113: The People's Party etc, with Rob from The Right Podcast
In this episode, Jack is joined by special guest Rob from The Right Podcast, creator of intimidatingly detailed yet somehow also accessible and enjoyable shows covering subjects from US domestic right-wing extremism to Russian right-wing extremism, Russia and Ukraine, National Bolshevism, etc. We have a chat about the populist US 'People's Party' - presidential candidate: Jimmy Dore - and their composition, actual politics, and internal scandals, including their recent disgraceful tweet thread of rape apologia. The conversation ranges over Dore and Caleb Maupin (and his tendency) to Putin and Russia, Greenwald, the 'alt-imperialist' left, the theories of Dugin and their influence, and misinformation, including Oliver Stone's disinfo 'documentary Ukraine on Fire. Rob's channel and videos come highly recommended. Content Warnings Show Notes: Please consider donating to help us make the show and stay ad-free and independent. Patrons get exclusive access to at least one full extra episode a month plus all backer-only back-episodes. Daniel's Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/danielharper Jack's Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/user?u=4196618 IDSG Twitter: https://twitter.com/idsgpod Daniel's Twitter: @danieleharper Jack's Twitter: @_Jack_Graham_ IDSG on Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/i-dont-speak-german/id1449848509?ls=1 Episode Notes: The Right Podcast on YouTube The Right Podcast on audio Rob's Twitter
I'm Jack Graham, he him, and in this podcast I talk to my friend Daniel Harper, and in this podcast I talk to my friend Daniel Harper, also he him, who spent years tracking the far right in their safe In In this show we talk about them, and about the wider reactionary forces feeding them and feeding off them.
Be warned, this is difficult subject matter.
Content warnings always apply.
Hello and welcome to I Don't Speak German episode 119.
And it's a bit of a new type of episode, this one, because Daniel's not here.
I know.
It's weird, isn't it?
So it's just me.
Sorry about that.
Except that it's not just me, because I am very, very pleased to be joined by the right podcast guy, whose name is Rob.
Hi, Rob.
So, the Right Podcast Guy produces excellent podcasts and YouTube videos, which I thoroughly recommend that you go and check out on all sorts of subjects, covering the right, obviously, but recently covering all sorts of issues like far-right extremists in Russia and clearing up a lot of the Russian disinformation about Ukraine.
Excellent episode about Nazbols, from their origins right up to the present day, or their present-day descendants, we should say.
And the most recent episode is, again, another excellent episode about Oliver Stone's quote-unquote documentary, Ukraine on Fire, which you do an excellent debunk on.
So, welcome to the show!
Yes, yeah.
No, thanks for having me on.
Thanks for a great intro there.
Thank you.
Yeah, just before we get started, we're going to talk about the People's Party, I believe, but I just wanted to really compliment you on that episode about the Oliver Stone movie, which I think... That movie's a few years old now, but going through that the way you do, it really helps to put current issues, very current issues, into perspective, I think, for people who
You know, maybe, probably people listening to this show are not likely to be particularly disoriented by a lot of the disinformation, but there's one thing to not buy something, and it's another thing to know exactly why and how it's wrong.
And I think if people follow that episode of yours, whether in podcast form or on YouTube, they will get a really excellent primer on why so much of the The disinformation that certain people are pumping out about Ukraine and Russia and so on at the moment, why that is just totally wrong and totally dishonest.
Daniel and I have actually podcasted about Oliver Stone before because we're kind of resentful fans of some of his earlier movies without believing a single word of it.
We're both kind of fascinated by JFK and Nixon, those two movies.
But there was one thing that this occurred to me while I was listening to your Oliver Stone Ukraine on Fire episode, which is he leaves out so much context because it's just completely inconvenient to the narrative that he's trying to spin.
And I think of that as the curtain rod maneuver, because in the entire two and a half runtime of JFK or whatever it is, he gives you so much information, but he never mentions the fact that on the morning of the assassination, Lee Harvey Oswald Took a long, thin package to work, which he told people contained curtain rods when he had plenty of curtain rods at home.
So Oliver Stone just leaves that out.
So yeah, he pulls the curtain rod maneuver many, many, many, many times during that Ukraine movie of his, as you point out.
Yeah, and you know, so that's, I like, I like the way you phrase it better, you know, I have a, I come from a different kind of background, not, not necessarily media per se, or comedy, a lot of these guys are comedians or entertainment, but I come from a more academic background and
So I looked, I mean let's start there, the reason why I even chose that, you said it's a few years old and I think that's like valid, why bother, but because a lot of people who I've been interacting with all over social media and people much younger than myself or my age too in different activist circles have Have cited that so many times, especially when they're confronted with information that conflicts with what it is that they feel like is happening in Ukraine.
Specifically, I mean, let's get to like with the Azov battalion, for instance, and the significance of that to the broader geopolitical events occurring in it and the massive history.
And so I said, people, everyone's talking, everyone's referencing this.
So I'm going to, I haven't watched it.
I'm going to sit down and watch it.
And looking at it from my background, I mean, to me, they're lies by omission.
I mean, the curtain rod is, I like that better.
But, I mean, there's intent on, you know, it's not an oopsie.
There's definitely intent on why things are left out.
And, you know, it's especially subversive.
It's insulting because you're talking about a people's history and culture and, you know, real people, real life.
And it's so obvious to me, but maybe not to everybody.
And that was the impetus to going in there and really dissecting this and saying, look, not everybody might understand the pro and con of this or understand how to put something together where both sides are equally represented and come out with objective information.
And it's presented in a way that gets your heart going.
There's lots of graphics, lots of fire, lots of quick action shots, etc.
But at the end of the day, as you said, I mean, it's just so extremely one-sided and biased.
And when you understand the propaganda coming out of the region, it's very easy to see that.
But, you know, you can't just say that to people.
You need to prove it.
And that's really why, you know, I don't even know how long that one is.
Sometimes these videos are like four hours long.
But that's why, because you have to go in.
And when people like Stone or anybody just throw stuff against the wall, as you know, unfortunately, it's twice as hard to take it back down and dissect what it is, you know.
And that's when I think they included going through NGOs from Russia, going through the history of Crimea and what happened to repopulation and all these things that just take a lot more time and unfortunately, I think only reach, you know, A fraction of the audience that the initial output got, but hopefully it'll get some people.
And yeah, that was kind of how I got there with that and why I did that.
It's frustrating when you're talking about real people, real lives, you know, and this is just so blatantly biased and folks don't know that.
Yeah, absolutely.
And it is extremely insulting to Ukraine and Ukrainian people, some of the things that are said in that movie, and then subsequently become repeated.
I mean, the idea that Ukraine isn't and never really has been a discreet nation, never had any claim to that, you know, that is just not true.
And it's an insult to an entire people.
The constant implication that they somehow, that Ukrainian people don't have the right to self-determination.
As a country, as a society, and the implication which is, I mean, it's just completely a given now in certain sections of the online quote-unquote left, you know, and without wanting to no true Scotsman it, I would certainly quibble with that.
That, you know, the Euromaidan revolution in 2014 was a US-organized coup or color revolution.
As far as I can tell, there's no evidence for that whatsoever.
They've just confected that from bits and bobs.
You know, there were some American NGOs there.
There was a phone call in which, you know, Victoria Nuland talked to the ambassador about who they'd like to see take over, etc, etc.
And the idea that Ukraine is a fascist country, when the extreme right-wing parties consistently poll very low in the elections, the president of Ukraine currently is a Jewish man whose ancestors fought against the Nazis in World War II, just slanders essentially on an entire society that are repeated endlessly by these people who claim to be in some sense progressive or on the left.
It is absolutely infuriating.
Yeah.
Yeah.
And so also just from my background as well, I have a bachelor's degree in history and master's in social science education.
And through that process, I just so happened to work as a student for Ukrainian American Historical Society and met many first generation folks and people who are visiting from Ukraine, worked with them very closely on their exhibits.
One of them was on the Ukrainian famine, which is completely absent in that movie.
Well, it might have gotten to play five seconds, but, but, but regardless, and it was, and it was during, it was during the time of the orange revolution as well.
So I'm giving my age a bit, but, uh, and no, just, just having that experience, if nothing else, you know, just intuition.
I think you watch that and you say, well, he interviewed Yanukovych, why didn't he interview someone from a different party, from an opposing party, you know?
Forgetting all that, just having been in that community and understanding what was happening, even that long ago in 2004.
As you said, seeing that get conflated to people that poll at, you know, 0.4%, 1.3%, and these volunteer forces that exist, you know, but seeing how that's conflated to generalize an entire community, and then understanding why, and the idea that, well, this is actually propaganda, and there's an ideology behind this propaganda too, of Eurasianism, And, you know, this is much broader now.
Now we're talking about people in Syria, for instance, and now we're talking about other countries, North Korea, and these alt-imperialists, we can call them, or anti-imperialists online that spread out everywhere.
But how there is actually a unifying ideology behind it.
And, yeah, it opened up a new world to me, because initially it was just me looking at this and saying, well, this is clearly wrong.
But then understanding why it's clearly wrong was the eye-opener.
This is one of the big questions, isn't it?
How do people get there?
And I think, well, let's get, because I think we'll come back to all this via our main topic, which is, or at least the initial topic, which is going to be the People's Party.
Now, I really, I kind of encountered this while I was looking in, I won't say researching, because that's a bit grand, but while I was looking into Jimmy Dore, the internet personality, the YouTube politics comedian guy, For our I Don't Speak German episodes on him.
And I encountered his connection with the, I think it's the People's Party or it's the movement towards a People's Party or something.
They've got a slightly convoluted name.
And I sort of, I went and had a look at their page, which is their website, which is basically, you know, boilerplate and, but it lays out what they say their policies are and things like that.
And I didn't really go into it much further than that, but I heard in passing people talking about controversies and scandals and things like that.
And just recently, actually, there's been this thing on Twitter where the People's Party has been talking about various allegations.
But yeah, if you can give us an introduction to the People's Party.
Yeah, and you know, I was introduced... How did I get there?
I think I think I'd have to say Chris Richards has a presence on Twitter.
He wasn't part of that party, but he does podcasts as well, and he's been interviewing former members for at least a year, that I can tell, and there have been some former members that have come public that I think are okay to mention.
Renee Johnston was a member, and she's been public with With her issues and things that she thought could be improved.
And then there are some other people too that, when they found that I was, you know, asking around about this, messaged me.
And I won't say their names because they didn't say it was okay for consent.
But yeah, you know, I got there from Jimmy Dore as well, you know, and I got to Jimmy Dore from some of these other accounts.
And maybe we'll get there, because that will probably bring us back to Ukraine, of course.
I think it was through those contacts, and so you're correct.
Yeah, Jimmy Dore was very much involved with the People's Party, and he was involved from the get-go.
He's one of the few people, however, who is still involved, and I think it's going to be interesting to see how he navigates this moving forward.
Just a few days ago, there were some lightning tweets occurring from that account.
That involved a sexual assault allegation, and they were pretty grim.
They were private messages between two parties, and one of them is... Yeah, that thread of tweets was disgusting, because they were talking about sexual abuse allegations made against one of their, I suppose, leading members by two separate women, I believe.
And the tweet thread was just this gigantic orgy of victim blaming and rape apologia, essentially, done apparently completely unselfconsciously.
To me, it looks like what you would expect the comments section for a Jimmy Dore video to look like.
Essentially.
Yeah.
And that's, I mean, I think in short, that's what happened to the party.
But, you know, moving back a little bit, yeah, Nick Cabrera is the person that formed this.
And that's for whom these allegations were levied against.
And I can only assume it's him or a close confidant doing this because it looks like, well, it reminds me of Trump Twitter when someone is just, you know, posting over and over and over again, manically.
The private, I mean, yeah.
If people don't know, there were a series of what were text messages and private messages between this one woman in particular, Nick Brennan, that were just sent out publicly, essentially saying that since they were talking after the allegations were made or the date of the alleged assault occurred, that nothing was wrong and everything was on the up and up, which is just atrocious.
But so and that's going to be interesting to see where Jimmy Doerr goes with this because he's been on the advisory council for the People's Party.
He's been involved with it since the beginning back in 2016-2017 when it was a draft Bernie for a People's Party that was its name before a movement for towards the People's Party and now it's People's Party.
I think that the naming convention changed because well one Sanders gave him the cold shoulder so they took his name out of it but Because they actually did achieve ballot access in a few states, so now it's the People's Party.
Yeah, you know, going through that and seeing what was occurring there, I think is a good summary of what the party became.
Initially, it had a lot of hope.
They had a convention back in 2020, I believe, and it included some pretty big names.
Marianne Williamson was involved, Nina Turner, Cornel West, Ryan Knight was there, Jimmy Dore.
Obviously, I don't have access to all those high-profile figures, but if you go on their Twitter feed and you just do a search for People's Party, all the posts seem to end in 2020 as well.
And the only person that's continuing with this is Jimmy Dore.
And he's really in, because over the past few months, the People's Party has also put up a splash on their Twitter page for a background for Dore 2024 People's Party.
And there's been lots of retweets going back and forth between he and them and the whole ecosystem that these folks are involved in.
And so I do wonder how he's going to react to the events that occurred just a few days ago, which are only the tip of the iceberg, to be honest.
So do we know what the rest of the iceberg is?
Of course.
So, I think that there's probably, it's one of these where to begin, and it's a hierarchy, I think, of just horribleness.
But I think at the base level, from what I've gathered from things that have been posted, published from previous members, as well as direct contact with previous members, Is that maybe at the lowest level, the base level, was just that at no point was this organization ever an organization per se.
It was never organized.
Nick Brenner ran it.
His name was on all the founding documents.
It was somewhat of an authoritarian thing where what he said went.
And there is a national Slack, a national, I guess you could say, chapter of communication.
But then there are all these regional chapters as well.
And some of the more outspoken folks have been from New York and Virginia, for instance.
And just basic things that might not seem like a big deal, but like using personal Slack information and your cell phone because the organization, you know, isn't providing that for you.
Not having basic things, team calendar, not having any, you know, meetings per se to help organize or discuss what the ballot access would mean in your state.
And, you know, the thing that I saw with this was these folks were really trying to do something.
I mean, they were upset with the two party system.
Many of them were disenfranchised Sanders voters or people that might have voted Jill Stein and said, well, the Green Party has been doing this forever in the States and they're not making headway.
So they had good intentions and they really put a lot of effort into it.
And it just hasn't gone anywhere.
And so I think the base level is just lack of organization.
And that can be from incompetency, or it could also just be from lack of interest in actually doing what it is that you say you're going to do, as opposed to having this great event with Cornel West and, you know, Nina Turner and all the glam.
And I don't know, but it does seem like with this party that they're big on the splash, but little on the actual work, you know, the canvassing and the door to door and convincing people.
So that's kind of like the base level.
And then listening to the experience of these folks, what they said changed, happened greatly in communication with other members and in the Slack.
And I think that that change coincided with the influence that it seemed like National, or maybe just Nick Brin, I don't know, but the influence that kind of YouTubers, Jimmy Dore in particular, was having on this party.
And by that, I mean, maybe what the new volunteers were like, you know, what they're interested in and things that I heard were people all of a sudden defending Kyle Rittenhouse, you know, people all of a sudden saying COVID is a conspiracy and that anti-lockdown stuff and anti-mask stuff.
And what broke the back for the Virginia chapter, I believe, was the Canadian trucker convoy and Brennan saying, you know, we're going to support this.
And people are saying, no, we're not.
This is a far right reactionary movement.
And I mean, you can try to make it sound like it's populist or something, but, you know, in good faith, how are we supposed to network with people in this area?
When you're saying that we're going to support this trucker convoy, it's going against what it is that we're trying to do at a grassroots level.
It's making it difficult for us when you're mimicking and proliferating reactionary right-wing talking points and events.
At that point, I believe the Virginia chapter just broke apart in protest.
Similar things occurred in New York as well.
That would be Renee Johnston.
She's been very vocal about the lack of support, the lack of infrastructure, but also along with that, everything that was just stated with As the social media presence began creeping in, all of a sudden, on their website, you start seeing Jackson Hinkle.
All of a sudden, on their website, you start seeing Caleb Maupin.
All of a sudden, you start seeing Jimmy Dore with Caleb Maupin, and Jimmy Dore's on the Hinkle Show, the dive, and Hinkle's on his show.
And all of a sudden, all these guys are also on RT Media as well, together.
And so, There's a disenfranchisement there, but what stood out to me, Renee Johnson being a woman of color, is the casual racism in the Slack channel.
And I think that that might have been what did it for her.
And the arguments about whether or not it's appropriate for, you know, white men to be using the N-word, for instance.
But it got to this point in which there was just a mass, you know, everybody left, essentially.
Along with that, also the allegations of, you know, sexual assault against Nick Brenna, too.
And that's kind of where the party's at at the moment.
It seems like the further it's gone down this road, the more and more prolific the YouTube-centered, social media-centered personalities have been involved with the party, too.
And, you know, that's probably a correlation.
You start seeing Jackson Hinkle posting all this stuff about the People's Party.
You start seeing Caleb Malkin talking about the People's Party.
He's at a comedy show.
You start seeing guys from the Grey Zone involved, too.
And I think that the spark that brought it home for me
And this is kind of what I'm working on now for my next project is the beginnings of what were potentially suggested, but now over suggestions or commands of a right-left alliance, this idea that there's a right populism in the United States and a left populism, and that they need to work together somehow to overthrow the corporate entities that are the Democratic Party and the Republican Party.
And You know, Renee Johnson, for instance, speaking with her, I mean, this is class reductionism, of course.
It's taking out any intersectional analysis.
It's white men.
I mean, this is a party of white men in power, and it looks like it.
It sounds like it.
And yeah, so it's all bad.
But, you know, this is where it kind of You know, this is where my ears perk up, is this idea that maybe MAGA is somehow a right populist movement.
You know, I start that, and I'm sure that you probably understand where I'm going.
I mean, this to me sounds a lot like a lot of other things that are in my other videos regarding other countries too.
Yes, indeed.
It sounds like, you know, I mean, the lack of organization Equals a lack of internal democracy.
That's one of the things about political parties, that you need a certain amount of organization and structure so that it can allow for internal democracy, so that it can allow for meetings and resolutions and policies to come, to a certain extent anyway, up from the bottom to affect the
The, the policies at the top, you know, the stated policies and parties that are disorganized like that, that just don't bother to have any sort of effective organizational structure.
And they, I mean, whether it's deliberate or just incompetence, there's a kind of, I think often, you know, they sort of merge into each other.
There's a kind of tactical incompetence that is exercised.
But it kind of robs a party of any possibility for that, doesn't it?
It robs the party of any possibility of the membership exercising a democratic power over the party.
So what you've ended, I think this is like, it sounds from your description, like a classic example of this.
What's happened in the vacuum that that has left, what internal democracy has left, and maybe a lot of the people originally on the ground, you know, making up the original chapters, were people of genuinely good intentions who were coming at this from a left or a progressive A genuine left progressive direction that wanted to get past the stalemate of the two-party system.
As with so many of these things, there is a hefty degree of truth in the analysis.
The two-party system does have a stranglehold on American politics, and the two parties are essentially corporate, etc.
Yes.
I believe that all that is true.
ground.
A lot of these people wanted to get around that.
But what you end up with in this sort of situation where you don't have organization and therefore you don't have any mechanism whereby members can exercise power, you end up with this vacuum and in step, essentially, right-wing opportunists, it sounds like.
Yes.
I believe that all that is true.
The only caveat I would add is that everything that I've said is essentially things that were told to me.
And so it's not necessarily even what I'm saying.
It's It's really what these folks that were involved are saying, and if you go on to the People's Party Twitter page or other social media accounts, you can also see that the events that occurred recently with the sexual allegations, I mean, that's not new.
And that these people that have created, for instance, like an internal petition to say, you know, we're concerned about the direction of the party and we'd like to discuss this, just getting purged and waking up the next morning and not having access to the Slack channel, for instance.
Yeah.
And then going on social media and there was a whole event that occurred where these folks were labeled democratic infiltrators.
And just a whole slew of people were just purged.
I mean, just lost access to all their accounts and information.
So yeah, I mean, I think everything that you said is accurate.
And it's not like it's something that needs to be proved.
I mean, it's just, it is what it is.
Um, you know, the question I suppose in the broader is, you know, how much of what so how much of this is, you know, maybe shared at the top level nationally?
Or is this all Nick Brenna?
Or is this Jimmy Dore on the advisory committee to directing this?
No, but yeah, you know, it's, it's, it's hard to As you said, with the two-party system, that's true.
With many of these topics, there's always some kernel of truth, and that's how it makes sense.
How can you convince an African-American woman Who has three children and who is single, that you should vote for this party when that party doesn't even have access to the ballot in most states, you know?
Yeah.
But you're also demonizing this person because they vote Democrat, say.
You know, that's an issue, right?
And so it's okay to talk about issues and problems.
Everything that's said about the Democratic Party is true, right?
But however, When what you're proposing is something that is completely inadequate to address that, and then demonizing people who go against that, then that's an issue.
And I mean, I think that that also gets to that other thing with these over, you know, suggestions of alliance between right and left, and how that's extremely problematic.
Yeah, it's the fundamental problem with that sort of, the parties are the same, so boycott them both, and if you don't withdraw your support from the Democrats, we'll never have anything better, we'll never be able to, that sort of thing.
That's, I mean, there is a degree of truth to a lot of the underlying ideas there, but it's very easy for certain people to say, you know, vote for none of the above.
And it's much harder for certain other people who are much more on the sharp end of what's going to happen if their local Republican candidate wins to take that view.
And if people come in and say from their positionality to, for instance, a woman of colour in a In a place where she's likely to be directly affected by a Republican win, don't vote Democrat.
That is extraordinarily tone deaf, particularly if you then go on to start telling her that she's a traitor to the working class or something like that.
Yeah yeah yeah and you know it's it's it's that with with this party you know and and I think when we say it's easy for some people I mean I think it's easy for Jimmy Dore for instance to go on a show and call everyone idiots and people uh etc etc uh but you know it's it's also easy to say that We need to break this corporate, whatever terms, catchphrases you want to use, duopoly, etc.
And to do so, we're going to have this populist movement.
I mean, what does that mean?
What are we talking about?
And I know a lot of these folks want to go back to Fred Hampton and stuff, but I think that in the real world, using that same example, what you're also asking that same individual to do is to say, also, we're going to align with people that were MAGA, for instance, and voted for Donald Trump, and this is how we're going to overcome the system.
And I just don't understand that.
No.
But you were saying we're seeing a lot more of...
There's a lot more connection now between the People's Party and people like Caleb Maupin and Jackson Hinkle.
I was fascinated when I was watching, for instance, the video that Caleb Maupin did with Jimmy Dore about the Bread Tube is funded by the CIA, that video, that ridiculous video, and Caleb goes off on his
Marxist rhetoric, you know, about what fascism is and about how bread tubers aren't real socialists because X, Y, and Z. And Jimmy's obviously not interested.
He just wants Caleb Maupin there so that Caleb Maupin can nod and say, yes, Jimmy, when Jimmy says, well, these other YouTubers that I've got a grudge against, they're paid by the CIA, aren't they?
You know, that's his interest.
But Caleb Maupin sort of goes off into these side tracks about how, you know, the Synthetic Left and the Bread Tube Left, etc., they're not really socialists, they're not really Marxists, etc., because they don't want proper socialism, they want things like workers' cooperatives.
And that made me laugh, you know, because Jimmy Dore is associated with the People's Party, and workers' cooperatives are one of the things in their manifesto.
Right.
So yeah, I'm fascinated by this alliance, you know?
Yeah, I mean, Caleb's in there.
He's in there.
I talked about him briefly in the NASBAL video.
And to be quite honest, it wasn't necessarily to do like an expose on him.
It was more to kind of bridge this, you know, global gap between someone in Russia, you know, writing books and Alexander Dugin and what's happening on social media in the United States.
Yeah.
But, uh, I mean, I mentioned, I might've talked about him for a few minutes and sure enough, I received a DM from, from a mutual actually saying, Hey, you know, he did a reaction video.
I mean, I'm, you know, I'm a person with the free Zoom subscription, I guess, and I come from an academic background with maybe 100 followers right now on YouTube.
So, I mean, it seemed a little almost off-kilter to do what you did, but even within that reaction, it was alleging that I was with some non-profit organization that I had just cited that was getting money from George Soros.
I mean, to the point to where he was so off kilter, I was like, you know, maybe I'm going to just not do anything more on him.
This reaction is a bit over the top for what it is that I even put out there.
But yeah, I mean, it's just, I'll say this about him.
So whatever it is I'm researching, I mean, and I do mean whatever, whether it's talking about white helmet stuff in Syria, Or Ukraine, or Jimmy Dore.
He is just always there.
I'll give him credit for that.
He is well populated across the internet.
But yeah, with these, you know, with these suggestions of alliances and things, I'm looking at some tweets that I have here.
I like using YouTube because I like being able to put together these montages of things, you know, and I'm looking at one now that just goes, that spans even including, you know, Glenn Greenwald talking about the populist left, the populist right.
Jackson Hinkle saying, liberals keep proving that MAGA supporters are our allies.
You know, MAGA tankies with the handshake thing.
Caleb retweeting, all these liberals want me, a Marxist-Leninist, to believe conservative Americans are the enemy, but we keep agreeing with each other on everything.
It's, I mean, it's very prevalent, you know.
And then looking at what Jimmy Dore does, you know, because you can, you know, talk is talk, but what do you do?
And, you know, he's all over Tucker Carlson, a guy that talks about white replacement theory openly, no problem, you know.
a funnel to the mainstream from literal, you know, storm from message boards type things.
And, you know, incidentally, a lot of these recycled topics, things that you talked about on the Jimmy Dwarf show, you know, Ukrainian bio labs, for instance, you go into, you know, yeah, if there are tools that you can use, you know, You can look at where these terms are at and, you know, hey, Jimmy Dore did something on Biolabs and all of a sudden it's spiking on Gab and ApeCrew and 4chan and BitTube video and Stormfront as well, you know.
These things are recycled through these ecosystems as well.
So you can make this public over thing saying, yeah, you know, MAGA are allies or something, but It doesn't, even without that, disinformation is still being shared amongst all these people in agreement.
Are they actually, like Maupin and Hinkle and that whole sort of, what are they called, the Centre for Political Innovation, do they have an actual material connection to the People's Party, or are they just sort of pilot fish on this thing?
I don't know.
I don't know if, for instance, they have a seat on the advisory council, but tweets are retweeted and shared.
They're on the website.
You can go on the website and the names are there, for instance.
So I can't honestly say.
For sure, what they have to do with the hierarchy of the organization in terms of participating in it.
But there's definitely propaganda around it.
And I think it's probably less to... I mean, at this point, it's what is the People's Party, you know?
But I think it's less to do with that than it is to do with Jimmy Dore, being quite honest, and just their association with him and the media circuit that exists for this crowd and the fact that they're all in each other's shows.
I think the People's Party is just another platform for that at this point, to be honest.
So it really is that opportunistic leaping on this as a vehicle, very much the same way that, well, I mean, that video where Jimmy Dore had Caleb on to talk about, you know, BreadTube being a tool of the American national security state, that very much had the feel of two people using each other for what they could get from each other in that moment.
Yes.
I stammer when I say this, because this is one of the questions I have, and I kind of stopped asking it because you'll never know.
The word grift is used often to describe this kind of thing.
And, you know, how much of it is being opportunistic?
How much of it is ideological?
How much of it might be Caleb who might have an underlying ideology saying, well, I can use D.O.R.E.
to proliferate this for a greater cause or something?
Like, I really don't know.
But I mean, I do find it funny that there is this alternative media that people look for truth.
And when you get, when you see what it truly is, it's a handful of people that essentially mimics mainstream media circuit too.
As if I wrote a book, I'm going to go on ABC and CBS, it's the same thing.
I'm going to go on RT and Jimmy Dore and The Die of Jackson Hinkle.
And it's the same circle, you know, it's just not produced as well.
And the irony I always think when I watch them is that in their way they are, it's not just formally that they mimic the mainstream corporate liberal centrist media, you know I'm putting all this in sort of air quotes, not because it's entirely wrong but because the way they talk about it is ridiculously simplistic etc.
It's not just that they formally mimic that system, it's also that in some ways their content mimics that system because You know, I've always thought that the strange thing about reactionaries is that the way they talk about liberalism, they're kind of, in some way, they're kind of incredibly credulous about what liberalism says, liberalism's own boasts for itself.
And the whole sort of project of being quote-unquote anti-imperialist in the way these people are, so often seems to boil down to just a complete rejection of anything that America does.
Which is, as other people have said, it's a kind of a reverse American exceptionalism.
The entire approach seems based on very much the same kinds of underlying assumptions that they claim to reject and that they criticize, just kind of inverted.
Well, yeah.
And I mean, I think that, too, I mean, I kind of with the People's Party, I think that you could say that with them as well, you know, that that there's all this there's all this talk about the two parties talking about Medicare for all and this and that.
But then when you actually see what it is and what they're asking of people and what they're really providing for people, realistically, it's very much so.
How are you better?
I mean, how can you solve these issues?
And the resolutions, again, if you're certain people, don't sound that great.
But I think that there is a tie with this, if you're talking about these anti-imperialists.
But I think there's a gap with it.
Because with the People's Party, truthfully, the ideological main thing that I heard was the introduction of conspiracy theories and And all these folks that we just talked about using reactionary right-wing conspiracies to, most likely, I can't read their minds, for algorithms and to boost views and to cross-pollinate, you know, audiences, etc.
But along with that, really this idea of economic reductionism and just pushing aside LGBTQ rights or women or people of color and having a more intersectional view of a reality of what's happening.
And with alt-imperialists, like what you just said, there's like a base, I think, critique.
And a lot of it happened from what I've seen beginning maybe like 2015, 2016, but really ramping up with accusations of the Assad regime in Syria.
And it initially seemed like two things.
One, these people are just inverting things, you know, that they're just they're defending an authoritarian government that's committing human rights violations just because they're against the U.S., you know, and that's that's either their ideology or their shtick, you know, that they're just against the United States no matter what.
But also with these two, most of these people claim, not all of them, but most of them claim to be socialists or communists or something of some sort, leftists.
And there's also this kind of critique, too, of this saying, well, I mean, the governments that you're supporting aren't even necessarily, you know, socialists or communist governments either.
I mean, especially if we're talking about something like Russia.
But they have all these major, major issues that put them very far away from, you know, what would be orthodox Marxism.
And I think maybe the gap missing there, and this is my opinion, but With that type of critique, I think it's easy to maneuver around, because that's not necessarily exactly what's at play.
I think more what's at play is less about concerns over, like, for instance, Caleb Malpin being an orthodox Marxist or something, but getting more back into or restarted with Ukraine and these ideas of fourth political theory, say, you know, or Eurasianism.
And that gets back into Russia, of course, and no one wants to hear that, because I think anybody who's slightly left the center just thinks about the election with Bernie Sanders and, you know, just assumes that this is a Democrat complaining about Russia.
But it's true, and there's an ideology behind that that is not economic-based, it's cultural-based.
And the proliferation of the use of anti-imperialism, anti-globalism, can take a traditionalist and conservative view as well.
And that's really where I'm looking at in this next video, that it does include Doerr, but it includes Doerr by Get to This Eventually, because I think it's somewhat connected, you know, in this idea, but that traditional critiques, I think, of these anti-imperialists might be missing the point slightly, that it's not about being orthodox Marxists or being equal when it comes to critiquing the US as maybe Syria, for instance, or Russia or whomever.
But that there is this ideology behind it that's kind of not economic, but cultural, and that abuses of human rights might not necessarily conflict with that, if that makes sense.
And I think an example of that would be something, I tweeted this out today, something when I suffered through reading Dugan's work.
One of the main takeaways, or something that made me kind of, you know, okay, I get it, is at one point in fourth position theory, he essentially says that any universal is imperialist, any universal is chauvinist.
And so I'm thinking to myself, and later he proves it, so therefore, if I believe in universal human rights, I'm a Western chauvinist.
And this is how you end up in these places.
I think more so than looking, you know, are these people Marxists?
Why are they defending this regime?
You can talk about Marxism, you can talk about campism, I think those have a place.
You can talk about national Bolshevism, I think Dugin copies a lot from that, but at the end of the day, it's this fourth position worldview of to attempt to assert your views on people, regardless of what they are, is in itself an act of... you're a globalist.
You're an imperialist, essentially.
So, yeah, I mean, I think the term campism I think applied to people that I've called, in this episode I've called the so-called anti-imperialist left, and you used the term alt-imperialist, which I think is very good.
Campism, I think, is okay as a description because it describes Something which is essentially true about them, which is that they do sort of, they have this kind of crude geopolitical analysis, which is based upon, you know, it's like, you know, they view world politics as like a game of chess, you know, between different sides, etc, etc.
So that's fine.
But it doesn't really get to the root of it, and I think also reducing it to calling them tankies.
Firstly, a lot of them aren't.
A lot of them don't call themselves Marxists or Marxist-Leninists or whatever.
Speaking as a Marxist myself, that is something that I could talk about at length, but we'll put that aside.
It's not anything like what I think, but I think it rhymes with old-fashioned Western Stalinism.
I mean, there's a wonderful quote Orwell has about people like that who In his view, what they've done is they've sort of relocated patriotism and jingoism and nationalism and so on away from their own country, because being that way about their own country is kind of embarrassing, and they've relocated it on to Russia.
And it's allowed them to essentially keep the same essentially reactionary habits of thought while seeming radical, and I think there's a lot of that in these people as well, as a description.
But it still doesn't really get to the root of it.
And I think you would see it ultimately tracking back to Dugin's project of Eurasianism, wouldn't you?
I would, and this is just my take.
I have found my way here, so it's not something that I didn't even know much about Dugan two years ago, but I think that you're right.
And when you get involved with these communities, I mean, they fracture, of course, and you can talk about You know, Romanov, Marxist conglomerations, and many different things, you know?
Campism, I think, is a good one to throw out there because it's basic.
I think it's like the first thing that people notice, but as you said, it doesn't resolve anything.
It's just an observation.
It's a description, not an explanation, yeah.
Yeah, and I've seen people attempt to talk about Trotsky, talk about Marxism and these, you know, saying, well, you just defend whatever it is, because it's not Western capitalism, per se, you know, and, you know, and there might be a little bit to that, but that's also incorporated into fourth position theory as well.
But it's, there's more than that.
It's not just it's, it's explicitly not economic, it's explicitly not a political program.
It's more A reaction against something and the reaction that it's being against is what you call, I guess, Western liberalism.
But in so doing that, yes, you are anti-globalist because, you know, you're against NATO.
Maybe you're against the United Nations.
You're against global capitalism.
And maybe you are anti-imperialist because you say the United States is wrong for invading Iraq.
But At the core, the solution is not to proliferate human rights or for mutual aid.
At the core, this is a traditionalistic conservative movement.
And really, when you look at some other works, talking about Eurasianism, it's a method or justification for, really, Russia to expand its sphere of influence into the greater Eurasia, that includes Ukraine.
So, There's some of the propaganda involved, and I think when you look at maybe like Oliver Stone, and he's straight up interviewing Vladimir Putin, you can say, okay, so that's like some geopolitical stuff right there.
You know, I get that, that's propaganda.
But I think in the rejection of this notion of homogeny, and I think that that's maybe the key, more than economics.
is a rejection of global homogeny and the idea that fighting that creates freedom and sovereignty.
But again, that sounds good, but what if the homogeny that you're discussing are human rights?
Or the rights of LGBTQ members?
Or the right for a woman to have access to have an abortion, you know, and that those things aren't necessarily explicitly discussed, just like they aren't for people that defended the Assad regime or defends, you know, Putin or North Korea and what have you.
The justifications might be different.
I don't know.
Maybe these people do subscribe to different ideologies.
But at the end of the day, I think the global phenomenon, you know, where you have people like Steve Bannon running around and tying into the United States or what have you, it is cultural.
I don't think it's necessarily economic.
And that's why even in the video that Caleb was featured in that everybody likes to share with Dugan, Dugan moves away from some of these older phrases and moves to populism.
And I do think that it is this right kind of like populist reaction against this seemingly for homogeneous globalization, right?
However, what it is that you're attempting to assert might be trying to help people too.
Well, I think we can understand the basis of a rejection of what could be seen as Western liberal values in Russia, given the incredibly traumatic social consequences of the transition during the 90s from the old Soviet economic system to essentially one maybe not
Maybe imposed is a bit too strong, but a certainly Western-guided transition to a more market and private capitalism.
The repercussions of that and the social trauma of that were incredible, and I say that without defending the previous Soviet system.
But I think what you... I mean, maybe this is me being a bit reductive, but I find Dugin's... I mean, what is it?
The fourth political theory, isn't it?
The book's called.
I find that really quite... it's quite thin stuff.
I mean, I don't think he really... he doesn't seem to take economics into account at all.
And the fourth theory is... it's quite nebulous.
I mean, the first theory is like, The first theory is liberalism, the second theory is socialism or Marxism, and the third theory is fascism.
And they've all failed.
So we're left now with the fourth theory, which is question mark, question mark, question mark.
And what it seems to be is a very... it just seems to me to just resolve basically down to quite old-fashioned reactionary Complaints, you know, dressed up in quite fancy clothes.
And it comes down to a kind of... it amounts to basically a defense of reactionary social values and a logic of Russian expansion or hegemony.
And that seems to be about it, as far as I can tell.
Yeah, and you know, it's interesting, too, with him, because he's someone that people quickly dismiss, and I understand why.
But I feel like he's a great influence, even if he is not.
His ideas have proliferated to the point in which people might be seeing them and using them, perhaps, without even understanding where it is that they came from, per se.
But even back with the actual National Bolshevist political party with Edward Levinoff and him, they were both critical of Putin originally, and they saw him as continuing everything that you said.
And you're right.
And, you know, prior to that with Yeltsin and the economic collapse and the consolidation with oligarchs, it's all the worst of capitalism, you know, and that's true.
But it's interesting, especially near the end of of Limonov's life, and then when Dugin really started to get some mainstream attention and ascension into some power, was how they turned, both of them, and by that time they had split, but how they turned to support Putin when Putin's foreign policy began to change.
And I believe that that probably occurred with the issue with Georgia, I suppose, but then later Crimea, especially.
And it's because the underlying ideologies that these fellows were involved in, and many of them were illogical, of course, but, you know, many of them were essentially based in some type of, I use the word reactionary because I don't want to say fascist, right, but in some extreme right-wing thing that involved not only culture but also race, and this idea that
There are these artificial lines drawn in the sand in that region, you know, and that this greater Novorossiya concept, or that this greater territorial entity should exist, and that's been artificially divided.
And there's lots of really bad conspiracies involved with that, including some things about the U.S.
and, you know, Western homogeny, but anti-Semitism as well, and it really, you know, goes down that road.
Well, many of the extremist organizations in that area, R.I.M.
for instance, or Russian Unity, all these affiliated Eurasian groups, Eurasian Youth Movement, etc.
are essentially just promoting ethnostates.
And so, you know, it's when Putin began to show the will for extraterritorial expansion that these folks started saying, oh, he's not just Yeltsin.
And maybe we have something in common with this.
And what we have in common is this, well, this really far right kind of idea of territorial gain and ethnicity and race.
Yeah, and also the deeply reactionary domestic social policy as well.
The revival of religion in public life, which again, Dugin strikes me as almost mystical.
A lot of it is so immaterial that it's almost mystical, and that seems to chime very much with the with the Putin regime's resurrection of religion as something really to be not just protected, but enforced culturally and socially.
I've tried, and I'll try again, but I will admit that when Dugan starts going down that road, sometimes I lose.
I don't know what road I'm on anymore.
But even with those avenues of of say mysticism or these you know old traditional religions and stuff that that plays into all of these on on the ground organizations that you know kind of alluded to r.i.m was a big one russian imperial movements but many of these have these kind of mystical ties to some type of you
And in doing research about the extremists from Russia and Donbass very early on in Ukraine invasion, that certainly existed.
And there were some documented, you know, white power, white nationalists, people from all over the world that were involved in some of those organizations that were very early into Donbass Through these paramilitaries.
So there's a connection there.
You know, there's a thread there saying, again, getting back to the economics of like, oh, Putin's not a communist.
I mean, look at the Russian Federation and what it is and what it has been.
So, you know, how are all these people supporting him?
And it's because it's not necessarily about that.
It's about these other things.
Yeah, and very key is, as I say, the reactionary traditionalist social and cultural attitudes towards things like LGBTQ plus people, and gay marriage, and abortion, and all this sort of reactionary stuff that is very much on the rise again, even in the West.
And I think Putin is definite.
I mean, this is one of the things that I wish we could get people to understand, that Putin is one of the global figureheads of a reactionary cultural and ideological revival.
And I think, yeah, that sort of reactionary, traditional, mystic, social attitude that comes from It doesn't come originally from Dugin, obviously, but comes from that tendency, shall we say, in the Russian power bloc, whatever you want to call it.
And it chimes directly with...
Anybody that looks at Caleb Maupin for 10 minutes... I mean, he calls himself a Christian, and of course that doesn't necessarily make him a reactionary.
You know, I have Christian friends who aren't reactionaries.
There's no necessary connection there.
But there is an awful lot of reactionary Christianity out there, what some people call Christofascism.
And he's definitely a reactionary Christian.
He definitely has reactionary social attitudes.
The infamous tweet, you know, if you're against gay marriage and against abortion, you know, I might disagree with you.
Yeah, you might, but you're still my comrade.
Well, that amounts to essentially getting into bed with people with those attitudes, and I don't think his attitude is how he portrays himself anyway.
Yeah, and I mean, again, I mean, I think that's a good example of maybe, like, implementing a Dugan-esque multi-polarity world, right?
That I might disagree with you, but we're okay.
You might commit genocide against people, but, you know, that's your culture.
As long as you, like me, are opposed to the liberalism that entails things like abortion and gay marriage and trans rights, then we can get on.
Right.
Yes.
And I mean, and there's a question with that, too.
And this also kind of goes back to the folks that aren't so involved with this, like a Jimmy Dore or something, of questioning, you know, why is the center always with liberalism?
Right.
Why is the center of discussion always focused on critique of neoliberalism as opposed to other things as well?
But it's interesting what you said with Putin, too, because I also wouldn't want to come across as being something pro-American or something like pro, you know, bashing Putin or this or that.
That's not it at all.
And I say critique America, critique American imperialism, you know, but also do so with other parties as well.
What you said about this conservative kind of movement, I mean, I think that that is the rebellion, in a way, that that right populist denial of whatever it is that comes of this Western homogeny is the fourth political theory, and how that develops is going to be regional in his idea, and that he has no control over that.
But that's the point, right, is the sovereignty and ownership of that, which again can result in, well, racism and bigotry and all these horrible things, too.
But how I even kind of going further back, how I even got there was looking at Putin through that lens and remembering when he really started to become popular in the United States.
And that was really with the Barack Obama regime.
And I went back and I was looking at that, and I remember some very sketchy conversations about people in the United States that had never left their hometown saying they had more in common with this Russian autocrat than they do with the President of the United States.
And they shared one thing in common, and I think we know what that was.
But looking back... Tucker Carlson fairly recently trying to resurrect exactly that kind of attitude with his, well, Putin never did this, that, and the other, to me, speech.
Right.
I just, searching, I found a blog from, and this will be a blast from the past probably, Pat Buchanan.
Who was just, you know, at one point, just on the fringe of the Republican Party.
He was a dirty name.
He wasn't as bad as David Duke, but you didn't want him in the picture, you know, or you didn't want him on the debate stage.
He was talking a lot about things that, I mean, Trump was kind of openly saying now on immigration, etc.
But he had a blog post, it's still up on his website, and the title of it is, Is Putin One of Us?
And reading through that, and I don't honestly recall a date off the top of my head, but it's old now, a decade plus, going down the list of Putin is a Christian, Putin is a traditionalist, Putin does not give in to, they didn't use the term wokeism at that time, but back then feminism was a big thing, you know?
Putin doesn't do that.
So attacking everything essentially that was anything left of center in the United States and saying, you know, Putin doesn't do that, therefore I'm more in common with him and I'm in a global right alliance with him than I am with Barack Obama, who is, and then go down the list of, you know, however, how horrible you want to get.
Right.
But that was very interesting to seeing.
At that time, that's kind of the rise of this Dugan stuff too, culturally, and extraterritorial expansion as well, that was, you know, kind of happening there.
So, that was an aha moment too, seeing someone like Pat Buchanan in the United States, you know, far predating stuff that we saw with the Trump regime and Bannon, etc.
Yeah, that was something that I found really clarifying to me in, I can't remember off the top of my head which of your videos it was, but I watched the video where you talked about this, and I found it very clarifying where you went through that sudden switch in attitudes on the American right towards Putin, and it really does, because George W. Bush has a fairly cozy relationship with Putin, but there's no great right-wing appeal to Putin at that time.
And then you get into the Obama years, and the switchover begins, where it's part of that...
Obviously, you know, you can't put the origins of anything that's going on now into, you know, you can't say, right, it started here, you know, and put an exact date on it.
But I think, you know, a huge amount of the reactionary upswing that we're seeing now in so many spots, it begins to gain incredible momentum during the Obama years for various reasons.
You know, the Tea Party is like version 1.0 of of QAnon, etc, etc.
And yeah, it was fascinating.
It was very clarifying to me that that really, that right wing, you know, flirtation with Putin begins in the Obama years.
It really did, you know, and I think that, and you know, it's nothing that I can say I've done research on, but I mean, just understanding the more modern American rights, say, you know, since like the 1990s or so.
You didn't have this, at least not nearly as much, in the 90s, and I think the 90s are really important.
I've done this in the past and it doesn't get as many views, but I just feel that what happened to the right in the 90s is extremely important, with the Patriot Movement specifically.
And the militarization of it, the militias that occurred, and all these small branches of ideologies that were breaking off from Christianity, and these figures, Timothy McVeigh and Eric Rudolph, that people don't really talk about, you know, as huge American terrorists that murdered hundreds and hundreds of people that were, you know, on FBI watch lists.
It's almost as if they don't exist anymore.
In that whole culture, you didn't have this, like, oh, look at what Russia's doing.
And perhaps it's because, you know, it's a different time.
But it really did occur with the Obama era, you know, and I have no problem saying I'm sure that race is involved with that, you know, and that the conspiracy theories involving, you know, race kind of branched out from there.
And it was also, I think, coincided with the internet and the advent of social media and how these conspiracies spread.
It was that era where you began to see this movement away from aligning with, that the American left is an enemy from within, essentially, right?
And that as opposed to aligning with fellow countrymen who I have political disagreements with, I'm now ideologically, religiously more in tune with this abstract global populist right reactionary movement idea.
And Russia was very much at the forefront of that.
Basically, I think what Dugan is saying is very dressed up and theatrically claiming that.
In doing that, you're being anti-imperialist and you're being anti-globalist, right?
Because the globalists and the imperialists are Western liberals.
I think it can get as basic and silly as that.
Yeah, indeed.
I think maybe to just sort of indulge in amateur theorizing, I think part of it is also the quote-unquote failure of neoconservatism in the early to mid-2000s, where you have the War on Terror, which Almost immediately after the invasion of Iraq, it starts to go wrong, you know, it starts to fail.
Of course, you know, a lot of the American corporations that engaged in the feeding frenzy on Iraq's economy and infrastructure, it went fine for them.
But in the political sense, it was certainly seen, it was perceived as a failure, you know.
Certainly the ideology of humanitarian intervention goes into crisis.
So the whole neoconservative project, which has been dominant, it is dominant from George W. Bush's Election, but it's also, you know, it's been incredibly influential up till then, but then it falls into crisis.
So you have this kind of opening of the space for a more grassroots, ground-up form of reactionary politics, which actually rejects many of the core tenets of neoconservatism.
I mean, Famously, neoconservatism and paleoconservatism or paleolibertarianism, they are antagonistic.
So I think the failure of the one leads maybe to the flourishing of the other.
Oh, I completely agree.
And also, I do think, to maybe give some credence to a critique on Democrats, I think it was a failure of neoconservativism.
You can find examples of that in Eric Rudolph's prison writings.
I wouldn't suggest anyone go look for them because they're on a website hosted by Army of God, which is a terrorist organization.
But I did get access to them regardless.
And essentially, you know, he was saying the reasons for why he committed the terrorist acts are because he had no political representation, you know, that there was no political in that time in the 1990s.
But I also think, too, to be fair, I think that there is some success in the New Democrat movement, you know, in third-way politics within the Democratic Party and taking a lot of those neoconservative votes away, quite honestly.
You know, people that might be in the suburbs that had voted for Reagan that saw someone like, you know, Bill Clinton and said, well, you know, he seems reasonable.
And went that way.
So I think that you can equally say neocons failed, but perhaps the third way New Democrats succeeded at taking a lot of those suburban votes away, some of those more moderate votes away from the Reagan coalition, maybe that had existed too.
Yeah, and Obama is, you know, in addition to the racial dynamics, Obama is kind of the ultimate expression of that democratic strategy in its successful mode, I suppose.
And also, it's another way in which any potential momentum for anything further left to the Democrats Any further momentum for that is cut away, which leaves again a gap in which very analogous to, in a funny way, the way the democratic gap inside the People's Party maybe left room for this sort of right-wing entryism or right-wing opportunism.
It leaves room for that, because if you are drawing on an ideology that sees liberalism as the great enemy, and associates liberalism with its claims for itself about bringing tolerance and diversity and human rights and so on,
And then you want to reject liberalism for various reasons, whether it's your disillusion with the neoliberal capitalist economy, or it's just your distaste for modern progressive values or gay people or whatever, or some combination of the two.
You are left fundamentally with that, and we see it over and over again, the conflation of the left with liberalism, as if it's all just, that's all there is, the liberalism as far left as it goes and there's nothing else.
Then you're left with nothing but the rejection of liberalism then, aren't you?
So if you want anything different, then you are left with essentially nowhere to go but into this kind of sometimes left-flavored but essentially reactionary kind of politics, which is kind of exactly what we see in the Jimmy Dawes and the Glenn Greenwalds and the Caleb Maupins, that whole tendency.
And to, I mean, being quite honest, if I were 16 years old and I were on Twitter, I could very much see myself, you know, getting wrapped up in this too.
And that's honestly why I, you know, that is why I do these videos.
And you'll see if you navigate to the channel there, some of them are extremely long, but, you know, it's not so much that like, you know,
F. Jimmy Dore, or if we talk about Caleb Maupin, or Jackson Hinkle, or Vladimir Putin, it's more just how so many people, like what you just described, how so many people can be susceptible to that and get sucked into it, and how there legitimately is some culpability from the major political parties, including the Democrat Party, in creating that space.
But also being cognizant and measuring the reaction to that reality that I have as a white middle-class man, to the realities of electoralism and what currently exists in the United States, and understanding that the lesser of two evils isn't necessarily bad for some people because those evils very much directly impact them.
Right, so it's this constant balancing between the two of, you know, this is what it is, and so I'm not going to say everybody who does this is bad.
However, it is true that the Democratic Party does have some global building creating this space as well.
Yeah, absolutely.
I mean, I'm no fan of the Democratic Party, but I mean, ultimately, You can have as many opinions as you like, but you have to base them in fact, you know?
And if you find yourself having to do essentially what Jimmy Dore does every time on his show, or Glenn Greenwald or Oliver Stone in that movie, if you find yourself...
They've just reversed themselves.
They've just inverted themselves.
And I completely understand the distaste for neoliberalism.
I completely understand the distaste for the Democratic Party, the manifold hypocrisies, and so on and so forth.
I get that.
But if you allow you to lead that to the point where Like Glenn Greenwald, you're kind of just doing what you beheld, but in reverse.
Literally, with the Ukraine Biolabs thing, they were literally just credulously repeating imperialist government propaganda about weapons of mass destruction that didn't exist.
So they're doing exactly what What people did when they parroted the Bush administration's rubbish about WMD in Iraq, and they're apparently completely unconscious of the fact that they have become the thing that they behold.
So, and I think that's, you know, not to be too empiricist about it, but I think that is kind of where you just let yourself go if you allow ideology to lead you and a priori assumptions to lead you, and you don't You don't bother referring to facts at any stage.
You don't stop yourself and say, hang on a minute, this thing I'm saying is patently ridiculous.
Yeah, and it goes back to that question.
Are they looking at the return on their monthly Google Analytics to see what hit?
Is it making more money?
Are they getting on RT, which is also a mainstream media outlet, and getting paid for this?
Or is there some ideology behind this too?
I mean, do they agree with, you know, anti-globalization, you know, being this idea of being against homogeny, regardless of what?
I don't know.
So it's, you know, that's up to whomever is looking at it to decide.
But there is, at the very base level, there's this inversion.
And that's the most basic.
And then it's, you know, well, why?
And is it ideological?
Is it because to them it doesn't matter?
There's a greater good that's being involved, and everybody's horrible, including the United States, in this, you know, nihilistic view of the world?
Or is it because that's what gets more money?
I think there is a certain amount of Machiavellian utilitarianism about it.
You say what is going to hurt your main enemy the most, and the main enemy in the eyes of a lot of these people is the American government.
So that's what you focus on.
And I think, in and of itself, that's not bad political strategy.
You focus on your main enemy and you focus on their weakest spots.
So, if you think your main enemy is the American government, then you're going to focus on liberal or imperialist rhetoric that comes out of it, and the liberal media.
But the underlying assumption is wrong, I think.
And also, I think it's I think this thing about, you know, do they mean it?
Is it a grift or is it ideological conviction?
I think so often, and this sounds a bit like woo-woo, but to me it kind of always ends up being two sides of the same thing.
And I think the thing that it's two sides of is positionality.
I think it really does ultimately come down to the class position.
Like I was saying about that thing where the bio labs thing is kind of an inversion of You know, Glenn Greenwald is kind of doing an inversion of what mainstream liberal news commentators did in the early 2000s with government misinformation about Iraq.
I think, you know, Glenn is doing his own version of that.
At least, you know, I think ultimately it comes down to the fact that he is, in his own way, just another media business professional.
I mean, Jimmy Dore certainly is.
Jimmy Dore likes to present himself as this outsider.
You know, his shtick is that he's a comedian doing a show from his garage.
But he's actually a very rich man who has, you know, staff and lots of money behind him producing a media franchise.
So, do they believe it, or is it just a grift?
Well, the answer to that is kind of, yes.
You know what I mean?
Or does it matter?
Yeah.
Yeah.
And it's something that a former member of the People's Party confided in me, because I wanted to understand the environment, and it was everything that you would think.
Again, the environment seems like a comment section to a Jimmy Dore tweet, but one thing that struck me with what they said was that they're from a rural area in the United States and they said, you know, the way that the People's Party started talking about outreach and the way that it coincided with some of the things that Jimmy Dore, for instance, was saying, it seemed like
A person who is not from the country, who is not of the working or lower class, trying to like project what it is they think that that is.
And that's why it looks like a caricature of itself.
It's almost as if they read Ropes of Wrath or something, and then to kind of spit this out and said, oh, well, that's MAGA.
All these white men in the Rust Belt that have been left behind, you know?
And that kind of superficial Who knows what the intentions are, good or bad, but whatever the intention of creating that, but that it was this kind of superficial outsider view of it, and that she felt that immediately, and that this critique was almost insulting, or equally as off-base as the coastal elites for which they braille against.
Yeah, absolutely.
Again, it's like their version of the same thing that is done by the people that they attack.
You know, there were certain sections of the mainstream, you could say liberal media, which did, you know, the response to Trump and Trumpism was sort of this constant going on safari to talk to these exotic specimens in the wild.
And it's always, you know, we need to understand Trumpism, so what do we do?
We go and talk to the The economically anxious white working class.
Well, that, you know, that does bespeak a certain amount of elitist disdain, not to mention, you know, huge just empirical misprisions about Trumpism's actual social base.
But yeah, they're just doing their own version of that, aren't they?
They're kind of, they're doing a sort of, like the Steve Buscemi meme, you know, how do you do fellow working classes?
Yes, yeah.
And I think that the thing that, I don't know if it was due to the course of research or if it just happened, but the thing that so far, and it's limited, I don't have too many videos, they're pretty lengthy though, that does tie them together though, is something along those lines.
And it's the back and forth and the interplay of, is this propaganda?
Is this ideology?
Looking at, you know, what we just described, you could say that Ernest Niekes talked about in Germany, you know, or that Patel's Communist or Bolshevik Manifesto discusses making overtures to the Volk, the working class.
And I mean, like, there's some ideology there that you could look at.
But do these people even know that?
I don't know, right?
So that's the back and forth.
Or does it matter?
Are they looking at their analytic reports after spending a certain amount on their ads and saying, okay, this brings back the grace return?
Who knows?
Yeah, I don't think they need to know, do they?
I don't think Jimmy needs to know about the history of national Bolshevism or anything like that.
I don't think Glenn Greenwald needs to have read Dugan's The Fourth Political Theory.
They come out with stuff that echoes that stuff, or their work ends up very much in alignment with it, at least in effect.
And I think it's because they're coming from a, well, as I say, it's a similar It's a similar class position, and a similar political position, sort of leads them inexorably into those sorts of channels, where they chime with politics that, well, I mean, you know, the association with Morpin is kind of like an actual, real-life demonstration of that process happening, isn't it, I think?
Yes.
Yeah, no, it's true.
And even as you're speaking, and I'm thinking in my mind again of like, You know, these people, I'm sure, don't sit down and read, you know, 1930s interplay and social democrats in Germany.
But, you know, I'm looking at the Jimmy Dore show one year ago, populist right and left joining forces against establishments.
And isn't that kind of like the caricature of all that?
You know, you don't really need to know what you're talking about, you know, but this is it.
So there is, to me, there is this connection, you know, how great it is or what have you is open to interpretation.
But it's how you can connect all these things, whether you're talking about anti-imperialist and these kind of global situations, whether it's Syria, Ukraine, et cetera, or someone like, you know, Jimmy Dore talking about, no, MAGA is our ally.
You know, that was actually Hinkle, but Dore having Hinkle on to talk about that, for instance, or populist right.
What do you mean populist right?
I mean, who is that?
Are those Proud Boys?
Yeah, yeah.
You know, in the video that he had with Malvin, they both talk about how they don't understand what economic reductionism is, right?
And class reduction.
Well, what is that?
You know, they do one of those things.
And after speaking to members of the People's Party, It's like, yeah, because this is what it's about.
As an African-American woman, are you asking me to join this coalition of people who are actively attempting to disenfranchise me in some attempt to just, I don't know, overthrow neoliberalism?
And the example they used is a union.
And it shows how out of context They said, well, if you're in the shop, in the union, and you're trying to get people to sign up, you look past your differences.
I'll throw my card out there.
I'm a high school dropout, and I worked in the union when I was 16.
I can guarantee you that at no point did we have people that were In militias or far-right organizations attempting to get people of color to join a union, you know?
But it's that disassociation of the reality for people outside of who they are, which is ultimately this very narrow, white, cis male kind of view of the world.
And I hate being like that because people don't want to hear that and they'll say, oh, this and that.
But I mean, I just feel like it's reflected in the output, in the content, and more so maybe what's not in that content.
Yeah, I absolutely agree.
I think that's the perfect way of putting it.
I mean, I think that little riff they had between them about the union recruiting, that is a perfect example, because the way they phrase it is, well, if you're trying to put together a workplace union, you don't do ideological tests.
You don't say, well, how do you feel about guns?
How do you feel about trans people, etc.?
Oh, you have the wrong opinions, you can't join.
Well, that You know, you could only come up with that characterization from that particular positionality.
Of course you don't have people in the union who are going to disrupt workers' solidarity with each other.
Of course you don't bring people into the union who are not going to have solidarity with other members of the union because they're trans or because they're whatever.
I mean, that's literally the definition of not a union, you know?
But these are fundamentally people that do not get that, and they fundamentally think that the economics are all there is, to the point where when you try to explain things like that to them, they are – well, I don't know, I want to say genuinely, I don't want to say genuinely about anything Jimmy Dore has ever said or done in his entire life.
But they do not get it.
They do not get it.
It is always, because again, from his position, it is always those people who are kind of like the extras, the ones on the side, the fringe people, you know, the LGBTQ, you know, and he will sort of performatively fumble over stuff like that.
He will say, oh, I think I'm an ally or something.
That's what they say.
You know, he does that sort of boomer shtick.
Yeah, it's for those people to accommodate to us, because what we're talking about is the important stuff like Medicare for All.
And if you don't accommodate to us, then you're being a wrecker.
You're being stubborn.
And this is where you get to Jimmy Dore on Tucker Carlson complaining about identity politics.
Yes, yes.
And even just that.
I mean, even just being platformed by somebody who expresses clear white nationalist monologues.
I mean, to me, that's a right-left alliance.
That's an overture to those groups.
That's the audience.
I mean, I know that most of our folks are folks that watch Fox, but I mean, that's a very specific show to go on.
But even just the dissociation of what reality is, kind of like, well, what's a working class person?
Oh, they're MAGA.
So let's do that, you know, like that person in the party said.
But also, you know, there are many different people that use the union example.
There are many different people in unions.
And, you know, if I'm a trans person that does work somewhere and they're unionizing, do I want my union rep to be somebody who is openly talking about How horrible trans—do I trust that person to represent me with management if I do come into some disagreement?
Or if I am accused of a misappropriation at work, is that—why would I want to enter into alliance with that person?
How is that going to help me?
And that's just like, it doesn't even occur that that could be a reality, you know?
Yeah.
Yeah, no, absolutely.
Yeah, you don't have to have read the Strasser brothers, you know, to be third position or red-brown.
You just need to have a certain approach to politics.
And this is so much of the evasion they do.
People will talk to them about People will call Jimmy Dore out on stuff.
I mean, literally, Rod Webber kind of did it in that interview that Jimmy then suppressed, you know, and they will do this performative misunderstanding thing.
Well, I don't even know.
Well, you don't need to know.
Again, you don't need to have studied the theory.
You don't need to know what the words mean.
You are doing the politics.
You are doing that politics.
Yeah, and I guess then it's culpability, you know?
And even if you don't know what you're doing, you're still doing it, right?
And I do think that there's room for that conversation involving, I guess...
You know, what we talked about with the Republicans, as MAGA movement going through the Tea Party, maybe arising from all the offshoots that occurred in the 90s with the Patriot movement, but it being seen as a populist movement, you know, I do see that you can have a red-brown alliance, per se, without discussing economics in the modern world, because so much of those spaces now
are not solely based in economics, but they're based in these things that I personally go back to Dugan because I see so much of this misinformation coming from Russia and, you know, the influence there.
But I don't think you need to.
I think that we can understand that in today's world, even if you just talk about one country, you talk about, or the UK or the United States, that you're talking about more than an economic system.
You're talking about culture.
You're talking about religion.
You're talking about all these different things that maybe weren't so much aligned with traditional, you know, 1930s.
Say, okay, we're trying to broaden the party base, so we'll incorporate your politics, but we're going to make overtures to nationalism, too.
You know, it's not that today.
Today, it's, I don't want to be told to wear a mask.
You know?
And this broader concept of you're forcing, this is homogeny.
You're an oppressor, right?
That fits into this larger populist, whatever populist means today.
And I know Maupin uses that as well.
He talks about, I mean, we're not talking about William Shetland, it's Brian here, right?
We're talking about something different.
And he doesn't say that, you know?
But this broader thing, and whatever that thing is, it encapsulates much more than just economics.
Yeah, certainly.
And it's quite open in its rejection of economics, because I think capitalism is just a given.
It's such a given that you don't even need to talk about it.
Some version of capitalism.
And I think when you get into somebody like Caleb Maupin, I mean, his bizarre idealization of FDR and the New Deal and stuff like that, alongside Lenin and Stalin and stuff.
I mean, pretty obviously a society economically designed by Caleb Maupin would be some sort of very state interventionist and authoritarian form of state capitalism, you know, something like that.
And that's that, you know, with maybe some Medicare for all on the side, you know, maybe.
Some form of capitalism is just a given.
Again, even as it rejects neoliberalism, it is fundamentally neoliberal because neoliberalism contains that acceptance of capitalism as an eternal given.
And what they have instead of an economic politics, they just have this endless cultural politics.
And really, I mean, you were talking about the mask thing.
It's not even really a cultural politics, it's becoming just an aesthetic politics.
And this is very frightening because I always think about what Walter Benjamin said about fascism being the complete aestheticization of politics, the complete reduction of politics to aesthetics, you know.
And I see that happening.
I mean, I'm not being a sort of grumpy old Luddite, but so much politics taking place online is reduced to memes.
I mean, what is that kind of reactionary meme culture if it isn't the total reduction of complex politics to just pure aesthetics?
It's something that I saw immediately when looking at that Russian National Bolshevist Party, to be honest.
I mean, they're not that that party had nothing to do with what we were talking about, you know, in 30s in Germany.
It was something else.
But looking at it, I said, oh, that's their flag is just to take off in this vicious shirt.
Right.
I mean, this is this is Edward Levinoff having lived in New York City in the late 70s.
And he's just co-opting this counterculture punk aesthetic and exiled.
I won't even get into it, but You know, these literary magazines that they have online look like zines from the 90s now, and they look like things I would've gotten at some punk rock show that I went to when I was 17 years old.
So yeah, I do think that there's something to that.
The intense program of online misinformation as well as a kind of aestheticization of politics as well.
Yeah, exactly.
I could very much see myself as a teenager getting wrapped up in it, unfortunately, and that's kind of where I come from it.
Again, so much of this is, I think, mutually beneficial because these guys debate, they have these super chats, and they know if they say each other's name it's going to hit the algorithm.
It's so much not about these people, and that's kind of the point.
I mean, it's not about Jimmy Dore or you, Caleb Malfin, or you, Jackson Hinkle, or whatever, or Mr. Brenna.
It's really about all these people that have genuinely correct assessments and critiques against politics and against global capitalism, let's say, that are just being led into these spaces that are very bad places.
Yeah, indeed.
I haven't seen a really great reaction to that, or counter to that, for whatever reason.
Yeah, no, I agree.
Okay, so we've been talking for a while now, so I think we've got an episode.
That was great.
Thanks for coming on and talking to me about this stuff.
I really do strongly recommend your podcasts and videos to the listeners.
The video I was talking about, the debunk of Oliver Stone's movie about Ukraine, the section about Belarus, it's the sort of thing I want to go around and I want to foist it on people, because this is not talked about, and really Belarus, what happened to Belarus with Russia, and what is still happening in Belarus with Russia,
That really is incredibly clarifying to me, you know, if I could just sort of voice that information on people that don't get it, you know, it's probably naive of me to feel this way, but I feel like people are kind of go, oh right, you know, because the Belarus situation is just incredibly illustrative of the Russian project, this sort of greater Eurasianist Russian project that seems to be, I mean, it is certainly, I don't know what the influence is exactly, but it seems to be
Very much echoed in Dugin's philosophy and Putin's project, you know, of expanding his influence in that region.
And it tells you exactly what, you know, what Russia's plans, that Putin's Russia, I should say, because I'm not a fan of generalizing about nations, you know, there's loads of heroic dissenting people in Russia, but it tells you exactly what Putin's, Russia's plans were for Ukraine and why Ukraine, you know, very, very reasonably didn't want to be in that.
And we're ending, but if folks want to maybe follow up on that, Foundations of Geopolitics, Dugan explicitly says as much.
Yeah.
Okay.
Well, that's a fantastic episode.
Thanks so much for coming on.
It's been an absolute pleasure.
Thank you.
I've been a fan for a while, and we'll communicate in the future, I'm sure.
Yeah, I hope so.
So, do you want to tell the listeners where they can find you, Twitter and YouTube channel, et cetera?
Yeah, so everything is The Right Podcast.
You can find me on Twitter.
There's a link tree there that can connect you out.
I do have a few articles.
However, I'm really moving towards the YouTube channel.
I like the visuals.
I still put out audio.
So if you can't do that, you can find the audio on iTunes or wherever you'd like.
It's the same thing, The Right Podcast.
But I would suggest if you can, if you have the ability to and the access to it, to take a look at that YouTube channel and look at some of those graphics and visuals.
Again, just add the right podcast.
Yeah, totally agree.
Great stuff.
OK, thanks for coming on.
And that was episode 113.
Thanks for listening, everybody.
I think next time we'll have normal service resumed in that Daniel will be back.
But in the meantime, thanks for listening and take care of yourselves.
Goodbye.
That was I Don't Speak German.
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