Fourth Reich Archaeology - #066 - FAUX Kings

Episode Date: October 24, 2025

This week we are calling an audible and deviating again from our regularly scheduled programming to do a special episode on the (spectacle of the) No Kings March.  As we are always looking for opportunities for the practical application of Fourth Reich Archaeology theory we could not help but put on our hard hats, sharpen our pick axes, and get to examining what history’s largest protest REALLY means for Democracy.  Of course we think it’s absolutely essential that people organize, gather, and show strength in numbers against the fascist agenda currently running roughshod over the United States and beyond. In fact we want to see much more organization, ideally organization with discrete goals, employing tactics actually designed to achieve them.  But in the wake of the No Kings March, we can’t help but feel like this one was just another performative, astroturfed event - a swan song for Progressivism, Inc. - that helps the powers that be enforce the two party model, funnel popular anger into electoralism (and the institutional Democratic Party), and distract the people from true organization.  In this episode, as usual, we use the text of Guy Debord and track how his words have come to life in 2025.  Just as Debord saw in his time, it seems like it’s impossible to find anything authentic within the spectacle, and the spectacle has turned all of its subjects into its defenders. The No Kings March is the embodiment of that, complete with its Byzantine network of corporate donors.Spoiler alert, we get pretty down and dirty in this one. Let’s get digging. Patreon: Pateron.com/fourthreicharchaeologyTwitter & Insta: @fourthreichpod

The spectacle which obliterates the boundaries between self and world also obliterates the boundaries between true and false by repressing all directly lived truth beneath the real presence of falsehood maintained by the organization of appearances. Individuals who passively accept their subjugation to an alien everyday reality are thus driven toward a madness that reacts to that fate by resorting to illusory magical techniques. The essence of this pseudo-response to an unanswerable communication is the acceptance and consumption of commodities. The consumer's compulsion to imitate is a truly infantile need, conditioned by by all the aspects of his fundamental dispossession,

as Gabel puts it, in describing a quite different level of pathology, that is, schizophrenia, the abnormal need for representation here makes up for a torturing feeling of being on the edge of existence. In contrast to the logic of false consciousness, which cannot truly know itself,

the search for critical truth about the spectacle must also be a true critique. It must struggle in practice among the irreconcilable enemies of the spectacle and admit that it is nothing without them. By rushing into sordid reformist compromises or pseudo-revolutionary collective actions, those driven by an abstract desire for immediate effectiveness, are in reality obeying the ruling laws of thought, adopting a perspective that can see nothing but the latest news. In this way, delirium reappears within the camp that claims to be opposing it.

A critique seeking to go beyond the spectacle must know how to wait. The self-imansipation of our time is a emancipation from the material bases of inverted truth. This historic mission of establishing truth in the world can be carried out neither by the isolated individual nor by atomized and manipulated masses, but only and always by the class that is able to dissolve all classes by reducing all power to the de-alienating form of realized democracy, to counsels. in which practical theory verifies itself and surveys its own actions. Only there are individuals directly linked to world history,

there where dialogue has armed itself to impose its own conditions. Colonialism or imperialism, as the slave system of the West is called, is not something that's just confined to England or France or the United States. Every nation, in every region, now has a decision to make. So it's one huge complex or combine. Either you are with us or you are with the terrorists. And this international power structure is used to suppress the masses of dark-skinned people all over the world and exploit them of their natural resources. We found no evidence of a conspiracy, foreign or domestic, the Warren Commission of the science.

I'll never apologize for the United States of America, ever. I don't care what the facts are. In 1945, we began to acquire information which showed that there were two His job, he said, was to protect the Western way of life. The primitive simplicity of their minds renders the more easy victims of a big lie than a small. For example, we're the CIA. Now, he has a mile. He knows so long as to die.

Freedom can never be secure. It usually takes the national crisis. Freedom can never be secure. Pearl Harbor. A lot of killers. We've got a lot of killers. Why you think our country's so innocent? country so innocent?

This is fourth Reich archaeology. I'm Dick. And I'm done. Welcome back to our show. We are so glad to have you here with us today before we get into today's episode. Let's get through the preliminaries. Thank you to everyone out there who has liked the pod, subscribe to the pod, commented about the pod to folks who have even spoken about the pod in real life. We know that the title of our program is provocative,

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and do a little something more to spread the word about this project. We are, of course, on social media. You can find us on Twitter, X, whatever, or on Instagram. Our handle is at Fourth Reich Pod. And lastly, but not least, we are actively and openly accepting correspondence from you. We are so thrilled every day when we check our inbox and we see that we have a new message from a new listener that is just filled with either great information, great additional

information about a episode we just did or some follow-up questions or just some kind words telling us how great we're doing. so if you are so inclined i do employ you please write us we are at fourth rikepod at gmail dot com did i miss anything don i think you covered it all you covered the whole waterfront and i as always will co-sign everything that you said we think that we've got our finger pretty firmly on the pulse of this here political, social, and cultural landscape that has engulfed so many in confusion. And we hate to see that. We hate to see well-intentioned people mired in the bullshit,

stuck in the hamster wheel that the propagandists have built for us and have pushed us relentlessly onto with the promise that it will give us some kind of knowledge, it will not. I think if you're listening here, you are already tacitly acknowledging that fact, and really our goal is to break through that bullshit, that set of erroneous beliefs about the world, world that we exist in that we've described as just a weight that we carry around with us in our conversations in our daily life and that drags us down and that beats the life force out of us. That's not good. That's bad.

And we don't want you, listener, to be saddled with that weight. and we hope that something that we're saying in our program will help to ease that burden on you and will empower you to go forth and help to ease that burden on the people who you know and love in your real lives, which is where everything is happening, much more so than on the internet. And that is, I think, the subject matter of today's episode. We're back in the present day. We are just almost too tempted. Perhaps it is the forbidden fruit that we're biting from now

in addressing the present day yet again, given the fraught and divisive nature. of commenting on just about anything. We were planning to return to our series within a series Shee Harvey Oswald and we've got a really great Shee Harvey Oswald episode in the works. I'm going to talk about Squeaky Frommi's imprisonment for murder two years before she had her fateful encounter with Jerry Ford. actually more like three years

and we're going to inquire whether she may have been some kind of a witting or unwitting asset of that California counter-insurgency crew the KKK in Maoist American English but a lack that will have to wait for another week

because this week, we are going to discuss no kings, the no kings march, the no king's movement, the no king's brand, whatever you want to call it, because as our faithful listeners are well aware, we love to engage in a little bit of Debordian analysis. here on Fourth Reich archaeology. And when the spectacle comes a knocking, you know your boys are going to open the door wide open. We just couldn't help ourselves here, but chime in

and provide a dose of reality as a salve to yet another incessant and overwhelming stream of bullshit, just like the actual AI-generated bullshit that Donald Trump in his epic meme post was dumping out of an F-16 onto protesters in his latest piece of slop. I think before we get into all of it, we should put out a disclaimer. right at the top. You could listen to this with the ear

that maybe we're being naysayers. And we don't want to be that. And this is not intended to be a show about how the people that went to this no kings march or suckers, we are

totally in support of all who attended the rallies. Or at least most. At least most. Maybe not all. Well, I should say we're not wagging our finger at people for attending. And we're not sort of trying to spread any sort of dumerism. And I think it bears noting all of this because it's pretty quick to critique what we're about to do as like the sour pusses in the room.

And not only that, it's also that, as we'll discuss in the episode, like the programming the right that's what I was just about to get into it's like for the listener who knows us for the person who is out there who is actually engaging in our materials in a good faith and a intelligent way which gosh if I if I can't say it enough we have some of the most intelligent listenership in the world what we are trying to do here is sort of create a supportive space to identify identify the problem to help people out of these various forms of false consciousness that has been imposed on them by this incredible and unprecedented machinery of propaganda, of brainwashing, that assaults all of our senses on a daily basis. This is stuff that is essentially hardwired within us. Yeah, very deliberately so.

Just to wrap it all up. If you know us, you know that we are approaching this or we are trying to approach this in an honest and respectful manner. But the truth does need to get out. And as you said, Don, our learnings and really are sort of what we've been discussing over the course of this last year or whatever, we can't help ourselves but apply what we have put out to this modern phenomenon. this greatest protest that has ever happened in the history of the world because the vibes were off. Yeah, I think maybe before we get into it, before we get the shovels out,

perhaps we could do a little thought experiment in the form of a brief guided meditation. So first, I want you to imagine that whether you did or you didn't, I want you to imagine that you attended a no king's protest and that you believed it in your heart of hearts to be the height of political participation, that it was the equivalent of being at the march on Washington and seeing the great Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King address his throngs of supporters in favor of the rights of black people and of poor people to live a dignified life in the United States of America, that you showed up, you did your part, and you expressed your repulsion with the horrors, and they are horrors of the Trump administration and

all of its fascist fuckery. And I want you to ask yourself very sincerely, very honestly, what did the No King's March accomplish? what except for the impetus to go and vote for whoever the Democrat candidate on the ballot will be in 26 and or in 28 steps do you have to follow in order to advance a political agenda up to the task of defeating the, what you've recognized by your presence at this event, fascist regime that controls really all branches of the government, what? And when you give that a little consideration, I want you to think about whether you find that answer,

if you are able to come up with an answer, whether you find it satisfactory. The other thought experiment that I would like you to conduct, the other switching of personi, right, you take off one mask and you don another mask, you inhabit another subjectivity, another consciousness. And this other consciousness is your most black-pilled, ultra-leftist, tanky, anti-liberal, revolutionary subjectivity that views these anti-king protests as an utter tool of the ruling class to fool people into engaging in a total charade that will merely have the effect in the best instance of funneling yet more votes into a corrupt and a complicit Democrat party that is shielding from liability genocides of the last administration, and that is corrupt to its eyeballs with the powers that be

and that would be sucking from the same teat as the Republicans, if only they could be in power today, and would be pursuing the same agenda on about 90s, 90% of the policy lines, whether it's data center imperialism or whether it's imperialist foreign policy or whatever, and ask yourself, what sort of communism or alternative system can you build without all of these. people filling the streets with their cringe, boomer, lib, no king's signs. And once you've given both of those experiments a little bit of thought, I want you to shake it off, don your PPE, pop that hard head on, affix the lantern there too.

Get the pickax. Sharpen that motherfucker up. Yeah, get the carbide tip. on it. Oh yeah, diamond tip, diamond tip. And a let's a get a diggin. We're gonna tear up the crown. Sanchez. You can see the Walt Disney Concert Hall in the distance out here. And people are stoked. This is a jubilant, peaceful celebratory atmosphere. And everywhere you look, the idea that Antifa is on the street. This lady's look, she got a big smile on her base.

Come over here. All those No Kings people out there, they'd be thrilled if any one of us on the right head, what happened to Charlie happened to us. I mean, it's a very disturbing fact. I've just been coming to terms with over the past month. Was the vibe in D.C. as much fun as what was happening in L.A. or, I mean, I know D.C. has just been a resurrected war zone, but you were there today, and you also were in a pretty interesting wardrobe choice. I must say, I feel like you were wearing a T-shirt that was designed to troll Donald Trump. Yeah, I am Antifa.

And some of the, I think a guy from the daily caller took a photograph of it, and then it was some kind of gotcha on conservative media. But, you know, it's just completely silly. Her fat ass needs to be fired, period. She's a pig, and I look forward to her termination, which I do believe will eventually happen. I'm not president. And if you want to talk about legacy,

let's talk about the legacy of mass deportation, deportation. I think they're not voting and Donald's broke. Okay, Don, Don, I have your rejoinder to your thought. And that is that what was accomplished on Saturday, October 18th, was a show up of about 7 million people nationwide who went out into the streets and made it known that they are against authoritarianism, that here in America we decided 250 years ago that we don't have. any kings and i think not to not to end off with a caveat and come back in with a caveat listener but it's essential i think to point out that we are totally down with that notion this idea of having people organized having people show up in numbers against a fascist agenda we want to see more of that.

We want to see much more of that. The problem is... That's 7 million potential Fourth Reich archaeology subscribers right there. That's right. Oh yeah, well, you bet your ass we want to see more of that. That was sort of what I was getting at in the opening there is like, you know, if there really are 7 million people that are against fascism like this,

man we really we have an untapped market but my point was that look this message the like pro democracy anti-authoritarian message totally on board totally totally on board who wouldn't be it's just so simple that's the problem is that it is basically the ultimate maybe even final boss version of identity politics for the libs for anyone the conservatives even anyone who isn't in the Trump camp it's basically this lowest common denominator thing that is largely meaningless what we need to see again is organization on such a local level an organization that is truly organic and not this Byzantine

amalgamation of I don't know how many special interests coming together on this lowest common denominator message because what does that do? It basically does absolutely nothing other than reinforce this Giede Dibor theory that we have been exploring in this show

because when you have history's largest protest a show up of 7 million people and nothing but empty platitudes and one-liners and then it's back as business as usual on Monday that is pretty absurd to me Yeah I mean the Iraq war protests that brought millions into the streets in 2003, at least had a discreet objective, which was ultimately unsuccessful, of course.

And perhaps that reflects on the tactic. Perhaps it signifies, again, the spectacular nature of the entire exercise. Yeah, totally. And I think maybe if we really want to explore the absurdity, we really should take a step back and just think about what this no king's mythos is really all about. And what it is they're trying to rally around. So it's this idea, no kings, right? Because supposedly in America, the people rule.

This is supposed to be a rejection of having Trump as a king. Nancy Pelosi breaking a crown, I don't know, I think it was like cardboard or something. that is the message right with a jump cut right it's it's an obvious it's an obvious nod to the founding fathers and the like mythos which we know is largely fake right that people rose up and defeated britain because they were against having this authoritarian rule the story goes of course that in 1776, with courage and reason, the founders of our country announced to the world that they would no longer be ruled by a king who would have absolute power over their lives. And because of that, they waged a bloody war for these notions of truth and democracy and justice and equality and

freedom and all of that shit. But this is so whack for so many reasons, right? The notion that this was the thing we rally around for this day is kind of perfect, right? Because if you know anything about

the American Revolution, if you know anything about the founding of this country, you know that from the get it was a business concern. There were some property owning whites who came out here to make money for the crown. By and large.

But what about the pilgrims in Massachusetts Bay? Their secondary characters, sorry. It was the Virginia planter class that led the American Revolution who had set up their financial interests in New England. It was not the pilgrims who landed at Plymouth Rock who are behind these notions, even if, of course, their narrative. was woven into the national story. To just put the fine point on it, it's that when, so when they say, you know, no kings means that when the people rose up and fought against the king of England, when they say people there, it's important.

It is critical that we are talking about business interests. We're talking about white male property owners because people doesn't include blacks. It doesn't include women. It doesn't include foreigners. It doesn't include non-property owning whites. And so the point of this little way into this discussion about fakeness and falsehood and how this is all just gobbly gook is adopting the No King's narrative now is just another opportunity to wash out this historical fact, to wash out the historical shame of what it really means to be an American.

Yeah, to paraphrase the big Lobowski. The bourgeois revolution is over, Lobowski. The king's lost. The king's lost. And that's, I mean, we should talk about, and we should talk about just like the boots on the ground, so to speak, in this protest is if anyone has been to a protest since the, I don't want to blame the Pussy Hat March,

but I think it was the Pussy Hat March, that really turned protest into a family affair where people would sort of come together. Largely, you know, middle class folks, a lot of older people would, you know, stand out with their signs, and it would be very tame. And indeed, they wouldn't really like for there to be any riffraff around, right? And this was no exception. I mean, I would place that transition even earlier in time. You know, de Beau is already talking about in the comments on the Society of the Spectacle

how the occupations and the so-called Paris Spring or the 1968 Freedom Spring that spread all the way from Paris to the United States to Prague to the rest of the world was immediately and effectively reincorporated and recast in a commodified way for consumption and for reproduction as commodity after those authentic experiences and the authentic urge to freedom that they represented were adequately suppressed and crushed and put down by the owners of capital, by the ruling class acting through its state security forces. And certainly it's been somewhat gradual, but as I mentioned, I mean, I think even that period of the Iraq war protest, and you could talk about the rise, of the answer coalition and this whole sort of astroturf phenomenon which is not to say that the underlying sentiments are not authentic among masses of people because they are certainly

authentic but as far as the paraphernalia the organization the work of planning and of communicating with participants and on behalf of a quote unquote movement centralized in the hands of a few that are not like a political party cadre elite like perhaps the Bolsheviks were back in the early 20th century but more like an NGO which will report the numbers of turnout on its next grant proposal submitted to the Ford and Rockefeller foundations for financial support, right? It's all corporatized. And as we, the readers of Guilla know, corporatization signifies the transition into a mafia-like structure. And so all of this, you know, think about it like a pyramid and not to buy into the right wing.

Shout out to Matt Farwell. Yeah, pyramid watch, baby. Not to copy the right wing framing of this stuff as Soros funded. These are Soros funded crisis actors, folks. Not to be Alex Jones. But it can't be ignored that. there are certain concentrated money and power interests that have a substantial role, not only in executing the spectacle itself by perhaps financing the mass printing of signs,

other really under the radar types of financial support, social media campaigns right that is you know paying influencers for sure for sure all the way up to overt media campaigns like the one million dollar nationwide ad buy from home of the brave dick you want to talk a little bit about what is home of the brave i don't think i can i'm not sure I know what it's about. I mean, I've read the about page. I've looked at their board members. I've read their stories. I guess the best way to characterize them is like basically every C or D list person you can think of that has been anti-Trump since 2016 has gotten together. It's like on both sides of the aisle. And these are people that, you know, they are. they're not your household names. And even less so as you go down the list. Maybe we should sound off on their board members.

Yeah, for sure. I mean, look, it almost bears reading their whole about page because it's so short before it gets into the biographies. So this is, of course, a 501, what is it, a 501c3 or a 501c4? 501c4, okay. So the contributions to this group are not tax deductible because it is a lobby group. Okay, so it's a political advocacy organization. And it's About page is, I would guess, under 200 words.

and it reads, Our nation is under attack. Donald Trump is exploiting the presidency to enrich himself and his family while forcing Americans to submit to his authoritarian agenda or face retaliation. Instead of fighting back, elite institutions, businesses, law firms, media companies, and universities, are caving. They're bowing to his demands in hopes that they can avoid being his next target. Home of the Brave is the community of Americans who refuse to be silenced. We're lifting up the voices of people whose lives have been directly harmed by the Trump administration.

We won't be bullied into silence. The first step in fighting back is speaking out, and that's exactly what we're. doing. So that's what they say about themselves. These are the guys that spent at least a million dollars pumping money into advertisement to spread the word about the no kings protests and maybe we could just kind of pass it back and forth. Dick, do you want to pick the first guy on there? Oh, man, do I got to? This one, I think, is probably the most famous guy, right? Maybe, actually, there's another, there's another lady.

He's top two. Yeah, for sure. So this one, anyone on Twitter will probably know. George Conway, George Conway is, I'm going to just read what he says he is, and then I'm going to give my little gloss over it. But George Conway is president of the Society for the Rule of Law and former partner at Wachtell Lipton Rosencats. he is a board member of Home of the Brave.

So for anyone who doesn't know, anyone living under a rock, George Conway, George Conway is the ex-husband of Kelly Ann Conway. I think they are either separated or fully divorced at this point. Kelly Ann Conway, of course, was Trump's campaign manager, the person a lot of people put in sort of give credit to turning things around for the Trump. campaign and then once they win of course she becomes this counselor to the president and george conway is anti-trump for from the get i think he is a more of your libertarian type of republican he is more of your old school conservative and i mean you know the partner at wakhtel that says it all he is

he has been very vocal against the Trump administration. He's on TV all the time, and he is a real funny-looking guy. Yeah. Yeah, he's a guy who, I mean, if the listener's not aware, right, Wachtell, Lipton, one of the biggest, if not number one ranked, you know, extremely, extremely prestigious major corporate law firms in the nation and in the world and George Conway's political involvement really peaked when he used his wife's position of influence in the Trump administration to lobby relentlessly for his

appointment to the role of Solicitor General of the United States, which would have put him in front of the Supreme Court many, many times on behalf of the Trump administration. And for whatever reason, I think we can guess the reason, it's because he talked open shit about Trump. Trump didn't bite on that hook. And so George Conway was diss and he was left out of the circle. And so even while Kellyanne Conway was the counselor to the president, not for a little bit of time, not just at the beginning and then she left the administration, right? She was the counselor to the president all the way until 2020. So they're cohabiting together. They're married to one another and they are living in the extremely, extremely wealthy

neighborhood of Kalorama where they're neighbors with the Jared and Ivanka Kushner-Trump couple, their neighbors with the Obamas, they're rubbing elbows with this elite behind the curtain. George Conway throughout this time is, again, capitalizing on the whole outrage over Trump by taking checks from MSNBC and from CNN, and it just, his name at the top of the list of the board of advisors. Tells you everything you need to know about this place. Well, yeah. It's like you read the thing and it says Donald Trump is exploiting the presidency to enrich himself and his family.

Okay, 1,000% true statement. But George Conway has been exploiting Donald Trump's presidency to enrich his ass without having to do any fucking work, assuming he did any at why. to keep them six figures coming in hot through donations from dupes that are pouring money into this organization and from MSNBC and from all these other sources that it's such a massive racket that to ignore that just because it's quote unquote, our side is lunacy. We should say allegedly racking in the six figures. I feel like George Conaway is the kind of guy that would come after us for, he would be like,

well, actually, it's more than that or something. Yeah. But having him at the top, I was saying, it's like, that pretty much tells you everything you need to know about this outfit. I don't think we should give George Conaway any more airtime. I think we should maybe not even do all of these guys No, no, no, definitely not all of them But I think it's fun to do this

I think this is actually will also tell you a lot Is all right, George Conway, top of the list Don, who's the next person up? Oh, yeah, I mean, the next real star of the show here to prove, to quote Bob Dylan To prove that all is equal and that home of the brave is on the level that it is in fact bipartisan the prominent Democrat, the one-time potential vice presidential candidate, the former ambassador to the United Nations,

the former domestic policy advisor to President Joe Biden, one of the great change. champions of the doctrine of responsibility to protect imperial warfare. That's right. We're talking about none other than ambassador, Susan E. Rice. Damn. She is. Likewise on that list. Damn.

And that's about where the household names end. To the extent either of these two are household names. There's certainly players in the establishment, whether it's the establishment of the right or the establishment of the left. But I just want to- Oh, man, the next guy on the list would be so sad if he thought that Dick from Fourth Reich archaeology didn't consider him a household name. Just look at his little constipated eyes looking at you on the website, man. Well, I'll say the name. He does have a household name. It's just not the guy you're thinking. It's Bill Crystal. Well, it's always the guy that I'm thinking

because I fucking will never let the neocons off the hook. Every member of the project for a new American century has a crosshairs permanently tattooed over their face as far as I'm concerned. That's metaphorical crosshairs, of course, to be struck with so many lightning bolts of the, the truth. And Bill Crystal is no exception, son of the er-neoconservative Irving Crystal, and carrying that torch forward as a now, full-time propagandist, editor at large of The Bullwark.

More like the bullshit. I, for one, when I hear the name Billy Crystal, I think immediately of Dan Quayle's chief of staff. a guy who will never misspell potato as long as he lives. But then it just gets, I mean, it just gets weird. There's another person from the bulwark, Sarah Longwell. She's a publisher of the bulwark, and she's a host of the Focus Group podcast. So these are, you know, this is definitely a network here. And then it just gets weird, right? You have Harry Dunn, a former Capitol police officer.

And he's described as former Capitol police officer who defended the Capitol on January 6th, 2021. The same with Michael Fanon, who is a D.C. cop, who is also purportedly assaulted by rioters during the January 6th attack. So it's like a real hodgepodge of folks who are against January 6th. I just want to do one more, and you could look this list up, but this one's my favorite. It just goes to show you. They were, I think at the end of this thing, they were really looking for seat fillers. You have Stephen Riker, and this is what they have on him, this is what we know about Stephen Riker. Stephen Riker formerly served as the Maricopa County recorder from 2021 to 2025.

What the fuck? You haven't heard of him yet, but you will, listener. our words. Yeah, but these are all just either Trump-era flunkies, another one, sorry to add to the list, but another was Trump's deputy press secretary in his first administration who only resigned from her position, which Home of the Brave gives her, of course, extra bravery credit for resigning after January 6, 2021. So she was happy to go along with the Muslim ban, happy to go along with the first attempt

at mass deportation under Trump, happy to go along with all the other shit that people were losing their minds over throughout the entirety of the first Trump administration. And yet, because she resigned from her job two weeks before she would have lost it anyways as a result in the change in administration, she got that sweet gig on the board of advisors and also landed herself a gig as senior advisor at Merrimack, Potomac, and Charles. Guess what that is? It's a fucking lobbying firm representing the same corporate interests that control the Trump administration and that controlled the fucking Biden administration as well.

Okay, so what are we getting at? And I think we should just get right to it. Do I have your attention? Good, because I have an important announcement to make. Dick and Don are fictional characters portraying the hosts of a satirical history podcast. They do not represent any persons, real or fictional, and any resemblance thereto is artistically drawn. Any statements regarding persons living or dead herein are not meant to convey or a verb any statements of a factual nature. Whoa, I don't know what all that means, but it sounds like it clears Dick and Don from any liability for anything they might say on here.

Isn't that neat? Now, back to our regularly scheduled programming. Enjoy! What we're getting at is that movements like this, what they're actually doing is they're weakening the greater cause. They're playing into that concept of give the people a treadmill to wear themselves out. You create this sandbox for dissenters so that dissent does get a seat at the table. It's just totally marginalized. It becomes an opportunity to basically just make another consumer choice, right? It's like go out by a sign and write something.

clever, right? And then of course when you show up, and I think this was sort of the vibe, it's like there was no real campaign for a candidate being promoted, but it's like the vibe at these protests was sort of like a midterm 2026 campaign fundraising event. They were, you know, asking for money from the people that were showing up. And when you have dissent start looking like this you know at best it does nothing to change anything and at worst i think it actually emboldens and empowers the the powers that be yeah and that's especially true when you see the organizers behind no kings explicitly disclaiming any involvement in any civil disobedience on the allotted day. And thereby, presumably perhaps, because after all, they're well advised by seasoned attorneys,

they want to avoid any potential liability that could come to them from any property. property damage or the like, notwithstanding the fact that the leaders or generators or moving forces behind the January 6th protests talking about you, Ginny Thomas and Rudy Giuliani and others, who met with absolutely no consequences for their spurring people on to the January 6th protests, which of course resulted in some violence and even injuries and deaths. But you see, this is the asymmetry in the two political parties and the two approaches, the two different hands of those, that strangling executioner, right? That they don't look the same.

And it's so, when you started talking about January 6th, and it's so funny when you really think about it, the no king's mantra is so universal that it's like, yeah, you know, four years ago, four years ago, the Trump crowd was chanting no kings. you know on January 6th saying like you know fight against tyranny and shit like what the fuck right and now with this forswearing of civil disobedience with this embrace of the mantle of the carnivalesque of the party like atmosphere the festive atmosphere that all the mainstream liberal media outlets write it up as, as though that's such a great thing

because it's so positive, it's not hateful, and it's a welcoming atmosphere that you can bring your kids to, right? And what they're really celebrating is the lack of any actual politics at work here they're celebrating the fact that not only do they decline to state any demands to the system but they disclaim any ability to extract those demands from the system and so if indeed these people believe, as we on this podcast most absolutely certainly do believe that the mass abduction of people on the basis of race by ice under the guise of mass deportation is utterly fascistic, is more repressive than any means deployed against the American people overtly in 50-plus years.

If they really believed that, what they're saying is, well, it's intolerable, but we're still going to tolerate it, at least for, what, another two and a half years until hopefully a Democrat majority Congress is sworn in in January of 2027? or even worse, we're going to tolerate it until Trump loses or his successor loses a presidential election in 2008 and his successor is sworn in almost four years from now in January, 29?

Like there's such a internal contradiction that is right there at the surface between the rhetoric of intolerability, of fascism, of authoritarianism, and the proposed solution of arms crossed weight and vote harder than you've ever voted in your life. It's kind of self-defeating. And if I were a fascist, if I were Stephen Miller, you know, the sort of mini-girbels of this administration, looking out at the opposition, I would almost feel disappointed not to have a better challenge to meet. It's too easy for them.

to impose their agenda over the dissent of whoever may beg to differ. Maybe it's time we read a little key deep bore into the record. experience of permanent submission one finds the psychological origin of the general adhesion to what is an adhesion that the spectator recognizes ipso facto as a sufficient value beyond what is properly secret spectacular discourse obviously silences anything it finds inconvenient it isolates what it shows from its context its past the intentions and and the consequences. It is thus completely illogical. Since no one can contradict it, the spectacle

has the right to contradict itself to correct its own past. The arrogant attitude of its servants, when they have to make known some news and perhaps still more dishonest version of certain facts, is to harshly correct the ignorance and bad interpretations they attribute to their public, while the day before they themselves were busily disseminating the error with their customary assurance. Thus, the spectacle's instruction and the spectator's ignorance are wrongly seen as antagonistic factors when in fact they give birth to each other. In the same way, the computer's binary language is an irresistible inducement to the continual and unreserved acceptance of what has been programmed according to the wishes. of someone else and passes for the timeless source of a superior, impartial, and total logic. On the level of the means of thought of contemporary populations, the primary cause of decadence

clearly derives from the fact that all discourse shown in the spectacle, leaves no place for response. And logic is only socially formed in dialogue. Furthermore, when respect for those who speak in the spectacle is so widespread, when they are supposed to be rich, important, prestigious, to be authority itself, the spectators tend to want to be just as illogical as the spectacle, so as to display. an individual reflection of this authority. And finally, logic is not easy, and no one has desired to teach it to them.

Drug addicts do not study logic because they no longer need it, because they no longer have the possibility. The spectator's laziness is shared by all intellectual functionaries and overnight specialists, all of whom do their best to conceal the narrow limits of their knowledge by the dogmatic repetition of arguments with illogical authority. If you really want to get to the heart of it of this like delusion and psychosis that needs to happen in order to, you know, really buy into this stuff, the like one of the strangest things to me is how this protest has this America first bend

it's like fully focusing on domestic issues in fact they don't want to talk about like international relations and policy and all of that stuff they don't want to talk about global issues it's very much framed as domestic stuff well they act like as their own cops right totally and it's no secret why but and we'll get into that in a moment but i was just while you were talking i was looking at like they have these just not to get into this home of the brave shit but they have this like testimonials page where they have real americans on their web page where they talk about the issues and it's hilarious man it's like it's the craziest shit it's like how are these not it's nuts it's like you know i would

say one out of three people are talking about tariffs and it's like quoting people right it's like it's like the person who pays the tariffs is the u.s and there's a guy it's like i lost my job because of the tariffs and it's like okay the tariffs are not really the thing i'm concerned about right now yeah but you know who is though the clients of mary mac potomac and charles lobbying group and the clients of Wachtell Lipton, they really care about policies that hit them where it hurts in the paycheck. Right. And then when it's not that, it's just like Trump has done more damage than good.

So, like, when you reduce it to this inorganic thing, it becomes, it's like obviously not going to work out. You can see it from a mile away. In fact, it's so short-sighted. Yeah. And this is where I think we should talk a little bit about, before we kind of wrap everything up, we should talk a little bit about the concept of false consciousness

and refer back to something we've talked about really throughout our geopolitic series, which is this notion that, people wind up their emotions and their identity and their ego formation around these categories that the spectacle puts on offer to them. And in this case, it's largely a reversion to the old two-party system because I would guess, and I think I would be correct in guessing, that the vast, vast majority of those 7 million attendees at No King's protests nationwide

strongly identify as Democrats, you know, capital D Democrats, people who consistently vote Democrat and people who take it a step further to consider something about themselves reflected in what they believe to be the values of the Democratic Party and say that this is a false consciousness because if you turn on the TV, right? And we did a little bit of this in preparation. The TV and another thing that we peeped into was the Pod Save America program, something. Oh, God. I'm not like you, man.

I don't listen to this stuff. And that was for me some of the first exposure to these guys. And who, yeah. To be clear, I don't listen to them either. I didn't mean to do that. Occasionally for research, and it had been a while. And so in this episode about the No Kings protests that we both listened to before recording this episode, like, it's alarming. The degree of psychosis was, it had my eyes popping out of my head.

Yeah, for sure. And for me, you know, I don't really listen to this stuff. It was from the get, right? When I'm turning it on. And listener, this is. part of the reason I'm asking you every episode please help fund us because we do not want to be a show that is resorting to advertisements but one of the things that really got me was from the get these guys are advertising home security systems with like video cameras and shit and I was thinking

about Matt Farwell and I was thinking about like damn we were just covering the shit and these motherfuckers before they start their program, they're slinging home security? What the fuck? Today's presenting sponsor is Simply Save Home Security. It's really feeling like the 1970s these days, inflation, an unpopular war, and an insecure little criminal in the White House. Yeah, they're getting paid by the surveillance industrial complex, which as we all know, whether it's ring or what was the one that they were shilling? I don't even think we should say their names. It's a fucking home video surveillance app or some shit.

Well, you could bet your ass that the data from that shit is in the fucking state of Utah, baby, getting fed into the simulation, into your Toppa, your doppelganger out there in the desert, waiting for you to slip up so that the deep state can let it slip. That's off the jump. But what they said about the protest, too, was very telling. And as much as it was, again, just reduction of politics to appearance. I mean, what was crazy to me was how they fully acknowledged, like, you know, they were, I don't remember who said it, but one of the guys was like, yeah, a lot of people have a criticism again. this and they say that like what did you accomplish or like that you know people voted for

trump he won the popular vote so is he really an authoritarian and of course their response is like well maybe not like now but it's certainly going that way and i thought that was dumb but but what i will say is what i did like about the guys at some point they did mention that a true patriot the most patriotic thing you can do is be critical of your country. So I'll give them their roses for that one. Yeah. But then at the same time, it's like they also invisibilize the fact that both this administration and the previous administration that they all supported had a continuing responsibility and culpability for genocide when they were describing the range of political positions that were present at the protests. They very deliberately, I would guess, I wasn't at the downtown L.A. protests and don't know if there were any pro-Palestine demonstrators there,

but I would assume that there were at least a few. And in any event, the pod Johns did not mention them on the spectrum of positions that were present. And that kind of goes with this fact that some protesters, and there were some videos making the rounds on Twitter, actively confronted pro-Palestine protesters at these events and shouted them down for being allegedly divisive for being signaling involvement with terrorism. There was some stuff from the Code Pink folks at the D.C. protest

where they were getting confronted and it's like I kind of to continue the theme of thought experiments in this episode I did a thought experiment myself imagining that like a big bubble is dropped over the top of this protest and you have trapped inside there all of the people who decided to take their Saturday and spend it at this place, right? So you've got everybody from your Lerushites that came to Pamphleteer to your mass of generic libs,

largely of an older age demographic, to your CAFIA-wearing Palestine flag-waving radicals, to your DSA types and everyone in between, right? And in that group, like, who is going to be able with infinite time to change the other people's views and bring them on board? And it's something I think is worth considering for people on the left, right? because even if your politics are as radical as they can be and as they should be and that see things clearly for what they are and that relentlessly critique the structures of power,

like what do you do when you're met with the kindly librarian-looking boomer libs who snatch a Palestinian flag out of someone's hand and say that shit is divisive. Here we're here to talk about our democracy. We're not here to talk about divisive issues. You know, and it makes me a little bit pessimistic because I actually don't see those people changing their minds. And that I think brings us right around to the, maybe we could even call this a conclusion of the thesis, but it's like in order to go through that thought experiment, those people would have to be confronted with the fact that, yes, indeed, there is authoritarianism, there is

fascism, we were living in it when Biden was president, we were living in it when Obama was President. We're living in it now. Of course, surely it is persisted and maybe even become definitely become more spectacular, but to acknowledge what the person that is trying to get the word out about Palestine, to acknowledge what they're saying, is to acknowledge that we have jackboots on the ground, or at least we have funded the jackboots on the ground. that are responsible for genocide. Responsible for genocide and using the terrain of genocide as an experimental laboratory. You know, shout out to Anthony Lowenstein and his book,

the Palestine Laboratory, all about how Israel and its tech culture is held up not just by the United States, but by the global tech and surveillance and military industries as the tip of the spear to try out all of their new technologies, to battle test the innovations that they are tirelessly working to bring to their government and private military clients, right? So the person who shuns the pro-Palestinian activist from the No King's protest is at the same time denying a very real connection between the forces of oppression bearing down

in the United States and the forces of oppression being developed. and being modified to adapt to the latest technologies in Palestine. It's all one and the same. It's all of a piece. And the unwillingness to see that full picture is a function, I think, again, of this false consciousness that is deployed through this Identitarian Manipulation, right? I remember in law school,

I had this professor who I really liked and still admire, who's a prominent critical race theorist who was not an overt Marxist and was kind of, I would say not a Marxist, was kind of cagey about the whole thing. He was of an older generation where the M word or the C word, right, were taboo. And this guy would say that he couldn't get behind Marxism because it assumed that too much was due to false consciousness, that the false consciousness excuse to him was a cop-out to explain away these very real

motivating factors that people feel deeply in their everyday lives and that cause them to support and contribute to institutions that not only are repressive generally, but that specifically repress them. And I think that that fails as a critique of Marxism because false consciousness is not a reversion to magical thinking. In fact, it's the opposite. It posits that people's emotions, their sentiments, and I'm thinking now sentiments in the way that Adam Smith used to,

write the word back in the day with the s that looks like an f you remember but that they are i think i said before wound up right they attach themselves to something bigger than themselves in the same way that religion operated on the consciousness for so many centuries and kept serfs subservient the feudal lords and now in bourgeois society where everyone is of the middle class in their own subjective understanding of their class position it's all the easier to bridge that gap and to serve a master who you believe stands for your values and the technology of endocrine at the disposal of the ruling class is unlike anything that has ever existed before. And we'll read a few quotes from Guy Debord and pepper them throughout this episode to get the message across

that in the consolidated and in the integrated spectacle, false consciousness is the sine qua non of domination by the ruling class it is the first tool in the toolbox to mold minds and it really is not that complicated and I think at the end of the day the polarized opinions on the no king's protest just as much the people that think you know I've done done my part by showing up here at this protest. Just as much for those people as for the people that say these are radical freedom-hating terrorists at the No King's protests. They're all operating from a position of false consciousness and any prospect to advance beyond the fascist authoritarian moment that we're stuck in requires breaking that stranglehold.

And to the extent that these spectacular do-nothing protests continue to proliferate under the Trump administration, I think we would be remiss not to attempt to take the opportunity to point that out in hopes of breaking the mental stranglehold, the spell, the hypnosis that has enraptured people, and fairly so, right? Not to say that it's like a sign of weakness or stupidity. Everybody is scared. Everybody is, in some sense, helpless before this beast that we're facing down. but to pretend that a pantomime of politics is an adequate substitute for politics

doesn't help anyone in the long run and only with that knowledge is real progress possible. otherwise this no king's thing will just develop into effectively what the issues are going to be for the 2026 midterms right you can see it now where you'll have challengers coming up and being like well i am uh you know i stand for i am against the tariffs i am uh for bringing you back DEI initiatives. I am against ice rates. I am against having the military in our cities. These very basic notions that effectively what the establishment has done is has been able to mobilize 7 million people behind them so that it doesn't have to address the very real issues

that we live in this psychotic surveillance state, that we have been funding a general genocide for years now, that housing has become less and less affordable for everyday Americans. Minimum wage has remained stagnate for decades. You know, the education crisis, the health care crisis, these things that are year after year getting worse and worse for people, no matter who is president. Yeah, and in that respect, all of this spectacle... whether it's the protests or the dis memes that are leveled against the protests or whatever is a big fat distraction from all of this stuff.

And I want to end by returning to the Pod Save America program and hereby declaring a war of words against the Pod Save America program. because we touched on it a little bit but both of us as we were discussing before we hit record like we hadn't really heard these guys didn't really know what they're about but god damn fuck every single one of those guys so hard they suck and are the worst type of propagandist to keep you and your loved ones, especially your older loved ones, trapped on this disgusting hamster wheel of spectacle.

Like, later on... What I'll say is to anyone who's listening to them, if your source of news is the same guy that's slinging home security systems to you, you got to listen to someone else. Dude, in their episode, first, To go back to the surveillance issue, they are talking about how ICE will now under Trump have greater surveillance powers and budgetary resources and whatever. And then they compare it to the Biden administration somehow that the Biden administration, after a certain surveillance contract became public,

Biden backed away from it. And they used that as a great example of what a great administration of Biden's was because when it's like... As soon as they had to be transparent about it, they decided it wasn't a good idea. Yeah, it wasn't their choice to be transparent about it either. They would have suppressed that leak from getting out in the first place. And once the cat was out of the bag, they found themselves for. to walk back from it.

And these guys are putting a medal on the Biden administration for walking back one surveillance contract. Let me ask the listener, if you are old enough or wise enough to recall when Eddie the friendly spook Snowden made his limited hangout about the extent of the national security states 360 degree surveillance program targeting everyday Americans, including you, listener, including

us, the Obama administration's response was to slap him with the Espionage Act and to threaten him with a life of imprisonment. Like, the deporter in chief was ripping babies from their mother's arms. I can say from firsthand experience, speaking with separated families back in those days. These were people who had been put into cages, La Yelera, the ice box. That was an Obama phenomenon. That was a concrete box marked by chicken wire fencing and those tinfoil blankets with kids sleeping on a roll on the floor

and the idea that now these people can come and say well now things are getting out of hand and then comparing it disfavorably to the process that their boss put in motion is disgusting like it's not that they're ignorant it's not that they're stupid they're fucking evil people and if they have any integrity they're invited on to this show to debate us because any bullshit inside the beltway jargon that they want to bring against our systemic critique of the nation that they would defend to the death and by nation i mean the apparatus of state police forces mobilized in the defense and expansion of the owners of capital right all they're going to say is bullshit they keep people trapped in this fallacy of identifying with one political party or the other like one thing that

I texted you about when we were listening to this. You want to talk about their comments on the Bolton? Well, I think before that, the comments on Salesforce in that episode are hilarious where they're like using the ICE, ICE's reliance on Salesforce. They're using that as an opportunity to plug their other ad sponsors, ZipRecruiter. Oh, yeah. Which I thought was just incredibly poor taste. Well, and they frame the whole thing up, too, as like.

The CEO of Salesforce, Beniof, this is a guy who was a lifelong Democrat, gave a lot of money to Democrat candidates, and now he's sucking up to Trump. And it's like, well, obviously, it's called the profit motive. It's what fuels and guides the behavior of all of these fucking people. And they're taking it as some scandal that now, to get an ice contract, the guy is sucking up to Trump and they like you said they use it just to

shill for zip recruiter Salesforce founder and CEO Mark Benioff who told the New York Times from aboard his private jet that he'd welcome federalized troops and then he fully supports Trump this is a man who donated millions of dollars to Democrats, one of the big Democratic donors

in years past a few days later the Times reported based on internal documents that they've seen. Benioff is trying to get ICE to use Salesforce technology to meet its hiring goals. Try ZipRecruiter, ICE. It's nuts. It's nuts. The Bolton thing, I think, is what you're talking about.

And it is crazy because they're talking about, and it's the same thing as the home of the brave folks, where it's like Trump is retaliating against his political enemies. And they're like, they're like mad. at the indictment against Bolton because it's like this thing that Cash Patel is like championing and they totally gloss over the fact that that started under the Biden administration, the investigation into Bolton started during the Biden administration. So this is a person

that was very much a target and you could say a political target of the Biden administration. And they're saying, well, you can put this in Trump's column as like a retaliation. You can be mad about it because it wasn't going anywhere until Cash Patel took over. Yeah, just because he was quoted with saying like, why isn't this motherfucker behind bars or something, right? Right, totally. It's nuts. Like, first of all, law enforcement has always looked for a pretext to lock somebody up that they, suspect of doing much worse crimes without a paper trail need i remind the listener of al fucking

capone he wasn't put away for racketeering or for conspiracy or for murder he was put away for tax evasion as everybody knows and when they said that i mean the guy actually quote said that because of George Santos pardon this is why you can be angry about the John Bolton indictment

the amount of work and effort that the Department of Justice puts into like putting together the case they got he pled guilty he admitted to his crimes he wasn't like convicted by a jury he admitted it this is why you can be angry about the Bolton prosecution you know Like whether or not the facts line up and he actually did it, right? Like this is like, if you commit a crime and you kiss Donald Trump's ass,

good chance that you get off. If you say something bad about Donald Trump and you did or did not commit a crime, you're eligible for prosecution and under this government. That's where it stands. Oh, thank you so much, Pod John. Thanks for permission to be angry. I thought I had to be happy because John Bolton is a fucking piece of shit. War criminal.

Oh, man. Yeah. Yeah, follow those fucking guys. And you can follow them right into the bleachers in the back of the P.T. Barnum Circus that is America. That has a big old sign over the top of it that's labeled suckers. Because if there's one quote that's been vindicated, it is. is that of old p t a sucker is born every minute i think debauch actually ended up echoing that sentiment in society of the spectacle and in the comments too

Santos thing is another indicator of how wrong these no king's guys got it, because Trump is no king. To me, if anything, he resembles a queen. A drag queen. Think about it. He's got the makeup. He's got the pageantry. He's got the hyperbole.

Everything is great. Everything's fantastic. Everything's wonderful. He's always up. cheery even as a signature dance move he's got a signature dance move and if anything you know beyond just the queen he's like a diva right like he's got beef with people he's got feuds right famously love scorned so to me it's like they got that totally wrong because this man is a queen he's a queen and a queen be a queen in as much as much as he sits there getting bigger and

increasingly more grotesque is served blindly by the drones in his hive and does nothing but produce more and more of them. I don't know if it's false consciousness, if it's hypnosis, if it's the art of magic, but the guy's got his spell over the country, and it will sure as shit not be broken by some clever signs. lines. And she said she comes to us and she's got to listening.

Oh, we have a new subscriber. We have a new subscriber. I want to give a shout out to Mike, who has joined our $15 a month tier so shout out to Mike thank you very much to everybody for listening be sure to tune in next week where I think we're going to get back to she Harvey Oswald I hope and unless something crazy happens between now and then I guess Jady Vance is going to Israel tomorrow he's probably there already so we'll see what happens but for now I'm Dick and I'm done, saying farewell, keep digging.

You have a car It's so cold Talking about No problem at all Yeah I missed you Wow

It's looking at I'm down on the street so much.