Rev Left Radio - American Exceptionalism and Innocence: Liberal Ideology and American Creation Myths

Episode Date: December 9, 2019

Danny Haiphong, co-author of American Exceptionalism and American Innocence: A People's History of Fake News--From the Revolutionary War to the War on Terror, joins Breht for a long, in-depth conversation about the stories that America tells itself about itself, and why those stories are false. We cover so many topics and ideas that its impossible to summarize them all here, so check it out yourself! Check out Danny's work at the Black Agenda Report here: https://www.blackagendareport.com/author/Danny%20Haiphong Follow Danny on Twitter @SpiritOfHo  Outro music: 'Craazy' by Rebel Diaz (feat. C-Rayz Walz) Check out and Support Rebel Diaz here: https://rebeldiaz.com/ ------- LEARN MORE ABOUT REV LEFT RADIO: https://www.revolutionaryleftradio.com/ SUPPORT REV LEFT RADIO: www.patreon.com/revleftradio Our logo was made by BARB, a communist graphic design collective: @Barbaradical Intro music by DJ Captain Planet. --------------- This podcast is affiliated with: The Nebraska Left Coalition, Omaha Tenants United, FORGE, Socialist Rifle Association (SRA), Feed The People - Omaha, and the Marxist Center.

Hello everybody and welcome back to Revolutionary Left Radio. On today's episode, we have Danny Hafong, co-author of the book American Exceptionalism and American Innocence, A People's History of Fake News, from the Revolutionary War to the War on Terror. The other co-author for this book is Roberto Servant, and there's a lot that obviously we couldn't cover in this episode, so I encourage people to read the book of this episode, or especially, at this episode, sparks your interest. But yeah, it was a really fun episode. And if you like what we do here at Revolutionary Left Radio,

you can go to Revolutionary Left Radio.com. On that website, you will find our sister podcast, Red Menace, our YouTube page, Twitter, and our Patreon. And if you support us on Patreon, you do that in exchange for monthly bonus episodes. So having gotten that out of the way, let's go ahead and get into this conversation with Danny HaFong on his book, American Exceptionalism and American Innocence.

My name is Danny Haiphong, and I am a journalist, activist, and author based in New York City. I write for Black Agenda Report Weekly as a contributor, and I am the co-author of the recent book with Roberta Servant, American Exceptionalism and American Innocence at People's History of Fake News, from the Revolutionary War to the War on Terror. Yeah, absolutely. And I'm really honored to have you on. I think this episode's pretty much been a long time coming. It's been in the planning process. But even when we started planning this episode, a sort of collaboration between you and I was overdue. So I'm glad we can finally get to this.

And this episode will be a little longer than normal because I just really love the book and I love the conversation that's going to come out of the book. So if we go a little longer than usual, oh well, I think people will ultimately enjoy it. So having said all of that, let's go ahead and get into the questions. And again, as Danny said, We are covering his book that he wrote with Roberto Servant called American Exceptionalism and American Innocence.

Let's just start off with a basic question, Danny, and that is, you know, why did you and your co-author write this book? And what's the main theme or argument of the text overall so listeners can sort of orient themselves to it? The reason we wrote the book, and there were many reasons. And first off, I just want to say how influential revolutionary left radio is and how I've really, come to learn so much from being able to listen to a program that actually talks about Marxism, Leninism, communism, socialism. One of the main purposes for me in writing the book was to try to integrate analyses, theory, history, and politics with the spirit of Marxism, Leninism,

with the spirit of socialism in mind. And so I just want to say I'm so appreciate. of the Revolutionary Left Radio for doing that weekend and week out. And so that was one of the main bases for the reason why I wanted to write the book. And actually, Roberta Servant reached out to me wanting to write the book because he wanted to focus on American exceptionalism and American innocence. And he felt that Black Agenda Report. And my writing in particular had been writing about this and talking about this ideology

for many, many years. And the main theme of the book for us was to highlight. how American exceptionalism and American innocence are really the most effective evils when it comes to the ideological apparatus of the U.S. state, that they provide a foundational framework from which the ruling class is able to impose its hegemony and impose its material apparatus, capitalism, imperialism, racism, on to the imperial core, as you have called it, where the United States as the hegemonic imperialist state for the last 70 years or so has necessitated an ideology which not only justifies its historical and domestic as well as its imperial development, but also its newfound role over the last 70 years as the empire of all empires, the hegemonic power from which all of our problems are rooted in. And so we really wanted to write about that because we felt especially since 2016 election, especially since the age of Obama, this ideology has come at us in full force in so many ways and has been exposed as a weapon of the ruling class.

But yet very few people talk about these ideologies in any way or even name them because we name them American Exceptional's and American Innocence. Others may say name them something different, but very few even name them. them when they're even well-meaning socialists and people on the left refuse to talk about these ideologies because they bring up not only inconvenient truths, but also a significant backlash politically. Yeah, absolutely. Incredibly well said. And I always say this, that anybody that wants to say that they're non-ideological are the

most ideological. And a lot of times with this American exceptionalism and American innocence, it really plays itself out as if it's not really an ideology at all. And I think that's one of the most pernicious effects of it. And of course, people in our society are conditioned to think that way without even knowing that they're being conditioned. And so when they, when they, you know, regurgitate some of these tropes, sometimes it really feels like they came up with it or they're, they're really speaking from some critical intelligence within themselves and not just regurgitating, you know, a conditioning that they've passively absorbed over time. Before we get into the next question,

I do just want to say really quickly, like, thank you so much for those kind words about the show, man, it really means a lot to me. So that really sort of put a smile on my face and thank you for that. But let's go ahead and drill down into the two primary aspects of the title, American exceptionalism and American innocence. These things are certainly related, but let's take them one by one to start. So what is American exceptionalism? How do you define it basically in the book? And then can you give me a concrete example of it that our listeners will be able to use to understand it better? Sure. And we use a very basic definition of American exceptional. Our hope was to make it digestible.

A lot of scholars who've ran about American exceptionalism, write about it in a very grandiose, inaccessible, very bourgeois academic way. And so we wanted to just come right out and say American exceptionalism, simply put, is the ideology that presumes the United States is a force for good in the world, both in its domestic manifestations, how the U.S. has developed over its course of its history, as well as in its current projects abroad and. its current condition economically, politically, militarily, that all of that represents this force for good, which renders it the most civilized, the most democratic, and the strongest arbiter of freedom and liberty that has ever been seen hitherto. And so a concrete example of it, are there so many examples? I feel like we're steeped in it every day. But I think one of the ones we really want to talk about because not only is it so controversial, but also it really has sparked a very problematic debate in a lot of ways, and that is the phenomenon of

diversity and inclusion. And we really position the whole conversation about diversity and inclusion within the destruction of black liberation movements, indigenous liberation movements, left-wing political movements of the working class in the United States, their repression, their complete and utter and total resistance against them by the state, eventually led into and bled into this neoliberal period, which now necessitated certain reforms to the state. And so one of the reforms had to be a granting of access to certain sections of the population that have been historically oppressed. And that's where this whole notion of diversity really sprung about. And so we talk about diversity and inclusion as on the one hand, a product of these

movements, but on the other, a real response from the state in an attempt to water down the political narrative in the United States to make it seem like actually U.S. imperialism is capable of reforming itself and becoming more accessible, becoming more inclusive to populations, which it actually relies upon their oppression to represent. make super profits and to maintain control of class domination. So we talk about the rise of Obama and Hillary Clinton as being, Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton as being two prime examples of this, to extremely well-connected, very committed bourgeois politicians,

ruling class politicians who were able to take advantage of the diversity and inclusion narrative forward the aims of U.S. imperialism, both domestically and abroad, to be able to expand the austerity regime in the United States to make it so everything was on the table when it comes to the very few things that workers can rely upon to survive in the United States. And not to mention the increased police surveillance, mass incarceration regime enacted by these politicians, but also being able to put a friendly face on imperialism to be able to say that a woman and a black president are in fact somehow indicating a progression in U.S. society

toward a more perfect union, which is what American exceptionalism is all about. Yeah, absolutely. And, you know, there is a sort of liberal identity reductionism at play here, especially, you know, and obviously Obama and Hillary, are epitomies of it, right? Obama is like, you know, I'm a black man. I represent the black community. My ascension to presidency is a win for all black Americans and perhaps even

black people across the world. Hillary Clinton's similar thing with feminism, you know, I could be the first woman president, etc. But, you know, the identity reductionism really serves to obscure class and imperial dynamics. And we can even see how like this liberal language of identity reductionism is at play when it comes to smearing even social democratic or socialist figures within the mainstream political establishment, like the attacks on Elon Omar and Jeremy Corbin as being, you know, particularly virulent anti-Semites. And, you know, I know for fact they'd be trying that exact same shit with Bernie if Bernie wasn't himself Jewish, but they do other shit with Bernie like, you know, a Bernie bro. And even Hillary, when Obama was running

in 2008, you know, you had the saying Obama boys to try to make Obama's base seem like. It was just a boys club and it was anti-feminist. And then they, did the same thing to Bernie. So it's interesting how that supposedly progressive liberal academic language around identity really gets, you know, weaponized in this new era of diversity and inclusion against the enemies of capitalism and imperialism. Just interesting to see how that works. I do want to say something really quick, though, about the American exceptionalism because

I hear this critique of Marxists from non-Marxist leftists, you know, libertarian, socialist, anarchists. You'll often hear them say that Marxists, especially Leninists and Maoists, they practice a sort of inverted American exceptionalism, right? Like, you know, Marxist and these anti-imperialists, they're so obsessed with American hegemony that they almost make America into this exceptionally brutal empire as opposed to a more nuanced understanding of global politics or something. That's the argument at least. I just wanted to push back on that a little bit and maybe get your thoughts. I think the reason we focus as Marxist-Leninist or Marxist-Mowis or just Marxist on American imperialism is precisely because the U.S. is objectively and empirically the largest and most powerful imperial power, largest and most powerful military, and the largest and most powerful economy.

So really the entire deck is stacked in favor of U.S. power, and U.S. power really guides the rest of the so-called Western world or its allies, etc. The second thing is, of course, when it comes to somebody like me or you, like we live inside of the United States, so it's what we know best. So, of course, Marxists within America are going to focus on American imperialism because that's the conditions in the society that they know best. And then thirdly, you know, the U.S., it leads the imperial powers and it really dominates ostensibly international formations like the IMF, the World Bank, NATO, and the U.N., all of these formations, you know, like to present themselves as non-biased international formations. but in reality we've seen time and time again how the U.S. and its allies really dominate even those formations and they're not really neutral international arbiters, but they're, you know, they become sort of limbs of American and Western imperial powers. What are your thoughts on that criticism of inverted American exceptionalism on the left?

Well, well said, first of all, but what it reminds me of in this really, I think, segues well into American innocence is a really common argument. that they bring up that I think is not even just reflective of those certain strands of our communist movement or socialist movement, but that there is this, especially in the age of U.S. decline, because that's really what we've been in in the last 40 years. But there is a real insidious move, and I think it does park into the very liberal tendencies of American exceptionalism and American innocence. And American innocence, which really is this notion that while, yeah, the United States is bad, it's an empire, it's a capitalist power, it's a racist settler state. Even so, those things can be kind of forgiven away and rendered in the powers that render those things real can be apologized for by stating, for example,

well the United States meant well or well actually there are other bad forces in the world too and the United States can't be blamed for all of the ills or that exist around the world and what I say to that is well if we're doing a real materialist analysis if we're really applying dialectics and you can actually show that much of this suffering if not the entirety of the suffering that exists in the world has the U.S.'s hands in it precisely for the reasons that you mention that the U.S. is the predominant imperial power in the world and that it's development. If we're really looking at development, then we can see that the monopolies, the banks, the military industrial complex, the police state, all of the interconnected apparatuses that

make up the U.S. empire really do have a hand in all that we say is negative or all that we say is a problem or an example of the exploitation that we really do invest ourselves in in order to create an emancipatory and revolutionary socialist movement. So I think that it's a real problem, and it shows another reason why I wrote this book is that American Innocence is just as insidious as American exceptionalism in a lot of ways, because American Innocence says that, yes, there are problems that the U.S. has caused, but in fact, there are bigger problems or these problems that the U.S. has caused are aberrations to at least a grander design, or we can even harken on a lot of Marxists do this.

They harken back to the developmental myth of the U.S. as being a progressive revolution, for example, saying that it became a bourgeois society, and we should all applaud the fact that the colonies made a transition from feudalism to capitalism. That's a huge line. A lot of older, especially Communist Party scholars, write about that. And I think it's, if we look at the historical fact, we can see that that is just not, not only is that not a correct reading, but it falls into this ideological trap that American exceptionalism and innocent set. And to not only alienate large sections of our class, but also to make us incoherent so we can't actually win over our class at the same time.

So I guess my response to it would be, well, we have to always be committed to the truth and our principles, our philosophy of dialectical materialism helps us. get there, but if we're not aware that we are actually repeating these mistakes, if we're saying, well, the U.S. is bad, but also Russia is bad, why can't we also understand that the United States actually help had a huge hand in instituting the so-called bourgeois democracy that Russia has today? Exactly. Actually, pressuring the Soviet Union to the point of its collapse playing a huge role

in the pressure that the Soviet Union experienced. in order to facilitate what ended up being the disaster of the Yeltsin period into today. So we can actually probably do that with every single example, not only around the world, but, you know, all the problems that we face here, all the issues that we face here, as well as all the struggles against these problems, which are ultimately bombarded, not just with the force of the state, but also the force of these ideologies. Yeah, that's a really great point about Russia specifically. And a lot of the, like, you know, centrist, neol, Democrat Party liberals that we see around us today, like, I think, like, they either think or they play it off as if they think that the USSR is still alive, like the memes they make about Trump being a communist or something.

So it says something interesting. I haven't really thought about this. I haven't fleshed this out. But it says something interesting about the American liberal mind that when it thinks of Russia, as you say, Russia has turned into a gangster capitalist kleptomaniac society. today precisely because of what the U.S. did in the Cold War and how that ended. So the liberal's mind, you know, going back to the Soviet Union and putting like, you know, a Russian hat with a communist symbol on Trump's head in a meme or something is really like this cognitive dissidents in the liberal imagination that, you know, they have to go back to these Cold War tropes to make

sense of their opposition to Russia and Trump today. It's really fucking fascinating and delusional. I do want to read something from your book, and this is the only time I'll read directly from the text. But I think it's important. And it's what you and your co-author write about American Innocence, and it's basically how you sum it up at the end of your little intro on it. The book says, to cite just a few examples, American Innocence has us remember slavery and settler colonialism as events of the past, not as structures of domination that haunt are present.

It has us view our violent overthrows of democratically elected leaders around the globe as mere aberrations of what we truly represent as a country, or as, quote, an unfortunate transitional developments on the way to full-fledged. liberal democracy. American innocence has us view the Iraq war as a simple mistake. It has us view Abraham Lincoln as the one who freed the slaves. It tells us that our laws are neutral, that our police serve and protect, and that our military fight for our rights.

It tells us that everyone can make it in this country if they just work hard enough. It tells us that our history, like every other nations, is a mixed bag, so it's time to move on. In short, the ideological work of American innocence is to remind us of the pure, benevolent intentions behind our imperial and genocidal actions, while at the same time assigning the most impure and evil motives to the violence of others. In other words, Martin Luther King Jr. may have been right that the United States is the world's greatest perpetuator of violence, but at least we always mean well. And I thought that was a really succinct, interesting way to sum it up.

And for my next question, maybe, can you just talk about how these two strands of American innocence and American exceptionalism sort of support one another and play off one another? Yes, and I believe they play off one another precisely because of the struggle against the conditions that these ideologies protect. So while American exceptionalism provides the foundational framework for how the ruling class wants workers, oppressed people to think about and to act in the world around the U.S.'s imperial and capital system, the force of American innocence is really solidified by its ability. to apologize and explain in a way when struggles for social justice, when revolutionary movements and even just movements of all forms

and political strands begin to push back against the lies that American exceptionalism propagates and distributes. So we know one of the biggest reasons why the United States, for example, was founded was to preserve slavery. That's now well in the stock scholarly literature from fellow comrades like Gerald Horn who write about what the real roots of the American

Revolution were. And there have been the black struggle for self-determination in the United States. And just working class struggles generally in the United States have been making a point for a long time that even if we didn't know that the original colonialists, the so-called founding fathers, wanted to preserve the profits, the super profits of the slave system, We do know that Africans, indigenous people, and other marginalized populations were in fact excluded from the so-called freedoms bestowed upon the Republic when the colonialists decided to separate from the Union Jack. We know all of that, and that criticism has been made for so long. But American Innocence then is able to protect the exceptionalist mythology of the United States by,

imbuing an almost an ingrained response to this, real bourgeois response, which is, well, that may be true, and we can acknowledge that as a mistake, but let's look at the values that the U.S. has always represented. Let's look at the ideals, the fact that the U.S. has always been a project of freedom and democracy, and we can now see that, okay, well, slavery and indigenous genocide and these blights on the history of the country can, in fact, not be inherently reflective of what the U.S. is all about. It's just, we just pass them by as necessary and unfortunate circumstances, which has now led to this most prosperous and democratic society that exists in the world. And this is where the U.S.'s imperial power becomes so

important because if it were not for the imperialist roots of the United States, if it were not for its ability to expand and eventually become the hegemonic power, this is why it's almost ridiculous to call us American exceptionalists for calling out empire, when in fact, if it were not for the global ambitions to make the United States the core center where the whole entire profit system generally is based on, there weren't for that, the ruling class wouldn't be able to explain a way or apologize for its history because what it has done, especially since World War II, is it has put on this cloak of exceptionalism, which in fact just presumes the United States to be far superior and more civilized than the barbaric countries and savage peoples

who the U.S. has sought to dominate. and so it has been able to play off its history using American Innocence as a framework for justifying its global and imperial motivations. And they play off each other all the time. One of the biggest examples now, which is so heinous, is Colin Kaepernick. And we write a lot about Colin Kaepernick in the book because we felt like the lack of support and solidarity around Kaepernick beginning in 2016 was really reflective of. how so many things had changed in such a short period from the beginning of the Obama period

into Black Lives Matter and then into Kaepernick's protests. We saw so much happen. And now Kaepernick is back in the news for attempting to get back in the NFL, but also maintain the integrity of his movement and of his politics and of his solidarity with the black community, his righteous struggle. What has happened to him, which is very troubling, is that because he has not wavered, because he has not kind of kneeled and bowed to the exceptionalist mythology of the United States, because he has never taken back his criticisms of the U.S. as a racist society that uses its police to murder black people,

because he's never gone back from that. whenever he is back in the news, there is this really insidious narrative of appreciation. So even though there are a lot of so-called corporate media sports pundits, so-called black journalists, a lot of these establishment figures have once said, well, we appreciate his cause because we believe that would make the United States a better place. We are angry at Kaepernick because he doesn't appreciate the opportunities that the United States has provided him. So at the same time that the mistakes and the blights, the so-called mistakes and the blights and the oppressive conditions are acknowledged by the initial support of Kaepernick by the so-called corporate media class, on the other hand, whenever he steps out of line, for example, like snubbing the NFL, not taking their ridiculous offer, which would have literally legalized his repression.

it would have basically said, well, you can't take any legal action against the NFL for basically being blackballed out of it. Because he refused to do that, he's being labeled as unappreciative, which is a narrative that has existed since the origins of the United States when slavery was the central economic mode of productions. And the enslaved were thought to be unappreciative whenever they rebelled. Surprise, surprise. And, you know, that's where this all kind of connects. is that American innocence is almost the defensive posture of American exceptionalism, which is the offensive posture if you want to get into sports, is that American exceptionalism is the attack dog, the ideological attack dog of imperialism, while American innocence is the

defensive posture whenever there is a pushback. And we can see this with Russia, too, because for all of Russia's devolution after the fall of the Soviet Union, just small moves to make Russia maybe a country that respects international law in some respects to make Russia a country that isn't completely under the thumb of Europe and U.S. imperialism. Just for those things, Russia is demonized as some sort of Soviet experiment 2.0 when, in fact, what's actually happening is more complex, but because Russia will not kiss the ring of the U.S. imperialism, it has to be demonized. and demonization, dehumanization, white supremacy,

they're all at the core of American exceptionalism and American innocence. They all form the basis of which these ideologies become so effective because they do signify domination. They do signify superiority. And they signify superiority and domination for a particular class of people who have particular interests

in maintaining their status and position within a class society. And we wanted to push the conversation on that direction because even those who can say, well, of course, X, Y, and Z about white supremacy in the United States. Or, yeah, of course, the U.S. isn't exceptional. Very few are saying, well, how come? How come this is how our conversations about these topics play out? Why do we have conversations about Kaepernick's legitimate protests? Why do we have to talk about his appreciation, whether he appreciates the opportunities he's given in the first place?

why do we have to talk about Russia's moves to respect international law and any sort of accept why do we have to get angry about that well it's because um any move away from the us's orbit of domination imperial hegemony is seen as a crime it seem as on and we have to see it as unexceptional that is the way that the ruling class wants us to look at both domestic and international phenomenon yeah incredibly well said and yeah I even wrote down like before you said it, I wrote down offense and defense as a sort of way to understand exceptionalism and innocence and how they play off each other, you know. And thinking about Kaepernick, it reminds me of, you know, Phenon, understanding the colonized

and colonizer dynamic. And the Marxist position, the Marxist, Leninist, Maoist position is that, you know, black people in the United States really are their own nation, their own oppressed nation. Lenin called America the jailhouse of nations, right? You know, the indigenous people, the black people, immigrants to some extent. These people get brought in and then they're systematically oppressed by white supremacy. But the colonizer's logic, whether it's in, you know, towards black folks in the U.S. Or whether in Phenon's context, it was the French versus the Algerians, the colonizer is always pushing forward this narrative that the colonized should be grateful.

That the colonizer comes in to tame the savagery inherent and barbaric people and give them the opportunities of capitalism and any protest at all against any real injustice in society. to not have to look that in the eyes and not have to address it, they can just shift to like, why aren't you grateful? Be grateful. Thank us. You wouldn't even be here without us. And that's very much colonizer logic. So I hope people really keep that in mind.

Last thing I'll say before we move on, this really reminds me of the whole American innocence thing. I think it manifests an example that I came up with is that it manifests in this communism killed 100 million people thing. Because the hidden premise of this whole line that everybody is conditioned to regurgitate on, command that communism killed a hundred million people. The hidden premise is that communism is objectively empirically worse than capitalism and communism actually intends to kill people, but when America

does it, you know, it's an accident. Because by putting forward this communism killed a hundred million people line, but never giving an inch of ground when it comes to capitalism killed fucking three billion people. They never talk like that, right? So that hidden premise is like communism is worse. And when America's fucked up, we did it on accident. When communists, fuck up. They do it because their ideology is evil. And I think that is a sort of sneaky, subtle manifestation of this American innocence and the way it manifests in our daily lives. But let's go ahead and move on because we have a lot more questions to cover. And I know we've touched on this a little bit. Maybe we can drill down. So let's focus now on the sort of creation myths of American

society, the founding fathers, and the Revolutionary War itself. You guys dedicate an entire chapter to it in the book. So what founding myths do we tell ourselves about ourselves as Americans, and how do those founding myths sort of live on today? Well, what's interesting about the origin's myths of the United States is that they really hearken on this inherent exceptionalism, this almost biologically determined exceptionalism, which is rooted in the white supremacist origins of the United States. And, yeah, we did decide to dedicate an entire chapter on this because we felt that this narrative of the United States' benevolent origins is perhaps the most pervasive.

And now in this age of decline is something that has both taken almost a backseat in a lot of ways where there's a lot of fear about hearkening back to these founding narratives about how of the U.S. is exceptional, but on the other hand, there is, especially among liberals, because to be honest, this book was not, and we say very explicitly, it was not a targeted towards these sentimentalities of the so-called anti-Trump resistance or the, or we weren't really looking, even though we do understand the right wing in liberal wings of the political establishment in this country, we weren't looking to create some sort of balanced look at this. We were looking at to make an objective assessment about what is the biggest threat to us

as leftists at this very moment. And to me, the biggest threat was how the so-called American liberal class, the white liberals as well as their collaborators in all sections of society, have attempted to apologize for and remake the history of the United States into something that is so-called complex or something that can be digested by the left while at the same time maintaining critiques about that history. And so we made an entire chapter about the origin myths because we found Gerald Horn's arguments so compelling about how the U.S. is actually a product of a counter-revolution.

And we wanted to write a chapter in that spirit to understand that when we're talking, talking about the development of societies, especially Marxists, we have to be very careful painting one broad stroke over the development of the entire capitalist world as if the United States doesn't have its own unique components to it, which, while we won't call exceptional for our purposes, we understand that they're exceptional in the sense that they do represent this new transition into an age of U.S. imperial dominance. And so the founding fathers their principal concern was not democracy and freedom in liberty, which is what we are told constantly from the day we go to school until the day we die, we're told that this was the principal concern. Every U.S. president repeats this trope, you know, every single figure in the ruling class in its supporting institutions.

repeat this over and over and over again, glorify George Washington as a hero. They glorify Benjamin Franklin as a hero. All of these figures are seen as the standard bearers of what freedom is all about. But we ask, well, freedom for whom? And we show that, in fact, what the founding fathers were looking for was the freedom to become a more, I guess you could say, a more liberal capitalist system with a huge slavery component, a system that was dependent upon the enslavement of Africans and the genocide of indigenous people, where the British Empire, which no one apologizes, no one should apologize

for the crimes that it committed up until this point, was actually looking to reign in the colony's slave system and its penchant desire to destroy indigenous land because actually the British Empire was in a pretty big crisis at the time. prior to the so-called American Revolution. The British Empire was marred trying to maintain stability in its colonies in the Caribbean. It was trying to ensure that it had the revenue to maintain what was already an outstretched empire, which spanned across the globe. And so it had to do certain things like arm Africans to protect colonies. It had to free some in order to maintain military dominance.

and it was also embattled in a lot of wars with its colonial rivals, France, the Dutch, etc. So what ended up happening was the colonialists were very angry about this. They didn't like seeing Africans collect taxes from them. They didn't like seeing them in red coats. They didn't like a feeling as if they were becoming enslaved. And that's a lot of American, a lot of the backlash, especially white backlash, to criticisms of American exceptionalism is this idea that there's almost, And this gets into the guilt complex that a lot of white Americans feel is that there's almost this threat that now they'll become enslaved.

And that's the origins of the United States is the notion that the UK or what became the UK, the British Empire, was going to enslave the colonialists, not because they were actually going to enslave them literally, but they were going to take away what had actually gave them so much power and privilege. and that was the profits of the slave system. And so what a few people know too is that a lot of the founders that we don't hear so much about actually had deep roots in the Caribbean and in these colonies where the British Empire was having so much trouble, whether it was Antigua or Cuba, et cetera. There were just a lot of issues that the British Empire were facing in maintaining a white minority enslaving a black majority or an African majority. and a lot of these slave owners and traders would migrate to the colonies to feel safe and to create a society that was now dominated by a white majority and its capitalist class feel safe in protecting the slave system.

And when the British Empire decided, well, this needs to be regulated more, this needs to be rolled back a bit in order to maintain the sustainability of the British Empire, that's where the bourgeoisie and the mainland of the colonies really, saw the British Empire as a threat. So this whole narrative of this progressive revolution is what we try to challenge in the United States because what is not factored in and what we try to factor in in the book throughout whatever we talk about is the resistance to empire, the resistance to capitalism, the class struggle that always has at least two components to it, at least a principal contradiction where the Africans who were rebellious against slavery, the indigenous people who were taking up arms with the British to protect their lands. This is not so much talked about because it challenges this myth that the United States

is the most democratic society to ever be born, that its values can always be harkened on because those values are representative of these elite, white, almost godlike figures in Washington and Jefferson and Franklin, that these figures, they're beyond, and now Hamilton with that play that we talk about, that these figures are above all of the unfortunate mistakes and unfortunate policies that reflect injustice. And so those are the myths that we tell ourselves because they're imposed upon us. And they live on today in so many ways. I mean, we can just see how, especially with this Hamilton play, I know the creator of

Hamilton just got into a lot of trouble trying to play it in Puerto Rico while he was peddling some coffee monopoly. And, yeah, I forget what the, it's a big corporation. But, you know, he is, I think he's Lin-Manuel Miranda, Miranda, I think his name is. And he's always been, I mean, from the beginning of the whole Hamilton phenomenon, he was peddling his product, reviving the imagery of Hamilton, who married into a slave-owning family and a slave-trading family and who was a financier for them. Miranda has always been connected to the banks, and he's made it very clear that he's trying to make money. And on the so-called myths of the United States, that these lies are something that are worth reviving, especially if we can diversify the lies and make them more palatable to especially the people,

especially black people who have been the principal target of these lies and who have suffered so much from them. So, you know, that's an extreme example. But, you know, we can just go through every election cycle and see how these founding myths are always harkened back to that there's always this idea of the original framework on which the U.S. state was developed upon that both political parties, regardless, and this is what's so interesting about American exceptionalism, is that it. and the origin smiths is that it really does burst asunder this idea that the ideological differences within the ruling class somehow negate their unified class interests. Whenever we look at how the ruling class promotes the origins of the United States, we can see up front and center that the class interests are always primary, that the extermination, the enslavement, and the oppression of black people in the United States.

indigenous people and then the exploitation of the working class is always the principal force which all of these lies and the principal reality which all these lies revolve around and they're completely unified around them absolutely so i have a few points i mean there's so much that i thought of when you were talking because you made so many points and covered so much ground you know Hamilton is really a really good example of how ideology works because you know we're not saying that the director of the writer sat down and said, okay, how can I weaponize the history of the U.S. to lure black folks into believing that it was better than, I mean, this ideology doesn't operate that way. It's the director of the writer. Everybody involved in the play has

been conditioned from a child to believe in these idealistic understandings of American history. And so it regurgitates out through their art sort of on an unconscious or subconscious level. And that's how ideology works broadly, which is why people saying they're non-ideological are as I've said earlier, the most ideological. Another thing I want to mention, a lot of people, especially younger comrades when they're coming up, and this was true for me as well, when I was a little bit younger trying to learn Marxism, is very difficult to understand sometimes what do we mean by idealism versus materialism?

You know, those words are used so differently in colloquial context as compared to academic ones, compared to Marxist ones. So people have a lot of struggle with that. And I think what you did, Danny, is perfectly illustrate the materialist analysis of how American society actually came to be. It was about protecting status and wealth and power and slavery, etc. That's the material version of U.S. history. The idealistic, the idealism version, is what we're all taught in schools, which is that, you know, America was founded because some very brilliant men finally wanted to put into practice the high ideals of liberal philosophy.

And, you know, the United States is really a monument to human progress and human brilliance and the beautiful depth of liberalism broadly. And, you know, we're taught this as a kid, and then these founding fathers are raised to almost, you know, deified levels. And so, you know, understanding that difference between materialist analysis of U.S. history and an idealist version of it is really important to help, I think really helps clarify, especially for Americans trying to learn this stuff, what those differences are. And then I really like your point about the counter-revolution, about the, you know,

the U.S. revolution as actually not an inherently progressive one, but an actually a counter-revolution and Federici actually I think in her book Caliban and the witch makes this claim pretty much for capitalism overall that the transition from feudalism to capitalism wasn't necessarily one of linear progress in the right direction but was actually came about as sort of a counter-revolution to some of the especially concerned around like women's autonomy and self-determination in earlier stages of human history and you know capitalists the witch hunts were a way to to dominate and subordinate women and their bodies to this new capitalist project that was taking off. And so in a lot of ways, in the enclosure of the

commons, et cetera, was a counter-revolutionary move. And that really flies in the face of more orthodox understandings by Marxist of a very stage-oriented history. And I would just warn against Marxist falling completely into that stages trap because a lot of thinkers since Marx have really done great work sort of showing how that's not completely a good way to look at it. And once you start looking at it that way, you do sort of buy in to the idea that the American revolution was an inherently progressive one, and I think, you know, that's a huge problem. Federici points it out, you pointed out, Fanon points it out, and I think people should really keep that in mind.

The stagist approach can often be very reductive and very deterministic. So all those things are what I thought about when you were giving that wonderful answer. But let's move on because I really like doing this. I like sort of going through these huge aspects of American society and culture and ideas and then turning them on their heads, if you will. So now that we've done the creation myths, let's move on and talk about World War Two in the Cold War. So how have the twin mythologies of American exceptionalism and American innocence shaped our understanding of World War II and the Cold War specifically?

So important for us because World War II and the Cold War, I mean, as socialists, as Marxists, as those who are really seeking to revolutionize society and the world order from the decrepit conditions of capitalism. These two, this period generally, World War II and the Cold War are so important because, as you said in the beginning of our interview about how communists have killed a hundred million people, there's so much mythology and vicious lies to demonize socialism and to make it an unpalatable idea for those who are trapped in this imperial core, to figure out how to organize a working class movement. So when we wanted to really talk about World War II and the Cold War as an example, not of the U.S. being able to flex its democratic prowess, which is what we've been taught for so long, especially World War II, where all we hear about up until this day, it's almost

I call it, and we kind of allude to it in the book, I call it almost the last bit of history that the ruling class in the United States believes it has complete and utter legitimacy over that it can maintain its grip on this illusion of exceptionalism and it can continue to promote itself as such by hearkening back to the World War II era because what happened during World War II? Well, after the U.S. entered the war and even before it entered the war, it was coming out of the biggest economic crisis in history to date, the biggest capitalist crisis, and it was creating a military.

military and industrial economy, which would not only help fuel the Second World War in a lot of ways, the destructive aspects of it, but also it would take the United States out of that economic crisis and render it as the other imperial powers became absorbed in the most destructive war in human history to that date. It would render the United States actually the biggest superpower. And so that imagery, that nostalgia, it really permeates. all levels of a ruling establishment, the ruling class, and all of its collaborators in academia, in politics, and even in our movements. I mean, I've had so many interviews where you talk to folks in the anti-war movement and they always say, wow, you know, when you write about

World War II, it just made me think that is the most difficult conversation to have with even the staunchest of leftists because there is this mythology of the U.S. entered that war on a well-meaning basis to stop fascism, which is such an interesting thing since when we look at the facts that American exceptional and American innocence are so fact-free. And it's no wonder we have Donald Trump in office. Everyone calls him a liar and a liar and a liar when, in fact, these ideologies which ended up producing Donald Trump are rooted in the most insidious of lies, lies posing as truths.

And World War II is such a huge example of this, where not only was the United States biggest monopolist and industrialists and capitalists helping the Nazi movement in Germany prior to its formal entrance into the war economically and militarily. There was Henry Ford, Prescott Bush, George W. Bush's grandfather, these figures who were part of the ruling class, who were honestly the oligarchy at the time, they were helping finance the Nazi movement in Germany. And then we forget that the Soviet Union, was in fact the force to fight fascism head on to actually defend the planet from the scourge of fascism head on sacrificing over 20 million people and doing so because it was the target

of fascism that in fact the United States entered the war very late and that it's so-called heroic entrance into the war was really a political calculation based upon well now Nazi Germany is a hindrance on the capitalist entrance of the United States. It's not achieving what we thought it was going to achieve, which all of the media at that time was talking about, which was the destruction of the Soviet Union, even before the so-called Cold War, US capitalists were frothing at the mouth, hoping that would happen. Hitler and the Nazi movement in Germany was a very convenient force for a long time. But when the European capitalist states were already almost bashed to bits.

That's when the United States came in and said, okay, we'll use the military industrial complex that we've built to prop up Great Britain to restore the so-called democratic Western powers and to ensure that we come out of this as the imperial superpower. And Japan also had a lot to do with it too because there was so many economic interests in that East Asia region, which the United States wanted a part of. And so, you know, whether we look at the complete and utter criminality of the U.S. participation in World War II, whether firebombing Dresden, dropping two nuclear bombs, or just literally propping up the military complex of Europe in order to create heinous crimes, whether it's in Japan or whether we're talking about in Germany, there was such brutality.

related to that war. But it was a brutality that was justified by this so-called worst threat that was coming, which was the fascist movement. And we are totally inebriated with this lie that, in fact, the U.S. had the most benevolent interest at heart here. And because it became the superior superpower materially, it was able to justify and prove that in the minds of many working class Americans. I mean, there was, there still is a lot of passion, especially from those who can remember or who were raised by people who can remember it, that World War II was the beacon of what American liberty and freedom meant, because the U.S. was going in and stamping out

the scourge of humanity. And that's the myth that we're told. But we forget the two nuclear bombs over Hiroshima, Nagasaki, the firebombings of Japan, the fire bombings in Dresden. the complete utter destruction that the U.S. cause. And then we move into the Cold War where, in fact, the U.S. ruling class was much less concerned about fascism than it was about socialism. And that's what the Cold War was really all about.

There's a reason why so many former Nazi-aligned scientists and other useful political figures in the intelligence apparatus were recruited by the CIA and others in the U.S. state to do work against the Soviet Union directly after World War II. And that was because the Soviet Union and then China not too long after represented the principal threats to U.S. capitalism. And so all the American exceptionalist mythology and the innocence that were told that even though the Cold War had many blemishes to it, whether it was invading Korea, killing millions of people, invading Vietnam, killing millions of people, literally going to every single nation in the third world, it could find that had any resistance movements not aligned. to U.S. interests, stamping them out, overthrowing democratically elected governments in places like Iran, that all of that served to justify and to prop up U.S. dominance cloaked as freedom and cloaked as keeping the world safe, really keeping profits safe from alternative economic

arrangements, whether it was the Soviet Union's socialist economy, the China's socialist economy, or all of the non-aligned movements that had maybe a more binary process integrating some elements of the Soviet Union's influence, but at the same time trying to develop a capitalist base. All of those movements, whether on the African continent, the Middle East, everywhere in Latin America, they were deemed criminal. And so during the Cold War, we were told that communism was the enemy. Communism was the enemy, and it was the antithesis of American freedom, of American liberty. And that had ramifications not only around the world where the U.S. military now is the most powerful force in the world, the most powerful state force, and the American capitalism as the most powerful economic force, they were also directing their energies to domestic movements.

And while we talk a lot about Coento Pro, we talk a lot about repression in the United States, especially in the 60s and 70s, we have a chapter in the book that, dedicated to the broad swath of repression that the U.S. capitalist state has leveled upon working class and national liberation movements in the United States. And the Cold War period, especially during the height of the McCarthy period, really exemplified how American exceptionalism and American innocence were really ideologies that criminalized so much as they deified the U.S. state. They criminalized those who spoke out against what the U.S. was doing domestically and abroad.

They criminalized people like Paul Robeson, W.E.B. Du Bois, Shirley Graham Du Bois, they criminalized Claudia Jones. They made these figures into pariahs of the Soviet Union in order to maintain Jim Crow racism in order to maintain the hustling and bustling capitalist system, which we were told was in its golden age. And so this period is so important for us, especially in terms of historical memory, because there's probably no other period in history where we have had a stronger revolutionary movement than during the period of World War II in the Cold War. And because of all the mythology that has been shoved down our throats about the U.S.'s role in World War II, as well as the U.S.'s role in preventing the bulwark of the evil communism from. arising and spreading because of all the mythology around that meant to legitimize the so-called superiority of the United States. We have been robbed of our ability to understand that history, to even seek out that history, and then to take lessons from, you know, you do this a lot in your program, which is so appreciative, is that to be able to take lessons from the Soviet Union,

to be able to take lessons from China, which is still a state which has a Communist Party in power, very few of them exist left, or to be able to learn from the DPRK, or even to just defend China, the DPRK, existing socialist countries like Cuba, defend them from U.S. imperialism because I've how deeply embedded anti-communist mythology is in our minds and how it's related to our now ingrained desire, even in our movements, to defend the U.S.'s role in these periods as more complex than just a sort of class struggle, which has been the trend in the United States, which is to move away from any notion of class struggle, to move away from any notion of a struggle between contending forces of society, which are trying to, which are both so interconnected, but at the same time exemplify. the inherent exploitative and oppressive reality of these systems, especially of imperialism, which the Cold War and World War II really defined and brought out. It brought out this new American empire, this empire which was now unchallenged.

It no longer had to compete with any other of its empires. Everyone was either a junior partner or on the other side, struggling for a different way of life. And we should really, and hopefully we can begin to challenge exceptionalism and in a sense to make that point, that that was the reality at that time. And especially for us younger folks who weren't able to live in that time, I was born right before the Soviet Union fell. So we really need to focus on these periods. Yeah, absolutely. Again, covering so much ground, I'm deeply appreciative of it. I do, and I plan on doing an entire episode on the Korean War, because I think it is one of the,

most under-noticed, underappreciated wars in American history. People don't really talk about it, don't think about it. And a lot of people will look at North Korea today, the DPRK, and make a whole bunch of outrageous claims about them or whatever, but never understand that during that Korean war, the U.S. slaughtered 20% of all Koreans. And just trying to understand why a country would go into such a desperate defensive posture, you really have to understand the Korean War.

And so I'm going to do work on that in 2020, early 2020, for sure. But two points really quick before we move on. I think you mentioned the two nuclear bombs against Japan in World War II. And, you know, it's well known, at least on the left, it should be that dropping two bombs was really primarily about flexing muscles to the Soviet Union and saying it's on now, you know. You know, fascism is sort of suppressed for the moment, and now we can really show the Soviet Union what we have in store for them specifically. You know, if it was really just about dismembering Japan or something. Japan was already on the ropes.

It was already going to quit. One bomb would have surely been enough, but they had to do two, and that really is about flexing their muscles in the very beginning stages of what we now know as the Cold War. And actually, American Innocence comes into play. When you were talking, I thought of this, American Innocence really comes into play with the nuking of Japan, because whenever you talk to anybody, center, liberal, reactionary, and you start talking about the nukes, what will you always hear? you'll always hear the following statement.

Well, if we didn't drop those nukes, we would have had to do a land invasion and a lot more people would have died. Now, that argument is not because these people you're talking to have sat down and studied World War history and understand Japanese culture and history and understand the dynamics that play there. That's because they were conditioned with the propaganda of American innocence. Yeah, sure, we slaughtered hundreds of thousands of babies and children and mothers, but we had to because a land invasion would have been even worse. So please excuse us for, you know, know that were innocent, right? And that is a disgusting display of American innocence and how much

blood is covered up by that just conditioning. And people fucking vomited out as if it's something unique that came from their mind and not something that was force fed, you know, into them like fucking foie gras. And then the second thing I wanted to say, and you mentioned this, and I think you mentioned this in the book as well, that of course two points about the Nazis. One, the Nazis took great inspiration from the U.S. apartheid state. Hitler looked to the U.S. as perhaps the primary real world influence for how he would go on to to help shape and mold Nazi Germany. And then the second thing you mentioned was, you know, the U.S. after the, after World War II, bringing Nazi scientists and engineers over.

And, you know, people can look this up. It's called Operation Paperclip. And it was not only bringing Nazis over, saving them from any accountability, whether from the West or from the Soviet Union, it hid them, it changed their names, and it allowed them to restart their life in the United States. And a lot of those Nazis would go on to play integral roles in the Cold War against the Soviet Union. So really what you had was not brave America, finally having enough of fascism and standing up and crushing it. Not at all.

You had them coming very late to the game when they saw that their capitalistic interest might be, you know, compromised. And then you see them immediately after the war, teaming up with the very fascist and Nazis that were told America so bravely fought against to fight the Cold War against the Soviet Union. And not only that, but shielded them from all accountability, gave them in time. new names and new starts on life. And a lot of those people went on to live very happy, prosperous lives until they died and never being held accountable at all for the, you know, depravity and violence they inflicted on millions and millions of Jewish people and other marginalized people throughout Europe. So, you know, really understanding those two aspects of the Cold War and World War II

I think is really important. And your book does a great job really highlighting that it wasn't America versus fascism. It was America and Fascism versus Communism. And all of those movements that we talk about, we talk about Moses. Zodek and Iran. We talk about Guatemala, talk about El Salvador, Chile. Those all happened in the Cold War and they were all proxies of it. It was the U.S., you know, making sure that it strengthened up its Western Hemisphere against any sort of communist movement, whether within its own borders, within the Americas, broadly, or within the world overall. And so, again, those things are essential to understand. So let's go ahead and move forward now. We've covered the creation myths. We've covered World War II in the Cold War. And now I want to talk about neoliberalism specifically. So, So, you know, during the 1980s in both the U.S. and UK, Reagan and Thatcher, we saw the rise of what today is known as neoliberalism, and we are still firmly living within the confines of this sort of subgenre of late capitalism, if you will.

So can you please talk about how American myths of exceptionalism and innocence manifest themselves, particularly in our neoliberal era? Yes, yes, yes. The neoliberal period, it was and is something, you know, in the book that we really take stock in. We thought it was so important to have, especially we had a few chapters dedicated to the economic, and we're not economists stick in the Marxist sense. We were trying to really, though, synthesize the narrative of neoliberalism, the ideology of neoliberalism, and the ways in which capitalism has developed over the last especially 40, 50 years,

synthesize them together to show what is the economic reality for working people, for working class people, especially black people in the United States, especially oppressed nations in the United States. And what is the narrative that we're constantly being fed? Our book was in part of response to the Sanders phenomenon in 2016, where we saw the word socialism become more popular, even though it was more of a New Deal-esque socialism. We felt it was important to understand and describe how that came to be. In the neoliberal period is really why this resurgence and the popularity in socialism has come to be in American exceptionalism and innocence. While in the book, we talk about how insidious and dominant they are, we also try to employ an objective

assessment, a dialectical and materialist assessment. That shows that, well, on the one hand, it's so dominant that doesn't necessarily reflect strength. And right now, the economic situation brought on by the neoliberal stage of capitalism has rendered exceptionalism, American exceptionalism, especially more and more vulnerable to critique, especially when at this moment, our class in the United States is pretty far away from becoming an internationalist movement, a movement that, critiques imperialism, our anti-war movement, which another reason why I wrote this book is to talk about the necessity of an anti-war movement right now. That's farther away than what I see as a resurgence in ideas of universal economic policy, of New Deal, liberalism, now being called democratic socialism in the United States. We're seeing that become popular again, especially among young people. And that's because exceptionalism and innocence, American

exceptional as in American innocents are becoming increasingly delegitimized by the economic reality of working people. There was just a study by the Brookings Institute that shows that 44% of U.S. workers make less than $16 an hour. That is a staggering number from a bourgeois institution, which its research analysis had flaws to, like every research study does, it had to exclude certain sections of students and graduate students. And if anyone listening as a graduate student, they know that oftentimes, they know that

oftentimes they are low-wage workers. So the number is a lot higher. And so we talk about what has neoliberalism done by completely erasing the vestiges, last vestiges of the policies which workers struggled for, the programs as well as the unions which workers organize, the assault that neoliberalism wage against the economic condition of the working class in the United States and in the West has thoroughly delegitimized. American exceptionalism and innocence, and the way that these ideologies have manifested themselves have in part been a response to that de-legitimization. And we write in the book a lot about how

neoliberalism is so much more crass. And on the one hand, there's a lot of these bourgeois economists and even Marxist economists will talk about neoliberalism as if it's, you know, just the free market. It's just the resurgence of the free market. It's not liberalism. It's a strand of of this resurgence of free market zealotry and the notion of privatizing everything. But on the other hand, there's another part of neoliberalism that we talk about, which is how the resurgence of the sanctity of the free market, the complete austerity and privatization regime that's associated with neoliberalism also requires a criminalization regime.

It requires a more solidified state apparatus, which in a lot of ways is very contradictory. When you talk about, as we know, a lot of libertarians talk about how the free market must be unhindered by the state. Well, neoliberalism wants to not only free the market, what it really means is free corporations and banks and monopolies from state regulation, from any accountability to working people. But it also wants an extremely strong state apparatus to suppress the rebellious tendencies. of workers and oppressed people. That's what we've seen in the neoliberal era, that it's not just that the economic assault has occurred and has rendered U.S. workers and workers all around the world increasingly impoverished. But at the same time, the way that the U.S. ruling class talks

about the state as an exceptional force of punishment and an exceptional force of repression is something that I think also contributes to the delegitimization of American exceptionalism. So as the U.S. ruling class talks about freedom and liberty, we see the rise of the mass incarceration regime. We see the fact that police departments are receiving hundreds of millions of dollars worth in U.S. military weaponry. We see that the U.S. military budget has gone up by hundreds of millions of dollars since the neoliberal period began, all to ensure that U.S. banks and corporations can remain unaccountable to workers and oppressible and can continue to render them more and more obsolete

through processes like automation and whatnot. So control is a huge part of neoliberalism. And as we see these myths of exceptionalism become louder in a lot of ways, we see especially in the U.S. political apparatus in order to avoid the reality of neoliberalism, we see politicians, Kamala Harris, Joe Biden. We see these folks continue to try to hold on to what they feel is dear. We hear Kamala Harris talk about the Obama coalition. We hear Joe Biden. He can't stop talking about

Obama. But he also talks about all the good things that the U.S. has been able to do. And a lot of it is about control. Being able to be the, we hear it all the time. What is it? It's the narrative that the U.S. is no longer legitimate to the free world because it can't rain in. enforce its ideals and values in the international scene. We hear that all the time when it comes to people like Biden. It's because neoliberalism is such a force now. It is the predominant mode in stage of capitalism. And there are so many contradictions that come with this all-out assault on working class people. And this rise in socialism, this continuing creep away from U.S. imperial hegemony around the world, from other countries trying to figure it out on their own.

There are so many threats to neoliberalism around the world, and the U.S. ruling class has had to resort to trying to maintain legitimacy and the myths of exceptionalism in essence based on values, while at the same time maintaining the reality of what neoliberalism has created for so many people here and around the world, which is utter misery. So it is so important that exceptionalism in innocence are almost given the final death blow. That's how I see it when we talk about it because neoliberalism is helping provide the conditions for that. But what we know is that neoliberalism is now creating such a toxic environment that not only is the left so affected by this, conservatized in a lot of ways by this, but also we see the emergence of right wing forces masquerading as populism and whatnot, because that struggle now is arising where people are swinging left and people are swinging right based on the fact that neoliberalism has delegitimized a lot of the mythologies that stabilize the so-called center in a lot of ways. It kept the U.S.

ruling class, secure and stable from any threats to it. Now, fear of rebellion is so grand among the rolling class that, yeah, neoliberalism and its ideology is really coming into conflict a lot with the exceptionalist and innocence ethos of the society at large. I had a few thoughts really quick that I made before I asked you that question. I just wanted to just kind of highlight them really quick and then we can move on, which is just like you know the rise of right libertarianism as we know it today you know it's always existed as you know freer the markets freer the people stuff has always existed in one level

over another but really in the 70s especially with like pinachet and milton friedman going down there to help chile sort of do the first experiment in neoliberalism all the way through today when we see people constantly call themselves classical liberals or you know libertarians that really is a sort of product of the neoliberal era in a lot of ways and the role that academic economists play in maintaining American hegemony and maintaining this ideological fog, I think really can't be understated. In an episode we did on the 2008 Great Recession, we had a whole segment talking about how a bunch of high-level academic economists from like Harvard, they would be paid to really give the academic sheen and the academic justification for a lot of the policies

coming out during and after the Great Recession. One of those huge policies, of course, was the ideology of austerity. You know, it's like, you know, the whole sort of system has really collapsed, and the way that we build back up that system is that everybody's going to have to, you know, tighten their belts and, you know, pulling their bootstraps a little bit. We're not going to, we have to slash, you know, social welfare programs just because we have to get out of this terrible mess. And it's never, you know, pointed out that the mess was caused by, you know,

the ruling class and they get bailed out while the regular working and poor people the world over get dominated by austerity. You know, it's just important to think about how these things really play out. And then, of course, libertarianism, when put under pressure of, you know, the modern pressures of capitalists and increasing crisis and environmental collapse, you see a lot of this classical liberalism or libertarianism just turn to forms of fascism under pressure. And it's really interesting to see even 10 years ago when libertarianism was like the big thing on the political right, you know, free markets and all this stuff, it was everywhere. and to see how much that's changed today where you don't really see libertarianism as much, but you do see right-wing populism and fascism really coming to the fore. And I think a lot of those people who were libertarians just 10 years ago

are now pretty much fascist because that libertarianism is just complete idealism. And so under any sort of pressure, it will collapse. And I say, you know, you push a libertarian down the stairs, there'll be a fascist before they hit the bottom. And I think that's really played out. Okay, so now I want to transition to the last. third of this conversation where we just basically take everything that we've talked about and learn so far and just kind of reflect on it and, you know, explore some of its implications.

And the first way I want to do this is just reflecting on how these myths sort of shape the American identity. You know, often when you bring up this stuff, when you challenge some of these really core myths about the American experience, the reaction can be so very explosive and intense. So what role do you think these mythologies play? in the psychology and the self-identity of most Americans? Well, I mean, there's so much to it. And I think the reason why the self-identity and psychology of Americans are so shaped by American exceptionalism is because there is no alternative, right?

That's really what neoliberalism in a nutshell. That was the famous acronym. There is an alternative, Tina, which neoliberalism promoted. And because for centuries, the U.S. population, especially white America has been embroiled in these founding mythologies, the racism that's steeped in them. And racism, what racism really is is, it's anti-class solidarity. And so what Americans have really ingested is an identity based upon the inability to develop social solidarity, not only with oppressed people within the colonial borders of the United States,

but also with people around the world who Americans are always hot, that they are superior to them, that they have developed a society that is a beacon of hope for humanity rather than a beacon of destruction for humanity. And so the explosive and intense reactions that we see often whenever. I mean, even someone like Bernie Sanders and Tulsi Gabbard, for example, even when Bernie Sanders with his economic critique of neoliberal capitalism or Tulsi Gabbard with her anti-regime change war narrative, even those on its face, those two separate political phenomenon, they receive such intense backlash by the ruling elite. in the United States because, in fact, just these crevices, these cracks in the narrative of American

exceptionalism cannot be tolerated at this time. And so I think that the reactions become more and more intense. The fear becomes more and more intense because part of the problem that we're faced with American exceptionalism and the mythology of exceptionalism is that the policies in the system of capitalism and imperialism, that the policies forward, they have created a real culture of fear and a real culture of white supremacist fear, this notion that the U.S.,

if any more debate, if any debate at all, really, around some of the fundamental injustices of the United States are taking part in, then in fact, that the whole system will be transformed. just on its face. We're at a period now where the U.S. ruling class has made a calculation that its system is incapable of any significant reforms beyond cosmetic. And so that calculation has led into an even more staunch defense of American exceptionalism the way we've seen in periods where there was more class struggle domestically and abroad, where there was more

malleability within the capitalist framework of the United States to integrate some of those aspects of those forces in order to maintain the integrity of the system and move into its next stages and to maintain the profit motive generally. So the self-identity of Americans is so steeped in white supremacy. It's so steeped in these mythologies that without an alternative to look toward without the ability to look, let's say, across the world at China and say, wow, China has reduced poverty by so much that could be something to look at in the United States as something we might want to emulate because China has been demonized as this new so-called authoritarian threat to the U.S. interests.

We can't do that. And because someone like Colin Kaepernick stands up against police brutality and police lynchings of Black Americans, we're told that he is not appreciative by people, like, let's say, a Stephen A. Smith of ESPN, who makes $8 million a year to basically defend the ruling elite and to show that actually black people should embrace the U.S. state as it is, because not only does he exist, but also he is successful in retooling. the American exceptionalist mythology to make it palatable to large sections of the population, to make it consumable. And so we have a situation, I think, where conditions on the ground are

becoming more and more acute for working class people, for young people, for poor black communities, working class black communities, for indigenous people, for the undocumented people forced to flee from countries terrorized by the United States as imperialized. system. Because all of that is happening, we're faced with a situation where the exceptionalist mythology is becoming less and less legitimate to more and more people, but at the same time, the forces that have an interest in maintaining those mythologies are becoming more and more and more brutal and more and more repressive and more and more desperate to silence us. And so we see that in so many examples today, and the election is a huge

one right now where sort of any deviation from the U.S. ruling classes line on any particular position is seen as criminal in a lot of ways. It's seen as worthy of suppression and worthy of demonization. Yeah, exactly. And I think you hit on something really important that when ideology starts to weaken, when ideology wanes, the repressive mechanisms that ideology often, you know, sort of conceals from view really have to come out because ideology does a lot of the work of you know pacifying the population making them believe these myths so that you know business as usual can continue but in moments of crisis when the ideology becomes you know under widespread scrutiny then you really do see this the sort of mask fall away and the more explicitly repressive

mechanisms of the ruling class come out whether internationally or domestically and as environmental collapse continues, as economic crisis continues, I think as ideology stops working as it did in the past, I think you will see more explicit, abject repression from the American state, as we already see, and black people and indigenous people and immigrants have always seen it, but now the white working class is really going to get its own taste of it in a way that might not have been precedented in American history. Or in some ways it has, of course, there's been like the Battle of Blair Mountain and these early labor struggles were certainly indicative of that. But at least we haven't seen it in a very,

very long time. And so I think it'll be interesting to see how more and more Americans react as that sorts of slip away. But I do agree that like the Americans that are really committed, the white Americans mostly, that are really committed to this, to this ideology, they don't want to view themselves as racist settlers, right? They don't want to have themselves viewed that way. They don't want to view themselves that way. And so by protecting America, exceptionalism and American innocence, they're also protecting themselves from any internal critique or external critique. And the American ideology sort of gets internalized by the American settler as a sense of self. And whenever you challenge somebody's sense of self, when you start

knocking at the core pillars of somebody's self-identity, you will see a violent, you know, reaction a lot of the times, especially in this context. So, you know, those things are definitely happening now and they'll continue to happen and happen more and more. And we already see the fascists on the far right, you know, not making any excuses, taking on this idea of Western civilization, heightening the ideology and internalizing it deeply and saying this is a white country, you know, and we're going to come out and just fucking say it and we want to get rid of everybody that's not white. So you see the increasing ideology on the fascist side and you see more suspicion growing on the left and you see the center sort of have to be more repressive in respect.

response to it. So let's go ahead and move on to our next question. This is more, this is getting deeper into sort of reflecting on what we've talked about. Do all societies and cultures, in your opinion, need some form of a founding mythology? And if so, like, how can myths manifest in perhaps healthier and less toxic ways than they currently do in the Imperial Corps? That's such a good question. You know, I think I look at societies and cultures as products of developments and of economic development and a struggle, the struggle embedded in that development process. And it's interesting this idea of mythology because it's always going to depend on the interests of the class that is promoting that mythology. And the need for it at all, I think, is rooted

in the maintenance of a particular form of society. So for me, I would say that when it comes to, And I just think about the, just a revolutionary transitions out of the, of private property being the predominant form of production of profit. And I think about the way like, let's say China talks about its history. And I just talked to someone. I'm going to China on the 26th of December for a couple of weeks. And I just talked to a few people who went. But they only were going to actually be in Jingjing province most of the time. And they were mostly in Beijing doing more of a, a.

tourist kind of tour and, you know, they, they were talking to me and they're socialists themselves and they were talking to me about how China has a way of talking about its certain transitional stages after the revolution that for some may be difficult to stomach, it may seem like mythology, but how I saw it was, well, in order to protect the integrity, the national integrity of China, the nationalist integrity of China, from foreign threats or from the Communist Party being delegitimized in any way, that there does have to be some revisions made to the way that history happened and some, in terms of us communists talk about all the time, what we talk about publicly will have to be different from how we talk internally. And so I see that

in terms of nations as being also very important in this time where imperialism, U.S. imperialism in particular, is on a rampage to just destroy any alternative, that there does have to be a way of maintaining national unity and spirit that may harken to some mythology. There may be mythologies in the positive aspects of any era that China and how China and the Communist Party talks about itself, but that that is a necessity in a lot of ways to defend against imperialism and to defend against any encroachment on the legitimacy of the Communist Party and the legitimacy of the socialist state. So especially in a world divided along class lines, I think there will, we are going to have

to use propaganda in a way that is both effective and that does imbue spirit. I mean, we saw this with the DPRK, for example, Juche, and the very spiritual aspect of socialism and the DPRK may seem like mythology and exaggeration and, you know, and a lot of people because of just the gravity of racism in the U.S. and West, they see it as almost barbaric, but in a lot of ways, that's a necessity when not only do you have to preserve the integrity of the social estate and independence, but also you need to unify the country and ensure that the cultural aspects of a people are respected and that we understand revolution as a process, that we do, we can't just eradicate all vestiges of history after the revolutionary process. So I do see the potential of using, I guess we could call it mythology, but I think just using our principles and promoting our principles in a way that can build that kind of,

unity, which will need, especially in the United States when we think about just, I always talk about this, like how much the United States owes the world, owes certain sections of the population, how much is owed there will need to be, I won't, I don't think there needs to be mythology in the U.S. case, but there's just going to be a lot of gushion about, well, how do we talk about U.S. history? How do we talk about the development of the United States? And how do we rectify and repair all of the damage that has been caused by the racist and imperialist nature of the U.S. state. And that, yes, we're going to have to ultimately swallow a lot of disagreements that we may have. I mean, that's how we can build unity by understanding and throwing out this

notion of purity and going towards more of a framework of solidarity, which, whether we want to call mythology or whatever, whether we disagree on certain aspects of how a certain people or a certain nation does its business, we ultimately have to take that into account now, a different framework, social solidarity, internationalism, all of this will be dependent upon our ability to understand how people different from us with different experiences, people who have been on the receiving end of imperialism around the world, for example, how they've responded to that and how they're going to now take destiny into their own hands with newfound freedom to do so, should we and if we can sort of get rid of the most violent and most punitive and the biggest barrier

to that, which is the U.S. imperialist system. So I think that mythology is such an interesting term when we think about just who has had the control and who has had the power and what system is at the power to define what that is and isn't. Now, when we're talking about a revolutionary process, a transition in any stage of history, we can think about how mythology is not neutral in a sense that it's always dependent upon the class forces that wield it for whatever purposes. And, you know, and I see China as, okay, yes, we may have disagreements with how they frame the Mao era versus the dang era versus the new period under Xi. But at the same time, we have to respect why that may be the case, why there may be this very neutral way that the Chinese Communist Party promotes its history around the world as, you know, seemingly all positive, right? and when it acknowledges mistakes of it acknowledges them in a way where those mistakes are rectified, that it's trying to maintain the integrity of the Communist Party and the integrity of the social state from real threats. We won't really know what it's like to be able to have conversations about that until we figure out stuff on our end.

You mentioned purity and the fact that we're going to have to work together. and I've lately been thinking about, you know, this purity politic. I mean, you can think about it any along the spectrum, but specifically on the left, this impulse toward purity is really an impulse away from dealing with contradiction. And it's an impulse away from dealing with revolution as a process. I think the impulse toward purity is like, you know, I don't want the messy bullshit of having to go through the process of building a revolution because it's so complicated. So therefore, every attempt that wasn't immediately perfect in my ideological eyes is to be,

dismissed and denigrated and really you when you do that you're playing into you know American mythology as it currently stands you're really buying into a lot of bullshit and perpetuating it and so I think that's one that's one thing to keep in mind here contradiction is inherent and any revolutionary process is going to have to deal with contradiction you have to wrestle with it you can't purge it right if we take seriously the idea that contradiction is the sort of motor force of dialectics you know then trying to run away from it is not the way to deal with it and There is no such thing as perfection. There is no such thing as purity.

You have to be able to realize that a struggle is a struggle and that contradictions will always be present. And we should not run from them, but understand them and try to work through them and think through them. But as I'm thinking about building a healthier culture in the future, I really keep coming back to Phon. Because one thing that Phelon emphasizes in his text, The Wretched of the Earth, is that culture, and I assume some sort of founding mythologies will be, you know, under the headline culture

here. Culture is really built in the process of struggle, in the process of liberating yourself from forms of mystification, of domination, of oppression. And through that process is actually how you build something that can create new culture and move forward and leave the old shitty versions behind in the past. And, you know, he really juxtaposes that to this need to sort of return to some idyllic past instead of looking forward and working through struggle towards a new culture and towards liberation. So I think that's definitely a role in it. Like a lot of these questions will be answered in the process of a successful revolution, I think. Hopefully we have one before the oceans are turned black and the sky chokes us.

But if we can pull that off, then I think that will really sort of set things in motion in that way. And Fanon also has this understanding of like he's talking in the context of national liberation and decolonial struggles. And he, you know, he defends sort of building a national culture. But he immediately says that if you don't turn that national culture into an internationalist one into one that is humanist in its first. focused, then you know you're going to have a sort of dead end. Nationalism hits a dead end and it can only go so far. Phenon sees a national liberation struggle as clearing the way to build up a humanist international socialism.

And I think that's at least interesting to wrestle with and think about. And I think we see in places like Venezuela and Cuba through the struggle of anti-imperialism, the population as a whole has really been demystified to a lot of these ideas. I mean, of course, they've seen it. they've seen the domination and imperialist interjection into their lives firsthand. They've seen it, but they've also been taught by the revolutionary process, what anti-imperialism is, what imperialism looks like, the forms that imperialism can take, including domestic coups. And so in that process, you really have an education of the people of these countries fighting it.

And I think they're far less susceptible to these mythologies than people who don't ever have to fight it and can sort of live comfortably inside of its own bowels, if you will. So those are how I sort of think about it, and I think you answered it great as well. We don't have all the answers here, obviously, but at least I think we're gesturing in an interesting and worthwhile direction. The last question I want to ask you, Danny, before we move into the conclusion, is just sort of thinking about this stuff going forward. So in an increasingly unstable world in the process of catastrophic environmental collapse, how are or will the dual narratives of American exceptionalism and innocence be marshaled by the same? state, you know, ideological haphoraduses and its proxies as the ruling class becomes more and more desperate to maintain its grip on power. So how do you think these ideas of American

exceptionalism and innocence will play out as crises, you know, sort of pile up? It's a very hard question, so I'm sorry about it. Yes. No, that's a great question. There's, again, a lot to this. How I see it, though, especially in the last eight years, because I became politicized, or less eight to 11, 10 or 11 years, I became politicized. I became politicized. and radicalized by the Obama period. And I think what we've seen, and we write about this in the book, what we've seen since the Obama period in the United States is that this attempt to use inclusion and diversity as a way to water down and to tamper down the expectations of workers generally, but

especially black workers and workers of oppressed nations, that this is becoming less and less tenable. So what we're seeing is that rapidly the ideological weapons and the political weapons of the ruling class are becoming, just like its system is rapidly in decline, its ideological weapons are also rapidly in decline in terms of their effectiveness and their ability to inspire people, not just to tolerate the system, but also to assist in the process of its reproduction. And that, I think, is going to continue on, since the Trump era, I mean, it's been infuriating in a lot of ways because since the Trump era began, what we saw was a real consolidation of the imperial state posing as a so-called resistance to Trump, just continuing to strengthen him as they have acted over the last four years. But they've created these narratives, so there was a Russia gate now, we have Ukraine gate. They've created these very convenient and very desperate in a lot of ways policy frameworks and political frameworks from which to maintain some air of legitimacy for the political system.

And I think what we are going to see from here on out is that the ruling class is going to focus all of its energy because it doesn't want anyone to highlight, especially the corporate. media, especially the two parties in Washington. No one in those arenas and in Wall Street and on the boards of all the major corporations, no one wants to see the real problems, the actual problems that working people are facing domestically abroad to come out. They don't want anyone to question the dominance of the military. There's no space to question the legitimacy of monopoly capital, they're, that they're going to completely suppress that. And that's what they're doing now. They are attacking as much as they've posed as being anti-Trump. They've used the so-called anti-Trump narrative to actually redirect a lot of energy to suppressing people

like us and to making our content a lot harder to distribute by labeling us all doaps of Russia and dupes of the Kremlin. We have been... Assadists. Yeah, Assadists. We've been suppressed in a lot of ways, much more subtle in the age of the internet. But what we do know is that this will continue because there really aren't any more cards to play.

I think the whole impeachment phenomenon now shows how the U.S. really has any cards to play in terms of legitimizing its political apparatus and preventing someone like Donald Trump from being able to... Russell some control away from the political apparatus from those who see themselves as the more enlightened bourgeoisie, the actual ruling class, which hopes to use people like Donald Trump as convenient punching bags. But at the same time, they love their existence because they provide the scarier alternative and give them room, breathing room, especially ideologically, to try to rehash at what we're seeing more and more as the same. narratives just recycled in a different form. And so I think the desperation of the capitalist class is at an all-time high. And so American exceptionalism will become more and more blatant in its display.

And I think we see that in the election process of 2016 when Hillary Clinton said that the U.S. was already exceptional when Donald Trump was saying that he was going to make the U.S. great again. She was saying the U.S. is already great. We're going to continue to see the conflicts among the ruling class be shaped by that narrative. And we're going to see a continuing encroachment further and further to the right among all the entire ruling class. Because that's really the only solution left for them in terms of how they're going to prevent, first of all, a social democratic politician like Bernie Sanders, who's so popular. that's the only way they can prevent that from taking hold and challenging the sort of normalcy of the two-party duopoly.

But on a broader scale, there are all of these very critical and hotspots, whether it's the U.S.'s decline in terms of its economic influence over the planet. There's also the fact that the capitalist crisis of 2007-2008 spelled a sort of doomsday prediction among the ruling classes, more financial segments that they understand what's coming. They understand that there is a catastrophe on the way, the environmental catastrophe, the economic catastrophe, and the political catastrophe. All these things are becoming more and more out of their. control. And so the inherent contradictions of capitalism and imperialism are going to continue to play out and we're going to continue to be bombarded with very old but also just slightly reformed ways of looking at old and very desperate narratives. And the Trump era is such a lesson in this because we have really seen the desperation of the ruling class come out with the election

of Trump and with this idea that even a far right politician who normally would just be tolerated if he had simply verbally acknowledged the supremacy of NATO and the anti-Russia hysteria in the United States, if he had just towed the line on that, he would be a politician that the U.S. ruling class could abide by. But now that in order to gain legitimacy, someone like Trump has to harken to those positions, against those positions. He has to maintain legitimacy somehow. He is able to only blow the dog whistle around racism and nativism, but he also has to show that he's different from others because racism and nativism is not different as much as a lot of liberals want to say that this is the worst it's ever been. racism and nativism are the core of the United States. So he was blowing the dog whistle of

racism and atavism to, you know, stir up his base. And then he flanked a supposed anti-war position in order to show that actually he is different from the traditional Republican Party, which most Republicans have known has been a white man's party for decades and decades. And that's how it's branded itself literally. So, you know, in a lot of ways, we're going to see a lot of more of the same of what we're seeing now. But it's hard to predict, depending on which one of these catastrophes becomes so acute that there needs to be a response. It's hard to say which one that will be. We have a Democratic Party primary coming up, which could be very ugly. This summer, we have an economic crisis on the way and many people living in a state of economic crisis every

day. And we also have a real threat of a new kind of world war, a global war, which the United States is at the forefront of fueling and of creating the conditions of destruction of all of humanity. And so I think those are the three areas where the class struggle is really going to have to respond in a very concerted way. And it's hard to predict how, what that will look like. But we do know that American exceptionalism and American innocence will be the weapons, which will be employed, and I believe employed in a much less effective way. Russia Gate was an example of that and Ukraine gate impeachment. All of this are very ineffective ways of drawing any inspiration to the legitimacy of the U.S. state. In many ways, they attack the legitimacy of the U.S. state.

And so I think we're going to see more of that because it has become less and less popular to talk about the U.S. being a beacon of the American dream, for example, economically, or to be a military power around the world. A lot of those things, people are more and more masses of people are weary of those narratives, even as at the same time, you know, they can become popular in a minute if the U.S. decides to, you know, wage a new war, et cetera, et cetera. There's contradictions brewing in the population. And I think we're going to see the U.S. ruling class continue to struggle. with those contradictions, because ultimately this is what a lot of Marxists, Leninists, et cetera, have been analyzing for a while is when is that point of no return

coming? When is that point of crisis going to lead to the genesis of not just rebellion and spontaneous rebellion, but also of real organized class struggle? And I think the ruling class is struggling with how do they stop that from occurring when it seems in every section of society and every arena, globally and domestically, there are potential spots where that's inevitable. Yeah, yeah, spot on and incredibly well said. You know, when you were talking, it just made me think one thing that definitely will help, you know,

maintain ideological coherency and deepening crisis is, you know, having an enemy. And we can look through American history in its entirety. and even when your latest example of the Democrats blaming Russia for their own fucking incompetence and failure, and we can really see that having some external enemy is something that the U.S. ruling class has returned to time and time again to maintain its ideological hegemony on the domestic population. And liberals are just as guilty of this as conservatives, and both of them will continue to do that as much and as long as they possibly can. But we're coming up on two hours. This has been an amazing conversation. I really want listeners to go read this book because we have a two-hour conversation,

but this book is over 300 pages and there's so much that you can wrestle with inside of its pages. I do want to ask you one last question before we wrap up, and that is if readers can only take one main thing away from you and Roberto Servant's book, what do you hope it is?

We hope, and I'll speak for myself here, I definitely hope that when people read this book, that they take away the need to really have an intense ideological conversation, debate, and struggle in whatever they're doing. And, you know, this book was really geared towards those who are looking for some alternative way of thinking about how imperialism, capitalism, white supremacy, how these systems are talked about or not talked about and how the conditions not only throughout history but also in our current and present day situation have rendered that conversation so weak and so watered down

to the point where we are struggling to build any forces against endless war and imperial domination that we're struggling to build a real class struggle in a time where over half the population is living paycheck to paycheck. It is our hope that people can take away from this book the urgent need to begin to build a language of struggle and a language of resistance that targets who the enemies really are and to begin to unlearn how the ideology of American exceptionalism and innocence and how they really do point the fingers at those who are not our enemies at all from our comrades in struggle to peoples around the world who are seeking a different way of life

in a different way of organizing their societies. That is what American exceptionalism and innocence are all about, keeping us from being able to even just have a conversation with each other. So I hope that people when they read the book, they can begin to develop a language for why this has occurred, why we're in the situation that we're in, but also be inspired to learn from those who have always been challenging the mythologies of exceptionalism and innocence in the United States, learn from the internationalist and self-determinationist struggles of the black community, of indigenous peoples, of working class people, and to take those lessons and begin to implement them in the situation we find ourselves in now.

Yeah, absolutely. And, you know, what I take away from this text, as I take away from so much of what I engage with on the really principled Mante imperialist left is that at the end of the day, the United States of America, in my opinion, honestly needs to be destroyed as a prerequisite for the sort of liberation globally that we on the left are constantly talking about. You can't just have a social democratic or democratic socialist movement arise through the mechanisms of the American state and carry on a lot of these mythologies, carry on settler colonialism, carry on implicitly the white supremacy that this society was built on and get us anywhere closer to anything like liberation for the people of this planet. So that's definitely

what I take away. Danny, it's been an absolute honor to talk with you. I'm so glad that we could tackle this book and have this long, you know, two-hour conversation about it. And I hope people really, you know, get a lot out of it. You're going on your trip to China soon. Maybe when you return, we can link up and talk about your experiences there. I think that'd be incredibly fascinating. and really eye-opening, especially for a lot of Americans like myself who have never even been outside of the country, let alone across the world. So I think that would be really instructive. Before I let you go, can you please let our listeners know where they can find you, this book, and the rest of your work online?

Yes. So I'm on social media. You can find me. I'm on Twitter. Just search for the tag at Spirit of H.O., Spirit of Ho. Then you can also find me on Facebook, Danny High Fong, I welcome requests. And you can find my work at www. Blackagenda Report.com each week. And I also write for American Herald Tribune at times, mostly focusing on election issues. But if you want to purchase the book, there are a few options on the Skyhorse Publishing website. So if you Google or search the title of the book in Skyhorse Publishing, you can find Barnes & Noble.

There's, I know there's an indie sort of independent media, independent bookstore kind of distributor that you can purchase from. And then there's, of course, Amazon, which dominates so much of the publishing world. So that's where you can find the book. So I encourage people to pick it up. And yeah, definitely follow me. And I'm definitely looking forward to reconnecting here because I feel like, yeah, I definitely want to talk about China. I'm planning on hoping to write a book about it.

My hope is to focus on Belt and Road, as well as sort of the concept of socialism in China. And, yeah, it's going to be a good trip. I'll be going with Cynthia McKinney and some other folks who are really seeking to just see what is actually going on beyond the imperial narratives that we hear all the time about China. Yeah, absolutely. And I'm really looking forward to that.

So, yeah, thank you so much for coming on today. and I really look forward to you and I working together and collaborating in the future because I really appreciate your work and it's a shame it took us three years of Rev Left being on the air before you and I linked up. So, you know, safe travels to China. Hit me up when you're back and let's collab again in the future, okay? Let's do it. Thank you. All right, have a good one.

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General Slo. My name is the boneless chicken And the soulless victims. Homeless Conditions. Why fight my brother? When I could beat the system. I write 16s in 16 minutes. It's possible. That's what it is. But I know what isn't. Crazy. The words Garvey spoke. The same slang as Malcolm

Man. There's too many quotes. The wolf flicking the blade thinking it's Kool-Aid. Blood thirsty. Turning out cells in a slave. What's crazy is you in a gang. We won't do a god damn thing. When the police bang On the corners, we learn how to hang With no more nooses, just manned tree

The same old thing. It's crazy as how They control our blame. It's the demonic song that the radio play. You're a revolutionary? Yeah, it's all good, but they don't know you in the hood. What's good? That's crazy. And I don't got no time to look at Crazy. My straitjacket or

cooking. Now that's crazy. Because I look different than you. Sparkley At the corner of your peripheral. Call me crazy. Like I'm the violin. living in the empire that was born off the gun now that's crazy what I'm supposed to do when they shut the stores down and ain't no food now that's crazy like I'm the violent one living in the empire that was born I was a gun crazy like I lost my marbles like all I want to do is criticize an argue like my screws loose because I say what I want to shit say what I got to it for that I can't We want a change In that we end up I'm comingos

No creos You say I'm loco And need a doctor I say let's be realistic And do the impossible Check it out I'm on a higher plane Some say it ain't sane

I say it's okay Let your mind sway Ride the way Better that than on land It's stuck in one place They won't you sedated Drug than medicated More paper in the pockets

To the drug fabricators All indicators Show all society's sick Disease by greed That's the diagnosis. Now that's crazy. Because I look different than you. Spark fear at the corner of your peripheral.

Call me crazy. Like I'm the violent one living in the empire that was born off the gun. Now that's crazy. What I'm supposed to do when they shut the stores down and ain't no food? Now that's crazy. Like I'm the violent one living in the empire that I was born on the gun. I'm crazy. Thank you.