Rev Left Radio - Minoritarian Rule: SCOTUS' Assault on the American People

Episode Date: July 3, 2023

Alyson and Breht discuss the recent rulings by the Supreme Court, a wildly anti-democratic, thoroughly corrupt, and staunchly reactionary institution that the American right has spent years and billions of dollars capturing in order to impose its minoritarian rule on an American majority that firmly rejects what they stand for. And they do it all without having to worry for even a second about pesky things getting in their way: like democracy, human rights, or basic accountability to the American people. 

Hello everybody. Welcome back to Red Menace. On today's episode, we decided to kind of put aside the angles. We have one more episode on the angle's origin of the family private property in the state. We're still going to get to it. We're still working on it. But to be quite honest, I was in a pretty fucked up headspace for the last couple of days, looking down the barrel of financial ruin after the Supreme Court ruled on student loan forgiveness, ruled against it, as everybody listening, almost certainly knows. And so instead of doing Engels' third part, we just kind of wanted to come to the microphone and riff a little bit about what's going on. If nothing else, act as a cathartic release for people who are also sort of black-pilled by living in American society, kind of, you know, parse through some of the rulings, tie it to bigger issues in society, tie it to the ruling class and the dictatorship of the ruling class, and just kind of have a free-flowing conversation. So this is really sparked by the recent rulings that came out regarding LGBTQ distribution. discrimination, affirmative action at the level of universities, and, of course, the student loan debate. And the first thing I guess I would like to say is, and this is obvious, but none of this is rooted in actual legal, like, objectivity. And that's one of the things that gives the court

this sense of being a real institution of checks and balances and nonpartisan. You know, this is just like really, really intelligent legal scholars applying the law, you know, dispassionately and acting as a check on the other branches of government. But what has been revealed, but it's always been true, is that this is an ideological institution. And more than that, it is an institution where the reactionary elite in this country whose ideas have no hold with the vast majority of the population, particularly the younger people, coming up. This is one of the last bastions that it can retreat into where it is not in any way shaped or accountable to the democratic process. And they know that, you know, the Republican

party, just for example, hasn't won the popular vote this century. And they know that the more old people that came up in a whole different time pass away and young people who are coming up in totally different material circumstances rise. They have less and less ability to convince people or to trick them ideologically into siding with them. They can only scapegoat so many vulnerable communities, and that only works with so many people in the population. The social conditions continue to deteriorate for most people, and people are smart.

I mean, they know that this is, you know, they're not, most people are not bamboozled by Republican pointing at trans people or gay people and saying go after them. And so this is one of the ways in which they're going to try to instill minoritarian rule in this country by hiding behind the Supreme Court and, you know, I mean, Donald Trump never got above 50% favorability rating in this country, lost the popular vote, put three judges, unelected, unaccountable judges on the Supreme Court for lifetime appointments, and systematically they are just stripping us of our civil and human rights, guaranteeing that young people have no financial future in this country, bringing back legalized discrimination against LGBTQ people, and a whole other slate of horrific, horrific things.

And there's no way to dislodge them from power. There's no way that anybody could have a vote on whether or not we agree with these policies. And that's the kind of situation that we're in. And it's incredibly bleak. But at the same time, it's also a reflection of heightening contradictions in society. There's a sense I get that this can't go on. They're trying and they're doing everything they can. but there really feels like how long

can this bullshit possibly continue and it can I mean they could surprise us and it could last many more decades but I just feel like people are really really getting fed up so that's kind of my opening salvo but I would love to hear your opening thoughts as well Allison yeah I mean a couple thoughts there one is that I think like you're getting at this idea this sort of like mystification of the court

as this objective stands above politics just there to kind of regulate and make sure everyone's playing fair in the field of politics ideology that is so central to kind of the mystique of the Supreme Court. And one thing I think is clear is that the court knows that that's falling apart as like an ideological construct in American politics. Roberts, in his opinions, goes on and on about how disturbed he is by people questioning the apoliticalness of the court. So there even is coming from the justices themselves, this kind of recognition that, yeah, the populace isn't buying this idea anymore, right? No one actually believes that.

that the court is apolitical, that the court exists outside of these partisan skirmishes that characterize American politics. It's obvious bullshit. And the thing is that, you know, whether or not Roberts and these other people believe it themselves, the actions of the court also really do show the extent to which they're obviously playing politics. Plenty of people pointed this out, but the conservative Supreme Court that we have now really likes to do this thing during their sessions, where in the middle of the session, they release their rulings that are going to make liberals happy, and then at the very end of the sessions, they release their rulings that are extremely reactionary. And we saw that with this session as

well, right? In the middle, you get these rulings about indigenous adoption. You get these rulings about immigration enforcement and these rulings about gerrymandering that are very much more in the direction that the liberals would appreciate. And then at the end, it suddenly, boom, three decisions that are obviously going to make people angry in the United States. And that kind of move, framing of the decisions in this release order, I think, is a recognition by the court on a certain degree that it is fucking playing politics, right? Like a truly a political sort of institution doesn't have to try to play that kind of PR game. So you can see it even in how the court is functioning there. And then the other thing is just on a very, very basic level, I think it is

clear that the court is inconsistent in its rulings in this session in particular. The court's rulings in several of its earlier cases, in particular the case regarding immigration, took a very restrictive interpretation of standing and whether or not states have standing in, you know, contesting federal law and regulation. And as a result of that, there were a number of more kind of liberal legal analysts who were hopeful, actually, that some of the conservatives might side for student loans because the standing in the student's loan case is a little iffy. It's the states that are suing in this case. And based on the decision they just made an immigration, those states probably do not have standing in this case. And yet the court

of course ignores the previous decision that it made in order to make the political move of shooting down student loans. So overall, I think it's incredibly obvious to any observers and the court knows it's increasingly obvious that what this is about is enforcing, like you said, a reactionary political agenda, which my God, I think we need to insist over and over again, isn't popular in the United States, right? This is not actually what the majority wants. This is not actually a populist or Democratic position, the right-wing agenda of the Republican Party and of the kind of paraparty apparatus that's developed around it is really incredibly unpopular. And so has to be forced through the court, through these other institutions in a way that is just so blatantly fucked up.

And I think for us coming at this as Marxist, right, this isn't just like a matter of pointing out hypocrisy, right? Because at the end of the day, pointing out hypocrisy to the right is kind of irrelevant. They just don't really give a shit. But what is relevant here is for us to kind of, you know, maybe take a second while we're pissed off about this and recognize that like theoretically we can understand this. The law isn't something that exists outside of class society. The law, in fact, is kind of the codification of class rule, right? It's the writing down of the rules of the class domination of the bourgeoisie such that it can be consistently enforced through the courts and through the policing system on a population. And so obviously, yeah,

the courts are not apolitical. They are not outside of class struggle. They are, in fact, are the highest level of enforcing class struggle to make sure that the right side wins over and over again. Why was there no court case challenging the PPE loan forgiveness when there was a court case challenging student loan forgiveness? These kind of things make it very clear that the law isn't about playing fair. It's about making sure that the bourgeoisie always wins. And that's what we see here in the student loan case. It's what we see here in the affirmative action case, which is going to make sure that more fucking bad score legacy students get admitted to Ivy leagues over people of color who have worked hard to get into those positions.

And it's what we see in the 303 creative case, which protects the right of the petty bourgeoisie to discriminate against people on the basis of sexuality. The court's job is to enforce class domination. It can't be something that is outside of that. And that's the only way that we can understand where these rulings are come from and see through the idea that even some of the liberal, hold on to of the court as like this mystical arbiter of American politics. Yeah, absolutely. And with the PPP loans, I mean, this is just flagrant as fuck. And this is a classic

example of the PPP loans were given out to the business class. And there's no sense in which anybody is, I mean, anybody institutionally is upset about the fact that all these loans are absolutely forgiven. In many cases, we're talking hundreds of thousands or millions of dollars, going out literally to politicians who are celebrating the, you know, the squashing of any student debt relief, it's wild. You know, one of the things that I thought might restrain the court a little bit is this fear over delegitimizing themselves. So, you know, I thought, like, maybe you go after the big things.

Yeah, like abortion is like a 50-year project. You're not going to try to, you know, be easy on that one issue so you can gain legitimacy. That's the one that's going to hurt your legitimacy, but you take it because of everything that's been, you know, laid down for us to, for the right to get to that point. But with something like affirmative action or LGBTQ discrimination or student loans, I was, you know, there was a bit of naive perhaps hope that out of pure self-preservation, out of pure want to maintain legitimacy in this fucking decaying institution that they would throw out a few important things to the left to be like, okay, everybody calmed down. But there's this sort of nihilistic acceleration instead. there's this sense that I mean they're individually

their lifetime appointments they are utterly cocooned in comfort and opulence and luxury they don't ever pay the price for any of this there's no actual accountability not even just democratic accountability like you lose your seat

but they don't even have to in most cases face working class or poor people in any sense there's no sense in which I mean what was the worst thing that happened after Dobbs decision was that people started protesting outside to some of their houses. And that rattled them. That rattled the entire ruling class, even

Democrats were like, well, this is way too far because they saw themselves in the justices who were at the, you know, that really scares them. So protests are meaningless, tweets are meaningless, getting angry doesn't do anything. Going to their house obviously starts to get them worked up and then they're going to try to do whatever they can. Anything beyond that is I think where the real accountability might lie, but they feel very safe that that's not going to be an issue. you um now for for me just to kind of let people know like my situation i have 65 000 in student loan debt i didn't go to harvard i didn't go to yale i didn't even go out of state i went to the university of nebraska okay and and for the first two years i went to fucking community

college so i did everything right i did everything like i was supposed to do it and of course when i'm a young 20 something i couldn't afford to live and go to school right that's a a choice many people have to choose. So part of taking out loans was not only to pay for this exorbitant prices of schooling, but also to allow me to be able to pay my rent just enough. I mean, I'm still struggling hard as shit at this time, but just enough where I can work part-time instead of full-time, which would allow me to go to school to try to create a future for myself and my family. And for the balls of trying, the gall, of trying to build a family and a life for myself, by going to college, the first person in my family to go to college, I give

get paid back by having this crippling debt. You know, I have fucking three kids. Every, we live month to month. Inflation's kicking her ass on stuff like groceries. And now I'm looking down this idea of like never being able to pay this shit back because in part of the predatory interest on these loans. Like this one thing to be like, hey, you know, you have to pitch in a little bit. You know, if the cost were reasonable and there's no predatory interest rate, you know,

it's a slightly different ballgame. but these exorbitant prices plus the predatory interest rates are really scary because on one hand it's like fuck it just default and then I go and start reading stories of what happens to people who default and it's horrifying. They hold your taxes

they garnish your wages they fuck your life up and you know the government federal loans the government can easily get in there more than even a private business can and take your shit so then I go over to people who actually try to pay the fucking thing and I see their horror stories

I pay $700 a month for 10 years, and my principal is bigger than it was when I graduated. So this is a scary, horrific situation for 40 million people to be in. 40 million people who are ostensibly supposed to meaningfully contribute to society. You know, the right would love to see us form families and be married and own homes, this whole traditional idea they have of what America should be. Meanwhile, they are crippling us with unserviceable debt. There's no way a lot of people can get out of this. I see one person mentioned doing whatever you can to get an income-driven repayment plan.

So you can pay as little as maybe $50 or $100 in some cases, $0 a month while remaining in good standing. But the problem with that is the interest rate balloons forever. So because you're not even paying down the principal and you're not fucking touching interest, yes, you only have to pay $50, maybe $100 a month. but that loan gets bigger and bigger and bigger and bigger over time, which is horrifying in its own right. So you really put millions and millions of Americans in an impossible situation where no matter what they choose,

their financial lives are going to be ruined. And, you know, I have to, again, I have children, and I'm trying to provide for them and make sure that they have what they need to survive and live in this life. And now I'm looking down the possibility of $600, $800,000 extra a month that I don't have forever and for what for the crime of trying to go to school and being a productive member of society

it's brutal it's predatory and then you look over at Biden and the Democrats and Biden is just I mean just doing what of course we know he's going to do and he's one of the architects behind a lot of this shit of course but you know for me in this naive utopian fantasy world you know I would just say to Biden like

what the fuck do you have to lose the right is going to hate you no matter what the fuck you do you have one foot in the goddamn grave you know the your your approval ratings are already dog shit and you have all these contenders coming who are who are more to the left economically than you are why not just go fucking nuclear you know like fucking erase the debt do whatever you can do the most over the top strong man shit possible at the very least you'll show a little fight you'll deliver for tens of millions of people you ostensibly want to vote for you the right

is never going to love or respect you they don't give a fuck about laws or norms they will do whatever it takes to instill their policies you know they don't give a fuck so why are the Democrats still trying to like point to the rule book when the Republicans are fucking firing off guns

into the air for Christ's sake Biden won't do that of course but that would be the move to do in his situation because literally he has nothing to lose he's going to go down as one of the weakest most ineffective presidents of all fucking time why not just go big you know but of course of course they won't they serve capital they have

their donor class um and so we know this is class war from both sides and the two parties don't represent different classes they represent different factions within the ruling class right um but it is i mean it's it's it's very very dark to be an american and just try to get by they make it fucking impossible yeah no and to get into like the biden side of things of it i think it's really important to emphasize, like, why doesn't he do it? Because he fucking doesn't have to, right? And that's what's so depressing about it, right? Who's going to make him? And what does he gain from doing it? And I think, actually, if we look at legally how this played out, what's so frustrating is that there still is a chance that he does get seen as going big and being this tenacious fighter because

of this pivot that he's doing now, even though that's obviously not what it is. So a little bit of context around this. Biden's student loan forgiveness was done through the Heroes Act, which is an act that came around in the wake of September 11, basically allows the government to take extraordinary action, including potentially forgiving debt, certainly holding payments on debt in the wake of a national emergency. This was invoked originally by Trump in response to the COVID lockdowns as the justification for the payment pauses. So that's where we saw that. And Biden made an that he could likewise use this act in order to forgive student loans. And that was kind of the legal justification for the action that the Supreme Court just overthrew. And what's really fucking

annoying about this is that advocates for student loans, of which there were many, were saying the entire time that this was a bad idea, right? The Heroes Act is not the strongest way to possibly do that. It's very open to attack. It makes it a unilateral decision from him as the executive rather than having some sort of rules change that happens within the Department of Education. And people point out that this was going to be very difficult to defend legally. Go fucking figure. Now it gets overthrown. One of the other options that was on the table that activists had pointed out was a better option was to try to actually do it through rulemaking within the Department of Education and to have the Secretary of Education invoke the Higher Education Act, which explicitly

has language that says that the Secretary of Education has the ability to forgive debt, like written out in the text of the fucking law. This is how student loans should have been forgiven. This is what legal experts who were arguing for it pointed out to the Biden administration, and it's not what we went with. Now, in the wake of the Supreme Court overruling this, the White House has put out this nice little info sheet on their website saying, okay, we're still fighting.

Now we're going to try to go through the Higher Education Act. and do this. It's going to take some time. No guarantees. Blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And so here's what's frustrating, right? There was a right way to do this originally that would have been much more likely to stand up to legal scrutiny, but it didn't. Biden now gets to blame the court, say, look at what the conservatives do. And now he gets to say, I am going big, right? I'm trying this other way. Look at me, this tenacious fighter for student loans, when he could have just fucking started that way. But this looks better before an election, right? This is more politically useful for Biden. It is just at the end of the day, absolutely cynical politics in order to put him

in a better position going into 2024 with no care whatsoever for what actually happens to working people in this country whose lives are on the line here. You know, it's just cynical, absolute politics from a guy who is basically just a court jester for a different faction of the bourgeoisie. And that's really all it comes down to. Absolutely. Yeah, one of the, one of the saddest things that I see as well, this is completely predictable but just like soul crushing is to see like regular working class conservatives online and shit just like celebrate this clear just emiseration of 40 million of their neighbors and that's one of the ways in which it's almost cliche to say divide and conquer but it's one of the ways in which the two party system and the ruling class that sits behind it maintains itself

is by pitting desperate people against each other the right wing in this country they have no vision for the future they have no solutions to our actual problems. So much of their politics now is just, it used to be called owning the libs, but really it's just imposing cruelty and suffering on people you perceive as your political opponents as the entire ethos of your political project. And it's just, it's so, it's unreal to see like people dancing on the financial graves of their neighbors because they've been trained to hate regular people in their own community because of the ideas in their head and how they see them. also speaks, I think, to a successful political program that would advance things like, you know,

getting rid of student debt. The best way to do it in an ideal vacuum would be to do it under universal programs, right, as one piece of a broader universal major radical reform renewal of our society in which, you know, people, no matter where you are, if you're in the working class, if you're in what used to be called the middle class, that's dead these days, that no matter where you are, what your ideas in your head are, what political faction you prefer, everybody's material needs are lifted up at the same time. But insofar as you're trying to do this piecemeal, you will always be able to allow room for, you know, certain actors among the ruling class to pit desperate people against each other. And that's one of the

saddest things that you see clearly when something like this happens. It's just like there's no win for the conservative side. It's just suffering and misery for their opponents. And that's enough to really get them going. Uh, it's fucking sick. Right. Yeah. Um, yeah. Yeah, no, and I think there's something to be said there to real quick as a final thought on that is that there's a like capitalist argument for student loan forgiveness anyway, right? Which is that when the student loan pauses went into play, consumption went up, right? And that is, you know, a classic capitalist argument in terms of legislation is will increase consumptive spending, which is good for the economy generally. And we saw that families that couldn't afford to spend could afford to spend. There's

literally a conservative case to make for this but this fucking warped American sense of justice where like you have to pay for taking out a loan this like fucking like almost like Nietzsche and Rosentamont right towards others just overrides the economics in this case and the ideology

really comes first yeah yeah and you know between killing affirmative action in universities and overruling debt relief like the Supreme Court and the right wing movement in this country is sort of making it clear implicitly

that they really do believe that higher education is for the children of the elite only. They really want a country. Functionally, practically, they want a country. Of course, they're going to be a part of this small ruling elite

that has a ruling elite that replicates their specific privileges via their generational lines. So you turn around and untaxed, hand all your wealth down to the other. So everybody you care about is taken care of. But then a vast underclass of desperate people

people who just basically serve them, watch their kids, mow their yards, deliver food to their doorstep, and importantly have no chance of upward mobility and thus no access to political power. And what the reactionary elites see is this, you know, young, diverse, because of our material conditions, left wing, you know, generation, millennials, Gen Z, and the one that comes behind us, all we've known is the failures of these systems. and because of those material conditions the politics that we carry are much more radical

than anything they could accept they look down and they see we cannot let these people have access to political power if we truly open up democracy and this is a long struggle in American history too of course it's just the most recent iteration of it if we open up democracy to the rabble to you know like imagine being like a boomer conservative

who got theirs you know you're sitting atop a nice little nest egg you turn on Fox News and you just see like black and brown young people taking to the street during black, whatever you know, like day in and day out, you're hit with this idea that your country is being taken away from you. And you are actually being trained to think in line with a certain element of the reactionary elite who just wants to make sure that none of these people have access to political power, that they can't do anything to them. and this is the way that they are imposing this rule on us outside of popular support. And this is just one example of deteriorating society on my way over here. I live in Omaha. Okay, I don't live in New York City. I don't live in San Francisco.

I live in Omaha, Nebraska. On my way to come here to record this episode, I saw a family out on a intersection, a busy intersection. And it wasn't just panhandling. They were all like, you know, know like normal people whatever but they all had they all were wearing the same clothes and they had these big signs with a picture of like a six year old little girl and the signs basically saying our daughter is disabled she has a bunch of of care medical and therapeutic care that she needs and we can't afford it can you please help us out so a family with a little baby who is disabled

they didn't obviously don't know the exact details of it is only so much you can fit on a sign standing out in the rain in the rain holding up these signs begging for help because their daughter needs medical care in the richest country to ever exist in human history and I just I drove past that and I think to myself something has to give something has to break

there is no way that this shit can just go on indefinitely now they're doing everything to make sure it can I mean, and we know that Americans put up with a lot and we're hyper individualist and everybody is divided and polarized and media tricks people to turn on each other but a big sense of me it's sort of like black-pilled and optimistic at the same time

like shit is so fucking bad and has been bad for so long but at the same time like something has to give and I just I think to myself what is it going to take now of course we have the ideal of a put together socialist movement in this country blah blah blah and there's certainly still hope for that and we're working towards that but there has to be other ways of renewal as well like i just wonder what's going to happen like right now i see like room for a really and this is it almost hurts me to say as a socialist but based in reality and how most americans relate to politics like is there not room for a new leader to emerge and

really try to enter us into a period of renewal now this has happened throughout American history right like look at the Gilded Age and then the Great Recession it gave rise to FDR FDR was no friend of communist and socialist and FDR's entire administration was made possible

by on the ground struggle so these things are not separate but he comes in and ushers in a whole new era and when you look at the conservative right they say make America great again in part what they're thinking about is this brief period of time after World War II With the new deal in place, wealth inequality was at its lowest, tax rates for the richest were at its highest, union jobs were everywhere, you could graduate high school and provide for an entire family, buy a house, buy two cars, you know, one spouse could stay home and you could provide for your entire, like this is in some sense, I think, what some faction of like working class conservatives mean when they say make America great again, their political project and the vehicle they've chosen to express.

it is never, ever, ever, ever going to be able to do that. And this is why you need a critique of capital, especially within both of the political parties, to see what their real interests are. But I just wonder, what are the odds of renewal? What are the odds of either grassroots movements, married to a top-down leader who emerges, who tries to make an argument for how things should be?

I mean, there's so much discontent in this country, so much thirst for change, for something different. Is it naive to hope that that's going to happen? I don't know. I just feel like at some point, people are going to be sick of living an impossible life. Working a shitty job that you fucking hate to make somebody else rich while you barely get by. You're held down by debt that's impossible to escape from. You don't have access to fucking health care.

You have to watch the people you care about get sick and not be able to go to the doctors. I'll tell you one more story. This is from my life this week. I don't want to get too into the details for personal reasons, but I have nieces and nephews. And last year, a year and a half ago, one of them was in a very bad mental health spot, as so many young people were coming out of COVID in particular.

There was an attempt to harm themselves finally and ultimately. And the place where my sister and my brother-in-law live, Omaha metro area but not inside Omaha proper they have a private ambulance force so when the ambulance came to you know

grab my loved one and pump their stomach and try to save their life they went to one hospital who wasn't fully equipped so the ambulance took her to another hospital this is a private ambulance company that then asked for thousands and thousands and thousands of dollars from my working class sister

they couldn't pay it they got sued and now their wages are being garnished every single time and this is like they do this thing where if you're head of household only 15% of your base pay can be taken but my sister works

a commission oriented job and that extra commission is considered disposable income so they can take all of it she has four kids right so because her daughter had a mental health crisis and needed help she is now being sued and her wage is garnished

for simply using an ambulance to get to a hospital when you're in need this is not something that happened years ago this is not something that happened to somebody I know that's removed by one or two people that I heard through the grapevine this is my family and this is the shit that you have to deal with in this country

and I just fucking cannot imagine this shit going on forever you know right yeah I mean I think you get at the question that I find myself coming back to you, and I think everyone with our politics comes back to you, which is just where is the breaking point for Americans, right? Like, there has to be one. At the same time, like, I don't know. Maybe I feel more cynical on this, but like, I just don't see even that

kind of, like, populism that you're gesturing towards how it can happen, right? Like, an attempt on the left was made with Bernie, and what we saw was the party machinery of the Democratic Party was really, really, really, really effective at shutting that down, right? Like, it did exactly what it's built to do and to shut down even the most moderate kind of social democratic challenge, right? And on the right, what is so frustrating, and I think we really see this more and more, is that the right-wing culture war framing of everything really does just have the right convinced that populism means culture-waring, right?

There isn't even really like a right kind of view of labor. You have these groups that, like, kind of talk about it, American Compass and these other think tanks. But at the end of the day, they don't have anything that would even be close to trying to rejuvenate things economically. And it is just really, you know, kind of dark to say that even in terms of like bourgeois reforms, it almost feels like the system can't even allow those to a certain degree. It just, there's no room for it. One of the other things that I think I would gesture to that is really something that we just

have to figure out how to combat in the United States. and I don't know how we do it is just the fucking individualism at the end of the day. Because even when people experience these problems, understanding these problems as a systemic issue becomes very difficult to convince people of. And for anyone not experiencing these problems, the idea that you might fall into poverty, you might fall into homelessness is just kind of unthinkable to them. One thing that I see that really disturbs me a lot is I live in Los Angeles, right? So this is one of the most expensive cities in the United States that you can possibly live in.

As a result, it has skyrocketing rates of homelessness. When you go around Los Angeles, you see what are basically small tent cities that have been set up, where people are doing everything they can to try to get by and stay sheltered. And realistically, in a healthy society where people aren't so fucking just horrifically indoctrinated into capitalist individualism, that should horrify us in that we're seeing other human beings suffer, right? We're seeing a system that puts people into that. position. But the thing I see in the city over and over again is even working people who

manage to stay within an apartment or find their place just want to see the homeless, want to see poverty out of their sight, right? The sweeps are what we constantly see. There's just this hatred for those who are in a position that anyone could fall into at any time. And I wonder what it takes to ideologically overcome that. Because I think in order to hit that breaking point that you're talking about, people need to kind of have this solidarity that seems so precluded in America, right? That seems so outside of how people are conditioned to think. And I don't know when we can get there, but somehow that solidarity, you know, to me put in Marxist terms, that consciousness of, you know, the people as a class has to happen in order for that breaking

point to get hit. And I just don't know where we're at. We're getting there. It's very horrifying to see. Yeah, and you saw a spark of what could be, you know, again, we're not hardcore Bernie Sanders supporters or anything like that, but there was a spark in his message when he was running. I can't remember if it was the first or the second time. I forget the exact slogan either, but it was basically at his rallies and stuff, he would talk about issues with, you know, debt, with health care, et cetera. And a big thing was like, you know, it's not your fault. It's a structural issue. Look to the people to the left and the right of you they're struggling too and if we can come you know so there's like this sense in which there's

the possibility and people want to hear it people are are thirsty for a message like that people feel deeply alienated and they don't understand that the individualism that manifest in so many different areas of their life is the alienation but at the same time we've been trained that like nobody's coming to help you you're foolish to think there's going to be any sort of collective or communal caretaking so there's almost like um a defense mechanism where you double down on the individualism well either i'm going to get mine or i'm going at least make sure me and mine are taken care of forced by the material conditions right and so like because you live in a society that doesn't give a fuck about you you embrace individualism because you

have no other choice and and so like you know how do you break out of this it's very hard it's going to be a combination of things but there is you know there is room for a leader to come along to take on both parties to push this message i mean in our organizations and our political education we're certainly trying to push it showing how everything is deeply and inexorably connected and even like the the fantasy and the delusion of rich people in this society who truly think that their money can save them but they feel as if right they can gate themselves off from the society that their wealth helps deteriorate their hoarding of wealth gives them simultaneously i mean the reality that they that their wealth is connected to the great

poverty they see everywhere else, but also the delusion that they can ultimately just cordon themselves off from all of the negative impacts in society. As the skies fill with smoke, as every major downtown corridor fills up with tents, as crime picks up because desperate people do desperate things, they feel that they can continue to retreat and retreat and retreat. And it's a individualist fantasy as it manifests in the minds of the wealthy, of the rich. Um, but they don't see that ultimately we're so interconnected that, that eventually the barbarians will be at your gate. You know, there's only so much, so much shit you can put people through. So much impossibility you can throw on their shoulders until everything breaks.

And you can't escape that. Um, but they live in this fantasy world where they believe that they can. And it's just, it's, it's, it's, it's sickening. Now, yeah, I don't really know. I, I kind of wanted to, uh, also touch on these third party runs and just sort of like, criticize them as well, but do you have anything to say about SCOTUS or anything else before we move in that direction? Yeah, I mean, I wanted to touch on affirmative action real quick, because I think this is an important one, and this gets at something interesting, you know, that maybe we can think

about a little bit. On affirmative action, I'll just touch on it briefly. This one is one that I think for me, I have a weird connection to because I spent about four and a half years working as a private tutor who was mostly trying to get rich kids into Ivy League universities. My job was to help them with test prep, help them with their applications, help them with oftentimes retaking the SAT to try to get a better score. And so as a result of that, I had this very interesting experience of kind of working with the people who are, you know, presumably this case is about, right, students who were largely white or Asian American, who felt like affirmative action was somehow keeping them out of these schools that they were supposed to get into. And I think there's just a couple of things to note about

this particular case briefly that are useful kind of theoretically. So the first, right, is that at the end of the day, this ruling on affirmative action is not primarily going to benefit Asian Americans, which is one of the big framings that was used to justify this, right? The idea was that Asian Americans are discriminated against in some unique way as a result of affirmative action. And the reality for these universities is that what this is going to do is clear more room to a lot legacy students in, right? Legacy students get into these universities at already elevated rates with worse scores, with worse at GPAs on the whole, because they come from families who donate to the university, who buy buildings for the university, who have access to all of this. And now that system can just become even more corrupt. And I think, again, as you pointed out, Brett, this shows us that these court cases are about perpetuating the power of the bourgeois.

see, right? This makes sure that they're able to get in there. But then regardless beyond that, the other thing that I think I saw in my time tutoring is that there just is no meritocracy built behind the test scores and the GPAs in the first place, right? The students who I got to work with were the rich of the rich in many cases who could afford a private tutor, often could afford multiple private tutors in different subjects, who could afford to retake tests over and over again to try to get in and who were ultimately buying their way into better scores, right? Students that come from working families don't have access to private tutors. They don't have access to test prep courses. They may not even have access to paying to take the SAT more

than once because you have to pay for these fucking tests, right? The ability to gain that system in the first place comes from the rich. And so even if, you know, legacy students don't get benefited particularly, and somehow this just ends up, you know, truly being whoever has the highest scores get in, that system is still built on keeping disadvantaged people out. And those disadvantages in the United States fall along the lines of class and race, because race and class are intertwined, right? So I think it's just important to take a moment, talk about how this is one of the most blatantly obvious cases of ensuring the perpetuation of the rich getting into elite institutions and no one else being able to do it. And, you know, I think it's just worth recognizing. And of course, you know,

wants to point out that the dissent is like this skating critique of the court and all this and points us out already and sure whatever but also who gives a shit about the dissent right because at the end of the day the conservatives won and so there's this huge frustration here and i think our job is to point out to people that yeah the american myth and meritocracy that's at play here is already a structure class domination in and of itself and this is just reinforcing that domination yeah well said yeah and uh you know it just goes to reiterate like again these all these court rulings and stuff

instead of trying to solve any problems in society there's literally making everything worse and I saw this I saw this kind of interesting tweet that said if I know anything about conservatives getting what they want is only going to make them angrier and there's a sense in which that's true

like no amount of victories for them ever is enough there's this frenzy to keep going they always feel aggrieved they had this huge victim complex, you know, the person goes on to point, like the locus of their unwellness is, I mean, we would say material conditions, but also in their own psychology where this need to scapegoat and project your frustrations onto others, which then turns into just enjoying cruelty and

suffering for its own sake. And it's like no matter how many wins they get, they still are so pissed off. They're so aggrieved. They're so, they play the victim forever. Nothing will ever satiate them. Nothing will ever make them feel like they've won or that, you know, America's finally great again or whatever. It's just a relentless, never-ending sort of horror movie that we all have to endure. And they have all the power and money so we can't do shit about it. I did want to say something else as well. Like, you know, I talked earlier about, you know, if you default, you're fucked. If you try to pay these fucking predatory loans, you're fucked. And just a couple stories like this this on Twitter they collect a bunch of these people's stories where they're talking

about their situation and it just it makes people feel less alone it also just shows how predatory this shit is like if you're going to do federal student loans bare minimum don't charge an interest rate nobody needs to profit off kids going to school you can just repay the loan and and that's it but the interest rates balloon things to where you can pay your whole life and never catch up so just a couple um stories summarized into like a sentence These are different people's little stories. I was led to believe you can pay off your loans in 10 years. 18 years later, and I still have 13 years to go to pay mine off at current pace.

The next person. First generation college grad from a relatively cheap state school, and my balance is now $41,000 after a starting principal of $34,000. I've been paying for 14 years. A next one. Was told to go to the best college I could, and so I did. paid $700 a month for most of my 20s. I worked two jobs.

I still owe $80,000 12 years later. Two more. I went to college on loans as an out-of-state or at a public university, and I have been paying them diligently ever since. I still owe over $80,000, and I'm almost 16 years out from undergraduate. This is a broken system. And finally, I took out around $48,000 in student loans to go to college. I've paid probably $30,000 since I graduated in 20,000.

2016. Right now, I owe $50,000. So this is the predatory. And again, these are fucking teenagers. These are teenagers who do not have financial literacy. God knows we don't learn it in high school. Who are being told, if you want to make anything of your life, you go to college. So you go in to go to college and say, before you go to college, if you want to get into college, you got to sign here. And this is how you get, this is how you pay for it. Okay, so 17, 18, 19 year old, sign the fucking dotted line.

and then 20 years later their principal is three times the amount that they originally signed up for and this is not a question of like fairness or or sticking to your responsibilities this is being viciously preyed upon for other people's profit when you're not even legally allowed to buy a beer

because you're not mature enough yet you can sign away your fucking financial life and they want to talk to us about hey if you signed up for the fucking loans just step up and pay them you know fuck off it's impossible yeah no absolutely i mean the fucking interest is insane and this is the other thing that drives me fucking nuts right is at the very least some sort of interest relief could be done at the federal

level and no one's even tried to do that right like the just absolutely pathetic level of inaction i think really does show that at the end of the day no one believes these loans are getting paid back they're fucking obviously not right we will die without standing debt and at the end of the day it is about this kind of just hatred for others this vindictiveness for you made a decision now you have to live with it that's so baked into the american consciousness and it just is so irrational at the end of the day and is yet where we are at and when you make them when you make the right you know hate universities think they're these bastions of marxist education talk about gender studies programs and all of this shit you're just amping people and priming them to turn against their

neighbors when it comes to shit like this because yeah why would i give a fuck that this person who just got indoctrinated by marxism for four years has crushing debt good fuck them they should you know it's like everything the right does is about demonizing and dehumanizing the other so that you can more easily prey upon them so not you working class conservative can pray upon them but so your rulers can pray upon them and profit from them and trick you into taking their side it's fucking sick, but it is so fucking good and so effective. Why would they ever stop?

Yeah. It's brutal. But let's go ahead and move to the... I kind of wanted to talk about this. I don't think we've really had a chance, especially me and you, to discuss these third-party challenges. Now, of course, everything on the table, these don't work. You know, the two-party system is designed to not allow third parties

to break through. RFK and Marianne Williamson are far, far, far from being anything close to, like, principled socialist. Cornell West is a bit of a different figure for sure, has a lot of integrity, a lot of history, certainly no Marxist-Leninist or Maoist, but, you know, the best person that's ever ran for president in our lifetime, even though there's literally no chance that he'll win. But what I do see here is an attempt for something new to pop up. There's so much dissatisfaction with the two-party system.

so many people seeing no way out Americans are trained only to react and relate to politics through the electoral spectacle that it feels like something's trying to emerge but of course it's America so it's going to be this distorted

clownish hellish thing that's emerging and not like a good pure thing that emerges but just kind of I just would love to hear your thoughts on like those three figures in particular given what we all know third party runs are you know they're doomed to failure but at the same time, they can be an interesting gauge for people's upsetness with the status quo.

They can be a gauge for people's deep yearning for anything else than Trump and Biden again. And in that sense, can be an interesting phenomenon to keep an eye on and to observe and to watch. And I do think there's a lot of space for a really charismatic leader to rise up one way or the other and try to tie people's disparate longings and yearnings and struggles together into something, but this is obviously not going to happen in 2024. But yeah, just your general thoughts on any or all of these third party candidates. Yeah, so a couple thoughts. Broadly, I think the first thing that I would frame the entire thing with is that it is clear

that Democrats are worried about third party candidates existing, right? because in response to this, we are already seeing this fucking panic from Democrats of like, oh, if we have these third parties, Trump wins again or DeSantis wins, which is the story that we always hear, right? So that kind of panic is already kicking into gear. And I think there's two levels to that. One, I don't think that that usually does play out that way. Third parties do not usually take the election for one party or another.

Their support is so fucking minimal in the United States that it is not actually that significant in most cases. And second, what that's primarily about for the Democrats is, I think, trying to constrain what ideologies are allowed to exist on the debate stage, right? That is the primary function of that kind of panic and that freak out that we're seeing there. So it's worth keeping that in mind. In terms of the three candidates that we are looking at here, kind of broad thoughts, I will group Williamson and RFK together because I think they're similar in some interesting ways. So both William and RFK have managed to get some kind of support across both sides of politics. RFK mostly for his statements about foreign policy, right? He's very much

framing himself as this anti-war kind of figure, as someone who's going to be willing to stand up against U.S. involvement overseas and has really positioned himself that way. Williamson, a little less on the foreign policy side, but generally seen as progressive on a whole host of issues. Both of them also have the same weird thing, which is that they're very invested in like alternative health woo shit at the same time as well, which is kind of the other side. In Williamson, that doesn't look like explicit anti-vaccine politics, but in RFK, we have seen that as well. RFK's campaign website has talked a good bit about his focus on overhauling U.S. health care by which he means not so much universal health care if you actually look into the details, but making alternative health care more

available, right? So there is this kind of weird thing going on with both of them that makes me very, very skeptical of them as figures. I think generally, like populism in the United States often tries to use foreign policy as a place to try to push certain levels of more progressive politics while then falling back on other forms of kind of reactionary social views or reactionary views about science. I generally think that the evolution of this kind of more woo populism is a sign of American descent into fascism in a lot of ways, actually, where irrationalism and this emphasis on kind of like anti-modern irrationalism, anti-science attitudes really represent a kind of fascist idea of irrationalism. I could go on a long rant about Adorno's

writing on this, because it's one of the few things I think that guy is actually right about. So that makes me skeptical of those two figures. Ultimately, I think that they aren't going to matter very much. RFK is going to matter more than Williamson because, uh, much more broad support on the right. There's definitely people on the right who are very, very interested in RFK as a figure. But at the same time, I don't think he can have the broad appeal against Trump and against DeSantis that he wants to. There are certain people very far on the right who feel like Trump betrayed them by developing the vaccines and refusing to apologize for the vaccines. And those people definitely seem to prefer RFK to Trump, but how big of a

number that is. It's not enough for me to know whether or not it's really relevant. One, other interesting thing on RFK is that Alex Jones has been trying to figure out where his stance on RFK is. He doesn't really know where to position himself. He's in this weird, am I for Trump or not at this moment? And one of the things that he says that I think is actually true is like, Americans can't get behind a guy with a fucked up voice like that. It's like an idea that Alex, yeah, he keeps coming back to it. And he's like, if only it wasn't for his voice, maybe he could win. And there's a level of truth there, right? Like, I actually think that for how Americans think, think that is kind of a limiting factor that Alex Jones is talking about. So those are the thoughts

on those two. I don't think they'll be super relevant. I think RFK will create some interesting discussions because he wants to run as a Democrat. But ultimately, I mean, I don't think there will be any substantial challenge there. West is more interesting because West wants to run not as a Democrat, right? And that actually creates some kind of complicated things here. So West originally announced running with the People's Party, which from myself and many others got a big what the fuck. but he seems to have kind of backed out of that is looking for the Green Party nomination and trying to go through that route. And this, I think, is more interesting because I think West is a much more respected figure than Mary Ann Williamson and RFK. He is someone who is really interesting

position in American politics because he's this religious figure and also a populist figure, right? Cornell West is a Christian. He's a very outspoken Christian who frames his politics through Christianity. And I think that might give him some appeal that, you know, we wouldn't necessarily see from a normally more left-leaning candidate, which is interesting. And we'll see how all that develops. It's going to be hard to say the best case scenario is that West is able to push and take jabs at Biden and at the Democrats that really do reveal the class function of the Democrats. There's no way West wins. I think there's probably no way West even sticks all the way through to the primary. I don't think that's going to happen. But anything that can be oppositional

that can lay bare what the politics of the U.S. really are coming out of Cornell West, I think will be useful. Again, he's not a Marxist. He's been very, very clear about the fact that he's not a Marxist. But if he is able to bring anything even approaching a critique, which comes from the angle of class, into these conversations, there's a benefit to that, at the very least, that I'm willing to kind of recognize and acknowledge. Will it actually change anything? I don't know, but I think that we can be hopeful for that. And that kind of is where I see this more as this is not really about winning an election.

Ideally, there is useful propagandizing, useful critique on a public stage that comes out of his run. Yeah, I totally agree with the Cornell West analysis and your other analysis of RFK and Marianne Williamson. The thing I would add to RFK is he's a fascinating sort of cultural product and figure for a few reasons. One is like he's simultaneously like horrifying to Democrats and actually great for them

because the horror comes from like he has the Kennedy name he clearly has some level of popular support he's interestingly trying as he explicitly says I listen to like long interviews with them

I listen to the whole Joe Rogan interview and shit he says he's trying to bring the far left and the far right together which just makes a Democratic liberal shit their pants they can't they hate that talk but on the other hand he's great because if you're a corporate dem you get to tie RFK crucify him

to his silly woo-woo anti-vax bullshit but if you listen and that's all they do so like I saw after you went on Joe Rogan I listened to that whole interview and then I went and saw all the liberals and quote unquote leftist who are shitting on him taking these clips of him saying ridiculous things easily disprovable things about vaccines and shit right but so so then that he's totally discredited

but if you go on and listen to that interview he gets into these fascinating discussions about empire, about wealth redistribution, and about Big Pharma, and what he would do, like not allowing them to advertise on TV, not allowing them to lobby the FDA, talking about capture of these institutions by lobbyists, etc. So all of the genuine critiques he has of the status quo, which the Democrats are fully culpable in just as much as Republicans, are completely overshadowed and actually sort of disqualified by association with his obviously nutty woo-woo vaccine shit. So like there's a genuine critique to make of big pharma.

And what gets lost in all of this shit is like we need to critique big pharma, right? The problem with the pharmaceutical industry is the industry part, not the medical science part, right? But these things can all be packaged together. So what you get is this weird phenomena where dumbfox, like, Like Joe Rogan and all the millions of people that like listen to him and really relate to him will have this insane and sometimes completely valid criticism and skepticism, importantly, of big pharma. Like, oh, this is a breath of fresh air to hear somebody say like on a huge platform that like pharmaceutical companies are fucking criminal. They should not be allowed to advertise to us. They should not be able to capture these institutions ostensibly there to regulate them.

But then there's no skepticism at all when it comes to the ultimate. alternative shit. So, like, if, if these people apply the same hard-nosed skepticism they have for vaccines, for Big Pharma, for all of this shit, just take that exact same skepticism and apply it to, like, anti-vax, alternative medicine shit. And, like, that would at least be intellectually consistent. And that's what I think folks like you and I do. Like, yes, we're very skeptical of Big Pharma. We fucking hate the control they have. They're the number one lobbying group on Washington Hill, or Capital. Hill. They advertise to people. They pay doctors, incentivize the entire system to shove their shit down our throats, etc. But we're also very, very skeptical of like people selling their own piss on the

internet, you know? People taking ivermectin or whatever. We're also going to apply skepticism to those claims. And it's just like lopping off an entire half of that, you know, like I'm, I'm starry-eyed and naive as fuck when it comes to alternative medicine, but I'm a hard-nosed

scientific skeptic when it comes through vaccines and established medicine. It drives me fucking crazy. But yeah, RFK plays this role where his real critiques of the Democratic Party, his real critiques of empire, can be completely overshadowed and made irrelevant by his association with scientific quackery.

And so for that, it's really interestingly good for the Democrats to be able to shield themselves from the criticism of empire and wealth inequality, which they are fully culpable for, by this association to his quackery. yeah and i think that's really important right one thing like the way that i almost think about is it's almost like a reverse sheepdoging that happens for the democrats where the ostensible opposition to them

paired with the bullshit reinforces them and i think you know there's two things to point out here one is that the democrats are ideologically super invested in the idea of horseshoe theory right and the idea that the far right and the far left are ultimately the same thing we can see this like super clearly in 2016, this claim that like the Bernie pros flipped for Trump, right? This is this idea that you hear over and over and over again, this idea that ultimately the left and the right coalesce at this kind of anti-liberalism. And that's super useful for the Democrats because what it means is they get to say, look, we're the only ones who are actually consistently like socially progressive, for example. Everyone who cares about economic issues or foreign policy issues will

ultimately side with the Republicans on their social issues, and it lets them control this discourse in a really annoying way. And I think RFK is a good example of that. We suggested this before, and I stand by it. I think this is why the fucking manga communism shit blew up. I think it's good for Democrats, right? Like, associating communism with conservative reactionary ideology, fucking dope. If those guys aren't getting paychecks from the DNC, they really need to be getting paychecks for the DNC. I don't know what better thing you could do for the Democratic Party. and this is why I think ultimately it is good and significant that West stepped away from the People's Party, right? Because that would have been the attack against West as well, as you are

citing with this group that is full of blatant social reactionaries, and that would ultimately benefit the Democratic Party. That move away, I think, is very good and does differentiate things a little bit from what's going on with Williams and an RFK, where hopefully that reverse sheepdogging effect doesn't take place there. But I do think, like, in all of these things, we just need to keep in mind that like there is this concerted effort by the democratic establishment to paint socialism and communism as socially conservative at the end of the day, right, as willing to fall back on right-wing populism. And so when we look at these third party runs, it's super important to hold these people's feet to the fire about not reinforcing that. Yeah. Yeah, because if you're a high-ranking member in the Democratic Party apparatus, you are in the top 5%, 1%, you are very comfortable. you tell yourself that you got there through your own meritocratic efforts

and that you are somebody that's truly deserving of these positions and you're not going to undermine the basic system and structure that gives you this super cushy fucking life and you also get to indulge in the delusion that you did it all yourself but they also want to present themselves as being very progressive and being the leading edge so what you do is you you over-emphasize the identity stuff and the social progress stuff while under-emphasizing and attacking the class-based stuff

and any movement that tries to say we're for the class-based stuff but we also buy into these reactionary socialities are going to help the Democrats in exactly the way that you say by tying into that whole horseshoot theory bullshit and the fact is what most people want, especially younger people,

is a mixture of social progressivism with economic progressivism. They want something like social. socialism, something that advances the ball for, you know, minority identity in groups who have been unjustly oppressed and absolutely deserve social progress and basic human dignity and equal civil rights. But in order to actually get that, in any real lasting way, it has to come married to an economic package of universal programs that lifts everybody up. And they can't do that because that undermines their very existence and their place in the higher. right so it is this fucking doom loop carousel of whore that we have to go through all the time where they're trying to constantly stake their claim as being super fucking progressive but can only do it

on the rails of of hardcore identity reductionism and then the right gets to gin up a whole bunch of people who are pissed about that stuff but both parties end up perpetuating the underlying destructive material conditions that are ruining everybody's life while we tear our neighbors throat out over what they think about this or that issue um so and another thing the democrats do that fucks them and it ties back into the rfk thing is that in the face of this faux populist right wing attack on institutions mostly on democratic institutions that that or any institution that will hold right wing people accountable in any way they're going to go you know sort of scorched earth on those institutions and then the democrats find themselves having to justify and tie themselves to institutions that

most people hate for good reasons right like we hate we hate all these institutions for good reasons but you have to um you know basically tie yourself to them to say that we're the party of of like tradition and rule based institutional order but you're tying yourself to these institutions ostensibly to show and defend us of you know liberalism from this right wing populist attack but those institutions have delegitimize themselves for good reason and so by tying yourself to them you further bring down the brand you further alienate people you suppress turnout because nobody wants to vote for a party that's like we love the fucking military we love the CIA we love the FBI we love the Supreme Court as the Supreme Court is slitting our fucking throats but it's an institution with tradition and so you have to defend it it's it's it is wild and that's what leads me to say like this shit can't go on forever something has to break and it's not going to in America it's not going to be orderly and nice and shit is going to be catapuck and strophic i think i think we're going into some of the most difficult years like this is it's already begun um but we are being

the further we go into the 2020s i think the worst shit is going to get maybe things will break maybe change will come as has happened at various times throughout american history where there's like years and years of like contradictions heightening and heightening and heightening and then some relief some renewal some change that at least satiates enough people to keep the whole system as a whole rolling and you know that's kind of the sad thing because like if we do have like FDR 2.0

the basic thing that it does is keep intact the capitalist system and perpetuate its longevity but it also reduces suffering for people that have to fucking live in it so it's kind of like what do I do? Do I suffer less or do I just become a full on accelerationist so this whole thing crashes?

It's like again another impossible situation. Yeah, no absolutely. And I think, yeah, I don't know. It's interesting to see, I think that I just am skeptical that the bourgeoisie is interested in these reformer figures who could theoretically kick the crisis can down the road, right? It seems like increasingly it's just we want to ignore crisis, right? We want to seal ourselves away and pretend it's not happening. And I think, yeah, that's going to bite them in the ass, right? Yeah, absolutely.

Well, we're over an hour here. I kind of got some of the main points I want to say out. I know this is just going to be mostly a cathartic release and, you know, people agree, but sometimes it's nice to hear, you know, just people fucking rail against this shit. It's sad that that's kind of what we're reduced to is just these acts of catharsis. But, you know, like, I'm fucked up. This sucks. Everything that happens in American society just makes life harder, shittier, more precarious, more uncertain.

You know, I care about my kids. What world are they going to fucking inherit? I care about my financial future and my ability to provide for my family. family and just everything is just going in the wrong direction. And so perhaps it's this this deep urge for change that gives me this idea that like something has to give. But knowing America, they can, they can drag this shit out for many, many more years. Fortunately.

Yeah. Do you have any closing thoughts, closing words, anything like that? No, I mean, not too much. Obviously, you know, this episode is an expression of frustration on our part. I hope that, you know, like you gestured at, that there's catharsis at the very least for people on this. I think, again, at the very least, what we need to do is recognize that all of this shit that is happening at the end of the day is class warfare, right?

That is what it is, and the solution to it is class struggle against the ruling class. That's really what we have to reemphasize what that looks like, how we get there in the U.S. Well, that's the fucking question that socialists in this country have been wrestling with for quite some time and continue to wrestle with. At least this can hopefully underline the urgency of these fundamental political questions for us. and I'll kind of just leave it there. Yeah, and I would just say, like, no matter how dark shit gets, we still have to do political education,

we still have to engage in organizing. Unions are still a great vehicle to fight the class war, to fight back. You know, if you're somebody that's in a position like mine that just can't fathom the financial ruin coming down the pike for you and your family because your loans are just completely uncontrollable, it's a long shot,

but there are things like the debt collective at debt strike. They're trying to organize, collective resistance, as hard as that is in America. If we just leave it to us being individuals trying to deal with our individual situations, we're going to be picked apart by the wolves. Our only hope on an issue like student debt is collective struggle. And when enough people get together and refuse to pay as a political demand and a political act, that is going to at least give us more hope of actually solving the problem

than simply recoiling into our individual lives, crunching the next. numbers and trying to figure out what's going to work for you and your family. We all have to do that still. But by showing support something like the debt collective, I mean, you don't have to pay dues or anything. You sign up, answer some of their surveys, help them continue to sort of build up the momentum to take this fight to higher and higher levels. Better than doing absolutely nothing. But again, it's it sort of feels shitty telling people to do this stuff because on one level we know that it's not really, at least in any foreseeable future, going to change anything on any deep level

and so there's a sense in which we're all fucking held hostage as Americans to the fate of this entire fucking empire and we are imprisoned within its stomach and we can fight and punch those stomach lining and spit and rage but we're going down with the ship

and that's going to make stuff like organization stuff like you know even mutual aid but coming together pooling resources taking care of one another. These things are not going to suddenly stop being essential. We've been talking about these things for years. They're still as relevant today as they were when we started this show. They're going to be relevant in five years. It's our only fucking hope in some sense.

Absolutely. Yeah. All right. Well, I think that's going to wrap it up for today. Hopefully there's something of value in an episode like this. We're going to come back with the third installment of our Engel series. We're going to wrap up that text and reflect on it what it means as a whole text. And then we have some interesting stuff coming down the pike later on this summer as well, which we will keep you abreast of. All right. Well, that's it for today.

Love one another, fight. Keep your head up. And we'll be back with you soon. Love and solidarity. You know