Rev Left Radio - The Bush Years: 9/11, War Crimes, and Economic Collapse

Episode Date: April 8, 2026

In this episode, public school history teacher Gianni joins Breht to trace the historical roots of our current political and economic crisis -- democratic breakdown, endless war, institutional distrust, rising authoritarianism, and deepening inequality -- back through the George W. Bush administration and the early 2000s. Together, they explore the contested election of 2000 and the Supreme Court's decisive intervention, the burial of that crisis in American political memory, the continuation and intensification of neoliberal economics through tax cuts, deregulation, and financialization, the role of No Child Left Behind in reshaping public education along market lines, the rise of neoconservatism and the ideological drive toward the Iraq War, the structural forces behind U.S. imperial policy across administrations, the relationship between U.S. foreign policy and Israeli strategic interests, the 2008 financial collapse and the total lack of accountability for elites, the devastation of working-class communities through war and economic crisis, the transition from Bush to Obama and the limits of liberal restoration, the conditions that gave rise to Trump, and more! Follow Gianni and The People's Classroom on Instagram @thepeoplesclassroom315    Check out his full lectures on YouTube HERE ---------------------------------------------------- Check out our NEW REV LEFT MERCH with Goods For The People HERE Support Rev Left and get access to bonus episodes: www.patreon.com/revleftradio Make a one-time donation to Rev Left at BuyMeACoffee.com/revleftradio Follow, Subscribe, & Learn more about Rev Left Radio https://revleftradio.com/

Hello everybody and welcome back to Rev Left Radio. All right. On today's episode, we have back on the show, our friend Gianni from the People's Classroom. He was on last year to talk about Reagan and tracing a through line from the Reagan administration and, you know, exploring all the policies and the shift into neoliberalism from Reagan and then connecting that up with the rise of Trump. And so I had him back on to do another iteration kind of like that, but this time with the George Bush years, right? the war on terror, the Iraq war, 9-11, the 2008 financial crisis. And so we're going to explore the Bush years through the lens of retrospect, right? Through the lens of the Trump years to try to once again connect these historical iterations with the current situation,

the world and Americans in particular find themselves in with Trump. So we go through 9-11, the war on terror, the Iraq war, Israel's role, the neo-conservative role in the Bush administration. the lies, the conscious, purposeful lies that were crafted after 9-11 to get us into Iraq, the 2008 financial crisis, the rise of Obama instead of reforming the system in any meaningful way, simply stabilized it and created the conditions for the rise of Trump, who takes all the anger and despair from the cumulative effect of decades of neoliberalism and turns it back into not only a reactionary fascistic project, but actually one that re-entrenches the same processes and issues that his campaign was presented in a fake populist right-wing way,

presented as if it were the cure to. So this is another great installation of this basically ongoing series where Gianni and I kind of take one administration at a time, not in chronological order, but bouncing around from Reagan through Trump and kind of explain the trajectory. of American capitalism, imperialism over the years. So this is a treat. Also, if you like what we do here at RevLeft Radio, you can support us on patreon.com forward slash RevLeft Radio.

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forward slash RevLeft Radio. I'll link to that in the show notes. and that just helps this project continue on, you know. It really is the, it really allows this to go on. We're nine years in. Next February will be a full decade of Rev left and we could not do it without our supporters. We'll never run an ad. We never take corporate money.

We never, nobody would give it to us anyway. We are 100% independent left wing media and we depend because of that on our supporters and they've always come to support the show and I really appreciate it. All right. Without further ado, here is my conversation with Gianni from the People's Classroom on the Bush years, neoliberalism, the Iraq War, and how it all continues to lead up to the modern situation. Enjoy. My name is Gianni Paul. I'm a longtime public high school social studies teacher in New York, and I'm actually coming up on close to a year now that I've been running the People's Classroom, which is an in-person and recorded for YouTube lecture series on history and current events from the working class perspective.

We cover topics ranging from the history of Palestine and the genocide today to anti-imperialist movements and U.S. regime change to domestic issues, like the more radical history of the civil rights movement and the Black Panther Party and other buried aspects of history. You know, basically, I have amassed a ton of material over my 15-year teaching career on a plethora of different topics that I have, you know, really poured my heart and soul into that I think would be valuable for people to learn from, especially the pieces of U.S. and world history that are often completely ignored or missing the oppressed, you know, perspective. Now our social studies curriculums are designed to purposely spread misinformation and half-truths, or now they're just straight up, you know, mandating Prager You videos in some public schools, which is a whole other, you know, despicable issue. but, you know, it leads to Americans to grow up with this warped mindset as to what the country is really all about, and it makes it so that a typical person is unable to grapple and reconcile with the past in order to act appropriately in the present. And I want to rectify that, you know, as much as I possibly can. And that's my ultimate goal with the people's classroom. And, you know, I just want to say a huge thank you, you know, to you, Brett, obviously for all the incredible work you do,

but especially for inviting me on a few months ago and asking me to come back today. You know, it's really helped me to expand my reach and for my lessons to be viewed by, more people. It was so wonderful to see such a positive reception to the episode I was on for the Reagan presidency. It was honestly, it was a huge honor when I saw that you picked it as one of your best of us for 2025. It truly meant a lot. And it's also one of the reasons why I feel like I've been able to branch out a little bit and offer some unique things with the people's classroom. You know, just a month ago, I were able to hold a special screening in my local city of Abby Martin's incredible new documentary Earth's Greatest Enemy and the catastrophic impacts the U.S. Empire

has on the environment. And we even got to do a virtual Q&A with Abby that I got to host afterwards. So it was awesome. And I feel like that was in large part due to you providing me with a platform and lending credibility to what I'm doing. So again, I cannot thank you enough. I'm really looking forward to this conversation. There are so many important connections and lessons for today that I really want people to understand about the Bush era. Yeah, well, that's awesome.

And I really appreciate the kind words. It's really cool to see that you've gotten more attention on your genuinely great work after that. and hopefully this increases the amount of people that come across to your work because it really is great. And I knew when I had you on that first time, not only was it going to be a best-up because it's so crucial to understand that Reagan to Trump movement, which I think is crucial now. But the way that you deliver the information is super accessible while still being intellectually serious and rigorous and deep. And so I knew when we hung up the conversation that first time that it was going to be a great episode and people were going to respond well. And I knew that I was going to have you back. So we were going to go through several other presidents.

And we're not doing it in chronological order. We're doing obviously George, you know, George Walker Bush today, the younger one, you know, 9-11, 2008 financial crisis, all that stuff. We'll get into it. But, you know, the Reagan to Trump jump is, you know, we covered that. It's clear. It's in some sense, you know, Reagan is the, as we said in that episode, I believe, inaugurating what we now in retrospect call neoliberalism. and Trump is perhaps the crescendo of that broken period. I often think about Reagan, more or less, ending FDR's New Deal,

and on behalf of capital restructuring not only the domestic economy, but by extension of hegemony, the global economy in so many ways. And it was not in the interest of working people here or abroad. It was in the interest of capital, and specifically multinational capital and financialized capital. But, you know, Bush brings us into an interesting different era, right? If Reagan was the beginning of the 80s, we went through Clinton in the 90s, Bush is president at this crucial period of time for a lot of reasons, right? Obviously 9-11, it ends in the finance.

It starts with 9-11, goes through the war on terror, catastrophic wars in West Asia, ends with the financial crisis, gives rise to Obama, and we'll talk about that. But also for me personally, I was born in 1989. so I'm coming into political consciousness. I obviously, as many listeners probably share, I remember where I was when 9-11 happened. I watched it live on TV in my seventh grade classroom. I remember protesting the Iraq War as a teenager. This is the Bush years were the period of time

that I came into political consciousness. And so it's a crucial time for my own development and my own memory formation as a human being under those years. Before we get into the actual questions, Do you want to say any like, you know, 30,000 foot comments about the Bush ears or your relationship to them, et cetera, before we get into the details? Yeah, and that's actually what I'm going to focus on first is exactly what you said. Like, these were pivotal years of my life and really helped to form, like, who I am today. So, like, I just want to pretty much launch off, like, what you were talking about.

That's exactly why this was such a pivotal moment for me, just on a personal level. So that's kind of what I was going to start with. Cool. Yeah. And I also just wanted to quickly say that there has been, and, you know, frustratingly, for folks, like us, in the face of Trump, there's been this pathetic liberal nostalgia for the Bush years, as if, you know, Bush is like, you know, he did polite politics better, you know, at least they had decorum, you know, now with the New Iran War, it's like, at least Bush tried to convince us of

WMDs before he went into Iraq. And so I think one of the goals of this episode, among others, is to kind of dismantle any remaining nostalgia, not that our audience will have any, but, you at least it will be better equipped to go out into the world and put an end to any liberal nostalgia that us and our listeners come across going forward because it's, yeah, it's grotesque. Those are exactly the points I'm going to hammer home, so I'm super excited about that. Well, in that case, I'll shut up and hand it over to you. That's great. Yeah, but let's go ahead and get into the question. So to begin, can you kind of walk us through the seemingly forgotten historical context of the election of 2000 and how George W. Bush became president in the first place?

why has this all important history been so thoroughly buried? And what does its burial tell us about how American political memory gets managed? Yeah. So I'm going to start by bringing this down to the personal level, just like you did, and then kind of broadening the scope from there. But, you know, like, for me on a personal level, the election of 2000 was what I believe was the election that really, like, got me interested in politics in the first place. Like, it was definitely a turning point. You know, I was in high school at the time, and I remember the buildup to the election. My 11th grade social studies teacher gave us a political spectrum survey of like 20 questions. And by the end, it told you whether you were more liberal or more conservative. Now, you know, mind you, like looking

back, the survey was incredibly restrictive. It didn't have like a communist outcome, which, you know, shows you how limited the political spectrum in the U.S. actually is. But I remember I scored like the most liberal you could possibly score on the survey. And all my conservative friends were just shocked. And it was, you know, kind of an eye-opening experience because most of the questions boiled down to like, hey, should poor people be allowed to live and breed the same air as you? You know, and I was stunned. And I heard some people say no to such basic things. But, you know, the results of that survey and the conversations we had in class is what got me

interested in politics and made me pay much closer attention to the 2000 election. And also for the first time, like, I started getting into some heated debates with my very close friends about politics. And, you know, for example, two of my absolute best friends in the world of one of which at the time actually had Tumblr as his AOL instant messenger screen name, which, for those who don't remember, was George W. Bush's Secret Service nickname. And my other buddy who was a Dide in the World Conservative, you know, ended up joining the military during college. You know, all of us would get into it from time to time, and our teacher would chime in as well. And I'll never forget

our teacher telling us the classic conservative line of, if you aren't a liberal in your teens, you don't have a heart. And if you aren't a conservative by your 30s, you don't have a brain. Well, you know, if he could see how unprofetic those words were today, because I am still very close friends with those two guys. And that quote did not hold true in the slightest. You know, we have a group chat together with another good buddy of ours. And it's like, you know, 20% Sopranos memes and now like 80% communist adjutop at this point. So yeah. That's a great mix. It's been it's been one of the bright spots and seeing how people can change their perspectives and evolve politically. And I believe it was the material conditions and the lessons they thankfully learn from what we. are going to discuss today that has brought them along and allowed them to politically progress. And the reason why I wanted to share all that to start with is because, you know, I'm hoping your listeners can take away the same lessons both myself and my friends did from this absolutely pivotal time, you know, in our country's history and grow as a result. And, you know, those guys are also big fans of yours, by the way, so, you know, I wanted to shout

them out. Shout up to them. Yeah. But, you know, anyway, if we can actually, you know, broaden out to the scope and talk in terms of actual historical context for the George W. Bush presidency, like, you know, we're coming off the heels of the Clinton presidency. And of course, the Monica Lewinsky scandal. But the economy was like doing relatively well. You know, there was a budget surplus, which was absurd to even think about in today's America. And there were, of course, things festering under the surface in the country, you know,

all the ingredients for massive problems were there. You had the Columbine shooting and the bombings of Kosovo. And of course, you know, Clinton's continued policies of neoliberalism. And maybe it's just my, you know, like 16-year-old self looking back in a naive way, but I felt like there was enough enough of a veneer over certain sectors of society, those economic problems weren't as obvious and glaring as they are now. Like, I just don't think the American people were as tapped into economic policy as they are today. And I feel like there were more Americans who at least had like the illusion of comfort and still had some remnants of the New Deal carrying them through. You know, the cost of college and rents and mortgages had not completely exploded at this point.

And if there's this illusion of that happy little middle class not a life for like enough of the American population, then economic issues for those suffering under the boot of capitalism tend to fall by the wayside. So this to me, it really turned the election of 2000 into two key focuses. And number one was like, which direction did the country want to go on a social level? And then number two became all about like the personalities of the candidates. And honestly, like it was the corporate media doing their typical garbage job of framing this as a popularity contest and asking, who would you rather have a beer with, you know, like crap like that, but kind of on steroids.

And the campaign really was a spectacle in retrospect. And I'm sure most people remember the S&L debate parodies with Will Farrell and Dary of, you know, like lockbox and strategy. And the, you know, infamous kiss between Alan Tipper Gore at the Democratic Convention. You know, that sort of personal surface level stuff really captivated large portions of the nation's attention. There was not a lot of substance and that clearly, you know, has only gotten worse today. You know, the Biden-Trump debates were something that I don't even feel like idiocracy could effectively parody. these days. And, you know, since social policy was at the forefront, you know, Gore really tried to distance himself from Clinton because of the Monica Lewinsky scandal and they rarely campaigned together. And I think, you know, this ultimately hurt Gore because he did not really draw on the popularity and some of the positives of the Clinton presidency. Now, you know, of course, I am in no way arguing the Clinton presidency was good for the working class. Like, you would have to immediately kick me off this podcast if I was arguing something as idiotic as that. But I'm just saying from like a purely strategic. campaign standpoint, you know, it was dumb. And then you flash forward to election night,

and I can vividly remember staying up late with my dad, you know, watching the results come in, and it seemed like Gore was going to win. You know, Florida was initially called for him. But then by the end of the night, you know, we just felt like something was off once the networks seemed to be in chaos over what was happening in Florida. And people, I think, also tend to forget that Gore lost his home state of Tennessee and also lost Ohio, which, you know, to me tells you a lot. If he spoke more to the underlying hidden economic issues of the Rust Belt, he would have easily won

the presidency and not even needed Florida. Kind of like Hillary back in 2016. But anyway, like all the shadiness of the eventual recount in Florida was also just an incredible few weeks in U.S. history. You had George W. Bush's brother, Jeb Bush, as the governor of Florida at the time, playing

a crucial role. You know, and he ended up he made like 95 calls to the Bush's campaign's headquarters during the entire 36-day recount. So like there's super shady stuff going on there. And then you also had Kathleen Harris as the Florida Secretary of State and her direct connections to the Bush family. I mean, she was the state's top voting procedures official and she was also the co-chair of the Bush campaign. You know, so just massive red flags all over the place. And it was found that Harris denied over 360,000

new Florida voters from being able to vote by not adding them to the voter rolls in time. There were a number of polling stations and more gore-favored areas of Florida that seemingly closed early on election night, there were some gore-favored counties that all of a sudden were magically requiring two forms of ID instead of the Florida state law requiring only one, you know, like stuff like that. And then eventually, once the election reached the Supreme Court, I believe it really helped to show what a complete sham that institution actually is. Like you have this American exceptionalist illusion of what these Supreme Court justices are like. You know, they're so regal, they're so pure, they're so above and beyond bias, like, nope. You know, they are bought and sold frauds just like any institution born out of

capitalism. And the five to four decision in Bush v. Gore and the Supreme Court's, you know, 14th argument amendment, are, yeah, argument in favor of W is especially disgusting when you know the history of the 14th Amendment and its original intention. You know, like that amendment was typically used to enhance various groups' rights and more progressive time periods in U.S. history, you know, like the Warren Court era, for instance. And it shows how, you know, in a liberal democracy, reforms in progress can be done away with in the blink of an eye. You know, when you live under capitalism, it will eventually find a way to continue its course of dominance. So all of a sudden, the 14th Amendment can get applied to help a rich nepo baby like George W. Bush so he can become president instead of

enhancing rights for the oppressed. So, you know, that's how we get good old George W. Bush, you know, aka Dumb Reagan and his buddy, Mr. Halliburton Oil himself, Dick Cheney as VP. And then, you know, lastly and importantly, you can't. not forget about the classic liberal takes of blaming Ralph Nader and the left for Gore's loss in the wake of all this. You know, there was no accountability for the failings of liberalism

or the Democratic Party as a whole. No, no. Liberals began shaming Green Party voters, saying that they all just fell in line, you know, Bush wouldn't be president. And it is obviously a tactic they still use today, trying to shame people into voting for a neoliberal order that couldn't give a damn about them.

You know, you still see Kamala stands out there tweeting from their fancy brunches that None of this would be happening with Trump if you petty left us just voted for our precious Mamala. You know, but I'm sorry. I thought the whole point of an election was that you're supposed to earn my vote. But I think, you know, the most infuriating part of all of this, whether it's the election of 2000 or 2024, is how liberals always seem to hold working class people much more accountable

than their own politicians. Like they expect so much out of us to follow such strict guidelines and standards, yet they have absolutely no standards for the people in power. Like it's really perverse when you think about it. And it shows you how the Democratic Party and the like, they do not give a single damn about anything other than their side of the capitalist aisle winning. You know, morality and principles that just get thrown right out the window. Yeah. Yeah.

I mean, incredibly, incredibly well said. And it really was, you know, for all this talk of the stolen 2020 election on all this, this really was a by any reasonable metric stolen election. Again, not that Al Gore would have come in and changed things, but, you know, Al Gore would have put things on a different. path. Now, after Al Gore, would we have gotten Obama? I don't know, because it was precisely out of the depravity of the Bush years culminating in an economic crisis that somebody just even named Barack Hussein Obama in the War on Terror era could ever be elected, let alone the first black president. And we all know that instead of reforming the system, as Obama really had a mandate to be able, a lot of leeway to be able to really make structural reforms. His fundamental orientation was to

stabilize the system. And that is a rotten system of neoliberal capitalism at home and imperial depravity abroad. And we're still living in the wake of that. But again, we'll get to that in a bit. But yeah, I think I think you did a really good job kind of outlining the basics there and how that election was fundamentally stolen. And also coming out of the 90s, you know, I think like this is probably a product of me growing up in the 90s, but it feels like that that was the end, right? of an era in American life. Whereas you said, yes, there was still poverty. There's still imperial violence.

There's still deep, hardcore racism. All the problems of America have never, ever, ever gone away. But, you know, before, really before the economic crisis in a lot of ways, most people, most of the time, could live a decently, I mean, compared to today, at least, a decently comfortable life in a way that is genuinely no longer possible whatsoever. But I think a lot of the nostalgia for the 90s is that a lot of millennials grew up in the 90s and that's our childhood and we're always going to romanticize the years that we grew up if we had a decent childhood. Still, obviously, deep, deep issues. But, I mean, I remember where I was during

Columbine. You know, I remember getting called out of school early for like a dentist appointment with my mom and getting into the car and hearing about the Columbine shooting as a whatever, however old I was, probably fifth grade or something like that. And just like trying as a fifth grader to understand what it means that some kids went in to a school with guns and killed a bunch of other kids, right? Like that even just conceptually to grapple with that at that age was probably impossible on some level. But yeah, I really do think the Bush years are a turning point, as we'll get to in the rest of this conversation. And the election was the beginning of that turning point. You know, one thing that I always think about with Al Gore, at least, was, you know, this is the climate change guy.

So, you know, I don't know what other policies would have been enacted. I'm sure he would have more or less continued the Clintonian third way triangulation, you know, neoliberal bipartisan consensus thing. But it would be interesting to think about what would have been done at that crucial time when, you know, climate change hadn't really sunk its teeth into our necks yet, what could have been done with a president who genuinely knew the science and was compelled in some ways to, push through policy that perhaps would address it in a way that Bush was completely uninterested in, right? These are the years where the fossil fuel industry is really

battening down the hatches on this is a hoax. It's not really happening. Frying Fox News, boomers, brains that climate change is not something whatsoever they need to be concerned about. And you mentioned Abby Martin's documentary. This is the unleashing of that brutal fossil-fueled military empire that she details so wonderfully in that film, which is just this climate destabilizing machine, right? The largest non-state

emitter of carbon on the planet. Two huge, long wars, right? This is the opposite of anything approaching a green policy. So those are just some of my thoughts. I want to toss it back over to you before we move into the next question. Yeah, I think like the 90s was like the last time I actually believed in the illusion of like what this nation could be. And then from there, like,

I just saw all the cracks in the veneer. And if Gore was elected, like, maybe there was at least a chance of something positive happening. But once Bush got in, like, that was the end of it. And, you know, it's really what we're going to kind of expand upon in the rest of the conversation. But there was no chance of any positives taking place once Bush got into office after that stolen election. Absolutely. Well, let's go before we go into the war and stuff.

Let's go into the economic model. Because as I've said already and everybody knows, this entire eight-year presidency culminates in the financial collapse, the greatest one since the Great Depression. And in so many ways, you know, the economy has never recovered from that crash. So let's, let's think about what leads up to that, right? So in what ways was the Bush presidency a continuation of the neoliberal Reaganite, as you said, the dumb Reagan economic model? And how does that through line connect to the economic conditions that produced Trump and that we're still living inside of today, as I said? Yeah, there are so many connections. And again, it's why the dumb Reagan meme is spot on. But, you know, the easiest thing to point to is the Bush. tax cuts, you know, or the Economic Growth and Tax Relief Reconciliation Act of 2001. You know, it's just the same stuff as Reagan. Trickle-down economics expanded over a 10-year period. You know, reducing the top marginal tax rates, which are already incredibly low from 39.6% down to 35%.

You know, you got to remember, top marginal tax rates were over 90% during the height of the New Deal. You know, so Bush's tax cuts also phased out the estate tax, which for those unfamiliar is the death tax. So, you know, like rich kids could hoard wealth. They had nothing. to do with after their rich parents died. The act also allowed, you know, for lower payroll taxes, which starved Social Security. And of course, this was pitched as, well, you're going to see so much more money in your paycheck now. Like, nope, it's saved the working class, peanuts, like 500 more dollars in their salaries per year. You know, whoopty do. It's not going to do a thing. The act also lowered taxes on capital gains and dividends. It's all just a huge windfall for the rich,

and it ultimately destroyed the surplus. You know, the CBO did a study that showed the Bush tax cuts added over $1.5 trillion to the total debt during the decade. And then you also cannot forget that Obama made those tax cuts permanent. He ignored the sunset provisions in them when he got into office. And when Obama renewed them, you know, it passed with huge bipartisan support. The vote was 277 to 148 in the House. And as if we needed more evidence, you know, but it showed what a joke both of these parties are for working class Americans. You know, there was the quote from Steny Hoyer, you know, the Democratic Majority Leader, who said after the tax cuts, were extended, and I quote, there probably is nobody on this floor who likes this bill. The judgment is,

though, is it better than doing nothing? Some of the business groups believe it will help. I hope they're right. End quote. Like, I hope people understand how clarifying that is. These people do not give a single damn about a working class person. Like, oh, the capitalist class said it was a good idea? Cool. You know, let's do it. So, of course, you have to focus, you know, on the, also the massive increase to the military budget during Bush's time. When Bush took office, the defense budget was just over $300 billion, which is already too high. But he increased it to nearly $700 billion by the end of his administration. And this set us on the path we're at today where Trump wants to increase it to $1.5 trillion now. So of course, what this ultimately led to was the Great Recession and the subsequent battle out of Wall Street.

And that's such a critical moment for Americans to understand. Like you finally saw, plainly for all to see what a pyramid scheme capitalism actually is. You know, how the government is bought and paid for by the capitalist class. And now not only that, but we're asked to foot the bill for their insatiable greed. And what do we get in response to this economic calamity in which people were, you know, thrown out of their homes, lost their jobs, became destitute? You know, an Occupy Wall Street movement that absolutely had its heart in the right place, but ultimately learned nothing from the failures of previous movements. You know, Occupy followed that path of horizontalism instead of democratic centralism, and it got crushed. You know, it's an important lesson for people to learn from in these current times.

You have to be better organized. And honestly, like, can we all just please read Lenin? You know, it's one of my frustrations with the no kings rallies. Again, hearts are in the right place. But if you aren't challenging capital and have some actual concrete demands, you know, plus ways of accomplishing them, these rallies turn into nothing more than a spectacle to fill the ego. You know, it's the direct opposite of something like the Palestinian Solidarity encampments, you know, in my eyes. But the last key aspect of these tax cuts in Bush's overall economic agenda was the way in which, you know, they were designed to starve public education, which I know we'll get into more in a second. But, you know, to put it plainly, the Bush era was an acceleration of the Reagan era, just like the Trump era is a further acceleration of the Bush era.

They all build off one another as the ruling class continues to test the limits of what they can actually get away with. Yeah. I mean, it jumps to mind that for all our many, many, perhaps infinite critiques of figures like Clinton and Obama, they weren't raised rich kids. Bush and Trump in particular are completely dyed in the wool, rich kids through and through. Nepo babies to the core. Obviously, George Bush's dad was president, a huge figure in the CIA, a lot of Bush's cabinets. Because Bush is naive. He's ignorant.

He's incurious in a lot of ways, much like Trump, although Trump is like an intensification of that ignorant. like, you know, relishing in one's own ignorance and totally submitted to one's own ego. But Bush was very, I mean, you know, everybody mocked his intelligence. He was not a particularly insightful person. And so he surrounded himself with his daddy's henchman in a lot of ways. And that really continued to shape his administration. And in a lot of ways, you know, Iraq was this target that, and we'll get into this later, that his father had in his presidency was never able to confront.

And so a lot of that cabinet comes over into Bush Jr. And they are going to cynically find a way to capitalize on 9-11 to do what they've already wanted to do, which was topple Israel. Or I'm sorry, that would be awesome. To topple Iraq. And we'll get into Israel's role in the Iraq war as well. But I also wanted to say that this is a period of time as well for younger Gen Z types that might be listening. This is a time when pre-cell phone, right? So the first iPhone came out in 2007.

There is no real independent media. Yes, there's an internet, and if you are particularly savvy, you could find certain thinkers that you could read. But for the most part, 95% of Americans are getting still their news from the corporate media. And we all know what that entails and what that means. The counterculture to the Bush years was really felt, in my opinion, in like music. So I was really into like underground conscious hip-hop. you know coming up through my teens and they were you know very harshly critical of of

Bush and and that you know punk rock some of these musical forms is where you would go if you were countercultural in the Bush era but the Bush era is this time of evangelical religious fanaticism Fox News ideological domination and as you said I think the right way to think about his relationship to neoliberalism is this intensification and extension of it right the through line runs like from Reagan who was like union busting, deregulation, tax cuts, financialization, etc. Then you move on to Clinton, who as I said earlier is this triangulated neoliberalism, creates neoliberalism as now a bipartisan consensus, does horrific welfare reform, NAFTA, the repeal of Glass-Steagall.

These are all contributions to the neoliberal era from Clinton. And then you have Bush who comes in and, as you said, massive, tax cuts for the wealthy, a hyper-privatization agenda, further deregulation, supply-side economics through and through, and debt-fueled speculative growth. So you can see that this process is going through several decades, several administrative iterations, and is just deepening the process the entire time. And the very last thing I'll say, and I'll toss it back over to you before I ask the next question, is the Occupy thing. Now, Occupy, it came about, and I was a part of this, It came about really in the Obama years because the financial crisis happens, more or less in parallel with the campaign for the election, which Obama eventually wins.

And then there's this hope that Obama is actually going to fix the problem. And then he bails out the banks. And then you see this final sort of crack in the populace that gives rise, among other things, to the Occupy movement, which ideologically incoherent, fetishized horizontalism was quintessential spontaneation. for all its flaws, but was genuine energy from people that are being decimated by this economic, these economic processes we've been discussing, trying to grapple or grasp for a solution coming out of the late 90s and early 2000s where the political left in the U.S. was really anarcho-inflicted, right? Like, you know, the Animal Liberation Front, punk music. There's not a, there is not a real Marxism that is vibrant in that period of time.

But what I will say, and I would like to hear your thoughts on this, I was involved in the Occupy movement, right? I protested, I marched, I did all those things. And I actually think the failure of Occupy set the stage for what we're kind of seeing now, and I think you and I are actually contributing to now, which is the growth and development of a more mature left-wing response to the problems, which is Marxism, which is anti-imperialism. You know, there has been iterations like the genocide in Palestine, which expands people's consciousness to how imperialism works and an Israeli settler colonialism.

And, you know, they're sort of like tying all these things together. They see how these spontaneous protests fizzle out and get co-opted. And I do think that over my lifetime, for my emergence into political consciousness to now, that there has been a shift on the far American left towards a Marxism and away from the anarchism of the 90s and the 2000s, which I think is a signification or a signifier of the American left's growth. It's not fast enough. It's not as robust as we would like, but it is happening. And a bunch of variables play into that. But one of those variables, I think is the failure of Occupy. What are your thoughts on that? Yeah, I totally agree. Like as a teacher, one of the things that, like, I always just want for my students is like,

see your past failures and grow from them. And I feel like that's what we are actually starting to see with the left wing in this country is like, you know, what we did in the past, again, hearts were in the right place. Absolutely. Like, I was obviously a big support of the Occupy Wall Street movement, but now looking back, like, you can see the inherent problems inside of that protest. So I think exactly what you said, like, people now are learning from the past. And like, we actually need to formulate a more appropriate response that is rooted in Marxism that creates the tool set that is necessary to actually progress us forward and actually win something that can, you know, threaten the capitalist class. If you are just anarchist,

Like eventually, as we've seen throughout history, the Paris commune, etc. And like, those movements ultimately get crushed. You need to have a dictatorship of the proletariat and try to actually work towards that if you want to create a bulwark against fascism. So, you know, the fact that- You need to build organized discipline political power. Yes. Not just play defense, not just protest, not just disrupt, not just dismantle, but actually create an organized form of political power that can actually confront power. And in lieu of actual organized political power, you literally have nothing.

And they'll steamroll us every time. Exactly. Because they look to successes in the past. Like, that's what the Soviet Union did. That's what the Bolsheviks did. That's what Mao did in China. That's what the Vietnamese did, et cetera. Like they created the conditions that were necessary to actually create a dictatorship of the proletariat

that could ward off these advances from capitalism. If you don't have that, if you're not striving for that, like you will eventually get crushed. And we've seen it too many times. But again, like, that is one of the highlights that I'm seeing is that people are learning from the past. And that has been really refreshing, ultimately, to see. Yeah. Okay, well, now we've kind of covered the election. We've covered the neoliberal intensification of the Bush economic years.

Now, you know, one of the things that people talk about, people certainly hear, but I don't think really gets the emphasis it should, is the no child left behind policy, this domestic education policy, which. I think is a product in so many ways of the neoliberal ideology, as we'll get into. But you look around the country now, you look at falling literacy rates. You see 50% of Americans, I don't know if I'm getting these exact stats right, look them up on your own time to get the exact numbers, but huge swaths of Americans read at or below a sixth grade level adults. You know, we have an illiteracy rate, functional illiteracy, somewhere in the 20 percentile range.

in the United States, it's clear that other countries like China, for example, are surpassing our educational capacities. And, you know, this is the richest country that's ever existed on planet Earth. There is no reason that we cannot give high-quality public education to every single one of our children, and that would reap enormous benefits for our society. But the ruling class, the capitalist class, they're not particularly interested in, first of all, public goods, public schools at all, but also in a particularly educated proletariat or citizenry. The more educated, the more critically thinking, the more historically informed a population is, the more of a threat that is to the ones who sit atop this pyramid scheme of an economy.

And I think no child left behind is not necessarily this cynical attempt to make people dumb, but it's a neoliberal application to education that, emphasizes, and you can get into this, not only neoliberal metrics, but also like the rise of private education so that you start seeing in a really new way rich people beginning to move their children into a different realm of society where they have their own private education, you know, private school vouchers, all these other programs that we're still fighting with today as public schools continue to be under-resourced and left to rot. So I don't want to answer the question, but I'll just throw up.

my initial thoughts out there, but then also ask you to kind of talk about the No Child Left Behind policy, what it is, what its legacy is, et cetera. Yeah, it's perfectly set in a perfect setup for exactly the things that I want to take a deeper dive into. So, you know, in my eyes, as a public school teacher, you know, the No Child Left Behind Act, it's one of the most vile pieces of legislation, I think, in our country's history when you really dig into it. You know, it's right up there with any other neoliberal policy in terms of the scope of harm it did to this country. You know, to me, like NCLB essentially took away the soul of education. it took away the soul of our youth.

You know, public education has always stood as a bulwark against fascism. It's one of the last bastions in which the profit motive played next to no role. There's a place which, like, capitalism just couldn't reach its greedy tentacles into. You know, it exists to benefit humanity. You know, it's about trying to grow and nurture a child's mind in a support of environments so they grow up with, you know, empathy and compassion and all the important things the child needs when it comes to being a fully formed human being. Of course, you know, this was unacceptable.

to the rich. And going back, you know, to the Powell memo of the 70s, which we talked about in a previous episode, it'd been a long-time goal of the capitalist class in this country to penetrate, influence, and ultimately dismantle public education. Of course, you can't just say that to the public, so instead it was dulled up as, you know, saving education. School choice, right? Don't you want a choice in your child's education? You know, it's ridiculous. But, you know, to get into the specifics, what NCLB proposed was to argue that public schools are failing. Now, mind you, there was no actual evidence of this, but they didn't let a minor detail like that stand in their way. They claimed there was no accountability for our public school system, and the players inside that system, you know,

greedy teachers and their unions are sitting on their butts and doing nothing all day and nothing's being accomplished inside of our schools. You know, schools are not preparing kids for their future employers, and we got to fix this, and here's how we go about it. So the big conception was, like, we need to increased standardized testing and link school, student, and teacher performance to these standardized tests. And that's the critical change in NCLB. Public schools morphed into nothing more than a national scattering of test prep factories. You know, like the humanities, the arts, music, who needs that crap? Is that going to help you get a job? You know, it's time to grow up, but we've got to get serious about how we need to prepare our students for the globalized 21st century.

So it greatly diminished and sidelined, like everything in a school, a child, a child that's child might actually enjoy. It got rid of everything that might provide that all too important, like escape for them. And instead, you know, it's said that a student's worth and the teacher's worth is now centered around making sure the correct answer is bubbled in on a Scantron sheet. You know, teach to the tests became the major refrain in public education. And we can't forget, like, the NCLB passed in the House by a vote of 381 to 41 and in the Senate with a vote of 87 to 10. And if that doesn't tell you everything you need to know about this country, then, you know, I can't help you. But, you know, the impacts of No Child Left Behind are massive and are sadly still greatly felt around the public school system today.

You know, testing went through the roof, especially at the third grade through the 11th grade levels, where students were now expected to take over 10 standardized tests each year. And that dwarfs the amount of tests students are taking in many other nations around the world. And that added up to 40 hours a year of students sitting and taking these mind-numbing exams. You know, that's 40 hours. Students could have spent engaging with a teacher and their classmates in something actually meaningful that was connected to their humanity. You know, like going on a field trip to a museum or completing a cool project or engaging in debate, you know, taking an elective course. Now, the list just goes on and on, but no, your worth is now tied to how you bubble in these questions that give you no chance to explain yourself or express critical thought. And the question we need to ask is who benefits from an educational system like this?

And it's the capitalist class, obviously. You know, you think about how the private test prep industry exploded in the early 2000s. It allowed rich kids who could hire private tutors and take these private test prep classes to excel look like the smartest kids ever because they had the wealth to gain the system and advance in society as a result. If you were poor, you know, good luck. You're not going to be able to afford the fancy Kaplan or Princeton Review course. You're not going to be able to afford the $50 an hour private tutor. You know, you're on your own.

And again, it was designed to be that way. That's the sinister nature of it. It also made school a very tense and unpleasant place. You know, I was in high school when this passed, and the way in which our teachers' attitudes changed was alarming. You could tell that they were now feeling the heat. And any fun thing that we used to do had to get cut because there was no time for enjoyment. We just got to get you ready for these tests.

And I've obviously personally felt this, you know, the past 15 years of my teaching career because, you know, race to the top just continued all this. But, you know, kids last, like, hey, can we go on a field trip? Like, well, no, we have no money and we got to go get ready for the Regents exam. You know, it sucks. The most public school years, they're so precious. And that's what NCLB destroyed. They destroyed the joy of learning, the joy of literacy,

and basically just the joy of education as a whole. It's really disgusting. And it's all done, you know, because of capitalism, is to make some rich prick, you know, even richer and give that rich pricks kids and even bigger leg up in life. Which gets to the other huge and, like, major effect, which is the explosion of charter schools, like you mentioned. You know, well over 4,000 charter schools were added during the early 2000s,

and nearly two million students became charter school students. And if people don't know, like, a charter school, it's just a private school that draws funds away from the local public school in order to create more choice. You know, it's privately run, it's a for-profit institution, they don't use unionized teachers, they can create their own curriculums. And their true nature is to destroy teachers' unions and public education as a whole. It gets a manifestation of the profit motive in the school system. They're really vile institutions when you think about it. And then lastly, if you think in the long term and in the big picture, the impacts of NCLB are catastrophic. Like, it's in my eyes when we lost the soul of education.

It's one of the biggest reasons why, you know, we have AI running rampant in education today. When education becomes meaningless and you just need to memorize garbage in order to circle the right answer to pass a test, of course you're going to turn to AI for help with your schoolwork. Like, you're completely alienated from your basic humanity inside the school system now. students and even a number of teachers figure I might as well automate it to get this dumb work done since my soul's disconnected from it anyway. You know, and it's really, you know, it's all part of a long-term plan.

It's a capitalist Trojan horse to get Google and other capitalist organizations into our public school system and hollow out what's left of our students and teachers. Now, the goal of education now seems to be to turn our children to like obedient and docile workers. And I could go on a complete diatribe about the immense dangers of AI and widespread ed tech adoption like Chromebooks and schools, but, you know, I don't want to go off too long,

but there's that groundbreaking MIT study last year and subsequent studies this year that show how usage of AI is killing whatever critical thinking skills we have left, especially for children. And ed tech usage like Chromebooks is killing the ability for students to actually focus and truly learn and like engage with various topics and material. It's all defeating the entire purpose of school and leading to some dire conditions. You know, I saw a study just last week that concluded 12% of, public school teachers are now satisfied with their jobs. That's over 20 percentage points lower than the previous low just a few years ago. And that's insane, but it tells you a lot.

But I wanted to close this question out with a quote actually from Dan Walton, who was a professor at the University of Tulsa. But he wrote an article recently about what the goal of education should be and what we need to like get back to that I thought was really powerful. So I just wanted to read that quick. But he wrote, you know, we on the left generally agree that education is for the students benefit, not for the benefit of their future employer, and that students go to school not merely to acquire skills, but to develop an entire social and intellectual life, to have something good and to have it forever. And that is what education should be all about, but, you know, capitalism prevents it, and I feel like the NCLB is what set us on this path to educational hell.

Yeah, so, so well said. And you're not, you're not just speaking from scholarly study. You're speaking from inside the public education system as a teacher. So you see a lot of these developments on the ground in real time. You know, I often say like, you know, socialist revolutions throughout history, the first thing they've done is they rose the literacy rates, right? They got literacy, like in Cuba, for example, literacy up to the 99 percentile or whatever it is from much lower versions. And you always kind of think, as somebody living in the imperial court, it's like, well,

you know, at least our revolution won't have to worry about raising literacy rates because we're you know we live in in the developed world and and literacy rates are already high but actually now we realize in the 21st century in the richest countries that have ever existed that a socialist revolution would entail raising literacy rates to humane levels like literally human levels of literacy because literacy being able to read and write and think um in those ways they're crucial to the formation of a human being. And, you know, I'm a hardcore humanities partisan. Like, I think, like, you know, education is not to create workers

or little, you know, unit movers. It's to create a society of well-developed human beings that can critically think, that have the capacity for moral considerations, that are able to work with one another on problems, that actually can create the bedrock of the possibility of democracy when you do not have an educated, literate, critical thinking population, democracy literally becomes impossible. And obviously, even though the U.S. claims it is a democracy,

it is not interested in democracy, and it's not interested in a critically thinking engaged populace. They want to distract it, impoverished, desperate populace, easier to manipulate, easier to subordinate. And again, it's not a conspiracy. They're not going into a smoke-filled room, like, let's dismantle education for this. It's the logic of capitalism itself, particularly the logic of capitalism in the neoliberal era, applied to every arena of life, every aspect of life, including education. If I was dictator of the United States, first thing I would do, straight up,

ban private schools. Say every single American citizen, you better fucking be invested in public schools because all of our kids are going into them and they're all going to have to rise or fall together. You don't get to extract via your resources and wealth your children from the public school system, move them somewhere else and then take out resources

from the public school. So other kids who committed the sin of not being born to rich parents have to live in a decaying, you know, educational infrastructure while you've extracted your kids to be the rulers of the next generation.

It's grotesque. And that would also entail paying teachers. They are professionals with high levels of education. And they're not just managers. They're not just somebody who sits there and makes your, get your kid ready to take test after test after test.

Teachers are professionals with a highly socially valuable skill set that need to be treated like that. They need to be paid like that and compensated like that. And, you know, one of the grossest things about recent history was these fucking ice agents who you sign up,

you get your student debt forgiven, you get a 50K signing bonus in some cases and you make 100 to 200K a year as an ice agent. Showing that our society could invest in teachers like that, you know, but instead choose to invest in

a terrorizing Gestapo, racist Gestapo to go out and terrorize our own communities and kill American citizens and non-citizens alike and all the crimes that we're familiar with. But the last thing I just want to say is like, what is a socialist ideal of education? Well, as I said, I'm banning private schools and that it's collective, that we're all in this together. The goal is not to create perfect workers or workers that are just, just competent enough to generate profit for you, but they're to create well-rounded human beings, which means creating art, reading books, doing science experiments, going on interesting field trips, teaching, critical thinking, and moral thinking, you know, working together in groups to generate collective knowledge and solve problems together and creating education and schools that are actually fun and not hostile to one's humanity, right?

Not this, this doldrum sense of just preparing for the next thing. And I don't want to put that on the feet of teachers. Teachers are doing their absolute best. They truly are heroes in our society, and they have an unfair burden put upon them in this whole structure. And still, they do their absolute best. And some of the, you know, I have three kids, two of them are in school. I love their teachers. You know, I am always enamored with how wonderful they are and how socially necessary they are.

And I admire them and their work so much. And anytime I have a listener on Rev Left who says they're a public school teacher, I go out of my way to make sure that, like, you should be saluted. Like, you are, you are dedicating your life to one of the best things you could possibly do, which is to teach the next generation, even in these hostile conditions. So, yeah, I'll just toss it back over to you for any of your thoughts. Yeah, I really appreciate that sentiment because that's really nice to hear, especially when you think about, like, the way that our budgets are constructed

inside of the public school system in the United States. Like, it's really disgusting when you think about it. Like, the state chips in, you know, a little bit for each state that you, that you live in, but like the vast majority, it's just property taxes. You know, that's what funds our public schools, which leads to this huge dichotomy inside of the school system. If you're rich, you get to go to a great public school. If you're poor, you don't. And you're just kind of trying to pick up the scraps, you know, for the rest of the day. And that's why it's so disgusting, like you said, like with the fact that ICE agents get, you know, their college paid for and all this

other stuff or get whatever forgiven, like it shows what we value inside a society. Like the reason why China is number one in education. It's because education is their top federal budget line. You know, us, we chip in like five to seven percent of our federal budget towards education, and then the rest of it's just picked up in the slack with property taxes. Like, it's so disgusting. And I don't know if you remember, uh, remember Michael Moore's documentary, uh, where to invade next? Yes, yes. Yeah, like, it was one, it was enlightening for me to, when he, like, traveled to Finland and France and he saw like how other, you know, um, countries deal with public education. You know, in Finland, every single kid goes to the public school. So that public school needs to be

great. It's a simple thing. But we do the direct opposite and it all ties back to capitalism. Like, it's designed to be this way. We want to create a world of haves and have-nots. So we can exploit the have-nots. But like you said, you know, a vision for an actual socialist education is exactly what you talked about, like treating the full humans so that they actually grow up with compassion and empathy and all those things that should matter to really live a fulfilled human life. But we just, you know, our system is opposed to that at a fundamental level. Yeah. And that, that's just is in a process of breaking down on every level, including on the educational front. And so, you know, we have to start not only having our criticisms of the current system, but really

thinking through and advancing a vision of how to actually solve these problems. As Marxist, as socialist, as whatever, we're not merely critics of the system. We also are visionaries. We have a human vision of collective liberation. And we can apply that to every sphere, including education. We absolutely have to, especially, as you said, in this really horrific situation where young people going into college, like, what do you even do? Like, you know, if you told me 10 years ago, I'm going into computer science, I would think, oh, well, obviously that's a great fucking choice, like, brilliant, you know, I did philosophy. Maybe that's not the best, but I, by the way, love that I did that because. Oh, yeah, it's cool stuff. Exactly the reasons we're

talking about. But now that's increasingly obsolete. So if you're coming out of high school, like, as a young person, you have no fucking clue about where to invest your time, what degree to get, what sort of moves you should make in this economy that, first of all, is already hate you and is hostile to you, but is also being, you know, racked with these new technologies, particularly AI, whose explicit goal is to replace you as a worker as such. And then if you're going to make a choice, it's so high stakes because of the fucking debt that is going to be necessary part and parcel of getting that degree. So, like, okay, I'm going in tens of thousands of dollars of debt.

I need to make a really informed decision about what I'm going to do here. And then the possibility of making that informed decision is just totally in the air. And there's really no way to go. And that's just one problem here. So I don't know. I feel terrible for young people. And as a father of a 16-year-old and an 11-year-old, these are real live problems that I'm trying to solve in my personal life as well.

Well, same here. I mean, I have a 7-year-old and trying to figure out what history is. future is going to look like and what college is going to look like, how we're going to pay for it, like all that stuff. It's just really disgusting. Like these should not be questions that we should have to worry about. But here we are. Absolutely. All right. Well, let's go ahead and move forward and let's get into obviously probably the defining aspect of the Bush years, 9-11, and then obviously the subsequent war in Afghanistan and then the war in Iraq based on lies about WMDs, etc. So the neo-conservative movement really was the intellectual engine behind the

Iraq war. Many of those figures either directly influenced Trump's foreign policy today or trained the people who did. So can you help me kind of trace that lineage, what it tells us about who actually drives U.S. war policy, and sort of the neoconservatives in particular that were the engine of the Bush war on terror? Yeah, this is such a crucial point for people to understand. Like, tracing that lineage is so important because they trace back to the same thing. Like it, of course, simply ties back to capitalism and imperialism. Like, those are the root causes that bring us to the point we're at with Trump. So whether we're talking about Donald Rumsfeld or Hegsseth, like, the personalities to me are kind of trivial. Like, they're all there to serve the military industrial complex.

You know, capitalism, it's a cancer that must grow and exploit, which is what has led to the U.S. intervening in countless nations across the world. Like, it helped to create the material conditions in those countries that led to resistance movements and laid the foundation for the 9-11 attacks. Like, to me, you've got to go back to the cold. War and the U.S. intervening in the Soviet-Afghan War in order to really understand the context of all this. Like, the U.S. just simply couldn't handle the fact that literacy rates went up and land was being redistributed to the oppressed in Afghanistan.

And what the Soviet Union was supporting was a direct threat to capital. So it had to destroy it. And that's what led to the funding of the Mujahideen and the rise of bin Laden. You know, remember, bin Laden was once labeled by the West in the 1980s as an anti-Soviet warrior who was putting his country on the path to peace. You know, but the reasons behind why Bin Laden coordinated the al-Qaeda attack all tie back to the U.S. intervening and engineering regime change across the Middle East. If you read Bin Laden's letter to the American people from 2002, which is like almost impossible to find these days, you know, he highlights the reasons behind 9-11. And just to summarize a few of those things real quick, obviously said, like number one, the attack was due to the U.S. stationing troops in Mecca and Medina after the Persian Gulf War and the insane amount of U.S. military bases across the Middle East.

Two, due to those bases like the U.S. empire is a major culprit of environmental devastation. Three, he talked about U.S. sanctions and the death they have wrought. Four is an obvious one. The U.S. is undying support for Israel and the oppression of Palestinians. And five, he argued that the U.S. citizens in his eyes are fair game since our tax dollars fund all this destruction. And then, you know, to be fair, he also discussed issues of what he deemed as widespread moral depravity in the U.S. such as homosexuality and gambling. But, you know, I've got to say if you put on any type of sporting event lately and you see the amount of draft kings and fan duel ads you're getting blasted with, it's kind of hard to argue against it.

Or polymarketing, collishing shit. Yes, actually, great examples. Yep. But, you know, the key point was this. Like, 9-11 resulted from the material conditions the United States and its proxies created throughout a number of decades. Bin Laden was not acting like a comic book villain. Like, he was responding to U.S. capitalism and imperialism full stop. You know, the devastation he wrought on 9-11 is what the U.S. exports around the world on a daily basis.

And then to, like, you know, link this to all to Trump and where we are today, like, W's policies are the same as Trump's. And Trump has just dropped the veneer of decorum. It's now pure barbarism for the sake of barbarism. With W, you had this illusion, you know, of a rules-based order or whatever BS term you want to use. And you certainly had the capitalist press, you know, close ranks and protect him from any pushback or criticism after 9-11 in the buildup. to the war in Iraq, and we're seeing the exact same media consolidation for Trump today. Like, Jig Tapper, might as well get out his pom-poms at this point, just openly cheer this war on. Yeah.

You know, but for Bush, people forget, like, his approval ratings were tanking in his first few months in office. They were hovering right around 50% and dropping steadily. After 9-11, it shot up to 91%. And that's because of the boatload of propaganda that was just pushed down American people's throats. It's insane to think about, but it was all designed. I don't know if people remember this, but this is really nuts to go back to. You had People magazine labeling Donald Rumsfeld as the sexiest cabinet member alive and referring to him as, and I quote, a big flirty pussycat.

What the fuck? You know, just disgusting. But I mean, you also had the Disney Channel creating ads for children with their stars like Hillary Duff and Shia LaBuff talking about how much they loved the American flag, just like fawning over it. Like you have to go and find them. those clips of those Disney ads because they are absolutely unhinged levels of propaganda. Like, they are the actual real-life versions of what racist idiots thinks happens in North Korea. Yeah. It was like Starship Troopers level of brain damage.

It was just unhinged. And then he had Bush throwing out the first pitch at the World Series at Yankee Stadium in 2001 and the media freaking out because he threw a strike, which I guess meant, you know, like, we're going to forget about the fact that he did nothing for 10 minutes while the attacks were happening and he was reading My Pet Goat. in that Florida Elementary School classroom or that he ignored the August 2001 report 36 days before 9-11

that stated, you know, bin Laden was determined to attack inside the United States. But no, you know, he threw a strike with a bulletproof vest on, so he's a hero and the American public just ate that crap up. It's the same way to me, like a huge portion of morons today

ate up the Team USA hockey gold medal win at the Olympics and the celebration with that dork cash Patel or the Team USA World Baseball bringing in one of the Navy SEAL that killed bin Laden to hype up the team or whatever. But, you know, for Bush, all that propaganda worked, and it worked incredibly well. And now with the American people firmly behind him and anyone who questioned him being completely shut out of civil society, which, you know, is

perfectly represented by Bush's quote shortly after 9-11, which I'm sure most people remember, but he said, you know, either you are with us or you are with the terrorists. And, you know, with sentiments like that being popularized and supported, both himself in Congress could pass whatever they wanted. That's how they were able to get the Patriot Act passed. You know, passed in the House with a vote of 357 to 66. Passed in the Senate with a vote of 98 to 1, with only Russ Feingold voting against it. So that insane violation of Americans, you know, basic privacies went through in the blink of an eye. But, you know, beyond the Patriot Act, the bigger goal and the bigger ask was to push through a full-scale invasion and more. And that is always at least a little bit more of a taller order for the American people. And that's one of the most interesting things compared to what has

happening with Trump. Just think about all the hoops the W administration felt like they had to jump through to justify the war in Iraq. The ridiculous claims, you know, Saddam having WMDs, Colin Powell's pathetic and embarrassing presentation at the UN with what looked like a fourth-grader's drawing of a truck that apparently was proof that Saddam was transporting WMDs. You know, the planet's stories about Saddam having a human shredder to turn them into some cartoon-level villain. the New York Times and other massive publications just beating the drums of war with headlines like The U.S. must strike at Saddam

and how the Iraqis must be minutes away, you know, from launching a nuke. And of course, you also had, I know Oprah and other pop culture icons getting in on the action by airing show after show but how the Iraqi people wanted us to liberate them. He even had stories in Time Magazine for kids, pushing the propaganda on children that Saddam was a uniquely evil person who deserves to be taken out. And then, I mean, I'm sure you remember the French fries becoming freedom fries because

the French were on board of this war. It was just like a crazy time period. But a media analysis study in 2003 showed that in the buildup to the war in Iraq, 71% of American media sources were pro-war, 26% were what were considered neutral sources, which in my eyes just means they were also pro-war. And then only 3% were what could be considered anti-war. You know, it was an all-out media blitz to turn. public perception in favor of the war, and it worked. You know, capitalism needs war,

and the capitalist press is going to make sure it delivers for its masters, and it certainly did. You know, 75% of the American public were in favor of the war at the outset, and it's just like every other instance in U.S. history, the Lusitania, Gulf of Tonkin, the USS Maine, the Noriah testimony from the Gulf War, and the American people just keep falling for it time and time again. They really are like Charlie Brown, you know, trying to kick that football. But what Trump proved, was that you don't need to do any of it. You can just go ahead and start a war and trim all the pomp and circumstance.

Like, it turns out you don't need Oprah. And it reminds me of that quote from the Star Wars show and or. They say, like, the empire doesn't even bother to lie badly anymore. I suppose that's the final humiliation. And that is so spot on. Like, you don't need to do any of the lying

or justifications for war. At least 30% of the American people are just straight up fascists, I think at least, who are just instantly on board. And basically the rest of the, of us might post about it, or do our little state-approved marches, but that's about it. You know, like, the ruling class is very comfortable these days. And of course, you know, when you get to the actual votes for Iraq and Afghanistan, it was exactly what you think.

Like for Afghanistan, you know, it was 420 to 1 in the House and 98 to zero in the Senate. And Iraq was, you know, pretty similar. But, you know, it's so hard to get the Senate to agree on basic necessities for the American people. But you want a war and more profit to feed the military industrial complex, you know, no problem at all. And this lastly, you know, to close the the question out. Once the Iraq war was launched, and I'm sure listeners remember Operation Shock and Aw. And if not, it was the opening carpet bombing of Iraq before the land invasion in March of 2003. But that's when I was in college. And during that time, I remember watching it on CNN. They had a live feed of the massive bombing campaign of Baghdad. And all throughout my dorm, you heard people

cheering and screaming and chanting, USA, USA. And it was a pivotal, moment in my life. Like, it really showed how sick, depraved, and war-obsessed our society is. You know, you're watching the live slaughter of innocent people and your responses to cheer, like, not even question it like a little bit, just like a hint of critical thought. Like, of course not. You know, not in this country. And, you know, the buildup to Iraq, I think, is what truly set me on my radicalization path. You know, it was clarifying. And I think it helps to illuminate the point. I want to drive home to tie it back to your original question. Like, it does not matter what party holds the White House, the U.S. Empire will keep us in a perpetual state of war because capitalism requires

it. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, expertly, expertly said, and for those that didn't live through that period of time, like, yeah, you see the belligerence and childishness and absurdity of the Hegsses and the Cash Patels and the Trump's administration and just the, the lazy, sloppy, 13-year-old boy-ass propaganda that they pump out on Twitter with these stupid fucking edits and all this stuff. Like, who does that even appeal to. But that time in American politics was, in some ways, even worse. There's more skepticism now. There's independent media.

You know, this war in Iran doesn't mean it. It doesn't mean anything, but it's interesting to note that it is the lowest popular support of any war that we've ever fought since World War II, which says something about the effect of propaganda, but also at the same point, the lack of a need for propaganda. Like, why do you need propaganda? It's because on some level, there's still democratic input that you have to appease or you have to convince. And in a system, after 40 plus years of neoliberalism, where all possible, even shreds of democracy have utterly been dismantled, and the only interests that matter are the moneyed interests that actually fund campaigns and act as a donor classes of these parties,

you don't even have to do the propaganda. You don't even have to spend months and months trying to convince people of WMDs anymore. You just say, fuck it, we're doing it. And even in that environment, 41% give you the thumbs up. I mean, you know, they showed us that chart as if it's supposed to be like, oh, nice, Americans are waking up or something. But I look at that and say 41 motherfucking percent still are giving the thumbs up. Like, holy shit. I completely agree.

Yeah, it's disturbing. But, you know, you also have to understand this Iraq war. as wanted, right? This is not a serious response to 9-11. In fact, after 9-11, Rumsfeld was caught by somebody else in the administration who came out afterwards and talked about it, telling Bush, now we get to do Iraq. So right after 9-11, even though there was, and they knew this explicitly, no connection whatsoever between Saddam and the terrorist attacks, they were thinking about ways to do it. And to highlight that disconnection, Saddam, and after 9-11, got with his counsel and said, hey, actually, you know, this is kind of good for us because obviously the Iraqi bathists are like sort of the

secular government that are against in some ways, the regional jockeying with figures and organizations like Al-Qaeda, like they're at odds with each other. So Saddam, after 9-11, figured this is actually an opportunity for us to better our relations with America, to act as allies in the region against these, these sorts of groups. And meanwhile, in Washington, D.C. and in Langley, Virginia, they were thinking, how can we use this, despite no connections, no evidence, no compelling aspects whatsoever. How can we connect this to Saddam and allow us to go in? And they spent the next year and a half, because 9-11 happened in September of 2001, and we're doing shock and awe by March of 2003 in Iraq, the

Afghanistan war happening in between that. A year and a half from 9-11, they figured out of the way to finesse with the corporate media, with Colin Powell going and doing the WMD's bullshit, they figured out a way to make the two link, to dominate the minds of Americans, and to get, as you said, huge swaths, huge majorities on board with this criminal fucking war. And to think that George Bush at any point in his presidency had 91% approval ratings, unheard of, unfucking heard of. But I just wanted to make that connection. And I also wanted to say, you mentioned business.

Loden. And I've told this story before, I'll be brief, but I was 19 years old. I was going to community college. We were all at our computers doing some project and I had some extra time. I had finished up. And I don't know what compelled me to do it, but I just kind of like interestingly looking into 9-11 and some, and I stumbled across. This is in 2008, 2009, 2010, something like that. I guess I was 19, so whatever that equals out to. But 2010. I'm not great at math either, don't want to. But I came across the actual Bin Laden letter. And I was like, oh, I actually want to read this.

His justifications for the war. And I was like, it blew my mind wide the fuck open. I was like, holy shit. Like everything he's saying is like legitimate greed. Not the gay stuff, not the gambling stuff. But the basic argument is that the U.S. and Israel are slaughtering people throughout the region and have done so. Topling governments, staging coups, co-opting governments, you know, blowing up hospital, schools,

all the shit that we see today. And bin Laden is like, that's why we're going to attack you. And the American people, you look over in America, 91% support for Bush, the cheering, the insanity going on. It's like, yeah, those motherfuckers are on board. They're open targets. Whether you agree with that or not, that is at least a reasonable conclusion, not unlike somebody looking at Israeli society with 86% support for the war, 80, 90% support for the genocide in Palestine, and saying, yeah, this whole society is fascistic. and rotten to the core. You know, I don't think that means

that there's no such thing as innocent people and I still think bombing the Twin Towers and killing innocent people, that is my moral line, right? I just never, ever think, no matter what, that killing truly innocent people is ever justified, although it happens in every single war.

But I think we have to be clear about that moral line. But I just wanted to say that the Bin Laden thing reappeared a few years back, if you'll remember, on TikTok, where it started making the rounds, And people started like, you know, young Gen Ziers are now coming to that moment that I had when I was 19 in community college. They're now seeing that on TikTok, they're like, holy shit.

So like now a whole new generation has come face to face with bin Laden's explicit justifications for 9-11 and being kind of convinced by it. And I think that plus Palestine made the specifically the Zionist, but generally the American establishment elite, really think of TikTok as something that needs to be captured. And they've since done that. Right. Larry Ellison and that whole Zionist billionaire movement has taken control over TikTok precisely for those reasons. But I always thought that that was interesting. And when that was going viral on TikTok a few years back, it reminded me of when I was 19

coming across that for the first time. I'm like, wow, this is this new generation's response to that, similar responses I had. Yeah. And like my preparation for this episode, like I was trying to. trying to actually find, like, the original letter, the, you know, letter to the American people from 2002. It's, like, almost impossible to find. It's, like, behind paywalls now and stuff, and there's, of course, a reason for it. Like, they don't want people reading that.

So it's kind of interesting how they just completely shut that down now. Yeah. And if you'll remember in the Obama years, the right wing was tying Obama during his first run to Pastor Jeremiah Wright. Yes. Reverend Jeremiah Wright, a Chicago pastor, whatever, who had this 100% correct sort of rant at the pulpit. What do you say the chickens are coming home to roost? The chickens are coming home to roost, which I think is a Malcolm X line about JFK. That what Malcolm X said when he got silenced by Elijah Muhammad was in fact true.

America's chickens are coming home to roost. We took this country by terror away. from the Sioux, the Apache, the Arawak, the Comanche, the Arapaho, the Navajo. Terrorism. We took Africans from their country to build our way of ease and kept them enslaved and living in fear. Terrorism. We bombed Grenada and killed innocent civilians, babies, non-military personnel. We bombed the black civilian community of Panama with stealth bombers and killed unarmed teenagers, and toddlers, pregnant mothers and hardworking fathers. We bombed Gaddafi's home and killed his child.

Blessed are they who bash your children's head against the rock. We bombed Iraq. We killed unarmed civilians trying to make a living. We bombed a plant in Sudan to pay back for the attack. On our embassy killed hundreds of hardworking people, mothers and fathers who left home to go that day, not knowing that they never get back home. We bombed Hiroshima. We bombed Nagasaki.

And we nuked fire. more than the thousands in New York and the Pentagon and we never better than I kids playing in the playground mothers picking up children after school civilians not soldiers people just trying to make it day by day we have supported state terrorism against the Palestinians and black South Africans and now we are indignant because the stuff we have done overseas is now brought right back into our own front yard America's chickens are coming home to roost.

Violence begets violence. Hatred begets hatred and terrorism begets terrorism. On Fox News, they played this every day for months and months. You could not turn on Fox News without seeing Jeremiah Wright screaming about chickens coming home to roost and tying that explicitly to Obama. This is Obama's pastor and Obama had to come out and disavow Jeremiah. right in this grotesque capitulation to right-wing insanity. We all know how that goes.

But Jeremiah was right when he, Jeremiah Wright was right when he had that rant. And the Bin Laden justification thing is really interesting. And the fact that it's so hard to find now when I stumbled across it on the internet at 19 in Community College really goes to show that they have locked that down for very specific reason. Absolutely. Well, let's go ahead and move into this next aspect, which, which, really absent at the time. So, you know, I was politically conscious. I was anti-war. I had all these, all this information, you know, alternative forms of information counterculture. What you didn't hear too much of, and in fact, probably the right wing had a monopoly,

the conspiratorial fringe of the right wing, had the monopoly on the Israel criticism with the ideas of Zog, right, coming out of the 90s and these right-wing movement, Zionist occupied, obviously right-wing reactionary anti-Semitism. You didn't really see, the left wasn't talking about it and Israel's embeddedness within the system was just really not questioned in any serious way. It's really being questioned across the spectrum now and they are freaking the fuck out about it and I've talked about that. But Israel had a role in pushing the Iraq war. The neo-conservative movement and the Zionist movement are really in so many ways one in the same. They are embedded with one another. You might have, you know, Christian WASP-type neoconservatives that

that have their own ideas about why they do it and the Zionists who have their own ideas, but they really come together, the military industrial complex, all these different interests, but they really come together to form a really single unified whole. And when we talk about neocons today, like the civil war quote unquote on the American right, when they talk about neo-conservatives, they mean Zionists and vice versa. But Israel's role in pushing for the Iraq war, even though it wasn't talked about at the time, it has been extensively documented, right? The clean break memo, APAC pressure, Sharon's explicit encouragement, etc. We're now watching a near identical pattern with Iran.

So what does the consistency of that influence across two administrations, more than two, and 20 plus years, tell us about this relationship between U.S. foreign policy and Israeli strategic interest, and maybe you could flesh out the Israel interest with the Iraq war in particular? Yeah, for sure. So, you know, our foreign policy and the Israeli strategic interests are completely aligned and intertwined. Like, obviously, as a history teacher, I believe the historical context is crucial to properly address your question in this connection. But, you know, I have a presentation that I'm really proud of, one that you can watch on my YouTube channel on the history of Palestine. It's an over two hour long presentation.

I take a deep dive into the origins of Zionism right through the genocide in Palestine today that I highly recommend people check out to gain like an even better understanding. I'll link to that in the show notes. Yeah, absolutely. But just to cover like a few things. You know, when you look at the roots of Israel, you can see how they perfectly align with the roots of the United States and how it eventually leads to the interconnectedness of these two nations today. You know, both countries were born out of capitalism and settler colonialism. Those are the fundamental principles on which these nations were founded. You know, Zionism is simply the Israeli version of manifest destiny. Our nations were both born in the blood of indigenous people. And from those bloody roots, you can see the natural parallels and connective tissue, you know, up our nations today. And if you flash forward to the actual creation of Israel, the U.S. needed a proxy in the Middle East and the creation of Israel was the perfect vector. It allowed the U.S. to directly influence a region that's very much opposed to U.S. intervention and for very good reason. You just throw a dart on the map in the Middle East.

And the U.S. has engineered regime change or bomb destabilized or done some evil combination of all three of those things in just about every country since World War II. I mean, just look at, you know, what we did to Iran and Mossadegh in the 1950s. Like, it's pretty clear why most people around the world. view the United States as the single biggest threat to world peace. People around the world hate us, and again, for like very justified reasons. So we need an attack dog, one that could directly do our bidding for us and help maintain our influence over the region. And just like we funded, you know, the Musha Hadin in Afghanistan, and that eventually came back to bite us with 9-11. You know, our funding of the state of Israel is the same thing. But I could argue, like, in some ways, it's even

worse because it's like more nefarious. And that's because of the control they have over our government with A-PAC and because of how much money we send them and the ways in which it can easily be argued, those funds could go towards, you know, like basic necessities for the American people. But, you know, to discuss the clean break memo and its importance in particular, one of the problems with discussing Israel is that everything you find out about the country initially seems like some sort of whacked out tinfoil hat conspiracy theory that cannot possibly be true. But not only does it end up being true, it's actually like somehow even worse than what you

originally imagined. And it makes conversations about Israel. Like, it's difficult because way too many Americans do not have the critical thinking skills or attention spans to, like, actually understand what's happening here. But like, for the clean break memo, it's a prime example because if you walk through the steps of it, it's like, all right, wait, you're telling me that going back to 1997, there was a cabal of Zionists who ended up playing critical roles in the Bush administration, who wrote up a strategy to abandon peace in the Oslo Accord type of approach, start a covert campaign to get the U.S. to topple Saddam in Iraq so that it would trigger a crisis in Syria that would then allow Israel and the U.S. to wage a proxy war to ultimately topple Hezbollah in Lebanon

and secure Israel's northern border. Like it sounds like an insane strategy some nerd came up with to win a round of Siv 6, but it's like, you know, it's actually scarily true. And, you know, it actually makes complete sense that Israel would attempt to coordinate something like that. It's not far-fetched. It's perfectly in keeping with the original goals of Zionism, the Israeli state, and the great at Israeli settler colonial project, which leads me to the most important point I want to make regarding Israel, and whether we're talking about Israel influence the beginnings of the Iraq War or now with the beginnings of the war with Iran, Israel gives us an excuse to fight and to fight forever. Israel is the most convenient excuse we can use to beat the drum for war

after war after war. But one of the deeper reasons for it, in my eyes at least, and this may not be one that people would typically think about, but it's the role our educational system plays in all of this. Like, I think it's made us prime to support Israel like Pavlov's dog. Like if you look at social studies standards across this country, even in U.S. history courses, the Holocaust is prominently featured as like the sole genocide to focus on. And again, I just want to make a clear note of this. I am in no way trying to diminish the Holocaust or any idiotic thing along those lines. My question is, why does that seem to be the only genocide that ever gets any attention in our school system? You know, just about every kid across the U.S. knows who Anne Frank was, has read her diary,

or had a Holocaust survivor come in and present, and those are all excellent, powerful things for children to be exposed to and engage with and learn about. But why does it never expand beyond that? You know, why do we not have a Rwandan genocide survivor come in and talk to the students? Why do we not have an indigenous person or group come in and talk about the horrors their ancestors experienced right on the very land we are currently occupied? You know, why do we never see the connection between the horrors and Frank experienced and the horrors Hein Rejab experienced during her precious life? You know, why do we never seem to make the connection between these genocides? You know, we don't talk about that there were other oppressed groups also targeted by the Nazis, the Romani, queer people, the disabled, Slavic people, like political dissidents, especially communists.

Zionists want to monopolize this trauma and then use it to their advantage. And Americans are all too willing to go along with it out of fears of being labeled as anti-Semitic. Americans have been primed to the thinking that by supporting Israel they are making up for the failures of, you know, stopping the Holocaust, while also completely erasing the history that it was the communists, the Soviet Union, who gave countless lives to finally put an end to the Nazi terror machine and, liberate those concentration camps like Auschwitz, but, you know, no, no. To an American, by supporting Israel, they are saving Jewish people, as if they are Oscar Schindler himself. You know, think of how much more powerful our curriculums would be in this country if we actually

connected the dots and all these horrific genocides and understood that never again means never again for anyone. It would help our children to see the importance of solidarity like with all oppressed peoples. But of course, you know, that'd be a threat to capital, so, you know, we simply cannot have that. But, you know, to end it on a more positive note for this topic, I do believe the American public is finally starting to see through all this. I'm sure you saw the Gallup poll from just a few weeks ago, which showed that for the first time ever, more Americans sympathize with Palestinians than they do with Israelis, you know, 41 to 36 percent. And I can't tell you how incredibly powerful that was to finally see. Like, I have basically teared up, you know,

actually seeing that. And it's a huge cause for hope and a sign that maybe, you know, just maybe, things can actually change. Even though at times, you know, it feels like the propaganda machine and the U.S. and and Israel are all too powerful and these wars are inevitable. Like they don't have to be, and we can't forget that. Yeah, absolutely. And this goes into my theory of why Israel is pushing so hard. You know, Netanyahu has tried to get every president since Clinton to go to a war with

Iran. All of them for various reasons have said no. The war in Iraq obviously served their interests in a lot of ways. And Clinton and Obama and Biden, obviously, totally partook in bombing. and drone strikes and all this stuff in the Middle East, still doing their bidding, but going into the Iran, you know, war, there was obvious reticence about that across the level. But Trump was the perfect person to do it. His administration is really full of Zionist. He's clearly on the Zionist side himself.

And he has an ego that is, he has an ego that is manipulatable and also a complete incurious and ignorance that would allow him to be further manipulated. and he lives in an information environment where he's getting basically two sources of information, one from watching Fox News all day, which is just cheerleading and reflecting back to him, his own insanity. And then he has a bunch obviously of like yes men, more or less in the administration who are in his ear all the time, sycophants or that are manipulating him in some way. But Trump is obviously still 100% to blame. One of the most infuriating things that I've come across on the right is if you watch that Joe Kent and Tucker Carlson,

interview lately, they'll say everything except that Trump is bad, right? On one hand is like Trump is our strong leader, you know, thank God he got elected, he's going to save the country, but also he's this hapless victim of manipulators, right? He's the commander in chief, and yet, you know, he's a victim of being tricked. It's like, which one is it? You will never, ever see Joe Kent or Tucker Carlson or many of those figures in that space directly, you know, lay the blame at Trump's feet himself. right and they much rather just say that that he's this object of manipulation which i think is a

is a cop out on so many on so many levels i think the interest just aligned perfectly and it is dumb on from trump's perspective like if you were trump or in his position it is just dumb to get into a war with iran right it's like horrific but he's obviously susceptible to being manipulated like hey this is going to be like venezuela if you go in and you topple um the iatollas like you'll be seen as a hero. You'll be like the best president, certainly for Israel, but even in the history books of the U.S. You'll have taken down this evil regime and prevented nukes. And you can easily see how Trump would buy into that, right? Stuffing his face with McDonald's while he's watching Fox News saying the same shit. So, so yeah, that's just an interesting aspect. But I don't

want to take any culpability away from Trump himself either. So that's an important thing. But I also wanted to add this point, which is this strategy employed by specifically Netanyahu, but by Israel and Zionists more broadly, where they associate, of course, Zionism with Judaism. It's a one-to-one linkage for them. And so if you criticize Zionism, you criticize Israel,

you are being called an anti-Semite. Now, they've overplayed that hand so much that people are now waking up and turning against Israel. And on the right, this manifests as literal anti-Semitism, right? And they create the thing

that they're saying they're trying to prevent. So then in the face of more anti-Semitism, it's actually good for Zionism. Because they can point and say, see, the whole world is anti-Semitic. They all fucking hate us. Antisemitism is rampantism is rampant on Twitter, which is why I think Musk allows it to continue,

is because it's useful for Zionism to point to that and say, see, we're right. If you're Jewish, they fucking hate you, and Israel is the only place you can go to be safe. So they foment anti-Semitism. Antisemitism naturally spreads, and then they capitalize on the natural spread of anti-Semitism. And this is one way,

that Zionism literally hurts Jewish people because it increases, it consciously and purposefully increases anti-Semitism so that they can say, hey, the only real cure to that, the only real safe place for you Jewish person across the world is to come to Israel where we, you know, are armed to the teeth and can defend you. I think that's breaking down in so many ways. Most American Jews are actually against Netanyahu and are increasingly against Zionism itself. So that strategy is losing its grip, but it's certainly generating a lot of anti-Semitism in the meantime,

not really on the left in any meaningful way, as they often like to say, but certainly on the right. And, you know, when you go on Twitter, you see the censorship so much, but yet the anti-Semitism, like the reactionary fascist anti-Semitism, is still allowed to flourish. And I truly don't think that's an accident. They could cut down on that if they wanted to.

They like it being out there because it just feeds into a Zionist narrative, that they are the victims of anti-Semitism and that they are the only cure to it. That's such a great point that you brought up because you've got to go back to the roots of the founding of Israel and Theodore Herzl, who initially said, like, anti-Semites are going to be our most powerful allies

because they are useful to us in order to accomplish exactly of the creation of the Israeli state. So I'm really glad that you focused on that because everything that's happening ties back to the roots of Zionism and why they push for this in the first place. Yeah, absolutely.

All right, well, we have a couple, couple more questions here. I kind of want to shift gears a little bit. You know, looking back on the Bush years, working class and poor Americans, you know, they bore the cost in a lot of ways domestically, at least. They didn't bear the cost of losing their lives like people throughout the region and specifically in Iraq and Afghanistan did, of course. But, you know, they bore the cost of the Iraq war in the 2008 crash, right? Their kids went over and died in some instances. The homes were foreclosed. Communities hollowed out. The neoliberal globalization intensified. So, you know, less and less opportunities for people to be able to provide for their families, the opioid epidemic arose in the wake of that despair, et cetera, while the people who made all those decisions, of course, faced and continue to face zero accountability.

So I want to ask about that, but first I just want to put on the table that, you know, after the Iraq war happened, is raw raw the whole fucking time. Then it got it got bad towards the end. The financial crisis kind of put Bush's, you know, legacy in question. Obama came in, all this stuff. Then everybody started shifting against the Iraq war, right? Then eventually after it was all done, after all the people had been killed and all the fucking, you know, cities had been bombed and everything was finished up, then people started saying, hey, we're against the Iraq war.

And in fact, Trump ran in part on being a vocal critic of the Iraq War when that was still kind of edgy to do in a real mainstream campaign, but now it's become, you know, standard. But how can we repeat that mistake if everybody realizes it and comes out against it? it's precisely because nobody was held accountable, right? Everybody can have a change of heart. Everybody can chase the new wave, the new fad, the new consensus that the Iraq war was bad. But if nobody was punished, there's nothing to stop them from doing it again. So I think if you wanted to prevent the current Iran war, people would have to be in prison right now

who did the obvious crimes of the Iraq war. Since that never happened, since Obama never even thought about seriously pursuing such prosecutions, we get an increasingly belligerent, you know, Trump administration that has learned, not that war is bad, war in the Middle East is bad, but that you can do whatever the fuck you want and you'll never be held accountable. So with all of that in mind, can you kind of talk about how those processes are manifesting today and kind of creating the, I don't know if it's a realignment or just a de-alignment within the American population, but kind of the political residue and fallout

from that era. Yeah, this is without question one of the most important points I want to focus on when it comes to the key lessons of this era. Like you detailed, think of the devastation wrought by the Great Recession and the subsequent battle out of Wall Street. Think of the countless war crimes and atrocities carried out by the Bush administration, stuff that you know could spend entire episodes on like Abu Ghraib, waterboarding, Guantanamo Bay, the Battle of Fallujah, and a number of others exposed by, you know,

Assange and WikiLeaks. absolutely nothing was done about any of them. And Obama wrote in his garbage book about his inauguration day of how outraged he was that protesters showed up to demand Bush be arrested, he called those protesters and I quote, disgraceful. Like, do you have any idea of what kind of a soulless sociopath you have to be to call the people who want to hold a torturer and butcher of countless innocent people

accountable for their heinous actions disgraceful? Like, it's just so beyond infuriating. So of course nothing happened. Michelle Obama ends up taking little cutesy pictures with her hugging George W and them sharing mince together. And Bush just to go on with his privileged life. Now, getting paid hundreds of thousands of dollars to give his little speeches and paint his, you know, shitty little pictures. And throw out first pitches at the Texas Rangers games and sit back and eat popcorn at Dallas Cowboys Games in his luxury suite with the segregationist Jerry Jones.

And go on Ellen and dance around and laugh it up. And it's, you know, it's that George Carlin quote once again. It's a big club and you ain't in it. And Bush, you know, has been completely whitewashed in history and it's sickening. You have liberals today fawning for the days of W, even pointing to his immigration policy and how he was a, you know, compassionate conservative that actually cared about immigrants. It's like, what the hell are you talking about? This was the bastard that created ice.

He was the guy who did nothing as New Orleans sank during Hurricane Katrina, even telling, you know, Fidel Castro to shove it when he offered to say. send a slew of Cuban doctors to treat those dying. He was the guy who planted stories about John McCain having a child of color out of wedlock to tank him during the 2000 Republican primary. He's a ghoul, but it's all being erased. And I just, I can't take the historical revisionism, but, you know, mark it down. The same thing will most likely happen with Trump, you know, in a few years. But, you know, lastly, I think it's a basic analogy, but I can't help myself as a school teacher. But I think about it like this. If I was in the middle of a lesson

about the civil rights movement. And some students said something super racist. And my response was to go, huh, well, that sucks. Anyway, back to the lesson, kids. You know, like, what message did I just send to my students? I signals to them that it's totally okay to be a racist prick in this class. There's no accountability, no standards, no consequences. What message did we send to the ruling class by allowing the Bush administration and their enablers to get away with their atrocities? It's fine. You know, there's going to be no repercussions, and now we have Trump, committing levels of atrocities that put Bush to shame, like at least in some ways. But it's a natural escalation in my eyes. Just like a student test teachers' rules to see what they can get away with, the ruling class do the same thing with the

public. Once they see there's no accountability, like, what do you expect them to do? It's one of the reasons the ruling class was so brazen and continues to be so brazen about the Epstein files. It's why ICE can openly execute Americans in the streets. It's why they can wage a legal war after illegal war, they're basically spitting in our faces and taunting us at this point. They're just straight up saying, like, yeah, we are a cabal of pedophiles and megalomaniacs and war mongers. What are you going to do about it? Yeah, yeah, exactly right. And this has a long history, you know, you go back, like, what has really happened in so many ways, it's the accumulative de-legitimization of the system

as a whole. The economy is rigged. The justice system is rigged. The schools are hollowed out. You know, somebody can run on a campaign of no more forever wars and then go into Iran and still so much of the base who voted for him ostensibly because there were no more forever wars or hooting and hollering in support of a new, you know, possible forever war, a new war in the Middle East, the exact things that those people, Trump, Tulsi Gabbard, etc. promised that they were not going to do. And nobody does anything. But the process is slowly delegitimizing the entire system. Zionism is being delegitimized. the corporate media is being, has already delegitimized,

the average age of MSNBC and Fox News listeners are like 163. You know, they're not, they're not compelling, but the people in power are all of that age. They're all like really rich boomers. By the way, if you are a rich boomer, you had the best, most resource, you know, wealthiest, most entitled, comfortable life of any human being in history.

Not all boomers, white wealthy boomers have lived the most comfortable lives of, of any human being, any generation in human history. And they are still in power in so many ways. And it's not a generational thing. It's a wealth thing. It's a material conditions thing. That's the situations out of which they came that can't be separated from it.

But, you know, I go back and I look at other periods of time in American history, and we can see like Watergate, for example, as often pointed to as the beginning of the end of the legitimacy that was kind of, that was consolidated in the wake of world. World War II during the height of the New Deal, right? There is a general legitimacy in the system. But the Vietnam War and Watergate began to dwindle that. And I think we're continually living through further and further iterations of de-legitimization as capitalism, imperialism, plays itself out. And the Bush years were another iteration of this.

But if you remember, and this goes to my point earlier, after Watergate, after, you know, those crimes, which now wouldn't even be on the news for 12 hours, right? If, like, Trump was caught doing Watergate, nobody would give a fuck. It wouldn't even register as important, right? That is exactly the note I just wrote down was like, would Watergate even, like, make the nightly news at this point? I don't think so. Absolutely not. I'd be like, yeah, of course he did that.

Why wouldn't he? That's smart. Sure. Yeah, whatever. Move on. But if you remember, after Nixon, Gerald Ford came along, and he did not hold Nixon accountable. He said it would be bad for the country for us to do a trial and a prosecution. We're going to let him go, right?

Nixon got off the hook. Same exact thing happened with Bush and Obama. instead of holding these people accountable Obama deferred, stabilized the system now there's a liberal rehabilitation of Bush and the Bush years in a lot of ways and then now what's going to happen after Trump

is Gavin Newsom going to come in? Is Kamala Harris going to come in, Amy Klobuchar, Pete Buttigieg going to come in and learn the fucking lesson that you have to fucking hold these people accountable. It's going to be very unpopular with the right. Who gives a fuck? You got to do it. You got to have charges, you've got to have deep

investigations, you've got to put motherfuckers on trial for the many, many crimes committed. No, the Democrats are not going to do that. They share a donor class. They share a comfort above the on the top of the pyramid scheme together and they know that opening the door to prosecution for Republicans

also means opening the door for prosecutions of the many crimes that Democrats have been you know, have been guilty of and have abetted including the genocide in Palestine as well. So they're not going to do that. And then it's just a question of what happens next.

Less and less people are invested in the system. Less and less people can make a living in the system. They have delegitomized so many different aspects of the system. The ruling class now just like belligerently kind of does whatever the fuck it wants with no pretense of democratic input anymore. And it's like how long can this go on? And that's an open question for damn sure. But yeah, do you have any thoughts on that? Yeah, I think like I don't know if you saw it.

It was like a couple of months ago. but there was like a kind of analysis that came out that basically what the rich are trying to do is that they're making the bet that like the bottom 50% of society just like doesn't matter anymore. So we just need to completely forget about them. As long as there's like just enough of an upper crust of that kind of, you know, illusion of a middle class life that is really driving the economy by still going out and buying, you know, consumer products and whatever that we can just forget about the bottom 50% and hope that they're just not going to be able to organize themselves in any sort of revolutionary manner to put the pressure on us. And I think, like right now, that's kind of what they're banking on, is that

people are just going to kind of go along with the flow and hope that they don't really rise up and they can see how long they can sustain it. And they're building out the surveillance state to kind of embed that nomination. If they can get this AI surveillance state truly and fully integrated and embedded before the people get too uppity, then basically, even if down the road 10 years, 20 years, as the climate starts to fall apart, as people become more and more desperate, it as it's clear that there's a permanent underclass. People will want to rise up, and by that time it'll be too late. You know, you have AI facial detection.

Every single one of your movements is tracked. You're so embedded within the Internet and phones and all of that, that you will, every text will be acceptable or will be accessible to them, every post you've ever made, and you'll be locked down. And people will be picked off and made examples of, and the other people that see that will put their head down. And that's the future, literally the future they're wanting, is like a fucking Blade Runner dystopia.

And they view that as the best possible outcome. And it's really a race against time, a race against their construction of the surveillance state, a race against the real climate collapse that is already happening is going to continue to not even in a linear fashion go up, but in an exponential fashion. Feedback loops. We're already seeing, you know, historic heat in March. Like things are only going to get worse and worse. Trump is letting fossil fuel rip, dismantling whatever, you know, tepid starts to.

a green renewable future were possibly being enacted before him. And it's just like this belligerent, as I call it, death drive accelerationism. They are going all in on replacing us. You mentioned that they don't need the bottom 50%. Well, look at the data. The 50% of all consumer spending in the U.S. economy, half of all consumer spending is done by the top 10% of richest Americans. 80% of consumer spending is done by the top 20%. So they're making a bet because everybody asks, well, if they replace us and our jobs, who's going to buy all their shit, they've already figured that out. They don't need the bottom 75% of us to buy their shit. They can appeal to the top 10% and 20% who have all the money anyway and that can, that, you know, can consume at high, high rates and consistent rates.

They don't need us. And that's literally their positive vision, like what they want, their desirable outcome is this hellish dystopian. And that's what they're leading us into. And you and I and people that are listening and people that are organizing, screaming from the top of our lungs, we have to stop this. And I think it is growing. I think more and more people are waking up, but it's just a matter of the timeline and how quickly that happens and how quickly that waking up translates into political action that is meaningful. And that's why I'm glad you meant. Like the cop cities, like that's why they're creating those.

Because like if the working class does get organized, they have a foul safe system in place with these cop cities. Like that's the whole point. So they can absolutely suppress that and just keep. keep, you know, business going as usual. Absolutely. Absolutely. So things are coming to a head. Like, you know, we're living through a crazy time in American history and in world history.

And we have obligations. You know, we didn't choose to be born at this time. It doesn't matter. We have obligations in this time. And literally, everything is at stake. I don't think it's hyperbolic. Like our futures, our children's futures, our children's children's futures, future generations, the biosphere itself.

Like, could the stakes be higher? And then you look at the people in charge, you're like, holy shit. Like this is a dark, dark time in human history. But I still remain optimistic. I still believe in the human spirit. I still believe that these people will ultimately fail. A lot of people will get hurt in the meantime. A lot of people will get chewed up and spit out.

We're already seeing innocent people all over the world being massacred and dominated and oppressed. And that's going to be an ugly time. But I do ultimately believe that these architects of dystopia, will fail, but they'll only fail if enough of us play our part and fight back. And I think that's incumbent upon all of us to take seriously. Yeah, 100% agree. All right, let's go into this last question here. And I'll ask the question, but I also just want to keep it wide open for you to have any last words or any thoughts that you haven't got to yet. But if eight years of Bush produced the conditions for Obama and Obama's limitations, again, as we talked about, created the conditions for

Trump, what are some of the key historical lessons from the Bush presidency that we can learn today? and maybe what that means for where the society might go, you know, might move in the next few years. Yeah, I think one of the biggest takeaways is the importance of directly addressing root causes and not achieving just symbolic victories. Like, I can't tell you how at this point, like how sick and tired I am appearing about how we just need to get rid of Trump or just got to get rid of Netanyahu or just, you know, vote Schumer out of office. Like too many people think that if we get them out and somehow everything will be magically cured. Like, that's going to do essentially nothing in my eyes. If you get rid of one of them, another cretan will simply pop up in their place. They're just figureheads of a system that will recreate another cretan to shepherd said system.

You know, and that was the big push with W's presidency, like move on.org. You know, we just got to get them out of office and everything's going to be fine. Well, we eventually did that and we got Obama, you know, the single biggest political disappointment of my lifetime. And we already did the same thing in 2020 with Trump. You know, and it led to Biden, who fostered the genocide in Palestine. through people to the wolves with COVID, destroyed the railroad workers' strike, and basically laid the groundwork for Trump to return more emboldened than ever before. We've done nothing to address the root causes of what could lead to evil dumbasses like Bush or Trump

becoming president in the first place. And I believe it's essential that we look to the past and be much more strategic in terms of what will actually move us towards liberation. You know, maybe a little book by V.I. Lennon called What This Could Be Done Could Be a Value Here. I don't know. But, you know, it's one of the reasons, and I am, again, in no way trying to desecrate what they are doing since my own political party participates in them. But I got to come back to the no king's rallies. Like, I just don't see the point the way that they are currently constructed. You got to remember, like, these are all state approved marches.

If you need to go to your oppressor to get permission to march, then I'm going to have to go ahead and assume that march is in no way, shape, or form going to be viewed as a threat to the one who is in power. Like the ruling class, like we've talked about, they already know that they're incredibly unpopular. You don't care how many of us march quietly in the streets with our signs and little witty slogans. Like the only positives I can see is using these rallies as a starting point to better organize protests and actions that can actually begin to disrupt capital. And hopefully begin to radicalize some liberals or people that are beginning to move to the left. Or use it as a launching point for an actual general strike, which was, I feel like one of the big bright spots from the ice protests in Minnesota, we just need more of that. But if these rallies just stop at marches and then everyone goes home. home for brunch, like it's not going to get the job done. And, you know, the other message of these rallies

and from the liberal apparatus as a whole is ultimately just wait it out and go vote. Like, we've already done this so many times. And it leads to people like AOC and the squad and Mondani, you know, people that give you a glimmer of hope until they ultimately become just another cog in the capitalist machine. And in some ways, one could argue, like, these people are even worse. And it goes back to Malcolm X's quote, you know, what's more dangerous, the fox or the wolf? At least with the wolves, the conservatives, you know that they're trying to kill you. With the foxes, you know, the AOCs of the world, they present themselves in such a way that you think them to be a friend, you disarm yourself, and they stabbing in the back. I mean, my God, we just saw this week, Mom, Donnie threw his own

wife to the wolves. You think he's going to stand up for you, you know, when push comes to shove? Like, come on. We're so beyond the point of, like, voting our way out of this. And I'll go back to a Kwame Ture quote, but he says, you know, and I quote, you think voting once every four years is the end of your political responsibility. That is the height of bourgeois propaganda. It's making people politically irresponsible. Politics is every day. And I feel like people need to remember that. And I'll call myself on all this as well. Like my classes and what I'm trying to do in my community, it's certainly nice. But I feel like I could absolutely be doing more every second of every day. Just difficult. And I know you feel the same way. But, you know, one other crucial study that I want

to highlight that ties back to your original question is it's a Princeton and, you know, Northwestern study. It's over 10 years old now, but it's not like any of these issues have gotten any better. But the study was titled, Congress literally does not care what you think. And it shows that the opinions of the bottom 90% of Americans has essentially zero impact on public policy. It's only when the top 10% wants things done, does Congress actually, like, they swayed towards passing a piece of legislation? And that's really important, I think, for Americans to understand. Wouldn't have mattered if we voted Bush out in 2004. Wouldn't have mattered if Trump was defeated in 2024. It would have gotten another president or another politician who was simply there to work on behalf of the rich. There's no way in hell an actual working class person would ever be allowed to get anywhere close to the levers of power in this country.

The system is specifically designed to prevent that. And it all goes back to the importance of understanding those Marxist concepts of the base and the superstructure. You can make some superficial changes to the superstructure. You know, you can elect a few progressives every now and then. but ultimately they're going to be co-opted by the system and eventually serve to reinforce the base, you know, which is the capitalist system. We've just simply seen this too many times now, and we need people to break out of the mental straitjacket they are in that voting is the only solution. But, you know, to go back to the original question, though, and what will this second Trump term ultimately produce, you know, nothing good. We're going to have Gavin Newsom shove down our throats or the CIA spook Abigail Spanberger, you know, being promoted.

Or our favorite little rat boy himself, you know, Pete Buttigieg pushed on. on us yet again. When whichever one of these puppets end up winning, it'll all just ultimately lead to the ratchet effect continuing its cycle once more. You know, the right pushes the nation even further to the right. The liberals capitulate and block changes back to the left, and it leads to an even harder shift back to the right. You know, I guess I think I've finally reached a point where now I completely understand why the Black Panther Party used to sing and chant during their protests and actions that revolution is the only solution. Yeah, yeah, truly, truly. And yes, in the same way that, you know, liberal Zionists, including Bernie Sanders, will lay the blame for the crimes of Israel at the feet of Netanyahu and the Lekud Party as a way to distract from the fact that this is a structural produce of the Israeli settler colonial state itself, that Netanyahu is a figure produced by an underlying system.

And if you replace the leader keeping that system in place, the system will continue. continue on just under a new guise. And the same delusion occurs within liberals here in the U.S. That if we can defeat Bush or if we can defeat Trump, the system itself, we just get a good person in, a good guy into the leadership, that that will somehow resolve the structural contradictions. And it's just not the case. I always tell Democrats and liberals, you've been voting liberal and Democrat your entire fucking life. And it's led precisely here. Like, what will it take for you to rethink that strategy. And insofar as there are people that go into that system to try to make it better, well, you have to be ready to be confrontational as fuck with your own

party. But if you are going to capitulate, compromise, negotiate with the donor class of the Democratic Party, you are safe. And if you're allowed to get into a position of consequence, it's because they know you're safe and that you're not actually a threat. And actually you serve their purposes by renewing hope among the population that this rotten, decrepit, murderous system can be somehow made to be nice. And it just can't. And I don't necessarily think that Mondani or AOC think of themselves as doing that, right? They don't conceive of themselves as bad faith actors or whatever. They conceive themselves as most people do, as good, authentic people operating good faith trying to make a difference. I actually truly believe that inwardly they think that. But

without a systemic understanding of how this system actually operates, that's why you fall into that fundamental delusion. And so, you know, I want to kind of give them the possibility of like some grace, like they probably think they're doing good, but by by embedding themselves within the system and playing that systems game, throwing your wife under the buzz, cozing up to Nancy Pelosi, not voting no on Iron Dome funding, whatever it may be, every single time you capitulate, they smile, nod, and take a little bit more. And before you know it, you are just a product of this machine. And we see it time and time and time again. So what does that mean? It means that real change will have to come from outside the system. That's not to say that an outsider can't

rise up and fight within the electoral terrain, but that can't be an individual going for a career. That has to be a product of an underlying movement that can come up, fight the good fight, not worry about their career, not worry about advancing and becoming a senator and doing this, but using the bully pulpit of your position to advance the struggle for the working class and for the international proletarian for the future of humanity and being willing to nuke your career advancements and then falling back down and being absorbed back into the movement from whence you came. In lieu of that, you just will have careerists and opportunists, finding ways to advance themselves, even if they have a good line or run

a good campaign or even if they solve some issues on the margins, which are still important. I'd rather have Mom Donnie than fucking Cuomo as as mayor of New York City. There's no contradiction there. But ultimately, you're not going to be able to solve the underlying. And I'm not asking a mayor to solve

the underlying structural problems of empire. But I'm just pointing out the pitfalls of joining that system. And the only way to actually change things is to confront that system from a fundamentally hostile outside perspective. And that's why Lennon talked about not only the party form and political power organized, highly organized, but the production of dual power.

That we have to actually begin to do the things that the state does in a parallel way to be able to create the conditions for real movements that are self-sustainable to take on the power structures. Like, you know, we have to find ways of organizing ourselves, of producing our own food, of being able to defend our own communities outside dependence on the state structure. Exactly what the Black Panther Party did. 100%. And that's still a great blueprint for us to follow. And the very last thing I wanted to say, and then I'll toss it back over to you for final thoughts, is that, you know, we talked about mass delegitimization. We talked about the emiseration of the underclass in American society, you know, the lack of class mobility,

the lack of really a positive vision of a future. And in the United States, if you look back historically, when those frustrations emerge, Sometimes they produce something like a progressive force, but more times than not, they produce reaction, right? The anger of Bush and Obama and neoliberalism and neoconservatism produced a Trump that then went back and reintensified the very system that produced the despair that produced the Trump. And so reactionary politics, this is a settler colonial imperial society, right? Like it is fundamentally structured to break to the right when it breaks. And, and, you know,

maybe some people will wake up and realize that right-wing populism is never a solution, that fascism never solves any problems, right? They always just go out in spectacular displays of violence and gore and mass murder. But how many iterations of that will it take for enough people to realize that? And again, the whole American psychology, as we've discussed today, is geared towards taking all that aim. anger and fed upness with the system and putting it into reactionary politics instead of truly internationalist, collective and liberatory ones. And that's part of our task as well and a huge

obstacle we have to overcome. For sure. Yeah, I think just the biggest thing I want to focus on to close out is just can I just please have people focus on root causes? That is so important. Like I've been having the exact same debate with my dad like every single week and he just keeps coming back to we just got to get Trump out. We just got to get Trump out. Like, that's not going to cut it anymore. And that's why, like, hopefully the work that I'm doing and obviously the work that you've done forever, Brett, is just like trying to educate people to understand those systems of power and actually find the weak points to actually begin to challenge them. If we don't do that, we're just going to keep having the same conversations over and over again and not really addressing

those root causes. Exactly. Well, Gianni, thank you so much for coming on another amazing episode. I really hope this is useful for people. You know, a lot of us that are millennials will have lived through this and we'll have memories of this. But we have a lot of young listeners, you know, teenagers and 20-somethings that didn't live through this period of time. And so hopefully this helps. And of course, the people's classroom is this ongoing political education project that you

have. Lots of your stuff is up online, which I'll link to in the show notes and anything else that you want to say before we wrap up and let listeners know where they can find you in the people's classroom online and how they might be able to help or support your project. Yeah, for sure. Again, like, I can't thank you enough for having me on. Like, it really is a dream come true to actually be on Rev. Left Radio. So it's just super cool. But just for a few things of ways that people can follow me. On Instagram, I'm pretty active on there. So it's at the people's classroom 315 for my Instagram handle. And then on YouTube, you know, I record every single one of my lectures and upload it pretty much right away. So that's at the people's classroom. So that should be easy enough for people to find. And then I have some two exciting presentations that I'm really looking forward to come. coming up, actually, one's on Tuesday. So I'm doing a brief history of the Soviet Union, Part 1 on March 24th, and then Part 2 is going to be March 31st. And then my next presentation is, Why Are We Made to Hate China, which is Part 1's April 28th, and Part 2's May 5th.

So I will record those and upload those to my YouTube page. But I'm definitely looking forward to those presentations in particular. Wonderful. Yeah, so go support, go follow on IG and YouTube. I'll link to all that in the show notes. I'll link to your history of Palestine in the show notes as well. I'll link to our previous episode on Reagan, and I'd love to have you to come back. Maybe we can talk about the Obama years, the Clinton years next time, and continue to flesh out this basically tour of neoliberalism through the administrations that produced and reproduced it. So this is, I think, a useful intervention in recent modern American history, and I really appreciate all the amazing work that you're doing. And without a doubt, you'll be back on as soon to talk more about this period of history.

Again, thank you so much, Brett. It's really been a dream come true.