Rev Left Radio - The State of the American Left (w/ How The Red Was Won)

Episode Date: October 4, 2025

Breht went on How The Red Was Won to talk about the current state of the left, the contradictions of American trade unions, American geopolitics, and much more! From the original description: You know him. You love him. It's everyone's favorite Breht O'Shea from such fine podcasts as RevLeft Radio, The Red Menace, Shoeless in South Dakota, and more! We talk about what organizing in the USA looks like 2025 - from unions to the socialist orgs, mutual aid, resisting fascism, and raising anti-fascist kids.Part 2 here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t-AxFA8SnBU

Greetings, comrades, and welcome to How the Red was One. A podcast about organizing in the South, Texas, Fascism, and How to Fight Back. I'm your host, Jen Big Nasty, and as usual, I just want to start off by plugging my Patreon. Shout out to everyone who supports me on that platform. Every little bit really does help. There are no ads in this podcast. There never will be. I am a regular working person, and it's really helpful if you are able to find

financially support this project on Patreon. So thank you so much to those who do. Today's guest is really a man who needs no introduction, but I'm going to attempt it anyway. So if you are in the U.S. and even vaguely on the political left, you have heard this man's voice. Maybe it's on Rev. Left Radio, Red Menace, Shulis in South Dakota. Maybe you heard him back in the day on guerrilla history. or as a guest on such fine podcasts as Upstream or Prol's Pod, shout out to the Proles always. It is your friend and comrade, Brett O'Shea. Welcome, Brett. Yeah, thank you so much for having me. It's a pleasure. It's an honor. I've been following how the red was one since it came about. Obviously, I think we had been following each other before that. So it was on my

feed, and I noticed it, and I've been rooting for you, been loving the stuff you've been pumping out. you're in Texas, I'm up here in Nebraska, so we got the Great Plains thing going for us. But yeah, very cool to finally be here. Yeah, thank you so much. This is actually technically, I think, the one-year anniversary episode. Nice. I didn't plan that on purpose. I kind of just looked at the calendar and was like, oh, my God, here we are already.

So, yeah, thanks for joining for this. So the theme today that I wanted to talk to you about, and maybe over the course of this conversation, will come up with a better title. But a small topic. The state of the American left. You know, just a casual conversation here. So that is obviously a whole lot. And we can get into like the different orgs

and the movement in general and what the current political climate is like for those of us working on this side of the political spectrum. But let's start off talking about unions, right? We are workers and, you know, I think it's really important for the working class to be organized. And one of the best ways to at least start that is through our unions. So I know that you recently started a new job in a new field. And I believe you've mentioned that you also joined a

union when you started this work. Could you just tell us a little bit about that? Absolutely. Yeah. It's an exciting, difficult, challenging transition I've had over the last two months. transitioning into, you know, the trade unions, you know, industrial trade. I don't want to get too specific, obviously, because I'm still pretty new, and I don't, you know, put too much information out there. But I'm in a local union. I'm in a local trade union based out of here in Omaha, and I'm working on huge construction sites, you know, hard hat, gloves, eye protection every day, the whole nine yards.

The shift into that line of work was intense, but I also am getting a lot out of it, you know. I like for somebody that's lived so much of my life, you know, working with my mind and in the intellectual realm and doing podcasts, discussing theory, being in academia, the shift to working with your hands and tools and building stuff. It's been fascinating and I'm enjoying it as much as I am being challenged by it. And, you know, when I was getting onboarded into the union as an apprentice, I was thinking, like, look at these pensions that are available. at this health care that is available for my whole family. When I turn out as a journeyman, I'll be making, you know, a wage that I never thought was possible. And I'm like, why doesn't

everybody do this? Why doesn't everybody join a trade union? And then I did my first day of work. And I was like, oh, this shit is hard. You're waking up at five in the morning. It's physical labor. It is gritty as shit. Like, yeah, you're going to the bathroom in Porter Potty's in a hundred degree heat in the middle of August. You're working outside in the middle of the winter. So I get why people don't do this en masse, but I am still, you know, very proud to be a part of it. And a big thing that's, that's come over me over the last, you know, a few months of doing this and integrating into the union is the pros and cons of trade unions in the United States. The pros are obvious. There's the material pros for the workers that are in the

union. There is this solidarity that is implicit. People care about each other. If you're in the union or you're just in the unions right the labor movement more broadly you're automatically seen as a brother as a sister you're welcomed with open arms um you know you get to immediately contribute to union culture like on the job site everybody's in the union right but there's a whole spectrum of people who give a fuck right some guys just or you know some guys and girls just pay the dues to get by um and don't show up to meetings don't do the events don't really rep the the paraphernalia the merch, the logo, all that stuff. And then there's people on the full other end that, you know,

absolutely do all of that and are really seen, see themselves first and foremost as union members and workers for a contractor. Secondly, and there's the whole spectrum in between that. But being able to now perpetuate, learn and perpetuate this culture is also an exciting thing. The con side of it is just, you know, what Lennon would refer to as the limits of trade union consciousness.

These are not hotbeds of anti-inferialist, anti-capitalist, revolutionary sentiment by any means, right? The red scares in the early 20th century, de-radicalized unions and really integrated labor unions into the American Empire in a lot of ways. We see, for example, in Italy, dock workers being much more radical and much more internationalist and their self-conception. And there's an internationalist perspective, right? Like when you're in these trade unions, they're often international trade. unions, including the one I'm in. And so there's that element of it. But, you know, the overwhelming sentiment that I've picked up so far on the job site is pretty

much apolitical, right? There's Trump supporters. There's anti-Trump supporters. There's progressive people. And once or a while, there's a couple radicals for sure that you come across. And I think the union itself pushes people that might otherwise shift right word towards at least left-wing economics. Right. And then the social issues are a whole other thing. But it's clear that revolution in the United States is not going to erupt out of the trade union. Right. Yeah. Yeah. I wasn't naive enough to have that notion going in. And, you know, so I didn't need to be disabused of any starry-eyed romanticism with regards to that. But yeah, the limits of trade union consciousness is certainly there. Now, compared to any other workplace I've worked in, the solidarity is built in. When you go to these union meetings,

the sense of community, of having each other's backs, of giving a fuck about bigger issues and given a fuck about one another, combating the individualistic alienation of our society. That's all there. And it's never been present in any other workplace I've been in, like it is in the union. So, again, pros and cons, you know, people out there, especially young people thinking about what they want to do with their lives,

this is a path, but don't be rosy-eyed about it. Don't think it's automatically going to be some radical thing. that it's going to be not hard, right? Like, if you're not into working in, you know, difficult conditions and gritty environments, it can be a lot. But for those people that are okay with that physical labor type of lifestyle, waking up at 5 a.m.,

shitting in porter potty when it's 100 degrees out, if you can accept that part of it, it's a path, is all I'm saying. And again, there's no, you know, student loan debt or anything like that. The union trains you and pays you while you're being trained to enter this union. So food for thought. Yeah.

I mean, moving into blue collar work in your mid-30s is quite impressive. I've been a personal trainer for over a decade now. And as tough as that blue-collar work is, looking at people's bodies, like, over a lifetime, sitting at a desk is like so much harder on your body than it is doing this. manual labor, even though it doesn't sound like it would be. But we're not meant to sit so much, right? Like, we're meant to move our bodies and work physically. So I think it's really cool that you're moving into that. To touch on that, I think that's a fascinating aspect. I'm into fitness and longevity and being strong and capable for the rest of my life. And I was into that before I got

the job. And so getting into the physical labor aspect of it is interesting because on one hand, it can facilitate a healthy fit athletic body but on the other hand on the job site you also see dudes that are alcoholics that smoke cigarettes that eat like absolute shit go to the gas station and get like monster energy drinks and cheese burgers for there and so in that in that sense if you don't take care of your body physical trades will break you down right if you do take care of your body then it can be an extension of a healthy fit lifestyle but that's certainly not the case for everybody so but i totally agree with you that when i was working in offices i've worked in offices sitting and staring at a screen for eight hours a day my mental health was the no the most

noticeable thing that took a hit yeah but the physical health as well i i just become you know less fit my posture gets shittier um you put on calories because you're not burning calories while you're working so so yeah pros and cons for sure but entering into the late the physical trades i want to continue to maintain my body. I play sports. I lift weights. And now I've shifted my weight lifting in a direction that complements the actual type of labor I do on the job so that they can sort of synergistically benefit one another instead of working against one another or otherwise just breaking down my body. But it's hard. And I already feel like the first several weeks of working, I come home sore, right? My knees hurt. My back hurts. So it's no joke in that sense, for sure.

Yeah, yeah. That's, yeah, cool. So back to unions. I am a member of the IWW. I'm a wobbly. I have been for a few years now, even though I haven't really been active for about a year, right about the same time that we made our full shift into mutual aid. We'll get into like the local orgs in a little bit. But I kind of took a step back from just like really being involved in the union. But the wobblies are great, right? And they've been around for over a century and really are one of the more radical unions that you can join here. They are international. That's with the ice. Well, no, the eye stands for industrial. But they are also international. But like when October 7th happened, like immediately issued like a very like we stand with Palestine.

Like just always really on the right side of history. So it's really good to see that there are unions like that that you can join. And the cool thing about the Wobbleys is that they cover like all industries. Like anybody can join that's not a boss is really the rule there. As long as you don't have the power to hire and fire people, you can join that union. And a lot of the local work that they have been doing here is really just like assisting other groups that are organizing. So they were working with like Alamo Draft House United. and there's like a local pizza chain that was trying to get a union going as well.

So they do a lot of like behind the scenes, like teaching workers how to organize, which is really cool. And it's an important thing that exists now because I think there's a lot of us that are like, like, you know, the first thing you opened with was like, you know, this union is offering health care and pensions and all of the stuff that people are like, damn, I want that. But like, how do I get it? And like, it's great that there are organizations.

around that can tell you how to organize and how to do that. So they do exist and they're around. They have a chapter in pretty much every city. You can definitely reach out to the wobbleys. Can I say something on that? Please. IWW is the first organization, like left-wing organization I ever joined. This is probably my late teens.

I was just getting into radical politics. The social media wasn't where it is now. I'm almost 37, so it's been a long time. And when I was getting into politics, social media existed, but not in the way that it does now. The left communities online were not as robust as they are now. And it was just a different sort of terrain that you had to navigate to find organizations like that.

But IWW, I stumbled across and I joined them. And so they've always had, and I've organized with them, right? And their general defense arm as well in the past that did a lot of legal work. And when I got arrested for a protest in 2017, it was that organization that I was organized with that really led the fight for, you know, the legal battle taking care of the issues surrounding being arrested and having to go to court and the organization that went into that because it wasn't just me. It was several other comrades who got caught up in that mass arrest. But the IWW has a big part of my heart. And even today, I rep the merch. I you know on my lunch pail I have an IWW sticker right next to my actual locals sticker and you know you said you know I always get this confused too I international workers of industrial workers of the world I've I've done that a million but it's the world part that is the internationalism right yes yes and that's a beautiful thing and the other beautiful thing that's rare about the IWW is that is it's across industries and one of the limits of trade union consciousness is the fact that it is fundamentally

you know it is interested in the working class as a whole and when you when you go in and you get integrated into the union you are very class conscious in that sense and unions see themselves as like i mean in some sense not in the leninist sense but in their you know sort of sense a vanguard of the working class the labor movement right all these unions we are the we are the thing standing between total immiseration of the working class as a whole and the corporate overlords that run our society but they are limited that i mean you know fundamentally your union is trying to get the best deal for you as the member of that union and the iww has always held out this promise of of not being so narrow in their scope internationalist and all workers right no matter what you

do and so um i love them i support them i recommend people getting involved in them and i think they are one of they had this beautiful history and tradition which you know any person that's interested in labor history should study. But they also, again, they're still going, and they hold out the hope of a more radical, more internationalist, and more inclusive in the sense that, you know, any worker can join form of trade union consciousness that is certainly more militant, more advanced, and more ultimately revolutionary than, you know, the trade unions that exist today. a full agree on that and that transitions nicely into again I don't want to bash any unions here

but this this idea of being you know workers of the world and of being across industries and I mean really like there are a lot of reds in the IWW still whereas we were kind of perched from a lot of the other unions during the multiple red scares that we have lived through and so you you have unions like the auto workers, like the UAW, who, I think them and the teamsters are both run by a Sean. So I get a little bit confused. But when Trump was originally putting like tariffs and things on, the union leader came out like pro that because it would be good specifically for their industry's worker to cut down on competition. But if you take an internationalist workers of the world view on these things, we have to understand that like we're harming workers

in other places for the benefit of the imperial core. And that's obviously not what we as like Marxist Leninists are about. So it's important. Um, you know, and again, I still think you should join a union even if they have some incorrect lines. You know, the idea would be to join it and push them to be better. Um, but it is important that, um, that you stay aware of these things when you are joining an organization and ways that you can push it, you know, to be a little more globally conscious, right? Absolutely. I think that's essential.

And it's a site of struggle like everything else. You know, I always talk about terrains of struggle. And this is still a terrain of struggle. But yeah, like one issue that pops out and you alluded to this is the immigration issue, right? Traditionally, unions have been against immigration for the obvious reasons that, you know, their way that capital can't capital can use them as a way to drive down wages and take the floor out from underneath the working class blah blah blah but if that is not connected to an anti-imperialist politic then what you do is you lose the root cause of what causes mass migration in the first place

and you be and you fall very easily into a reactionary trend that says they're just trying to come here and get what we have and the racialist trend that says this is a white christian you know all this other bullshit but if you if you have these anti-imperialist understanding, then how could you ever divorce mass migration from not only imperialist wars, like explicit wars around the world, like the Syrian mass migration, for example, completely a product of wars and Western meddling in West Asia, but also the sanctions regime that the U.S. imposes on so many other countries. Venezuela is just one example. All these Venezuelan immigrants, right, are coming here.

and then you have like this Venezuelan gang in Denver that the Wright made a huge, you know, or in Colorado that the right made a huge thing about trying to frame them as like this horrific invade. Well, what do you think is happening in Venezuela? Well, socialism has failed and so people are fleeing. No. The U.S. has imposed a brutal, multi-decade sanctions regime meant to inflict maximal harm on the population with regards to food, medicine, and broader trade that undermines that country's ability to just survive as an economy in the world

because in the modern world you need to trade with other countries in order to survive. And if the U.S., the biggest economy in the world is putting its boot on your neck, right? You're going to create so that they can also say socialism failed, by the way, but you're creating the conditions

that people have to flee for better economic opportunity. And the whole idea that I kind of sum it up in with regards to immigration to the United States is, would you rather be in front of the gun or behind the gun? And immigrating to the United States is kind of, now with ice, you know, fuck ice. You're not actually behind the gun. But the idea is, like, why do they all come here? They love our freedom.

They love our, no, because you are the hegemon. You're the Roman Empire of the modern world. And they come here to try to find a better life because you have, you have dislodged them from their home. 99% of human beings would prefer to stay. in their communities, with the language they speak, with the culture they know, with their family and their friends, and most migration is a product of economic or, you know, fleeing economic devastation or fleeing war, violence, conflict, and sometimes even just crime that is the product

of poverty. But when you trace back the root causes, almost always it ends at imperialism or colonialism that is creating the conditions that people have to flee from and then they flee to the imperial core. So I'm not interested in any analysis of immigration. That does not start and end there. And working in a union or working as a political educator anywhere, I think one of the big things we have to do, especially in this period, of fascist crackdown, of the ICE Gestapo going out and terrorizing people and the very easy, visceral reactionary trends that can emerge in the face of that and to support that and actually give rise to that is to educate on this issue. Why is this happening?

We're not against immigrants. And that's the internationalist thing. I have more in common with a Venezuelan worker or a Chinese worker than I do with any politician in the United States or any capitalist. So I also want to start there. And these are the sort of things that we have the duty. to bring together for people and to highlight for people so they can fully understand the dimensions of this issue, which is a vaccine against falling into dumb, fuck, cruel, violent, reactionary

analyses of this issue. Oh, yeah. I don't know if I have anything to add to that. What I've been saying is make unions red again. Yeah, yeah. Sums that up a little bit. It'd be nice. And you were mentioning the, sorry, you were mentioning the, sorry, you were mentioning the,

red scares. That was a way of de-radicalizing unions. And then Reaganomics and neoliberalism was a way of just de-unionizing unions. And so we live not only in the wake of the red scare and the de-radicalization of those unions, but also in the de-unionization of the economy itself. And there's only a few places where those still exist. And they're often in the skilled trades because those skilled trades take years and years to learn. And it's not so easy to just replace them. Right. And so they have leverage that they that they use in the union context to negotiate with with with with capital but yeah but yeah so I always I always see the 20th century in the US as first we got to de-radicalize the unions collaborate bring them into the fold and then they're still pesky they're still annoying because it's the working class organized so then we got to get rid of them all together that's neoliberalism and they did a pretty damn good job of it um it's a good point that uh this the skill traits so you have like the the electricians union is pretty strong, the steel workers union, like you have some of these things still. But the U.S. economy has shifts so much to this like tech and service that those are

notoriously difficult groups to organize. You know, I was a part of a group that was trying to organize bartenders in my 20s. I was a bartender. But man, trying to get a group of bartenders in their 20s to come to a meeting, you know, that's what 11 a.m. is like first thing in the morning for a bartender, you know, like, it was just, like, impossible. And, you know, these jobs are, you know, notoriously in Texas at least paid $2 an hour, right? So you rely on tips. So it's really hard to push for more. Legally, they don't have to give you anything. And then the tech sector, a lot of our organizing comrades work in tech. And they have decent jobs. They get a nice, like, benefits package and stuff. So it's, there's so much less likely to start to organize a

Union, even though, you know, a lot of them do realize that they're working for like trillion dollar companies and they're, again, getting paid well, maybe six figures, but it's certainly, you know, they're still having their labor values stolen. But it's, it's really hard to organize people that are getting health care and paid vacations and really getting through to them that like, even though you have it better than the guy at McDonald's, you're all still part of the same class. And it's been very difficult to organize those falls. for sure. And the tech sector is increasingly precarious with the rise of automation and the take for years we heard learn to code right and now with AI regardless of AI's limitations it's

almost certainly true that AI is at least capable of taking huge swaths of that away so like even if you did everything right you're still screwed and you're still in a precarious situation and if you don't have a union and you but you're making good money right now that's not guarantee teeth, right? So if you had the foresight to see that I'm living pretty good right now, but if I can break out of my individualist confined box of analysis and see that this whole economy is actually crumbling underneath my feet and that my job, as sure as I am, that it's stable, actually isn't. Um, you know, that's, but I, again, I think it's going to be a rude awakening when this house of cards that is the U.S. economy eventually shits out.

And it's coming sooner than later. I think we're going to have a bigger than the Great Recession economic sort of event during the Trump administration. And how was the Trump administration going to handle it? Look how Obama handled it, bailing out the big bank, mudding people fucking get kicked out of their homes. And that's a progressive liberal. So this insane techno-o- oligarchic fascist regime under Trump is certainly not going to bail out the working class or do anything like that when this next horrific event inevitably comes because the economy is just shit and um you know one of the contradictions of the trade unions at the at the moment is these huge data centers which they are a bananza for the trades right

this is where the steam fitters and the plumbers and the electricians um and you know all of these iron workers all of these trade unions are getting huge job opportunities for these data centers but the huge contradiction and in fact these data setter constructions i i i I keep repeating this stat that I heard, one third of the growth in the economy right now is centered around the construction of these insane data centers. So we have, take out the data center constructions and you're already in a recession, right? But then by adding that on, yes, you're getting short-term jobs, especially for all these skilled trades, but at the cost of what?

electricity skyrocketing massive water usage these these things are going to be used to continue to surveil us palanteer is involved um this is the techno oligarchy consolidating its monopoly power going forward and to build a multi-billion dollar data center um you need to already have an insane amount of capital to invest in just the the opening costs of that and then what's so you know smaller tech firms or whatever are never going to be able to compete with Google and meta and all this other shit. And then going forward, what they're going to do is they're going to rent out space in these data centers to smaller firms in order to have access to cloud power and CPU power, et cetera. So these are actually, you know, we did a whole episode on

techno feudalism and we discussed the limitations of that term. And this is obviously still late stage monopoly capitalism. But the technology. feudalist aspect is that these huge monopoly corporations are creating a context in which anybody smaller than them that wants to survive in the digital age is now going to have to rent out space in these data centers to have the CPU power going forward. So, and here's another layer of the contradiction. Sorry, I'm long-winded, as people know. I'm a podcaster after all. But another contradiction is the tech oligarchs, they're running up against the limitations of a 75-plus-year-old American grid.

So weirdly, the huge tech firms are wanting massive state investment in upgrading the grid, which obviously is a good thing. We need to enter the 21st century, et cetera. At the same time, though, that they're ingratiated to a regime. that is dismantling green tech, not only just like not only like not using it as much or letting fossil fuel come, but actively dismantling the green infrastructure that has so far been able to be built and is clearly in the pocket and in cahoots with the fossil fuel industry. So you have these huge two, these two giant sort of corporate interests that are fully and

integrated in the, in the Trump regime, kind of having different desires here, right? I mean, a modern grid would benefit lots of different people, but to really make it modern and to make it sustainable, you would have to bring in this renewable tech aspect that is in contradiction to the fossil fuels interest, right? Which is really an accelerationist death drive, let's burn as much shit as possible, let's raking as much profits as possible before this whole fossil fuel fucking scam eventually goes away because it's just outpriced by renewables, you know? in the same way that Israel is stepping on the gas pedal for full genocide and finishing the Nakhba because they see that the world has turned against them even the youth in the United States across the political spectrum has turned against them

so they see this as they're like this is do or die hit the gas pedal and see what you know so in a very similar way that's happening here in the US with reactionary politics with the fossil fuel industry and these interesting contradictions emerge in the meantime yeah that's a good point about

I like that connection you made, but the point about the grid is so important. Texas has a notoriously fragile grid. We get a little bit of snow and the whole fucking state shuts down, mostly because we don't know what to do with it, because it's not something that any of us grew up, but I didn't grow up. I didn't see snow until I was 22 when I went to Colorado, and I was like, this is the coolest thing I've ever witnessed. Like, it's not something that we have here, you know, south of like Dallas.

there's no snow, but now with the climate catastrophe and these huge swings in the temperature where we have our summer days that can reach 110, and that collapses the grid because everybody's AC is running at full blast. And then we have the opposite of that in the winter when everything freezes over because nothing is weatherized for that here. Because again, we haven't historically had these types of winter storms. And so then, of course, the Texas legislature, every time since the big deadly storm in 2021, they've met, they meet an odd year.

So they've met like three times since then. And they have failed to do anything to weatherize the grid. And yet we are building these data centers. They're trying to build one right outside of Austin. Of course, there are lawsuits to stop it. But those, you know, as we know historically, they just kind of slow it down, which is good. And it can help build momentum against it. But generally, the corporations always win against the people, because that's the type of system we live under.

So, yeah, they start building those that sap even more energy. We are very, very fucked for the next big winter storm. It's going to be, and a lot of people will die. And that's a sacrifice that the ruling class is willing to make. Because when it's, you know, it's generally the homeless, the poor, the elderly that suffer the most from these big heat, waves and freezes, they're very, very willing to sacrifice those people. They absolutely do not care. Absolutely. Yeah, Texas is concentrated America. The contradictions of American society are really highlighted and concentrated in an interesting way in Texas. And Texas is opening up its

state to be fully penetrated by the techno oligarchs in this way. They want to ride this wave of data centers, even though they're on the front lines of all these issues. And their private grid is just a fucking disaster. You know, their government is very reactionary and gerrymanders the state to ensure that even as the populace shifts and becomes more purple and eventually blue, they're trying to lock in minority and right-wing rule for as long as they possibly can. That's the fossil fuel state, you know, that is the data center state. So all these things we're talking about is really like concentrated.

I mean, that's Elon Musk's on the Gulf Coast launch and rocket state, right? Like this is what Texas is right now. And so Texas really in so many ways, I see it as like concentrated America. And when the contradictions burst asunder, they'll burst in Texas as well as across the entire country. I've been saying for years, the revolution will begin in Texas. And that's for better or worse. Like the fascist revolution could very well begin here. In fact, in a lot of ways it has.

But I also think that the socialist revolution could begin here. the people that I've met throughout my different organizing ventures and when I go and meet we can go ahead and start jumping into like the socialist orgs so I was a member of CPUSA for a few years and I'm not here to bash on the organization I'm not a member any longer for a lot of reasons mostly because they kicked me out but I you know the the country is so big and yes we live under like a kind of a centralized government you know we have the federal government, but things are very, very different, population-wise, you know, geographically and politically in different parts of the country. And so I've noticed that the

people that live in Texas, in Kentucky, in Florida, Georgia, these openly oppressive states that have like the governors that you can name because they're so bad, right? Those people are a lot more radical, a lot more willing to take the next steps than the people. And again, no offense to good comrades doing good work in places like New York City or California. The conditions are just so different that the things that people are willing to do and the types of organizing that people are willing to do vary. And again, they should because the conditions are different. But I just feel like people that live in states that have maybe enshrined abortion laws or are taking steps to protect trans kids, things that I think are very important, they rely a little more

on electoralism and they still see hope in electoral politics so much more than people that live in Texas that know that like that is not going to work for us. Like we cannot vote our way out of this shit. And so people in specifically the South are just a lot more overtly radical, I think, in so many ways, right? So that brings us to, oh yeah, go ahead. I think that's, you know, from the dialectical materialist perspective, that is precisely because the contradictions are mounting in those areas in a more aggressive way as what you just alluded to. The conditions are worse. They're deteriorating. The electoral terrain is completely owned and operated by the corporate right and there's no sense of any any ability

to break through to that i live in nebraska i live in a deep red state um we had pitts for many years he's just the rich kid of a billionaire whose daddy owns the cubs or whatever and bought him the governorship and now he's now he's running for senate and actually interestingly in the u.s um or in in in Nebraska um he's running for senate against dan osborne who is a union mechanic right running as an independent so he's not a republican not a democrat obviously running as a democrat Nebraska isn't a is in a good move any reasons but he's running as an independent against the corporate republican machine as a union mechanic coming completely out of the trade union movement and uh and i've talked to him on rev left before when kellogg's here in omaha had a big

strike um and you know his politics are what you would expect his politics actually are a good representation of what i was talking about earlier with the limitations of trade union consciousness but you know his economics are bernie sanders style economics his social issues are moderate in between liberal and conservative you know social issues so take it for what it is but having a union mechanic independent dislodge a corporate republican machine in a deep red state like the u.s bodes well for for this sort of independent outside the two-party kind of struggle would be an interesting thing to see would deliver a real blow to the

Republican Party and the corporate machinery that run it because he's not taking corporate money he's a worker, you know? Yeah. And is a perfect example of the exact thing that you're saying, which is in these deep red states, these contradictions come to a head sooner. And they give rise

to, I mean, this is just an electoral thing, but they give rise in more robust ways to what you're saying, which is a certain type of desperate fucking organizing that comes out of increasingly desperate conditions. So yeah, you have something for sure. Yeah.

Hell yeah. So, yeah, let's kind of jump in to these different, there are a couple of different, the big national, like, quote unquote, left orgs. I listened to an episode you did, I think back in July. It was like leading up to the big DSA convention where you talk to a couple of people that were very involved in that.

And I paid attention a little bit to like what going on during and after the convention and it seems like they passed some really cool things to bring their org further to the left because some of the bigger critiques of DSA is that they're extremely big tent and they have straight up liberals, democratic socialists. There's a Maoist sect though. Like they're kind of all over the place. But it looks like they've been starting to be pulled in a more radical direction, which is obviously great, at least, you know, from the perspective that you and I come from. Yeah.

You know, and I think they are, or they are the largest, like, quote unquote, left organization in the U.S. and something that seems to benefit them in a lot of ways is that they are not officially a political party. Like, they do not run their own candidates under the DSA banner, but they put candidates that run generally under the Democrats, which I, you know, personally, not my theory of revolution, but I do think that, you know, Lenin talks about the illegal and the illegal, right? We run our candidates, and for a lot of ways to show that when the powers that be stop them, it teaches people that, like, maybe we can't win through their system.

Um, so yeah, do you, have you been a member of the DSA or do you just, you know comrades in there? I was, I was a member many, many years ago. I think in my early 20s for a couple years, I was a card carrying member of the DSA. Before Bernie, before it got big, I'm not saying that in the hipster sense. I'm just saying that like in the sense that it was, it was a different party free Bernie, right? It was an old folks. I mean, it was an older folks party. It was really a relic in some ways.

And it had no, no juice among the American population. and I don't think millennials had really found out about it yet because it was through the Bernie campaign that they did. So that was many, many years ago. And I'm not a member of the DSA, but it's a terrain of struggle. Like I keep saying, every organization is a train of struggle.

And when you see a rising left, you will see every manifestation of it. So the idea that you're going to have a rising left that doesn't include impurities, that doesn't include like right-wing fucking freaks pretending to be communist and socialist or, you know, more liberal. liberal ingratiationists, you know, arguing that they're the real purveyors.

And look what Lenin argued with, Rosa Luxembourg, Kotzky, and Bernstein. These fights have been going on since Marxism was a thing, right? Since revolutionary, Marx and Bakun, it goes way back to them. I mean, that's anarchism versus Marxism. So we should not be surprised. And in fact, we should welcome that when the left is getting on its fucking feet, every manifestation of it is going to come to the fore. And we could navigate that, but we shouldn't be surprised at it, and we shouldn't resent it.

So the DSA, there are many good comrades working in it. It is the biggest explicitly socialist organization in the United States. It has its flaws, as we would expect, as trade unions have their flaws, right? As every organization has their flaws. And there is a real struggle happening within it. So anybody's saying, oh, fuck the DSA, I'm against the DSA. It's just too myopic. it's too static it's not it's not seeing the struggle and even an organization as a living breathing

evolving thing but as a thing that either does or doesn't check off the static boxes you want it to check off and so it's short-sighted you don't have to organize with the dsa right you could have politics such that i'm not going to put my efforts in that direction but salute to the comrades that are and as you said there are mls and there are MLMs and there are left communists and they're anarchists probably or some version of them in the DSA working in their own way to push it to the left and in many ways succeeding

and as the contradictions in American society continue to mount as young people with no fucking future continue to look for political alternatives as the Democratic Party continues to self-immolate of course the Democratic Socialists of America along with many other left-wing organizations will continue to rise

and what they're doing is in many ways they're trying to strike the very difficult balance between having a tent that is too small and having one that is too big. So you can, you know, there are a million little microsect parties on the American left, whose tent can be condemned is too small. Now, the benefit of having a too small of a party is, God damn, do you have the perfect theoretical line, right? Right, right.

But you don't have the coalition and the buy-in from masses, at least a fraction of the masses, that you need to move that organization forward. So maybe you isolate yourself and you and your 20 comrades are just perfect on all the issues, but there's a real ceiling to what you can get done. Or you can maybe integrate into a bigger tent like the DSA as a caucus and struggle within that terrain with other left-wing organizations that, you know, I don't think the DSA necessarily has

what we would really call a mass base, but they're certainly trying to build one. And they're certainly taking coalitional politics seriously, which honestly, if we want to win in any sense, and if you look back at all the revolutions, including the Bolshevik revolution and the Chinese revolution, coalitions were a thing. You have to navigate the petty bourgeois z and their factionalism, right? The Chinese communist had to unite with the nationalist to take out the primary contradiction, which was Japanese imperialism, and then they could turn on each other. You have to go to the masses, meet their material needs, meet. them where they're at, which in America is not on the radical revolutionary

Marxist left most of the time. Right. And that's the hard, difficult work of organizing. So again, trying to strike that balance between too small of a tent and too big of a tent is admittedly fucking difficult. And, you know, some orgs err in one direction, some

orgs err in the other. I think obviously the Democratic Party is the perfect example of just a tent so fucking big anybody can come in. You know, like Kirsten Cinema, Like little Republicans. Imperialists. He'll get a Netanyahu will get a standing ovation for the Democratic Party.

So that's way too big. You and your little sect of three incredibly principled Maoists is a little too small. Right. So somewhere in between there, we got to find the right size. But, you know, not shitting on the small malice orgs. A lot of them do great work. But, you know, that's the, that's a real live issue in the DSA. in its unique way as trying to navigate it

and having the autonomy of the chapters and having the caucuses and having these conventions where struggles can take place between different factions that is actually good and healthy you know and I commend all the comrades

working within the DSA to push it to the left by that we mean in an anti-capitalist an anti-democratic party a pro-internationalist and an anti-colonial direction and that's exactly what this last convention

was a struggle over front and centering the Palestinian struggle, refusing to compromise with Zionism, those are fucking necessary moves that any organization, calling themselves socialist, has to make, and that only comes through struggle. Yes,

agreed. So next, I wanted to talk about the PSL, the Party for Socialism and Liberation. There is a common misconception that they are Trotskyists. They are not. They did split from a Trot org a couple of decades ago, but

their line is Marxist-Leninist. Um, so they're also a fairly large organization. They have chapters everywhere. In fact, um, I grew up in Waco, Texas. Shout out to the cult. Um, but, uh, they even have a, they have a very active chapter in Waco, Texas that I, I follow on, like, Instagram. Um, so they really are everywhere. And they're doing a lot of really good work.

And they, in a slightly different way than DSA does, they, they run candidates as well, right? So DSA runs candidates that work with them but are through like the Democratic Party. The PSL is a political party. So they run their own candidates, you know, famously Claudia de la Cruz and Karina Garcia ran for president this last year in 2024. And I think they, again, they really, even more so than DSA, they follow that lininous line of running candidates under their own party banner because we can use these. bourgeois platforms of like a presidential election to really like get this message out and and obviously it's a struggle for them because our corporate media does not want to they don't even want to talk to the green party which is the largest third party um you know so so so psl does get ignored a lot but

if you you know follow them online uh which i think you know everybody under 50 really gets a lot of their news from social media more so than like CNN or MSNBC then you really do get this information from them and what they stand for and what they're really fighting for. They've been at the forefront of a lot of these Palestinian liberation, like, well, they take second chair and work with, like, Palestine action and these other groups, but they are really out there in the streets. They're very good at, like, making signs and stuff, like their head, from what I understand, because we used to work with them when I was in CPUSA, their national just kind of like emails them, like PDFs and stuff.

and they just go to like kinkos or whatever and just like print out, they stable them to their signs and they're so good at protesting. And, you know, we can argue about the validity and like what is really accomplished by protest movements. But I think that the visual aspect of that and having thousands and thousands of people in the streets really does help, like what I might call like normies or liberals, understand that there is a left out there. really aren't the left. And when people see these mass movements of people in the streets

really demanding an end to imperialism, demanding an end to genocide, demanding, you know, health care for all or whatever that they may be, PSL is so good at getting people out into the streets. And I think that they fill that aspect of like what's needed on the left really well. Do you have experience working with any of them? I mean, I've interviewed many, many PSO members, including the co-founders of the organization, PSL, I think, has a presence in my area, though it hasn't traditionally had a super strong presence. In fact, my swearing in for my union, there was a couple, I believe, PSL members in my local who were listeners of Rev left. And they knew a mutual friend of mine and they were asking, you know, like, can we connect and stuff?

So I'm still looking forward to that. If you're listening, meet me at the next union meeting. Let's chop it up. Oh, yeah. That's awesome. But, yeah, what PSL does. So the DSA is building coalitional politics and taking the electoral terrain seriously as a site of struggle and having within it a really big tent of different ideological tendencies, struggling it out for the future line of the organization.

What PSL does really well is at least in the cities they operate in, and some cities, certainly more than others, they really do have a mass base of support. They build up mass bases of support and their protests for all the limitations of protest are a display of the amount and diversity of the people involved in these PSL organizations. And they hold a really, like you said, an ML line, right? And then, you know, just as the DSA has all its left critics, PSL has many critics on the left well. You'll call them Trotskyist, call them Marseists, whatever. All the PSL comrades I've personally met have been incredibly principled, hardworking motherfucking organizers. I'm not

in the PSL. I'm not in the DSA. I actually enjoy keeping Rev Left radio outside of any given organization, not because I don't support organization, but because, you know, I don't want to get into the intra-organizational dramas that pop up all the time. Or, you know, all the, I want to be a truly independent voice, but my voice is always geared towards getting people organized. You know, if Reve will have to accomplish anything, it's to hopefully equip people with, in Red Menace and all the other stuff that we do, equip people with theoretical knowledge so that they can take that knowledge into organizational spaces and put it to work, like the PSL, like the DSA, like tenant organizing, whatever. So, so I, I really have a lot of

respect for PSL and what they're doing. And I think if the left is going to be successful, it's not necessarily going to be one organization that wins out, right? It will continue to be this ecosystem of left-wing voices and organizations that have to increasingly come together and have to find ways of organizing and collaborating coalitionally to build a left force. And the idea of infiltrating the Democratic Party is dead. And I think even most people in the DSA know that. We're not infiltrating this corporate Zionist insane party led by 70-year-old millionaires and billionaires. But the Green Party, insofar as we take seriously competing on the electoral terrain, the Green Party has more institutional buy-in and an infrastructure waiting to be moved

to the left and used for that reason. So if we're going to take electoral terrain organizing seriously, we have to understand the limitations of trying to break into it, like the PSL. They run their candidates, God bless them, but they don't break in. Right. The Democratic Party totally gone. Just give up on that. We have to oppose them hard as hell just as much as we oppose the Republicans. Okay, the Green Party has this interesting little in-between position where he has ballot access. It has electoral credentials, right? It's been around for a long time. And it's very, it's kind of a hollow shell, right? Like the Green Party, it's been different things at different times. it doesn't really have like a full steam hardcore ideological line and that's sometimes it's

weakness but also an opportunity arises for real a real left internationalist anti-colonial takeover and it wouldn't even be a takeover I think most people in the green party are increasingly like let's do this but it is a vehicle that I think can more can more reasonably be used by the actual left anti-capitalist anti-imperialist anti-colonialist anti-colonialist left in the United States to fight on the electoral terrain. So I would like to see a coalition of left forces come together and try to basically use the Green Party as the electoral mechanism for which we fight. And then you have all these organizations, do your tenant organizing, have PSL mobilize people

over here, have the DSA continue to play their coalitional political strategy while at the same time seeing the Green Party as like this interesting middle ground that the left can can reasonably use as a mechanism to combat our many, many enemies on the electoral front because most Americans experience politics through electoralism right now. That's just the fact. And if, you know, as Marx and Lenin, they talked about the uses of electoralism to see our numbers, to organize and to get our message out to the masses. And if we are not seriously engaged on that realm, how we're going to get the message out

to the masses, right? algorithms will put us in silos, our tiny parties that don't ever get on a debate stage, will never introduce our message. And I think the Green Party kind of has a unique position to possibly do that. Not saying it is, not saying it will, but it has the possibility of being that, right? Well, you know, what you're talking about essentially is a united front, right? And that's really how, you know, left action has historically worked. You know, I've said a million times, if we had a vanguard.

party already, we would be doing the damn thing right now, right? And whether or not we see that arise and be like, oh, this is it and can name it immediately. I think it is a moot point. It doesn't really matter. But it will take an amalgamation, an organization of all of these different, slightly different like splinter orgs, whether it's some people from the CPUSA, some people from the PSL, some DSA, some Maoists, some anarchists, whatever. all coming together. And maybe that is under the Green Party banner. I think that's a really interesting way to look at it because the Green Party also is sort of big tense, but in a very much more left aspect. And I think they've been moving much more socialist in the last

couple of decades, looking at someone like Butch Ware, who is currently planning to, or he is running for governor of California. And I'm really interested to see how that takes place. You know, the Republican doesn't usually win in California unless it's Arnold, and that's, you know, just because of his celebrity status. And I think Newsom is quite unpopular, if he's even running again, because he's probably going to run for president. So it's a really interesting time for somebody like Butch Ware, who is, I love listening to him speak. I don't agree with everything he says, but, like, he makes his points really well, and he comes from a very, like, educated place when he talks about the things that he's, is passionate about. And I think someone like him does have an opportunity to take the Green Party up to that

next level. Like, if the Green Party won a governorship of a state like California, that would be huge for them and could really get them more ballot access, more financing to maybe continue down that path of electoralism as a part of revolution. Yeah, that's interesting. Have you followed him a little bit? Yeah, I have. I haven't talked to him.

I don't know everything about him. But I follow on social media and I, yeah, he would be for sure. But yeah, like, you know, a main thing I wanted to kind of say, bouncing off what you said, the Vanguard Party is not here yet, right? That's clear. We don't have the mass base of support that is the foundation of a Vanguard party. How did the Chinese communists build a Vanguard party? First and foremost, through complete and total building up of a mass base through the

struggle against imperialism and the struggle then against the nationalist. How did the Soviets the Bolshevik Party? It was through a mass base of support with workers and soldiers in the context of World War I in the declining Russian Empire, right? And they worked in coalition with the socialist revolutionaries and the Mensheviks when and where they could. They even teamed up, I believe, with elements of the liberal left to fight off various coups in the lead up to October. We just did a whole episode on precisely that. People can look up to it. So this coalitional aspect is important while staying principled and not being absorbed into a lesser politic, a class collaborationist politic. And also what you see in the Chinese revolution

and in the Russian revolution in China, it was peasants and workers. And in Russia, it was also peasants and workers, but they had a bit more built up of an industrial base. So there was more of a proper working class is you see the utter importance of labor and that's one of the challenges I think of the American left is not only to build a mass base of support which I think we're working towards and young people are if not brought over yet susceptible to this sort of message especially as the faux populism of the right reveals itself to be an utter fraud right the populist right carried the mantle through the Biden administration of real change we're going to you know we're going to bring a real change we're going to fight the elites and then you get the

trump administration 2.0 like if you have a functioning brain cell you can see right through the the hollowness of that and so in the wake of four years of trump you're going to have another pendulum swing back to the left right oh this didn't work just like after obama you had a pendulum swing to the right because that didn't work and i always say trump is the the right wings obama promising hope and change delivering more of the same so so that that that pendulum swing is going to continue. We need to build up a mass base. But every revolution that's been successful has had real penetration into the labor movement, had real buy-in, at least from factions of the labor movement, had union support. And that is a big gulf. I actually think

the U.S. left can build up, in some senses, is already building up more of a mass base, which is an easier thing for them to do than it is for them to get into coalition with labor unions, in part because of the history we've talked about, the class collaborationist nature of it, the individual comfort of a lot of union members as a faction of the labor aristocracy in the United States, the ideological patriotism and nationalism that is often present within unions, right, by American made, American flags. These are things you see very often in the union movement, which contradicts with a lot of the critique of the American Empire on the left. But if we don't have strategic coalitions with labor

unions, how can we impact the economy, which is the only language capital speaks? If we are just outside, if we cannot leverage our power within the economy, right? We are at a real disadvantage when it comes to wrestling political power. And if God forbid the right population, can take over large parts of the labor movement in the United States. They already have the fucking police. They have ICE. They have the ATF. They have the FBI.

They have the CIA. They have significant chunks of the military. And they're making inroads pathetically and in part because of the democratic failure to the labor union. Now, the labor union being a class conscious organization is immune in many ways to this movement. At least fractions of it are. but you'll find right-wing reactionary sentiment within unions as well

and what a blow to the left if they also take them we don't expect the police to come over right I mean the Chinese and the Russians they got the they got huge chunks of the soldiers yeah you know we don't even expect that but to lose the labor union

is an all-time defeat and I think really weakens our prospects in significant ways that's a very difficult in road to make. And I'm not sure how the left is going to do it, but it certainly has to happen. And at the end of the day, if you're on the left right now, I'm a worker, you're a worker, all my family and friends are workers. It's not impossible.

We are working people. We have a working class politic, right? It's not as viscerally appealing as the shallow, fascist appeals to emotion. It's a little more intellectual. It takes a little more work. You have to break out of ideology instead of subsuming within it. so that does take work but at the end of the day we actually have the real vision for liberation for working people and that is still our advantage um so this is an interesting contradiction in

development that we're going to have to continue to make but right now the you the u.s left has an ecosystem of voices and organizations and it's disparate and it's spread across we don't have billionaire funding like turning point USA right we have all the apparatus of the state waged against us all the apparatus of capital waged against us. Zoran Mamdani, if he gets in, the first thing he's going to have to deal with is shit like capital strikes. Right. Where the capitalist

organized capitalist class goes on the counter-revolutionary offensive against anything Zoran Mamdani is going to want to do, using their political puppets in the state and national, you know, in the state legislature and Congress and their political power more broadly

to stomp out anything that actually impedes on their capital accumulation process. So these are the issues of our time, and there's no easy answers for sure. No, if there were easy answers, again, we would be doing the damn thing. Okay, well, let's shift a little instead of these big groups. And I'd like for you to talk a little bit about the Omaha Socialist Night School. What is that?

What is that about? What are you all doing? How is that progressing? Yeah, fundamentally it's a political education coalition forming attempt in a deep red state and a small to medium-sized Midwestern city. So you already have real opposite. We're not L.A. We're not Chicago. We're not New York City. We don't have huge organized organizations that have been around for a very long time. Omaha does have an interesting history of black radicalism.

Malcolm X was born here. Harry Haywood was born here. The Omaha chapter of the Black Panther Party was really an undervalued and underrepresented aspect of the Black Panther movement and their leaders, I forget one of the leader's names, but Edward Poindexter was the other. They were imprisoned for life on trumped up charges, both died in prison, the leaders of the Omaha chapter of the Black Panther Party. In fact, Ed Poindexter just passed away, I think, in 23, in prison for a crime. He almost certainly did not commit as part of the national crackdown

on the Black Panther Party more broadly. And then the labor, the labor history here in Omaha is real, but stomped out. So all that is to say, there's a disconnect from our history and our traditions. Most people in Omaha have no clue about the left-wing history. here. We're run by right-wing billionaires and Republican corporate donor classes, and they have a real firm grip on the state as a whole. So there's challenges in a medium-sized Midwestern Red State City to organizing. But political education is obviously a first step. And so we're doing this political education course over six weeks, first starting with elements of the organized left here in Omaha. So, you know, and Lincoln. So, you know, organizations like the

PSL, insofar as it has a presence here, the DSA, other small organizations. Omaha Tenants United, for example, is a really popping organization here in Omaha that got the first tenant unions in Nebraska history established just in the last few years. We had episode with them. They're my good friends and comrades. Just hung out with them like two days ago. In fact, me and the O'TU and some other comrades were, we had dinner with Bill Ayers and Bernadine Dorn from the weather underground. That's awesome. Yeah. Here in Omaha.

It was an amazing event. So love O'TU and I would say O'TU probably represents the most advanced Marxist organization in Omaha right now. And they're actually getting material wins for tenants and establishing the state's first tenant unions, which is an amazing fucking accomplishment, especially in the place. Oh, yeah. So Night School is bringing members of these organizations together to uplift. the theoretical and historical knowledge of these already engaged organizers, right? So you're

already engaged in organizing. You want a better world. But what you find time and time again, a lot of people don't have the historical and theoretical knowledge, which leads to errors and all these, you know, problems. You know what practice without theory implies. So the idea is to bring these people together and uplift the consciousness, theoretical and historical consciousness of these already involved organizers in and around Omaha and Lincoln. And that's what we've done. We ran the first iteration. We provided child care, free child care, free food, amazing food.

We weren't just getting Subway sandwiches, no hate to people that just have to get by. But we had actually a professional cook who was involved in left-wing circles come in and provide amazing, like Palestinian food, you know, all these different genres of cultural food that was just top tier. I mean, people walked away saying some of the best parts of this night school was this food. But, you know, it was a six-week commitment. So people had to commit to come in once a week for three hours for six weeks. That's quite the commitment. And people did.

And we maintained attendance throughout six weeks. People met each other. Organizations were filled in, right? Like OTAU did one of the weeks. I did two teachings. I did historical materialism, kind of just, you know, know teaching that aspect of it and the history of socialist revolution so I did two courses out of six and it's a real treat and now we're trying to run now the second iteration

of this program and we're already organizing and having meetings to get this second learn from what we can learn from from the first iteration reach out to new cohorts and you know get a bigger venue so we can have more people there's a lot of interest that's bubbled up out in the wake of the first one and so we're trying to do this second iteration so not only is a political education but it is coalition building too we're getting people into the same room over many weeks eating together talking together working out problems together um and that i think is is a promising preliminary move to a more robust organizational front here and here in omaha and lincoln oh yeah well and that you covered such important basis for things like that by providing

child care and a meal, because that is like a sticking point for so many people that would like to be involved in more activism, left-wing, organizing, whatever it might be. And this is something that I keep running into. So many of these orgs, the ones we talked about, other ones, are very white male dominant. And like, no offense to the awesome white guys that, that we organize with, but I've been trying to really get to why that is and how to not combat it, but get other types of people involved. A lot of these spaces are also very queer, which is hopeful, and I think that queer people in our country right now are kind of at the forefront of radical politics in so many ways because they have to be, because they are being extra

oppressed right now. But, you know, so often, unfortunately, because we live, a patriarchal society, the child care falls onto women, onto the mothers very disproportionately. And so some of the difficulty in getting women specifically involved in these types of actions is that they cannot do it because they have to take care of their kids. And so that ability to provide not just child care, but a meal as well, really freeze up so many people to be able to come and get involved. And it's such an important base to cover when you're trying to set up. this like um learning type of environment for people so like that's that's very fucking cool and

very very important um to cover that i i think another another problem as well and you you highlighted lots of good ones about diversity and certain people that are excluded from these spaces and you know this is i know means a critique of young people but because of those issues sometimes you'll have organizations overrepresented by very young people and that's great the Black Panther Party was like mostly 19, 20, 21 year olds. Right. SDS, Weather Other Ground came out of college. That's an essential and always has been.

Yes. An essential aspect of left organizing. But sometimes it can be alienating or could be a reason that older people might not take it seriously. It's like, oh, this 19 year old wants to change the world. Yeah, we've all been there. So that's great because that energy comes from youth, right? The youth are fucking essential.

And I love speaking. I love speaking. with engaged 18, 19, 20, 21-year-olds. And to have them right into the show and be like, because of you, I got organized. I'm in high school and you're helping develop my politics. Holy shit. The best thing ever. But the diversity of orientations, the diversity of experiences, the diversity of

experiences, the diversity of racial backgrounds and identities, and also a diversity of age, right? It's really important because we are about the masses. And the masses come in every color, they come in every orientation, they come from every religious background, and they come from every age. And so I think one of the things that we were happy to accomplish was to get a relatively good mix of different ages of people to engage in this. And a lot of our teachers were 30s and 40s because they have a lot of experience. They've been organizing for many, many years, and that experience is valid and important. And there is a difference in life experience and experience when you're older and you've been in the game for a long time, right? One of the the pitfalls of Occupy was this horizontalist obsession where, you know, somebody could come in just from the local college with no organizing experience and have an equal, say, as a 30-year veteran organizer.

And, you know, I get the appeal of that. But it also puts a ceiling on the actual strategic movement of an organization if experience isn't taken seriously. So these are another set of interesting issues for us to think about and for us to try to resolve within our organizations, right? That's a good point too. I wanted to just briefly chat a little bit about mutual aid and the group that I am involved in, Red Help ATX. so basically we were all the word they used was liquidated our CPUSA chapter

was liquidated for a few reasons but one of the main reasons was they didn't like that we were spending literally all of our money on doing mutual aid with the local homeless community and we were told that the lumpin

is not the revolutionary class and that we should be more focused on the working class and I don't disagree that we should be focused on the working class. on the working class. We also show up at picket lines. We have several members in the IWW. We do a lot of that as well. But, and this is my interpretation of the peasant question for like modern times is that prisoners, undocumented people, and the homeless are, again, they're really at like the forefront of this because they feel the oppression so much more than housed people, employed people, documented

people and folks without a criminal record. Having any of those things in your past makes it so much harder to find housing, to find a job. To, you know, our society runs on credits. So if you fuck up your credit score, you might not even be able to get a vehicle to get to the job that you got. And we live in a city that doesn't have great transportation. The bus system is okay, but it can take 90 minutes to get across town, you know,

like adding three hours to your work commute, if you have children, that might not be possible. So we rebranded ourselves as just a red mutual aid group. So we are openly communists, and we go out, we work with two different communities in the city of Austin, a couple of times of month. And I just, I think it's so important to not just, obviously the work we do with these people is very important and to build that trust with a community that has been so, shit on by both parties, really. I mean, Austin is a very, like, quote, unquote, blue city, right? We have a fully Democratic city council. Our mayor is a very right-wing Democrat, but he is a

Democrat. And we still are constantly passing these ordinances to where people can't camp downtown, and we're not building any extra shelter. So it's like, well, what are people supposed to do? These communities are so very underserved. So a big part of our revolutionary work is building trust within these communities that have been so neglected by, you know, modern society. And we also host, like, reading groups and, you know, I do a lot of just, like, resource collection. And it's been such a great way to get, I keep using the turn normie, but like normie liberals, especially women that I know in my, daily life. I go to a women's gym, so I meet a lot of people there. And I don't open with like, hey, I'm a communist. I open with, hey, do you have any extra blankets that you'd like to donate to

help these people that are in need? And then it's really easy from there to start talking to them about these community members because they see them. You know, we see these people everywhere and they just get ignored. You get to a certain point where like you see it, but you don't even acknowledge that they're there. And so this ability to, to breathe, in people that might not really be into organizing from the left into like, hey, we're helping this community. Oh my God, I would love to, can I come with you one time? So I've gotten a lot of people to be able to come out with us and meet the community

because it's something to do, because it makes them feel good, right? And I think that is very important to feel like you're part of something bigger, to feel like you're helping people. And then from there, I have like a pamphlet on dialectical and historical materialism. if you want to read something. And so it's been a really good way to bring more people into our movement without having to be like,

hello, I'm a communist, nice to me. You know, so I think there are a bunch of other ways to do it, right? And mutual aid is a good one. Yeah, there's two aspects there. One is you lead with meeting people's material needs. So in the case of mutual aid or helping people out in your community,

You're actually trying to address real problems that capitalism not only doesn't solve, but actively perpetuates. You don't need to come and say, I'm a communist, they hear some food, right? Right, right. And then with the other side of it is bringing other people in to organize along with you is you, you tap into their desire to help people, which is a human desire. You know, Che famously said, at the risk of sounding ridiculous, the revolutionary is guided by a great feeling of love. And the best recruits, if you will, the best. recruits from liberalism are those people that are genuinely guided by concern and love for other human beings. Now, that's not all liberals, right? There's plenty of liberals that are basically right-wingers,

the Bill Mars and whoever the fucks. I mean, these people don't care about other people. They're narcissists or they're Zionists or they're whatever. They're met it in the system. They benefit. They're millionaires, whatever. But a lot of liberals are good fucking people. In fact, I would even argue that there are a lot of regular working conservative that have shitty views about something or other, but actually have good fucking hearts. And the most promising attribute that you can have to be open to the real left is a big heart.

It's not theoretical understanding. I read all these books. I'm an intellectual, whatever. Is do you give a fuck about other people? Because when you go far enough to the right, there is no sense of caring about others even the right like the Nick Fuentes types who are you know leading this anti-Israel charge on

on the right which is probably good in a broader strategic sense of the whole spectrum turning against Israel but it is not based really in a love for Palestinian people or a belief in liberation for all people or a critique of settler colonialism in fact they actively mock

the settler colonial analysis and why that's irrelevant right it's about organized jewelry and why jews are bad and there's no real concern about Palestinian people at all sometimes sometimes these like um I use Nick Fuentes because he's rising on the right and I've listened to a lot of them lately to try to get a hold of that faction of the right that is on the rise there's this thin patina of Christian love smeared over what is really just fucking hate and so it doesn't really come from a place of love, and you're not going to get love and compassion and empathy and concern for others, which is really the basis of internationalism in a lot of ways, out of reactionary trends.

So there are so many liberals, as much as we dismiss liberalism and feel hopeless for liberals, we have to understand a significant faction of them, are moving leftward, they are waking up to the utter decay of this system, they might still have some hope that some Democrats going to come along and save them, or that a lot of these. problems are because of Trump and the Republicans and if we could just defeat them, we'll be okay. So there might be naive in various ways, but anywhere and everywhere

somebody's willing to come hand out food, hand out blankets, care for somebody else, or even just donate to a cause that does that, that is somebody that has the potential to move left because they have love in their hearts. They have concern about other people. What is the right wingers hate homelessness? What's their solution?

A Gestapo-ass police force to go and fucking grab them by the back of your hair and throw them in a cage. what is the solution on the left to to homelessness to provide the material fucking basis for a decent and dignified life for all human beings and to have a society invested in going out and helping people that clearly need it you know if we give if we give complete material um you know sort of dignity to people right there crime and poverty and homelessness gets cut down by 80 90 percent they let's say you have somebody on the street because they're mentally um you know they're under mental illness of some sort, which is honestly a genuine, you know, fraction of homeless people, then a society would go out and help them. A society would go out an organized, fully funded force, not to arrest them and throw them in a cage, but to go grab their hand, help them up and take care of them as we would

take care of our own fucking family. And that also extends to Palestine, right? If you love people, if you really, as Chase said, tremble and indignant, nation at every injustice, then you look at that and you see yourself and you see your own family because they are. They're us and we're them. And you can't stand it. And that is love. It's not some intellectual theory of like actually settler colonialism is bad. Therefore I have to oppose this. First and foremost, you oppose what Israel is doing because you love fucking human beings and you can't stand them being hurt. That is where really our politics starts. So,

Yes, going out and meeting people's material needs and then finding those elements of, as you said, normies, liberals, conservatives, moderates, whatever, that have that beating fucking heart, that have not been deadened inside by this fucking rotten system. That is fucking essential work. And so I applaud you for doing it. And that is why we cannot write off huge swath of the population. Because most people, I truly believe most people have a good heart. And they're confused and they're disoriented and they're lied to and they're manipulated. but they have a fundamentally good heart and that is still and always will be

to our advantage. Yes. I had they actually recently moved but I had a guy that he's like my mom's age a MAGA guy that lived diagonal across the street for me for years that he's been in that house much longer than we've been here.

And a couple of years ago I had like just like a Black Lives Matter like yard sign right? Just kind of you know those were like corrugated cardboard whatever. sitting in the yard and I guess somebody was driving around the neighborhood like taking people's like left signs my maga neighbor calls me he's like somebody just stole your yard sign and I ran outside I jumped in my car he jumped in my car and we went to go try to find the guy that was

doing it and this guy does not he doesn't he's not pro BLM he's maga but like he was like that's not fucking okay and like because he and I knew it each other and we're neighbors and we had a neighborly relationship, he was willing to like go out of his way to help me, um, even though it's something that he's not even like principally a thing he stands on. And, and I think that's so important. Like, again, obviously he and I disagree on politics, um, but he's not a bad person. He's just been lied to his whole life and, and sees incorrect solutions as the way to fix the problems that we all struggle against, right? And yeah, that's such a good point. It's all about just meeting people and understanding where they're

coming from and seeing the good in them because 95% of people are not irredeemable fascists. I hope at least 95%. There's a lot of people that are, right? But for the most part, people are decent and want to help. So our fearless leader, Donald Trump, recently designated Antifa as a terrorist organization. And when I first heard this, I did laugh because you and I both know that there is no like official organization with that name. There are lots of organizations that consider themselves anti-fascists.

But obviously there's no like Antifa meetings. And so at first I was like, yeah, LOL, that's ridiculous. But then the more I thought about it, I was like, well, they're just going to use that label to any sort of left-wing anybody and use that to bring them up on terrorist charges. It hasn't exactly happened. Well, it does. I feel like somebody that was involved in Palestine action actually recently just got sentenced to several years in prison. Like, it has happened, calling these people terrorists for fighting against the empire in a variety of ways, specifically attacking, like, private corporations. Do you have any thoughts?

about Antifa in general or like this like what does this mean as more ways that they can come after left-wing organizations yeah it's it's an interesting thing we were talking about the red scares earlier right and in a period of a period of clear capitalist crisis and probably American imperial empire crisis you time and time again see this attempt in an attempt really to re-fortify the system, which is capitalism, this fascist aggression against the left more broadly. And trying to find conspiracies or spooky aspects to use as a pretext to do the crackdown they've always wanted to do. And so in the wake of something like Charlie Kirk's, you know, assassination or murder, I don't even want to call it assassination, just a murder.

Right. Yeah. They use that and they're already using that to kind of crack down. Now, the question is, does Trump have the follow-through to actually do the crackdown, right? There's been times in the past where Trump has officially declared Antifa as a terrorist organization. What does that actually mean in practice? And there is still obvious legal constitutional rights to free speech that just cannot be washed away by the term terrorist. But applying the term terrorist does give some legal wiggle room probably if it's taken seriously. if in any way the Supreme Court validates it. But even if the state itself doesn't do much in this regard,

it is a dog whistle, in a sense, to for street violence or vigilante violence from those on the ground that see themselves as part of the right wing or against Antifa, right? Anti-A-Fa-Fa-Fa. They cancel out. You're a fascist. But interestingly, it's like, it's also, in liberals, we've been telling liberals this the whole time when the right cracks down

on the radical Marxist left the communist left and when you Mr. Good liberal helped facilitate that you're really signing your own death warrant because they do not differentiate a liberal who made a TikTok giggling about

Charlie Kirk's death is Antifa to them right somebody who believes or wants to join a protest against ICE or against the Republican governor for abortion rights or something, that's Antifa to them. It is a catch all term to

anybody they deem as their political opponents, which is anybody to the fucking left of J.D. Vance or whatever the fuck. Right. Right. So, this is a trend in American history. We saw it in the 70s with the Black Panther and the

move bombings. We saw it with the first red scare, the second red scare. McCarthyism. I have an episode coming out about 20th century anti-communism. in America that covers all of this history and it is it is yet another iteration of that now in the past though there has been more of an organized left right in the first red scare there were militant radical red trade unions right right in the 60s and 70s there were the weather underground in the black liberation army and the black panther party organizing masses in black

communities against capitalism and empire right there is a left in this country for god damn sure it's just not organized and that is a purposeful consequence of a century of attacks on that left um and so that's why organization is so important but the more organized we get the more counter-revolutionary backlash and violence from the state that we will receive but then again dialectically it's precisely our organization that in some sense allows us to weather those storms and we're just a bunch of individuals with opinions on the internet right the state can come in or some vigilante racist freak can come in and do violence against you and it's harder to to prevent or be organized against or to have an organized response you know in reaction to so so yeah who knows where this

is going it could be another trump just talking shit bluff there's still a legal architecture here that he just can't go start ripping you know people out of their homes i mean i guess ice is doing that but on the pretext that they're not here legally yeah and trump has alluded to the fact that He wants to use ice against even legal citizens. But this is what's happening. And if you had a more competent, ideologically focused fascist, other than a bumbling fucking idiot like Trump, I think we'd be in a lot more danger.

Somebody that could actually maneuver the institutions in the way that they want. So Trump's ignorance and goldfish attention span is kind of to our benefit. But he is building out a state apparatus that is capable increasingly of doing this. And so I really am, you know, sort of ambivalent about what's coming next, about how much to take these threats seriously. But as capitalism continues to fall, as the left continues to grow, as the empire continues to weaken, as contradictions continue to mount, the state proper will have more and more of a reason to try to suffocate and stifle

any growing opposition to this decaying rotten system, which generates opposition as it decays right so yeah i don't really i'm not exactly sure what to expect here antifa again is just a it's just a buzzword it's a boogeyman antifa is just anybody who's anti-fascist and yes there are totally autonomous cells um that do rise up to confront fascist in the street when organized fascist movements come to the street but it's not it's not even an attack on the state right no it's ideologically opposed to the state but what it ultimately when it actually manifests as like black block it is sometimes

in protest of police like in Portland but often it is to confront organized reactionary and fascist movements that show up in cities and you'll continue to see that because people don't fucking like fascist and Nazis organizing in their city so how do you crack down

on basically what is a sentiment there's no organization this Republican reactionary idea that there's funding behind all of this I'm sorry we're on the American left. We don't get funding. George Soros is funding us. He's funding like

liberal NGOs or whatever the fuck. There is no funding, but this insane fever dream reactionary idea that were paid protesters and there's like these shadowy funding forces is as hilarious as it is disturbing because these fucking freaks actually believe it and they have at least in theory the power and money

to do something about it. Yeah. That's an interesting point about like the Soros money and it leads into my next topic or whatever we have another big no-king's protest coming up and I haven't looked into this one but the first one was funded in large part by one of the Waltons

of the Walmart inheritance and obviously I'm very skeptical of anything that is billionaire-backed even if they're claiming to be somewhat anti-fascist. I did not go to the first one. And I, I, I, I kind of want to swing by the second one to see just what happens. But it is these, like, very astro-turf, very, I went to some of these after the Dobbs decision came out. Texas has, or had a trigger law. And so we're under a full abortion ban here

now. And I, naively thought that that would be a turning point to really get people to rise up and start to organize more and to fight against this oppression because I had heard for decades women say that they take this right away, we're going to burn everything down, and then like literally fucking nothing happened when they did take that right away. So I went to some of these women's march type protest. Mostly, I usually show up, me and some comrades will show up with a bunch of bottles of water and some flyers, right? And just be like, hey, you know, we see that you care. You know, here's the next step or whatever. Like, and it's, you know, some vaguely Marxist stuff.

So thinking about this next no king's protest and I just I worry that these types of like liberal astroturfed organizations that aren't really actually anti-fascist they're anti-Trump right

and that they make a point to make a distinction there and so much of their solution is well let's just vote for Beto or like let's just get Gavin Newsom as president, and like, everything will be better. So I kind of just wanted to get your thoughts on these liberal protest actions,

and if you think that they are a valid point of struggle that Marxists can, if not infiltrate, at least, like, show up to and maybe propagandize to some of these people a little bit, or if you think we should just completely ignore them and keep doing our own tenant organizing or whatever certainly having a presence at these these protests can't hurt what what is there that is a value is energy a lot of the energy is is is is neutered by liberalism and what they're ultimately calling for is a return to a democratic party which has paved the way for this exact thing they they're not dialectical materialists right they're locked in the ideology they do not see how the people and politicians that they support and

the politics that they represent got us precisely here they've been voting democrat their entire lives they've been supporting blue no matter who their entire lives and this is where the fuck we are going back to navit and to gavin newsome or bedo or whatever the fuck or pete buddhajid or heaven forbid kamala harris in twenty twenty eight isn't going to solve the problem it will only make it worse obama didn't solve anything he made everything worse Biden didn't solve anything. He made everything worse. While they had some better policies than the Republicans, it's still little, you know, little thumbs up on the way down a fucking hill. So, you know, there actually, there's no real substantial solution to any problem at its root. It is just band-aids on broken legs until the fucking body falls apart. So are you going to get through to a liberal telling them this? No, they'll see you as a Russia puppet or whatever, because they're as much in a cult as the maga fucking freaks. Yeah.

And I don't say maga freaks to mean all conservatives or all people that voted for Trump. I mean the fucking cult members. We know who I'm talking about. There is a difference for sure. Yeah. For sure. And the same thing with the liberals, as we were talking about earlier, plenty of good-hearted people interested in moving left or movable.

And there's a faction of the Democratic Party that is just a fucking cult. And they're so locked in their ideology, they can't see outside of it. They're in a box. and they are also exactly part of the problem because their solution is more of the problem. It is contributing to where we got here. Some of them you'll be able to break through, but there is just a, I mean, this is America. This is American ideology in a decaying American era where the empire and the economic system is in rapid deterioration. The psychological consequences of that is what we're seeing in society, rampant nihilistic violence,

violence, incredible narcissism, consumerism as everything falls apart around us. And the people who have been ideologically conditioned inside the narrow spectrum of Americanism going fucking insane as they still try to slam their square block in the circle hole of reality. Yes. And that's just going to keep happening. And that's the psychological consequences of buying into a system that is fundamentally falling apart in front of your eyes.

but being unwilling or probably in many cases incapable of getting out of it, right? Yeah. So have a presence, have a critique, understand the limitations. At the end of the day, though, even having a presence isn't that necessary. There are certain movements where we should have a presence in, right? These popular fronts against ice for bodily autonomy, you know, Bernie rallies against the oligarchy. Those are places where I think that energy actually has. a significant portion of it that is, you know, if you're doing the, let's elect Gavin Newsome

and let's make sure that no crazy left winners come into this protest. And, you know, then I think that that protest is probably a losing battle. And you'd probably be better spending your time and resources anywhere else, you know, even if there are like 10 people that are winnable, you know. Yeah. And, you know, sometimes I think just fliring a little bit is helpful or there are other events that might be more liberal that are more worthwhile, things like explicitly queer things like pride. Pride in so many ways is taken over by corporations. The parade here is always like, here's the Tesla float, like, as if that is a good thing to have. But I think in general, queer people are very liberation-minded because they're under this extra oppression under

capitalism right now. And so maybe our energy is better spent at these events. that are maybe slightly more radical or able to be more radical than this No King's thing that is, again, funded by the Walton family. Yeah. You know, I think it is also helpful relationships that you already have.

Personal relationships, I think we, you know, you, me, everybody who might be listening to this that is more a Marxist, that is more radical, has liberal friends and family members. members. And they might think you're a little bit wacky, but we can gently educate the people in our lives. I had lunch with a friend the other day, and somehow I found myself explaining the 2014 Maidan coup to her because she was like, wait, you don't support Ukraine? And I was like, look, I support the working class of both countries. But like, this is actually why this war is

happening. And she, like, had no idea, right? She didn't know anything about that. And I sent her some information. She is appreciative of, you know, me explaining these things to her. I also told her about Tom Homan and how he was actually originally hired by the Obama administration who gave him an award for being so good at deporting people. And he was, you know, he was there during Trump one. Biden didn't get rid of him. And now he has this high up position where he's like the super deporter or whatever. And it's like these things, Trump didn't just give this man. a job, right? Like, he's been here for decades because of Democrats, because he does what the liberals also want him to do. And so, like, gently having these conversations, and then just giving

people resources to, like, you don't have to believe me. You know, it's like, LeVar Burton used to say, you don't have to take my word for it. You know, open a book. And, you know, it doesn't have to be aggressive or, like, read Lenin. Like, I don't think everybody has to. I would definitely never tell anybody they have to read Capital. Like, that is it. It's so hard to do. It's so much. Exactly.

But as long as most people understand where you're coming from and stay out of the way for the most part, you know, people don't want to fight fascists or, you know, be aggressive like that. Like, I understand that. But, like, there are people that can grow food. and like mend clothes. And there's so much work to do on the ground that isn't fighting, you know? And I think once people start to understand

that, they will be a lot more likely to support in some way the cause of liberation, right? Absolutely. Pause one second. Okay. Yeah, so I wanted to touch on a couple things that you said. I know you're not there right now, but you'll be back. I'll just talk for the

recording so it's not dead air. but the thing about the reading Lennon and reading capital and stuff that's what a vanguard party is for that's what political educators are for not every person needs to read it there are certain ways that you can get the important information across without making somebody sit down and read all of that and I think you know a lot of the stuff that we're trying to do here is um is to do that is to uplift people's consciousness and to teach them things I was just talking so there was no dead air um I'll cut the dead air anyway You look much less angelic now. You were just shining with light. I was turning into pure light. There you go. But I also wanted to say a point that I always make and you're talking about people in your life

and connecting with them. I think this, and I make this point all the time, I think it's crucial. This is why being a good person is important. People in your life that respect you, that know you have a good head on your shoulders, that can count on you, that find you to be responsible,

that find you to be honest, that find you to be a good person, that actually is much more of an opening for you to have your opinions than not. If you're a shitty person, right? If you're a fickle person, you're feckless, you don't show up when you say you are. You lie, you deceive, you're self-interested, you're narcissistic, whatever. People will just look at your politics and be like, oh, I bet they are a communist. Like, yeah, okay, I'm going to listen to you about how to change the world. You know, you're a fucking dick.

You're an asshole, you're an idiot, whatever. But if you are actually, if you live to a standard of high ethical standard, that actually is one of the best things you can do for the communist movement because then people will hear your opinions. My coworkers, they don't, when I walk in, they're not caring about what the fuck I think about the world. Can you work with me? Can you make me laugh? Can you shoot the shit back and forth? Can you earn my respect? Can you have my back?

Then once I have that, then they're like, actually, you know, I'll hear Brett out on. this thing, you know, my family, my friends, my coworkers, because they fundamentally know, first and foremost, I'm a good, normal, not weird, not alienating person. And that opens up the door. So I truly encourage people listening. All the politics stuff, all the theory stuff, all the practice stuff is essential. But it's also essential to be the best fucking person you can possibly be. Not so you can lord it over people, not so you can feel good about yourself, but because being a communist means having an extra responsibility to other fucking human beings, not only politically, but personally. Treat people with dignity, with respect, tip well, don't tell lies,

don't cheat on your spouse, you know, don't fucking be an asshole. Don't be an egomaniac, right? You're not here to tell other people what to think or why they're wrong. People will just shut you the fuck out. Be a good person. Hold yourself to a high ethical standard. And that creates the conditions in which you can reach people much, much more effectively than if you're a fucking freak, an asshole, right? I love that. You can be weird.

Just be a positive kind of weird. Oh, definitely be weird, yeah. I'm weird, but in a good way, in a good way. Yeah, exactly, exactly. The right kind of weird. Okay, so the last thing I kind of wanted to touch on is concerning, like, the next generation.

No, I'm not talking about Captain Picard. I'm talking about children, right? So, you know, it's well known that you are a father. I believe you have three kids varying in ages, right? You have like a teenage daughter and like a little one as well. So I can't even imagine how hard that is right now. Being a teenager right now seems so difficult. We're close to the same age.

Like I'm really lucky that we didn't grow up with like social media. and just all that crazy influence and having a smartphone on you at all time. You know, I was, you know, a kid in the 90s staying up late having like landline phone calls with my best friend. You know, like that's what that was like. Playing outside, you know,

we didn't get a gaming console until I was much older. So I, the struggles of the children themselves is one thing. But just like what it's like trying to, impart some of this stuff onto your children without it being

just overwhelming. I was listening to you on upstream recently. It was a specific like two hour episode about like raising kids. So without having another two hours here, just like maybe something you can impart

about like just what it's like to combat this conservative propaganda. that is fed to children in public schools. It was bad enough when we were growing up. You know, this whitewashed version of history that we've always been given, you know, and a lot of us had to seek out maybe if it was reading Howard Zen, or things that kind of started to open us up to like the real history of this country and just in general.

But now it's getting even worse in the public schools. Texas passed a law saying that the Ten Commandments have to be displayed in every classroom, which, you know, it's unconstitutional, but that doesn't matter anymore. Like, these norms that we used to have are just thrown out the window and the far right does whatever they want. So I know that's a huge question. But just any advice you can give for helping the younger, the little ones, the younger generation to grow up. understanding some of the stuff that we've talked about and like what it's like to be that good person to impart good values um not just on the adults in your life but on on kids as well it's a great question and a question a lot of people are asking especially as people you know some people begin to have families and have kids in this fucking crazy historical moment um and of course if you want to hear my full opinions that upstream episode relatively recently a couple months ago on radical parenting. You can easily find it. And that was a really deep discussion on

exactly these points. And I'm having another one soon with J.T. from Second Thought and Nick from Means TV, who are both new fathers themselves. Yeah. But yeah, so I have a 16-year-old daughter, a 10-year-old son, and a 3-year-old son. So I run the full gamut, get the full experience. I like you. I was born in 89. So my childhood was the 90s. And I have a lot of nostalgia for the 90s. And we have a lot of nostalgia for our childhoods in general because we were children. We were innocent. Things were different and fun and new. Right.

So, you know, it's not to say that the 90s weren't also a shit show in many ways in the United States. But, yeah, you know, staying outside with your friends all day until the fucking lights came on and not having social media and having to go to a store and buy your first album with parental explicit warning on it and stuff like something nice about that. And I do think humanity will figure this out, right? humanity will find the balance with technology but that's like that's like at the cost of like two full generations before we do and that's what we're seeing there's like there's a sandwich generation that we're like humanity hasn't figured this shit out and it fucking sucks and you just have to

deal with it now okay all throughout history generations have had to deal with shit um you know so there should be a basic robustness where we understand that there's been no period in human history that has been totally free of fucking terrible things it doesn't take the form of rapid technological progress, but whatever, a tribe invading yours 5,000 years ago and you watching your brother and father be butcher to death or whatever. I mean, the human experience is one of suffering and obstacles and horrendous tragedies. So that aside, still, we care about our children and we want to do the best we fucking can. So how do you navigate that? Well, one thing, and this kind of speaks to my last point, you have to have a good relationship.

relationship with your kids, right? Raising kids is fucking hard. It's stressful. You're not going to be a perfect parent. If you think that, you know, I'm a super calm, level-headed person, I never yell, I never scream. Having a kid, I would just take those same traits and, okay, kids will push you in ways you can't fucking imagine. They will bring outside of you, you can't fucking comprehend.

They will humble you in that way. You're not as patient of a person as you think you are. Trust me. and you're under the stress of trying to fucking live life already and yeah kids are a lot and um i could have my wife on it to tell to talk more about that uh because it's fucking not easy um but so first and foremost have a good relationship with your kids you're not here to impose anything on them i i always say like if you're an authoritarian parent if you're trying to impose things on your kids they will always rebel or they will be stunted and navigated right

being an authoritarian parent has back has like backlashes to it that are that are terrible and actually get to the exact opposite point what are the craziest sort of kids in school are the ones that have been suppressed their whole life and the first time they have freedom they don't know how to navigate it and end up doing crazy shit so you have to have to have this balance between a libertarian parent and authoritarian one not in a political sense but in a you know letting your kids flourish to the discover and you know um and have a good relationship fundamentally respect their autonomy as a separate being they're not just your kids they're a they're a full human being also they don't know anything so like they're not they don't have like look at the adults that don't have emotional control right like you think a kid you're going to have emotional control be able to sit quietly for an hour or not have fucking meltdowns and shit no so expect that um and and then the main thing I think is you have to walk this line between putting too much on a kid's shoulders right like the kids don't need to know about all the terrible things in the world

but also equipping them without shelter oversheltering them because that's the libertarian dynamic right you over shelter a kid they are less equipped to deal in the world um you you let too much in they are fucking overwhelmed because they're kids so trying to strike that balance is incredibly important. So what I try to do is bring out a child's natural sense of equality and fairness, which people are, we're social animals, so we fucking have, you know, most people, unless you're like constitutionally sociopathic, you have a fundamental sense of what is fair and unfair, what is just and unjust, and a recoiling in the face of the unjust. That can be beaten out of you by ideology. You can grow up in a fascist society that beats that part out of

you but kids have it and so your job isn't to impose on them it's to cultivate the seeds are there in the soil what do you give water and sunshine to um and so okay the palestine issue my kids know about palestine right my kids say free palestine they they connect with that issue and in fact they've seen their dad cry about it um you know my my 10 year old son was impacted by just watching his who he sees, for better or worse, as a strong, big guy that, you know, can take on anything, weeping in the face of listening to the news together on the way to school, right? Yeah, yeah. And that, that is a doorway into radical curiosity.

My son, like, looks at me like, we're just driving to school. I'm listening to the radio, too, right? It's like some NPR thing or whatever. It's not some crazy, like, detailed gore or anything. And he sees this reaction, and out of that comes a conversation. a delicate one, but one in which I say this basic thing is happening in the world

and they're just like us. You're right? There's Palestinian little boys that love their dads as much as you love me and there's dads over there that love their boys as much as I love you and it's not fair to hurt them. We don't have to go into the visceral

and the gore of it, but they're being hurt. And the American government is participating in this hurting and we don't stand for that. So, again, these conversations are delicate. They're dialectical because then the kid's going to come back with something that you have to navigate. But having a good relationship with your kids, cultivating their basic sense of justice and fairness and equality, and letting in a certain amount of the world without letting in too much, it's a hard balance to strike.

But I think that's where you begin when it comes to radical parenting. And then I've taken my kids to protest, right? I've taken my kids to union events, not scary, intense. protest but you know acceptable family ones and i've taken them to um to a socialist night school my older my older daughter niece you know i took them to a socialist night school thing my niece and my daughter 18 and 16 they're developing political consciousness my niece in particular she's 18 years old she looks up to me a lot and she's learned a lot of her politics from me and she comes to me with serious questions personal and political um and i try to navigate and and

lead and guide her in a lot of ways and you know what there's a lot of rewarding aspects to that like there's a lot of i get a lot of meaning in my life through my ability to teach and guide my children and my nieces and my nephews especially in those moments of their growth where they need it most right they're going to go through difficult times they're going to go through insecurities young women in our society they deal with insecurities i've had countless hours of talking with my nieces in my daughter about confidence, loving yourself, how our society promotes insecurity, how women in particular are targeted and susceptible to patriarchal conditioning where they never feel like they're enough and how to try to reject that. And the part that the eat, and this is

where Buddhism comes in, the part that the ego plays in insecurity. Wherever there is insecurity, there is also ego. The most egoic people in the world are deeply insecure. And I always use Trump as an example. He's such a good example. He's clearly, Yeah, he's the biggest narcissist you've ever met, but he needs to make sure his crowds are big and nobody's making fun of his hands and, you know, people think he's a billionaire. If you're a seriously healthy individual, why would you give a fuck about those things, right? But at the same time, when you're a teenager, that's ego development. So we're not trying to kill the ego.

You're a teen. Like, there's some fun in exploring and developing a healthy ego and understanding that insecurity comes with it. When I was 17, 18, 16, I was insecure too. You know, young boys and young girls are insecure. They deal with it in different ways. Insecurity is like kind of a growing pain that you have to go through. So helping them develop a healthy sense of self, connecting the political to the personal, the psychological to the material, and being above all a good role model.

Because what you say is hollow if you're a fucking piece of shit, right? Many parents try to impose things on their kids and their kids just watch them every day, not live up to it. disregard it. I don't respect my, at some point they don't respect you because what you say and how you act are totally different. And as a parent, you will make mistakes. You'll be in a bad mood and you'll scream. You'll yell. And then what do you do next? You go and apologize. You role model apologizing and reconciliation. Me and my wife might get into a bickering match in front of the kids, right? That's going to happen. I'm sorry. We're not perfect. And then we come to the kids and we talk about it and they see us reconcile right hug kiss say we're sorry to one another

you're not going to role model perfect behavior but you can role model reconciliation compromise letting go of your ego saying you're sorry being accountable when you fuck up and that's actually more important i think than being a perfect parent that never fucks up right right because that's impossible on one hand and the people that try to present that it's clear at some point that that's a facade. When you have a normal life, but you try to present us everything's perfect. Everything's great. I've never had any problems ever. People see

through that kids see through. So again, complicated. We could talk about this for three more hours, but those are some opening thoughts. Yeah, no, I think that's really good. And the point you made about, like, specifically with your daughter and niece, you know,

and it is important that, because we live under patriarchy, that we make sure that our girls understand the extra oppression, the extra scrutiny that they're under just because of their bodies. And it's also important that boys understand that as well so that they can actively combat against it. Oh, look, my dog is peeking in. It also makes me think about how black parents have to teach their kids extra things about watching out for the police because we live in a very racist society.

And so black children, specifically little black boys, are treated as adults so much by the authority figures in our society. And so, like, that's an extra thing. You know, children of immigrants, also something else they have to think about, right? So it's all these, like, layers and layers of things. But the greater point that you make about just, like, being a good role model, right? And being honest with your kids and not just teaching them. how to apologize, but knowing how to do that yourself as well is so important. And I think a lot of

adults have a hard time with that, especially because, you know, like, you and I were raised by baby boomers. And, like, I'm not here to, like, talk shit about my parents. Like, I love my mom. She's great. But, like, they were raised by the generation before that, like, didn't apologize, especially men. Like, men don't apologize. Like, why would I ever? And so, like, it's, it's also that unlearning these bad habits and things that we were raised with and trying to impart better things. You know, we always just want our kids to do better than us. And I think capitalists look at that as financially. We want our kids to be rich. But I think that coming from a understanding working class politics and a left perspective is that we just want our kids to be better people

and to be like more emotionally well rounded than maybe we were at their age. And that's a really cool point you made thanks yeah and also the working class like i i do embed pride in them like you know like in a society that says be rich you're only valuable if you're an influencer if you're rich you're driving new bugatti right all these messages that kids get from the internet to like instill in them like yo we are fucking working class our parents your grandparents are working class your great grandparents working class all our friends are working class right there's nothing to be ashamed about that, you know, and not only be ashamed, be prideful of it and care about people who work for a living. Because one of the, one of the hugest thing, this has always been true in American

society, and we felt it growing up too. But with the fucking internet, like this idea of like you're, you have to be an influencer, have status, have fame, be rich, right? Most kids now, if you ask them what they want to be when they grow up, it's to be an influencer. Rich. Yeah, yeah. Rich. It's synonymous with rich and then and then you go on instagram and you see every life looks better than yours right every kid or every whatever your algorithm shows like huge houses going on yachts you know the guy you look up to on the internet driving a fucking you know sports car whatever um and like you know call like andrew tate now if you're a 13 year old boy you're on the internet like three years ago or two years ago and under tate was huge he's like disrespect women if you're

Broke, you're meaningless. If you have to work a 9 to 5, you're trash, you're a brokie, I have a Bugatti, you know, that is so fucking toxic. So, in colcating fucking class consciousness and being like, we're working class, we're fucking proud. You know, here's this union event we're going to now that I have this job, and we're going to represent the union. I buy the union clothes for my kids so they can represent it. We are working people.

We care about working people, not only here, but all over the world. and there's nothing wrong there's nothing indoctrination about that that's who we are and we're not gonna fucking be ashamed of it right hell yeah well I'm glad this turned out to be positive I was a little worried

state of the American left can go a lot of different directions and I know you always take like a positive outlook on things and I'm really glad that we stayed with that through the whole thing do you have anything in closing

that you would like you know anything that we miss, anything you want to talk about, just to close it out. I want to say rest in power and peace to Asada Shakur. I think we all have a duty. She just passed away yesterday, I believe. We all have a duty to recognize her sacrifice, recognize the risks she took at that time, recognized the state and the obstacles she went up against, take our hats off to Cuba, who let her live and die as a free woman, refused to give her back to the U.S. so she could be shoved in a cage

for the rest of her life while people like fucking Net and Yahoo and Trump march around the world, live in luxury. Somebody like Asada Shakur was going to be put in a fucking cage for the rest of her fucking life, like this disgusting system. And Cuba said, fuck you, we're not sending her back. And to continue her legacy for the next generations, right? People coming up underneath us, they're thirsty for knowledge. They also need to be reconnected to this history and these traditions and where this knowledge comes from and it comes in part from people like Asada. And so we mourn her, we recognize her, we educate ourselves about her, and then we keep the torch burning for her for the people coming up, the 18 year old just tuning in to how the Red was won or Rev left for the first time. You know, they're looking up to us and now we have that responsibility to pass that along.

So, you know, huge love to Asada and her family and her legacy, huge love to Cuba for keeping her safe and letting her live and die in dignity as a free woman, which she deserved and she was always free. And even if she was in a fucking cage, she would have lived and died as a free woman in that deep internal existential sense because she rebelled against injustice. She rebelled against the mentality of being bowed and cowtowed by a racist. civil system that fucking hated her. And she refused to be a coward in the face of it. And she refused to ingratiate herself with that system. And so she is a true giant and a true hero. And so I wanted to maybe end on giving her the love and respect that she deserves and urging everybody listening to educate yourself on the life and sacrifices of Asada and to keep carrying her legacy forward. And of course, always free Palestine. The Palestinians are still being bombed, being slaughtered,

being pushed out, being ethnically cleansed. You know, we get to turn off our phones and go hang out with our friends and have a beer and turn on the football game and go to sleep in a comfortable bed. They fucking don't. And we have to keep them in the front of our minds and the front of our hearts. And to see them as the front line of humanity against this global beast of the system. And so any and all support around the world, the flotillas support them. you know, the dock workers refusing to ship stuff to Israel.

This is how South apartheid, you know, apartheid South Africa fell. The Israel and the UK and the U.S. We're supporting them at the state level. The people around the world turned against it, right? Labor unions would refuse to ship fucking shit to them. People came out and protested and shut down, you know, their cities to protest it and refused to give in. So this is a, it takes way too long. And every day Palestinians die, and it's fucking unfair and unjust and disgusting.

But still, this is how these processes play out. And that the UN, when Netanyahu tried to give his little shitty fucking speech, the Hitler of our time, most people in that assembly got up and walked to the fuck out. And he tried to act tough. It bothered him because deep down he knows that this is the end of Israel. That even if they can somehow pull this genocide off, they are not long for this world. and the history bin is where Israel will eventually go

because it is rotten to its motherfucking core and it is evil and what it's doing to these people is fucking evil. But again, you know, we get to turn off our brains. We got to go do something else. The Palestinians can't have that luxury and so they deserve to be at the forefront of our hearts until they have a free Palestine from the river to the sea.

Hell yeah. Well, thank you so much for joining, and free Palestine. Cheers. Absolutely. Thank you.