Nick Hauselman is still out of the country, so Jared Yates Sexton brings on friend of the pod Karl Folk for an in-depth discussion of the changing political environment, including the Mamdani win, the rising solidarity movement against fascism, and how this moment is both the sum of past events and something new entirely.
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There's no music today because, quite frankly, I don't know how to work that shit.
This is the Mutt Craig podcast.
I'm Jerry J. Sexton.
Nick Halselman is still out of the country.
We're sending our thoughts, our prayers.
I had to turn to somebody to fill in the second chair, and there was very few people that I was going to trust with that.
And one is Carl Folk of the Institute of Unreality.
Carl, thank you so much for coming on.
As always, a pleasure.
So we got everything to talk about.
I saw that we hadn't talked since April.
Yeah.
So we got a lot to get over.
Before we get into it, a reminder, everybody, head over to patreon.com slash McGregpodcast.
Support the show.
Keep us editorially independent and growing.
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The water is fine.
Carl, we've got so damn much to talk about.
Everything has more or less changed since we last talked in April.
I want to go ahead and start with the major story that I think you and I can get into and see what's underneath the really bullshit analysis of everything.
Of course, in New York City, Zoan Momdani has won the Democratic nomination for the mayorship.
In the past few days, I knew it was going to be bad.
Like, you know, I saw all of the tepid, well, I reached out to him.
Wish him luck.
Not a lot of endorsements coming out.
We knew the rank and file Democratic Party was going to push against this.
It's gotten really, really ugly.
Kirsten Gillibrand went on public radio, claimed that he had called for a global jihad.
Hakeem Jeffries went on ABC and lied and said that he had been saying globalize Antifada.
We've been seeing this left and right.
The lies have been piling up.
One thing that we know at this point is that the Democratic Party, it turns out, really can put up a fight when they want to, but it's not to Donald Trump.
It's not to fascism.
It is to a democratic socialist who wants to provide free buses to people.
Carl, there's a lot for us to talk about here, but what have been your thoughts since you saw Mom Dani pull down this nomination?
Well, I think it's tough, right?
Like in a couple months ago, I had said something to the effect of, you know, if it becomes clear that Mom Dani is going to win or does win the primary, that we are going to see the full force of the neoliberal third way corporate establishment hit back as hard as we've ever seen.
And I think we're, you know, squarely in that world right now.
And I think, you know, we're all old enough to remember the reaction to 9-11 by certain Democrats and the way that anti-Muslim racism and bigotry was the game plan.
There was nothing else.
It was just rank, open, disgusting racism.
And by the way, George W. Bush was one of the few moderating voices on that, if that tells anybody exactly what that time period was like.
Yes.
And, you know, I think it's really interesting.
I had posted something, you know, that the post, it was a, it was a cover of the New Yorker from 2008.
The terrorist fist bump.
And, you know, at the time they said it was satire.
But the White House, the McCain campaign came out and just said the truth.
This is racist as hell, even if you're, you know, quote, being satirical or whatever.
And, you know, seeing the response now to that was even more abrasive and more racist and more angry than I remember then.
And, you know, it's tough because a lot of people spend a lot of time trying to gloss over this reality that, you know, both, both parties have this terribly racist streak towards anyone from the Middle East who is not specifically the people they are looking to court.
And it's really, I mean, this is just as disgusting and open as it gets.
And what we've seen from the right is being given more power by the lack of any kind of pushback from the liberal elite within the party.
And what we've seen with people like Jeffries doing nothing, it opens the door to further problems.
And these people are going to throw the fucking kitchen sink at this guy, right?
Like, excuse my French, but these guys don't want this to change because ultimately neoliberalism has lied to us for its entire existence as to what its goals are.
And what we've seen now is that the technocratic governance model is ill-equipped and unable to deal with the real world problems that were presented.
And that's where Momdami showed the world the lie.
And this is a fight for the soul for the party as much as it is against fascism now.
And, you know, what we've seen with all of the members of Congress coming out either to say nothing or be somewhat racist towards this guy, even though he won a primary in their party.
This is laying bare something really fundamental, right?
And it's something fundamental to the mindset of any change that is not incremental and technocratically adjusted based on metrics that are outside of the control of any normal person is seen as a threat.
And if someone who's saying common sense fixes for the majority is seen as radical, is seen as communist, big air quotes, well, you've destroyed your ability to argue against them then because you're using an ad hominem attack that means nothing.
And ultimately, it makes it harder for you to say that you're on the right side, right?
And this neoliberal establishment is fundamentally broken and it's dead, right?
Like the actual neoliberal movement is dead.
Unless they can pull off this smear campaign and unless they can, you know, kind of continue cementing this power, they don't come back.
And that's a big threat to a whole bunch of people's power, position, and money.
And ultimately, that's what we're up against is corruption on a scale that we really don't fully understand yet.
And that's been known, right?
Like, this is stuff you and I have talked about at length in the past.
This is stuff that you've written about extensively.
I've written about.
But seeing it laid bare is hard, right?
Like, this has been incredibly upsetting in a way that I didn't think it would be, even after doing this this long, because it makes it very clear.
Like, they're not looking for real change.
They're looking for some sort of performance.
And that's painful, but we have to move past that.
And that means we have to primary everybody.
You know, now it's just the simple mechanics.
If we're going to do elections and they're going to work, then we have to take them all out.
And I think to take your point, I think in this country, in America, white supremacy, it's a little bit misunderstood.
It's the idea that it's just that white people think that they're better than other people.
But it's not just an ideology or a worldview.
It's how it's worked in politics, economy, all of it.
And neoliberalism basically worked to control people around the world in so-called second and third world nations in order to extract their resources and exploit their labor.
And authoritarianism doesn't just sprout out of nowhere.
It builds off of corrupted, corroding disease.
And you have seen time and time again, neoliberalism used to allow the ability, particularly for neoliberals and liberals, to sort of put a happy face on it.
Like they're all for democracy.
They're for nation building.
They think everybody in the world should have a better life.
We're going to, you know, raise everybody up into the middle class.
But what have we seen in the duopolistic foreign policy of the United States is that the parties come together when they look at elected leaders around the world and they say, yeah, they might have won, but we don't trust them.
We don't think they're capable of doing this.
And the Mamdani win is a weird domestic version of what we've seen in ongoing foreign policy around the world.
I mean, not only did he win, but it was an uprising in New York City.
The rejection of Andrew Cuomo, and by the way, I think that's when fascism emerges sort of in its full-throated evolution, it's when the mask comes off.
You don't even have to say the kind, pleasing, smiling things anymore.
And the way that they rallied around Andrew Cuomo, the fact that Bill Clinton actually was like, I'm going to use some political capital.
And for people to understand this, Bill Clinton, who has been allegedly an assaulter multiple times, for him to stand next to Andrew Cuomo and share that stink, people need to understand the calculation that was there.
For him to even be in the same room and endorse this person, it was a four-alarm fire.
And the only time that we've seen that in the modern era were the assaults on Bernie Sanders in 2016 and 2020.
It was the breaking case of emergency situation where anybody with a democratic socialist or even reform progressive platform, it had to be destroyed.
That's when the Democratic Party puts its thumb on the scale.
And what we're talking about here, and the disgust that you were talking about, it was a moment of joy in a really dark, clouded time.
And it's not just the idea that Momdani has an agenda that is exactly what is necessary to defeat authoritarianism, which is to enlarge solidarity and to actually increase public programs.
But it's also the fact this is a decent person from all accounts.
Yeah, no, that's the toughest part.
He's a good guy.
He's actually just a really good, authentic guy from everything that we can tell.
And maybe something will break and we'll find out he wasn't.
But to have to go so far, I mean, the National Review published an article today that was like, in college, he stole a table and that proves he doesn't care about private property.
They are so desperate that the mask cannot hold.
And we've now reached the point where all of the tools, all of the weapons, all of the cudgels are on the table.
But here's the thing, Carl, and this is what gives me hope.
It's not working.
They had this nuclear option, which was the anti-Semitism thing.
And for people who don't know, this is what took down Jeremy Corbyn in Great Britain, who was one of the few reformers that we've actually seen over the last few years actually get in that position.
It doesn't work now.
And the reason is because no one in America under 60 right now believes any of this shit.
They've either had their skulls cracked open by police and counter protesters, they've been decried by the Democratic Party.
And by the way, Carl, the Democratic Party right now has over 50% disapproval.
I was going to say disapproval numbers should be scaring the shit.
Should be terrifying them.
I think that's probably what we're seeing, right?
And that's exactly.
And that's what I wanted to get to and I wanted to ask you about is that what we're watching is a friction point where an entrenched party that controls all this money, all this power, all this leverage, they're historically unpopular.
They are being faced with a group of insurgent candidates that they cannot control and are popular.
Where do you think this is going?
Because for me, I'm not saying Mom Danny is like the point.
I'm not saying that's the case.
But in this moment, it's becoming clear that the torque within the Democratic Party is really moving in a way that I think we all kind of felt coming.
I was going to say, yeah, I mean, I think we knew something was going to happen at some point.
But yeah, no, I mean, the party's going to fracture, right?
Like, I think ultimately what we're going to see, and we're already seeing, like today's announcement by, you know, this group that's saying they're planning for Project 2029 and they're including Tandon, Slaughter, a bunch of third wayers.
Like, this is not people who are looking to change Things, right?
They're definitely not looking to fix the problems that have now become front and center because that's going to take actual governance in a way that isn't just putting on your best, brand new purchased wares and going to kneel in the Capitol Rotunda.
It's going to require someone to say, this is wrong and we're going to stop doing it.
And we are going to make it impossible for it to happen in the future.
And neoliberalism, the infrastructure of neoliberalism is inherently an authoritarian problem, right?
And we've talked about this before, but that infrastructure can't actually accommodate for true politics.
And that's why they got steamrolled by the far right and the fascists, because the fascists are playing a different kind of game.
And their will to power is crazy because they understand the social construction of law.
They understand the social construction of democratic norms.
The weaknesses of liberal democracy.
Yep.
And the vestigial pieces, right?
And they also understand that that means, oh, we can just hit them with a steamroller.
Fuck them.
And when you're faced with true change that is coming at you like that.
And you're dealing with a technocratic form of, well, we'll do this little fix to do this thing.
We'll give you a tax credit.
So you might be able to have your house and like a dog.
That's great.
That doesn't do anything, right?
That doesn't fix the problems.
And in fact, in a lot of cases, it makes them worse.
So when you get to that point, and this infrastructure has been built now for decades on the Democratic Party side, there's a sunk cost here that they're unable apparently or unwilling to walk away from.
And there's no way that the party survives in its current piece, you know, pieces in a way that they win.
Right.
So I don't think that the party makes it in its current formulation another two years.
There's going, this reckoning is happening faster than they can control, as you said, but it's also happening faster than like I think most people would ever understand politics to change because they've never seen them change, right?
Like this is akin to the Whigs.
I don't like the full analogy with that, but like it is akin to the shift that happened in that era where people said, well, maybe this isn't the way.
And the more the, I mean, at this point, the more the neoliberal side of the party digs in, the more damage they're going to do to themselves, right?
Like this is turned into one of those no weapon you wield against me will harm me kind of situations because everyone under 60, as you said, has experienced the real world, right?
Like when everyone younger than me and you has watched for two years, some of the most abhorrent violence you can see, you've seen your elected officials who say, we're on your side, say you're a terrorist for saying this is wrong.
When all of these things have happened, whether that's my generation in 2008 and Obama telling us that there's nothing we can do for you, but the banks get a bailout, this breaks people's ability to sit by and see the lie for just the lie.
You see past it.
And when your whole game plan has been to bullshit people into feeling that there's no other option, you run into a situation where another option shows up and it's a better option.
What do you and I think to go along with that, to tie together a couple things you just said, for people who don't know the historical context, the Whigs were one of the two major parties in this country that and parties, Carl, I had this, I think about this three to four times a week.
There was this person, I've blocked them on all social media platforms.
We're a former guest on this show.
It wasn't my decision.
And I talked to this person and they were like, who do you think the party is?
And I was like, well, there's a party apparatchik that controls vested interest.
And with the Democratic Party, it's the professional managerial class and so-called liberal billionaires and corporations.
That has always been who controls the Democratic Party, particularly since the 1980s.
And now, much like the Whigs who had that vested interest and they had that entrenched power, at one point, the what the precursors to the Dixiecrats, the Southern Democrats, were going into Congress and literally caning them almost to death.
Eventually, the people said, if you're not going to go in and fight against these people, we're going to find somebody who will.
And it doesn't matter how much money and how much wealth is behind that.
And if you look at the Democratic Party now, you have, I mean, absolutely baseless ideas like the abundance movement.
And as someone who moves in the nonprofit world, they have all the money behind them.
They have no constituency.
They literally have nothing beyond the billionaires that I just mentioned.
No one wants this.
It doesn't poll well with anybody.
It's got all of the influence behind it.
Meanwhile, the Democratic Party is throwing tens of millions of dollars out looking for a new strategy to talk to young people.
They've literally spent more money trying to find the next Joe Rogan than Zoron Mamdani spent on his actual damn campaign.
Literally.
And it's because we have reached a point where the tension that we've talked about, and I think you and I both, we get, I think we get labeled often as almost being like pessimistic nihilist, but we continue to say politics does not stay the same.
It changes and something happens where you have rising fascism, you have a lack of resistance against it, people want something different.
It literally does not matter how much money and power is against it.
If the people are together, eventually there will be a crack.
And in this case, what are people looking for?
They're not looking for a slick Joe Rogan of the liberal set because the problem isn't the message.
The problem is that they don't have the principles that people want.
In this case, if you take an iPhone out and you tape an ad of someone like Zoron at a food stand, that does more than hundreds of millions of dollars of advertising.
And that's when things start to shift.
And then, again, I'm not saying this is for sure because entrenched power takes care of itself.
But Carl, like this weekend, Jeff Bezos went out and had a $46 million wedding.
Like gross inequality.
It reaches the point where there is a friction, which is why this fascist administration is attacking people, disappearing people, threatening people, blackmailing people.
And eventually at some point, the people rise up against this and the two objects hit each other.
And no one can tell you where it goes after that.
It doesn't matter how much money, how much power is on one side.
If the people are on the other, often democracy ends up winning out in these things.
That's just it, right?
Like ultimately, democracy as we understand it, like the actual idea that we toyed with as a country initially is really radical and it's really different and it's flawed the way it was instituted by the framers.
I think we all can agree has some fucking problems.
A lot of older people still want to believe that that message is too extreme.
The reality is that's really just middle road now, that the framers instituted something radical, but it was not the thing that we should have.
Not the way it should have been done.
I think what we're seeing with Mamdani is a true reestablishment of the radicalness of what democracy can be if we actually take it to the logical extent that we should.
Instead of being cowed by people who tell us that like, it has to be, you know, incremental.
It has to be something we can institute in the next two years.
No.
The real promise of democracy is what it gives our grandkids and our kids, grandskids, kids, not what we necessarily get out of it in this moment.
And that means reestablishing that democracy when we get that chance in the future, because we're not a democracy right now.
We really have to understand that.
And I think that the energy that someone like Mamdami brings is that radical view that we can and must do better for everyone, including people that we generally throw away as a country because they don't hold the same power, quote unquote, as the people who tell us that we shouldn't dream bigger.
And I think one of the most resounding messages that I've seen just in general, not even just from Momdami, but across the board with this new slate of progressive, and I'm using that as the best analog I can, candidates, is what they're asking people is to dream, to look forward, to look at a future that isn't set in stone and to build it.
And that's the part where the neoliberalism can't keep up.
And there's no way it ever can, right?
Because it's not about affecting change.
It's about maintaining a system.
Well, that's why MAGA gained the traction it did, is because they didn't intend to solve any of these problems, but they were willing to lie and say that they would.
And they've already shown that that was the weakness of neoliberalism.
Like if you go out and you're like, oh, by the way, Goldman Sachs is on our side, right?
And then the other side is like, no, you've been screwed over.
We're going to fix it.
That side is going to win.
And neoliberals can't say it.
And I do want to say, Carl, in the midst of all of this, what Mondani has said is actually not all that radical.
It's common sense stuff.
The idea that a government should help people have better lives.
In the past, that used to be a centrist position before neoliberalism won out.
The most radical thing that Mondani has said is that we shouldn't have billionaires.
And let me tell you something.
That polls in the 80s.
I was going to say that polls as high as the uprising in Minneapolis after George Floyd was.
And quite frankly, I've got, and I know that there are a lot of people who listen to this who are, and I say this and I say it with almost no respect.
I know there are lanyard class people who listen to this.
The people who are in, you know, Congress right now who are like listening in order to keep tabs and also talk to their Congress people.
I want to say this.
If right now you are pissing your pants because of what Mom Donnie is saying, the next batch of candidates are going to light your hair on fire.
If you're watching CNBC and listening to them fret over Dark Knight Rises situations where Wall Street people are being walked out on the ice, which is just the most insane paranoid bullshit.
It is the reason fascism won.
Is that sentiment right there is the reason fascism got voted in?
The fear.
Like these people, these people literally believe that Nancy insider trading Pelosi is one of the most dangerous people in the world.
That's what they believe.
If you think what Mom Dani is offering right now is radical, wait until the next batch of people come out.
Because the whole point is that what we're talking about, a common sense agenda that talks about making people's lives better, it's infectious.
It's addictive.
And on top of that, it's what people want right now.
Even the conversations, the conversations that you have at like a no-kings protest with liberals who took their Saturday to make a sign and go out with their kids, they're open and ready for it.
They're ready for the next part of this.
And people who don't know the history of this country, Carl, they don't understand that literally citizens used to fight wars in the street against national troops.
Literally, this country is so radical in its heart.
So radical.
And so absolutely against what like the government, quote unquote unquote unquote, is.
Carl, the first uprising was fought against George fucking Washington.
I mean, hell, let's Blair Mountain.
Let's just have a conversation about Blair Mountain for one second so everyone can understand that the first time the American government ever dropped aerial bombs on an enemy mine workers on the East Coast.
And that is the reality of this country, whether we want to like it or not.
Every one of us has done more to be the ungovernable asshole who dislikes kings and leadership that acts like gods than any elected official.
And that makes some sense, but it also should be an indication to all of us the true power we have.
And, you know, I've been at the No Kings rallies.
I have mixed feelings that everyone knows about them.
Watching here in Minneapolis, the day that two of our legislators were shot, one was assassinated and one was assassinated and the families were assassinated and seeing tens of thousands of people come out and say, bring it is incredibly powerful.
The more powerful thing, though, is walking through the crowd and realizing there were people in black block, there were communists, there were other groups, walking through that crowd and having conversations that if you had told me while I was wearing a plate carrier in 2020, we'd be having, I would have laughed you out of the room.
I'm glad you brought this up and I want to talk about this.
For people, and you and I are veterans of this stuff, when you go to, and I'm not dismissing regular protest, but when you go to protests that are like combative, like you need to understand that there are people and they can be labeled Antifa, they can be labeled whatever.
Those people are their own groups of people.
And they hang out with themselves.
And when they show up at a thing, they're over here.
They're over here.
When you see those groups, and it happened at the No Kings protest, I saw so many parts of it.
When they go out and dialogue with so-called squares, and those people are ready to hear what they have to say, you need to understand that the political paradigm is changing.
And to put this into perspective, the last time that we had situations like this in the early 20th century on the heels of industrialization, when the robber barons owned everything, the predecessors to our current tech oligarchs, tech fascists, people need to understand this was not just a moment where the progressive movement was marching.
You had a group of people in this country who were fighting an insurgency against them.
And what happened, Carl?
They rounded them up and they shipped most of them to Moscow.
And what we're talking about now, we even saw, we're recording this on Monday, June 30th.
We already saw the administration like entertain the idea that the administration might denaturalize Mom Dani and deport him.
And so what people need to understand is for all of the posting, for all of the sharing of memes, for all of this spectator politics that we've seen over the past 10 years, we are entering into a period in which shit might start getting really weird and there's some potential for things to change in a way that I think listeners probably need to prepare themselves for.
Oh yeah, no, I mean, this is one of the rare times.
Like the last time in American history where things were this up, like truly up in the air, figure, there were socialists coming down from Minnesota and getting busted on by the Pinkertons because the Pinkertons thought we were blowing up buildings in LA.
They were running people off of the trains.
They were running people out of their towns.
And, you know, I mean, hell.
In Minnesota in that era, we elected a socialist.
They tried to do a coup.
He succeeded.
They didn't succeed with the coup.
And he's now got statues all over the state.
And like the reality is these moments make this country what it is.
And unfortunately, sometimes we have gone the wrong direction, never quite in this tone.
But this is all very much America.
As much as all of us hate it, as much as this proto, the proto-fascism that birthed the movement that brought us Trump has always been with us.
So has the other thing.
Yes.
And the other thing is much more powerful because it's the people versus a manufactured movement.
And that's been, I mean, getting back to what we were kind of saying about the Democrats, they're trying to manufacture something you can't actually manufacture.
And the only people who can are right-wing ideologues who lie, right?
Because they're using a different style to get people to click in to their populist messaging.
And they're un you know, they're unbridled by any kind of constraint.
The Democrats, it just won't work for them, the corporate side.
Now, with that being said, at the first no-case route at the state capitol, I snapped a photo that still is one of my favorite photos I've ever taken.
And it was two communists standing on top of Floyd B. Olson's statue waving an Irish national flag and the American flag.
When you see the communists out flying big American flags and they're flying other nations' flags with them like that, and they're getting people to come in and talk to them, like this wasn't a PSL group, thank God.
This wasn't one of the weird cult, you know, Communist groups.
This was a true, you know, kind of socialist communist group.
People are down.
Always have been.
We've been indoctrinated into thinking this isn't who we are.
The reality is, most of us are going to agree more with someone like Mandani, with someone who is a socialist, with someone who is not exactly liberal than we are with the neoliberals.
And that's become so apparent and so powerful that this is the shift, right?
Like everyone talks about revolution, quote unquote, as being this thing that's like in the street with banners and, you know, kind of this, this vision of like a Leninist kind of revolution, right?
That's just not the case, right?
Like true, these big movements in democracies, at least, or what were once democracies, those are the will of the people.
The will of the people, that shit's an inextricable force.
You do not fight it because you lose.
And I do want to point out, there's something very interesting that's happening here.
And I'm glad that you touched on this.
I've come to the realization and I've been doing my own analysis.
I've been doing my own strategy.
And again, I try not to lay cards too much on the table because of what this is and the situation we're in.
But one thing that's becoming clear to me, and I think Mom Dani represents this as well, is that we have a very strange new synthesis of nationalism and internationalism.
And at the root of this, and I think we're going to look back and we're going to see what happened with Gaza underneath the Biden administration, the growing awareness of the genocide and war crimes that took place there, in which the United States said, this is happening over here.
We do not want to help this.
We do not want to aid this.
But we're also starting to realize, and I think Mom Dani speaks to this really, really well, which is that people around the world have been oppressed.
People around the world have been exploited.
And it's time for us.
And I'm going to use a word here that has a lot of loaded power to it.
These are our comrades.
And what's also happening while we're needing to build this international coalition of oppressed peoples, because the United States is late to that show, all of a sudden we're looking around.
We're saying, oh my God, this is wrong.
And other people are like, hey, we've been living in this for a very long time because of you.
Yeah.
It's the first time the United States has said, well, we caused it.
So we have to stop it.
Now we have to stop it.
And when you start having those conversations, all of a sudden, what has happened in these other countries to these other people is they've had an imperial force come in.
And now neoliberalism, which is stateless, which is nationalist, we now have this foreign body that has been circulating the globe.
So now this is something I don't think Marx, Engels, or Lenin could have imagined.
Because I think this is actually where Marxist critical kind of theory starts.
Yeah, because for people who don't know, it's actually, if you look at the long history of this, it goes from Marx and Engel into Lenin, and then it's all disputed where it goes from there.
We now have this weird thing where nationalism and internationalism are coming together, which is a wild thing.
It's like, no, this doesn't happen in my country.
I don't want this right now.
I don't want.
And weirdly enough, you have rootless bodies, corporations that have created in themselves international bodies that don't belong to any state.
They're not loyal to any state.
A group of oligarchs that don't belong to any state.
They're not loyal to any state.
You now have these two energies that have always been opposed to each other that are now coming together to form something that, quite frankly, we have not seen before.
And it's the natural reaction to this new threat that we haven't seen before.
100%.
And I think that's the thing, right?
Like, I think we're, you know, I think about where Marx and Engels and then the neo-Marxists kind of leave off.
And it's incredibly useful, but also this is different.
Well, can I say real fast, by the way, Carl, because you're one of the few people I can have this conversation with.
I think the reason that they left off is because nobody could have imagined that.
No, no, that's.
That's the exact, that's the exact opposite of what the old ethos was.
Now, all of a sudden, we have a brand new configuration that is ripe for the reaction to this.
I think that's absolutely right.
Because they collapsed in denialism, basically saying the left has lost.
There's nothing we can do.
And now all of a sudden, there's something we can do.
Yeah.
Well, when I think about like how we've framed what this is, right?
And like framed kind of the way that we think about the, you know, neoliberalism is this bizarre thing, like you said, that's stateless, that's completely kind of removed from the physical world in the way that politics and governance work.
It's above the nation state.
It's evolved past it.
Yeah.
And understanding that, you know, let's use this as an example, you know, kind of an example of like the neoliberal international, right?
Like the globalism that they built now is being co-opted by the message of anti-neoliberalism or of neo, you know, kind of anti-neoliberal global bullshit.
And for for a group of people who literally have been told that they're dying their entire lives, whether that is leftists in America or leftists worldwide, sure as heck, doesn't seem like they're dead.
In fact, it seems like they've figured out that the solidarity between nations now is more powerful than the solidarity of a select few outside of the nation.
And it's very interesting.
This is something, you know, I had a conversation with a colleague recently and we were talking about kind of this idea of like why the global intifada claim Is so scary when it's actually a really kind of neutral term in reality, is because it's actually talking about global solidarity.
And the global solidarity of the working class is actually like the scariest thing that I think most neoliberals and capitalists in general can think of is a world where the workers have actually united, but not under communism, under a common good for one another that doesn't use the name communism, but understands that we are stronger as individuals together in a common fight.
And that's really interesting to me, because in the past, this would have been a communist movement, right?
Like we would have talked about this as a communist movement, even if it wasn't really.
And it's not.
And I think that's the most interesting thing to me is this, this seems like and feels like a global awakening that we are all sharing the outcomes, no matter where we are, because now they've been distributed worldwide.
And I think that's one of the more powerful parts to me is like, this is now people coming together on a common thread of our shared humanity versus, well, we believe this economic thing or we believe this social right.
This is just a, people are people.
They shouldn't get murdered just for being people in the wrong place that you don't like as an ethno-nationalist.
And that's a powerful argument because there's, that's not an argument.
That's just a fact.
We're all just humans doing what we can do to survive.
And looking at that and saying, how do we make that better for people?
If that's radical, as we've been told now it is, well, that's going to make people double down, right?
Like we're getting into a land where people's cognitive stuff is going to start to kick in as much as the political.
And if you're hanging out with a bunch of people who you know are getting the short end of the stick, and we all are, you're going to start to see our similarities more than our differences.
And that's the thing I think we're seeing now where this has globalized a whole different way of understanding the political quote unquote sphere as a human sphere.
And the politics are really the dam, you know, are damaging.
So how do we do, how do we do that better?
How do we do it right?
How do we make sure that X, Y, Z groups aren't oppressed?
And, you know, this is the thing that I think when I think about what Martin Luther King talked about with his revolution, with this idea of the true change that had to come from civil rights, this is the thing, right?
Like finding our shared humanity, saying that no one deserves X, Y, or Z terrible thing because of the place they were born, of the region they came from, because they crossed an imaginary line in the sand.
And that's powerful in a human way that you can't really counter message without looking like an asshole, right?
I mean, these are incredibly powerful things.
And I think that that really does put us in a position where this is truly a revolutionary time.
I was talking with someone this morning and I had a very interesting conversation this morning at the park with someone who randomly came up because their dog walked up to me, which I always appreciate anyone listening.
If your dog wants to walk up, please let it.
And we were talking and he asked what I did.
And, you know, I told him I was like a sociologist.
I deal with kind of far-right politics.
I deal with authoritarianism.
I deal with this stuff.
He was like, oh, you're not going to like who I voted for.
And I said, let me ask you a question.
And I said, what do you think about what's happening right now to anyone who isn't white in this country?
He didn't even pause.
His exact words were, it's an abomination and it's not what we do.
Okay.
Let me, let me keep going, right?
So like, then I just said to him, I was like, so I got to know more, man.
I got to know more.
And we talked and, you know, he's 60 plus year old white guy who runs a painting company.
And we were talking and he was just like, you know, I shows up.
My guys are getting away.
I might not.
They are.
I certainly isn't getting on the job site.
I don't deal with Nazis.
And I was just like, okay.
What the hell?
You know, like this random conversation on a Monday at the park turns into a 30-minute conversation where this guy voted for Trump.
He voted for Obama twice.
He voted for Reagan.
And what he, at the end of the conversation, what he said is, why don't they tell me about the fact?
Why didn't they tell me there are people like you who don't care about what I made a choice to do, but care that we all come out of this okay or better?
And I was like, because that's the game, man.
Like, yeah, you made a shit choice.
I don't agree with it.
I probably don't agree with a lot of your politics, but you know what?
You know what's right and wrong and you're willing to fight for it.
That puts you in a place where you're going to be in a better place than just being lockstep with it.
And that is a very interesting place in Minnesota in 2025 to be where literally some random guy comes up and, you know, is more on board what I'm saying and what we're talking about in the sense of like common good, decency, democracy is a common good for everyone, not just the select few than he was on the Republican side.
And, you know, when you get it, when you get someone to shake your hand and say, this is really important, I don't know what's happening, but people want something that doesn't make them feel terrible.
And we have to deliver that now.
Otherwise, we don't get out of this.
And that, I think, is the essence of it, because one of the problems here and neoliberalism, you know, Carl, studying it, the thing that always stuck out to me was It's literally its own religion.
It is a religion that has no ability whatsoever to self-reflect.
It can't, because if it did, you would walk away from it.
You're not going to have a thousand-year right.
You're just not.
And everybody from Napoleon to Metternich to Hitler, all of them, like they all believed that they were going to create something that was going to last forever.
And eventually, the hubris of it, it leads to so many hobbling contradictions that do not work with each other.
So for instance, I had brought up Caza.
Like so many people, I want to say it's like 80% of Americans are opposed to what has been done to the Gazans.
And eventually at some point, unless you are beholden to a certain ideology, you look at this and you're like, no, this isn't okay.
And on top of that, even if the problem isn't humanity, the problem is, why are we paying for this?
This is obviously something that shouldn't be happening.
Why are we involved in this?
And all of a sudden, the red-blue paradigm start, and because it's so brittle now, that's the problem.
I had a conversation this weekend with a person who I have seen become more radicalized in so many ways towards the right.
But at the same time, they looked at this thing with like Mom Donnie and they're like, what are you doing calling him anti-Semitic?
This is obviously so transparent.
And all he's talking about is trying to help some people.
I don't see the problem.
Because when you actually get down to the actual politics, and I'm not talking about the spectacle, nobody watches this shit anymore.
Nobody really peddles it anymore.
It doesn't matter if it's on social media or out in the world.
The moment somebody starts saying this, people are like, shut the fuck up.
Like this doesn't make sense and it doesn't work.
And I recognize what you're doing.
Those appeals don't work.
And the longer that Trump is in power and he's so transparently corrupt, inept, and incompetent and just awful, but the Democratic Party, their bullshit doesn't work anymore.
Nobody wants an inauthentic technocrat to lie to them about what they're going to do.
And what has been our lives?
You and I have lived through the past few decades.
And anytime that somebody has told us something was going to happen, it didn't fucking happen.
Or they didn't fight for it.
They didn't push for it.
They didn't actually use political capital for it.
And so when you have this sort of like almost rootless feeling that what we've been told isn't true, the only thing left to do is to burrow down into basic humanity and ethics and morality.
And at that point, you're not talking Republican and Democrat anymore.
You're talking right and wrong and whether or not somebody is actually on our side or not, because that breaks down.
And it has broken down so spectacularly that there's only room for it to grow something else at this point.
Well, and that's, I think, the most interesting part to me in some ways is like the shared humanity argument is powerful because nothing else is, right?
Like this has always been a narrative.
As much as we talk about it, like the right and the left, you know, quote unquote, it's always been a narrative.
It's never really been the thing that they, you know, the purely political thing.
And when your narratives can't stick because everyone sees them as bullshit, you're in tough shape.
With the Republicans, what we've seen is they understand for themselves that the way that you achieve that then is at the barrel of a gun.
That's right.
The Democrats, God bless them, are sitting at the bottom of a well wondering why there's a golden retriever dunking over them every two minutes, you know, no matter what they do.
Or just to throw this out there, Carl, another analogy, they're standing in the hotel at the 1968 convention looking out and saying, why are these people doing this?
Yeah.
I mean, truly, that's actually a really good analogy, right?
Like, and I think that disconnect and the narrative, like the stickiness, quote unquote, of these narratives, once they become unsticky, they don't really regain it.
No.
And something else becomes more sticky.
And what we've seen repeatedly is that the true, like that, that, that human heartfelt look, we just need to make lives better, whether that's by lowering rents or whatever, you know, like actual real world changes to your material reality for the positive.
That doesn't have to be sticky because if it happens, you experience it, it's done.
That's the power of it.
And I think stripping away the technocratic governance, the we're going to provide you with health care, but it's going to be really kind of a Republican plan.
You don't lose your providers.
All these things, all these narratives, all these stories have never turned into the thing that they need to for them to stick in the correct way.
Whereas when someone hears, I'm going to try and lower your rent.
I'm going to try and hold the wealthy accountable and make sure they at least pay their fair share, not even like, we're not going to get radical.
No one's going out on the ice tonight.
You know, like that's really sticky because it's real.
And for most people, that's the thing that they, you know, those are things that they deal with every day, whether you're in New York City or you're in rural Nebraska or you're in rural North Dakota or Minnesota or California, the real sticky argument is the one that actually changes your life, even if it's this much.
And it does.
And one of the things I really think the experience we've had of watching the Overdon window slide towards fascism has really made people believe that politics only moves in one direction.
And it does not.
I want to give an anecdote.
I think to people who have listened to this show, they heard me struggle with something.
It was as the ICE raids became more and more blatantly fascistic.
I got on here and I said, and I did it in a bunch of conversations and a bunch of interviews.
I started talking about the monopolization of violence.
And at what point is a mass thug coming in and trying to steal your child from an elementary school, at what point are you not going to take that any longer?
And what I noticed, Carl, originally, because of how this environment has worked, like originally I was a little itchy, like saying that out loud, you know, because what we're actually talking about here is radicalization.
Oh, yeah.
And what is allowed and what isn't allowed and what's accepted and what isn't accepted.
At that point, everyone started reaching out and they were like, I'm with you.
Like, why would you allow these thugs to go in and intimidate people and knock down your doors and do this?
Like, that just simply isn't allowed.
People are now more open to a different type of view.
Like the words like criminal, terrorist, anti-Semitic, all of those things, they're gone.
And it's the power, I think, that MAGA realized, which is that all of the guardrails were in our minds.
All of the guardrails were imaginary.
And all of the power that they had were like Tinkerbell and Peter Pan.
We gave them power by believing in them.
And now, like one of the things, and this I think is one of the reasons that the Momdani thing is so important.
And I said, the people who come next, Carl, what happened with MAGA?
The incentives, once those guardrails started going, there were entire ecosystems and mini ecosystems of people who kept seeing how far they could go.
And I mean, that's how someone like Fuentes became Fuentes.
Like he suddenly said, oh, wow, I can be a neo-Nazi in public and I'm going to gain from it.
Like the moment, and Mom Donnie hasn't even said this, the moment that somebody starts coming out and talking about nationalizing SpaceX or Tesla or Google, and they start talking about actually going in and taking some of these companies and they start talking about, you know, class action lawsuits against tech oligarchs who have so intentionally hurt our children and our mental health and our well-being.
The moment that that happens, all bets are off.
Because people are not going to run away from that.
No, no.
No, people are not going to say, oh, I think this is a little too far because this is what's actually in the heart of people because it's what's right.
People know, right?
Like they feel like no.
They feel it.
Yes.
You feel it.
That's the other thing about it is if somebody says it and you don't run away from it, you start asking a bigger question, which is, why aren't other people saying this?
Bingo.
And whenever I started talking about the Supreme Court, people are like, oh, maybe we should stalk.
And it's like, no, actually, it should be abolished or it should be replaced or it should be democratically elected.
And when you start having those conversations, people say, wait a second, that actually makes a lot of sense.
And instead, we're getting this gruel.
Why is that happening?
And so the entire point is that the paradigm is changing very quickly.
And I think the emergence of an actual left, which has been suppressed, assassinated, destroyed, systematically like attacked.
What actually lies in the hearts of people is that they recognize that this is wrong.
Oh, yeah.
Now, now the so-called left is catching up to what the right has done, which is what always happens in these cycles because they are so repugnant and they're so wrong that people are like, why aren't people saying the important thing?
And for me, if you're a politician and you can't at least say the words abolish ICE, like you, I don't have anything to do with you.
I wouldn't even consider voting for you for a moment.
Yeah, no, there's the door.
There's the door.
And by the way, it's not even that.
It's like you have to hold these people legally accountable for what they're doing.
Yeah.
Well, and I think that that's the thing that people are starting to see, right?
Like there's a level of like, you actually abolish ICE is a real middle road, pretty, pretty normal position right now when ICE is the fucking Gestapo, right?
And like the radical positions I've heard on ICE over the years have changed.
And I say radical with big air quotes here.
You know, when we have attorneys online and in real life literally saying that people have to go to prison for what they've done, that should tell you where the medium round is, right?
Like, I think it's really tough because people, the right has monopolized some of the language that you actually need to use to deal with them.
And that's been intentional on their part as part of this narrative campaign they've done.
But people have to get comfortable with the fact that like there are going to have to be mass trials.
People are going to go to prison or worse.
And we can't do what we did after the civil war here and after World War II, where we say it's really scary to hold these people accountable because their followers are fucking crazy.
And yeah, I mean, it's going to be, fascism makes your country inherently dangerous, right?
We're in a dangerous country now, more dangerous than it's probably been in our lives if you're white.
With that being said, it's always been this way for anyone who isn't white or male.
And that reality means that the work we have to do going forward has to account for that going backwards, right?
And that means holding people accountable in real ways.
And with ICE, for example, ICE is 15 years younger than I am.
I just keep thinking about this, right?
Like ICE literally showed up when I like, I was in a, I was in AP German when ICE got created.
Like I was in high school.
This isn't, these aren't like acts of nature.
These aren't forces of nature.
These were choices we made.
And now we get to make the other better choice, which is to shut them down, hold everyone accountable, take their money.
And if you are a billionaire involved with any of this, you're getting your money forfeited.
Sorry, guys.
And that's if you're lucky.
That is the nicest response I have to that.
Yes.
And the reality is we have to get very hard nosed on the left, wherever we qualify ourselves.
And we have to get comfortable with the fact that We are on the right side.
We are making the decisions that are the best for all of us because that's what you do.
And with that knowledge, you have to walk into this thing knowing that that's also your shield.
If these people want to argue that it's not fair that we hold billionaires accountable or that we hold the perpetrators of mass ethnic cleansing, which is what ICE is engaged in right now, accountable, well, then we'll never get past this.
So that means the base point is remove them all.
Everyone goes to jail.
Money's forfeited, the whole deal when we come out of this.
The fact, though, that we're at a point where that conversation is not seen as radical, but as kind of a dinner time conversation for kind of, you know, average people should tell everyone, again, about these imagined futures that we now have open to us and what those potential futures can be if we do the hard work now.
And that's, that's it.
That's the real power now is we get to build a future that's ours if we do the hard work.
And these are steps towards that hard work.
This isn't the hard work.
And just to put a bow on that, that is what's exciting about watching a campaign that talks about actually changing the paradigm and helping people.
It's infectious.
Yes.
Because what actually has held us back, and I've tried to explain this multiple times, it's the liberal neurosis.
It's this thing.
They become so conservative because they're so afraid of being seen as radical.
They're so afraid of taking a chance and it not working out.
Anybody who's ever had a manager that like let them down, they know exactly what I'm talking about.
The middle manager who's too afraid to actually rock the boat and then they end up damning everybody.
And now it's this permission to start like, you know, I think Mom Dani will probably win this race.
I think that's probably where this thing is going.
But even somebody saying these things and winning in a primary, it's enough for people to be like, man, you know, like these things are really common sense.
I don't even know why this is controversial.
And then all of a sudden it changes that Overton window.
And now, like you said, conversations about abolishing ICE, like a few years ago, like the Democratic Party ran screaming away from that and campaigned on being tougher on illegal immigrants.
And now all of a sudden, if you go out there and try and defend this as a Democratic politician, good luck getting out of the room.
Literally, good luck getting out of the room.
And it's not, it literally is about dismantling the apparatus.
I mean, we can't go back to this period over the last 10 years where we're hoping that people in the FBI and CIA white hats are going to solve all of it or, you know, any of those things.
Like those things need dismantled too.
And they need change.
They need completely dismantled in every possible way.
And in a way, what has happened with this iteration of Trumpism and what has happened with the capitulation of not just the Democratic Party, but the so-called cathedral of higher education and culture, it has made it apparent that all of these things have been farcical to begin with.
And now people are desperate and hungry for it.
And you don't hold that back, except for, as you brought up earlier, the barrel of a gun.
Yeah.
And that's exactly where we are heading is that we are going to have a clash and you're going to find a lot of people are going to be on the different sides of that gun.
That's the different conversation.
No, and that's a different conversation.
And the reality is, like, after last week's Supreme Court shit show and lighting the Constitution on fire to smoke cigars with, we're closer to the pre, like the 1850s view of the state, like the big state, right?
That inherently puts us in a position where we get to build something better because we can't now go back to any kind of previous norm within the neoliberal historical system.
It's gone.
It doesn't exist.
It's gone.
It's gone.
And, you know, any kind of incremental quote-unquote fix is not going to work because you can't incrementally win back democracy.
And I think there's a real point where we're heading towards where people are going to realize the right is waging war against us.
Like, actual war.
Like, it sounds hyperbolic and it sounds conspiratorial, but like, the reality is what we've been experiencing, if we were looking at this, like, I'll put on my professor, you know, like my academic hat for a minute.
This is what modern civil conflict looks like until it turns into what we saw in the Maidan.
This is the thing that happens up to the Maidan.
Once you hit that moment, the barricades come out, that's when all bets go out.
We don't know where it lands.
What we're seeing is the social kindling for kinetic conflict.
And when I say kinetic conflict, I mean a war on the streets.
That is a real tough place for us to talk about because there's a lot there that, you know, there's just, it's very complex.
People's personal, the way that people individually act can change the whole trajectory of huge things in those moments, right?
So like nothing's foregone.
There are no, there are no like set in stone things here, but we have all the pieces that when you look at conflict at the social scale are there.
You know, I am concerned that we have a situation right now where the right has built a narrative structure for the last 20 years, roughly out in the open, And the far right for much longer.
Where they've said blue states, blue cities, blue citizens are the enemy, enemy territory that must be conquered by force.
Inherent evil.
Yeah.
And when you talk about that from the strictly Republican view, they've talked about it.
You talk about it from the Christian right, the Dominionist view.
They love that shit.
And then you have the neo-reactionary fascists, and they're like, well, why can't we just deploy drones to kill only Democrats?
And so what you're, you know, like, this is there.
The consciousness within their movement has been there for a while and they're waging war.
We have to understand that.
It doesn't look like columns of guys in, you know, gray and blue shooting into fields in the south, but it's the same systems and build of any other civil conflict we can think of.
And they're trying to keep it below that kinetic threshold where some dumbass ICE agent pulls the trigger on a crowd and the crowd opens up on them because then they lose control.
The moment that happens, they lose control.
They've already lost control.
They just haven't figured out how badly yet.
The minute someone pulls the trigger, all bets are off.
We don't know where it lands.
Everything goes.
They want that to happen.
That's why they're using AI to message abhorrent things like what's going on with Alligator Alcatraz and their fascist plans to build the infrastructure of math death.
And I'm very rarely like, you know, the serious guy on this level, but we have to be very clear with the language we're using.
This is an ethnic cleansing that's already happening.
This turns into genocide.
And they are building the apparatus to do it effectively and at scale.
So with understanding that, and that they are now putting troops on the ground in blue states and blue cities, and their goal is, according to them, to do it to other blue states and blue cities, we have to just admit what this is.
And that's where we get to the part where stuff gets sticky, where narratives start to work, where things start to happen because people see it.
They feel it.
They know.
And like most people, even if they're not plugged in like you or I are, know somewhere deep down something's real wrong here.
And they can feel it.
And they don't, you know, some may not know what it is.
But you talk to people.
They know.
They just don't know what yet.
And I think that that's, we're truly in virgin territory for us in the modern sense.
This has very much to do with our past.
And we need to embrace that because we've done this before.
Well, no, and we all have that sort of an inherent memory of it, you know?
And I think to go ahead and bring this home, like I was raised up in extreme evangelicalism where I was taught at a very young age that eventually I was going to be called on to do war against Satan's armies.
And it was very clear who they were.
There are millions of Americans who have been steeped in that and millions more that have been told that over the past few years.
You brought up the alligator Alcatraz thing, Carl.
Like it's literally the celebration of suffering.
It is a death cult of a group of people.
And on top of that, you're right.
It is the apparatus that's being constructed right now.
And people feel it.
I don't think that most Americans have the experience of having heard things like maybe you and I have or what I experienced as a kid watching this stuff.
And it feels this delusion of normalcy, the idea of like at some point or another, it'll fix itself.
Normalcy bias.
None of it's going to fix itself.
It just isn't.
And just to bring this home, what happened in Minnesota with those assassinations, that isn't an isolated incident.
We've seen so many instances and people like that guy, and I want to be careful on how I say that.
These people, they heard the message loud and clear.
They got to it before everyone else did.
Timothy McVay heard the message loud and clear.
He got there before other people got there.
And it's for every one of the abortion bombers.
Exactly.
Who are the ones who said, you know what, I've been called to do this.
It's time for me to wage war.
And so it's what we've seen so far are glimpses of what it was going to look like.
And eventually at some point, those people will catch up to the people who got there first.
And now we're watching the state apparatus build up around that.
But that is the point is it's not built yet.
It's being built.
And that means that we still have a chance to prevent it from being built.
And that's not a call for people to follow in those footsteps because we have something on our side, which is solidarity.
And we are more powerful that we don't have to go do that.
We can instead bound together and actually say, no, we will not allow this to happen.
Exactly.
And we're already seeing it, right?
Like as much as I've kind of been wishy-washy, let's say, on certain parts of like the no kings movement or whatever we want to call that.
That community that's born out of that turns into what we're seeing on the streets in places like LA, in places like deep red parts of Florida, where people are standing up and saying, you know what?
Come through me.
And that is how this starts.
Just like their infrastructure, we are building infrastructure as well.
But we're building an infrastructure of solidarity, mutual aid, mutual understanding as best we can, and a shared collective humanity.
That, you can't fucking kill that.
You can't destroy that.
Physical things, built environments for fascist death, those aren't permanent.
We've seen that.
They disappear into time just like the people who did it.
You can incarcerate somebody, but you can't destroy them if they're.
Yeah.
No.
And you can kill a person.
You can't kill the idea.
This is where we're starting to get into the real world of what it means to truly be an American.
Because the thing that you and I talk about, even though it sounds radical as hell, is democracy.
The true vision of what democracy was intended to be, not the thing they institute.
And that multiracial democracy thing.
We've never actually done it here.
That's fucking.
We've had a semblance of it, a simulacra of it.
Every once in a while, it breaks out and then white people do a coup, right?
Like literally, that's how it's been.
That's how it works.
And, you know, Red Summer.
I keep thinking about Red Summer and Tulsa and the Wilmington coup and the way that the Klan was built to stop Reconstruction.
This is what we've been.
It's not who we're going to be in the future.
This is it.
And for a lot of us, we didn't, you know, I grew up in a very weird place where, you know, my mother is a sociology professor.
My dad was a business person.
I, you know, coming out of that, you see things differently, far differently than the upbringing you had.
But what I've come to realize is those upbringings actually bring people like us closer together because there's a shared realization of the humanity of it, not of the politics.
And that's the thing that gives us power going forward is that we aren't, we might be the sum total of our actions, but we're not the sum total of our upbringing or what we were once taught.
And what we're seeing is when you switch how you think, when you start seeing things as right and wrong versus left and right or red and blue, it gets a lot easier.
And those shared convictions and the shared sense of right and wrong are literally the things that build democracy.
And they build the power that's needed to actually build the coalitions that go to build a true multiracial pluralist democracy that represents everyone, not just wealthy white men who own property.
And it's been very interesting for me as someone who is not generally a party politics person to sit and really see people understand that thing.
And it's not even an issue.
It's like a secondary, it's just a, okay, cool.
Carl, they don't, they don't have the educations that we have.
They don't have the specialties that we have.
They don't have the research we have.
It's intuitive.
It's literally the intuitive part, right?
It's that part where you don't have to be educated in this to know what's right and wrong.
But we've never had people tell us it's okay to say this is wrong and then to act to make that apparent through your politics because that is scary as hell to people who have a vested interest in keeping us from doing that.
And I don't know, we just we inhabit such a unique place, but such a not unique place right now.
It's it's really interesting because like we truly have the ability to write our own future now.
It doesn't by the way, that's the scariest thing in the world, but it's also the most exciting and freeing thing imaginable.
Horrifying.
Horrifying.
Part of the thing that scare, I think scares us all, I know for myself, right now, is the ambiguity, the not knowing.
Where does this, where do we end?
Do we end Germany 1945 or do we end in a way where Hitler never makes it to the bunker because he never got to the other things?
And that is scary as hell because it puts it on all of us collectively, not individually, to make choices.
Americans make a lot of choices day to day.
And a lot of them aren't ones we like to make because we're forced to make shit binaries.
This might be the first time in my life that I can remember where we didn't have an A or B door.
We have a whole alphabet.
I would go so far as to say that Americans don't make a lot of choices.
And that's the privilege of being an American.
And one of the reasons why MAGA took off, it's the freedom of unfreedom.
Yes.
And not wanting to make those choices.
But now we have no choice.
We have to make choices.
It's really interesting, right?
Because I think we are forced to make terrible choices generally.
Arbitrary choices that aren't always up to us based on income, based on our healthcare, based on any one of 20 million things.
This might be the first time in any of our adult life, you know, like in many of our lives, where we get to choose a true, real, open choice to move forward, to stay where we are, or to do something really dumb.
And yeah, 70 million, 60 million Americans, they're going to make bad choices, apparently.
Really bad choices.
Makes some sense.
Gambling is big here, right?
Like a lot of this makes sense.
That's not very many people when you got 380 million people in the country.
Sorry, everyone.
Like, we, we actually, if we do the work, we win.
No, and if you actually offer people an alternative, you win.
Carl Folk, I could talk to you for hours, my friend.
Tell the good people where they can find you.
Find me on Blue Sky at Brain Not On Yet.
You can find me at Dark Times Academy, where I'm teaching this fall again.
We're going to do a nice little brain buster on, you know, a little bit of apocalyptic fascism and omnicidal fascists trying to end the world.
And then you can find me on Did Nothing Wrong Live.
We're, you know, kind of yelling.
All right, everybody.
That's going to do it for this edition of the Mutt Craig Podcast.
I'll be back on Friday with the weekender.
Head on over to patreon.com slash Mutt Craig Podcast.
Gain access to that.
My dog is incredibly upset.
If you need us before then, you can find us on Blue Sky.
