Chapo Trap House - 426 - Musings (6/8/20)

Episode Date: June 9, 2020

Chris picks Matt’s mind on a few topics from our rapidly evolving political moment, and some topics Matt’s brought up in his recent live streams.

Hello everybody. It's it's your chaff. Oh, it's your chaff for this week. I believe that's the first time I get to say that on the I think so. I can't remember another time. Well, it feels good. We are here just me and Matt this week to go over some stuff and we kind of decided to do just like that classic trusty episode where I talked to George Meany about collective bargaining agreements. Yes, exactly. And that's what we're going to do. 90 minutes. Yep. Is there a labor crisis in America? We interrupt Felix listing Fortnite guys if they were Albanian to give you instead this discussion of current events.

But kind of the impetus of this is that I don't even know if we've mentioned on the show, but you know, since maybe the beginning of quarantine, Matt has been doing these live streams and honing some some tenants of Christmas thought. Yeah. And I kind of, you know, we've the last week or so we've kind of been responding to these this wave of protests amid the pandemic, amid the presidential election. We've kind of just been like, you know, it almost feels like you're in front of like a tennis ball machine and you're just like swatting them at the as they come. You're just eating them in the face and balls. Yeah. So I thought we could

maybe take some of this Christmas thought that I have been absorbing since I watch every one of the streams to kind of go through and make sure that there's nothing too insane for me before before I put which I very much appreciate. Yeah, on on YouTube. So I thought that I'd kind of, you know, be a sounding board and team that up to talk about the things and if you like this, then maybe you can follow up on the live streams. Yeah, they're all on YouTube on Twitch or on YouTube. Get get fricking Chris that goddamn YouTube button already. We're at 66,000 subscribers, subscribers, 34,000 more. I get the trophy. If you think

nothing of me, nor should you just do it for this man, the hardest working chap out by far. Give him his adorable YouTube plaque. But let's start with this. Let's let's start granular and personal experience and then kind of zoom out. Matt, you got in a protest this week. I did. I did. And it's it's been a pretty amazing experiences that I've gone out three or four times this week with no plan really. I met my friend for one March. But other than that, I would just in the afternoon, I would walk outside. I do live near relatively near the Barclay Center, which is a real focal point for protesting. So I just

walk around Flatbush Avenue and then I will just run into a giant March. Yes, it's insane. And then at two times, two separate times, I've left one March to go home and then on the way home, hit another one and then join that one for a while. It's it's that's the thing that's bonus. Amazing is the sense of spontaneity, which a lot of people like, you know, it's it's a double-edged sword. We'll talk more about that. But yes, just yesterday, I went out on Flatbush. I looked up and down the street about five minutes later. There were 1000 people there walking up towards Atlantic. I walked with them. I kind of thought it

was one of the smaller protests I'd seen if this was like maybe a block long. But then by the time we got to the intersection of Flatbush and Atlantic, I look back. The entire street was people all the way to the to the Grand Every Plaza. It's like people just filled in behind. It's very. It's kind of like a musical, you know, and so it starts walking and singing and then people start. Yeah, the seventy six bones. Yeah, yeah, like like Les Mis shit. It does have a Les Mis vibe to it. I also live very close to Barclays. I I think somebody on we were monitoring on Instagram was saying yesterday that

basically protests were leaving on the hour from from Barclays like it was a tour group or something. That was my experience Friday night that, you know, I met up with a few people and we basically we walked from Grand Army Plaza to Barclays and we're just kind of hanging around there for a second and then a group walked by and we were just like, OK, we'll get with those and we ended up walking something like 10 miles through central central Brooklyn down to Flatbush and then back up and around. I mean, that was kind of interesting because the protest itself had very good vibes and we were getting support

through the, you know, it was very peaceful protest and we were getting, you know, support from everybody that we saw along the the route. But then it came out afterwards that that particular one, one of our city council members was in the group and had coordinated with the cops to basically and the protesters apparently to basically meet the cops at 11 p.m. And then they would peacefully disperse so as not to create a class with the cops, the cops would not arrest anybody, but the but the protests would disperse three hours after curfew. And I saw a few people who were pretty salty about that concept of

that kind of collaboration and coordination with the police. And yeah, I mean, I don't know, I think that's a difficult thing to describe because you basically have to like what it when we set off from Barclays, was it our goal to get arrested or not arrested from that night? And I don't think anybody there knew. And that is the other edge of the double-edged sword of spontaneity and an uncoordinated activism is that you are left sort of in a rudder list and at the mercy of people who will take charge. Right. We're already seeing that happening. There's apparently, I think it was in New York, there's a male model

who's now appointed himself a community leader and is liaisoning with the police and having photo ops with the cops and organizing the protests with them. I'm not sure what city that is, but you could look it up. He is a brand ambassador and actor like a guy fucking ran to the head of a ran to the front of a protest with his headshots and handed him to the one of the white shirt. Tony Bologna's uncle. Oh, by the way, have you student support with Joe Bologna yet? Always. I support both Bologna's people forget there was a there was a capo pepper sprayed a girl during Occupy and his name was Tony Bologna. I remember Tony

Bologna. Yeah. Tony and Joey fighting in your soul for eternity. But but that's the problem. And then you're like, why? Where are we going? What are we doing? And without without a coherent message around which to rally and people to exercise strategy on behalf of a larger group of people, discipline, in other words, sort of party based structure. The danger is, is that you will either dissipate or you'll be corralled into acceptable parameters, parameters. Exactly. Yeah. I mean, not to be corny, but I kept thinking about the rage against the machine line from sleep now in the fire. Raise your fist and march

around. Just don't take what you need. Indeed. If the protest doesn't come into conflict with some kind of power structure, then right, what is it actually protesting? That's because there's a certain there's an ambiguity at the heart of this. I think because traditionally and definitionally a protest in the in the frame we're seeing peaceful demonstrations. If you were to analyze their even if the people don't even know what the goal is, practically, the goal of a demonstration is to make an appeal to authority, right? Right. On behalf of a certain issue, and to demand change

to in that authorities relationship to that issue, right? Right. That is different than an insurgency or an insurrection, which it tends to displace and remove and overthrow a power. And like you could say that at moments, people involved in some of these specific conflicts with the cops, especially early on, like maybe the first Friday night here in New York when they were burning the cop cars or something when they set fire to the precinct in Minneapolis. Yeah, exactly. That the initial initiate insurrectionary act like literally failing to acknowledge the authority of

the police and then everyone else seeing holy shit. You can do that. Yes. Wow. And then, of course, coupled with, parenthetically, the fact that, you know, it was a way to go out of the house without feeling like you were being selfish right after being cooped up. I mean, the role of Corona and the quarantine in all this has to be kept in mind at all times. Yes, it's very hard to see this happening out of sight of that context, which has repercussions and it influences like, you know, what's going to be effective and how this is likely to shape up. Fuck, what was I saying though? Insurrection. All right.

So, but I would say at this point, especially once the cops realize that if they let the gas off a little bit, they wouldn't get as much pushback. I would say now they're getting bigger. Like there are 20,000 people in LA yesterday, right? But they're also much more peaceful and partially that, of course, that's the cops failing to incite, but it's also a lack of an insurrectionary agenda and a goal among people on the demonstration, which means that we have settled into, because frankly, we shouldn't be doing an insurrection. There's no power that could affect a revolution in the United

States. How high would you have to be to think we're in anything like that moment right now? You can maybe build durable institutions. Out of this could come someday down the line, challenge capitalism, but we are not in a place where this movement, whatever you want to call it, is in a position to overthrow and existentially challenge power, which means it's demonstrating against it. Yeah. Or it's demonstrating for it to change its policies, which means it's accepting the legitimacy. At the end of the day, it's accepting legitimacy of those institutions. One of the things I was thinking about is how

we've seen the first week of this protest, and then thinking back to some of the most wilder moments in Ferguson, some of the earlier moments, that the initial stages of these Black Lives Matter protests are usually more insurrectionary. I guess one of the things that I was thinking about as I was seeing the crowd and the tactics and the atmosphere of these protests is that it kind of is this convergence of two different strains. I would call one of them the maybe the more insurrectionary Black Lives Matter protests, and then the like women's March crowd, you know, the more maybe lefty, maybe

traditional Democratic Party progressive crowd that that then is that cooler that that wants to come in with, you know, the the I'd rather be at brunch signs, right, which thankfully we we've not seen that much of that kind of aesthetic in there, but I think that it is that crowd that learned how more or less learned how to do that kind of thing in the early days of the Trump administration, you know, glomming on to the right. But the thing is, is that even that initial edge of insurrection in in in those moments, those aren't, they are just impulses, though, they're undirected, they're spontaneous, right.

So that means by definition, if they're not directed and stoked and kindled, they will go out, right, which is what happens because there's only so many people who are that terminally alienated from an authority from from the systems of control that they're willing to risk, like actual significant imprisonment and maybe death. Right. That is that's a slim margin of people. And so once that is as is extinguished, that rouses, like you're talking about people who but but those people are also less alienated from the system, less willing to risk to oppose it. And I'm not judging that. I'm not saying

that is that is a character flaw. It is just a fact. It's just it's not even conscious. It is a subconscious adherence to norms because of your ingrained fear of of of oppression. Yeah. If you try to push against them, which is a real thing. And that the only way you overcome that is if you have a sufficient enough organized and sized force to oppose it, in which you could feel like there's any hope of success. And that's what you have to build from numbers. Right. And that it's in that my personal experience of being in that cloud crowd that had its like negotiated stand down where, you know,

some people were pissed that a negotiated stand down with the cops on Saturday night occurred and those people have that more impulse. But I'm sure another huge portion of that crowd would hear that story and be like, thank you, yes, man. And we're frankly for probably from getting probably relieved. Yeah, they're probably relieved. And there is this fantasy, I think, because people spend their time honing these beliefs online and feel that there's so much a part of their identity that like that to say this is to judge people. No, you know, there is there, there are greater and lesser

amounts to lose there are greater and lesser investments in your life that are psychologically connected to the system that you live under in a way that you don't even know about. You know, you're not making this choice even yourself to be the insurrectionary or the demonstrator. The idea that every the idea that enough people could will themselves into making the jump from one to the other spontaneously, not absent to change in conditions. That is, I think, a fantasy that only can persist if people are conceptualizing their politics entirely online. Right. And it feels so dismissive and

insulting to say that, you know, protesting for the vast majority of people, vast majority of people like myself, like my my friends, that it is more or less an aesthetic choice. Yeah. But it's true. It's the case. And until I am until I can look into my heart until all my friends can look in their heart and say, No, I'm ready to go to jail for this. Yeah. Cause and things there's two things that can change that that percentage in people. One is if they have less to lose because things are worse. And that's honestly a thing that we have to reckon with might actually prolong this more

than anything else is if this economic recession really starts smacking down and and then dominoes of economic distress start falling, then people are going to have less to lose. That's one way of that. That's one factor that will make them more likely to become insurrectionary. The other is if they think that they can win if they think they could do it without dying without going to jail for a long time by changing things. And that's what a lot of people I think are doing now. They're convincing because they don't have it that bad. They aren't that desperate. They aren't that willing to to to

sacrifice, but they convince themselves, OK, we actually can be successful in the moment. And that's sort of an auto hypnosis. And they do it so that they can push further. You know what I mean? And I think that is where the police abolition thing comes from. Right. I think that when people explain why abolition is a goal, they are never it's never in the terms of how is this relating to a broader demonstration movement to change actual positions under actual capitalism, given our actual existing institution, intact institutions, because we are not going to overthrow them. And so

therefore we can only change conditions within them. Right. Right. So that there is no argument, in my opinion, to say abolish in the in that if you are arguing, how do we get the biggest coalition that will last the longest, get the most coherent demands and apply the most with the most consistent pressure on powers that be to do the things that you're talking about, reduce the size of police forces, reduce police armaments for God's sake, take away their guns, make them over have oversight, make them have to live in the fucking communities. I mean, yeah, that is all the people. And if you push

abolitionists, they'll say, yes, even under capitalism, there will always be police, but they'll look like this. And you're saying, but my response to that is, but that's not abolishing the police. Right. And the argument is, no, it's so different than the current paradigm that it's actually radically different. And I would say to that, you're that's why you convinced yourself it's radical enough to support. That's not how you convince other people. Right. You know, like you are already convinced you've already done the reading where you're like, Oh, abolition really means X, Y and Z for people who are not

already on board. They don't have that built in understanding of it. And the internet makes all these conversations so frictionless that people assume, Oh, they if they don't, if they don't know about, they don't know what we mean by abolition that they don't want to know. And that is because you're not really trying to expand the base, what you have to do to do the job that you need to do in terms of show that you can actually move the needle. Like that's the hope. The hope out of this is that the hope to come out of this, in my opinion, is that you move the needle because that could teach an entire generation of young

people who are staring down the barrel of just a desolate hellscape of pandemic, climate collapse and economic stagnation and ruination and say, Hey, you can change things. There is there are levers here that if there are enough of us grab, we can move. And that is why if you have brittle demands that can either be co-opted or will run out of steam because not enough people buy the underlying premises, then people are disillusioned even further, right, further convinced that again, I guess we're fucked. I guess I will just game until I die until the song until the seas seas claim me because what is the difference? And

that's the biggest danger out of this is yes, there are a lot of really bad outcomes we could get. We could get police defunding and replaced with private security forces with Elon Musk said 209. Exactly. We could get. Oh, honestly, the thing I'm most terrified of is that like the liberal cognitive dissonance happens when nothing really changes after all of that marching makes the HR like inquisitor model of social justice, like the coercive who's your boss, you're fired, become even more oppressive and even more overwhelming, which is literal poison to any possibility of class solidarity in this

country. It's like it's like setting the thing from the John Carpenter movie out in the fucking landscape to have these liberals and positions of influence in media and in employment waving this this woke orthodoxy over people's heads like the sort of Damocles that will alienate people because not everybody went to college and not everybody accepts these underlying premises. They could be brought around to them, but not in that context. So there's a lot of dangers. And that is why I'm glad that the movement to the degree that's happened from abolition to defunding has occurred. And I think it needs to move

further than that because there's a second there's a second clause with the funding that needs to be added to four people who aren't on board, which is we're not just taking money from the cops so that there are fewer cops in your in the same context of the cities that in the most in a lot of places are deeply dysfunctional and have a lot of pathologies and crime in them and have that have to be engaged with. You reduce those by paking that money and putting it elsewhere in refund and to refund exactly refunding. And I think like the value of demonstrations, the value of this moment is that it might

get people off of the Internet. It might get them snapped out of it enough to engage with with politics on the ground rather than in the sky. And I think the move towards defunding from abolition is is encouraging. And my hope is that if this moment doesn't dissipate and there is the sense that we can get something real that it needs to push farther than that. Like a lot of people are declaring victory about Minnesota saying that they're going to reform their police department. That's one of those things where I'll believe it when I see it. But even if they did it, if they're rebuilding it in a context in

which this whole movement has guttered out like movements in the past like it have and it's happening without the oversight, without the pressure, without the huge media microscope on it, then it's going to look like, yeah, like swapping out cops for Blackwater guards or something. Right. Or even strategically removing police at just to see if crime rises. Yeah. And then doing sort of the opposite of what they do now, which is like strategically like allow places to suffer and malign neglect. And if you don't change the underlying economic conditions, you can't assume that that's going to drop,

that crime is going to drop that much. But it does feel like this very narrow window where maybe like if you get the defunding coupled with the refunding, like that is something that seems like it could be inaction, fairly revolutionary, but also palatable to a large number of people and understandable. And that's like the thing that you were talking about. I mean, that, yeah, that, that mentality of it's not my job to educate you about the true meaning of abolishment, but defunding, refunding, simple demand. Almost everybody buddy would be like, yeah, let's, let's give some money, money to

schools, one less, one less cruiser and then a stack of cruiser shaped textbooks to the high school. Yeah. I mean, there might actually be, I think there is to some degree a positive feedback loop here, but whether it becomes self sustaining is a question of how things play out and who can know that at that point. But I think there can be a, a positive feedback loop whereby as, as if the, if the, these protests continue and they increase and they keep pushing power to make accommodations that are of course, you know, flimsy, not worth the paper, they're even printed on, tweeted on and just meant

to mollify. But that even in the face of that, you don't see the cooptation. You don't see the, the dissipation of, of energy or worse, like the, the, the coalescing around like unrealistic or conflicting goals happen. If that doesn't occur, that there might be a positive feedback loop between the people who right now like need, need to think in abolitionist mindsets in order to convince themselves that this moment is revolutionary enough to invest all their, all their anima into all their Jussons into. If you keep seeing things change, even if it's just the, the enemy sort of strategically

retreating, that maybe reduces your need to feel like you're in an insurrection. And maybe you can let go of that, like that one fist that's still sort of grabbed around this idea that, no, we're actually overthrowing capitalism now and, and recognize that this is a moment in which you might see the creation of durable institutions of left political influence in this country, which have not existed for 40 years. Right. But that would be the residue. That would be, that is the, that is what we could hope for. I mean, yeah, sure. The whole thing could follow apart like, like the, the Winter

Palace in 1917, but that's very unlikely. And you can't assume it's gonna happen. You have to sort of assume that these are durable institutions for the very simple fact that they've endured for so long. And more importantly, the, your relative to it lack of coordination. Right. So I'd say everybody needs to stop assuming ahead of time, whether this quote unquote succeeds or fails. I feel like everybody, a lot of people anyway, have made up their mind ahead of time, people who are participating and people who have decided not to have made their head up ahead of time, whether, oh, this is

going to result in why, or, and that could be revolution. It could be some significant, like urban, you know, like dual power relationship that, that is a challenge to existing capitalism or, you know, the creation of, or these, the nascent formation of an actual network of people that could exercise political power in this country as the crisis unfolds and continues and expands. And, and it fuels the fires of discontent that can be utilized and channeled now that you actually have an institutional framework. And whatever it is, they've already decided. And I just say to people, you don't know. No

one knows what's going to happen. So you have to, it's just your responsibility to engage with it as it is, not as you imagine it will be even a week from now. And again, going back to what I was saying about how this feels like the confluence of two different types of movements, I think you can see that happening. You have evidence of what you're saying happening, basically, is that, you know, there, we saw the first steps of these people figuring out how to do this in Ferguson. We saw then all the, like, middle-class libs figuring out how to do this with, like, the women's

march and subsequent protests. And now this feels like a much more well exercised muscle. I mean, it is, as we were saying at the beginning, amazing to see the kind of spontaneous coordination that results in a march leaving every hour from Barclay Center. But it's because people have learned how to do it, this generation. And hopefully the next thing they will learn is how to take it beyond the level of demonstration. Yeah. Take it to it, take it to different levels of conflict and contest with power. Right. And with capital. Workplaces, of course, would be the best if that could come

out of this. Yes. That would really be the dream. If we could reattach some of those severed nerves between, you know, political consciousness and American workers. And if this could provide any fuel for that, that would be phenomenal. It doesn't necessarily have to be that way. I mean, like a lot of people point to rightly the co-optation by woke capitalism of the Black Lives Matter movement. You've got Raytheon talking about how they value Black lives. Offer not applying to Somalia or Djibouti. But they're doing that because they want to make sure that this is channeled into meaningless reform. That's

why that's why the Senate and House leadership of the Democratic Party today performed one of the most baffling and nauseating acts of self abdication I have ever seen. They don can take cloths and at meals in the capital dope for nine minutes. You can't even make up anything anymore. Why is anyone trying to make up things? Certainly Wakanda National Nancy Pelosi and Chuck Schumer was not something I had imagined seeing, but at the same time, it's over the top for a joke. You wouldn't make that joke. You wouldn't make that joke. And now it's like she's literally there with the outfit. You

don't even have to make... You're not even really joking to say like she's going to mandate bean pies in the house cafeteria or like they're going to give this congressional medal of honor to General Muck Muck. I think a friend of the show, Jack Wagner said it best that we live in the surreal time where about twice a week, you see something where you can't remember if it was a joke that you and your friends made up in the group DM or not. Yeah. No, it's all intermingled now. Yeah. Well, a hotep Nancy Pelosi. Was that on come town? I don't remember.

But I want to stick with this or maybe go back to this idea of aesthetics and talk about another thing that you've been talking a lot on your streams as you have yourself has have wrestled with it. And I think it is a time for everyone to wrestle with it, which is posting. And just one of these things I'm sure everybody who's listened to this has seen is, you know, I haven't especially noticed it on Instagram is like everyone overnight their Instagram just turning into a massive, a constant reading list recommendation for, you know, every book about a, you know, white frailty, a white frailty. By the way, the author of

White Frailty is Italian. He's a white lady. Excellent. Well, you know, it takes a real an Italian with that much. It's true strength and guilt to look inward and write something like that. But you know, it's just kind of hilariously like all these people recommending dozens and dozens of books that they themselves have not read and being, of course, finally time to sit down and watch the thirteenth on Netflix. And I find it funny, but I also find it, you know, I have sympathy to people because people don't have any way to express their political feelings other than this aesthetic way, this posting.

And, you know, that's why I think this is a moment that no matter what, you have to, you have to seize, you have to engage with, because as, as, as in effect, as, as perhaps low percentage, I guess you'd say, as demonstrations tend to be now in the political context of the United States, they still have a higher percentage than posting. Right. Posting is a vocation posting as the sum total of one's political engagement is a recipe for sterile stagnation and doom because you are playing all of these chess matches against the capital by yourself, right, on both sides. And you can't really do that. You know, you

can only really play chess against another consciousness. So you can only really engage politically by relating to the world around you. You can't figure out all the moves ahead of time in your head and then act like the game's already over. And that, that to do that is what the internet is basically designed to, because that is one more thing that makes it addictive, because now your political dissatisfaction and alienation and sense of, of what's right gets to be channeled onto a profitable way by clicky, clicky, clicky. You get all the ads and you got the clicks and they got the money and

you get to feel like you've done something. Right. And, and breaking that and, and, and the great gift of this movement is it breaks that cycle. Now, it doesn't necessarily mean good will come from that because these are very, we do live in a over determined neoliberal moment of atomization, racialization, class completely invisible in American life that makes any kind of sustained, effective countermobilization very difficult. But if it's, if we're, if the idea is to post it into existence by crafting the perfect arguments and then making them to enough people that spontaneously you can

revert them to your side, that will never work. That is doomed to fail, but it is sure as shit also going to make a lot of money for Jack Dorsey in the meantime. Well, yeah, one of the things that you said that I think I've personally tried to internalize a little bit and I think is correct is like, you know, if enough people recommend white fragility on Instagram, maybe some people are actually going to see that and pick up a copy of it and read and maybe learn something, but I think I don't want them to read red light for J.L.D. though. That's the thing. Half the stuff is garbage. Sure.

Half the stuff is designed to where like the what the moment calls for us for white people to feel worse. Well, that's what I was going to get to racism is that and that is a recipe for basically emotional burnout among all these white people. They're not going to be able to handle that level of just of trying to craft themselves into the perfect like abject subject of the perfectly, perfectly repentant sinner because that's going to cause one of the people who go after that are going to get a nervous breakdown and eventually the rest of the white people are going to be like, fuck that. This is what is the point of

this? What's in it for me? Because guess what? People politics is about what's in it for me. Now, the socialist case is that what's good for everybody is best for everybody. And I think that that's a persuasive case, but there has to be an element of self-interest in it, too, to hook people who don't already have your point of view. Right. And that is what people have. Just because because it's so easy to create a completely hermetic and hegemonic worldview on the Internet, you can really believe that that is representative of anything like a majority of people and it one million percent is not.

Well, the thing that I was, I think that's all right, but the thing I was going to get into is that you have to kind of internalize that any of that recommendation or anything that you're posting, whether it's recommendations for anything good or bad, that ultimately you are doing it for yourself. Yes. That it is purely to, and maybe it is, it can be a healthy exercise to think through some things that you're thinking or try to reinforce values within yourself, but nothing is ever, like the target audience for any post you make, you can never think of it as someone else. It is always for you.

And I think that this is like a step, right? Because we were talking about, I was talking about aesthetics earlier, like embracing an aesthetic of protesting is not just like, I'm not trying to say that as a critique of people. I'm saying that that is something that everybody needs to work through to get to the next level. And I'm not saying I'm there. Either. I'm just thinking about having to work through this myself. The danger is, is that for, because like the Marxian concept of, you know, of political self-interest involves, you know, working class people working on

what they, they, they view as a class project that they view that there is a collective goal that we will, we should, we should strive for, because it will help all of us. Right. We don't have that idea. So people are operating out of individualized political motivations. And because left wing political thought is so moralized, and it should be, I mean, it is a fundamentally moral thing, but because it's so morally based and because class is so diffused, and because there is such unequal distribution of resources that a lot of people's liberal and leftist politics are bound

up in being selfless. Right. The idea of altruism as the full, as the full motivator. Right. And so therefore, there's a real danger that that politics then becomes completely, completely symbolic, because all you need to do is do a ritualized abeyance. Like those people who were kneeling to give up white privilege. Oh boy. Apparently, in Cary, North Carolina, some white protesters washed the feet of the black organizers. Amazing. Yeah. I mean, oh boy. Again, it's obviously like we're trying to talk around like the structural problem of like changing power dynamics involved with that. But again, I have sympathy for

these people because there is no other way to express. No, that's the thing. There's a limit to which we can we can blame anybody on any of these, any for falling for any of this shit, because that's there for a protesting cringe as it were. If it didn't work, it wouldn't happen. You know what I mean? Like these systems reproduce these things because they are there. It's antibodies. They're it's cultural antibodies, and so those have to be fought through and not everyone is going to be able to do it immediately. Not everyone's going to have read enough posts to be able to amidst instantly apply a rubric towards their

acts actions that is perfectly aligned with the moment. It's got to be learned. It's got to be learned over time. And that is why people have to embrace the idea not only that they don't know what's going to happen, but that more likely than not, whatever they're imagining as the best case scenario will not happen. Right. That is you have to have already died, you know, inside. You have to have killed that part of you that thinks that it's going to work. Now, it might work like I said, but you can't operate from the assumption it will because that will it will deform your actions, and it will make you more

less, less responsive to the world around you because you can't you have to deny what's occurring because you can't you can't accept in your head the mortality of the moment. You have to accept that failure is always the most likely outcome and that the bet that the point is to engage so as to gain for the future, right as to create something that wasn't there before out of that tumult that can be applied maybe to even greater advantage later on a slow, steady grinding effort in which every moment, even as dramatic and huge as this seems. And it is unprecedented that these are still just almost pinpoints

on the on the on a on a very slow moving graph. Sisyphus with his fucking shoulder to the goddamn boulder and that that it is that it is the struggle that will build anything durable and meaningful. But that requires that requires not assuming not not not bending not depending on it being successful, not not not not not embracing a triumphalism out of a psychological compensation mechanism. And of course, we must imagine Sisyphus happy. No, I must imagine Sisyphus posting. And the thing is, is that you know, I want to be clear that I can kind of maybe clear. Let me be clear. I

can intellectually wrap my head around these, but I don't know if I my these ideas, but I cannot say that I have emotionally embraced that idea that, you know, that nothing ever will be good or or I may never see anything be better. Never see anything good. I don't know if I'm right now may see anything. No one alive now may ever see the promised land. That's a real thing that has to be really cellularly assimilated. But I keep getting this image in my head of like if you maybe if you squeeze like a ball of putty really quickly and like you don't know what will happen, but like maybe a

little squirt of it will come out like randomly between your knuckles one way and that may be the change that you did not expect like right the Minneapolis City Council disbanding their police department and we don't know that we don't know if that's a good or bad as we were talking about earlier, proven yet, but it's something that happened. This is why you have to assume it will fail always because if you have your like you say that's a perfect analogy actually squeezing it and it comes out of one of the finger holes. Yeah, that if you have your eye fixed on a goal on a victory,

then there has to be some sort of quality to it, right? It has to be defined in a fair in some sort of way, right? For you to imagine it to strive towards. And if you fix too much on that because you think it's in grasp, then when pressure is applied and something pops up elsewhere where we're like the stalemate breaks in a way that was not predicted because of the random distribution of events, the butterflies on butterflies on butterflies that determine physical reality that cannot be accounted for that you were able to change directions, pivot, pivot towards the new fracture and you can't do that

if you are fixed on thinking that you're going to get to X or Y, right? You have to be able to look at Z when it pops around the corner. Well, let's continue widening the lens. So we kind of talked about our individual experiences of the protest and now we're talking about like the aesthetics and demand demands and accomplishments in general. But let's stick with the theme of nothing ever getting better. Yeah, and talk world baby and talk about Joe Biden. He's vibing, folks. He's vibing. Well, not specifically Joe Biden, because one of the other things that I've been thinking about that

makes this moment so difficult to predict what's going to happen is just the overall complete inadequacy of our governing institutions and the sense that they don't even seem to have the ability to do anything anymore. No. I mean, that's what we learned. That's what we learned over the course of the COVID quarantine. Oh, my God, there's nothing coming. Nobody's whipping up a strategy here. You know that scene in Apollo 13 when there's a leak in one of the filters or something? Yeah, they're figuring out how to do it with the milk crate and the coffee filter. He dumps the thing full of all the odds

and ends they have on the ship and say they have to make this square thing go into this round thing with this. And then cut 20 minutes later, they drop it on the desk. I think we all have maybe this dim idea, this mid-century naive vision of not politics in the political state, but just the architecture of America can be bureaucracy. The clock punchers, the NASA guys, the medical NASA guys. And that's so when we all went indoors at the end of May, was it? No, March, April. It was it was mid-March. It was, I believe, was June 1945. If I, that's how long it has felt like it is. But we all kind of had this thing.

Okay, now there's going to be something. Someone's going back there and they're going to whip up a little doohickey or something. No, they were doing nothing. Everybody was, everybody in the Trump administration was just selling each other multi-level marketing scams. And that was it. And now we've all given up. And this is all part, by the way, people need to acknowledge that this is all part, this burst of demonstrations is part of that breaking up, that dawning realization that there's no cavalry coming, that the state is completely non-functional, and that therefore the selfless act of staying indoors is

liberal virtue signaling to yourself. You stay home and it's like this sucks, but I'm a better person than those chuds who are out hooting around in fud ruckers at Possum Dick Arkansas. But then a moment like this comes and, hey, I could go out and still feel good about myself. And that's not bad. You know, that's not a condemnation. It's an opportune moment when things come together. It's how history works. It's fucking, it's structures meeting with happenstance. And that's what creates the moment, the moment of opportunity. Right. But yeah, there's this incredible sense of brittleness to everything.

And when you see like that thing of, you know, what the, what the Democrats put out today about like what their cop bill is going to be. Yeah, yeah. Outlaw choke holds and like, yeah, the same thing where they say police will be required to do X, Y and Z before using deadly force is garbage because the final arbiter of those things is the cop. Yeah. If it's a cop versus a criminal and the criminals dead or even shot or injured in any way. And the cop says, I did it. I did X, Y and Z. What the fuck are you? What's going to say? Who's going to move against him? I mean, oh, let's check his body cam. Oh,

that was off weird. How that happened. Yeah. I thought we required those things. Yeah. Yeah. So yeah, they banned choke holds. Choke holds were not part of NYP. I see training procedure when Eric Garner got fucking killed. You know, at the end of the day, it's not only what a cop wants to do in the moment. It's what a cop knows he'll be able to get away with. Right. Which is essentially anything. Yes. But yeah, it's the same dual, dual day thing of the Biden campaign putting out. Well, I guess we already kind of went over this. Of course the Biden campaign is not going to say, yeah, we're in favor of abolishing

police departments, but it's the dual day thing of like Biden saying explicitly saying I will not, my administration will not endorse any kind of structural change to anything. Yeah. And the Democrats saying we're going to instruct cops to trust more. Yes. No, that's the only options because at the end of the day, these are non-negotiable positions. Yeah. You can't rearrange. The government has lost the power to rearrange power structures. Yes. No, there's there's nothing. I mean, you'd have to get it through Congress, you know, which is immovable. I'm movable. I because it's like, oh, there's all

these demonstrations, even in red states. Right. But the political coalitions that have kept the political Republican Party in power are still there. Right. They still, they still buffer them from a lot of those public views. And so they have no, they have no incentive to go along with anything you want to do. And the Democrats have every incentive in the meantime to turn everything into the most palatable version of itself, either the most meaningless or even worse, the most insidious, you know, we're going to break those cop unions will also break those teachers unions at the same time. You didn't notice that they're

both in the same bill. We can't get it through unless they're both together, which one you want. Yeah. That's that's the real danger if if if if there is not a a coherence and a a a coordination that comes out of of the next weeks, which I don't think you can say will happen or more. And most likely it'll be on a scale. Some there will be formations that will emerge that agree to which they can affect change is not to be known until until the conditions present themselves. And it's at the same time, it's lending to these massive cognitive dissonances where you have this, I guess, maybe at this point,

this one of the single largest consistent protest movement. I mean, I don't know numbers. I can't say if it's large, but I mean, let me let me sense the Vietnam War, sir, since the Vietnam War, that is largely, I mean, what I saw was intergenerational, but it is largely younger people, very here, at least here in New York, very racially mixed. And yet over the weekend, I saw an interesting thing, and I think Felix retweeted this, that was looking at the voter turnout at the South Carolina primary and how Biden was able to turn the South Carolina electorate into majority white for his election. It

just made me think of something that you told to me a few weeks ago or set off handedly that's been rolling around in my mind that at this point, electoral politics in this country is basically a people over the age of 50 arguing about whether the 60s went too far or went just far enough. Yeah. Yes. That's the difference between a Boomer Republican, a white Boomer Republican and a white Boomer Democrat, is whether they think the 60s were rad and far out or it was a it was a damn shame. That's it. Yeah. And then all the culture wars are just an echo of that, that, that wild battle in the

skies. It's been because they because they're the they're the last generation that's squatting on the ever shrinking, you know, loot of treasure than the post war boom. And so they're not giving up their cultural preeminence. Yeah. So we get to just watch them fight about about whether whether Shana and I was groovy or not. It's fun. Well, I mean, at the time, Shana and I was, you have been a 50s throwback. They were in the Woodstock. That's still hilarious. Well, they were probably the most aesthetically reactionary band in in Woodstock. Yeah. But that is funny. Yeah. I mean, I don't know that that

stat about the South Carolina primary electorate, I found grimly hilarious. Yeah, because the danger was that there would be a coalescing of one around one candidate among the more than anything, the the Democrat, the upper class Democratic white electorate, which is the predominating one in the primaries and in the party. They're the ones who established the agenda. As long as they were divided, Bernie had a chance, unless he could have taken that time to build enough of a connection to a broader working class base of people who don't vote in primaries, which was the hope that we would get, unless he

had something to counteract that, if they unified, they were going to go, Oh, good, this, we got to stop Bernie. And they did. Yeah, because their class interests were for that to happen. And the fact that Bernie was not able to engage enough of the less affluent electorate or more crucially non-voters, that really shows that there's all so much work to be done. There's so much fucking work to be done. And hopefully there was some residual influence of the Sanders campaign. They moved the brick a little bit farther, you know, down the up the hill. And maybe this can connect to that and move it even

further a little bit. That's the hope. Or maybe rather it's bricks building a wall or something. And this is just another brick in it. Another brick in the damn wall, another brick in the damn wall. Yeah, that's true. Yeah. Think of it like Bernie built like a little, a couple, like the first couple lines of masonry unevenly. And then the question is, how many more lines will we get from this? And that's up in the air. And I don't think you can assume either way. And you just have to make that damn leap of faith that gets us all to engage in behavior of any kind in this world. Yeah, it's tough. And you know,

like when we talk about actual, like affecting power, I mean, I think that's why so many people got so emotionally invested in the Bernie campaign because it was a shot to it was it was almost like we were invested and we didn't realize in the time that we were like all all trying to type out a cheat code at the same time. And in the end, the cheat code didn't work. Exactly. And that's because that's all we have left is cheat codes. Yeah, because they're because everything we everything we know about how these things work is you assume the working the working class movement emerges out of the forges of

capitalism. And then over time, it, you know, engages with power in different ways. And that builds institutions. And then those institutions, you know, get undermined by conditions changing compromises loss of energy, you know, things like that. And then over time, they got dissolved. And so they're now we're trying to build from scratch. And no one knows how to do it. Yeah. And so it's throwing it's like we're trying to paint a wall by just throwing paint at it. You don't have a roller. We don't have just have big handfuls of paint that we're throwing at the wall until we can get it completely covered in the

color. Well, with that, let's go out even another lens out and talk about I'm trying to make this speaking of painting walls, but I don't know if I have an analogy here. Speaking of bricks factories, the satanic mills, let's talk about history and specifically you kind of went off on a tear on your last stream about 1848. And I kind of wanted to to to bring that up. I forget what even the question was. I think somebody just put put numbers 1848 in the chat and you spoke for about a half hour. But I think one of the things that you've been trying to do on your streams is find good analogies for this moment, not

only because it's fun, but it's also like useful to to look at the past and learn from it. And the two that you settled on are 1848 and 1905. Yeah. Can you elaborate, Mr. Christmas? I think the thing that come to mind with both of them is is their spontaneous character and the degree to which they caught the existing socialist or left wing movements as they existed completely off guard because they emerged from just a sudden deterioration of legitimacy in in the across Europe during in 1848 and in the Russian Empire 1905. And that then that led to this prolonged contest, which was eventually defeated in both cases due to

its inability to over the course of the time stand up durable, effective counterweights to state authority and eventually were divided and conquered in peace. And I think that there's a lot that echoes with this moment 48 specifically, which started in Paris. And then the rest of Europe saw the uprising and realized simultaneously from Prague to to Vienna to to Rome to Hungary, Hamburg to Berlin, that shit, we could fucking do this. And so it spread throughout the continent. And then over time, every every individual constituent piece of the of the revolution was was rolled up by reaction

due to its inability to organize broader structures within itself. And that happened in 1905 as well. But the key thing to remember about both of those is that they both left a residue of of institutional memory and ideological coherence that was then picked up and utilized at the future endeavors. I mean, Marxism really was forged in the revolution of 1848. I mean, I mean the communist coincidentally, and it really just speaks to the way that like there is this in historical, there is like a geist that kind of moves through history, and people can kind of feel it like, you know, like their hairs on

the end. The communist manifesto was published in 1848, just before the rebellions broke out. Right. And even though it was describing a condition of industrial labor that was still only a small fraction of Europeans actually engaged in, but they saw it coming and they saw the 48 as the first gasps of crisis within the system. And that happened in 1905. The Bolsheviks and SRs and everybody were caught flat footed by 1905, but they came out of it more influential and more organized and with a larger buy-in from the greater population than ever before. And that the moments like this are to be engaged

with and seized and utilized with the knowledge that that is your best, the best thing that you should be hoping to can endure. Not necessarily what will happen because conditions change and you have to move with conditions and recognize openings when they come. Because who the hell knows how fucking fragile this whole system is. We have no idea how close to the bottom of the Django tower they're pulling shit. You know, maybe the whole thing falls over tomorrow. I don't fucking know, but you cannot assume it. 48 though. And that's one of the things that is like mind bogglingly about

going back to the the seeming brittleness of the an inflexibility of any kind of government response. It's one of those things, you know, that just makes more questions because on one hand that inflexibility makes it seem like is like a point of evidence on the nothing will ever change side. But then that same inflexibility is the same thing that, you know, causes things to suddenly break. Exactly. Brittleness. Like when I was talking about brittle demands and a brittle in a brittle agenda among demonstrators, there's also brittleness of institutions that are being pressed against. But the degree of that

brittleness is not you don't know it yet. You can guess, but these things are meshes of data that are beyond anybody's singular ability to absorb. So there it's the brittleness is discovered in testing it in dropping the bowling ball on the car. Yeah. And seeing how big the dentist. And of course, because this is America in the 21st century, we do have to then also factor in that the stupidest outcome will always be. Oh, yeah. We'll always forget that. And that is that's like kind of the the chaos element, right? Where where you like you the one thing you can bank on is that the stupidest

thing will happen. But that is also usually something random and unpredictable. Joe Biden in a dashiki. Yes. Let's see it. Let's make it happen. It will happen. He will have cornrow. He will take his hair plugs and put it in the cornrows. I mean, I'll tell a very, very long story about going to see car wash in 1977 or whatever. Man, that everybody meant they were kung fu fighting. I'll tell you right now. It was a hell of a scene. People were passing marijuana joints and the hep cats. I called the cops. That's going to be his. His inaugural address. Yeah, yeah. He'll just be reciting the

lyrics to to Super Freak. I think that's everything on my list. Anything else you want to talk about? No, that's good. I feel like we've we've covered a good gamut here. Some musings. Yes. Musings start with Matt Chrisman. Yeah, just to wrap things up here again. I don't think we've ever mentioned that you've been doing these streams on the show. I just realized that today kind of been your extracurricular project. If you like, I don't know. I have a feeling that this is going to be one of those insanely divisive episodes where Oh, baby, exactly half the audience says that this is the worst one we've ever

done and half the audience says you should only do episodes like these from now on, which is how I know that the episodes are the best. It has when it has equal amounts of detractors and haters and lovers. It's usually how it is in all things, isn't it? Yeah, but if you like this, you know, twitch.tv slash Chappatrap House, Matt has been going usually around six. Yeah, every day, three or four, three or four times a week. Yeah, yeah. I think I'll do one today and it's all been leading up to the grill stream. That's I think tonight guys, by the time you listen to it, this I might have already recorded it. You

might have already promised anything, but I think I'm going to inaugurate the grill tonight. So this has just been a little taste of those. I try to put them. I try to put as many as I can up on YouTube afterwards. There's a whole long playlist of of more of these to go back through. I'm not on them. They're they're all Matt solo, but I figured I would try to pull some of the best concepts that I've heard out of them through this. So hope you like it and if not, we'll be back on Thursday with yeah. Please don't be mad at us. We have plenty of other types of content. Yes, and if you're really mad, remember email

virtual. Yes, as always. All right. Bye. Bye.