of, I think, build a sort of conscious, subconscious sort of representation of the experience of what it is to live in a society that is so violent, duplicitous, but also, I mean, let's just be frank, mad.
Yeah, yeah.
And boring, too.
You know, the fact that all of that can happen at once.
Yeah, you're right.
It's funny to say, you know, that it's like a new album coming out and you don't get excited about things like that anymore.
But an Adam Curtis documentary is something you're running to your computer to watch.
I mean, that's that speaks to something, you know, about like where we're at.
You know, I think in previous eras, it wouldn't be such a there wouldn't be such a need to really hear a voice that's going to put it together for us.
So, yeah, I think that the the Curtis documentaries, you know, I when I was living in Brooklyn, I had a group of friends that that would screen them in their, you know, a friend who would screen them in his basement.
And we would get all these These people together that were all a bunch of, you know, graduate students and writer types, you know, let's face it, there are certain type of people that get into Adam Curtis films more than others, I think.
But, you know, I think there was part of it.
The social experience of watching Adam Curtis was like, you know, we're all drinking and smoking and sort of like hanging out, watching this sort of wash of images.
You know, he does, I think, capture the visceral feeling of being alive during a really surreal moment in history where all, I mean, the ghost of Nazism is more than a ghost, you know, at this point.
And I think that That thing you mentioned about Mount Rushmore and seeing Trump with the flag and it meaning something different because of how it's being constructed during that era, that's really important stuff.
I mean, I think about my my parents who are sort of, you know, ordinary middle class liberal types that do have my parents are baby boomers.
They were born in the 40s.
My dad had served in the military and has a patriotism.
And I think that was one of the most painful things about it, that the Trump era was watching that flag shift meaning.
And, you know, for me, I had a different perspective because I'm like sitting there being like, well, that flag has always meant that, you know.
and now you're just seeing it for the first time.
And that's that's kind of I think what what Curtis is doing is something that Trump did for us, too, which was sort of like give us a vision that was undeniable in terms of in terms of seeing those forces underneath, because Trump Trump brought those forces to the surface.
You know, he speaks them out loud and he said them in a way that that was Yeah.
different than every other American politician, in part because every other American politician is skilled at weaving all of it into some benevolent project.
And he just shows you the fangs of the beast.
And that part of it, I think there was some part of the left that was excited about Trump in a weird, weird way because they're like, finally, people like my parents are going to see what America is.
I think the key is that we don't, you know, fall back into, you know, this idea that Trump was just this anomalous monster, and now we're back to normal and good.
I think we have to have a more, you know, nuanced view of what Trump was, where he came from, and what the forces that created him, you know, what they are, and why they're still here.
Because that's a much more realistic view of what we're dealing with, I think.
Yeah, I couldn't agree more.
And I want to point out the social aspect of that.
Because, I mean, let's be honest, to be a leftist in this country is lonely.
I mean, it's a lot less lonely post-Trump.
I'll say that.
Because suddenly you could start to look at a lot of this machinery that I think a lot of us knew was there before.
The illusion flickered, which I think is a really important thing.
It's almost like in They Live when all of a sudden the transmission goes out and everyone gets a good glimpse of who they're eating dinner with and who's sitting across the table from them.
But that, I think with Curtis, and I think with people like him who are At that level, and I think are important.
And by the way, I'm not going to sit here and tell you that that documentary doesn't have problems because that was a dude feeling his opes.
I mean, that was a guy feeling himself and shooting off into space.
But I think one of the things about Curtis is it was like going to the library Finding a book that interested you and finding a letter that said, hey, by the way, you're not alone.
There is an explanation out there, and the suspicions that you have had, they're valid.
And that doesn't make you crazy, that doesn't make you absurd, that doesn't make you delusional.
And once you start finding that stuff, and I actually think, I don't know how you feel about it, but The emerging constellation of podcasts, conversations, even social media when it is not the absolute worst thing on the face of the earth.
There are moments where you start to feel like, oh, that's right.
I'm not crazy.
Like there is a problem here and there is an underlying issue at stake.
Yeah, and that's something that's changed dramatically in our lifetime, right?
And I mean, part of that is the internet, because we've been able to connect.
I mean, I'm talking about going to, in the 90s, I'm going to these head shops and getting these tapes, and I feel like I'm the only person in the world listening to them.
And I don't need, I mean, once I listen to the Chomsky stuff, my only option is to try to convert other people to listen to it, so they'll be my friends too.
Because there was really no community to find That I could find, especially if you're not in a major city.
When I moved to Los Angeles, I remember going to events where Michael Moore was speaking, or Naomi Klein was speaking, and there was an ability to meet the left.
This is part of why I wrote my book about coffeehouses in the 60s and 70s, because they were places that made the left visible, and places where they created a sort of social experience of having left values and that sort of thing.
But, you know, with Curtis documentaries, you know, that's it's funny because the coffee houses used to screen documentaries.
That was one of their primary sort of event nights was screening documentaries so that people were on the same page, you know, with with with their their their values and their critiques and their ideas.
And yeah, I mean, there's plenty to critique about the Curtis documentaries, but the fact that they exist and the fact that these conversations about about technology, about finance, about propaganda you know there were i think that was part of what i remember about hanging out in brooklyn with these guys when we were watching curtis films i think this was like a 2010s somewhere during the obama years which were sort of lost years for the left too because we were just like where where do we go um
it's hard to it's hard to it was i think it was harder to take on obama than it than it is to take on biden um But either way, the conversation was the point.
You know, it was the sort of ideas that came out of the Curtis documentary and our disagreements and our different sort of shades on what we had just seen that I think helped clarify and produce something that was real.
And that's what I think is the value of movies like that, like Curtis's, because they're They're not about sort of downloading Curtis's point of view.
When I see the fanboys that are just kind of like, you know, Adam Curtis is right about everything.
To me, it's like we need lots of Adam Curtis's in a sense of like, and by that I mean I'd love to see a diverse range of people making documentaries.
We're talking about these two white dudes.
you know, that are doing similar things, that are telling us, you know, what is your vision?
Because it is a very, you know, as much as Curtis, I think, grounds his stuff in a really intense and practical vision of history, at the same time, it's an editorial, you know, it's his vision.
And I think that we should be honest more and more about like these, that that's what we want.
We want to see like as many different diverse visions of what you see as these forces.
And because that's how we sort of construct them and how we take them apart at the same time.
Yeah.
And I think the left, especially like, it's a weird thing, the left, particularly in America, because on one hand, I mean, there is such cultural pressure against the left, which is Don't speak out, don't say too much or else you're a radical, you're a communist, you're a socialist, and you could lose your job, you could lose the people in your life, you could lose any number of these things.
And the moment that like a movement, and by the way not to mention that we are atomized, we're kept from one another, we're alienated from one another in general just as a rule and it's hard to even come together in terms of solidarity or understanding or communication.
But then it's like, if you do start to build that up, then all of a sudden it turns into violence or intimidation, which is quite a bit of what we're watching now.
But I think what you're saying is right, which is the media or these sort of efforts, particularly if there are different types of them, there are different types of voices.
I actually, um, I thought one of the most Curtis-like but more complete documentaries of the last few years was like O.J.
Made in America.
Yeah.
Which kind of felt, I don't know, that felt like it emerged straight from the head of Zeus, fully formed.
I love that.
I love that documentary.
And honestly, the Netflix film starring John Travolta and Cuba Gooding Jr.
is a sort of like really cartoonish, wonderful satire, like a satirical take on the same thing.
But yeah, O.J.
Made in America is great.
I wish I could teach a whole course On that, I mean, it's important why we do a lot of L.A.
history on our podcast because the history of Los Angeles, I mean, was something that surrounded me in the 90s and I had no real way of understanding it at all because none of the L.A.
riots were in 1992 when I was, you know, in middle school.
You know, the only opinions I was subjected to were the people around me that didn't really give you a good, any kind of realistic picture of why the riots happened.
And it's like, you know, watching O.J.
Made in America 25 years later, And almost 30 years later, and thinking, God, all of these forces, whether it be the LAPD, the story of real estate in Los Angeles, the story of, you know, the story of, you know, the sequestering of black people into these neighborhoods, the story of racial abuse.
I mean, all of it, the stories of the girl Latasha Harlan that's killed in a convenience store that arguably had more to do with the anger on the streets that day than the Rodney King thing.
I mean, all of it was not, or I should say none of it was explained to us.
Certainly not for a young, for a young dude in the suburbs that was only like 50 miles away.
What I got instead was the voices of reactionaries around me who said, they are going to come up here and they are going to burn our stuff and take our stuff.
And so, you know, it's really, really confusing when you're 13 years old, which is how old I was when the riots happened to absorb that stuff and to figure it out.
And I have to say, I didn't figure it out.
You know, I didn't until much later.
So when you say like, when do you when do I Get into deep politics.
It's really about trying to understand my childhood and trying to understand like, holy shit, the things that I witnessed when I was young that were momentous historical events were portrayed to me in a completely distorted way.
And so in other words, that sort of undercurrent, that sort of subterranean history that we're talking about is just the actual history of what happened that's been lost and it's been distorted and covered up by stories.
Um, and I think that's part of why on, uh, on my podcast, at least I'm sort of obsessed with the nineties.
It's, it's partly personal because I'm like, I'm trying to understand how I was sold a certain vision of, of history and a certain vision of what American society was specifically in the nineties and how wrong it was and how it's now, you know, it took a lot of time and reading to understand sort of what that, what the nature of that lie was.
Um, if that makes sense.
Yeah, it does.
And you know, I get a lot of pushback on things that I'll say online.
I think sometimes, you know, people come necessarily, you know, their bad faith on social media, but there's also times where people are very, very comfortable and sort of a comfortable thing.
And one of the things is that People do not want to admit that reality and culture affect one another and that, you know, movies reflect how people feel about the world and they also affect how people feel about the world.
And it's a cycle and it goes back and back and forth.
I feel like right now, particularly because of social media and because of developing technologies, I think we're in a moment of reconsideration.
I think we're in a moment where suddenly a lot of us who, and I'm sitting here, I'm a white dude, I'm a white cis dude, I've done a lot of reconsideration, I've got a lot more to go.
It's a lifetime gig, to be real.
And I think as a culture, Those old stories have lost any sense that they used to have, like any shred.
I think Donald Trump threw that out on the curb and basically destroyed any remnants of it for people who want to be honest about it.
And I think that this is the time where we have to start thinking about things.
And on one hand, I love what you just said about, like, the riots.
Like, what a misunderstood thing that was.
And, you know, it was portrayed on the news and it was just like, this is a developing threat.
As opposed to, you know, the Martin Luther King thing, which is the riot is the language of the voiceless, right?
Or the oppressed.
And I do feel like on one hand, we are starting to reckon with some of these old things.
But that idea of reckoning and reconsideration is also being latched onto, surprise surprise, by corporations looking to make money off of that trend.
And all of a sudden, and I think when I messaged you to have you on the show, was the day that the Cruella de Vil reboot origin story trailer dropped, which I saw that, and I almost couldn't function for a day, man.
I was just like, because for people who don't know, and good for you, Cruella de Vil is a character who is like pure evil, who wants to skin puppies, and Disney's like, Oh, I think we can make money rehabilitating Crill DeVille, you know, because we like these gritty reboots.
We want to talk about the Joker and why he does what he does.
What is your feeling about this weird cultural cannibalization that is going on?
What do you think it says about us?
What do you think it says about the moment?
I mean, obviously it's about making money, but what do you think is deeper down at the core of it?
Because I've got some thoughts.
Yeah, I'd love to hear them.
I mean, that's part of what I think I mean when I use the word nostalgia trap, is the sort of idea that we are in a culture that's been eating itself for a really long time.
In fact, I can remember expressing my one of these these these these poker nights, you know, watching watching Adam Curtis films.
I can remember when Stranger Things came out.
I was talking about how much I hated it.
And I got such pushback from everyone who I thought it's such a great they love Stranger Things.
But, you know, that's fine.
Loving Stranger Things is is is there's nothing wrong with that.
I'm not judging it.
But I was more kind of expressing that this is like this this 80s nostalgia is only because the people who are in charge of culture that are working at all these corporations are in their 40s now and were raised in the 80s and are going back to their own childhood in the same way that George Lucas made American Graffiti about the 1960s, you know, and sort of like this endless cycle of of of of of of of sort of recapturing your youth is being played out.
It's almost like the midlife crisis of TV writers is something that we have to we have to witness.
But then you ask yourself, why is that nostalgia so popular?
It does.
I mean, it does feel like that we're stuck.
It does feel like that those stories are sort of all we've got.
And I mean, I'm not a Star Wars or Marvel person.
I know that like that for whatever reason, that's become a conversation that gets people really mad and riled up about.
They do not like to talk about.
Right.
But, you know, to me, like, you know, I'm not I'm not a fan of that stuff.
I don't hate people that are because I understand that the stories are powerful and the effects are, you know, if I were a kid, I would probably be really fucking into Star Wars.
But that's part of me.
Part of, you know, me just being an older guy and looking at that stuff and being like, this is like the same shit that was around.
I mean, nothing has it does feel like it's driving you insane to just see the same stuff popping up again and again and again.
Um, how many Spidermans, how many Batmans, how many, you know, I know that the argument to be made is like, these are our mythological creatures, you know, and these are the, the way we communicate stories to people.
But it also is just sort of disappointing because I feel, I feel completely left out of all that stuff entirely because they, it just seems like it's, um, it's running on autopilot, if that makes sense.
It's a, it's a culture running on autopilot and one that's not creating new myths.
Yeah, and to bring the Curtis thing back around for those who haven't seen it yet, one of the main ideas here is, and by the way, Curtis loves to say this, like almost verbatim, it's, it's, they lost the ability to imagine the future, you know?
And it, and it's... No tomorrow.
There is no tomorrow.
I don't think that that's wrong.
I feel like we're on a hamster wheel of culture.
I mean, to really try and extricate ourselves from whatever this moment Is and all of the economic and political influences.
It seems almost impossible, like it seems.
And by the way, like, you know, I don't like to tip my hat very much to neoliberal projects, but like they created a system that continually adapts and sustains itself.
Yeah.
And it keeps us from actually in any idea that might actually change it is easily commodified.
I mean, you know, there's like a complete reactionary grift, which is just like, no, burn it all down.
It's like, by the way, my PayPal link is in the comments for everybody, you know?
And it's really, really weird that we keep taking these old stories and just continually going with them.
And of course, I think like Jung would have something to say about it or, you know, some psychologists would have something to say about it.
But I feel like we're trying to remember our way out of this rut, which is how societies collapse into fascism or neo-fascism.
It's just continually trying to get back into this old, like, uh, Platonian, like, Kiklos moment, right?
Where you're just trying to return to the beginning of civilization to save it.
And, uh, the problem is, uh, that doesn't work.
Like, you know, it sounds great, I guess, when you're in a big, giant amphitheater and everyone's holding up torches.
But, you know, it doesn't really do anything.
I don't know.
It feels very much like we're in a car that's running out of gas.
Yeah, I mean, it's funny you say a car running out of gas, because for a long time, my entryway into deep politics on the left was understanding that it was all really about oil.
Because the Iraq War, I think you mentioned 2003, that was a critical moment.
Iraq War, George W. Bush, all of that, to me, it was politics and history slapping me in the face in the years after 9-11 and saying, like, here is the historical moment.
And it was a lot about the things I was reading was a lot about Dick Cheney and Halliburton and U.S.
energy policy in the Middle East and oil.
But we're in a different moment with all of that stuff now.
And it feels like, you know, you talk about, can we imagine a future?
It feels like for a long time, climate change and the conversation about it was very much about this is the end.
We've come to the end of and we're just going to watch the rest of the world sort of die, or watch the world die in front of us.
You know, this is like, I'm thinking about like, think about lefty documentaries, "Inconvenient Truth," Al Gore, you know, there's like, I think there's one called "Eleventh Hour" with Leonardo DiCaprio.
I mean, these were like an industry and screaming that, like, we gotta get off carbon and oil and we got, so that was the narrative for a long time.
It feels like, you know, green capitalism may be the future And that is exactly kind of the horror you're talking about in some way, about like, you know, watching all these movements like Black Lives Matter, etc.
be absorbed into the corporate reality, because it feels like capitalism at some point is going to figure out how to survive.
And how it's going to survive is by commodifying surviving climate change.
And I have to tell you, That is one of the most insidious things happening in culture now.
And, you know, I was talking to somebody about this the other day.
It is obvious that corporations understand that the future belongs to at least espoused progressive ideals of inclusivity and diversity, and that they have realized, and to watch, I don't know if you follow this stuff on social media, but it's like, Brands have always tried to portray themselves as living, breathing beings.
And now to watch these corporations that totally exploit people, destroy the environment, have these characters that interact sometimes with explicitly socialist and Marxist communications.
Yeah.
And what it actually ends up doing is it commodifies A leftist point of view to the point where it becomes your brand.
It is.
And when I think about it too long, much like an Adam Curtis documentary, I feel like I just need to go wash my brain for a while.
It feels so overwhelming and also, I think, I think frightening to be honest.
Yeah, because it feels like you're being played like at every at every angle.
And and, you know, I think that one of the great points, you know, Um, that I would point out that Curtis makes is something that we mention on the show a lot, and I think you would agree with.
It's sort of like the feeling that reality is illegible, that it's sort of impossible to figure out exactly what's going on, particularly because of the way social media is diffused, but also because there are multiple stories contradicting each other all at once.
It sort of becomes necessary for you to create your own stories and create your own sort of brand of understanding all of it.
I mean, it is confusing to see, like, you know, on the one hand, Colin Kaepernick being kicked out of the NFL, being treated like a pariah and then, you know, being on all the Nike ads.
And it's sort of like, wait, is he the ultimate radical or is this guy now the front for one of the most vicious consumer corporations in American history?
What is this?
And I think the answer is that, you know, we're witnessing, you know, transformations and transformations in the, you know, if I'm doing Adam Curtis, I'm like, and then something strange happened, a development that no one anticipated, which is that and it should be, it should be anticipated that capitalism is going to figure out ways to survive the immense Uh, divisions that are, that are, that are happening on the planet.
And those divisions are, are, you know, as you catalog, Jared, very well, I think, you know, these, these rigid reactionary politics and racist politics are, are on the rise and have been for a while.
And I mean, Curtis talks about that stuff in his, in his films as, as the sort of like inevitable result of, of people of, of almost like democracy.
He like seizes you.
He's really, his attitude towards people is interesting.
Cause like, he's like.
No, it really is.
It's really strange.
You know, and part of it, like, one of the episodes, episode four is called, But What If The People Are Stupid?
And there is a little bit of a teenager in Adam Curtis that likes to say, well, you're all too dumb, you're all shopping, and you're very easily distracted.
Yes, he hates, he seems to really despise this, like, quote unquote, radical individualism.
He hates the idea that, like, there could be a whole politics or even sort of social reality of Individuals pursuing their own actualization.
He despises all that language, sees it as just a way for us to be split up.
For me, as someone who thinks about the counterculture in the 60s and 70s and the reasons why those things emerged and the sort of discourses behind them, I get it.
I get the large picture of how people were sort of de-collectivized and unions went away and we became a collection of individuals that just do whatever we want and get into Star Wars or whatever we're going to get into, and that disrupts and makes democracy impossible.
That seems to be what Curtis is saying.
But at the same time, I'm thinking to myself, well, what can you do about that?
What can you do about the fact that people want to express their individual nature?
that part of it, um, seems like the engine of the whole system.
Um, and that, that's the part of me that's watching Curtis and being like, wait a second, you know, there are questions here, but I always, um, I always find his stuff really, really engaging because it brings up those kinds of questions.
Yeah.
It brings up questions that we don't see very often.
Before we go, I gotta ask you because we talked about it very, very briefly.
I kind of felt like this was, again, Adam Curtis feeling himself.
I think after hypernormalization came out, and for those who haven't followed Curtis or they're not Curtis heads, hypernormalization came out and it felt like one of the first cogent explanations of what had happened with Donald Trump and Brexit.
And it's sort of, I don't remember hearing it was going to come out.
And then one day it was there like a lightning bolt.
And I was like, I need this in my life so bad.
And I'm now going to watch it four or five times through.
I will say that this one felt like Curtis's most ambitious project.
It felt like the way that he created it, scored it, edited it.
He doesn't usually, I mean, he jumped around so much in this and really relied on the viewer to make the connections and to have faith that he would bring it around to something approaching, again, a cogent point.
I, I think it is, again, one of his most ambitious projects.
It's one of my favorites, but I think there are problems with it.
Where do you put it in the power rankings?
I think I agree with you with hyper normalization.
That was a peak moment for me.
And I think because it sort of did exactly what I wanted Curtis to do, which is to explain the moment, you know, explain it to me.
I think that the new one is really fun.
I enjoyed watching it.
I would definitely watch it again.
I think that his his his aesthetic, you're right, is looser in the sense that he's there were more of those sort of like hypnotic sequences where we're just watching like a slow motion of like a guy going through a car wash in some like suburb somewhere.
And there's like a Brian Eno ambient soundtrack for a few minutes.
You know, there's a lot of that sort of stuff.
You're right.
I mean, he's swinging for the bleachers on this one.
Like it's an ambitious thing.
And I think that since it is ambitious and he's billing this as the quote unquote emotional history of the 20th century, you know, what is subtitle by the way?
I know, right?
You're going to end up, I think, simplifying and squashing out some of the nuances there.
And I mean, there was a moment at the end of episode four where he says something like, you know, that politicians had always been representatives of the people.
And then during the 90s, they They reversed themselves and got and started being representatives of power.
And I was like, wait a second, like that's that's not a vision at all of what of what happened.
But at the same time, I think it's important to keep in mind, like what we've been saying, that Curtis is hitting on a different level than a just like Michael Moore would.
You know, he's hitting it.
This is propaganda.
This is a vision.
And it's an artistic vision.
It's a sort of like he's giving you a sort of very colorful expression of what he sees as the world.
And it resonates in part because it is so grounded in the real and recognizable.
He's a very, very, very skilled filmmaker, I would say. - I would too.
And by the way, I'm so glad that you said the word propaganda because I have to tell you that I've been trying to have conversations more and more with people about propaganda and the fact that propaganda is not just something our enemies do.
And propaganda is absolutely necessary for building movements.
And motivating people and bringing people together.
I also think, and maybe this is one of the things that I need to think about and chew on a little bit, this isn't just like a documentary.
I mean, Curtis films are radicalizing objects.
I mean, they really are.
And it tells us that there is an actual system out there and a force of power that is being used against us.
And we'd better get serious about it and understand it, which I think is, I think that's a world shifting kind of a thing.
Well, just to go back to Noam Chomsky, when thinking about propaganda, his little thought that I encountered years ago, in which he said, propaganda is more important to the maintenance of a democracy than it is to a totalitarian system, because in a totalitarian system, you can just run people right over.
But in a nation that is at least pretending a vision of progressive democracy, you need to control the people one way or the other.
And culture is a really powerful way of doing that.
And I think that Curtis and Chomsky and many, many others have sort of started deconstructing for us how exactly that works in American society.
From Marvel movies to O.J.
Made in America, all of it is projecting a sort of set of assumptions about what the country is.
I mean, it's there.
And I think that what's that's what sets you off on the journey is sort of trying to understand that it's all propaganda in one way or another.
Um, it's all projecting some sort of idea or value or ideology.
And our job is to sort of learn to read through it, you know, and become more literate because that's what, that's reality might be illegible, but it's partly illegible because we're surrounded by so many, um, you know, bits of media that are thrown at us for all sorts of ideological purposes.
Yeah, I mean, it's the postmodern problem, of course.
David Parsons, absolutely wonderful.
I could talk to you all day.
Next time that we have you on, I'll hit record as you're throwing out pearls of brilliance.
Where can the good people find you?
Everything is at nostalgiatrap.com, so check us out there.
And my Twitter is at David L. Parsons.
Find me on Twitter.
I'm on there a lot and working on some new projects for Nostalgia Trap.
Thanks a lot for having me on.
I appreciate it, Jared.
Oh, no problem.
So glad to have you on Nostalgia Trap.
Easily one of the best podcasts out there.
Thank you, everybody, for listening.
This was David Parsons.
Go check out Nostalgia Trap.
All right, everybody.
That was my interview with David Parsons from Nostalgia Trap.
Historian and a really, really good guy.
I can't wait to have him back on the podcast one of these days.
Again, there's Nostalgia Trap.
Go check that out.
Really, really good stuff.
Yeah, yeah.
So, thank you everybody for listening.
We will be back for our regularly scheduled Patreon-only Weekender Edition on Friday.
If you want full access to that, all you have to do is go over to patreon.com slash muckrakepodcast.
Nick, I think our weekenders are pretty damn good.
I'll be honest.
Yeah, and everyone listens to them to the bitter end.
They go all the way, even though Nick is averse to longer podcasts.
And each one of them is going for like an hour and a half because we get on, we start bullshitting, and it's hard to get off.
I guess they must listen to it at like 1.2 times speed or whatever that is and, you know, get through it.
I don't know.
It's weird to me.
I don't know if I have enough time in the day to consume all these podcasts that are long.
People enjoy podcasts!
They like when it gets in, they like when it gets in depth, and The Weekender is where we let what little hair we have left down.
So, again, that is over at patreon.com slash muckraigpodcast.
We'll be back on Friday, hopefully, knock on wood.
No emergency episodes are going to be needed.
It feels It feels a little bit like things have chilled out a little bit even though there's like danger over here lurking just out of camera, but hopefully we can get away.
