It’s Tuesday, February 24 and welcome back to The McSpencer Group— leaked audio reveals that we said nice things about Fidel Castro back in the ‘80s. Top issue: Bernie v BloombergSenator Bernie Sanders won Nevada—and won it in a landslide. A man who was once a curiosity in Washington is now the undisputed frontrunner and the figurehead of a mass movement. MSNBC is freaking it out. Conservatives are dusting off talking points from the Brezhnev era. And American voters don’t seem to care. Bernie’s most powerful opponent is former New York City mayor Mike Bloomberg, who’s spending hundreds of millions on social media and literally paying people to like him. The billionaire class might lay claim to owning the American presidency, but never before has a billionaire sought to buy the office for himself outright. While Trump plays a nationalist on TV, Bloomberg is a ruthless and effective defender of neoliberal capitalism. The panel discusses what all this means for dissident politics of the Left and Right. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit radixjournal.substack.com/subscribe
It's Tuesday, February 25th, and welcome back to the McSpencer Group.
Leaked audio reveals that we said nice things about Fidel Castro back in the 80s.
Top issue, Bernie v.
Bloomberg.
Senator Bernie Sanders won Nevada and won it in a landslide.
A man who was once a curiosity in Washington is now the undisputed frontrunner and the figurehead of a mass movement.
You guys look like revolutionaries.
You're prepared to make a revolution?
MSNBC is freaking out.
Conservatives are dusting off talking points from the Brezhnev era.
And American voters don't seem to care.
Bernie's most powerful opponent is former New York City mayor Mike Bloomberg, who's spending hundreds of millions on social media and literally paying people to Lincoln.
The billionaire class might lay claim to owning the American presidency.
But never before has a billionaire sought to buy the office for himself outright.
A social democrat who is much more of a 20th century social democrat than he is a woke new leftist, I think that should be pointed out, versus the just outright, unashamed, obvious forces of technocratic plutocracy.
And that is what is happening in the Democratic primary.
And it is extremely interesting, just as a spectator.
And I think, actually, I would find certain virtues with both of those men, both Bloomberg and Bernie.
I have a certain sympathy.
I probably have more of a sympathy with Bernie, but I have a certain...
I have a real respect, actually, for Bloomberg and what he's doing.
And I'm not going to go in on all the anti-Bloomberg stuff.
You know, all right, oh, he's a Jew.
It's like, yeah, yes, he's clearly Jewish and he's a Zionist.
But unlike...
Goofy people who wear masks and try to explain things.
He is what he is.
He is a billionaire capitalist from Wall Street.
But he is what he is.
And that honesty is, I find, absolutely refreshing.
So anyway, I find the whole thing fascinating.
You did a video on Bloomberg, Keith.
Why don't you jump in first?
And then Ed can determine whether he's left-handed and gay.
I'm 100% on Team Bloomberg.
I mean, you know, first it kind of started off as a joke.
It's like, you know, it's great to see someone that's so sort of unashamed about being a neoliberal technocrat.
Yeah.
But, you know, the more I thought about it, the more I thought, like, there's actually no real downside to Bloomberg winning.
From our perspective, that would be any worse than Bernie or Trump.
Because the one thing Bloomberg, I think, could do is that if he does win, he'll have to steal the nomination from Bernie using his appeal to the non-white demographic.
And so if he wins, he's going to ride into office of this just, you know, stealing of the win by cynical use of demographics and non-whites.
And, you know, that's going to put the left in a tricky position where they're going to see that their populist movement of Bernie Sanders was stolen from them by You know, a Jewish neoliberal capitalist that used non-white demographics in his favor.
And I think it would also, as much as I can see the arguments for Bernie winning, I think from our perspective it would be bad in some ways if Bernie gets in because I think it will set back political discourse in that he's not going to get any of the real socialist policies he wants done.
He's going to be stymied the whole four years.
But the right is going to revert to this.
And the right is going to revert to this sort of, you know, Paul Ryan, Venezuelan socialism, Cold War talking points.
I just don't think it would be a good direction for anyone.
But if Bloomberg wins, I mean, there's no longer going to be the middleman of someone like Trump that still sort of represents populist nationalist sentiment.
It's just going to be this, you know, again, unashamed plutocrat technocrat.
And he'll be he'll be a perfect representation of what the United States is.
And, you know, finally, we can have a proper political discussion and people can see can see what the U.S. is and what it represents.
And they'll see that, you know, the head of the snake is neoliberalism, is social liberalism and multiculturalism.
And Bloomberg represents all of that perfectly.
When you compare Bloomberg to Trump, in many ways, Bloomberg captures that sort of Republican vision of America a lot better than Trump.
Trump inherited his fortune and benefited from the biggest tax break in New York State history.
Bloomberg genuinely did toil his way up to success.
That's kind of a funny comparison as well.
He's the son of a bookkeeper.
Bookkeeper.
I discussed this last week.
Yeah, we talked a little about it.
I think he did go to Harvard Business School, but I presume he got in using his merit.
He offered a service to Wall Street and became a multi-billionaire.
Again, he is...
I think all aspects of him, you know, they do reveal the real nature of reality.
He's, you know, he's a pro-Wall Street neoliberal who wants to maintain the system.
And in a kind of funny way, he needs to call upon, you could say, kind of...
You could say racism in order to maintain it.
So he will maintain the system.
He will throw 600,000 people up against the wall in order to make sure that the trains run on time in New York City and that neoliberalism can continue.
If Trump had lost in 2016, we'd probably be sitting here now saying, if only Trump had won, can you imagine there'd be a massive wall on the border, all the illegals would be deported, he'd be running it as this quasi-fascistic state.
But after four years, you know what the reality is.
What's going to come of another four years of Trump?
It's going to be four more years of Charlie Kirk talking points, it's going to be four more years of people just silently being displaced, losing their country.
It's just four more years of slow crushing defeat.
Let's just go one way or the other.
Why sit around for another four years and just wait for more days?
Yeah.
And before Ed jumps in, I mean, there's this interesting discussion, you know, in our circles and in really any circles that are marginalized of accelerationism.
And it goes back to an apocryphal quote, the worse, the better, from Lennon or someone.
I'm not sure he actually said that.
But so, you know, we kind of flip between, oh, we're going to get our guy in there and he's going to bring about a utopia for us.
And then we flip over to the other side of that coin.
Which is, we should just have the worst possible person in there who just makes everything totally nuts and the system collapses and then we take over.
Both of those are fantasies, actually.
And none of them are really that productive.
I don't think Bernie is an accelerationist candidate at all.
I think he's going to have a lot.
First off, I think he's going to have a hard time enacting his agenda because of the Supreme Court, because of opposition, his own party, and just the...
I don't think it would be radically accelerationist.
He is a 20th century social democrat.
That is his MO.
Even when he...
It's all about, oh, these other people want to separate us on the basis of race, but we're going to all come together on the basis of Medicare for All.
It's that type of thing.
It's not a kind of divisiveness.
And I think, if anything, he's an anti-accelerationist.
It's the wrong kind of divisiveness.
There will be divisiveness if Bernie gets in, but it'll be the divisiveness of Bernie's supporters will be blaming the patriarchal white male Republican Party for...
For stymieing this populist uprising.
And, you know, people on the right will be, again, these, like, nonsensical talking points about Venezuela and socialism.
All the wrong things are going to be discussed.
It's going to further entrench this sort of false binary between, like, you know, the sort of open borders, like woke capital socialism of the Bernie bros and, like, I don't know what you call, like, boomer republicanism, like neoliberal talking points.
It's just going to reinforce that.
It would double down.
It would double down on the problems of Trump.
Just to stick with this real quick on the Bernie side, and then we'll talk about Bloomberg.
It would accelerate the whole problem of Trump, which is that in January 2017, and actually a little bit before that, he adopted conservatism.
Trump did a few things like the Muslim ban, which isn't an actual Muslim ban, and all this kind of stuff.
But his agenda has been Paul Ryan's agenda.
And the people stalking his administration are conservatives.
Some Tea Party people, some old-line Republicans, and the conservative movement has embraced him, and he has embraced the conservative movement.
And that was not the dynamic in 2015 and for most of 2016, which was he couldn't show up to CPAC because they were going to attack him as a nationalist socialist or something like that.
Now he shows up to CPAC.
And he's a superstar.
But it's not like they've really changed.
His nationalism was so vague that it could just be kind of funneled into black unemployment's down, the stock market's up, billionaires are getting tax cuts, Apple has higher profits this quarter.
That's what it is.
And so with Bernie in there, all of the right would just be just Charlie Kirk.
On steroids, it would be utterly awful.
Whereas, if Bloomberg's in there, and I know this is a bit...
I know how...
Like, I know this is a long shot, and I know it's hard, but that is actually an interesting dynamic where the Bernie bro types, serious alt-right people, not your, like, you know, I'm a conservative Trump supporter and I'm racist on weekends or something.
Those kinds of people, they could get lost for all I care.
But serious people who want to change the world can start finding a lot more in common through...
Because there wouldn't be any pretense in the sense of, you know, in the sense of like, oh, well, Trump's populist and he's appealing to the people and evangelicals or whatever.
It would be like, no, we have a literal oligarch through fascistic means instituting oligarchy.
There's no pretense.
There's no illusions.
There's no...
We just get rid of it all, and we deal directly with the problem.
And in that sense, I think Bloomberg deserves to be president of this country.
And I think it would actually be a great thing.
It would introduce a new dynamic.
It would introduce change.
And from our perspective, change is good.
Four years of Trump, we're just going to be fighting these same battles over and over again.
And people are going to continue to be deluded.
And I think in terms of what Trump might do in a second term, most second-term presidents, they have a little bit of a window of political capital, and then they spend three years just...
farting around, basically.
But if Trump reelected and feeling like he has major political capital, I could see war with Iran.
I could see a lot of just really awful stuff that conservatives And that is good.
That is real accelerationism.
And then it makes things clear.
Yeah, could I make a point about this?
No, you may not.
So I basically would be inclined to agree.
As far as I'm concerned, Trump has done nothing.
He hasn't done what he said he'd do.
He hasn't done it.
So that's a waste of time.
So what did Trump getting in actually achieve?
What it achieved was the left going mad.
Going bonkers and a big crackdown on the alt-right and on alternative media and on YouTube and whatever.
So essentially, from our perspective, as dissident people on the right, it's been quite bad.
And the good stuff that he said he'd do, stop immigration, build a wall, there's been minor things in that direction, but he essentially hasn't done what he said he'd do.
Secondly, it strikes me that a fundamental problem with the American system since Roosevelt is that you have two-term presidents and the second term, he's a lame-duck president for the whole time.
If there could be a third term, a fourth term, a fifth term, well, interesting things.
But essentially, if you're re-elected, great.
You're a successful president like Eisenhower or Clinton or anybody else that's been elected twice.
But you're a lame duck immediately.
And people are therefore speculating on who's going to replace you.
So he won't achieve anything.
He won't do it.
He won't be able to do anything.
And it'll just be four more years of the left being terribly upset.
I like the false sense of security that the left might get out of a Democrat whim.
I quite like that.
when that person's not really a Democrat, not really, not in any ideological sense.
He's simply a rich man who wants to be president of a country, exactly like Trump.
And let's not forget that in the 90s, Yeah, Bloomberg was a Republican as well when he ran for mayor of New York.
How fascinating.
So basically, they're just wealthy men that want to buy the presidency of a country, go on the dollar, basically.
So I like the idea of, as you say, it being an overt, clear, no messing about.
I love the idea of a debate between them as well, like just two New York loudmouths that are just the worst of everything and they're having a debate about how best to serve Israel's interests and who's the bigger Zionist.
He won't achieve anything, he won't do anything other than...
Purchase eight years in power, or four years in power, whichever it happens to be.
And then often, of course, when there is more left-wing influence, then, of course, that's when the right, in terms of this acceleration, that's when the right regroup and actually do things because they're under pressure.
As you say, there is a false sense of security, perhaps, in America, to having a Republican president and a president who says, oh, build a wall, and talks the talk.
There's a false sense of security.
Let's get rid of that false sense of security.
The only thing I can think that he achieved, really, Trump.
Is YouTube bans for interesting people?
Some other things in economics, let's not subtract.
He's done some things.
I mean, the economy apparently is doing a little bit better in America than it has been doing, or immigration is a little bit down, or something like that.
But I don't think it justifies the full consequences.
Corporations have taken on debt and bought their own stock, running up the price of their own stock because debt is so cheap.
Like, it's all a fucking game.
Like, you know, it's just a joke.
And, you know, yeah, maybe some middle class people, their 401k went up.
Who cares?
I think it's kind of interesting, actually, because I was watching this video on this company called Theranos, this total con job that went from $9 billion to $0.
A woman went from being a billionaire to being $0.
She was just an absolute con artist and sociopath in so many levels.
But I think that was a kind of representation, I think, a lot of the end of this kind of magical thinking that we had in the 2000s of, you know, with Steve Jobs being an icon of it, that, you know, it does.
None of this really matters because there's going to be some outside the box, quirky college dropout genius who's going to just invent some new thing and change the world.
I think actually that mythos was, you know, Steve Jobs kind of died at...
His death was symbolic.
I mean, he died at the peak of it, and 10 years later, it's over.
And I don't think people think...
They just don't buy into that.
I think that is ultimately a good thing because we get out of that illusion and we start working together in order to change the system.
And we're going to have to change.
The alt-right, dissident-right, whatever you want to call us, we're going to have to change.
We can't be doing this.
Own the libs.
We're right-wing conservatives.
Whatever offends the libs is good.
We're super conservative tough guys.
That kind of stuff just really needs to go.
And I think we can start to, again, create a serious radical movement that is actually attracting people on the left.
It's attracting serious people.
It's attracting people who don't even know who they are right now because they're alienated from the system.
And those are the types of people that we...
I think these are all...
And this is the thing.
You echoed a lot of my sentiments there, but I think the way you should be looking at it is not where will the US be in 2020, but where will it be in 2024?
And, you know, with the Bloomberg presidency, you know, I said in my video, just to kind of trigger people a little bit, that Bloomberg is like an ideal third position.
But he's like a third positionist of all the worst elements.
Whether you're attacking him from the right or the left, you have to attack him on something kind of substantive.
It's not going to be the Sean Hannity critique of him that wins out.
It's not going to be about that he's, you know, like when Obama was in office, he's a secret communist or whatever, and this is like a plot to take over the US.
He's just an unashamed capitalist.
That's the only way to attack him.
And some people say, oh, it's so naive.
It's Wignat saying that they can win over Bernie bros and they want to throw you in
I do think there'll be serious black pill in there and there will be scope for the best of those people coming over and maybe something else forming by 2024.
But that's really what it's about is where I mean, with another four years of Trump, what's it going to be in 2024?
Every right-winger will be off the internet.
It'll be just, again, this slow sort of burn.
The demographic trends will continue.
All that's going to happen under Bloomberg as well, but the difference is there will be some kind of symbolic center that people can unite around with Bloomberg out of office.
Whatever the antithesis of Bloomberg is, that's what I'm for.
So if Bloomberg's in office, more people can unite around that.
Absolutely.
And, you know, and it's worth saying, just to add here, in terms of, you know, actually caring about white people who are suffering right now, which if it is a, and this is certainly possible, if it is a Bernie versus Trump campaign,
and you ask yourself, who is going to directly I think it's
clearly Bernie.
And that just is what it is.
If I were to vote for Bernie, it wouldn't be an accelerationist vote.
It would be like, this guy actually has some programs that could help people, and Trump is just going to be more of the same.
The Bloomberg factor would be very different, because it would be, again, two neoliberals battling it out over who's the most scientist or something.
The one thing, the one time I've become kind of left-wing is when I'm in America and I see these toothless people who are toothless because they can't afford to go and see a dentist or who have bits of them chopped off because they haven't afforded to go and see a proper doctor or whatever.
Really, it's like England before the health service was brought in.
In the UK, you had cases of women who had had hernias and held these hernias in with a bit of cloth tied up.
I've been like that for months and months or more, and then they finally get to go to a doctor without paying what they can't afford to pay, and then it gets fixed.
It was absolutely dreadful before the health service was introduced.
I don't understand why people should have to pay to see a doctor.
In Finland it's a problem.
You have to pay €20 to see a doctor, to see a state doctor, a rubbish doctor where you have an agency.
You have to pay something like €70 for a 15-minute consultation with a private doctor.
And it means that people have to think about And they shouldn't have to, because thinking about should I go to a doctor or not when you've got a lump, is this important enough to go and see a doctor or is it not?
That could be the difference between not dying.
Or if you've got coronavirus and you decide not to go to a doctor because you can't afford it and you infect another 20 people.
Yeah.
Yes.
I don't know what the healthcare system is like in Italy.
But perhaps that is relevant, because I get the impression that the people in northern Italy or wherever it is, near the Austrian border, wherever it is, have died.
If you've gone to the US, it's going to be very relevant, isn't it?
They were quite poor.
So maybe you do have to pay to see a doctor in Italy, and maybe the guy didn't.
He died.
An old guy of 79. Five that have died now.
I'm not sure how many of them have died now in Italy.
So, yeah, that's a very good reason, containment of viruses, why you shouldn't have to pay to see a doctor.
Right.
And in America, if it comes to America, think of all these people that, oh, I've got the flu.
Should I go to the doctor?
No.
You know, it'll cost me however much it costs to go and see a doctor.
I don't have health insurance, so it'll cost me whatever.
You know, how much does it cost?
You know, how much does it cost if you haven't got health insurance to go and see a doctor?
It's just, it's pure bankruptcy almost immediately.
I mean, the cost of health care if something is serious.
Like, if you're battling cancer or really serious surgery, you're just simply going to go bankrupt.
I mean, it's going to be tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands.
I mean, you just can't do it.
And again, it's like the cost of health insurance, I think the average cost is something like $25,000 a year for a family of four.
And, you know, you can kind of work it.
Yeah.
Yeah, it's a huge thing.
It's the highest in the world per capita.
Unbelievable.
I watched some of the Sticks Hexenhammer video there for my sins, and he was making the libertarian argument for this, which is that American health care is so expensive because it's not private enough.
So, you know, all these Western countries that have per capita costs that are a quarter of the United States, you know, you could just go socialize and go to, you know, something around that.
But no, you should take a gamble, go more privatized, and you might actually get it cheaper than them.
Yeah, I mean, there's a kernel of truth to that in the sense that we have the worst of all possible systems in the sense that it's kind of socialized in the wrong way and then privatized in the wrong way.
I mean, I could go with a libertarian argument that if we had just a pure free market, that there would be like a McDonald's of healthcare and things like that.
I can...
Kind of work my way there.
But we're just not...
People aren't willing to accept that.
Conservatives are not willing to accept that.
Like, the idea of taking away Medicare of conservatives, they will...
If the boomers would, you know, actually riot over something, it might be that.
And so we're in this system, and we need to find a way out of it.
But where it is now is just...
Utterly unbearable.
And also, the insurance.
What we've done, what we did with Obamacare, and Obamacare was originally, in the late 80s and early 90s, was actually a Heritage Foundation project.
So it was a conservative project, and then it was first implemented by Mitt Romney.
And then Obama did it as this grand compromise, basically.
And then conservatives called it socialism, even though they invented it.
And what it basically does is, you know, we're afraid to be a socialist country.
So we don't want to have a national health service where doctors are literally employees of the state, or we don't want to have a single-payer system.
We want to have this system where we're kind of subsidizing the insurance industry and forcing people into it.
And so it creates insurance that isn't insurance.
Because insurance is something that you don't want to use and don't actually plan on using.
You buy insurance on your house catching flame.
Insurance originated historically as merchants who would have ships going across the ocean, and they obviously did not want this to happen, and they didn't plan on it happening.
But compulsory health insurance is not insurance because you know you're going to use it.
And you, in a way, want to use it.
You're prepaying for your medical care.
It's just the worst thing.
No, no, no.
You don't want to get ill.
You don't plan on getting ill.
Of course not.
But everyone...
Yeah.
But you don't...
It's not like there's some catastrophe that you take care of.
Everyone has to visit the doctor.
Yes, that's true.
You're not even unhealthy.
This is the world we live in right now.
It's a kind of prepayment system.
And then also, with your employer offering it to you, it's connecting you to this corporation.
And obviously, employers love that.
A lot of people aren't quite willing to leave employment or search for another job or do something else, start a new business or whatever, because they don't want to lose their health plan.
And I understand.
So anyway, we've socialized the insurance industry and they're profiting from it.
It's privatizing profits.
This is what fears me about Bernie getting the nomination.
I'm already seeing people that were so on board with the MAGA movement in 2015 that were borderline national socialists.
Attacking Bernie on, like, oh, he's going to increase the deficit.
How is he going to pay for the spending plan?
And it's like, the libertarian alt-right pipeline is, like, suddenly going in reverse now.
And there's, like, conversion on, like, Paul Ryan talking points.
It's just awful.
They can pay for anything.
The United States has never had a failed bond auction.
So, like, you can...
Print debt effectively.
They're not really printing money.
I think that's kind of a wrong way of saying it.
But they are basically printing debt.
In an unlimited fashion.
And they can do this because of politics.
Because we are a dominant global power.
And people don't want to mess with us.
And so that's what it is.
There is no problem with paying for any of this.
And all the stuff that conservatives want is equally massively in debt.
Like rebuilding the military or whatever.
All of that is debt finance.
It's all a bunch of...
Debt.
And at one point, this whole game is going to break down and it's going to be...
It might happen fast, it might happen slow, but it's going to be a catastrophe.
But we're not there yet.
So stop talking about how are you going to pay for it.
It's not like the government is like a checking account where you put money in and then you take it out and you pay for it.
It's like, oh, we can't pay for the military this week.
We better take on a second job or something.
It does not work like that.
It started with Thatcher, that you run the government budget like a household budget or like a small shop.
You always see people that are low-info people that love to use this analogy for everything, but it's really limiting.
For a country like the United States, the facts just say otherwise.
And this is like the false dialectic it creates as well, because then when a Democrat is in office, the Republicans just stifle him on spending, and he doesn't get any of the economic reforms done, but he gets all his terrible social reforms done.
Yeah.
And then, you know, Republican comes into office and, you know, look at the debt after after Reagan was in office.
Look at it now with Trump and the deficit goes up, the debt piles on.
But it's just this money that's sent straight to the elite rather than to things that would benefit the working class.
So, you know, it is a terrible dialectic in American politics.
Absolutely.
So let's get Bloomberg in there.
Absolutely.
The Mick Spencer Group, America's favorite social sponsors.
Yeah.
Yeah.
I'm still waiting for my Bloom books from Bloomberg.
If you were smart, he would do it.
I managed to get hold of one of these MAGA hats, one of these Make America Great Again hats.
There's the Bloomberg merchandise that perhaps I could get hold of.
What is it?
Mike will get it done?
I think that's his.
I like Mike.
I like, yeah.
I'm with Mike.
Yeah.
We are willing to accept.
We will make this argument, so we're not, like, selling out.
We actually believe this, but...
We are fully willing to accept bundles of cash.
I think he's only interested in people that appear as non-whites.
