Chapo Trap House - 612 - Half Baked (3/21/22)

Episode Date: March 22, 2022

We continue to look at the domestic media response to the ongoing Russian invasion of Ukraine. This time, we’re talking about “the left” and how some of their “half-baked” ideas about foreign conflict lack serious intellectual rigor and nimbleness, curtesy of an article by “fully baked” author Eric Levitz. Please follow and support the Amazon Union drive: https://twitter.com/Amazonlabor https://www.amazonlaborunion.org/

breaking news for the listeners Felix did not sleep well last night and is not repeat not feeling submissive and breathable this morning okay give some backstory here we're in the ringed city where they keep the dark soul of Houston and someone woke Phillionore because there's like a hurricane today and you know we knew it was coming it's never really a surprise but by that I mean it's if you if your home is destroyed by a hurricane it is your fault of course because you can always tell when it's coming and you should just move your house yeah but anyway like we were talking about it yesterday I was like

well I want I bet I can go to the gym before it gets bad and you know sure enough I woke up this morning and I did not go to the gym now there was a secondary factor going to the gym that wasn't just fitness there was a theory agreed to by many at the time that if I went to a high-end gym in Equinox and we were you know I was kind of trapped there by a hurricane it would just but because of the time of day I would go around 10 am the only other people there would be you know 32 year old Milps yeah and the thinking was is that that like we're just trapped there and I have to repopulate the earth with them because

everyone else is dead in Houston but I woke up this morning and I didn't feel like doing that so I just went to the hotel gym and did pull ups were there were there were there were no Milps there there is no one there was no one there yeah by the way there is this is like I don't know like the third or fourth largest city in America it is massive Houston is is mega city one it's I went out this morning to just like to have a little constitutional walk around see what's up this is like you know Midtown Houston maybe I don't know enough about the neighbor but I felt like the fucking Omega man there was no

one on the street and you know on our tour here in Texas Felix has been auditioning for the role of Don Johnson's character in a boy and his dog he wants to he wants to repopulate the post-apocalyptic landscape with just sort of like sort of like a very very tanned southern women yeah yeah just women whose faces look evil because of like they didn't they got filler when they didn't need it you know now they just keep getting it it's okay you know I would we were in Dallas and I went to a pretty evil neighborhood in Dallas Highland Park but I have never felt the level of there's the hurricane I've

never felt the level of evil swag that Houston has well I mean we pulled off the highway first of all we get work of course you know highway right downtown really right next to everything first thing we see downtown is that there is a ferris wheel and one of those rides where you just go up and then come back down right next to the highway yeah it was a ferris wheel and one of the like they're the rides where you go up and down and it would just like pop up and they're just be like 30 kids strapped waving at the busiest section of freeway in the United States and then you come off the highway and we're down

at Midtown and our neighbors are literally the headquarters of Chevron and Aramco yeah and I think we have to paint the picture of like how the building seemed because it's like you know we live in New York and other major cities but like something about the buildings in Houston is just they're built in order to terrify you yeah it's like a new like even the parking garages look evil and hostile to humanity and like there's there's there's no zoning here so like right as we go up the freeway right before we get to the evil building district there's a house the architecture style I could only describe as

stupid this is a traditionally stupid house you know it's like oh this is Victorian the two-door real housewives style house that I built in 2017 it was one of those houses that look like if you like kicked one of the fence posts on the garden the entire thing would come down but everything everything in downtown is built it's an Orlando the two styles of architecture here are an Orlando and undead settlement because they don't everything that isn't like the headquarters for like the Contras or or the Bilderberg group is it's like a basketball court that's never had any people come on it people just like

glitch just wander in and out of traffic it's interesting because we were in Dallas which also gets accused of being a very evil city and I certainly understand that but the buildings first of all there's you know they've actually got some older stuff and they got some pretty interesting brutalism in Dallas but even they're in pain they're yeah they're newest they're newer skyscrapers we're all built in the 80s by people who are just absolutely suited on coke and they have a fun coke whimsy to them like hey let's make this into a giant triangle yeah let's make this one look like a

Cubert level we're having fun let's put a hole in the middle of this building but every skyscraper in Houston it's like it was designed by oil yeah like they just they they consulted a simmering like deep pocket of like crude that just vibrated like the cube in Prince of Darkness and then it gave it just like psychically communicated the plans to them and then they just built them yeah Dallas is the city that Coke built but Houston was built by people who like for religious reasons can't even drink soda but like but but are like are allowed to have sex slaves like that exact intersection of religion yeah

yeah I'm walking around I just see a few guys walking around you know in there in their business casual outfits and look like they were having a great time and see downtown Houston anyway seems like fun time if you've ever tried to blow up Michael play well yeah we've been having a having a blast here on our trip through Texas you know just just meeting and greeting all the all our prized hogs and bring them to fare up slapping a big blue ribbon on all of them here down in Texas it's great though we're doing a show tomorrow night in Houston but fellas it's Monday March 21st let's get into let's get into the

swing of things yes and I suppose that means we have to talk about Ukraine again oh boy and you know they're still at it over there yeah it's it's uh it's you know like thousands of people are dead it'll be war continues to grind on like I don't know what the situation is in terms of like it like it seems bad it seems terrible yeah but let's talk about like you know just reactions to it here in this country and once again folks the left is being taken to account yeah the left is being brought to you finally anyone who's most responsible for the current situation it definitely is the left when I look at when I look at the

left in this country I think you know I'm like basically powerful enough right yeah like basically powerful enough but we need someone who loves articles to take them on who is who's the who's the biggest article head they can tell him what's for well here's the one that's burning up burning up burning up my timeline today it's a Eric Levitt's writing in New York magazine headline the left has half baked answers on Ukraine I'd like some fully baked I want to be fully baked I'd like them to be crisp and golden brown how about you know what honestly I don't take longer but it's worth it give me some twice

baked ideas yeah there needs to be like fully cooked ideas like just send them weapons with no preconditions or anything great years and just see what happens fully baked ideas like like what our former secretary of state explicitly said turn it into Afghanistan that's the fully baked idea I've ever heard one I mean like I mean yeah like the premise of this article is that there are fully baked ideas to be had here but I mean I think that's I mean it's starting off I mean like no cap game continues to take massive losses in Q1 Q1 2022 do you realize that two countries who were both doing no cap November have never gone to

war with each other I mean like this is the thing here I mean that this is why this is why articles exist here is that nobody right left or center has any good no baked ideas when it comes to I don't know how to deal with Russia trying to create their own empire or it basically had there is no good answer to a nuclear a nuclear armed state yeah it's deciding that like okay we're just gonna go to war with a country that doesn't have bombs yeah no it's so it's I mean there was no answer for America doing that no no one else in the world could stop us doing Iraq this is what the collapse of the precious and beloved

international order looks like and wishing it went the other way doesn't change it that's not fully baked either well that's just that's just whining well yeah I mean right now is the it is the greatest time to just say the most decontextualized things possible I've seen people go I'm you know I'm against American intervention and and the war obviously but like doesn't Ukraine have agency to join NATO it like just as much as did like like it's a apartment building co-op but the this specific type of article which you know the left has no power in America why would you write this article because your point of

view has won it's the only point of view that we've ever fucking seen this article completely because of that it cannot talk about the past at all so that anyone anyone even tangentially associated with the SA talking about it maybe saying that like maybe this strategy of escalate and of escalation and like expanding NATO past 1991 maybe we're looking at its failures right now right that is just that's holocaust denial basically you can't say that you can't talk about the past because if you're writing one of these articles we are seeing the fruition of your worldview was there a time was there a

time in the Obama administration when like the DSA international committee was in charge of foreign policy did Trump give something did Trump give like a Twitter Stalinist an important post at state no this has been running the show the entire fucking time yeah and you know like I could I I sort of like I understand that the need for these kind of articles in a 2020 context when people like could credibly or at least in a fantastical sense will trick themselves into believing that like the Bernie Sanders left the dirtbag left the bros the DSA whatever you want to call it could exercise some influence over the

course of events so they had to have a fully baked foreign policy so but that certainly isn't the case now and you know like the DSA international committee is not fucking isn't it's not bending the ear of the Biden administration in any way but you know when you were like look when you are holding out the leftmost position at sort of credentialed media institutions you got it you got it you got it got to earn your keep somehow yeah and you have to show them that you're normal yeah as they said there's no good answers and none of them want to write like the full hog version of this which is yeah some

fantasy about arming Ukraine and fighting to the last Ukrainian and and all that like ringsmanship that is of course icky and and and as a good liberal leftist you wouldn't want to do so what can you write and the only answer is I can show everybody how serious I am by chastising these these unserious people who have no power and more importantly than anything are not under any kind of institutional authority don't answer to anybody have are not part of any like large-scale structures of power which means that there is nothing you can tell them that even if they agreed with you they could do about it yeah and you

know here here here's a fully baked idea and this was one of the most attractive prospects of Bernie 2020 was the idea that at least a lot of the people on on his side in foreign policy who would have had top jobs would have understood that the time of America's the soul superpower is coming to an end and when negotiated would have negotiated our exit in a way that would have avoided calamities because guess what it's going to fucking happen one way or the other it's already happening yes and now we're the people in charge both parties the blob are the serious people who take or who bake things all

the way through are all completely enraptured with this fantasy that we have the ability to assert control over these situations well I mean it's just like it's a it's another round of like you gotta you gotta gotta gotta gotta do you gotta purge the cranks and conspiracy theorists and the nuts you know you have to like define yourself in opposition to these people even though I don't know how anyone can look at the events the last 20 or 30 years and just categorically dismiss all nuts cranks and whack yeah mostly yeah they've been way right or they've been way they've been way more like if you like play out

there like like theories or I believe some matter how outlandish over like 830 40 year time period and compare that to the the smart sensible decent crowd of people who and they're fully baked opinions and see which fucking which adds up better way those out on the scales so let's dive into what Eric has to write here it begins he writes as Russian missiles rain down on Ukrainian cities the American left has come under a more figurative kind of fire in recent weeks a wide variety of publications and politicians have taken us left us to task for their collective response to the crisis in Ukraine collective response

which has been derided as blinkered pro-Putin and worse things besides these critiques have prompted rhetorical reprisals from socialists who contend that their factions analysis the war has been unerringly sound both morally and analytically more ambivalent fellow travelers meanwhile have vacillated in the crossfire and there's like a billion hyperlinks all this shit like I'm not sussing who cares yeah article heads I'm not addicted article heads oh I need eight more articles while I'm writing my articles just so I can feel a buzz the debate over the American left's position on Ukraine is confounded by

disagreements over what constitutes the American left and its position on Ukraine the impetus for most the most discourse on this on this subject were statements published by the Democratic Socialists of America's International Committee yet that committee does not represent the views of all DSA members let alone Americans who identify with the left and the DSA IC's policy demands the lifting of sanctions against Russia the denial of military aid to Ukraine and America's immediate withdrawal from NATO directly contradict the positions held by Americans America's most prominent socialist politicians he's

referring to you know like Bernie Sanders and AOC if conservatives have allotted this complexity to declare the entire US left weak on Russian aggression some socialists have done the same for contrary purposes no they can't but I'm sorry that is the one like I guess the argument here that is not like buying this guy bullshit is like well you how's it gonna look to the other people what are the conservatives gonna say which of course is always dumb but is extra dumb here since the most vocal and most unapologetic pro-Russian people are fucking members of Congress for the Republican Party yeah and I mean like

Florence called Zelensky a thug yeah now being featured in commercials on Russian TV there are tens of thousands of bodies just from the last decade from Democrats who wanted to look serious to make it look like they had fully baked ideas we can just go back last year to Brandon when after taking a bunch of shit for the Afghanistan withdrawal and not predicting the MI6 inside job just kidding am I you know to show he's serious and has fully baked ideas about security he killed at least 13 civilians yep in a drone attack in Afghanistan there was also during the Biden presidency one of the fucking

dozens if not more annual african operations that took out 60 people in Somalia who all turned out to be fucking civilians these are all trying to show that you're serious that you care that you are very conscious of how things look to the other side do you think that they they they stood back and said well you know I don't like Brandon but he's serious about America's security no instead instead Boebert and MGT were just hooting and hollering at the space State of the Union at the man and give him any credit for killing all those foreigners um Eric Levitz he goes on to discuss Elizabeth Brunig's article in

the Atlantic yet another article we're talking about here I mean your dog I heard you like articles yeah damn I'm just gonna skip ahead a little bit and you know Brunig was defending at least the like as Levitz describes it the Bernie Sanders position of what he thinks is like a like a normal humane response which is that we should do everything possible for to help the Ukraine but help Ukraine sorry to help them without triggering a Russian military response but you know I mean like it's a question of where you draw the line yeah you know like it's and you know it's difficult that again I'm not

baking here I'm not a baker I don't got buns in the oven here but you know like everyone's trying to figure it out as best they can but okay I'm just gonna skip ahead a little bit I mean like how do you how do you look at this and how do you look you know at the last eight years not conclude like anything I propose is meaningless now yeah the bad things already happened which is not just your provocation NATO's provocation was answered as so many people actually fucking wanted with tons of fucking innocent people caught in the front crossfire fighting their war for them we already did the near decade of

unaccountable weapons shipments and we will I mean really Ukrainians will live with the consequences of that for decades to come it's already happened the bit all the bad things have already been done and there is nothing you can do well the one thing you can do is if you're a journalist looking to advance in your career as with the left brand is show the people who might hire you that you're a serious person who is not gonna be a in during crises like this is not gonna be a liability and so you got to write this article everybody's got to write this fucking article it's literally like an audition tape I don't

see how you can have a clear understanding of the world no no what time it is sort of see yourself as a realistic person brand yourself is this acceptable left liberal and suggest anything but free passage and citizenship for anyone from any of these countries that you know what America does to them which is most countries that's the only thing that should be on the table but instead you're showing maybe 9,000 people who read this article how normal you are Levits continues within the small world of self-identified American leftist however the DSA's substantive positions are far from marginal indeed a

large contingent of prominent left-wing writers activists and organizations have argued in recent days for ending indiscriminate US sanctions against Russia withholding military aid from Ukraine and immediately dismantling NATO this contingent's perspective deserves to be taken seriously for one thing it's analysis spotlights many inconvenient truths that few other American political factions wish to acknowledge as importantly however the weakness of some of the fits arguments reflect genuine pathologies within the US left's foreign policy thinking above all an ideological rigidity that leaves

American socialists ill-equipped to interpret this emerging multi-pole multi-polar world order and therefore to change it many on the American left were ideologically unprepared for Putin's invasion as 9 to 190,000 Russian troops massed on the Ukrainian border in January and February conventional wisdom among US leftists held that no war was in the offing there were they were hardly alone in that assessment the Ukrainian government had itself argued that Western officials were overhyping the threat it faced some mainstream criminologists believe the same they noted that Russia's state media was not preparing its

populace for a major war and that a full-scale invasion of Ukraine made little strategic sense Vladimir Putin might be ruthless the reasoning went but he was not reckless many leftists echoed this these premises but their widespread if hardly universal failure to anticipate Putin's intentions was not rooted in such dispassionate analysis alone the vehemence with which some socialists automatically dismissed the US government's narrative which is to say it's over the top prediction that Putin was intent on marching to Kiev and toppling the Ukrainian government betrayed ideological discomfort with

that possibility okay so we want to go with this one because like you know Levitt's right like I didn't expect Putin to go full full war in Ukraine and you know like I'll cop to that but I mean like whatever I don't have a fucking crystal ball here I mean I don't know what what Levitt's thought was gonna happen but well as usually they're doing the thing the same thing with Iraq only I guess flipped in this one where it's like well yeah you were right you were wrong for the right or you were right but for the wrong reasons and now it was you were wrong and everyone was basically wrong but you were extra wrong

because you didn't have the rigorous analysis behind your wrongness I'm sorry if everybody got the wrong clue if we got the wrong answer what the fuck differences make especially since you're on the outside what else do you have to go for by ideology nobody is going nobody who is not in government and not has act doesn't have access that like actual like intelligence wherever the fuck that is is going off of anything other than their preconceived priors and you know the mood the vibe because nobody fucking knows and you know as long as you're talking about priors here I mean like for Eric here if I can if I can

cop to my own reasoning the VM it's with which I dismissed the US government narrative was simply based on the last three plus decades of being alive and observant yeah I've just tried paying attention as best one can to how current events play out and what the US government says about them yeah I have a personal policy that I followed for a long time of I do not make predictions this bookie does not take bets in Eastern Europe and that you know kept me from too many bad screenshots of me predicting otherwise but is there gonna be a tongue wagging at Zelinsky who is basically saying the exact same fucking

thing yeah but he wasn't doing it because of ideological rigid right in the realm of foreign affairs America's left-wing activists and intellectuals are at our most cogent and self-confident when holding the US government to account for his if for offenses against the peace and before right Putin's invasion it wasn't that hard to see the Russia-Ukraine crisis as a byproduct of America's overweening imperial ambition if you cock your head to the left as socialists have emphasized in recent weeks the US back NATO's expansion in the 1990s and 2000s in defiance of both its promises to

Russian authorities and the Council of its own national security elite nevertheless the US carried on projecting power eastward eventually extending an offer of NATO membership to Ukraine itself this drew objections from the socialist left but also from the likes of Henry Kissinger who warned that trying to turn Ukraine into an outpost of the West would risk its very survival since to Russia Ukraine can never be just a foreign country sounds like they were right sounds like they were fucking right like what is the counterpoint to this what other fucking policy was put in place in America

America proceeded to seek influence over Ukraine's domestic policy politics using soft power to channel Ukrainian's domestic discontents over corruption and economic stagnation towards a movement for Western integration following 2014's Maidan uprising the US lent its back into a Ukrainian government that undermined the language the language rights of Russian speakers and other minority ethnicities the US did all of this knowing that one there were profound divisions within Ukrainian society over the question of questions of language policy and whether to align with Russia or Europe to that

Russia had repeatedly signaled that it considered a Western aligned Ukraine intolerable and three that NATO wasn't actually prepared to fight in defense of Ukraine sovereignty should it come under a Russian attack I mean I don't know like what argument is Eric advancing here and I mean like the question of whether Ukraine aligns with Europe or Russia the language that that is all obviously completely their fucking business I mean now it seems like things are quite settled thanks to the most genius invasion of all time but the moment you introduce American institutions the moment that you put

every fucking tentacle of the American Empire in place the moment that you pump money in from world institutions and it goes into companies who kind of just create positions just for the sons and daughters of American politicians to siphon out you taint those questions you taint the natural political processes of the nation I guess in some the left in the left's account US foreign policy placed the advancement of Western influence above the welfare of ordinary Ukrainians who security and domestic stability would have been maximized by an embrace of neutrality between the great powers to its east and west this

remains a worthwhile critique of Americans Paul America's policies towards Ukraine indeed Putin's war of aggression only underscores America's recklessness in declaring that Ukraine would one day join a military alliance hostile to Russia only to refuse for more than a decade to actually grant Ukraine that alliance's protections so I mean like is Eric saying that we should have let Ukraine join NATO or we shouldn't have offered it to them I think he's saying that all this stuff was right but then once the war starts it becomes irrelevant and you're doing you're doing war crimes by bringing it

up right once the once the bad thing that you said will happen as a result of this happens it shows how wrong you are and you have to you have to you have to shut up and wave the blue and yellow flag I don't know how this is different than any other any other emergent crisis caused by American imperial overreach that that we then are told like I don't know how this what's how this is not just more of the same this how this is differentiable in any way from the Atlantic monthly line on it I just just because he's willing to like grant it everything they said was right before he just says but you still have to shut

up and do and follow this fucking line because you're yet even before Russia's invasion the left's dominant narrative about the crisis in Ukraine had its awkward aspects it is perfectly natural for foreign policy realists like Kissinger to disdain heedless affronts to Russia's sphere of influence or to insist that Ukraine must give Putin's kleptocratic regime veto power over its foreign policy but socialists do not generally recognize the legitimacy of imperial orbits nor counsel acquiescence the relations of domination for the sake of do they acknowledge reality yeah do they acknowledge that Russia is a

country with nukes and the and a perceived like national interest that it's gonna pursue you're gonna pretend that's not real what is the good guy position to fight to the last Ukrainian yeah I mean or just that like now not like not the good guy position is not to say Ukraine the Ukrainians must fight to the last the last man against Russia but you you can think that you don't say it but then you scold the people who are saying otherwise yeah or saying that like maybe don't dump more weapons into this fucking thing meanwhile the notion that Russia's opposition to NATO expansion was rooted in legitimate security

interests as a segment of leftist routinely avow is hard to credit surely a nation's only legitimate security interests are defensive ones and Russia's nuclear arsenal was always sufficient to deter the threat of invasion as we are now seeing that arsenal is menacing enough to stop Western leaders from entertaining so much as a no-fly zone for Ukraine never mind an offensive invasion of Russian territory what difference does it make if I think it's legitimate or not yeah who gives a shit that the legitimacy is is determined by the power that the state has to affirm its legitimacy that's

what makes it legitimate is that if you don't agree they will do something about it there is no legitimacy that exists outside of power projection and force projection you're supposed to live in a fantasy land and to assert that the this cut this hypothetical notion of legitimacy on a foreign country and again that is the signal difference is because you're talking about you're talking about values versus like an analysis of of you know just reality and and and they're always pointing out like well you have these values when you're talking about America but all of a sudden when you talk about these other

countries you're embracing realism and you're not using you're not using languages of morals and all that well the reason people talk about their own country morally is because they're trying to affect a political change yeah they're trying to make a pitch for a politics that other people can sign on to and do something about that project is totally pointless when referring to other countries and doing so insisting on larding on moralistic language only makes it harder to actually understand and discuss what the fuck is going on to avoid giving Russia the dreaded legitimacy rune that they can take to the

tower and boost their stats by 20% the left is giving them you know I think this invasion is completely criminal and awful and it's undeniable that innocent people are dying as a direct result of Russia's actions that if your concern is as of which I think is a very real concern a not just as of but other similar groups that this is the best thing you could have done for their recruiting that said if they if Mexico had joined a union of states backed by nuclear power with a bunch of other Latin American states and a defense pact that we were specifically excluded from as as Americans you would be you did

they would write this article about people on the left who are against invading Mexico but just for reality's sake and they're writing articles in Bloomberg right now that Amla's decision to just buy back one of Shell's refineries and have the Mexican state refine their own oil and gas is is economic imperialism yeah what the fuck do you think we would do if they joined a defensive alliance with like China or Russia yeah we don't even have to go into hypotheticals because we are doing things just as bad every fucking day that we will never see these people talk about every fucking day I'm gonna

skip ahead a little bit to the next subhead of Eric's article it says when reality turned against left-wing orthodoxy some leftists turned against reality once Putin validated the Western media's predictions the American left's ideological orthodoxies cease to provide it with it with unambiguous policy guidance socialists generally support the self-determination determination struggles of nations victimized by imperial aggression they are also typically wary of flooding war zones with American munitions DSA supporters of the boycott divestment and sanctions movement against Israel

affirm the legitimacy of economic sanctions as a means of liberating people from military domination yet such leftists also know that sanctions are a form of collective economic punishment against civilians and routinely decry their use the American left disdains NATO for its destructive humanitarian inventions yet it also prizes solidarity with socialists in less fortunate corners of the globe and many Eastern European leftists consider NATO a vital bulwark against their republic's subjugation to a re-reactionary autocracy a conviction be that became difficult to dismiss once

Putin launched a war of imperial conquest instead of grappling with these complexities however many leftists simply pretended that they do not exist okay so like now that they are now that Eric has acknowledged that they do exist I'm waiting for him to just say like what's what what to do what do you want to say what does that what's what's the correct course of action and I think the correct course of action is basically one that the US government has already undertaken well I mean we'll see we'll see how many more fucking javelins they throw in there what that leads to on Wednesday the the DSA I see

votes voiced its opposition to US military into Ukraine arguing that the provision of weapons to the Ukrainian government would escalate the conflict and prolong the war instead of the instead the committee argued that the progressive anti-war voices should pick push for a diplomatic resolution to the crisis this basic line is shared by many progressive commentators and organization in an otherwise slotful piece the left-wing reporter Ross Barkan argues that liberals have fallen prey to crackpot realism meaning a maniacal moral fervor for dead escalating a deadly conflict on the grounds that they

support sending arms to Ukraine rather than aiding Ukraine self-defense Barkan implores progressives to demand peace which can only come with an agreement that both Ukraine and Russia can live with a prospect that Western talking heads do not want to accept and Jacobin Bronco Marsetic offers it offers a tellingly elliptical version of the same argument instead of making a forthright case against providing military aid to a democratic government suffering an imperial invasion Marsetic chooses to invade against the purely hypothetical prospect of arming a future Ukrainian insert insurgency against a

Russian imposed puppet government in Kiev this maneuver shifts the terrain of debate into the left's comfort zone rather than confronting the tensions between socialist historic commitment to national national struggles against imperial aggression and its wariness of flooding war zones weaponry after they talking about like is he talking about like the the Spanish Civil War when you actually had like a international coalition of like communist and like a popular front governments that were coordinating actions and and and like sending troops as opposed to now when you have posters it's people just it's

just posters that's all we have here what is our what is the historical obligation to post and you like I mean like when he said like an imperial aggression against a democratic state and look like any country whose you know his borders are transgressed upon by like a foreign military and they're under like invasion and occupation I think has the like you know moral and political right to resist it by any means again they're gonna do it they're gonna do it one way or the other if they don't want to get invaded they will resist it if they can but like to call it this is like you know like this is an imperial

autocracy invading a democratic country I mean like this is getting harder for Levitz's side in the context of Ukraine banning like I don't know pro-russian political parties several of whom hold like 44 seats in parliament or something like that yeah when all you have is a hammer though I mean that the only policy suggestion here is again the same thing we have done for nearly a fucking decade which is weapon weapons shipments I don't think they have a problem with not having quite enough guns I don't think that's fully the problem here by column is that somebody somewhere is suggesting powerlessly maybe don't give

them guns but yeah and like and again like I don't understand here because like the weapons are gonna continue to flow they're gonna keep getting military aid for the United States yeah but he says by columns and marxetics case against turning Ukraine into another Afghanistan starts shading into an argument against providing arms to a sovereign government under siege insisting that peace cannot be achieved through a military solution but only through a mutually acceptable negotiated settlement that guarantees Ukraine's territorial integrity and gives Moscow a road back from what at this point is

looking like a disastrous miscalculation while addressing Russia's long-standing security concerns what all these analysis is willfully ignore is that the clear relationship between Ukraine's military strength and the plausibility of such a settlement three weeks ago Russia had no interest in a diplomatic solution that guaranteed Ukraine's territorial integrity it aimed to dissolve the Ukrainian military and install a puppet regime it was the Ukrainian armies unanticipated success and fending off a much larger Russian force that led the Kremlin to abandon those demands and entertain settling for Ukraine's

neutrality nevertheless Russia is still insisting on large territorial concessions and its refusal to agree to a ceasefire calls the sincerity of its diplomatic posture into question should the fragile military stalemate between Ukraine and Russia breakdown decisively for the latter there is good reason to believe that a mutually agreeable settlement will become impossible I remember like I saw a little bit of the back and forth between Bronco and Eric on this piece and the question of Bronco asked of Eric is that like in the context of the Iraq war would you regard would you regard America as like a

reactionary imperial autocracy invading a sovereign nation and if that's the case would you've been in favor of China and Russia selling weapons planes and you know anti-aircrafts batteries to Iraq right because you know it would strengthen their hand into like you know reaching a diplomatic peaceful solution with the United States which had you know invaded it in a war of conquest well the thing is Eric's answer by the way was yes that would have been good damn okay all right so I mean like I seems like I agree more with Eric than I have a feeling though that if if somebody in his position looking to have a future in

media wouldn't no matter how consistent it would have been and how fully baked it would have been would have put that one out there for our consumption I find it hard to believe that like that anyone in Eric's position would have advanced the case that China sort of sold arms to Saddam Hussein to fight American imperial conquest and invasion would Eric argue that we should have zero zero sanctions zero anything on Iran because I mean it's obvious the real reason that we you know have any any real distance animosity towards Iran is how they humiliated us in Lebanon in their own country their proxies making

an asshole out of William Buckley not the writer but the CIA but I mean is that you know a reactionary force occupying Lebanon 400 Marines dead would he have supported that would he support just rolling back any sanctions we have against Hezbollah in Iran and of course right now I mean you don't even have to get historical or hypothetical we have the Yemeni war telling you that this ironclad commitment to countries resisting reactionary invasion that means nothing yeah because like we're literally helping them do it and I mean Eric if you want to be serious and fully baked write a fucking article not not

about how we need to stop helping the Saudis boring that's that's absolute bare minimum not not even sufficient given our position you know the same position that makes it necessary for us to help the Ukrainians not only do we need to stop helping the Saudis we need to switch sides to the Houthis yeah we need to send them we need to send them well not F-35s we're trying to help them we need to send them you know like all the drones we got all the goodies we need to help them just level Riyadh to in order to defend themselves yeah maybe that's why our frigates keep crashing into Iranian shores we're trying to give

them shipments there's a bunch of Eric Levitt's in the military I mean yeah like this this goes back to you know like a just aren't give Iran nuclear weapons yeah that's my position on this and like by the way talking about it um could there be a better time than now to just switch sides to the Venezuelans in the Iranians because like the Saudi will not getting the high well they will not even pick up the phone to us getting the hi-hat and we're still giving them Patriot missile cats in the cradle with the silver spoon in 2045 we're going to put a man on the moon Saudi Moon project 2045 yeah now we

were we're getting absolutely we're getting just Sun every day by these motherfuckers yeah no I mean to roll back a little bit yeah again to bring it to a more recent example I mean I would have to say that Gulf monarchies versus the Syrian government which is the more reactionary force yeah would just more of an imperialist autocracy right would Eric support sending Marines to Damascus to fight on the side of the Syrian army you know I just I doubt these things uh Eric continues my point here is not to assert that arguments against arming Ukraine should be beyond the pale thanks for that oh thank you

very much Eric thank you you're he's putting he's putting his discourse gun I mean yeah no it's just like like you know like I'm not trying to be too hard on Eric because he clearly believes that I am in the pale and not beyond it because you know I mean if he said if he said if he had said positions you know certain positions that I hold that we've watched on the show are beyond the pale then I'd be real sore oh my god you can't get back in that's what's tough such policy entails real harms these weapons will not disappear on the day peace is declared many will find their way onto black markets and from there to

places where they kill and maim innocence further if one deems Russian military victory a foregone conclusion then there is a case that minimizing needless death requires a betting Ukraine's swift defeat that is a grim argument and one that seems much less credible now than it did two weeks ago but it isn't ludicrous what is ludicrous however is to speak as though there is a button marked mutually agreeable diplomatic settlement that Joe Biden could press today if only he weren't mashing the more more guns button instead the left's argument against America's sanctions policy has

been more worthwhile the risk of waging near total economic war on the nuclear superpower are vast and unprecedented and the immediate impact of US sanctions is to amiss rate many Russians who are powerless to influence their autocratic government while also exacerbating hunger crises in the global south given the routine failure of sanctions to deter aggression it is hard to say with confidence that the benefits of economic welfare will outweigh its costs yet the socialist left is the one of the only factions in the US politics that's interested in subjecting our sanctions policy to cost-benefit analysis

nevertheless it is doubtlessly the case that sanctions make it harder for Putin to finance his war machine and the DSA IC has not made much of an effort to explain why this is an unworthy goal nor has it tried to reconcile its moralistic objections to sanctions against Russia with its support for BDS in theory there are plenty of ways of rationalizing these stances one could believe that broad-based sanctions are more likely to work in Israel since the Israeli governments is democratically accountable to much of its population or that economic warfare against Russia carries a nuclear risk that economic

warfare against Israel would not well I mean Israel's got nukes yeah yeah democratic accountability that is a funny way to describe the Israeli government accountable to whom I guarantee you guarantee you if America really put Israel under an economic blockade some of their nukes would wind up and let's just say certain hands that are ready to use them in a major American city yeah some some characters you may have missed from the 90s and even 2010s that last argument strikes me as dubious it is hard for me to believe that if the United States decided to kick Israel out of the dollar-based

financial system until it withdrew all settlers from the West Bank the American left would mobilize in opposition on the grounds that sanctions severely impact working-class people regardless fail or to acknowledge and explain a parent contradiction invites the suspicion that the DSA's foreign policy stances derive less from considered principles than ideological reflex the American left contains multitudes some of its factions have navigated the present crisis with humility and curiosity no hyperlinks and by no hyperlinks great given in that no treats no no article treaties boys and girls

what the fuck article plug closed up and the left's more dogmatic members have also made some valuable contributions to the discourse on Russia Ukraine socialist polemics remain a better guide than mainstream reports than many aspects of the conflict on the questions of refugee resettlement and debt forgiveness meanwhile the left solidarity with Ukraine is more robust than that of more mainstream political tendencies well there you go well there you fucking go we have to get all the way to the end of the article the left wants Ukraine in the best of all worlds to be its own nation that can control

some of its own destiny you know reality permitting meanwhile the forces actually in power want Ukraine to be this thing that you stick IMF money into and that your son can take it out of or your friend or whoever whoever it is whether you would are a Democrat or a Republican whether you're Brandon or you're uh what did he call Trump uh president president president Trump or president Trump or or or Hillary's son-in-law you know getting all those in Hillary's son-in-law got all this inside info for Ukraine for his hedge fund and lost money by the way remember that by going along on Greece yeah good

work you know how to pick a man and by the way as long as we're talking about um just taking money out of the Ukraine got number hundred Biden's natural gas job that's not patronage okay he found that job and indeed he knows look he smokes crack but he knows a lot about your Ukrainian natural gas markets that way I want to say that I love the Bidens because it's they are they're in the fold of like Clintons and all these evil families but they they always fuck up they all like Joe gets to be president but in a time where he's only living in his own memories after he's gone hollow Hunter gets like the patronage job that

like every like Clinton relative and friend gets any one of these fucking families Chris Dodd's families but like fucks up so bad everyone sees his dick somehow as a result of it everyone sees the memes that he made on his computer on his imager account of his dad saying the n-word like they're like just a regular Delaware family made good yeah you know I love them I love them I'll admit I love the Brandon's and Matt say the thing about the way that you phrase the thing about Hunter's kid yeah somebody pointed this out is that he knocked up a stripper right so that means that there is a woman out there

whose mom is a stripper and whose grandfather is the president hey well I mean I mean good for her I hope she's getting some of that Biden money absolutely natural gas money she's off that guest but like you should get the the special jewel that the Chinese yeah just still on the Bidens Bo Biden is like another Bo Bo Jackson he was gonna take that family into like D1 evil families yeah he had it all he like he got that Dupont off on that disgusting case oh god at it all but in perfect Biden fashion he goes into a war that his dad voted for and later when you ask him about it is like oh I got

tricked and instead of getting like the plumb assignment that even Pete Buttigieg God he's next to the burn pits yeah and that's probably where he gets the brain cancer that kills him yeah a mate like no one can fuck it up like the Bidens yeah amazing family yeah how do you do that and like speaking of like the senators the fact that like the UAE and Saudi Arabia are not even picking up our calls about oil prices and while we continue to sell them weapons and like they're not just look the other way while they do a genocide in Yemen but like actively refuel their fucking jets after they triple tap a wedding party

yeah I think we got a thing like Ukraine must feel a little bit of the way we do now and that they've been giving these fucking make-work jobs to every fucking like every crack-addicted fucking cocaine-addled son of like in politics political fail kid of the American ruling political class for years yeah just all expecting that like when it comes time we're really gonna have their back we're gonna let them join NATO and I think like this is the fucked up thing about this is cuz like even if you believe that like the NATO expansion is good or that like right or Ukraine should be in like this European or Western

sphere of influence it's just like what are we talking about again like we gas these poor fucks up with me had never not even the most hawkish person had any intention ever of allowing Ukraine into NATO yeah we just want to shift them a ton of weapons and like create this sort of buffer zone where yeah like this horrific conflict could be waged out between Russia and Europe and our dipshit kids could huddle and just get just literally siphon off the national gas pipelines running through the country what does that tell you though about like all this like chastising is that like nobody on the other side of this

argument seriously ever considered allowing Ukraine into NATO ever I will go back to what I said in fucking January where I you know I don't think this war will happen I hope it doesn't but it is horrifically tragic for me to think about 18 year old and 19 year old Russians and Ukrainians dying for either of these fucking places but especially Ukraine after it has been just a playground for the worst fucking Americans gassed up into fighting our war for us that we want that we publicly all the time say we're not yeah you can't join NATO we're not putting troops in it's horrific and you you're just we

won't see any condemnation about this for another 10 years maybe we'll be like Libya where you get a brief acknowledgement then we go on with business as usual and now these and now you got the Levitzes of the world deciding actually the Ukrainians are epically owning Russia completely and they're winning the war they're gonna win on the battlefield which I'm sorry that's just a fantasy that's what you want to tell yourself so that continuing to fucking stoke the flames of conflict is a moral good because it's gonna lead to a better outcome and more freedom the freedom index is gonna go up

like no the country's just gonna keep getting fucking reduced to fucking rubble and in the day that it does stop which I really fucking hope it's as soon as possible as it rebuilds the worst people in that country yeah all are gonna be all the more all the more powerful well thanks in part to us thanks in part to Russia thanks in part to the worst forces in both countries that is the reality also considering that like I said they just literally banned like all the left-wing political parties in Ukraine from being in the government I mean yeah but you wait so it's martial law baby what are you gonna

do it's it's it's a Samo hungs and the martial law yeah running at the essay you know what's gonna look to restate it on questions of refugee resettlement and debt forgiveness meanwhile the left solidarity with Ukraine is more robust than that of more mainstream political tendencies nevertheless some of the most prominent left-wing writers and organizations in America have proven too ideologically rigid to see the conflict through clear eyes that might like me not like precious little Eric Levitz who has all of these real material interests that align with holding the the consensus line on this

thing but have no impact on the clarity of his vision clear eyes realize clear lies I loved Eric song on the final cut behind clear eyes their arguments have been less offensive for their substantive content than their intellectual carelessness so like this we talk about like cuz he he goes to this whole article and he says over to get over and over again well like substantively like much of what like even a position I'm like I seem to be characterizing it's actually like quite right but it's their intellectual rigidity and carelessness that's what really bothers me that that's what

compels me to write this article that does not need to exist that has nothing okay what if they fucking dragged no chance he's old-ass out and had him say on a YouTube thing I was wrong the whole time actually about you know criticizing your own country and all that stuff you slavage you glory to the heroes or whatever the fuck what would that change about anything what would what would be different in the slightest about anything happening I think they could notch a little victory in the in the in the posting war yes they could notch a little victory about like you know like they could feel like they

have a power of discipline a disciplinary power look I could keep these hogs in line please put me another rung up under the trough events have been less offensive for their substantive content which Eric has just outlined was like you know more or less correct but their intellectual carelessness obvious counter arguments go unaddressed apparent contradictions it's unexplained falsified predictions unaccounted for oh man well we went into the argument haunted house all these things are terrifying bring it bring it bring in this bring in this jumbo jet in for a landing here so let's go this

apparent aversion to acknowledging complexity and moral ambiguity should trouble anyone invested in the left's political project policy proposals are generally relatively binary what the what why is this obligation that you have to have acknowledged every possible shade in what is like a supposed to be political speech when that is never expected out of anyone else because it's impractical it's ridiculous you know you say that but honestly until we can acknowledge complexity and moral ambiguity I have serious doubts about the left political project I know they better again they better if only they

could get some of that complexity and ambiguity in there I think they have a shot that's why the right wing has been so powerful in the last six years just really complex and ambiguous they really embrace and the thing is they embrace and acknowledge the complexity and ambiguity at all times yeah guys if we can look at successful political projects in America for the last decade look at what works kicking out the cranks holding them accountable in front of everyone yeah socialist forfeit all hope of persuading anyone outside their esoteric circles if they call for choking off military aid to Ukraine and

demanding demand a mutually agreeable diplomatic resolution to the conflict without one addressing the obvious objection that Ukraine can only hope to secure such a settlement through force of arms to offering an evidence-based theory for how Russia can be persuaded to respect Ukraine's territorial integrity through sheer diplomacy or three explaining why the left why the left would oppose sending arms to a democratic government struggling against domination by a for a far-right autocracy given its historic support for arming the second Spanish Republic and the Sandinista government yeah the

American left can't begin to fulfill its vision for change without dramatically expanding its ranks associating itself with undercooked defenses of toxically unpopular positions on the world's most salient geopolitical crisis seems like a poor way of going about that task well I mean obviously it's correct that they need to get more numbers done but the idea that's what preventing the left from gaining popular currency and like numbers is is their lack of seriousness on the Ukraine policy is something you can only believe if you are completely up your own ass yeah I think you if you

actually had I mean if we had a like a politically engaged population that could be you know engaged realistically from a few you know relative commanding heights of of media that were consistently putting out a left-wing perspective I think the idea of this isn't your problem you shouldn't have to pay $10 a gallon gas for this would probably go over pretty fucking well yeah only not if you're talking about serious people but guess what serious people are never gonna fucking care about do your leftist shit because they're against it they are they are their interests are in opposition to it the

failure of the Bernie 2020 campaign I hope everyone or most people saw the same thing that we did which is that the way that Bernie could have succeeded was by activating a critical mass of non-voters and the states where he won where he did very well he did that or he came close to it where he fell short he failed to do that when someone is a non-voter but it otherwise amenable to these types of policies I do not think it's a lack of seriousness in Ukraine policies if you think that if you think that the fucking woman cleaning up hotel rooms the the the guy busing tables the people who have never voted you

want to vote if you think they did not vote for Bernie because they're like ah he's like kind of ambiguous on like on slobby Ukraine you are you are an article addict you are so addicted to articles it's insane yeah you need to go to a 12-step program yeah you need to go to articles immediately yeah you need to go to article inpatient yeah like you know like like Eric you want to talk about like like yeah like we said like the problem left from this country is it does seem cloistered in esoteric circles there is no more esoteric circle than that of foreign policy the sensible foreign policy wonks and and and good

sensible liberal thinkers in America that circles even smaller than the fucking DSA circle if the left was in power and affected foreign policy but that only foreign policy was just like a sort of vulgar non-interventionism at least a million more people would be alive today yes but even if it wasn't consistent and nuanced the yeah no so it goes here of course the hazards of ideological inflexibility aren't merely reputational the American left inherited many of its present and verities from the Cold War era and the ensuing period of US global hegemony but the tradition of all dead generations ways like a nightmare on the

brains of the living incisive analysis of incisive analysis of the emerging multi polar order and the challenges it presents to egalitarian change will require nimble thinking coming to dogmatism will not only undermine the left's capacity to win power but also its fitness for wielding it you know the way he's talking about this like oh it's all this ideological rigidity I mean another word for that is principles you know like actual like sustained principles and he's basically saying like look it's so fine and dandy to believe a thing in abstract but you know when when a foreign policy emergency

happens and it's all hands on deck and it's all anyone's talking about and it's number one priority you know amongst the media class well then all of a sudden your precious little ideology ideological priors and and principles they have to be adjusting you have to adjust to the new reality that there's a war on and you need to pick a side yeah show you're serious by changing your mind the second someone yells at you yes yeah you know like our friend Dan said this the other day but it's just like I mean this is the same as it ever was the same as it ever will be and it's just like you know the left opposed the war in Iraq

when that happened and did that help their electoral chances yeah by being by having adopting the morally and analytically correct position on the war in Iraq no yeah it did not and the idea now is like it's not even a matter like of like you know actively opposing Ukraine or like rooting for Russia just a matter of like just simply not taking sides in this is not good enough no you've got you've got to you've got to you have to be sensible you have to be nimble you have to be morally ambiguous you have to be a smart little smart like a grand green character and like and if if the fact that that nimbleness is rewarded

by the Malak demon state that we all agree is what the United States is well that's just a coincidence and you know like I will cop to a certain amount of ideological rigidity that you know did prevent me from thinking it was likely that Russia would invade Ukraine as fully as it did sure but like I will cue to I'm not I'm not going to get more limber on this because anytime the US fucking State Department or fucking like just the the mandarins of foreign policy in this country every time they're counseling for this country to adopt a course of action in any regard it is never ever going to be the benefit

of the flourishing of human life on this planet right I do not believe them for a second I do not believe that their their priors or ideological commitments are making render them capable of judging or acting in the world in a pop by positive way and I'd say that for myself my failure to see that Putin was gonna invade is I think they have a piece with my failure to really absorb the Trump was gonna win in 2016 and it was both of those I think looking back or for the same reason that I did not think that we were there yet you know like these things are all possibilities until they occur and some part of you wants

to put off the reckoning but what we're seeing in the last decade certainly is that everything that you know that that people kind of mused about in terms of what what what crisis would stand for in in the 21st century are having to come to terms with the fact that the timetable is much much shorter than that that they wanted it to be but that doesn't change the analysis I mean I said this a couple weeks ago but I mean like well I think what Levitz is really going for here as he auditions for like you know the Jonathan Chait chair at New York Magazine is this idea that like yeah they all took it on the chin

because of Iraq and what they really want the the ideological you know limberness that they're going for here is this sweet swat of just being like yes America has done some very evil things and very recent memory but Russia is actually more evil than the United States and what we're like what we're seeing what they're doing to Maripole right now or like they're bombing hospitals full of people like shouldn't that be proof positive enough that there are still countries more evil in the United States give us a break come on and I'm saying no yeah sorry like at the very best I'm willing to say that we are

about as evil as Russia is but the problem is we're a lot more powerful well that's the thing is that like every government is pretty much equally evil in that all of the incentive structures and power structures pull the worst people into positions of power and and kind of cannot allow anyone else to hold power the only real differentiation is the degree to which they can assert power over others and that's where the actual like execution of evil does and since we're the most powerful country by definition we're the most evil sorry and they just they don't want to give up the ghost on like you know like the 90s

era of like of America like post-Cold War having to have a reason for why we're still a military hegemonic power and that is humanitarian intervention they still don't really want to give up the ghosts on that because they don't like to protect baby they don't want to give up I mean even if you believe that like it's horrible that like you know genocides and abuses against civilian policy populations occur they don't they can't give up the ghosts on this idea that like well America we always mean well you know like it's just like we just we can still do some good in this world but the power all the bad that

we're supposed to be fighting that we're morally obligated to fight is all in the context of a global order that we enforce yeah no people say they hate subway you made the sandwich all right let's let's leave it leave it leave it there for that all right Houston we'll see you tomorrow night yeah yeah great all right Matt I'm going to go to the Cavendish food store 15 minute ride from here my brother in Christ please come with me and buy a pair of pants okay Texas is a place I nearly love to be but all my exes live in Texas and that's why I hang my hand in Tennessee