It Could Happen Here - Occupy Gotham

Episode Date: December 5, 2023

Garrison and Mia discuss the parallels to Occupy Wall Street in 2012's The Dark Knight Rises, conspiracy theories surrounding the movie, and the problem of constituent power.  https://libcom.org/article/utopia-rules-technology-stupidity-and-secret-joys-bureaucracy-david-graeber See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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I'm Garrison Davis. Joining me today is Mia Wong. Hello. Hello. So I don't know what this episode is about. I have been told the words David Graeber and that's all I know. been told the words David Graeber, and that's all I know. Graeber will come up. So we've had a lot of upsetting stuff that's been covered on the pod recently. It's not a great time in the world. It's a lot of upsetting things happening, but I thought we might get a small reprieve from all of the real world chaos and mayhem to talk about some fake world chaos and mayhem. And it's also, you know, we are vastly approaching the holiday season, which means that I, I think next week, am doing my yearly Batman Returns

watch party, which I am extremely excited about. It's going to be a fun time, which is, it's probably the best Batman movie. Oh no, is this about Batman? Oh no! The aesthetics are unparalleled. I've discovered what this episode is about. The aesthetics are unparalleled. I've discovered what this episode is about.

But there is another Batman movie that's also set during wintertime, which is also very political because Batman Returns is weirdly political. We have the penguin running for mayor. It exposes the corrupt core of our political system. of our political system. And there is another Batman movie also set during winter that tries to expose the corrupt core of the political system, which is Christopher Nolan's 2012 The Dark Knight Rises,

a not very good movie, which I think we have referenced before because there's this one essay by one David Graeber, which really gets into the film, which we're going to get to. But the reason why I actually put together this episode or I wanted to do this is because when I was at the Ghost Conference earlier this year in Seaside, Oregon, as you can listen to that two-parter, which came out last Halloween, I got a whole bunch of old magazines from this conspiracy talk radio host.

Now, I love collecting old magazines. I find them endlessly fascinating. We have this one from 2003 called MKZine. Oh, no. On the cover, we have mind control, ritual abuse and political implications, the cult of national insecurity. I've not flipped through this one super in depth before because I'm more taken aback by the other magazine I got from 2012 called Paranoia, the conspiracy reader. On this cover, we have Beyond MKk ultra satellite terrorism in america science fiction or space faction oh no and dark knight kill programming which is obviously the one we're

going to be talking about here today oh no is this the the sandy thing no no this is this is this will briefly get into the um aurora uh mass shooting because this comes up in this in this article i'm not going to get too into it that's actually not the the focus yeah well i think i'm realizing i'm confusing my you're confusing your 2012 mass shootings no there's that because because there there is actually a alex jones conspiracy that there was predictive programming in the dark night returns or the dark night rises. That's what this is going to be about. Oh, okay. Okay. Okay. Sorry. This is by discount Alex Jones, Clyde Lewis, who lives in Portland.

There's, there's some pretty fun stuff in this issue, which we might get to later at the end to kind of close out all of our political mumbo jumbo that we will actually get into as well. But I want to first look at how conspiracy theorists read this movie and how they read the political aspects of this movie, because this movie is obviously very political. If you've seen it, we will we will get into some of some of the stuff. But I want to I want to talk about how these conspiracy theorists saw this movie. Because the way that they do political analysis of media is very different from the way actual academics and people who take this stuff seriously do political analysis of media. And I think there's an interesting juxtaposition there.

So this is the cover page for this story. The storm is coming. Oh, no. No. Stage one already off. Oh, no. No. Stage one already off to a bad start. Yes. Yes. All right.

So I will read a little bit from this magazine and then we can kind of talk about it and then compare to to our colleague David Graeber. As I was watching Christopher Nolan's The Dark Knight Rises, I didn't know the political substance right away, which is a great way to start this because the film is so obviously political. This movie, like, people who haven't, like, this movie, like, starts with Bane literally saying he's going to occupy Wall Street

and, like, seizing the floor of Wall Street. This is what we will soon be debating. But anyway, I only saw it as a bit of predictive programming and a believable scenario as to how it might all begin. In The Dark Knight Rises, Catwoman as Selina Kyle and Batman as Bruce Wayne are dancing at a socialite gathering when Selina purrs in his ear, there's a storm coming, Mr. Wayne. Selina purrs in his ear, there's a storm coming, Mr. Wayne. As it turns out, The Dark Knight Rises is a damning indictment of the anti-corporate movement

and the threat of social chaos it poses. Despite rallying people around their deceased hero, Harvey Dent, the rich are losing their grip on Gotham City. Antagonist Bane, played by Tom Hardy, and his League of Shadows rise up against the bankers and the elite billionaires like Bruce Wayne and attack Wall Street, savagely beating the rich while promising the good people of Gotham that tomorrow you claim what is rightfully yours. Bain's organized violence against the wealthy evokes the reality of Occupy Wall Street.

But Bain is no Robin Hood. Wall Street. But Bain is no Robin Hood. He is plotting a massive transfer of wealth through stock exchange after inciting civil unrest and taking control of cutting-edge weapons technologies whose algorithm can be directly traced to Bruce Wayne, software which will avail them from the fortunes of the rich. As the war between the people and the police in The Dark Knight Rises indicates, the predictive programming of statistical data could very well undermine the 1% and send them into the streets where the disgruntled will eat them. Fraudulent practices will be exposed. Identity theft, credit card fraud, securities fraud, and a number of other practices that the elite do in order to bilk the poor out of their money. This is one interesting thing about these sorts of kind of conspiracy radio guys.

How they're both against the elite, but also fundamentally also for the elite. Like this film is celebrated as being, you know, like it's deriding the anti-corporate Occupy movement, which they hate because they hate, they would dislike, you know, a left-wing popular uprising. But in the end, they actually prefer this corporate, like Illuminati to the actual alternative well and

it's it's it's interesting too like the ways that they think that like rich people exploit people is through like credit card fraud it's like that that's how you think rich people get rich like really like all right we are almost at the end here. Christopher Nolan's epic sounds the alarm of the advent of an organized puppet master anarchy that plans to topple the government by exposing and gutting the fortunes of the elite. In real life, it might look like an Occupy in the Streets, Sans and Evil drums, a soundtrack pounding out the perennial battle

between the haves and the have-nots. While The Dark Knight Rises acknowledges the systemic inequality and injustice, it is not the rich, but anarchy that is the bane of Gotham's existence. Get it? Get it? It's a pun. Nolan portrays the Occupy anti-hero Bane as a demagogue, ultimately seeking to speculate on legitimate grievances. And when Bane hands the reins of power over to the people, they really won't know what to do with it, which is something that never happens in the movie, by the way. No!

Now, at this point, Clyde Lewis stops talking about the movie and instead talks about this bit of predictive programming in the movie, which has a few kind of aspects. Then there is the intriguing subplot that seemingly seeped into reality on the eve of the Dark Knight Rises release, that a software company takes its findings to the Supreme Court and exposes so-called political heroes,

which would lead to riots and marauding shooters creating mass casualties. Imagine that intelligence is aware of the threat and issues a declassified memo from the Department of Homeland Security warning law enforcement that terrorists could be killing people in movie theaters. All that is needed is the catalyzing event and immediately the police state is activated. Flash riots take place in cities. Civil unrest brews under the radar.

Truth becomes stranger than fiction as we examine the media stories surrounding the main story of the so-called brainwashed low-nut James Holmes opening fire in a movie theater in Aurora, Colorado on July 20th, 2012, and allegedly killing 12 and injuring 59 others. Interesting use of the word allegedly there in regarding the people that were killed. Oh boy. And then the next sentence is really where things pick up not only is james holmes connected to the neuroscience super soldier peak soldier performance experiments but his father works for a software company that analyzes fraud so i'm not going to actually read the next bit because it is just the ramblings of a conspiracy-brained lunatic who thinks that because the shooter's dad was a neuroscientist, that therefore his son must have been this victim of a super soldier program to brainwash you to activate the police state once you receive a bit of predictive programming. receive a bit of predictive programming and the the other i will i will get to one other paragraph um and then we'll be we'll be done with this article because there's really not much more substance um quote the chilling predictive programming looming behind the dark knight

rises does not escape at least the unconscious of those watching bane the leader of the fictional anarchist mob, decides to plant bombs in the Gotham Underground, the final target being a stadium where the mayor of Gotham attends a sports event. A young boy sings the national anthem with a British accent. Bane pauses to listen to the distinct voice, then says, let the games begin. After which the stadium is bombed and the mayor is killed in his reserved viewing box now clint lewis believes that this was a bit of predictive programming in order to prepare people for a mash casualty event at the london 2012 olympics which you might know did not happen. Was not a thing. But he is convinced that this is part of some predictive programming to either trigger this event or cover up this event or allude to this event.

Again, an event that did not happen. So that's, you know, as we're going to be talking about, you know, how people view mass uprising and political movements in media for the rest of this episode. This is how a certain sect of conservative does their own media analysis, which I think is a really fun look into how their brains operate, sorting a very political film into these predictive programming boxes. into these predictive programming boxes.

But we will return to talk about the virgin David Graeber and the Chad Mark Fisher after this ad break. Hey guys, I'm Kate Max. You might know me from my popular online series, The Running Interview Show, where I run with celebrities, athletes, entrepreneurs, and more. After those runs, the conversations keep going. That's what my podcast, Post Run High, is all about. It's a chance to sit down with my guests and dive even deeper into their stories, their journeys, and the thoughts that arise once we've hit the pavement together. You know that rush of endorphins you feel after a great workout? Well, that's when the real magic happens. So if you love hearing real,

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Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, I'm Jacqueline Thomas, the host of a brand new Black Effect original series, Black Lit, the podcast for diving deep into the rich world of Black literature. I'm Jack Peace Thomas, and I'm inviting you to join me and a vibrant community of literary enthusiasts dedicated to protecting and celebrating our stories. Black Lit is for the page turners, for those who listen to audiobooks while commuting or running errands, for those who find themselves seeking solace, wisdom, and refuge between the chapters. From thought-provoking novels to powerful poetry, we'll explore the stories that shape our culture.

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from conservatives from liberals and from leftists and anarchists everyone agrees that this film has some very very obvious occupy parallels we're going to get into how much of those are actually kind of built into the film's production versus how much of those are more or less coincidental um now unfortunately for me, not actually unfortunately, because I actually do like Graber a lot, but his analysis was by far the best out of anybody else's in regards to this film.

Unfortunately, the schizoid acid-fueled chaos magic of Mark Fisher kind of paled in comparison to the precision of the anthropologist David Graeber in terms of their analysis of this film. But both of them had roughly the same opinion. Graeber just went into a lot more depth about how kind of this film actually politically operates. So I'll be mostly talking about and quoting from Graeber with a few things from Fisher kind of mixed in. from Graeber, with a few things from Fisher kind of mixed in. And then we'll compare it to some stuff in Breitbart and The Daily Caller and a few other reactions from liberals who enjoyed the film too much and are unwilling to kind of cede this conservative ground to Nolan's 2012 film.

And I think this is actually really interesting to talk about this film this year after the release of Oppenheimer, which I think is Nolan's probably most politically mature work. And he has definitely grown a lot in the past 10 years as a filmmaker, at least in terms of his ability to get into politics in a way that is not just purely reactionary. I think a lot of his early films are kind of absorbed by this reactionariness. And I think he has matured a decent bit, at least as a political filmmaker. So we will start with a paragraph from Graeber. Quote, Christopher Nolan's Batman The Dark Knight Rises, not the title of the film, is really a piece of anti-Occupy propaganda.

Christopher Nolan, the director, claims that the script was written before the movement even started, and that the famous scenes of the occupation of New York, Gotham City, were really inspired by Dickens' account of the French Revolution. This is probably true, but it's disingenuous. Everyone knows Hollywood scripts are continually rewritten while movies are in production, and when it comes to messaging, even details like precise wording or where a scene is shot can make all the difference. Then there's the fact that the villains actually do attack the stock exchange. Still, it's precisely this ambition, the filmmaker's willingness to take on

the great issues of the day that ruins the movie. So, the script was written well before Occupy started. Shooting for Dark Knight Rises ended two months after the start of Occupy. Most of the shooting for the film took place before Occupy even happened. And now in 2011, it was widely misreported that the movie was going to be filming at Occupy itself, which started from like, I think something in the LA Times, which just got blown out of proportion. It was not true. They did shoot in New York, but they did not shoot at Occupy. Yeah, probably because they would have gotten run out. Probably. Now, leading up to 2011, both Nolan and what became Occupy were on very similar

conceptual roads. They were just leading to two very different places. The Dark Knight released in the middle of the 2008 financial crisis, right after the 2008 writer's strike ended. So there were a lot of class issues circling around in Nolan's bubble. So it made sense that Nolan's next Batman flick would tackle these things that rose to cultural prominence by the time he finished the more patriot act inspired The Dark Knight. Now, Nolan and other writers obviously saw economic inequality and corruption

seeding people's anger and the rising possibility of civil unrest, and that was put into the script, and then it just happened two months before they finished shooting. Now, Nolan also took a lot from The Tale of Two Cities. This, probably more than anything else, The Dark Knight Rises is actually based on The Tale of Two Cities, a passage of which is read at the end of the film. And there's plenty of parallels to the French Revolution, including the storming of Bastille. There's actually two prison breaks inside The Dark Knight Rises. There is the release of Blackgate, and then there's, of course, when Bruce Wayne escapes the giant hole in the ground and frees the other prisoners as well. So still, throughout all of these kind of class issues that Nolan is talking about in this film, he still shows a deep distrust of populism,

or at the very least feared how easily it could be subverted in a charged financial climate. I'm going to read one quote from Fisher here. Quote, When Nolan revived the Batman franchise in 2005, the setting, Gotham, in the midst of an economic depression, seemed like an acronistic reference to the superhero's origins in the 1930s. 2008's The Dark Knight was too early to register the impact of the financial crisis, but The Dark Knight Rises clearly attempts to respond to the 2008 situation. The film isn't the simple conservative parable that the right-wingers would

like, but in the end, it is a reactionary vision, which I think is the fairest way to look at this film. But now we're going to go deep into Graeber's analysis, which is by far probably one of the best write-ups on 20th century superheroes and their role in American culture. It's my favorite by far. It's the one that I always push on people when people talk about Marvel because – Yes. No, absolutely. This is an essay that you've referenced a lot on this show.

I've been going into a bit of a graver resurgence lately. resurgence lately. I deeply enjoyed his essay on puppets, which I'm going to respond to by writing an essay on why nihilists hate puppets and accept the adversarial framing of the police. But that is a digression. Now we will get back to Graber's essay in the new inquiry titled Superposition. Oh, the thing I want to mention here about this essay is he wanted to oh the thing the thing i want to mention here about this essay is he wanted to uh oh god what was the he wanted to call it uh on batman and the problem of constituent power but they wouldn't let him do it so it's well superposition instead this is that is certainly what it's actually about is constituent power um we will we will get to that very shortly so uh quote superheroes are a product of their historical origins.

Superman is a Depression-era displaced Iowa farm boy. Peter Parker, a product of the 60s, is a smart-ass working-class kid from Queens. Batman, the billionaire playboy, is the scion of the military-industrial complex that was created, just as he was, at the beginning of World War II. I will say, the early origins of Batman are far divorced from that, but that is certainly what Batman has evolved into. Quote, these heroes are purely reactionary in a literal sense. They have no projects of their own, at least not in their roles as heroes.

Almost never do superheroes make, create, or build anything. The villains, in contrast, are endlessly creative. They are full of plans and projects and ideas. Clearly, we are supposed to, at first, without consciously realizing it, identify with the villains. After all, they're the ones having all the fun.

Then, of course, we feel guilty about it, re-identify with the hero, and have even more fun watching the super-ego clubbing the errant id back into submission. This essay that Graeber wrote is very Freudian. Graeber makes a lot of Freud references in this. I am not going to be getting into that as much. But superheroes are also very, very Freudian.

Yeah, I want to say one thing about this specific passage or specifically the way that you're encouraged to identify with the hero. And then like that gets like that gets subverted. You're supposed to come back to the hero so this used to be a kind of you're supposed to identify with the villain and then yeah and then come back to the hero yeah so and this is part as this works as like a conservative project of conservative ideology and this used to be like an implicit thing in these movies and then you get to black panther which is literally well literally they just like that that is just the met like like they they stopped being subtle and we're like hey here is a guy who's an anti-imperialist and then the ending reveal is oh my god he's actually evil in terms

of marvel i would say yes i would i i think my my two favorite superhero movies which would be tim burton's batman and batman returns, do the reverse of this, where very obviously the villain is the main characters of both of those. And Batman is really just a side character. And I think those actually work better for this medium so much more. Oh, yeah. When it comes to Marvel, absolutely. Yeah, they're just like openly doing this now. It's really sort of like.

Yeah. This is what the second one's about, too. Yes, yes. Now, Graber then talks about kind of what the project of these comic books were originally supposed to be and how that kind of continues on today into pop culture. Quote, politically speaking, superhero implications would not seem especially dire, especially because the message still does carry a healthy dose of ambivalence. After all, the heroes of even the most right-leaning action movies seem to spend much of their time smashing up suburban shopping malls, something that many of us would like to do at some point in our lives. In the case of most comic book superheroes,

however, the mayhem has an extremely conservative political implication. This is where we start getting into God versus the people, and using both of these things as constructs, right? Neither of these things really fully exist in a super material way. Both of these things are constructs, quote-unquote God, quote-unquote the people. They both occupy a very similar ontological role. And this is something that Graeber gets into. Quote, any power capable of creating a system of law cannot itself be bound by them. In the Middle Ages, the solution was simple. The legal order was created either directly or indirectly by God. The English, American, and French revolutions changed all that

when they created the notion of popular sovereignty, declaring that the power once held by kings, and by extension God, is now held by an entity called the people. The people, however, are bound by the laws. They are able to create the laws through those revolutions themselves. But of course, revolutions are acts of lawbreaking, so laws emerge from illegal activity. This creates a fundamental incoherence in the very idea of modern government, which assumes that the state has a monopoly on the legitimate use of violence. It's okay for police to use violence because they are enforcing the law. The law is legitimate because it's rooted in the Constitution. The Constitution is legitimate because it comes from the people.

The people created the Constitution by acts of illegal violence. It all circles back on itself. The obvious question then is how does one tell the difference between the people and a mere rampaging mob, which is a question that comes up all the time across the political spectrum from anarchists to fascists to liberals. This is a debate that still goes on. Without the law, what is the difference between the people and just a lynch mob? Now, Graeber doesn't really give an answer to this because this doesn't really have an answer. This is a very vague question and kind of, as Graeber points out, it's vague by design. The response by mainstream respectable opinion is to push this problem

as far away as possible. The usual line is that the age of revolutions is over. Now we can change the constitution or legal standards by legal means. This, of course, means that the basic structures will never change, unquote. And this is where kind of Graeber talks about how the role of tradition has totally taken over the legal implications of our system here, how the US, which was at once progressive in its electoral college and two-party system, is now quite old-fashioned compared to a lot of other popular democratic countries. popular democratic countries. There's a good line, quote, we base the legitimacy of the whole system on the consent of the people, despite the fact that the only people who were ever really consulted on the matter lived over 200 years ago. In America, at least, quote unquote, the people

are long since dead. So now we have this situation that we have this idea of the legal order, which comes from God, which then came from armed revolution. And now it just comes from this idea of the legal order, which comes from God, which then came from armed revolution. And now it just comes from this idea of sheer tradition. Now, there's obviously a lot of American politicians who would want to give this power back to God. Yeah. Even then, I was like, it's really hard to actually do that. Like even even governments that are very explicitly theocratic, like, for example, like Iran, it's like, well, they still have elections and they still have this. Like the notion of popular sovereignty belonging to the people is very hard to dislodge unless you're going to straight up impose a monarchy.

is very hard to dislodge unless you're going to straight up impose a monarchy and even a lot of the monarchies now are like you know they they follow the european thing of like claiming to like derive authority from the people or something sure but we also on we also have people like like walsh and michael knolls who are very openly like catholic monarchists who are yeah and like you have to you're getting a lot of prominence in American culture. Yeah. It's like, I don't know. I wish them bad luck. Oh, yes.

That is a more moderate thing I wish upon them. So, back to Graeber. For the radical left and the authoritarian right, the problem of constituent power is very much alive, but each takes diametrically opposite approaches to the fundamental question of violence. Now, I think this is something that has – I'd be interested to see Graeber revisit this idea now. Unfortunately, that cannot be the case because this question of violence has certainly evolved a lot in the 10 years in which he wrote this, both in terms of how the alt-right operates, but also in terms of how the quote-unquote left views violence as a necessary political tool. But getting into his analysis of the 20th century, I think it is still fairly accurate. Quote, largely moved away from its older celebration of revolutionary violence, preferring non-violent forms of resistance. Those who act in the name of something higher than the law can do so precisely because they don't act like a rampaging mob. For the right, on the other hand, and this has been true since the rise of fascism in the 20s, the very idea that there is something special about

revolutionary violence, anything that makes it different from mere criminal violence is so much self-righteous twaddle. Violence is violence, but that doesn't mean a rampaging mob can't be the people, because violence is the real source of law and political order. This is why, as Walter Benjamin noted, we cannot help but admire the great criminal, because as so many movie posters have put it, he makes his own law. After all, any criminal organization does inevitably begin developing its own, often quite elaborate, set of internal laws. They have to, as a way of controlling what would otherwise be completely random violence. From the right-wing perspective, that's all law ever is. It is a

means of controlling the very violence that it brings into being and through which it is ultimately enforced. Now, I think this is also true of even certain aspects of the left where we have, we don't call them laws. We might call them like community guidelines or something, but we often actually do this same process, especially in the anarchist kind of formations that try to replicate gang formations, like, purposefully, we get this same essence that has developed in order to, people might, you know, reject the use of the word police, but at least, you know, make some kind of structure that deems which violence is acceptable and which violence isn't. But back to Graeber, quote, this makes it easier to understand the

often surprising affinity between criminals, criminal gangs, right-wing political movements, and the armed representatives of the state. Ultimately, they speak the same language. They create their own rules on the basis of force. As a result, they typically share the same broad political sensibilities. In Athens nowadays, there's active collaboration between the crime bosses in poor immigrant neighborhoods, fascist gangs, and the police. In fact, in this case, it was clearly a political strategy. Faced with the prospect of popular uprisings against a right-wing government, the police first withdrew protection from neighborhoods near the immigrant gangs,

then started giving tacit support to the fascists. For the far right then, it is in that space where different violent forces operating outside of the legal order interact, that new forms of power, and hence of order, can emerge. What does this have to do with costume superheroes? Well, everything. Because this is exactly the space that superheroes and supervillains also inhabit. An inherently fascist space, inhabited only by gangsters, would-be dictators, police, and thugs, with endlessly blurring lines between them.

Sometimes the cops are legalistic, sometimes they're corrupt, sometimes the police themselves slip into vigilantism. Sometimes they pursue the superhero, sometimes they look the other way, sometimes they help. Villains and heroes occasionally team up. The lines of force are always shifting. If anything new were to emerge, it could only be through such shifting forces. There's nothing else, since in the DC and Marvel universes, neither God nor the people really exist. Now, I think this is Graeber hitting on something that really does hit at the core of this whole genre, is that this is the genre that was really only inhabited by the Ubermensch as this governing body, right? There really isn't the god in any kind of meaningful way.

There isn't the people in any kind of meaningful way. There is just the super individual. The Ubermensch himself is what inspired Joe Shuster and Jerry Siegel to create Superman. Like this is the origin of this entire genre. By the way, I want to mention some comic book nerds are going to get very angry here and be like, well, there's's someone above all it's like okay like god like there there are there is technically god in this right but like god is the thing that you can beat the crap out of like it's not god in the sense of like god ordained authority as well like it's not it's

not the same thing this is that's not what graver is talking about please don't be pedantic in the comics or whatever and i'm talking like as like a literary tradition god does not operate as a significant role in these pieces of art like that like if you're going to be looking at this genre as art for 12 year old boys god does not operate a specific uh crucial role in in this world's ontology and it's funny too because one of the things that happens after this is there's, there's a thing called, there's a thing called occupy Avengers and they make this attempt to bring

the people. It's, it's a shit show. It is awful. It's so bad. Like it's well, and it's interesting to you. Cause like anytime they try to do that,

that was an attempt to bring in like sort of the people as like a left wing constituent body. And that was a disaster they tried to do it like they tried to do it again but the people exist as this sort of like very right-wing like force that is like it is like this bob that's constantly on the edge of sort of like destroying society whatever that's been like the most recent attempts to do it no there are certainly attempts to bring in like the american political system into various aspects of comics whether that's like lex luther being president whether it's stuff like in the i i know this stuff and i think it's

called the immortal hulk has has has a lot of politics but that one's wild that one's i i do think graver's kind of point here is is still still still accurate and rings true. I have one other paragraph from Graeber. Then we'll kind of get into a little bit more more discussion. Quote, insofar as there is a potential for constituent power, then it can only come from purveyors of violence. The supervillains and evil masterminds, when they are not merely indulging in random acts of terror, are always scheming of imposing a new world order of some kind or another. Surely if Red Skull, Kang the Conqueror, or Doctor Doom did ever succeed in taking over the planet,

there would be lots of new laws created very quickly. Yeah, and there was actually, after he wrote this, there was an arc where Doctor Doom successfully conquered the entire universe, and he did in fact do exactly that. So, which also, what another W for common David Graeber W, which also does not last very long because if, if, if that happened for a while,

it would make the story incredibly boring. Yeah. So things, things, things always return to the status quo, which is also another crucial aspect of, of this genre that things have to return to the, to the status quo, which is something I will get to very shortly. Back to Graeber, quote, although their creator would doubtless not himself feel bounded by

them, superheroes resist this logic. They do not wish to conquer the world. Now, this is where I'm going to actually disagree slightly with Graeber. He writes that superheroes, quote, remain parasitical off the villains in the same way that police remain parasitical off criminals. Without them, they'd have no reason to exist. Now, I'd argue that the police actually create the spectral category of criminals to justify their own existence. Criminals didn't create the police. It's the other way around, right?

You can look at the way, even the past few years, police have been lying about inflated crime rates to justify their own increased funding. And now obviously people always broke social norms. But if you're looking at the actual like political class of criminal and the political class of police, this is – it's like everyone has done a crime, right? Like police commit more crimes than the average person. But they do, everyone has done a crime, right? Like police commit more crimes than the average person, but they do not often get called a criminal. I'm talking about like a very political class that we call criminal. And this is something that the police create. And curiously, in the same way, most superheroes also predate their respective supervillains, as it is the presence of the superhero that often births the adversarial supervillain.

We see this across tons of superhero medias where they use the example of how the superhero predated the arrival of these theatrical villains. And this is actually the superhero's fault, right? This happens in Batman. This happens in Spider-Man. This is very, very common. happens in Batman. This happens in Spider-Man. This is very, very common. We even see this in something like The Boys or The Watchmen, both of which target superheroes as a reactionary right-wing tendency, which are aligned with the police and military. We literally have Homelander creating supervillains to justify his own existence, or super-terrorists. In The

Watchmen, the actual team predates the arrival of many supervillains. So this is one small nitpick I might say with this article, at least in terms of the causality loop between superheroes and villains and criminals and police. Do you know what also predates all of us? Every single person listening.

We're going to have someone who's a hundred and the advertising industrial complex predates every single one of you fuckers the surrealists burst this hellhole of of advertising which tricks your mind via predictive programming to get you to buy this fucking food box. Hey guys, I'm Kate Max. You might know me from my popular online series, The Running Interview Show, where I run with celebrities, athletes, entrepreneurs, and more. After those runs, the conversations keep going. That's what my podcast Post Run High is all about. It's a chance to sit down with my guests and dive even deeper into their stories, their journeys, and the thoughts that arise once we've hit the pavement together. You know that rush of endorphins you feel after a great workout? Well, that's when the real magic happens.

So if you love hearing real, inspiring stories from the people you know, follow, and admire, join me every week for Post Run High. It's where we take the conversation beyond the run and get into the heart of it all. It's lighthearted, pretty crazy, and very fun. Listen to Post Run High on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Welcome. I'm Danny Trejo. Won't you join me at the fire and dare enter Nocturnum, Tales from the Shadows, presented by iHeart and Sonora. An anthology of modern day horror stories inspired by the legends of Latin America. From ghastly encounters with shapeshifters

to bone-chilling brushes with supernatural creatures. I know you. Take a trip and experience the horrors that have haunted Latin America since the beginning of time. Listen to Nocturnal Tales from the Shadows as part of My Cultura podcast network available on the iHeartRadio app, Apple podcast or wherever you get your podcast. Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. me and a vibrant community of literary enthusiasts dedicated to protecting and celebrating our stories. Black Lit is for the page turners, for those who listen to audiobooks while commuting or running errands, for those who find themselves seeking solace, wisdom, and refuge between the chapters. From thought-provoking novels to powerful poetry, we'll explore the stories that shape our culture. Together, we'll dissect classics and contemporary works while uncovering the stories of the brilliant

writers behind them. Black Lit is here to amplify the voices of Black writers and to bring their words to life. Listen to Black Lit on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Okay, we are back. We have returned to the status quo of our podcast. Speaking of which, we're going to talk about returning to the status quo. So what superheroes and the police, which are very ontologically similar roles in a lot of cases, what their end project is, is that they seek to maintain what is and then seek out and destroy anything that threatens to alter our civilizational fabric. They fundamentally are defenders of the status quo. That is the role of the superhero across almost all media.

This is why, if you had the powers of Superman, why are you just saving cats from trees and instead not fundamentally reshaping the world in something that is better? Now, this is a question that gets tackled by people like Grant Morrison and Alan Moore as to, they often give reasons

for why someone shouldn't do that. But still, this is a fundamental aspect of this genre, is that these guys never really have any generative political project. They are purely reactionary, and they purely are made to hold up the status quo and always return to this single point from which they emerged. Back to Graeber, quote, they remain defenders of a legal and political system which itself seems to have come out of nowhere and which, however faulty or degraded, must be defended because the only alternative is so much worse. They aren't fascists. They're just ordinary,

decent, super powerful people who inhabit a world in which fascism is the only political possibility. Why, might we ask, would a form of entertainment premised on such a peculiar notion of politics emerge in the early to mid-20th century America at just around the time that actual fascism was on the rise in Europe? Was it some kind of fantasy American equivalent? Not exactly. It's more that both fascism and superheroes were products of a similar historical predicament. What is the foundation of social order when one has exercised the very idea of revolution? And above all, what happens to the political imagination?

So at this point, Graeber starts talking about how basically all power goes to the individual, but the individual who is embedded within a system. He discusses how the core audience for superhero comics are adolescent or pre-adolescent white boys, at least that was in the 1920s or 30s and 40s, and roughly is still the case. It's that these comic books and now Marvel films, although unfortunately Marvel films

have a much broader audience, but they are targeted to people who are at a point in their lives where they're likely to be both the most imaginative and a little bit rebellious, right? This is the 12-year-old white boy is the thing that this is targeting. So they're both very imaginative. They're a little bit rebellious. But they're also being groomed to take on positions of power and authority in the world, right?

They're about to transition to being fathers, sheriffs, small business owners, middle management, right? So this is what this genre is targeted towards. So what are they supposed to learn from these kind of endlessly repeating stories that are all very much the same story? One aspect is that imagination and rebellion will inevitably just lead to violence, right? And then second is like imagination and rebellion,

violence can actually be a lot of fun. But ultimately, violence must be directed back against any overflow of imagination and rebellion or else everything will kind of go into chaos. These things have to be contained. So this is why superheroes are only allowed, I'm going to quote from Graeber again, quote, their imagination can only be extended to the design of their clothes, their cars, maybe their homes, and their various accessories, unquote.

Basically, all of their imagination for the superhero is limited to commodities, right? This is the fundamental aspect where that's the only acceptable outlet for your imagination. It's just with commodity fetishism. Like that's the only possible way. Back to Graeber, quote, it's in this sense that the logic of the superhero plot

is profoundly deeply conservative. Ultimately, the division between left and right sensibilities turns on one's attitude towards the imagination. For the left, imagination, creativity, and by extension, production, the power to bring new things and new social arrangements into being is always celebrated.

It's the source of all real value in the world. For the right, it's dangerous and ultimately evil. The urge to create is also a destructive urge. But this is also what separates conservatives from fascists. Both agree that the imagination unleashed can only lead to violence and destruction. Conservatives wish to defend us against this possibility. Fascists wish to unleash it anyway. They aspire to be, as Hitler imagined himself, great artists painting with the minds,

bloods, and sinews of humanity. I think this is a really good distinction between conservatives and fascists in terms of how they view creative violence. And to get back to superheroes, I think this medium, as Graber points out, has this kind of built-in essence of a guilty pleasure. It revels in the absurdity of both the costumed heroes and villains, all while still targeting an imagination which is too expansive, too outside the norm, as being the ultimate crime. This guilty pleasure aspect even applies to the great superhero satires like The Watchmen and The Boys, which we applaud for poking and prodding at the conservative superhero,

all while still reveling in watching the outlandish antics on screen or on the page. all while still reveling in watching the outlandish antics on screen or on the page. Now, Graeber even applies this guilty pleasure aspect into explaining the kind of the conservative backlash to superheroes in the 40s and 50s, particularly with the book Seduction of the Innocent, which kind of viewed superheroes as this weirdly fetishistic kind of naughty impulse, which resulted in superheroes getting very sanitized and much more silly, much more campy, which resulted in the fantastic 1966 Batman show. But still, it kind of points at this guilty pleasure aspect. There's something inherently kind of naughty about viewing this material. All right, we are nearing the end

of Graeber's analysis here. Quote, if the message was that rebellious imagination was okay as long as it was kept out of politics and simply confined to consumer choices like clothes, cars, and accessories, this had become the message that even executive Hollywood producers could easily get behind,

which results in stuff like the 1966 Batman show. And now leading us back into Christopher Nolan, we get this really good paragraph from Graeber. If the classic comic book is ostensibly political about Mad Men trying to take over the world, but really psychological and personal about overcoming the dangers of rebellious adolescence, but then ultimately political after all, then the new superhero movies are precisely the reverse. They are ostensibly psychological and personal, but really political. But ultimately, they go back to being psychological and personal. So this is me just riffing now. Let's take Batman Begins, right? We have Rachel Gould, who operates in this psychological role of a second father for bruce right um after bruce's training initiation to the league of shadows only then does race reveal his political goals to destroy gotham and rid the world of

corruption um so this is like the psychological is the first bit then it's actually political and then by the end it actually goes all the way back into being truly psychological. Now, I'm going to read one paragraph from Graeber, which is only because it has a very funny two-word

combination. In the original comics, we learned that Ra's al Ghul, a character introduced tellingly in 1971, is in fact a Zirzan-esque primitivist and eco-terrorist determined to restore the balance of nature by reducing the Earth's human population by roughly 99%. None of the villains in any of the three movies want to rule the world. They don't wish to have power over others or to create new rules of any sort. Unquote. And I just really like the term Zerzan-esque primitiveness to describe the 70s Ra's al Ghul.

Which is a deeply brain-poisoned way to describe a comic book. If you're unfamiliar, John Zershin is an eco-anarchist writer who certain sects of social anarchist theorists liked to make fun of. Yeah, I think Graeber's most devastating thing about the primitivists was calling them all Marxists because they're the only people on Earth who say it's a program, not a critique. Which is very funny i think like one of the things that's kind of going on here is like everyone who's writing about superhero movies is also trying to settle their own grudges a little bit and oh absolutely grudges in this is like one of graber's grudges that he was like like he was tear gassed like very very close to a lot of where these things were shot like a month before and his second grudge is that he had

to spend the whole fucking 90s arguing with a bunch of primitivists and he's very annoyed in it because i guess early 2000s yeah so those are those are his grudges going into this and i do believe his his kind of framing of the nolan supervillains of not really having any desire to rule the world as ringing true. They really only want to wipe the slate clean. I think Graeber correctly identifies Nolan's supervillains as being primarily some form of anarchist, just a very peculiar type that really only exists in Nolan's imagination. Graeber describes them as, quote, they are the anarchists who believe that human nature is fundamentally evil and corrupt, unquote. I think this is taken to its most obvious extent in The Dark Knight, with the Joker, who openly claims affiliation with anarchy and fetishizes destruction.

His sick and twisted imagination is the real villain, even with the backdrop of the film's kind of deceptive war on terror framing. Now, between the production of The Dark Knight and The Dark Knight Rises, the funniest thing happened. The economy completely collapsed in 2008, and it wasn't due to an eco-terrorist cult or a clown set on a total negation. Instead, it was bankers and finance managers and Wall Street bros who became the obvious villains. In their quest to maintain the lie of endless growth, millions of people lost their homes and source of income. So in response, there was a whole bunch of popular uprisings that took place all around the world. Graeber lists regimes being toppled in the Middle East and people occupying squares everywhere from Cleveland to Karachi, trying to create new forms of democracy.

So there's this resurgence of constituent power, right? And this imagination-driven, kind of radical, and largely non-violent form of resistance, at least here in the States. And this is the sort of political situation which superhero universes can never really fully tackle, because it can't exist within their own weird ontology. To quote Graeber, quote, In Nolan's world, something like Occupy could only have been the product of some tiny group of ingenious manipulators who are really pursuing some secret agenda. Why does Bane wish to lead the people in a social revolution if he's just going to nuke

them all in a few weeks anyway? It's anyone's guess. He claims that before you destroy someone, first you must give them hope. So is the message that utopian dreams can only lead to nihilistic violence? Presumably, it's something like that, but it's singularly unconvincing, since the plan to kill everyone came first and the revolution was a decorative afterthought. In fact, what happens to the city can only possibly make sense as a material echo of what's been most important, what's happening in Bruce Wayne's tortured brain.

Yeah, it's a good line which is yeah because in the end uh batman and the police rise from the abyss literally in both cases both of them are trapped underground they both rise from underground join forces to to battle the the people occupying outside of the Gotham City Stock Exchange. Batman fakes his own death by disposing of this nuclear bomb, and Bruce Wayne gets to live happily in Florence with the criminal Selina Kyle, and then a new phony martyr legend is born in the role of Batman, and people of Gotham are returned once again to the status quo. of Batman and people of Gotham are returned once again to the status quo. I'm going to read kind of Graeber's final kind of overview of the entirety of this message, right? Like of what this thing is really trying to convey, right? Quote, if there's supposed to be a take-home message from

all of this, it must run something like, yes, the system is corrupt, but it's all we have. Anyway, figures of authority can't be trusted if they've first been chastised and endued terrible suffering. Normal police might let children die on the bridges, but the police who've been buried alive for weeks can employ violence legitimately. Charity is much better than addressing structural problems. Any attempts to address such structural problems, even through non-violent civil disobedience, really is a form of violence, because that's all it could possibly be. Imaginative politics are inherently violent and therefore there's nothing inappropriate if police respond by smashing protesters' heads

repeatedly against the concrete. As a response to Occupy, this is nothing short of pathetic. When The Dark Knight came out in 2008, there was much discussion over whether the whole thing was really just a vast metaphor for the war on terror, how far is it okay for the good guys,

America obviously, to adapt the bad guys' methods. The filmmakers managed to respond to these issues and still produce a good movie. This is because the war on terror actually was a battle of secret networks and manipulative spectacles. It began with a bomb and ended with an assassination. One can almost think of it as an attempt on both sides to actually enact a comic book version of the universe.

Once real constituent power appeared on the scene, the universe shriveled into incoherence. Revolutions were sweeping the Middle East, and the U.S. was still spending hundreds of billions of dollars fighting a ragtag bunch of seminary students in Afghanistan. Unfortunately for Nolan, for all of his manipulative powers, the same thing happened to his world when even the hint of real popular power arrived in New York. So that is kind of the essence of Graber's view of this movie. I think it's pretty good. This is a pretty solid take on this. Now, there's obviously people who have opinions that are less good than this.

There's obviously people who have opinions that are less good than this. I'm going to read this write-up from these two guys, Jeff Sprouse and Zach Buchamp, who argue that Batman represents this symbolic defense of liberal democracy, which I think is true. But the way that they go about their analysis I think is heavily flawed. Because yes, I do think he represents a defensive liberal democracy. I just don't think that's necessarily a good thing. Yeah. So they talk about how fear is the kind of the core emotion across all of Nolan's Batman films, right? We have in Batman Begins, fear takes the form of Scarecrow as one of the main villains. But we also have this terror of there being a powerful criminal underworld, which overwhelms

the power of political and social institutions that are meant to address such criminal underworlds. We have Batman in his role is to fight injustice by turning, quote, fear against those who prey on the fearful, right? Batman is this terrifying symbol meant to restore the balance of fear between the anarchic private underworld and the gutless public sphere. To quote Jeff and Zach's write-up, quote, in The Dark Knight, Nolan continues his examination of the terror of anarchy, as well as the potential for the state and allied institutions to abuse their enormous power. Bane and each of Nolan's other villains

attempt to exploit fear for ideological projects, revenge, or simple fun. Batman aims to channel it, to make his opponents legitimate grievances subjects for debate in an orderly system, rather than through violent resolution. Which is not what Batman does. What? Batman punches people. Wait, were we watching the same movies? Quote, to entrust Gotham to heroes with a face, as he says in The Dark Knight,

and to democratize Batman as a symbol that can be embodied by anyone. It's not that Christopher Nolan is taking his side in our political debates. He's simply defending a particular system through which we address them. Which is nonsense. A writer from Forbes said that this analysis is, quote,

a beautiful rebuttal to those critics who viewed the film as fascistic or as a critique of left-wing populism. Batman as the defender of liberal democracy, not of conservatism or liberalism, but the system itself from the forces of fear and chaos. Gotham as an examination of the frailties and pressure points that make this system weak in the face of the unexpected and uncontrollable. While there is indeed both praise for the role of civil society in these films, there's also a portrait of economic inequality that provides the brittleness needed for men like bane to truly succeed this is not

a critique of the government or private sector as so much as it is a critique of the frailty and fragility of our system and its institutions and the power of symbols to combat this fragility which is a deeply a deeply liberal analysis but it's not even good like i mean this is the thing this is the thing that really pisses me off about this so the the the cadre of liberal intellectuals that we've gotten in the last like 20 years is like look you don't have to be like unable to form coherent and that like it is it is not a precept of liberal of like of like liberal intellectualism that you are unable to form a coherent argument or do any piece of analysis whatsoever like they used to be able to do this and then at some point like after the war

on terror they just stopped and now all we have is like matt inglesias it's like these i think this is what gray were talks about when there's like a fundamental incoherence. Yeah. And I think this is really exemplified by like the structure of The Dark Knight Rises. It's a very messy film.

The pacing is bad. The plot is very convoluted. It's so it's so plotty, which is often Nolan's kind of biggest failure as a as a filmmaker, in my opinion.

It's it's very structurally just confusing. Yeah. Whereas The Dark Knight is actually pretty clear. It still has a few of those weird plot, like super plotty elements, but overall, it's much clearer. But in the wake of the war on terror, and then the financial crash, there's this fundamental incoherence that kind of seeps into everything. I have two final takes to read because I know we are getting long here, but I think it's important to look at what the conservatives

and the fascist right actually said about this movie beyond just the conspiracy rattled ramblings that we started this episode with. This is from The Daily Caller 2012. The film is sympathetic to the concerns of the poor and points out that

some who achieve wealth don't earn it legitimately. But these themes disappear as soon as the hulking terrorist Bane takes over Gotham City. All the criminals are released, rich people are executed in sham trials headed up by Bane's lunatic friends, government officials and police officers are killed or captured, Bane claims that he is solving inequality by leveling the playing field, but his true plan is to perpetuate mass murder by setting off a nuclear bomb. In this way, viewers see a familiar story unfold, one that's reminiscent of communist and fascist revolutions in Russia, Germany, Cambodia, and North Korea. No matter how legitimate criticisms

of the economic, political, and social order may be, any revolution that shatters the rule of law or eliminates the market entirely will necessarily result in greater inequality, suffering, and death. It's so funny. You can tell how on the defensive they are like in the wake of Occupy because you have these people going like, wait, social inequality is real. But if you try to do anything to it it's also so funny this is this is the interesting thing about like i think i think the fundamental incoherence of it politically is that they've tried to graph the french revolution onto occupy because like yes yes the two things that occupy resolutely refused to do was one have a leader and two like do any kind of mass violence like arguably outside of oakland but that wasn't even

like what that was like okay in oakland sometimes they fought the cops like in new york like no only bank window in new york that was broken the entire time was uh i think it was a bank of america window that was broken when a cop smashed a protest just head through it like that's it's that's why that's why i really don't think the dark knight rises isn't about Occupy. It just isn't. It arose from similar conditions that Occupy arose from. And then in its final two months of filming,

they did some parallels to Occupy. But it is much more about the French Revolution, especially in like, Bane is like a vanguard. Like he is a leader of this. There's no such rule in Occupy. Now during the editing

and final production of the film, obviously they realized that there is some obvious parallels here, which they did indulge in. But, I mean, most of the writing and the filming of this took place before Occupy. I think it just came from a very similar social place. Yeah, although even as a French Revolution thing, it's incoherent because it's not like –

Oh, absolutely. It's not like Robespierre got in there and was like, this is all a secret plot so i can just like start executing beggars like it doesn't make any sense it's like that's why it has that fundamental incoherence right yeah there's one other paragraph from the from the daily caller then we will read something from breitbart like the communist parties of real authoritarian states, Bane and his cohorts represent a new ruling class that pretends to care about equality and liberation, but in practice resorts to oppression and extreme violence. The film's good guys are Batman and the police officers of Gotham, who bravely go to war to prevent Bane's genocide. Genocide!

genocide these guys have these guys have never had more than two thoughts like consecutively it's really impressive if the political message of the dark knight rises seems muddled which which it does it's because real life problems can't be solved with batman there is no well-funded superhero with a glut of fancy gadgets and moral incorruptibility. A core part of these films is that Batman is morally corrupt. Sorry. Nor are there villains in America as damning and transparently evil as Bane. The film doesn't offer much... Wait, wait, wait. The voice is right there.

The film doesn't offer much of a practical answer for what... The film doesn't offer much of a practical answer for what to do about inequality, social unrest, or terrorism. Great work, Daily Caller. Oh my god. No, no. Where do they find these guys? I guess they find these guys from failed actors, so makes sense. So, you mentioned Bush as being an obvious villain. Well, Breitbart disagrees.

Obviously, Breitbart disagrees. Here's our final take on The Dark Knight Rises. Quote, Bane, a hulk of a man burning with resentment against a society whose only provocation is being prosperous, generous, welcoming, and content, instead of miserable like him. What? First of all, that is not Bane's gripes. But anyway, in Gotham's sewers, Bane recruits those like himself, the insecure thumbsuckers raging with a sense of entitlement,

desperate to justify their own laziness and failure, and to flaunt a false sense of superiority through oppression, violence, terror, and ultimately, total and complete destruction. As expected, The Dark Knight Rises is a love

letter to Gotham City, its flawed but ultimately decent people, its industry and generosity, all of which are byproducts of liberty, free markets, and capitalism. Did they watch this movie? In other words,

just as The Dark Knight was a touching tribute to an embattled George W. Bush who chose to be seen as a villain in order to be the hero. Rises is a love letter to an imperfect America that in the end always does the right thing. And Nolan loves the American people. The wealthy producers who are more often than not trickle down their hard-earned winnings.

The workaday folks who keep our world turning. A financial system worth saving because it benefits us all, and those everyday warriors who offer their lives for the greater good with every punch of a clock. Nolan's love for this country is without qualifiers and is symbolized in all of its unqualified sincerity in the form of a beautiful young child sweetly singing a complete version of the the star spangled banner. Just before Occupy. Attempts to fulfill it's horrific vision.

Of what equality really means. Nolan. Sorry. Like this passage. This whole thing. It's such a great explanation. If you weren't around for it. For how the Trump guys

just completely blew aside all of the old George Bush coalition, because all of the George Bush guys were fucking like this. They all talked like this. It was this, like, absolutely insufferable, like, it's completely sincere nonsense.

It's crazy stuff. It's all this shit. Because also, it fundamentally misunderstands Nolan as a filmmaker. He is purposely juxtaposing a British child singing the Star Spangled

Banner at a sporting event with this destruction inherent to America. He's making these things kind of combat each other. Like, this is actually

pretty good framing. And this guy fundamentally misunderstands this. Nolan's genius as a filmmaker is without question, the pacing, the editing, the performances, the humanity of the Dark Knight Rises will be talked about for decades, which it doesn't. This is by far one of his worst films. This is widely seen as one of his worst films.

The editing, pacing, performances are all heavily criticized. This is widely seen as one of, one of his worst films. The editing, pacing, performances are all heavily criticized. This is actually like a bad movie. I, I do like the juxtaposition of the Star Spangled Banner at the sporting event with this like spectacle of destruction. I think that plays very well,

but like that is, this is, come on, come on. These are the people who, and this, this is the thing, this, this, this is why the sort of trumpist um like the the the sort of like ironic detachment stuff became so popular because these are the people who listen to born in the usa and are like this rules this rules like this

is this is about how america is good and it's just like like these people they have nothing there's nothing going on with them there they have nothing there's nothing going on with them there's just like there's nothing going on in their heads they don't have any ideas whatsoever they just have that like they just have this like reflexive flag worship stuff and that it's awful it's like the whole fucking american right was like this it's just like yeah this is how the trumpians just destroyed them because this is a really good example of nothing of the conservative political conditions that led to populist takeover right we have all of these guys who are lampooning populism um and have this very like deeply sincere neoconservative outlook which then got all got decimated in three years by trump's

very kind of basic childish rhetoric just blew this stuff out of the water. I think this is, all this stuff is a very fascinating snapshot into the politics of 10 years ago. I know there's a lot of Zoomers who listen to this who may not have been as politically kind of engaged in 2012. All this stuff is a very good look at that.

And I know this is too long, but the final, final thing to just laugh at, we will return, as all good superhero stories do, return to the status quo of my paranoia conspiracy reader magazine, which also had a review

for the Cabin in the Woods movie, which it thinks is a secret Illuminati message about how there's secretly control rooms that are navigating your entire life about how there's secretly control rooms that are that are like navigating your entire life there's like people in control rooms who are like controlling every aspect of your life the cabin in the woods

was an ironic admission of this pretty good pretty good our technocratic controllers and manipulators are crass and evil pretenders able to get off only spectacles of pain and torture pretty funny there's some quite racist stuff in the middle which I'm just not not even going to mention oh yeah that's the other thing it was like people were really racist people are still really racist people are still quite

shit that like like you could say shit back like like people who were ostensibly liberals would say shit back then that like would get you like thrown off a building today we have an article by someone who says quote my father worked with jimmy carter on the submarine one killer and chased flying saucers for project blue book which is a fascinating article and then it talks it also talks about here that uh cern is building a matrix like you know like know, like the movie The Matrix. Oh, my fucking God. We have. One day we need to do an episode about the CERN conspiracy. We should.

It's the silliest thing. We really should do an episode about CERN conspiracies because, man, yeah, they are certainly quite amusing. There's one other aspect in this article that I wanted to mention. Here's the CERN stuff. Oh, here it is. Here it is. This is in the Aleister Crowley section of the article so no oh no you know i i think we've actually suffered enough i will i will let you imagine what this guy says what this guy says about alistair crowley uh hitler and v for vendetta

oh no so i'll let you imagine what that says, because we've gone on too long. I'm happy you were able to join us in our deep dive into the 2012 disaster, The Dark Knight Rises. Not very good movie. And instead, if you want to watch a Batman film about politics and Christmas, just watch Batman Returns. That's what I'm doing this week. So get your friends together.

Watch Danny DeVito vomit black goo for two hours. Watch Michelle Pfeiffer's Catwoman in a latex suit. It is much, much better. So that does it for us today. It could happen here. I hope we learned a little bit something about constituent power, police, superheroes, and how CERN is building a matrix and this predictive programming targeting the next Winter Olympics. the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts. You can find sources for

It Could Happen Here updated monthly at coolzonemedia.com slash sources. Thanks for listening. Hey guys, I'm Kate Max. You might know me from my popular online series, The Running Interview Show, where I run with celebrities, athletes, entrepreneurs, and more. After those runs, entrepreneurs and more after those runs the conversations keep going that's what my podcast post run high is all about it's a chance to sit down with my guests and dive even deeper into their stories their journeys and the thoughts that arise once we've hit the pavement together listen to post run high on the iheart Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. You should probably keep your lights on for Nocturnal Tales from the Shadow. Join me, Danny Trails, and step into the flames of fright.

An anthology podcast of modern-day horror stories inspired by the most terrifying legends and lore of Latin America. Listen to Nocturno on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Welcome to Gracias Come Again, a podcast by Honey German, where we get real and dive straight into todo lo actual y viral. We're talking música, los premios, el chisme, and all things trending in my cultura. I'm bringing you all the latest happening in our entertainment world and some fun and impactful interviews with your favorite Latin artists, comedians, actors, and influencers.

Each week, we get deep and raw life stories, combos on the issues that matter to us, and it's all packed with gems, fun, straight-up comedia, and that's a song that only nuestra gente can sprinkle. Listen to Gracias Come Again on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.