Rev Left Radio - The Deprogram: Marxism and Independent Left Media

Episode Date: February 18, 2022

Breht was given the honor of being the *first ever guest* on The Deprogram podcast, a new(er) show hosted by Hakim, JT from Second Thought, and Yugopnik, all of whom came to public recognition through their separate YouTube channels. In this episode, they interview Breht on his life and background, the harassments he's faced by the Right and the State, the role of independent left media, what independent left media should NOT do, and much, much more. Subscribe to The Deprogram on your preferred podcast app, and support them here: https://www.patreon.com/TheDeprogram Sub to Yugopnik:https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCs8mbJ-M142ZskR5VR0gBig Sub to Hakim:https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCPPZoYsfoSekIpLcz9plX1Q Sub to Second Thought: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCJm2TgUqtK1_NLBrjNQ1P-w/featured ----- Support Rev Left Radio: https://www.patreon.com/RevLeftRadio or make a one time donation: PayPal.me/revleft LEARN MORE ABOUT REV LEFT RADIO: www.revolutionaryleftradio.com

Hello, everyone, and welcome. to a very special episode of the D-Program. This is our first ever guest episode, and we are super excited to have with us, Brett, from Rev Left. Hakeem and I have both been on the show before, and we both had a great time, so we're glad to finally be able to return the favor. As a personal note, RevLeft is one of my absolute favorite podcasts,

and it was critical in helping me develop my understanding of theory when I was just a tiny little baby leftist. So, Brett, thanks for coming on. Hell yeah, thank you so much for having me on. I'm a fan of all of your work. I really loved your presence on YouTube and it was very excited when I heard you're coming over to the podcast world. I do have to say, J.T., I heard the last teaser for your most recent episode,

and I just want to extend my condolences for your harsh case of Havana Syndrome. Hope you can make it through the episode. I know. It's the end for me. I'm feeling pretty yucky. But for those who don't know who you are and what you get up to, why don't you take a second and just tell the listeners a little bit about yourself and about the podcast and what you do? Sure. Yeah, my name is Brett O'Shea. I started Rev. Left Radio, sort of left-wing political podcast focused on history and theory and philosophy at the very beginning of the Trump administration. It was actually, it started as a sort of outgrowth of local activism at that time, because if you remember in those heady days when Trump was on the campaign and then it became obvious that he was going to be the nominee, and then he won. And then there's that gap between when he won and when he took office. There's There was this rise of resurgent fascism within the country, and I live in a deep red state.

It was certainly present here. And right after his victory, the night after, I think I met up in a park with a bunch of other local leftists who we'd talked back and forth online for several months or years at that point. And we all got together. We said we got to do something about this rising tide of fascism locally. and that organization developed into just a broader socialist organization and when we would go and we would do rallies or we would do counter-protests or whatever there would be media engagement and I sort of became this de facto person that everybody would point to like Brett's good with words let them talk to the media

and out of that grew the idea that maybe we should have a media wing to our local organization just to be able to get information out you know we were thinking locally maybe regional You know, that was the aspirations at first. But it quickly burst the bounds of that and became a national and then like a sort of international show with audience members everywhere. And I've just sort of been, you know, writing that wave ever since. And we've also developed two other shows, guerrilla history, which focuses on, you know, proletarian history in particular. And then Red Menace, which tackles specific texts of left-wing political theory. Although now I think we're going to move into like reading anarchist theory.

even fascist theory, and just, you know, reading theory more broadly to deepen people's understandings and make this stuff accessible, you know, especially more accessible than it often is to regular people. So that's kind of who I am and that's kind of what I do. That's fantastic. I mean, the fact that you've created not one but three outlets for people to learn more, and they're all incredible podcasts. If you guys haven't listened to any of them, please go and check them out after the show. But I think we're all kind of in the same boat where we want to make this stuff more accessible to the average person because especially here in the States, and I think you can attest to this, not a whole lot of people can actually

put into words what the problems are. We see that there's a lot going on and there's a lot wrong with the status quo, but sometimes it's difficult to kind of connect the dots. So what I want to talk about today is kind of the role that we play, the role of alternative media, whether that's podcast or YouTube channels or, you know, bloggers or whatever, the role we play, the vanguard. In the radicalization of normal people, because I think that is super criticalicalical going forward and building that class consciousness, both here in the States and abroad, which Hakeem and Ugopnik can attest to.

So before we get into that, though, let's talk a little bit about what your personal political development look like, because I'm sure we all have pretty varied stories. What was your political development like? It sounds like you were a socialist well before the Trump thing came along, which radicalized a lot of, you know, former liberals here in the states. But what was it for you? Yeah, no, it goes way back, you know, and you look back retrospectively on your life and your development or really history at all. It gains more clarity. So at the time I was just sort of, you know, going through my life, but looking back, I can see a clear trajectory. It really starts, I won't go too deep into the biography part of it, but it really starts, like, as a child, you know, living in a lower working class family would often come home when the electricity would be turned off or the car was being repossessed or, you know, all these different things that just the day-to-day grind of not complete immiseration, but, you know, the lower end of the working class.

And so I had that background experience in that milieu, sort of. And as I grew up and I became politically engaged, of course, there's only two options in the U.S., conservative or liberal. My dad was actually a really big conservative talk radio guy. So for lots of years in my life, I would listen to right-wing talk radio. And in fact, my political consciousness sprang up in and through my reaction to that. And I just always, even before my political ideology was even coherent, I just felt inside that they were wrong, you know. And so then I set out and trying to figure out why they were wrong.

That pushed me, you know, towards progressivism. I had a child very young. So I spent a lot of my teens recklessly, you know, drugs, sex, fights, just not caring about politics or anything deep at all. But then at the age of 19, I got my girlfriend pregnant. So I had a child coming. I was working at a fucking gas station at the time. And I just remember thinking, like, I'm having a child coming into the war. world. I need to know who the fuck I am. I need to know what's going on in this world. I need to do

something. And so just I just started, you know, I would like work late at this gas station and, you know, there'd be like plenty of times when you just go like an hour and a half without anybody showing up at 11 or midnight or whatever. And I would just devour books just randomly. I would just like, whatever book caught my fancy or caught my eye, I would just start reading it. And then clearly that gave me more of a historical basis. I started understanding culture. I started understanding politics at a deeper level. And so then that really progressed into the Obama era. I remember like sitting, waiting for my daughter to be born as Obama was giving his inauguration speech.

And I was very hopeful at that time. You know, 19, 20 years old, Obama after, you know, fuck a ton of years of Bush and the Iraq war and all this nonsense, of which I was like, you know, politically aware but not deeply informed on, but still anti-war, you know, in general. I listened to a lot of hip-hop, so I kind of had that perspective. but I remember like having hope in Obama like you know this you know if America might be able to to put itself on a right path and do something and it was actually during the Obama era specifically after the financial crisis and the response to it that radicalized me into socialism so before the Obama administration was fully over I was already a socialist of course you know

this is before a lot of stuff was even available like you know you couldn't just go online and find communists talking about communism it was you know we actually kind of lose sight of just how recent this development is where people are all over online proclaiming themselves to be socialist and communist. That's a new development. And so I didn't really have a lot of resources. Obviously, you go back and read Marx and read books and stuff, but it wasn't as accessible as it was now. So I originally just got into the Democratic or the DSA before it was big before Bernie. I was a card-carrying member for a few years in my early 20s. As my radicalism deep end, I moved into anarchism, as is often a sort of trajectory people take, was never

really comfortable in it, because I felt like it did not answer several questions, you know, deep questions like, you know, how do we bring about this stuff? Historically, what has worked? You know, what is the actual strategy to pursue and, you know, pursue change and transform the world? And I was still, you know, indoctrinated with anti-communism, as most Americans are. I was scared of I didn't want to be an authoritarian right I didn't want to apologize for Stalin or anything like that so that kept me away from calling myself a Marxist and it was actually a book I read by Terry Eagleton called Why Marx was right you know it's a really it really opened my mind and I needed that book at that time and what it basically did for me was was dismantle my ingrained conditioned anti-communism and anti-Marxism and for the first time I began calling myself a Marxism and for the first time I began calling myself a Marxist. and proudly. And then I started the show calling myself at the time a libertarian Marxist, right? Because I still didn't want to commit to scary things like Leninism or nowism. Yeah, classic. But then through the show, right, I'm talking to a bunch of people. One of the things we did early on was these tendency

episodes. So we'd focus on a specific tendency and bring somebody on from that tendency, not to argue or debate, but just to explain. I want to understand Trotskyism. I want to understand Marxism, Leninism. I want to understand anarcho-communism. And it was through that and then the broader conversations I was having that I just began being pushed towards a more principled Marxist position. And then, you know, once you read state and revolution or something like that, you know, socialism, utopian, scientific is over, you know. I'm on board. I'm on board. And so at that point, it's just Marxism-Leninism, Leninism, flirtations with Marxism, Lennonism, Maoism. And I kind of now I call myself sort of an anti-revisionist Marxist Leninist.

but I like to be in that space of tension between Leninism and Maoism. I think it's an interesting space of tension, the disagreements there are interesting to me. And so I have sympathies with Maoism, although perhaps I wouldn't fully commit to calling myself a Marxist-Leninist Maoist. But, yeah, long story short or short story long, that's my political trajectory. Well, that's really cool. It's interesting as a younger Marxist to hear. what it was like in the before times, you know, before Bernie came along and before it was, you know, more easily, it's easier to slip into the stream of socialism to proper communism these

days because you've got so many resources online. It's for a lot of people my age, it started around Bernie or a little bit before and you, you know, you heard those talking points. You're like, yeah, that makes sense. Why don't we have that here? And then you learn, well, Bernie's not actually a socialist. Okay, what's socialism? And then it's just, you know, it snowballs from there. But it sounds like it would have, I can imagine, taken a lot more work on the personal level to find those resources back in like the Obama era and even before, especially in the United States where everything is geared towards keeping that information subdued, where we don't want to think about those alternatives. Everything is okay, we're doing fine. Obama's going to fix everything. He's got a broad coalition, et cetera, et cetera.

And of course, we all know how that turned out. top ten anime betrayals all time. Yeah, no kidding. I was going to say, sorry to cut you off, but the thing about the having hard time finding resources is very right, and I think this was kind of

global as well. I think both for you up thinking I would have been similar. But God bless those, you know, like I don't have much good to say about Trotskis. This is a joke for people who might take this seriously. But God bless those trots on the Marxist's Internet Archive. They have the most garbage

fucking design, but bless that website. Anything you want, you could find on it. Absolutely. Amen. The whole website is like three goddamn megabund. So I was reminded when, Brett, when you're talking about the, how, you know, your trajectory going through DSA and then into anarchism and whatnot. And of course, since you're a card carrying member, you attended meetings and whatnot. And for some reason that when you mentioned card carrying member,

that reminded me of one of the very. first like political like meet meet meet ups or something if you want to even call it that that i had and i was still a very new marxist and i basically enter into the room and just see a whole bunch of boomers yeah exactly they're all fucking they're all you know they're all fucking smoking and shit and i remember and uh what caught my eye one of my very first experiences and this i think is very apt it was the sectarianism of the left i love it it was two old guys in the corner and one of them was basically yelling you haven't even fucking red for d'aig that was that moment for a second when you said card carrying i just imagine that

picture i don't know why sorry to derail this fucking conversation go on going no definitely i'm i was actually in a very small meeting to actually inaugurate the first sort of omaha chapter of the dsa and yeah the first thing you notice is that you're dealing with the the previous generation or two of leftists and all of the sort of kind of sad and tragedy that that you see in their eyes like you know if you're a leftist coming of age in the 80s for Christ's sakes in the United States like I just have to tip my hat that you carried the flame forward at all you know yeah yeah no shit no shit boasting just pain they didn't even have the trenches of Twitter well no exactly that is true ideological warfare but yeah for for me the situation was relatively similar actually specifically in Eastern Europe where you know in the post-socialist countries that got literally billions of dollars of funding to set up a center-right or even far-right parties, sometimes also-liberal parties, in order to make sure that different socialist parties or the old communist parties

don't get back into parliament with the first elections right after the collapse of the local systems, or I should better say, the destruction of the local systems. So there was so much propaganda that moved. into both the school system and like just everyday media that you consumed, that one could say that we kind of had a speed run of Red Scare propaganda, but not for a period of 50 years, but in a period of two, three years, these countries that proudly called themselves socialists all of a sudden turned into quite literally these spawn points for some of the most disgusting rhetoric

you could find anywhere, be it in Europe or the rest of the world. But the reason I'm mentioning that is, I don't know, I was like 17 when I went to, I wasn't even like ideologically knowledgeable in any way, at least not the way I am now, not like I am now. But I went to the first, there was a fascist meeting or what they call themselves, Chetniks, et cetera, et cetera, in the specific city that I was living in. And when I went to the counter protest, it was literally only filled with basically. what you could call an anti-fascist protest. It was literally only filled with 16, 17, 18-year-old potheads or 75-year-old grandpas. So there's these 70-75-year-old dudes in full suits, marching, not even holding flags, just, you know, shouting profanities at the fascist from the other side and reactionaries of all different stripes. And right next to them, these kids that, you know, stink of skank from like seven miles away.

And it was just the, seeing both of those generations that kind of believe in the same thing, yet have vastly different lifestyles because they grew up in different conditions, is quite a sight to behold every time you see it. It's like the meme of the, this is what it's like in every communist YouTube comment section, and it's the picture of the two people on the subway, the one old dude and then the anime-looking girl with the blue hair. every time and there's so many fights you guys don't know like there's so many fights when like now at this point when antif where antifai is a thing it has been for like 15 years here but when it's a proper anti-fascist march right every time some grandpa shouts long-lived Marxist Leninist revolution or he shouts long live Stalin long live Lenin and then you have the anarchist kids that are like 21 that shout no we denounce the authoritarian in this protest but But they listen, but they listen when some fucking, you know, consumers will save the planet and we shall save the world by not eating meat, et cetera, et cetera.

That guy's allowed to, like, have, like, stand up there and talk for like an hour. But an old grandpa that actually probably held a gun back in 45, nah, fuck that, dude. But yeah, sorry, different rant apologies. Let's get it back on track here. I want to go back to the podcast a little bit to Rev Left. You've been producing the podcast for a number of years now. So has your approach changed at all? Have you found that some types of content perform better than others

or that something resonates with your audience a little bit more than something else does? Yeah, well, first thing to say about that is, you know, when I was thinking of making this show and specifically in the context of us discussing the lack of resources available, you know, at that time they were starting to pick up, but they weren't anywhere near where they are even now. But I wanted to make a show that I wanted to listen to. Like I was very into talk radio growing up. And then when podcasts came along, I was like a very early adopter, like delivering pizzas and listening to podcasts, you know, for hours and hours.

So I was already a huge podcast fan. And I would search. I was desperate. I was looking for, you know, socialist, communist, principled left political podcast because that was the sort of world that I liked engaging with. And the very best you could find is like rad lib, progressive stuff at best, which I did listen to. But, you know, when I was going to make Rev. Left, it was like, I really did want to make a show that I wanted. to listen to that I could not find. And so that was part of the impetus.

But as for how my approach has changed over the years, I'm not sure that my overall approach has, but I've certainly gotten better at interviewing, right? That's a skill. And, you know, you jump in and you start doing it and you realize that it's fucking harder than you thought, right? You have a guest on, especially if it's a prestigious guest and you're a little nervous. You know, you have to follow what they're saying. You have to bounce back, you know, responses to stuff that lay lay on the table.

you also have to be ready to transition to the next question. Some people are more talkative and outgoing and gregarious than others, so sometimes it gets a little awkward, right? So those are all things on the learning curve that I sort of had to get better at just by doing it over and over again. But, you know, I was able to also pick up new information from every episode, and I still do this, obviously, to take forward into future episodes. So it does sort of build on itself.

And my knowledge has been increased amazingly because of, you know, the people I've been able to take. talk to you. Like, it's so surreal now where I'll read a book or, you know, I'll see something on the internet and just be able to reach out to that author or that creator or that person and say, hey, you want to come on for an interview and they say, yeah. You know, so like it's sort of like indulgent that I get to talk to people that otherwise I would just read their book and think about it for a few weeks. Now I can just say, hey, you want to come on and talk to me about it. So that's kind of interesting. As far as like what types of content perform better,

there is this general rule that I try to abide by for nothing else in my own sanity, which is not to pay attention to numbers, not to pay attention to what performs better and what doesn't. I feel like some incentives could sneak in there that you're not fully conscious of that can kind of skew what you're doing or you start playing to your crowd in a way that is not necessarily principled. I think you see this a lot with certain sort of people on YouTube, but I think also YouTube is a more algorithmically competitive environment. So you sort of have to play that game to survive in certain, you know, platforms and context. But with podcasts, it's not as intense in that sense.

And I just don't want to get in my head about it. You know, I don't want to start chasing numbers and chasing stats and only doing stuff because I feel like it'll get the most. And I don't even like promoting, you know, my shit. Like I don't feel comfortable doing a lot of that. And that's like probably a personality thing more than anything else. So I don't really focus on that, but, you know, some things do get traction and you just notice it based on the response that you get. And I don't know, you could do a lot of different examples of this. I mean, at this point, with Patreon in the public fleet, we have hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of episodes.

So it's even hard to remember all the episodes that we've done. I know my, like, my red hot takes where it's just me doing a monologue style rant over something that I, you know, feel particularly inspired to talk about. those tended to do pretty well probably because they're hypertopical and there's a lot of emotion behind it so like my episode America on fire during the George Floyd protests you know I was I was you know as I say in that episode like I was heartbroken like you can hear me on the episode tearing up and you know sort of like crying and getting fucking enraged and it was a hundred percent authentic and it felt like I was you know venting some emotional intensity that a lot of other people people had inside them. And it was sort of cathartic for me to make and cathartic for people to listen to. So, you know, those do well. And I'm particularly proud of that one. The, the, yeah, I don't know. There's a lot of episodes. I don't even like to point one out because then I'll be driving home later and be like, damn, I should have gave that one a shout out or I should have stressed that. But overall, I try not to hyper focus on what performs and what does. And I try to be,

I try to do stuff that I'm genuinely interested in because that genuine interest comes through, right? If I have a guest on and I'm sincerely interested in the topic I'm discussing, that's going to provide a better conversation than if I just had somebody on because I know that it's going to generate more clicks and content, but I'm not really into what they're doing or I haven't read their books or whatever it may be. So just trying to be as authentic and do follow my heart and have episodes that I'm genuinely interested in and let the chips fall where they may. You know, that's sort of my personal approach. Yeah, I think that's a great approach. I mean, I discovered something similar because I used to do, you know, general interest kind of science-y, infographic-y kind of stuff on YouTube. And I, towards the end, I was just, I hated it. I was just burned out.

It wasn't having fun. I didn't care about it. And because of that, the views just absolutely tanked. People could tell I was miserable. And then when I switched to doing the stuff that I do now, which I genuinely care about, the views shot right back up. It's just, it really is a consequence of being authentic and just talking about things that you care about because if you care about it, then people will just, they'll care about it too because they care about people who are invested in things and who are genuine and not, you know, drenched in seven layers of irony, which can be fun. But, you know, it's, that's not a good way to live. But yeah, looking through your back catalog, it's just incredible.

The guests you've had, the number of episodes you've put out. It's something that we definitely aspire to, the longevity and rigorous approach you take to your podcast. It's really something. I appreciate that. But going forward, what would you say is your number one goal for REF left? Do you have an overarching goal? Well, it's certainly political education. It's getting these narratives out.

It's rethinking about history from a left perspective. It's trying to give people that are interested in this stuff, the ammunition intellectually, that they need. need to think through their own politics and then defend that politic against, you know, all sides, right? If you're a communist in the U.S., if you're communist anywhere, you're going to have enemies all over the political spectrum and you're going to have to be held to a higher standard than anybody else is intellectually. Like, as I always say, like, if you're an anti-communist, you can be as sloppy as you want. You can just make shit up, you know, you can be like Jordan Peterson and flip through the manifesto and then, you know, get hundreds of thousands of likes and

praise. On Rev. Left, we just took down James Lindsay, a particularly sloppy anti-communist, a charlatan, a pseudo-intellectual, but makes money and has a huge audience just because it's so easy. The bar for being an anti-communist is below the ground. And there's always going to be a place, especially in American politics, for people to make a career out of anti-communism. So in Marxists, we have to know history, we have to know economics, we have to know philosophy, you know, we have to understand culture. Everything about everything. everything about everything you know um and so i i like to make sure that you sorry i was just going to say if you don't know what hochi men ate in 1952 march 4th 952 yeah exactly but yeah just the correct

answer there is he didn't eat because communism no food sorry exactly communism no food um but yeah just trying to equip people intellectually so that's obviously one element the other element is to inspire. I do not want to be a dry academic. I'm not an academic. The way I talk, the who I am, you know, it's not this pristine, short-up, you know, academic style. But it comes from the heart. It's a little grittier than, you know, maybe other stuff, especially that existed at that time. It's more unapologetic. And it's, it's, I try to, you know, infuse a human element into it because I realize that appealing to people's intellectual, is good and important and one element of it, but you have to appeal to people's hearts.

You have to actually appeal to their personal experiences. You have to connect with them on a human level, and that will give more gravitas to the intellectual content. And especially lately over the last couple of years, I've been trying to embed this communist politic into a broader engagement with life, right? So, like, you'll see a lot of episodes on Rev. Left on Zen Buddhism, on Islamic mysticism, on psychoanalysis, right, on a whole bunch of Russian novelists like Dostoevsky, the recent episode we just did. And what I see with that is twofold. One is this expanding of what we're

about. Like, we're not just Marxist. We're also human beings and there's other elements to being human. And so that's an important thing to do, like to fully flesh that out. But also to give people different doorways into the left, right? If I put up a bunch of stuff about Marxism and communism and blah, blah, blah, it's important. It's essential. I do. do do it, but you're not always going to bring people in unless they're directly interested in that stuff. But if I have an episode on Zen Buddhism or I have an episode on Dostoevsky or whatever it may be, you're giving people a doorway into your show. So somebody's going to be interested, let's just say, in like crime and punishment. They're looking for something that,

some podcast that's going to help them understand Dostoevsky and his work. They search it in the bar. Rev. Left Radio comes up. Oh, this looks interesting. Clicks it, right? Oh, wow. was a really interesting good conversation i like that let's see what else they do you know and they start scrolling and then whoa communism and marxism and what the okay well maybe i'll give it a shot you know that first episode was pretty good the sound quality is up there i'll give it a shot and i've had people tell me that's how they got into left wing politics coming into a rev left episode that wasn't ostensibly about politics at all um and then that being the doorway through which they discovered the rest of our catalog and then that pushed them leftward etc so

education, inspiration, and then embedding our politics in a broader engagement with different areas of life are my, in totality, the goal of Rev Left, if you will. That's awesome. Yeah, I think that's a really effective approach. I mean, as you've seen with the success of your podcast, casting a wide net, but with the same ideological core behind it, I think that's really cool and a great way to bring people in who might otherwise not be terribly interested in, you know, the strict dry communism stuff.

It might turn them off. But yeah, giving them doors, like you said, that's a great approach. And we do add in the political element, right? So we have like an episode on Stoicism or Dostoevsky, and then you'll hear all of that. But then you'll also hear a discussion about how left politics, if at all, interacts with that. And that can create some genuinely interesting stuff because you can go online and find a bunch of shit about Dostoevsky or Zen Buddhism or Stoievsky. But you'll almost never hear like a principled Marxist trying to wrestle with the implications. of these things, right? So then that makes

a topic that's been covered a lot truly unique as well. So I think that helps as well. I think one of the stated goals of the politics, of course, that you forgot to mention was bringing down Western civilization. Of course. That's implied. That's implied. It goes without saying.

Attacking Judeo-Christian values. That's what's our point. Absolutely. Sorry. The protestant work ethic. Well, Brett, you mentioned a little earlier that being a communist online, you make a lot of enemies. And so let's segue towards the realities of being a communist online.

I think most people listening to this probably already have a personal understanding that being open about socialist beliefs can come with some risk. Is that the case in your life, especially given the status of your podcast as one of the more well-known socialist programs? Have you faced any harassment or negativity in your time online? Oh, absolutely, yes. And it was very much offline. The harassment took the form of offline harassment.

So I've weathered since the beginning of the show waves of docs campaigns. Specifically early on when our show was so deeply tied to local activism and thus local anti-fascism. You know, and you know any anti-fascist org is going to be sort of shadowy, right? The whole point is like OPSEC and protect your identities. And this is early Antifa days in the U.S. though. So, like, people weren't fully informed on all of the dangers and all the ways to stay safe yet. That's sort of been generated as Antifa has advanced in popular culture and in the political realm. But at the beginning, you know, because the show was so tied with this activism and we literally went after Nazis in our area and, you know, fuck them up.

Like, not physically necessarily, but, like, chasing them out of town, really bringing consequences for them, for their schools and their employment, etc. And I wasn't a leader of this. I was just one of the many members of like regular working class people that were trying to push back against the fascist insurgents. But because I was popular and had a public facing platform, I became the face of everything Antifa in the area because I was the only person they could readily identify. And so that made me the target of very intense docs campaigns by Nazis to the extent that, my workplace at the time i was working in retail every car in the parking lot uh were flired with these you know flyers against me the um my fiance's workplace was was flired her mom's house was flired my mom's address was put up on these neo-nazi websites um my mom would get

hate mail from nazis threatening menacing letters like i'm you know we're coming to visit you and your boy next week or whatever you know and she would call me fucking crying It got very intense. One of the things they also did was they called in fake terrorist tips against me to the local police. So they said that I was a radical communist that was trying to kill rich people and blow up infrastructure. And so they actually were able to weaponize the police against me so that I had detectives showing up at my house, you know, trying to question me. We had FBI people come to my house to question me about certain things. and an investigation was opened against me

so they were pretty good on that front in getting a well-rounded attack on me on all fronts and it was fucking relentless and it went on for months and months and months and no matter how cool, calm and collected you are that shit fucks with your head. It gets in your psychology, you're driving home like they would say on their sights

like, we don't exactly know where he lives right now but this is what he is, this is what he is, this is where he works, if any good patriots could follow him home and give us his ad, dress we'd be very much obliged and we'd be very happy with that or whatever and bro i got kids i have three children uh you know my my son was an infant my wife was terrorized like didn't know what the fuck was happening her family my family and they didn't know what was happening so one of the

consequences is is uh taking self-defense incredibly seriously so i've always been i've lived in only nebraska montana always been around hunters and outdoors men i know how to fuck with guns so i got guns got big dogs, you know, got a security system. And, you know, one thing about fascists is they're ultimately cowards. You know, nobody ever, you know, some crazy will, and that's always the, the idea, right? It's like, it just takes one crazy fucking weirdo to do something insane, right? It is not like you have to think rationally. Are these people really going to do this, like in a game of chess? But most of the time, they're cowards. They want to, you know, lob shit against you from afar. They don't ever want to actually confront you. And so, so I never actually had fascist

at my house, which other people have had. And that's a whole other thing, although I was constantly ready for it and constantly having to be on the guard. Like, every night I would go to sleep and I would, like, turn my fan on low just so I could hear anything. And I'd have my dog out in the living room so he could bark and my gun right next to my bed if I had to jump into action. So, yeah, it was insane.

I mean, at some point, we used to have a podcast early on called The Geotene, whereas actually me and this anarchist, and we got targeted by Alex Jones. So Alex Jones did a segment on Info Wars because it was at this time when the right-wing people like Jones were getting canceled and pushed off social media, right? So they found the craziest lefties they could find, which was at the time our show was called the guillotine and we would do video with us masked up. So the images were perfect for them to throw up on their screen, like violent communists, you know, this guy says he loves Mao, a brutal dictator, you know. And so that caught a lot of steam and that resulted in another wave of doxing against us and all this shit, you know. but it happens. It sucks. I've learned a lot. I've learned home defense. I've learned how to protect my identity. And I've also learned that especially if you have a public platform,

you have to be very careful. Like I have a family. My first responsibility is to them and keeping them safe. And there's certain ways that I can go about doing my shows that either do or do not invite backlash. So going after specific people, you're inviting that backlash. And that was part of the first. docks is on the guillotine, we'd go after these Nazis locally, and I'd name them out, you know, we'd put them up on the screen, we'd tell them what school they went to, et cetera. Okay, well, what you give out, you get back. So I had to learn that lesson brutally that, you know, if you're going to play that game online, expect it to blow back in your fucking face.

And so I've had to, you know, sort of reorient myself back up. Not that I would water down my politics at all. I'm still, as you all know, unapologetically anti-fascist to the fucking core. but there's you know you don't need to go out of your way to invite the the nonsense and even so much is masking up right i learned that to be a mistake because it just feeds into an aura it looks violent it looks scary especially in these early antifa days when people really didn't know about the far radical left and so they could run with those images and you know put them on flyers say whatever they want etc so i've learned how to navigate this space in a way that doesn't overtly invite that sort of backlash but uh but yeah man it's it's been It's been intense. Yeah, I can imagine. That's terrifying, honestly. And the showing your face thing, that was something that I really thought about when I made the switch to my political content.

I figured, okay, I can try to obscure my identity or I can just be open about it from the get-go in the hopes that I'm not giving these people like a present to unwrap. Like, here, this is me. Here's my name. You can, you know, and I was banking. on the fact that most people, like you said, they're cowards. They'll send death threats, but not actually do anything. And so far, so good. The only people I've had show up at my door is the DHS one time. And that wasn't so bad. I mean, that was, you know, a few minutes of them asking, you know, strong-arm questions trying to intimidate me. But man, I can't imagine the

stuff you've had to deal with, the doxing of your family especially. That's terrifying and also infuriating so I mean kudos to you for for dealing with that and and I hope it doesn't you know come back again that's uh I well I appreciate that and you know one thing that I try to make very clear too is I'm a father so you know any fascist or whatever Nazi that wants to try to be tough or bring heat or whatever like they got to understand that you know I am my father defending my children I will fucking do everything I'll do anything like you are playing with fire if you think I'm going to let you come anywhere near my family and so you know if you if anybody were to try to do that like they would be met with

buckshot on the fucking front porch and i would never want to do that of course but when you're when you're pushed in this direction you got to think in those ways and that's and that's rough and i did do an episode back in the day called don't talk to cops where i talked about some of my experiences with this fbi agent or with this detective and the sort of games that they would play and i learned very quickly you know how much they lie and deceive and manipulate and what they're always they're never they always present themselves as your friend but they never are um and so i learned like just don't talk to them don't give them anything to work with because they're not good faith actors and they're not fucking on your side um but the other thing i wanted to mention too you mentioned about

showing your face is there's a little bit of a paradox here because by not showing your face and by by going out of your way to hide your identity you do kind of create a context in which it would be nice to unveil you right and so i i learned that too okay well if i just in honest I show my face whenever I'm asked you can find me online I do you know interviews where they do video and they have YouTube channel so you know that's my face I sort of like loosen those boundaries a little bit because I realize that if you're a public figure and you're just out there being public and not necessarily trying to hide your your shit it de-incentivizes them to to pull back the curtain and you know reveal who you really are like everybody already knows who I am

you can go see me so there's that paradox you want to hide yourself and be safe and and and protect yourself, which you absolutely should. But on the other hand, sometimes that can create the incentive to try to figure out who you are. And I don't say this to scare anybody or to make anybody, you know, ruffled. This is the early days of Ancify. I don't think it's as prominent where this level of doxing and harassment is going to be necessarily totally ubiquitous unless something else shifts in our in our politics and our culture. But it is just to say that, you know, you should be thinking about these things very deeply if you're going to be an outspoken communist in any part of the world.

Yeah. Well, one thing we've talked about on the deprogram before is that a lot of these fascists are young and impressionable men who are kind of lost and don't know where to turn. And a lot of them do grow out of it. Have you had personally any success with, you know, de-radicalizing those people or winning them over, or do you think that's more of a waste of time? I think it can be useful. A certain sort of person is better adjusted to that than others. I came out of the gate in those heady early days of anti-fascist as like an outspoken anti-fascist, so I was more interested in, you know, understanding them so we could fight them as opposed to trying to lure them in. Yeah. But, you know, other people have different qualities and different types of shows that might be more conducive to that. I certainly think it's worthwhile.

I mean, I think there's plenty of young, confused angry people out there who are reacting to social conditions they don't fully understand and it might be that one video or that one lifeline that a leftist extends to them that takes them off that path of going full fascist into that angry hateful insane world of being a fucking fascist and trying to organize with other complete assholes like the worst people in the fucking world right um so i think it's it's worthwhile if done right um but that was never my objective and I don't think I've been particularly successful at even attempting let alone succeeding at that though I do hope that maybe as people you know there's somebody

somewhere that was maybe being lured in by fascist rhetoric online and looked up Googled or you know went to a podcast app to find something about fascism found rev left and maybe that broke down their ideas and shed light and push them off that path you know I have not necessary I mean I get a fucking fuck ton of emails and stuff i can't i can't read them all i don't know um but i would like to think that maybe i've i've been able to do that at some point uh but yeah i'm not sure what are your thoughts on that i think we're i think we're probably on the same page um it's in my opinion you know i'm not particularly good at it either i've gotten a couple of emails saying like hey i was on this you know alt-right pipeline or whatever and i watched some of your videos and

they really resonated with me yada yada so some people you know whether they're how far gone they are, it's hard to tell, but some of them have come out of it. But that's not something I go out of my way to do, because it does take a lot more effort, in my opinion, and that ever could be spent elsewhere talking to people who don't already have that kind of ideological baggage. You don't want to end up with a highly suspect comrade that you've converted from holding these awful views about, you know, whoever it is, Jews or women or whatever. If they accepted those views at one point, they might still kind of cling to those further down the line. So I think there's definitely some people you can win over and become

good, worthwhile comrades, but it is a bit of a risk and it is a time investment that may not end up being worth it. But Hakeem and you got, Nick, we've mentioned this a little bit before. What do you guys think? I don't agree with either of you. I think you have definitely, quote, unquote, de-radicalized people, but maybe not in a way you think. So the way I look at the fascist pipeline specifically, the only proper way and the most successful way for a communist to push a potential fascist into the, what I could call the left pipeline, is to catch them at the point and with the point of contention that they have with the world. So, for example, many young fascists struggle in relationships. They can't either get laid, get a girlfriend, boyfriend, etc., etc. And then the fascist manages to push them in by promising them a more traditional world

where the man can put his hand on the table and reintroduce the nuclear family, etc., etc. Or they're struggling with finances and the fascist introduces them to the Jewish question of why they are struggling with finances or they had a horrible experience once or twice with somebody who happens to be ethnicity, A, B, C, or D. By making communist principled Marxist, be it videos, be it podcasts, be it writing books or leaflets, et cetera, et cetera, which analyzed those specific things, like I gave relationships as an example from a Marxist lens, we can potentially catch these people before. they go and listen to the fascist argument.

And not only before, but even in parallel, a lot of people are struggling with a lot of things. So they're continuously looking for answers. The same way, you Brett, were sitting at work and plowing through all of these books. Like at the end of the day, yes, you're a super cool dude. So that's why you went to that direction. But in an alternate world,

the first book you might have read at that gas station could have been the complete opposite. So what I'm trying to say here, basically, is very simple. At the beginning, there's a beginning of a radicalization process, and there's a reason why somebody gets pushed into the fascist pipeline. If we address all those points that fascists are addressing but in their own insane manner through a Marxist lens, we will have a much better time because we will not, quote unquote need to fight or deradicalize as many fascists as is this today because they would

not become fascists in the first place and both you and the jt and hakeem have a lot of content out there that i believe really did a great job in doing it it doesn't have to have the title oh how to convert fascist bob from nevada you know that's that's really interesting yeah i think it as a silly i guess analogy like the cuban health care system it's It's better to be preventive rather than symptomatic treatment, right? Absolutely. So, yeah, exactly like, like Yugopnik said. I think there's also another aspect that's, I think it's missing from my content,

but you guys do a better job with that, which is the more cultural aspect, let's say, especially Yugopnik's work, I think. But same with both you guys, where you, like, it's one thing to be like, hey, you know, surplus value, right? And it's another thing to, like, go from the angle of why are you unhappy in relationship, and how does that relate to alienation and how does that relate to capitalism? That's a kind of a deeper analysis, maybe more tedious and also, I guess you could say less impactful, like from a propagandistic point of view.

But at the end of the day, it's something that can help fix issues of mostly young people who don't really know what's going on in the world are confused and just want to find an answer. But yeah, I think it's, I lay in the middle of all these positions. It's, I think we shouldn't devote all our energy into de-radicalization. of fascists, but we shouldn't completely ignore it either. I think there are certain people who are cut up for the job, and those certain people are the ones who can kind of carry the brunt of it, those who have an inclination towards more cultural-type

content, who understand, like it's funny to say, but like, nowadays, if you really want to work towards de-radicalization in that sort of sphere, you'd have to be very into, if you want to call it internet culture or whatever, you need to know all the stupid memes that they have on their side. You need to know all the talking points. You need to. And after a while like me personally, I wouldn't be able to drudge through fucking fascist I don't know, like threads

or fucking Reddit or some Reddits or whatever looking at what they have to say and whatnot and then trying to because at the end of the day I just see it and I'm like yeah but the fuck your answers are so simple that they're wrong and by virtue of their simplicity they're always wrong right. You can't just point at one

you can't point at the complete economic decline of the United States, the single greatest empire to ever exist and be like, oh, you know, Jews. Yeah, that's not a war. Fuck. Oh, my God. Or the Irish. Oh, yes.

Oh, the Irish conspiracy. Fuck. And then they always, oh, God. They are in all media. Oh, Jesus Christ. The people are, yeah, it's, as, you know the meme where it's like a politician and there's like a puppet hand above him? And those are the Jews.

And then the puppet hand above that is Albanians. That's the long we're all seen. I'm joking. These are all fucking jokes. All the Albanian communists just went underground. Why do you think they built all those bunkers? It wasn't defense against Yugoslavia. It was the ultimate escape plan together with the lizard people underground.

They made a lizard-slash-human communist utopia. We're just missing out. Real Poseidatus hours. Yeah, why do you think Albanians, why do you think Albanians sounds like, I don't know, the Sims language? It's because it's half lizard, half human. Much love to my Albanian brothers and sisters. J.T., bring it back on the rails. Yep, you got it.

We talked a little bit about winning fascists over and whether that's worth it. But let's talk about winning people over in general. So with so much animosity being directed towards the left and that mindset being reinforced by the mainstream media, what do you think the role of alternative media is, like what we do? Do we have a responsibility to counter these narratives, or do you think we should be focusing more on just doing our own thing and leaving countering to other people? What do you think? Yeah, I mean, I think we certainly have to counter these narratives. Like I said earlier about giving people a sense that, you know, if you're on the left, you actually belong to this beautiful, you know, insanely human, gorgeous tradition with all of its good, bad, ugly, you know, everything included.

And giving people that sense that they can be in that tradition. that tradition that's been suppressed, that's been eradicated from our schools and our popular culture that most people don't know about, to be on the left and to find that tradition is actually really beautiful. And so that can be a really starting point of bringing somebody over is like, no, you can partake in this amazing history that goes back through, you know, Rosa Luxembourg and Mao and Lennon and all these other movements all throughout, you know, the last several hundred years, all the way back to Marx and Engels and beyond them to like, you know, peasant struggles for a better life.

this is a beautiful tradition that we exist in. And that's really interesting and gives people a sense of history, particularly in a culture that doesn't give you anything to be proud of. If you have half a heart, American culture is anathema to everything that good people should stand for and believe in. It's grotesque. And so you've been now actually deprived of being able to have, I don't know, love and pride in your country and your society or feeling as if you belong to a tradition that's worthwhile

and moral and beautiful, you know, we've been stripped of all of that. And the only way to really regain that and to like take that on as an American is to become a fascist or at least a conservative or a reactionary to say, no, actually I'm proud of all this horrific shit. And so most people, they're sort of unmoored. They don't have community in this hyper-individualized, ravaged capitalist landscape, but they also don't feel like they have any cultural connections and any traditional connections. And so that's one thing that we can offer. And then, the narrative that we can that we can place on top of that is an understanding of, okay, here's our history, now let's use that history to understand the present and make

that more digestible, more understandable, given that history. So that, that I think helps. I think humanizing ourselves is huge. And I always, I always like to make this point in a culture that degrades and dehumanizes specifically communist, but leftists in general, that eradicates our traditions, that suppresses our history that really makes communists seem like

these heartless, mechanic villains to humanize ourselves and to say, hey, we're just fucking regular people. We're interested in regular shit. I have a family. I have friends. I've existed in this culture my entire life.

I'm not some scary outsider. I am a product of this insane society and I'm standing against it. And, you know, these are the reasons I'm standing against it. intellectual, moral, emotional, aesthetic, right? We can go cultural. We can go all across the gambit here.

But, like, we're human fucking beings. And my position as a communist comes out of my humanity and my love for other human beings. Even people across the planet, I don't know, that don't speak my language. Even people back in time that are long gone that I still care about and still find connections to. So that's one thing. Connecting with people that human level. Do you mind if I just interject just slightly? I completely agree with this and this.

This one aspect I think that, sadly, I don't really see on the American left, but it should be something that's more emphasized, which is the idea that somehow communists are anti-American, not in the way, just to like preface it, all Marxists, all communists are anti-American in the idea of what America is. Right. But the American people, the actual human beings, the flesh and blood people that exist within those borders,

whatever line you want to call it, the people who, the politically motivated people who care about them the most always end up being Marxists or communists because we're the only ones that want to make sure these people are housed, fed, educated, are not burdened with debt, are not burdened by a completely meaningless fucking bullshit jobs that just, you know, suck them dry and not in the good way. Yeah, exactly. They're completely, they're completely, they're completely, suck them dry out of any pleasure in life until they completely, you know, break down as in body and in soul,

all for, like, corporate profits. Meanwhile, those who claim to be oh so patriotic and loving of America and Americans and everything that America stands for are the ones who, you know, send jobs overseas and as a result bankrupt local communities. They're the ones who dump pollutants into local communities. They're the ones who basically rise up gated communities to basically segregate themselves from those other Americans who they love so much, et cetera, et cetera.

I think it's just it's a real shame that this particular point has kind of been handed to the other side where, you know, where are the anti-Americans and they're the problem, whatever, despite the fact that, of course, this doesn't get into the conversation of Patriots and blah, blah, blah, like understand what I'm saying. But yeah, that was just a small interjection, sorry, cut you off. No, yeah, I think that's really, really important. And even to explicitly say that to somebody who might even be suspicious is like,

I oppose America, I oppose the government, I oppose the economic system, I oppose the empire, precisely because I love the people, and not just the American people, but people in general, but certainly it's, you know, the people of America are being robbed and destroyed by America unless they belong to a certain, you know, class of privileged elites or whatever. So, so yeah, making that very clear, I think, is important because those things can be easily conflated. Oh, you hate America. So you hate my grandpa who died fighting the Nazis in World War II or no, all my friends, all my family. I've never even left the country. I fucking know is American.

I love them to death, you know. So, yeah, making that point, I think, can be helpful in, in blunting the edge of that particular critique, which does hold weight with, like, regular Americans. Like, well, you know, I don't, I don't hate America. Like, why would I hate, you know, like, they don't really understand all the stuff about the economic system and the imperialism and all that? Pofftarts are great. Yeah.

We're talking about it. Yeah, so that line of reasoning can be convincing to them. but just one more thing I really wanted to say about this in addition to humanizing ourselves well two more things one is to be humble right because I think another stereotype of communists is that they're overly academic overly you know stuffy and and they use big words that regular people don't understand and they're talked down to you right they want to they want to lecture you like like academic elites and you know you're all dumb and we're coming to give you the information that you need right so being humble and really being

humble is uh can can prevent that uh because it's like no i'm i'm just learning along with you i'm not here to tell you anything um here's some views i have and let me learn this with you and what do you think and so that that's that's important but the really important thing the last thing i'll say on this and this goes back to our conversation we were having a few minutes ago right wing conspiracy theories in particular which is just right wing ideology a lot of the time um it does three things it as as you've all said, it hyper-simplifies the narrative. It scapegoats the vulnerable, and it gives the believer in the conspiracy theory a persecution complex, even if that person is, by all actual measures, a member of the racial, ethnic, religious majority of that country, right? So white evangelical, upper-middle

class, suburban Christians in the U.S. can hop on to a conspiracy theory like QAnon, or even just the general brain rot that is right-wing American reaction and actually convince themselves that they're the victim. They are being attacked by these immigrants, by these specifically liberal elites, by these leftist intellectuals, etc. So we have to understand that on the left if we want to counter it. And one of the hard things about being on the left is precisely that simplistic versus complexity narrative problem, which by virtue of being absurdly simplistic, you can reach people very easily. Like you said earlier, it's the Jews or it's the Muslims or it's the politicians you don't like or, you know, it's the media that you don't like.

So that's what's causing all these problems, right, in society. And so you take your vision away from the actual ruling elite, those with money and power, you point it towards the vulnerable, you reduce the complexity of the problem into very simplistic narratives, and you will be able to easily convince lots of people on that front. So we have the problem of trying to combat hyper simplicity with an analysis that is, by definition, complex. We are wrestling with the complexity of history, the interrelations between cultural institutions, legal institutions, the economic base, you know, so many different things. And so we actually have the, I think, objectively more correct story to tell, but that story is by definition a much more complex one. and so that's where a lot of this other stuff comes in is like we have to be very good at explaining complex topics and concepts to regular people we have to be regular people ourselves we have to know what regular people think and what they're like we have to be humble and humanize ourselves to others and we have to appeal to them at the level of the mind as well as the level of the heart and i think i think that is our task and and that's what we should be focused on so i guess that would be my answer to that broad question although there's plenty more answers to be given. I think that was all very well said. I think it's so critical that we

consider how we package our perspectives and our worldview and the stuff we want to get across to people. And I think that's also why it's so important that we do have kind of an established pipeline on the left, where you have channels like mine where I'll present things very, very surface level. I'll do 101 stuff. And I'll delve into some proper Marxist topics, but never use the jargon. I'll try to find ways to talk about it that an average person can understand. And from there, if people kind of like the vibe, if they can identify with the problems and say, okay, this guy sounds like his heart's in the right place, he wants to help us. And then I can hand them off to another channel like Hakim or Ugopnik or toss them to your podcast. Then they can get a little bit more information. They can go a little bit deeper. They can start to learn the jargon. They can start to learn the history. I think it is more of a team. effort. And it's critical that it is a team effort on the left versus with the right. Their pipeline is just it gets more and more racist with each YouTube recommendation. So it's not quite as critical. But yeah, I think that was all very, very well said. I was going to say SMH,

SMH, damn revisionist. You're telling me Mao's rejection of the negation of the negation isn't a simple topic? Please, all right? I'm sorry. Well, Hakeem, you had mentioned what you thought the American left was missing, but Brett, what do you think the online left in general is missing? What can we... For a second, I thought you were going to say, what do you think the Iraqi left is missing? Oh, shit. Let me tell you.

Yes, please. Sorry, sorry, go. Arms and legs. Jesus Christ. Like half of my holidays. this facade, but yeah. Anyway, Brett, what do you think we as an educational ecosystem can do better going forward? Yeah, so I have some main points to cover here. And I'll be pretty quick about this. One is to, especially with thinking about, you know, the left, the online left,

the educational left on whatever platform you're operating on, you know, what do you, what should you not do? So we should not make it about personalities and egos. I see this all the fucking times. It is so annoying where it's like this leftist disagrees with this other leftist on this point. So I'm going to spend 20 minutes talking about why this leftist isn't a real leftist. Like that is absolutely fucking brain rot nonsense, you know. And it's ego driven. So it's about being right.

It's about putting other people down. You're not actually educating. You're not explaining. You're not reaching people. I mean, it can, drama and outrage generates clicks. And so people do. it for obvious reasons, but definitely avoid that if possible. Second thing is I've always been anti-debate culture. I think debate is like bourgeois indulgent nonsense. I think it doesn't shed

light on anything. But debate me on that. I'll debate you later on that point. But it's not productive because what happens is the two people debating bring their audiences and they're already hunkered down in a defensive position. I'm not here to learn. I'm here to make sure my guy wins. And so right there, education has been tossed out of the window. And it actually doesn't matter. Whoever wins a debate says nothing about who's right or who's wrong. It just says who spoke better, who got the better upper hand, who thought of the witty thing first. It says nothing about who is actually right or wrong.

So it sheds absolutely no light. It just generates meaningless heat. So avoid debate culture. And that's not to say avoid criticism or debate. It's to avoid a certain sort of debate. Have you read London? Exactly. Exactly, exactly. Debate and spectacle is different than just debate. Exactly.

Right. But like I had a series where I had on anarchist just as a discussion series. So I had on three different anarchists. And we just back and forth in a respectful context explained our differences. This is where I think anarchism is kind of weak and doesn't have an answer. Well, here's my answer to that. And here's why I think there's a good criticism of Marxism historically. So then right now egos are put away. Nobody's on the defensive. And you're having a back and forth conversation. And that can actually generate. real insight and educational purposes. And then the last thing I would say for what not to do is, and I don't think any of us fall into this, and I think if you're far enough left, you probably won't fall into this, but it's this chasing the car of daily electoral politics. You know, this shitty politician said this, what do we think? Oh, Joe Rogan says this, what do we think? This upcoming election is happening. Who do you think is going to win?

Oh, this governorship in Virginia race is pretty close. Like, you know, what are your opinions on who's going to win? like that's all meaningless nonsense and you're just like I said it feels like you're chasing the car of this ever moving politics you're not actually shedding light you're not really educating people it's just like opinion mongering for its own sake and it's tied to the ephemera of day to day meaningless lowbrow you know political engagement um with the electoral realm in particular so those three things I would avoid and then for things that we should obviously you know do is I think we've covered a lot of it you know connecting our politics up and with other fields of interest, humanizing ourselves, providing many doorways into the left. Everybody comes to their platform or their show or whatever they do from a different direction with a little different emphasis, with a different personality, and, you know, let all those flowers bloom bloom. Let everybody on the left have, those flowers are going to bloom regardless, as you know.

But, you know, let it happen because somebody might listen to me and not really connect for whatever cultural, background, personal reasons. And I don't really connect with him, but I do connect with this content creator, so I'll go in this way or whatever it may be. So casting that wide net and providing many doorways is important. I would love to actually see the emergence of a real principled communist party in the United States, precisely because we could marry a lot of these disparate educational platforms and stuff up to that broader party. And that would be interesting and I think worthwhile. while and then would would push in the direction of actually putting these ideas into action,

right? We need that party apparatus to be able to pursue our politics and going on the offensive instead of constantly playing defense or merely talking to one another. So that would be a nice development to see. But yeah, so those are just some of my thoughts, but I've also genuinely interested in some of your thoughts as well, all of you. Well, I think the debate point really resonates with all of us. We won't get into it too much.

Don't want to get clipped or anything. But, yes, I definitely agree with you there. People do tend to come with their own, with their boxing gloves on, and they've got their guy in their corner, and the other guy's in the other corner. It's just not productive, and it's, it, those people will tend to just talk themselves into a corner. Like, they're trying to convince themselves of something in order to get, you know, a spicy enough take to post on Twitter,

which I think is incredibly counterproductive. If you're not walking away with literature at the end of the discussion with somebody else, then most of the time it probably wasn't a productive discussion. And especially one where you're just trying to convince each other of not even opposing cue points, but just where your point is not, oh, is what I believe truly correct, but instead, oh, I want to prove you wrong instead. Of course, this isn't valid for, you know, 100% of the time. But if there is a respectful conversation that takes place, like you said, the format you had between anarchists and a Marxist, that Marxist being yourself, of course, that's productive and something can emerge out of that. But at the end of the day, you need to have a constructive conversation built on mutual respect and a slight non-combativeness. There's a time and place for everything, right?

I don't want to say that the debates are useless 100% of the time. But 99% of the time, they pretty much are. A simple example is, if you want to even think about the entire history of the Bolshevik Party is filled with instances of what? we would, I guess, considered to be very vitriolic, is that the term in English, debating between two different sides or two particular individuals. By the end of the day,

some great theory came out of that. But what's important about this point is that the people who were doing the discussion were highly educated in the matter that they were speaking of. They had personal experiences that they've done the research, right? Lennon wrote an 800-page book about the development of capitalism in Russia. He knew what

he was talking about when he was, you know, like, that's what I mean. Not like skimming a fucking Wikipedia article. But anyway, sorry. Absolutely. Exactly. But they were bouncing concepts and ideas off of each other in order to find a greater truth, a more material true analysis of the world.

But what you have, especially connected to the so-called funnel that we're talking about, is be it individuals or groups, which understand that at one moment, people are going to go further down, or one should say. higher up through the funnel after they're done with their specific type of, be it content, be it rhetoric, et cetera, et cetera. And what does that mean? That means, come on kids, yes, less money for them, less attention, less eyeballs, and so on. So why allow these people to move further down the pipeline?

Well, you would and you would care about that a lot more than lining your own pockets if you were actually doing this for the movement and not for yourself. But when your personal greed takes precedence over your participation in the world we're trying to create, that's when, you know, you cut off the pipeline and you start building a wall that's as thick as you can. And sometimes you actually even create a separate pipeline to take people in constant circles like one of those old Nokia snake eating its own ass type of games. And it's just self-serving at the end of the day. And honestly, I always ask myself if it's self-serving by instinct because, you know, they see the line go up and they're like, okay, I'll keep doing what I'm doing right now because, you know, it's helping bring more people to the community and because, you know, I'm lining my own pockets. Or is it genuinely intentional and do they at one point stop feeling like they're a part of the class movement they were part of before and turn it just into another grind the way 99% of all of us are trying to go through in order to survive?

That question only they can answer, I think, but time will show at the end of the day. where their true intentions, you know, lie, be it with themselves or the movement. Yeah. Yeah, and then there's plenty of both of those versions actually out there, you know, people that sort of fall into it and people that very cynically pursue that. And that's the ego-driven stuff I'm talking about. And that's really the careerism that you have to watch out for, especially when you're on the left, you have a platform and you start getting some recognition,

is like, okay, now you're locked in materially to this thing. So do you want to, you know, build a career out of this? At that point, you're going to have to maybe leave some of the more radical stuff aside or do something simply because it generates clicks and not because it's actually substantive. And then once you start playing into that whole calculus, then you're just off into opportunist land. And I think it's also important about a political party that can, you know, like to operate as a media platform in connection with the political party, there's that there's, it's not just an individual in their careerist or egoic ambitions. But it's actually, I'm literally tethered to this political formation, and I can, in some sense, be disciplined by it in the sense that I can't just free float off into my opportunism and my careerism, but I actually am in service of a larger political project and tied to other institutions. And I would like to see the emergence of something like that as well. That will be able to haunt your accountable a lot more than just, you know, the random cloud of the entertainment.

no you're good now we like to try to end on a positive note so brett what is one thing that you're hopeful about i mean obviously we don't want to be naive about the challenges we face but what is something you see going well in the coming months or years or decades yeah well i have to definitely do more than one and because i think it is important to provide hope because i think being a marxist a communist on the left just being a human being that actually feels feelings you can be very pessimistic it can be very dark we live in dark uncertain times and being hyper aware of all the ways in which things are terrible can be deteriorating to somebody's mental health to say nothing of their ability to stay engaged with this political project

and you see a lot of people get hopeless and just clock out they basically they recoil into their personal life and they turn away from politics because it's so frustrating it's so shitty and if all the Marxists are doing is just pointing out how shitty everything is it can obviously deactivate people so we have to have this revolutionary hope we have to sometimes lead with it things aren't all terrible

we do still have agency we can make a change and I think change is coming it is coming right and what that change looks like nobody knows but things are in a insane moment of radical transition and we do not know what's coming next but we know that for sure the old world

as Gramsci once said is dying and the new world is certainly trying to be born and now is certainly the time of monster like I love that fucking quote and it hits so fucking hard in 2022 you know just as hard as I assume as it did in his time are you perhaps insinuating that matter is in motion I think so I would say that yeah so so so that process is a historical process and it is happening and and so So one of the thing that gives me hope is that change is inevitable, right? Everything changes. Nothing is stagnant. And the dialectical fact that every advance that the forces of reaction and empire and capitalist rapaciousness make creates instantaneously the resistance to it.

Every time, like right now in the U.S., you could use a million examples, but the Supreme Court is very likely going to overturn Roe v. Wade. It's seeming very likely sometime this summer it's going to come on the docket and it will very likely. I mean, a lot of people think that's going to be the non-American audience. Yeah, Roe v. Wade is the constitutional right for a woman to have access to abortions. And so, thank you. Yeah, that's going to be overturned, meaning that women will no longer in the United States have a constitutional right to basically bodily autonomy. Right.

So then the right's going to think that they won. And they spent decades trying to get juice this bench of judges coming from the right and these think tanks and getting a big majority on the Supreme Court, which Trump absolutely allowed them to do. And then they're going to do this thing. And what is it going to do? It is going to create the backlash to it immediately. And we saw that with everything that the right tries to do. So as things get worse, as all the worst fucking people continue to ravage and devour the planet and society, It is creating already and will continue to create the resistance to it.

Our job, hopefully, is to help broaden that resistance and to make it more principled and to get it out into the real world and to actually have an organized force that we can do political struggle through. And I'm hopeful that that will emerge. Another thing is the youth, you know, it's sort of a cliche, well, the youth will save us. No, I don't think that. There's just as many 15-year-old fascists as there are 55-year-old fascists. A rabid empire based in genocide and white supremacy is not going to go kindly into that good night and is not going to be undermined simply by demographic shifts. But young people specifically around the climate issue know goddamn well that their future is on the line. If you're a 70-year-old boomer, you know, and you're in the Senate and you have a million millions of dollars in your bank account, what the fuck do you care about the future really?

And you're already probably a sociopath because you're in Congress, so you don't even necessarily care about your kids, let alone other kids and their futures, or you convince yourself it's not even happening or whatever. But young people cannot do that. They're emerging into a decaying world. And I think that is going to be one of the epicenters of change and forcing institutions to respond to this global crisis as time goes on. And so I'm hopeful in those ways. It's not going to be easy. What's coming in the next years and decades is going to be. tragic and brutal and lots of innocent people are going to be fucking hurt and the climate is going

to ravage entire countries and it's going to put insane pressure on the contradictions inside every single society so I don't want to paint a polyanish view of what's coming but there is reason to hope the the movement for humanity for liberation for justice for truth is going to be present and I think we can take we can take some some some reference in that fact. And then I would also just stress as a last thing, the thing I do on Rev Left a lot is this idea that outward transformation has to come with some degree of inner transformation. And that doesn't mean that you should recoil from political struggle and focus on, you know, spiritual engagement or whatever. But I do think it means that as communists, at least for me, I not only have a responsibility of transforming the outward world, but I feel like I have a responsibility to transform my inner world in the sense that I am less and less dominated by my ego. I'm less and less pulled around by greed. I'm less and less machismo in my reaction to things. I'm less and less reactionary to things in general. But, you know, this parallel process of almost like a new

consciousness emerging, a more dialectical, more internationalist, more ecologically minded, civilizational collective way of relating to the natural world to ourselves and to one another in parallel to this outward change that is already happening and will continue to happen. And so I really do think, like, humanity is at a crossroads. Like, do we evolve in the sense of do we, like, culturally move up this next level and leave these old institutions and structures and way of doing things behind? Or do we, in so many words, perish, right? Fall into barbarism, fall into the distinctions.

that very well could be tossed at our feet if we fail. I think that is a, that's, that's a, that's a, that's a huge question. And those things and more, uh, they give me some hope. Although, again, like Gramsci said, you know, pessimists of the, pessimism of the intellect and optimism of the will, no matter how dark things get, it's not over till it's over. And we all have an obligation to humanity to, to, to fight in this fight. That's a beautiful perspective. And I think that's, that's really the best way to look at. It's not to be naive. going forward, but to re-up your dedication to the cause, to really hunker down and recognize that we're in for a long, difficult fight. And it is our responsibility to keep these ideals strong and to keep moving forward and to fight for a world that really works for everybody. We've broken free of these shackles that we've suffered for so long and come out the other side stronger. So I think that's a great perspective you've got there. all right well i think that about does it for today brett thank you so much for coming on the show

tell our listeners where they can find you and your work online yeah first off thank you all three of you so much for having me on truly genuinely honored to be able to be i think the first guest on this on this podcast right yes so thank you so much it's it's a it's an honor absolutely um and if you're interested we're honored to have you man yeah very first uh deprogram challenge coin hell yeah it's all love um but if you want to find me and what I do. Anybody can just go to Revolutionary LeftRadio.com. You see all three of our shows, our Patreon, our

social media, and we even hooked up with a little co-op called Goods for the People to make some merch. So if you're interested in that, definitely check it out. Unique design. I'm really proud of it. So yeah, that's where you can find me, and that's how you can support us. Fantastic. Well, thank you again. You guys, make sure to go and check

out Rev. Left. Check out all the links that Brett's just mentioned. This has been the D program. I'm J.T. I'm Mike. And I'm Yovnik. And I'm Britt. And we'll see you next time.