Rev Left Radio - Red Hot Take: Combatting Liberalism on Russia, The US, and Cuba

Episode Date: October 27, 2022

In this episode, Breht plays clips of, and responds to, a recent podcast put out by Sam Harris and Yale Historian Timothy Snyder on the Russia-Ukraine war in which they advance several liberal, pro-american criticisms against dissident thinkers on the topic. Then Breht plays a clip from a NYT podcast about Cuba and launches into a classic Red Hot Take style rant on the topic.  Outro music by Kodak Black  Support Rev Left Radio: https://www.patreon.com/RevLeftRadio    

Hello everybody and welcome back to Rev Left Radio. On today's episode, I'm going to do another one of my Red Hot Takes, which are basically kind of extended monologues on a certain topic that fired me up, more or less. And this episode, I got fired up because I do this masochistic thing where I continually listen to liberal, centrist, conservative, and even right-wing media, ostensibly to keep a finger on the pulse of different ideological factions, in society, but also just because I can't help myself. I'm a political junkie in the truest sense, and even against my own internal wishes,

I subject myself to constant streams of nonsense, to the detriment of my own mental health in a lot of situations. But this time I was listening to Making Sense podcast with Samuel Harris. Oh, Sam Harris, we all know that liberal idealist. And on this episode, he has on the, let me think, I think Timothy Snyder. He's a very famous, let's see here, he's the 11 professor of history and global affairs at Yale University and a permanent fellow at the Institute for Human Sciences in Vienna. He's the author of a dozen books, including bestsellers on tyranny, R. Malady, the Road to Unfreedom, Black Earth and Bloodlands, etc., etc. So he's a very well-respected, vaunted academic who specializes, particularly in Ukrainian.

history. So he teaches that Yale is more or less a Western expert in Ukrainian history. And Sam Harris is having him on Sam's show to push back against these claims coming from the far left and the far right that mock the liberal centerist fetishizing of Ukraine, that critique the neoliberal, neo-conservative approach and posture to Russia and Ukraine who center American brinksmanship as a leading factor in this common or in this current situation, et cetera. So basically, and I'm sure the far right has a bunch of deviations and stupid shit on this topic that I'm not by any means trying to wade into, much less defend. But on the far left, there's the far left, there's certainly.

critiques of this war, critiques of Americans' position, critiques of the constant shoveling of funds and weapons into Ukraine, into the hands of literal neo-Nazis, and just an overall seeming brinkmanship that is pushing us closer and closer to nuclear war. And of course, we have to center NATO expansion as part of the reason why Russia made this move. And none of this is to necessarily excuse bloodshed. I am for peace. I want in the interest of the working class people of Europe, of Ukraine, of Russia, even of the United States, since our tax dollars are going to fund and arm many different people, but including Nazis, that we should be critical of this stuff. And we should push for peace. We should push for an end to the conflict and for, at the

very least, radical de-escalation, especially on the part of our own government. But, you know, Sam Harris, the liberal that he is, can't stand this. And so he has on Timothy Snyder to push back against these arguments. But in the intro, and I'm going to get to that for sure. In the intro, though, to this episode, Sam Harris talks about Kanye and talks about some tweet that Sam tweeted out, condemning Kanye. And he's talking about how he got a whole bunch of hate back, you know, from mostly, he says, the far right. And then he goes into this horseshoe theory bullshit. And I just wanted to kind of point this out and push back on it because it is such fucking nonsense and it is absolutely grotesque to sit here and listen to somebody, try to bend the political spectrum into the shape of a horseshoe and just falling in headfirst into the abyss of absurdity in the process. So I'm going to play a clip from Sam Harris in the intro, this is not even getting to Ukraine and Russia quite yet. in the intro where he makes a claim about anti-Semitism on the far left. So let's play that here. I haven't focused much on anti-Semitism in the past. I think I've devoted exactly one podcast to it out of 300.

I've noticed it on the extreme right and the extreme left, obviously. Briefly, the way this breaks down is that on the extreme right, Jews are not considered white, and therefore they fall within the scope of white nationalist racism with the added spin of various conspiracy theories. But on the extreme left, Jews are considered extra white. They get something like double the white privilege points, so they fall within the scope of anti-white bigotry and activism. So you move far enough left or right as a Jew

and you meet fairly stark expressions of hatred. Wow. Okay. So on the far right, he's correct. Of course, anti-Semitism is a pillar, of fascism, of reaction, of right-wing conspiratorial fucking nonsense. Their worm-eaten brains are often, you know, conspiratorial and anti-Semitic and racist and all this other stuff. So we know that, and he's right about that. Of course he is. But then what does he say? about the far left, has anybody listening to my voice right now, assuming that you're probably on the far left, have talked to people on the far left, are surrounded by friends and comrades who are on the far left, have any one of you ever come across a left-wing articulation of Jewish people being extra white, of Jewish people being labeled by any significant faction

on the on the socialist communist communists, Marxist, anarchist left of being extra white such that they are now at the mercy of anti-white bigotry. So the idea here is the far left and the far right are equally anti-Semitic. I mean, we know the far right is just, I mean, they did the fucking Holocaust. They're anti-Semitic to the fucking core. Of course we know that. Okay. And then then the left is anti-white racists and we conceive of Jewish people somehow as doubly white, therefore they get double the ire. So I thought he was going to go with the classic attempt to do this, which is to label any criticism of Israel as anti-Semitic. And that would be his way of saying the far left is also anti-Semitic, or maybe dabble in the absurd

bullshit UK-British, you know, media lie that the left in Britain and Jeremy Corbyn in particular were just ravaged by anti-Semitism. Right? Like those are the the two moves that these sort of horseshoe theorists when they comes to anti-Semitism try to make. The left critiques Israel, therefore they're anti-Semitic, or look what happened with Jeremy Corbyn and his campaign. It was just rotted out with anti-Semitism, a fake controversy created by the UK corporate media to stop an insurgent, class-based democratic socialist movement from gaining power. And one of the ways that the liberal centers do that is by weaponizing liberal identity politics and the accusations that come with it. against anti-imperialist and pro-working class leftist to try to tar them as scary or as in cahoots with the far right or whatever it may be for their own corporate purposes, which is fundamentally about protecting profits and the corporate structure of modern capitalist societies. So they'll use cynically identity, politic, rhetoric against elements of, you know, the far left to try to slander them and prevent them from getting any sort of power.

that could threaten their corporate monopolies and their profiteering and their cushy position atop that hierarchy. So that's usually what they do. But, but now, you know, Harris goes for this absurd thing that the far left thinks of Jewish people as extra white and therefore doubly the targets of our campaigns against white supremacy or something. I really, it really falls apart very quickly there. Now, also, what does Sam Harris mean by the far left? It's very similar to Bill Maher or Joe Rogan, all of these absolute dumb fuck rich boys who are completely detached from anything, who pretend to love free speech but never actually truly engage with it, and are committed anti-communist and anti-socialist while having very little, if any, understanding of what

the fuck that even means. Moreover, both Sam Harris and Joe Rogan and Bill Maher do this thing where they talk about the quote unquote far left, but what they mean is almost always like neoliberal identitarian fetishists, right? Like super politically correct, overwrought sort of liberal types who are constantly accusing everybody of bigot and playing, you know, the social, justice hierarchy Olympics you know i'm this this this and this therefore you need to shut down and shut up and listen to me who's talking right all this stuff we know how this happens but what they do is they'll conflate the far left and our class and anti-imperialist politics with this really center-left liberal identitarian hysteria which often does come in the form

of hysteria and is sometimes very naive very childish immature etc There are legitimate critiques, of course, to be made of the, you know, neoliberal identityan types. But the conflation of the far left with the most absurd, you know, overwrought versions of identitarian fetishism on the center-left liberal scale is something they do all the time. And it creates a lot of confusion, I assume, for their audience, but is also something that, you know, really gets under my crime. We need to push back on that shit. That is not who we are advancing a politic of justice, of equality, of anti-imperialism, of anti-capitalism, of anti-fascism, in a profound and treasured, even if you disagree with it, political tradition of socialism, of Marxism, etc. That very tradition, by the way, that defeated fascism, that ended the Holocaust, that liberated the camps, that Jewish people from around Europe flocked to. in the face of the failures of capitalism in the last century and the rise of fascism.

And so to try to act as if the far right and the far left are equally anti-Semitic just in different ways actually erases the entire history of Jewish socialists, of Jewish Marxists, of Jewish communists who have contributed massively to the intellectual tradition as well as to the tradition of actual revolutionary praxis, whether that came in the form of anti-fascist partisans, or of communist leadership, or of members of the Red Army, or whatever it may have been. And so not only is there a bunch of confusion about what the far left is and this absurd attempt to do horseshoe theory, but it's actually an erasure of the Jewish people who have been integral parts to the far left. And by far left, I mean Marxism, socialism, anarchism, communism.

Those are the things that I would consider to be in the far left. And he completely erases those. There's a reason why Hitler and Minkoff talks about Judeo-Bolshevism and why today cultural Marxism is linked as a dog whistle of anti-Semitism whenever it's said. And the modern-day instantiation of cultural Marxism traces itself right back to the rantings of Hitler and Mankov talking about Judeo-Boshevism, tying the two things together. Does Sam Harris know any of this? No. And so that's why, same with Rogan especially, but sometimes, oftentimes, Bill Maher as well,

is they'll talk authoritatively and confidently about shit that is so obviously not understood by them and so obviously they've never in good faith even engaged with it. And that's the thing. Like when Jordan Peterson was going to debate Jizek, he just flitted through the communist manifesto and then came to that debate confident that he could destroy Marxism. And Zizek made him, humiliated him because it was just so obvious he didn't have any grasp of Marxism, but because anti-communism is so ambient and background, people think that they could just, you know, do, say anything, you know, flit through the pages of the Communist Manifesto and now you have a grasp of Marxism. I've been studying Marxism for the last 15 years of my life and I am constantly still learning.

Things about it, about its tradition, differences, disagreements, wrestling with core ideas and concepts. So this idea that people who have never read a Marxist text in their entire fucking life can speak authoritatively on it is always something that will, you know, irritate me to say the absolute least. So I just wanted to point this out how far backwards liberals have to bend to try to make horseshoe theory work, make themselves out to be the good guys, while everybody to their left and their right are menacing evildoers that have hate in their hearts. And that's precisely what Sam Harris is doing here. And I just wanted to one more time point out the absolute absurdity. If you're listening to this, you're probably in left-wing milieus. Have you ever once, even on the liberal-identarian center, heard somebody say, Jewish people

are doubly white, therefore they should doubly be the target of our campaigns against white people or white supremacy? Like, that is just, he pulled it out of his ass. It's not even like one person somewhere said it, you know, pretending to be this or that is like, this is a wholly made up claim by somebody who is seen and sees himself as a serious intellectual thinker, a free independent thinker that loves free and open debate, you know, and is always moored in sincere intellectual honesty, just completely throwing it all to the wind just to get a shot at who he thinks is the far left and tries to make the far left. synonymous or just as bad as the far right, which actually does the work of the far right.

If you can convince people that the number one opponents, the people who actually combat and defeat fascism in the streets or on the scale of world historical confrontation like in world wars, that those people are just as bad as the fucking Nazis doing hail Hitler's salutes saying Kanye was right about the Jews or just as bad as the motherfucking fascists who ushered in Jewish babies and women and men, innocent human beings into the gas chambers, the people that defeated those monsters are somehow just as bad as them is fucking disgusting.

And it's actually a fascist lie. It's actually a fascist lie. It concedes ground to the fascist right and it makes their number one opponents moral equivalents of the worst motherfuckers that have ever existed on fucking planet Earth. That's the real work that Sam Harris and these types do when they talk like this and when they promote horseshoe theory bullshit.

Okay, now that that intro part is done, he moves into the actual conversation with his guest, the Yale professor Timothy Snyder. And in this opening, more or less question, he is going to frame the entire discussion, really, around some of these views that he is seeing as anathema or ill-informed or somehow nefarious you know and him and timothy are going to talk about them and then push back on them and so let me think here one thing to say about timothy snider is without a doubt and if you listen to the whole interview here and just know his work it's clear that he knows much more about ukrainian history than me and probably you as a leader

expert in the United States on Ukrainian history, you can't deny that that's true. And I would completely and fully admit he knows more history, Ukrainian history in particular than I do. But what's at stake is not who knows more? That's the fetishizing of expertise. That is an appeal to authority to just say, this person has more credentials than you and has studied this more. Therefore, whatever they say is superior to whatever you say. Because although he is a a renowned historian, he's also a liberal. And what we understand as Marxists is that you could have access to all the facts in the world, but those facts are then filtered through your ideological lens, such that we could all start with the basic set of facts on any given topic. And somebody

who is an ideological liberal will differ in how they combine and understand and interpret those facts than somebody who is a committed libertarian or a committed fascist or committed Marxist. because we're all subject to ideology. Ideology is a way in which we make sense of various unconnected facts in the world. And so you could have access to really good, objective, factual reality, but still filter it through an ideological lens that ends up distorting those facts and that knowledge or leading to poor conclusions or whatever. So the mere fact that this person is an expert on Ukrainian history is not synonymous with this person is an expert on geopolitics, on what caused this conflict, and how to understand it and interpret, right? And so that's something I want to say up front. Now, let's listen to this clip, give them their chance to fully put their stuff out on the table, and then I'll respond to it.

I really want to target a specific audience in our conversation. I think we'll take a few passes on over the terrain to actually get down to bedrock. But here's what I most want to address. And I think we, I know you're going to have to cover a fair amount of history before we get there. But what I most want to cover are the doubts and fears of very bright, rational people who at this point think that U.S. and EU support of Ukraine has gone too far. right, that we're running the risk of plunging into something like World War III quite unnecessarily and that we, in some sense, provoked Putin, right, or at least we're culpable for our own failures of diplomacy and that, you know, that NATO essentially and the United States has backed him into a corner and put him in a position where his behavior is now pretty rational and even defensible from some, you know, non-sinisting. angle. And again, you'll be familiar with much of this. But, you know, if I look at my Twitter experience, I'm seeing many smart, well-connected people, some of whom have very large

platforms. You know, as I've said, none of whom are subject matter experts, but they're not dummies. And yet they're speaking as though Putin has some kind of reasonable, you know, as I said, non-sinister claim upon the patients of the world at this point, and that we should step back and get Ukrainians to step back, and that there has to be some kind of path to de-escalation here that isn't an abject capitulation to the threats of a tyrant. And just to kind of round this out, I mean, the cynical take here is that most Americans can't find Ukraine on a map, right, and still can't. And yet many are speaking about the Donbass as though the blood of Ukrainian mothers runs in their veins. And that we've been propagandized to by a weird union of a neoliberal,

neo-conservative order. And all doubts about the wisdom of this project and the wisdom of going all in on Ukraine is they're being silenced. And, you know, this is all kind of an escalator. ratchet toward something awful, you know, the true awfulness being a proper exchange of nuclear weapons between the U.S. and Russia. So that's where I want, I want us to defuse all of that. And I know you have to get into some relevant history before we get there. But that's where I want to put that flag on the horizon and I want us to aim at it. Yeah. I mean, that's, that's fine with me. I think you'll probably have to have to break it up into little pieces. Yeah, I will. what you're talking about is kind of you know you're giving a take on a bunch of takes which are

pretty far away from any you know recognizable empirical reality having to do with russia or ukraine or for that where the u.s or if i could i'll just say a little bit of the at the u.s i mean the before we get into the other parts the idea that the u.s was expecting this scenario and is somehow behind it is um not only wrong but deeply colonel the U.S. expected that this war was going to be over in three days. That was the official American position, and that was the basis for our actions at the beginning of the war. Very important to understand that the Ukrainians are people who have agency and who have taken

risks and decisions, and the risks and decisions that they have taken have in turn affected Russia and America. I think a lot of the thinking or some of the problems and the thinking, that you're describing, starts from the unspoken assumption that places like America and Russia are real country and Ukraine is not. And once you start from there, you then have to twist yourself around an awful lot to try to try to understand what's happening. So I think, I mean, that's, that's a base I would start out with. I think the idea that somehow America is behind all of this is, is, you know, it might be left-wing imperialism, but it's imperialism because it's overlooking the

agency that small and human-sized countries can have, and it's overlooking the decision, you know, the ethically based decision that Ukrainians took when they decided they would defend their country from this atrocious war. Okay, so there's a few things

you want to get on the table first. The first, and the point I really want to make here, is that Timothy Snyder doesn't actually address any of this stuff substantively. Now, to be fair, this podcast episode, Sam Harris does this thing where like the second half of every one of his episodes is paywold.

So I'm not paying a bunch of money to listen to every single one of his episodes. So I have to admit that there's like 35 minutes at the very end of this episode. This, by the way, this part I'm talking about is at the very front. But at the very end of this episode, there's, you know, 30 minutes or so of discussion that I don't have access to. And so I can't speak on them ever coming back around and touching on these issues. But I do just want to make this point that look at what Sam Harris puts on the table. all of these ideas that they're supposed to ostensibly be dealing with. And then look how Timothy Snyder, world-renowned expert, responds.

Because I would argue that he doesn't respond substantively to any one of these essential claims. So what are the claims? What are the things that Sam Harris, quote unquote, says he most wants to address in this episode? Here's a few of them. These are his words. This is the position that he's articulating in order to critique it, right?

position that I more or less hold, which is, and here's the fear of the pillars. These people, people like me, are saying the U.S. support for Ukraine has gone too far. That's his words. And he's ostensibly disagreeing with that. I do agree with that. The U.S. support has gone too far. You are shoveling billions and billions and billions of dollars and billions of dollars worth of arms and ammunition into Ukraine because America sees it fundamentally. and it's geopolitical and ultimately economic interests to corner and isolate Russia.

And that has been the goal for a very long time. It's also part of the alliance between Russia and China and this whole, you know, multipolar world that is emerging. And so the U.S. is tripping over itself to use the Ukrainians. And I'm not saying that there's not legitimate Ukrainian desire to fight back. Of course there is. There should be anybody that's invaded by anybody else. regardless of the reasons, has a right to defend their home, their family, and their community.

But what the U.S. has done is brought the entire situation, helped bring the entire situation to this brink. And now, once the explosion has erupted, funneling more guns and money into the situation, which doesn't de-escalate, which doesn't end the conflict, which doesn't end the war, it only escalates. It creates more bloodshed. It creates more tragedy. It prolongs this conflict, which is, of course, in the United States, interests because they're interested in grinding down Russia for their own geopolitical and political and political economy needs and interests and wants and really domination of the fucking globe. And Russia is one of those countries that is big, that has a storied history that stands up to the U.S. Is Russia a good country? No. Is Russia a non-capitalist country? No. Russia, like Ukraine in the United States, is a deeply corrupt, ripe-wing oligarchy.

And that takes many different forms. It can be hid behind the facade of democratic parliamentarianism, like in the United States, or it can just be the surface-level approach of things like in Russia, but the fundamental mechanics are more or less the same. I have as much say in my political fucking government as the average Russian working class person has in theirs, which is to say precisely zero. The same exact amount of say that a regular Ukrainian working people has in the Ukrainian government. So let's not talk about, you know, this democracy versus authoritarianism, this egalitarian democracy of America and Ukraine versus the authoritarian oligarchy of Russia.

That is pure, pure ideology. So, U.S. support has gone too far. Agreed. They disagree. The U.S. has somehow provoked Putin. Yes. In the 90s, after the collapse of the Soviet Union, there is even a discussion between Putin and Clinton, where Putin asked, can we join NATO? We're no longer the Soviet Union.

NATO was constructed to combat the Soviet Union. whole system has fucking collapsed. We're capitalists just like you. Can we join in your parade? And there was, I think Clinton at the time said there should be no reason why you can't, but of course that would never happen. And now they have recreated modern Russia into a threat once again, because for many reasons, but one of the reasons is that the military industrial complex in particular has a momentum and a logic of its own and is in their material interest to have conflict exploding all over the world. America is the number one seller of arms around the world, and the military industrial complex in the United States benefits financially and profiteers off of never-ending conflict, which is why when one conflict ends, America is constantly searching and how they can get involved in yet another one.

And that military industrial complex and its corporate profiteering has radically disproportionate influence over our political system, leading America to be this insanely aggressive. weapons distributing monstrosity of blood and slaughter. And even if America is not directly involved in blood and slaughter, if you peel back the fucking first or second layer, you can almost always find some American funding, some American arms, some CIA intelligence support, et cetera, in every fucking major conflict of the past century. And so has America provoked Putin? Well, in the sense that they have increased brinkmanship, they have pushed NATO towards his borders, and have refused to agree to basic demands of making Ukraine a neutral country, not a proxy state for the United States or a client state for the United States, and in that sense have provoked Putin.

And if the fucking shoe was on the other foot and Russia was doing to us what we are doing to them, America and fucking idiots like Sam Harris would never accept it, would never accept it. would never accept it. But when it's America doing it to somebody else, all this obfuscation, all this mystification comes into play. And the, the, you know, claim that arises here is that this is bullshit. America, this is what they're defending. America did not provoke Putin. And NATO played no substantial role whatsoever in creating this conflict. And look at, so before I get to Snyder, I'm going to continue to say things that Sam Harris put on the table. So that's you. U.S. support gone too far. That's provoked Putin. The NATO's role in all of this, which we've covered on other podcasts as well, on Red Menace and Rev. Left, if you want to hear that full

articulation, but it's certainly a fucking factor. And then this idea of, you know, us crazy Putin apologists are saying that Putin is actually acting rationally and that the goal for the United States and for humanity at large should be to de-escalate. What is there to disagree about that? Putin, as I've said, a million fucking times since day one is not a madman. He's not a crazy lunatic. He doesn't have a psychological issue that he's working out on the field of global, you know, um, geopolitics. He is a rational actor, not a savory one, not one aligned whatsoever with my ideological and value commitments at all, but a rational actor engaging in what is best, what he sees and interprets his best for his country and his people. Now, I don't

think war is good for anybody, but I understand, especially giving Russian history, how there would be a sense of precarity and insecurity about their borders, about NATO expansion, about U.S. Empire and what its goals are for the region. And in that context, whether you agree with it or not, Putin is operating solely from the perspective of Russia and is acting in a way that is rational, that is logical given the premises and the basic history involved. Now, do I agree with every one of his claims? Absolutely not. Do I I agree with his justification of why he's necessarily doing stuff? In some instances, and in some instances is not. Do I support the conservative pro-war movement within Russia? Absolutely

not. So there's nothing here where I am uplifting Putin as some hero, nothing here where I'm saying Russia and their political economy or the structure of their society or their mode of production or their social relations or anything but a capitalist dystopian hellhole. But the goal should be for anybody with a goddamn heart, particularly anybody that cares about the working class, should be to de-escalate this conflict, even if that means making Ukraine-NATO or making Ukraine neutral and taking NATO membership off the fucking board, conceding some things to Russia while Russia concedes some things to Ukraine in the West, and de-escalating this conflict so that the bloodshed can fucking stop.

And there were multiple opportunities throughout the years for the U.S. and Ukraine to come to a reasonable compromise in which the thing would not have been brought to the point of invasion. And if you, and that's just, that's just a fact. And there is a brinkmanship here that is absolutely present. And America and its interests are absolutely present within that brinkmanship. And America backing Ukraine, pushing Ukraine forward, refusing any compromise, refusing any reasonable negotiation, refusing to see things from the Russian perspective and to put the shoe on the other foot,

has led, in large part, to this situation. Ultimately, the decision to invade was Putin's. And, you know, and, you know, you're not going to say that America made it happen. But I would say that Putin is behaving rationally, given the premises and the interest in which he's supposed to be serving. And I do agree that de-escalation, meaning stop, the flow of guns and funds into Ukraine, de-escalate the rhetoric, sit down at the goddamn fucking table, and negotiate a peaceful compromise that you won't get everything you want,

no side will, but will end the bloodshed. That is the point of anybody that is against war, against the slaughter of innocent fucking people, and wants this shit to end. And if you, good little liberal, are continuing to advocate that America ratchets up its rhetoric, escalates its funding, shovels more fucking weapons into Ukraine, then you are actively a part of the escalation of this conflict. And more and more people will die if your fucking position is taken by the fucking government as a whole. So these liberals dressing themselves up as freedom fighters and lovers of democracy

are actually soaked in blood and asking for more. That's what's actually happening here. And then he goes on to this absurd claim. Americans don't know, can't find Ukraine on a map. And this is a fallacious move here. So he's talking about all these really smart people who have these positions. Thank you, Sam. And then he conflates it with the average American not being able to find Ukraine on a map.

He says something like, you know, the Americans can't even find Ukraine on a map. They still can't. But yet, you know, they're talking about the Don boss and they're talking about, I guess the idea is the 2014 made on coup or they're talking about this geopolitical issue. And that is a conflation. The people who are sincerely investigating this topic have genuine beliefs, want to de-escalate, are talking about NATO brinkmanship. These are precisely the sort of people that can find Ukraine on a map.

I can find Kiev on a map. I can find Kiev on a map. I can find the Donbass on a map. I can find Crimea on a map. I know what the fuck I'm talking about. And a lot of the people that are asserting these sincere, coherent, articulate positions in the force and on the side of de-escalation and peace are certainly people that can find Ukraine on a map. They're not the people you go out in the middle of the street, have somebody walk by and say, hey, can you find Ukraine on a map? Those are not the same camp of motherfucking people.

In fact, the people who can't find Ukraine on a map are much more likely to be susceptible to the overall propaganda that says Ukraine are the good guys. really a fight for democracy against authoritarianism, etc. Those are the people that are most susceptible to liberal, centrist, neoliberal, and neo-conservative propaganda, precisely because they don't have a really full-out fleshed version of the history or the geography or any of that stuff involved. And they more or less have been conditioned with American propaganda their entire lives. So that conflation between people who hold the positions that I do and these other smart people that he's pointing out do. And the American who can't find Ukraine on the map, that is a fallacious conflation. And it should be rejected outright. But this is a tricky

little move. He's trying. It doesn't fucking pass muster with me. So these are the things that Sam Harris is laying on the table. I just said all the reasons in which I agree with these things that he's disagreeing with. But then when Timothy Snyder responds, and I'll give him the benefit of the doubt, and we'll go a little further and see some other comments he makes. But mostly, in his response, there's nothing substantive here at all. He says this idea that the U.S. is behind it is a form of left-wing imperialism. Well, there's two claims there. Left-wing imperialism, wow. I guess just saying that we want peace and support is somehow, in his mind, conflated with full support of Putin and the Russian invasion, and therefore we're doing an imperialism by supporting

it. So that's absolute bullshit. World-renowned Yale University professor expert here. a completely absurd claim and then he says this idea that the U.S. is behind it right and what he's trying to do there or at least what's coming through is a conspiratorial thing the U.S. is behind it

the U.S. is pulling the strings behind the screen and making this thing it's almost like it's gesturing towards some some sort of conspiracy theory which is not the case at all when the people like me say

that the U.S. playing a role in this, we're talking about the historical expansion of NATO, the refusal to compromise and negotiate, the made-on coup of 2014, the repeated shutdowns and rejections of any attempt to hear the Russian position and compromise on anything at all. That's what we're talking about. All out in fucking plain sight. None of this is conspiratorial. This is politics.

This is what has fucking happened. And by framing it in this spooky way that the U.S. is behind it all is bullshit, fallacious, straw man. But then he uses that to go deeper, the claim of left-wing imperialism and the U.S. being conspiratorially behind it, goes on to say, this does two things. These people, us, are denying Ukrainians their agency and are more or less stating that only America and Russia are real countries and places like Ukraine are not a real country. Who is this position attributed to? Who is saying these things? Absolutely nobody. The Ukrainian people absolutely have agency, just like the American people, just like the Russian people.

There are people in Ukraine, good working class people, good regular-ass people who want to more or less align with Europe and good people that want to go to Russia or good people that don't really care, but now in the face of invasions, say, fuck Russia. Like, okay, they have agency. Now, do they have a democratic say and the choices their government makes? I would say no more than Russians or Americans, as I've said before. So their agency has a limit. Just like the working class people in America's agency has a fucking limit on it. We're not free agents.

We are confined agents operating in confined context and having little to absolutely no say in the big questions of political economy and empire when it comes to our government. So to call that government democracy inject the position to an authoritarian dictatorship is absolute America-brained liberal, bull. shit. America is better at propping up the facade of democracy, but we all know for a billion reasons why we don't have anything like it. But I am not, and nor is anybody in this camp, any serious thinker in this camp, arguing that Ukrainians have no agency, that the only two players on the board are America and Russia? Absolutely not. It's a complex situation. Ukrainians, like Americans and Russians, probably have a diverse slate of views. But once your country is invaded, there is always going to be a sense that you have to fight back. And I do

support the idea that Ukraine is an independent country. All of the history aside, in fact, it was the Bolsheviks. It was the communists who, Lenin and Stalin, who pointed out Ukrainian nationalism, saying they're real national people and, you know, extended independence to them, you know, republicanism and their own nation state to them. And so, I'm not saying that Ukraine is not a real country. I'm not saying I agree with Putin's claims that it's just full-on Russian territory and can be taken back at any time. For whatever reason, a culture has developed, a dialect, if not a wholly different language, has developed. And the Ukrainians, like any other people in the world, have a right to self-determination.

Now, America and the Ukrainian government are not necessarily advancing self-determination for the average Ukrainian people, nor is Putin and the Russian military or the Russian power structure. But of course Ukrainians have agency. Of course Ukraine is a real country. I believe that anybody in any country that's being evaded has a complete moral opening to fight back, to resist, to defend their communities, regardless of the reasons of the war happening. And that's our position. So here I just really think that Timothy Snyder, a really vaunted and well-respective

renowned academic is just not answering in any substantive way whatsoever any of the things that Sam Harris just said he most wants to address. And he is hiding the ball in various ways through rhetoric like left-wing imperialism, the U.S. conspiratorily being behind it, that we believe Ukrainians have no agency, and that we believe Ukrainians are not a real country. This is the fallacious attempt to say anybody that is critical of this insane fucking war and U.S.'s' role in it are actually Putin apologists that are working on behalf of Russia.

And that is the exact same shit, that same form, if not content, of anybody who critiques the war in Iraq is a traitor, stand in front of our troops, or stand behind our troops or stand in front of them. Fuck you, you don't love America, leave it. It's the same sort of bullshit logic, and it needs to be utterly rejected.

Okay, now let's move on to another clip. Now, this is Sam Harris talking about Jeffrey Sachs, an economist that is articulating a view that, based on what Sam Harris is saying here, I completely fucking agree with and is incredibly on point. But then see where Sam Harris takes it. So he's going to articulate Jeffrey Sachs' views, again, which I agree with. And then he calls it perverse. And he calls it a moral failing and watch the next move that Sam Harris makes.

For instance, I noticed the economist at Columbia, Jeffrey Sachs, on some podcast talking about this. And it's hard to imagine the Kremlin not liking anything he said, right? He essentially said that the U.S. and NATO have been provocative all along and that the off-ramp for Russia was always obvious. We just have to declare the neutrality of Ukraine and give an insurance that they'll never join NATO because that obviously impinges on Russia's core security concerns. How would we feel if, you know, we had a Russian client state in Mexico or Canada? And there are many people saying things like this. And I mean, one thing that's perverse about that, which I'll just point out before you give me the rest.

But, I mean, immediately what strikes me as perverse is that it concedes that we are the moral equivalent. of Russian despotism, right, and that the spread of democracy is no better than the spread of fascism. You try to flip things around in that way. It's just, you know, who's to say anything is better than anything else in terms of spreading a political orientation over the surface of the earth? And that's just so dishonest and ethically upside down that it's just amazing to see academics in America talking that way. Okay, so he makes this wild-ass claim after laying out perfectly reasonable positions

by Jeffrey Sachs, the person he chose to highlight in this little part. And then he follows it up with saying it's perverse and it's a moral failing. And what this position does is position that more or less I hold, Jeffrey Sachs holds, I don't know his full position, but the ones articulated here that we hold, it's morally bankrupt because, according to Sam Harris, it is positioning America as the moral equivalent of Russia. And his argument is that how could we be the moral equivalent of Russia?

America is great. America, for all of its problems, is a beacon of democracy and of freedom. and Russia is a backward, scary, fascist dictatorship. And this is just wild for lots of reasons. The entire dichotomy between, you know, democracy and authoritarianism is already a liberal, you know, fucking ephemeral, nonsensical, ideological relic, this idea that America is this robust democracy and all these other countries that don't do things exactly our way are authoritarian. when in reality, America calls countries authoritarian based on what America's relationship is with that country.

America could be in bed with any fucking flavor of right-wing fascistic dictatorship or military rule and has been over the decades and doesn't call those countries authoritarian. When was last time you heard an American president get up and call Saudi Arabia authoritarian, a fucking literal monarchy? you know and they probably wouldn't call it a democracy but the way that they emphasize and fetishize this dichotomy between democracy and authoritarianism and now saying that Russia is a fascist country. Russia is a fucked up, you know, capitalist oligarchy for sure. But calling it outright fascist dictatorship, I just don't see it. I don't think I don't think what Russia is can be considered fascism. And Sam Harris's attempt to say that one party states are equivalent

with fascism is obviously nonsense. And it reminds me of that old quote about America. America has two political parties. Or America has, what is it? Oh, America has a single party dictatorship. But in typical American extravagance, they have two of them. And that really is true. this facade of two competing, highly contentious parties that on core issues of political economy and empire completely and utterly agree and are completely not susceptible to democratic pressure and are completely in bed with huge corporations,

that is this beautiful democracy. And what Russia has is a fascist dictatorship. So that dichotomy is already bullshit. But I would argue the main core here is Sam is flabbergasted at the idea that anybody could even suggest, even as a downstream effect of other opinions, that America is in any way a moral equivalent of despotic backwards Russia. And I would argue, over the last 70, 80, 90 years, America is fucking further back,

America is not the moral equivalent of Russia. America is the moral inferior of Russia. the amount of bloodshed and murder and slaughter and injustice and drone bombing weddings and blowing up schools and hospitals that America has done unrelentantly for the last half century or more makes America the most evil empire of the last hundred years since Nazi Germany has been defeated the most evil empire on earth the number one purveyor of death and destruction the number one underminer of democracy and self-determination, the world over. So to even, because of course Sam is making the exact opposite argument, Sam is arguing that America,

not least because of its robust democracy, is the moral superior of Russia. And this is a uncontestable claim. Anybody that would even suggest that there's an equivalency here is off the rails. Me suggesting that America is the moral inferior of Russia, historically. would be seen by Sam as proof point that the far left is just a lunatic fringe, you know. But when you actually sit down and say, what are the crimes America's committed? Nothing is to excuse any negative thing or any bad thing that Russia's dinner. A single innocent person that, you know, the Russian nation state has murdered over the years.

Every nation state has a pile of bodies behind it for sure. And this is not to say that any nation state is completely with clean hands. nor is it to hide or obscure any negative thing that Russia has ever done. But just pound for pound, what America has done, the amount of suffering America has caused in the last 75 years post-World War II order, disorder, is not challenged by anybody on earth. And it's extra funny when this claim inevitably gets made about China. Because while Russia has certainly had, you know, dalliances of military incursion, you can think about the Afghanistan war, whether or not you support it or agree with it or understand the reasons why they did it. Okay, people suffered. This recent invasion. Okay, invasion of Georgia, whatever. There are things that Russia has done in the past several decades that would at least make you say this is not a morally perfect fucking society and country and leadership. But this same argument is and will be used against China, who has done none of even that. When was the last time China invaded another country? When was the last time China invaded another country? When was the last,

time China went to war with another country? When was the last time China dropped bombs on another country? And this exact same logic that Sam Harris is applying to Russia, Sam Harris himself would apply with zero changes to China, who compared to Russia and the United States is a fucking saint on the global stage for the last 50, 60, 70 years since the end of World War two in that conflict. And so just seeing, especially when you push it over to China, how this logic is just American-centric chauvinism, it's just liberal internalization of American mythology and myth-making and a chauvinistic belief that America really is so exceptional that no matter

how many people it kills, no matter how many hospitals it bombs, no matter how many countries it invades, it is always inherently. morally superior to every other competitive country. Morally superior to Russia and to China. And I'm sure, and fucking Sam Harris' liberal rotted out mind, Cuba and Venezuela, and every other country that America puts up as its list of enemies. And that is chauvinism. That is internalizing American nationalism and American exceptionalism

and letting it radically distort your moral lens, Sam. not ours. Your moral lens is corrupt and grotesque and not at all the conclusion and the natural product of independent, objective, critical thought, and study. So it's just disgusting. All right. Now I could go on and they have made many more claims and I could spend four hours kind of going through every single claim and wrestling with it. But I just wanted to kind of highlight. a couple points here and kind of just show the intellectual dishonesty masquerading as independent free-thinking intellectual honesty here and just a real lack of substance. One thing that you see and throughout this episode is so many of the main points that we are making about NATO, about, you know, the history involved here, about U.S. geopolitical brinkmanship, about the need to de-escalate and the need to end this war.

not escalate for more bloodshed. None of these points are actually substantively dealt with, at least in the hour or so that they made public and there's 30 more minutes at the end, which I said earlier, I am not paying to get into. But there's just a real lack of substantively dealing with these claims. And I would love if, you know, in the spirit of the free market of ideas, you would have on the guy that you're quoting, Jeffrey Sachs, this economist guy who has this businessman, who has this position or anybody that you respect in academia that is articulating this position

coherently, you could have them on to actually get into dialogue with Timothy Snyder, somebody that holds a different position, and not a debate necessarily, but, you know, a dialogue, because I think that would actually promote real learning. You would not have to regurgitate what your interpretation of that person's position is, and you wouldn't be able to get away by straw manning it, because you'd have somebody in the room. that is saying, that's not what I believe. You know, I didn't say anything about Ukrainians having no agency or their society or their country doesn't need to exist, right?

And then you, then you would force a Timothy Snyder to actually address the substantive claims being made here in an intellectually honest way. But when it is just them going off on it, you're not going to get that. And there's no pressure whatsoever here to actually respond to the specific claims. And I think that's bullshit. And, you know, fuck, even when I go after people or have a disagreement, I think, on our recent mega-communism episode, you know, I didn't just like fake or pretend or give my version of what they're saying. I read at length pages of their own words. So at the very least, I'm not having those fucking clowns on the show, but at the very least, I am reading their actual words, what they actually put out there, their actual conclusions, and then responding meaningfully to the substance that they actually.

wrote. I'm not having somebody who disagrees with them frame their positions for me and let me just have batting practice at it and take it wherever I want because that would be intellectually dishonest. It would not be confronting the robust version of the argument that you're claiming to disagree with. And I think that's important. And so that would have made the conversation much more interesting and it would have disallowed Snyder from talking about everything except the core arguments being made that they're ostensibly so appalled by. So that is enough for today. If you want to go listen to the whole damn thing or at least that first hour, it's making sense podcast. You can go check it out and deal with it yourself. But yeah, I think that's going to be

enough for this part. But I do want to do one more clip from a different show because after I after i uh pulverized my my brain meat by listening to this one i went over to uh the argument from the new york times because they had this episode with three people from gen z three 20 somethings 20 21 22 year olds um and kind of talking about their politics and where they see the world and is interesting i like hearing young people just coming into political consciousness wrestling with the state of american society um and these people all of them almost all of them i think claimed that they became politically conscious during the 2016 election. So it's very interesting to hear these young people who are now budding into adulthood who came to political consciousness only in the last

several years, but are dealing with an increasingly insane American society and increasingly failed political and economic system and then wrestling with it. So I, you know, I'm always interested in that. So I clicked on it and I listened and man, did I get a juicy little bit to talk about today? So I don't even have to really respond to this. I will. But they They undermine their own argument in this fascinating way. Now, this person is like a 22-year-old, you know, progressive person, not a bad person whatsoever, but is a Cuban immigrant living in Florida. So her great-grandparents fled what she calls the communist dictatorship in Cuba for the freedom of American society. And then she talks about what that freedom gave her.

And it is bonkers. So let's listen to that. And then I'll respond to it. What appealed for you about pursuing policy work, which is, I know for, you know, it's pretty tiring and exhausting and sometimes kind of demoralizing. Yeah, absolutely. I would say this kind of goes into growing up in Florida. So growing up with Republican parents, I didn't really, I was told what I was supposed to think. I was told our country before, you know, turned into a communist dictatorship. We had to leave. This is the country that's going to give you all the freedoms, you know, just follow the rules, follow the American dream. And for me, I just always held on to that. I thought it was possible. I thought, you know, my grandparents made it. I'm able to stand here today and get a higher education and things like that and my parents as well. But when I was in high school,

I did face a lot of tribulations, things that I didn't realize were abnormal. For instance, I didn't have health care my entire life pretty much. I grew up with a single mom. So going to the doctor was always a thing of, is it really urgent? Can you wait? Is this something that we can fix at home? Even now, I kind of had to tell myself, go to the doctor. Also, in high school, I experienced homelessness for a few months with my mom. And that was something that took a really big toll on my mental health. And my senior year of high school, I feel like it all just poured over because I grew up in Broward County. I used to live in Parkland, Florida, and I went to elementary school there. My sister went from Marjorie Stone and Douglas when we lived there.

So when the shooting happened, I was a senior and I had friends in the building. I remember texting them. I remember receiving videos of young people bleeding on a classroom floor and dying and just immediately being traumatized. And that day changed my life forever. Oh, wow. Okay. So first thing first, I feel for this girl, like, you know, all my love and support. She was raised by, you know, Republican parents, is a progressive now fighting against gun violence in schools. This is nothing against her by any means. But it's just a fascinating look into this anti-communist, especially the sort of anti-communism that comes out of the Cuban immigrant community in Florida. And it is, it's juxtaposition to reality. And it is just

fascinating. So let's go over this claim here. So she starts off by saying, you know, my grandparents fled the communist dictatorship, that terrible, horrifying dictatorship, 90 miles south of Florida. Can you imagine living through that brutality? So they fled to come to America where they get, quote, unquote, all the freedoms. And then she just shifts seamlessly into her self-described tribulations throughout high school. And what are those tribulations? Growing up as a kid, I never had health insurance, therefore we only went to the doctor when it was an absolute emergency. Now, I'm somebody that lived that exact same way and still do to this day. I have a piece of glass from a pint glass that I was in the dishwasher, the washer I was trying to wash and it broke and my hand was

right there and I got glass lodged into my knuckle. And to this day, it hurts whenever I bump it against anything or whenever that little piece of glass shifts. It's fully embedded under my thing, but I can't go get it out because I don't have the money to do it. and I've had, you know, long bouts of depression and anxiety with absolutely no recourse to get any sort of help. I've broke my ankle and got second degree burns in an incidence once, and I just never could even think about going to the doctor. I had to go to CVS and get like burn patches and spend two, two and a half weeks kind of healing my own ankle and my own fucking back by myself because it was just off the table that I could even think about going and asking a doctor, can I get some fucking help? so absolutely sympathized with her. So she came to America, got all the freedoms, except for health care. And then what was the next thing? Her and her single mom spent several months homeless during her high school years. So you come to America, you get all the freedoms except health care, except a house. And then what's the other thing? She was shaken into political consciousness by a school shooting. She's in Parkland. That Parkland shooting, she had friends in the school. I mean, sorry, I do choke up a little bit thinking about that.

I can't think about babies getting shot without fucking breaking down a little bit. But, okay, horrific fucking experience. My heart goes out to her. So what happens in retrospect, and this is a two-minute conversation as all this stuff comes out? she her and her grandparents escape the communist dictatorship of Cuba to come to America where finally they have freedoms and she even mentions I can get a higher education what you can't get an education in Cuba um it's going to cost you here uh so she can get a college education in America except the only difference there is that it's going to cost tens of thousands of dollars in

America whereas in Cuba it would be more or less free she came with all the freedoms to America but she didn't have health care um so she couldn't go see the doctor and in Cuba, of course, they have world-class, universal healthcare system for every single Cuban citizen to use. And when everybody, you know, when anything happens anywhere in the world, Cuba sends its expert world-class team of doctors to go help with disasters and give free medical support to anybody who needs it. So all the freedoms in America, thank God you fled that horrific communist dictatorship that would make sure that you could get higher education at little to know. cost and that you could have access to health care no matter how much money you made. And then you were living this amazingly free life in America, but you became homeless. Now in Cuba, there is no homelessness because housing is treated as a human right, not as a commodity. So that horrific, bloody,

brutal dictatorship down there in Cuba would have made sure that you never are homeless. Now, imagine what they could do in a situation in which I don't know, they could trade with the rest of the world without an embargo and a blockade on them, imposed on them by the freedom-loving American empire, such that, yes, their cars and their houses and their overall society is not economically advanced, because for the last 60 years, they've been strangled off from global trade. So imagine what they could do if they had actually just an economy that could exist in the world, like any other fucking economy, what they could do on these fronts of education, health care, and housing as a human right.

But even the beleaguered, poverty-induced, strangled Cuban society manages to do all these things while America can't. And then the final thing, of course, is that her friends got slaughtered in fucking school. So she escapes the communist dictatorship, this brutal, horrifying dictatorship where everybody has health care, everybody has housing, people have access to education, and school shootings just don't fucking happen. She comes to the land of the free and the home of the brave where she can't see a doctor. She spends time being homelessness as a teenager, as a child, living in the fucking streets because this fucking richest country that's ever existed in human history makes housing into a commodity and not a fucking human right. And then she goes to school and has to worry about her or her friends getting fucking murdered by AR-15s in the hallway going to math class. So, I mean, and there's no sense here.

Nobody chimes in. She herself doesn't even like point out the absurdity here, the host never jumps in to point out this. It's just like in two, less than two minutes, this juxtaposition is thrust upon us. And nobody thinks to point out the fucking insanity of saying that you fled a communist dictatorship where you had health care and housing and safe schooling and access to education. for the freedom-loving country of America where you have none of those, or if you do, it come at a steep motherfucking price. Now, she is blossoming into political consciousness. She's self-described as a progressive.

I would love to hope that maybe one day she'll stumble across the Rev Left episode or stumble across a book or some other resource that connects her to her Cuban heritage in such a way that you should have fucking pride. I'm an American, okay? my 23 and me says I am Irish Scottish and German that's about as an American

settler as you can fucking get born and raised in America and I have no patriotism for this goddamn fucked up country I love the people I love the land you know I want what's best

for the land and for the people I do not support the economic system I do not support the political system I do not support the elites I do not support the power structures and the political and economic hierarchies whatsoever and I do not support the economic hierarchies whatsoever and I do not support the economic

not support the empire of blood that America stands atop. I would love to live in a society that I could be proud of. I would actually love to be in a society that I felt so strongly aligns with my values that I would be willing to go to war and to fight to defend that country and a country like Cuba would genuinely get my patriotism. And if I was a Cuban immigrant and I realized that yes, my grandparents might have been Lusanos and fled Cuba, but my pride comes not in integrating myself with American patriotism, but looking back at my Cuban heritage and saying, holy fuck, what bravery, what perseverance, what strength by the Cuban people to take on the biggest and most brutal economy and empire on fucking planet Earth and all of

human history and stay standing. And stay standing in a sense that you still give your people absolute dignity when it comes to the basic necessities of life. That is something to be fucking proud of. That is something to really get behind and form an identity around. Yes, I am Cuban. Yes, I am proud of that revolution. Viva Fidel. History has already absolved him, you know? And so it's incredibly sad to see that beautiful tradition being cut off and demonized by obviously the right-wing immigrant community in Florida, which comes from the revolution, and those are the people that were in positions such that the revolution was not in their interest. So they're on the political right-right-right-wing community in Florida of Cuban

immigrants. And also you have old white people from all over the country, going to God's waiting room before they die in their retirement, creating more conservative politics. So Florida really is this swamp, literally, of right-wing insanity. And it sucks for the people in Florida. And she actually has been brutalized by that. She's been brutalized by right-wing ideology in Florida when it comes to health care, when it comes to education, when it comes to gun control, and when it comes to housing. And so I still hold out a lot of hope that she'll reconnect with the good parts of her heritage and come to find great pride in her own people's history and her own people's perseverance. Because that is where pride is actually located

and nothing about America and its so-called freedoms makes my heart swell with pride because this society is built around shoveling as much fucking money as possible into the pockets of the already incredibly rich and powerful, to the detriment of everybody else, including society at large. There's nothing to be proud of in that. What I am proud of in the American tradition is precisely those movements and those people who bravely fought against American Empire, against American nationalists, and against all the fucking bullshit values that America ostensibly stands for. The indigenous people that fought for their land and their people upon being invaded. The black people who survived 400 years of slavery and still persevere and create, among so many other things, absolutely beautiful cultural products, like one of my favorites, hip-hop, and the Black Panther Party, and Malcolm X, and Martin Luther King Jr., and Baldwin, and Fannie Lou Hamer,

And, you know, every person that stood up against the white supremacy of the American state, I find pride in the working class movements that fought against this capitalist dictatorship to eke out some dignity and some human decency out of this indecent and inhumane capitalist American's fucking system. So precisely the people who fought against America, against its ruling class, against its myth-making, against this political and economic system are the people that I'm most proud of as somebody who is born and raised in the United States of America.

I am not proud of the people who have won. I am not proud of the genociders, of the slavers, of the colonizers, of the imperialists, or of the capitalists. I fucking hate our political parties. I fucking hate our elites. I hate everything about the American political and economic structure while loving to the deepest parts of my soul,

the American people and people in general. Human beings and the human condition and advancing the ball for human dignity. That's what I care about. And in the American context, that's almost always taken the form of movements that stand up and against American empire, American elites, American political and economic system.

So that is what it is. um maybe she'll hear this no but but but all my love and sympathy and support definitely goes to her um horrific that she had to endure those things and um and i encourage her progressive political consciousness to continue to dawn and continue to develop and um i i have a lot of of hope in and young people i really do um i know that we we can't fetishize generations generations and those differences because they often obscure more fundamental differences like class

and I'm not trying to fetishize generations but there is a sense that young people I mean millennials for sure I was born in 89 so my bursting onto the scene of political consciousness was like fucking 9-11 and the Bush years and the horrific fucking reaction

and nationalism and cut taxes for the rich at all costs sort of fucking politics that's where I came up so of course I'm a fucking radical revolutionary socialist and gen z coming up are going through that same shit um millennials and gen z have just had our face shoved in the shit of of this failing political and economic system and that's going to create a deep desire which is already present and is actually already the majority of millennials and gen zers to support a different system and the majority

of people are age and younger support systems in the direction of socialist in the direction of treating health care and housing as human rights, not as commodities that make some people rich, of treating education as a social good and seeing social investment in education as literally investing back into the health and productivity and development of your own society and an end to the violence and the school shooting being one prime example of American violence, which is, among many other things, a product of the frontier and the empire coming back home. The violence that it took to found and sustain and still takes to this day to maintain this empire of blood creates in its own internal population the very sort of

violent depravity that it exports around the world. So for all of these reasons and more, America and this idea that it is a free, robust democracy and all these other countries are absolute trash bags or dictatorships or morally inferior, whether or we're, we're talking about Russia and Ukraine or we're talking about Cuba or any fucking thing else. It needs to be pushed back on. We need to confront this shit whenever it appears. And I didn't even really have to make an argument here because the argument was embedded in those two minutes. I fled a communist dictatorship.

I came to America. My parents told me, thank God we're here. We have all the freedoms. And then I experienced fucking homelessness and school shootings and not having access to health care and having to pay tens of thousands of dollars coming from a poor single mother. home for a higher education. The argument is there. This last 10 minutes of me talking shit has really been superfluous. So not a ringing endorsement of my commentary there, but it is what it is. So that's my episode for today. I woke up this morning, listened to the shit. I knew I had to come to the microphone and talk my shit and just kind of highlight some of these things because

they're relevant. They're important. In the first half, we're talking about the Russia and Ukraine, and the liberals and the conservatives having to contend with different views on that subject and having their core values and their American mythology challenged at the deepest levels possible and seeing how they really can't respond to that in any substantive way. And then we see here this Cuban situation and the juxtaposition to American freedom and how that actually plays out in the real world. So that's my episode for today. I hope some people out there listening found some value in this.

Sorry if I got loud at certain times. You know, me, I get worked up from time to time. But I hope it was an enjoyable, informative, and useful episode for all our supporters. And as always, if you like what we do here at RevLeft Radio, you can join us at patreon.com forward slash RevLeft Radio. And for just the cost of a cup of coffee every month you get access to bonus content, early releases, etc. and me and Dave are planning something cool and new on the Patreon,

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with somebody who you think it might positively impact. All right, love and solidarity. I'll be pulling our scraps when you fuck, niggum. I go young and man, man, you nays can't fuck with me. If a niggas say it's up, you just stuck with me. What's the principle? Pippin ain't easy. I'm invincible.

Niggas can't beat me. Hey, what's the principle? Pivot ain't easy. I'm in invincible. The niggas can't beat me. I was in an 8-5, me apart here, and I've been out six months. My fuck made four million, sliding in the six four window tintin' Nika had to get low, then boys start hitting.

Fuck around hit the little hole with no timid. Every nigger say go, better go kill him. Say the little's old, you cut up with no feelings. Mama watch a little boy turn to a minute. I don't care I go fed, get a life sentence. I'm on everybody dead, nigg, no limit. I don't shake niggas' hand because I ain't friendly. When I pull it to the krill, I have no pennies.

I be leaning to the right like I'm on zinnis. I've been thinking all my life, man, real minute. When I whip out the four five don't pin it. When I whip out the four five don't pin it. I be pulling out scrouts when these fuck niggum. I go young getting made on these dumb bics it Like a type man, you nays can't fuck with me If a nigga says up, then stuck with me

What's the principle? Pippin ain't easy I'm invincible, niggas can't beat me Hey, what's the principle, pebbin' ain't easy? I'm invincible, niggas can't beat me. New AP flood, water on my butt like a thug They got my little gun in the club Don't worry about me, I'm a thug You kill a street nigger get a dime

If you kill a rap nigger get a dog Big chain on my neck, don't budge Fucking day's loaf like a stud I swat docked out to my hip for the gun Swart like the Yite for the mud Swart like the Spikes for the Bud Fucking on her dite, I'm in love I'm fucking with a dice, she the one

Call they don't show no remorse I'll show no remorse I'm gonna talk with the boys Said they got a whole gunstore on the buzz Missy Elliott come and sex me Hoping off a jet to a check to a jet sleep I be bought a nigga like the music I'm thuging in my rebalt I never need Gucci

I don't even see the confusion I fucking young and made long as she got a coocher Say she got the scrap in the toilet Say she put the crack in her booty I be pulling out scraps when he fuck nigg I go young getting made on these dumb bics it Like it's like man you niggas can't fuck with me If a nigga says luck you then stuck with me

What's the principal? A pimpin ain't easy I'm invincible, niggas can't beat me Hey, what's the principle? The pippin ain't easy I'm in principle The niggas can't beat me Thank you.

Thank you.