Rev Left Radio - Guillotines for the Epstein Class

Episode Date: February 17, 2026

Alyson and Breht discuss a range of current events, including Cuba, the Epstein Files, Iran and much more.  Make a donation to Socialist Night School via Venmo @OmahaNightSchool Outro Song: "to each their dot" by Haley Heynderickx & Max Garcia Conover ---------------------------------------------------- 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 everybody. Welcome back to Red Menace. All right. On today's episode, we had originally planned an episode to kind of talk about the life and legacy of Gassan Kanafani, you know, the Palestinian Freedom Fighter. And we will get to that eventually. I think that's important to kind of do historical, theoretical work on particular Palestinian liberation fighters and, you know, founders of the PFLP, etc. So we will get to that eventually. But at this point, we just felt like there was so much shit happening in the United States. the world that we had to kind of just kind of work through it for our own sake, our own sanity, and hopefully to help other people have not only the cathartic release of hearing other people who they, you know, hopefully respect and, you know, whose opinions align with their own talk about these issues, but also for the, you know, analytical depth and theoretical depth that

hopefully we can bring to it to have some clarity about everything that's happening. So we'll see if we achieve that goal. But obviously, Allison is with me again today. And I think we're going to start off just kind of talking about the overall vibe of the situation and how each of us can try to kind of really kind of stay sane in what feels like an escalating dystopia where our enemies are in power all over the world and things seem to genuinely be getting worse and kind of how we can make sense of that in relation to our own personal existences and what it means for the rest of our lives. But Allison, welcome and any opening thought you might have before we get into that.

Yeah, no, I mean, I think this will be good to talk through. I think, you know, from my perspective, just like discussing it kind of subjectively, you text him with Brett a little bit in the lead up to this episode, but it feels like at this moment, we're not just seeing like a crisis in American society and then the international ripples of that and like the classic sense. Obviously, as Marxists, we think crisis is sort of endemic to class society. But there's something so horrifying about this kind of current moment of crisis and that we're seeing just sort of the unbridled kind of evil of the ruling class

without any ideological justification for it, without any claim that, you know, they're acting in defense of higher values, which was obviously always bullshit, but which at least like showed some level of like self-consciousness to their own avarice, like, you know, evil. And in this current moment, I think what's really been bizarre about, you know, really, I think the second Trump administration, but we started to see some of this under Biden, too. It's just this kind of like mask off. We're doing imperialism. Mask off.

Yeah, there is a fucking pedophile elite in this country and they're not going to face consequences for it. Kind of, you know, there's no defense for it anymore. It's just, yeah, this is what it is and you're going to accept it. And there's a sort of destabilizing horror to seeing a crisis that doesn't have an apology attached to it, that doesn't have ideological niceties attached to it, that doesn't have ideological niceties attached to it. And in a sense, I think that's like a really good thing because it demystifies the reality of the world that we're living in. But it's also very destabilizing. And I think like we can look at the world as Marxists and we can take on the analytic lens of historical materialism.

But we're also like people who are impacted by the things we see and the news that we're taking in and the realizations about the world. And that's obviously going to have like actual impacts on who we are, on our mental health, on our ability to just exist in this society. So I think talking about, you know, some of that horror, talking about some of this broader sense that I feel at least of just like shock about everything is a worthwhile undertaking because, again, like us and you, the listeners are people who still have to live in this world and figure out how to navigate the subjective side of things as well. Yeah, and on one level, like I tell myself and others now that this,

is history, right? Like we were born into a sort of fairly unique interregnum with a certain unipolar moment and we were born in the belly of the beast of that unipolar hegemon. And, you know, you could, we had the sort of intellectual class pumping out stuff, end of, end of history type stuff and, you know, sort of triumphalism in the wake of the collapse of the Soviet Union. And there was a sense growing up that it's just kind of kind of, you know, even if it was sort of implicit, that it was just going to kind of slowly kind of get better for everybody and that you had a future and that your future, if you did these certain things, you know, you would have a nice future.

If you went to college and you got a degree and you worked hard that there was a chance at having a decent life like your boomer grandparents had, and depending who your parents were, maybe that your parents had. And, and, you know, we can kind of reasonably say that that was the exception to the historical rule. And we're kind of right back into history. in a sense, you know, and we're no longer buffered by the unipolar hegemony and, you know, all the things that maybe people in previous generations in the U.S. since the, since the World War II,

sort of post-World War II consensus took for granted. But on another level, while, you know, on one level, this is not unique to be in history in this sense and that most of our ancestors live through very troubling times and unstable times in their own right, depending on how far you want to go back and how you want to think about that. Certainly in the modern history has been sort of upheaval after upheaval. But on the other hand, we have this new element, which is that we are hyper radically aware of everything all the time. That because of the instantaneous nature of the communication apparatuses that we use every day, the technological advancements, social media, the Internet, that we are in a way kind of bombarded and tapped into the chaos of it all.

And in a previous time, like, you know, even if you lived in the middle of Nebraska during World War II, yeah, maybe some guys from your town got drafted and maybe a protest or two, you saw on the news and you saw the stuff happening, you know, through the newspapers at that time and then in Vietnam to an extent through the television shows. But it wasn't like direct mainlined into your consciousness every second of every day and not just that issue, but every issue around the world. And so that really does present, I think, a new sort of psychological challenge to our generation in particular, where, yes, we're back in history and that's not particularly novel, but the instantaneous way in which we interact with it and the depth of our engagement with everything that's happening, that is new. And so, you know, there are collective and individual things that we can and should do, I think, to kind of protect our sanity and to make ourselves more robust for the inevitable and, perhaps never-ending fights that are coming down the pipeline for the rest of our lives. And that there is not going to be a single moment of victory. There's not going to be a single moment where everything falls into place and that we can just coast out the rest of our lives in relative happiness and contentment, that we have

to kind of prepare ourselves psychologically for the long fight. And living in a period of historical transition, I think, kind of condemns us in some way to spending the rest of our lives engaged. And that I think also implies some sort of approach to that reality that can kind of keep us sane. That doesn't entail recoiling totally into your personal life and trying to shut it out. That's an impossibility anyway.

You know, the ostrich strategy of shoving your head in the dirt and looking away, that might be okay for a while. But as we all know, eventually politics in one form or another is going to come knocking on your door, whether that's climate change, whether that's AI taking your job, whether that's World War III, like, you can't hide from politics. So that's a non-starter. You know, that's a form of cowardice and it's a non-starter and it won't work. So I think, you know, I just wanted to kind of say that up front. And I have some ideas for how individuals can kind of protect their sanity, but I want to toss it back over to Allison for her thoughts.

Yeah. So I think like the amount of information that's just available all the time to us and the extent to which you can just kind of like let yourself sink into that information and really like, you know, doom scroll is the term that I think people use. Is this, like, unique thing where, you know, I, at my worst times, I have found myself just spending hours scrolling through Twitter. And, like, everything that I have seen on Twitter has made me feel worse, right? Has had the effect of making me feel more hopeless about the world, has had the effect of, you know, making me not have a ton of faith that there is a way out for humanity, all of these things. And so, you know, I think there is all that information and we need to be careful not to sink into it.

And I do think like figuring out how to relate to the internet and relate to that information is kind of one of the important things individuals need to be doing. I think there's this weird tension between it's like, well, I'm a communist. I want to be appraised of current events and know what's going on. And that requires me to be on top of information. But also the way in which information is algorithmically served to us by platforms that generate money off. of facilitating controversy and outrageous perspectives and all of these things,

makes it hard to do that consumption of info in a way that is kind of sane. And I think on top of that, the like takeover of both media and social media platforms by kind of tech fascists who have really aligned themselves with the right and created space for that also means

that like we're bombarded with like the most reactionary ideology in these spaces while we're trying to get info from them. And I don't know that I have like the perfect answer for what, you know, the solution to that looks like. But I do think a more meditated engagement with social media, more immediate engagement with news media is probably something that needs to be developed. But again, like you said, Brett, it can't just be like a turning away and like, you know, head in the sand approach. One thing I was kind of thinking about as

I was wrestling with this is I think you and I, we did like a Patreon episode on a Bo Burnham's inside when that came out, which is, you know, a comedy special that's very like tuned in, I think, to this information overload and what all of this does to us. But it's really interesting. Like I was going back and re-listing some of the music from that. And it's very upset about like corporate wokeness and like, you know, the joke is like bugles take on race. But, you know, it's weird. The information overload part of that media has really aged well.

But the actual content has it in that like we don't even have corporate wokeness anymore, right? We have full-blown corporate fascism, aligning itself with, like, open white supremacist right-wing ideology in this country. And so things, I think, have only gotten worse, sort of since the pandemic in terms of the psychic mental health effects of these social media landscapes. And I think, again, there has to be some strategy for mediating it there while not giving up on taking any information. I don't know if you have found anything that has worked for you, but I find that this is, like,

a crucial question for me at least in staying sane during these times. Yeah, I mean, I think there has to be some mediation. And, you know, this is not coming from a place of I've perfected this in my own life, right? My shit is messy and oscillating and I'll delete the apps for several days and go quiet. But then something big will happen and I'll be sucked right back in. X in particular, Twitter in particular. Yeah. I can feel the gravitational pull. When I lock in, especially around a big event, it's just I am like sucked in in a way that I'm not with any other social media. platform. And it's also the most overtly reactionary. You cannot scroll Twitter for more than a minute without seeing like insane fascism, hardcore racism, slurs everywhere, the richest man in the world

retweeting the craziest fucking right-wing cooks you've ever heard. And it's, and it's just disorienting. You're seeing Zionist propaganda efforts on every platform. And then you're trying to combat that in your own mind. And I think there's a, there's a benefit to the ruling class and the status quo to keep people bedazzled and befuddled and sort of disoriented and to have their attention span being jerked around so quickly that they can't focus in on anything. So I think step one is not to necessarily extract yourself entirely because there are some obvious benefits to staying in tune with what's going on, but you know, to set obvious limits. Most of our phones have time limits that we can set, you know, I'd give myself an hour a day to going into the social media chaos, whirlwind,

and kind of, you know, understanding people's takes or seeing what's going on, but that I'm going to, I'm going to set time aside to do other things. And, you know, here are some other things. And I'm just talking about the personal level. I think number one on the collective level, before I get into the personal level, and a lot of these things I've said before, but I think they're worth, you know, re-saying to myself and to others all the time. On the communal level, getting involved in your community is always going to be genuinely helpful. I know Allison and I and anybody on this side of things is talking about organizing, get organized. It does give you a grounding in an actual real life community that isn't online.

It gives you a sense that you're working together with other people to make a difference, even if that's small and on the communal level, getting involved in tenant organizing. There's a way in which that grounds you and brings your focus back down to your immediate sphere of control, your immediate sphere of influence in your actual own community, while at the same time building out the sort of ground level capacities that are absolutely essential to build on for any future attempt to build real political power, which is, of course, the ultimate goal. On the individual level, though, there's some things that I deal with and that I use and I think that there's some real benefits here. And again, this is going to be retreading some ground, but maybe it hits somebody else in a new way for the first time or maybe you haven't heard some of these things. I try to wake up and I don't always do this. I have to go to work at 6 a.m. every day, but I wake up at 5 a.m. on my best days.

And I spend the first 30 minutes meditating in silence, right? My whole family's still asleep. I'll do a guided meditation often. And that really sets a certain, it basically reset your nervous system. It calms your nervous system down and centers it so that I can go throughout my workday. I can engage in the world and learning about the world without necessarily having my nervous system ramp up and start redlining. And there's a sense that I get when I keep a consistent meditation practice.

that I can handle anything. And I notice that goes away when I don't meditate. When I don't meditate, I find myself more anxious, more worried, more frazzled at things. When I keep a consistent meditation practice, I truly have. And it kind of emerges really subtly in the background of your being. But this feeling that I can, no matter what happens, tragedy in my personal life, tragedy on the political sphere, to some extent, even my own annihilation, that these things I have a sort of comfort or okayness with.

And that really gives me a robustness, right? It's not a flight from reality. It's not a cushy feeling that everything's going to be great. I'm just a terminal optimist no matter what happens. It's just the sense that even though things are dark and very likely to get darker, that I have a certain confidence that I can take on anything. I can face any challenge and fundamentally be okay. And that, I think, is a profound accomplishment that we,

can all strive for in our own lives. The other things that I do, spend time in the natural world, you know, go on a walk with no technology in the woods, just spend a little bit of time, even if it's like a couple hours a week, if you can make that happen. And, you know, my schedule is incredibly busy. I can almost never make that happen. But, you know, last weekend I spent an hour and a half in the woods with my son. And there's a way that you just reconnect, not only with your family, but with the natural world. And it's ebbs and flows that I think is mentally and emotionally grounding. One more thing, and then I'll toss it over to Allison, is like, this is applicable to some and not applicable to others. Everybody's economic situation is very different.

I've become increasingly obsessed with kind of keeping a low overhead, that I want to like keep the amount of money I spend as low as I possibly can to be able to kind of have some economic cushion for the inevitable upheavals that are coming one way or another, whether it's AI or a world war or a dollar collapse or who knows what could happen, trying to, you know, not overconsume, not overreach, right? I have a really old pickup truck that's like over 200,000 miles on it. And, you know, I could in some theoretical world maybe have a small car payment and go buy a new car. I'm driving this thing until its wheels fall off. I'm trying to keep my prices and the cost of living as low as I can. Again, easier said than done. I live in Nebraska. It's not as high

cost as many other places. People are just, you know, to the grindstone, just barely getting by. So that's not applicable to everybody. But if you do have any chance to do that, there's a certain economic anxiety that comes with writing on very tight margins. And if you can lower that, reduce your consumption, be happier and happier with less and less. I think that's going to be forced on us economically anyway. And so there's a certain way that I'm like, So prefiguring that in my own mentality as much as I can. Again, I have three kids. It's not easy.

I don't always succeed at it. But it's something I try to do. And there's a little anxiety reduction on that front. But those are marginal things. But I think if you stack them on top of each other, they can kind of help kind of create a certain robustness in our individual lives that is useful. Allison? Yeah. I think, you know, I'll start with the collective as well.

I think you're right that like organizing means something. And then, you know, yeah, I think there's like a few levels to that. One is I think you're totally correct that like when you actually do organizing, there's a terrain that you exist in which you are able to affect change and you can see the effects of change, right? Like, especially in tenant organizing is just the example that I'll use. Like, yeah, I may not in the immediate term have the ability to like change the structure of property in this world, even though that is what I am fighting to do long term.

But in the short term, I can see winds that impact people's lives. I can see the way that a community coming together and fighting against their landlord can accomplish things. And there is, I think, a very profound sense of hope in that. And I think it's very collective in nature because you see specifically how people banding together, coming together as a group and fighting together, you know, as neighbors. And I think, you know, what we try to tease out of that is also as a class that can change things. and that really does re-center things to where you can have that focus. And it's important not to like only exist in that smaller scope focus, right? The macro still matters.

But when you feel a lot of despair and the inability to move the macro, temporarily focusing in on what can be done on that smaller focus, I think is, yeah, maybe like therapeutic in some sense. And then I think the other thing is like camaraderie and having comrades is just really meaningful. And I think in like, you know, internet leftism and like subcultural leftism, we use like comrade as a term for someone like who agrees with our ideology, right? Or someone who agrees with our perspectives on Marxism. And there is a sense in which that is a comrade, but there's also a sense in which a comrade is a person who you are engaged concretely with in trying to

change the material world around you. And having comrades in that sense, who you are spending hours with every week engaged and mutually in trying to transform society. I've found that to be remarkably, remarkably grounding. I mean, not this last weekend, but the weekend before, I did like two, like, eight-hour sessions, plus like a little four-hour session with just a group of tenant union comrades trying to do an analysis of like what's happening in our city and how do we move in it. So like a whole weekend, just kind of struggling through that together.

and was kind of miserable in terms of how long it was, and, you know, people get tired and people get on edge. But being with people who are trying to change things concretely, who you trust each other enough to have those long, difficult conversations and struggle together, for me, I find that to be, like, remarkably grounding in moments like this, where, yeah, like, the world's in a pretty bad place and we really have to see it. But I also immediately have people in my life who are fighting to make it better and who are trying to do analysis together. they're trying to get grounded and get enough of a stable footing to be able to act. So yeah, organizing and camaraderie, I think, matter immensely. And I just, like, cannot recommend it enough. I think if you are someone who's, like, interested in socialism and Marxism, but you're disconnected from the movements that are fighting from it,

you're going to feel much more isolated than if you manage to connect with those movements. So that's a big part of it. And, yeah, individually, you know, it is treading the same ground. but I've just like, in the last couple of months, like, dived a lot deeper into mindfulness and meditation, and I've found it to be one of the core things keeping me sane right now, I think, honestly. And, you know, you can listen to all of Brett and I's episodes where we've talked about spirituality, but I've always expressed concern that I think those practices can be a turning away from reality. And the deeper that I've gone, the more that concern has evaporated.

And I've really kind of concluded that actually, like, meditation is sort of a turning away from reality. about training a muscle to be able to engage with reality and come back to reality and actually be in reality in a more full way and in a way that creates that sense of equanimity where you feel like you can deal with what exists and what is. So yeah, again, I don't think it changes, you know, the political world for us individually to take on these practices. But if the world is going to keep getting more and more horrific, I can't recommend enough that you engage in contemplative practices that I think have stuck around for thousands of years at this point for a reason. They kind of do something that is valuable for humans and that will be valuable in an increasingly

unstable and changing world. So yeah, those are kind of the ways that I'm approaching it. Everything still feels crazy and insane right now. And I suspect a lot of other people feel that way. But those are the things that make it bearable, I guess. Yeah. And I love what you said is that the more you get into spirituality, the more the concern about quietism and retreat evaporates.

and the more I see that there are so many people out there, even teaching spirituality, certainly engaging with it, that are still fundamentally operating through that as a means of escape. And so, like, you know, sometimes that can skew how those communities look from the outside. Like, look at all these people that are too scared to talk about Gaza or that, you know, are obviously using this as a way to retreat into their own personal lives and away from politics. They use that as an excuse to not get bogged down in the messiness of politics. And you start to see that as like,

oh, that's kind of like a form of spiritual materialism where the ego is using spirituality as a vessel to flee from reality instead of being able to face it. And my thing about meditation, even though it's sometimes presented as like this path to ever, ever evolving ease and happiness and comfort, is that that's not reality. That actually it is a terrain of facing truth ruthlessly, ruthlessly in its best form, inwardly and outwardly. And so for me, it has never, ever, ever dampened my commitment to try to act in the world in a way that faces injustice. It's only made not only that commitment more robust. It's made me more robust in my pursuit of it. But again, it's not something you do once or twice and then call it good. It really is something that builds momentum over time.

And while you can see some benefits, even after just a couple weeks of doing it consistently, doing it consistently over weeks, months, and years, it is. transformative in all the best ways. And so I encourage people to do that. You know, one little glean of optimism I've had recently in my personal life is, you know, I'm in the trades. I work on construction sites. I talk to dudes all day long from all across the political spectrum. And these conversations, when they do get into politics, it's never me imposing a political discussion on somebody or being weird or anything. But, you know, people talk about it organically. And of course, I'm there to to bounce off. And I really like focus on listening to people. I'm not so much interested in pushing my line as I am in like hearing where people are at.

Like, you know, genuinely regular blue collar people where they're at. And they're all over the fucking board, as you might expect, all over the board. But it's hilarious to me. And this has been true down to a person that I've talked to. And I've talked to, you know, probably dozens at this point. all the conversations end in an agreement that we need violent political revolution. It's like hilarious. It's almost a game I play with myself now is like not to see if I can get it there, but it's almost like if I can keep the conversation going long enough where this person organically says, we need a fucking revolution.

And yes, the idea of what that is or what we would achieve afterwards is all very different. But I think it does testify to like a grassroots bottom up. sickness with this system. And even though the political ideals are all over the map and oftentimes very confused and even sometimes very conspiratorial, they still end in the same place that this system is untenable. It is an affront to our existence as human beings and it needs to be toppled. And the Epstein, which we can get into now, the Epstein case just kind of quadruples people down on that front.

Like this whole system and this entire ruling class are truly really, rotten to the core and that there is no more path to solving these problems within this thoroughly corrupted political system as it currently exists and the only way that we could possibly free up a path towards anything like a livable future for whatever that means to whoever I'm talking to it's going to have to come through some sort of confrontation

with the status quo and with the ruling class as a whole and so again I take that for what it is and still the American is still subordinated in so many ways, right? We still get up, we still go to work, we still pay our taxes, we're still kind of scared to step out of line in our day-to-day lives, and enough people are comfortable enough not to want to risk at all on some sort of dramatic political action. But there's a bubbling up here that has never been present before

amongst the average American that I think represents some sort of subjective turning point in our political system. But just a little note. guess. Yeah, no, I mean, I think I definitely feel that. I mean, this has been what's kind of interesting about the Epstein file release and then like Pam Bondi's testimony and all of this is you do even see like parts of the like right wing coalition in this country really sort of turning on like Bondi in particular. But I think on some of the coalition on the whole around this because it's just so fucking blatant that things are being covered up. Right. And I think even, you know, like many people

who are invested in, I would say, like, a kind of false consciousness and, like, right-wing ideology, know when someone's just fucking lying to them with a certain level of blatancy, right? And, like, I think that is a thing that we're starting to see more and more. And the sense that I do get from people generally is that, like, something has to give, right? Whether or not people are on the far left or not, that sense of, like, shit, things are really bad right now and are really broken in a way that, like, might even be structural in nature. And again, I don't think people can name the structure, but they sense that structural nists to the whole thing.

I really feel that on the rise to a certain degree. I think the Epstein files have done that. I think the violence of how ICE has been deployed has done that. I mean, you know, anyone who's like too online has seen the transformation of like Will Stancel from like the most annoying liberal on Twitter to being like, shit, actually the face of American fascism is here in my city. and there's a structural issue, right? Like, people are being forced to confront these things

whether or not they have the scientific explanation for them. And I do think there's room for hope there. And I think that it means that, again, as always, like as Marxists, it's like, shit, I think we have the scientific explanation. How do we get it to people in a way that they can understand and adopt in order to see what's going on? But the level of dissatisfaction, the level of anger, and the sense that something has to give seems to be pretty high,

across politics in the United States right now. And it's sort of a question of where that all breaks, I think. Yeah. And, you know, just kind of boiling off my, like, sort of rolling off my last point with the people I talk to and take this for what it's worth, right? These are like almost, I mean, there's definitely, you know, women on the job site for sure, but just by the nature of construction jobs, it's like 98% guys. And so the crews that I'm on are 98% like just dudes, blue collar dudes.

And they're very, very open to. economic critique. They're all on board with like corporate corruption and that this system is a dictatorship of corporate class control and that the working class gets fucked. And when their reactionary strains come out, it is always in relation to what they perceive as the left, which is like a hyper-moralizing liberal identity politics. And you know, these people are rough around the edges. They're not always politically correct. For the most part, they're not bad, evil, racist human beings. But they recoil under the moralizing, identitarian reductionism of liberalism and think that represents the entirety of the left. But they're all actually on board with a left-wing economic

project, and a lot of my Marxist and socialist talking points on that get through quite well. And I'll often tie this into like the working class itself is very diverse. And the way that the ruling class keeps us at each other's throats is by creating the, artificial divisions between, you know, gay people and straight people, white people and black people, and like, we have to see that for what it is. And when I make that argument, they're very open to it. And they're very open to the idea that even conservative versus liberal and right versus left is another tactic of keeping us divided. And we start to see our commonality. And I think that's a, it's an interesting political context for me to operate in. And, you know, I'm learning as much

as I'm sort of trying to navigate that and offer up these ideals that kind of blunt the sharpest, edges of some of the most reactionary stuff that I see in a way that still maintains communication and people like like and respect me. If they don't like and respect you, they're not going to listen to you. So that's, you know, take that for what it is. But the Epstein files, right, like what do they really represent? What do they really mean? I think the pedophilia and the insane crimes that's all worth discussing and that is the main sort of focus. But also I think we have to emphasize the, you know, the Zionist angle here. And not even that Epstein was a Mossad agent, but that Epstein is like a fixer among the U.S. and Israeli elite class, that he is probably running

some sort of blackmail operation to gain leverage over the richest, most powerful people, to be able to have that leverage utilized primarily, I think, by Israel. There's a, there's a strain of really patronizing Jewish supremacism in these emails where it comes clear that some of these people really look down on non-Jewish people in a really grotesque way that obviously instigates on the right, you know, forms of blatant anti-Semitism, which I think really missed the point in a lot of ways. We get to see the American ruling class lie through their fucking teeth. Like Pam Bondi, Cash Patel, they've denied that these things exist. There was a time where they came out and said, there are no Epstein files.

There's a time when Cash Patel did the podcast round saying there's nothing persecutable. We can't find any actual crimes here. You know, Trump comes out, calls it a hoax. Then by the imaginations of Tom of Massey and Rokana, they have to release something. They did it a month past the legal deadline. Still, they were forced by the hand of Congress to do something. And so they released three million, many of them very damning, but nothing conclusive, right? nothing particularly conclusive.

Victims' names were released while perpetrators of violent crime seemingly were redacted. Why are you protecting people talking about nine-year-olds and torture videos, right? Like, why are you protecting those people while you're like letting slip through the cracks, the names of victims who ask, you know, please just don't release my name again. I don't want to relive trauma or be targeted anyway. So they're literally protecting these people. And we learned that there's three million more documents. at least that have not been released. So if these are the ones they are releasing, imagine what they're

not releasing. But even through the ones that they have released, we see deep connections with Ehud Barak, with the Israeli intelligence agencies, and with members of the ruling class in the U.S. as well. And these people are sick. They're entitled. They're smug. They look down on the rest of us. They truly think that they're above reproach. They live above the law. And they, deserve nothing but the complete dismantling of any sense of wealth and power that they have. And that's being kind. I think we all know what should really happen to the Epstein class. But there has to be something here. And just speaking about the Democrats, all, you know, things taken for granted about how weak they are and how complicit they are, if they do not regain power and immediately come in

and hold all of these people accountable, do full fucking investigations, release. all of the Epstein files and then persecute and prosecute those who are implicated in any investigate anybody implicated in any crime if they do not take these ICE agents who have now been revealed who murdered Renee Good who murdered Alex Pready who have conducted all sorts of crime sexual assault the sexual assault of detainees the complete obliteration of anybody's human or constitutional rights while in detainment if these people are not firmly held accountable investigated and on the kinder side of things in prison for life for these crimes, well, then the entire system is going to continue to spiral out of control because it has been

thoroughly and completely delegitimized at every level across the political spectrum. And so the only way to kind of re-legitimize this state is not only a bunch of reforms in a million different areas, but is actual the concerted investigation and outright prosecution, which would have majority support if it wasn't partisan, Right. If it was truly bipartisan, it went after everybody, no matter their political allegiance, it held everybody to account and was done by people who themselves were not implicated in any way, shape, or form by the files. I think that would be a re-legitimizing tactic that could work by the ruling class, not that we're necessarily saying we would want the re-legitimization of this system.

Right. But from their point of view in a real politic way, anything short of that is just going to be a non-starter. and the system and its legitimacy will never be regained. And the last thing I'll say before I hand it over to you is just, this makes Watergate seem like nothing. If Watergate happened today, this, you know, Watergate is held up as this like, in tandem with Vietnam, this huge delegitimization of the ruling class as a whole and like, you know, the sort of breaking away of any, like, naive optimism or love for the system that people had.

It was like a real crack in the foundation. Watergate happened today. It wouldn't even last 12 hours in the news cycle. It would be like, yeah, of course Trump did that. Like, who gives a fuck, you know? Like, it would be nothing. This Epstein shit is Watergate times a billion. And I don't see how the Trump administration comes back from this.

They've already lost so much support that they might have had. They've squandered all their political capital. All polling shows that they've lost support amongst virtually everybody that matters. The coalition they put together is all. already decimated a year into the Trump presidency because of his actions with Israel, because of his war mongering, because of his complete inability or unwillingness to even acknowledge, much less try to address the unaffordability crisis, the open corruption, and now the Epstein files. And so the only hope that the Trump administration has, I think, and we can get into

this in a bit, of moving forward is some sort of brutal crackdown on elections as such, because there is no way that this faction of the ruling class itself has any legitimacy to continue on. And it's totally nuked. J.D. Vance, his chances going forward. And I think he's been pretty damn silent because he knows that his insane, disgusting careerist ambitions are looking darker and darker by the day. But, you know, he's like a shittier Trump that's tied to all the crimes of this administration without any of the charisma like it's not going to go well for him. And that's all he wants out of life, of course. So those are just some thoughts.

But Allison, what do you, what do you think? Yeah. God, there's so much to say about the files. I mean, I think, yeah, one, there's the kind of, like, fixer angle that is interesting. And I think, like, to a certain degree, you know, and I've been saying this for a little bit now, I do think that, like, this, a lot of what we've seen here about how Epstein was operating about the blackmail angle, about the fixer angle. Dutta's point, I think, to the idea that. some of the parapolitics ideas people put out there have been kind of correct. And in particular,

the claim that I've seen from like parapolitics folks to say like, it would be silly to think that the ruling class wouldn't have somewhat conspiratorial ways of maintaining control where they feel it's necessary. Right. And so again, I don't think that that necessarily means like broad, sweeping conspiracies, but it does mean figures like Epstein operating out there to take care of contingencies, to make sure that blackmail is available, and to make sure that like you know, the way I saw someone phrase it, that the cost of gaining power is to be compromised, in a sense, and to make sure that you can be controlled as your power increases. And so I think the blackmail angle does point to the ways that the ruling class,

and I think in particular factions of the ruling class particularly focused on, again, like you said, I think like Zionism, but I also think on imperialism generally on maintaining a specific, you know, function for the American state oriented towards the world, as a imperialist power, not just on domestic politics. That all gets caught up in this and I think is, you know, very relevant here. So I do think it is worth thinking through, like, some of what it means that we had a figure like Epstein going around, collecting the information that he was collecting, doing all of this in a way that did make people compromised and blackmailable.

So that's one angle that I've thought about a lot. And then the other thing is like, yeah, this question of like, is anything going to happen, I think is the big question. And that's where things feel somewhat destabilizing to me. Obviously, the Trump administration is just making every excuse they can. Or just blatantly lying, right? Like Bondi saying in front of Congress, there's no evidence about Trump in the files, which we just know is like a blatant lie, right?

Like no one believes that. There's no one who that is meant to persuade. And so the blatant lying is what we've seen there. But the one thing that I think Bondi has said that is like slightly fair that like we should wrestle with is like, Merrick Garland had this fucking evidence, right? This isn't new. It's not like this one that's sitting around. And so I think one of the rather horrific things that this all reveals in the fact that these files have been around that the FBI under multiple administrations have had access to this, the fact that Epstein got the sweetheart deal in the past that he got before he finally got taken down, points to kind of a ruling class solidarity and a unwillingness to push back against this shit among the ruling class because again, maybe it's because many of them are compromised, precisely in relation to this. Maybe it's just out of basic class solidarity, but across parties

we've seen just an unwillingness to actually do anything about this in any serious way. And again, these files are not new. They have been sitting there. And so I think like you said, Brett, like this is taking away any credibility that the current right-wing coalition in the country had. It is fracturing that coalition that is already fracturing around a whole bunch of other issues. and I think you're right, it means that they're going to have to try to move to extra legal or non-legal means to stay in power. But one of the things that I think has been like so kind of destabilizing about this iteration of the Trump administration has been this attitude of just like, yeah, no, I mean, look, like yeah, turns out everyone's pedophiles. Turns out we're violating court orders all the time. Who and what is going to fucking do anything about it, right?

The attitude that we see coming from them is, okay, try to do something. about it. The courts aren't going to do it. When they try to crack down on elections to stay in power, the courts probably won't do anything there either. And there's just this brazenness of, yeah, we're in the wrong, we're operating illegally, we're fucking monsters and you're powerless to stop us. It is kind of the thing that we're being sold. And for me, that's what I find so crazy about these files is that there's this just insane stuff in here. And the response is tell lies that aren't even convincing and just kind of be like, well, nothing's going to happen about it and try to keep moving forward. And with the Watergate thing, right, you think about how Watergate is scandal, which

pales in comparison to this, was able to become a crisis in a way that this, which is so much bigger, can't quite become a crisis due to just like, I don't know, a lot of factors, but I'd say, I guess, like, the breakdown of the notion that, like, liberal civil society is a check on anything, right? That has just fully dissolved under this current Trump administration. And so part of the destabilization, I think, comes from, again, like the mask being ripped off of liberalism, the mask being ripped off of the idea that there's a justice system that can hold the rich accountable. And now no longer even any need to pretend that there is and just as sort of laughing in the face of the populace of, yeah, I guess he caught us. We're all a bunch of fucking pedophiles. There's nothing that's going to change.

And so that brazenness, I think, is just really wild. And that's really what is destabilizing. And we'll see how this all plays out. We'll see how elections go. We'll see whether or not they are able to interfere with them significantly. But the thing that, like, is so overwhelming is the sense to which they seem to think that if they just keep pushing forward, they'll get away with all of this. And nothing is actually ever going to have to change despite everything that's been revealed. Which is a historical pattern amongst ruling classes, even as even as their,

control is delegitimized even as their spiral. They feel untouchable in some way. And, you know, here's another thing with this, this all-out race for AI and the construction, which has been going on since at least the war on terror, but, you know, is reaching new heights with new technological capacities there, which is the construction of a surveillance state, where it is now increasingly sort of, the leverage is all on the side of the ruling class. That, you know, like, think about even just committing a crime like Luigi, doing his thing. How is he caught? Well, everything is on camera. You know, you walk down a neighborhood. Everybody's

ring camera is picking you up. You go into any store. You're being, you're being filmed. Now they have AI facial recognition, right? This whole, like in the Epstein files, we see Peter Thiel in particular, knee-deep in all of this nefarious behavior. Palantir being pitched by Epstein to Ehud-Barrac is something that Israel and Ahud-Barrac in particular should invest in. Now, Peter Thiel and Epstein are very close. are thinking that they're going to build such an impenetrable surveillance state, a techno-dispopic, AI-driven surveillance state that they no longer have to pay homage to the idea of democratic input or accountability, the idea of democratic restraint. And that's already like halfway there, like already.

And, you know, we've seen with how they treat protests and protesters. They can murder American citizens on camera. And yes, we'll bitch and moan and post. about it, nothing will happen. They can fund and arm a genocide. We can see all the murders and the mass slaughter. We can see the rubble. We do nothing about it. We can be revealed that the bipartisan ruling class and the economic and political spheres are, you know, some of the biggest names are knee deep in these Epstein files and implicated in a million different ways to this grotesque criminal behavior. And we do nothing about it. And a lot of us are thinking, well, what can I do?

If I go out and protest peacefully, that's just laughed off. They love that all day. You can vote for the Democrats. Well, liberals have been voting for Democrats their whole lives and it's led precisely here. If you're a liberal or a Democrat, you spent your entire fucking life voting for Democrats in every single election and it has gotten you exactly to this point in space and time. And how you can keep thinking that that is a path anywhere but to fucking fascism is just beyond me. You know, why didn't the Merrick Garland, Attorney General, you know, the judicial system or the Biden administration, why didn't they release these files, even though it would be very damning to Trump? Because it's damning to the entire political and economic class. Even if Biden is not particularly implicated or this or that figure is not implicated, it is a delegitimizing force and a destabilizing force for the political class as a whole. And the economic elites who make up the

owner bases of both of those parties. And so they probably had a sort of real politic calculation that releasing this is just going to kind of light a fuse under the entire ruling class of which we are a part and of which we benefit. And I'm only one or two degrees separated from the worst monsters in these files. And so I think that is, that's the calculus on their part. And it's like, you know, like, who cares if, you know, people like the right wingers will say, well, Bill Clinton is implicated or, you know, these liberals are implicated. Yeah, we know, fuck them. They're all pieces of shit. They should all be investigated and held accountable for their fucking crimes. I don't care if they have a D or an R outside of their name. That doesn't work anymore. And so I think

that is kind of the concern on behalf of why they didn't pursue that more vociferously, when it would seem like a real nice win electorally for them in that case. But I also wanted to mention in the Epstein files, it becomes incredibly clear that the ruling class, is deeply involved with the cultivation and perpetuation from Peter Thiel to Epstein meeting with the founder of 4chan the day before 4chan is launched. Literally Epstein met with the founder of 4chan the day before it's launched that they are involved in a kind of conspiratorial way in the construction and perpetuation of this right-wing populism, which they know is not a threat to their power base. In fact, as we see in real time through the Trump administration,

the right wing populist movement culminating in Trump has only been the best thing that could happen for these people. And Trump has spent the entire time doing everything he can legally behind the scenes to prevent even what we've seen so far. And so, you know, even though it has cracked through on behalf of congressional forcing of the hand in some ways,

there's still so much that's hidden. But what becomes clear is this elite is totally fine with neoliberalism. It obviously benefits. from globalism. It's entrenched in both donor classes of the Democratic and Republican Party. Any mainstream figure in either of those parties get elected.

Israel is safe. Palantir is safe. The techno-oligarchs are safe. You know, and the right-wing culture war, time and time again, historically and presently, is a powerful tool in the hands of the elite to prevent a left-wing economic movement coming for their shit.

Which is the only path to actually holding these people accountable and dismantling the system that they benefit from and sit atop of is socialism, is a grassroots bottom-up, you know, labor union focused, multiracial, democratic movement that wants to displace this entire ruling class and build a different system in its place. That is the only threat. Any other political movement from identity reductionist, progressive liberalism, to neocentric or neocentrist liberalism, and neoconservatism to right-wing populism to full-on Hitlerite fascism,

they can work with all of that, but they can't work with one motherfucking system, and that is a militant socialist movement. And I said on Instagram, you know, everybody in the Epstein Files loves Israel and hates Marxism. Isn't that nice? Even the left-wing figure,

Chomsky, implicated in the fucking Epstein Files, is a lifelong opponent of Marxism. Isn't that funny how that works? Because that's the only thing that can actually challenge these motherfuckers. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, God, yeah, the Tromsky thing is like a whole other thing that I think we can get into. But no, I mean, the two sides things of you are on the side of Marxism or you are kind of at least on implicitly implicitly on the side of this is, I think, a very powerful idea. And I wish we could, what I want to figure out is how to convince and sell that to normal everyday people, right? Because I think that's very powerful for those of us who are already some what invested in it, but sounds like this leak. But I do think as Marxists, we have to, like, talk about these things. And I think Marxists have been scared to talk about things that seem conspiratorial in a way that I consider to be a mistake. Because, again, it would be silly to believe that the ruling class isn't organizing internally, or at least the factions of it aren't organizing internally to maintain their power, to maintain their foreign policy incentives and to maintain ideological hegemony.

Right. And I think the 4chan thing really does just, like, blow the lid wide open about how. intentional this is. But you don't even need to be thinking about like backroom meetings to be able to buy into that, right? Because the reality is that Peter Thiel is constantly talking about the forms of social engineering that he's trying to do out in the open, right? There are these billionaires who are quite upfront about the fact that they are trying to shape culture into a specific thing. They span both the right and the left in a lot of ways, even figures historically associated with like the center left, like Bill Gates, are very much a part of this envisioning of what the future can look like. And again, I think because people like Alex Jones talk about shit like this, the Marxist left hasn't want to talk about it. But I would also suggest that like, yeah, the relevance that Alex Jones had at one point maybe was to, you know, kind of shitcoat the ability to talk about this and to make it seem insane to talk about the fact that there is intentional coordination among factions of the ruling class to shape society into a given, you know,

form. And I don't think that this has to contradict like Marxist structuralism that focuses on the way that the form of societies created by the structural realities of capitalism and by economic impulses and logics of capitalism. But at the same time, I think as Marxist, we never want to be overly deterministic, right? We have to believe that the, you know, working class, despite the way its ideology is crafted by the capitalist state, can break with that and can achieve consciousness and can move in a progressive manner. And likewise, I don't think we should see the ruling class as overdetermined, but actually as organizing amongst themselves as well.

So I do think that's something that we have to take away from the files and just like a willingness to talk about these things that, again, because they're associated with like fascist idiots like Alex Jones, it's been easier to kind of avoid talking about in the past. Yeah, and it's funny because Alex Jones living in the culmination of everything he could reasonably said to have spent his life building up. Like, this could be a moment of complete vindication for Alex Jones. But guess what? Alex Jones is compromised. He has a legal sort of like life existential reason to side with his Trump administration who is not going to pursue any legal grievances against him. He's already lost in court that he could lose everything. That now he is tied to the

sinking ship. And so even when his entire worldview gets presented so clearly, because it implicates his closest political allies, he now has to come back from that ledge and try to contort and distort and weave a web that somehow precludes Trump from being implicated. You know, Tucker Carlson is also like this. Tucker Carlson presents himself as like this critic of the war state, the deep state, now the CIA. He critiques Pam Bondi, Cash Patel, major Republican figures. Who is one person? He won't fucking call out directly is Trump.

It is so fascinating. He's been on some talk shows where they, where they, where they, even kind of directly confront him with the idea of like, hey, everything you're saying is like true and fair, but you understand like Trump is doing it. Trump is the leader. It's his administration doing everything you just spent a half hour, you know, chiding into writing. And then Tucker Carlson will step back. He'll do some red herring. He'll shift the topic to something else. He will never directly critique Trump. Isn't that fucking convenient that the leader of everything that you're saying you're standing against is the one area where you won't go in and, uh,

launch a direct attack. Of course he won't. So that's just sycophancy and the elitism of all these people and the self-interest of all these motherfuckers. But I also want to say on the other end, if we're taking seriously this idea that economic left-wing populism, whether it comes in the form of democratic socialism or more robust, revolutionary Marxist inflection, that obviously that's the path forward. And what I've become increasingly convinced of, not in like a flippant, I'm more left than you social media way, but just in, I'm listening to what you're saying and my heart rate

is increasing and anger and despair is like the AOC and the Mamdani's. They're the new Pelosi's. They're the new barricade being erected by the, I mean, not consciously, not conspiratorily, but their inability to really challenge imperialism, their acquiescence with the status quo of the Democratic Party in order to advance their own political career. and that they might frame it as, well, actually I'm sort of acquiescing to the Democratic Party as it currently exists to push my goals. Well, we'll see what goals you get accomplished. But all I'm seeing is an acquiescence and a subservience to the elitists within the party, an inability or

an unwillingness to rock the boat in any serious way, jumping at the chance to reinforce imperialist narratives. Right? Momdani comes out and calls Maduro, a dictator in the lead up to his kidnap and extradition by an extrajudicial, judicial, you know, military operation in Venezuela. And what's interesting about that is now Venezuela for the first time in its history is shipping oil to Israel and no longer shipping oil to Cuba. Isn't that convenient? And so, you know, I don't want to fall into like the harshest criticisms. I understand there's real difficulties and real lines to walk.

But I just see this new crop of so-called democratic socialists. really like another barrier, another barricade being erected by the status quo, even unwittingly, right, in order to prevent the emergence of a real fighting working class, a movement. And hearing AOC at her latest, I forget where she was, but she is talking about all these things. It just seems so clear that more than anything, she's interested in finding a place within the Democratic Party where she can build a career and not, you know, challenge the status quo to vociferously. You kind of want your social democracy, higher wages, health care, but you don't really want to touch any electrical fence when it comes to, you know, taking on the democratic elite, taking on the corporate billionaire class in any real meaningful way and certainly confronting or taking on Zionist's interests, the deep state, the military industrial complex and imperialism writ large. I just don't see that fight in any of these people.

No, I completely agree. I think, yeah, Mamdani since coming into power has, you know, I don't want to say like disappointing because I'm always kind of like an ultra leftist piece of shit. He assumes the worst about these people. That's kind of like how I tend to leave, but also like, but you're validated all the time. Unfortunately, for the hopes that people put in him, I think like, you know, there has been like an incredible amount of disappointment to that. But I think, you know, ultimately this is the difficulty is that there. is going to continue be momentum, I think, towards engaging in the electoral side of things. And I don't know. Like, I've always historically been more abstentionist. I actually feel like maybe my abstentionism

has, like, weakened a little bit. But I do think, like, a question that has to be asked repeatedly is, if people are put into these electoral positions, are they accountable to a socialist movement, right? And consistently, what we've seen is that that's not the case, right? Here in LA, the most recent person who's entering the mayoral race is Nithia Raman, who has had a DSA endorsement and then has supported anti-Palestinian stuff on the city council, has consistently been an opponent to those who are fighting for the interests of tenants in the city, and who has been, like, censured by DSA, but that's never really, like, led to any changes because that accountability mechanism is it there. And so my worry is that kind of until something like that exists where

accountability can exist, the left that wants to engage in these electoral struggles, it kind of just going to keep getting taken advantage of by opportunist grifters, basically, who, you know, are not ultimately going to fight for what we're interested in. And so, again, like, I don't want to, like, completely throw away, like, some of the focus that, you know, at this point, there are comrades in DSA who I, like, respect and I want to respect the, but they're trying to implement. But this question of accountability, I think, is just absolutely huge. And I think we will continue to see ourselves in this place until it is answered.

And I know my focus will remain outside of that realm because I do see these figures more or less getting in the way of where we need to be moving and trying to act as kind of a limit to what is acceptable left-wing discourse and demands rather than expanding those demands. Yeah, my critique is not even of the DSA. I think there's lots of interesting and important fights going on within that organization. It's these figures who have been lifted up. And they're tangentially related to the DSA. They often rode the DSA wave and that constituents. to power and I still am always open at any time either one of these figures can turn around and start

actually putting in the fight and I'm willing to be one over fuck I want to be one over you know this is not coming from like cynicism or holier than now leftism it's a genuine like I would love to see it please God and and you know for the electoral realm I would fucking love love to have a real fighting working class anti-imperialist party fighting on the electoral terrain. I think it's essential. I think that's where we can reach more people.

It is breaking out from our echo chambers and our sort of online niches that most people don't engage with and taking it to the national stage. That would be an objective advance of the sort of subjective revolutionary forces. It would be a way that we could get out our message, which I think people will resonate with.

If they could hear a genuine message from an articulate socialist, talking about the intricacies and the interconnections between empire and emiseration and the way that we, you know, all these things, right? Like, you know, the stuff that we believe in. And it doesn't even have to be articulated in communist jargon or hardcore Marxism. Just somebody that is able to put these ideas in commonsensical language, inspiring language, and that, importantly, is not about their own advancement. They could give a shit less, even if they flame out. and are only on the national stage for two years.

And then their career gets nuked because of the forces of the status quo. And they fall back into the broader movement and somebody new is put forward. You have to be willing to do that. You have to be willing to say, I'm going to be so fucking principled. I'm going to make every person in political and economic power hate my fucking guts. And I'm going to advance the fucking ball. I'm going to be a fighter for a genuine cause. I will not compromise one little bit.

And I am not just, the whole movement is not dependent on me. I'm a product of a movement that I'll dissolve back into after, after this, if this thing doesn't go well. And then we'll advance somebody else because we're not just individual careerists. We are a movement putting some, putting people up to fight and articulate for our goals. And I think it would, it would really resonate with people. But that's exactly why they shut us out. And that's exactly why certain people are allowed to move forward and certain people aren't. You know, Donald Trump was never a real threat to the status quo because as much as

certain factions of the ruling class gnashed their teeth and tore their garments, they still fundamentally allowed him to get through and immediately ingratiated him and his politics into the broader system to perpetuate it. He was never a threat. He was never really an outsider either. And so these are just things we have to learn from. But I'm not an anti-electoralist. I believe that we need a presence on the stage. I'm just saying that motherfucking Democratic Party ain't it. And in fact, It is the primary obstacle to the emergence of such an actual fighting party. Yeah. No, I mean, I think we're in agreement on that one. Well, you know, we touched on Cuba. And so maybe we can move in that direction.

You know, it goes without saying that Cuba, this embargo, this Trump administration led by Marco Rubio, they're putting the boot into the throat of the Cuban economy, the toppling of Maduro and the sort of the rerouting of Venezuela. oil away from Cuba toward Israel, my God. This is just blatant. They're making the economy scream. They're running the Kissinger and Chile playbook in Cuba in particular. As they're doing in Iran to try to, you know, Nancy Pelosi was just being interviewed about Iran and she was saying, you know, the Iranian regime, they still have a lot of support

in rural areas. And we have to ramp up our sanctions to make those people suffer more so that they can kind of get on the train of regime change. just out and out saying we need to inflict genuine suffering and emiseration on more regular Iranians so that we can see through our imperialist ambitions in the area. This is the Democratic Party, right? This is Nancy Pelosi talking. And Marco Rubio says the same shit.

It's a bipartisan consensus among the elite. But Cuba's really in dire straits. They're fighters. They've been under pressure forever. The Cuban masses are very well-versed. on exactly what the fuck is happening. So they have a real resilience that drives the ruling class of the U.S. fucking bonkers.

But, you know, people can only survive so long. An island nation strangled of international trade can only survive so long. And so it's in a real dire situation. And these things are all connected. But, Alison, your thoughts. Yeah, there's so much going on here. I mean, so one, you know, Cuba has been a target of the United States for a long time. It is not like U.S. aggression and economic string.

of the island is new, but there certainly is just this like intense revitalization of the effort going on. I mean, it's so frustrating. A lot of that has to do with just the piece of shit that is Marco Rubio, right? And like the personal animus that he is bringing to this and pulling into that. But also again, a U.S. that feels emboldened after what it was able to do in Venezuela, a U.S. that feels, you know, again, I think really like thinking about this revitalization of the Monroe doctrine and a pivot towards. controlling this particular hindusphere to carving out a sphere of influence there. And this sense that, you know, if the U.S. can't be the unipolar hegemon, it will at least have the Caribbean and the Americas, right? And this is leading to this revitalized imperialism that I think is quite horrifying. And yeah, the lack of Venezuelan oil that is going there is a huge part of it. You know, for a brief moment, it looked like Mexico was maybe going to cease oil shipments. Shinebaum walked that back and said that like that was a lie, but it really did kind of look for a bit there,

like that was going to occur. I will say Mexican aid has arrived recently in Cuba, so there is some aid that is moving through. There's not like the total abandonment, but the pressure on other states in the Americas to participate in the U.S. isolation to Cuba further, I think is really increasing. The U.S. states insistence that other countries do not need to take in Cuban doctors who are doing aid work, but could in fact take in U.S. presence instead really shows this concerted effort to isolate them. And again, I think, like, there's two sides of this. On the one hand, like, there's the incredible resilience of the Cuban people and the Cuban government, which has really withstood an incredible amount of hostility,

which withstood the collapse of the Soviet bloc and the economic ties that were created there, and which has been finding ways to navigate this isolation. But obviously, the increase in that isolation poses, I think, a potential existential threat that needs to be accounted for it. And I don't know where this goes, I guess, to a certain degree. I've seen some people say, like, this may be the end of the Cuban project. And I don't want to believe that because the Cuban project has been incredibly resilient and has remained resilient. But absent our ability here within the Imperial Corps to push this, you know, fucked up policy in a different direction, it's going to be tricky and absent solidarity from other countries who are willing to defy the United States,

it is going to be tricky. And I think we have seen that defiance decrease. We've seen a right-wing pivot within much of Latin America. We've seen an expansion of U.S. clientelism. That is clearly what the U.S. wants to do to Mexico and wants to do to Venezuela. And again, the U.S. control over Venezuelan oil distribution that has allowed the U.S. to redirect it to Scandinavian companies, which are then sending it to Israel really shows this broader imperial project. And so I think the thing that's important to keep in mind is that all of this is part of a broader imperialist project. All of this is interconnected.

What was done in Venezuela cannot be separated from the issues of Israel and Gaza, cannot be separated from U.S. aggression towards Mexico, cannot be separated from U.S. aggression towards Iran. These are all part of this broader thing. And the reason that I say that and think this is important is that I think you will find people on the left who are like, I'm willing to defend this country from U.S. imperialism or this country from U.S. imperialism, but this one like crosses a line. And that's a failing strategy, right? Because all of these countries are implicated in this broader strategy. You cannot disconnect them. And so you can have whatever you concerns you have about the government in Iran or the government in Venezuela or whatever.

But those concerns are ultimately irrelevant in the context of denouncing you. U.S. imperialism. If you want to defend Cuba but not defend the self-determination of these other states, you're in a losing position because the isolation of Cuba is inseparable from the aggression towards these other states. And so I think, I don't know what the solution here is, but I think, again, as always, like, reaffirming a strong, committed, universal anti-imperialism becomes really necessary during crises like this, and really pushing for the left in the United States to take that seriously, I think, is important. I don't know. Those are kind of some of the things that I'm bringing to mind here.

It all remains horrific. I mean, the fact that Maduro is still in a U.S. jail right now, the fact that nothing has been done about it, the fact that by all accounts, the U.S. seems to have gotten rid of that blatantly illegal action. There's a horror to it, and it is necessary for the left to consolidate around anti-imperialism in the face of that. Yeah, and you know, I've seen I've come across, and this is my own fault for being on websites like X, but you know, you come across a certain leftist, sectarian pedantry that likes to like, you know, spend time talking about why Cuba's not really socialist or, you know, Venezuela's not really socialist or I've even seen, you know, left coms and Maoists, just kind of like saying, you know, Che wasn't even a communist, Sankara wasn't a communist. You know, and it's like, it's sort of like in their minds detached from real politic. They're trying to like, in their minds probably like support an actual definitional

formation of what socialism is and isn't and create clear boundaries. But at this time, it's just so obvious to me that that doesn't actually matter. That imperialism globally is the primary contradiction and to spend your time sort of being pedants about this or that or attacking other, you know, countries as not, you know, a socialistist. It's like, what is the fucking point? That is, that, I think, is so detached from reality. Right now, we are entering a phase of, of naked imperialist aggression. And anywhere and everywhere, under any political formation, that imperialism is being fought against, that deserves our support and our clarity around what is actually

at stake here. And, you know, the sectarianism and the pedantry is annoying in the best of times. But in times of real fucking global crisis, when so many people are suffering under the boot of this rabid fucking naked, fascist regime and its allies, like, I just have less and less patience for that. Like, it is grotesque what is fucking happening. And zooming out from the U.S.'s point of view, you know, we talk about multipolarity and there are plenty people that say, you know, this is too much is made of multipolarity. And there's a reasonable argument for that. Like, multipolarity is kind of the norm. And, you know, these Pax Americana or Pax Romana versions of

history are sort of the exception to a more jostling, conflictual world, you know, throughout the history of class society. But from the U.S. is pretty, perspective, there is a multi-polarity emerging. There are powerful states that can assert their regional sort of interests in a way that the U.S. can't always push back upon. The time of the U.S. being the unipolar hegemon and police of the world is genuinely coming to an end. It is lashing out and it is violent and it is going hard for kind of trying to maintain that. But it's particularly interested in shoring up the Western Hemisphere. And this is not, you know, my speculation, this is the words of Marco Rubio, the words of the Trump administration,

that in this New World Order, it is particularly important that we have total hegemonic control over at least our own hemisphere. And that means rooting out any perceived enemies or any perceived nations that could work with America's enemies. And the number one enemy, of course, in the American military mind is China. And so, you know, the idea of having Venezuela or Cuba having good relations with China is untenable. And even Greenland, to a large extent, even though it's a Danish territory and it conflicts with the very idea of NATO. That's not as important as maintaining hemispheric domination, particularly in an era of climate change. And we're going to talk about climate change in a second, but the irony of the Trump administration who still refuses to believe it's

anything other than a hoax, is dismantling the EPA, is obviously deeply entrenched with the fossil fuel industry at every fucking turn, dismantling any, like trying to dismantle any progress that's been made for green tech and renewable energy in the process of lifting up fossil fuel industries. The reason Greenland is becoming strategically essential is precisely because the Arctic is fucking melting. And the Greenland, the glaciers in Greenland are fucking melting. And there are mineral deposits and resources that are becoming for the first time in human history available because of that melting. And the Arctic itself is becoming an increasingly, to the near and medium future, an increasingly important trade route and military zone. And there's Russian contention and Chinese

contention. And so there is a need to have U.S. And even though Greenland is, militarily, like the U.S. can do whatever it wants through treaties with Denmark, etc. They already have many bases there. The want for control is actually a product of the realization that climate change is opening up this new terrain of great power, conflict, and struggle. And so all of these things are deeply related to an empire in decline, the end of unipolar hegemony, and the rise of a much more fractious, conflictual, multipolar world where the outgoing empire is going to do everything it can and go towards more and more desperate means to do so to try to maintain its global domination, but in lieu of that to certainly shore up its hemispheric hegemonian domination.

And that is what we're seeing from the perspective of the U.S. ruling class, which is capitalism, imperialism on the global stage. I mean, that's what it is. That theoretical analysis is still essential to understand. But that's how these things are deeply connected. Yeah. No, I mean, I think drawing the connections is good. And I think, like, yeah, you and I think come to a similar perspective on anti-imperialism

where, like, those sectarianism questions, I think, would matter a lot more if, like, global socialist struggle was on the advance or on the offensive, right? But that does not, by all accounts appear to be the case, right? And again, I think those who are. more positive about Higibibibopalarity would say, actually, maybe this is the transition to that in some way, but this is the moment of crises during the transition point. Regardless to me, it kind of looks like things are quite bad for leftist countries internationally, especially in the Americas. And so setting aside the sectarianism when we're talking about imperialism,

I think is really important. And, you know, I've actually been kind of surprised to see some Maoist groups taking a better stance on Venezuela. than I anticipated in terms of like being willing to mostly just make a denunciation and leave it there, which I think is again the correct move at a time like this and really how things ought to be approached. So I am somewhat hopeful that we can strike that tone. And then I think just, yeah, there's this difficulty where like, you know, with Iran, I think it becomes very difficult because people point to like legitimately repressive and reactionary aspects of the Iranian state. And they use that then as the basis for like, oh,

we need to support regime change in Iran. I feel like Iran is the easiest one that I see the left slipping into supporting regime change for these days. And using the left broadly here, I don't think most Marxist-Leninists slip into that, but people outside of that ideological position often do. But I think, like, we just need to be realistic that, like, whatever critiques you have of the existing state in Iran, the alternative is significantly worse, right? I was in downtown L.A. yesterday driving home from a union thing and there was this massive regime change protest about Iran in downtown L.A. Really huge and you could see all the cars driving to and from it. And all of them were flying Iranian imperial flags, so the monarchical flag of Iran, right?

The movement for what that regime change would look like would be reinstituting monarchy in Iran, reinstituting the most reactionary possible Iranian state. And so I would just like urge those who are tempted by that sectarianism around Iran in particular to consider that like the people that you are making common cause with are Iranian monarchists. Right. And whatever critiques that you have of the existing government in Iran, the people that you are being calming cause with have a significantly more fucked up vision for what should happen in that country. And are your political enemies, right? They oppose everything you stand for and believe. Yes, no, absolutely. And they would like to see you not in a good place, right? They are anti-communists, the highest extent, they are anti-left wing, they are out-and-out reactionaries. And so rejecting that, I think, is really important. And again, just focusing on how U.S. aggression against Iran is part of this whole broader edifice of imperialism is important. So I hope that the left can get it shit together a little on this and not find itself siding with and being synthetic to Iranian.

monarchists because this is like the one issue where I do often see slippage unfortunately that I think we need to learn how to avoid. Yeah, absolutely. I made like a sort of a humorous post on Instagram about the Iranian diaspora and this applies to the Cuban diaspora, etc. Where they'll use this liberal identity politics thing to be like, you should not be talking over Iranian voices and you know, it's just the meme of being like silence. I am talking now. Like we are getting rid of the idea that your identity gives you some sort of exclusive right to have an opinion. I do not care what your nationality is, what your race is, what your sexual orientation is. It does not give you inherently a right to speak on global politics and shut everybody else up.

I care about your ideas. What are your actual positions? Do they align with my values in a political world that is geared towards justice? Or is this, you know, rotten ideas of regime change that will not be better for. for the Iranian people to be subjugated to U.S. and Israel domination is not somehow better. It would be good maybe for a new strata of the Iranian bourgeoisie that is completely interconnected with those forces and who are rewarded by those forces. But it's fundamentally an attack on self-determination of the Iranian people.

And the people in Iran know that goddamn well. And that if they want a revolution, it will have to be completely outside of any maneuvering by the U.S. and Israel who will only make things worse for them. And that right now is not what's happening. Right now there's a concerted effort on behalf of Israel and the U.S. to do everything they can to undermine the social stability, economic stability, and political stability of that nation in order to topple it. And if that ends in civil war, if that ends in balkanization, if that ends in mass famine, they don't give a fuck. They just want to take Iran off the board as anything that can stand up to,

Western imperialist colonial hegemony to anything that can disrupt the greater Israel project and to anything that could stand as interference for the genuine desire on behalf of the U.S., even in a multipolar world, to control the crossroads of humanity. Iran is placed at the crossroads. It is a mountain fortress placed at the crossroads of multiple continents. That whole region is, but Iran is like sort of the main power player in that region that is not just going to roll over to U.S. monopoly capital and Israeli interests in the area that will actually combat it and fight as it has done repeatedly. And also, from the U.S.'s perspective,

there's a huge Zionist push here, right? And I can and I will make the argument that from an America first perspective, going to war with Iran is fucking stupid. That actually it serves very little interest for the United States from a pure, I want our interest met perspective. And this is articulated even by figures like, you know, Tucker Carlson or, you know, figures that see themselves in advance a political project that they see as America first. I say, this is not in our interest. This is fundamentally in the interest of Zionists and neocons, which are two kind of words for the same faction in Washington, D.C.

And obviously there's deep economic and material interests on behalf of bank. banking institutions who could open up new markets and infiltrate the Iranian economy, a huge economy with a huge population. There's military industrial, always military industrial incentives and material interests in war for its own sake. But there's also an interest in the fight against China because Iran and China are allies economically, to a lesser extent, perhaps militarily. And Iran is central to China's Belt and Road initiative.

which is an attempt to reprogram global trade away from U.S. dominance and obviously to the self-interest, but too, I think a broader interest of people in the region that would sort of allow for the going around U.S. as an economic superpower in the region and get away from dollar domination and dollar hegemony and that being the reserve currency that dictates so much global trade in the first place. So while there is, I think, deep, deep Zionist, and perhaps primarily, there are Zionist interests in toppling Iran. And Zionists are very well situated in the U.S. government, in the upper echelons. The Adelson's donated the most money to Trump.

You know, Jared Kushner is a figure in that administration that is pushing for those, a huge swaths of the Republican Party. We all know that. Secondarily, though, I do think there is a strategic anti-China perspective in the U.S. deep state that sees Iran as a crucial domino. And if they could topple it, they can weaken it, or they could ideally do full-on regime change in the reinstallation of the Shah, that they could kind of kill two birds with one stone, right?

They could serve Zionist interests and the interest of greater Israel while at the same time kind of knocking down a crucial domino for China, which puts a lot of, you know, weight in the lap of China. Like, are you going to allow this to happen? Are you going to allow it to happen? And, you know, perhaps they will. Perhaps they'll eventually retreat if things get dirty enough and dark enough that they'll cut off that domino and say it's more important for us to consolidate power and to kind of build up our economy and our military rather than take on full on, basically World War III at this moment. So there's a high chance that that does happen.

But that, I think, are the dominant strategic dynamics at play here. it's not as simple as simply saying this is all for Israel. It's primarily, I think, for Israel and Zionist interests, as well as the material interest I articulated earlier. But there's also a China dimension here that can't be overlooked. Yeah. No, I think that's really important. And I think hitting at the China trade with Belt and Road actually might be an interesting transition to the climate change conversation and that Greenland tie-in that you mentioned. because I do think we should talk briefly about, you know, what Arctic trade means in the future and what that has to do with U.S. policy towards climate change. If you're okay with us going there, I can kind of do some work there.

Yeah, yeah. Totally. Yeah. So, I mean, I think this like question of trade access is kind of the defining aspect of the shift to multipolarity that is shaping a lot of policy right now, right? if the U.S. is not going to be a global hegemon, if the U.S. is going to be basically this regional hegemon in the Western Hemisphere, its ability to access international trade markets becomes really, I think, a primary concern for it. And I think what climate change, this is where this, you know, is becoming an interesting question and really does explain the Greenland focus really well, which is that, you know, basically since like the age of European exploration, the dream has been to find an Arctic passage, because the Arctic Passage would give you the fastest shipping lanes between the Americas, Europe, and Asia. Like really fast shipping lanes.

But the routes that have been found throughout the Arctic are by and large seasonal and hard to actually even navigate in the best of weather. So you have like the Northwest Passage, for example, is this very important path that has been found that can seasonally be done right now. But which has seen thinning ice sheets basically since climate change has accelerated. and which very realistically could become a year-round route for Arctic trade and maneuvering, and that the United States has insisted it has legal access to, that Canada has insisted it has legal access to, and that China has expressed a desire to use for shipping in the region as well. And so the climate change thing, what is sort of horrific is that it does feel like as we are

really coming to the conclusion that we are past the threshold for certain levels of climate change. The ruling class's conclusion seems to be, all right, fuck it, let people die as a result of that. What can we gain from it? And access to Arctic shipping and Arctic trade routes really does seem to be the main positive takeaway that they can get. And so I think, you know, Trump recently has just gutted the EPA's ability to really do much about climate change by taking away the finding that greenhouse gas emissions pose a health problem to citizens or people of the United States. and therefore that guts a lot of the regulatory power of the agency from just a legal perspective. And so I think, you know, if you ask why is there this blatant self-destructive action being done by the ruling class,

the answer is because while climate change is going to mean destruction for the poor people of the world and the working class of the world, the ruling class sees opportunity in it and sees ways to consolidate power. And this, again, I think does really explain the weird Kremlin fixation that Trump has, is this actually quite logical recognition that a more kind of regionally influential U.S. that is not a global hegemon is going to need access to trade routes and that the Arctic is where they are going to be and that whoever can have a large military presence in Greenland

is going to control much of the access to those routes. And so it's very, you know, kind of horrifying to see a sort of like shrugging in the face of climate change and just a willingness to accept that, yeah, climate change is going to decimate the planet, but at least we are going to find some way to profit from it, being sort of the emerging attitude among the global ruling class. But I think that's kind of where we're at. And it means that I think for normal everyday people,

the assumption should be that the effects of climate change that will affect us are not going to be mitigated by states, are not going to be particularly mitigated by international actors, and that those are going to be focused on just what they can gain from the opening up a climate change rather than slowing it. And that has to affect, I think, a whole host of political calculations that we might need to make about what the future looks like. Yeah. And I find it kind of concerning and maybe curious how, you know, the climate change discussion kind of ebbs and flows in the political imagination. There have been periods of time, even since we've done our show,

right, where climate change really jumps to the fore. You know, huge wildfire events, you know, they'll really bring the thing back to the forefront of. people's minds, but then quickly it sort of moves, shuffles back into the background. Meanwhile, things are just getting worse, right? 2025, one of the three hottest years on record, which marks an 11-year streak, 11 years straight of record-breaking global warmth. And what they're seeing now is that warming is now accelerating. So it's accelerating at a faster and faster pace. And that's kind of a tipping point in its own right, which is it's not going to be this sort of nice easy curve upwards it's it's more or less you know thinking more in terms of an exponential curve

that things get hotter and hotter and that spirals things in a hotter and hotter direction and then you do reach tipping points and those produce you know jumps or increases or accelerations in the rate of warming um you know we're now with a 70% chance the UN environment program projects that the five year average for 2025 through 2029 the period that we're in right now will go above the 1.5 Celsius levels. That's sort of been the threshold of the Paris Agreement, which the U.S. has already extracted itself from, et cetera. And, you know, it must be said that this death drive accelerationism, as I've talked about before, is being conducted by old motherfucking men that won't live to see the worse of it. And even if they, even if those, they're middle aged men in some cases, men and

women, that they'll have the wealth and resources in their estimation to provide a buffer. They'll be able to move anywhere in the world where things aren't as bad. We all know the story of billionaires building various sorts of apocalypse bunkers or Zuckerberg buying huge swaths of Hawaiian land and a grotesque act of imperialism and colonialism that he is now, through the money that he's earned entitled to swaths of Hawaiian land. It's just absolutely grotesque. But they're getting ready to accelerate this problem and deal with the fallout being buffered by their status and their wealth. And just the generational fact that many of them will go on, they'll fucking die, and that it'll be us and our children and our grandchildren that will have to actually solve the problem.

And this is just a crime against humanity. This is just the logical conclusion of colonialism, capitalism, capitalism, imperialism over centuries. It leads to this. It can't lead anywhere else. but to this dystopic fucking situation where the worst people in the world, and now proven by the Epstein Files, the most evil fucking pricks on planet Earth are the most powerful and are the absolute richest,

and they are stripping our planet for copper as the world fucking burns. And we are going to be a permanent underclass in their perception of things that has to fight over whatever scraps they toss our way in this new fortress world where you try to keep out the despise, masses from huge swaths of the world that you consciously obliterated through this deregulation in the pursuit of short-term profits at any fucking cost. And no amount of Democrats coming in and trying to put the pieces back together and do a little 2% carbon tax or maybe we re-enter the Paris agreement is going to solve this fucking problem. The economic system itself is generating the crisis

and anything that keeps that in place will continue to perpetuate this crisis. But they just don't give a fuck. They don't care. Quarterly profits are, again, seen in quarterly installments. And a lot of these people are 60, 70, 80 years old. They don't give a fuck. And it's going to be all on our plate and our children's plate to deal with this chaotic fucking world where life expectancy decreases, where wars over resources increase,

where domestically and internationally, there's a broad. broadening gap between those who are hoarding as much resources in the face of the crisis as they can and an ever-growing underclass that has been displaced through economic machinations, through in their minds, AI replacing them in the economy so that they could still have a productive economy. They can still extract the resources of the planet and enrich themselves without having to even worry about workers getting uppity, right? This is the future that they're creating. It's the only future that this system can lead to and they're dragging us by the hair into it. And something has to break.

Something will break. It's just a matter of can we wrestle over political power before it's a terminal fucking crisis or not. Yeah. No, I think that's the real question, right? And I think, you know, again, like, it's so hard with climate change because it's so easy to just like fall into despair in the face of what it is. But I think like the question of can we contest for power is what is going to really matter.

And I think ideally climate change ought to offer us like a sense of urgency, right? And ought to offer us a sense of why it is necessary for us to fight for the power of the working class, to fight for solidarity, to fight for a system that expresses the universal interest of the people and not just a small ruling minority. And that will be increasingly necessary in a world where resources become more scarce. And I think setting aside like the like macro level political necessity that really comes that is involved in this, I also think there just is, you know, there should be a drive in the face of these realities for people as individuals to get more involved in their communities.

Because if resources begin to become more scarce, if the effects of climate change get displaced onto impoverished communities and those living in the periphery of society, having forms of collective, collective decision-making, collective senses of solidarity is going to be all the more important to make sure that it doesn't just turn into an atomized scramble for resources. You know, I think about what the world looks like when shit hits the fan someday. And I do kind of think, like, if you and your neighbors have never talked to each other, then when things are quite desperate, you're going to be in a bad spot, right? But if you and your neighbors not only have talked to each other, but organized together,

organized in your neighborhood, tried to win things together, built some sense of a shared power and a shared destiny as a result of that, then perhaps things will be more navigable. And so I do want to say like, you know, it is easy to feel the sense of despair in the face of it, but hopefully that can push us to invest in a necessity of engaging in struggle and engaging in building, you know, communities that are resilient and won't just turn on each other when things start to get bad. Because things do look bleak and we should start to account for what that might mean. And I do think that that means that organizing together, bringing communities together, is going to become increasingly important for navigating what the world will look like when

climate crisis continues to escalate. And I would also add to this that as bleak as things not only look but objectively are, that dialectics is still always in play. That, you know, the revealing of the Epstein class is at the same exact time an increase in the delegitimization of that class and of the administration that tried to not only participate but protect the people involved. As climate change becomes more brutal as it impacts more and more people, the natural desire to address it meaningfully will continue to increase. As fascist authoritarianism,

not only completely fails time and time again to solve the problems it presents itself as being able to solve and ratchets up the oppression and the immiseration of people at home and abroad, resistance to that grows. As U.S. imperialism becomes more belligerent. It all at the same time sacrifices its soft power capacity and its close, alliances and turns the world against it to the point where you have the Canadian president or prime minister, whatever the fuck, talking in front of the Davos crowd about how we're in a new era and maybe we should think about linking up outside of the U.S.'s influence because they're no longer reliable and they're fucking insane and you can't fucking trust them as far as you can

throw them. So, you know, there is the dialectic continues. And as they, as I always say, turn up the dial on fucking insanity. So too does the dial on resistance get turned down. up. So too, do people become radicalized in certain ways, right? We've seen that right-wing populism doesn't fucking work. No doubt tens of millions of Americans will still buy into it over the next four, eight, 12 years. But less and less people buy into it overall, right? The sort of complete falling out of the floor of the Trump sort of constituency and the people that, you know, got him over the,

over the popular vote line, you know, to say nothing of the electoral college, like, that's going to continue to increase. And Democrats want to come up and try to plug away at the same old bullshit. Well, huge and growing swaths of the Democratic base itself is turning against the elites on their own class, turning against the donor class and the way of dealing with issues that the Democratic Party has conducted so far. They're delegitimizing themselves. So this is something that it's evolution.

it continues to unfold and our role is to organize and educate ourselves and others in the direction of seeing this shit for what it fucking is. That there is no way out through the paths provided by the system as it currently exists and that we have to become more oppositional. And when you see stuff like the ice raids in Minneapolis giving rise to this organic mass, I say spontaneous, but it's also deeply organized and it has organizational capacities held over from 2020. and before that, that are able to mobilize these things. People are talking about general strikes. This is the dialectic. And so I'm not a doomer. I'm not a pessimist, right?

Every advance of darkness is also an equal and opposite reaction from people waking up and seeing the light. And so in some sense, it's a race because time is running the fuck out. But I do believe in the majority of people's capacity to be educated on these topics, to see through the lies, to be sort of, you know, disillusioned with the system as a whole and to be open increasingly to alternatives. And we know in the bottom of our hearts, even if it's not our exact, we don't know the exact sort of trajectory and playbook here. We know at the bottom of our hearts that our politics broadly conceived is the actual solution. It does actually strike at the root of the problem and uproot the primary causes of the crises that we're living through. We know that

that and we can push forward with with that confidence with love in our hearts with the genuine desire to create a better world for ourselves and more importantly everybody that comes after us and we can we can take that fight forward and dedicate our lives to it because like it or not this is our life this is the moment in history that we are born into and as fanon says as a generation we can rise to the challenge or fail to rise to it but this is the moment in history that we're presented with and we have to look that dead in the the fucking eyes and fight like hell for the remainder of our life. And interestingly and nicely, we get meaning out of that, way more meaning than we would get out of a stagnating capitalist

world where you just go to work every day. And the ruling class is fully entrenched in power. And they have total hegemonic domination. And we just squander away our lives working to make them money while we fight, you know, month to month to get by. And our demands lower and lower and lower as the quality of life spirals downward. Like it's nice to know that that doesn't have to be and really is not going to be the rest of our lives. And we can rise to the challenge kind of with love in our hearts and a smile on our face knowing that, hey, this is life. This is history.

This is what it means to be a human being. And I'm going to do everything I can to link up with other like-minded people and fight like hell for the future of this species and this fucking planet. Damn. Yeah. I don't know that I have too much to add. That feels like a very powerful point. And Don, I think that is the attitude that we need to have, right? Like, things are going to change, but that's a fucking law of reality, right?

Like, it's just going to happen. And it's our job to be involved in that change and fight to make it into something just. And yeah, I do think we can fucking do it, honestly. Absolutely. All right. Well, I'm sure we'll be back and talking, you know, depending on what happens. There's more events that are on the horizon that we'll come back and talk about. But I think that that wraps it up for today.

Before I leave, I do just want to say that here in Omaha, we're running another iteration of our Socialist Night School coming up later this spring. We are looking for funding. 100% of those funds go to bringing in a labor organizer from Minneapolis to teach a class on labor organizing, goes to provide free child care for all participants, as well as free food. This is a six-week program once a week over six weeks. And so we just need funding to make it happen. And if you're so inclined to support that project, if you have any extra income to support it, I'll link in the show notes of this episode. And you can toss us a few dollars, which just helps us make that program run at its maximum capacity.

And Allison, is there anything that you would like to plug or promote on the way out? If you're in L.A. on Saturday at 630, All Power Books is doing a screening of the young Carl Marx and myself and some other tenant union comrades will be there afterwards doing kind of a discussion of the communist man. if that's interesting anyone. But I also want to plug what Brett just plugged. I think Socialist Night Schools and these spaces that create room for people to come with childcare where a working family can show up and get this kind of education are so unbelievably important. Like our podcasts get to people who are already on the left, but these spaces that get to

people who might not necessarily listen to podcasts or might not necessarily already be in like kind of the left media ecosystem are so just like unbelievably valuable. So yeah, I just really want to encourage people to donate to that. I think it is a super, super important and worthwhile thing. And we need more of those. And I can't think of someone better to be teaching at them than Brett. So please do actually take the time to support that. Well, thank you.

I appreciate that very much. And yeah, if you're in L.A., go support Allison at All Power Books. This will be out this week. So this Saturday coming up is when it will be available. Look into it if you're in the area. Go show Allison some love. And, yeah, attend a really cool event. I've still never seen the young Carl Mark.

got to rectify that personally, but, totally. But yeah, so everybody stay safe out there. Keep your heads held high. Ride the wave. Be accepting of the fact that we live in history. Find ways to make yourself more resilient and more robust in the meantime so that you can be a more effective agent in history, a vehicle through which history flows and that we can

kind of push this thing in a much more positive direction. The fight is not over until we are all in the grave. I don't know if that makes you optimistic or pessimistic, but it's our duty nonetheless. So love and solidarity, stay safe out there. Connect with your neighbors, with your comrades, and let's keep fighting. I see you clearly now. My skin is a soft shade of brown. Our revolution's coming around.

We're watching a system disrupt. Two coins in a pinhole cup. Crushed with Tansi. What do you want me to believe? And what can I know? What of our nature? To reach their color. I'm into each their love.

I see you clearly now. Getting lost in a deep run. The revolution's coming around. We're watching a building collapse. No prayers or the folding. My voice says take a step Because you don't trust me I don't trust you

Yet we put these men in suits To handle conflict like they do All right You can see what I can see And I have stupidiology Well neither of us Want to be crucified And if you look at me in my dress

Say how cute you are And if I look at you And your rage is testicular Humanity's best Interest is circular They're just making money off of us fighting. What do you nature? To reach their color.

Wish their color.