Trillbilly Worker's Party - Episode 115: Rise of the Neoliberal Biker (w/ special guest Sam Adler-Bell)

Episode Date: September 26, 2019

Cincinnati journalist Sam Adler-Bell (@SamAdlerBell) drops in to tell us about his recent article in The New Republic about fascist farmers and the overlap between nationalism and ecology. We also discuss all the most recent news, and hear from our old friend the neoliberal biker. Sam's article can be found here: https://newrepublic.com/article/154971/rise-ecofascism-history-white-nationalism-environmental-preservation-immigration Sam's podcast can be found here: https://www.patreon.com/knowyourenemy And finally, please support our Patreon: www.patreon.com/trillbillyworkersparty

I'm ready. Hit it. All right. All righty. Tom. I just got one question, really, to kick things off with. Sam, you ever been to the state of Indiana? I sure have, yes.

Really interesting. Spend any time in the Bloomington Farmer's Market by any chance? No. No. Although, apparently, some fascists do interesting but if you you yourself hadn't been there it's kind of a kind of an outrageous thing yeah i wasn't the first person to find these people out actually there was like antifa researchers who identified these people

who attend the farmer's market as pretty active online fascists. I'm just curious because I don't know that I've seen a farmer's market fascist in the wild except for Valerie Horn who runs our Leisure County farmer's market. Actually, I guess i have seen them they're hard to they're hard to distinguish from just regular hippies before we get too far down tom's um uh what's charlie rose before we get down too far down tom's charlie rose impression um let's back up for a minute and introduce the show. Welcome to the Trillbillies.

This week we've got Sam Adlerbell, as he's known in the Trillbillies canon, Sam Adlerdingtong. Being run in live from, yeah, you guessed it, folks. Fucking Cincinnati. he's back we never got rid of him love this fucking city love the fucking city of cincinnati the only city in the fucking world you can get a good piece of pizza i love how this second-handed joke has still found its way into our canon and

everybody talks about it like i i can't believe it it's so stupid it's so so stupid the addled ones um contributions to our podcast you really uh do have a really special place in trailbillies canon because your contributions to the podcast include cincinnati fucking cincinnati sam fucking cincinnati the fucking big apple the fucking apple and um you were the first person on our pod to have introduced the now infamous infamous let's just see what happens if we try this Elizabeth Warren thing. All of this

is on you, man. You guys are getting shit for that now. We tried to bury it on the Patreon, but it reared its ugly head. We're not getting shit for it. The entire left not getting shit for it. The entire left is getting shit for it. Yeah.

I think we've been... Honestly, Sam, I do have to say that you wrote one of the probably most cogent, or I'll just say sober, analyses of the Elizabethan... Ironically. Ironically. Look at him. He looks like him. Right. He came down here and I got him hooked on Kratom and now he's, like, you can positively see it in his eyes. No comment. But, but no, you did. I think it

was for the outline. Yeah. It was a pretty good summary of the the whole working families party debacle um you know man the left has been myself included has had a normal one for the past week or so yeah that happened yeah i like i think i think i said everything i have to say about it in that piece so you don't so are you backing off of your june 2019 i'm going to quote you here now we're having look i have journalists of the of the bonus episodes or something i I do. I have interns type out all the transcripts to every single episode. And I'm going to hold your feet to the fire like every good journalist we have on this show. You said that we could have all kinds of... You said quote.

We could get all kinds of goodies from elizabeth warren presidency all right goody man what say you now yeah answer for your crimes all kinds of goodies i stand by that uh you know what my point was i know what your point was it's less it's there man yeah they're gonna destroy b destroy Bernie if he gets elected. Every Republican and a third of Democrats will try to make his presidency a disaster. Well, today, so as we're recording this, we're like in hour three of breaking news that the Democrats have decided to impeach Trump finally, or at least begin proceedings. Oh, thank God. At least begin proceedings.

What say you, NYC pundit Sam Aldingdong? Would this help the Democrats or hurt them going into the election? I have no idea. I i'm sorry i'm a horrible guest i i don't know this is okay i mean yeah i mean who the fuck knows people are like so certain about it helps them or hurts them i don't know well here's my i'm just glad biden's involved here's my take on it if you want my take on it why wouldn't you uh here's the thing is the only reason the only thing they stand to lose is sort of empowering these hordes of chuds to like really come out full force next election you know or whatever you know it to get behind their boy and get him re-elected or whatever

yeah they're already behind the eight ball that goddamn election anyway i mean the fucking uh jeff goldblum from the fly and joe biden running that's the favorite i mean like they might as well go for broken peach's ass and see what happens yeah well man that's i haven't heard that jeff goldblum at the fly i stole it it really works he's falling apart before our eyes he is it's like reanimator um but the thing is i'm all for it because i know they'll fuck it up like they will absolutely fuck it up and the the funny thing about it is um they'll probably fuck it up so bad that they like lose badly in 2020 and wouldn't it be pretty funny if they lost the house again and it's just Trump, just like it was in 2016. I guess it would be funny.

Here's two victories you have to put together to make that work, though. It's not just about, like, successfully impeaching his ass or whatever. If you, like, run Joe Biden and impeach, like, you're just undoing your progress. You know what I mean? Like, you have to run somebody that can beat him and then impeach like like you're just undoing your progress you know what i mean like you have to run somebody that can beat him and then impeach him yeah yeah yeah i also saw buddha judge today uh was at a rally and he said something like um can't you don't you look forward to turning on the tv and seeing the you know the president and your blood pressure goes down instead of up yes

and the crowd goes wild it's like the stupidest thing i've ever seen like can't you isn't it so exciting to have a president who like is it absolutely boring uh and forgettable and so it's so much preferable to the situation we are in now i mean the point being buddha judges doing the same thing that uh biden's been doing is like let's just go back to when everything was rosy before trump was elected which is like you know insane and uh and impossible and really offensive to everybody who was under the boot before trump got elected the halcyon days when we didn't know there were kids at the border being mistreated well yeah when when it wasn't in our face every day well that's the funny thing is like they'll

send out the picture there'll be pictures on twitter all the time they're like look at this it's horrible kids are being detained at the border and then it's like this picture is from 2015 yeah yeah yeah well uh the the ironic thing about that is that um trump actually doesn't make my blood pressure raise like what makes my blood pressure raise is people like joe biden yeah i mean like people who yeah i mean like people who i think are sort of adjacent to my politics obviously not in any way like there's heart there's a little bit of overlap enough to where like i see what they're doing wrong and what they could be doing right um so and that's what makes my blood pressure go up

like trump is just also it's like hillary clinton didn't make any democrats blood pressure go up and so no one went to vote for her she yes you're right she she spread her plague literally the one that she had inside of her. Her, like, narcoleptic plague and we all sort of... We didn't Pokemon go to the polls. We Pokemon fell asleep and forgot to go to the polls. Yeah.

Yeah, Poodajedge is... Or Bootyjedge. I said Poodajedge. Poodajedge. He's having a kind of good week. He had all those people dancing with the big cutouts of his face. That was... Yeah.

What the fuck was that? That was tight. That was badass. Yeah. Is that... I mean, he looked... It was a little bit more realistic than the Klobuchar video. Yeah.

Has politics always been doing this? In Iowa, they do it. So they do this every year? Did they do it for the Republican primary in 2016? I don't know. Probably. They get them to do all kinds of ridiculous shit in Iowa because's like a really weird place that happens to matter an enormous amount so like they have to like eat like 10 000 corn dogs and like uh you know you know dance around and that's iowa

have y'all ever like watched like a caucus happen no no so i didn't know about this but like republicans caucus in kentucky now like sort of and it's basically like a bunch of people just go to a house and then like they ask the question like three times in the affirmative who do you support and like if you support one person you go stand in one corner yeah that's how it works in iowa too that is so fucking weird. It's like a school gym. Yeah, what are they trying to prove? It's like Red Rover, basically.

Yeah. Dude, isn't that literally how, like, ancient Romans used to vote? Like, you would go down with your voting tribe to the forum, and if you support flavius maximus demidius you go to this side if you support julius caesar you go to the other side and then if you guess wrong they just fucking kill you that's right i mean i want to find the warehouse with all the massive discarded heads of every politician that's run for the last 30 or 40 years in Iowa.

Yeah. There's Dukakis cutouts and drums from the Dukakis drum circle 88. Yeah. Sounds pretty dope. Or like a big ass Kucinich. That's what I want. Yeah. Kucinich's face.

They just been letting us down these these last couple years dude when i was like 21 or 22 when i was in my early 20s dennis kucinich was like the man that was like my quintessential politician i was like man obama's cool but he's he's not as left as my man yeah dennis yeah well that's that's one reason to be like you know grateful is that like the best left-wing politician is no longer dennis kucinich yeah that's true that was bad times yeah my friend from iowa caucused for him in 20 uh 2008 he was like like him and four people in the auditorium making a case for Kucinich. You know where Big D's from, don't you?

I don't. I think you do. Oh, fucking Cincinnati. Oh yeah, Cincinnati sun. The political sun comes back. I'm so proud of Dennis. Dennis. Always welcome back to Cincinnati.

Yeah. Fucking, he's even got the last name, Falky Dinskusinich. That's right. It's from the fucking old country. We came over here. That's right. He sounds like a union leader.

All right. Yeah. Well, the funniest thing about dennis kucinich and this got totally swept under the rug but do you remember so i was about to ask do you remember when benghazi happened but of course you do i can't get it you were there yeah um you were part of chris stevens what was that guy you could to help ambassador stevens did you were part of Chris Stevens. What was that guy's name? You did everything you could to help Ambassador Stevens. You were part of his praetorian guard. When that happened, it was like, I think, because they also like bombed the building or whatever that the ambassador and other people were in, right?

Something happened, I thought. I don't remember. Maybe in my mind I'm conflating this with Gaddafi, but I seem to remember, like, I think actually now I think about it, it was Arab Spring, and when Gaddafi got booted out, they found all these documents, like, in a government building in, like, Tripoli, in Libya, whatever, that had, like, detailed, like, Denis Kucinich's, like, very personal relationship with the Libyan government under Gaddafi. Oh, yeah.

I remember this being a huge deal for, like, two days. And everybody, you know, like, this amounting to, like, Denis Kucinich,ich like violating the Hyde Act or amendment or whatever that fucking shit is and then it went away my man skated well leftists used to be real kind of apologists for Gaddafi back when I was in college

still are I mean I don't know may he rest in peace yeah yeah well do what i was just gonna say we came we saw he died dude this fucking come on bell show a little class the um speaking of umqueror Caesar Clinton She had a tweet

I think like a few days ago I mean like obviously people have been Pointing this out all day on the website And the media or whatever but Just the outpouring of liberal Support for Greta Thunberg Yeah She's just like

Our civilization will perish We will drown under 23 devotion everybody's like yeah she talks like she was like uh like one of the oracles in that movie 300 um yeah i love it i love it it's great like theatrical uh shit but yeah no it's absurd like all these people who are completely complacent and at fault for uh the you know imminent destruction of the world being like we love this little kid we're all with her she's giving us hope i'd like to see a reality show where it's just greta thunberg sneaking up behind billionaires and screaming how dare you in their ear and then pushing them in front of a bus and she just systematically murders all the world's billionaires to carry out bernie's agenda how dare you how dare that's the last thing you hear before you just get the ax oh i love that yeah

um well this is something funny i just got an email from a uh a new republic fact checker uh to fact check the piece i was reporting when i was down there uh-huh did you did they ask if tom actually is hung like a bank mule some holes in my account of things huh yeah yeah they're like basically everything tom says is suspect yeah we're gonna actually need you to measure the size of his penis personally we don't believe it yeah i shouldn't have included that but he insisted so better believe it Pally dude I'm trying to log into my New York Times account I mean

what I just use the pocket app to get around the paywall it is a good workaround I did buy a New York Times account briefly so for our live show. We did a live show about this Letcher County politician from the early 1900s,

and the New York Times kind of wrote about him. But to access their archives, you have to fucking have an account. I still have an account. I never canceled it. Good excuse. Yeah. But there was an op-ed in the new york times today that says for our future the oil and gas industry must go green the global the global

global economy has to reach net zero greenhouse gas emissions by 2050 at the latest the person that wrote it was christiana figures she's an executive secretary of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change. So, like, I hadn't really planned on talking about this today, so I hadn't really prepared anything. But this kind of just goes back to the Greta Thunberg stuff. Oh, yeah. She's essentially, you know, your families will perish in the unquenchable fires of the future.

And people are like, yeah, yeah, we got to get the green. We got to get the oil and gas to go green. And on Wall Street Journal, I always listen to the Wall Street Journal podcast. I don't know why. In the mornings when I'm getting ready to not go to work, to sit on my ass all day. morning so i'm getting ready to not go to work to sit on my ass all day um and the the woman who hosted was uh or they had a reporter on there who was at this thing where greta thunberg this this plan on climate change and she asked trump like what he thought about the whole thing he goes i like clean air i like clean water that was his response i fucking love it man

what was that thing that was going around today where he said with respect to joe biden i didn't see it did you see that i have to find that no it was i forget what the context was it was funny it was something they were asking about something that had nothing to do with Joe Biden and he spoke about it glowingly but then he spoke about Joe Biden pejoratively to like bookend it and it was just weird and had no place.

It's like he's just like Biden's absolutely going to be the nominee so I got to get out there in front of him. I got to start setting the landmines folks. That's what he thinks yeah for sure oh fuck well you didn't come here to talk about dennis kucinich sam that'll ding dong we came here to talk about uh uh farmer's market fascism the sierra club etc etc so uh yeah you wrote a little thing for the new republic today entitled

what you're asking me white supremacists are hooked on green living yeah sorry i didn't choose the headline so i don't remember what it is so i'll just go ahead and lead in with that sam why are white supremacists hooked on green living um well the piece like it tracks kind of two tendencies within what could be called eco-fascism and the first is i look back at like the german experience um and like people like remember people maybe know it's an interesting way to put it german experience yes tell me more about the german experience what happened there okay well the point being that like, there's a,

there was a tradition of like ecological nationalism that started in Germany well before the Nazis took power. It was like the Volkish movement and it was basically like an anti-modern anti-capitalist revolt of sort of young people to go back to the land um and i also and then and then that became that that like was part of the roots of early nazism and there is like some people have some vague sense of the fact that there were like green nazis um and that's true there's like dispute about whether they actually implemented like particularly environmentally sound policies. Cause obviously they also like industrialize the country extremely rapidly and, um, also

like, you know, did war on the entire world. Um, yeah, but, but it is true that there was like people high up in the, um, Nazi party who were very committed ecologists who implemented sustainable farming methods and innovated a bunch of green technological shit that actually now is used by lots of nations. And the point is that people talk about, people know the slogan blood and soil and people focus on the blood part. The soil part is also really important, um, because, uh, what eco-fascism does is sort of

identify the national identity with the land, um, and with the protection of sort of the, like, you know, ecological pristine specificity of that land. Um, and so I talked about that, the sort of Nazi green shit, which there are like new iterations of popping up now in Europe and to some degree here. And then I also talk about sort of the American environmental racist tradition, which you guys have talked about in the podcast before. Yeah. We talked about the American eugenicist and the legacy of Teddy Roosevelt

and whatnot with Brennan O'Connor, but what else, what else you got to add to that conversation? I think the thing that I tried to do in the piece is sort of talk about how there is like a uh uh symmetry between the german fascist uh blood and soil movement and the uh american conservationist tradition, specifically around this idea of conquering territory and wilderness and open land as the place where the national soul resides. And you get that with the early conservationists,

who, as you know, are like also like total eugenicists, John Muir and Madison Grant. John Muir signs my paychecks, buddy. Yeah, you say some particularly inflammatory things about my employer and others like that. my employer and others like that. The Sierra Club. What are some of the things that you came across in researching this that people might not know about these supposedly

benevolent liberal big greens? This is stuff that is pretty well known and acknowledged by the Sierra Club, but maybe not well known by people who just think of Sierra Club as the big green organization. but like in the 1990s, the Sierra Club had a pro, you know, strict border laws position and also population control position. Um, and, you know, and, and I think you talked about when you were, when Brendan was on about John Tanton, who sort of was a Sierra Club dude who really pushed the organization to embrace more nativist tendencies. formed with money from cordelia scaife may he formed you know fair and all the like contemporary

like powerhouses of anti-immigrant research and propaganda that exists now many of which fund uh ally organizations that i deal with every day and i think about that a lot like yeah and i think a lot of them are like aware that they're taking money from fascists to do the work or whatever. Yeah. But yeah, they keep going back to the people that are funding it, which happen to be eugenicists. Yeah. genesis yeah so so one of the things that i think is like important is that it's not like incidental that ecological thinking is susceptible to fascists thinking um and in and one reason for that is that there's this like discourse in ecology of the like dualism between man and nature right like humans are a parasite on the earth on nature

which is this like edenic perfect place right pristine place um and so humans presence in this otherwise pristine uh nature uh marks the sort of fall of nature and so if you accept that then it necessarily like reproduces this like malthusian shit because if man is that which destroys nature then saving nature requires fewer men right right you know it's it's funny it's funny because i was thinking about this today especially in relationship to bern Bernie's big rollout of, you know, the I don't believe billionaires should exist thing and everybody losing their shit, including Ellen DeGeneres' producer or whatever.

But it's funny, like even like obviously the organization I work for is funded by Michael Bloomberg, and it's kind of like if these people who have stolen these huge fortunes, which you really can't do without stepping on poor and working people, and they too are also the people that have, for lack of a better term, the biggest carbon footprint and all this stuff we uh yeah we definitely need to give them the wall first yeah well this is yeah this is another thing that like uh came up a lot when i was writing this piece is like you know uh i don't know if it's fashionable to talk about murraychin anymore, but like, he's like, you know, anarchist,

social ecologist who kind of like identified the fascist tendencies and like the rising deep ecology movement in the eighties and nineties. And one of the things that he was always talking about is that when we, when we make ecological arguments, we're always talking about, we, like we have destroyed nature or like humanity, humankind has done this violence upon nature. But like, the question is like, who the fuck is we? Yeah. What's this? We shit. Because like, and so the, the, the anecdote that he always,

that he always talked about in all his speeches and shit was that he was at the natural history museum in the early 90s or something and he saw all these like uh you know working class like kids who were uh participating in like a field trip and at the they had this like uh exhibit about ecological destruction and at the end of it, there's a thing that says like the worst destroyer of like the natural world. And then it's just a mirror and it's like humans, humans do it. So, so Bookchin is like, watches this happen. And he's like, like, what the fuck did this like black kid 10 year old from brooklyn uh you know who's poor do to contribute to the ecological destruction of the earth right and so what happens when we

like talk about humankind as the problem is that we like create this undifferentiated mass instead of being able to name our actual enemies, which is not poor people. It's not, you know, for the most part, it's not, you know, working people in the global South. Um, and it's, it's certainly not, you know, like 10 year olds at the natural history museum. Um, it's yeah, it's the, the fossil fuel companies, the billionaires, the millionaires, people who have benefited from this system they continue to like prevent anything from getting done um so that was a that was a thing that kept coming up when i was working on this too daren't you got anything i'm green nazis oh no

no i mean i could go on about this shit forever but I'm watching I'm re-watching The Sopranos right now I'm in season one and there's this fucking one of the central themes of the show right is like Tony trying to square

what he does with like you know Melfi you know sort of like she tries to prod him towards his own sort of sense of morality and he does with like uh yeah you know melfi you know sort of like s you know she tries to prod him towards his own sort of sense of morality and he'll be like what about the fucking ceos in the business you know they pollute the fucking earth like we just you know what we're doing what we're doing it's basically like that that's my contribution um i'm signing off now the way you were doing the accent it sounds like he's from cincinnati yeah what what does cincinnati tonic soprano sound like it sounds exactly like that um yeah i mean and obviously part of the message of my piece, and actually a lot of other people have written good pieces about eco-fascism lately,

specifically because the Christchurch shooter, the shooter in El Paso, their manifestos reference eco-fascist themes. They say things about how the world is being destroyed by people of color coming into this country, and our natural inheritance is being destroyed by immigration um and you know and even implying that climate change necessitates you know making these kind of triage choices about who deserves to live and who deserves to die um and so people have been writing about a lot but like that that part of it is sort of the really live thing to me which is that like as climate change accelerates and climate

catastrophes become the norm like stateless refugees are going to become a very live phenomenon even they already are right um but the far right is preparing its strategy for confronting that by saying, well, citizens deserve care and protection from the effects of climate change and everybody else doesn't. And it's, it's, it's wild because like one of the things that I came to in the report, reporting this piece is that the U S government has also like predicted this outcome.

So in 2003 site, people know that this isn't new to me, but, uh, it was, I didn't like uncover this, but it was new to me. Um, but like in this 2003 study, um, where they, they describe sort of this Pentagon study of the likely geopolitical effects of what they call an abrupt climate change scenario. And they say that wealthy nations will respond by constructing virtual fortresses around their countries, preserving resources for themselves, and that borders will be strengthened around the country to hold back unwanted, starving immigrants from the Caribbean islands, Mexico, and South America.

So basically saying that the border wall or any of these sorts of measures have less to do with the crime and all this stuff. And it's really just a hedge against like, uh, further depleting what resources we have available in preparation for the coming, you know, authoritarian climate, not marriage crisis. I think it's both. Yeah. I mean, it's not just one or the other, but I do think that like, there's a vert i i think that the how like conscious the fact of climate change is in the minds of sort of fascist governments um isn't necessarily clear to me but they're already responding to the conditions created by it right which includes increasing migration uh climate disasters where you have to triage who matters who's what

where to spend resources puerto rico maybe not but uh did you see when they were evacuating people from the bahamas they had to they literally asked people to get off the boat they changed the rule right while they were while they were on the boat yeah to make it so people who didn't have. What is this? People who had criminal records or who had been arrested. Isn't that wasn't that what it was, Sam? It was just that previously. Weren't allowed to be saved. Previously, it was the case that Bahamian citizens could come to the United States without a visa if they had a clean criminal record. could come to the United States without a visa if they had a clean criminal record.

And they changed the rule that you needed to have a visa during, like right after the hurricane. And so there were in fact people on like boats leaving the islands who were, who found out like while they were on the boats, oh, sorry, you're not gonna be able to go if you don't have a visa. And those people had to get off and stay. yeah um so yeah so the point being that like they don't need to acknowledge climate change as these eco-fascists actually tend to stay there and deal with the fucking 180 mile per hour winds yeah exactly um and uh mean, like, it's one way to understand what's happening in the world right now. These like nation state fortresses are responding to conditions that are created to some degree by climate catastrophe. And they're like, you know, nationalism is a form of climate adaptation. And what the adaptation is that we're going to, you know, do is a form of climate adaptation. And what the adaptation is that

we're going to, you know, do triage so that like the privileges of wealthy people are protected at the expense of like the, you know, life or death needs of the poor. Dude, speaking of that, so, you know, you've got the far right wingers, like this is the big thing you hear now, right? Like the big thing you hear right now in terms of climate change is adaptation. We've all sort of resigned ourselves to any kind of political solutions. So now the far right, their adaptations are nationalism, fortress states, as you're saying. The technocratic liberals, I shit you not, I saw an article in the New York Times the other day talking about how pigeons, because they've been able to thrive in urban environments where they're constantly like under attack and stuff, they can teach us lessons for climate change. So the thing is, like, I think it's the same exact shit that happened with Trump.

Like, basically, the technocratic liberals are saying now, oh, we're so against this shit. Like, okay. I talked to Christian Parenti when I was writing this piece and he has this idea of the, of the armed lifeboat, which is to say that like, you know, there's this whole idea of lifeboat ethics amongst like disgusting Malthusian ecologists, which is that if you have a lifeboat with 10 people in it and like 30 people are in the water drowning and the whole lifeboat will sink if you let 10 more people in, like the ethical thing to do

is to deny them entry into the lifeboat because otherwise everyone will die. And Parenti has this idea of the armed lifeboat, which is to say that like, that's what nations are doing with border walls and militarizing their borders. They're creating armed lifeboats. And I think like the super rich,

like liberal technocrats. This is the kind of shit you've, you've like it every. I think Tom is like 30 seconds behind me and you, Sam. I know. I'm just noticing that. Let me finish this thought,

which is just that like, I'm here, I'm just noticing that. Let me finish this thought, which is just that, like... I'm here, I'm here. I'm just turning off my camera. About the broadband in Whitesburg. See, I'm in Whitesburg. Tom's in fucking Lexington, so I don't know what his excuse is. Oh, there you go.

So I should finish this thought? Yeah, I see him talking right now, though, so we're about to get an incoming message. um i thought so i should finish this thought yeah i thought his can't i see him talking right now though so we're about to get an incoming message okay he's giving us a thumbs up from the past or the future i don't know yeah uh all i want to say is that i think that like these technocratic liberals i'm with y'all i can hear y'all go finish that thought okay i was gonna cut all this real quick i was gonna cut all this but it kind of is amusing all right okay so finish your time technocratic liberals who are twiddling their thumbs writing articles about what pigeons are going to do for us ultimately when push comes to shove they're going to join

in in this armed lifeboat shit like that's why you had that like google sponsored like let's solve climate change out in the on an island thing where they all took like private jets to go talk about climate change that's what they want ultimately they're going to create they're going to use private wealth to protect themselves effects of climate change um and this all this technocratic like bullshit is just them like waiting for the time where it actually matters and at that point they're going to go along with the fascists yeah i think you're absolutely right um but the weirdest thing to me about this is that all their scenarios and like hypotheticals they're all based on a situation that like we're just not in yet like i mean when are we ever going to get to a point where 30 of us are in the water and 10 of us are in i mean like i don't know like that is just such a

weird it's a metaphor and we're already the idea from the right-wing people the green nationalists and the fascists is that we're already there right there's people trying to get into the country and we don't have enough resources or whatever to care for them so the the humane thing to do for the sake of the people already in the country, which is, say, in the lifeboat, is to prevent these people from coming in. Right. Which is insane because especially as it's related to America. I mean, I don't know shit about the vast like 95 percent of the world, but I do know that in America we have plenty of fucking resources. Oh, my God.

But that's the thing. Like, I think that you're, what we're getting towards here is, um, the real purpose of all this stuff, uh, which is,

um, I mean, it's for a sort of like political purpose. We have two Toms in the chat now. How is this happening? We have a Tom from the past and i guess a tom from the present this is like this is like fucking black mirror shit this is fucking hear me now motherfuckers yeah we can i had a lot of incisive commentary that

just got lost in there yeah well that you're kind quieter, and I can only see your teeth and mouth. Sorry. Okay, carry on. Anyways, the point is, and it's the point with the Bahamian refugees during the hurricane, it's not predicated on any actual resource constraints it's all uh for a political agenda to you know ignite the fucking maga base and get them more riled up for their racist purposes and yeah the the weird thing is there's a sort of like complicated play between um using potential future conditions as a justification for doing racist shit, like pursuing their fascist, like race purity goals with reference to like imminent,

like ecological collapse and responding genuinely to ecological conditions with racist shit. Like it's I don't think that it's really like the causation thing is it's caught the causal situation is easy to identify so of course like there is the kind of fundamental bullshit which is that like actually all of these countries need laborers like they all need workers right um and like the idea that they don't want immigrants to come in is false they want they only want immigrants to come in if they can be illegal so that they um can exploit them yeah that's exactly right they need them to be politically disenfranchised and they need them to yeah marginalize from the political process yeah actually it's one of the like most stupidest things about like even left-wing

discourse is the idea that they don't want people in the country i mean like they principally are against them for like racial like hygiene reasons but also do want them as long as they are like maximally exploitable yes that's exactly right um you need a you need a sort of underclass that has absolutely no rights whatsoever um so that you can uh you know you could call that uh i don't know i mean it is sort of a form of slavery in its own way as all sort of like wage work is in this country but um and it's also it's also demonstrating higher value for for example people in appalachia that are like desperate for income you don't have a sense like hey you could have these jobs these people are taking from you so basically what it's doing is keeping people

like in places like where we're from locked in this cycle of desire in these like shitty choices you know yeah yeah oh yeah anyway well um well so yeah i don't know um if there is do you uh what's the uh solution sam yeah what's the upshot man it's funny because like the end of the the way the piece ends like in the version that got published is like i'm like well the only thing we can do is like communist revolution and uh brendan brendan o'connor was like dm'd me and was like hey man you just did the thing which is when you like have no nothing to say at the end of a piece you just do the like we need communist revolution kicker it's like it's like correct but like you like is not that helpful of a answer um but like i guess the important thing is that i think that like i think that even the left isn't sufficiently prepared for a situation where the right the empowered right is sort of like

distinguishing between human beings and non-humans on the basis of the border so we're like saying that we like we like immigrants blah blah blah but we actually have to like develop a concept of like political community that extends beyond borders because they've already developed an answer to the problem of statelessness, which is that anybody who's not a citizen deserves to die or like can be interned basically in camps. So like even as much as the left discourse about migration has improved, it's not probably where it needs to be, especially in terms of linking it to climate catastrophe.

Yeah, yeah. So, yeah, basically what you're saying is... We need communism. What was it? Internationalist, you know, labor movements. That's quite a turn from the sock damn goodies of liz before this is the problem i'm always like too far to the right or too far to the left for people like i just i think that well whatever i feel like no say you've got a

platform just say what you want to say man respond to my yes that you're in the tribunal i think that people like i think that a lot of i don't really care i put less stock in electoral politics it seems like than some of these people who get really mad at me about being like so so about elizabeth warren because i'm like we're not going to solve it this way so like like yeah the bernie like cult of personality is like a little bit silly and embarrassing to me interesting interesting i can't take tom seriously because he sounds like he's got a sock over his phone or whatever he's talking into that he does this looming boilerplate charlie rose presence yeah and i just see your nose and mouth uh well i mean that's always been my thing from the beginning uh but i don't know like um i guess

my thing from the beginning has always been more't know like um i guess my thing from the beginning has always been more of a critique of the electoral system itself and its limitations for affecting change but um as warren goes more and more into her sort of um i guess strategy of trying to peel off certain bernie voters and just straight up appropriating some of his platforms. And as a result, Bernie kind of moves further to the left, which I think is happening. I mean, I think that's true. Yeah. I think it's interesting. Did y'all see the hilarious headline in The Washington Post this morning? It's like Sanders, influenced by Warren, starts talking about sweeping tax.

Oh, yeah, yeah. Murder notoriously late to the party on those things. Yeah. The guy who literally said, like, millionaires and billionaires, like, every 10 seconds in his last run. Right. Yeah, is now taking Liz Warren's beats. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

I mean, obviously, you know, I think Bernie's my dude, full on. Like, man, I listened to his. He was on that long interview he did with Joe Rogan. Did you listen to that? I never did listen to it. No. It's kind of good. Like, you realize that, like, it's kind of good like you realize that like

it's never hard for him to answer a question because the answer is always like the class war right and that's just like really incredible to hear from a person who's running for president so i still have that like romantic attachment to bernie for that reason but But I don't know. When I try to be clear-eyed about the prospects of our electoral system and the constraints of the executive and like – They just make fun of you for it. Yeah, I guess they make fun of me. But like when Bernie sits down for his – President Bernie sits down for his first meeting with the Joint Chiefs,

is he going to say, look, no, it's over. None of these wars like yeah bring them all back like that's a big question no he's not going to do that it's like yeah it's like like is he going to be compromised on day two of the job when he doesn't immediately withdraw ever you know what i'm saying well these the generals will say like yeah okay like he'll maybe he'll float it like let's move people out of like this part of North Africa. And they'll say, well, you know, 2,000 or 10,000 people will die if we do that. Like right away, you know.

And he'll be like, he'll have to make this kind of like global hegemony like, you know, choice. choice. And I think he'll be constrained by just the fact that we haven't actually won. This is the problem of running to be the head of an empire. Yeah, you guys have talked about that

before. I think that's right. Well, I guess I'm becoming a little more sort of, as time goes on, what would be the word? I'm looking up the word sanguine. I think that might be the word. Bloody? Covered in blood? Sanguine penguin? I mean, you know, I don't know. I think the reason why people just get so, you know, passionate about it, which we all should be as, you know, leftists who care about the future of the left. I think the reason why, though, is, well, there's a lot of different reasons, but people really need something to believe in right now. And also the thing I hear a lot is this is a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity.

It's a once-in-a-lifetime shot. And that's the thing. It could be. And I don't have a rebuttal to that. In fact, if that's the case, then we really do have to take a page from our friend Lennon's book and seize history. Because if it really is a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity, then, I mean, yeah, it's like we've said before also on the show, you can't sit it out. And so I don't know. I think we should be doing everything we can to make that the case. But but don't let it crush you and your soul and spirit

and everything about your optimism about the future if he doesn't. Yeah. So I think that feels like a pretty... That feels right. I think that's sensible. Thanks. I've been working on it.

After... This inadvertently turned into stop four on the bernie apology i feel like i feel like the degree the like the difference of like demeanor of all of us from the beginning of this episode to now is like an extreme uh difference extreme difference. We all do awesome things in this hour. Tom, would you get off your goddamn phone? Get back on your

computer. I can't even hear you. I'm sorry. My computer's just... Damn it. Well, I don't know if this episode will be salvageable, but at least we've done a character arc. One of those classic things you're supposed to do in all episodes, right? Yeah, yeah, exactly. We started at point A and we've gone to point B.

Yeah. Anyways, the question is, yes, we do need communist revolution to avert all these things. The question is, is how do you get there? And whether it's through Bernie, I mean, it's hard to say because none of us can read the future. But I think the point is, is that leftists do have to take advantage of historical circumstances as they're presented. of historical circumstances as they're presented. And the weird thing about history is that, and as I get older, maybe I'm sort of softening on this,

but the weird thing about history is that it doesn't necessarily contour to historical materialism. It really is a kind of interplay between personalities. Intermination and contingency. Yes. Intermination and contingency. that's terminism and contingency that's exactly right yeah and um and so yeah you you kind of have to take advantage of it uh yeah i think the best argument for bernie is that like if he's president like he's not gonna be able to implement all these policies because like the congress is going to be divided the courts are going to strike down whatever he tries to do anyway.

But he can be like an agitator in chief. And, like, yeah, my line lately has been, like, that Bernie should do what Trump did for racism, but do it for class war. Okay. Bernie should match Trump's commitment to racism think about it Trump like mainstreamed all this like horrible

racist bullshit and he like prints it out on his like twitter all the time he picks fights with people so to polarize the public around basically like racist conflict and Bernie should do the same thing but for class war like pick fights with the

with the enemy all the time yeah mainstream socialist ideas and use use you know use the presidency to like help the movements because bernie's presidency isn't going to win socialism it's it's going to be a passing thing that happens because our movements aren't there yet yeah but if bernie can do whatever whatever like i don't even know everything you could do whatever is in his power to do to empower the movements then it would be worth it well something terence has said a lot is that bernie would be a good union organizer union agitator and all that kind of stuff and so well i think i think the thing is, my line on this is that I think he would be a great asset to the labor movement. It's like because of what you were saying about him going on Joe Rogan.

He's so great at that kind of thing because his answers always go back to class war. And so this is again why my line on this is do everything you can to make sure that Bernie stays in it as long as possible and even wins. But don't be crushed if he loses because he is an incredible asset to the labor movement, which historically in the West and, well, just worldwide has done, in my opinion, has been able to affect a lot more sort of disruption to the system than electoral politics. And that's what we need right now. I think we do need disruption to the system more than we need reification of the system. Maybe I'm becoming an accelerationist, but I'm also getting pretty fucking angry. I don't have health care. And look, I don't have a whole lot to fucking lose.

All right. I'm eating too much canned foods and TV dinners. And I think a lot of other people are probably in that boat. I don't fucking know. It's hard to know. It's hard to know. I don't fucking know. Yeah.

Well. It's hard to know. It's hard to know. I don't fucking know. Yeah. Well. Look, there's also a lot of people in this country who love Elizabeth Warren type electoral politics. And we shouldn't forget that Hillary Clinton got more fucking votes than like any candidate in history. Yeah. and uh well yeah the other problem is that a lot of those people who were like the very liberals uh voters who were with bernie last time are with her this time you know like it just happened to be that he was the only like in their kind of political schema he was the progressive so they went with him yeah but as soon as there was an alternative that wasn't as scary quote unquote

they want her instead and that's like a real that's a political reality um that we have to face and the upshot to that though too is that like y'all are saying bernie's moving further to the left as a consequence of that right because to sort of differentiate himself from this appropriator of his policies so you know that's that's something that can be worked with yeah yeah well again though i think leftists need to keep in mind that we live in a bourgeois democracy in which the people that vote are generally more materially comfortable and they have a lot to sort of lose from a bernie presidency and so uh it is it really is threading a needle and so um that's why uh we can't like

what i'm worried about dude is you know after the french revolution um there was like you know like the sort of gothic literature movement like um you know mary shelley and frankenstein and all this Frankenstein like was born out of the sort of disaffection and demoralization of the post French Revolutionary Society like the dream in fuel in full view of a better society of a more equal society just dashed on the rocks of reaction and that's really what i'm scared of i'm scared of an entire sort of generation a millennial generation becoming disaffected and um you know writing gothic horror i love gothic horror but did you know that frankenstein's the doctor not the monster what the fuck mind blown but that does worry me and that's I guess those are the people that I'm also speaking to it's just like we

like don't put so much into this that we are yeah we're all writing gothic literature in our parents basements in 20 years yeah that's for sure. I was thinking before I came on, though, that the neoliberal biker might have something to add to this discourse. It has a few policy suggestions?

Can you get him on the line real quick? Yeah, yeah, hold on, hold on. It's weird. He's up here in New York. So listen, we're thinking about the future. We're thinking about what we're going to do about climate change. But here's my idea. Hear me out.

Look, you fill up all the bodies of water with that stuff that if you break open a glow stick and that stuff is reflective. You put that in all the water and all the earth and I think we got it pretty much solved right there. I think I see what you're saying, mister.

You're saying the sun rays go back up into the space? Yeah, some of the boys have been using those sticks for some reason. I told them at first they were kind of, you know, lame. But I've come around, and I think that might be the solution right there. Interesting. Well, I'll put you in touch with Greta Thunberg. Oh, I love Greta. Maybe the two of you can, as she goes goes back across the ocean you can ride your bike

right next to her across the ocean yeah i've just been yas queen and so much watching her on tv oh fuck god damn it oh fuck god damn it wow yeah thanks for being with us man nice to see your faces boys it is we miss you um we've missed you a bunch uh you got a podcast yourself now that you teased a little bit last time you were on but now y'all are pretty well into it you're fully grown yeah yeah why don't you uh plug that a little bit? You're fully adult. Yeah. We got a podcast. It's called Know Your Enemy.

It's hosted by me and Matthew Sittman. And it's about the American right, the conservative movement. ideas of the right and uh we try to you know take them apart but also identify the ways in which we have something to learn sometimes by the movement strategies of the right um or you know learn the the ways that we can defeat them by understanding their their real ideas better um so yeah it's know your enemy and we have patreon where we do bonus episodes probably less frequently than this podcast but uh well we're mentally diseased literally you really clearly are uh but we we have we're on patreon as well at uh know your enemy and we're on twitter at uh i think it's no yr enemy pod it's like that lcd sound system song dance yourself clean but where you take all

the vowels out except for the o and pod because then it'd just be know your pod, which is also very important. Yeah. Well, I guess like kind of writing about eco-fascism is in keeping with the stuff we talk about on the pod. So if you're interested in that, what we talked about, then I don't know. Well, I got to tell you, I thoroughly enjoyed it. And I'm not just saying that because you're here like I usually do with other guests. It's very good.

So everybody should go check that out. Then go check out this new Republic piece. We just talked about and. Yeah, it's called if just one more time, why white supremacists are hooked on green living. So, yeah, thanks. It's been real boss. Thanks a lot, guys. All right, buddy. supremacists are hooked on green living. Thanks. It's been real, boss. Thanks a lot, guys.

We'll see you later. We'll see you soon. Give our regards to the neoliberal biker, too. Who's sleeping on your couch, apparently. Yeah, he just passed out. Great. Alright. Adios. See ya, boys.