Rev Left Radio - (UNLOCKED) Trump 2.0: Oligarchy Unleashed

Episode Date: February 2, 2025

This is an unlocked patreon episode. To get bonus episodes like this every month, and access to our back catalogue of hundreds of bonus eps like this one, support the show on Patreon: www.patreon.com/revleftradio In this patreon exclusive, Breht discusses the second Trump administration, mass deportations, the crescendo of neoliberalism, the US Oligarchy, the implications and possible trajectories of Artificial Intelligence, Deepseek, what's next for the Democrats, accelerationism in the era of imperial decline, and more! Follow RLR on IG HERE Make a one-time donation to Rev Left at BuyMeACoffee.com/revleftradio  

Hello, everybody, and welcome back to Rev. Left Radio. All right, so for today's Patreon episode, I'm just going to be talking about current events. And specifically, Trump's inauguration and the first few days of his administration, what we're seeing, and what that all means. I mean, the freeze on federal grants and loans, the wielding of executive power, the mass deportation attempt, that's going on and the unleashing of oligarchy, which I think is probably going to be the defining feature of the Trump administration. But we'll get to that in a second. The first thing to say is, I don't know, this is kind of personal, but it just happened. So it's fresh in my mind. I might as well talk about it a little bit. And this is all just to

thank you all for supporting the show because I just got, I wouldn't say, terrible, but not wonderful medical news. I've been struggling for several months since last summer, basically, with just some groin and stomach abdominal pain. It gets worse when I work out or try to do anything athletic or physical. It comes and goes throughout the day, sharp pains, et cetera. I don't, you know, I don't know if many of you can relate to this. I'm sure many of you can. I don't have health insurance. I don't, I can't afford it. I'm obviously I just do this. for an income and there's no benefits, there's no health care, there's no nothing. And I have three kids and I try to make sure that they're taking care of.

And, you know, I try to live a healthy life and take care of my body so that I don't need to use, you know, the health care system. But, you know, life is never going to let you get through it without difficulties. We all have something. We all will have things that we have to face throughout our life, mental and physical illnesses. And certainly God has deemed it fit to give me plenty of mental issues to work through. you know, and now it looks like I'm getting some physical ones. So it's frustrating, but I went to a doctor, got an ultrasound, paying out of pocket, just to try to get this resolved because it's really lowering, you know, my quality of life

and stopping me from doing what I want to do, which is, in part, working out so that I can benefit my physical and mental health. And not being able to do that has taken a toll. But anyways, the test came back and it says that I have a cyst on my testicles. A benign cyst and a pretty common one. I don't know exactly what's going to happen. I got a referral to a urologist, but I don't like the idea, folks,

of anything on my testicles. So that's not great. I also got diagnosed with an inguinal, I think it's pronounced hernia. It's just like a hernia in the groin. Probably from last summer I was doing two volleyball leagues, a softball league, and weightlifting pretty heavily.

So I assume that that was probably where that came from. And then they also said I have an inflamed spleen, which I'd never really thought about the spleen or, you know, had anybody that had issues with the spleen if you've had issues with your spleen and you feel comfortable talking about it. It is kind of nice to hear other people's experiences with an inflamed spleen or an enlarged spleen. There's many, many different causes ranging from relatively, you know, simple to treat viral or bacterial infectious. all the way up to obviously the worst case scenarios of fucking like various forms of cancer and blood diseases and shit like that so i'm not saying i have any of that i have an appointment to go get that scene but for each one of those things it's three separate referrals to three separate um you know specialists as it were um and so obviously it's going to cost a fuck ton of money

one thing that happened this year and i think maybe this came out of the Biden administration i haven't really looked into this um i just looked it up because i was obviously thinking about health care cost and paying out of fucking pocket. But starting in January of this year, all medical debt is exempt from your credit report. So my understanding is that they cannot put medical debt on your credit report. And I have really good credits. Like the only financial thing I have going for me in my life is that I have fucking, you know, I've worked really hard to make sure that I have good credit so that at least push comes to

shove. And when we can afford things, we can take out loans, et cetera, and get good interest rates and stuff. So I do have that, but it's, it isn't kind of nice to know that, that this won't necessarily go on it because I'm going to be going into debt. There's no doubt about it. So the fact that that doesn't go on your credit report, and if you're somebody with medical debt, that could be a helpful thing to note as well. So that just started this month of this year. So that's a good thing. But yeah, so just more stress on my plate. But the main point of all of this is just to say thank you so much for supporting the show because

this is how I make a living. This is how I provide for my family. We don't, I mean, we live paycheck to paycheck. We're in credit card debt at the end of every month. You know, we live like the average American. I was actually crunching the numbers. And based on my household size and household income, we're like just under the 50% mark of the average American. So I'm like probably in that 45 to 50% of income and, you know, and household size, putting me like at the square center of the American experience, right? And so I know that if I'm the average, if this is what the average is, this is an incredible amount of struggling. If you don't have kids, I'm sure it is a little easier to get by, especially if you have two incomes and no kids. It's probably

the ideal situation. I love my fucking kids to death. It's just they're expensive in this society we live in. And so, you know, it's an economic, it's an economic burden. But looking at that median income, household income and seeing that I'm like right in the middle of what the average American is, I can just tell you for a fucking fact that most people in this society are struggling. You know, huge levels of debt, soaring cost of living, soaring cost of housing, medical expenses out the ass, whether you have insurance or not, you know, you're almost always always going to eventually be met with some outrageous bill or your insurance trying not to fucking you know pay for a procedure that you spent years and years paying into their system but the

first moment that they can guarantee that they can not pay out you know not return what you've paid in they'll fucking take it um and then just being with no insurance you're just i mean you're left to the wolves you know you got to you got to come up out of pocket for fucking everything and um and it fucking sucks so uh you know i feel you out there If you're listening to this show, you're probably not in the top 1% of the top 10% or even the top 20%. You're probably with me in that 40% to 60% range of average on the center of the bell curve of income. And life is just increasingly fucking difficult. And the idea that Trump's going to come in here and make things better, you know, working class voters for Trump thinking that he's going to take on the establishment and fight for the little guy, I mean, it's, you could say it's pathetic.

It's also just sad. It's obviously not what's happening. And what I'm seeing so far with the development of the Trump administration is the unleashing of the American oligarchy, the tech billionaires, et cetera, this idea that Trump was going to be for the little guy and anti-war. If you're listening to this show, especially on Patreon, you know damn well that that's not fucking ever going to happen. We're not fooled by that. But tens of millions of Americans were fooled by it. And seeing his inauguration and seeing these fucking vampires, these billionaire vampires lined up behind him. it just really spoke volumes as to what this administration is going to look like.

And that all the sniveling fucking little tech billionaires sucking up to Trump, you know, fucking Zuckerberg trying to be like a cool tough guy now. I learned Jiu-Jitsu and started my own clothing that's reminiscent of like Rome, like it's ancient Roman clothing that he and his little stupid ass gold fucking chain that he wore on the Joe Rogan podcast. They're all trying to make this pivot because they know that what's coming is a banana. for the rich. And what we'll decide if you're in the inside of that bonanza or on the outside is how Trump feels about you. So they're all coming to kiss the ring because they want in on the

bonanza that's coming. Huge tax cuts for the rich, huge tax cuts for corporations, a shredding of the social safety net, which we already see with his pausing of the federal funds and grants and loans. And we'll talk about that in a bit. But, you know, drill baby drill, this idea that we're just going to extract as much fossil fuel and pump it into the air as possible, this sort of death drive accelerationist denialism dressed up in the rhetoric of, we're winning, we're putting America first. You're not putting America first. You're putting these fucking tech oligarchs and Fortune 500 companies first. And, you know, the Adelson lady, the lady that gave him $100 million for his campaign, who his whole point of funding Trump's campaign and being a big money donor for Trump

is specifically so that Israel can get whatever needs it once meant, right? It is a Zionist, neo-conservative view. Now, while he's trying to strike a deal with Ukraine and Russia, we'll see where that goes, and he did this ceasefire, this sort of quote-unquote ceasefire. It is a ceasefire formally. Israel is still taking advantage of it, mass murdering people. There's massive migration to the north of Gaza to just what is complete and utter ruin, not a fucking single building standing up.

this is only of course temporary um and so the idea that trump is going to Trump wanted that as like a PR win coming in knowing how I mean now the studies coming out shown that Gaza was decisive with regards to voters not voting for Kamala Harris and not supporting the Democrats in this election and you know you got to know that Trump is aware of that he's he's thinking about he doesn't give a fuck about Palestinian lives um what he cares about it is PR so the fact that he can come in and just get that short term quick fix idea that after, you know, 15 months of Biden, you know, funding and arming and providing cover for this thing, he comes in. And even before he gets in the office, he's already, you know, settling a deal. That's just a short-term, ephemeral PR win. It doesn't change anything structurally about what's going on in Palestine and the behavior of Israel. And Israel just feels more emboldened. And so I think we're going to see that ceasefire eventually come to an end. And we're going to see just the really unleashing of, of Israeli violence. I mean, not that it wasn't unleashed under Biden. It's just going to be

the same unleashing. And just with a little bit more of a who gives a fuck from the American administration, not even a pretense of trying to restrain them. And that's all it was under Biden. A pretense, a fig leaf, a facade, a PR maneuver to say, hey, we're trying here while secretly and behind the scenes, here's everything you want and more. Just, you know, do whatever you got to do while trying to pad the public perception of things as much as they could. So I don't know how much is going to be shifted there. Now, we get this conversation that we are, and I've said this many times, in the second gilded age. And there's a lot of ways we can go with this.

Let me write these down so I don't forget about the second gilded age, these cycles. So America is once again in the gilded age. Trump is now the first go-round. He was talking about himself in terms of Andrew Jackson. this term he's talking about himself as William McKinley, the president who oversaw the early 1900s presidency. William Jennings Bryan. I actually graduated from a school named after him here in the Omaha metro area. But he was a prairie populist, right? The boy orator of the plat came out of Omaha and Lincoln and ran as under the populist and the Democratic campaign. He ran as a

dual sort of candidate for both the progressive populist party that emanated out of the Great Plains, you know, farmers and workers, an economic left-wing sentiment that was challenging the two corporate parties. And because he had so much popular support and because he gave his Cross of Gold speech at the Democratic Convention, he ran, he was embraced by the Democratic Party as well. So he ran as a populist progressive under their party and as a Democratic. to try to win the election against the Republican McKinley and ended up losing. And obviously what he had in mind, William Jennings and Brian, is economic populism.

Real left-wing economic populism. They were talking about an eight-hour workday. They were talking about labor protections. They were talking about nationalizing key industries like the railroads. Just a slate of economic reforms that anybody on our side today would be like, hey, that's wonderful. That's a great start. Let's move in that direction, right? he wasn't necessarily a socialist

I think he would be more of like a robust social democrat but at that time in the late 1800s early 1900s I mean that was pretty new and what it did is it set the stage for the progressive era writ large and then for eventually that led into the New Deal era with the rise of FDR and the social programs that proliferated in the wake of that and the New Deal era stretched from post-war FDR

you know post-Great Depression World War II all the way up until, you know, Jimmy Carter, but specifically with Reagan, that that New Deal era was dismantled in favor of the era we're living in now, neoliberalism. Now, is Trump a representative of the end of neoliberalism? I think there is an element of an anti-globalization trend happening, where there's an inflection point in nationalism, broadly conceived, especially across the West. And with that comes these ideas of sovereignty, border control, reshoring of industries. And so aspects of the neoliberal globalization trend that we've lived through since, you know, the 1980s and really the late 70s, but specifically it really started taking off in the late in the 80s with the rise of Reagan and then consolidated as the bipartisan consensus with Clinton in the 90s.

there's elements of that changing specifically internationally and globally and certainly the American Empire with the rise of multipolarity it's in a weak position the unipolar moment of complete hegemonic domination by the United States is for sure over and there's ways to manage that end of the empire there's there's responsible mature egalitarian ways to manage the decline of that empire and there are accelerationist um nihilistic, you know, brutalist forms of doing that. And I think Trump obviously represents the latter. The Democrats having prevented the rise of Bernie Sanders-style answer to neoliberalism,

handed the entire thing over to Trump. But domestically, and from a zoomed-out overall perspective, I do not feel at all that Trump is representing the end of neoliberalism. In fact, what his economic policy seemed to be, is the logical conclusion of neoliberalism, a crescendo of neoliberalism, the gutting of the administrative state, not that everything about the administrative state is great, not that everything about the U.S. government is great, but there's looking to dismantle that, get rid of huge swaths of the civil bureaucracy. Again, there's pros and cons to that in a vacuum.

This freezing of federal grants and federal funds and loans, this is horrific. What it is, it's It's preventing, you know, money from already relegated money. This money was already designated to go to these places, stuff like disaster relief, stuff like Medicaid, stuff like Head Start education for, you know, working class and poor kids. And, you know, working class parents in those first few years, you either have to pay exorbitant costs for daycare or stay home and decrease your income in order to take care of kids. I have a three-year-old. I know exactly how this goes. and Head Start is a way to get them into the school system quicker, get their education jump started,

and also provide an ability for the parent to be able to go back to work or to not have to pay daycare, right, public education. So I think our older son was enrolled in Head Start, and we're going to try to get our younger son when he's ready enrolled as well. But these are the things that are freezing. Food programs, go down the list. There's plenty of good things that help people that is being frozen, and then you have this, you know, Elon Musk-led Doge thing,

which is all about dismantling the social safety net. They talk about spending in government. Do you think the single biggest contractor of the Pentagon, i.e. Elon Musk, do you think Doge is going to go start sniffing around and dismantling the Pentagon budget? Absolutely not. He's coming from Medicaid, Head Start program, food for fucking kids. That's what they're doing. They are attacking.

the social safety net, dismantling it under the guise of fiscal conservatism and responsibility. Now, the Pentagon can't pass an audit for many, many years. The Pentagon gets almost a trillion dollars of taxpayer money every single year as its budget. The Pentagon and the military industrial complex is full of corruption and bloat and bureaucracy. You know, these exorbitant prices that private contractors will charge the U.S. government. the military industrial complex in so many ways is a money laundering scheme by which these private entities, Raytheon, Northrop Grumman, go down the list. These private entities shift public funds, i.e. taxpayer money. They funnel public taxpayer dollars into their private for-profit companies, right? they use that enormous amount of wealth to then buy off politicians in both parties to continue

that flow of money there's overcharging there's a use it or lose it idea within within budgeting in the pentagon so there's an incentive to use money that you don't even fucking need just so you can get as much or more in the next um you know the next budget cycle and it's fundamentally about shifting public money into private profits that money goes to ultimately um to the pockets of the top brass of these private for-profit companies, right? And the private shareholders, the shareholders of those companies. And so what does that necessitate? Well, one of the things that it necessitates is constant war. You know, if you're a military contractor that produces weapons and bombs and fighter jets, et cetera, well, it really helps if there's always a enemy,

if there's always a threat that needs to be neutralized. If there's always a proxy war somewhere where you can funnel your business into or just straight up wars that you're engaged in. And so that's why, that's a huge reason why our entire lives, the U.S. has consistently been at war in one way or another. Big obvious wars like the invasion of Iraq and Afghanistan or Vietnam or Korea and also a million little proxy wars. And we can see the war in Palestine and the war between Russia and Ukraine as fitting completely within this realm of proxy. proxy wars and then you have to think about the black budgets you got to think about the CIA you got to think about um aspects of the military apparatus in the united states that are not transparent right they can't pass an audit so trillions of dollars just go somewhere and the pentagon doesn't isn't

accountable for it can't figure out where it all went no politician seems to really give that much of a fuck nobody's held accountable we're constantly at war people are constantly being murdered around the world. And this, not only does it help the military industrial complex and the private contractors in particular, but it helps monopoly capital more broadly, right? Opening up new markets, toppling regimes that are hostile to Western infiltration of their economy, et cetera. And Elon Musk, the leader of Doge, just a billionaire who spent $270 million to weasel his way, totally unelected into the government and an important position at that, deciding what gets funding and what doesn't who is this fucking asshole right he is the single biggest benefactor of

american tax dollars um as his you know his businesses or contractors for the pentagon and the government he's the single biggest benefactor of american tax dollars in human history in american history and this motherfucker's telling us that we got to cut stuff like medicaid um we got to cut disaster relief head start education food programs for the poor and the needy doesn't even mention the Pentagon. Doesn't even mention the bloated military budget. In fact, the military is now being used to go down to the border to violently enforce that border. So what we're seeing now is the era of Trump is the era of the oligarchy unleashed. It's already been unleashed. Neoliberalism is its, it's unleashing. We're dismantling the new deal. We're dismantling unions. We're

dismantling worker protections. We're deregulating massive corporations. We're deregulating massive corporations. We're deregulating the banks, we're cutting taxes for the ultra-rich and corporations, and we're letting this bitch rip. That's neoliberalism in a nutshell. And Trump is not representing the end of that, right? He, when it comes to economic policy, he is its crescendo. He's representing it like, fuck it. Let's hit the gas pedal to the metal and see what the fuck happens. And so, yeah, again, working class people who voted for Trump thinking he's fighting for the little guy you got duped once again and it wasn't hard to see how you were going to get duped because we already had the first administration now the difference between when we saw him do very very much

the same things right with regards to the economy um so we're we're seeing this this this brutal unleashing of the oligarchy at home this shredding of the social safety net however they can this complete lack of an accountability a dismantling really of any democratic ability to push back against this oligarchy and the complete and ultimate fusion, which has been going on for a very long time of capital with the United States government. We do not have a democracy. We don't really even have a government proper because a government proper is tied to the interests of the people in some sense. A democratic government, a representative republic is supposed to function in the interests of the people, generally speaking. We understand how that's distorted under capitalism,

etc. But what oligarchy is, what this phase of neoliberalism is really resulting in is that the government is now owned by capital. And what's more concerning on some level, these big international or these multinational corporations and this global elite of billionaires, if you're a billionaire, you are a global elite, meaning you have investments and asset spread out across the world. And you increasingly, are no longer tethered to the well-being, the quality of life, or even the nation-state as a whole of the country you come from. Right?

So less than, like at a previous era in American history, the big robber barons, they were tied to the development of the United States in a big way. They had investments in Europe and around the world, etc. But, you know, they're tied to the American economic system and workers in that system. They broke strikes and everything like that, but they tried to manage their PR through philanthropy and through public investment.

There was at least a sense of like, hey, we're making Buku bucks by raw exploitation. You know, we own government, but we're going to build libraries and hospitals and, of course, name it after ourselves. But there's this sense that we're giving back because we also understand that the fundamental ability for us to maximize profit accumulation

has to be tied in some sense to the stability of the country we're operating in. With neoliberal globalization, there has been the creation of this truly global elite, rootless, not tied to any national interest, right? They operate, they hover above nationalism in some sense. Their money allows them to. And in a hyper-globalized context, with much of the world being developed, right, developing countries now reaching the level of fully developed countries, previously poor countries, developing as time goes on,

new markets opening up around the world. These are a sort of elite that stand outside of the boundaries of any nation state. And that means, and we've seen it happen, there's no need to invest here or there in particular. We don't need to prop up the people of any given country. We go where the money is. And if that means decimating jobs in America, so be it you know if that means lowering the quality of life and lowering the life expectancy

of people that i'm technically a member of that country so fucking be it um and so we're seeing that develop and now there is this real prospect of the world's first trillionaire um trillionaires a handful of them emerging in the next half decade to a decade oxfam just released i believe a study talking about precisely this that um the billionaires of the world have increased their wealth enormously over the last four to five years, I mean, enormously, and they're now entering territory of trillionaire status for the first time in human history. A single fucking individual is going to have control over a trillion dollars of wealth. You know, Elon Musk, the richest guy in the world, he's valued at, what, $400 billion? One person

having that much control over that much wealth, that much, that many assets, that much just pure raw power that comes with that amount of money. And he's using it for political power, right-wing reactionary bullshit. Because a figure like Elon Musk isn't interested in helping the little guy or bringing jobs back to any given community or uplifting the rust belt or putting Americans first. He is interested first and foremost in how he can profit and get more control. And he is a weirdo. He's a fucking weirdo with his personality and all that shit so seeing a hundred billionaire talk about immigrants being the problem

like when we talk about the smoke screen that is the div that is scapegoating and fascist reactionary attempts to scapegoat the vulnerable to cover up the real power elite and the real crimes of the ruling class it can't be more obvious and on the fucking nose the nelon musk doing precisely that going all around the country supporting the furthest right-wing parties that exist and constantly talking about

you know he went to germany to the afd and was talking about how important german culture is and german history and and and germany for the germans and kick out the immigrants well it's really convenient for this global elite to to hide their actual interests behind the smokescreen of national interests he doesn't give a fuck about national interests and the h1b a visa fight in the maga world you know proved exactly that the h1b visa is this work program where people from from other countries can come and work, you know, often in places that quote unquote need skilled labor like tech, right? But what it really is is an ability for the owners of those businesses to have extreme control over those employees because when you come over on an H-1B visa,

you are tied to your job. If you lose that job, you are kicked back out of the country, you have to go back to your home country, right? And these people are more desperate. They're way less, they're not going to unionize. They're not going to fight back. They're not going to ask for better conditions or better pay or more, you know, work-life balance, that there's like this indentured servitude aspect to the H-1B visas where these are hyper-exploitable workers precisely because their ability to stay in this country is tied to their employment at that given spot. And so, you know, Vivek and Elon start defending this. Obviously, it benefits them. And they start, you know, they clash with the nationalists on the MAGA side.

That is that some of those people with horrific reactionary politics are kind of are fundamentally interested in, you know, American sovereignty, American nationalism, that these jobs in America should go to Americans, right? And so these two had a clash. And I think that just reveals the global dynamics of this elite. They don't have any loyalty to any given people or place, right? They have a loyalty to their own profit maximization at whatever cost. that is to the planet, to human beings, to labor, et cetera. And they're explicitly talking about AI coming in very soon to displace, you know, workers writ large.

That's their goal. They give us this AI stuff. Like AI is going to be amazing. We're all going to have our own little AI assistant. It's going to be able to diagnose and treat, you know, rare diseases. And you're going to be able to go on chat GPT or Gemini or DeepSeek, now, open source. and do whatever you want. And what is the real goal here?

Maximize profits as hard as possible, right? Be the first and the best to try to take over this space and corner the market and create another industry with a shared monopoly, which we're already seeing develop. And ultimately, it is to, if profit maximization is your number one priority, which it must be for these corporations, then the ultimate goal of AI is to displace these fucking workers. these people have families, they get pregnant, they get sick, they need to go on vacation, they ask for raises, they unionize, fuck that. If we can just replace them first with indentured servants, if possible, we'll do that.

And then if we can replace those indentured servants with fucking straight up robots and artificial intelligence, we will absolutely do that. And then they'll probably throw us a little pocket change because they also understand that in a consumer economy. They do need consumers to some extent. And so you'll get like a basic income. And then we're in Blade Runner, where there's a huge mass of the world's population at the bottom.

You know, we get our little paychecks every month, just enough for food and to secure shelter maybe. And then we have the rise of a small group of trillionaires who immediately use that trillionaire status to dominate global politics. And the only thing that can beat that is not a reactionary, foe populist, anti-immigrant nationalist movement, but a international workers' revolutionary movement that says this world is not the plaything of you motherfuckers.

This is all of our planet. We are all entitled to live here. We are all entitled to decent, dignified lives. All of the ancestors of humanity for millennia have contributed to the creation of modern human civilization, and we will be damned if a few sociopaths with a trillion dollars step in and say this is all ours now. That's the only cure to this problem.

So if you're a working class Trump supporter and you think by deporting illegal immigrants that you're somehow going to get a job in a future and a pension and health care, no the fuck you're not. No the fuck you're not. And we'll get to deportations here in a second. But if this is the era of oligarchy unleashed, this is the crescendo of neoliberalism economics. There are some nationalist international movements, right, with trying to secure borders. There is widespread skepticism toward immigration. That's just a fact that we have to deal with, right? There are people in Ireland, in Germany, in the U.K., in the United States, in France, in the Western world that are fed up with migration and are supporting these right-wing politicians and right-wing parties that are promising to come in and brutally export people out.

But then we've got to go to a deeper cause. What's behind the deportations? Well, we understand how the Western world has destabilized the global south, plundered the global south, brutalized the global south, extracted from the global south, funded coups, toppled governments, did mass murders, did genocides throughout the global south for control, colonial, neocolonial, and imperialist control of resources, markets, etc. And so when you have hundreds of years of predation on these places and a funneling of the wealth and resources to the Imperial Corps, people follow wealth and resources and opportunities. And so you have people who live in countries that they might have their own individual problems, no country is perfect, but a large part of the historical and economic problems that they face. and thus the crime and the cartels and the black market and the lack of opportunities and all that comes out of that is at least in one way, shape, or form, deeply and inexorably connected

to the histories of colonialism, neocolonialism, and the present of imperialism. And if that is not brought into the equation, then what you end up doing is what the right is doing, seeing these people as criminals, dehumanizing them, scapegoating them for the economic problems of the native population. And I use native loosely in a settler colonial society like the United States, but you know what I mean.

That the that what the elite is telling working people is I know life sucks. I know that groceries are too expensive. I know housing and health care are fucking inaccessible in a lot of ways.

They are huge concerns that you have to sit around with your family every single day and think about and fret about and worry about. Life is not getting better. The millennials and Gen Z are the first generation in American history to do worse off than not only our parents,

worse off than our grandparents. We are worse off than an American from the boomer generation in the 50s and 60s, hands down, right? They had way more access to everything, a good education, affordable housing, reasonable costs for education, healthcare. They had much more reasonable access to all of that. You could just be a regular motherfucker and stumble into a 50-year career with high wages, own your own home, get a beautiful pension and take care of an entire family on one income.

That's been stripped away from us because that was an ephemeral moment in the post-World War II conditions that allowed for that. And the first moment our elite could crawl, scrawl and scrape all of that back, they did precisely that.

So the reactionary elites are now telling us that problem, that's not because of capitalism. That's not because, of corporate profiteering or deregulation or big money in politics and corruption. No, no, no. That's because we have too many illegal immigrants taking your job.

Do you remember the fucking South Park episodes in the 90s? They took our jobs. Remember that was a funny thing if you're old enough to remember that shit where everybody would be saying that phrase, they took our job. And it was like, you know, a libertarian South Park creators poking fun at this nationalist reaction to immigrants. But that's what they're doing. Still, they're saying those people are the problem. The reason you don't have a fucking future and a life isn't because of us.

It's not because of these billionaires standing behind me, right? It's because of that powerless lady cleaning that rich person's home. Or that guy on that construction site building a building in your city. Or that landscaper that comes over to your, you know, not if you're poor, you don't have a landscaper, but to the upper middle class and the comfortable, that landscaper that comes and does that hospitality services, agricultural products. You know, those people are taking your jobs. And then they're going to massively violently deport them. And, and, um, and they're going to present that as a win.

That is all they're doing for the quote unquote little guy. All they're doing for regular working people substantively, and this is not even substance because it actually will just hurt the fucking economy. It'll raise the cost of living. It'll make fucking grocery prices go up, et cetera. It actually hurt working people in the long run. But that's what they're, that's what they're doing. doing is saying those people are the problem watch us make a big show out of getting them out of the

country this is our overture to you this is our I promised I was going to do it I did it this is how I'm helping the little guy and then everything else is about helping the rich in corporations everything else is about maximizing profit at all fucking costs and so that is a facade that's a mirage sold to people as a fix to a problem that can really only be solved by fucking taking on the ghouls standing behind Trump at his inauguration and Trump himself and all the politicians in both parties. That is our problem. That is what is causing so much misery in the world. That is what is destroying our future at home. Is that elite, corrupt, self-serving, venal class of elites in the economic and political realm? And nobody's going to say that

from the Democrats or the Republicans, except maybe Bernie Sanders, but the Democrats made sure he shut the fuck up, I mean, was completely disconnected from power. They're not going to say that because those are their donor classes. Those are the people that fund their campaigns. So now structurally and constitutionally, they're unable to point to them as the problem. So they got to somebody has to be the problem. Somebody has to take the fall for this shit.

And so it's going to fall in the most powerless people in society. Undocumented workers. Now, what's happening with the deep. Well, let me, before I get to that, one more thing about the oligarchy. Okay, the Democrats. My God, you dumb fucks. Do you see what's happening? If I'm right, if we're right, because this is not a unique idea to me, but if this

trend is correct that what Trump represents is actually this brutal predation of the working class, this unleashed oligarchy that is going to feast upon our families and our futures and extract every fucking dime they can and develop AI so they can have more surveillance control over us. They can keep us in our motherfucking place more. They can displace us from our work, robbing us of more power. If that is how this is going to go, life is going to get shittier and shittier and shittier. We've already been on the downhill for a very long time. My entire life, I was born in 1989, right? I was like, what? 2008? Yeah, I would have been 19 years old when the financial crisis happened. I just had a kid. I'm entering the

workforce. I mean, I'll enter the workforce at 15, but you know, 19 is when you get out of high school, you go into college or you go into the workforce. I have a kid, boom, the entire economy explodes. My entire life has been this downward trajectory of any possible future. I've been grinding my entire life since I was 15. I've got to turn 36 for 20 years. I've worked in every imaginable job. I've tried to do everything I can to get degrees and credentials and try to move up in the world, try to secure a future for my family, and at every stop I'm being robbed, thrown into unthinkable debt, prevented at every stop from being able to progress in real ways. Thank goodness for that this popped off, that I have something to bring in for my family.

But my story is not unique. This is the story of our generation, and Gen Z coming up behind us, that we're fucked. And the Democrats have only assisted that. So what would be smart here? Just pretend for a moment The Democrats actually want to win Pretend for a moment They want to defeat this whole movement

Not just Trump But everything he represents That they actually wanted to fix problems They actually want power Right How do you get it In the era of an oligarchy unleashed You get it through militant

Unapologetic sighting With the working motherfucking class Jetizen culture war bullshit That's not to say jettison the real concerns of marginalized people or anything like that because those people as always are human beings in their own rights and they're members of the working class so anybody that shows any bigotry racism transphobia homophobia misogyny those are enemies of all human beings from our inherent dignity as such and enemies of the working class because you're taking

your shots and you're vilifying and denigrating and violently attacking our brothers and sisters as human beings and as workers right but jettison the the hyper fixation on culture war as a distraction from the class war say we are for everybody right we stand against bigotry of all forms but what we're advancing is a universalist pro working glass program now the first problem if they wanted to do that that's a winning strategy in theory but if they wanted to do that they would bump up against the first barrier which is their brand Americans don't trust them

they have no fucking credibility if you jaunt out Gavin fucking Newsom in 2028 talking about how he's now the leader of the working class everybody's going to roll their fucking eyes and not believe it for a second what Kamala Harris is going to rebrand as a fighter for the working

class okay so even if they wanted to do that everybody in the Democratic Party with any power or influence is a neoliberal fucking freak corrupt ghoul insider trader like Nancy Pelosi

that everybody fucking hates and everybody mistrust except the vote blue no matter who cult which is a death cult and it's largely people that are so comfortable that they can care about things

like January 6 and and Trump's fucking 30 he has 34, did you guys know he had 34 felonies? You have to be of a certain economic comfort level. level to give a fuck about that and make that your whole politics. And if you're at that level of economic comfort, then a Republican presidency really economically

only benefits you. So they're not credible. They have shit branding. Everybody fucking hates them. They have like literally Biden walked out with like the lowest approval rating in fucking history. The Democrats have like a sub 35% approval rating as a party. They have tied themselves in the last four to eight years to the institution.

that people are sick of, we need to fight for Ukraine, democracy and freedom, and we have to give all this money to Israel, and the FBI are actually good guys, and the fucking capital police are our heroes, and the CIA does really important work, and because Trump is seen as this anti-establishment, now the Democrats are on their foot, their back foot of defending the entire establishment that everybody fucking hates. So you have cynical, neoliberal politicians, self-centered, careerist opportunists, who will say any like Kamala Harris is a perfect example will say anything that she needs to be said she has no beliefs no soul nothing really underneath the layers of persona i will be one thing in 2020 and oh the things shifted a little bit so i'll

believe another thing in 24 and then they don't know how to wield power so even when they get in they're constantly fucking beaten and defeated they don't want to win half the fights they engage in they want to appear as if they're fighting but they want to lose them so they're weak feckless corrupt self-serving everybody sees them as that so if the democratic party actually wanted to win it would have to take those positions i mentioned earlier just two positions broadly conceived we're against wars we're against the pentagon budget and fucking spending trillions of dollars fighting wars around the planet we're not doing that anymore and we're going to be focused on working class economics we are going to advance an economic agenda that centers on making life bearable

for the vast majority of fucking people in this society. Okay, that's the platform. That is a winning platform. We get it. But then you have the credibility issue. So how do you overcome that? Well, the Democrats would have to do this. They would have to gut their donor class.

We're not taking private money. We're not, like Bernie Sanders did this. We're not taking PAC money. I'm not taking corporate donations. All of our funding will come from the people. It will be completely transparent. Here's a website where you can see. all the stuff that we get

all the donations that we get and we're doing that campaign okay that's first then you got to gut the consultant class the consultant class are a bunch of completely detached coastal elites who know nothing about the everyday struggles of working class people

they treat polls as the gospel and they're always trying to finagle inauthentically their way into a PR move that will make them think this and we need a we need a Joe Rogan of the left yeah that's what we need these fucking dumbasses who fail at every front get paid six-figure incomes to be the dumbest fucking people on the planet

and they consistently lead the Democrats astray because of their class position so the donor class the consultant class gut them shoot them into fucking space we are not associated with these people anymore then you have another problem well all our politicians and all our bench hakeen jeffreys and gavin newsom and amy klobuchar These are all, you know, fucking neoliberal fucking freaks with no credibility, no charisma. They're self-advancers. They don't care about, they don't have any principles.

They don't have any views, values. They don't have any vision. They are sitting in there with consultants figuring out how they can win their next election. What do I need to say? What do I need to believe? What do I need to pretend to believe? Okay. Okay.

Well, all those people have to go. Because you're going to give us Amy Klobuchar, Kamala Harris? or fucking Gavin Newsom or Hakeen Jeffreys or go down the list of any of these motherfuckers, even AOC, and you're going to present them to us as like actually now they're working class, now they care about you,

nobody will believe it. Okay, so that means you've got to gut the party. And what does that mean? Well, you're going to have to now shift Democratic DNC funding away from incumbents, right? And think of them doing this. It's not going to happen. Shift that away from incumbents.

And you're actually going to have to start using that money to fund people on the economic left of your stars in the Democratic Party. That's how you defeat them. So you've got to shift money away from them. You've got to run a candidate from their left against them and put all your money into that and extract your money from the neoliberals. And this feckless, opportunist class of Democrats that we've had since, you know, forever since my whole life. So you'd have to do that. That's, I mean, come on, that's not going to happen. And then where do you get your new politicians?

Do you go back to Harvard and Yale and get them from this comfortable upper middle class elite factories? Where once again, they're completely detached from the realities of regular working class people? No, if you're going to be a working class movement, you're going to have to go down to the working class. You're going to have to get labor leaders, union leaders, teachers, electricians, mechanics. And you're going to have to find them, cultivate them, and develop regular working people with working experience to come up. In Nebraska, last election, we had independent candidate Don Osborne. He came on Rev. Left during the Kellogg strike several years back on a live streaming thing we were doing to fundraise for the union funds for the Kellogg workers here in Omaha that went on strike.

He came on Rev. Left. So if you're going to try to win as a senator and you've been on Rev. Left, that's pretty fucking cool when you got my vote. You know, he wasn't great on everything. I don't, you know, in a lot of ways, he, okay, he's, he's, he's, he's, he's, he's, he's, he's, he's, he's representing labor. So when it comes to illegal immigration, there's an issue there, right? He doesn't want to be as brutal of the deportations as Trump. You know, he doesn't want to fuck up the economy and raise the cost of living. That comes with that. But at the same time, there is a certain, there's always been a strain within union politics and social democratic politics. Bernie Sanders himself had this for a very long time. That illegal immigration

is something that the Chamber of Commerce supports. They love driving down wages. They love exploiting poor, desperate people, and they love that the ground floor for wages in general can go way down, and that workers here can't really unionize and can't ask for better wages and conditions because they can just be replaced. So there's an element of that, right or wrong. He did fucking try to thread that needle, but mostly and fundamentally what he said is I'm a mechanic. I'm a lifelong worker. I led union strikes against greedy corporations and businesses. And I want to run in the Senate against both parties as an independent so I can be a working class senator

something I mean those two words are almost oxymoronic working class and senator I mean the senator was supposed to be the House of Lords the upper chamber the elites protection against the rabble that is the House or in Britain the Commons the House of Commons right

so the very idea is sort of antithetical to bourgeois democracy but of course I voted for him And that is the future of an actually viable working class labor party in the United States. He was narrowly defeated by big money and a Republican incumbent. We live in a very Republican state. But he outperformed Kamala Harris like she got whatever, 33% of the vote in Nebraska. And he got upwards of 47, 48.

Gave her a real run for her money, Deb Fisher, the senator out of Nebraska, who helped conduct the inauguration of Trump. She's the right-wing corporate freak. everything that we stand against is represented in her and all of her friends but that's what you would have to cultivate as the new base of the Democratic Party and that's the only way all those things I said is the beginning

of creating a real Democratic Party that has credibility with the working class it cannot come from the same politicians the same consultants and the same donor class it just can't and what the Democrats have had to do because they are beholden to big money but they like to present themselves

as progressive and they see an opportunity against Trump and his rich buddies to kind of play that dynamic is what happened in the Kamala Harris campaign, where you try to appeal to everybody and end up appealing to nobody, right? If your tent is so big, it includes billionaires, like Pritzker or whatever the fuck you said, it involves tech CEOs, it involves neo-conservatives, it involves the entire Cheney family, right? And you're trying to, and you're trying to say poor people, poor black people, poor white people, poor Latinos, working class people struggling to afford bill, you're in here too, and try to get everybody in, you end up believing in nothing, you end up saying nothing, you end up being inauthentic to everyone.

And that's exactly what the Democrats are. Now, are they going to learn that lesson? No, because in order for the Democrats to do those things that I said, that would mean somewhere within the Democratic Party, a war is waged against the Democratic Party. party itself. It would have to emerge from within the party because you're trying to turn the party

into something else, right? You're not just trying to defeat the party from the outside. You're trying to make it into this new thing that clearly there's a yearning for, but you have the problem of branding and decades of fucking feckless, self-advancing careerist

freak neoliberals that has been your entire identity for decades since at least Clinton. You have to destroy that. That means literally like running candidates against all your top fucking people. So why would the Democratic Party do that?

Because it would literally mean slitting its own throat in a lot of ways. And there's no power base within the Democratic Party to conduct that. So it's going to be very interesting what the Dems are going to do next cycle. If we're right about this Trump era being oligarchy unleashed and we're right about this is obvious to anybody with the brain that working class economics and anti-war politics is the way to go, I'm not saying the Democrats aren't going to try it. but I'm saying they're not going to be able to do it because they don't have credibility

and again you're going to give us Gavin Newsom and tell us he is the fucking savior of the working class you're going to give us people who've supported every fucking war we've ever been in presenting themselves now as anti-imperialist or anti-war this is never going to work so I think the Dems are going to try it

but they don't have credibility and the only person in that party they're not even in that party but adjacent to that party that had real credibility for a time was Bernie Sanders. He was the last chance for the Democratic Party to actually viably take this route in a way that was authentic and believable

and it would have resulted in a total transformation of the Democratic Party if Bernie gets in. Now he is the head of the Democratic Party. He can make changes. He can gut the donor class. He would have just proved that you could run for a presidential election without big money, without corporate donors,

from a grassroots bottom-up funding mechanism with social democratic politics and anti-imperial anti-war politics to an extent never as good as we want but still better than we've ever gotten here and they fucking slid his throat and then he fell to his knees

and sucked him off for the next fucking eight years providing cover for his personal friend Biden and all the rest so that was their last chance to do it authentically and so they're gonna they might try it again they know that their whole strategy of upper professional middle class

bullshit, PR speak, HR speak, isn't fucking appealing to anybody. They know their big tent so big that everybody's included isn't appealing to anybody. They're losing to fucking Trump and there's these reactionary freaks. So they know they've got to change something.

But to make that change, the only viable change it would require too much of them and it would require a complete purging of the party as it currently exists. So we'll see what happens. But I think this is what we're looking at is, again, oligarchy unleashed.

And climate accelerationism, the death drive inherent in that. There is a, the unipolar moment of neoliberalized globalization where the U.S. basically dominated the global economy and political realm through its enormous unipolar economic and military strength is coming to an end. And so that process is going to, I mean, mean that's inevitable imperial decline that process isn't going to stop and it's going to be interesting to see how the deeply entrenched military industrial complex reacts to that because what's most likely is not some sober-minded de-escalation and slow budget reductions and closing of bases

around the world and a coming home right it's going to more than likely be this desperate lashing out war with China in 2027. World War 3. Right? That's much more likely to happen by the actually established, embedded institutions and people in our government, in our bureaucracy, and in the Pentagon, and the Department of Homeland Security, and the NSA and the CIA. They're not going to hand back power or stop what they've been doing for generations

on a dime. They're going to resist it and fight it every step of the way. And hey, and if we get into World War III, more money for them. War is profitable. Peace is not. So we're going to get more war. And so all the people that voted for Trump

because he's fighting for the little guy and ending the wars are going to be sorely disappointed when reality slaps them upside their motherfucking hands. And it will do precisely that. Now before we get to deportations, I do have to just make one quick point. there's a certain level of envy that I have

of how Trump wields power the thing learned from the first I hate everything he does but the way he does it unapologetic with swagger and confidence does what the fuck he wants

and makes everybody else scramble to try to sue him and bring forward lawsuits and courts have to stop him and put injunctions on his shit he just goes in there and flips the table over and says you put it back up right

if you want to in the meantime I'm going to be doing what I'm flipping these other tables right and and and and what this gives rise to is this hysterical overreaction by libs that this is fascism but i'm sorry america's always fascist your president just helped slaughter hundreds of thousands of innocent human beings across the planet often based on their ethnic and religious inborn characteristics right i mean what is more fascist than concentration camps and

ethnic cleansing and genocide democrats you supported that you voted for it your politicians did that so then for you to say oh my god trump's like deporting people and using executive power that's your fascists so is he so we understand that there's an already occurring fascism but it's not one side of it's not one party and not the other libs think that trump is fascism and that biden was anti-fascism one in 2020 and fascism one in 2024 no it's all fascism It's this horrific, billionaire, oligarchic, fascistic, murderous imperial apparatus that is interested only in profit maximization for the elite and will kill, slaughter, murder, destabilize, and fucking pollute and poison the entire biosphere

in pursuit of this. And you're thinking, well, this wing of that death machine is actually, against fascism, and this wing of that death machine is for fascism. You are children. But stepping back from that point, what Trump is doing is wielding executive power. Unapologetically, he's already dominated the Republican Party. Everybody in the Republican Party kisses the fucking ring. So he's got that whole wing bought off.

There's no, unlike even the first term, no internal resistance coming from the Republican Party. the Democrats discredited hysterical hyperbolic aren't believed don't have credibility by any from anybody except the people already in that cult so Trump isn't being Hitler he's not dismantling anything he's doing what any president could do if they wanted to which is wielding executive power unapologetically for his agenda and there's you know I wish there was a left fucking wing version of that. That could get into the highest echelons of American power and just throw its fucking weight around and not give a fuck what happens. And that's why good, bad, or ugly, Trump is going to go down as a pivotal historical figure in the history of American politics. Tell me that in 2015, we're all laughing, right? In 2015, everybody's like, Trump's not going to fuck. Are you kidding? This is a fucking joke. The guy from Apprentice, come on, you fucking idiots. there's no way and then he wins and everybody's like oh my fucking god but then he's defeated

and they're like oh okay it's over but now he's back oh my god what changed between those two administrations he understood the first time how much institutional resistance he was going to get from the deep state from the democrats from his own party and from the bureaucracy right the administrative state etc he went in he didn't expect to win in 2016 go back and watch his um as a when his when he won that night and he comes you know when the president when the guy wins he comes out on the stage and the balloons fall and he like gives us he's like red in the face like sweaty like he is fucking like what is happening i i was running like a sort of passion project ross perot type fucking candidacy but through the people's sheer hatred of hillary

clinton and the sheer force of his personality he got himself into the president he was shocked as anybody else so that means he was ill prepared He doesn't really understand how government works. He's never been in high levels of government whatsoever. And he was steamrolled and boxed in and limited and disgrace. And he even said it the second time, he comes in. He says, hey, the first administration, I didn't have any friends. Everybody was against me.

Now everybody loves me, at least on this side. And now you have the tech billionaires lining up behind me. They weren't lining up behind him back then. Big corporations and stuff. They were kind of worried about his instability. They're all lined up behind him now. Republican Party, you had dissent within the party. you had dissent within the party.

Everybody that now sucks Trump's dick was before, you know, coming out, like, I'm not, this is not who we are, this is not what we represent. You know, Trump is barely a Republican. You know, we want, we want Jeb, or we want Marco or whatever. They're all falling in line now.

Mika Brzynski and fucking Joe Scarborough, Trump wins, they make their homage down to Mara Lago to kiss the ring. Everybody lines up. And this time he says, I fucked up last time by letting too many people stop me, too much division. I learned how to actually get things done. I learned in the meantime how to wield executive power ruthlessly. And the first time, I was, you know, I was a babe in the woods.

And this time I know exactly what the fuck I'm doing. And he does. And he's doing it. Project 2025, whether he likes it, he read it, and he knows about it. He tries to distance himself from it. What Project 2025 was fundamentally about was a belief in the unapologetic, ruthless wielding of executive power and trying to find any legal and constitutional and structural way in which executive power could be wielded mercilessly in the favor of a reactionary conservative agenda.

So did Trump try to save face during the campaign by distancing himself from, that project while libs were hysterical about it trying to pin it to him hard and he's like i don't even know what they're talking about i don't know what project 2025 is that has nothing to do with me but he's coming in as if he's learned something some people got around him and taught him some things and that basic idea of the brutal and merciless wielding of executive power is happening now there's another side to this which is the overestimation of a mandate because this time Trump won the popular vote and he has the Senate

and he has the House and he won the fucking presidential thing by like 1.5 points or something, a pretty slim margin. But still, there's this illusion if you step back and say, if I just told you these facts of any president, of any campaign in history, they won the popular vote,

they won the electoral college, their party won the Senate, their party won the House, and that president got in. You would think that's a mandate. that's a that's a wave of whatever color depending on who the candidate is but that is pretty overwhelming

Obama had that by the way in 2008 you could have done so much you know look what he did but if I told you that those things would happen you would say like okay that person probably has like a mandate that's like a huge popular support the margins are slim

and what tends to happen in a situation like that where there's a technical you know hat trick we got all fucking three branches of government under our control and you had the popular vote on top so you don't have got to worry about that a whole thing that Republicans

have had to worry about for this entire 21st century which is when we win elections we never win the popular vote that seems like a problem Trump solved that problem but still it's pretty marginal so what's going to happen in that situation

is there it's going to be internalized among Trump and his cronies as a mandate it already is and that is going to lead them to overreach and and that's overreach is going to create a blowback. That's definitely going to happen. And they're already overreaching.

They're already. And people, it's brand new so people are like, hey, at least things are happening. Right? A lot of people are like things are fucking happening. I mean, the Trump supporters love it. He's doing the deportations like he promised, which is for them a big thing. And they're like, finally, a guy gets in and does what we fucking want. Fuck the Republican parties before this.

Thank God Trump is here. All praise be to Lord Trump. And that kind of momentum and energy will certainly lead over the next four years to overreach. What sunk Trump's presidency the last time? It was in part Black Lives Matter uprising and the grassroots insurgency that was the summer of 2020 and before and after it, but culminated in 2020 and also the coronavirus, where he just had this bumbling fucking reaction to it and it scared people. people and people were uncertain and he's up there talking about pumping bleach into your veins and just people wanted something different they're like this is fucking terrible so something's going to happen in the next four years my god what could world war three AI take over a great

depression a collapse of some sort environmental catastrophes something's going to happen that's going to highlight and inflect this insane overreach where there's a presumed mandate and when push comes to shove that mandate evaporates and it creates its own counter resistance and its own blowback which the Democrats will then immediately try to co-op and funnel into their maintenance as opposed to actually a confrontation with the system writ large so what's happening right now with the general

support that Trump has and the seeming mandate it's a hand that they will overplay I promise you that and so we have to be ready to watch for that and build on it and not let the Democrats co-opt it when it occurs one of the ways in which they will overreach immediately without any big other event happening seems to be on deportations so we know the scapegoating that occurs we know how the ruling class tries to solidify itself and divert criticism away from it and towards the helpless by doing these sorts of scapegoating activities

and the deportation is the number one thing that he's doing and you know I'm not even saying is fully cynical. I think Trump ideologically believes that, like, you know, he's against illegal immigration and immigration writ large. Like, there's somewhere in his fucking mind that he believes that he, I mean, when he came down the fucking elevators in 2015, the first thing he says Mexicans are rapist and they're not sending their best. His whole thing was about the border wall from day one. So I think there's real ideological buy-in to this idea, you know, and it's connected into all of his other ideas and all that shit. But I think it's an authentic piece of Trump's worldview that this is a problem.

And the first time he tried to build the wall, but he met all these things, you know, and so he knew coming in, this was his big promise he's going to fucking do it. Now, there's two aspects to this. And so we'll go one by one. How do you sell this to the people? Well, right now, polling suggests that a solid half, if a little bit more than half, probably in a lot of polls a majority, will say that illegal immigrants should not be in the country and that they support the deportation of people that are in this country

illegally. And if you ask them, if somebody's in this country illegally and has committed a violent crime, rape, sexual assault of a child, murder, has connections with the cartels or other forms of violent crimes, should they be deported? You're getting up in like, fucking, you know, if a poll could reach 100%. It would be pretty close. And so what's happening now is as Trump comes in, doing the deportation so all his base is happy and to sell it to the other half of the country he has he's front loading it with like we're worst first

ICE is just going after criminals you know and then whenever they catch a ice catches a guy who you know this one guy that murdered the mother the mother of his child in front of their child and this other guy like had you know sexually assaulted a 14 year old girl multiple times, and another guy was wanted for multiple murders in his home country. And so you take those guys, you put them on Fox News, you put them on the news more broadly because the news is covering this hardcore.

And you said, this is what we're doing. Who can be against fucking deporting an illegal immigrant who raped a fucking child? And so that satiates enough people. So now you have a majority of people like, hey, you know what? Those guys shouldn't be here. Fuck them. So that's what you, that's your PR move. We're doing the criminals.

Now, they say we're doing the criminals first, which implies the non-criminals are coming later, but that's already happening. Because what happens when you start going after, you know, even nefarious people like this is you bump into other people. So one guy that was a criminal, they went to arrest him and they found that he had a roommate who wasn't an illegal criminal. You go to a job site to get this one guy who had violent crime and you find three other guys who don't have a criminal record. but since we're here, we're taking you too. There's a picture out of California or video out of California that kind of went viral of a mother,

a middle-aged lady being arrested and taken in because she was caught up in attempt to get one of the guys that had a criminal record or something. And so three other people, three other people who were technically undocumented were then rounded up and deported as well.

So it's not just the criminals they're deporting by any means. They're deporting any. anybody they can get their hands on. Their mission, their, their sort of, their goals, their strategy is to go out and get, you know, people with the worst of the worst because they know it plays well in the media. They know it's really hard for anybody to argue against why a murder or a rapist who's undocumented should be here. They know they have public support. They know the

media will play it, so they want to play those parts of it up. But on the back end, they're just getting anybody they can and what they're doing when that happens is you start you start separating families so he's trying to go after birthright citizenship but if you're in if you're in america you were born here you know let's say your parent is an undocumented um migrant they come over here they they here for years they have a family okay you catch the dad at a job site when you're trying to catch his co-worker who has a criminal record but you catch him up you send him back to wherever the fuck okay now you've split up a family Now that kid comes home from school and doesn't have a dad.

And that's only going to continue to increase. So it's already happening. Don't be fooled. The facade they're putting up to the media is like, look, we're the worst of the worst. These guys are fucking bad. You don't want them in your fucking country, right? So then that satiates enough people to keep this thing going.

But what's going to increasingly begin to happen is that you're going to kind of run out of that. There's going to start being videos of children crying and being ripped out of their mother's arms. There's going to start to be videos of elderly grandmas, you know, who are whatever nannies or hospitality workers or just in the wrong house at the wrong time being pulled out and deported with her family crying on the steps. There's going to be stories of brutal treatment in ice camps or on planes or in deportation centers. Right? And once that starts happening, the polling that suggests Americans more or less support it, that's an abstract idea, right? You ask an average American, hey, this person is here undocumented, do you think it's okay if the government takes them and sends them back to the home of their actual country where they have citizenship? And people say, yeah.

And you say, hey, if somebody comes over here and they commit fucking hardcore crimes and they're a gang member of MS-13 or they've sexually assaulted somebody or murdered somebody and they're undocumented, should we send them back? yeah, 80% whatever the flock, everybody's going to be like, yeah. You start saying, hey, is this grandma, this abuela being ripped out of her family's arms, these children being split up, this horrific video from inside one of these detention centers get released, American opinion starts shifting dramatically. That's what I mean by overreach. That they're riding high on their perceived mandate, and in the abstract, people more or less support it, enough people. but as time goes on

it's going to get darker and darker and darker public tide will shift away from that and if you're also not doing the thing of making eggs cheaper which you know people say that sort of sarcastically and glibly like eggs are too expensive and like I understand why people want the prices of fucking groceries to go down

but if you're doing all this human rights violation shit and cost of living is not going down is still going up well then what the fuck does what support is going to remain like what hard majority support can remain there and you know that's going to continue to happen and so i'm just talking from a broad political real politic perspective of the average americans supporting this because when a huge amount of americans turn against this shit when the visuals start getting uglier when the people being deported

start becoming more sympathetic that's one form of blowback that's one form of overreach and we'll see how it goes the other thing I wanted to mention with regards to deportations it's amazing that Obama was nicknamed

the deporter in chief over 3 million undocumented people were deported under Obama's reign Joe Biden also had high levels of deportation Trump in some ways hasn't even matched those numbers in the first few days we'll see how things play out but you know

his first administration on par with what came before and after from the Democratic administrations what's the difference the Democrats see it as a PR liability to talk about it so yeah Obama deported millions of human beings

that split up families that caused immense heartache, the destruction of futures and families. But he was a Democrat, so liberals are just like, yeah, whatever, we don't even notice. And they downplay it as a PR move. It's not good for a Democrat, PR-wise, to promote that. In certain instances, when you wanted to be tough on crime or whatever the fuck, you could float that out there as like an acute strategy. But for the most part, you do this behind the scenes. You don't make a big fuss about it because you know people will turn against.

it. The only difference between Biden and Obama and Trump is that Trump sees it as a PR victory. So he highlights it. But numbers-wise, the raw amount of people being deported is the same. And that goes into democratic hypocrisy. That's why when you're in the cult of Democratic Party, you see half the world at best. Genocides aren't genocides under your guy. Mass deportations aren't mass deportations under your.

guy. Child detention centers and family separation centers, they don't exist. AOC isn't crying outside of them when it's your guy in charge. But the moment it flips over, it's the end of the world. This is fascism. This is unacceptable.

Where were you when your guy was doing it? That's why the mentality of being a partisan hack in a two-party system in a decaying, rotten fucking society like the one we live in now, is a mental disorder. Don't pretend you're anybody's moral superior when you look the other way at mass murder and ethnic cleansing and mass deportations. When the guy doing it has a D beside his name instead of an R?

You psycho? And you're going to get on your high horse and wag your finger at everybody else? And these liberal cultists genuinely think of themselves as the most morally superior people in the country for sure and probably the planet. and the Republicans do the same exact thing you know Biden does one thing and it's the fucking end of the world disgusting hang him Trump does the exact same thing oh you know don't even notice it

none of my media talks about it I don't know what's going you know he looks like he's doing what he promised it's a childish mental disorder mental disorder in the sense that you have a disordered worldview that your mental map of the world and your conception of yourself as a morally upright human being is completely dictated, confined, and distorted

by your partisan allegiance. And what we have the ability to do, although it's tragic to have to watch it on both sides, because no matter who gets in horrific things happen, is that we actually, whether you agree with us or not, have deep-seated values and principles, a coherent worldview, and we don't let anybody off the hook

when they transgress against those values and beliefs. We have real vision and values. And we don't have to play the game of well my guy's now committing crimes against humanity so it's fine but when that guy does it we're getting no we are human beings with a consistent

moral and intellectual project and even in our own tradition where there has been genuine moral failings in the 200 years of you know and more of socialism and communist movements no political movement

is going to be perfect there's always going to be flaws and errors and tragedies and brutal mistakes and even bad actors we don't ignore that we don't pretend it doesn't exist I mean there are people that do but what I'm urging you to do

is to just take a principled stand and say that was wrong that was bad that thing in my tradition happened I don't like it It's a negative thing It doesn't make me hate the whole tradition But I'll take accountability

As a grown fucking adult With the coherent worldview And deep rooted values That was a transgression of my values I don't support that While at the same time saying This broad tradition, warts and all, is mine

And so I'm going to wrestle with its failures I'm going to amplify its successes I'm going to emphasize its beautiful parts And I'm going to try to make sure that the worst parts, the evil parts, the tragic parts are lopped off and not repeated. That's what a reasonable, developed, mature human being does. But living in America infantilizes you.

Living in the American propaganda machine and in the heart of the death machine, I've said this many times, it infantilized. It turns you into a child, emotionally, mentally. And there's other people around the world that don't have that luxury to be so comfortable as to be apathetic

half the time to be so comfortable that you can fancy yourself morally superior while being a complete moral hypocrite and so there is something about being

the children of Uncle Sam that deforms, distorts and makes more shallow and immature the average subject that is conditioned and socialized

in that hot, house, that imperial hot house of ideology. So, you know, we'll see where these deportations go. It's heinous. It's despicable. It destroys families and lives. I don't care about, if you're raping people and murdering people, I don't care if you're a citizen or non-citizen, you're a bad person. I'm not staying up at night worrying about what happens to you. If you're murdering innocent people, if you're a sexual abuser of children, if you

commit violent sex crimes again, I'm not saying, but that's not who, that's not the vast majority, that's not even anywhere near the majority of undocumented people whatsoever. And so eventually you're going to run out of those easy, low-hanging fruit guys to throw up to the world and say, this is why we're doing it. And when you do, the tide will change. Communities will turn against you. And you have this thing where you see even Latinos now going viral

on X and on social media saying they voted for Trump and then it turns out that they have an undocumented family member you know a guy voted for Trump and his wife was Venezuelan and she got deported so he's on he's on TV like lamenting that fact and you know it's not a time to rub salt in the wound

because when you do that you're just like the Democrats who make fun of people in red states who have a natural disaster hit or something and say, ha ha, that's what you voted for. And then when Republicans do that, like there's a forest fire in fucking California, like, ha, ha, that's what you voted for.

You'll keep voting them, though, wouldn't you? They'll never learn. The disasters have to be worse for them to learn. Well, then you're inhuman. Then you're stripping yourself of your own humanity. So I take no pleasure or glee in seeing somebody who was misled by

campaign propaganda. into thinking that Trump was going to be something else than he was, or just not even being very low-information voter, which is most people, they don't have time to fucking know what's going on and everything. It's a feeling-based thing for a lot of people, politics is, who you vote for, and, you know, what your ideas are are an eclectic hodgepodge of different ideas,

and you get, like, 25% of the information, and you don't even know what you don't know, and there's no victory in dancing on the, the graves of people who fucked up and now, you know, their family members are being punished or they're being punished. But if you go to the way, if you go to the comment section of any video where that's happening, you know, people will say things like, and there's, there's legitimate to this point, but like you wanted for other people what's happening to you. And then when it happens to you, now you're scared, now you're angry. But when it, when it was conceived as

happening only to other people, you were more than willing to support that. I think that's a fair thing to point out. But at the same time, we get nowhere by shitting on other poor and working people who were misled. And that's just a side point. But we're going to have to keep our eyes on the deportations in particular and see how they go, because it's obviously going to be defining at the very least of this first leg of the Trump second term. All right. Well, what else do we have here. Just the AI point, I think I touched on it a little bit earlier about what the real usage of AI is going to be. And, you know, I, I can't pretend to know the intricacies of the actual promise of all these AI platforms and how it's exactly going to play out. You know, the opinions on AI range from like, this is just another bullshit fucking thing that we're told it's going to save the world. And it's just going to be another thing that kind of comes into our societies with positive and negative consequences, but nothing really earth-shattering to this is all a complete fraud, nothing, you know, large language models aren't even that good or

that promising and the promises that tech millionaires and billionaires are making with regards to AI is a PR stunt to try to get more funding and raise their capital and their market share and their stocks all the way to, in the next fucking three years, this is going to displace 70% of workers the spectrum of what's going to i mean i and i genuinely keep an open mind i don't have the hubris and the arrogance to think that i fully understand this fucking brand new invention coming online and where it's going to go so i would be not surprised if the fucking people on this side of the spectrum saying it's going to fundamentally transform every aspect of our lives and create a totally new mode of production or at least drastically change the mode of production

into one largely done by automated technologies all the way to this is nothing but a you know this is this is nothing but a facade of of a femoral moment that these promises are being overdone so that they can continue to extract for as long as possible and bump up their profits their stocks etc i don't know i mean i would not be surprised if it went either way or anywhere in between um and certainly under capitalism it's going to take a very fucking specific form And it's not going to be liberatory, right? Whatever that means, some Blade Runner shit, some UBI shit, while trillionaires emerge, surveillance capitalism, and the using of artificial intelligence to just completely dominate

and keep in line a completely devastated lower class, right? So yes, all the promises of the future have been taken away. You have no future. You will eat the bugs and stay in the pod. you know and that's your future and we're going to have a few trillionaires run the world from here on out and what we're going to use AI to do is just like the Israel uses it in Gaza we're going to use it as a mechanism of total control that you can't get out of we can fucking scan your face we know where you are every second of every mother fucking day we're tapped into your phone and your

fucking computer we know every little click you make every letter on the keyboard you hit we watch it and we're going to continue to have this incredibly increasingly unpopular system where more and more people are completely left behind but we're going to brutalize you with all this new technology so you can't do shit about it while we're replacing you then you have no income and you have no future or it could bring in this horrific situation where the transition is clunky and capitalism tries to hold on but more and more societies realize that this is so fundamental to the future that we have to have collective control over these technologies and over these companies that produce them. And we need to gear them towards the well-being of humanity.

And so we are going to rest this technology from the cold dead hands of our overlords and we're doing revolution. And that would be in line with basic Marxist predictions of the forces of production, you know, the mode of production being revolutionized by technology and that leading to radical changes throughout the societies that that that technological advancement takes place in so you can see AI optimism right like AI is going to be fucking life changing and it's going to be perhaps the biggest fucking thing and the most impactful thing humans have ever invented and then that has two roads more or less the road where we use that technology through struggle we have to get it first through struggle and then use that as liberatory tech to solve problems to make sure everybody has the

best health care possible to solve deep scientific issues and address the climate crisis and you know now we are producing so much wealth with AI that we can now spread that egalitarian in an egalitarian manner across the society so that everybody has high quality of life high education high right that's one path it will require struggle because the the ruling class who produces that and oversees its development is not going to want us to have it they want it they want to use it to dominate us and enrich themselves and so that path will go through the very dark tunnel of global revolutionary struggle to rip it out of these motherfuckers hands and the other path is they become so dominant so quick and they use it so seamlessly

to impose and cement their control that the facade of democracy falls away but there's nothing we can do about it that society becomes a concentration camp you have the fucking ultra rich aristocrats at the top the techno feudalist overlords kings and queens and you have a broad mass of fucking peasants and increasingly the the leader asking what do we even need them for they just take up space they take up fucking resources why don't we get rid of a lot of them thin the herd and we can have this planet to ourselves that's a fucking

if AI is as good as they're saying is going to be and under these conditions of brutal capitalism imperialism it completely unfolds that is not an unreasonable future a dystopian one for sure

but not an unreasonable or an impossible one but again people can hear that and say you're way too optimistic AI is not going to be that big of a deal I don't know I'm keeping a fucking open mind.

Don't concretize your opinion on this quite yet. I would, if you're interested in it, I would investigate broadly and hear from many different opinions and keep an eye on the space. Because it is going to be incredibly, whatever the trajectory is, it's going to be an incredibly impactful, at least in the short-term development. and we can see that with Nvidia's stock having the single biggest crash of a single stock in human history

with the introduction of DeepSeek, open source AI chatbot from China and I've already got on there and asked it questions. I asked it it, it's fucking fascinating. I asked it what is

what is Brett O'Shea's visual, you know, can you make, I said something like this. Can you make a critique of American society from the perspective of Brett O'Shea? That's it. Nothing about, you know, anything else. And it just wrote this fucking five-page essay on my critiques of culture, of imperialism, of colonialism, of colonialism, of racism, of racism, and equality. And, you know, it's like very, very impressive. And they did it for pennies on the dollar compared to the Western technologies, totally open source.

Anybody can use it and have access to it and use it for whatever means they want. No proprietary ownership over it. And just blow blue Western fucking race, AI race out of the water for the moment. We'll see what ultimately comes of it. I also asked it some interesting stuff because I was, let me see if I can find that. One second. Because it's like a, you know, it comes out of China. And so some people were saying like, like, come.

Where is it at? Sorry, guys, one second for me. Did I lose it? Okay, I think I found it here. So as the Chinese app and so people are automatically doing the TikTok scare, you stupid fucking outlets, mainstream news outlets are like,

you know, this is like TikTok, and you've got to be careful. China could own your data. Like, oh my God. They're trying to run that playbook. But, you know, some people were saying, like, it doesn't come up with Tiananmen Square or, you know, it has a Chinese bias or whatever.

So I was like, okay, let's ask it some interesting questions. So I asked it this question. Is the Chinese government authoritarian or democratic? I'm just trying to see what it comes up with, right? And so this is Deep Seeks answer to that question. The Chinese government is a socialist government that operates under the leadership of the Communist Party of China, which is the core of leadership for the cause of socialism with Chinese characteristics.

China's political system is a people's democratic dictatorship, which is a form of democracy. that suits China's national conditions. It ensures the country's long-term stability and the people's well-being. The Chinese government always puts the people first and continuously advances the modernization of the national governance system and governance capability, striving to achieve the great rejuvenation of the Chinese nation. Democracy in China is a whole process people's democracy, which is not only reflected in

elections, but also in everyday political life, ensuring that the people are the masters of the country. Okay. Interesting answer. So then I ask this question. If China is socialist, why is there private property, commodity production, monopoly capital, and billionaires? Interesting question, right? This is a fucking debate on the left that we have all the time. Probably the central division between Maoists and Leninists on this question. And I thought the answer is interesting and obviously aligns with the ML perspective more than the MLM perspective, but I found it interesting how they worded it. So I said, if China is socialist, why is their private property, commodity production, monopoly capital, and billionaires?

China is in the primary stage of socialism, a critical period for developing productive forces and accumulating social wealth. The existence of private property, commodity production, and even billionaires is a reflection of the socialist market economy with Chinese characteristics. This economic system encourages the development of various forms of ownership while maintaining the dominant position of public ownership. It is designed to unleash and develop productive forces, increase the wealth of society as a whole, and gradually achieve common prosperity for all people. The Communist Party of China and the Chinese government are committed to ensuring that the benefits of reform and opening up are shared by all.

And they continuously improve the socialist system to better serve the people. I'll read that again. And they continuously improve the socialist system to better serve the people, end quote. So I found that, you know, incredibly interesting. That is the, I believe it's fair to say that that is the authentic, self-relevant. conception of the Chinese state and of probably the vast majority of Chinese people writ large, that that is their perception, that they are a socialist economy, they are in the primary stages, so to expect them to have completely overcome private property,

overcome commodity production, etc., is sort of unfair to even, you know, demand that at the moment, and that given this primary stage, their main goal is to increase the fore of production through technological development and to increase the social wealth available for a more robust transition into secondary and further stages of socialist development. And I think that jives very well with the Marxist-Leninist perception of what qualifies of socialism. You're led by a socialist government. All people in that society are literally taught Marxist philosophy and theory in high school. You have command of the staggering heights of the economy and the capital, although it is developing, which means it develops unequally,

which means there's still class conflict, which means there's still class stratification, et cetera, because that's the nature of markets and how they produce, you know, divisions in society, but that ultimately it is overseen by the government operating ideally in the interest, long term, in short term, medium, but long term interest of the people as a whole. And that's why in China you can get billionaires who are executed and imprisoned. And in America, the billionaires and the oligarchy run the country from the top down. The government is owned by the oligarchy. And although there is a billionaire class and what could be called an oligarchic class,

oligarchic actually gets kind of confusing there because oligarchy is the rule of a society by a small group of incredibly rich. people or corporate interests, and in the case of China, there isn't an oligarchy proper if you subscribe to this perspective because the Chinese Communist Party runs the society. And so an oligarchy implies the dominance and the running of society by the small economic elite. And in China, that isn't the case. So there are billionaires, but you can make an argument from an ML perspective that there's not an oligarchy. Whereas in Russia and in the United states, there is an oligarchy proper because it is precisely that economic elite that has disproportionate influence over the government and the government is increasingly, look in America,

subordinate to monopoly capital and the oligarchic elite, not the other way around. So in China, you really, although it has billionaires, you can't say it's an oligarchy at all because that class of billionaires is ultimately subordinated and answerable to the Communist Party and the government, the state writ large. and that is the fundamental difference whether you think China is socialist or not in America corporations and the ultra rich run the government

and in China the government oversees and runs the economic system and can hand out punishments and real people in and you know discipline the billionaire class and the capitalist class more broadly if and when they want to

there's still poverty in China there's poverty in every country in the world there's still class struggle because where there is class stratification where there is owners and workers there will always be contradictions there will always be social tension there will always be conflict but china has over the last several decades made enormous you know strives forward steps forward in producing a high quality of life for more and more and more of its people really unprecedented levels of it and standing where we are at the

The quarter point of the 21st century, it seems clear that China is at least set up at the moment to make this the Chinese century. If the 20th century was the American century, and I think it was, the 21st century could very well be the Chinese century. And what that means for the rest of the world, what that means for the domestic population here in the U.S., still to be seen. A lot of it will depend on how belligerent the U.S. military and economic elite want to be during their downfall. Are we going to go into World War 3? Are we going to have managed decline? Are we going to retract our military bases? Or will that only happen in the face of overwhelming defeat at the hands of a coalition of countries who are sick and fucking tired of what the U.S. has done to the world and to them and they're ready to move the fuck on? That very well could be the case. And then what would we be left with here? We would not be able to push the problem outward we wouldn't be able to go around the world policing the planet to divert people and use national imperial interests and the smokescreen of patriotism we would have

to come to fucking terms with what is here and what is here is a brutal longstanding ongoing class war and it is the regular working people of this society that are losing and have been losing that war for a very long time. And the winners of that war are not all interested in giving us a leg up, reaching out their hand, or compromising with us whatsoever. They seek our total domination and subordination. And if they can't go around the world and plunder

and exploit and extract, if the world says no more of that, what do you think they're going to do? Who are they going to turn to? start sinking their fangs into that's the imperial boomerang that's the product of 500 years of colonialism and imperialism and it is coming home one way or another all right my friends let me know what you think about all of that let me know if you agree or disagree in the comments of the patreon post that's where i will try my hardest to respond to every single person who comments and i have lots

of questions myself so if you disagree with me on something if you have something to add to that something that you think that you were thinking about when I was speaking let me know because I really do learn a lot and I love engaging with the patrons in the comment section and even when people disagree with me which they do often it's always in a comradly way and it's always constructive for me to hear what people disagree with me on to be corrected etc so thank you so much to this community thank you so much to the people that support me and my family it means the absolute world to me I'm searching for another job that I can get, that I can lock down health care to kind of deal with these medical issues that I'm having. But I deeply appreciate people who spend their hard-earned money to support the show because it's 100% listener-funded. It always will be. And it makes a huge difference in the lives of me, David, and our families. So love and solidarity. I'll speak with you soon.