Rev Left Radio - Red Hot Take: The Fascist Riot on Capitol Hill

Episode Date: January 8, 2021

Alyson and Breht discuss recent events. Outro Music: "Sound of Violence" by Other Lives www.revolutionaryleftradio.com

Thank you for tuning in. You are listening to Red Menace, and we will also be putting this up on Rev. Left as well. This is Allison. I'm here with Brett, and we are doing somewhat of an emergency episode because of events going on in the United States right now that I'm sure all of you are aware of.

So yesterday, from the time of recording, on January 6th, you know, right-wingers had a large Stop the Steel rally in D.C. It's one of several rallies that they've had. This is not the first time they've been there, but today it lined up with the congressional vote to certify the Electoral College and begin the transition of power more formally to Joe Biden. And they were there to protest that and to disrupt it. And as things progressed and escalated,

very heavily. A crowd, some of whom were armed to varying degrees, basically got into the Capitol building and were able to breach the Congress and Senate chambers. There's, you know, several things that we'll talk about that led to this, right? How much of that was successfully breaching the building, how much of it was being let in by the police is hard to say. But what happened was these buildings were stormed. They were successfully occupied for a period of time. Things were taken out, a lot of dumb-ass selfie moments were had for these people in very self-incriminating ways, and we are now kind of in the wake of this, right? It's the next day now. Things have stabilized somewhat. Obviously, they've cleared them out. The congressional vote was able to continue and

certified Joe Biden. And Trump, you know, as of about an hour ago, managed to get back on Twitter to post a video saying if the election's over, we're having a peaceful transition of power, you know. So we're kind of on the other side of it. There's a question of where things are going, also like what the fuck happened yesterday. I think it's just difficult to wrestle with. People were caught off guard. I don't think any of us were really expecting something, you know, of this scale to happen after so many of these smaller rallies from the right have been happening in DC. For it to spill over into this, I think is a little surprising. There's a lot of debate. Was this an attempted coup? Is this comparable to things like the beer hall push? You know, there's a lot of debate about

this. And so we're here kind of to talk it out and hopefully try to come to some answers about how to conceptualize what just happened. Yeah. Yeah, I mean, the first question I'd ask all the listeners are, are you sick of living through history yet? I mean, you know, 20 years ago, the end of history was declared, and here we are every week now. It seems like a major historical event happens. And I think it is important to, you know, regardless of your critiques of American history and the way it talks about itself, I mean, having a rag-tag group of fascists storm the capital and ransack it is a historical situation that has really never happened at least in this in the last century for for generations and generations it was simply unthinkable and it did happen um you know

trump as you said just got on on twitter um after being um banned for 12 hours or whatever um it's funny to think that the president can't go on facebook or twitter but can have access to the nuclear codes um which is just an interesting irony of the situation we're in but you know trump comes out after all of this just, you know, within the hour and basically condemns everything, throws all of his supporters under the bus, is really concerned about saving his own ass. This whole thing in large part, not entirely, but in large part is about and has been about Trump not wanting to give up office, in part because of his ego and his refusal to say that he lost something, but also because it opens him up to prosecution and even the dubious self-pardon won't protect him from state

charges, et cetera. And so now with this, you know, there's real legitimate, you know, criminal questioning as to whether this is incitement, you know, does this put Trump and his family, especially like his kids who are even more explicit than he was about what they wanted to come out of this, does this put them in legal trouble? And so a big part of Trump coming out and dismissing everything and putting everybody down and saying, you know, this can't be allowed to happen, I think is really him saving his own life or his own ass. But what's hilarious is that Trump incited this entire thing, not only from months and months of conspiratorial dog whistling and saying this is a stolen election, et cetera, but literally the morning that this fascist ransacking happened, he was there coordinating it and citing it, telling people to march to the Capitol and saying, you've got to be strong. You can't be weak. If you want to take your country back, we can't be weak, right? So he incites this entire thing. Four of his supporters, as far as I know right now, lost their lives, literally for him. This is not like a, a political party that has a set of demands.

This is not, you know, a coherent ideology that wants this and this changed about the system. This is a personality cult mired and conspiratorial thinking, you know, ransacking the capital almost exclusively to ensure that President Trump gets four more years in office. I mean, this is absurd, but four of them lost their lives doing it. And then Trump immediately, the first chance he gets back on Twitter, just throws them all under the bus and just once again shows his his utter, you know, disloyalty and really disdain for his own supporters. There's just no loyalty among people of this type. And no matter how much he proves that with his inside circle, he once again proved it

with his followers today. And it's just, it's, it's hilarious. In some ways, it's also, like, dark and tragic that these people were so, you know, so mired in conspiratorial thinking and so convinced of Trump's egoic lies that they were really willing to lay down their life. You know, some of them, I think most of them were like a guy tased himself and died, another guy's heart exploded, and the woman who died literally breaking down the windows to crawl into the one segment of the Capitol where they had, I think, Pelosi and maybe Pence.

I can't remember exactly who was behind there, but that's when the secret service or the defender of whatever politician shot that Ashley lady in the throat, and she fell back and died soon thereafter. But yeah, just a complete and utter cluster fuck showing a really rabid element of the American population's conspiratorial and fascist willingness to do whatever

it takes to, in this instance, to keep their leader in power for four more years, their favorite millionaire in power for four more years. But, yeah, I mean, I guess I would say, you know, I hear a lot of verbiage about this and we can maybe talk about the anarchist stuff in a bit, but, you know, insurrection and mob violence is getting thrown around a lot. And I was kind of curious, Alison, as to how you think we should think about this.

I've been saying a fascist ransacking, but even I'm unsure if that language quite fit. So what do you think about the term insurrection specifically? And do you have any language that makes sense to you to describe this event? Yeah. So when trying to wrestle with that question, I think it's difficult. You know, the language that I see right now is riot, insurrection, and coup. riot, I think, is probably closest to what we saw, but, you know, I think we need to wrestle with those other two briefly. So in terms of whether or not this is a coup or an insurrection,

you know, I don't think it's that coordinated, is ultimately the thing. And, like, to be clear, the events of yesterday were in a broad sense planned in the open for quite some time, right? So Trump was talking about on Twitter, I'll see you in D.C. on the 6th, he was hyping it up, And you have other people, like Ali Alexander, who's kind of the guy who's been trying to popularize the Stop the Steel hashtag and organizing these protests very publicly, was making a big deal about it. He's now not taking credit for it. His last tweet being Antifa agitation as of yesterday. But, you know, you had these people planning this. Alex Jones, if you were listening to his show in the last week, was hyping up an occupation of D.C.

and talking about getting a boat blockade to block naval entrances off the coast. So, you know, there's been some discussion of this. ongoing publicly for a while. But at the same time, I don't think these people who showed up there thought that this is how it was going to go. You know what I mean? I don't think there was the level of coordination where they thought they were successfully going to be able to take this building. And I sure as hell don't think there was coordination to actually overthrow the government as a result of it. What we saw here was a group of people who are very unhinged in their politics and very willing to take big risks in terms of their lives and criminal liability

for this apocalyptic cult of Trump and QAnon that they believe in. But I don't think that's the same thing as a coup, and I don't think it's the same thing as an insurrection. I think that this caught them off guard as much as it caught anyone else off guard in many ways, and I don't think we should oversell the level of coordination here. And in a sense, you know, I think that that's almost scarier, right? The fact that these people are so mad, are so rabid in how they're viewing this, that this could spill over into this somewhat unexpectedly on their own side,

says how much people are willing to enact violence and put themselves in danger for this cause. And that should be absolutely terrifying to us. But I do think that what we are seeing isn't an insurrection. It's not a coup. It's something more spontaneous that we need to understand. And it's not ultimately at the end of the day just about keeping Trump in power, right? When I hear the talk about a coup, what I worry is that we think that this is just a matter of people who want Trump to remain the president. And while that's a part of it, there's a broader conspiracy.

see, there's a broader ideology at play here that's going to live on even once those hopes for Trump remaining president are totally dead as they are today after he gave his speech. So I want us to avoid language that focuses too much on Trump's role in this and that overemphasizes the level of coordination. What we saw here was bravado and recklessness, but I don't think that's the same thing as having a tactical or strategic vision on the level that you need to stage a coup or an insurrection. Yeah, and I think that's completely makes sense to me. It's, it's very sober-minded. I agree. A riot probably is the best terms. And it really is a testament to, at least in this instance,

but more broadly, whenever the right gets together, I mean, you know, the left can can point to them and say it's very dangerous and they're not wrong, et cetera, but it really is a testament to their incoherence, their disorganization. I mean, if the left stormed the capital, you know, there would be a set of at least demands. There would be a coherent political vision that they're pursuing and once in well what do you do and when these weirdos got in they just like sat in the desks and and played with the statues and sat behind the dais and in the in the senate in chamber and and like really almost like didn't know what is like the dog that caught the car like not really knowing what to do so you go in you you commit multiple felonies in the most surveilled

one of the most surveilled buildings in the entire country very few to any were wearing any sort of disguises or masks, and for what? To pick up the phone and pretend to talk to somebody on the other line, to throw your feet up at Nancy Pelosi's desk. I mean, okay, I mean, we'll see what happens, but it's certainly a testament to their incoherence and disorganization. And like, it is a strength of the left that we, for all of our problems, for all of our infighting, for our profound relative weakness, there is still a level of organization. We still have a political vision we're pursuing with obvious demands that fall out of that basic political vision.

And like, you know, when the left riots, if you want to use that language for the left all summer, which the right is, you know, loving to draw these parallels and call out hypocrisy, when Black Lives Matter, quote unquote, riots, they're doing it because agents of the state that their tax dollars fund are murdering them in the street. You know, when the left does occupy, it's because there is criminal bailing out of banks while human beings lose their homes. There's criminal levels of wealth inequality. There is a critique that is systemic and that falls out of a deeper political vision of egalitarianism

and equality and human freedom and anti-racism, etc. This just doesn't exist on the right. Or if it does, it exist in such fractured and weird ways that it can never come together in any coherent way. What really unites them at the end of the day, the people that ransacked this building and I think is going to be a legacy that continues to live on is the simple, belief that their political opponents are just not legitimate. If they lose an election, it literally cannot, by definition, be legitimate. And there is deep senses of entitlement that stem from

whiteness and settler colonialism at play here. And as we were talking beforehand, and it is somewhat trite or cliche at this point to mention that if this was Black Lives Matter or the left, you know, how different the response would have been. But it really is important to think, especially if this was a Black Lives Matter protest storming the Capitol, you would have, and I'm not exaggerating, you would have dead bodies on the Capitol steps, you would have bloodshed, you would have mass arrest, you know what, 40 people got arrested at this event, whereas peaceful protests all through the summer routinely got hundreds of people mass arrested, just caged, cornered and arrested on mass, no matter what you were doing or you weren't doing. And then at the next day, there'd be grand jury hearings. I mean, there'd be FBI raids of black organizers' homes. I mean, you would see a much more robust response from beginning, middle, and end from the state if this was a left wing movement. And that is, among many other reasons, I mean, there's whiteness definitely involved here. With Black Lives Matter, it would have been, you know, no question different. But it's also because the left actually represents a different vision of the future and a systematic critique of the status quo.

Whereas angry white settlers feeling entitled to storm buildings and do whatever they wanted, it's not a challenge. to the U.S. state? It's a function of it. It's a function of the empire. And sure the ruling class doesn't like it. It's messy. It's dirty. You know, Pelosi's probably horrified that some white fascist sat in her desk and stuff. They don't like it. It makes them look bad, but it's not a fucking threat to the status quo. It's not a threat to any of their pocketbooks or their place of power and prestige in society. And in fact, they can and will use this as more pretext to crack down on the left, right? Maybe we can talk about the anarchist language now, but also to expand the police state, to expand surveillance, and to use

this going forward as a both-side sort of thing. And I think that speaks well to the overuse of the word anarchism when describing these people is that whether that's conscious or not on the behalf of the pundit talking, it serves that interest of tying the far left and the far right together, muddying the water around these terms. And I was listening to ABC, CNN, Fox News, switching back and forth all night between these different channels and MSNBC. I heard anarchy and anarchism dozens of times. I think I heard fascism maybe once today on MSNBC, maybe if I remember that correctly. And so that will definitely continue to play a rhetorical and linguistic role going forward whenever there is any sort of left-wing protest that turns in any way sort of violent or

rioty. That will be marshaled up again, I think. What are your thoughts on that? Yeah. I mean, so maybe I think I would like to contextualize it to make the case that fascism is the correct term and then sort of do some juxtaposition between how it's being talked about. Because, you know, the question is like, what is this fight that we're seeing in a certain sense? Who is this faction attacking the state? And CNN, all these people, you know, the word that they have for it is anarchism. But these are people who, you know, they're not opposed to the state existing, right? They want a president to stay in power. So clearly anarchism is an incorrect label just on like a purely semantic level. But also, like, the failure to call them fascists, I think is important, right? So I think there's like two things that are worth considering, you know, to step back and maybe abstract theoretically a little bit. So one is, what is the class composition of the protest we saw yesterday? And, you know, we have both made the case, and I stand pretty strongly by this, that the class composition, you know, of these Trump supporters is largely petty boucho, right? So it is mostly the smaller capitalist business.

owners or maybe skilled contractors who come to the level of petty bourgeois status and we can see that in several ways, right? Your average working person can't afford to fucking fly to D.C. to storm the state house. In a recession, right? In a recession. In the middle of the work week.

Exactly. Right. Exactly. So that's just not going to happen. And they're not people who own boats to take part of these boat brigades and all this other bullshit that we're seeing. It is very clear that the base of this sort of fascist coalition is the petty bourgeoisie. And And in that sense, I think we can contextualize what we saw yesterday as a fight between the petty bourgeoisie and the big bourgeoisie.

We can get into more details about that, but that I think is a fair way to conceptualize it. So then I think the other thing we need to theoretically is say, who is the base of fascism, right? Who is it that makes up the fascist base? And I recommend all the time Clara Zetkin's work on fascism. I think she makes a really good case. But in her analysis of the sort of post-World War I period in Germany, she argues that a huge part of the huge part of the mass of the sort of mass base of fascism is a declassed or precarious petty bourgeoisie, right? So it's the petty bourgeoisie who were hurt very badly by the sort of sanctions that were

put on Germany following the war. And that caused them to be positioned as critical of the big bourgeoisie, but also not progressive in the interest of the working class. They had their own interests in mind. And I think if we look at these clearly aggrieved Trump supporters, we see an aggrieved precarious petty bourgeoisie. The pandemic has put that class in a very difficult situation, right? Restaurant owners are getting fucked in terms of being able to stay open because of the way that the lockdown is functioning, and the livelihood of this class has been threatened. And when threatened with the possibility of proletarianization, what the petty bourgeoisie often does is not turn to the working class to find a coalition against the capitalist powers,

but to assert their position as having a rightful place within the capitalist class and to reassert their demand that they ought to be included in it. And I think historically, and again, you should all dive into some of the theoretical texts around this, when we look at who makes up the base of fascism, it is these aggrieved, angry, petty bourgeois elements during times of crisis. And that is precisely where we find ourselves. So, you know, all that to say, the word to describe these people is fascists. That is who they are. historically the parallels are very, very clear. The class composition is the same. And this is a fight between petty bourgeois fascist elements and the big capitalist elements who support the state. This is not between progressive forces or regressive forces. These are two reactionary elements. On the one hand, you have these petty bourgeois people fighting. And on the other hand, you have large corporations

like Chevron saying we need the rule of law and to ensure a peaceful transition on Twitter. Right, exactly. So the conflict there is very clear. So the language we need to insist on is that these are fascists, but obviously that's not what we're seeing develop. The liberal response has been to call them anarchists, which I think, you know, is even two people who don't know that much about anarchism, not quite correct. I think most people can kind of see through the stupidity of that claim. But the other language that liberals are armed with to discuss this is radicalism or

extremism, right? And there's a whole industry of counter-extremism or de-radicalization built into sort of the industrial complex that's developed around the War of Terror. And it's that language that we're also seeing that concerns me, right? Because when that language is used to describe what happened yesterday, the problem there is opposition to the status quo, not fascism, right? You're saying the problem is that you're outside of the mainstream, not that you're genocidal fucking assholes who want to, you know, kill people in order to maintain your own economic status. And so a shift is moved away from the ideology that needs to be condemned towards the tactics that are used. And

when that shift occurs, it creates a really, really good justification for this new liberal Biden regime that has Congress and has the Senate to massively expand repression of all dissidents, right, to massively expand surveillance overall, because the problem won't be named as fascists. The problems will be named as those with extreme or radical views. And so the language that's happening here isn't just a matter of semantics. It's a matter of justifying state repression that I think we are going to see spike very intensely, not just just towards the right, but also towards the left as a response to this. Yeah, I could not agree more with that. And just to go back to your claim about the petty bourgeois being the main class strata that is the core of this movement, you've laid out, and we've talked about it before, all the evidence in favor of that, you know, like all their big, you know, shiny brand new trucks and boats at all these rallies all throughout the summer. But then also, you know, as the doxing and identification start coming out from these people

that ransacked the capital, it's just further proving that. of the people identified was the kid of a Supreme Court justice at the state level. Another one was an owner, as I think you said, an independent contractor. And the night before, there was video of them talking to the media out in the streets and literally screaming into the camera, we are the business owners. So, I mean, they can't make it more clear. And I'm going on, you know, I'm on Twitter because watching the news and going between Twitter and the news to just keep up on what's happening.

And you see some elements of the left saying, you know, if you're going to dismiss these people, you know, this is the problem why the left, you know, needs to talk to rural people. And these are poor people and the left needs to reach out to. No, they're not. What in the fuck are you talking about? Like, as you said, like, it's the middle of the weekday during a COVID pandemic recession. And these are people flying across the country, oftentimes with entire like costumes and heavy weaponry. Like, just stop with that nonsense. And somebody said, this is. how elements of the settler left like coddle these white fascists, you know. It's like you're treating them like the cops treated them with kids gloves. Right. Trying to make them the victims of anything or act like they have revolutionary potential. If there is fascism in this country, this is going to be the hardcore street level base of that fucking fascism. If this was Nazi Germany, they would be sea gailing. There's no revolutionary potential here.

They don't give a fuck about working class people. They certainly don't give a fuck about non-white working class. people, they're gripping as tightly as they can onto their position on the, on the relative hierarchy in the face of this proletarianization process that's coming out of not only the pandemic and the subsequent recession, but at this broader crisis within capitalism and at the same time reacting to these historic protests in favor of equality, in favor of black lives, in favor of left-wing critiques that are being advanced in the face of the status quo, that they know that they really don't have an answer to and will actually, it's kind of ironic because in many ways

these people would, would do better under a socialist sort of situation. There would be much less precarity. You'd be taken care of. You'd have health care and all this stuff. But they can't let go of their position in that hierarchy. It says that we're not, no, we're not these people of color, right? We're not Black Lives Matter. We're not these working class people. We actually, we want to fill this position of power. And a lot of them want to be, you know, as, as, as, as all petty bourgeois ultimately do, they want to be the big bourgeois. So they're not fundamentally interested

in overturning the system or an egalitarianism, and they will fight and kill, as we've seen all throughout this year, to ensure that these movements don't continue to rise and that their relative place on the hierarchy isn't challenged.

So to sit back and say that you're on the left and talk about how these people are possible comrades or that they're poor and we need to reach out to them, I mean, that is absolutely absurd and should be rejected on its face. Yeah, I mean, absolutely. And it again just totally ignores the ideological components

that are at play, right? It is true, like, you know, as you acknowledge that the petty bourgeoisie would be better off under socialism in some ways. You know, they would be forced into proletarianization as a result of it, but they would also have stability and of freedom from the precarity that small business ownership implies. But, you know, just because that is true doesn't mean that they're thinking rationally in that way, right? The entire ideology, of white supremacy, the entire ideology of settler colonialism, has this entire manifest destiny birthright bullshit put into it that is so deeply ingrained into their head that they aren't necessarily seeing the actual class relations that could give them a better form of life.

And, you know, I think that it is a little trivializing to downplay the question of race and colonialism to a question of false consciousness. But false consciousness is a component of it, right? People can, in fact, adopt political positions that are against their economic interests. And that's what we're seeing here. And there's no reason, even if hypothetically you could change their minds and make them see through it, there's no reason to think that we need them is sort of the other thing. There are so many disengaged working class people and even lump and proletarian elements who are disengaged with the system dissatisfied with it.

Why do you not focus on them, right? Why does our focus need to be on small independent contractors and business owners in rural states who absolutely hate our guts, would like to see us exterminated, and are already deeply invested in the ideologies of white supremacy and settler colonialism, you know, aside from just how much I think it's a misunderstanding of how consciousness functions under capitalism, it's also just strategically dumb. Yeah, exactly. Exactly. And I also want to expand the rhetoric around, you know, because we heard, you heard the anarchism and Allison, you know, dissected that for you. But you really

also have to understand how undergirded this entire movement is by just latent atmospheric anti-communism. And these people clearly don't know what the fuck they're talking about. Like, you ask one of these anti-Marxists, like, can you just give me like a succinct summary of what Marxism is? Like, they would flounder. It would be worse than an intro to philosophy course, you know? Like, these people don't know what they're talking about. To them, communism is something like government tyranny or when their party loses. I mean, they think Nancy Pelosi and Joe Biden are communist.

One of the signs at the leading front of this edge when they plowed into the Capitol said, the real invisible enemy is communism. You know, like the role that anti-communism plays and the rhetoric, even in moments when there's not acute crisis, that latent anti-communism is always there, always being poked and prodded, always making sure that it's still there

so that in times of crisis, it can easily be marshaled for the forces of reaction and the forces of the status quo and whether they're talking about, being anti-Marxist, whether they're blaming things on anarchist, or whether they're screaming fuck Antifa. It's all the same shit. And anti-blackness is also inherently tied up into all of this. When you saw the people marching into that capital, 95% were white men. And there was an incident, I think, in L.A., and you can correct me if I'm wrong, where there was also a rally at the same

time. And I think there was just a black woman walking home from work that got surrounded, harassed, sprayed, got her hair pulled by some white fascist asshole, you know, men grabbing her and pulling her around and shit. And she was just on her way to work, but she was black. So that made her an enemy in the eyes of these weirders. Did I get that scenario right? I only sort of saw it. Okay. So anti-blackness, anti-communism, it's all deeply intertwined. You know, in their minds, Antifa and Black Lives Matter and Marxism is all the same, just vague, homogenous threat to their, to their whiteness and their position on the hierarchy. And so, These people aren't reasonable people.

They're not people you can talk to and find some shared ground with. They're rabid dogs. And this shows, and this proves that as they march into the Capitol. And, you know, maybe it's time to shift over to talk about the police helping them here. Right. We've mentioned how different the approach would have been if this was a Black Lives Matter thing. And we've seen all throughout the summer and fall and spring a peaceful protest getting absolutely brutalized. We saw that old man in Buffalo get his skull cracked and the cops walk over his body and countless incidences, you know, here in Omaha by itself, we had mass arrests and just brutal police brutality at completely peaceful marching protests.

Literally at one point here in Omaha over the summer, people marching back to their cars after an entirely peaceful protest. And the cops justified the brutal crackdown that came by saying, you know, there was the potential of possibly at some point turning violent. and they kettled them on a bridge and beat them mercilessly. And in this instance, we see, you know, it's not just incompetence. It's not just being ill-prepared. They're opening gates for people. They're waving them in. There's a new video today of an officer coming out, waving them in.

Over 85% of cops in this country voted for Trump. I mean, this is the Blue Lives Matter crowd. And although there is some contradictions emerging now between elements of the far right and support for the police, there's still heavy police support. And a lot of the cops probably saw this as their way of helping a cause. They genuinely believe in. So, I mean, we're seeing that right now. And that should not be surprising to anybody.

But it should be something that is highlighted. And I even see, you know, like MSNBC today, the liberal mainstream media highlighting this point, showing those videos. I'm interested to see where that's going to go. But, yeah, do you have any thoughts on the police in this instance? Yeah. I mean, it seems obvious to me at this point that the police allowed this to happen. we're on the side of it, right? You know, all the things you mentioned, people taking selfies with the cops that were in there. And, you know, also, even if we look more nationally, like the head of

the Chicago Police Union, basically coming out in solidarity with the protesters today. So, you know, it is clear what the dynamic between these people and the police is, right? And I also think on the federal level, right, obviously the feds had intel about this ahead of time. And clearly, you know, nothing came of it. The thing that I think we need to be careful with, right? and something that I think we're seeing from liberals that I want the left to, like, be very careful for, is that the answer to this isn't we want the cops or the feds to crack down harder, right? You know what I mean? There's sort of this attitude of like, oh, well, you knew about it. Why didn't you do something about it? And that's not what we should be saying, right? We should be pointing to the fact that they didn't do something as an example of the role that they play materially within capitalism. And is an example of the fact that when you have these intra-capitalist squabbles like we're saying here, state forces end up in interesting positions, right? You know, we should point to those things. We should give a materialist analysis of it. But our takeaway shouldn't be like, man, they need to be cracking down. No, we should be opposed to that because whatever mechanisms are built to allow those crackdowns

to go better are going to get turned right back around, you know what I mean, on really anyone who can be framed as a dissident. And that's kind of my concern going forward. It is very clear that law enforcement allowed this to happen and was this on the side of this. And my kind of worry over the long term is that the response that liberals are going to have to that isn't to, you know, question the legitimacy of law enforcement, which would be the correct take, but one that is opposed to their material interest, so obviously could not happen just feasibly. But the response is going to be to overhaul the system of security and overhaul the attempts to quell dissent, right? You already see the sergeant-at-arms of the Capitol building step down, the Democrats are calling for a total overhaul of security measures, and the language, being used by people like Biden is already one of pushing back against domestic terrorism. And that kind of language, that kind of framing, doesn't fix the problem of the hypocrisy.

It just expands the measures the state uses for repression. And that's something I think we need to watch out for, something we need to be vocal in opposition to. So when pointing out this hypocrisy, we need to be due it to opening people's eyes to the function of state repressive forces, but not as a justification for the expansion of those forces. Exactly. And while, you know, it's only human to have a little bit of shot in Freud, when it comes to, you know, police and proud boys duking you out in the streets, I think you're absolutely right. That's the principle taken. Devante Harris, an athlete, said it really well today on Twitter. He said, we're not asking you to shoot them like you shoot us. We're asking you to not shoot us like you don't shoot them. And that's what we should be aiming at, you know. And I think that's the prince. That's the only principle take because you're absolutely right. All this rhetoric, all this co-operate. option of this scenario is being put to expand the police force, expand states, the carceral state, the surveillance state, and it will be even more so brought down on the head of the

left than it will the right going forward. And it is worth noting, and maybe this is a point that I wanted to get to, and I'll just say it right now, and maybe it takes us in a new direction, but it just, I just got to point this out, because the day before the riot, right, the fascist or riot at the Capitol, Asif and Warnock won their races in Georgia. And that, was, you know, everybody, you know, electoral believers, we're waiting on that because they say, okay, well, then the Democrats don't have any blocking, right? Mitch McConnell no longer can block everything they do like they did with Obama, the Democrats now have the executive branch, the House, and the Senate, and so they can really do some big stuff. But then with this crisis,

right, it even adds to that. In the wake of this crisis, all polling shows that the vast majority of Americans, across the political spectrum, the apolitical, et cetera, if you ask people, average Americans on the street about this event, they're disgusted by it. They don't want to be associated with it, et cetera, right? So this creates even more of a mandate, even more of an opening, even more leeway for the Democrats to really come in hot, do some big structural, you know, changes and reforms that this country so desperately needs, you know, regardless of whether or not you want the system to continue, just to help the suffering in this society, like a real pandemic response, universal

health care, the expansion of voting rights, stuff like that, would really would make a material difference in people's life while we continue to organize and whatnot. And so they won't do that. And, you know, this is not even a prediction. I'm not trying to like rub my crystal ball here. I'm telling you, as a matter of fact, they just won't do it. They will be some sort of stimulus stuff, you know, out of the gate. And they'll probably use that as their excuse of, hey, we did a big thing. Maybe everybody gets $2,000 checks once biting gets in. And that's his sort of like, there you go. Now we're done with that. But they really have an opportunity, even above and beyond just winning the Senate now with this crisis to really do some huge things and they won't do it.

One of the other things that I think is going to happen in the wake of this, and I would love to be proved wrong on this, but there will be a state crackdown and FBI investigations of the participants, right, of the people on the ground that went in who hold no power, you know, relative to the elites and can easily be given, you know, heavy charges, possibly heavy prison sentences and show the world, see, the U.S. is here. We do have law and order still, blah, blah, blah. But the elites, the rich elites that cheered this along the entire way that knew from day one this was a load of bullshit like Ted Cruz and Josh Hawley and Trump himself and all the sycophants and slime balls that surround these weirdos, they knew, they've always known this was complete and utter bullshit. They pushed the lie anyway. And those people will have absolutely no repercussions whatsoever. In fact, Kelly Loeffler, right? One of the people running for Senate, just the most despicable racist piece of shit. Did insider trading, trading when the coronavirus hit, made a, you know,

it was already a millionaire, made even more money off this tragedy while downplaying it to her constituents. You know, she comes out last night after this and she's like, I can no longer in good conscience, you know, object to the Arizona, you know, electoral college or whatever, as if that's some heroic move. They're just saving their asses and there'll be no repercussions at all. if the Biden administration and the Democrats really wanted to get their shit together and start understanding there's no such thing anymore as bipartisan outreach. You're not going to reach across the aisle to the people that fucking hate you and don't think you're legitimate. If they were serious about that, they would go hard on prosecuting these people, on showing the

country that even the elites have to have some sort of accountability for this sort of widespread lying and destabilizing of the country and the just direct and explicit incitiveness. to riot like this. And still, you know, like the, the senator, I think he's a senator, maybe he's a representative. Mo Brooks is out here saying it's Antifa, you know, a bunch of these weirdos are, I mean, Matt Gates is saying, you know, this, we have evidence that this was Antifa doing the whole thing. You know, if the elites don't ever face any sort of accountability for this shit, the

U.S. government is just going to continue to be delegitimized in the eyes of millions and millions of people. The far left, folks that are listening, you know, Allison, I, a lot of you that are listening, the state's been delegitimized in our eyes. forever, right? But it still held a lot of sway with average liberal, centrist, and conservatives. But now, you know, we had first the Russiagate conspiracy theory where liberals started to not believe that the outcome of the election started to delegitimize the state. Trump himself is the best de-legitimizer of the U.S. state imaginable. And now the right, huge chunks of the conservative,

patriotic constitution, till I die right, are now convinced that the system is delegitimate and that their government is stolen from them, et cetera. So the entire state apparatus is really being shaken to its core. I'm not even sure with, you know, heavy punishments for these elites that partook and exacerbated this entire thing. If that will bring back the sense of legitimacy, but certainly by not holding any of these absolute sickos accountable for this shit, it will continue the rabid and intense de-legitimization of the entire.

system in the eyes of more and more people every single day. Yeah, no, I mean, I think that's absolutely correct. And, you know, it's just a nightmare, right? Because they can't actually go after the elites who are responsible for this. Because that would be to reveal, you know, the weakness of the ruling class, right? That it does have these internal divisions, that there are power struggles within it, and that the state is a blatantly repressive power. But if they were to show that disunity, that would put the liberals who are themselves,

the servants of capital, in a more precarious place. right? And so what's always going to matter there is the material function that's at play. And, you know, it's really wild to watch all the rats try to jump ship right now. Yeah. They're trying to avoid that. You have cabinet members stepping down. You have some Republicans who are now saying, oh, we need to invoke the 25th Amendment. And then those who are more proxible to this screeching about it being Antifa, right? Everyone wants to suddenly distance themselves from this thing that happened yesterday. But at the end of the day, right, you are correct. The politicians who push this and even the bigger players that are,

pushed it ideologically are going to be fine. I think that in the long term, we are probably going to see a lot of those people who are taking selfies in the building facing federal charges. It's just too goddamn easy with the fact that a bunch of them identified themselves on camera to pictures without masks. We're very open about being there on social media. And it will be in the interest of the new Biden administration to have that crackdown that goes on there. But that's not going to fundamentally change the conditions that produce this, right? The conditions that are still that made it happen are still there. And the broader movement is still going to be there. The conspiracies are still going to be there. The conditions of precarity that drive the petty bourgeoisie

to these kind of actions are still going to be there at the end of the day. And yeah, the Democrats are not going to take any actions that would fundamentally alter that in any way. And they really can't, right? When faced with crisis on this level, capitalist flounder, it's really all they can do. Because the only resolution to these kind of crises is to rupture and break with capitalism entirely, which is not an option for capitalist political parties. So we find ourselves in this situation where things are looking pretty bad. And yes, you know, we're going to come out the other side of this with a right that is going to face a crackdown, I think, that it's going to see a lot of problems come its way legally, but that is going to be just as strong and probably

learn some lessons about OPSEC and going underground. You know, and I think that that is not a victory that we need to be like, yeah, this is going to be good. It's going to change the terrain on which things happen. And in a lot of ways, it's going to make things more intense the next time this happens, you know. I think people, everyone wants to sort of draw historical comparisons about what's going on here. People have compared it to the beer hall push a lot. So the failed coup that the Nazis tried to lead originally. And I think there are similarities there in a certain sense, right? This was not a success for these people, but also people got a taste of what it feels like to strike for power. And that's an addicting thing. And it is something that is

exhilarating and that I think they will not forget and it's going to radicalize their factions even more towards their ends. So that will push towards a future situation where I think we could see something like this happen again where they've learned lessons about security organizing and how to actually orchestrate things. And that would be highly concerning and something that we need to be on the lookout for. And the other thing is just this whole thing is going to be used to attack the left as well. And that's the thing I want to keep emphasizing. You have kind of the other, if we want to make parallels to the Nazis, the other parallel would be people who are trying to do the whole Reichstag fire move and pin this on Antifa, right? The attempt to say this was actually the left

infiltrating us with, you know, mostly seeing this in Congress from fairly marginal congressional people, but that doesn't mean it doesn't bleed into the culture, right? You know, I saw someone explaining what this Antifa did it sort of line functions as ideologically, and it's not for anyone to have to believe it. It's for, you know, as they said, for your racist uncle to be able to say that so he never has to take a stance on the situation. Exactly. It's a ideological, cultural idea that allows them to continue on with these fundamental beliefs and to set up to do it again.

And that is really harmful regardless of whether or not the mainstream politicians and mass pick up that line. So we are in a pretty wild situation. I think you're right. The Dems could hypothetically do a lot and they won't because of the conditions of capitalism. And while some people are going to take the fall pretty hard, it's just going to set things up for a tumultuous next decade, essentially. Yeah, absolutely.

And I really liked your point about sort of providing themselves. They don't really have to believe the antifalai, but it just gives them that reasonable doubt to not have to even expect their own situation. And it is in so many ways just another attempt to paper over obvious contradictions on the right. You're the back of the blue people. You're the Constitution people. You're the respect law and order people. And here you are.

you're very same people doing the opposite of every single one of those things. So, you know, your mind is already overheating and steams coming out of your ears. And so you can just say Antifa and have that be your little pressure relief valve and to continue thinking that you're a good patriot and you really do believe in the things that you tell yourself every day that you believe in. And so that psychological shit is definitely in full effect right now. And I think another one of the consequences, you know, I mentioned Russiagate. This was an attempt by the liberals to, you know,

that Trump was not a legitimate president and paper over their utter and embarrassing failures to beat an obvious fucking con man. And so they went with the Russiagate narrative, right? And that really does set a ball rolling down the hill. And then Trump comes and does basically rush a gate for the far right, which is stop to steal, that, you know, that they stole the election from me, et cetera. So one of the downstream effects of this going forward is that no matter who is elected president on either party going forward, there will be tens of millions of Americans on

either side who genuinely do not believe that the president, whoever they may be at any given time, is legitimate. And that can only lead to more destabilization, more clashes, more scenes like this. And it's all, it's all because elements of the ruling class don't ever want to look inward, don't ever want to take accountability for anything. And as you said, don't want to actually can't ideologically and just, you know, from their own position, do anything about it. Because to do anything meaningful about it would be to challenge the very status quo that launched these slime balls on both the Democrat and the Republican Party into power and wealth and prestige and luxury that they enjoy. And so that's going to continue to delegitimize the U.S. state. That was only going to make

the U.S. state be more defensive in the form of an expanded police state. And I think those are ultimately, at least in the short and near term, going to be the immediate consequences of not only this one event but of the last you could even say four years you know yeah no i think that's correct and you know i think maybe one thing we might want to wrestle then with is like what does this mean for the left right moving forward and this is a debate that i'm already seeing right people are saying do we need like a united pro-democracy front right is one thing that people have talked about or is this not our fight do we stay out of it and let these squabbles happen and i think that those are questions that are fairly good to be asking, right? Like, how do we relate to this kind of crisis is something that is

fairly difficult to answer. You know, this is a fight, like we said, between our enemies to a certain extent. And as a result of that, you know, neither side really advances our interests. So, you know, I don't know what thoughts you have on how the left relates to this. But, you know, the main thing that I have kind of in my impulse would be to say, let them fight it out and stay out of it. For the most part, that this is not a fight that we can benefit from. I think that no matter who wins this, power gets consolidated in the hands of one faction, the capitalists or another. And I think, you know, one of my comrades said something I think is very insightful, saying that if you look at what anti-fascists and community defense groups in D.C. did during this, they made a good decision.

They didn't go out there and fight these guys. They defended their churches, their synagogues, their mosques, and their neighborhoods and made sure these people didn't come in there and fuck them up, while they let them battle it out with the federal government, right? And I think that is more or less the stance that at least my impulse would be to say is where the left needs to relate to this. If this fight keeps going, there's going to be fallout and there is going to be negative effects on marginalized communities. And our job is to intervene to prevent that, but not to take sides in the bigger conflict. I don't know. What thoughts do you have on that?

Yeah, no, I like that. And in fact, I was sort of surprised. I tweeted after the initial sort of riot at the capital. as everybody was being dispersed. I was like, the sun's just going down now. Like, these people are going to fan out over downtown DC. The police and the state forces are going to be concentrated on the capital. And I really thought, like, there's going to be huge, you know, brawls in the streets and stuff with very little police response given what just happened. But I was surprised and in some ways pleasantly surprised to not see that happen

because of the strategic retreat to playing defense. Let these assholes fight it out amongst themselves and not to give any more flame to the fire. Really let this, let this event be known for what it was and not muddy the water with, you know, because if you saw left wing brawls in the street, it would just feed into this Antifa bullshit and there's both sidesism, etc. And their arguments are much more transparent and weak because that didn't happen. So that was actually pretty cool to see. Thinking about what the left can do, I mean, certainly, you know, the same stuff that we always say applies, like organize, build up mass, you know, support for our stuff, continue to to build and create a left wing culture that is in that really, you know,

you know, points out things because one thing the fascist and the liberals can't do is make sense of what the fuck's happening around them. We can. That is one of our strengths, although it's a little harder to explain, you know, history and capitalism. But, I mean, we're up for the task, and we certainly have more outlets every day that allow us to get those messages out. But one thing we cannot do, you know, we talk about tailism. And usually it's in the context of tailing the masses. There is a significant chunk of the so-called left that tails the Democratic Party that is hitching their wagon to, you know, figures like the squad, not to say that they're bad or they're terrible people or anything like that. They're good, well-intentioned people, but you see the contradictions

of trying to do anything within the party itself or to tie your political project to that of the Democrats. When you look at the Democrats, you have somebody like Nancy Pelosi, you have somebody like Joe Manchin. Like, this is not a tent for working class radicals to do anything in. I'm not going to be in the same political party as, as these absolutely. ghouls and millionaires who have obvious, contrasting economic visions for how they think the future is going to go and for their own personal wealth and power. So we have to not only to really cut ourselves off entirely from the Democratic Party, which is a rotten brand that most people, even those that hate the right, they don't like the Democrats for a very good

reason. Why should we have that albatross hanging around our neck at all? Cut off ourselves from the Democratic Party and continue to challenge them. and be an outside force that rejects them. And that actually will bring in many more people. The liberals are already committed to the Democratic Party. You're not going to convince them of anything. They're already in. It's the, as you said earlier, the tens of millions of working class people who are being

pulverized right now that know the system, no matter who's in power, doesn't work for them. Joe Biden's administration is about to prove that once again, cut off, rupture completely from the Democratic Party and challenge it from the outside. just as vociferously as we challenge the Republican Party, but that can't just be rhetorical. It has to be rooted in continued organizing, in continued mass work, and continue

building up of these revolutionary cultural outlets that can give our own perspectives, our own narratives, our own analysis, to more and more people every single day. There are lots of young people that were radicalized this summer over Black Lives Matter. There are lots of young people coming up that are radicalized looking down the barrel of climate change,

knowing they have no fucking future. These people are millions and millions. There's more every single day, and they are increasingly open to structural critiques of this entire fucking system and to continue playing patty cake with people like fucking Nancy Pelosi

and Chuck Schumer and trying to do it from the inside even though for centuries we've seen that just doesn't work is a form of sort of nihilism. Like, it has to end. And so I think that's another crucial piece, which won't be surprising to anybody listening

to this show, but it's something we should, should continue to push and not put up with anybody who wants to marry any segment of our movement to this rotten, dead sinking ship of a political party. Right. And yeah, I think that it's important that we be prepared for how ideologically this is going to go down. Because the thing that people are talking about they think is correct is that Biden is, you know, he ran as and he's going to try to sell us this vision of national unity, right? We need to come together. We need to heal these wounds. We need to fix these problems and rebuild our country after four years of chaos. It's

basically kind of the story that we're getting here. And that story is going to be more compelling after yesterday, right? Because what he gets to juxtapose that national unity to is this kind of chaos that we're seeing in this situation. And that is going to be the pitch. And to a certain extent, that offer is going to be extended towards, you know, people just to the left of the center left, right? There is going to be an attempt to pull those elements back into coalition. I think it's important that we be prepared to stand opposed to that. Right. I think that it's very likely that in the next four years, we could, if we are not careful, see the emergence of sort of a revived popular frontism, right? That sort of says we need to protect these democratic rights in the face of rising fascism. And that means standing in solidarity and in political unity with liberal elements in the Democratic Party. And that would be a huge mistake. And I think that that is something we absolutely need to watch out for. So long as we are always stuck tailing the Democrats, so long as we are always stuck tailing the Democrats, so long as we are. we are always stuck relying on them as the big brother we hope will throw us a bone every once in a while,

we are weak and powerless. And that is something that we need to escape. So, you know, like you're saying, getting away from the Democrats and rejecting this vision of national unity, rejecting the move towards like a sort of popular frontism is important. That's not to say there isn't work for a more tactical thought out and refined united frontier, right? I think that now is a time where it makes sense for left-wing elements who are seeking political class independence to work together and to try to come up with an analysis of the rising fascist tide that we're seeing and figure out how to work together to fight that even across certain ideological lines. But the baseline for that needs to be class independence and opposition to this national unity message, right? We need to answer the question, who are our enemies and who are our friends.

And until that question is properly answered, we can't have that kind of united front that is actually progressive and actually able to pursue working class interests. So I think there's a fine sort of needle that we're going to have to thread here that it's not going to be easy to do, but that the important thing to keep in mind is political class independence, and that's what needs to be built. And obviously, that is a lot harder than campaigning for Democrats and hoping that they will actually be accountable to you after they win elections, which has been a very failed strategy. So that's kind of how I'm looking at moving forward at least. It's a big task, and it's a difficult task, and the stakes are going to be higher than ever. the repression will probably be higher than ever as well. But the situation is fairly unchanged fundamentally, in my opinion,

and we can't give in to the temptation of this kind of coalition with the big bourgeois Z against fascist elements, because fascist elements are produced by the conditions of capitalism. You can't beat them by aligning with capitalists. Exactly. And that was the point I was going to make, and that's perfectly said. It's that these neoliberal administrations, they lay the groundwork for the fact. that they then say, you have to join with us to stop. Eight years of Obama's tepid neoliberalism gave us Trump, you know, and now Biden is going to do the exact same thing, and it's just going to get worse and worse.

All the contradictions of society are only going to get more intensified, including climate change, including inequality, especially after this recession, possibly a depression. And so it's just going to lead right back down that same road of creating enormous space for foe populists on the far right to take advantage of it. And that cycle will continue all the way into barbarism and apocalypse and dystopia if we don't eventually say enough is enough. We are not citing at all with the Democratic Party. We can side with liberals when it comes to strategic, as you said, shared interest around certain things. And certainly when it comes to street level confronting of fascists, we need all the numbers we can get. But when it comes to actual political organization and

political, you know, pushing for a vision, it has to be not only separate from the Democratic Party, but actually outwardly challenging it to show that, no, we are not by any means, you know, teamed up with these fucking people that even if you're not a right-wing weirdo with the melted brain, you still don't trust and you still hate for very good reason. Those are not our friends. We're not working with them. We don't want to be in the same party with them. And we can actually offer better critiques of them than the right ever can. And we can offer better critiques of the right than the liberals ever can and you know we have all the deck stacked against us because we're never going to get advertising and and big you know astro turf organizations and big funding but we do

have numbers and more numbers every single day and those numbers become very meaningful when they're organized properly and that is continues to be the task there is no easy way out of this and in fact for the next several years to several decades depending on how things go it's just going to get worse and worse. You know, people are, people are saying, oh, thank God, 2020 is over. It's almost as if people forget calendars are just arbitrary distinctions that help us measure time. There is no ending or beginning. It's just a downward fucking, you know, slog in the mud until fundamental change, which both parties fundamentally oppose, happens. And so the sooner we can get our shit together, get our numbers together, organize them, the better. But it's not going to happen

overnight. And it's going to be a long fight that we all have to commit ourselves to for our lifetimes and hopefully we can get out of this without a death spiral into barbarism and another which we're already deep into mass extinction event. So these are some of the thoughts that Allison and I have about how the left can move forward given what we're seeing. Is there anything else that you wanted to touch on or any ideas you wanted to use to wrap up with? Yeah, maybe on a hopeful note, something that might be more positive. I think one thing that I want to think about and wrestle with a little bit is, you know, what we saw yesterday was quite the spectacle. There's just no question of it, right? Those images are wild, and it was a strike

at the state that was on a very intense scale. And in response to that, I've seen a lot of people on the left who are like, oh, we are out-organized by these people. They're way more militant and way more organized than us. And I want to push back against that a little bit. And I think, like, one thing that I want us to think about is that the right has a huge. advantage over us in that the only things they need to organize around are these kind of street brawls and these kind of moves, right? They don't give a shit about feeding people. They don't give a shit about helping people not get evicted. They don't give a shit about bail funds. They don't care about all these broader organizational structures. They get to focus on just these things. If you're a

proud boy, your job's pretty easy, right? It's street brawling, and that's what you have to care about. But if you're on the left, we have way bigger vision, right? We believe in labor organizing. We believe in mutual aid organizing. We believe in tenant organizing. We believe in all of this wide array of things, of which community defense is one part. But our task is so much bigger. So when you see these displays in the street,

what you are seeing is people who are only focused on that one thing, right? And that is not the same as being more organized. I think it's very important to push back against that. The left for as weak as it is has kinds of infrastructure that they don't have. This summer, that balloon. right, the expansion of bail funds, the expansion of relationships between lawyers and the National Lawyer Guild and activists that are now coming onto the scene and doing work, the expansion mutual aid and the lessons learned about distribution of goods during times of crisis.

Those are forms of organization that the left has that the right doesn't. And we can forget about those if our vision is just these street battles and these big spectacle moments. But it's the daily, you know, like smaller grind of organizing and workplaces, organizing. unions of getting people pulled together and conscious that counts as organization for us, not being able to temporarily storm buildings or massively mobilize for street fights. So I want to push back against the idea of like, look what happened. There's so much more organized than us.

They're so much stronger than us. I don't think that's necessarily the case. They just have a single thing they get to focus on where we have to focus on everything. So I don't think that we should get discouraged by that. I think that we should be asking, how are the forms that, infrastructure that we built this summer in response to a crisis going to transform to long-term resistance against a rising tide of fascism. And there's a lot of room for hope there, I think. So that's kind of the thought that I have, at least. Beautifully said, and I echo that sentiment 100%. We are not only

better organized as the left broadly because of all the stuff that we've had to do and have done for many, many years and are getting better at every year. And we also have way more people on our side. This was actually a relatively small group of people who went buck wild and overwhelmed a police force with only half of their heart really in it. I mean, it's not really a wild show of massive organization and coherency and political discipline, if anything, it's the exact opposite. Our advantages still lie in our organizational capacity, still lie in our superior numbers to the far right, and still lie in the fact that we actually understand the world. We have a critique that actually makes sense and we have a vision of the future which everybody, no matter

what skin color or language or, you know, background or religion you come from, can join in with and push toward a better world for all of us and our children. Those are still our strengths and our only chance to get out of this barbarism and this dystopia we're being ushered into is to continue to build on those strengths, play on those strengths, not get discouraged and refuse, refuse to recoil back into your own personal life because it, it, it's It can sometimes be incredibly disheartening to live in this rotten world with the sort of ideas and the big hearts that so many of us have. But we got to keep fighting, as I always say, history is, we're not the past of playthings of history. History is manifesting through us.

What we do, what we say, how we carry ourselves in the world is how history is manifesting right here and right now. So that is our responsibility. And I think we're up to the task. You know, the system is in disarray. The ruling class is fractious and infighting. The far right are some of the worst people in the fucking world, and everybody except them knows it. We have advantages on our side, and we have been able to advance the ball in ways that we didn't even think possible 10 years ago. I remember living through the Obama administration as a socialist.

Those were bleak times, you know? And there's been monumental shifts in people's perspective, and even liberals are now having to contend with some of the critiques that we've advanced over the last several years. and just the fact that they have to contend with it on their national shows and have to have an opinion on and have to respond to it, that is showing that there are movements. Things are changing, but we can't give up, we got to keep fighting, and we got to keep playing on our already established strengths

and make them even stronger going forward. Yeah, don't have much more to say than that, honestly. I think that pretty much summarizes it. All right, well, we will end it there. This was a sort of last-minute emergency episode. I'm sure things will continue to play out. this is what 24 hours even yeah 24 hours after the initial riots so it's still very new and it's still so many questions to be answered like how are the next two weeks going to play out you know

um so i mean we'll come back and we'll continue to address it but we wanted to get this out to to give people something to orient themselves to what's going on help inform people and continue to push you know ultimately our optimism and what we can still do and what lies before us in the coming years. So to everybody out there, thank you so much for listening. Thank you so much for supporting us and other shows, you know, and stay safe out there, continue to organize and continue to continue to stay optimistic in the face of so much disastrous, you know, tragedy and chaos. There is a way out. We do have a future to win. We have a whole world to win, and we're making the moves as quickly as we can. But stay strong, stay safe, stay together, and keep fighting.

After life Golden Gate A happy wife Nothing compares To the sound of a Violence Great destroyer You plant the sea

Living guilt and the losers' grief But Nothing compares to the sound sound of a violin, no, nothing compares to the sound of a island. Somewhere we're laughing in far away places instead Say what you will and you know we're just hanging by thread

Oh Take your time, take your time, don't lose your head And all your pretty ones, you're sitting still They're getting it's easy, so have you feel well Nothing compares to the sound of your violin Ain't it funny how the years go back Nothing changing long as we're alive But nothing compares to the sound of a violent

snow, nothing compares to the sun. Somewhere laughing and faraway pieces instead Say what's you in and know we're just hanging by a thread I don't know I don't know I'm going to I'm going to I'm

I'm Thank you. I'm