Rev Left Radio - Ceasefire in Gaza, The Monroe Doctrine Under Trump, and a US Economy on the Brink of Collapse

Episode Date: October 14, 2025

Alyson and Breht analyze current events, including the ceasefire in Gaza and its implications, the newest round of US imperialist aggression against Venezuela, Regime Change aspirations in Iran and Venezuela, the absolutely horrific state of the American economy, the AI bubble, Free Speech, ICE raids, and more. ---------------------------------------------------- Support Rev Left and get access to bonus episodes: www.patreon.com/revleftradio Make a one-time donation to Rev Left at BuyMeACoffee.com/revleftradio Follow, Subscribe, & Learn more about Rev Left Radio https://revleftradio.com/

Hello and welcome to Red Menace. My name is Allison. I'm here with my co-host, Brett, and we have another current events-based episode. coming your way. We've, you know, done a lot of different stuff on the podcast lately, but so much is happening right now that I think it's worth addressing some stuff. One thing I want to say is I know we kind of go back and forth between more topical and the more current events. We are planning some work around a discussion of the years of lead in Italy and, you know, trying to unpack what happened there. People have been throwing around that time period as analogous to the U.S. to a large extent recently. So we're going to have some conversation about that in some upcoming

work that we're putting together. Hopefully that's of interest to people. I think the term gets thrown around a lot without like a very historically deep dive into that time period. So we're hoping to be able to provide that as we move forward. So that said though for this week, we're going to talk about a couple of different things. Obviously the situation in Gaza with a sea spire is very important right now, but there's so much that is just kind of happening as the contradictions of capitalism, both globally and domestically just continue to intensify in these very extreme ways that I think it's worth just taking some time to do that analysis. So to start that off, I think, you know, the first thing that we're going to talk about is the ceasefire agreement that has been made

between Hamas and Israel. And this agreement, obviously, is a thing that Trump is pointing to right now as an example of his commitment to diplomacy and peace and all of these things. And for us, it's very relevant because we've talked fairly extensively about the genocide and the resistance to the genocide that is occurring. And there's this question now of, is this the end of, you know, not necessarily the genocide. I think the genocide has been happening since the NACPA, but of this very acute phase of, you know, intense genocidal violence. And on the left, I think you've seen quite a few different responses to this coming from different directions of people saying, okay, well, like, I don't want to hand it to Trump, but this seems.

like it might be it versus skepticism towards whether or not the Israelis will be willing to, you know, actually stick to this in the long term. And I think it is difficult to provide any sort of real analysis as things are shaping up. There's a disarmament that is going to be a part of this in some level, which I think is, you know, going to concern those who have been very supportive of armed resistance. The question of what government will look like as the deal goes into effect, I also think is up in the air. The statements that have been made by the resistance groups have, you know, not shown complete support for some of the absurd demands that Israel and the U.S. are making. And I also think there's a broader geopolitical question that has to be wrestled with. One of the things that Hamas negotiators said is that they were under more pressure from Arab and Muslim states than they have ever been before to take this deal. And so there's a question of what kind of shifts are occurring on the global stage with how those states relate to American imperialism that I also think is relevant here. So those are a whole bunch of directions we can take this in, and I think we'll probably get

into all of them. But Brett, do you have any thoughts on what this means, what is happening with the current state of the ceasefire, and what we can anticipate moving forward? Yeah, so I think first and foremost, we have to acknowledge that this is, for Palestinians on the ground, a much needed and deeply desired to reprieve, that whatever happens, next that any second of the Israeli U.S. boot off their neck, of the constant bombings, the displacements is good for the Palestinians, and we want nothing more than for Palestinians to be free from fear and violence and the genocide that's been occurring since the Nakaba and is in

this incredibly brutal phase recently. So I wanted to start off by just kind of like highlighting that. And it seems that the, as far as we can tell, right, that the temperament on the ground is one of, like, thank goodness. And I am in some indirect communication with just a regular family in Gaza that we've been supporting on Rev. Left that I get sort of like mediated communication with. And clearly that's what they've been begging for, hoping for anything to stop the constant displacement, if not fear of death looming over them 24-7. So I wanted to highlight that. And, you know, just kind of highlight the Palestinians and their right to exist and live as, like, the main thing that we can never lose sight of when we get into these more grand, you know, grand discussions of geopolitics and what it means. So having highlighted that, I just have some questions.

I mean, the first thing is I approach this with skepticism, right? Because the U.S. and Israel have done this before. They've used diplomacy as a smokescreen to launch attacks. they've they've promised ceasefire agreed to ceasefires and then immediately violated them and and the bigger question is well like you know if this is if we're supposed to think that this is the final like sort of ceasefire and everything is good now like from the perspective of Netanyahu the Lakud party and the the genocidal state apparatus of Israel more broadly how could this be the end like you know what what is the thing here that they're just now going to basically take the boot off the neck of Gaza, let, I mean, ostensibly let Hamas reconstitute itself, let the Palestinians start rebuilding. That doesn't seem to be in line with the vision of what Netanyahu and the Lekud Party and just the Israeli government more broadly with mass support from the people, right? Not Netanyahu in particular, but the general assault on Gaza has widespread mass support.

And we also know that this was never about the hostages, right? Netanyahu, they don't give a fuck about the hostages. It's a thing that the people on the ground care about. And insofar as there were protests against the war, it was almost solely and narrowly because they wanted their hostages back. Now, there is going to be a swap, a prisoner hostage swap, right? So that Hamas will release hostages that they still have, which are, you know, I think a couple dozen at this point, if I'm not, if I'm not incorrect about that. And in exchange, we'll get something like, I believe I heard the number 2000, something like that, political prisoners back. We'll see how that goes. I think Hamas has to release their hostages first, and then, you know, they get theirs back.

So we'll see how that process goes and what the government of Israel makes of it, right? Do they take the hostages and immediately use them in some sort of way to reignite tension so they can go back in there? And then an even broader question I have is, you know, the pivot to Iran. the u.s and israel haven't over didn't overthrow syria for nothing they haven't been bombing yemen and lebanon for nothing right they haven't been conducting this multi-front war for west asian hegemony for nothing and they had they didn't bomb iran's nuclear sites for nothing we don't know you know how devastating that actually was and and by all um intents and purposes it seems that it wasn't like a fatal blow to irons a capability to build up nuclear weapons or

enrich uranium or whatever, but still, it seems that that is what their goal is. So one part of me is thinking maybe they are taking a break from Gaza, giving Netanyahu and Trump short-term political wins that they can take back to their people and say, you know, Trump can boast about being crucial to the ceasefire deal. And in some sense, the U.S. was here. And Netanyahu can go back to his people and say, hey, I got the hostages back, right? And then, you know, they can also reconstitute and sort of reform their, you know, beleaguered and beaten up reserve army that has been, you know, going head to head against Hamas in Gaza as well as on other fronts for an attack on Iran. The Israel has been for a very long time, and it's been increasing

lately, carrying out sabotage and terrorist attacks inside Iran to weaken its infrastructure, create an atmosphere of chaos, and basically just anything they can to heighten the contradictions internally within Iran to weaken the government in as a prelude to a more vociferous attack. And Netanyahu, especially in Hebrew media, I mean, does make very clear that this is a temporary ceasefire that Iran needs to go. and he's been saying that for decades. So I'm incredibly cynical that this is somehow the end of the conflict.

I think this is a strategic move by Israel and the U.S., and I think it gives them short-term political victories for the leaders of these two genocidal, fascist states. And I think that it's just the eye of the storm, if you will. But before I say more, Allison, what's your analysis on that stuff? Yeah, I think you hit on several things that are really important there. I mean, one is just the ideological makeup of like domestic Zionist ideology in Israel has not shifted to the left whatsoever, right? We maintain kind of this like

very maximalist blend of revisionist and religious Zionism that has territorial maximalism as one of its fundamental claims. The language around settlement continues to expand. Violets in the West Bank has actually only intensified in the last several months. And this note, motion of greater Israel continues to be floated in domestic Israeli politics. And so the conditions for, you know, some sort of shift to a two state are simply not there, I think. And so we should be skeptical of anyone who tries to frame this ceasefire as a step in that direction, I think. Obviously, that's not how Net Yahoo and the governing coalition frame it, but that is definitely how more liberal Zionists are trying to talk about it. And we should more or less reject that framing, I think,

because the conditions within Israeli politics for that to even be on the table simply do not exist to begin with. And I think it's worth being attentive to that reality. And then, yeah, I think the other thing that you got at that I think is worth thinking about is how this offers Israel the chance to rebuild some of its strength militarily and try to get itself into a stronger position from which it can take additional aggressive actions, whether that's towards Gaza, the West Bank, or Iran. I mean, one of the things that we saw almost as soon as the deal was announced, was Germany saying, we're going to end our arms embargo on Israel. We're going to start selling them weaponry again. And I think more and more countries are going to feel more

comfortable shifting back to that kind of relationship with Israel, which will only, you know, just strengthen its military position, unfortunately, and give it the ability to act more aggressively in other contexts that it wants to. It's so hard to tell exactly, like, where things are going with Iran, because the rhetoric is so blustery from the U.S. and U.S. and Israel and yet we have not really seen like a massive escalation beyond these back and forth strikes, right? And those tend to have kind of just flattened out over time. And so it'll be interesting to see where things go. But I think there is political desire for wiping out the Iranian state in both countries very obviously. And it's a question of how far people are willing to go

with that. The other thing that I just think is relevant to consider here is just like the normalization of Arab state relations with Israel and the United States, unfortunately, which is really one of the foreign policy things that Trump can point to most clearly, I think, as something that he's accomplished. And it has created this very difficult situation where this idea of the axis of resistance is kind of falling apart a little bit. Obviously, the overthrow of Assad delta blow to that general resistance coalition in a way that I think is worth just being honest about, but in addition to that, the Arab states, which were often seen as being able to be kind of arbiters within some of the conflicts that occur are clearly just on the side of the United

States and Israel at this point, in a way that has shifted the balance of forces. And so knowing what the future struggle is going to look like, I think is very difficult to predict right now. If we see disarmament of Hamas and other militant groups within the resistance, that's going to create a fundamental shift in a lot of ways of the reality in Gaza, and we are going to have to just kind of watch the details of this as it all plays out. And I do fear that if there is disarmament, that is the kind of thing Israel will take advantage of within the next several years in order to gain territorial concessions. The desire within the religious scientists community to take Gaza and to actually settle it is very, very high. And they are an increasingly

important part of the governing coalition in Israel. So I remain cynical, I remain skeptical, I remain thankful that, as you said, the Palestinian people are having at least some reprieve right now that is so absolutely necessary and that really has to happen. But, you know, I don't trust Israel one bit. I trust the U.S. just as much. I think the situation likely is a pretense for a consolidation of strength for both of these governments. And in the long term, that worries me. Yeah, and I go back to something I've been saying from the very beginning, which is that there's this what I've been calling death drive accelerationism on behalf of Israel,

Netanyahu, in particular, personally, politically, legacy-wise, right? He is an egomaniac. He's a fucking psycho. He does care about his place in, you know, Zionist in Israeli history. Or, I mean, he might even conceive it as Jewish. history more broadly. And so I do not think he is looking to smooth the waves of these tensions and, you know, use diplomacy now going forward to kind of, you know, just merely normalize relations with other Arab states. I think he personally and psychologically wants to leave his

mark. And he sees that as the Greater Israel Project, which is, you know, a necessary step of achieving that would be eradicating the Iranian threat. You know, Iran is in and of itself, the bulwark against the greater Israel vision and just, you know, the bulwark against Israeli hegemony in the region. And then a nuclear armed Iran is just, I mean, look at little North Korea, you know, the DPRK, because it has nuclear weapons, it is just the ultimate deterrent from being able to do anything against it. So, you know, it's unacceptable from the view of Israel for Iran to become a nuclear power.

And there's the psychology of Netanyahu at play here. And, you know, one of the things I think this, one of the many trajectories this could take is if we are at all correct that this is a sort of reconstitution of forces as a prelude to an attack on Iran, you know, a war with Iran, particularly if the U.S. is directly involved, is an ultimate attention. umbrella over which Israel can finish the job in Gaza. If there is a multi-state conflict versus Iran, a hot war with Iran, you know, the sort of hyper-fixation and focus of the global world, the media, you know, whatever on Gaza gets shifted, right? At least a big part of that attention pie now is going over to Iran and under that umbrella, Israel can finish what it started.

mean think about what the state gaza is in right now gaza is in fucking ruins so even if there was no more conflict no more attacks on gaza whatsoever they were completely left um to do what they may i mean they have to just rebuild that's that's a generation right of rebuilding if they can even get the materials in right because israel still controls its borders and trade etc um so it's it's unlikely that that um that's going to happen and in that sense israel has time to reconstitute itself. I mean, you know, the Palestinians and Gaza are completely beleaguered. And so, you know, it can take a couple months, reconstitute it forces, get these short-term

political victories for their domestic constituencies and electorates. And, you know, Netanyahu can continue, you know, sort of his bid to stay in power personally. And again, that bid for Netanyahu to stay in power personally, that's a big thing for him psychologically because there's the, you know, the legal cases that he'll, face in Israel to say nothing of the global sort of state of his criminality and, you know, where he is and isn't allowed to go. And if he's out of power, that gives him even less leverage to survive that. So from just that psychological angle, you know that Netanyahu's going to want to continue some sort of conflict. And indeed, conflict is going on, right? After the ceasefire

in Gaza has announced, Israel still bombing Lebanon. You know, it's still engaged in all of these assaults. They already toppled Assad. And they're ingratiating themselves. with the new Syrian regime. And so this is not by any means a finished project. And from Netanyahu psychology all the way up to the geopolitics of it, it's almost a certainty that regardless of what trajectory this takes, it is not going to be a trajectory towards sustained peace. It is going to be more and more conflict and probably bigger and bigger conflict.

Yeah, I think that is the unfortunate reality of the situation, right? and we obviously, you know, we'll have to watch. The main question in my mind is what is left of the resistance after this and what does the struggle continue to look like? I do not believe that if there's a transitional government and even a disarmament, that that is the end of the Palestinian struggle for national self-determination, right? That is not going to end with this process. It has not ended with many different so-called peace processes that have tried to facilitate it. The people of Palestine, I think, will continue. you to have national aspirations. And so the flip side to what is the aggression on the state going to look like is also what is the resistance going to look like. And I truly have no idea, honestly. We'll have to see how far into this plan things get. But in my mind, I think the thing we need to remind ourselves is that resistance is still going to exist in some form or another. We don't know what that is going to look like yet. And what we as Marxists and communists need to affirm very explicitly is that regardless of if a transitional government comes into place or

whatever, the Palestinian right to national self-determination is a non, something we cannot compromise on as a movement as internationalists and as we need to continue to insist on. I do worry that if there is a transition towards more peace, like this central place that Palestine has taken and the international left might get bumped out of the way, but I think we really need to avoid that and continue to insist on it as one of these flashpoints that our internationalism is oriented around whatever form the next stage or struggle takes, because it continues to be this very important fracture point within imperialist ideology. I mean, the unpopularity of Israel right now is huge. Their isolation is unprecedented. And we need to figure out how to maintain that momentum

moving forward, regardless of what next steps look like. Yeah, and my very last word on this is that To your point, another positive, another strategic victory that this ceasefire allows for Israel in particular is as a pressure release valve for the ratcheting up of the global pressure on Israel in the form of, you know, even though we know it's half-hearted and bullshit, the European states coming out and, you know, informally or whatever, recognizing a Palestinian state, but also the flotillas, which we're continuing to build. that more and more were happening. It was bringing Israel into conflict with not only domestic populations around the world, but in some extent, and to a limited extent, like even European powers, right? There was, I think, a period of time where the Italian Navy was at least to a certain degree, you know, ushering the flotilla along. And, you know, those things are intense.

And then every time Israel would stop the flotilla and get on, all the activists would come out and talk about the horrendous conditions they face. you know, Greta and Chris Small is getting roughed up, the racism, you know, Ben Gavir coming out and saying we're going to treat them just like the terrorists, et cetera, that that ratcheting up of pressure is going up, up, up, up, and now it can dissipate just a tad. It'll never go away, but it can dissipate just a tad. But that's also, it speaks to the point I was making about, this is Netanyahu taking his ultimate shot here, is long term. Israel has completely decimated its reputation. It is still popular among the American economic and political elite, and that's

enough for it to survive for now. But over, you know, a generation or two across the world, there are very few places where there's a positive view of Israel. And everywhere there are positive views, it's a fucking fascist clown fucking show like in Argentina, Malay, the Trump government in the U.S., and obviously, you know, the Zionists. around the world and in Israel in particular, but that's not going away. And they know that. And they've forever, I think, lost the left, the global left. And their hope is that if they can somehow, some way carry out this project while maintaining support among, in particular, the American right and center, that they can still live on, that they can still have the necessary

American funds and military and economic support needed to continue to carry out the greater Israel vision. But that is, that's dubious. I mean, you know, the American right for many reasons that are good and many reasons that are bad, right, are turning against Israel. And the younger generations in particular are turning against them. And in fact, I would, I would say it's one of the main schisms on the American right right now. I mean, go on the American right. And you'll see a lot of the discussion around Israel killed Charlie Kirk, Right? Candice Owens and Fuentes is against this idea that Israel did it, but it's still in the conversation. You know, Ian Carroll, every day posting about, you know, we found a new one, the redacted show on YouTube.

These are all right-wing shows that I follow to keep a finger on the pulse of the American right. And that's like the number one schism happening right now. So I don't know. Israel is in a very dubious position and over the medium and long-term in an even worse position. And so I think that is all the more reason to be concerned about it using conflict and war as, as I said, this death drive acceleration to achieve its goals before it's, you know, before it's too late. Yeah. No, I mean, I think that death drive is absolutely what's at play there. I'll transition us to another application of that death drive, unfortunately, which is what is happening with Venezuela right now. So I'll set a little bit of context here because I think there are several layers to this. So obviously, U.S. aggression against Venezuela has been a mainstay of U.S. foreign policy across multiple

administrations now, and a desire to depose the government there has been, you know, very dominant. You can see this through just kind of overt coup attempts, like what happened, you know, with Juan Guaido. You can see this with U.S. kind of special, I don't remember what there are special forces or people who have a military background with the U.S., who were captured a couple years ago. Within Venezuela, you can see the collaboration that occurred with the Venezuelan military kind of rebel factions who decide to decide with that coup. And you can see it through the intense economic sanctions that have been applied over and over and over again to Venezuela to destabilize their country, to try to prove that this nationalized oil economy doesn't work,

et cetera, et cetera. It's the same playbook that we see with U.S. imperialism towards any country which tries to go in its own direction and establish some form of economic sovereignty over its resources. And so this is ratcheting up recently. Interestingly, Venezuela has becoming very central to Trump's kind of domestic and international policy. Domestically, much of the crackdown early on for his increased immigration raids had to do with this argument that Trend de Aragua is some international terrorist

organization and that they, as a transnational cartel, an international terrorist organization can be cracked down upon within the United States in order to justify things like deportation to Seacot, et cetera. This was the basis for their invocation of the Alien Enemy's Act as a justification for much of this. So Venezuela has played a big part in the domestic policy. And that designation as a foreign terror group and as a transnational cartel has now led to a situation where the U.S. military has basically missile struck multiple Venezuelan boats. Now, these are not Venezuelan military vessels, are government boats. The U.S. claims that these are drug cartel boats being used to smuggle drugs. There is a very high likelihood that

these are just fishermen, honestly, and one of the boats apparently may not even have had Venezuelan citizens on it. It appears based on comments from Petro that they were Colombians, potentially, although it's a little unclear exactly who it was that was on that boat. But we've seen this increase in literal military action. Today, Pete Hegseth announced that there's going to be a higher focus in the Southcom region on fighting transnational cartels, by which they mean attacks on Venezuela because of this conflation. Their argument is that the Venezuelan government is a direct backer of these gangs and

cartels and that they are essentially an indistinguishable entity. So all the language about transnational cartels as foreign terror groups is really about justifying aggression against the Venezuelan government. Now, to top all of this off, you've probably all heard about the Nobel Peace Prize, which was awarded to Maria Corina Machado, who is a, I'm going to be honest, peace or shit fucking resistance person in Venezuela. They call her a democracy activist. She has said that the first thing she would like to see is the privatization of Venezuelan oil, the opening up of Venezuela to foreign investment, and she has praised Trump's attacks on these boats. This is no anti-autocratic or anti-authoritarian resistance figure. This is essentially Comprador bourgeoisie who wants to sell her country to the West. That is what she is.

And unfortunately, you've seen this choice to give her the prize work to do some manufacturing of consent with liberals. Liberals were really quite concerned that Trump was going to get the peace prize. He was kind of demanding he'd get it. And liberals were rather mad about that possibility. And so when it was given to a pro-democracy, Venezuela activist, I've seen many liberals praise that as good. They gave it to someone who deserves it, not Trump, ignoring the fact that this person is a right-wing reactionary who supports Trump. And again, who wants to see her country hollowed out by Western finance capital. and who was backed for the Nobel Peace Prize by Mark Rubio.

Like, Marco Rubio, like, literally, it's just there is not a distinction here. But clearly this is meant to actually, you know, manufacture consent for further aggression against Venezuela. We are seeing a ramping up, and this is a very concerning situation. I think it would be incorrect to believe that the Venezuelans are not ready to fight if an all-out fight comes. I think the reality on the ground is that Venezuela has had a, movement that has created, you know, some degree of an armed populace who are trained and who are ready to resist. But I think this is something we need to be keeping a very close eye on because things are

moving in a very concerning direction at the moment. Do you have any thoughts of kind of all of what's going on, Brett? I have so many. So the first thing is like this whole idea of, you know, opening up the U.S. or opening up Venezuela to, you know, multinational infiltration and taking over of their natural resources. This is just a stark, clear example. of what Lennon was talking about when he says monopoly capitalism is imperialism, right? This is like a quintessential little just real life example of how that actually works and how

imperialism is necessary for the interests of monopoly capitalism. So that's just an obvious point that I think is just worth noting. The other thing is these attack on these fishing boats. Like, you know, you have said, and I'm not saying that I disagree with this. This is the framing that These are military actions against drug cartels or whatever. I think it's important to realize that this is just straight up extrajudicial murder of non-combatants. And for all we know, non-drug-related people at all. Like one of the boats that was hit was a Colombian boat. And the Colombian president said, these are Colombian fishermen.

And this is an act of fucking war in our waters. And so what we're actually saying is extrajudicial murder of civilians. and then we're being told to believe without any evidence or questioning that these are some big, bad, terrible cartel members, which maybe, maybe not, but there's no evidence. And moreover, even if you are a drug smuggler, you know, these are not the kingpins of a cartel that are driving boats, right? These are low-level smugglers, if they're even correct that this has anything to do with the drug trade.

And the crime for that, even if you were to go to trial and everything, is not instantaneous. execution by Trump, right? Right. And again, Trump has committed almost certainly, well, without a fucking, without a shadow of a doubt, has committed crimes a thousand times worse than even the worst accusations against the people on these boats. And he gets to live. And with the Epstein connection, it's almost certain that there's pedophilia or statutory rape in his background. And now that's aside from the actual genocide, he's actively and consciously helping participate. This is a mass murder, serial killer freak piece of dog shit, and he's murdering people, and it puts it up on the, on the American media screens and everybody's

like, oh yeah, that's good. Like, nobody even fucking thinks about this is extrajudicial murder of fucking people who we have no evidence whatsoever other than Trump's dumb ass word that these people deserve to die. This is fucking insane, truly insane. Not surprising. if you understand American imperialism, you know, we could go down the list and all through history of these sorts of things happening. But the way it's just digested by the American media, it's like baby-birded into the mouths of the American populace through the media is grotesque. This is murder. And then, you know, in any other administration, they would have the decency not to brag about it, right? There wouldn't be videos put out with like

emojis and fucking AI constructed Department of Homeland Security fucking images, just When Obama would do it, it would just be a couple lines in the New York Times and we would move on. You know, there's a grotesqueness in the brazen braggadocia that this is accompanied with that I think makes the Trump regime unique, but not the act itself. So, I mean, just grotesque all around. And in Colombia, which was for a very long time, you know, a U.S. ally against Venezuela, a launching pad against these sort of threats, intimidation, saber-rattling, and even attacks. on Venezuela, I mean, Trump is really turning the, I mean, there is like a more left-wing president there, and then Trump is doing all of this, which is turning Colombia, even more and more overtly against the U.S. and U.S. imperialism in the region.

That's an interesting dynamic that's evolving, that now you're even alienating Colombia. There's still, I'm sure, plenty of fucking pro-U.S. forces and sentiment within Colombia, especially in the political and economic elite, but still, it's an interesting development. Maduro, as far as I understand, has made certain overtures to the U.S., like, you know, can we negotiate here? Can we compromise? Like, I do not want my country to be fucking attacked overtly by the United States after, again, decades of sanctioning and, you know, intelligence operations and decimating of the making the economy scream, as Kissinger would say. And so, you know, Venezuela is like all these victims of the U.S. sanction regimes and the CIA attacks and, you know, undermining is not in a

strong domestic situation. They're strong domestically in the sense that the people of Venezuela through these actions have dialectically learned and had their political consciousness raised to understand the machinations of imperialism. And that will create a lot of genuine sentiments in the people of Venezuela to fight back and resist. So in that sense, Venezuela has the masses on their sides. I do believe that most Venezuelans, even if they have disagreements with the Maduro government or whatever, are

educated enough to understand that they are not going to accept the complete U.S. infiltration and plundering of their country, not for their interests, for U.S. corporate interests, right? They know enough to know that, and we see mobilizations of not only the military

proper, but, you know, street militias and forms of community defense that will come out. So how this war is actually played out as an interesting thing. Another thing I want to highlight, you mentioned Marco Rubio. Marco Rubio, like, this is, like, where is there a broad base for such actions in the American electorate? Like, nobody wants, we don't even want any war in Iran, nobody wants also war in Venezuela.

This is a Marco Rubio wish list being checked off, and Marco Rubio represents this small, insane fucking constituency in fucking Florida of right-wing ex-patriots of Cuba and Venezuela that want this.

So this is an incredibly tiny insane fucking constituency in the U.S. that is elevated to having policy priority because Marco Rubio is in this high position

in this fucking Trump regime. And so we really have to understand that Marco Rubio is I mean, there's always been attacks on Venezuela, but he's really, he would love nothing more. You know, what Netanyahu wants for the Palestinians and Palestine, Marco Rubio wants for fucking Cuba and Venezuela. It's at the top of his fucking list. So, and again, the whole idea of cartels and gangs is a mere Trojan horse for Monroe Doctrine, right? This is just a long

desired outcome in the military and political and economic elite of the United States. States, the imperialist United States, they want to overturn these regimes, they have for decades, and the fig leaf being presented here is gangs and cartels as a way to get in here. And the very last thing I want to say, I know I'm being long-winded that I'll toss it back over to you. But here is my sort of idea about what the strategy is here. The ICE deportations are obviously deeply connected to this. So many of the Central and South American immigrants that come to the U.S.

come in large part, as Allison and I have made clear for so long, because of the outcome of the sanctions regimes, of the imperial meddling, in the destabilization of all these countries, for generations, mind you. And so there's a direct cause and effect here. The thing that ICE is doing and the Trump regime is doing is let's deport as many people as we physically can, shut down lots. lock down the border and then that is a nice pretense that's the table being set for these wars of aggression against these you know central and south american countries and particularly venezuela that will massively destabilize these countries right and will send a bunch of migrants you know anywhere but there um but if we've already if we're already engaged in deporting we're already acting as a deterrence in the way that we're violently and fascistically attacking and

deporting people and we're militarizing and shutting down the border, we can withstand that wave of desperate fucking people fleeing further destabilized Venezuela, et cetera. So I think the ICE deportations, there's many reasons around that. But one of those reasons is to fortify this whole state, this militarized border regime in order to absorb and prevent the influx of desperate migrants. would be a bad look for the Trump for the Trump regime right let's start a war in Venezuela people are already against extra wars and now we have an extra 100,000 500,000 millions of people from this region surging northward out of desperation because you've further

destabilized and already destabilized country so these things are deeply and profoundly connected and I think when we talk about it we can't lose side of that yeah I think that domestic connection is absolutely crucial and I think it's important because that's what cuts through the ideology of the Trump administration, right? Their whole framework is this concept of America first, right? And so they'll tell you the reason we need to secure the border so that when you put America first, we're not losing resources to immigrants, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And there's been, you know, always some attempt to play at like non-interventionism, right? Oh, we're actually opposed to U.S. form policy overseas. We don't need NATO, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And that is just

absolutely not true. And I think you framed it very well. The way that the immigration crackdown actually facilitates the international aggression and there is a self-reinforcing between those two strategies coming from Trump. I think it's just absolutely crucial. And I think that is why for us as conning us, we have this very difficult task, I think, of drawing those connections and being able to connect them not just on a podcast like this, but in existing movements and struggle around all of these things, right? In the U.S. right now, there's massive organizing being done in community self-defense to resist the immigration crackdown that is. happening. And that is crucial and needs to happen. But the job of communists involved in that work is

to start to draw these bigger connections as well and start to show for the people who are involved in these very concrete struggles how this is all interrelated in such a way that we need a unified broader struggle. And I don't know. Maybe I'm reading too much Lenin recently. I think it's very on my mind how much we need to unite these different struggles and expand this. But I think your analysis here, Brett, gives us some of the analytical framework for how to understand the relationship between this horrific Monroe Doctrine foreign policy, which I don't even think the Monroe Doctrine's the unspoken part. They're using that term now, unfortunately.

But the connection between that foreign policy and the domestic crackdown around immigration, which I think is very quickly going to escalate into a domestic crackdown generally beyond just immigration. All of these things are tied to each other. There is no anti-interventionist American right-wing policy because intervention. is politically necessitated by the reality of the dominance of finance capital that defines the American economy. And so being able to draw these connections, I think hopefully can allow us to push back against the ideological trappings of Trump's ideology that unfortunately, I think, have persuaded some people who might otherwise be sympathetic to more left-wing perspectives.

Yeah, and the big question I have here, and I would love to hear your thoughts, if you have any, and this just may be a sort of obvious answer here. that is just, there is no real big strategy or competence at all, but it does seem a little fucking crazy that all of these fronts are sort of being opened up. The U.S. economy is not in a good place. We'll talk about that in a bit. The Israel situation doesn't seem to be ending anytime soon. And a war with Iran seems plausible, if not likely. And, you know, Netanyahu has made that clear as such. And we know that if Israel pushes forward on that, that regardless of what Trump says or once, the U.S. will fucking go along with it.

There's always China looming in the background in Taiwan, but that's been put on the back burner, I think, as these other fronts are attempted to be sort of dealt with first. But, you know, a hot war with Venezuela, while Israel is trying to ramp up aggression against Iran, there's a certain level of insanity here. And this is late stage imperialism. this is the the absurdity of fascism i mean look what hitler did in world war two it was also an insane strategy of every front opening up all the time and you know one of the big critiques militarily of strategically of of of hitler was precisely that right you're opening up too many

fronts you can't you can't adequately confront them all and i think we're seeing something like that occur again here that there is just so many fronts opening up and as you push push forward on those fronts, new fronts will then open up, right? As you push forward on Iran, you push forward on Venezuela. You're destabilizing entire regions. You're making surrounding countries make a choice and things get messier and messier from there. We saw with, you know, Iraq and Afghanistan that there's this hubristic confidence on behalf of the, uh, the U.S. state that they can just go in and have their will and they couldn't do it there. They couldn't do it in Vietnam. They couldn't do it in all these other places, but still that insane hubris persists.

And so maybe that is the answer, right? Just incompetence mixed with hubris that they can push on all these fronts. Or maybe one of them will fizzle out. Maybe it's maybe the, uh, the Venezuela thing will fizzle out. We saw many years ago the attempt to push Juan Guido forward. We saw the attempted, um, you know, sort of weird under the Trump, the first Trump administration, this attack on Venezuela that the Venezuelan fishermen packed up and put a stop too. And so maybe this is another iteration of that, but again, I think the new variable here is that you do have Marco Rubio as the Secretary of State. He's ideologically committed to this.

And all of this ultimately is materially good for the military industrial complex, right? There's nothing wrong with multiple fronts if you're, you know, the military industrial complex, which has a huge foothold in the deep state, in intelligence agencies, and in the you know, the ostensibly civilian government already. So, so maybe that is, maybe I answer my own question there. But what are your thoughts there? Yeah. I mean, I think there's a few aspects to what's going on. I mean, I think the first thing that we need to recognize when we're trying to understand if this is incompetence and where it's all going is that the Trump administration's not fucking popular right now, right? Like, the popularity has actually been pretty low. They're just blatantly

lying about polling results to try to make it look higher at this point. And the economy is falling apart in a pretty staggering way in terms of jobs added and in terms of other economic indicators that would show that the lives of your average person are getting better. I also think there's this thing that is driving a lot of the Trump administration right now of this fear that Trump is getting older. He cannot be the political leader forever and they may not be able to consolidate under someone else. And to me, what this multi-front thing almost feels like, both on the international multi-front and the just kind of like domestic multi-front repression feels like this race to just do as much as they can with this moment that they have right now, knowing that

the clock might be ticking both on how long Trump is going to live just because he's old and also how long a populace would be able to tolerate these things. So there is this kind of like rushed, frenzied attitude that obviously is also being driven on by people like Marco Rubio who are these ideological fucking, you know, just monsters. in terms of their commitment to this sort of thing. But I do think there's this kind of panicked frenzy that is driving everything as well that we need to keep an eye on

because that points to the potential for rupture as well. Now, I do think ultimately, they may be overextending. That seems very possible. You're right, there's been a shift away from really, like, caring and talking too much about Taiwan and China, but also Trump has refused to kind of like back off of Ukraine as well, right?

He's pivoted his position to know maybe the war should continue in a way that I think shows, again, an unwillingness to make a strategic pivot completely. So overextension is a real possibility here, I think. The question is whether or not, I think, as you pointed out, the military industrial complex can react and compensate for that and be able to expand in the face of this, and they are certainly trying. You know, we're seeing tech moving more and more in a militarized direction, and we're seeing

this idea of weaponized AI being used in a military context also becoming more popular. So there are these companies within the military industrial complex and within tech more broadly who definitely want to see this expansion. The other thing that I think may be happening here is that I think just realistically, Trump and Hegseth are not popular with the actual leadership with the military. I think that stupid stunt that they did where they pulled all the generals together did not go well. Every leak that's happened in the wake of that has indicated sort of a lack of support for a lot of what they are trying to push. And so facilitating something like a hot war is a way of pulling the military together in a more united way that is able to strengthen their control over it potentially because it makes this a more dire necessity to have military unity under the control of Trump.

So I do wonder if there's a consolidation of military power that is driving some of this as well. Yeah, that part's really interesting because you got to think like all these military leaders, you know, we have all obviously a million critiques of the military and all this shit. But when they see some fucking alcoholic Fox News host pundit clown, take them from all over the world and tell them come here to listen to my stupid fucking Twitter post about, you know, fat people in the military or whatever the fuck, they take that as incredibly fucking patronizing, annoying bullshit that this fucking asshole has the balls to come and tell us what we need to do, how we're not running things correctly, you know, being talked down to. to by this fucking clown who just barely got sober three months ago. This is, you know, in telling everybody else how to carry themselves, you know, how to shave their be beards, how to get themselves and fit. If I can be fit, you can too. And he just lives this cushy fucking life where he's overpaid to do absolutely nothing

and just stumbles forward in life to higher and higher echelons of status and careerism. I mean, for those guys in the audience, you could fucking hear the eyes rolling. And so that is not a way in which you consolidate support in the military. Now, I'm not, they're not going to be a goddamn military coup against the Trump administration or anything, but that, that gap of legitimacy and buy-in from the military will have consequences. Now, if Trump says it's time for war, they're going to get the fuck up and go to war. But those consequences, I think, are going to be more subtle, more less obvious, but still weaken resolve and weak. in any attempt to make more aggressive moves. And so I think, but I do think conflict is coming, right? I think that was also a sort of prelude to some sort of aggressive act. Is that going to be in Venezuela? Is that going to be in

Iran? Is that going to be somewhere else? I'm not quite sure. But it was an attempt at a pep rally to, you know, in the minds of Heg Seth and Trump to get their military ready for something that they know in the back of their minds that they're not making public quite yet is coming. And again, this is the last Trump administration. He is getting old. He, like Netanyahu, is an insane fucking narcissistic egomaniac that thinks he's making America great again and making America stronger. And so that psychologically can lead to these insane overreaches that are not strategic, that are not well thought out, that don't have mass support, don't even have mass support within the military, but has mass support in this smaller and smaller echo chamber bubble that Trump and Hegseth and Marco Rubio are in that makes them convince this is a good idea. They're all kind of amping each other up. So it's interesting to see where this goes. But yeah, I just thought that Hegseth display was it just is shooting yourself in the foot.

Like if you wanted to ingratiate yourself to the military, that is the exact opposite way to do it. And at the end, I think it is formal procedure not to clap at political speeches. But at the end, you could see Hegseth deflated when he finished his punchline of his stupid fucking speech and it was complete fucking silence in the audience and again a lot of these a lot of these guys have been through a lot more are older than Hegs Seth and do not

take kindly to being fucking ordered around or bossed around by this dumbass you know right yeah and I think we should be attentive to these contradictions that exist right I think you're correct there's no military coup coming or something like that but these contradictions matter because they do shape the decision

making that comes from the administration do you have anything else on Venezuela broadly, or do you want to transition to the next topic? Yeah, I think we can transition to free speech and fascism, which is just dialectically just another aspect of what we've already been talking about. But I do just want to one more exclamation on this conversation. It's just the conflagration of conflict that we're seeing around the world, you know, even like hypothetically, how do we as a species, as a country,

step back from this ledge, right? it seems that the only way forward and all from Ukraine to Taiwan from Venezuela to Iran from Palestine anywhere else in the world it feels like the only thing that this this whole the momentum of this can lead to is catastrophe right is world war three is some sort of like this is a powder keg that is already being ignited and you know you look back at world war two you look back at World War I in the run-ups to those global conflagrations, and you can't help but see not only like certain repetitions, but almost in some cases a worse situation for all of these things to really pop off into some dramatic thing. And so there's so many variables at play that

I think even if there was some come-to-Jesus moment by multiple leaders of crucial countries here, that the momentum itself is pushing the world over the fucking edge here. And I think we're going to see us plummet over that edge sooner than many think. Yeah. Yeah. No, I'm in complete agreement. It is hard to see how a corrective course could occur here. And that is part of what's so dire about the political moment.

Right. So that said, let's talk about what that means domestically a little bit and some lines that are being crossed there potentially. So I will say, like broadly the question of whether or not, you know, this is a fascist regime or not is not something that I think we can answer on this episode. And I think people have very good reasons for wanting to use the word fascism and very good reasons for not wanting to use the word fascism. At the same time, a thing that I hope we can recognize is that there has been a qualitative increase in domestic repression that is happening, or a quantitative increase

in domestic repression that is happening in the United States. And that that is having some sort of qualitative shift on U.S. society more broadly in this way that is not just the same. some of all of the changes that are occurring. There's been a shift that has occurred. I think in many ways, the question of free speech after the Charlie Kirk assassination has become very crucial to this. So the difficult thing is that we still don't really know why Charlie Kirk was killed or any of the details about that. But as everyone who listens to this, I'm sure, saw, the government took it as an immediate opportunity to begin to paint this framework of domestic left-wing extremism, now engaging in political assassination. They, you know, said we found transgender and Antiva ideology

on the bullets. They immediately latched on to that. They maybe even weakened their legal case with some of what they said, because they went so rapidly towards these talking points. In addition to the Charlie Kirk assassination, we also saw the attack at a ICE detention center in Texas, in which, you know, Cash Patel expects us to believe that someone on a bullet just wrote anti-ice, and that that is indicative of some sort of far-left Antifa ideology. In the wake of this, there have been a couple of things that have happened. Trump has made an executive order saying, oh, you know, like Antifa are domestic terrorists. What that means legally is not clear because there is no domestic terror registry in the United States.

There's only the foreign terror organization list. So it's not clear what that means in a strict legal sense, but what that's gearing up for, think is quite clear. And then in addition to that, he passed a national security memorandum, basically saying we are going to move the executive branch and its enforcement mechanisms towards cracking down on left-wing extremism, construed so broadly as to include those with hostile views towards the traditional family, or those who are anti-Christianity. And so they're moving to consolidate this idea of a left-wing domestic threat that is so broad that it absolutely does, just include liberals, honestly. They are defining it extremely, extremely broadly. And they are

talking about going after funding mechanisms for Antifa and pointing to what are really liberal nonprofits. If you look at the list of actual groups that they recently said that they want to go after, there's groups like if not now in JVP, which are again above ground non-profit organizations that I think even many on the radical left would consider to be on the more moderate and liberal wings of this mass movement. And so this attack on, you know, speech and this attack is definitely ramping up. We kind of have to wait to see what it looks like in terms of court cases beginning to happen if they actually start making arrests. And then we have to see to what extent that will be tolerated. But things are sharpening quite intensely. I think one of the things that

is complicated in the United States is that we have the First Amendment. We have this notion of freedom of speech. But the First Amendment is very broad. And the question, and the question of what the scope of the First Amendment is really comes down to several court cases that the Supreme Court could overturn. The most important one is probably Brandon Bird v. Ohio, which found that violent and inciting rhetoric is only illegal if it poses an immediate threat of leading to lawless action. And so under the court precedent previously, you could say we should overthrow the U.S. government. And if that statement is not backed by an immediate conspiracy to do so, it is theoretically legal under the precedent that has been set, even though there are laws on the books that say calling for the overthrow of the U.S. government is illegal. Later, the court would develop a clear and present danger test as a way of testing whether or not speech is legal again with this idea of if the speech is not backed by an immediate criminal action, then speech is not illegal in terms of political speech and incitement. But it is clear that we have a Supreme Court that does not care about precedent, that does not care about these things. And there is no

legislative framework protecting that kind of speech. In fact, the existing federal legislation is much more restrictive about speech because of the McCarthy-era laws that were passed, and it is the court that has defended a more broad interpretation of speech. And so it seems quite likely that the Trump administration will take repressive action that goes in the face of those previous court decisions like Brandenburg v. Ohio in the hopes of creating a situation for overturning that precedent. We'll have to see. what this looks like when things begin to get worse, but I think it is very likely. One of the things that they've highlighted consistently is the use of the IRS to try to go after organizations, which

actually reflects some of the tactics that they've used against organized crime as well. And so in addition to just trying to make specific forms of speech criminalized, they also might increase financial scrutiny in a way to try to look for mistakes on the books for various organizations or something like that and using that as a justification. So, Again, I'm not going to answer the fascism question or not, but domestic repression is ramping up. We are seeing the federal government making this massive pivot towards it. And the language about a left-wing fifth column within the United States is as explicit as it has been since the McCarthy era. And I think this poses a major threat that we need to wrestle with, regardless of what label we apply to it.

So that's kind of just by opening thoughts, Brett, I'll pass it over to you for really anything you have on that. Sure. Well, the first thing is that Allison and I, you know, others have said for a very, very, very long time that, hey, liberals, your desperate attempt to try to separate yourselves from the crazy Antifa left in hopes that you will not be targeted is always going to be an error. We've said many, many times. The history of fascism is the history of not distinguishing between anybody to their left. So whether you are a moderate or a liberal, and I've spoken out, against Antifa or whatever the fuck, we can already see immediately that that is completely, those distinctions are completely obliterated, not even comprehended by many of these people. They all see them as the same. And Antifa is the perfect, open-ended, ambiguous, vague title that can be applied to anybody. And again, if you're just, you're not trying to win over the liberals or the independence or the left, you're trying to consolidate the right.

you can call anybody Antifa and really who does the right wing base hate is not relatively obscure communists like Allison and I though I'm sure they're not fans if they ever learn about us but it's like fucking liberals

and you know George Soros and Nancy Pelosi and these people who they have already been calling for years you know Marxist and communism these are dipshits and dumb asses and cruel evil people and they do not make such

nuanced distinctions distinctions and this is totally in line with the whole history of fascism and or you know right wing authoritarian crackdowns et cetera and we released an episode on rev left recently about the 20th century history of red scares from the palmerade smith act um through the mccarthyism first and second red scare all the way up through the civil rights and using communism to tie it to you know the civil rights campaigns um through the the cold war regan etc all these things and we see that exact same pattern emerging once again with even a beleaguered, unorganized, you know, serious left, like a real left is not organized in a way that could pose any real structural, you know, threat to the overall system as it stands. But it is being used as the fig leaf for a broader crackdown on the entire left as they perceive it, which is anybody to their left.

And so I think that's an important note to stay. I will say, like, to put my cards in the table, like, I understand fascism not as a thing that is or isn't happening, but as a process that's always at play, particularly in a settler colonial state, fascism is inaugurated at the moment that the settler colonial activity begins, and all through American history, there has been fascism, and it's taken more overt or covert forms based on the material conditions and surrounding context. and I have no problem with saying that this is fascism and that we are living through fascism and that Trump and his regime is a fascist regime, but at the same time I'm not saying that like a liberal would say it, which is to imply that that wasn't here during Obama or under Biden or whatever. Those have always been there. And for marginalized groups, you know, indigenous people, black people, immigrants, fascism has always been ever present in their lives, poor people, etc. And so when it bursts more broadly and becomes more overt, we're tended to have these

debates about whether this is or isn't. But I would say, yes, fascism has always been here. It's a process. It's becoming more overt and more acute currently as the material conditions around not only capitalism but empire disintegrate, which is exactly what we would expect, right? Even if we ran like a hypothetical computer program about a society with these material conditions, a good Marxist would look at those conditions and say, that's a goddamn prime, you know, condition set for the rise of fascism. And that is precisely what I think we are seeing. Now, if you're expecting American fascism to be incredibly competent, I think you're just, you know, naive about that. It's cruel. It's evil.

It's violent. it's also incredibly fucking stupid and cringe. It's American fascism. It's never been some sophisticated, high-minded fucking thing. It is a visceral reactionary impulse in the American project that's always been present and is coming out more vociferously as the quality of life for the average American decreases and as global hegemony for the American Empire is being confronted on multiple fronts. So take that for what it is.

But again, we don't really need to get bogged down. in that because it's fairly abstract we're just dealing with what we're dealing with and this is what it is regardless of what you or I want to call it. So I think the main thing I want to stress here is that the strategy here, you know, much like the strategy that we just talked about with ICE and Venezuela and these imperial aggressions here is like advance these things and take advantage of them. And this is very much in line with what Stephen Miller has always wanted, for example. What they're doing is their stoking reactions to justify a crackdown. So they send out these belligerent, buffoonish ice agents to terrorize communities. They're creating a highlight reel for their psychotic supporters.

So they say, yeah, yeah, yeah, you're doing what you promised. At the same time, they know that that is going to necessitate a response on the street level, definitely not the structural Democratic Party level, right, which is completely missing in action, which we should expect. But from the street level, is going to provoke a response that they can then use as the pretense for a further crackdown and point to a justification for, if not outright martial law, than a broader crackdown, which is already happening, right? And they're targeting these places that over the last five to ten years have been particularly in the news for, in the case of Chicago crime and in the case of Portland, radical leftism.

and they're pushing ice into those areas knowing that they're going to generate a response so that they can then justify the crackdown. And that's not to say that there shouldn't be a response. There absolutely should be, but we should see this step-by-step strategy that's at play here. And even though sometimes they have to reach,

like I saw recently on Fox News, they were talking about the unrest in these cities and Trump is talking about Portland is burning to the ground. It's like Portland is totally fucking normal. and they're using clips from like 20-20 pretending like they're happening now as you know to like fucking convince these boomer-brained freaks who watch Fox News that this is actually an existential threat that needs to be you know needs to be cracked down on so I think that is the tactic that does not mean that we should play into it blindly

but it I mean nor does it mean that we should not have a response like I do think it's important and in fact it's not even like there's a coordinated response it just is the masses responding in real time to the infiltration of their cities and communities by these fascist thugs. And that is to be expected and to be applauded because people should do that. But it is a part of this broader strategy and I would not be surprised. We already see, you know, Antifa labeled as a domestic terrorist organization and perhaps this is leading to some sort of martial law. But it's going to be clumsy in this way that as they advance it, they lose more and more

support and they have very little left to bleed really um so it's it's this is the dialectic right back and forth the more that they advance their game plan the more resistance that is being met the more they can use that resistance to justification for further crack down the more they further crack down the more they alienate more and more people in the electorate you know weakening their base of support for this fucking nonsense so those are just i have i have more thoughts on this free speech stuff but yeah what's your what's your thoughts yeah i mean i think there's a couple things that you hit at that get at something that I think is important to emphasize, which is that I think there's a precariousness to what they're doing right now, right? I think you hit at like the extent

to which they are having to just lie as they are trying to escalate, right? So they are trying and provoke a response, but they're also just outright lying about Portland being on fire, blah, blah, blah, blah. And we've seen this before during the 2020 uprisings, that same rhetoric got used, but the 2020 uprisings were a lot more intense than what's happening right now, right? There is a pretty significant difference between what is happening in this moment in Chicago, Los Angeles, and Portland, and what happened in 2020 all across the nation. And I do think that rhetoric is not connecting in the same way. I mean, in L.A., when we were the site of the intensity and it's kind of moved on in terms of the most intense sites, I heard just normal,

relatively apolitical people being like, they're lying about what's happening in this city, even some like more moderate conservatives being just like, I'm offended. My city's not on fire. Right? And there's a certain amount of the population who may not be necessarily opposed to, you know, draconian immigration enforcement, but who also are put off by that lie to a certain degree. And I think you're correct. They have not actually provoked much of a coordinated response. I don't want to pretend like the left isn't organizing right now or the left is not doing a lot of work, pushing a lot of coalitional community self-defense work. But it's, I think, based on what I've seen in Los Angeles, that a lot of that work is organic. And it is spontaneous. And it actually is community members just saying, no, actually, we're not going to put up with this and figuring out a solution to it. I mean, here in L.A., so many of the people I know involved in that work are just the children of undocumented immigrants, like the adult children who are trying to do what they can to defend their own families, essentially. And so there is this very organic nature that I think makes some of the lying, like really

stand out to the populace. And they are at risk, I think, of overextest. a little bit. I do think that's just a real possibility that has to be wrestled with right now. And so we do need to coordinate a response, and we do need to pay attention to the extent to which they are having to lie. We need to politicize that and bring that fact to people in a way that gets them angry and gets them ready to push back. I mean, again, like, I think we're behind, honestly, on coordinating. And realistically, all that I've seen from the left has been largely defensive in orientation. No one's figured out how to move beyond that. And that's okay in a moment of astute crisis, but defensiveness is not going to be sufficient

in the long term to a certain degree. And so there will be a need for more coordination, and that will dialectically ratchet up the state repression simultaneously. The thing that I think I really want to pitch to those on the left right now, though, is there's no way out of this but going through it. You can't run from this. You cannot try to back off. You cannot moderate your demands. As Brett said, they are conflating the liberals with the far left in a way that makes it clear that there's nothing outside of total loyalty to their politics, which is not going to be construed as Antifa terrorism. So running away and backing off is not a solution. You cannot try to say, oh, well, what if we just don't give them a response and somehow that's going to make everything

stable? That is not how this is going to work. And so we're in a very difficult position, but we need to maintain organization. We need to heighten the level of organization that is presently occurring. And we need to be able to politicize the broad mass. in the face of wise and crackdowns that are coming from, again, I think an actually numerically unpopular government. Yeah, and the, you know, the designation of anti-Americanism, anti-capitalism, anti-fascism, advocacy for the revolutionary overthrow of the American government as all indicators of thought crimes, right, of indicators of pre-criminales is it's simultaneously amusing and laughable. but also it's that meme with the Simpson character and the bus saying I'm in danger because it's like oh you know for the last eight years I've been screaming into a microphone

about exactly those things I hope that doesn't come back to bite me in the ass but you know that there's like a general um atmosphere of fear that they're trying to stoke with that and just a sort of implausibility that they'll be able to track all of that down but at the same time and opening up for them to you know target target people who they want to target. There's certainly going to be people that are going to be arrested or attacked or harassed or intimidated or put on a list and monitored that are associated at all with the left in general or anything that they could reasonably say is Antifa. And that is cause for concern and something that I worry about in my own life. I'm sure a lot of you have questions like, is this Trump bluffing

and talking shit or is this actually real? And when you marry this Trump regime and those sorts of politics with AI, which we'll get into here in a second, there is a real now bolstered ability for this repressive regime to use AI to do some of the things that before were implausible, right? You have like during the War on Terror, whatever, and the NSA and all these things that came out, they're compiling all this information. But there was a practical limit on the amount of information that people could siphon through. And I think with AI, the ceiling on that is raised enormously. Even with all the limitations of AI, which we'll get to in a second, I think there is an ability now to just scrape social media, find these posts,

elucidate networks of connections between people. And, you know, when they start doing that, you know, like a lot of us, if we have any social media presence at all, are going to be in those networks. Does that mean that we're immediately going to get a knock on the door? No. But it does mean that we're going on lists that we're being monitored and and this is a this has an overall chilling effect on people and what they do at least at least you know publicly and outwardly and I think it's also smart to be careful about what we do say publicly knowing you just have to assume that anything you say publicly on any of these corporate ran fucking techno fascist platforms are going to be scraped in and identified and connected with you and so that does you know just

it's a it's a call for some some basic sort of strategy when it's comes to that stuff, but they are building out this AI surveillance state. That I think is the main driver. You know, we're going to talk about the AI bubble. A lot of these data centers going up, which are propping up the U.S. economy currently, are not merely to pump out AI slop forever. These are data centers and an AI infrastructure and a bubble, really, that has a lot of government and military contractual buy-in because the government and the military sees promise in these technologies precisely for the bolstering of the surveillance state. So when I see an AI data center going up, I see that as a similar infrastructural

buildout to cop cities. That's actually what it's going to be used for. It's not going to be used for these viral absurdities, AI slop things that convince boomers it's real on Facebook. It's going to be used for this sort of stuff. Again, we'll get to that here in a second. I just want to put that on the table. but there's two points I want to make before I wrap up this section here

one is the Zionist media takeover which I think you know needs to be highlighted here Larry Ellison the TikTok buyout Barry Weiss is failing free press bullshit getting 250 million and being put as the lead editor or whatever on CBS News there is now a concerted domestic effort on behalf of American citizens

right who have complete and obvious and stated Zionist sympathies. And in fact, in so many ways, put Zionist project in Israel ahead of their own natural-born country and in their echelon and hierarchy of what they give a fuck about, actively taking over the domestic media apparatus, not just old-school media like CBS, but also new school social media like TikTok, in order to try to reinforce the domestic media narrative on behalf of Israel. on behalf of Zionism.

Now, to what degree that will work, I'm not sure. Like, I don't think, like, so many Americans have been educated on this that no matter how much pro-Zionist nonsense you puke out on these fronts, is it really going to be convincing, particularly the young people? Like, yeah, I think you'll be able to convince, like, you know, boomer libs and stuff that just watch mainstream media that are kind of already bought into these narratives to further buy in. But I don't think the young generation is,

lacks the media savvy to be able to see through this bullshit. So there's an attempt here. It shows what big money can buy. It shows the connections between the economic elite in the United States and the Zionist regime. And they're kind of sort of shared strategic approach here. But we should be aware that this is happening and kind of continue to point it out. But again, I think the efficacy is pretty blunted among the 40 and undercrow, which really is the future of Zionism in this country.

You know, I just, there's no more putting the genie back in the bottle on this front. So that's the front. And then the very last thing I wanted to say, you mentioned it, Allison, which is these, you know, these shooters and the, the ostensible ice shooter, which grotesquely, whatever this turns out to be, he only killed migrants, only injured and killed migrants. Not a single ice agent was hurt, which kind of either feeds into the utter incompetency here or to some sort of conspiracy that this was, you know, whatever you want to say, like a false flag or something. to generate more backlash, but I'm not even sure you need that to generate the backlash that is being generated. So the one thing that's concerning about all these shooters is that they tend to be ghosts. Like, you know, the dude who shot Trump in the ear, like, what do you know about him? Can you guys tell me three facts you know about that, dude? The ice shooter, what do we know about him?

These, you know, these mass shooters and stuff. Maybe some will get a little bit of a profile. They were in these nihilistic internet subcultures or whatever. But even that is so fickle. And what really happens is that these shooters are ghosts in the sense that there is no real, it's just an amorphous blob of like posts and donations that nobody can make sense of. But the immediate thing is to do the red versus blue thing where it's like he was one of yours. No, he was one of yours. And then the right just believes that all these shooters are like trans Antifa, radical lefties, right?

And the left is like, hold on now this guy voted for Trump or anti-ice seems like a really weird thing for any anti- um you know anti-ice person to say or put on their bullets and isn't it so convenient that it's right there but then it's like what what are these things really used for like wouldn't trump be doing the exact same thing even if these things hadn't taken place and isn't there just a fact that there's a bunch of young nihilistic people in a decaying society in a very armed and violent society that will just lash out and does that under every administration and so so it's kind of hard to see or make sense of. And I think there's a real rabbit hole you can get sucked into to trying to make sense of that stuff that I think doesn't really lead anywhere, right? And you see this on the right all the time. They're still hyper obsessing over, you know, trapped doors and exploding microphones with the Kirk assassination. And, you know, we have this guy who was involved after 9-11 was doing interviews about al-Qaeda who was there and he's a patsy and all this weird shit. And it leads absolutely nowhere. Like it doesn't ever come to any firm conclusions, but they spend weeks and months

hyper fixating on this stuff, which seems to be like just a red herring, you know, whether that's consciously placed there or not. You're just kind of following the drain and, and naval gazing on these, on these ambiguous fucking things that there's no conclusion to. And that kind of, it wraps up a lot of your attention and stuff. And I don't, again, there's like, where does this lead? What conclusion can I even draw from this? I don't know. But I'm wondering if you have thoughts on on the weirdness of these mass shootings and and kind of the the ambiguity about what it's all about. Yeah, it's a tough one. So, okay, cards on the table. Some of our long-time haters might be surprised to hear me say this. I've maybe taken the paranoia and parat politics

pill like a little bit more. I think, yeah, I think I'm slightly sympathetic to some of the conspiratorial side of things. But I think the extent that I'm sympathetic to them, I think that it not making sense is kind of the point. If there's any level of orchestration to what's happening, it is orchestrated in a way that is meant to be basically meaningless. My stance for a long time has basically been that I do not think the government is going out of its way to facilitate these kind of shootings. But I do think it often has what feels like a surprising amount of intelligence that could have stopped it that didn't get acted on. And if you see that relatively consistently with some of these like terrorgram discord servers and all of that, that we know have some federal surveillance of them.

So I try to walk a line of like, I don't think the government's like actively going out and creating shooters. I do think there are some weird webs of connection that we shouldn't ignore. And I think the fact that they're across administrations actually shouldn't be that, you know, concerning for that view because of the fact that all these administrations. share a certain level of commitment towards the development of a more refined American fascism and surveillance state. I mean, broadly, if I have to really put my cards on the table, I think the uptick in nihilistic shootings,

basically, in these teen subcultures defined by nihilism, defined by a certain form of, like, white supremacist esoteric fascism to a certain degree probably has some overlap with intelligence work. And I think the real indication of that, if you want to read a really good piece, it would be to read the Rolling Stone article about Ottomoffin's attempted attack on a U.S. military base that gets into how the FBI has been paying and funding someone to write text in support of the Order of Nine Angles, one of the

kind of groups involved in this. Again, does any of that mean that there's like this concerted centralized conspiracy? I actually think no. But I do think that all of that indicates that this kind of material, this nihilistic nonsense floating out there that is motivating these actions, is something that the intelligence apparatus is willing to tolerate, I think because it creates these ghost-like impossible to understand phenomenon that justifies increased surveillance, that really justifies whatever the government needs at a given time, and that increases the amount of tension in the population more generically. So I definitely maybe am a little bit more on the parapolitics side of things here, but, you know, I don't think, yeah, maybe I'm a

moderate on this question, I guess, is where I would. place myself. I'm kind of Machiavelli-Pilled on the Israel Charlie Kirk thing. It's like, do I think Israel carried out the assassination of Charlie Kirk? No. But do I think it's kind of good that the right wing is convinced that they did? I'm like, okay, kind of. So there's a little realpolitik going on that I'm kind of amusingly watching.

And if you're interested in that, like check out like the Candace Owen stuff around Charlie Kirk and the text messages that she just revealed, and the short of it is just that ostensibly, according to these narratives at the end, Charlie Kirk was turning against his Jewish Zionist donors and actually had texts that actually have been verified by his own people that Candace Owens put out, that basically said Charlie Kirk was talking to his Jewish Zionist donors saying that he can no longer support the Israeli cause and was moving more in the direction of Candace and Tucker Carlson, who were his close personal friends on that issue and was, you know, inviting on Dave Smith and these sort of figures on the right that, you know, these big money

donors did not enjoy him doing. And these texts at the 48 hours before he was killed saying that more or less he's breaking with the cause, according to this narrative is the impetus that Israel would have to carry out such an assassination. So again, this is them following their own you know, kind of conspiratorial-minded thinking on that issue. But what it does do materially, and for our interest, whatever's true about that, is that it generates more and more disdain and hatred and distrust of Israel on the American right among younger conservatives, which is the exact demographic Israel does not want to lose.

And Netanyahu having to come out 48 hours after Charlie Kirk was killed to try to convince people that he didn't do it is a fucking, huge shift in the Overton window on the right that I'm having a little, as I said, Machiavelli-pilled enjoyment at watching unfolds. I don't know. Totally. No, no. Again, like, I think at the end of the day, like, people get carried away with the speculation one way or another. I think we can see materially what the impacts of everything that's happening are. And, like, trying to uncover some vast conspiracy might be interesting, but it is not immediately useful. And frankly, at this point, I am too busy with, like, actual organizing to, like, spend any time worried about that.

It's just kind of where I land intellectually a little bit more. But the practical on the ground considerations remain somewhat the same regardless, I think. Absolutely. All right. Well, I think we have one more section here to cover in our notes, and that is what we've been alluding to, which is the state of the economy and its relationship to AI and the almost certain AI bubble that is continuing to. to be inflated and is actually, and literally this is true, holding up the U.S. economy. Yes. If this motherfucking AI bubble bursts, the entire economy is going to collapse like a house

of cars and I think make 2008 look pretty damn tame by comparison. So let's transition into talking about this and the economy. Some facts I just want to make up front about the economy. 50% of all consumer spending is done by the richest 10% of Americans currently. I think something like 93% of all stocks are owned by the top 10%. Without the construction of these data centers, the U.S. would already be in a recession. Virtually zero growth in the economy outside of this AI infrastructural buildout. And so what, and there's many more stats to talk about, but the overall picture that it paints is an incredibly top heavy economy with a lower 60, 70, 80% of Americans,

struggling to get by. No real movement in like people being able to get jobs. If you have a job, you're not necessarily getting laid off quite yet. But if you're trying to get a job, it's fucking impossible. And all of it is propped up and continue to be humming along by what is almost certainly a bubble, which is not to say, as we made clear in previous episodes, that there's nothing to this large language model stuff. There's no place in the economy for it. Certainly the government believes that there's some advantages for it.

with this stuff. But that is just radically overinflated. And that is, and we've seen this with the dot-com bubble. We've seen this with, you know, the mortgage crisis in 2008. We see this over and over and over again. These things always and everywhere lead to economic collapses. Overinvestment, a sort of glut of investment that doesn't pan out, massive losses that drags the economy down with it. And in a globalized economy has reverberations throughout the world. So, Alison, what are your opening thoughts on the AI, the idea of whether or not it's a bubble and the general state of the American economy? So a couple things. One, yeah, I think it is a bubble. And I think the other stat piece that is very useful for looking at it as a bubble is the fact that according to multiple reports now, a majority of U.S. companies that invested heavily in AI are not seeing any returns in productivity or profitability on AI. And that for me is the other key missing piece. I think you painted the picture clearly how much AI is the only thing keeping the economy afloat.

And then the real kind of nail in the coffin is that it's also not making any of the people who are paying for it any money right now. And AI, the other thing we should acknowledge, is only going to get more expensive. These companies are charging prices for it that are in fact not sustainable in terms of them becoming profitable. And so it is going to get more expensive and more and more companies are going to actually see not getting returns on this. And that may reduce the demand for AI, which puts us in a position of that bubble potentially bursting. I think the AI is actually already suddenly getting more expensive in ways people don't realize, like I use an AI product as part of my job as

a software developer. And the amount of premium features behind that that get locked off after a certain amount has increased in the time since I started using that software. And I think we are seeing that more and more where there's this attempt to kind of introduce higher prices, limiting access, that paired with a lack of actual, you know, usefulness with the corporations and companies that are investing it is pretty solidly indicative of a problem for the economy. Again, the jobs numbers in the U.S. are also abysible and not consistently being reported at this point because Trump is supposed to consistent reporting around them. And so we find ourselves in this difficult situation right now where we are highly over leveraged in one industry. It is not proving to be useful. The

companies in that industry are not turning a profit, are investing massively in physical infrastructure for data centers in ways that are costing a staggering amount of money. And the U.S. government has tied itself to this through investment of money into this. In my opinion, we're sitting on a ticking time bomb right now. And this is the other reason, I think, that we see this rush from the Trump administration to just push everything it can push on every front, because the economy is already in a bad spot. People are already mad about it, and it's probably going to get worse. We keep saying, oh, we haven't seen numbers this bad since 2009. And what happened in 2008 and 2009? Well, obviously, a massive recession. We are coming right back to that, and this is a bigger bubble than housing

potentially that I think will have a devastating impact when it pops. So on the economy question, I am quite concerned and I think this is going to become a disaster for the country. Absolutely. Healthcare costs are going up so that this whole government shutdown is basically about the Trump administration and the Republican Party stripping tax credits from the ACA that kept prices on premiums low for houses and for households. And now with that, this going out, and when the Democrats are trying to stop it, whatever, I mean, it's small cookies for the overall economy. But basically for millions of people, if this goes through, this will mean that they're already insanely expensive fucking health care costs, monthly

health care costs are going to triple or double or triple in many instances. So you have health care costs going through the roof. The construction of these AI data centers are driving up basic utility costs. Housing is more unaffordable than it's ever been ever. education is hard to say where it even leads like if you're going into college to get a degree like you know a generation or half a generation ago everybody was told learn to code and now those people are some of the least employed college graduates in the country right now um this is a real how again a house of fucking cards a fascinating fact i just heard is that there is now more private equity firms in the united states than there are mcdonalds there's about over 16 000 private equity firms

compared to about 14,000 McDonald's across the country. And what does this actually mean? Well, it indicates the top-heavy nature of the American economy because private equity firms are primarily interested in putting together financial products for a certain class of people that can afford it. Again, we get back to roughly the top 10%. So you have an economy that is based on a bubble that is driven almost in large part by the top 10%.

That is now facing, even if the AI bubble collapses, I think it's fair to say that there's going to be massive job losses to LLMs to AI, especially going forward as these things are maybe made better. You know, there's real precarity for young people trying to find a career that might last. The trades, like as somebody who is now in the union trades, are being really driven forward by these data center buildouts. you know it's it's a bonanza right now uh for the trades but that's the short-term bonanza that comes you know at all these other costs so there's a real contradiction there and so what we see when we zoom out is a picture of not only an empire in crisis lashing out not only a sort of tariff regime that is you know shooting itself in its own foot but a domestic economy that is on the precipice and that is being run by the trump administration so we saw how obviour

handled 2008 and in contrast to Trump, like, you know, just as far as like technocratic ability to deal with an issue, almost anybody would rather have an Obama type administration than a Trump administration. We saw how Trump handled fucking COVID. So now imagine a scenario in the next two to three years where you have an economic crisis and a fucking war with Iran or with Venezuela or whatever the fuck happening at the same time. I mean, I think we are in the lead up to the Great Depression in World War II type of scenario. It doesn't mean it's definitely going to lead there. But I think if we have to look back at a historical period in American history that was

most like the one we're in now, it would be the late 19, fucking 20s. And having the most incompetent fucking anti-evidence-based administration, maybe in our, I mean, maybe ever, definitely in our lifetimes overseeing that crisis, holy, fucking shit um you know we're in for some fucking dazzling historical moments uh i think coming in the next year two years three years and that's the problem with trying to predict this stuff we have we don't know when it's going to give right no financial analyst or you know economic guru actually knows when this is going to fucking tumble there's so many variables at play but it just does seem from every angle and i'm no economic expert myself but from any reasonable analysis of the situation

that there's only, just like I was saying earlier with the conflagration, the global conflagration, only one direction this can lead in one way or another, that's off a fucking cliff. Yeah. No, I completely agree. And I think the comparison to that particular time period, it's horrifying

to think about that, right? But that is what it feels like, I guess. And, you know, I'll try to give us something positive here again, which is that all of these conditions are going to increase desperation, significant in this country. And that can be taken advantage of by fascism or it can be taken advantage of

by socialism, right? Like, you know, I set this like, this is some friends recently, like, you know, things are getting a lot worse. It's still socialism and barbarism just like it was 10 years ago and just like it was 100 years ago, right? Like the calculus sort of remains the same. And so as we find ourselves back in these historical waters that are quite terrifying about the degree of crisis, I think it really does just come down to the fact that our only option is to try to pave a socialist path through this. And we either succeed at that or it's probably the end of us. And that kind of sucks to say and that kind of sucks to acknowledge. But with the degree of the crisis that we're talking about, it is probably true. But it is also true that there are people who, if this bubble

pops, are going to be furious at finance capital, are going to be furious at a government that through hundreds of billions of dollars at AI are going to be furious towards a capitalist class that is increasingly parasitic, as we have talked about before, in very obvious ways in terms of its financialization. And that presents an opportunity for us. But the difficulty is that in order for that opportunity to work, we have to have connections to the masses. We have to exist in their communities, in their neighborhoods, and be able to do that. And that is why a thing that I think we always come back to you on this show is that you have to be organizing, you have to be out there, you have to be doing the work. Otherwise, we will be trampled under the

momentum of history. Essentially, our only option is to fight. And if we're being honest in my perspective, the American left is doing quite bad at that. And so in response to rising crisis and rising fascism, it is necessary for a rising level of discipline and organization on our behalf. And that is, I think, what hope looks like in the face of, again, I think you're right, Brett, another great depression in potential world war. Absolutely. Like the old Joe Rogan boomer meme said, weak men create hard times. And the weak men who think they're the strong men are creating very hard times. And you're right, going through the war on terror and going through 2008, there's a learning curve that occurs where at the time there was, you know, muted.

but it was there, but it was drowned out by the mainstream skepticism of, you know, the war machine during 2000, like, you know, stand behind us, the yellow ribbons, support our troops, fuck you if you don't. And then 2008, yeah, there was a lot on the, it's always both, both instances on the left, a lot of, like, sort of disdain and pointing it out. Now that is more widespread. I think across the political spectrum, among regular people, there's great skepticism towards the war machine, towards the empire, and there is great. skepticism towards the economic elites. It's framed differently depending on where you are on the political spectrum, but there's a lot less just

visceral and intuitive buy-in than there was a generation ago. And I lived through, you know, the early 2000s, Bush era, and I lived through the 2008 crisis and Occupy. I saw the ambient level of disdain and distrust, and it wasn't as widespread as it is now. So we go

through these iterations, and people do learn things. But again, will that cash out in the form of some sort of left-wing, you know, emergence, or will that cash out in the form of another fascist strong man promising to, you know, fix things himself? I think one thing that Trump demonstrates is that, I mean, to people who are paying attention who are not totally in the cult, especially young people, oh, this right-wing populist bullshit about anti-woke and let's hate trans people and immigrants are the source of all of our problems, it actually

didn't solve my problems. Just like young liberals and young progressives during Obama, they thought he was going to fix everything and they had to come to the sad realization that, holy shit, he didn't and that radicalized a lot of people. The right's going through a similar thing. Now, does that push them to say,

we need somebody further to the right? We need a fucking Caesar or a Hitler. Or does that say, hey, maybe I should look to the actual economic left who haven't been given a chance yet. We've tried liberalism. We've tried identity politics, progressivism. We've tried neoliberalism. Now we've tried right-wing authoritarianism, and my life gets

shittier and shittier and shittier. What is left to try? Now, if you're a discerning, thoughtful fucking person, there's only one more place to look, and that's to the motherfucking economic left. But again, fascism isn't rational. It's not logical. It's visceral. It's emotion-based. And so some significant portion of those disenfranchised young right-wingers, I think as articulated by a Nick Flentes are saying the problem is we're not going right wing enough. And so that's the conditions we're entering here. Yeah. And it's our job to offer an alternative, I think.

And that is going to be a difficult task. But again, I mean, I think those are the stakes. We do that or we lose to fascism. And at the end of the day, that means that we need to step it up, which is not a fun message at the moment, I think. But unfortunately, where we're at. Absolutely. All right. Well, let's wrap it up there. These are rapidly developing situations. So we'll keep an eye on it. Hopefully we allowed, you know, people to get some sort of cathartic release about what's going on, but also maybe some, you know, analytical knowledge of how to assess these things and work through these things. That's what we're here for with our community of listeners is to as a community work through, you know, these real life events in real time and trying to make sense of them because if you don't understand them, you can't act on them properly. And so hopefully we're playing our small, humble role in a rising American real left. We'll see about that. But thank you to everybody who

supports the show, who listens to the show. You know, free Palestine. Our hearts are with everybody fighting ice, fighting the Trump regime. And we do have hard times ahead of us. But those hard times are opportunities for us to elevate our being, right? Not only elevate our society, our revolutionary consciousness, elevate the sort of people we are because all throughout human history. Our ancestors, no matter who you are, went through incredibly fucking hard times. And they, how they responded to those hard times is what we look back and call history. And so we are the vehicles through which history manifests. We are not the impotent plate things of history. And so it's time for us to think and to act and to, you know, have a wide-eyed,

deep understanding of what's happening as it unfolds, reach out to our community and the people around us and do every fucking thing we can to push this catastrophe of a system in a better direction. So love and solidarity, everybody out there fighting a good fight, and we'll be back with you soon. You know, You know,