TRASHFUTURE - The Bolsonaro Method feat. Greg Foley

Episode Date: January 28, 2026

We’re joined by Blood Work’s Greg Foley to discuss the ongoing wave of state violence in the United States, and think about what makes this time different and altogether more worrying. Also, we look at the Labour Party shooting itself in the head rather than ceding any control to non-Morgan McSweeneys… but before any of that we look at what’s happening in a country that dealt with its fascism problem properly. Check out Blood Work here! Get more TF episodes each week by subscribing to our Patreon here! TF Merch is still available here! MILO ALERT Check out Milo’s tour dates here: https://www.miloedwards.co.uk/liveshows Trashfuture are: Riley (@raaleh), Milo (@Milo_Edwards), Hussein (@HKesvani), Nate (@inthesedeserts), and November (@postoctobrist)

I'm going to go on a whim here and say I'm not a fan of violence myself. Well, I can get started because everyone else is. The times are. And so, you know. You don't have to be interested in violence to live on this planet, but it helps. You don't have to be interested in violence, but violence is interested in us. Yes. Yeah, I've heard a podcast, Fats, talks about that a lot.

I think it's called Pod Save. raising my little shot glass full of little 9mm bullets listen to Pod Save the UK It's called the rest of politics Rory Stewart Rory Stewart and Greg Foley talk about their time in Afghanistan Don't ask where Alastair Campbell went

Alistair Campbell's drinking shots If you know what I mean And Alistair Campbell said Nothing you idiots, Alexander Campbell's dead He's locked in my basement He's not really One sec, let's sink up So you know the drill

three, two, one, Mark. When I say, Mark, everybody, please clap. Three, two, one. Mark. Thank you very much. What I should have done is got a soundboard drop of a gunshot so that I could have just like, been like, yeah, I just popped off into my ceiling. That's why we have post.

I really, I really hate my landlord, so I've shot his house. This is, this is, paying rent the blood work way. Yeah, the thing is, I lower the rent in my neighborhood, but I increase the rent in my apartment because it has bullet holes in it that I have to pay to get fixed. So it offsets. Yeah, that's Keynesianism. That's military canzianism. That's as much as I come to understand it.

Yeah, all right, all right, all right. Hello, everybody. Welcome to this free episode of TF. And despite our, I would say, quite light tone, it is a worrying time to live in the world. Yeah, welcome to the jarring shift in tone hour. The reason why we came in with jokes is because we spent sort of like 15 minutes ahead of the recording talking about all of the stuff we couldn't say on the recording,

because it would be actionably violent. That's right. The word of the day, violence. Ding, ding, ding, ding, ding. Because the word of the day is violence, we have returning champion second time on the pod. Greg Foley, the host of Bloodwork. Listen to Bloodwork.

Imagine me pointing a gun at you. Greg, welcome back to the show. Thank you so much. In the immortal words of John Lennon, I read the news today. Oh, boy. Cool. Pretty good.

What happened? Hey, I checked out CBS News. They're playing a clip show. Pretty good. All right, all right. I think they're literally screening a night at the movies with CBS where they interview like Margot Robbie, which, cool. It's good to keep informed about these things.

They're finally going to get to the bottom of what the perfect Sunday really is. Yeah, the only questions you're now allowed to ask at CBS News are just what questions James Lipton asks at the end of inside the actor's studio. Yeah, we asked a masked up ice agent dripping with blood what his perfect morning was. We did not like what we found out to be. And the answer will shock you. What's your favorite curse word? Just a string of expletive beeps.

Hey, what's your favorite like profession to murder? Like poet or like nurse or like, you know, what's the, what's your favorite kind of like socially valuable person to like execute in the street? Yeah. And that and of course, them all auditioning for fucking America's funniest home videos by like flashbanging themselves every time they drive past a guy with a tan. It is pretty monstrous over there. And when the imperial hegemon is collapsing, it is worth taking note of it. And that's what we're going to be spending the vast majority of this episode talking about. But there are two things I wanted to talk about before we get to that.

One is utterly essential. I am unwilling to proceed until we talk about this. This is, I think, the only thing in the last few days of not sleeping and becoming slightly delirious that has helped me feel good about anything. Riley, please tell us a really funny news item. Funny, this is serious. Sorry, please tell us a horrifying news item. I'm standing up with my hand on my chest and my hat off.

I'm so sorry. This is a day that will live in infamy, as 89 people were injured when lightning struck near a rally supporting former Brazilian president, Jaya Bolsonaro in Brasilia on Sunday. The weird shit that happens to him is like transmissible. I swear to go, like ideologically, like supporting Bolsonaro and then you and 88 of your friends get struck by lightning. It's awesome.

You're dealing with the Brazilian wily coyote. I think it's a really funny thing for Brazilian fascists to be like, okay, we're going to demonstrate against Lula by all joining hands around this big copper wire in the middle of a thunderstorm. The only thing that is keeping him alive is the fact that nobody has found the Portuguese for me. I'm genuinely surprised. Like, you know, I actually, I feel like I have a lot of admiration, limited in a very limited sense in the sense of like nothing's killing this guy. Like, there's no evidence that he's getting stronger, but there's no evidence felt like he's not getting stronger.

And so I kind of like, I sort of respect that in a way. Yeah. It's like he cannot live or die. He's simply unvanchishable. Yeah. But that spreads to like his guys as well. And so the other thing of note here is that, like, if we're taking sort of signs and portents, right, Zeus votes for Lula, which is inherently funny, given that from what I know about Brazil, a decent number of the Bolsonaroistas probably were named Zeus. So my apologies to Zeus electrophilia de Hitler.

I hope you get better in hospice all. I'm now picturing Yaya Bolsanaro as Philotis from the Disney Hercules film. So you'll want to be my president kid, well, who do. I just, every, every Bolsonaroista loves to emulate their hero by going to the hospital, his favorite place to hang out. So it's like the official, like if we know that the official uniform of the Nazis was like the long Hugo Boss designed like storm coats or whatever. The official uniform of Bolsonaroismo is a full body cast.

No, it's paper gown with the ass out. You've got like a bunch of tubes like protruding from you You've got like an IV stand Also your hair is standing on end You're singed Both your shoes have been blown off Yeah it's like look

Here's the other thing right Especially with what we're going to talk about The Brazilian state did what it had to do And you look Bolsonaro Cloud seeding over the Bolsonaro One one sort of like Top Secret cleared Brazilian Air Force pilot

Flying away into the sunset Mission Accompan The Praetorian Guard of Guides with Zimmerframes wandering around like Vincent the Chin Gagante. But like this is the fascist tendency in Brazil when it was stripped of its power, when it was humiliated, when it's January 8th, when fucking nowhere, everyone was jailed, they've now become ludicrous. You know what I always say, right? I hate when the state defends itself from the left, but I love when the state defends itself from the right. And if that means driving out to the Bolsonaro demonstration and firing up one of the Vandagraph generators from the prestige, then fine, you know, great, fantastic. The last shot of the prestige where it was just like a wood in Colorado with a bunch of dead

Bolsonaro guys, piped on top of each other. The bolt hit as thousands gathered in the rain to demand their leaders released from prison. Video footage captured the moment of a sudden flash and thunder sent crowds scrambling for cover. Fire department officials said 45 people went to hospital street. The rally was organized by Congressman Nicholas Ferreira who called for amnesty for Bolsonaro, who was currently detained at a special detention facility in Resilia. He's faced ongoing health problems stemming from a 2018 stabbing during his first presidential campaign, including a week-long hospitalization in December for a groin hernia and treatment for persistent hiccups.

You can't ask for amnesty for Jaya Bolsonaro because the thing he needs amnesty from is himself. Talking to Jaya Bolsonaro and he's like hiccuffing the whole time. is like got an injured dick and you're like Mr. Mr. like former president, sir. A frankly Looney Tunes number of your guys have been hit by the fucking chain lightning power

from Bioshock. He says, oh, I'll take care of this immediately. Time to take a step without looking and just lands on a fucking single roller skate. I just pictured the surgeon slicing him open and hearing various spring noises. He's gonna, he's

monitoring the situation very closely and he's going to take action the only way he knows how getting a kind of ringworm that only exists in like three countries none of which are Brazil yeah the first man to get a ringworm there's actually a worm earlier this month bolsidaro untow went further medical treatment after falling in prison he's he is I swear to god he is like I don't think he's Brazilian I think he's from fucking tune town yeah they don't mention the fact that him falling in prison like I I said, Brazilian Wiley Coyote, when they say falling in prison, a piano landed on him and then he went down the staircase like a slinky.

Like, one thing Bolsonaro does have is he's able to defy gravity for a short period of time until he does look down. Until he holds up a sign saying, uh-oh. Yeah, he never actually talks. It's weird. He's going to get that roadrunner, though. This is what can become of your fascist movement if you jail their leaders and humiliate them. It's one simple trick. Yeah. Turns out you just have to.

defend yourself from them. Yeah, just inflict consequences. Not only are they not sort of like, you know, Superman, not only do they not have hearts of iron, not only are they not men of steel, right? But as you see from all the ice agents eating shit on like sort of icy streets, they will continue to do all of the Oaf stuff, but they just can't kill you.

Like they will never stop. Also, Nova, I'd like to issue one small correction here. They all definitely have hearts of iron. This is true. Yeah. Hearts of iron. Really bad when you get struck by lines. no. Bolsonaro's Sue is going to have a lung of iron.

Thank you. I'm going to sign off the podcast now. Goodbye everybody. I'm retiring forever. Thank you for listening to Brazil future, the podcast about how, unless we implement fully automated luxury communism,

the future is and will be Brazil. Honestly, I would love if the future was Brazil. Yeah, to be honest. That sounds pretty cool. That sounds nice. Like, you know what?

Great weather. Caprinas. and your fascist movement is doing a lot more looney-tune stuff. Yeah. And as many tunnels painted on walls as you could possibly want. That's right. Dangerous freeway system. Anyway, anyway, look, especially in Sao Paulo, which has a crazy motorway through it.

Check out no matter to Mayers. Fucking mental. I wanted to also talk about some UK news items because there are things happening that we definitely cannot ignore. Yeah, it's really funny, right? And I'll put the sort of button on all of this first ahead of time, so you know what the theme is, right? which is, in the US, the expression of things cannot get better and we will prevent you from trying is you get shot in the street by someone who doesn't have a soul anymore. In the UK, the expression of things cannot get better and more kill you for trying is a kind of tense meeting of the Labour Party National Electoral Committee. And don't get me wrong, we will let you kill yourself.

Like, there's one of the, like, Palestine hunger strikers who is about to die. but in the main politics in this country is going to be about like, no, you just can't vote for anyone who would do things differently. Yeah, yeah, we're going to keep, oh, you wanted, sorry, what we're going to do is we're going to make it so that the one guy who is, I'm not even saying the one guy who's good, just the one guy who is the least hated of anyone who's involved in your party, Andy Burnham, current mayor of Greater Manchester, former MP.

Do you mean my party, your party? I think I'm still a member of it. I haven't checked. I am so annoyed at them for who's on firsting the UK political system. It was confusing enough. Oh, your party? Wait, my party? Yeah.

Agreed. No, these, some of these politicians have some very unusual names, huh? But in the context of this as well, I want to just, here's what some of the other labor bigwigs have been doing recently, and these are the same things that make them so hated, then we'll go on to Andy Burnham. These are recent remarks made by Home Secretary Shabana Mahmood at the Tony Blair Institute. its Christmas party last month. Can you imagine a better hang?

I hope there's a full, like, wall projection of the one Blair Christmas card where it looks like Cherie's trying to stop him from fighting. They say to me, I never see you at the gym, and I say, them, I never see you at the Tony Blair Institute's Christmas party. Yeah. So this she was being interviewed before, I guess, like, the adrenochrome started flowing.

It's so funny that the acronym is TVI. We're spreading it. As Justice Secretary, Ms. Mahmood proposed a major expansion of GPS tagging of criminals to create, quote, prisons for offenders punished in the community. Since moving to the home office, she's announced a planned nationwide rollout of police-operated live facial recognition cameras

as widely as possible. You know, anyone might think that the full immersion VR Roblox sex offender wing was a bad idea, but, you know. So, in an interviewist or Tony Blair, she said, AI and technology can be transformative to the whole law and order space. When I was in justice, my ultimate vision was to achieve by means of AI and technology

what Jeremy Bentham tried to do with his pen opticon. Oh, cool. Okay. Ever since I was a little girl, I wanted to build the torment nexus. I mean, she's announced a whole raft of like policing stuff, which I have some thoughts on maybe we'll talk about it in due course. Look, there is some reassurance in the sense that like, if anyone tries to build a panopticon, they won't be able to because of planning permission.

And the fact that you can't, you know, you will not be able to build a panopticon because the council will not let you do it. Yeah, you're an obstruct, a legally protected view. The panopticon's on like a brownfield site and everyone gets cancer? Yeah, your podopticon might block the sun, you know, you're seeing the sunrise, like, at a certain location. And so that's why you can't do it. I don't want to distract from the substance, but I just want to point out an interview with Sir Tony Blair. I bet that was tougher than Paxman. It's a tough interview. I mean, also, like, as far as policing stuff goes,

I do want to quickly note that I'm incrementing the big sort of, I have the, I have the bulletin of the atomic scientist sort of like atomic clock thing, but it's a counter for the number of times they've announced a British FBI and we're now up to like conservatively 20 like they've been trailing British FBI since like 9-11 basically. You know why it's that they

didn't do for the British FBI what the US has been doing for the American FBI is they got to put Constantine Kiston in charge of it like they need to put a YouTuber in charge but the thing that that kind of is a British FBI there's a national crime agency and before that there was a serious and organized crime agency and before that

there was and it's just like you're right The clear thing to do is to rename it to the British FBI. So we get the Libidinal bit and then put us in charge of it. Okay, fine. I would take that too. The federal British industry. I mean, we have also been looking to like, you know, sort of make a win, like finding it seems to make a windbreaker for a while, right? This is true.

That is true. That could be it. Yeah. We're in it, but mostly for menswear. Yeah, like Zoran. Yeah. Nova's going to get one so that she could be a female Britain inspector. I just, the real handshake meme between me and Zora and Mamm Darni is like, I love branded office wear.

Like, give me the big, like, quarter zip that says mayor on it, you know? Yeah, he's getting so much menswear. Like, I've been watching some of the videos where he's been announcing snow stuff. And I'm just like, where you've been, you have had three different jackets. DSMY jacket. Hell, yeah, dude. Yeah, is it, is it, is it, is it pleated? What kind of, like, what kind of canvas are you using on that?

What's the collar? Like, yeah, you know, I'm very invested. Yeah, I am very invested. The mayor has donned New York's official double monks. I just planted that little mental landmine of the double monk's traps, knowing that it would come back again and again and again as a landmine does. It's a good analogy. Yes, it's one of these repeating, one of these machine gun landmines.

Yeah. It's curious how the menswear I abandoned returns to me as I decide to get a little bit footcher with it. But the reason I bring this up is then the government needed to send out an official response from Lord Mike Katz and the Lords who had to then say when these remarks got published, there is no plans to introduce mass surveillance of the entire population. Please don't worry. This is where I get annoyed, right, because it was only a few months ago that the Conservative Party were pledging $1.6 billion to create a British ice. And then when they did that, a lot of people raise issues with the idea of a British ice based on all the things the ice is doing right now in the United States. then now you have Mahmood promising a British FBI and you have Mike Katz going, don't get any

crazy ideas. It's not going to be like an FBI. And it was again, like the popular line during the whole announcement of the conservative ICE was like, I saw lots of very sensible sensible commentators being like, oh no, you don't get it because like if an ice is in the UK, it's obviously not going to operate the same way as the American ice. And the whole thing for Matt, the whole thing with that for me then becomes like, it becomes this thing where they go, you weren't supposed to think of an elephant when I loudly and enthusiastically told you I was going to bring you an elephant. and like with respect to them, like, in my imagination, when I'm told to think of an elephant,

it has big feet for stomping on people. It has big ears for listening. And it also has big tusks for goring. So I'm sorry. Curiously, you reacted when I summoned my dog with an ordinary whistle that you could hear as well. Like, what else are we supposed to think of? If it's not relevant, why make the reference?

But the other one I wanted to note as well. This is just the two kinds of people who are, let's say staying in the forefront of Labor Party politics. There's someone like Mahmood or then just Peter Kyle. I see this today. His new campaign is he saying, what if we linked MP salaries to GDP growth? And it's genuinely so...

I love to Cole's hyperinflation and paste the fuck out. And it's like both of these people are just sort of spinning out about whatever hairbrain scheme comes into their mind. Like what if we built a Panopticon? Hey, what if we did like something a LinkedIn person would think of to fix the country? Riling, do you think that any of this kind of incoherence and fumbling for anything else to announce is born of any kind of like internal strife in the labor party? No, I think it's a party whose fortunes are going up, up, up.

Cool. Yeah, pretty good. But the reason I'm saying that those two things is it's a sort of context for Burnham. One of the reasons why he's not as hated as these other fucking people is there's a, There's a several fold. And again, I'm not like Dick riding Andy Burtum here. He was a right-wing Blairite when it suited him. He was sort of soft left when it suited him.

That's never really been pushed on. He's not the guy. But to these people, he is their mortal enemy. And that's really funny. Yeah. He is their mortal enemy because he is 1% the guy. And they are all negative 100% the guy. Right?

He's the only labor figure who's not actively hated by the entire country. Just because he comes across as the opposite of, Those other two motherfuckers. Essentially. He's able to present himself as a human being who is wearing their own skin. Yes. This is the skin I was born with. I did not take it from someone else and stitch it together like a suit.

He doesn't stand there going water, sugar. Like that's it. It's like, hey, this guy's trying to turn the big nutcase dial down from 100%. Get him. Yeah. I suppose they hate him because he won't drink from the puddle. True. Yeah.

Not without sugar in it. Yeah. They hate him because he thinks that he's better than me. because of the fact that he is. Not by much. But yeah, they can't stand even that. And, you know, like Morgan McSweeney obviously would rather put one of his friends up for the election. They've briefed.

They would rather have streeting than Burnham. I actually have it on good authority. I have a Labour source. I'm not going to name who my source is because I'm a good journalist, but I have heard from a very reliable source that they are actually priming a certain figure to fight that seat. one Reza Pah pavarovic One Rezapalavi Sorry, I was so excited about that bit

That I just like completely dropped the landing Listen, listen Rezaphalavi has been the MP for Gorton For 7,000 years That's right We're going to declare a second Iranian kingdom Right here in the United Kingdom And Andy Burnham

Who's in the pocket of the Islamic Republic Islamic Republic is trying to undermine that That's right And that's what they won't tell you, but Morgan McSweeney is very aware of. Anyway, but I wanted to quote from the blog, a former guest of this show, Phil Burton Cartlidge, a sociologist, writing about the blocking of Andy Burnham from running for this by-election and potentially challenging Starmor for leadership. Yeah, it's like real, like the actual mechanics of it are real like Labor Party inside baseball stuff. It doesn't matter.

In itself, doesn't matter, but is kind of funny that these people love factional warfare and they love their fucking procedural meetings. They love having rules arguments. They love rules learning each other. Actually, I think you'll find I'm chair of this committee, and the bylaws say that you have to get a vote from us. And we're not going to let you build your panopticon. Read the bylaws, Jackie Weaver, and understand them. This is Phil.

He says, with Lucy Powell, the sole voice of dissent, and it appears the only NAC member with a grasp of political reality, the Labour right, the Stomer Loyalists, have declared their party done. They didn't just veto Burnham's eventual leadership bid. they snuffed out the only real chance that Labor had of avoiding a catastrophic, historic defeat in the next election.

But at least most of the Labor right will keep their jobs and prominence for a few more years. A parliamentary seat that at any other time would be a shoe in is likely to fall and labor's political decay continues at pace. The Labor right have gift-rapped more of the party's voters

and handed them over to the Greens. Cool, fine, great, awesome. Yeah, that was the chance. Yeah, thank you for those. Are you sure? We'll take them. Burnham was a chance, the chance to turn things around.

Instead, the NEC have engaged full seam ahead towards inevitable disaster, which I think is basically, that puts it, I think, pretty much exactly right, which is there is absolutely no future for a Labour Party that does not understand that in order for people to stop hating its leadership more than any other political figure in Britain has really ever been hated, or at least domestically, right? You have to get rid of them and change them for something else. Yes, there is no fixing the Labour Party, right? This is one of two institutions we're talking about here that is, has decided to make itself like irremediable, right?

Yeah. That is like, we would sooner be like this and end than continue in a different form. The other one being the federal government of the United States. I mean, the sort of running characteristic of a lot of it is this felt like they will refuse to admit in any way that like they may have been incorrect or wrong, right? And they would rather like implode everything than admit they were wrong. And when they do when they, when they lose and, you know, I'm not even. thinking about a general here, I'm thinking like, you know, we've got, um, they've got like local

elections coming up really soon and they're going to get like fucking destroyed. When they lose, it's still not going to be their fault, you know, and I think that's also one reason why they're putting a lot of emphasis on like attacking kind of like greens and by extension, like, left of the party who will not vote labor and never vote labor again. Because I think for them, it is very much like, they would much rather, um, believe that they were always right and everyone else kind of wrong them sort of like embrace any kind of modicum of humility. It's, it's very funny. This is also an apt critique, although a much less relevant one, of your party, a party which ultimately is the way that it is, you know, which is irrelevant, because it couldn't get over thinking like the Labour Party. So having been in the Labour Party is still a long-term threat to your political health because it will make you like this.

Yeah. So speaking of irredeemable institutions that are heading for world historic disastrous ruptures, the consequences of which are going to be slightly unclear and maybe not clear for quite a long time. Let's talk about the celebrated, memeified, rapid social decay of the United States from Imperial Hegemon. Yeah, it's happening, right? Here's the thing, right? I never want to be too firm on like my own predictive power, right? Because this is ultimately the kind of dog that has yet to bark, right?

But the last couple of weeks have me convinced that you are going to see a civil conflict where both sides are shooting at each other simultaneously in the United States in my lifetime. And this might not be the proximate cause of it. The next thing might not be. But I think this is the week where we have well and truly locked in the idea that this is the course that the US is on and it's not getting off of it no matter what happens. Yeah. You said it many times before, but I think we do have to sort of definitively say now,

Like, the falcon can no longer hear the falconer. Yeah. Yeah. Like, that ship has sailed. That bird has flown. And I think it's worth just doing a little bit of table setting, especially because there are so many facets to this. Yeah.

I mean, just bear as facts, right? Ice and Border Patrol have sent, like, 3,000 agents to Minneapolis off of partially spurious and partially not their jurisdiction anyway, claims of, like, welfare fraud amongst, like, Somali-American. most of whom are U.S. citizens anyway, those 3,000 federal agents outnumber like state and local police anyway. And in the course of being there, occupying Minneapolis on a kind of like punitive mission to arrest, disappear and deport as many people as many people who get in their way as possible, and crucially get good video for, you know, the sort of soy lords running the social media accounts to tweet out,

have now murdered two people on camera in unambiguously unjustifiable. ways. I think it's worth saying as well, I actually have the quote from the New York Times, which analyzed the video of Mr. Preti, the ICU nurse who was killed. I mean, I've seen it. You don't need to to like, I mean, it's a very, it's a radicalizing thing, right? If you're in the habit of believing the police, it's a, it's probably good practice to see it and know that it's, you know, you were being lied to to your face, but it is obviously murdered. Yeah. So I'll, I'll read this snippet here. This is from the New York Times describing the moment. where he is murdered. Several agents moved away from Mr. Preti, who has collapsed. Another agent,

the same one who shoved the civilians into the street and pepper sprayed Mr. Prattie, unholsters his gun and fires at him. The first agent also fires additional shots. Together, they fire six shots at him while he lies motionless on the ground, and all told, at least 10 shots appear to have been fired within five seconds. By the moment of the 10th shot, the agent who moved away with his gun, which he kept holstered, has crossed the street. So this is the second person to be shot and killed by Federal Agent Minnesota in recent weeks, who then was the subject of a constant all-channels lying campaign by the federal government.

Yeah, and it's their misfortune, as they would see it, that once again they have killed someone who is very difficult to smear in that mode. Well, I'd like to pick up on that, actually, because I read a BBC sort of a report about Alex Pritt. And I just want to lay some facts that were reported in that story about him for people. So apparently Alex Pretty was an outdoorsman, an avid outdoorsman, loved walking out hiking with his dog. He was a Minneapolis Veterans Affairs hospital nurse. He was a Boy Scout.

He sang in the Green Bay Choir. He worked as a research scientist before he became a nursed. And a few days before he was killed, he was having his garage door repaired. And he gave the Latino man who completed the work a $100 tip as a way of saying, sorry for everything that was going on. And then recently, just the other day, I saw a video of him giving a dying veteran his final salute. in the hospital in which you worked. I want to start with that as the preface because I don't want the thing

that I'm now saying to sound too glib because I do think there's something important here. I think you have to, and I think it contextualizes like the nature, the character of this fascist movement that we are seeing in some kind of spasmodic ascendance right now, which is that these people spend weeks, maybe months, trying to turn a podcaster and an influencer

into their horse vessel and ended up producing nothing but a complete catastrophic meme which even their own side do not take seriously, and which has now just become memified AI slop. And then the most sort of perfect candidate for a legitimate horse vessel figure is one who was slain by their own fucking pig moron officers.

And I can't stop getting that out of my head. I went for a nap yesterday just for two hours, and when I woke up, this had happened. And I have many more thoughts to share, but I really do want people to think about, like, these are the kind of people these guys are killing and then trying to dress up as terrorists. Yeah.

And I mean, it sort of works this way with like any kind of fascist movement. It's, you know, the people who get killed first are the best people, you know, in the sense that they are the ones who are out there trying to protect their neighbors. I mean, Alex Freddie was literally trying to like get in between ICE and a woman. They were just like brutalizing for no reason. They attack him for that reason and then shoot him off of us. Again, a kind of like impulsive, petulant rage. and it just this is what they're there to do. It's what they'll go on doing.

Yeah, and it feels facile to, like, give analysis, like, operating the level of poetics, but, like, ICE have literally, like, stormed into Minneapolis and killed pretty and good. Yeah. And there are lots of different ways to think about this. You can think about this in terms of the institutional arrangement of the people who are involved.

So, for example, the relationship between ICE, the relationship between Minnesota National Guard, local law enforcement. I mean, local law enforcement, the same people who oversaw the killing of, George Floyd in 2020? Yeah, well, this is the thing, right? I think if you look at the George Floyd process as a kind of like foreshock of this and

this may yet be a foreshock of the next thing and so on, then there are a ton of people who were radicalized then, right, who are out on the street now because they were then. And on both sides. Well, exactly, right? And there are people out there now protesting who have been pepper sprayed by state police, by city police, right? And so now the fact that they're sort of like standing by and not actively helping ICE unless they like until they're, you know, told to, right? That doesn't wash anymore.

Right. And I think that's one of the things is this is, I think, intended by its architects in the White House to be, to be like clarifying. Right. And it is. I think that's a calculation that they're making, but I don't think it's going to favor them in the end. Because I think anyone who's there knows that like Tim Walls doesn't give a shit. Jacob Frey doesn't give a shit, right? Like this is, they are not going to effectively be able to protect people.

And where that leads is more violence, right? And, you know, this isn't something that I think people believe can be de-escalated anymore. And I think they're right to believe in that. Yeah, and that's the, there are so many places that you could want to get with this, at least in talking about it, where I want to get with it is it not happening. But one of the, one of the things that I really wanted to pull out here, the reason we talk about, like the, the end of the first American Republic. That was something that you were mentioning earlier when we were talking before the show, No. Is that this is clarifying in the sense that if you believe that there is some

kind of congressional hearing or some kind of training program or that ICE just leaves and this doesn't happen again. I think you are, that is a fundamentally naive position. And I think that the United States of America is now in a cold civil war or as you said, a time where things are about to get more different than they've ever been. Yeah, yeah. I like to get less and less grammatical with that one, the worse it gets. Times are about to get as more unprecedented as they've ever been different, you know? Because I think the thing is, again, I don't want to be like, this is going to lead directly to Marvel Civil War II, right, immediately.

But I think this is the death spiral, like well and truly, because you can't have this kind of state violence and have a response to it that is commensurate, that is now possible, right? So, like, if you're kind of moderate demand is, you know, you put all of the people responsible for this on trial, right? And you maybe are a little bit like constitutionally flexible to do that. I don't think that that's possible anymore.

And I think what you can get, what is sort of like possible is no longer sufficient, right? And the second those two stopped being congruent, that was it, really. And however the U.S. kind of, like, lumbes on, because I want to be clear, this isn't the first time ISIS killed people. it's by no means that, right? And this is a sort of like long, long legacy of violence. But I think the specific intention and then sort of like media work on this is such that this is going to be the thing that like sets it on the path to rupture. Then this is, I think the reason that is, right, is that the, it's not just the violence. It's that the institutional violence is being directed

from the federal government to the state of Minnesota in the city of Minneapolis. This is something I wanted to actually drill down on because I saw yesterday some guy on blue sky. I don't know who it was, but you made a point where it's like, I really think it's important that we stress that what we're seeing right now is not policing.

And the thing with that is, that is technically correct, because policing falls under the remit of the Department of Justice, which oversees domestic enforcement of federal laws and the administration of justice. ICE falls under the remit of the Department of Homeland Security, which if you look on Wikipedia,

they are summarized as roughly comparable to the interior home or public security, ministries in other countries. Its missions involve anti-terrorism, civil defense, immigration, customs, border control, cybersecurity, transportation security, maritime security, sea rescue, and the mitigation of weapons of mass destruction. And so, like, one of my kind of, like, drums I bang on and have been banging on repeatedly is the fact that, like, we are living in the long shadow of, like, 2001 and the global war of terror. And also, like, the unwillingness and the inability or the fecklessness of, like, liberals or centrist, you know, to whatever this nominal opposition to this, this ascendant right-wing,

is to meaningfully grapple with that fact. And so then going back to that points about like, oh, this isn't actually policing. I saw, well, that is technically correct. But then it just pushes the question of me, which it goes, if it was policing in this current era in which we are now living, how would it look any different? I think my answer to that is a very narrow one on chains of command and accountability, right? Because what you're looking at with ICE is functionally a kind of a paramilitary or something

more like a secret police. And I think that, you know, even if the sort of like, it is as murderous or more murderous than like a more traditional policing organization, the fact that it's been sent there externally to occupy the city is sort of what makes it distinct for me. Because like in, you know, 2020, as much as the sort of National Guard were there on the sort of occupation role as much as the state police were, it was foregrounded in Minneapolis police, the already existing occupying structure of that city, you know? And I think there's another dimension to it as well. And this is, actually, this is currently on its way through, I believe, federal court right now at time of recording, which is part of what's being policed is Minnesota by the federal government. Yeah, Pam, Pam Bondi, I pronounce like the beach and I probably shouldn't. Pan Bondi is like very helpfully supplied the state of Minnesota with evidence that they were being blackmailed by tweeting, hey, I just blackmailed the state of Minnesota. and sent them this letter saying,

if you want us to withdraw ICE, who, again, have no business being there. Like, this, this, like, supposed fraud is not part of their jurisdiction. Minneapolis is, like, nowhere near the border. It is purely just, like, an exercise of executive power. But she sent this lesson. It's like, if you want us to withdraw them, then give us access to, like, all of your voter data and your, like, welfare data

so that, you know, our sort of, like, you know, Nazi influences can comb through and sort of like docs anyone who seems Somali enough. And obviously that's, you know, extortionist, right? And you can't use legally, you can't use deploying ICE to do that. And so that's what Minnesota is in court at the moment in federal court, trying to get them to sort of like injunct against this whole operation. I have no idea if that's going to work. But if it does, it will be, I would say pretty much exclusively because of just like saying that publicly.

Yeah, because she was, hey, I have an amazing way for you to fix this. Would you consider being blackmail? Hmm. Have you, I have some helpful blackmail for you. Diels are my art form. Yeah. And so this is one of the reasons why I want to talk about the institutional arrangement here. What makes this different from other times that ICE has gone out and filmed themselves committing spectacular violence in the last few weeks, last few months, the last few years, as long as they've been around and this is kind of what they've been doing. You know, what makes this so different is this is one institution of the country effectively. trying to militarily police another institution of the country. That's why it's like the civil war, in effect, I think, so the frame I'm using for it to think about this is a cold civil war is sort of already happening. Like one institution is trying to by force compel another institution of the country to do something it otherwise wouldn't do.

I mean, I think this is, again, this is, I thought you had earlier, Nova, it's war is, Rick stating again. The first person who realizes that this is happening is Stephen Miller. The next person who realizes it is. going to have a huge second mover advantage. Yes. Yeah, basically. So Riley and I, along with our friend,

Mati Lipschansky, do a podcast called No Guards, No Mers. I was, you know, in the episode that hasn't come out yet, I did an episode about a union general called Benjamin Butler, who not good general, fantastic administration. One of the reasons why he was a fantastic administrator was because he seemed like one of the first people to realize that the Civil War was happening. And at a point when historically, it was kind of no secret, right? like he was, you know, the Civil War had started, but everyone else he encountered was sort of like still curiously kind of like legalistic and vacillating.

And he's the guy who realizes that you can just like, say, occupy the Maryland State House and like stop them from seceding, right? And so by the same token, whenever whatever happens happens. And again, that may not be because of this directly. This may not be for years or it could be tomorrow. I have no idea. But when it does, it's going to seem retrospectively. obvious. And as, as you say, the sort of first people to notice this are going to be, are going to be sort of like much better off because I think that denial is going to persist for a long time because Americans want to believe that their country can be fixed. You know, no one wants to see an end to like, like a system that's lasted this long. But I think Stephen Miller particularly is trying to engineer one. And I think he is probably going to be successful now. And it's a question of when people realize that and when people realize it is is sort of like, I don't know. It's seeming more and more salient because if you read some of the coverage of this, you'll see people who are not politically engaged, who don't think of themselves particularly as like Democrats or liberals or anything like that as just like humanist and who are authentically outraged in this moment, right? And the challenge for any kind of left movement in the U.S. is to grab and retain and organize and sort of like pull those people leftwards. And I think one of the most convincing ways that you can do that is to make the case, which I think now is very clear, that the

old ways are not coming back, right? There is no president you can elect who will fix this. There is no kind of like law you can pass that will undo this. There isn't going to be a trial in the way that people want under the present constitutional settlement of the United States. And that's why I think about it in terms of like, you know, you think about the like fourth, fifth French republics, you know, like the governmental differences, the historical differences may not even be huge, but there has to be some kind of form of like governmental, change more than an election. Or like a change of the state, really.

The form of the state must change. The thing that the government is governing must change. Like, this is a moment of rupture and politics is different forever. We'll call it woke free. Because there was a time when you could fight it out on that line of like Stephen Miller and Trump and his people want to destroy the United States and we're not going to let them. We're going to try and preserve this like horrible institution. And that was that was the Biden line.

And notably it did not hold. Right. And I think you could have taken the kind of death now for all of this as Trump's second inauguration. But I'm putting it here as like, it just, you know, this is sort of like irrevocable now. I think to sort of add to that it's not even the case that like the sort of system is untenable because it's like structurally, like structurally it's not tenable. But it's also about like its advocates have no interest in kind of even trying to fix it. Like trying to sort of maintain it or fix it. Like there was that interview with Gavin Newsom with Benjamin here where.

where it's just like and I watch these in twos and I watch this like something I'm just like it's not that I get why you were sort of hesitant to sort of call these people fascists or whatever but it's like politically I kind of understand if you're constituent if you sort of imagine your

constituent to be to sort of be like centrist liberals who kind of believe that like you know there's a spectrum of beliefs and you know the way that things work is that you sort of take people from extremes and try to move them towards like more moderate positions even if you believe that's the case like you've kind of

You've got to try and do it. And like there's no effort among these people to even like try and do it. But also it's like a lot of these, a lot of these guys. And actually something that's interesting. I was talking to, I message Greg about this just before we started recording. I think I did anyway or someone where like I was sort of saying, oh, there's like a lot of these kind of like centrist, like columnist types who are now sort of saying stuff.

There was like that one in the Atlantic the other day at the time of recording. It was just like, okay, now I'm willing to call it fascism. I was really hesitant to sort of call Trump a fascist before. but now. And then he was like sort of or his like other Atlantic colleagues were getting mad that people were sort of dunky on it by being like, oh like, you know,

do you think it's smart to like dunk on people and make fun of him when, you know, just because they sort of reached your side of the aisle late. It's like number one, yes, Duncan's actually very good. Dunkin is funny. It's what Lenin would have done. I mean, I don't apply that to the people I was talking about. And I say this is love, the squishes, right?

The people who are just authentically outrage. And the thing is like, your enemy is kind of doing the work for you in that they will never stop supplying you with outrages, but it's what you can use that for. But I think it's those people who are like genuinely outraged, like they look towards certain figures, like some sort of moderateish figures to be like,

okay, like to almost get the permission to be like, okay, now we can kind of like use sort of language that was deemed to be extreme. But then these kind of like centrist types are still kind of be like, oh, we've got to be like really careful about talking, like calling them sort of fascist. That's good.

Tim, Tim Walls is putting out the statements sort of like, you know, knock it off, right? And it's like, obviously inadequate to meet the moment, right? But that's fine. Because again, as with, you know, Benjamin Butler again, right, the first person who realizes that all of this stuff is inadequate and that there is a great deal of hay to be made by not just saying, you know, abolish ice, but to go further than that is, I think, going to do very well. I mean, I would say the first, the first lib who sort of realizes that, like, you can kind of build political capital out of just like basically kind of calling these people sort of what they are and not really kind of giving a shit about like sort of you know people like like their side being like

oh you can't call them that it's historically inaccurate whatever and it's able to sort of build a movement out of the anger that is like sort of frustrating like I think as you mentioned like that'll be like very effective so I have some like so what's about this as I said like a few weeks back I'll speak to producer Thomas on our own show blood work listen to blood work and um we just imagine destroying you a gun you know just flowing in the air Yeah, I'm towards you. One of the things I said to Thomas about this sort of, this blob, this amorphous blob of fascist movement, I've assembled from like Pete Hegseth, Stephen Miller, Christy Knoem, Pam Bondi, Trump, J.D. Vance, etc.

Alex Jones, you can name so many people, was this thing that I said, I don't really know what these people actually want, but I believe that they want it. And I think that in many of those things, they are different things. I think that like Christy Kone, for example, wants to be like a sort of fitness Instagram influence. I think Pete Higgseth wants to be like a very like starship troopers like TV general in which like he's directing a war that is unfolding on the screen. I don't know if he actually wants the actual blood. I don't know. But I believe that he wants it.

I think J.D. Vance like wants a father figure and I think he wants to impress that. And I mean that sincerely. I think Pam Bondi and I think this comes back to that whole, um, the extortion lawsuit against, um, against the state of Minnesota. Like, yeah, you have to remember that she's still kind of in Donald Trump's bad books about the whole Epstein file stuff and things like that. And it is very possible that part of that is just hard trying to do something to please Trump. And I said this earlier before the recording as well. You know, Trump is a guy who he watches the Jean-Claude Van Dam movies and skips to the action scenes, but he doesn't really like blood.

And he has his stake well done. And, you know, when he was actually shown the footage of René Good being shot, he seemed like genuinely kind of unsettled by it. And so the problem with all these people is I think what they ultimately want is a good, clean product. And in terms of like what they are producing right now in Minneapolis, I don't think they're getting that. I don't think they are winning there, and I don't, I think they are losing very badly, and I think that they are panicking, which is why J.D. Vance is being sent out to eat shit, and it's also why Tom Cotton, who famously wrote an op-ed during the George Floyd protests about Minneapolis saying, send in the troops, he's now released a tweet sort of doing this whole, like,

oh, we need to turn down the volume and their deaths were a tragedy, and we need to enforce the rule of law. The one person I do think really, really wants it is Stephen Miller, and I think he knows what he wants, and he knows what he looks like, and it is, therefore, also quite scary, that he's really like driving the bus on this one. With regards to like who's going to respond on the other side, you know, I do. Just like, I just want to stress, like,

whether it's Greg Kalman, Bovino or any of these people, like this sense of like legal impunity that these people have, you could just list off, for example, like the assassination of Qasem Soleimani, January 6, the horrific Gaza plan, the hit and run attacks on, in Iran against like Fordo and other places, the invasion of Venezuela and the kidnapping of Maduro.

And again, this goes all the way back to 2001. Sorry, it goes all the way back to the global war on terror and the invasion of Iraq, like, liberal impunity. And just to like cap this off in terms of like, who is going to be the person to meaningly respond to this? Just today, Chris Murphy, a senator from Connecticut, put a post where he described something as top of the list of threats to democracy right now. And what he was referring to was a report that TikTok was now censoring anti-ice and anti-Trump content. And just to really, really draw a line under this on December 11th, 2023, in an interview with the dispatch on Thursday, Chris Murphy of Connecticut, who previously spoke out in favor of restricting TikTok's assets in the US, said he had moved from supporting, regulating the social media platform to an outright ban

since the October 7th Hamas attack in Israel due to its ability to, quote, drive this narrative of, quote, hateful speech among young people. And I just want to say, like, in terms of who is the person going to be that is going to stand up and combat this stuff meaningfully and be that second mover? Any of the people who are not willing to meaningfully and forcefully reckon with the role that they have played in hand, maidening this not only over the past two years with the campus protest in Gaza and the crackdowns

where again Chris Murphy, I'm sorry, as long as he's happy to be cracking down on content about Gaza and Palestine on TikTok and then he's suddenly worried

about TikTok centering anti-Ison anti-Trump content. He's not actually worried about the politics. What he's worried about is fundraising and that's not your guy. Well, so here's the thing,

right? Benjamin Butler, my guy, back in the day, before the Civil War, our guy, before the Civil War was an anti-abolitionist because he was a Democrat

because that was expedient. You don't have to be someone who cares about this stuff authentically. We can demand that it would be nice. But in terms of what's actually going to move people, I don't think it's going to require a huge amount of sort of ideological consistency. The other thing about this is I think you're completely right to identify the sort of competing power centers in like MAGA world. What's interesting to me personally is Donald Trump, right?

Because first term Trump, he wanted the blood, right? Or at least some semblance of it. But he was surrounded by people who were able to sort of just go around him or ignore him or talk him down. So like first term Trump was sort of like giving these disobeyed, you know, sometimes you pretend not to hear Mr. President orders to like just shoot into the crowds and like take people out of the kneecaps, right? Second term Trump seems considerably older and sadder and weirder is sort of like publicly musing about whether or not he's going to get into heaven. It's sort of like unprompted telling like, you know, shocking. psychodramatic stories from his childhood. And you have people like Stephen Miller who are seemingly trying to talk him up to this,

not because Trump isn't racist, not because Trump isn't a sort of violent person, not because he authentically cares about any of this, but because, you know, I think the reaction that he had when seeing the sort of like the good murder video is sort of instructive here in that, as you say, all of these people want spectacle. And the spectacle that they want might be someone getting killed, but they want it to be some kind of like, you know, tattooed MS-13 Antifa transgender. And reality is not cooperating. Violence in the real world has a strange sort of abruptness and sort of like irreducibility

that shocks all of these people to their core because they're not really practiced in it. And I think ultimately where that leaves us is, again, Stephen Miller's calculation of how to start a race war and our calculation of how to make him lose one. And if we're talking about the fact that some kind of conflict at some point is inevitable, that is being engineered pretty successfully at this point by Stephen Miller, as you say. I think he's engineering himself a losing conflicts, right? I touch wood, right? I think that like the thing that he wants is not only impossible.

And to be clear, a civil war in the US would be ruinous for the entire world. Like the sort of consequences of that are by no means to be celebrated, right? But this is the thing. You may not be interested in violence, but violence is very much interested in you, right? And this is something that can be imposed on you. And I think you have to be absolutely clear in your own mind that these people want to kill you specifically, right? And your friends specifically. And they mean to do it and they have the kind of ability to try and do that.

They haven't got to you yet, basically. Yeah. And so the reason that Stephen Miller is such a strange person and the reason that the way that the right seems to talk about this is so strange, In effect, they're trying to start a war against the enemy that they want, which is a Democrat party that has an army and supply lines and Antifa has to exist for them and that it doesn't in the way that they want, then. If Antifa didn't exist with a high command and supply lines like a Hearts of Iron 4 army, it would be necessary to invent it, which is what they try to do.

Yeah, if Antifa didn't exist with like a supply line, you would just have to sort of bumble around looking for stuff tripping over your own dick, shooting people at random, right? Which is what we're saying. Yeah. It's almost just, again, like, when they talk about Renee Good or Alex Pretty, they have to make them into an Antifa Special Forces operative

who was going to commit like a vehicular operation, you know? Yeah, I mean, this is something I brought up in my, in the episode we did about Carl Schmidt and his whole thing about like the friend and enemy distinction where I said to like people, if you're on the left, like, I don't think you have to subscribe to Carl Schmidt's political ideology. And I think you shouldn't. I think you should reject it.

But you should also, like, reckon with the truth or the reality that, like, when somebody has identified you as their enemy and they are confronting and approaching you as such. And you cannot simply, like, reject that and pretend it is no longer there. And it's quite clear that Stephen Miller is someone who has, like, constructed, however phantasmagoric in his own mind, an image of an enemy that he wants to destroy. And many of us and you and other people out there are within that image. And you cannot simply pretend that is not true anymore.

Oh, man. I think that's more my... You're ruined my gaming. Fuck. I was really depending on that, not being true. I wanted to live happily during the war. I read that poem. I have a really sort of like, you know, it's a pretty detailed schedule.

Like, I can't make time for this? Like, can I just sort of... You're telling me I've got to live unhappily during the war? You have to say, like, I live in societies. Is that what you're trying to tell me? That's crazy. I'm not getting invited on again, am I? I'm just seeing this now

that every document of civilization is a document of hold it let me just burn the ballerism oh no god damn that's one of the last things I wanted it to be for fuck sake I always saw my life as like more of like a B

or a C plot so this is really sort of yeah I kind of saw my life as being more of a kind of a filler episode no I mean what I tended to I mean here's the thing right you remember that tweet that's like

it's kind of really annoying I was born in 1991 I'm old as fuck but it was it was kind of frustrating to be born at the end of the fuck around century and at the beginning of the find out century, right? Well, that doesn't only have to go one way, right? Like, there are options before you, you know? And like I say, a large part of it is grounded in realizing what happens and being pragmatic about it. I think this was something, yeah, I think just something,

my last kind of point I wanted to share on this is that like, you know, again, I think we're all being reminded of various trite observations or the observations that have since become trite. And the one that I was thinking about today was Adam Ser was remark about, you know, the cruelty is the point. And I think that, I think that remains true. But the other thing that I've sort of thought about when I'm looking at sort of what's unfolding right now, Minneapolis and the way that J.D. Vance and Tom Cotton and Stephen Miller and Greg Kalman-Bavina are kind of bumbling around trying to justify this or frame this within any kind of like logical or political or coherent framework.

The cruelty is the point, but it's also all that they've got. And all they have, when I say like what it is, it's the performance of cruelty. And the performance of cruelty is at the same time, like, it's production. And then it's reproduction through memes and images and TikToks and vines. But then that reproduction,

that sharing it on Twitter or on X, the everything app and delighting in it and salivating over it, that again is the performance, which is again, the ultimate end product of all this. It's not satisfying to them. I don't. Yeah, and that's what I mean is that like, I think, again, with regards to everybody else, including the man himself, big man, Donnie Trump, I don't think any of them quite know how this ends where they're taking it. And again, this is why again, it makes me think of Gaza, Lloyd Austin, and Secretary of Defense under Biden, when he, when he very early on in the war sort of said, like, Israel has no theory of victory here. They have no theory of how to even end the war. And it just became like a sort of endless mass slaughter for the production of images and spectacles of violence for the people who were in Israel who were celebrating and salivating over it. They seem to be getting, like, weirdly depressed and scared about it to the point that they're sort of like,

they're doing the 1945 Furibunker stuff of being like, check out this suicidal penguin. What about this guy that, like, killed himself by flying a plane into the ocean? Isn't that relays of all? Isn't that cool? And it's, it's a cold ears. I think the idea that we are watching these sort of the cresting of like a cold civil war of some sort. But it has began in a memetic fashion in the sense that, like, what is happening right now is, it's like a bunch of baked Alaska's with fucking guns

just wandering around Minneapolis and I think a lot of people thought one battle after another was kind of one of the most politically salient or incisive films of 2025 I disagree, I think it was Eddington and I think that image at the very very end of Eddington of the young man's spoiler alert where he's like marching forward with a pistol in one hand

and his phone open in the other like filming himself shooting his own gun I think that was just so perfectly encapsulated kind of the main unit in right now and like again you know when Jonathan Ross shot René good. Again, if I go back and look at that, I think to myself, like, was he looking down the barrel of his gun or was he looking at his phone?

And not just looking at his phone, but what was he thinking about I'm going to kill a person or was he thinking this is going to be big? This is going to be epic. This is going to be epic. But also, I think it's worth noting there's Trump, there's the people around him, there are the feckless Democrats who do not understand

that there is no training program or set of hearings that fixes this. And then there are also course, the ICE agents themselves. I think it's worth talking about that before we end. These are, again, the most bloodthirsty freaks in the entire country or unfit for doing more or less anything else than just sort of terrorizing, actual contributing members of fucking society.

I think there was an important detail here as well that, like, of the two killers, both of them had been federal agents, one in ICE and one in Border Patrol for like, I think seven and eight years, respectively, like almost a decade. So I think one of the things is as much as you want those kind of like squishy humanists to sort of like get with you on this one, you also need them to internalize that this is not a new thing. This isn't just like, oh, Trump hired everyone from Jan 6th directly into ICE and now they're doing this. It's like, no, this is the same thing that ICE and Border Patrol have always done and are meant to do. They're just doing it a little closer to you, a little louder to slightly different people. Yeah, to wider people. And those differences shouldn't matter. I think people should also know that I think I heard reports that Jonathan Ross was telling all of his neighbors that he was a botanist. Because these people are, they are fucking ashamed of themselves because they know that they're disgusting. They know that they're disgusting pariahs.

They know that if anybody knew what they did or what they're doing, that they are disgusting pigs. Which is perhaps like the one thing that perhaps distinguishes them from the likes of Stephen Miller, who are the real deal, who are the guys who are like, yeah, I know what this is and I want it. These guys, again, like I said, I don't know, these men want to go to, oh, it's like Call of Duty, I think one of them said. They want to go to Minneapolis and they want to play out their fantasy. But guess what? Like, when you actually get there, like, people hate you and they throw shit at you and they make your life hard and you don't get to actually play out your like macho, masculine fantasy the way you thought you would.

Which again, brings us back to Tom Cotton saying in 2020, send in the troops. And then five years later, he gets exactly what he wanted. And he's there being like, oh, turns out like it wasn't just going to be a march on Rome. It turns out that like all these people, again, the white Americans who I thought were going to be celebrating me for going in and cleaning up the brownhorns. They all hate me. And they all think I'm disgusting. They did not greet us as liberators. basically.

It's also like the sort of reality that will sort of sink in for various people about like the things that you see on your computer screen do actually happen in real life and like the way in which like things happen on your screen, you can't predict them,

you can't control them, you can't control the response to it. Also like the way in which we react to violence online and on like, you know, on our phones and stuff. Like I think Gaza, as soon as you mentioned, Greg, like Gaza really has changed so much.

And like, you know, I think one of the biggest sort of, I don't know whether this necessarily call it radicalization, but like one of the things I think has really changed. many people who like did not necessarily have an opinion on what had been happening in the Middle East for a long time or sort of were very kind of comfortable to go if like oh it's complicated you know this is the first time where they've really had to experience like the feeling of like oh every time I go on my phone I just see dead bodies or I see like you know the most horrific things I can imagine and there's no way to get around that and this is the other thing too like you know all these attempts to kind of like control social media have largely failed right because there are ways to sort of circumvent that and like the sort of um the trajectory of like online content is not particularly easy to control.

And I think I keep going like the thing that you mentioned about like, okay, you may like these people have desired like a certain kind of violence for a long time. And in many ways they're getting what they want. And there are like some people who are really happy about it. Like you can sort of see like, you know, they froth at the mouth like seeing like these ice agents kind of kidnap children or like, you know, brutalizing protesters on the floor and like, you know, spraying pepper. Pepper spray and their faces and everything. But like I do wonder whether.

And I don't want to say for sure what's going to happen because I do, I also think that like one of the effects of sort of the ubiquity of violence online has kind of meant that like there is kind of a higher degree of tolerance. I don't necessarily have tolerance as the right word, but like it can just end up becoming like background at a certain point. And I do wonder whether there's sort of a strategy in play to be like, oh, okay, well, if we just sort of make this type of violence like normal, then, you know, the political consequences of that will not be that significant. And like in many ways, I can kind of see that strategy working in the sense that like, you know, like, every day, like, of 2026 has been like school shooting and no one's really like talked about it or like sort of just like a local shooting where people have died. And in 2025, the same thing. Like, you know, I think it was like basically every week there were like at least two or three

sort of shoe things by young people in which like there were at least kind of like one or two fatalities and it's kind of become so kind of commonplace for like no one has really, even like in sort of political discussions. like it's kind of like no one really talks about there anymore. And so I do wonder then whether it's like, okay, well, you can't predict the reactions to violence that people will have when they see like extreme acts kind of all the time circulating on their like, you know, a production of images. But I do wonder whether the strategy among kind of the right is to sort of like be like,

okay, you know, they talked about like flooding the zone with like, you know, slop and shit content and that like, you know, we would just sort of be fine sort of accepting that the information environment that we had would just be like contaminated forever. And like, lo and behold, you know, we've just sort of let that happen. And, you know, this idea that you could go online and basically like most of the stuff that you read and most of the people you interact with are not real. I wonder whether the same will happen. Like, the long term strategy for these guys is to just like make this continual background

noise until like everyone is none by it. I think that fundamentally, and we'll end sort of shortly. This is the moment where it all became obvious. But it's been going this way for a fucking watch. And I suppose one of the things that is, I don't know, leaves me particularly dumbstruck, is to have, it doesn't matter how much you see it coming and how much you say this is coming and how much you say this right-wing ratchet effect of essentially a state, a political movement that seizes control of a state and largely considers itself at war with most of the

people who are there who does not consider to be legitimately sort of citizens or whatever. British state does this quite a bit as well, in fact. To see this as inevitable, it's no less poleaxing when it happens, if you know what I mean? Yeah, I mean, this is the thing that that kind of like affronting kind of like irreducible thing about violence, it cuts in every direction, you know? And I think the only thing you can do is to try and have like a context and a kind of theory for it and to try and have like a network that you can rely on to be supportive and facilitative. I'm, you know, incredibly impressed with everyone in Minneapolis who is out there doing that

work, you know, regardless of whether they're, you know, liberals are actually correct. It's still, you know, sort of something that's incredibly valuable. Yeah, it's one of those, it's one of those trite comments you hear people make about, like, you know, that the US is like not in modern history, like, force a war on its own soil. And that might be true. But I think another thing that I think perhaps this current administration is underestimating is that they have not attempted to conduct a full-scale military counterinsurgency on their own soil against their own people.

And like, yeah, I think just with regards to what Hussein has said about becoming normalized to it, I think that like, yeah, I think maybe they are banking on the fact that like a lot of Americans and people across the West have become numbed and deadened to the mass proliferation of images of violence and death and destruction. And that may be a good bet, but those were images. And this is the real. The thing that sort of shakes you out of that is when it comes to you. And I think like, you know, with Gaza, like one of the sort of things that I feel like lots of people were pushing when it became clear about it. was kind of going to be incredibly difficult, if not impossible, to, like, defend Israel, even in sort of, like, very direct terms, was to be like, oh, this is happening really far away.

Like, you know, the sort of, like, the trigonometry, I don't want to, like, mention them. But in this one instance, like, when they kind of realized that, like, they couldn't, like, really defend Israel anymore, they were like, yeah, but that just happens far away. And, like, you know, if you're Britain, you should care about, like, stuff that happens in the UK. And if you're, like, American, you should have to care about what happens in your own state. But, you know, and that's under the basis of, like, well, the violence will never sort of come into the imperial. Well, now it has. And what's very clear, like the thing, you know, we've covered this in this episode, but I think anyone who's sort of paying attention

is that like, well, no, the violence will come for you. In some form or another, it will come for you. I think if anything shakes you from like the sort of endless numbing scrolling of sort of seeing violence and then like watching shopping videos like, you know, five seconds later, it's like, yeah, something really bad like may happen to you and you need to sort of like figure out what you're going to do about it when that happens. And just to be clear, you know, it has to be said that yes, like what we're witnessing right now in America has happened and been committed against numerous groups of different backgrounds in America first centuries since its foundation. I think that the point I want to sort of underscore is that both the people who are being subjected

to it and the people who are trying to enforce it are awakening to the fact that like in order for this political project to be realized and crystallized, like they're going to have to generalize that action and that activity. And I think that is then brings us back to Nova's question about who will be the second mover. Well, I think if we've learned something in this, in this episode, you may not be interested in violence, but I got to tell you, violence could very well be interested in you. Something is working towards you right now, and I mean you and no one but you. All right, all right. Look, once again, Greg, and again, absolute delight to talk to you, wish it was about different subject matter, but I must also recommend people listen to blood work,

your show that is all about the economy, psychology, the sort of world of violence. Yeah, I hope it's okay being the person who has the show about the bad stuff in the bad times of the bad stuff happens that doesn't sound draining at all yeah it's it's quite nice because on the one hand you get like people sending you just pictures of guns with listen to blood work and then stuff happens like what happened in the news yesterday and you're like that stuff doesn't feel so funny anymore and then also you just get you get people sending you've just news articles going saw this thought of you and you have to be like oh thanks boo um but no seriously i mean like look to i i had some ideas about like trying to describe what the show was

when the first came on but like how do I put it? I think that like what we're witnessing right now is that like the reality that like force and and authority and violence and all these things broadly construed like they play a much more like pivoted and central role in the way that our

politics and our society and our economies function than anybody in control of discourse and the levels of power ever really wanted us to be to be talking about or thinking about irrespective of how conscious we were of it or not. And I suppose like blood work is mine and Thomas's sort of like Odyssey or exploration into the

various different folds and articulations of violence trying to understand like what is this epistemological lacuna of violence like what is it what does it look like how does it function what does it perform who gets to perform it and for what reasons and who is subject is and who is made to be victim of it

and so listen to blood work it's a really fun time please check it out no it is good yeah I made it that's right anyway look thank you once again to Greg for coming on. Thank you to you for listening. There's going to be a Patreon second episode, 4 pounds 50, which is a change we made because we were like, oh, the American dollar might not be so stable. We're going to revalue the entire Patreon to Iraqi Dinas.

Yeah, that's right. Holding a garbage can and a clock at you and saying, listen to Trash Future. Yeah, that's right. Listen to Brazil future as well. Yeah. Oh, yeah. Listen to no gods, no mares. listen to Brazil future, listen to 10,000 posts. You know all of it. We're some Wiley Coyote cartoons. Yeah. Yeah, enjoy that. Yeah, we've got some, like, fun neon stuff that I kicked out of this episode.

We're going to put in the Thursday one. Yeah. So we'll see you then, everybody. Bye. Bye. Bye.