Rev Left Radio - Red Hot Take: The World on Fire

Episode Date: August 9, 2024

Breht reflects on recent global events, from the fascist riots in the UK, to the escalating tensions in the Middle East, to another coup attempt in Venezuela, to the electoral spectacle here in the US... Then he offers up a positive vision of the future and how each of us can contribute to human civilizational evolution. Outro Song: The Cure by Non-Prophets ------------------------------------------------------- Rev Left is and always will be 100% listener funded. We appreciate deeply everyone who supports the show in any way, you can support the show and get access to hundreds of bonus episode in our back catologue HERE Follow Rev Left on Insta

Hello everybody. Welcome back to Rev Left Radio. So for today's episode, I just wanted to hop on here and do a sort of solo breakdown of just some major events going on. I have a lot of thoughts in my head. I'm sure many of you do. We see fires popping up, as it were, all around the world. Several major events seem to be occurring at once. Things seem to be spiraling toward some sort of escalation. There's domestic turmoil in many countries, geopolitical turmoil in many countries, geopolitical turmoil in many countries. a regional war, the possibility of a regional war on the horizon. I mean, depending on your definition, we could say that we're already in a regional war based on the fact that Israel is bombing all of its neighbors, conducting a genocide. The U.S. is spending hundreds, you know, tens of billions of dollars, just positioning their incredibly expensive warships and all the staffing and supplying of those ships all around the region in order to deter an Iranian attack and to help Israel as Israel purposefully, willingly, and consciously escalates in such a manner that it is trying to drag in the United States. There is a sort of political, material basis for

this in Israeli society, and there's a personal, psychological, psychopathic motivation on behalf of Netanyahu. I've long warned against any attempts to blame this on Netanyahu as such, as it's a way of individualizing a systematic problem. I mean, Israeli apartheid and settler colonialism is the problem no matter who's steering the bus. But Netanyahu in particular has a deeply personal vested interest to keep this war going. And there is something about the psychology of old war-mongering men as they get up there in years, and they get closer to their own death. For some of them, there is a sort of psychological.

apocalypticism that takes over. And I think with Netanyahu's narcissism, his self-preservation instincts, he is wanting personally to not only escalate this war, but to try to be the sort of historical figure that, you know, really defeats Israel's enemies in a sense. And he wants to go down in history that way. So you do have that psychopathic, narcissistic, psychological element on behalf of Netanyahu, but of course the rot goes all the way to the core of Israeli society, and we can see that in stark detail when it comes to the sexual assault that's been happening as a matter of course, as Israel carries out this genocide and attack on all of its neighbors. There were the rape riots where several soldiers who were accused credibly, obviously, of rape as a weapon of war,

other soldiers and other people of Israeli society rioted in order to get them free and that worked so it was looking really intense for a moment as if there might be I don't want to say a civil war but certainly civil skirmishes over the over huge chunks of Israeli society wanting to free rapists and so somebody somebody tweeted that Israel could be one of the first societies in history that

prevented civil war by by freeing rapists and then the video comes out which if you if you've seen it it's been going around viral mainstream media completely silent on it but an actual video from inside one of their torture camps where israeli soldiers pick up one of their hostages and take i believe it's a man to the corner other soldiers put up their shields to block from what's happening while other soldiers brutally sexually assault this man to the point where he had to be hospitalized for his injuries after the sexual assault. Now, this is hardcore visual videotape proof of Israeli soldiers using rape as a weapon of war, brutalizing hostages, and all the mainstream coverage of hysterical accusations of rape

on behalf of the Palestinians that have just been, have not been proven. but have been shoved in your face over and over and over again since October 7th. And then when there actually is videotaped evidence of this exact thing occurring, but Israel is doing it, you don't hear about it on any mainstream, any mainstream media source. This is one of the many ways that Western corporate media provides cover for Israeli war crimes. But with getting to a really, I mean, scary and perilous point when it comes to the regional conflict, You know, it's very clear that Iran and even Hezbollah, to a large extent, aren't giddy for war. They're not trying to escalate.

They're trying to defend their dignity to do what any state has to do in the face of escalating aggression, but they're trying to do in a such a way that it doesn't spark a full-on regional war, for many reasons, one of which is that they know the U.S. is going to get involved. They know that both the U.S. and Israel has nukes, not that the U.S. would necessarily use them in this context, but Israel certainly will. If Israel is losing the war, what is it, something Samson, the Samson option, where if Israel is totally backed into a corner, it will use its nukes and it's going to blow up Tehran. And so there's this sense in which Iran has this extra layer, not only would you, if you start a proper war with Israel, where you have to take on Israel, which is doable. I mean, all the regional partners could come together to some extent and very likely defeat Israel.

I mean, I think there's no question. If Iran and Hezbollah teamed up and, you know, you had some support from Yemen and obviously you have the guerrilla war on behalf of Hamas and the Palestinian resistance. And if Israel was all by itself, Israel would be destroyed. But Israel has the imperial hegemon standing right behind it with its arms folded and that's the United States. And so they know a war with Israel also means a war with the United States. States. And the nuclear, the nuclear asymmetry is a real problem. Like, Iran should have nukes. And all of the discussion for the last several decades about trying to prevent Iran from having nukes is precisely for this scenario. When Israel is finally able to be the

rabid beast that wants to be regionally and wants to escalate into a regional war, if not a fucking world war, an apocalyptic war. And they know that they have nukes and they've been doing everything with the U.S. to prevent Iran from getting nukes, because that is the ultimate deterrent. It's the only reason, as we all know, why North Korea hasn't been invaded and toppled and destroyed and gutted, right, is because they have the ultimate deterrent, which is nuclear weapons. And, you know, if Iran had produced and was able, it was allowed to produce nuclear weapons, this could be a very different situation. Now, we know for many decades, Israel has gone out of its way to prevent this exact scenario by, among many other things,

assassinating physicists and top scientists who are working on or have the knowledge to produce nuclear weapons in that way. So it's clearly been a longstanding strategy on behalf of Israel and the United States to prevent Iran from getting nuclear weapons for precisely this reason. For this ultimate asymmetry, when push comes to ultimate shove, Israel has nukes and Iran doesn't. And Iran, you know, any rational actor has to take that fucking shit. into account. And so you, you know, there's a real possibility that, you know, nukes could fly. And look at Israel. You think they're going to constrain themselves? You think they're going to hold themselves back if they're in a corner, if they're losing

the war and not use their nukes? It is protocol that at some point the nukes will fly for Israel. And there's only one other country in human history who has used nukes on human beings. And that's its number one partner. It's senior partner, the United Fucking Snakes of America. And so you have this horrific situation where it's clear that the that Hezbollah and Iran and the Palestinian resistance and the Yemeni resistance all are on the right side of history. And Israel is a rabid dog that's conducting a genocide and bombing its neighbors. It's the number one threat to freedom, to safety, to stability in the region as it presents itself as the only democracy and the most moral army. we're an outpost for Western civilization. Yeah, it's an outpost for Western civilization. Hence the sociopathy. Hence the insanity. Hence the bloodthirsty war mongering. Hence the fucking systematic colonial mentality that results in dehumanization and rape and fascism. In that sense, yes, it is a little Western outpost in the region. But for precisely that reason, it's evil and needs to be destroyed. And, you know, that region will never know peace. as long as Israel is allowed to continue to exist in that region.

Because it can't live as equals. It doesn't see itself as equals in a region of other equals. It doesn't see itself as even internally equal amongst equals in the sense of like, you know, Jewish citizens versus Arab Muslims in Palestine, in historic Palestine, second class, third class, fourth class citizens. I mean, what do you even classify Ghazans? they're not even citizens in like a class like you can't say third class citizens they're being genocided so they're now a victim in the worst possible imaginable way of israeli settler colonial fascism and um so that's that that violence and that destabilization it serves u.s imperial interest which is a huge reason why u.s is a locked in ally but it also just proves that israel is the problem and that region can never no peace and stability with Israel pursuing its goals which is complete extermination of the Palestinians

and a complete takeover of a historic Palestine and a aggressive escalatory militancy against any neighbor country that tries to prevent it or has different ideas about how things should go so this is going to continue to

escalate and you know the U.S it's one of those things where you know all for all this talk of democracy we get no fucking choice when it comes to war there's no candidate that we can choose that has a reasonable chance of winning that would refuse to go

I mean even fucking RFK Jr. is up Israel's asshole the Democrats and the Republicans are you know vying to see who can be more pro-Israel under the Biden regime that you've seen you know 10 plus months of a brutal genocide that the Democratic Party is arming funding

arguing in favor of protecting at the UN slandering its opponent here at home. That's the Democratic Party. And then Trump is even going to be more aggressive, you know? So, you know, all for all the talk of democracy, we get no choice where trillions of our tax dollars go. What was it? Five, seven trillion dollars spent on Iraq and Afghanistan alone only to murder hundreds of thousands of people and to replace the Taliban with the Taliban. That's our money that should go to investments here in the United States of America where people are homeless, people are struggling for housing, people are struggling for health care, people are in debt,

for the crime of getting educated for the crime of being working class and trying to educate themselves they have to take on tens of thousands of dollars a debt I speak from personal experience here and all the fucking problems that our tax dollars could be used to invest in

gets blown away for the profits of the military industrial complex for the defense of a genocidal fascist apartheid state for endless wars abroad that has to come to a motherfucking end and clearly democracy does democracy in scare quotes does not provide a route out of that endless war mongering the system is so bought and paid for on multiple levels the military industrial complex is for sure one but look what apex just did they just ousted through dumping millions of dollars into a campaign ousted Cory Bush one of the only decent human beings in national politics ousted her with with with millions of dollars and because

she had criticisms of Israel. So now a foreign government operating a domestic lobbying bribery firm can just dump money into politics and choose which politicians are allowed to even be on the table of options for us. And they call this

democracy. So it's a disgusting situation. Israel needs to be put down. It is a rabid dog. The U.S. is a rabid dog. Imperialism is the core contradiction. There is no decent future for humanity as long as imperialism can continue to run amok around the world and what does imperialism the systematic sanctioning plundering colonial and neo-colonial

looting of the global south create well that tends to create a little thing we call mass migration a little thing we call a destabilization of somebody's home country to such an extent where they're desperately now moving northward to find opportunity. Well, yeah, that's because the U.S. and the Imperial Corps have destroyed any possibility of opportunity in those people's homes countries. One of the things you'll often hear, America is the greatest country in the world. If they weren't, then why does everybody want to come here? Because you fucked everywhere else up.

Because you fucked everywhere else up. Who did all the wealth and power in the world? And so, yeah, there's opportunities here, not because they grow out of some virtue of American society and civic association, but precisely because of imperial and neo-colonial plundering for the Imperial Corps more broadly. I mean, look at, you know, from Venezuela, we see Venezuelan economic migrants, Central American economic migrants. We see migrants from the Syrian Civil War that have been flooding into Europe for a long time. Afghanistan, Iraq, the entire region that is destabilized by the U.S., by its allies in Europe, and by Israel, creating mass migration into Europe as desperate people flee destruction and poverty and move towards an area that have some ostensible opportunities, even though those have completely dried up now, and then what happens, you get a fascist backlash in those home countries against the migrants themselves. for all the fucking people rioting and all the people across the west

hating immigrants and fuming about being replaced and coming up with conspiracy theories about a small cabal of people orchestrating the replacement of white genocide do any of them talk about imperialism about neocolonialism about sanctions as war

about the conditions that create desperate people fleeing desperate situations do they ever talk about that no there's no anti-imperialist critique on the fascist right they actually often support imperialism under the guise of nationalism and patriotism

support our troops stand behind them or stand in front of them love it or leave it these colors don't run that's all we've heard and then they have the audacity to act surprised when there's huge migrations of desperate people and then

instead of blaming the war mongerers or the rich powerful elite who orchestrate imperialism monopoly capitalism itself as an object of critique who catches the shit the powerless moneyless migrants and whatever faction not the whole ruling class but whatever faction of the ruling class they've been trained to hate and another layer is that the actual solutions to the problems of people who are upset about mass migration, the actual solutions are twofold, anti-imperialist politics, ending this scourge on humanity of imperial hegemony and wars, etc. And socialist economics inside of countries so that every country can have a, to the extent that

they have prosperity, share that prosperity widely. So people are not living in constant austerity, constant precarity, have crumbling social services, have no fucking life opportunities, have no way generated a decent income have no future at all but guess what those things have been denigrated as communist and socialist so if you go up to one of these fucking geeses over in england rioting and fucking attacking people of color and you said hey the real solution here um if you care about this issue the real solution here is socialist economics at home and anti imperialist of politics abroad you know bridged together by proletarian internationalism where the working people of every country see themselves

in the working people of other countries and we try to create a world that works for regular working people across the world they would call that well in the past they would call it a commie red menace you know whatever bullshit now they call it woke

right they would call that woke or socialism or communism tyranny and so the thing that's creating the problem brutal capitalism at home anti-imperialism abroad create one of its effects is to create desperate people fleeing desperate conditions which gives rise to mass migration and then the solutions to that problem which are to address the root

causes of imperialism and brutal capitalism are then denigrated by the the reactionary elements of the ruling class to their to their goable ordinary working class constituency denigrated as communist as socialist as woke as tyranny as whatever. And so you see this incredible bind that we are in, and you see how the ruling class apparatus and its ideological programming literally allows only for fascism to be the trajectory that people can take. The real solutions striking at the root are denigrated as socialist and communist, anathema, to our Americans and Brits or whatever the fuck. while the very cause of the problem just gets entrenched under nationalism and patriotism. We love capitalism. You know, we believe in entrepreneurship and liberty and freedom.

Okay, well, look at all the liberty and freedom you have. And, you know, we've got to be strong. We've got to project force around the world. We got to show the rest of the world that we can't be fucked with by going over and and destroying their countries over and over and over and over and over and over again. Okay, well, that's creating the problem. But now you're saying that you like that. because you're a patriot

and a fucking flag waiver well that's that's what the situation we're in and then what the left has to do and I've said this for fucking what I've been on the air for seven plus years now we have the duty of trying to politically educate people but you got to stick around

and you have to have an attention span and you have to set aside base emotions of disgust and othering and anger and rage and you got to think through a few fucking steps logically in order to a right at the conclusion of what the actual root causes of these problems are and that's a lot to ask from people unfortunately it's a lot easier to point at a fucking guy who looks a little

different than you and speaks in a thick accent and say he's the problem go attack him when you do that you are directly supporting the ruling class when you either pick a faction of the ruling class to identify with in the U.S., Republican or Democrat, so I'm on the Democrat side, fuck the Republicans, or vice versa, when you do the factionalism of the ruling class to where you are now a working person identifying with the faction of the ruling class, or you take the fascist route of scapegoating powerless, wealthless, desperate people as the cause of your problems, in either of those two cases, what you are doing is you are doggedly serving the interest of the ruling elite.

because factionalism they can play all day they love factionalism Democrats versus Republicans all day because no matter who wins the ruling class wins and you as a gollable duped working class person have gotten on your knees

for one of those two factions you've now identified yourself with one of the two factions of the ruling elite and so what does that make you do it makes you defend your ruling elite and criticize the other ruling elite and even better for them

criticize the constituency of the other ruling the lead. So you're a working class person who's on the Harris Walls train and now you don't have much criticism of the Democrats at all. You're voting for them no matter what they do. You're a good little dog on a leash. But who are you trained to hate?

Well, not the donor class of the Democrats, not the billionaires who fund the Democrats, not the corporations who fund the Democrats. You hate the Republicans. And more than that, you hate the guy in a MAGA hat down the street who's in your class. Oh, beautiful. Working class division. Awesome. That works just fine for the ruling class. And of course, vice versa. The guy in the MAGA hat is going to

defend Trump, going to defend the Republican apparatus, and so far as it abides by, you know, their cult leader Trump. No critique of capitalism as such. No critique of the donor class of the Republican Party. No critique of the billionaires and corporations that prop up the Republican Party. He now hates the blue-haired college student. You know, he now hates the guy down his street with the Biden, with the Biden Harris sticker on his car. Perfect. And then you add in racism. Well, that creates more divisions. You add an anti-LGBQ shit. That adds in more divisions. And then you have a whole bunch of little weak fucking factions of the working class split in a million in different ways, now identifying themselves with one of the two factions of the ruling class,

oh, you've played directly into their hands. Like I said, a good little trained, obedient dog. And it's why we're on the point really quick. I wanted to mention this thing I talked about voting. You know, there's all this argument now about, you know, we have to support Harris and walls. You know, this is different. This time it's different, guys. Seriously, like, you know, they actually are hope and change.

Like, my God. We've been through this so many fucking times, but because people are, there's people that will always be ignorant, always be susceptible to being tricked into this way. But of course, there's also this all four years, a whole new crop of young idealist people who do want change, but who easily get suckered into it. As we did when we were younger, you know, I got suckered into the Obama hope and change idea. I grew up, became politically conscious. Well, my first memories are under Clinton and then really politically conscious and active under Bush. And, you know, I was 18, 19 years old when Obama comes along really felt like, holy shit, this system can work. Obama really can make the change and really, like, helped the little guy and stop the horse and shit.

Well, I learned the hard way. And then I grow up fucking, you know, wrinkles now and fucking gray poking out of my beard and just beaten down by fucking living in American society for a couple more decades. And a whole new crop of bushy-eyed, bright-eyed young people come up and they're falling for the Harris Wall shit. now they have to learn and by the time they learn there's going to be a new fucking person coming along to trick the other people and and some of them won't learn like you know plenty of millennials that that lived through the Obama fucking betrayal are still fully locked in so I made this point and you know it's controversial but but I said you as an American taxpayer are already paying for the mass murder of innocent people you can't control that but if you then also actively vote for the party that is arming and funding that genocidal mass murder you're willingly going out and saying you're giving your personal thumbs up and personal green light to that party who is doing that that makes you a willing conscious participant you can't pretend you don't know you can know what's going on you know what they're doing and not only are you going to work and paying your taxes to support israel who has health care and you don't, of course. But support Israel, who has free college, and you don't, of course, but support Israel and their attempt to bomb the entire, you know, region of West Asia and genocide the Palestinian people,

you're going to go give your personal green light. Okay, well, now you're a willing participant. Now it's not just as matter of they're taking my tax dollars. I don't fucking control what they do with them. They're making it rain on Netanyahu a fucking fascist, right? But I'm actually going to go out and vote for the party doing that. so if the democrats can commit a literal genocide and still get your vote they don't have to worry about you at all

you are a lock you are on their leash you're going to vote for them no matter what they do because even outright fascism and genocide aren't red lines for you so if even even supporting openly fascism, which what is Israel if it's not fascist, a fascist apartheid, ethno-s supremacist state, conducting a genocide against people based on their race and religion, my fucking God, what's the definition of fucking Hitlerite fascism, if not that?

So they're doing fascism, supporting fascism, using your money to fund fascism, and not just fascism, but genocidal fascism, Hitlerite fascism. where there's literal fascism plus a genocide. That's what they're doing. Those aren't red lines for you. So why do they need to appeal to the left? If you are just going to bitch and moan and fall in line every fucking time, they don't need to appeal to you.

They can take you for granted. They can tie you up to the furnace and beat you. You're still going to fucking vote for them. So they'll simply take you for granted. Mr. and Mrs. I'll vote for I'll vote for blue no matter who, even when they're doing fascism and genocide. They'll take you for granted. And they'll appeal to people whose votes aren't guaranteed. The suburban wine moms, you know, making $150K a year. The older boomers who grew up loving Israel, who sometimes can kind of be swayed over to the Trump side of things. They're not quite sure. The centrists, right? Oh, maybe we got to get, we got to lock them in. Well, they'll go after them because those votes aren't guaranteed. They have to appeal to those voters because those voters aren't going to fall on their knees every four years no matter what the Dems do. The Dems can lose those people.

And so they will go after those people to shore up their ability to win an election. And you people who are voting for this shit on the left, so you call yourself things like leftist, and you criticize the genocide and you see it very clearly what's going on and you know you might have voted for Bernie in 2016 and you want real fundamental change or at least some change

and you critique the Democratic Party the whole way but every four years you shut the fuck up and you go in and you cast your ballot for the Democrats they can shut you out entirely who gives a fuck what they think what they say what they want

they're going to vote for us we can do anything so that's that's for the people on the left that are that are voting harris and walls who are coconut pilled you make me fucking sick those coconuts are full of the blood of Palestinians and I mean that's the obvious fucking big elephant in the room but just look at the lives of working people in this country No matter who's president Clinton, Bush, Obama, Trump, Biden

Things get worse and worse for everybody So what are you voting for? You think this time they're really going to give you Medicare for all? This time they're really going to defend women's rights And they're really going to pack the court And they're really going to do something about that This time they really will Your children, you are babies

being manipulated by people who know consciously that they're manipulating you. They try to coup Venezuela again. You know like every four years we have this mass psychosis event where we all of a sudden

become little cult members for one of the two shitty factions of the ruling class and we have this big spectacle and all this bullshit we have to deal with. Well, in Venezuela it's kind of like that except instead of elections it's coups. So every time there's an election

election, there's also a coup attempt. US-backed, far right-wing insanity. We've seen it over and over and over again. I've been in politics long enough to see this exact thing happen. Oh, you remember Juan Guido? You remember in 2017, the riots, you remember? Every couple years, they try it. The fucking fisherman boat thing, where the fucking, a small rag tag group of whatever the fucks

try to do a bay of pigs and got stopped. by a bunch of fishermen in Venezuela, remember that? Every couple years, they try to coo the country. Now, this feeds into our fascism and migration thing because the U.S. has strangled Venezuela with sanctions for years.

Destroying Venezuelan lives, hurting the civilians of Venezuela, because the U.S. doesn't like the way they do things down there. The U.S. doesn't like the way a sovereign government conducts itself.

and so just naturally and obviously they have the right to go and destroy that country and then what happens when you sanction a country into misery and poverty well you get the benefit of being able to blame it on socialism i guess but it also creates millions of migrants who are forced to leave their country the country they were born in they have community and their family is in and come up north end up at our borders where the very same people who green light and back up and defend the sanctions program and the coup attempts year after year and the destabilization of Venezuela then turn their anger and hatred on the Venezuelan migrants themselves do not come as Kamala once said

that brave brave progressive leader do not come so here's the cycle sanctioned destroy Oh, this country wants to nationalize their oil. This country wants to challenge U.S. imperialism on the global stage. Okay, fuck them up. As Kissinger said, make their economy scream, right? The old Chilean playbook. Sanction them until that country is fucked. And then that creates, again, the rhetorical ability for you to blame that on socialism or whatever.

But more than that, it creates this huge migration of people who now don't have access to medicine, food, etc. Opportunities, right? The economy crumbles. when the largest economy in human history is attacking it and putting its arms around its throat and strangling it to death and then those people come up north to the only place where there's opportunities in the region

and then the same people who supported those fucking policies that destroyed that country then become ultra-racist fascists and tell their dumb-dum constituents that those people are the problem these illegal immigrants, these aliens are what's causing your hardship

what's causing, I mean, this is happening in the U.K., literally, that's what they think is causing the housing crisis and the complete collapse of UK society is these immigrants. Not the ruling elite, not the economics of British, brutal, austere neoliberalism, which the Brits have just continued to pound away at why other countries start like, you know, kind of sharpening up, they're starting to understand, even the U.S. to some very slow extent, starting to understand the neoliberal is air. is over. Neoliberalism, of course, was a reaction by the ruling class in the West to the falling rate of profit through the 50s and 60s and into the 70s. So the unions had to be gutted. Everything had to be deregulated. The keys to society had to be handed over to the corporations because those falling rates of profit were a real structural problem for capitalism as such. But now that has played itself out. And what do we get after 40 years of neoliberalism? We get this hell world that we live in, the homelessness crisis, the housing crisis, the mental health crisis,

the health care crisis, regional wars, endless wars, World War III, that's what 40 years of neoconservatism and neoliberalism, this unholy union of neoconservatism and neoliberalism have wrought. And so that's coming to an end, brutally, violently, disgustingly, it's going to come to an end. The Brits, the inventors of capitalism over there saying, I think we can get a few more years out of this let's keep doing it the elites in the UK have turned the UK

into a tax haven and a playground for the ultra rich and let everybody else fuck off and then the reactionary elites in the UK point to immigrants and say that's your problem and then the dumb dumbs fall for it gotcha got you again

so that's what's happening in the UK tying that in again you see how I'm tying all these global events into the same handful of forces and you see how they all interlock and they all dialectically work together to create this hell world we're living in but anyways as most of the western world starts to wake up from their neoliberal haze the brits are insisting to keep plugging away at it and their country is being destroyed not because of immigrants which again are a product of all these wars that the u.s and the imperial corps are constantly fomenting and

and participating in. But it's a result of the actual elite, those with all the power and money and control in British society, which have ruined that society. You know, if you take London, I believe this is true, you can fact check me. I'm pretty sure this is true. Take London out of the equation, just that one city, just set that aside for now. And you take the UK and you make it an American state, economically it's on par with Mississippi, the poorest state in the union.

that country has been destroyed now some people will say well fuck them you know look at this history of colonialism and imperialism do you think the people that conducted colonialism imperialism are the ones that are suffering regular working

motherfuckers that just happen to be born in non-London parts of the I mean London too and in the UK I'm not I mean by no means am I excusing the British Empire my fucking god and yes this is a this is a product of of british colonialism this is what happens when you have a colonial empire and you plunder and loot the rest of the fucking world right those

that's all true but an average working class person who just has no opportunities in the UK because of their elite it's not it's not very helpful to say well well that's thanks to colonialism he's like i'm i'm a poor guy in fucking whatever newcastle or manchester or fucking Cardiff or whatever I didn't have anything to do with the British Empire I just don't have a job and I don't have any fucking future

so the elites have destroyed that country they've successfully taught huge swaz of England to aim all their hate and ire at powerless immigrants a tragedy sparks off

this kindling that's been building for many many years right many many years the EDL Tommy Robinson Nigel Farage, all this shit They also do Brexit

Which is like a hilarious I mean sad and Disgusting but on some level amusing Way of just shooting yourself in the fucking foot Thinking it's going to solve the immigration crisis And all it does is deepen your economic problems So now you have an even poorer country Detached from the European Union

creating more economic hardship that you then again point towards the immigrant, towards the Muslim, towards the non-white, and say, that's your enemy, go get them. And they go and get them. And that, of course, creates a backlash of Muslim and anti-fascist groups coming together to now push back against the fascists.

But, and you have to do that. The time for political education is passed when fascists are burning stores down and doing pogroms and pulling non-white people out of their cars and beating them brutally okay at that point there's no more room for political education go fuck them up with extreme violence

that's what happens when capitalism decays into fascism but that's precisely what we're seeing in the UK and in a lot of ways it's a nice little peek into our future if we stay on this path because the U.S. imperial hegemony is coming to an end.

end. Whether that's World War III, whether that is a new crop of politicians that come up and slowly pull back, whether that is an economic collapse that forces the empire to shrink, or just a total all-out defeat where more or less the rest of the world teams up and says enough is enough and puts the rabid dog down. But the imperial hegemonic age of the United States is coming to an end. and then you have to reset your entire society and economy for a post-imperial context

and the Brits fucked that up and this is what it's brought and we have the same venal corrupt short-sighted self-serving fucking pukes running our system and they're sure as hell not going to gracefully step back from their imperial hegemony they're going all out.

Nothing short of World War III is going to stop them from continuing to try to dominate the rest of the world. Spend trillions of dollars all over the world brutalizing people. And then you add climate change

on top of it, my God. Where in the fuck are we going? Kind of lost my train of thought there. But you see what I'm saying. You see all these forces. You see how they interact. You see the utter necessity of a radical shift in how we're doing things. A radical revolutionary reorientation of the economy and the political system to have a rational global order, a rational set of domestic policies that work for regular fucking people. imperialism globally is a small elite taking everything from the world and then siphoning it back into the imperial cores

where it's then distributed also unequally to a tiny fraction of that society domestically so what imperialism does globally you can see capitalism does domestically dominate the resources and raw materials plunder and loot and exploit siphon all the wealth and money assets from the bottom in the middle and the common land

up into a handful of incredibly incredibly disgustingly rich opulent elite and then try to keep the fucking rabble at bay through ideology through internal working class division through endless distraction I mean my god these smartphones

are just a genius way of keeping the population dumb short attention spans emotionally being shoved and buffered around all the time no ability to clearly focus on anything for a long amount of time no ability really to think critically

there's no sense in which anybody's teaching anybody how to think critically about how to navigate this new media landscape it's just it's not a product of a conspiracy it's a product of profit seeking but it works so well ideologically for the system

to have everybody just zombieed out onto their little fucking misery machines their little dopamine casinos training their attention spans to be like that of a kindergartener when you practice stuff like meditation or deep reading

or spending time in nature alone for long periods of time these are ways that you develop your capacity to focus to think critically to stay with something for a while this is the anti-that so if you're spending eight hours a day on your phone

what are you doing you're doing an anti-meditation an anti-deep-read an anti-nature time you're detraining your mind to become less sharp to become more jostled by emotional impulses to be more algorithmically directed to have an attention span

that is so fragmented and so scattered and to have that addictive impulse to reach in I mean like again this is not a product of conspiracy it just is a natural outgrowth of the dominant ideology and the profit seeking of corporations who want to keep your attention onto their shitty fucking websites for as long as they fucking can

and it's double-edged because where else are you going to see a lot of this I mean, Twitter is this hellhole in a lot of ways, but also you see shit on Twitter. You are never going to see on any regular mainstream news channel. You see videos on Twitter that you'll never see anywhere else. And that really does also help you get around the gatekeeping of the media establishment. So all this to chuck your phones into the river, I know none of you are going to do that anyway, and I'm not either. I'm not speaking this from some Zen monk-like superiority either.

I have my phone right next to me right now. But what it does mean is that there are things you should do to mitigate the worst impacts of that addiction. Like I said, meditation, deep reading, spending time in nature, and more importantly than anything, if it's possible, organize in your community, spend time in real life with people in your community, working on real problems that actually exist in your community. These are all ways to mitigate. And, yeah, you can use it. Set time aside. It's, you know, it's not all evil all the time. It does have benefits.

But that's just another, it's just a small side point. But mostly I just wanted to get on here and I wanted to break some things down. I wanted to show the connections between things. I wanted to show how the UK elite have robbed the British people of all races for several decades. they've plundered their own economy they've turned it into a tax haven for the ultra rich then their reactionary elites point to the most powerless people in society

sparking these low-level pogroms which is what they are and the tinderbox is lit by a tragedy that's immediately skewed by conspiracy online bullshit so three little girls were stabbed to death by a second generation

immigrant from her Wanda, but a full British citizen. But that I immediately got spun in right-wing British circles as an illegal immigrant, Muslim immigrant that just got here off the boat, goes on a rampage and kills three British girls. Now, that's a fucking tragedy. Right? Mentally unwelled person hurts little babies. It will never not destroy me and flabbergast me and break my fucking heart and my soul.

That people in this world can go out and hurt. little fucking children. So that's real tragedy. That's real heartbreak. That's real pain that a whole society feels. Remember when Newtown happened? Right? That happened up in the northeast, far away from where I live, maybe far away from where you live.

Did it not impact the entire society? I remember, it was like 2012 going to work in the parking lot of my job, bent over, bawling alone in my in my truck hearing the news of what happened in Newtown the mass murder of little innocent precious babies so those tragedies

hit an entire society and if you are at all out of your insane little ego fever dream of just me me me me me me me me and you're paying attention to the world around you and you have a fucking heart that beats, these things should devastate you. But of course, the deepest injustice that can happen is in the face of that tragedy,

you take it to demonize powerless people and just go out and start attacking random fucking Muslims and random fucking immigrants in your society. That's like the worst thing you could do in the face of an unspeakable tragedy is to do another unspeakable tragedy, but this time you've feel self-righteous about it this time you feel like you're doing something good that's evil the nazis thought in their own twisted fucking heads that they were doing something good and so it's almost worse like an evil person doing an evil act they know is evil for the sake of being evil it's incomprehensible but okay i can kind of feel my way into that

but then the scarier version is doing insanely evil things and Israel is a perfect example of this as well insanely evil things while simultaneously thinking you're doing good and more than that that you are actually the victim

which that's the mentality of fascism the aggressor puts on the garb of being the victim as it aggresses and you see that with these UK fascist riots and these little pogroms that are occurring. You see that with Israel.

I mean, my God, Israel's whole thing is feigning victimhood as it fucking mass murders 200,000 human beings. That is evil on another level. But that's precisely what we're saying.

And so we are living in interesting times. We're living at the beginning of something fucking huge. We are entering and have been for several years now a global and domestic, every sense, every nation state domestically and then globally, we're entering a huge crisis inflection transition point. You have other things in the background like oncoming AI, which people have different opinions about how life changing that's going to be, but certainly it's going to have a huge impact. you have climate change looming in the background these like sort of ghosts that are haunting us as the world starts burning

with political upheaval no part of the globe is untouched by this where is it going I don't know where was society going in the late 1920s could anybody have exactly predicted where things are going to go 1927 and you're at some fucking

party, you know, drinking champagne with the flappers and you have no fucking clue what's coming. The Great Depression, World War II, we're in a very similar situation. Interestingly, roughly

about 100 years later. It's an interesting little cycle. A hundred years is four generations. That's more or less enough time for the people that were involved. in those earlier crisis to have fully gone away so that we don't have you know living memory of people who survived the depression in World War II anymore

just in time for us to get us into another exact situation like that but worse this time and different because of these other variables like godlike technology and the global destabilization of our of our climate system that's not that's not meant to to bring despair things are changing that's whether you're talking buddhism Marxism, Marxism, or just rationalogical thought, that's all that we have is constant cascading change all the time. The dialectic moves. It doesn't ever stay stagnant. Nothing ever stops moving. So, of course, we're living in a time of change, but so many contradictions have built up over the previous, you know, several decades to 100 years, and they're all coming to ahead at the same time. But you see how the forces of fascism are emerging along. the crisis because Lenin said

fascism is capitalism and decay capitalism and its global system of imperialism which is a product of monopoly capitalism is in a state

of decay it's no longer working for regular people but the system itself is ran by people who are invested in

maintaining the system and when capitalism is really in a corner the only thing that can keep that system going is fascism

the alternative alternative is socialism and communism. The alternative is a radical break with how things have been done, which has not been working. I'm sorry, but a couple hundred years of capitalism has led us right to this exact spot.

Well, cool, we get gadgets. We get a little smartphone. I can buy a fucking 50-inch TV for $400. Cool, I guess. I'd rather have community and health care and housing in a future. But we get gadgets. we get Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos

Oh thank you our overlords Thank you so much for creating Amazon And Tesla oh my God You've changed the world Capitalism is so great No I'd rather have community I'd rather have a sustainable future I'd rather have an environment

That isn't fucking dying I'd rather have a flourishing Natural biosphere I'd rather have a society in which We're not constantly being advertised to or having to consume, consume, consume to feel alive, but where we actually have community and meaning and ritual in our societies,

where we actually cooperate with one another to create the highest quality of life possible for the most amount of human beings on fucking earth. Where we can all live decent and dignified lives instead of a small amount of people getting insanely rich by making sure that the rest of the world toils forever. Let capitalism go on long enough And it just brings you right back to feudalism, doesn't it?

Now with suits and ties instead of You know, crowns and capes Now with smartphones and TVs But the basic class structure Of a small elite on top Who live lives of luxury and opulence And a broad, writhing mass Of human beings on the bottom

Who live in a constant state of precarity If you're lucky because precarity means you're on the edge of the cliff but you haven't fallen yet precarity means you could fall any moment but you're still teetering for huge swaths of the world they've been pushed over the edge

look what's happening in Congo look what's happening in Palestine look what's happening in the sedan and I can point to many more places around the globe those people have been pushed off the cliff they would love mere precarity.

So that's the world capitalism has created for us. And to try to reform it, try to keep it around. It's crazy. Is extremism. That is extremism. The system no longer works for the vast majority of humanity, for the biosphere itself,

this dual system of capitalism imperialism no longer works if it never did but you can see how it arose out of the grotesque guts of medieval monarchy and feudalism and so was never going to be a beautiful system but we're in the 21st century

and we're still fucking doing this shit we need to grow up as a species We grow up politically by ushering in socialism and the end to imperialism and colonialism we grow up politically by shifting the focus from profit accumulation

for a few to a high decent quality of life for the many that we organize society around creating the highest quality of life that we possibly materially can within restraints we're not all going to be being fed grapes living in luxury but there should be no rich and no poor

I'll say it as extremist and terroristic as that comment is there should be no rich and no poor all human beings by virtue of being a human being on earth should have a decent and dignified life where they can pursue their interest in their hobbies and have community and have dignity in their day-to-day lives have some democracy in the workplace and their economy and how their local

and national and global civilization is ran regular people not manipulated by media by an ideology mass media campaign not pushed into extreme desperate precarity by an unequal economic system that then makes people do desperate things

but a society in which the quality of life for the ordinary citizen is the goal of that society not accumulate profit at all fucking costs and i do think there's a psychological cognitive consciousness component to our evolution you know my positions on buddhism go listen to my last episode on meditation i lay out that entire argument there where i believe that we are going to cognitively evolve to a point where we transcend identification with thought the distant future, we will have communism, and we will have a situation in which you spend

your childhood and your adolescence developing a healthy-ish ego personality to operate in the world, which is absolutely necessity, and you spend your early to mid-adulthood transcending that. And there will be a bunch of social structures facilitating that. It will be just a core part of our educational process. It will be very known that that's what adulthood means. it's a sort of ritual that that happens there will be better and more precise ways of ensuring more or less everybody gets on that train and we evolve politically outwardly socially economically civilizationally transcend class and thus war with each other and we also evolve psychologically cognitively where we are no longer slaves and servants to our thoughts

our feelings our emotions are our worst impulses we are no longer buffeted by the winds of the egoic desiring machine but we can stand back from it and use it as a tool it's a great servant it's a terrible master and what is normal in human civilization today is to have identification with thought and the ego personality be the master and that's why you can't stop thinking when you go lay your head down at night that's why you're talking to yourself in your head 24-7 that's why you're anxious that's why you're depressed that's why you're fearful for the future always worried about what's coming next not to say there aren't real things to worry about but if you notice your mind is constantly just finding threats finding things to be worried about you wake up one day you have a bad mood

now your whole day's ruined you have no control over it you are being dominated by a process that arose evolutionarily for your survival. And because it's only concern is to survive, to get through the day, you start thinking like that. Detect threats and just get through the day. You wake up in the morning, I just got to get to the end of the day.

You wake up on Monday, I just got to get to the end of the week. He's got to get to the end of your life is what you're going to do. That's no way to live. And so, yes, just like capitalism, The ego personality arose, you know, capitalism rose historically. That arose sort of evolutionarily in the biological and cultural dialectic of evolution of human species as a social species.

It served its role, right? But it is never meant to be the end place for humanity. The exact same thing applies with capitalism. So both of those, we will either kill ourselves or we will live long. enough to transcend and grow the fuck up from those two things. Identification with thought, psychologically, and capitalist class society in general politically.

That's a future worth having. That's a future worth fighting for. And everybody who fights for it is on the fucking cutting edge of human evolutionary development. And that's a decent way to spend a life. All right. Love and solidarity. I'll talk to you soon.

Don't deny that sick feeling in your stomach you can't run from it. Let it guide you into high view, then move beyond the summit. these feet through alleys. If it's done quick, you'll have the time to find the caves where days were never sunlit. Discover scriptures made by a society of blind men who suggest the best directions where you most likely will find them. Dead set. On checkmates, embracing a chest set. When bed spreads get wet, they're left with the scent of death threats. In seven seconds, I'll become undone. I'm breaking through. If you're around by the time I reach number one, I'm taking you. You're not the traveling type, then hide your baggage better. Before you die in normal death and write the average letter about your internal furnace.

And how life's a sexually transmitted disease That you contracted through her kiss When a boy writes off the world It's done with sloppy misspelled words If a girl writes off the world It's done in cursive I'm searching for a cure This is a sickness

Can you hear me loud I kick the dirt for what it's worth, listening to the birds chirp, the same cryptic speech, the breeze speaks and the sea repeats, recognizing the cycles with every passing day, riding full demands in the sand till the crashing waves wash it away. I watch what I say now, but I hate it, trying to make my mark, afraid of the dark nature of vague statements that plague the vacant parking. Where shopping carts go uncollected That sick feeling in my stomach starts To leave my heart and soul infected I won't accept it Do my vest to reject patterns till it hurts

Every second making bad turns for the worst She's getting further away I can feel it in the way my bones ache The ocean sealed it slips now The waves won't break the secrets it won't say Has got us trying to break codes and churches And lately I've been hating it's sole purpose When a boy writes off the world

It's done with sloppy misspelled words If a girl writes off the world it's done in cursive I'm searching for a cure This is a sickness Can you hear me love? Now I look for air pockets to pick, walk with a stick, start picking locks with it, opening up heart-shaped lockets with it, opening up heart-shaped lockets with little arguments, targy trinkets start to split, and contradict those who say one thing but think the opposite I bit the dust tongue kissing

documents in a smoke stack faith is harder to swallow than pride turning our throats black I want my home back I know that's not an available option it's the way that I'm walking in between a cradling coffin that just makes me pace myself if half the battle's done right the other half won't take my health while jacking my shadow's sunlight to crack it open and find the space between my breaths are desolate life is just a lie with an effinate and death is definite but after I scratched the surface. I never saw the karma before the storm acts so nervous. When a boy writes off the world, it's done with

sloppy misspelled words if a girl writes off the world is done in cursive. I'm searching for her. Can you hear me love? Can you hear me love? Can you hear me love? Can you hear me love? I'm going to be.

You know,