Duncan Trussell Family Hour - DTFH_229_abby_martin

Episode Date: February 11, 2017

When life gets crazy, and when doesn't it? ShopRite helps you keep it all together, now with a little extra help from Instacart. If you need your groceries now-ish, but your options for going to ShopRite are later-ish or never-ish, you can get everything you need delivered through Instacart right to your door in as fast as an hour. Skip the shop and savor more of your crazy, busy life with ShopRite and Instacart. Visit Instacart.com to get free delivery on your first order. Offer valid for a limited time, minimum order, $10 additional terms apply.

Hello friends, it is I, Dee Trussell, and you are listening to the Duncan Trussell Family Hour Podcast. And if you're like me, you have but one question you want to ask, and that question is, What the fuck is happening to me? What the fuck is happening to me? We live in an age of rapidly accelerating strangers, my friends. This is an age of weird firsts. The first insult Tweetin president, the first Super Bowl to go into overtime, the first

New York snowstorm following a 65 degree day, the first time that I've gone for more than a week without eating marijuana in over a decade. What will happen? None of us know. We are lost in a sea of abstraction and confusion. We are like pawns trapped in a warring game of symbols between invisible wizards vying for the control of the paradigm. And here to help us get our footing, our grounding, and to understand just what this insane shitstorm

that has kicked up around us truly is, is one of my favorite people, award-winning journalist Abby Martin. We're going to jump right into this episode, but first, some quick business. If you can cook, we'll die alone, and your dog will eat your face, and I'll be the only meal that you serve to friend, and that's why you need Blue Apron, Blue Apron. This episode of the DTFH is brought to you by the glorious food messiahs over at BlueApron.com. Blue Apron is the number one fresh ingredient and recipe delivery service in the country. They will send you a box of fresh ingredients, these laminated cards that make it nearly

impossible to screw up when it comes to cooking. When you're not cooking, you're missing out. You know that there are many people who think that when you go to eat at a restaurant, you're actually getting the psychic poisons of your chef mixed in with whatever meal it is that you happen to have ordered. If your chef, for example, has just strangled to death his grandmother in the basement of his leaky, moldy apartment because the voice has told him to, then that energy, the last terrified energy of his grandmother mixed in with the schizophrenia, is going to get

into your Denver omelet, which is why when you eat it, you will have a horrible bowel movement because your guts have been possessed by demons. This is where Blue Apron comes in. They've established partnerships with over 150 local farms, fisheries, and ranchers across the United States. Their seafood is sourced sustainably, under standards developed in partnership with a Monterey Bay Aquarium Seafood Watch. They can be delivered to 99% of the continental US and 99.5% of food deserts.

That's places where the only kind of food you can get is old, moldy, desiccated cucumbers from some side crack house that's selling corn and heroin at the same time. You don't have to go through that anymore. You can sign up for blueapron.com and immediately you will have delivered to your house affordable, delicious, easy to cook meals. All the ingredients are perfectly measured out for you. You don't have to go down to the store and figure out how much nutmeg you're supposed to get or what the hell an Asian purple cucumber is.

You don't have to go through that horror of realizing that you have someone coming over that you said you were going to cook for and that you have no idea what you're doing. You don't have to serve up some poorly prepared slop to someone that could potentially be the mother or father of your children anymore. You can give them a delicious, healthy meal. Give it a shot. Now if you go to blueapron.com, that's blueapron.com, you will get your first three meals free with free shipping.

That's right, three free meals. These are great. It's less than $10 per person, per meal, and I've tried it. I have a friend who has a tradition where when he gets his blue apron box, he invites his friends over, cooks them incredible meals, and looks like a god come to earth. Some kind of Gordon Ramsay Titan giving people delicious, healthy food. Also, it allows you to plug into that primordial part of the human spirit that sat on the planes and savannahs of Africa, cooking and frying up freshly killed gazelles and chomping mushrooms

and communing with the ancestors. Blueapron.com, it's fantastic. You can't mess it up and you will love it. I've tried it. I don't promote anything on this podcast that I don't use myself. Blueapron.com, forward slash trustle. Give it a shot. Learn how to cook again.

Do it for you. Do it for the apocalypse and do it for love. Blueapron.com, forward slash trustle, you'll get three free delicious meals. Sign up. Show them some love because they showed us some love. Much thanks to those of you who continue to use our Amazon link. Thank you so much for using that. It's a great way for you to support this podcast while gathering up the configurations of matter

that make your life so much better. They've got everything. I don't know if you noticed this or not, but I've been using a new vocal transformer, a Roland VT3. It's just fun. I love it. It's what Johnny Pemberton uses on his amazing podcast and I gotta say there is something quite liberating about having the ability to transform your voice anytime you want into

anything that you want. It makes you feel free. It makes you feel alive. It makes you feel less terrified. For someone who has a raspy lesbian voice like mine, there is something that is so incredibly liberating about finally being able to be whoever I want, whenever I want, just a switch of the dial and I go from being a beautiful, glamorous lady to being a beautiful lady. It's powerful, man.

It's a powerful thing and you can get it on Amazon.com. Just go through our link. Won't you when you decide to do that, please? I also have a live show coming up at the Bell House in Brooklyn. That's on the 21st of this month with Hamilton Morris. If you're not familiar with Hamilton Morris, check out his show on VICE, Hamilton's Pharmacopia. He is an amazing human being who has a deep understanding of psychoactive chemicals and I can't wait to have a conversation with him about the state of psychedelics today.

It's going to be a really fun podcast. That's at the Bell House in Brooklyn. Links are at DuncanTrussell.com. We also have a shop with t-shirts and posters. You can get to that shop by going to DuncanTrussell.com and finally, if you really feel like going for it, I'm going to be at the Ram Dass Spring Retreat in Maui. All you got to do is go to ramdass.org. There's all the information you need about that retreat.

Sharon Salzburg is going to be teaching there. Krishna Dass is going to be singing Kirtan there. It's one of my favorite things in life to do and I hope you will join us there. All right, that's it. Enough yapping. Today's guest is the former host of Breaking the Set on RT. She is the host of The Empire Files. She is a journalist, the founder of Media Roots and on all around amazing human being.

This conversation with her was exactly the mental palette cleanser that I needed. It helped me realign my compass and I think it will do the same for you. Now everybody, please welcome to the DuncanTrussell. Our podcast, the amazing and courageous Abbey Martin. Welcome back to the podcast. I have just one question for you. What the fuck is happening? Game show host, reality star billionaire, running the CEO of The Empire.

What's what's happening? So, but what I've been listening to the rise and fall of the Third Reich, I've been trying to tune in to, I'm trying to find some something in the past that lines up with what's happening right now just to give a sense of, I don't know, stability or an idea to prognosticate what awaits us in the future. Is there anything, is there any, what do they call a historic precedent for this? Has this ever happened before or something like this? Well, not in the sense of Trump.

I think Trump is a unique manifestation of horrible elements of American society that has culminated into this monster. But you can look at similar types of personalities, whether it's Benito Mussolini, similar fashion artistic uprisings in Eastern Europe. When you look at Hitler specifically, I always thought it was really hyperbolic and fear-mongering to call Trump, like, you know, this could potentially go down that route. But Chris Hedges, someone who studied the Christian right a lot and has embedded himself in the Christian right for years and years, said something scary to me.

He first said, you know, Hitler was the master conspiracy theorist. So if you're looking at, let's say, Soros controls everything, right? Sure. You see this kind of dog whistling anti-Semitism today where Soros is behind every protester, every mass movement, everything around the world. This is this one man. It's kind of like Jews control everything except now it's just one Jew. But so Hitler was not only completely manipulative in his scapegoating, right?

Only the white, Aryan Germans were, you know, the right race and stuff. But one thing that is really interesting is that he called himself a socialist and he was a member of the National Socialist Party. But so people will use that today and be like, no, like, Hitler wasn't a right winger. Like, Hitler was a socialist. But these are just misnomers that have been used throughout time. Just like neoliberal doesn't mean really mean these people are liberal. It just means that they utilize these terms in order to boost their agenda.

Hitler did employ full employment. And so Chris Hedges was saying, it's scary when you look at what Trump could do in order to hone in and galvanize his base and create the kind of brown shirt army that would act as a de facto like state forces on behalf of the state. And yet we what we're seeing right now is not Trump supporters who are being violent, but it's the left right now that are punching the Antifa, as they're called. We're seeing a lot of I'm not aware yet yet it will happen. But I'm not aware yet of Trump supporter, any Trump person who is like punching people

or we're seeing violence coming from the extremists on the left, more than the extremists on the right. Well, sure, you can you can point to the Berkeley thing as an example or punching Richard Spencer in the face. The Antifa and Black Bloc have been an autonomous force that has surfaced throughout many different protest movements. I think during the WTO is when we saw them in Seattle and all over Oakland, every time Occupy Wall Street would have a protest,

the Black Bloc would come on smash windows and shit. It would be very frustrating to say the least. I do think that we're in a new era where kind of neo-Nazi ideology is being normalized and I kind of do understand why someone would want to punch Richard Spencer in the face because he's going out there ranting about genocidal shit. Yeah, I think that this is a strategy and a tactic. I wanted to say really quickly about the full employment is that Hitler was able to hone in and utilize certain ideals in order to keep a base loyal enough

that they would act and be violent on behalf of him. We're not seeing that yet, but we're seeing the capabilities because Steve Bannon is a very scary figure, Duncan. He, and you can't talk about Trump without talking about Steve Bannon because he's really the ideologue behind Trump. He's the Karl Rove of Trump and he is a white nationalist. Yeah. He essentially is a neo-Nazi.

He hates even Asians. He says there shouldn't be Asian CEOs in Silicon Valley. So his strategy, his whole thing is to demonize the left. If you've seen Breitbart or Info Wars the last five years, they literally, it's like every fucking day, it's just shit about immigrants, women, trans people, Latinos, like those are the criminals, right? And it's the leftists is really the enemy to these people. And Steve Bannon has said time and again, he wants civil war in the streets.

He wants blood and guts and left as the enemy. Right. And that's scary as fuck. So if you're, if you're seeing, I've seen plenty of violence from Trump people 100%. I see people going on the street just shouting Trump as now, as now like, fuck you, Trump, Trump. I've heard people in the fuck, and I'm in Manhattan. I hear Haitian women behind me in the post office saying,

white women are smashing them with their shopping carts and saying, get the fuck out of this country. Trump is our president now. There is a huge emboldening of neo-Nazi ideology and fascistic rhetoric because Trump has won. I'm not even saying Trump himself is. I'm just saying the people on the ground are heavily emboldened. One of my friends here just got his knee crushed and he got jumped leaving a

leftist event. He thinks by undercover cops, part of Gavin McGuinness's proud boys group. So, well, no, this is why I say yet from the, from the right, but it's, it seems like what we're seeing is extreme, like we're seeing extremism on both sides and to even be anywhere in the middle is incriminating for, for, to yourself, to even, which is where I'm trying to land. At least trying to find the place where it's like, okay, what is actually happening here when that's where my needle, my compass keeps spinning.

Because when I see Berkeley or when I see Milo, Milo, how do you say his name? Milo Yiannopoulos. I think Milo Yiannopoulos going to speak at this rally, I can't find anything that that guy is doing that strikes me as particularly worthy of the level of demonstration that those people are doing. Like I can understand demonstrating like that. Maybe if what's the other dude's name? Spencer.

You know, I've read some of his writing and it's like he does not, he's not like hiding like he's tweeting. He tweeted about the Superbowl something about his excitement that there's three white people on the team or whatever. So he's like a white, he's a white supremacist, I guess you would say. And, and I've seen the, how do you say Antifa? I've seen their argument is like, listen, if you want to normalize is your idea, let's sit down and have a logical

conversation with somebody who, if you gave them full power over the planet, they more than likely would want to at the very least relocate a great number of ethnicities to some other place so that you could get what in my mind is a living hell, a pure white city. Can you fucking imagine? It's peaceful ethnic transition, Richard Spencer says. Peaceful. He just wants to turn everything into like fucking Florida to like white

Florida, but it's like, and by the way, for anyone losing that feeling, yeah, now you're being racist. No, I will say this. I like white people. I love being white. I enjoy white people. I, but I'll tell you, I also love black people, brown people, China. I like them all mixed together because that creates the most interesting

moments ever. And the merging of cultures and all of that shit that the white nationalists are so weirdly terrified of is just insanity to me. Obviously, you don't even need to say that. So I get the concept, okay, if this is a person who really believes these things, the conversation you need to be having with them, historically, we've learned about what happens if you have conversations with these people, it doesn't work.

So punch them or whatever. So I kind of, I hear you're saying, but even then like Noam Chomsky, you know, is saying like, no, if we do this, it's a slippery fucking slope. Because the thing is this, start punching these assholes and they, they are going to punch back and they're going to punch back harder and in a more organized way. And with a feeling of justice behind them, which is like, Hey, man, I got sucker punched.

I was just walking down the street and I got sucker punched by a coward and a fucking bandana who ran from me who didn't even talk to me. You didn't give me the chance to swing back. I got sucker punched. And so if you're sucker punching, it's like, what does Jean-Paul Sartre say? He said, if you, anything you do, you give permission for the entire planet to do. If you punch me, if you sucker punch me, I've got permission to sucker punch

you. And now we've got a fucking problem. Now we have an escalating, which by the way, I don't know what the solution is. So tell me, Abby, what are we to do that doesn't involve punching or macing or these like sucker punches? What are we to do right now? If a lot of us, as we are, as this thing escalates and every single day,

there's another fucking nut, nut, nutty, nutty tweet. He's losing his fucking mark. This is mutiny on the goddamn bounty. What do we do? Okay. So I want to do say, I want to say one thing about Milo. I'm not sitting here advocating violence against these people. I'm not going to apologize and be sad about Richard Spencer getting punched in

the face. I think it's fucking hilarious. But yeah, I mean, I'm not, I'm not advocating going out there and punching Nazis, especially since they will fucking destroy you if they have like, they're much more well organized and not, not Nazis, but I mean, like the right and also look who's in fucking power. They have the state behind them, the police, DHS, all these like fascistic Gestapo entities.

But I will say that Milo is not an innocent person. He, he used to sport open neo-Nazis symbology. He had an iron iron cross that he would sport on his Instagram. He now likens himself more as like a performance artist where he kind of hides under the guise of like, oh, I'm just pushing the envelope as far as I can. I think going back to the Steve Bannon thing, I think this is a strategy in order to make the left seem like the violent and people are saying, oh,

it's the left to our fascist, not knowing what the fuck fascism means. But Milo has singled out trans students at schools before on college campuses. One person had to quit school because he put her face up on the projector in, in a mob of angry xenophobes and started calling her out and said, look at this dude, it looks like a dude in a wig. I want to fuck him and just said all this crazy shit. He also puts up the ICE number and says purge your local undocumented students and people.

So that kind of free speech, quote unquote, I think posits also as like incitement to violence and incitement to hatred. And I, and I don't blame people for coming out in mass to try to shut down, especially when you're speaking at like a public university, you know, taxpayer funded space. Like he's free to go to alt-right meetup groups and KKK shit and go speak. But I can see why in one of the most radical institutions in the country that people would go out and mass to try to shut them down.

I don't think that you should be, you know, burning shit and breaking windows. And also I don't like this snide term for people who are like, hey, don't break windows. And they're like, oh, you're a window protector or whatever they call it. It's like, no, this is like you're smashing one. Like, oh, it's just a Starbucks or whatever the fuck. It's like, well, clearly you don't understand how franchises work. You know, this is just a person who franchised a place who like is like

any of us and you don't know their political leanings or whatever. I disagree right now. And I know I get it. A lot of you are thinking, yeah, but this is the only time to do it. This is the time if you're going to do it now, do it now. If you're going to break windows, break them now. Better to break windows now than when the fucking tanks are rolling through the streets and they're gathering us up to put us into fucking camps.

My instinct, though, right now is this is not what we're supposed to be doing right now. It's histrionic. I think that the universities are places where insane ideas, even noxious ideas, even noxious personalities, even the worst of worst ideas should be allowed without being shut down in the most obvious way. Should they be invited? Should Al-Qaeda and should be in London if you were alive, be invited to university?

I tell you, I've been wanting to interview. I would love to interview someone from ISIS. I'd love to talk to somebody about that insanity, just to hear it and understand it so that we can really, really do something about it. Because you saw what happened with Milo. His book sales went off the fucking charts. Here's what's going to happen is no other university is going to invite him on because if they do, they know the risk.

Like, Berkeley, what, lost like tens of thousands of dollars. I mean, it's risky as fuck. Like, they might invite him to speak, but I don't think Berkeley is going to have him. I think that, to me, that is problematic because when, OK, here's the problem. If someone is a fascist, I mean a real, like a Hitler level fascist with his 24 points that they originally came up with and involved, like a terrible, it's horror what they were doing in the very beginning when they're just seven people meeting in some dirty fucking bar.

And I don't know where they were in Germany, but like from that, from from that, like God, when you're on this rise and fall of the Third Reich is so good. But when you're here, when you just think there are all these moments, right? There are all these potential moments where that could have been stopped. You know, and in that case, you know, fuck, yeah, all of them punch them. What were those moments like? What give me one of them? Oh, God, well, you see moments, for example,

where you just where he was like rejected from art school or then he was couldn't become an art. He could maybe someone at art school said we should go to architectural school. He couldn't go to architectural school because he was he didn't have good grades in high school. And then his mother dying of breast cancer, you know, you think, oh, fuck, really, the Holocaust was kind of caused by breast cancer. Because after his mother died, he went nuts.

You know, that's when you just there's all these little moments, right? Where where something could have stopped him. So from that logic, I get the idea of like shit, maybe when Spencer got punched in the fucking face, that knocked him off track from becoming the next Hitler or something like that. Even though I don't think it did, I think it just made him into a martyr and boldened him. I think it made him like it made it excites a lot of people who want

the excuse to use violence. So I think that the the the idea of calling someone a fascist, right? This is a fascist. OK, fine. But let's really make sure this is a fucking fascist, right? Because I was looking at this actually is because everyone's throwing the term fascist around and on Wikipedia, they have the definition of fascism. And I was thinking, my God, this doesn't just apply to the right.

This applies to the far left, too. How does it apply to the far left? Well, because the swarm, let's check this out. This is hold on one second here. Umberto Ecos, Umberto Ecos, 14 general properties of fast fascist ideology. And might I just say, I see the look you're giving me. Listen, I do not believe this fucking immigration shit. The all the stuff that he's doing right now.

And I'm not what I call I'm not a trumpet or whatever they call it. But simultaneously, I'm when we start punching people, shutting down people's ability to speak, when we start swarming on people, when we start attacking people in this way, we unfortunately fall into this. It's easy to become the monster you're trying to kill. Who said that Churchill? I can't remember, but read me what you're saying, because I think that you're misrepresenting what the extreme left is left.

Leftist ideology is not fascistic in its nature. So we're really misrepresenting the terms. Okay, then I'm saying it wrong. Okay. So, so look, tell me what you think is fascist about the far left. Let's go through the points. Um, the cult of tradition characterized by cultural syncretism, even the risk of when all truth has already been revealed by tradition, no new learning can occur.

Okay, we don't have that. That's not there. The rejection of modernism, uh, which views the rationalistic development of Western culture since the enlightenment as a descent into depravity. Definitely not there. The cult of action for action's sake, which dictates the action as of value in itself and should be taken without intellectual reflection. I kind of believe that.

I like that. That's like from the Bhagavad Gita, you have a right to your action. So shit, I'm a little bit of a fascist. Here's where we get into what bothers me. And again, I think when you re list these, you could almost make a chart of who lands on, on these points. Disagreement is treason. Fascism devalues intellectual dis fascism, devalues intellectual discourse

and critical reasoning is barriers to action. What does that sound like? As well as out of fear that such analysis will expose the contradictions embodied in syncretistic faith. Right there. Disagreement is treason. This asshole is a fucking Nazi, secret Nazi, hidden Nazi. We can't let him speak.

We can't let him fucking speak. I don't think anyone's saying we can't let Milo speak. I just think they were saying, don't fucking speak on Berkeley's campus. And to me, you're actually falling prey to the Trumpettes. You are now just blindly parroting their bullshit, being like, the leftist fascist. When you resort to violence, dude, we're living in a fucking fascist police state right now. Trump is at the power and you're talking about fucking leftists right now.

This is bullshit, dude. I don't, I just, I disagree with you. Again, this is, I think this is what Steve Bannon wants, dude. Well, you know, I don't want to, I don't want to be what Steve Bannon wants or what anybody wants. I just want to be able to use logic to go to like, think about like, OK, if we're going to start shutting people down, let's like, be really certain what we're doing and why we're doing it.

Okay, well, when the president of the United States takes to Twitter and threatens universities on behalf of Milo, I don't really think that's shutting anyone down. I think that's the president of the fucking United States being like, I'm going to send out police to protect your ass. That's horrible. That's fucking crazy. No one's shutting Milo down.

He has the right to be an asshole anywhere he wants to be, other than where people fucking don't want him, students that are trans and undocumented and don't want fucking people out there inciting violence against them. I get it. So you're saying Milo gets to speak, except he doesn't get to speak at university. I'm saying I understand why people at universities are threatened by him and want to prevent him from speaking there. He has the right.

He no one's preventing him from going out and speaking where he wants to, other than that. No. So but you're you're saying not it. You're saying people, if someone comes to a university like him to speak, then the action that of like rioting, I never said that I just said, I understand why students want to shut him down because he is a threat to students. That's what I just said that the trans woman that he publicly mocked and made her quit school and he urges people to purge their

undocumented students at school. That's disgusting. No, that is that is fucked up. No, I totally super fucked up. But God damn it. Is it is the right way to do it to like set trash cans on fire, break windows, mace that woman who got maced? Well, that's fucked up. It's fucked up.

Masing women. But I think when you look at the Masing anybody. Traditional explanation of fascism is the marriage of corporations in the state. And that has been happening for a long time. And Trump is just the demagogue who's taken it to a new level and boldening fascist rhetoric of people who are xenophobic, crazy motherfuckers who now think the left is their outliers and their anti-establishment.

The left is the target. And it's really dangerous. Let's keep going through these. Okay, go for it. Appeal to a frustrated middle class. I'd say if we've got a whiteboard here, that's we're going to chalk up that to Trump or for sure. Obsession with a plot and hyping up an enemy threat here on one side of the

spectrum, it's fucking Russia, man. It's Russia. They hacked us. They got us. Russia got us on the other side of the spectrum. It's like what you were saying in the beginning. It's fucking the goddamn Muslims or no, it's fucking Soros, Soros. So both sides get a mark right there.

Both sides obsession with a plot. Then we have fascist societies rhetorically cast their enemies at the same time, too strong and too weak. On the one hand, fascist play up the power of certain disfavored elites to encourage in their followers a sense of grievance and humiliation. On the other hand, fascist leaders point to the decadence of those elites as proof of their ultimate feebleness in the face of an overwhelming popular will. I don't know.

It's hard for me to figure that one out, which side that lands on. I don't know. Check this one out, though. Pacifism is trafficking with the enemy because life is permanent warfare. There must always be an enemy to fight, both fascist Germany under Hitler and Italy under Mussolini work first to organize and clean up their respective countries and then build the war machines that they later intended and did use. That one right there, pacifism is trafficking with the enemy right there to

say from my perspective, you know what? I don't want to fucking punch Milo. I don't want to fucking throw shit through windows. People like, no, you do that and you're one of them. That lands on that fucking side. By the way, I went through this and I was like, oh my God, it's both, this is extremism that we're seeing. Now, I might have misinterpreted the left or something.

I'm totally willing to admit that because I didn't, I should have looked up leftism before I looked up this, but regardless, whoever's punching and swarming and doing this stuff, they fall into some of these slots, not all of them, contempt for the weak, which is uncomfortably married to a chauvinistic popular elitism. I'm going to say that we're going to land on that. We're going to give a mark for the Trumpeters right there because there are a lot of like, what's the term they use?

Oh, you poor, precious snowflake, contempt for the weak, Trumpeters, get a point on the board. All right, everybody is educated to become a hero, which leads to the embrace of a cult of death. The, your fascist hero is impatient to die. And as impatient, he more frequently sends other people to death. I can't remember who just said that, but somebody did just say they would die for Trump.

Oh, it's Jones. Oh, yeah. There you go. Bob, point for Jones on the fascist side of the board. Machismo, which sublimates the difficult work of permanent war and heroism into the sexual sphere, definitely the left, right? No, there's no Machismo on the Trump side. And then selective populism, the people conceived monolithically, have a common will distinct from and superior to the viewpoint

of any individual as no mass of people can ever be truly unanimous. The leader holds himself out as the interpreter of the popular will, though truly dictates it. Fascists use this concept to delegitimize democratic institutions. They accuse of no longer representing the voice of the people like the fucking judicial branch of the government. That fucking, what did he say about the judge? So-called judge is like, these so-called judges, how dare you?

It's like, dude, these are judges. Bush appointed the judge. Like you just decide you're a judge. You're like, no, I'm a judge. Like, no, I am. Trump's like, no, you are. No, you're not. It's an alternative fact. And then news, news speak.

Fascism employs and promotes an impoverished vocabulary in order to limit critical reasoning. So definitely if we're going to talk about an impoverished vocabulary, just fucking scroll through Trump's tweets, man. But still, you do see how we're like, yeah, these characteristics, not everyone's meeting all of them yet. Thank God. But there are many some people on one side are meeting one.

Some people are meeting the other. This is why I think it's important to be really aware of what's happening, because I get it. Why are we punching? Why are we calling people snowflakes? Why are we deporting people? Why are we we're afraid? That's on both sides, I would say.

There's a lot of fear, right, Abby? Yeah, but there's only one side that has the full force of the U.S. Empire behind them, and they are actually enacting rapid legislation that is demonizing all of these groups of marginalized people. And that is very scary. So there is a very rapid rate that one side is unfolding their power right now. So I understand a lot of the heightened tensions. I get the emotions are really, really extreme right now.

But yeah, we need to take a step back and figure out what the long term strategy is here. That's right. We have to figure that out. And that and that long term strategy is hard to figure out right now, because it seems like it's such a fluid battlefield. Things are changing so quickly. I have it hasn't happened yet, but I have a fear that they're going to take the internet away. They're going to figure out a way to that seems like that would be on the list of things they don't want.

But simultaneously, don't you have a little bit of hope that the system that's in place is going to, in some way or another, the system of checks and balances is going to prevent him? Is that naive of me to have that? I did think that, Duncan. I never actually finished my point about Hitler, that the full employment thing, Trump is actually looking to maybe do that. And if Bannon is smart enough, they will create some sort of jobs program for like the blue collar Rust Belt, this infrastructure program that he's talking about.

And that's what I was saying kind of is similar to Hitler, like really investing in his base, making him happy and loyal. But I think that with the presidency, we've seen more power than I ever thought the executive branch had. Like, what in the fuck was Obama doing for eight years? Jesus Christ. What a fucking loser. He's not in his goddamn hands. Two years, Congress had total fucking control and just didn't do a goddamn thing.

And so now Trump gets in and fucking unravels the whole country in five days. I mean, I think what we're seeing is, wow, the executive branch has way, way too much power. And I honestly don't know, Duncan, if we have institutions that can prevent this. I think, ah, contrary, I think that Obama allowing kind of this free-for-all, not ending the wars, continuing the mass surveillance state, police state expansion. We all were warning him for this last eight years. Like, dude, we don't want someone like Trump to get in and take the helm for very good fucking reason. This is another, and I think it's an important point to go deeper into.

This is another interesting thing that's happening is the indictment of the Democratic Party that's happening through the Trump presidency. And if you, God, I can remember tweeting some shit about Hillary Clinton. I can't remember what it was because I feel a little bit of anger towards her. I feel a little anger towards the DNC. I feel like, so I tweeted something like that. And then you get the, so you know, you get in the same way that you get propaganda terms that pop up, right? So one of the propaganda terms when it comes to punching people like Richard Spencer is, do you want to let,

and I've heard that you know that like it's something that someone invented when like a bunch of different people are saying the exact same thing. And that what they say is, oh, so you want to let a fascist speak. So you hear that different versions of that popping up because that's a pre-programmed response. In the same way, if you talk shit about Hillary Clinton, the pre-programmed response is now is not the time to blame. And it's like, no, no, no, if we are to like strategize and come up with like an intelligent and effective way to get somebody in there who isn't going to potentially start World War III, we need to place blame so we can understand what happened. And Motherfucker, just like you're saying, Obama, oh, oh, you couldn't shut down Guantanamo Bay, huh? You motherfucker. Oh, really? It was that hard to shut it fucking down?

Because in one fucking week, Trump's like, yeah, national parks, let's sell those motherfuckers. There's sunsets everywhere. We don't need to see a fucking sunset in a national fucking park. Let's just get rid of it. We don't need that. In one week, going away, all these things. So, yeah, to me, there is definitely an indictment happening. What were they doing? Oh, I blame them. I actually do blame them more than I do alt-right neo-fascists for Trump. I blame Hillary, I blame the Clinton dynasty, and I blame the entire neoliberal establishment for fucking this world up, for giving us this bullshit that people, you know, and then you have the audacity to blame fucking us.

Oh, the people who voted third party. Well, actually, people just didn't want to come out and vote for you, Hillary, because you're a fucking corporate shell, Clay candidate, who you have 30 years of scandal and corruption trailing your ass. Yes, that's right. And then you have fucking Trump come in and talk a whole bunch of shit about you, that's all true, you know? And so, yeah, I mean, it was very obvious, in retrospect, I did not think that he was going to win. I didn't either. But in retrospect, I completely see it now. Oh, yeah. Now, in hindsight, you can totally see it.

But still, so that being said, now what we have is, I mean, I could be completely wrong about this. I don't even know what to think anymore. I'm so deeply confused by the whole situation. But what are your predictions for the next American war? Oh, God. Well, when Trump got in, I think there were a lot of people who were libertarian, who liked that Trump was kind of signaling that he was gonna have normalized relations with Russia. That's certainly why I actually did like aspects of Trump. Like, look, he wants to stop NATO expansion on Russia's border. He wants normalized relations with Putin.

That's a good thing, because Hillary, of course, like you were saying, all the Democrats were fucking ready to go Neo-McCarthy on us. Start rounding up Russians in the U.S. It sure were, weren't there? It was nuts. They were posturing, like during the debates when, you know, like you could see Hillary Clinton like, let's fucking do this, man. Who cares? Putin's puppet. Yeah, oh yeah.

Putin's puppet. Yeah, yeah. And fucking a lot of liberals think that, you know, Putin had something to do with the election. 52% of Democratic voters actually think that Russia altered the vote. That's how deep the propaganda was. That's the, that is the plot, right? That's the fascist plot. Oh, it's fucking Russia.

Yeah, listen, here's, this is, when I think of that, I think, all right, so if I flew balloons into North Korea and attached to those balloons are everything that's fucked up about North Korea. And the North Koreans were like, oh, this is Duncan fucking Trussell flew these balloons in. It's like, you know, it's not the information that was written on the balloons. It's the thing that sent the balloons. So yeah, that was really fucked up to me, whether, you know, and everyone's like, oh, Russia is so scary. And then I saw some, and Putin's a fucking thug. When I saw the, you see Putin give a speech.

I don't know if you saw the speech that he gave where he's talking about during the elections. He's like, oh, it's, you know, they're saying these things because of the elections and it's political. But how much longer are we supposed to just sit back while they'd say these things about us? And this is a country. Exactly. How, and that's fucking scary because it's like, why are we prodding? Why are we prodding Russia right now in the way that we're prodding them? I think of everything going on really still in the Russia shit.

Yeah. Like, and if you, the most absurd thing about it all is that after the collapse of the Soviet Union, the U.S. literally fucking shaped and manipulated Russia's entire political economy, helped to steal two elections for Boris Yeltsin. He was the most hated motherfucker in the whole country. And now they have the audacity to be like, we, Putin's a thug, Putin's a killer. You only stopped liking Putin when he dissented against the Iraq war, motherfuckers. Yeah.

So let's actually talk about what this is really about. And also before, before those of you out there who are listening, this are like, well, she worked for RT. She must be a Russian provocateur. You, you on RT came out against Putin. You, you, that, which is a scary, scary thing to do because people who come out against him, they, they come down. They come down with some pretty bad food poisoning. Either polonium or, yeah, I mean, I, I denounced RT's coverage of Crimea and talked about Putin. And then I continued to talk about him.

And I think that really debunks the whole like totalitarian cartoonish depiction of like, RT is this Kremlin mouthpiece. They're no different than Al Jazeera and every other state-funded media outlet. It's just right now in the climate of Russia phobia, people think that it's like this crazy propaganda. When you, when you came out against him, were you scared? Did you feel a little nervous that something was going to happen to you? No, because everyone was, the spotlight was on me so that at that point I was being utilized as like a tool by all sides. So I wasn't really scared. I didn't want to go to Ukraine.

They wanted to send me to Ukraine to report on the ground. I was like, I'm cool on that right now in the middle of a crazy civil war with no war training at all. Can you explain what is happening over there? I think a lot of people are confused by it. And if not a lot of people, this person is, I'm so confused. What is that? I mean, Ukraine, there's a civil war going on. You want to talk about Nazism.

I think that people see what's going on in the rest of the world. It might be hyperbolic and kind of extreme to think that like Nazism is on the rise here, but really in places like Greece and Ukraine, there are open neo-Nazi parties that hold power. Yes. And they hold vast amounts of power and they, and if you want to talk about the extreme left, they have banned the Communist parties. They are really militant and fucking scary. And the media whitewashes them just like they do arming Al-Qaeda and Iraq. We like to call them rebels, I'm sorry, Syria and Iraq. We like to call these people rebels, but really they're fucking Al-Qaeda.

All of a sudden we're friends with Al-Qaeda in order to out a sod. So there's a lot of whitewashing going on with these terms, but you know, when you look into Ukraine, it's very scary what's going on. We basically helped this armed insurgency and helped the coup happen. And Russia's at fault also for what they did, but yeah, I mean the U.S. is definitely at fault very heavily in the situation. So it's just kind of pointing the fingers at Russia and being like, you guys invaded this territory and da-da-da. But really the U.S. was heavily involved in fomenting this dissent, just like we do all around the world. Right. That's our pattern.

That's our pattern. And isn't that interesting because that pattern of destabilizing regions and then keeping this like perpetual war going, which people blame on sorrows. That's one of the big things people blame on sorrows is they wanted, and the theory is they want to like, this is, so for the pro-Trump people, the idea is that somehow Trump snuck through. He got through this incredible web, snuck through, and what was about to happen was a complete, an economic collapse was going to happen in the United States, destabilization to allow for some kind of globalist regime to tighten down on the entire planet. Now whether that's true or not, who the fuck knows, but definitely when you see what's going on in Iraq, Syria, Afghanistan, somebody likes to knock over the blocks to kick over the sandcastles and then people are making a shit ton of money from it.

Yeah. And let's talk about sorrows because I don't want to, you know, I don't want to come out there and be like, sorrows is nothing, you know. Look, sorrows is a hugely influential billionaire that was heavily invested in the Ukrainian uprising. He's heavily invested in a lot of this shit. He hates Russia. That was, you know, when people say he's heavily involved in the Clinton campaign, he absolutely was. That's 100% true. Yeah.

And I will say that there are many more powerful billionaires than he. Koch brothers are just sure, you know, two of them. But I think that just focusing on sorrows is wrong. Yes, he should be focused on, especially since the Democrats are going to try to co-opt any sort of movement or resistance that happens and then try to utilize it to sell another fucking shill like Obama. Oh my God, Abby. Well, this is crazy to me because it's, you know, you. So what in a dream scenario, if you're running the show, what do you, what would you, what is the, because this is what I think. Here's my cheesy hippie idea.

God, this is so cheesy to say. I love the people. I like being around people. I think people are so amazing. Humans are amazing. What is the, what do we do for humanity? Like what's the, what, if you could create some political movement, find some preexisting political movement, bring them into power. What would it be instead of Trump, instead of Hillary Clinton, instead of the, what is it?

Well, I had disagreements with Bernie Sanders because he didn't attack imperialism. He never linked capitalism to imperialism like I did. But I think I agree with the democratic socialism thing. I think if you're looking at how do we actually have a functional democracy? Because we clearly live in an oligarchy becoming actually more totalitarian by the day. But Bernie Sanders, the democratic socialist ideals are just having democrat democracy, real democracy where you have democratic participation. You have localism. All of these things are encouraged and participatory elections are encouraged and you have to abolish the electoral college first and foremost.

You have to abolish, or I mean, you have to in state term limits. Like all of these things need to happen at a federal level in order for really us to engage locally and act change locally. Yeah, there's certain aberrations like city council seats can, you can put people in that are really genuine. But at the federal level, Congress is totally fucking bought. They are, can sit in there for like indefinitely. It's completely insane. They basically are telemarketers. They spend half of their time lobbying donations.

So, and look at all the so-called democrats all voted for every single Trump cabinet appointee. Chuck Schumer to Dianne Feinstein. So, I mean, it's just insane. I think that we need to take a step back and look at the system. Trump and Steve Bannon have hijacked these terms globalism, you know, cultural Marxism. Really, that's just xenophobic. It's basically the fear of the other. It's a fear of multiculturalism.

It's a fear of immigration. And I totally lost my train of thought, but that, but those terms need to be analyzed and debunked because, you know, it doesn't really make sense. And it really is just fucking racist. And Steve Bannon has said over and over again that he wants to not only temporarily ban Muslims, he wants to ban all Muslims, all immigrants. He is a white nationalist and he's in Trump's ear. And I wanted to really quickly go back to what you were saying about Trump's anti-war stuff. So, I think that I was really excited about the de-escalation of stuff with Russia.

I was excited that he was willing to work maybe with Assad. And unfortunately, we've seen just complete hostilities. Right off the bat, his ambassador, Nikki Halen, told the UN or something. She was at some board and she was like, we are not going to lift the sanctions on Russia unless you give back Crimea after the referendum and shit. It's like, OK, sanctions are an act of war. So that's crazy. So right there, that was off the table. And then Iran.

You have his other top guy next to Bannon, General Flynn, who's a fucking psychopath who says Islam is cancer. He's talking about 1.7 billion people on earth are cancerists who need to fucking die. That's what General Flynn thinks. And he came out and said, not only is Islam a cancer. I'm sorry. General Flynn said, not Islamic terrorism. Islam. Islam is cancer.

Islam is cancer. Wow. And he also said, we're putting Iran on notice, like their fucking 15-year-old child in the corner of your room. Or like an employee. Yeah. It's like what you do if an employee isn't functioning. You put them on notice. Yeah, put them on notice.

Give them a pink slip. Holy shit. So already within the first three weeks of Trump's presidency, we have Iran already retaliating with this crazy Muslim man to be like, fuck you guys, you're not allowed in our country. Already they're unraveling the Iran nuclear deal, saying we're going to fucking put you on notice like a child. Russia's sanctions are on. Already Rex Tillerson is fear mongering against Venezuela, oddly enough. So you see a lot of movement already on top of the extreme measures against women, undocumented people, and of course Muslims. Now, this is the new, this is at least popping up everywhere, is Bannon's fourth turning idea.

Right? The sinister idea that, yeah, we need these wars. The purge. Like we need the chaos of these wars to fulfill this insane, like, well, not really that insane, actually. I think the prophecy of the fourth turning or the idea that this is a cycle or that, or just any almost any dunce can look around the world and think, oh fuck, something's going to happen here. Like, I don't know what it is, but something maybe not so great is going to happen. I think Bannon knows about that, or understands that, but the idea would be, hey, I think we need to like maybe try to forestall the apocalypse, not like accelerate towards it. See, that's the scariest thing.

The Bush administration was one beast looking back, and Obama was a whole other beast. It was kind of like hypnotically putting everyone to sleep with his rhetoric and stuff like that. Right. The Bush administration, neo-conservativism, they never like wanted a civil war. I mean, they just wanted to kind of try to brainwash liberals into supporting their wars abroad and all their military excursions. But now we have people in power who are extreme evangelical Christians for the first time in a long time. I mean, Mike Pence has been trying to vie for power for decades. Eric Prince, the psychopathic genocidal founder of Blackwater, the mercenary army, has been advising Trump behind the scenes.

He is the biggest donor of Mike Pence. His sister Betsy DeVos is now running our education. Oh, wait, fuck. Oh, God. Jesus, you just exploded my brain. Hold on. Yeah. DeVos, I had no idea.

She is the sister of the guy who started Blackwater. And people can say, oh, well, don't blame me. Luke Skywalker was not Darth Vader. And you're like, well, okay, this is a family of evangelicals whose philosophy is very intertwined. One of them runs a private army and the other one runs our fucking schools now. Oh, holy God. Good little Christian warriors being bred for the war on Islam, Duncan. That is so sinister.

I had no idea. I mean, I knew that she, I knew her family. Like you could see who donated the most or like all the people, all the Republicans who have gotten money from her. But I did not know that she was in any way associated with Blackwater. I just thought she was like, I thought the concept behind her was she's just kind of like a dope person. Yeah, she looks like Dana Carby's character on SNL, like the dopey glasses woman. But no, she's, yeah, they're fucking nuts. And Chris Hedges gives a lot of insight on the evangelical wing who have been vying for power.

They've been putting institutions in place for this long and Trump was their dude, like their Trojan horse to get in. So you have kind of two movements, the Christian right that is now has more of a stronghold than pretty much ever. And then you have the alt right, which is kind of not really a political movement. It's more of just a reactionary ideology on like PC culture and shit. Let's talk, let's talk about globalism a little bit because I can understand why people are afraid of the current definition of globalism, don't necessarily want the European Union or some group, some cobble of like quote globalists making decisions about the taking away the autonomy of the United States, something like that. I get that. I wouldn't want that to happen. I also understand the idea of like, well, as a country, we should definitely tighten up our borders.

I mean, we have, we did, we did bomb Iraq. I mean, this is one of the funny things about being an American is our idea of war is very one sided. Our idea of war is we bomb people and they don't bomb back. Our idea of war is we attack people. They don't attack back. We swing. You stay still. We punch Nazis and they just stand. Yeah, that's that. That's our idea and that is not how war works. War works and with unfortunately generally in most wars, if you study wars, if you look at the bombings of London or any war works both ways, man. And so knowing that we have, in my opinion, quite idiotically got like attacked a country destabilized.

It allowed the rise to power of an extremist group of religious fanatics who understand the idea of wanting to allow refugees in and would weaponize refugee, any refugee that they could, they would love to do that and they would intentionally do it. So knowing that I get the idea of like, all right, we got to come up with a way to make sure those people don't come in while making sure the people who are fleeing those people are allowed to come into this country because they deserve to be here. How you answer that, how you figure that out, who the fuck knows. So I understand that too. Strong borders to keep people in the United States safe. I also understand the idea of like, let's bring jobs back to the United States. Let's make it so that it's profitable for businesses to work here. Sure, why not? That sounds fucking great. I understand all that. So how is globalism different? In other words, what is the right kind of globalism?

How can you have a globalism while still maintaining the integrity and the autonomy of a country? So this is where Hitler was not a socialist in the true sense of the word, among many other things, but he was very into nationalism. And he thought that only one race and class could have all the power. So as a true socialist, I believe in internationalism. I do believe in open borders. I think that everyone deserves rights, especially those who were trying to box into countries that we bomb and obliterated. I think that people are confusing globalism with capitalism. I mean, if you're looking at, capitalism already is globalism. If you want to talk shit about globalism, then maybe you should point to the system that has employed globalism, which is the global capitalist system,

that already you have what eight American men control half the world's wealth. That is the structure. That's the inevitability of unfettered, unchecked, unbridled capitalism that Trump is literally embodying more than anyone has. Because we've kind of learned to demonize the state, demonize politicians and not demonize business executives and CEOs who are fucking obliterating the planet and working off slave wages. Trump's whole mantra about business, bringing businesses back here, it doesn't make any sense because capitalism doesn't work that way. You can't just like say like, oh, we're going to start a factory here and businesses are going to move back from Singapore where they're paying people five cents a fucking hour to pay people minimum wage. No one does that. That's unfortunately the inevitability of the global capitalist system where people move where the wages are low. So even if they get, and they already pay no taxes abroad, so like this whole bullshit doesn't make any sense to me, but I understand. I'm sorry, just to clarify, you're saying capital, if you want to talk about fucking capitalism, capitalism is a corporation is like, I don't give a fuck about your country.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, exactly. You think I care about your country, so I care about profits. So I'm going to go wherever I need to go and if it involves exploiting fucking people to the point where they commit suicide by diving out of windows because they haven't seen the light of day because they're assembling fucking iPhones in some subterranean fucking basement, I'm going to fucking do it. And when they start committing suicide, oh God, I didn't know. Oh, whoops. That's what Apple did. What? Oh goodness, I didn't realize they were being mistreated there. You know, they act like they were just kind of oblivious to the fact that's your fucking factory.

You didn't know. So that's true capitalism. That's a great point. So that's a great point. That's globalism. That's what happens. There is no globalism that is not a capitalist tyrannical corporatocracy right now. Like we are looking at CEOs who control everything about the government.

And if you want to point to any aspect of our government that's not completely bought and sold by corporations, like that is the corporatocracy and the US is the empire and they are managing the world stage. So it's just weird that people have separated that and somehow glorified capitalism as this is our God and it can do no wrong and we need actually more capitalism and we need to remove all of the state. Well, to me, it's the other way around. I don't think that we, you know, I don't believe in like abolishing capitalism. I just think that this is a huge misnomer where people are like pointing to like globalist entities like the UN and NATO and being like these are the ultimate right. Like these are so the idea is like when you're saying globalism, like right now when I think of the propaganda, the anti globalist propaganda, then what I would think that I definitely don't think of capitalism. I think of some kind of murky contingent of, uh, yeah, it's so weird. I never thought of this.

It's just literally CEOs. I mean, that's who's running the whole world, you know, like that. I mean, I can see where people would buy into the whole dog whistling of globalism because Alex Jones and other people have been, they used to point it to like the international banking cartel and like, I always thought of kind of that criminal cabal of like the most powerful people, the Rothschilds. Yeah. But now, like, I kind of just understand more that there really is just like a handful of fucking rich assholes who control everything. Well, actually, the truth of the matter is if you are upset about the Rothschilds or the families or whatever, then you are upset at capitalism. Exactly. You're upset at functioning capitalism because that would happen eventually is that what the more capital a person has, the more capital they'll accrue.

And the more capital they'll accrue, theoretically, the less capital from other people. That's just a pair. And capitalism loves open borders. They want capital to flow freely through borders. That's what, so it's capital for, for them, but not for people. Okay. But I'm going to Fox News you here and I want you to shut me down just so that I can be clear because like, I haven't thought of this yet as globalism is capitalism. And I will admit, I have fallen prey to the idea of like, yeah, globalism seems fucking horrible.

I don't want a bunch of goddamn psychotic Muslims over here groping ladies in the fucking park. Because that's what's going to happen if we start letting them in. That's what's going to happen. We're going to have fucking, I am not going to be able to go down the street with my girlfriend without some fucking fanatical Muslim terrorist groping her in the park. That's the idea we see. And we have seen that happening. So help me. So I'm going to, so you shut me down.

Okay. So let me Fox News you keep going. Okay. So you're, let me ask you this. So your idea is, what are we supposed to take the money away from these families? That's your idea. If you're we supposed to, if it is 10 or 20 or five men with all the money, what's your plan? You want to take the money from them?

How much do you want to take away from them? How much do you want to tax them? When do we, where does the taxation stop? You want to put the state, I'm asking too many questions. You want to put the state in charge of taxing these people? You trust the state that much? How do we do this? Do you want to overthrow the state and replace it with somebody?

You can fairly tax these people. What are you talking about? Abby, we're going to take the fucking money away from them and give it to who? Absolutely. I think we should fucking tax the shit out of corporations who pay no fucking taxes. These corporations don't fucking pay taxes, dude. So what the fuck? Yeah, let's start with fucking making him pay some taxes.

Motherfuckers. They start paying for fucking healthcare. So yes, first of all, if Trump really wanted to do something to penalize corporations that went overseas and employed slave labor, fucking, why don't you find them? Find them. If you employ slaves across the world, find your asses. Yes. Unless you fucking come back here.

That's the only way they only speak in terms of profit. Wow. So find their asses and then threaten them and be like, okay, if you don't, like we're going to fucking cut everything off. And then import anything from you. So I think that, yes, I do believe in wealth redistribution to an extent. I do believe that as we're seeing unbridled capitalists getting wealth redistributed, I'm not talking about us.

I'm talking about people who have half the world's fucking wealth and people who have that much wealth. This is the whole erroneous nature of trickle down economics. It doesn't fucking work. People hoard wealth. Yeah. They don't fucking redistribute it themselves. So if you just keep giving the top 1.1% more fucking money, they will hoard it forever. So your idea is we take the top 1.1%.

So it's the idea is like we take the billionaires or the bill billion bill. But you look at like, let's say Richard Branson. Richard Branson, you want to take his stuff? The creator of Virgin Airlines, which by the way, has a fantastic airline. And I would tell you. Have you ever flown on Virgin? Well, Alaska just bought it out. It can't be that.

What the fuck happened there? Well, I like the idea that Branson's got some fucking money because it worked. Or Elon Musk, for example. Sure. So the idea is if we redistribute wealth, now I've always thought like, come on, man. Do you need $10 billion really? Like you need $10 billion. Couldn't you have one?

Like one would do you pretty good for a while. Like you're going to have a lot of fun, great weekend, at least for a billion dollars. Like do we need 10? And I've also, I've often thought, well, if I'm a, if I have $10 billion, then there's something in instantaneously unethical about that. Like if like you have that. You're hoarding your psycho. You're hoarding all this energy that could be put into the hands of the people.

But that isn't the idea that like Bill, the Gates Foundation are philanthropic. Like if you, the billionaires and millionaires should not be forced to redistribute the wealth because it's up to a human being. It's up to a person. Well, clearly isn't working. So whatever system that we have in place is not working. It's getting worse by the day. I think that there's.

How is it of things that we can do for redistributing? How is it not working? Because the inequality has just hit an all time high where eight American men own half the world's wealth. When two years ago it was 62. That's how rapidly. That's what I call working. It's shrinking.

Yeah. It's working for them, right? Right. I think that we, there's certain things that we could do before we talk about like a fucking socialist revolution. You can make tax havens criminal. Right. All these people hoard wealth and keep them overseas and like the Bahamas and shit, make

that fucking illegal. If you have tax havens, you can't be a sitting member of Congress. There are certain things that you can do to actually legitimately remove corruption from the political process. That sounds like a great stuff. And also fine corporations, you're talking about Virgin. Well, let's talk about BP and fucking ExxonMobil. Right.

If you are proven to be lying to the public and doing all this shit and polluting the ocean, you're fined a fucking year's worth of profits. Right. Like there's no more permit for plunder where BP knows that they can poison the fucking golf and then come and just pay a small fine and then just continue doing business as usual. If you want true capitalism, let the banks fail. You know, all of this is like, it's like socialism for the 0.1% where there's like a, you know, redistribution of wealth and resources only for the corporate CEOs.

Whoa. It's really disgusting. So you're saying that the top weirdly, the top 1% are actually enjoying a strange form of socialism. They get tons of subsidies from the government. Heat corporations get hugely subsidized. If you cut all government subsidies and let these motherfuckers collapse and stop bailing their asses out and actually find them, this is why I actually liked what Ron Paul had

to say. Because Ron Paul's idea was simple rules that apply to everyone. Yes. Very simple. I'm down with that. Very simple. I like that. Yeah.

If you pollute, you go to jail. If you extort, you go to jail. Like there's certain things that apply. It doesn't matter if you're a billionaire. I think I know somebody who should run for the next to be president next. It's you. This is, see everything that you're saying, I like a lot. I don't, I mean, I've been listening to the Google log archipelago and what, what happens,

what, what happened at least with their attempt at Marxism. And it's terrifying. I don't want that to happen. I don't want, I don't want that. But what you, everything that you're saying makes a lot of sense to me. It's like, yeah, okay. How do you do when the government isn't holding you up? How does it work for you then?

Let's see what happens when the people aren't subsidizing you. And then, and then how does it work? If it works great, fantastic. You deserve to have what you have. But if you have what you have, because the people are bailing you out, which is what just happened, then yeah, fuck you. You don't deserve that. That's great.

Wow. You know what? Holy shit. I'm so glad that I talked to you. This is why I knew, this is why I knew it'd be good for you to come on the show. Because right now we're all confused. I'm confused. It's so easy to get confused.

And there's a lot of heightened emotions. Like we're, sorry that I yelled at you earlier about that. Oh, I don't, I don't mind. It was scary, but I didn't mind. But, but, but I just think it's super important to like what you just said, just some very basic precepts that are actionable, that don't involve chaos, that don't involve adding to the chaos, but are a really very simple thing for people to digest, which is so simple.

If you pollute, if you have an oil spill, if you're fucking oil that you're making billions of dollars off of, permanently destroys ancestral lands, if these things. So, you know, for example, like this pipeline that they're all talking about, if, if, if let them have like the thing is if the people with the pipeline knew, okay, you do the pipeline, but if that thing leaks one drop of fucking oil, you're going to jail for 20 years, one drop, you're going to do the pipeline, but if it leaks, you're going to jail. Totally. That's going to make them think really hard about that pipeline.

I think things like that are supremely smart, because you know what that'll do? It might not get rid of the pipeline, but it's going to make a really, really leak-proof pipeline. Exactly. They're not going to cut corners anymore with building these fucking oil rigs, huh? And we all win in that case, you know, because we have fucking the economy will grow, people will make money, and some of that money maybe will trickle down, but simultaneously we're not going to fucking get poisoned in some sacred lands.

And if there is a drop of oil, then we all get to enjoy a show trial where some pig gets to go in front of it. And the CEO, no lackey employee. And also you don't go to some nice fucking prison. We're putting you in the locked up raw style prison. Rikers. Yeah, you're going to go to fucking Rikers, you pig. So I like that.

So let's very quickly just go through what you just said. So very strict punishment for sons of bitches who pollute. Jail time. Jail time if you pollute. Jail time if you, like everyone says, all these bankers that clearly broke the law. Jail time for these people. So in other words, we're not saying stop being a capitalist. We're saying just adhere to the laws that the people have to adhere to.

If we start there, wow. And unfortunately, people have looked at what we're talking about and saying the state bails you out. We don't have true capitalism. So let's try true capitalism. Let's remove the state and have like total unchecked capitalism. Obviously, that's not the answer. Look at what Trump is doing.

This is like really scary that now we're just removing the veneer of whatever the fuck system we had and putting in like the ex on mobile CEO. That's not good. This isn't something that we should try. Like we already know where this is going to go. So I do. It's not good when the Ayatollah Khomeini says something that is kind of true. We're just like, well, I'm glad that Trump at least is saying exactly the truth about

what's going on there. We don't want the Ayatollah Khomeini to sound logic. We don't want radicals to sound logical. By the way, I'm sorry. I don't know too much about the Ayatollah Khomeini. He might be a great guy. I like his beard. He seems actually kind of sweet.

You guys have a similar facial hair. We have similar facial hair. I don't know what his deal is actually. I don't really understand that. But what I mean is, so yeah, maybe what's good about this right now is that we are seeing the truth. Like the truth isn't hiding itself anymore. And maybe from that in the next four years or so, people like you need to be talking

about this stuff more because a lot of us are falling prey to some pretty weird ideas because what I've been absorbing about globalism is it's the most rotten thing ever. And I always think about the different types of classes of civilizations that they talk about. I can't remember if it's, it's like type A, type B, type C, have you heard of that? So the idea is like there's a scale to measure civilizations. And a type, the first, we're not even considered a civilization yet. Like a true civilization is where the entire planet has figured out a way to use all the

resources on the planet in a way that doesn't destroy the planet together to make it so that there's no more, basically there's no more people who are starving. Everyone has, we figured out how to harness the power of the sun. We figured out a way to like spread the race. We have unlimited energy basically. That's what we figured out, which is a theoretical possibility or at least not unlimited because of the laws of physics, but as much as up there in the sun, we should be able to use. And once that happens, once the entire planet is joined together in this way of like, all

right, let's figure out how to harvest all the energy of the sun and get that energy to everybody. Now we have a civilization. So globalism from the perspective of a futurologist or from the perspective of like an ideal perspective is what you would want. Yeah. I'm an internationalist, socialist, democratic socialist, so I feel like the international community is facing a multi-front dangers, you know, climate change to ISIS to a lot

of things that we need to be working together. I don't necessarily think it's bad to work with other countries. No. I reject this notion of like, I'm a nationalist and I'm all about the sovereignty of the US. I get it. And especially when you're looking at things like the TPP, like Corporation China, undermine our sovereignty, but you have to understand that globalism really means, what are we really talking about here?

Are we talking about, you know, who are these people that you're discussing and what are these entities and what danger do they really pose? So but yeah, I forgot what your question was. Globalism means, oh, I'm just trying to, I'm trying, your definition of globalism is different from the definition of globalism. My naive idea of globalism is the people should come first, the people deserve food, the people deserve shelter, the people deserve health care. I'm a socialist.

No! Those are the concepts of socialism. I'm going to kill myself. That's what it is. No, no, no, but also basic needs for humans. But simultaneous. Overcapital. Fuck.

Well, God damn it, you've done it again, Abby, like now I've got to like sit and wonder if I'm a socialist. I have to like, I don't, I love the people and I don't want the people to be sick or hungry and I don't think people deserve to be out in the streets and I don't, if that makes me a fucking socialist thing. This is, this is the basic tenets of socialism, housing, food, and I'm not talking about bread lines, I'm just talking about an economy that works for everyone. And right now we've seen the opposite.

So unfettered capitalism is not working and I think that we need a real fucking reality check about where this country is going and giving Trump all the power in the world to make it worse is, is not good. All right. Well, you know what? I'm going to go read the Communist Manifesto and fucking travel to, I don't know. You know, Abby, thank you so much. You are such a voice of reason and I'm so grateful for you for trekking in the snow

out here to do the show. You've given me a lot to think about and how can people find you? Yeah. And I, and I, I'm sorry if I, any Trump supporters are out there. I think it's, you know, reach out to me and we can have a conversation. I totally understand where you're coming from for the good things that people voted for Trump for. Yes, absolutely.

I totally get it. Me too. I hated Hillary. Me too. Against Hillary than almost any journalist. So I think that I, you know, reach out. It's time to build upon what we really are trying to seek. I think everyone cares about people.

We all want the same things generally. We want healthcare, right? So it's also important not to absolve the Democrats. We don't want them to co-opt whatever is going to happen. Look, there's a good thing happening. Trump and Bernie, I think, represented a change. Yes. We need to now be a part of that change and guide it the right way.

Everyone check out the empire files on YouTube and check me out Abby Martin on Twitter. And I have a podcast with my brother called media roots radio soundcloud stitcher iTunes. Thank you. Thank you. That was Abby Martin everybody. Why not visit her over at media roots.org. A big thank you to blue apron for sponsoring the episode of this podcast. If you enjoy the DTFH, do us a favor, subscribe to us on iTunes and go through our Amazon

link. And most importantly, figure out where your compass truly points. Don't let that sucker spin in the Bermuda Triangle of information that we are all currently passing through here in 2017. I love you guys. I'll see you real soon. It's Macy's friends and family get an extra 30% off great gifts for her just in time for Mother's Day when you use your coupon or Macy's card and take 15% off beauty essentials or

shop specials she'll love while supplies last plus star rewards members earn on every purchase except gift card services and fees at Macy's sign up today at Macy's dot com slash star rewards savings off regular sale and clearance prices exclusions apply.