Rev Left Radio - Iran Under Attack by the Fourth Reich

Episode Date: March 2, 2026

On this YT livestream (3/1/26) Alyson and Breht discuss the illegal war of aggression launched by the US and Israel against Iran. Throughout the discussion they take live questions from the chat.   Subscribe to your YouTube Channel HERE   ---------------------------------------------------- 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/

All right, welcome, everybody. Welcome. Some things up front as people continue to come into the chat. This is, I mean, our first time really doing, I think, in any reasonable time frame, our first time doing a YouTube live stream. We've done some on other people's shows. We've never quite done one just through our channel with just Allison and I. So, you know, work with us here. If we have to work through some kinks and stuff, it should be pretty easy. It sounds pretty boomerish of me that I'm struggling with just a YouTube live stream. But, you know, work with us here. It looks like everything's going good. Everybody in the chat is being supportive, so that's good. I also wanted to say up front that I think both Allison and I are kind of recovering from some viral infections. You know, she's in L.A. I got mine in New York City, so coast to coast germs. Right. We are healing, but my throat in particular is still very dry.

So, you know, apologies if there's any issues with that. I'm drinking green tea and all of that. So hopefully that helps. won't be an issue. We're going to aim for about an hour, hour and a half. And in the comment section, we're going to continue to look at the comments. There is a little bit of a lag. But Allison and I are both going to kind of keep a goal of ours to engage with the chat throughout. So if you have specific questions in particular, we'll keep an eye out for those. And if we miss it, just ask it again. And hopefully we'll catch it in one of the iterations. So yeah, so yeah. If this is

successful. I want to do this more. I think it's something that people have actually explicitly asked that we should do more more live streaming. I think it's a really cool way to not only keep up with our community in real time and have that back and forth, but also with all the events happening, like, we need each other to work through the issues, right? We need to be in communal relationship with one another and figure this stuff out. It's not just Allison and I handing down knowledge, right? Like, especially with, with a situation as complex as, as what's happening now in West Asia. It takes all of us to kind of work through these issues. So, all that out of the way, this is already looking nice. So hopefully we can keep doing this throughout the year.

But it's some dark times. And I don't know. I think if you're roughly around Allison and our eyes age, most of our lives has been in kind of dark global times. Nothing compared to what the people of West Asia are going through. Nothing compared to what the people of Palestine have. been going through and continue to go through, of course. But we're human beings and we're invested in the human condition and we're invested in the human story. And we all feel deeply the pains of human suffering happening around the globe at the hands of the most evil and dumbest people on the planet, right? At the most grotesque human beings that this earth has ever vomited out. are also the wealthiest, most powerful people bringing hell on earth to large swaths of the planet,

most of whom are completely innocent human beings who just want to live their lives, just want to get by, take care of their families, and enjoy the coming spring, and just be a human being. But they can't because this evil death machine of imperialism and colonialism insists on dominating the entire planet. and the attacks on Iran are just the latest iteration of this 500-year death machine. And it's, I believe it's terminal stages, but that makes it only the more dangerous. So I'll hand it over to Allison, and you can give your opening thoughts. Maybe walk us through the sort of situation as we see it with the foreknowledge that even in the best of times we talk about the fog of war. And now we have this fragmented social media, smashed black mirror version of reality that we're all trying to,

peer through with the fog of war and the irony of being exposed to so much information in real-time, real-time events also makes it harder to sort of parse through what's true and what's not. People just straight up lying online. Now we have AI to contend with. So, you know, it is very hard to know exactly what's happening in the best of times and it's certainly hard at the moment. But Allison, what are your opening thoughts and kind of where are we at? Yeah. I mean, I think that's just like a framing thing up front. I want to say that I really strongly agree with your take about like we all need to be able to talk about this together. Because obviously, Brett and I have our experience and we have our analysis, but I'm very curious

to hear from you all too. I think the last year in terms of the form U.S. imperialism has taken, global responses to blatant acts of aggression have all really like actually destabilized some of my longstanding analysis about kind of imperial stability and all of that. So I think that it will be important for us to dialogue back and forth here if we can because we're in times that feel somewhat unprecedented, at least in terms of the post-war world, in terms of how the U.S. actions have been met. And I think that that's worth going back and forth about. But to summarize kind of the situation for people who didn't see, I believe it was late Friday

night that the first strikes occurred. I've been trying to get a clear timeline whether or not it was Israel or the U.S. who struck first or whether or not it was coordinated simultaneously. but the first headlines that broke were if it Israeli air strike against Iran, actually, which was at the very least quickly followed up by U.S. air strikes against Iran. This has been referred to by both regimes, the United States and Israel, as decapitation strikes with this claim that the focus is on taking out leadership. There's been some discussion from both of these imperialist states about the idea of

decapitating the government, taking out the ideological heads, and then that leading to the possibility of regime change, which is pretty openly discussed at this point as a motivation behind this. These strikes did succeed in killing quite a few people. According to reports so far, they did kill Ayatollah Khomeini and also several other military and political leaders in Iran. They also struck a girls' school and killed, it looks like, at this point, I think, 150 school girls, maybe higher numbers than that.

the civilian casualties have been massive. This act of imperialist aggression has, as always, not just hit the people that they are claiming to target, but more broadly, civilians within Iran. And then on top of all of this, we are now seeing kind of the situation escalating. Last night, by U.S. time, Iran basically said that it was going to engage in retaliatory strikes and did seem to engage in retaliatory strikes. We confirmed hits, probably drone hits at a U.S. military base in Bahrain. I believe three dead as of this morning was confirmed from what I was seeing on CNN. There were successful strikes in Tel Aviv. There were strikes in Dubai. There were strikes in a couple other locations as well, specifically targeting American

infrastructure throughout the Arab world seems to be the focus. U.S. base is there. But also, we've seen footage of smoke this morning rising over the port of Dubai and again, this kind of retaliatory wave. It seems pretty clear at this point that the government in Iran is not rolling over in the face of this and sees this as a situation where it is necessary to continue with a counteroffensive. Exactly what the continued extent of that is going to be remains to be seen. Similar to what we've seen from Iran, you know, over the last few years, has been this massive mobilization of drone waves as a way of overwhelming air defenses and getting through as well as traditional missile strikes that have occurred. Again, we're still trying to get some of the details, but there's some pretty

wild footage of Iranian missiles being able to evade interception over Tel Aviv. There seems to be, yeah, just quite a barrage that has happened. As of, I think about like 10 minutes ago, Netanyahu has said more waves of Israeli strikes are likely. I don't know if the U.S. has confirmed more waves, but again, the situation does not seem to be quieting down at the present moment, and it appears that there may be some level of escalation, which is occurring. We obviously have to wait and see what that looks like, but based on everything that I've seen, that's about where we stand at the current moment. Yeah, I mean, there's a way in which this is already a regional war. The Iranian response has been regional in scope as, I mean, honestly,

it has to be, as it probably should be, it needs to be, it necessitates itself to be. You know, the old meme of all the American bases surrounding Iran is now in real kinetic play with regards to them being, being bombed directly. And, you know, I mean, it goes without saying Iran has a right to protect itself from this obvious war of aggression that has been ramping up for decades. This is the regional endgame from Libya and Palestine, the attacks on Hezbollah, Ansar al-A and Yemen, who are still fighting back. Hezbollah still exists in some capacity to fight back. Hamas never stops fighting. But the toppling of Syria and the replacement of the Assad government with the puppet al-Qaeda state. that they've formed now. And the goal, you know, ideally the goal for the U.S. and Israel would of course be to install some sort of puppet government. But what they'll most likely settle for is destruction of Iranian civil society and the

fracturing of the state apparatus and some form of volcanization with various forms of ethnic tension or sectarianism, filling the void, destabilizing the country. Perhaps they'll send ISIS in at some point to first. destabilize it from within, but that still serves the greater Israel project. And there are interests that abound here, right? This is clearly, you know, people talk about this is a war for Israel. And I think that's a fair way to talk about it. There is no like really clear-sighted American need to go to war with Iran right now with all of the problems that the U.S. faces. But this is an empire and decline. It is going to lash out and try to reestablish, you know,

hegemony that it's actively sort of losing. And in a lot of ways, this is how dying or declining hegemon's have to act. And it's also decisive. What exactly will happen here? What the outcome will be will determine the state of, and among many other things, U.S. imperial hegemony, at least in the region. So this is, of course, you know, high stakes. But the U.S. has interests in the region. I've talked about it in our last episode about the interest in having some sort of presence or at least destabilizing the region in response to China's Belt and Road Initiative, which in a lot of ways goes through Iran. Iran has always been geopolitically important for its geographical location on the map at the crossroads of three continents. And of course, this is punishment for standing up against

U.S. imperialism for decades and decades and decades. You know, anybody that stands up, no matter what the nature of your government is, no matter what the nature of your economic system is, if you stand up to total global domination by Western imperialism, you are on the list to be toppled and destroyed. So whether this is a serious situation for Iran or a Libya situation, that's what the U.S. and Israel clearly want. And from Israel's perspective, of course, they want the number one opponent in the region defeated and they want the number one obstacle to the Greater Israel project, which is Israeli Laban's realm. They want that defeated. So I've, you know, somebody in the chat mentioned, I think of the U.S. and Israel as one entity. I think there's still

something analytically to be gained from thinking about them sort of separately in their own unique interest, but functionally, materially, concretely in the region for what it actually is worth, they operate as a single entity. And it is, as I've said, the Fourth Reich. This is the legacy of the Third Reich. This is the Fourth Reich. It is fully equipped with ethnic cleansing, with a full-on industrial genocide, and with Labens Rom, with the expansion of territory into neighboring territories, with complete belligerent aggression, no attempt to do diplomacy whatsoever. In fact, now diplomacy is used as a fig leaf under which kinetic assaults can occur. Now, the U.S. strategy under Trump is to lure you into negotiations so that they can attack you,

which probably has some downstream effects with international relations going forward. But there's a lot at stake, and I don't mean to say any of that with assurances that this is going to be a victory. Iran is a tough, tough country full of people who understand the machinations of Israel and Western imperialism, who have been educated through decades of struggle, no matter what their differences with their own government may be, They understand that the toppling and pillaging and plundering and decimation of their amazing civilizational country by the U.S. and Israel is not going to be good for any regular Iranian person. And already the economic woes that they're facing in Iran is a result of these brutal sanctions imposed on them by the U.S., which itself is a crime against humanity. So this is the Fourth Reich death machine. It is marching on Iran.

you know if I had my way Iran would magically get an array of 10,000 nuclear weapons and China and Russia would come to its aid. I'm not so sure what the moves of China and Russia are going to be. I don't personally think that either of them are going to jump headlong into this war, but I do think there's going to be intelligence sharing and probably some weapons sharing. We'll see how far that goes. But it's a it's a dark time for sure. And yeah, so Allison, any, I don't really, I'm kind of just. figuring out where to go with this because it is hard to kind of think about. But yeah, I'll bounce it back over to you. Yeah, I mean, I think there's a few things to kind of expand on there. So one is in

terms of like, is the U.S. pursuing its own interest? Is it pursuing Israeli interests? The other kind of thing that I want to add to the table is Saudi interests as well, right? Because some of the reporting that we've seen in the last 24 hours points out that in particular Saudi pressure on Trump to engage in the strikes was pretty heavy alongside Israeli pressure. And that, that, is not surprising to me. I think Trump's foreign policy in the region has been focused on basically trying to create cooperation between Israel and the, you know, various Arab states that have traditionally not had a very positive relationship with it. This has been kind of the whole focus of the Abraham Accords moving in this direction. And so Trump wants a unified imperialist block in the

region that includes both Israel and states like the Saudis, right? And so this mixed pressure that is trying to be developed here does, I think, indicate some interesting things. The other thing that I want to bring up is it's always, like, difficult because I don't want to treat Trump as overly anomalous, because I think you can fall into this kind of personality, anti-structuralist understanding of what's going on. And at the same time, I do often feel like Trump's foreign policy is somewhat anomalous, right? Traditionally, I think what people have jokingly called, like, the unsinkable aircraft carrier thesis of Israel, i.e., Israel is fully subservient, to U.S. interests and is essentially just an American proxy in the region and America is fully in

control, I think that has been the best descriptive paradigm for most of recent history. But under Trump, it does feel like that may not necessarily be the case. It's a little complicated because we've both seen Trump willing to put Israel in its place in a way Biden wasn't willing to and sometimes, he's willing to kind of yank the leash when he thinks it's strategically necessary for his goals. but we've also seen Israel willing to force his hand in ways that I don't think we've necessarily seen under other presidents. So there's a higher level of instability to that relationship under Trump, I think. Part of this, I think, has to do with his just like own open corruption and just open clientelism, where people who can get close to him and can get the conversations they want with him are able to push him to do what, you know, they want him to do.

And we know his Israel envoys like Whitkoff are engaged in kind of this personal policy, ticking back and forth. That seems more capable of moving Trump than most presidents that we've seen in the past. So that might be a part of it. But yeah, distinguishing American interests, Israeli interests, Saudi interests. And then I think this fourth thing, which is like Trump's interests, which I think often are somewhat distinct from what the U.S. military industrial complex might consider its interests, makes this very hard to untangle. And I think as we're moving into, you know, as I've said over and over again, declining U.S. unipolarity. declining U.S. hegemony, this more corrupt clientelist relationship that is increasingly unstable,

that is increasingly handled through weird personal connection back channels is going to make some of those more longstanding analytic frameworks like the unsinkable aircraft carrier framework, less tenable because they're hard to map on to very rapidly changing situations. So that's kind of one of the directions that I'm looking in here. And I think the Saudi direction is the other thing it really needs to get picked up. I think Saudi influence on U.S. politics and foreign policy has been huge for a long time. I think you cannot understand much of the war on terror without the question of some Saudi interference. And so there are these various factors that are pulling. And I think a president who is just happy to play game with the highest bidder at the moment.

And that creates the situation that we're in. That's at least somehow how I'm reading it. Again, I think there's a risk of falling into an anti-structuralist, just, oh, Trump is uniquely insane kind of thing. And I don't want to do that. I think this is more a result of the kind of president you get during a period of unipolar collapse and exactly what that shift in imperialist policy looks like. For sure. And this is speculative, but I think it would be interesting to explore the dynamic of what, how can you actually get Trump to do this? You've mentioned some, you know, very sober thoughts about, you know, how things might go. But there's also a bunch of reasons why this is stupid from a purely Trump personal advancement perspective.

The midterms are coming up. You have historically low polling. Trump has lower polling now than at any time during his first administration and at any time during Biden's entire term, right? So your polling is low. Your constituency is increasingly fractured. You have this Epstein thing hanging over your head. In midterms are coming up.

And if the Democrats have a victory for all the weaknesses of the Democrats, it's just going to mean hearings. and, you know, holding people to account on the Epstein thing, perhaps, or releasing more files, forcing the DOJ to release more files. They're going to really put a stick in the road with regards to what you want to do on the second half of the Trump's, you know, second term. And so this, so this comes into play. Why would you do this? Well, there's this longstanding military industrial reason to do it.

There's this longstanding imperial reason to do it. There's this longstanding friendship with Israel. I'm not taking off the board the possibility that there is some sort of compromise that Israel has on Trump. Not that you need that for Trump to do evil and stupid things. That's Trump's whole thing. He is an evil, stupid man. And so this is not necessarily, I'm not advancing this as a, for sure thing. I'm just advancing this as a possibility that Epstein and Trump were best friends for 15 years.

If anybody, if Trump did anything at all at Epstein had, right, at the end of their friends, They were pretty bitter at each other. The emails in the Epstein files reveals that Epstein pretty much hated Trump and Trump talked shit about Epstein now that their friendship is over. So years and years of friendship, years and years of almost certainly crimes that were committed that Trump did do people, right, to children perhaps. If Epstein has that, he has these connections to Israel, Israel would have that. If anybody has the smoking gun on Trump, right, to hold over his head as ultimate leverage,

it would be Israel probably through Epstein. And there is a world in which he is having that leveraged against him behind the scenes and we will never know. And Israel says, as long as you do what we want, this will never come out. We will give you the narrative terrain to say that you're a hero. You can frame this however you want. We can talk about this being quick and not a forever war, no boots on the ground. We'll come out and tell that you're the best president we've ever had. You know, you'll go down in at least Israeli history as the best American president.

U.S. history, that's done with regards to anything positive coming out historically in retrospect on Trump. But there's a world in which that happens. So then somebody asking the comments, and this is connected, I think, how could this lead to a police state here? So I'm just talking about the midterms. And I was just talking about how Democrats coming in and winning the Senate and the House could functionally put an end to Trump's second term. This happens often in presidencies when you have a huge swing in the midterms, that you are now just fighting an uphill battle all the time to do anything at all. Under a state of war, Trump has explicitly talked about this.

There is a state of exception that if you can be in a war when the voting thing comes, plus you've planted these seeds about how these voting machines are rigged and they stole it in 2020, you could use the extravagant conditions of war to seize the voting machines and somehow some way refused to accept the results of the midterms election. an immediate constitutional crisis, but under the fog of war, which is much easier, I think, to deal with. Look at what Netanyahu's done. Right before October 7th, he was being mass protested in the streets. He had these corruption charges. He very well could be facing conviction, possible prison time. War gave him the ultimate out. I think Trump looks at that and sees. That is

obviously a path to him not, you know, basically relinquishing the second half of his second term. So I think how this relates to a police state here, we owe. already functionally live in a police state. The emergence of the data centers and the AI backbone is the new techno surveillance state that is now making all the data easily accessible instantaneously through these AI machines, basically, and that there is a world in which the midterms more or less don't happen are too contested to go through or where emergency powers under a state of war are declared that functionally stop the midterms from proceeding more or less as.

usual. I don't see how Trump gets out of this in any other way, right? I mean, to sit back and just let the midterms come, now you're in a fucking Middle Eastern war, your polling is even lower than it's ever been, and just let the Democrats come in and totally win and then just make you a fucking joke for the rest of your term. I mean, Trump's not going to let that happen. So I believe the police state is already being built up. This has always been a police state for marginalized communities, for poor people, for black people, for indigenous people. And in time, of crisis, we saw the red scares in American history, certainly during periods of war. There's been huge crackdowns on immigrant communities. We're already seeing that. On the radical left,

you know, red scare shit, we've already seen that on any unions that try to strike, especially in a context of war. There's new powers to crack down on that. So I think the baseline of a police state is already there. It's being fortified and technified by the AI backbone and emergence, which is why they're hitting the gas pedal on that. Anthropic and chat GPT. Open AI, I mean, have already had this little jostling with the Pentagon where Anthropic was like, our red line is like using autonomous robots with no human oversight to kill people and also using our AI to do mass surveillance. Those two things. Anthropics said, hey, can you have humans control who dies with these machines instead of AI? And can you not use AI to create mass surveillance?

The Pentagon said, fuck you. We're not doing business with you anymore. So what does that tell you? Those two things are a red line for the Pentagon. So the police status. here, it's only going to get more. And in a state of war, every single time in American history there was a state of war, the president used that crisis to amass upon himself more and more power. Every single time from Lincoln in the Civil War, FDR, World War II, Vietnam War, World War I, and right now we're seeing the exact same thing. Instead of FDR or Lincoln, for all their flaws, we have fucking Trump. So the police state is here. This will be used to consolidate it. And I think it's going to show its true face during the midterms.

Yeah, I think I strongly agree with that. I think very clearly there has to be some level of domestic motivation towards this action, right? I think it is just true that Trump is unbelievably unpopular at the moment and that there is this floundering fear going into the midterms. And when you think about it, starting wars is not popular, right? It is not actually something that is likely to give him a rebound. So in terms of trying to take an action that is going to increase his chances of winning a fair midterm, I don't think you could really explain this. I don't think you could really explain the Venezuela situation either. Both of those are actions that I think traditionally are very risky in terms of public perception. So that does leave us asking, what is it that Trump is trying to

accomplish? And I do think setting up the conditions for the declaration of some sort of state of emergency seems likely. You know, we talk a lot about the way that, you know, a lot of the power that Trump has exercised in terms of cracking down on internal dissent was actually built under Democrats. And one of the cases where this is very true is that even under the Biden administration, a lot of the discussion from Zionist lobbying and also even from some aspects of domestic intelligence was these attempts to tie the pro-Palestine movement to Iranian proxies, right? And to say, oh, this is in some way being funded by Iran or influenced by Iran. And this discussion of like domestic Iranian influence networks came up under Biden, even.

obviously became much more intense under Trump, and no prosecution has taken place under that, but the accusation has continually been thrown around. And so given some of that framework, which has been laid as a justification for crushing student dissent and dissent in the streets around Palestine, over the last several years, it does feel like then an expanding regional war with Iran does give some of the domestic clearance to be able to make that framing, right, of an internal threat or internal enemy that requires some sort of extraordinary use of powers such that the midterms could be voided. It's hard to say necessarily, you know, the midterbs aren't going to happen or something like that,

but the conditions to muddy them sufficiently such that there can't be a transition of power within the legislature does seem possible. And I do think that that is likely related to this. Again, it's hard to kind of say exactly what is motivating Trump here because wars are particularly unpopular. The White House is already trying to paint this as anti-war. There was this tweet that I saw that was like Trump is ending Iran's forever war on America was like the framing that they are trying to use for this, which I don't think will land, even with their base, right? I think the parts of their base that care about anti-interventionism, which is a component of some of their base, are not going to buy that, are not going to be interested in that. And so that shift in unpopularity around foreign

policy in particular is going to continue, forcing the regime to take some. some sort of action domestically. We'll have to wait and see what that looks like. But I do think the domestic picture really is a part of understanding the calculus that is being made here as well. Yeah. And somebody asked in the comments, and I think this feeds right into what we're talking about here is, do you all think something is fundamentally different now compared to Iraq in

terms of dissent on the right? But even that question of what's different now with regards to Iraq. I was talking about this over at the Workers Lit podcast, which will come out tomorrow. I was blooming into political consciousness during the Iraq War. I remember sitting in seventh grade watching the second plane hit the tower. And even though I was a teenager when the 2003 surge and shock and awe happened, I remember seeing it on TV. I remember it being ambient in the culture.

I remember by the time I'm 16, 17 listening to conscious hip-hop and stuff. I'm like out in Omaha with the sign protesting the Iraq War. there was, I mean, it's grotesque to say it, widespread bipartisan popular support for the Iraq War. And there was a dissident left, for sure, there always is. In every single war in American history, it's the left that is dissident. But, you know, relatively powerless,

especially back then. Think about how powerless the American left is today, like 2003, 2005, you know, not non-existent. It's always been there, but very, very small. But because of 9-11 and because of 9-11, and because of two years from 9-11 to the war, the invasion of Iraq in 2003, there was an ongoing effort with limited information streams too. We just had the corporate media at that time to sell the American people and the international world

on the fact that there were WMDs, which we now know was a lie. And everybody who supported it from Tucker Carlson to Hillary Clinton to Donald Trump, all have to come back around and say that they were wrong. My dumbass is 17 years old like smoking weed and holding up a no war sign was more politically advanced than the highest echelon of thinkers and academics and scholars in the United States which says something about the ruling class, not about me necessarily. But there was real support. When I went out and held up my fucking sign, I was getting flipped off.

People were throwing shit at me. There was a real sense of like, you know, those yellow ribbons were everywhere, support our troops, stand behind our troops or stand in front of them. You know, if you were anti-war and you had a big enough platform, you'd go on Bill Riley and he'd scream at you for an hour and everybody would seal clap. there was like if you go back and check the polls too I would not be surprised 70 especially in the early days by the end of the Bush administration

it was done right but in the early days I would not be surprised at 60 70 perhaps at some point 80 high watermark percentage of support for the Iraq war at some point because they sold it because there was limited information and because the US population hadn't learned the lessons from Iraq yet right the ruling class has learned one lesson

from the Iraq war it's not to not do war it's that hey these this nation building is annoying. Putting boots on the ground for years and years and trying to build up a nation like the neocons thought we could do and build democracy. That doesn't work. But we're still totally down for like the toppling of regimes and bombing societies and destroying them.

So I think what Trump's shift here is I'm not going to do necessarily boots on the ground. We're not going to have hundreds of thousands of American troops invade Iran. We're going to use our air power and our missiles and our ships and our carriers and our allies in the region. and we're going to pelt and destroy and fundamentally eradicate the state stability, the economy, the infrastructure, civil society. And the goal here is just to have volcanization, chaos, et cetera. The difference here, though, is that there is limited support. I mean, not that it matters.

80%, the latest poll I saw, 80%, 85% of Americans full on against any war with Iran, it doesn't matter. What's happened between the Iraq war and the Iranian war? Many things. One thing is that there has been a dismantling of even the pretext of representational government. There has been citizens united. There's been a flooding and a legitimization of outright corruption and bribery of which the Trump administration is this colman, this grotesque culmination of, where it's like, it's a joke to even think that you have a say, average American. There's been scholarly studies that have come out in a objectively and empirically shown. The once in needs and interests of the American voter has zero percent representation in actual policy. The once and needs of the donor class, the military industrial complex, APEC and all its adjacent things, monopoly capital, techno oligarchs. That is who the banks, financial institutions, that is who this government is of by and for. And it's always been that way, but even the pretext of democracy has been completely shattered. So what the differences between the Iraq war, much less popular support, that fact matters even less than it did

back then. And so that's just perhaps one of the differences. But having lived through both of them, it's shocking to see the amount of people that still are just open to it. I mean, they have a financial interest, the corporate media, we can talk about this more, but the amount of people that just get sucked into it. And with regards to the right, and I'll shut up after this and hand it back over to Allison, there are real fissures on the right. Right. What has happened on the left since Bernie has been this constituency, what the Democratic base for all of its flaws and heterodox character, it is at fundamental odds with the Democratic leadership. That contradiction is heightening and heightening and heightening and heightening.

That same thing is happening to a lesser degree on the right, but it is happening in a lagged way. And Trump is the only thing holding that coalition together. Who is like the biggest right-wing dissident against Israel and the Iran war right now is Tucker Carlson? Who is the one person Tucker Carlson never, ever, ever criticizes Donald Trump. Go to all of his interviews. Tucker will spend an hour talking about everything this administration of doing how it is bad, how it is evil, he doesn't understand blah, blah, blah. The moment somebody says, yeah, but you know, like Trump is the leader here and like the buck stops with him, oh, you know, Trump is doing his best. Trump is hearing a lot of different stuff.

Like Trump will listen to. It's amazing. But once Trump's gone, I really do think, you know, somebody said, like somebody laughed at the idea that there was dissent on the right. right. There is, there are real splits. Trump is holding it together through his pure fascism and personality and ego insanity. Um, but even that is severely weakening and you can see that in the polls. Post Trump, nothing's holding this thing together. So I do think there's a reckoning on the, on the American right. And, um, I'm not exactly sure how that will play out. But the longer this goes on, the more those fissures erupt. Allison. Yeah. No, I think this is a very useful framing.

On the question of dissent on the right, I think it's complicated, right? During the Iraq war and the war in Afghanistan, there was this kind of like right wing libertarian anti-war position that you saw. So I actually think like the website like anti-war.com was run by like libertarians, right? So one of these big voices that was out in the street at protests and stuff was run by right-wingers, actually. Interestingly enough, I think that type of anti-war right-wing anti-interventionist like ideology is dead at this point, basically. I do think that has essentially disappeared from the landscape. To the extent that there's an anti-interventionist position on the right is primarily articulated in nationalist terms, like rather explicitly at this point and a focus on how interventionism is disastrous for a national interest position. So that is a shift that's occurred. But I do think around the fringes generally of the right-wing coalition, there are just people who hold that kind of tacit nationalism who are like, why the fuck are we spending money on this, right? So it's not the same kind of principled position that you saw from certain, like, right-wing fringe under Bush, but it is still kind of present. The other thing is, I think Israel is a fracture point in the coalition under Trump right now, right?

There is just realistically a Nazi faction of that coalition that hates Israel on kind of anti-Semitic grounds in addition to their general nationalist grounds. And I think we've seen that fracturing point really kind of blow up a little bit more. Is any of that going to matter? I don't really know, but I do think that some of that dissent is there. The thing that I find worrying about, you know, war with Iran in particular is that some of the consent manufacturing around it seems to have persuaded some of the center left. That regime change within Iran would be a good thing.

So whatever dissent there might be at the fringes of the right wing coalition, unfortunately, may be made up for by tacit liberal acceptance of this. And we've seen this already. The democratic responses so far have been more or less to grant the premise that overthrowing the government of Iran is a good thing. And to more or less grant the premise that the justifications for this war are legitimate, but to argue essentially that there's a procedural issue, i.e. it's a war powers question, or Congress was not briefed on this. And so on the center left, there is still, I think, some support for like the general idea of what is happening right now.

They just want the Democrats to get to rubber stamp it along the way, unfortunately. So that is what worries me that some of that shift, you know, in terms of right-wing descent really won't matter. Kind of hard to say. But thinking about the difference between this and the Iraq war, generally, I do think, Brett, the thing that you hit on that's really important is that there are, I do not think we will see a follow-up with boots on the ground or sustained occupation here. One of the things that the U.S. seems to have landed on is that that is not tenable after the failure in Iraq, the failure in Afghanistan. I mean, really, the quite dramatic failure in Afghanistan. I mean, really the quite dramatic failure in Afghanistan. That does not seem like something that the United States is likely

to engage in again, which means the question is what is the long-term goal here? Is it to put in a U.S. puppet overseen by U.S. troops on the ground, which is what we saw during the earlier iterations of the war on terror or something else? And I think that just throw things into chaos position has become more and more what the U.S. is interested in. I don't think the U.S. really cares who fills power vacuums at this point. If they can get rid of governments that stand up to them in one form or another, That seems sufficient to them, even if other actors that come in play, including non-state actors, aren't necessarily friendly to the United States. As long as they're destabilizing that situation that was a bulwark against American imperialism,

we as a country seem pretty much okay with it. Again, Syria, I think, shows like the very big example of this. But even later developments in Iraq, I think, show the U.S. being sort of willing to accept some of that chaos. And so that strikes me as very likely what is being developed here. and what the long-term goal is, i.e. not much of a clear strategy for where Iran goes after this, because it doesn't really matter in the calculations to the U.S. It's fine with general volcanization and chaos. And that speaks directly to a commenter's question. Deep in history,

what's up? Do you agree with the current conventional wisdom on the left that the goal is not regime changed, but rather turning Iran into Libya, Syria, since that can be achieved with only air power? And I think that's right, because the alternative to that would kind of be boots on the ground, or this sort of fever dream idea of reinstalling the shock. which again we just have to point out we're bringing democracy and freedom to you're installing a monarchy like it's just fucking insane

that that's now like even center left people are like you know like we're kind of cool like these guys seems to have a it's the Wang Gwido thing all the time or all over again I don't think he has um I don't think he has the political support on the ground to to make that happen although that is kind of what they're floundering as the alternative

because they can't just come out and say our goal here is just to just devastate the country destroy this beautiful shining country and it's you know for all of its flaws it's gorgeous civilizational culture going back to the very beginning of human civilization our goal is to bomb and destroy these sites these people and and totally turn this into a shell a haunted shell of its former self like we did in Libya they can't come out and say that so they have this pretext of like well this this guy we used to be in power his dad did maybe we can reinstall him and like these people like go on like

Pierce Morgan and support this, have the flag of the Shah behind them? Like, we're doing monarchy again. There's nobody in mainstream media that calls out the cognitive dissidents of like, oh, we're reinstalling a monarchist hereditary line as our liberation of the Iranian people. Like, it's, it really is grotesque. So I think that that addresses that question. And so with regards to the right, you mentioned like there's like straight up Nazi anti-Semitism. That is definitely present. I do think there is also like genuine conservatives who aren't necessarily anti-Semitic who just like see this clearly like there's some anti-Semitism probably inherent in it. But there's also just like genuine people that like, hey, like what the fuck are we doing? All these problems at home and we're fighting these wars and they learn a little bit about some history.

They start thinking about whose interests are actually at play. They see how much money we give, how all of our politicians are bought out by APAC. And regardless of your political opinions, a reasonable point. person can look at that and say, fuck this. And then on top of that two years of murdering children and women and innocent men in a fucking horrific genocide, that taxpayers who are barely surviving in many cases in the working class here at home are funding while we can't even go see a fucking dentist. Like there's a reasonable way that no matter where you are in the political spectrum, you look at that and say that's bullshit. So as I've always said, Israel knows this is probably

their last chance. Israel knows that the Trump administration is their last. Israel knows that the Trump administration is their last chance to actually get the full support of the American military empire to go and do its, from its perspective, it's bidding in Iran, which is also the military apparatus, the military industrial complexes goal in so many ways and the neoconservative goal for so long. But the fissures on the right, with regards to Israel, the left is gone, right? So if you're going to have an Israel pro-Israel camp in the United States, it's a dwindling faction of the right. But with the Aedelson money that got pumped in to the Trump campaign with with Jared Kushner being an agent kind of in the administration itself, with the control they

still have, they are going to, they see this as their last hurrah and they're going full steam ahead. And if they can make that happen without leveraging some compromise on Trump, they would. But if they have to assert that, they can and they will. Do they have to? That's a lot. That's That's the big question. Doesn't even matter in the end? Probably not in any meaningful way that matters with regards to what the Iranians have to do to fight for their survival. So there's another question though. I'll ask it and toss it over to you to give a first stab at a commenter question. My big question is, what's going on with Iran's defense strategy? Are they holding back or were the people touting their ability to inflict real damage just wishcasting? I was always

skeptical, but it seems like they can barely even touch the U.S. or Israel right? now. No reports of casualties, I believe they're trying to say, that I've seen. So, Allison, you want to take a stab at that? Yeah, great question. Shout out to Saya for putting that one in the chat, because I think it does get like a really important thing. So yeah, I've been kind of trying to ask this, right? So as I mentioned, kind of upfront trying to summarize the situation, there's a pretty clear counteroffensive that has gone on attacking U.S. bases in multiple states in the region. So Iranian action has taken place. But yeah, I mean, right now we're talking, I think six Israelis dead, five, or maybe three Americans dead at this point. It is not massive

casualties. And so I think that does raise this question of, is this holding back? What are we seeing exactly? And my first thought is that this actually probably is strategically holding back somewhat. If I'm trying to imagine what the Iranian state is trying to figure out right now, it's basically what are the next steps for the U.S. and Israel? What are their actual goals? What we have seen from Trump pretty consistently is strike, attack, and then try to create negotiations. He loves this thing where he says, I've now made negotiations easier. And so I think that they are probably waiting to see what the U.S. move is going to be, whether or not a line of communication is opened there, rather than going all out.

And so one reason might just be, yeah, a lack of clarity around what the U.S. is actually planning and trying to bide their time to be able to see. But then the other thing is that this may be a kind of long-term regional conflict, potentially, right? With Netanyahu this morning saying that there will be more strikes on the way, I can imagine this being drawn out beyond just like a few-day situation. And so the Iranian state's other calculation might be not using the entirety of its air and ballistic offensive capabilities right away, but being able to sustain a more long-term

struggle. Now, this is, like, I think, a big open question for what war means these days at all, because what war seems to mean is pretty much just contesting tests of air superiority right now. That really is what it has felt like other than obviously on the ground operations in Gaza, but that's a slightly different situation than this war between formal states with formal armies that have, you know, more established capabilities militarily. And so I would guess that Iran is kind of playing into the, unknown as much as most states are right now and holding back in order to be as adaptable as possible. Which makes sense, again, whether or not sustained long-term war

is yet to be seen, but if it is a question of air superiority, air defenses, and your ability to have air offenses, then yeah, not just using everything right away and inflicting maximal damage, but taking a slightly more cautious approach, seeing how things develop makes sense strategically. That is my best guess about. it just in terms of thinking of Iran operating rationally in terms of its decision-making. But it's hard to say, right? I mean, I think there is the Duma read that I've already seen online of like, oh, well, Iran maybe it's not as powerful as they've, we've always thought they were. They've landed some drones and some missiles in Tel Aviv, but it's never been the massive amounts.

I'm more skeptical of that, just in terms of, I think, states tend to play it more conservatively with these questions because it is better for their long-term survival. And that's kind of where I tend to lean on less, I think. I agree. And you've got to think from their perspective. This is like, you know, not to be vulgar or silly about it, but like you're in a bar by yourself and three of the biggest dudes come up and get ready to fight you. Like, you've got to be strategic. You can't just go all out.

This whole lead-up, Iran knows that it is fundamentally outgunned. You have Israel and Iran. I mean, I think Iran can fucking take those assholes. But the United States is just the biggest, most overwhelming military force in human history. And so you've got to kind of play your cards right. The strategy matters more than ever here, right, when you're in this asymmetrical fight. And so what we've seen in the lead-up is this complete and it's almost like from, you know, far be it from us sitting in our armchairs to tell Iran what to do. But there's this restraint that we've seen over and over again.

Even after, you know, all these belligerent strikes on Iran, Iran comes back through probably back channels and says, hey, we're going to do this, this and this just to show that we're fighting back. but and not in a cynical way, but just in a way like we're not trying to move up the escalatory ladder because it doesn't serve Iran to escalate. But here's the thing that Iran probably also knows. There's no way to de-escalate with these flocks. They're going to do whatever they want. They don't care about negotiations. Their goal is to fucking destroy you. They already took out your head of state and they took out multiple of your high-level figures in the military and the political state and they'll take out as many more as they possibly can. Their goal for you is complete devastation. So this is now an existential threat that has been proven.

So, so, you know, like from a vague, abstract, like moving pieces on a chessboard around, you could say what Iran needed to do when Israel and the U.S. first started testing it is just go hard as fuck, right, to like establish real motherfucking deterrence. But from, and, you know, instead of this little tit for tat thing they did. But that would make them even more easily pariahed in the industry. international media, but more than that, they could then blame Iran for the escalation. So if Iran did establish hardcore deterrence in these early phases of this aggression, then the U.S. and Israel would have just pointed to them and said, hey, they're escalating,

let's go all in. But the thing is, they're going all in anyway. So it's like, then what do you do? Now, now they're in a real situation where the decapitation strikes have occurred. And now you're in a fight for your life. And now the calculation is like, you know, what do we do? what do we do here do we go all out and even if you're trying to go all out there's you still got to be strategic you don't just push all the buttons and let all the missiles fly and then the next day

you got nothing so they got to send out some of their older stuff they got to begin waves of sort of like light strikes in a sense right holding back your your bigger weaponry and i'm no military expert so you know take that with the grain of salt but kind of just logically you got to hold back some of your your bigger stuff your more powerful stuff as this war continues on then you got to go back into that and dig in and start launching them and kind of have your own ability to escalate in response to their escalation. So this is an impossible situation to be in. My heart truly breaks for the Iranian people and the Iranian state who is like in this literally impossible situation no matter what you do, you're fucked and these people have no conscious. They're coming

after you no matter what. They use negotiations as a pretext to assault and destroy you. So it's really, really difficult. Now they've closed down the Strait of Hormuz. What is going to to be the impact of that. That is one of their, you know, pardon the pun, Trump cards, and it always has been predicted as one of their main Trump cards in the case of exactly this happening. Well, if they keep that shut down, prices around the world are going to go crazy. Oil is not just the gas you put in your car. It's the stuff that goes in plastics and is really the baseline of any functioning economy is the energy source you get to make your products and fuel your industries. Now, you know, U.S. has some of that, but still it's going to throw global markets into chaos.

So that's a real pressure point they have on the global economy. They've already kind of, they're using that. But as time goes on, that hits harder and harder, right? Those teeth dig in with each passing day that the straight stays shut down. Ansarala launching their attacks now in the sea off their coasts. So again, it's really hard to be in their position and think critically. We would love to see them go whole hog. We would, you know, part in the vulgarity, love to see Tel Aviv be rained down upon with Iranian missiles and give Israel a little bit of what the fuck they deserve.

But they have to be strategic because it's not only their leadership is gone, but it's like, what is the, what will we walk out of this with? Right. But even that, I feel bad saying it because that's pessimistic. I still hold out genuine hope that Iran can inflict real motherfucking damage, that Iran can really come strong. with some shit and impose real costs on the U.S. and Israel, at least Israel, you know? And if your government is going out and not only your government, but the end game of your enemies is to destroy your society, what is left to hold you back from going all out? We already know that Israel has the Samson option. If Israel were in a similar situation as Iran is right now and as Iran

will continue to be in, Israel will nuke the fucking world, right? um iran doesn't have nukes but it has lots of fucking weapons and it has a country of uh 93 million human beings um that are within striking marching distance of of israel um so i i'm just i just want to assert like there's reasons why they aren't going hard as fuck that does not necessarily mean they aren't equipped to do that or that they are fundamentally like overestimated in their abilities um they're trying to be strategic and you also have to think they've made contingency plans for these decapitation strikes. But a lot of your leadership is either gone

or under serious existential threat or in some level of chaos. And no matter how much contingency you have in place, there's still some chain of command confusion and chaos that will occur when top generals get killed, the head of state gets killed, and those things happen, even with contingency plans at hand.

So who knows what's going to happen? Who knows how long this is going to go? but again, Iran is in an incredibly difficult situation. And just like with the Nazis, like the world has to come together to put down this menace. And we're just not at a point where countries are really going to do that quite yet. And who knows where this will go? As I said in my previous conversation on the Workers Lit Pod, what started World War I was one assassination.

One guy with the gun came up and shot, you know, France Fernadad. And that started the domino effect for World War I. We're already in a situation much more intense than that. And we think about World War III. Well, we have Ukraine and Russia at war right now. Pakistan and Afghanistan are now at war. We have the entire West Asian region in full-on regional war. We have the U.S. acting belligerently in the hemisphere, starving Cuba,

decapitation kidnapping in Venezuela. In some practical way, this is World War III. but to formally get there, I think we're right on the precipice and almost anything can explode this. And with an economic collapse brought on in part by continued strangulation of the Strait of Hormuz, like who knows what the fucking happened. We saw, what was it in Karachi, people storming the U.S. Embassy? I bet that wasn't on the trajectory card of the guys in Washington and Virginia trying to figure this out. Chaos creates more chaos and you can never fully understand where all these shrapnel pieces of human misery

are going to fly. And that is always the chaos of war. So as much control as Israel and the US think they have, they don't. Yeah. No, I think the street of Hermuz is the really important thing that needs to get brought up here, right? Because that is the powerful leverage point that Iran has besides air offensive capabilities. The ability to close that straight is going to have massive economic consequences globally, right? Not just on the United States, but on Europe and on really the entire world. And so in terms of thinking about what Iran can do long term, I actually think their ability to apply that economic pressure by closing the strait is significantly greater than their ability to do some sort of slower, smaller waves of air offense against other regions. Again, I think

someone posted in the chat that people are talking about crude oil going to $100 a barrel tomorrow. So this spike in oil prices seems very possible in relation to this and leads to, I think, much, much more instability. And so Iran will probably continue to lean on that. The other thing that people in the chat have been pointing out is that Trump is now saying that negotiations are going to resume and that Iran has reached back out. It'll be interesting to see I'm never super trustful of anything that Trump says or any way that he frames it.

But again, I think even if negotiations are occurring, that doesn't mean that these regional back and forths are going to stop. I also think Israel as basically a loose cannon that might just continue to push its kind of offensive does create a destabilization for any talks the U.S. might want to have. So we will need to see what things look like moving forward. And I think it's a fair question. But I do think the straight of horn moves is huge. And I do think that we are going to see by and large massive economic disruptions. And it'll be interesting to see whether or not that causes other countries to turn against the U.S. at all because they see the U.S. as perpetuating a situation that is keeping trade through that region down. Hard to say, I always want to be

optimistic about these things, but also every other country in the U.S. sphere of influence does seem to be willing to more or less bow to U.S. increasingly deranged forms of imperialism, so it's hard to know exactly what that might look like, but I do think we have to talk about the straight-of-horn moves as the other point of strategic leverage. It's not purely just about military offense for Iran. The economic damage they can do is massive and probably their most important tool. And honestly, I hope that they can create economic ripples

throughout the rest of the world. As an American with kids barely keeping my head above water in many ways, I think that we should have to deal with the repercussions of our government's actions. And if that means higher gas and costs shoot through the fucking roof, the American people need to feel the consequences of their actions to have any sort of wakening up moment to fight against this insanity as long as the average American can live in relative comfort like a frog in the boiling water slowly gets worse and worse but as long as they can be

in relative comfort have their Netflix and their little treats and their phone addiction things can keep going on when they can't go to fucking work and I'm not trying to say I want misery imposed on like me and my family and my community But at some point, the U.S. has to feel these repercussions. And if one of the Trump cards of the Iranian government is to, like, create economic chaos throughout the world, that should happen. The world should feel this insanity. That the world is so interdependent now, is so interconnected, not only environmentally, existentially, but economically, politically, socially. Like, these reverberations should impact us all.

And as long as the average American can more or less escape feeling anything from this war, like the baseline urgency for them to do anything about it is just not going to be there. I remember during the Iraq War, I was delivering pizzas. And I was broke as fuck. I would like break down on the way to deliver pizzas because I was trying to get the tip to put $3 in my car so I get to the next thing. And I remember paying $5 a gallon for gas. And I don't know, you live in L.A., so maybe in California,

that's normal. In Omaha, it's not normal. And I was just like fighting for my life. And, you know, I had my own politics and my blossoming political consciousness and all that. But like, and even that wasn't enough to create like a widespread opposition to the war. So I don't, I don't know what to say on that point. But yeah, it's just, it's just, it's, it's, it's really heartbreaking to see the position Iran is in. And and this little 250 year old shit country that Europe shat out. and its high water mark of colonialism is like devastating this thousands and thousands-year-old, gorgeous Persian culture, you know, of unique religious cultural sites. You know, Israel makes it a point, and this is part of genocide, right, to obliterate, you know,

longstanding centuries and millennial old cultural sites of their perceived enemies. And so there's no doubt that it will never get coverage because there might be like a mosque here or some ruins here. no doubt that Israel makes that part of their war plan against Iran to really undermine the historical and cultural basis of a society, if not to destroy the entire culture, which Israel and the U.S. will never be able to do, to undermine and just attack the psychology of a culture at its core. And we've seen Israel do this time and time again throughout the region. There's no reason to think it won't happen now. Here's another question, and I'll bounce it over to you, Allison. Can you share your thoughts on the way the U.S. media has been framing interoperable? prevention as a way to liberate women in Iran? Yeah, I can share some thoughts.

So a couple things. One, this is what I was talking about with like the consent manufacturing that seems more oriented towards the center left and liberals in the U.S. You know, let me just say that for those of us who were alive for the Iraq and Afghanistan wars, we've heard this before, right? This is not a new talking point. Liberation of women was one of the major justifications for, intervention in Afghanistan in particular. And as we know, that was bullshit. Look at Afghanistan today.

Look at the Taliban back in power, you know, everything that has resulted from that. The U.S. intervention in Afghanistan did not lead to the liberation of women. It led to worsening conditions and it led to instability and then the reestablishment of an even more outright reactionary state. And so I think that that just needs to, be rejected on face. We've heard it before. We know these justifications. We have to say no to them. And this is, I think, a thing that is particularly frustrating to me. One of the things that I've seen, you know, on social media from some of those who are more on like the social democratic left. So a little left of left of center, but not necessarily full and radical, has been like,

well, we have to hold two things are true, which is that like the Iranian regime is illegitimate and does need to be replaced, but that the U.S. isn't the one who should do it and it shouldn't be through war. And I just think there is no space for that right now. Right now, what needs to happen is denunciation of regime change efforts, a rejection of all of the ideological framings arguing for that regime change, and to understand that those framings are fundamentally dishonest in terms of their motivations, and that their purpose is for generating broad support for what would be an otherwise unpopular war. The question of the status of women in Iran is not the thing that needs to be debated while U.S. and Israeli bombs are falling on Tehran, right? There is an immediate existential threat

that is not just to the government of Iran, but to the people of Iran as well. If you want to talk about the status of women in Iran, I would say let's talk about the 150 schoolgirls who were killed by U.S. and Israeli strikes. That is the immediate relevant question right now, and I think it is very important for the left that takes a strong anti-imperialist stance to say, we've heard this rhetoric before. We heard it with Afghanistan. It was bullshit then. It made women's lives worse then. And that is the same thing here. And again, if you really want to get into the details, the fact that the US, you know, probably choice for regime change is a fucking Iranian monarchy is not really the kind of thing that gives hope about improving the status for women in Iran or leading to some sort of like

standard liberal notion of human rights in the region in line with Western democracy. We have to just reject that on face strongly, not capitually any ground to it whatsoever because that manufacturing of consent can work. We saw it with bipartisan support for the Iraq War, for the Afghanistan war early on. And later on, people realized their mistake that the damage had already been done. So there's no room for it. It has to be rejected out of hand. And I think essentially intransigence from the left on this, just a refusal to budge is the correct response. And from the people that brought you the genocide of Gaza for two years, murdering mothers and grandmothers and women and blowing up NICU units and killing journalists and doctors, they're going to tell you they care about

women's rights. It's pathetic. We should spit in the face of anybody who uses that as a pretext to do this shit. We know who you are. We've seen what you've done U.S. in Hiroshima, Nagasaki. We've seen what you've done in Korea. We saw what you've done in Vietnam. None of those things are to help the fucking people. We mock the idea, freedom and democracy. We're going in to spread freedom and democracy. Everybody, like, laughs and mocks that idea. Women's rights is the same shit. They did it with gay rights.

With trying to, like, make Tel Aviv, this epicenter of gay, you know, celebration. And, like, you know, if you were gay in Gaza, you get thrown off a roof. And then they just murder everybody. And you got these fucking radlib sitting back talking about, like, well, I really care about these rights. It's like, you are a fucking pawn in their game. You are a mark. You are a fucking idiot. the way that you protect women and children and anybody you fucking give a fuck about is to get Israel

in the U.S. as far the fuck away from them as you can. That is how you protect people, literally. These people, even in the U.S. How does the U.S. treat its own fucking people? You know, I mean, just fucking a couple weeks ago shot Renee good in the face several times. We would stand up for women's rights. Fucking bitch. This is America. What are you talking about? So anybody that talks like that, they should be fucking ridiculed. and mocked. And the sickening thing is this like liberal moralism where they think they're good people. They've attached themselves to this decaying, rotten, fucking monster corpse death machine, and they think they have the right to continue to wag their finger in the face of the world and of

you and I and tell us what is right and wrong in the world. You are a part of this death machine. A Democratic Party, there could be no genocide in Palestine. There could be no fucking Trump administration. there could be no rise of fascism. There could be no Iranian war right now as we speak without the Democratic Party playing its fucking role perfectly over decades. You know, this is what this whole system leads to. And these fucking people online is like,

well, I voted for Kamala and Biden, so my conscience is clear you're a corpse of a human being. You have been dehumanized and hollowed out by your identification with this system. And thinking that siding with the left hand of the serial killer instead of the right puts you in any moral high ground is a fucking delusion.

And delusions don't break by telling somebody that. They'll just, like, scoff at us and like whatever call us, whatever, tankies or whatever new word they have for us. But history will destroy them. History will tear asunder their cognitive dissidents and their entire identity structure, because their entire identity structure is formed in the crucible of U.S. colonialism and imperialism. And to be a liberal in the United States in 2026 is to be functionally. a fascist. And they don't see that. And you and I won't convince them of that. But history will. I truly believe that. No, I agree. I mean, I think the liberal opposition position is just basically

a call for really a return to almost like neo-conservative style imperialism. That's what we saw under Kamala was warming up to and inviting in people who had been part of Bush's coalition in terms of foreign policy, right? And so there is no question of whether or not liberalism represent some sort of anti-war, anti-interventionist position. It's just whether or not we will go back to 2000s era imperialism or not. And that is why it is necessary for the left to articulate something much broader and much bigger that represents a fundamental break with that liberal view of the world, ultimately. Yeah, absolutely. So we have about 20 to 30 more minutes. And I would love to take some questions. So if, or even just comments, people can just give their, give their two cents. I'm going to

scroll through here a little bit. I don't know, Allison, if you've seen anything, I've been doing less of a good time. Maybe we should keep a general strike in the backdrop at all time. International level also. That's the ultimate solution. I always say that this system speaks two languages, violence and money. And if you can't speak to them in one of those two languages, they do not listen. And right now they have a monopoly on violence. And they have a monopoly on money, literally monopoly capitalism. But if we can shut down their economy, the way that they make money, that's the only leverage point that we truly have, which again, my Mark said, the revolutionary force in capitalist society is the working class, not because it's

magical, not because there's something particularly noble and dignified about the worker necessarily, but because that is the leverage point in the economy that can be leveraged for demands and emancipation and every successful socialist movement and socialist strike and socialist government has been started or brought forward or advanced by versions of the general strike. Even in the U.S.'s own sordid history, our best moments were the militant unionism that helped give rise to the Communist Party after, you know, in the late stages of the Gilded Age. This is an absolutely essential aspect. And to see, you know, Minnesotans fighting ice and going to the general strike immediately,

all this organization on the ground taking that spontaneous. its energy and funneling it into a general strike. In and of itself, it fizzles out, of course, we should expect it to. But that is an objective and subjective step forward for the American working class of how we can actually do fucking something. Because protesting, posting, they've already accounted for all of that. If we don't speak money or violence, we don't speak to them. And we can't speak violence. They'll crush us. They'll destroy us. They'll obliterate us. But we can still speak money if we organize our numbers just right. Yeah, I think it's tricky, right? Because I do think there was, I think you're right, like an actual qualitative step forward and what happened in

Minneapolis with, you know, there was this discussion of a national general strike. And I don't think there was any national general strike, but there was something close to it at a city level that day, right? Again, I don't think quite of the same size, but getting close to it. And it did seem to really change the calculus. The question that I think is always difficult is could you mobilize American workers around foreign policy, right, around people in other countries. And that's where you have to confront, I think, just the frustrating level of which American chauvinism is built into the populace generally. I don't think that's unique to the working class in any way, like some people might want to suggest. I think it is built into how American ideology functions writ large. And so that becomes this broader

problem that we need to overcome. But I do think that that is where, like, political education and integrated into all of the different types of work that people are doing is important, right? I think if you are doing labor organizing, including political education about imperialism is necessary. If you are doing tenant organizing, you need to include that as well. In the tenant union here, we talk about Venezuela, we talk about U.S. aggression, we talk to our base about these things in order to try to build that broad base for anti-imperialist resistance. And so it's necessary, I think, for us to infuse the political education and kind of the ideological disruption into all of those kinds of organizing so that labor can be

something other than what it currently is, which is, I think, a fairly tamed force by U.S. ideology, unfortunately. And so that is where I think the political and the ideological struggle really still matters. It's just a tough thing to overcome that kind of American chauvinism that I think is broadly integrated within the population in this country on the whole. And, you know, it still is the spectrum. I'm in a I'm in a, I'm in a, trade union, right? And there is pros and cons to it. I mean, I've never been so intimately involved with the contradictions of trade union consciousness. At some points, it's elevating and uplifting. And other points, it's incredibly disappointing. But we have the Chicago's Teachers

Union, who, you know, seems pretty far on the left, has come out, speaking out against the Iran war, speaking against the genocide in Gaza. I saw some liberal reposts them and say, why is the Chicago Teachers Union talking about foreign policy? And it's like, Oh, what an anti-dialectical thing to say, as if these things are totally sad. It's like nauseating. But on the other hand, you have Sean O'Brien from the Teamsters who cozied up to the Trump administration and got fucking cucked, right? This idea that like Trump is speaking the truth. He came out on some anti-trans bullshit. Josh Hawley wrote some anti-transcrete. And Sean O'Brien came out and said, yeah, you know, this is this is true. You can't deny it. And cozied up with the Trump regime thinking he's going to get something. And you have one of the most anti-union presidents in human.

history and just fucking humiliated you and your union the teamsters which my god it's one of the big unions in the united states and and you've just totally cucked them out to one of the most anti-union presidents in in fucking american history it's despicable you should be humiliated that will be your fucking legacy as a labor union fucking leader in the united states at this moment in fucking history but there are still hopeful trends the general strike chicago's teachers union teachers are on strike right now i believe in new york nurses just went on strike there is a response. It's slow going, but there is a response by the American working class. But let's keep getting some questions so I don't talk too long. What do you both think maybe the tipping point to enable Americans to finally wake up and organize?

And then the other question, you can take either one, Allison. Do you think the U.S. will be emboldened with taking out Hominet to escalate with the situation in Cuba? Yeah, I'll take the second one just because I think it's pretty brief. And then I'll also touch on the first one. quick. But on the second one, my worry is yes, right? I think what we are seeing is that Trump has realized that you can basically take actions like this without any serious retaliation from the international order, right? Obviously, Iran is retaliating as a national actor in this case, but no one else has really retaliated on their side. No one else has taken any action, which I do think will emboldened the United States and Trump's decision-making calculus, unfortunately, which is very scary for Cuba. Now, at the end of the end of the end.

end of the day, whether or not Trump feels like he can open up this kind of conflict on multiple fronts is maybe a question. And is one of the ways where Iranian retaliation and the ability to draw this out with the Strait of Hormuz shutdown might really be a saving grace for Cuba by keeping the U.S. focused there and pushed in another direction. So we can hope that that buys some breathing room. But I would not be surprised if this is, you know, emboldening in that particular way. I really do think the U.S. clearly wants to overthrow the state in Cuba, and we are seeing a move towards an escalation there. Then in terms of, you know, what will the tipping point in the U.S. be? People have said this in the chat, but I think, like, all of this needs to start to materially impact the lives of Americans, right?

And I think you've said that as well, Brett, oil prices, all of those things. But also, I think, you know, one of the interesting things watching interviews with people who are on the streets in Minneapolis, particularly like middle-aged white people who are like, I'm not a political person, but I'm out here, is the thing that they said over and over again is, well, it's one thing when it's all on TV, but when I'm seeing this happening on my street outside of my home, that's different. I'm going to come out. I'm going to do something. I'm going to say something. And so Americans, I think because of all that ideological chauvinism struggle to see solidarity beyond what's immediately in front of them, but then as soon as the issue is in their face, I think,

that another side of American ideology, which is kind of this rugged, I fight back, I'm not going to take it attitude, can kind of come to the forefront a little bit more in some ways. And so it really is going to take issues starting to impact Americans directly, I think, in order for them to want to dismantle the system in the U.S. And that is going to happen. Things are going to continue to be more unstable. The government is going to continue to engage in forms of domestic repression that are horrific to normal people within the populace. And that will probably increase if some of what we talked about around the midterms happens. So we are moving in that direction, I think, where this has to confront us the Americans to their face. But I think it has to be that kind of in-your-face confrontation for Americans to begin to politicize around it, unfortunately. Yeah, mark my words, we're going to see federal agents at polling stations. We're going to have this double-sided thing about if they get the Save Act pass. We need to check IDs, plus our illegals voting, plus we're in a state of war. Iran is trying to hack our you know, voting machines. We're going to see all that stuff marshaled to kind of have a crackdown on the elections.

That's speculative, but that is my genuine prediction. Somebody asks in the comments, there's lots of questions here too. We'll try to keep up with them. Somebody asked in the comments, how Marxists should view the Iranian state? My answer is, as fighting for its life, right? Like, it doesn't matter what your critiques of the Iranian state are as an American or somebody in the Imperial Corps. I've always said this. The only people who have a right to overthrow the Iranian government are the Iranian people totally unmolested from U.S. and Israel and Western colonial and imperial forces. And the first step in that process is to defeat the imperialist colonial forces. The primary contradiction in the global order right now is imperialism. The states arrayed against imperialism run the gamut.

All different types of governments, all different types of economic structures and orders, you know, varying degrees of good and bad about how you might in a vacuum assess them. But they are the only material forces standing against the imperial hegemon. And that has to be the primary thing in which we're analyzing. Exact same thing with Syria, right? We're not talking about the Assad government being the template for our future societies, but we're saying that when Assad goes under, when his government is destroyed by Israel and the U.S.,

what will rise in its place is not a... only worse for the people in Syria in so many ways. We have ethnic tensions. We have murders, mass murders, killings. It's brutal in Libya. We have open slave markets. But also they do the bidding and advance the interest of that exact monstrous machine that toppled them in the first place. So there's no time to waste on what your opinions on the Iranian state are. If the Iranian people want to overthrow their government, hell yes. If there's a socialist revolution in Iran in a vacuum, we would support it. But that is not what's happening right now. Right now, we have Israel and the U.S. leading Western Imperial colonial forces trying to drown in blood a government and a society that stands in

their way of total domination. And that is the contradiction that is worth focusing on. You can't do shit about the Iranian government if you're sitting in the United States. Your enemy is the American fucking ruling class and the American motherfucking government who is taking your money and turning it into dead bodies around the world, right? And there's something grotesque about an American sitting in relative comfort opining on their abstract views about what this government or that government under the fucking boot of your government should or should not be doing. And I'm not saying you're doing that questioner. I'm just talking to a broader trend that I see on the left in an American chauvinist, colonialist society, which is really where the entitlement comes from.

So that's my answer to that. Yeah. Can I weigh in there real quick? as well. I think the one thing that I want to add to is just like this comes down to a question of like the primacy of different contradictions, right? And imperialism just is the primary contradiction in this context. Let's imagine right now that there were a socialist revolution that happened in Iran today. What would happen to that newly formed socialist state? I think it is that fucking simple. The US would crush it. It would do everything it could to crush it. It would probably come down harder than it is coming down on the currently existing government in Iran. And so, given that reality, if you believe in the necessity of worldwide socialism and global socialist revolution, the conditions for that to exist at all

required the defeat of American imperialism, which is what makes that the primary contradiction. So if you are talking about, oh, well, I would rather have a socialist government, you are talking about meaningless hypotheticals. You are engaging in the epitome of what Marx and Ingalls denounce as as utopian socialism, right? Trying to just, from first principles, build what the world should look like, rather than looking at the existing conditions and teasing out what forces are progressive

within those conditions. And so I think we absolutely have to say, yes, of course, as socialist, the thing that we want is to see socialist government globally and everywhere, but what prevents that? It is American imperialism. And so in order to be scientific socialists,

we have to start with the conditions on the ground. We have to start with material reality that prevents socialism from developing, and that in particular is imperialism. And therefore, we need to not do stupid, meaningless hypotheticals about what kind of governments we would like to exist and deal with reality and facts on the ground. That's kind of, I think, you know, the dialectical materialist way of looking at this. Somebody in the comment section said, I just have to throw my two shots at this asshole. Ethan Klein from H3H3 came out and literally posted a Shah flag on his Insta. That's the first time in my life where I, from my personal account, responded to that asshole. I'm like, you're posting a fucking monarchist flag, you absolute fucking dipshit.

I mean, Ethan Klein is an absolute nobody. I've already wasted too much breath on him, but I also saw that post where he's like, Iranian freedom and women's rights. And the thing he reposted just had a huge flag of the Shah. I'm like, you fucking idiot. but part for the course for Ethan Ethan fucking class Yeah

And what other things do we How much more time do you have Allison Realistically? I could maybe go ten more minutes At this point I feel you So maybe there's more questions coming up But one question we didn't get to

Is my question is what can Iran possibly do In Israel and the US stop again In order to continue to let sanctions and protests Continue to drag them down And is this a new strategy for regime change Or is that strike and wait Strike and wait Happened before

That's a good question. I don't think it represents a wholly new strategy for regime change. I think we've seen this before. I mean, back in 1970s with Chile, you know, with Salvador Allende, there was a Kissinger saying make the economy scream as a sort of pretext. This strike and weight thing, I think, is acutely a response to not wanting to do boots on the ground, right? As I said earlier, that's what the Trump administration has more or less learned from these forever. wars is that boots on the ground and nation building is bad. So in lieu of that, this seems to be kind of the only strategy you can do. Obama kind of pioneered the drone warfare strategy as in the wake of the failures of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars as well as another way to kind of do something a little bit like this. But sanctions overall have really risen over the past 20 years as a main mechanism of imperial assault, particularly in the context of the dollar being a hegemonic currency and being able to weaponize the dollar as the global currency to inflict economic damage. And then you get the dialectical rise of trading blocks and bricks and stuff like that,

which are imperfect and still emerging, but our attempts to try to divorce these various siege countries from dollar hegemony for precisely that region. So I wouldn't say it's a new strategy. But I would say acutely it's a response to not having the stomach or maybe even just seeing the failures of boots on the ground nation building that necessitates this sort of approach, I think. Yeah. And yeah, I don't necessarily think it's new either. But I do think it represents probably like a shift in what the go-to strategy is and what the new normal is, right? I do think, like, post Bush, it really does just feel like there is an allergy towards any

form of, like, long-term occupation, right? Both the right and the left in terms of the voting base seem to have concluded boots on the ground, staying around, stabilization missions are a nightmare. They do not work. They spin out. And so there's this attempt, I think, to try to figure out exactly what this kind of imperialist depression needs to look like now. And this strike and weight approach seems to be it. Who knows? Maybe if Trump is given any kind of like particular innovation, it will be stabilizing not as the strategy of U.S. imperialism, unfortunately. But, you know, I think at the end of the day, things are in a kind of a weird situation because I do think we do continue to see the U.S. position globally slipping and this renegotiation of what it is

actively happening here. And in my mind, that is kind of the room for hope, right? Like, we do not know that the U.S. is capable or willing to commit to the kinds of long-term aggression that it has in the past. And so that is why I think the Iranian state potentially taking a militarily more conservative approach, not going all out immediately, does give some hope about, you know, a calculus of perhaps it is possible to weather this storm. We'll have to wait and see what that looks like, but I do think, you know, I feel some sense that this is just not the end of everything. I think that it's easy to doom her out a little bit here, but I don't think that that is an appropriate response. Much is up in the air.

Things are very unstable, and that is always scary, but that is always also the possibility for change. That is always also the space in which global dynamics shift. And we just kind of need to write it out and see. And I think that is really what Iran is trying to do, again, by not going immediately all out on an offensive. What forms that will take? I do not know. But I don't feel like, you know, this is necessarily a situation to give up hope. Somebody in the comment section asked, I mean, this is a totally legitimate question.

And I encourage people to try to do your best to learn about Iranian history and culture. It's important in these moments to kind of educate yourself on that history because this history is inseparable from the present moment. But they asked a totally legitimate question, which is, what do you mean by the Shah? What is the Shah? And the Shah is basically, you know, there was an Iranian revolution in 1979 that, you know, basically installed the modern Iranian government in its current form. And the Shah was this sort of monarch before that.

So from 1941 until the revolution in 79, the Shah is basically a monarchy, the monarchist dominator of Iran. But they had a prime minister in there, as many of you with your history, you know, hats on will remember. In 1953, Prime Minister Mossadegh tried to nationalize British, I believe British and American oil companies in Iran try to nationalize their oil resources on behalf of the Iranian people basically just take what the Shavista revolution in Venezuela try to do, take back your resources from Western Imperial and Colonial Forces and corporations and the UK and the U.S.

Of course, with the help of Israel, always, always, you know, overthrew, they couped Mozadek. And the Shah was basically the dictator, the monarch of Iran during that period of time leading up to the 1979 Iranian Revolution, that basically was a U.S. Western puppet or served their interest in a very similar way that Batista in Cuba, before the Cuban Revolution, served Western imperial interest and was overthrown by a revolution there. The revolution in that case was led by Fidel and Che and turned in to socialism, you know, Cuban socialism.

And in the case of Iran, it gave rise to the Ayatollahs and the Iranian government that we've had ever since then and ever since nineteen forty nine there's been a desire on behalf of western imperial colonial powers to reinstall the shah um but it was it's a lot like trying to reinstall the grandson of batista and cuba like you know there's the diaspora loves the idea because the diaspora from cuba and iran have a similarity here too the diaspora of iran and cuba often come from the national compradore class or the elite class under the previous dictatorship in Iran's case the Shah, in Cuba's case Batista, who benefited from those dictators and who lived nice lives, right? In Cuba, had plantations, had fucking slaves, treated the local population

as indentured servants of one form or another, brutal dictators, brutal forms of punishment against anybody who tried to rise up and speak out, and they were overturned in these grassroots revolutions, and Western powers never forgive these societies for doing that and seek to, if they can't reinstall the Shah, they'll settle for complete vulcanization and destruction of the society. Very hard for me to imagine them reinstalling, you know, the Shah and fucking monarchy in Iran. But as we said earlier in the conversation, they'll settle for a total obliteration of civil society and vulcanization. I think that's what they're going for. Mostly, and they're holding up the Shah in a similar way that they're held up, Juan Guaido,

or all these other figures, Machado in Venezuela, as like, maybe this person could do it. like we have a plan. It's not just, we don't want to just destroy the society. We'll put this person who's actually, you know, they actually have the right to this. And in a monarchist sense, you're just going back to like, this is the right hereditary bloodline. So they actually have the right to rule. You're like going back to like feudalists and monarchical concepts of divine rights of rule to establish your puppet dictator. It's all quite farcical.

But that is what the Shah is. And that is why those figures. that we see on Western mainstream media advocating, often in the diaspora, advocating for the rape and pillage and plunder of their country by a U.S. and Israel, fly the flag of the Shah. And that's what they're kind of getting at and gesturing towards. It's like, we want to go back. Because, you know, our grandparents benefited quite heavily from having that dictator in charge instead of, you know, this government. So I hope that clears it up for you. Yeah, it's a good little educational bit. And I hate that fucking flag. I live in a part of L.A. where, unfortunately, you see that flag quite a bit just because of what the diaspora population is and that,

yeah, that kind of rabid crusano ideology in the case of Iran is like quite intense actually. So, you know, yeah, I think it's good to give that education. I think it's good to give that background. I think it's easy for us to take for granted that like everyone knows the decades and decades long histories of these regions and that's not necessarily the case. And I think it's a good reminder that like socialist education like can come down to like doing some of that historical work, right? That might not necessarily be there because God knows.

I doubt U.S. education system is giving people an honest summary of that history, if any whatsoever. Yeah. Somebody said the Dalai Lama was used kind of like this too in Tibet. I do agree that this is the figure, this is the sort of figure that emerges when there's a certain imperial interest at play. You can get off. I know, Allison, you're still recovering.

And I have another interview. I'm actually after this interviewing. Torkel Lawson on unequal exchange. So the history, present, and future of unequal exchange, which is a really important core sort of Marxist economic, political economic concept. But that's at noon. So I do have a little bit more time. Allison, you're free to stick around, free to go. I know you're still healing from, I believe, COVID. So I appreciate you taking the time already. But somebody asked an interesting question, and I kind of wanted to play with it a little bit. They said, can you define left versus right? I do not use these terms. I think that's interesting,

because one thing you'll see a lot in discourse is like it's no longer right versus left. It's bottom versed up. And I think there's something rhetorically powerful about that when I'm talking like conservative co-workers and stuff. I will sometimes even lean on that rhetoric as a way of kind of like creating solidarity where they see that it might not exist. But left and right goes back to the French Revolution, right, who sat on which side of the stand during, I forget the exact details of it. I have to refresh my mind on some of this history. I have a whole element. I have a whole episode on the French Revolution. You can check out if you want to. But right and left for me represents two fundamental reactions to the crisis of the center when it occurs. The right is

reactionary. Therefore, it is reacting to various forms of social progress, whether that is like social progress in the form of feminism or gay rights or the advancement of civil rights. They're reactionaries when their politics is based around reacting to that. social progress and certainly in the case of socialism, communism, the ultimate forms of actual historical progress reactionaries center themselves as anti-socialist, anti-communist. Mussolini, Hitler, arch reactionaries, first thing they did dismantle socialist and communist fighting forces in order to then be able to move ahead with their political project. So when you say somebody's on the right, they are looking backwards. They want to conserve something about the status

quo. They can be Burkeian conservatives. Burke himself opposed the French Revolution, thought it was too radical. But these are people who are against sort of what we would view as progress. And the left are progressives broadly conceived. But the difference between reaction, going back, holding back, looking to the mythologized past for some golden era that we have to get back to. Nietzsche did this. Jordan Peterson does this. Trump is Make America great again. all types of reactionaries are always implicitly asserting some golden age that needs to be returned to, that we need to go back in history, which is not only a fantasy, it's an impossibility. Center, center, left, center, right?

They want to conserve what is right now. A centrist, you know, in the ancient regime would be somebody that defended the king and the queen, right? A centrist today is somebody that defends capitalism and imperialism and neoliberalism and neoliberalism and neoconservatism, and the right is looking to socially progress. We are revolutionaries. You can't be a right-wing revolutionary because a revolution is implying forward momentum. Right-wingers are reactionaries, and the left are revolutionaries when you get to the actual real motherfucking left, us, you know. We have a vision for the world that is liberated from all forms of domination, oppression, and of class society itself, right? Communism is the ultimate

revolutionary vision of liberating human society and human civilization from the rusted cage of stratifying human beings into owning, exploiting classes who live lives of luxury on the toil of the working classes. We want to live as equals on the planet and cooperate to create the highest quality of life for everybody. And we spit in the face of kings and servants, masters and slaves, bosses and workers. We want to obliterate that entire binary. So that would be my first go at it, but Allison, what would your response to that be? Yeah, I'll answer this one and then I'll hop off, I think, but I did want to answer this, because this is an argument that I see fairly often is people arguing for the abandonment of this language. And I think if people don't find

the language helpful, it's fine to like try to move away from it. But I do think that the language does describe, as you got at Brett, like a particular historical moment and then kind of the trajectory and momentum, which has carried on from that moment. So I think it is just worth like emphasizing, like you said, that this distinction between left and right develops during the French Revolution, and by and large, should be understood as mapping differential responses to the bourgeois revolutions, right? And so the bourgeois revolution wave occurs across Europe, the overthrow of monarchy, the establishment of constitutional republics, or constitutional limited monarchies, and there are a variety of responses. Obviously, there is the left response,

which in this context, by and large, represented at one point the bourgeois position, right? If you go pick up the Communist Manifesto right now, there's an extended discussion of the original revolutionary role of the bourgeoisie right at the front of that text, because the bourgeoisie did represent that left position. And the right position by and large actually came down to remaining aristocratic, royalist and monarchist factions who were opposed to the bourgeois revolution. And then as capitalist society stabilizes and begins to develop over time, obviously what occurs is that monarchies are gone, and so the right begins to become, again, these reactionaries who want to return to this previous form of governance. I think, Brett, you're correct to frame

kind of Burke as like the figure really you should look at to understand the right. It's the skepticism towards the bourgeois revolution, skepticism towards any notions of liberal progress, etc. So I do think the words map onto actual material realities in terms of class struggle in Europe in a way that makes them still useful. Now, what's become complicated over time is that we are now centuries on from many of these revolutions. And so the question of whether or not terms that demarcate one's position in relation to capitalist revolution, whether those are still useful, I think, is a fair question. But those two impulses still exist, I think. There is still the kind of belief in extending the, you know, liberal ideals as far as possible versus those who want to return to some

sort of pre or anti-liberal sort of world. And so I do think that they're still meaningful in that way. And I do hear people say, like, Marxism is not of the left or socialism is not of the left. And I think you could argue that in a sense that that is true, because socialism would institute a new revolution that would make the distinction between left and right as two responses to a bourgeois revolution, essentially meaningless. Right now you would have to have new positions demarcated in relationship to a socialist revolution. But I do think, you know, socialism is kind of of of the left, right? Like socialism found inspiration in the bourgeois revolutions to a certain degree, in what the bourgeois revolutions revealed was possible, which was the overthrowing of feudalism in the

monarchies. And so that breakthrough in history was part of what helped Marx develop an analysis of the possibility of socialist revolution. And so seeing some of that grounding in the left is there, I know our comrades over in Marxist Unity Group and the DSA are very interested in like the Republican Marx and really drawing some of that continuity there. But I do think I still use the terms because I think they're somewhat descriptive. When socialist revolution comes, maybe I'll abandon them because again, there will be a whole new event that everything has to orient towards. That's kind of how I look at it. But yeah, I'm going to hop off after this question. I'm going to go rest for a little bit. But thank you all so much for the questions. It's been really awesome talking with you all.

and, yeah, hope to do more strings like this in the future. Thank you, Allison. I appreciate you so much. Yeah, no problem. See it. Yeah. I'll wrap up here, but I just wanted to say one thing that is helpful with this right-left distinction. I think Allison made really great points about in the context of the bourgeois historical epoch and the mode of production that is capitalism and the political form of capitalism, which is liberalism, right and left, are oriented fundamentally to that. But ultimately, whereas during the French Revolution, the bourgeois class, the capital, capitalist class, the rising merchant class, the liberals were the progressive force in history. Now that liberalism and capitalism have played themselves out, they are now a regressive force

in history because history has moved forward, and now the socialist and the communists are the progressive force. And just like with the bourgeois revolutions, there was decades and centuries of attempts to establish bourgeois republics against feudal and monarchical ones. There is, and we've already seen over the last century, starting with the Paris commune, particularly but successfully with the Bolshevik revolution, we're now starting to see historically, over spans of decades and centuries, the emergence of these socialist and communist experiments,

which very much mirror the lead up to these bourgeois revolutions that ushered us in to liberal capitalism. And, you know, I truly do believe that if we don't fucking go extinct or blow ourselves back 500 to 1,000 years, we will move in the direction increasingly of socialism by necessity, by the necessity of sustainability and the necessity of the human desire to live and flourish. But a fun thing to do, understand Burke's position on the French Revolution, and then look at Mary Woolstonecraft and Thomas Payne reacting to Burke. So that was like they're taking the side of the

French Revolution while Burke is criticizing it. It's a really interesting historical debate that says so much about the entire epoch we're in. And the other thing I would mention is find your right wing figure, any right wing figure, Mussolini, Hitler, Nietzsche, any modern right wing figure, and then ask yourself, what is their romanticized past that they would like to return to? They're all kind of different, right? Mussolini wanted to reestablish Rome and the Roman Empire. We are the people of Rome, right?

Hitler had all these ideas of the supremacy of the Aryan race and reestablishing the dignity of the German people after World War I in the defeat. Trump talks about Make America Great again. Nietzsche had this aristocratic need to return to ancient antiquity, Roman and Greek ways of being. They all have it. And among so many other things, it's impossible to get back to. That's why fascist movements always fail. You can't go backwards.

My favorite line is historically, the only way out is through. That's dialectically true, and that's true from a Marxist perspective. And we totally imbibe from that reality. There is no going back. The only way out is through. And that's our task. So I have to wrap it up here to get ready for my next interview, but this was a lot of fun.

Absolutely love the showing, even with pretty minimal heads up. I only gave 12 hours heads up tops. And we have a really cool amount of people in the chat. Great comments. We couldn't get to all the questions and comments, but you all are absolutely amazing. It's so rewarding to see the sort of people who care about Red Menace

and care about Rev Left, who listen to us and who engage in this stuff. My goal for this year is to do more live streams like this, public live streams on our YouTube channel, which has hitherto just been used as kind of another platform to put our audio episodes out on, kind of a backup. You know, we never really engage much here. We never promote it very much at all. We don't do much separate from what we do on the podcast here, but I want to change that this year.

I want to do many more live streams. So thank you so much for this wonderful first showing, and may this be the first of many going forward. But in the meantime, you know, find your community. This can be a very alienating time. It can be a very dread oriented and despair-oriented time. When you look around and see the apathy, right? James Baldwin, I'm terrified at the moral apathy. We too are terrified at the moral apathy, but there are millions of good fucking people.

Even in this rotten society, they're all around us. Connect up, organized, reinvigorate yourself by getting into a reading group, getting into a tenants union, talking in real life with people who share your values and your ideas, that is so much more enlivening than sitting online and just watching the dread drip, drip, drip, and the insanity of the fragmented social media landscape. To be in real communion, to hear the birds chirp, to talk to friends, to work through difficult texts with one another, to create a goal in your community and go out with like-minded friends and achieve that goal. That connects you to life, that destroys despair.

it really prevents burnout and it gives you meaning in this moment in our history and there are I promise you millions and millions of people who think like us who are ready to think like us who have hearts that are wide open like us and and it's our duty to go out to them meet them and link up with them that is our that is our only hope right only thing we have is numbers and the only way we can make those numbers matter is by organizing them effectively and we can't And I always say this, we can't do everything, but we can all do something. Every single one of us has a role to play. Making art, doing political education classes, joining a tenants union, you know, creating a YouTube channel, making films.

Whatever your thing is, whatever you're good at, link up with other comrades and put your talents in service of the revolution. Truly, that creates a meaningful life. And it creates community, which is something that we all desperately. want more of. And it's not going to be given to us. We got to fucking build it. So that is our historical task. And I know that we are truly up for it. So love and solidarity. Let's do this again. Talk to you soon.