It Could Happen Here - Why Tim Walz Called in the National Guard in 2020

Episode Date: August 9, 2024

Mia and James attempt to explain why Tim Walz consistently deployed state violence against protesters by taking a journey back through the history of the welfare state.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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. Listen to Post Run High on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

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I'm here. It's great to be here. Intro on. Yeah, and this intro-less episode is, I think, the first episode that, well, can I promise this is the first episode that was recorded after we learned that Tim Walls was going to be the vice presidential nominee defeating the sexual assault guy and then the other sexual assault guy who probably covered up a murder? Yeah, don't slack on the also covered up a murder then, man. Yeah, that was a truly impressive truly impressive sort of set of candidates yeah that party elite were choosing from it's still somewhat surprising that they didn't like fumble i mean that they will still fumble we have months to go

but that's true yeah i mean to be fair i, God, we figured out this guy covered up a murder is probably the kind of thing that like even the Dems like dog shit opposition research people were like, hmm, we shouldn't run that guy. Yeah, yeah, yeah. They're tweeting about his murder cover up. Let's leave this one. Yeah, that's Shapiro out of Pennsylvania, who's one of the other candidates, by the way. Yeah, suck shit. out of Pennsylvania, who's one of the other candidates, by the way. Yeah.

Sucks shit. But, you know, so the guy we ended up with is sort of folksy Midwestern. Actually, I think it was just a defensive coordinator or whatever the defensive coach for his football team. He's a very sort of folksy guy. We're going to get more into him next week. But the thing that I wanted to sort of start our discussion about the vice presidential candidates with is attempting to reconcile something that I've seen a lot of discussion about,

and sort of, I don't know, kind of confusion to some extent about, about how do you actually make sense of the sort of two halves of Tim Walz's record, right? Which on the one hand, he's signing a bunch of extremely progressive sort of welfare legislation while being the governor of Minnesota, including things like universal free school lunch. I think I said it was lunch or breakfast. I don't remember. I think it was both. No, it was both. It was both. Yeah. Yeah. And you know, on the one hand, you have this sort of sparkling record. And then on the other hand, you have, you know, him calling in the National Guard and deploying it to suppress the uprising in 2020, which, lest we forget, started in Minnesota.

Yeah, that's where the 3rd Precinct burned. And also using the police to sort of horribly brutalize protesters against Line 3, which is an oil pipeline through a bunch of indigenous land that probably, I don't know, we're probably two years out from an unbelievably horrific oil spill coming out of it that everyone's going to go, how could we possibly have predicted predicted this it only had spilled a million times before etc etc and that walls like rammed through and had people who were resisting it like horribly beaten by cops so how do you sort of reconcile these two halves of this guy's record and there's like a local politics explanation, which I see bandied about a lot, which is true to some extent. And that explanation is that he's not really a progressive

and he's mostly kind of a moderate who's just going along with a fairly progressive Minnesota legislature as getting credit for just like signing bills. And that's kind of true, but it's also, I think, ultimately a cop-out. Because we are on year about 140 of the welfare state, and this shit keeps happening every single time. And what's really sort of at stake here, analytically, is that the relationship between the welfare state and violence is significantly deeper than the record of one guy. And so today what we're going to be doing is not really talking about Tim Wall so much. What we're going to be doing is we're going to be going back through some of the history of social democracy and trying to understand how it became entangled with the sort of use

of force and with police violence. Because I think there's a story there that's been completely buried by the tidal wave of just like, I don't know whatever walls takes and you know i think presidential elections are something that has a tendency to just destroy everyone's analytical capacity for like two years so let's resist that and go do something interesting yeah okay yeah so i think the place to start with this is this is a place that we start, I think, not infrequent amount on this show, or at least I do. And that's the sort of original debates from, you know, about the 1830s through roughly the 1870s, early 1880s when it changes about what socialism was going to be. socialism was going to be. There's always been, to some extent, like a bunch of different kind of understandings of it. But something that, you know, you'd call the sort of left wing of the Democrats, which is like everyone at that point, right? And the anarchists kind of agree about,

and this is the Marx agrees about, with sort of the anarchists at the time is that socialism is, you know, it's the free association of producers, right? You know, it is the working class abolishing itself but then also like being the people who directly run the new society that's sort of brought about by this thing without sort of the state or sort of political mediation etc etc and even you know people like angles who are like arch statists right like angles you know uses a theoretical justification for like every time a socialist picks up a machine gun to shoot someone and that's so switch to the state like that's angles is justification for but even he's

talking about how like one day the state will be like put on a shelf in a museum and people will walk past and look at it and then like walk by because it's like it's a tool of a by-be-gone era that nobody needs anymore and in this period it's very clear that socialism is workers directly controlling the means of production, and it's directly democratically managing their lives. But this becomes less clear as the 1800s go on. important here. While this is sort of going on, right, there's two kind of trends in the development of the state and the development of sort of socialist ideology. One is a move in the 1870s and 1880s. Socialists start watching states build railroads, and this drives them completely nuts. It just obliterates their brains. It's like this and the post office just like absolutely nuke their brains. And they start going, okay, hold on. But what if instead of workers directly managing their affairs and having,

you know, workers coordinating like the production of society, what if instead the state did that? And socialism was literally when the state did things. And this is something that like even Engels is like pretty hostile to in the sense that like he's a statist to some extent, but he also is very wary of doing things like calling state-owned enterprises socialism right because like well no obviously that's not necessarily true because like you could just have capitalist state-owned enterprises like lots of places is includingly importantly sort of Bismarck's Germany in this period which we will come back to in a second yeah and lots of the places that people on Twitter think are socialist paradises today

yeah are just these so we like say don't enterprise hell holes we've talked about this extensively with china elsewhere and this sort of like shifts the conception of what people think socialism is and you get these more sort of reformist trends in sort of socialist circles you get your kotskis uh your bernsteins people who think that like you don't need a revolution. You can vote your way into the state-owning property, and that will somehow achieve socialism, or you can stabilize capitalism and make it not bad anymore. Now, that's what's happening on the socialist side. So there's this sort of project of autonomous workers' control over everything, right? That had been the original socialist project is being eaten away on the one hand from its own parties. But then on the other hand,

as sort of David Greer points out, the capitalist class realizes that all of these sort of autonomous institutions that the working class is building, like your unions, your giant political parties have their own sort of welfare system. The state realizes that you can replicate these and use it as like a direct buy-off to stop these people from revolting. I'm going to read a passage from David Graeber's The Utopia of Rules. Audubon Bismarck's reaction to socialist electoral success in 1878 was twofold. On the one hand, ban the socialist party, trade unions, and leftist newspapers. On the other, when this proved ineffective, socialist candidates continued to run and win as independents to create a top-down alternative to the free schools, workers' associations, friendly societies, libraries, theaters,

and the large process of building socialism from below. This took the form of a program of social insurance for unemployment, health, and disability, etc., etc., free education, pensions, and so forth. Much of it watered down versions of policies that had been part of the socialist platform, but in every case carefully purged of any democratic participatory element. In private, at least, he was utterly candid about describing these efforts to buy out working-class loyalties to his conservative nationalist project. When left-wing regimes later did take power, the template had already been established

and almost invariably, they took the same top-down approach, incorporating locally organized clinics, libraries, mutual banking initiatives, workers' education centers, and the like into the administrative structure of the state. So there's two interesting things here. One is that the development of the things that are going to become the body of welfare state, this is implemented not by all these sort of policies that we're talking about Walls doing now.

These were originally implemented not by the left, but very deliberately by Otto von Bismarck, the arched late 19th, early 20th century conservative, the guy who is literally responsible for the foundation of Germany, right? Like that's his project. He is the guy who creates the nation of Germany and thus will forever live in infamy as one of the most evil people in human history. The line directly from him to Hitler is incredibly straight. But the second part of this is what social democratic politics turns into, right? Which is this effort to sort of centralize all of the sort of autonomous institutions that the working class had constructed and to centralize all of that activity into the state, right? You know, this is like having your sort of clinics be state-run, having your libraries be state-run, having your like mutual banking things, like all of these things that had been independent institutions are folded into the state

project. By folding these things into the state, Graeber's interested in the extent to which they become bureaucratized and the sort of democratic elements vanish entirely. I am less interested in that here, and I am more interested in the extent to which it ties all of these things to state violence. Now, James,

do you know what else is tied to state violence? That was a masterstroke did not have that one written down came up on the cuff absolutely fantastic please tell me Mia what is connected to state violence it is the products and services that support this podcast 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

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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.

Blacklit is here to amplify the voices of Black writers and to bring their words to life. Listen to Blacklit on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. We are back. So we've gotten into sort of how these things that used to be mutual aid, right? These are the sort of programs that were developed by working class institutions to support each other were sort of folded into the state. And now we have to get into the reverse of this process, which is how violence was folded into social democracy. In the 1800s, and this is something I think is kind of well known among the extremely nerd left, but I don't know if it's very well known outside of that.

who is like a Marxist in any stripe is a social Democrat. And this is true equally of reformists like Bernstein and also people like Lenin, right? Like the Bolsheviks and the Mensheviks both are splits from like the social democratic labor party. Is it social democratic labor party? I forget the actual name of the party, but it was the social democratic party of like Russia, right? Yeah. This is the thing, like all of the communists and all the socialists like split from these sort of social democracy things, which means that inherently, and this is something that you can see reflected in the ways that they come to power and in the ways that they sort of govern. Leninist communism and social democracy are both just two variants of the same thing. And you can see this most clearly through the ways they come to power, the way they embark on this project of centralizing power, violence, production, and the organization of society into the state. Both of them take power by machine gunning their enemies on the left with the newfound power of the state. Alongside this

Russian revolution, there is the German revolution. And the German revolution is defeated when the Social Democratic Party of Germany, which had been the party of angles, right? Like Marx writes stuff about their platform. This is the premier Social Democratic Party of Germany, which had been the party of Engels, right? Like, Marx, like, writes stuff about their platform. Like, this is the premier Social Democratic Party in the world. They take power by stopping the revolution, slaughtering the communists, and using the sort of proto-fascist Freikorps to, like, just kill them all. This is how Rosa Luxemburg is killed. So the first Social Democratic government to, like, come to power in Europe since, killed. So the first social democratic government to like come to power in Europe since, I guess, technically, there was about two months in 1848, when there were social democrats in France, but that lasted very, very brief amount of time. But you know, so the first time they come to power is in Germany. And in Germany, they come to power in this bloodbath that, you know, sort of destroys

like the rest of this like armed left and attempting to centralize politics and military power in the hands of the state. This is how they defeat the revolutionary movements. In Russia, basically the same process happens, right? There's the first revolution, which is the February Revolution, 1917, and then the Bolsheviks take power in the second revolution. And the moment the Bolsheviks take power, they spend basically the entire rest of the russian

revolution and the russian civil war just straight up slaughtering every single other left-wing faction in the entirety of russia which ends in sort of the massacre and beyond oh yeah oh yeah they've got a lot of ukrainian leftists they are killing anarchists from like azerbaijan to like fucking spain make a prominent appearance in spain killing anarchists in may 1937 yeah in the sort of immediate russian context right this is solidified by the massacre at kronstadt where the bolsheviks sealed their sort of opposition to any kind of like autonomous working class right for the bolsheviks the working class is going to be directly subordinated to the bolshevik party and to that platform and any deviation or any attempt to

manage yourself autonomously is just going to be stamped out. And Lenin's attempt to do this is going to be followed by Stalin doing this even more. And so what you have here, what collective ownership is in social democracy, and this is true of both the German social Democrats, who are what we think of social Democrats today, right? They're sort of like electoralists. They're like capitalists. And also the Bolsheviks. What collective ownership is, is the state owns things, and if you try to do anything about this, they shoot you. So this is sort of the origin of like these two forms of social democracy. There's also sort of more liberal forms of this, right?

Like FDR does not conceive of himself as a social Democrat. Like he thinks of himself as a liberal, but the American liberal tradition is a bizarre one. But, you know, we actually talked about this in my episode about the time that wizards of the coast, the creators of magic,

the gathering deployed the pinkertons against a guy for revealing what was in a magic product too early amazing i think it also has some roots i think in like this kind of i mean the examples i'm most familiar with the british like post 1832 reform act right like of like this paternal state benevolence, right? They all lie in the same thing, right? Which is state trying to buy off co-opt resistance and doing so in a way that like, it's carrot and stick, I guess. Yeah, there's elements of this in Leninism too, right?

Like Lenin's like great theoretical contribution to whatever is when Lenin talks about like trade union consciousness, people bring this up a lot because like, yeah, like there is obviously issues with just like all of your organizing being, you make a trade union and then your trade union becomes the AFL-CIO and tries to actually not even tries to successfully overthrows Allende and installs Pinochet, right? Like there's a thing there. But when Lenin is talking about trade union consciousness, the thing that lenin believes is that they need like middle class petite bourgeois like fucking theorists to come in and teach them what socialism is and this is an explicit part of their theory right this is that same sort of paternalism that

they have to be like led even the sort of vanguard the working class needs to be led by these like theorists who i don't know emerge from like lenin's friend group in exile in Switzerland or whatever. And FDR's sort of policy works, I think it's not really understood how similar FDR's stuff is to like how the New Deal scene at the time, even by people like outside of the country, as compared to like the others from massive social upheavals that he placed as opposed to sort of Soviet communism or even like fascism, like Nehru, the guy who was going to become like the founding prime minister of India, has this whole thing in like 1941, where he's looking at the New Deal and he's going, this is either going to produce communism or fascism. So like the New Deal is a fundamental

rewriting of the American social contract. And a big part of it is he's doing the same thing that the Social Democrats are trying to do, which is he's trying to centralize everything into the state. He's trying to centralize partially this is welfare benefits, right? He's trying to centralize unions very specifically into the state. And he's also trying to centralize violence into the state. Because before this, the US, I mean, we've talked about sort of blair mountain on behind the bastions before right like there are just open wars between the literally capitalist armies and sort of union armies armies formed by labor unions not like the union army i feel like i need to clarify this yeah yeah the great anti-capitalist of the union army and a big part

of what fdr is like running on like part of of his platform is like, okay, we need to end this like era of gun thugs, right? Like we can't have these fucking like robber barons running around with their private armies killing people. And like, yeah, that's obviously good, right? But his solution to this is, again, we're going to centralize all of the violence into the police. And unfortunately, for sort of the rest of us, right? If you're going to maintain like a capitalist system, somebody has to be pulling the triggers. And that's now the police instead of these sort of like private armies. And the other part about this bargain is that the unions also have to basically disband their armies, right? Because the miners at Blair Mountain, right? They have like 17,000 guys.

Like all of them have rifles. They will go out and they will fight. They have machine guns. Like they have cannons. Yeah. And it's FDR who begins the gun control in the US because of the National Firearms Act of 1934, right? They talk a lot about prohibition era violence, right? But what happens at Blair Mountain is why you have the NFA.

Yeah. And so what you have, it's the same process, the process of sort of turning mutual aid into state programs, right? Walls is very explicitly doing this, right? I saw people talking about how like, oh, he's achieved the dream of the Black Panthers like free breakfast program by like making it into the state. And it's like, no, you don't understand. The reason the Panthers were doing that was to build the roots of an autonomous society. The reason the state is doing that is so that you don't fucking revolt and you don't do

2020 again. Yeah, these are different things yeah and this is something that as the u.s welfare state cycles through you get various versions of this there is another version of this that is the products and services that support this podcast by centralizing all of your money into their pockets and then using it to hire security guards. 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. podcast, Therapy Gecko. It's a show where I take real phone calls from anonymous strangers all over

the world as a fake gecko therapist and try to dig into their brains and learn a little bit about their lives. I know that's a weird concept, but I promise it's pretty interesting if you give it a shot. Matter of fact, here's a few more examples of the kinds of calls we get on this show. I live with my boyfriend and I found his piss jar in our apartment. I collect my roommate's toenails and fingernails. I have very overbearing parents. Even at the age of 29, they won't let me move out of their house. So if you want an excuse to get out of your own head and see what's going on in someone else's head, search for Therapy Gecko on the iHeartRadio app, Apple

Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. It's the one with the green guy on it. Hey, I'm Jack Peace 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. 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 iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. We're back. So the Great Society, which is Johnson's sort of like big, we're going to end poverty thing.

You know, he's doing the Vietnam War at the same time. So, you know, there's this sort of domestic kind of returgency stuff in the Central Asian state violence is now being projected out. And in the US, it's always happening, right? The US fundamentally is a project of colonial expansion going from fucking one coast to the other, killing everyone near path and seizing their land. And the contradiction of this, right, the fact that like the people who nominally want sort of a welfare state also normally are like revolted? The fact that the people who nominally want a welfare state also normally are revolted at the fact that they're burning millions of people alive in Vietnam, Cambodia, and Laos. This contradiction is kind of what tears apart social democratic politics.

And what replaces it is, if social democracy is a carrot and a stick, right? Neoliberalism is just the stick. It's just more prisons that hit you with the thing instead of this sort of like more genteel process of, well, we're still hitting you with the stick, but also here are these handouts. If you don't like oppose us. Yeah. So we've talked about these examples.

I wanted to kind of move into some more modern examples of this, because I think everything I've been saying is old, right? But this stuff is still happening today in, in the social democracies that exist, right? Like one of the biggest examples of this is there's two kinds of social democracies that people point to, depending on where on the political spectrum they are. One is like the Nordic countries, right? And this never worked on me because one of my foundational experiences, like as an activist, when I was like a little baby, 15 year old old in 2013 was talking to someone who had a mounted calvary charge done against them

by the swedish police because they were doing an anti-fascist action and they got trampled by fucking horses because that's that's what the state is and you know so like that's like kind of on the one hand but the thing that we're seeing right now is you know the remains of the welfare state being paired with this incredible like rabid anti-immigrant violence right and this is the thing you see in places like france too right we still sort of have the welfare state it's also this unbelievable violence against sort of non-white people and anyone who's trying to like enter the country yeah i think it's was it sweden or was it denmark that had these laws were like they

would like seize the property of any immigrant who like came into the country jesus i don't remember that i know more people who have migrated to sweden i think it might have been it might be denmark i'm not familiar yeah they're also part of the sort of broader like european border project which is unbelievably violent and you're getting this with walls too right he's signing on to sort of kamala harris's like fucking terrifying fascist border violence and that's again because like all of this project is tied in with state centralization well okay so what happens when you centralize a state the answer is it starts enforcing its borders yeah in order to sort of like create underclasses of incredibly dispossessed and incredibly battered and brutalized

people who can be exploited for labor. Yeah, like people who are insecure with respect to the state, right? And so they can be exploited by the state or by capitalism that supports the state. Yeah, you know, obviously, like the US is sort of one of the global pioneers, but like the Nordic social democracies are also really sort of part and parcel of the system. like the Nordic social democracies are also really sort of part and parcel of the system. The other things I want to turn to here is Latin American social democracies, because I talked about this at length in the Brazil episodes, right? Brazilian social democracy, Lula's like first term, right, has simultaneously this massive sort of push in social spending,

and then also enormous enormous like a budget increase for the military there's this incredible unbelievable spike in police violence like rate of police killings is way worse than the u.s yeah and this is true in like fucking all of these places right like this surely how the coup worked in 2020 was because the bolivian government kept just like handing money to the police over and over again and the police like did a coup against them right this is also true in venezuela which is like unbelievable rates of police killing like terrifying oh yes i was there after the revolution but i saw some of this happening right the revolution going from spontaneity and workers control and people's control to a degree to

like being caught which happens in almost every revolution that we've seen right it begins with the people and it becomes co-opted by the state it's wild to see like the equipment and weapons of their police on one hand and then the poverty of yeah folks that they are policing on the other and then this has also been omlo's thing in mexico right like even though he came in on the like hugs not bullets campaign which for some incomprehensible reasons you still see like the fucking washington post writing about omlo talking about how he was doing like hugs not bullets like she never he there was not a single day where he implemented that shit he came in and immediately was like hey the army do you want control of even more of the country yeah like it was very funny when omlo came in

right and he was doing it like hugs not bullets english translation and then simultaneously i was getting press releases being like we have deployed several thousand more troops to the tijuana area come to the parade and i was like no look are they huggers they sent in their tactical cutlery does this exact same thing in haiti where he goes to haiti he plays soccer with these kids and he says we will show them another way and then just like in the background are all the armored vehicles from the brazilian occupation of haiti it's just like well oh my god they're showing him something yeah and so the tie between this absorption of of socialist politics into the state you know and this sort of centralization and increasing of state violence is something that continues to today and you know we're now kind of in the last decades probably probably too strong, but roughly decade, we're kind of seeing social Democrats who want to break out of this in the form of the kind of like moderate abolitionists.

So these are the people whose thing is like, okay, we're going to defund the police and we're going to reallocate their resources to funding welfare programs. to like funding welfare programs. And this is like, obviously this would be good, but if you know anything about what happened after 2020, none of this stuff ever happened, right? No one ever defunded the police, right? Like there was no sort of movement.

We defunded the libraries. Yeah, but even on a fundamental level, like I don't believe that this can work. And the reason I don't believe that this can work is because in order to have a state that functions, you need an apparatus of violence. It can inflict on its subjects. Oh, I'm going to turn here. Oh, this is a joke you're probably not going to get. Oh no. I'm

going to turn here to famed political philosopher, Brennan Lee Mulligan, quote, laws are threats made by the dominant socioeconomic ethnic group in a given nation. It's just a promise of violence that's enacted. The police are basically an occupying army you know what i mean i was just to see i'm aware of this dude he uh he plays dungeon dragons on the internet occasionally he says something that's right and you know the important thing about this is that you know without without the threat of violence behind it right laws are just suggestions you can't have a state without an apparatus of violence. You can't stay in power without one.

And this has always been the sort of central contradiction of social democracy, right? In order for Walls to have his sort of like pretty sparkling programs, he needs to have the cops to destroy you if you attempt to do anything different. And this is what 2020 was, right? to do anything different. And this is what 2020 was, right? 2020 was the most serious uprising in the US, like the most serious challenge to the authority of the sort of draconically anti-black, like settler American state, right? And it was something that promised something different. And even, and you know, and that meant that everyone, whether you were a fucking like hardline fascist, you know you were tim walls right your one goal was to smash it and was to deploy state violence state violence you had in

your hands which in this case was a national guard was to send them in to make sure that these people never fucking burn another police station again and that's what happens it's like obviously like the ability to have it's I've been thinking about this a lot because I've been writing a book and I'm really trying to get it fucking finished. So I've been writing it a lot. And like when a conflict, be it one within a country or between countries stops being between states or about what the state should do and starts being about whether the state should be, then we see the entire state

system like pivoting on all its suggesting morals right and just being like no we cannot allow this to happen and i think we've seen that domestically to a degree in the u.s right but like the state can't abolish itself state won't abolish itself the sine qua non of the state is ability to like lock you up beat you up or shoot you up if you do what they don't want and that will always be the state doesn't matter if it's got like a hammer and sickle or like you based fucking bashar al-assad or whatever like it the state will still come and kill you if you become a threat to it yeah and that's the solution to what hopefully will be the title of this episode why did tim walth call the National Guard? And the answer is to make sure

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