Latest / PlasticPills Critical Theory & Philosophy / Pill Pod 25 - The Kayfabe Coup

Transcript

Pill Pod 25 - The Kayfabe Coup · PlasticPills Critical Theory & Philosophy

• 0:08
  Good. What's up? What's Up's up? What's up? Big week for
• 0:15
  news guys, slow news day yesterday, Yeah, no doubt Well, we
• 0:22
  do have to send out a few thoughts in prayers, probably before we get
• 0:25
  started some of the biggest stories of the week. Kim and Kanye. You
• 0:31
  know, you hate to see what happened. I was waiting for that one.
• 0:34
  Wait a minute, they're breaking out. Don't worry, Kim and Kanye
• 0:37
  will work it out. Is that Is that a real story? It's true?
• 0:41
  Really well, I mean I think it's alleged true, but it's I
• 0:45
  didn't I didn't make it up this time. Thoughts and prayers also go out
• 0:51
  to Jeff Bezos. Sad news for him. Yeah, no longer the richest
• 0:55
  man in the world. Really who took him over Elon? Which is strange
• 1:02
  because I'm pretty sure like none of Elon's Musk's companies have made like any money.
• 1:06
  Like, I think it's all hypothetical, Yeah, isn't. The SpaceX
• 1:10
  is probably generating some pretty lucrative speculations. I think it was. Actually The
• 1:15
  Tesla stock went up seven a year or so, despite despite having basically no
• 1:25
  difference to the products of other automakers, as far as I can tell,
• 1:29
  having released all the blueprints to like all their vehicles is like open source on
• 1:33
  the internet too, well, not on the internet, but to those who
• 1:37
  know where to find them. I think they're barely profitable. Now. Well,
• 1:41
  we're still all looking for the electric revolution, but it just seems like
• 1:44
  the regular car manufacturers are stepping in for that. But gy yay elon,
• 1:49
  good, good job, you're weather capitalism. But of course, the biggest
• 1:55
  event of the week, the one that everyone's talking about, politics is in
• 2:00
  absolute turmoil. I don't know if I believe it, and I don't know
• 2:05
  if anyone else is going to believe what's happening up here. But it's in
• 2:07
  all the newspapers. The electorate is livid, of course, So here's what
• 2:14
  happened. I'll read a summary. Rarely is a public outcry rooted in so
• 2:20
  many offensive elements which are so easy to understand yet so difficult to comprehend.
• 2:25
  There's the hypocrisy of politicians pledging solidarity with those in lonely isolation even as they
• 2:32
  searched online to upgrade seats for family reunions. There's the raw deception of MPs
• 2:39
  MLAs and a senator pretending to be among us in pre recorded Christmas greetings when
• 2:46
  they knew they'd be slathering on sunscreen at the swim up bar by the time
• 2:50
  it was released. My god, should you believe this? How dare they
• 2:54
  go on vacation? Can you seriously imagine? So we are, of course
• 3:00
  talking about the disgusting, cancerous Canadian politicians who left to go on vacation while
• 3:08
  they were supposed to be isolating in COVID. I feel like this is a
• 3:13
  fascist coup of my health and well being. Yeah, they're kicking back in
• 3:19
  Hawaii and other colonial holdings while I'm stuck here. What kind of fucking blows
• 3:24
  my mind about it is they had to know that somebody was going to figure
• 3:27
  this out eventually, and that it was gonna look really, really bad,
• 3:30
  Like it's hard to hide those kind of things at this point. And apparently
• 3:35
  some of them even had pictures in them floating around online on vacation and what
• 3:40
  did you not think that maybe it would be better not to fucking like jump
• 3:45
  into that shot. Hello, you are on the pillpod and we are Canadian,
• 3:52
  proudly Canadian. That's TBD. We know America's on fire and we're gonna
• 3:57
  get there. But the big news in Canada this week is that politicians pre
• 4:01
  recorded messages encouraging citizens the electorate to stay home for Christmas while they went to
• 4:11
  Cancun. And some of them are still hiding to do there's some of them
• 4:15
  are hiding out there, like Mexico and stuff. They're hiding. Wait,
• 4:17
  did something happen in the States? Oh, didn't you see the fire?
• 4:23
  I don't actually pay attention the fire, the Kanye news or the other news.
• 4:28
  I have a south facing window, so I can see there's a little
• 4:30
  bit of smoke rising. He said America was on fire. What do you
• 4:33
  mean it's on fire? Goes down on your back porch, Well, Canada,
• 4:39
  Canada got the smoke from California. Maybe that's it. There's a little
• 4:45
  bit of forest fire fumes coming up our way. It's nice though, I
• 4:48
  didn't have to smoke as much weed while that was happening. Sorry, that's
• 4:54
  not who we are. I don't represent everybody on this pot. I don't
• 4:59
  think anyone represents anyone on this pod. And we may disagree on the significance
• 5:02
  of this event, but there shall be no there shall be no coups of
• 5:08
  the podcast or cups of my of my health and well being Tate. Anyway,
• 5:13
  what a hey, I get it. What a perfect end to trump
• 5:17
  Ism. We can call it an end. I don't think there's anyone to
• 5:20
  down the mantle of the gaping hole he's going to leave in the politics of
• 5:27
  our neighbors to the south. I guess that does depend on where he spends
• 5:30
  his twilight years. I'm excited for the new disciplines this is going to open
• 5:33
  up in this year. Trumpology, trumponomy, trump and emetrics, koopism,
• 5:39
  trump studies. Yeah, holy side departments are going to be rolling in it.
• 5:43
  It's going to be a new subfield in my political science department. It'll
• 5:46
  be the sixth one. Uh yeah, trump studies. How to perform a
• 5:50
  trump ectomy. I was thinking about all the poor video game designers and showrunners
• 5:56
  who are going to have to come up with plots as stupid as this for
• 5:59
  their They should be they should taking a plot of Assassin's s creen, not
• 6:02
  like not the Napoleon's coup, but the cow Shaman coup. Yeah. I
• 6:09
  remember the South Park creators were just so, they're not even gonna do anything
• 6:13
  on Trump because he just like deconstructs himself. I'm actually wondering who's gonna play
• 6:17
  him in a biopic ten years from now, because you know, perfectly while
• 6:20
  like the Oliver Stone of the next decade or something is going to see this
• 6:27
  is a perfect Oscar bait. And I was like, well, they were
• 6:30
  able to pull w off, and then they were able to also pull fucking
• 6:38
  like Barack Obama off. But most we get to play Trump. Yeah,
• 6:42
  you know what you should actually see there's a mini series, a two part
• 6:46
  mini series called The Komi Rule. Trump is played by Brendan Gleeson. Yes,
• 6:49
  I remember you telling me about that. I could see that for work
• 6:53
  is actually quite good. It's it's impressively good because I think pulling off a
• 6:56
  Trump you have to really toe the line and somehow like avoid being a caricature,
• 7:00
  when Trump himself is a caricature. So it's like, how do you
• 7:03
  play somebody without it just seeming like like the Alec Baldwin Like hilarious. Yeah,
• 7:09
  that's what I was thinking about it. And it's gonna be really difficult
• 7:12
  to step out of Baldwin's shadows since he gave such a definitive take on the
• 7:15
  character. I'll send you a video actually of a gleas In doing it.
• 7:18
  It's pretty impressive. He gets he gets this the head tilt and the breaths
• 7:24
  really well. Like I don't know if you ever, if you guys ever
• 7:26
  noticed how Trump has this weird way of breathing where he'll kind of be like
• 7:29
  it's disgraceful and he'll like breathe in as he's talking and tilt his head.
• 7:31
  I don't know, if you guys, there's like there's a very distinct breathing
• 7:34
  pattern that Trump has that this this actor captures very well. It's that McNugget
• 7:39
  sauce that's just blocking up his airways. Maybe we can find like a cousin
• 7:45
  or something to play him, maybe like back when Larry David did Bernie Sanders
• 7:48
  that was pretty on point. Yeah, we'll need somebody like that. I
• 7:53
  think. I think Shy the Beef is going that direction if he if he
• 7:56
  just carries on for another ten years, he'll look like Trump will be Trump.
• 8:00
  Just get Kanye to play in his Oscar role. Yeah, hopefully that's
• 8:05
  within his range. All right. I don't know where we all are on
• 8:09
  this event. I think we probably disagree. Well, can I just say
• 8:13
  I loved to some extent, I liked it, not like because I was
• 8:18
  happy that it like that had happened, but I was But in the sense
• 8:22
  that I think a lot of these like Trump, you know, stop the
• 8:26
  Steel, their their kind of whole motivation was was somehow sustained by a fantasy
• 8:33
  of oh, like we're gonna do this, We're going to overcome all this.
• 8:37
  And I think there's something kind of satisfying about watching them like storm it.
• 8:41
  It's like, what are you gonna do? And then they storm it
• 8:43
  and then it's like nothing happens, and if anything, it had like a
• 8:46
  very damaging effect. It was kind of like a splash of cold water.
• 8:50
  Oh contreer though they got in there. Now they got in there, and
• 8:56
  their purpose evidently was to take selfies of them elves having got in there.
• 9:01
  Sure, okay, no, no, but hold on, hold on.
• 9:03
  So I think like there's the point that Hijak makes a lot about like the
• 9:09
  sort of role that lost causes has in our fantasy, like if we never
• 9:11
  get to attempt something, it's like it stays alive. More So, to
• 9:16
  some extent, I think that like the fact that they went they got into
• 9:20
  the capitol and then nothing happens. It kind of interrupts the ability for that
• 9:24
  fantasy to be sustained, where they can be like, well, if only
• 9:26
  we would have tried, you know, we could have done something, and
• 9:28
  it's like, well, you got into the capitol and like splash cold water
• 9:31
  on like your little like juissance of of of. I don't know, imagine
• 9:37
  what could have been possible. He references Yeah, Lacan and this notion of
• 9:41
  the two deaths as a kind of metaphor for what happens where it says if
• 9:45
  you look at various Politicaca says, you know, if you look at various
• 9:48
  figures. Following hegel throughout history, people like Napoleon, sometimes you're dead,
• 9:52
  but you're not really cognizant yet of the fact that you're dead. So,
• 9:56
  of course Napoleon was utterly defeated, you know, and the war the Sixth
• 10:01
  Coalition, but then he managed to stage what he thought was a comeback for
• 10:03
  one hundred days before you know, it all endi catastrophically with the Battle of
• 10:07
  Waterloo and he was shipped to an even crappier island where he died. And
• 10:11
  it does seem I agree with Victor in some senses like this follows the same
• 10:13
  structure where it was pretty clear that trump Ism had been dealt a mortal blow
• 10:18
  when he lost the election, especially since so much of Trump's brand is associated
• 10:22
  with winning and overcoming and beating the odds. But rather than acknowledge that,
• 10:26
  it kind of limped onwards. And now there was this attempt at some kind
• 10:31
  of revolutionary outrage or revolutionary rupture to restore him to power, but it all
• 10:37
  just ended up coming across as extraordinarily baanal and kind of impotent and demonstrating that
• 10:43
  no, Trumpism really is dead, not that as a movement, but as
• 10:46
  an administrator and as a government at least for now. Yeah, what was
• 10:52
  that quote? Lenin attributes? Lenin attributes to Napoleon. He might not have
• 10:56
  said it, but it was something like jump into the fray and then just
• 11:00
  what to do? I think that's what we saw yesterday. Yeah, that
• 11:03
  is the sixth Except the Napoleon's plural were pretty good at coups. What they
• 11:09
  have three successful coups between them. Yeah, I mean this wasn't a coup
• 11:13
  obviously. Well, but I mean this actually demonstrates why it is that Trump
• 11:16
  is really not a particularly skilled political actor, and a lot of people have
• 11:20
  pointed this out. I think Corey Robin is the most successful of them,
• 11:24
  right, But you know, he's postured as a political genius because he kind
• 11:28
  of beat the odds and won the twenty sixteen election. Before that run the
• 11:31
  Republican nomination, But it's worth noting that he did so under various circumscribed conditions
• 11:37
  and by very narrow margins, and since then he's remained tremendously unpopular. He
• 11:41
  wasn't able to expand his base despite the fact that the Republicans had all three
• 11:43
  branches of government. He wasn't even able to push through any major piece of
• 11:48
  legislation. And then he lost the second election, and it looks like he
• 11:50
  lost pretty much every elected branch of government that's available to the Republicans. But
• 11:56
  isn't this tragic for the followers these pig in, one of whom got shot
• 12:01
  for him, and they don't want anything. They just want him or their
• 12:07
  image of him to look down shining upon them. And he's the one who
• 12:11
  says we're going down to the Capitol, I'll be with you, and then
• 12:13
  he just sits and watches them on TV while they're hood and holler in Dowey
• 12:20
  hog brain. That's what he wanted. He wanted, He's it was all
• 12:24
  narcissistic. He just wanted, like like, that's why he had such a
• 12:28
  hard time condemning them, because the fact that he knew all of those people
• 12:31
  in the Capitol were there because they fucking love him so much that is irresistible
• 12:37
  to him. So he couldn't help himself. He couldn't help himself and condemn
• 12:43
  them because he's like how in his mind, he's like, how could I
• 12:45
  condemn people who love me this much? It's like that's all he wants,
• 12:48
  right, all his main emodus operanda is like getting people to love him.
• 12:54
  He doesn't care about politics really, And this is what I was getting at,
• 12:58
  Like successful cups throughout history and you get the guy like the Bolshevik Revolution
• 13:01
  against you know, the February government in nineteen seventeen, and then brothers take
• 13:07
  a lot of work, and they also require and hence focus on detail,
• 13:11
  because really you have to be able to pull off what's the equivalent of a
• 13:13
  political magic trick where you swap out the one government and then replace it so
• 13:18
  quickly that it's almost like nobody really knows what happened, and by the time
• 13:22
  your enemy has kind of realized what's going on, you've already kind of trained
• 13:26
  the status quo. Trump didn't do anything that was necessary to actually kind of
• 13:30
  solidify that kind of possibility by, for instance, reaching out to the military
• 13:35
  or the police to try to make sure that they would give him a carp
• 13:37
  launche to do whatever he wanted. Yeah, exactly. He didn't have any
• 13:43
  kind of institutional allies exactly right, in any of the major administrations of the
• 13:48
  US government. All that he really had, as Victor pointed out, was
• 13:50
  this mob of people who loved him, And it's not surprising that he didn't
• 13:56
  really think to expand beyond that, since that's pretty much who he is,
• 13:58
  right He's that's all Sister feeds off of his base and their reverence for him.
• 14:03
  All the other stuff takes too much work and involves actually making the kind
• 14:07
  of oddly enough, you know, the deals that he defined himself on for
• 14:11
  a little while, But what actually would actually make up so much of political
• 14:15
  life in which she's proven really incompetent, failing grade on the insurrectionary report card,
• 14:20
  and the first president in who wasn't who hasn't been assassinated that only served
• 14:26
  one term. Not only there's really any other president barring like extenuating circumstances,
• 14:33
  that only served one term. They all serve. Yeah, and then there
• 14:41
  was Carter also, And Carter was in the eighty and he only served one
• 14:43
  term and he got beat by Reagan, which is a shame because I actually
• 14:46
  like Carter quite a bit. But anyway, we got four deaths. One
• 14:50
  was gunshot related, three were fast food related. The other death think one
• 14:56
  guy tasered himself. I always thought that that might have been a Twitter.
• 15:01
  We'll just say three of them were fast food related. But at least they
• 15:03
  all died happy serving their god emperor, the god emperor of their Facebook.
• 15:09
  This was a live Facebook event. It I agree it was a spectacle too,
• 15:13
  you know. But I think the story to me isn't so much that
• 15:16
  this was a coup. I mean, obviously it wasn't a coup. It
• 15:18
  had none of the institutional markings of a coup. It was more a story
• 15:22
  of the sort of psychological impact that that conspiracy theories can have on people that
• 15:28
  like alternative media, that like YouTubers, and that having a president stoke those
• 15:33
  flames and and create like fear, uncertainty and doubt in people that that matches
• 15:37
  their own predisposed political biases, their love for Trump. You know, you
• 15:43
  put all those things together with like the modern media landscape, and this spectacle
• 15:48
  is what you get from it. Yeah, And that's why I actually take
• 15:50
  this more significantly than I think my pills. And it's because even Trump himself
• 15:56
  is pretty incompetent, right, and I think we're both wanting this out.
• 16:00
  He needed possess the kind of tactical acumen or really the patients to pull off
• 16:03
  something that would genuinely resemble a coup. Right. All he was able to
• 16:07
  do was rile up his base, kind of stick them on his political opponents,
• 16:10
  and then it all broke like waves on a rock. Right. But
• 16:14
  it doesn't mean that somebody can embody a kind of Trump his postmodern approach to
• 16:18
  politics and do so a lot more effectively and with much more tactical acumen and
• 16:23
  political sensibilities than Donald Trump. Right. And I think actually what we saw
• 16:29
  just before this happened was a couple of heirs a parent tried to do just
• 16:32
  that. Somebody like Ted Cruz, right, who's genuinely a pretty smart guy,
• 16:36
  seemed kind of desperate to seize the Trump't mantle for himself by continuing to
• 16:41
  propagate these false stories that the election have been stolen, arguing that by DP
• 16:47
  pens should disqualify certain lectures, all that kind of stuff. Right, So
• 16:51
  that's what really worries me about the future, especially given Trump's age and the
• 16:56
  unlikelihood of him having that political capital to run again. And I guess all
• 17:00
  right, well, I'll introduce some points for debate at least. Uh,
• 17:06
  hang on, there's one. There's one last detail that nobody's talking about.
• 17:10
  There were explosive devices found at both the RNC and the DNC headquarters. Well
• 17:15
  I didn't know which were which were successfully safely detonated, but I mean nobody's
• 17:21
  talking about that shit. That seems pretty significant to me. Talk about it,
• 17:26
  Eric, Well, Well, I'm talking about the lack of coverage,
• 17:32
  right. I mean, it's true that that wasn't like covered, But I
• 17:34
  mean, I guess does that would that add more to the argument that this
• 17:38
  was a coup attempt or or or just like more mischief more? I mean,
• 17:42
  the people literally, like most of these people literally thought that this election
• 17:47
  was stolen likes, like most of them actually believe that in their heart of
• 17:49
  hearts, and that's dangerous, a dangerous combination of beliefs, like with the
• 17:55
  whole media landscape. And uh, you know, I want to make a
• 17:59
  prediction right now that I hope doesn't come true, but I think will is.
• 18:02
  I think that during Biden's presidency you're going to see a domestic terrorist attack
• 18:04
  similar to the Oklahoma City bombing. Yeah, and that's what worries me about
• 18:11
  the future. Also, like I was saying before, I think that the
• 18:14
  kind of comparisons to the Bier Helpouch are actually really overstated because that was actually
• 18:19
  carried off with a lot more success, at least for a little while.
• 18:22
  And then what we saw here in part because the Nazis did actually try to
• 18:26
  coordinate with major sectors of German society and try to get the military on their
• 18:30
  side, and we're actually able to seize control of Munich for a brief period
• 18:33
  of time, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. But you know,
• 18:34
  later on they did actually seize power legitimately because the energy of their movement
• 18:38
  wasn't really dissipated, it was actually vitalized. By the fact that they almost
• 18:44
  successfully pulled this off, at least for a few days, and then,
• 18:47
  you know, the German authorities went soft on them because a lot of people
• 18:49
  were nationalists and sympathized what that they were trying to do. Right. What
• 18:52
  worries me is that this might be the end of Trump and his administration.
• 18:56
  And I think there's no question it will be, since he's losing a lot
• 18:59
  of political But I'm not sure this will be the end of trump Ism or
• 19:03
  postmodern conservatism, or neo fascism or traditionalism, you know, whatever you want
• 19:07
  to call it. Right, I think that it might actually have a long
• 19:10
  future ahead of it, and I really worry about what will happen if somebody
• 19:14
  a lot more confident and a lot more ruthless gets seizes the mantle of this
• 19:21
  kind of Outlook. Well, my point number one was media fear mongering,
• 19:25
  and now you're doing it for us, so we have both sides represented.
• 19:29
  It is concerning, though it's concerning for you. I'm not concerned at all,
• 19:33
  But I wanted to at least introduce a point that we can debate,
• 19:37
  which is one hundred percent to me, this is a pseudo event, a
• 19:41
  pseudo event is images taken out of the consequence versus cause we would see a
• 19:49
  normal political action in history. So I'm taking the side that this is an
• 19:56
  image that we'll have probably no consequences. I'll defend that. And the image
• 20:02
  is the perfect image to me is this cow the cowhead guy sitting at the
• 20:06
  chair at the head of the legislature. And should we not expect that the
• 20:11
  head of the legislature was always a person wearing a cow head anyway? So
• 20:17
  yeah, the first the blue check Twitter is freaking out calling them terrorists,
• 20:22
  calling them Nazis, making the comparisons with the beer hall pooch very funny to
• 20:26
  me, And to me that shows a lack of imagination that journalists have because
• 20:32
  the only anytime they see a threat to democracy, it's the Nazi comparison.
• 20:37
  Immediately current affairs did it, the one that you just mentioned, And yeah,
• 20:42
  I would hope that we can have a better sense of imagination, particular
• 20:48
  because of what we said a few weeks ago. There's no one committed enough
• 20:51
  to be a fascist, and the people that are committed enough to be fascists
• 20:55
  have almost no effect on American politics, where all of the power is still
• 21:02
  exactly where the power was before this all happened, which is why I say
• 21:04
  that it's completely inconsequential. It's it's the parties and the donors, not the
• 21:11
  cow guy that is the enemy. Well, I think that I guess,
• 21:17
  you know, to to to just say, well, this is just an
• 21:19
  image, this is just a spectacle. I mean, I guess I think
• 21:22
  that those things can have a huge influence on people's minds, and I think
• 21:26
  yesterday we saw you know, a proof of that. I think, because
• 21:30
  I do think that that these people were motivated by spectacle, by by like
• 21:34
  these these ridiculous images of things, of of you know, the of ideas.
• 21:40
  I guess maybe in that case they're not images or like the belief in
• 21:44
  that the election was stolen, But in any case, like I don't think
• 21:47
  it's it's inconsequential. Like I certainly wouldn't write it up. But I agree
• 21:51
  that the media is very quick and hasty because they don't understand the alternative media
• 21:59
  like landscape. They don't understand YouTube very well. So I think when they
• 22:03
  see something like this happen, they do jump to these you know, pretty
• 22:07
  pretty like simplistic takes, and and they they get very alarmist, I suppose,
• 22:15
  so I don't. I don't. I don't disagree that the media's reaction
• 22:18
  to it, but but I also agree with Matt that that this that that
• 22:22
  this is in p these this spectacle is having, is going to have an
• 22:26
  impact on people that I'm already seeing like a lot of these kind of more
• 22:33
  white nationalists or not white nationalists, but traditionalists, far right, you know,
• 22:36
  Trumper people on Twitter talking about how they want to burn the Republican Party
• 22:41
  down, and they're celebrating and after they're seeing like Lindsay Graham and all these
• 22:44
  people quickly turn their backs and by the way, as an aside, Jesus
• 22:47
  Lindsay Graham. I don't know if any of you guys saw his speech,
• 22:48
  but holy fuck, did he that guy do a one ad quickly like after
• 22:52
  like after after he won his Senate seat narrowly in South Carolina, he was
• 22:56
  like, I'm gonna fight with you to the end. Trump and then others
• 23:00
  and then as soon and then on the floor of the Senate like yesterday or
• 23:03
  this morning or something, I saw him in almost like restrained jubilation, so
• 23:07
  happy to be like totally turning us back and being like, yeah, we're
• 23:10
  not going to do this, like we were never going to do this.
• 23:11
  It's like what the fuck? Like, holy shit, this guy is like
• 23:15
  fucking rat escaping a sinking ship as quickly as possible instantly, Like I don't
• 23:22
  agree with what you're saying, but I'll defend to the deaths. You're right
• 23:25
  to say it. That's their that's their sort of fallback position, but also
• 23:29
  stoked the fears of a stolen election for so long and then now he's like
• 23:32
  it's like he it's like he didn't he never did it. He's like totally
• 23:34
  did one to eighty. Yeah, but I do think this speaks sorry,
• 23:38
  this speaks to I just want to respond directly to that because when I say
• 23:41
  consequential, it definitely has to do with institutional power and decisions that are made
• 23:49
  by legislative bodies that actually affect individuals. And on that ground, I think
• 23:55
  that trump Ism is less effective today than it was two days ago, because
• 24:00
  now the whole institution is saying, no, we have a firewall. I'm
• 24:04
  not saying that some psycho is not going to blow up a building in the
• 24:07
  future, but that's always a threat, right that that threat might be marginally
• 24:11
  increased or not. I think even an event like that, Yeah, I'm
• 24:15
  gonna split the difference. Even a threat like that though is not different from
• 24:19
  three days ago. But the institutions have very much drawn a firewall saying we
• 24:26
  are not that, we condemn that, even the ones that we're flirting with
• 24:30
  it, like you just said a few days ago, now like that is
• 24:33
  that is definitely fringe. It's been pushed to the fridge. Yeah, I'm
• 24:37
  going to split the difference between these two and say that I think there are
• 24:38
  two reasons why we need to be more concerned then Pills is allowing while still
• 24:44
  acknowledging that I think everyone's right that Trump isn't certainly less effective now than it
• 24:48
  was even yesterday, and part because of this event. And in this sense,
• 24:52
  it's less something to catastrophize and more something to recognize, as I would
• 24:56
  think almost the death rows of at least this admishion. And the two things
• 25:00
  that I wanted to point out, which are reasons for concern is that this
• 25:03
  doesn't really represent a dramatic shift in the way that the GOP has actually approached
• 25:08
  politics. I would actually say that the deer man that you saw on the
• 25:12
  Senate floor is actually the way GOP politics have been moving for a very long
• 25:17
  time, at least since the nineteen eighties. And you can talk about the
• 25:21
  emergence of people like Russia Limbaugh, you can talk about Nut Gingrich and his
• 25:25
  hyperpartisanship in the Contract with America. You can talk about the attempt to essentially
• 25:29
  impeach pop like Clinton over the blowjob Jones and the info Wars Alex Jones.
• 25:33
  They get it all from, Yeah, the Bush administration talking about how it
• 25:37
  is that we create our own reality now and then all the kind of postmodern
• 25:41
  politics that you see associated with trump Ism, right, and it's onreality,
• 25:45
  it's big news, it's highly identitarian orientation, Breitbart, you name it,
• 25:48
  right, And none of that is going to go away just because this event,
• 25:53
  if you want to call it, that is delegitimated. Yeah, this
• 25:56
  is a full blown subculture we're dealing with. And in our hyper connected digital
• 26:03
  world now, these people find each other. It's just like it reminds me
• 26:06
  of the flat earthers, right, Like those those people that they have their
• 26:11
  own conferences, they have events, People meet their fricking wives and husbands at
• 26:15
  these things, and like it's a, it's a community, it's a whole
• 26:18
  subculture. And do you guys see something like that out there? It was
• 26:22
  for Republicans thought that storming the Capitol was justified and a good idea. Yeah,
• 26:30
  And this is what I'm saying, Like, certainly this has been a
• 26:32
  slap in the wrist, not a slap in the rist. It's a pretty
• 26:33
  big condemnation of trump Ism that even senior members of the AFP, whoor allies
• 26:40
  of Trump are now turning against him. But whether or not that's actually going
• 26:44
  to shift the direction of American conservatism, I think is a much more open
• 26:47
  question. And the second thing is that I agree with you that there's this
• 26:51
  kind of spectral quality to what went on in the sense that materially and institutionally
• 26:55
  it's not shifted all that much. But when I think that, you know,
• 26:57
  following Dave Bojar, you really see is precisely that that what we're seeing
• 27:00
  in the twenty first century is the subordination of the reality principle to hyperreality,
• 27:07
  right where the image of politics has now become what politics is and it's not
• 27:12
  connected to anything that's more substantial than that. And Trump is thoroughly flurisht in
• 27:18
  this kind of environment, and even if he himself goes or is canceled or
• 27:22
  people tire of his particular stick, somebody else might very well come along and
• 27:27
  be able to embody the same qualities, maybe even somebody who's younger and more
• 27:30
  competent with the kind of media and subcultures that a lot of Yeah, Don
• 27:37
  Junior, right or someone. And so that's what concerns me, because I
• 27:41
  do think that this is an apocaal shift or cultural shift if you want,
• 27:45
  that we're not going to get away from, which also contributes to exacerbating a
• 27:49
  lot of the tendencies that's seen in American conservatism for a long time, since
• 27:52
  I think it thrives precisely in this kind of hyper and real, highly narrativized
• 27:56
  environment. Oh and also I should say, just as a comment on Eric,
• 28:02
  this was a funny thing. I saw this website the other day where
• 28:06
  conservatives now don't want to live near liberals, so you can. They actually
• 28:08
  are creating websites online where you can try to buy a house in a conservative
• 28:14
  neighborhood, and the aim is essentially funnel you into what a really safe space
• 28:18
  is by any other name right while you'll be in the same neighborhood with other
• 28:22
  people. And I was watching an interview with the guy who was organizing this
• 28:26
  website and he said like, look, I just think that make good fences,
• 28:29
  make good neighbors, and not having any liberals around tends to make me
• 28:33
  happy. So you know, wow, yeah, I mean this has really
• 28:37
  become a mode of life, you know, conservative ethno state. I see
• 28:41
  your bouderyard and I raise you, Dubor, Like I said, something like
• 28:45
  a democracy loves to have an incomprehensible enemy like terrorism. I don't know,
• 28:55
  maybe COVID Gombin would suggests that, but now there there's this latent fear that
• 29:03
  is propagated, and the latent fear is for whatever this is, trump Ism
• 29:07
  I don't know what it's going to be called after that. But then the
• 29:11
  institution can allow everyone to convince themselves that compared to terrorism, what you have
• 29:15
  is really good, so nothing will be changed. So we talked about a
• 29:19
  Gombin once on this podcast way back who said that COVID was going to be
• 29:23
  a state of exception. I think we all disagreed and dismissed that. But
• 29:29
  if there's a fear that I would have out of this and fear monger.
• 29:32
  I would fear monger that this state of exception is going to be used to
• 29:37
  the full extent that it can be to justify any manner of state interventions and
• 29:44
  that kind of repression of otherwise or of freedoms that we would have had now.
• 29:48
  Yeah, And I would say that that's actually the wrong way to approach
• 29:51
  this. And one of the reasons is that Trumpism is thrived in an atmosphere
• 29:56
  where people feel that their political institutions are delegitimated because they only serve elite interests.
• 30:02
  And I don't think that's just true Trump. You also saw similar animosities,
• 30:06
  provoking things like Brexit over the turn to law and justice and poland you
• 30:08
  know, you name it. And what I think we need right now is
• 30:11
  a process of democratic renewal to allow people to feel that their institutions reflect their
• 30:18
  actual wishes, rather than doubling down on elite driven technocracy in the name of
• 30:22
  security or whatever it happens to be. So that's what I take away from
• 30:26
  it, Kevin. But I mean, I do also think that right now
• 30:30
  there's a real opportunity. I mean, the Democrats also like one which I
• 30:33
  think is forgotten. They won both Senate seats, so now the Democrats have
• 30:37
  control of all branches of government, and I do think that there's probably real
• 30:42
  motivation to pass things like healthcare and the two thousand dollars stimulus and all these
• 30:48
  other things, which which is it? I mean, I think one of
• 30:52
  the things that's interesting with the mega crowd, the mega cult, is that
• 30:57
  there is an underlying economically left wing populist element to it, which is kind
• 31:03
  of interesting. Like and Trump was pushing right the two thousand dollars, so
• 31:07
  I got so I wonder whether or not there's an opportunity here for for the
• 31:12
  Democrats to pass some things that will make that mega like like economically left wing
• 31:18
  populist aspect like happy, or I don't know, pacify them a little bit
• 31:22
  by giving them healthcare, giving them two thousand dollars. They don't want to,
• 31:26
  they already won like that. Now that the fascists quote unquote tried to
• 31:30
  take over the set the legislatures, they don't have to do anything for four
• 31:36
  years, which is what that deboord quote that I mentioned is kind of saying
• 31:41
  they don't have to do anything anymore because they can say at least we're not
• 31:45
  that well. I actually disagree, like I do think that there's a momentum
• 31:47
  in the Democratic Party to pass those things. I hope that history proves me
• 31:52
  wrong. I'll say a complicated are more complication here, because what Pilly Boy
• 31:56
  is saying is on track, I think is that. Well, I hope
• 32:00
  that doesn't stick. Remember that MAGA and this wave of far right people like
• 32:07
  Trump did not cause this right. This is something that Cornell West brings up,
• 32:10
  is that this movement of the far right began under Obama. It began
• 32:16
  under the Democrats. Not so. The Democrats are just as much to blame
• 32:21
  for this whole situation as the Republicans. And that's why the fact that Trump
• 32:25
  is going down in flames really doesn't give me any fucking comfort whatsoever, because
• 32:30
  now we have mister Joe Biden, the fucking king of the milk toast presidents,
• 32:35
  coming into office, and like, what's he gonna do. He's just
• 32:37
  gonna resume a kind of Obama program where it's like, all right, let's
• 32:40
  switch Republican donors out for big corporate Democrat donors and nothing's gonna be any different,
• 32:46
  and the same social issues that caused this sort of unrest are just going
• 32:52
  to exacerbate further unless there is a real actual change in the Democratic Party,
• 32:59
  a good sign of which would be for them to accept something like a Green
• 33:02
  New Deal or some other more radical kind of platform like that, rather than
• 33:07
  just moving back to like this sort of safe democratic politics, because that everyone's
• 33:14
  that that's the problem in the first place. Conservatives and Democrats, they're all
• 33:17
  liberals. They're just a little bit different side of the same fucking spectrum.
• 33:22
  They're all the same in the end, and we're just switching out one for
• 33:25
  another. The puppet on the left and the puppet on the right, and
• 33:29
  basically the same person holds both puppets, And it's all like, that's why
• 33:32
  this is some extent, I mean, I think the idea that Trump is
• 33:36
  sort of this is a big turning point. No, it's not, give
• 33:39
  me a fucking break. I mean, I think you're right that that that
• 33:44
  I don't think there's going to be like some bit radical shifts. You need
• 33:49
  something. I mean, you need to change the entire system of government in
• 33:52
  the States. I mean, so the I agree to some extent, I
• 33:55
  do you think that we're going to see these what are pretty moderate things.
• 34:00
  The things I mentioned are not revolutionary, right, just like get having a
• 34:01
  public option, like the two thousand dollars stimulus, like a couple other things
• 34:06
  like, that's not rather change at all. That's just like, oh yeah,
• 34:10
  exactly a lot of other countries have gotten a lot more. But I
• 34:13
  don't think the reason for that alone is because of Part of the reason for
• 34:19
  that, though, is also the institutional factor. Like even though the Democrats
• 34:22
  won the Senate, they don't have a super Like they need sixty votes to
• 34:28
  pass a filibuster, so even now you know they it's not possible. Like
• 34:34
  I think a lot of lefties are going to start getting mad at Biden for
• 34:37
  not doing more. But even if he wanted to do more, even if
• 34:39
  he wanted to do literally everything that Bernie wanted to do, there are a
• 34:43
  bunch of institutional and also party factors, one being Joe Manchin, who's like
• 34:46
  a moderate Democrat who is already on record saying he will not support a Green
• 34:52
  New Deal. He will not support right. So like, there's just so
• 34:54
  many factors in play that you can't just blame Biden for. I'm sure Biden's
• 34:59
  happy about it. But I'm just saying there's like a bunch of other factors
• 35:01
  that just structure procedural Even if like factors that would exist if Bernie Sanders was
• 35:07
  president right now in the same conditions, the same barriers would exist, and
• 35:10
  he would have just as much chance of passing the things that he wanted.
• 35:15
  Yeah, well, the a bill to abolish the filibuster in the Great Cosmic
• 35:19
  Irony would probably get filibustered. Yeah, well, I know this is one
• 35:22
  of the problems, right, And I think there's exactly right. And people
• 35:25
  have talked about how it is that during the nineteen thirties through the nineteen fifties,
• 35:30
  because there was a kind of overlapping consensus around a kind of monitored social
• 35:36
  welfare ism and the two parties were less polarized on many issues, it was
• 35:39
  actually possible to pursue a pretty ambitious legislative agenda. And he saw people like
• 35:45
  FVR do that. You saw people like excuse me, you know, Liddy
• 35:51
  Johnson did that, even saw people like Reagan do that up to them.
• 35:53
  But it's because the two party of the parties have become extremely polarized, it's
• 35:58
  very, very difficult to get anyone to shift on their positions. And I
• 36:01
  think that this might not be a problem in a purely majoritarian legislative setting,
• 36:07
  where all you need is fifty percent plus one. But the problem is that
• 36:09
  the United States is designed so the American Constitution is designed to be extremely resistant
• 36:15
  to change and extremely resistant to any ambitious legislative efforts unless there's broad bipartisan consent
• 36:23
  to them. And for that reason, you've seen legislative bridslock on virtually any
• 36:29
  kind of substantive measures for the past what is it thirty years now or so.
• 36:34
  I mean, if you look at the legislative achievements of somebody like Clinton,
• 36:36
  they're pretty minimal. Bush actually was able to really do all that much
• 36:39
  except and act a bunch of tax cuts at the domestic level. I did
• 36:44
  cause the Asian market collapse, but no, no legislative Well, this is
• 36:52
  one of the things, one of the few powers that really is quite substantial
• 36:54
  is the executive power over foreign affairs that's vested in the office of the president.
• 36:58
  Right, But if you look at bomb his signature achievement, right,
• 37:00
  the Affordable Care Act, that only came after he won a massive sweeping victory
• 37:05
  in all the elected branches of government and really had to struggle to push through
• 37:12
  the Affordable Care Act, which was only the result of just hamstringing compromises with
• 37:19
  the moderate Democrats and GOP members who might be willing to sign on to some
• 37:22
  provisions. And then Trump's the only legislative accomplishment again more tax guts, right,
• 37:28
  And I think people are really sick at this and really tired of it.
• 37:30
  But it's very difficult, for the reasons that Victor was pointing out and
• 37:35
  a lot of others to see how that could fundamentally change with that big institutional
• 37:38
  change. That's why I always get it frustrated with, like with I get
• 37:42
  frustrated with like the online left or you know, the Bernie or bust because
• 37:45
  I'm always like, okay, like that's premised on your own misunderstanding of how
• 37:50
  the American political system works. It doesn't really matter if Bernie was president or
• 37:53
  not, Like so many of the would matter, Like he would make a
• 37:58
  difference to the extent possible, right, would push it more left in I
• 38:00
  mean, he would make a rhetorical difference, but he wouldn't make a difference
• 38:04
  in the Senate. He wouldn't make a difference in the House of representatives.
• 38:07
  It would just be like symbolic. But then you wouldn't be able to get
• 38:09
  anything done, Like you would need the House and the Senate to be democratic
• 38:14
  socialists like that, Like that's what So you would literally need everybody to be
• 38:17
  I don't know why you're saying that these parties are polarized either. That's exactly
• 38:22
  the opposite of what Eric just said. He said they're both serving the same
• 38:24
  interest, which is one hundred percent what I agree with. Yeah, so,
• 38:28
  and what you're saying that they just don't do anything. That's the success
• 38:31
  of the system. It's designed not to do anything except for the donors that
• 38:37
  are the same for both parties, whether or not you give tax cuts.
• 38:39
  Yeah, partisanship, I mean, this is the thing. If you look
• 38:44
  at the way that conservatives speak about back up through the nineteen eighties, people
• 38:47
  who are willing to sometimes agree that the other side, the other political party,
• 38:52
  had something of value to offer. Right, this is rhetorical, This
• 38:57
  is not, This is not since the seventies fundamentally shift any change of wealth,
• 39:04
  any distribution of wealth except who has it, and it goes up all
• 39:07
  the time. Well, no, I actually think that that misapprehends how it
• 39:10
  is that the US political system works. Right, There is real polarization in
• 39:15
  the United States between people like democratic socialists who really do want to pursue a
• 39:19
  radical agenda, and things like social conservative capitalists who want exactly the opposite.
• 39:25
  The reason no democratic socialist agenda has ever been advanced since at least what the
• 39:31
  okay, but early when I'm getting at right, the reason why it is
• 39:36
  that you see very little because very little difference in how the actual parties engage
• 39:40
  in governance. Isn't because there's no real polarization in the population. It is
• 39:45
  because there's dramatic polarization in the population, which means that the two parties tend
• 39:49
  to pursue what sometimes called the median voter, right, the most average person
• 39:53
  right in the middle, who's not going to have any views that are going
• 39:58
  to offend anyone, because you're fighting for very thin margins when it comes to
• 40:02
  any election. Right. So it's actually a consequence of the partisanship that you
• 40:07
  see in the United States, sorry like in American culture, that there's so
• 40:10
  little difference in the actual policies the party pursues because none of the parties are
• 40:15
  actually willing to pursue a radical agenda that will upset the few people in the
• 40:19
  middle who might be willing to shift their opinion. Right, So there's a
• 40:22
  problem with the representation of a representative democracy. But that's exactly the same thing
• 40:25
  as I'm saying the system's working like it should for the people that are paying
• 40:30
  for it. I think I agree that it's the same thing to say that
• 40:32
  they're completely different as to say that they're the same. And there is no
• 40:37
  difference when you draw a really hard line around politics and you don't look at
• 40:42
  the extra political factors that influence this, Like sure, things didn't change since
• 40:47
  the seventies except the Internet, social media, world economic relations, like everything
• 40:53
  other than politics has basically changed. And now we're looking at drawing a circle
• 40:59
  around and looking at politics to figure out, well, what the hell is
• 41:01
  happening, And nobody's looking outside, nobody's looking at say, what's the well
• 41:06
  people are looking at this. What's the role in Facebook in destabilizing this?
• 41:09
  What's the role in new geopolitical configurations that have emerged in the past decade or
• 41:15
  two and their influence on American politics, Like American politics is not happening in
• 41:19
  a vacuum. But so your assessment is great insofar as it is siloed in
• 41:24
  a purely political economic view of the states. But when you start factoring in
• 41:30
  all these other exactly the opposite what I said, though, I said wealth
• 41:34
  distribution is the only thing that's changed about politics. Well, wealth distribution has,
• 41:38
  like you know, it improved after World War Two, it was more
• 41:42
  distributed, and then since I had since the seventies. So yeah, we'll
• 41:45
  just given moved on. I'm just stretching back a bit further than since the
• 41:49
  neoliberal revolutions in the seventies and eighties, the wealth gap has slowly gotten worse.
• 41:54
  Again. Okay, that's a huge factor in all of this. But
• 41:57
  some of the other ways that we do today and then we learn about things.
• 42:01
  You know, you talk about this as a spectacle, Well what is
• 42:05
  the spectacle? What is carrying these images? Right? Like in the old
• 42:07
  analog days, we'd all be reading about this this morning in our with our
• 42:13
  with our corn cob pipes and our rocking chairs out on our decks, and
• 42:15
  then when the boy throws the newspaper onto the balcony. But now we have
• 42:22
  this, we have this phenomenon called instant explanation. I think it's something like
• 42:25
  Benu Means was saying this back in the day. An event barely is even
• 42:30
  allowed to take place before it is explained to death and spun in a thousand
• 42:34
  different directions. And that's why we're never going to get to the truth behind
• 42:37
  any of this. Everyone's going to be glued to their streams and their image
• 42:42
  sources and their media bubbles, and everyone's going to be looking at it through
• 42:47
  these separate lenses, where what we need to do is maybe broaden our scope
• 42:52
  a little bit and try to look outside politics and purely economic causes, right,
• 42:57
  or else we're just being determinist about it. Yeah, And this is
• 43:00
  what I was going. This is kind of what I was trying to get
• 43:01
  at. Right, that in the kind of earlier era of print media that
• 43:06
  you saw existing through the nineteen you know, the late nineteenth century up until
• 43:09
  about the mid late twentieth century, right, it was possible for people to
• 43:15
  consume relatively complex media that would expose them to a wide variety of alternate viewpoints
• 43:21
  and for them to just view that as normal and part of the community that
• 43:23
  they lived in. Right, You could pick up a newspaper and it would
• 43:25
  usually have a polemical point, but they would use You would usually at least
• 43:30
  get exposure to a few different socialist views, left wing views, right wing
• 43:34
  views, et cetera, et cetera. And what you've seen right now with
• 43:36
  political stratification is people entering into their silos and hearing nothing really of substance about
• 43:42
  the other side, aside from the fact that they're wrong about everything. And
• 43:45
  the interesting thing about this is there really is deep political and cultural disagreements in
• 43:50
  the United States over virtually everything. Right, a democratic socialist on the far
• 43:54
  left who wants trans rights for all we know we didn't, every other drug
• 44:00
  completely legalized, and a vast welfare state and worker ownership that means of production
• 44:06
  has a very different outlook on what society should look like than a Christian libertarian
• 44:10
  who thinks that, you know, guns, Jesus and capital are what should
• 44:16
  make the world go round? Right, I guess where do I guess?
• 44:19
  What I want to ask them is where would all this disagreement have come from?
• 44:22
  Because when we hear, like I think, we talk about Bernie Sanders
• 44:27
  saying that in the sixties, you know, a lot of Bernie Sanders platforms
• 44:31
  were like the general consensus platforms, whereas today Bernie Sanders platform is extremely divisive
• 44:39
  and only appreciated by people on the far left or or the real left.
• 44:45
  And it's a divisive it. So where did this division come from? And
• 44:47
  yes, like economic disparity is a huge cause behind it, but where else
• 44:52
  did it come from? You can't just sort of use political division to explain
• 44:59
  why there's political division. That's like a tautology. And if I may just
• 45:04
  tack on to that point, what you're calling politics is what you're saying ordinary
• 45:07
  people believe, which is absolutely not what I'm calling politics, because what they
• 45:12
  believe has no recognizable effect on the way that power shifts or that a country
• 45:19
  is governed, as evinced by the last forty years. Well, but this
• 45:22
  is what I'm saying, it does, right, And it's precisely because the
• 45:23
  United States is so polarized culturally, you know, along the parameters that we've
• 45:29
  discussed it. But that's why it's working. Why is it polarized? Like
• 45:31
  Eric just said, the Southern strategy that, yeah, but this is what
• 45:36
  I'm trying to explain, right that because there's mass polarization on the part of
• 45:39
  the American of American society. Right, you have two political parties because the
• 45:45
  institutions are designed to produce a two party system, right, who have very
• 45:49
  little interest in chasing after what they consider to be fringe views, right,
• 45:54
  because they know perfectly well that they have their supporters and most of the people
• 46:00
  on the fringe are going to align with them no matter what. Right people
• 46:04
  Bernie Sanders supporters are never going to break from the Democratic Party because the only
• 46:07
  alternative then is something like Donald Trump. Right. This means that the kind
• 46:12
  of people that both parties tend to pursue are the median voters, right,
• 46:15
  the people who exist in the middle and who have very innocuous views, and
• 46:21
  that tends to keep politics moving on a relatively unambitious, straight and narrow course.
• 46:25
  Yeah, maybe that tells me a little bit that the moderate voters and
• 46:30
  abstraction, it doesn't really exist, just like Obama's middle class. It doesn't
• 46:34
  really exist. It's just an abstraction and you don't really need to appeal to
• 46:37
  them at all because it doesn't make a difference because they're not fucking there,
• 46:40
  because they are just a number in a well. It's true. So back
• 46:44
  to backup pills too, like I think what you were saying is that what
• 46:46
  the average person thinks has no impact. And it's actually interesting. There's when
• 46:50
  I was studying like comparative politics, it's like the political science research on American
• 46:54
  politics has a very strong consensus. All the evidence shows pretty much that like
• 47:00
  a random citizen's policy preference has almost no impact on what policies are chosen.
• 47:05
  Yeah, in fact, like it's it, there's the relationship is almost is
• 47:08
  I remember the quote was something like in the abstract with something like the relationship
• 47:14
  is so weak that it may as well not exist, like between a voter
• 47:19
  between like policy preference of the voter and what policies are actually enacted by the
• 47:22
  government. And they have all other reasons which are like institutional reasons, like
• 47:27
  private interests, like special interests, like as much having a much stronger relationship.
• 47:32
  I wonder what that scale is relative to corporate donors. But that's exactly
• 47:37
  my point. You're saying that thing happens because they're appealing to a middle and
• 47:42
  I'm saying, like you're just you're over determining the effect by not just saying
• 47:49
  money dominates the system. Money gets decisions made, not voters. Well,
• 47:52
  I think that the two things are fundamentally related. Right. I mean,
• 47:54
  what you have in most US elections is again a two parties in which there
• 48:00
  are many friend views, right, competing for a small minority of voters who
• 48:05
  might change their mind in certain swing states. Right. And so this requires
• 48:09
  unbelievable amounts of money to try to target those voters and get them to shift
• 48:14
  one way or another. Right. But because do you mean, oh,
• 48:16
  explain that, Explain that get them to shift? Well, I mean,
• 48:20
  you can think about voters in Florida, you can think about voters in Ohio.
• 48:22
  You can think what is the specific mechanism by which they get convinced them
• 48:27
  with commercials and shit, wow, this is what I'm saying. It's usually
• 48:30
  by being targeted by That's what I was looking for. That's exactly, But
• 48:35
  it exactly. But also it's also important. It's also important to disentangle like
• 48:39
  a citizen's random policy preference when you ask them, like what they want to
• 48:43
  happen, and their allegiance to a party too, because there's tons of people
• 48:46
  who they're citizens are totally inconsistent and incoherent with their beliefs, Like you ask
• 48:52
  them like, do you want like healthcare or whatever, and then depending on
• 48:54
  how you ask the question, they'll say yes or no, like that's why
• 48:58
  Brianna Joy Gray and like all these other cringy leftists they often say like,
• 49:02
  oh, like the public supports a Green New Deal, but like that's based
• 49:07
  on some survey, But like the way you ask the survey question matters,
• 49:09
  Like if you say, are you willing to pay like you know, ten
• 49:13
  dollars more a month in taxes to pay for the Green New Deal, like
• 49:16
  the support for it goes like below thirty percent, whereas if you ask,
• 49:20
  like do you support the Green New Deal? So like in any case,
• 49:22
  the point is like citizens are totally incoherent, so like people are. Often
• 49:27
  they have allegiance to a party because it's their team, but that doesn't necessarily
• 49:30
  mean that that's the same as what their policy preferences are. In fact,
• 49:35
  usually the two are unrelated, and people will vote for a party and have
• 49:38
  very little knowledge of what the policy like preferences of the parties they're supporting are.
• 49:44
  Yeah, the policy specific thing is good because I know that even here
• 49:47
  in Canada, I like a I don't usually know half of the platforms that
• 49:52
  for the politicians that I'm voting for. And b most of them aren't even
• 49:55
  fucking clear about what they're gonna do when they get into office until they just
• 50:00
  do the Napoleon thing and they just dive in and then think from there.
• 50:02
  Right, they know nobody like maybe our Green Party or our NDP will put
• 50:07
  on like a fully worked out platform that you can go through and look at
• 50:12
  each thing individually. But our main parties lives in the conserves. They don't
• 50:15
  do shit. They they put out like some vague promises, half of which
• 50:20
  they don't follow afterwards. And it's the same thing. Yeah, for policy
• 50:23
  preference, it's it's silly. There shouldn't be a correlation, and I'm glad
• 50:28
  to hear there is barely one. Yeah, and it's just and it's just
• 50:31
  and it's just people, you know. So it's like, yeah, it's
• 50:34
  like special interest money. And then a bunch of fucking clueless citizens who have
• 50:37
  incoherent views, who don't know anything in the middle, who are being hypnotized
• 50:42
  by the spectacle of it all and cultural concerns. Right, I think people
• 50:45
  are much more aware of like what their cultural membership and their identity membership is.
• 50:49
  That seems to be much more important to people. And that's really what
• 50:52
  self imposed immaturity indeed cultural it's cultural polarization and membership polarization. But like like
• 51:00
  you know, economic and like policy preference, like people are fucking clueless about
• 51:02
  that shit, like they don't know. I'll give you a sexy spectacle quotation
• 51:07
  from debor politics will eventually be replaced by imagery. He writes this in what
• 51:14
  the sixties or whenever this was written. The politician will be too happy to
• 51:17
  abdicate in favor of his image. Or we could include party, because the
• 51:22
  image slash party will be much more powerful than he could ever be. It's
• 51:27
  working, it's doing what it should. I just wanted to say there's a
• 51:30
  really funny thing. There's a comment I wanted to make about the economic issue.
• 51:35
  And then I also want to make a sift the Simpsons reference. Actually
• 51:37
  I'll go with the Simpsons reference first because what I always use to explain this
• 51:40
  to my students when talking about the incoherence of people's views is you might remember
• 51:45
  there was that episode where the student the teachers go on strike because they're not
• 51:51
  getting paid enough, and they all meet in front of the parents, and
• 51:53
  who propa gives this big long speech. She's like, don't you want to
• 51:57
  give your children a good education? All apparent? So like, yeah,
• 52:00
  yeah, children are the future, and Skinner goes up and he's like yeah,
• 52:04
  but to do it, we'd have to raise taxes. And then all
• 52:07
  the parents are like, oh, the taxes, we can't put up with
• 52:09
  that. And then she's like come on, and they're like, oh,
• 52:12
  yeah, kids the future, future, and he like like does that little
• 52:15
  motion with his hand about money, and they're like, oh, yeah,
• 52:16
  that hand thing means the taxes and stuff. Right. This is really how
• 52:21
  it is that voters actually tend to approach a lot of issues. If you
• 52:23
  offer them the option of supporting left wing programs without attaching it to any kind
• 52:28
  of cost, they'll usually say yes, right, because who doesn't want more
• 52:31
  public services? Right for the most part, Yeah, if you don't attach
• 52:36
  to any cost, and also if you don't attach any like cultural meaning to
• 52:38
  it. Right. So, if you just ask them something really specifical without
• 52:42
  saying whether it's like left wing or whatever, like yeah exactly, you can
• 52:45
  get like a really conservative person to be like, yeah, like I want
• 52:47
  that, like I want and then but if you're like, oh, it's
• 52:50
  like socialized medicine. Then they're like, no, I don't know exactly.
• 52:52
  You can even use vague hetoric, right, do you think the government should
• 52:54
  be more compassionate towards those who need it? Right? And a lot of
• 52:58
  people will think like, well, I believe in compassion, so yes,
• 53:00
  check, check, and all of a sudden you sound like a DSA or
• 53:01
  right. But like on the economic point, I mean, this is one
• 53:04
  of the things I actually think a test to what you see with trump Ism,
• 53:07
  which is important because there have been a number of different studies done in
• 53:10
  political psychology to assess whether Marx was actually right. People feel a sense of
• 53:15
  class consciousness, and it turned out that the best empirical evidence we have right
• 53:19
  now is that he was half right, Unlike what a lot of neoliberal economists
• 53:23
  claimed. People don't just make evaluations about how well they're doing by comparing themselves
• 53:29
  to themselves. Right. I don't just ask myself, am I doing better
• 53:32
  today than I was yesterday? Which was kind of the Thatcher question in the
• 53:37
  nineteen eighties, Right, I will actually ask how am I doing relative to
• 53:40
  other people? Right? The problem is that we don't tend to ask how
• 53:45
  is the working class doing relative to the capitalist class, Or how is Joe
• 53:49
  the plumber doing next to Jeff Bezos. I guess Elon Musk will be the
• 53:53
  new poster boy for just incomparable graft, I asked myself, how am I
• 53:59
  Joe the plumber doing next to Professor so and so Who's toilet I repair?
• 54:04
  Right? We make interpersonal comparisons to the person who's above us immediately right.
• 54:08
  And this is extremely problematic since it means it's very difficult to actually mobilize people
• 54:14
  against ruling elites, because the elites can say, well, no, the
• 54:16
  people that you're angry at aren't us. You shouldn't be pissed off at the
• 54:22
  capitalist class. You should be angry at the doctors, the lawyers, the
• 54:24
  educators, the bureaucrats, all these undeserving people who think they're better than you,
• 54:29
  who live in a nicer neighborhood than you, and who are able to
• 54:30
  send their kids to cool colleges when you have to settle for a community college
• 54:35
  or state level college or whatever. It happens to be right, And it's
• 54:38
  really effective because those are the people that we tend to comparisons to mentally,
• 54:43
  right, And I think that there's a lot of common sense to back this
• 54:45
  up. I don't typically sit there thinking to myself, geez, you know,
• 54:50
  I wonder if I'm still pissed off that that judge on the Supreme Court
• 54:54
  is making two hundred and fifty thousand dollars I should be making that I sit
• 54:58
  there and I think I should have tenured position, or that PhD student who
• 55:01
  got a scholarship. His work isn't much better than mine. I should have
• 55:04
  a scholarship, all that kind of stuff. Yeah, I mean, I
• 55:07
  agree. I was just gonna I was thinking about how this this human tendency
• 55:12
  to compare ourselves to others. I'm just noticing a lot a lot of like
• 55:15
  the right wing reaction to what happened at the Capitol. Right is is immediately
• 55:20
  doing what we call what about ism, But I think it like speaks to
• 55:22
  a similar thing, which is just like comparing. It's like, okay,
• 55:25
  like my people did this, but like what about Antifa and and and BLM
• 55:29
  and stuff. And it's always thinking about like what is what is being culturally
• 55:32
  legitimized on my team, and what is being culturally condemned on the other team,
• 55:37
  And what's the what's the balance and what's the material difference. I mean,
• 55:40
  I'm seeing that talking point all over all over the right wing. I
• 55:43
  think it's a problem, and that pisses me off because I'm like, look,
• 55:45
  you might be able to condemn some of the violence that was committed during
• 55:50
  the protest during the summer, but there's no doubt that they were motivated by
• 55:52
  something that's a genuine concern, right, which is the murders are of an
• 55:54
  innocent person by a police officer, right, Whereas this was motived by a
• 56:00
  desire to overturn a democratic election to make sure that their own guy would get
• 56:04
  in office. So come that's you can be more sympathetic than that, I'm
• 56:07
  not. I'm actually less sympathetic than I'm betraying myself here. Well, deep
• 56:13
  state pedophiles are trying to kick out your guy and put in put in a
• 56:17
  zombie animated corpse guy who represents the establishment and has his entire light. If
• 56:23
  that were if those were the Steaks, I'd probably get a cow hat on
• 56:27
  too. Yeah. I mean, whenever you think about the reality of what
• 56:30
  happened, that picture, that image of all those dudes and inside of the
• 56:35
  Capitol and that guy with the horn, the QAnon, dude is going to
• 56:37
  be in one of those like one hundred years of photography books right next to
• 56:42
  the right, next to the VS carpet bombing pictures and the moon landing pictures,
• 56:46
  And that's going to be in there. And now QAnon is going to
• 56:50
  be like just fixed in the American historical memory for the next century because of
• 56:58
  that fucking barbarian from Diablo to come to life. Yeah, I'll flip You'll
• 57:02
  be flip it through your history book and they'll be like the two towers falling
• 57:07
  down. They'll be like Bush with like the mission accomplished thing, and then
• 57:10
  they'll be that dude with the horns and the q sent me the professional BLM
• 57:15
  counter protesters. Honestly, I'm very most mostly jealous of QAnon with the fact
• 57:22
  that they've just been able to develop and nurture and have so much buy into
• 57:28
  an entire cosmology of the world that is completely divorced from reality. I mean,
• 57:32
  we can thank Facebook for it in part hands Eric and I, as
• 57:37
  Eric and I discussed on a Patron podcast yesterday. Yeah, it's the condition
• 57:40
  of their possibility. But I'm jealous. Where's where are our myth makers?
• 57:46
  That's the thing the news that's like this was Walter Benjamin's point in the storyteller,
• 57:51
  with our hyperconnected world, what I was saying earlier, instant explanation,
• 57:54
  right, nothing has time to become a story, nothing has time to be
• 57:58
  mythologized. It's all explained immediately, and that takes a way that you lose
• 58:04
  something in your culture. Maybe maybe it's this is a bit of an older
• 58:07
  view now, but you do lose something when you can't tell stories. Like
• 58:13
  I said, we'd all be hearing about this as it comes through the proper
• 58:15
  media channels and is filtered in various ways, but we get sort of raw,
• 58:21
  unfiltered imagery and in a way that's like more confusing and even worse than
• 58:27
  at least we have professional newspeople organizing it for us and putting together the narratives
• 58:34
  for us, and in the meantime we can sort of mythologize and speculate,
• 58:37
  and then when we get the full story, those things come together and it
• 58:42
  creates something bigger. But today we just get whatever your whatever, your echo
• 58:45
  chamber wants to say, whether whether it's and most of those times those echo
• 58:50
  chambers are filled with Twitter robots and what do you call that shit? Copy
• 58:53
  pasta where someone immediately just makes all these posts about things like I think,
• 58:59
  I think I'm seeing one now about the BLM protests. Because people will make
• 59:04
  the points, people will make all these points, someone will anticipate it and
• 59:07
  make a copy pasta, and then it goes through the echo chambers and everyone
• 59:10
  just copy paste, copy paste, And that's that's arguments today is what aboutism
• 59:15
  and copy pasta? That's that's what our online discourse is at right now.
• 59:21
  It's a very it's a very good it's straight out of Ivy League level of
• 59:24
  debate. There we are being turned into algorithmic subjects. I just want to
• 59:30
  finish this up because this is actually about QAnon. It was really funny because
• 59:32
  I was looking into a little bit about how he sends them messages, and
• 59:37
  I was kind of thinking to myself that in some ways this is really appealing
• 59:39
  because many of us sometimes feel a sense of existential dread, like the meaninglessness
• 59:44
  of existence. But these QAnon people really have an almost like excessively meaningful world.
• 59:50
  And the probably the pre eminent example of this is there was this picture
• 59:53
  of Trump with a bunch of other senior Republicans and they were all giving a
• 59:59
  thumbs up something. And one of the symbols that these people interpreted as being
• 1:00:02
  from Q and on was the fact that if you draw a circle around their
• 1:00:06
  thumbs and draw a line between one thumb and another, it looks like a
• 1:00:09
  giant queue. And this was taken to be a sign that all these Republicans
• 1:00:14
  are into it, and they're sending a message to their supporters that they're all
• 1:00:17
  part of the conspiracy. Right, It's fitting that he wears then that that
• 1:00:22
  bull head dress because it's a completely totemic religion. He probably drinks loads of
• 1:00:27
  Nike will too all the time. Giant fucking queue there too. Yeah.
• 1:00:32
  Can I just make a point about the protests. So I think one point
• 1:00:37
  I was thinking about yesterday is I think on a previous podcast we talked about,
• 1:00:42
  you know, the like use of violence or rioting, the legitimacy of
• 1:00:45
  rioting. And I think I might have said at the time, you know
• 1:00:47
  that I have less of a problem with people destroying government property versus people's private
• 1:00:53
  property, right, like like just destroying some random persons, like you know,
• 1:00:57
  small business or something. So like some extent, I think, like
• 1:01:00
  yesterday, it's like if you're gonna write or something. You know, even
• 1:01:02
  though I totally obviously disagreed with the message, it's like the fact that they're
• 1:01:07
  rioting and like a symbol of or you know, that's a government institution.
• 1:01:12
  It's it's like that's that seems like a more legitimate target to me. Yeah,
• 1:01:15
  they did a good job. People, we're talking about it. It's
• 1:01:20
  symbolic and it's and it's it's you know, it's it's public property. Didn't
• 1:01:23
  kill anybody. Well, yeah, they didn't kill anybody themselves, right,
• 1:01:27
  Like, so I would be like, I'm i al would say, I'm
• 1:01:29
  more supportive of of destruction of property when it's public property. First. I
• 1:01:31
  will also say that there was kind of an amusing element to this where apparently
• 1:01:36
  Ted Cruz and a couple of the other like megafar right, Trump is we're
• 1:01:39
  amongst the first people to evacuate, And I read an article where it was
• 1:01:43
  like, it's kind of amusing that they weren't willing to sit there and just
• 1:01:45
  deal with the monster that they created or helped create, as it like stormed
• 1:01:50
  into their fucking headquarters and all of its glory and fucking I can just imagine
• 1:01:55
  Ted Cruse with his Ivy League education looking at the guy with the fucking news
• 1:02:00
  helmet being like, that's your man, Teddy, I'm your number one fan.
• 1:02:07
  Yeah. Yeah, it's interesting that we don't. We never took seriously
• 1:02:12
  all the all the incitement when it was just in words, but now that
• 1:02:15
  it's cropped up in images and video and now we're all like stunned that it
• 1:02:19
  really happened. It's so we still kind of culturally draw a really hard line
• 1:02:23
  between words and images. Words words can be deceptive and kind of meaningless,
• 1:02:30
  but for some reason images are are traumatic and shocking and and and somehow that's
• 1:02:35
  where we draw the line. Now we're all outraged, not outraged by the
• 1:02:39
  telling of people the incitement of a riot, were enraged when the riot actually
• 1:02:45
  happens. That's it's self defee It's funny. It's funny you say that because
• 1:02:49
  I think I'm assuming you're thinking about like these politicians who are now all of
• 1:02:52
  a sudden like outraged by what happens, even though they've been like letting this
• 1:02:54
  incitement happen. The outrage I think the reason for that is because Paul,
• 1:03:00
  and I mean, I think politicians are often thinking very narrow mindedly about their
• 1:03:06
  own like interests to be reelected. So like they are making very very situational
• 1:03:10
  calculations about what they should how they should react to something, and they're thinking
• 1:03:15
  about voters. So I think like oftentimes they let these things slide and weren't
• 1:03:20
  thinking about like the broader implications of what they were sort of like morally legitimizing
• 1:03:25
  or authorizing and more just thinking, well, I really don't want to piss
• 1:03:29
  off this base. This base is really energized. I need to make sure
• 1:03:31
  that I'm in their good books. I need to make sure that you know,
• 1:03:35
  I don't they don't like turn on me. You know, it's very
• 1:03:37
  narrow Calcua like Cruz was making these I don't know, half gestures sort of
• 1:03:43
  like endorsing or stoking before all this happened. Canadian, By the way,
• 1:03:47
  we're not sending our best at all. I feel like you made that joke
• 1:03:52
  before on this podcast. I think I made it with respect to that Lauren
• 1:03:57
  Southern. Is she Canadian? Yeah, I admit it with respect to her.
• 1:04:00
  So we still have a few we have a few more awful people to
• 1:04:05
  go through that we've sent down there. But at least rhythm. But anyway,
• 1:04:10
  they hate, they hate and will never love Cruise because they can smell
• 1:04:14
  that on him. They can smell this uh uh political maneuvering on him in
• 1:04:18
  a way that Trump is too, too narcissistic and too filled with his own
• 1:04:25
  ego or his own lack of ego that he's trying to feel genuine. So
• 1:04:29
  then they they're never gonna love him. And this is kind of why my
• 1:04:32
  theory of this is that it's a pseudo event, is that there's nobody with
• 1:04:36
  that gravitas, that that desire that Trump has that could fill that place.
• 1:04:43
  Like even when Don Junior does it tries to incite the the yocals, he's
• 1:04:47
  he's totally transparently try hard about it. And the thing that Trump doesn't have
• 1:04:56
  is the ability to look like he's trying hard because it's his. It embodies
• 1:05:00
  his entire being out of this way so true, So who comes who can
• 1:05:03
  keep Trump going or who can keep trump Ism going? Who can keep the
• 1:05:08
  the bullhead guy going after this after he's gone and unless he starts doing it
• 1:05:13
  from the sidelines and goes to a media outlet, But there's no one.
• 1:05:16
  Yeah, I'm wondering. I think I think I think the most likely candidate
• 1:05:20
  for that is somebody from like cable news, so like a Tucker Carlson or
• 1:05:26
  like or like one of these people who is already part of like the you
• 1:05:29
  know, the the hyperreal like whatever these you know BODERARTI in terms you like
• 1:05:32
  to use, like part of that like ecosystem that's gonna have. Like I
• 1:05:36
  agree with you, it's it can't be one of these conventional politicians, no
• 1:05:41
  matter how much they supported Trump, they just don't embody the rhetoric. But
• 1:05:45
  you know, a Hannity, a Sean Hannity, you know, Tucker Carlson,
• 1:05:48
  one of these people. I could imagine them coming in and being scarier
• 1:05:51
  because that they're at least Tucker Carlson. I think is I'm gonna actually make
• 1:05:55
  a propsy right here, And I want you guys to note it because when
• 1:05:58
  I'm proven right in ten years, we're gonna look back on this and I'm
• 1:06:01
  going to just mash to be play like. You know. Another prediction,
• 1:06:09
  I predicted there's gonna be another Oklahoma. First they went for a movie star
• 1:06:13
  with Reagan, then they went reality TV star with Trump. The only place
• 1:06:16
  to go is porn star next? So I think that's ultimately what we're going
• 1:06:20
  to see. It's a hot prediction. I like it. I'm I'm gonna
• 1:06:25
  I'm gonna say it's gonna be Kanye trying to win back Kim. He's gonna
• 1:06:28
  do this grand romantic gesture. He's gonna run for president and be like this
• 1:06:30
  one's for you, take me back please, And he's going to try and
• 1:06:33
  do it to impress her. He could have crossed the aisle support. Yeah,
• 1:06:36
  or it could be or it could be a YouTuber, oh god to
• 1:06:42
  youtub or president YouTube could be a YouTuber yeah, yeah, it could be
• 1:06:49
  like it could be one, or it could be one. Have to die
• 1:06:51
  before that. He's not American though, you know, but one of these
• 1:06:54
  like American right wing like YouTube commentators honestly like you know, and also too
• 1:06:59
  like in response to you know, Matt, you're joking about a porn star,
• 1:07:00
  but I feel like equally absurd, but probably much more likely one of
• 1:07:04
  these fucking weird right wing YouTubers has a shot. Could you even imagine like
• 1:07:10
  a fucking president, Dave Rubin, what would that be? Like? You
• 1:07:13
  thought that Donald You thought Donald Trump was fucking dumb. You'd sit there and
• 1:07:18
  b L I d would be like, what city am again? You're in
• 1:07:21
  the White House, don't worry about it? Oh okay, good? Yeah,
• 1:07:29
  it would be fucked up fucking grifters, man, I swear, I
• 1:07:31
  don't know. I don't know. It would have to be somebody who's That's
• 1:07:34
  the thing though, Like the problem is that there's the the A lot of
• 1:07:38
  these people are grifters. It would have to be one who really believes,
• 1:07:40
  like the way that Trump believes. You know. I stand by my porn
• 1:07:44
  star prediction, though. I think that there's a teleology to history here,
• 1:07:47
  and the natural evolution of the moral majority types is that eventually they're going to
• 1:07:53
  sell their soul so hard that they're going to bring in somebody who used to
• 1:07:57
  get banged hard for president. I don't mean the old dead horse. But
• 1:08:00
  I think we're all gonna come together when the real impact of climate change in
• 1:08:04
  fifty years start to come to that's gonna be the external enemy there finally unites
• 1:08:10
  us all. And of course it'll be far too late by then, but
• 1:08:13
  we're all gonna be fucking saints in fifty sixty years. We're all gonna be
• 1:08:17
  saints. You don't think it's gonna You don't think it's just gonna lead to
• 1:08:19
  it's gonna lead to what's it called like like a like an apocalyptic No,
• 1:08:25
  it'll be like a nine to eleven fact, except like over many many years
• 1:08:29
  is everyone's just gonna come together against the external enemy. Except the external enemy
• 1:08:33
  is going to be well, ourselves, but also the one hundred industries that
• 1:08:38
  have done this to the world and various other things. Or we'll end up
• 1:08:44
  like mad Max. Na. It won't be well, it'll be Mad Max
• 1:08:46
  afterwards. But leading up to them, like when after it's too late,
• 1:08:49
  but we're all trying to stop it. That's when we're all that's gonna be
• 1:08:53
  the best time because we're all gonna come together. The political binaries will be
• 1:08:57
  abolished because we'll all be Green Party and then but it'll be too late of
• 1:09:00
  course by that barring some amazing technology being invented that can scrub loads of carbon
• 1:09:06
  out of the atmosphere. Uh. They you politicize a virus though, dude,
• 1:09:12
  I don't have much hope. Who did the Republicans? That is true,
• 1:09:16
  maybe not the Republican cues, but the virus is doing the exact opposite.
• 1:09:21
  With the virus, we're all stuck where we are with climate change.
• 1:09:26
  We're going to see millions and millions of refugees pouring in from on the coasts
• 1:09:30
  and from all over the place, and it's going to be a very different
• 1:09:33
  problem. I mean, at first it's going to be rough because we have
• 1:09:38
  seen the refugee crisis. That's like on the back burner now apparently we haven't
• 1:09:43
  heard much about that. But once that starts back up again, we're going
• 1:09:45
  to be going through some shit. And then finally we're all going to come
• 1:09:48
  together because nobody's denying climate change anymore. It's not this isn't the two thousand
• 1:09:53
  and tens, for fuck's sake. Nobody's denying climate change anymore. So we're
• 1:09:57
  all going to come together over it. Today we can argue about what caused,
• 1:10:00
  what hope so did that, Whose faults this? But we can argue
• 1:10:02
  about jerk off, about the cultural war and like you know, SA gender
• 1:10:05
  bathrooms and nonsense. Well, while while we're making predictions, I predict that
• 1:10:11
  Q becomes a fully fledged state religion in the in the conservative Ethno state in
• 1:10:20
  what is now centered in what is now Florida the Q Party, which which
• 1:10:24
  at the same time goes under water, and then there is a great war
• 1:10:28
  between the Northern United States and the Q State. Do you think there's a
• 1:10:33
  chance that there could be a third party like emerge in the States in reaction
• 1:10:36
  to this, like a MAGA party or something that's going to totally split the
• 1:10:40
  conservative vote. I mean, I hope so that'd be good for the Democrats
• 1:10:43
  strategically. There's just no reason, it seems it is possible. I am
• 1:10:47
  genuinely I thought today that what might very well happen is that the Republicans might
• 1:10:53
  try to find some way to actually just outright exclude Trump from being able to
• 1:10:57
  run for office. Because he's made a lot of political enemies. Well,
• 1:11:00
  that's that actually happens. Well, that's actually why I think I think there's
• 1:11:03
  a chance that that they could impeach Trump after he leaves office, right,
• 1:11:06
  because if they impeach him after he leaves, that means he can't legally be
• 1:11:10
  president again. Oh yeah, but I won't keep him from campaigning to be
• 1:11:14
  prep president even if that's the law. Right, Yeah, But that's what
• 1:11:17
  you're right. I think, Like that's why the Republicans might actually support impeachment
• 1:11:20
  because they might just not want to let Trump be president again. Yeah exactly.
• 1:11:25
  But in that case, it would shock me if he didn't decide it's
• 1:11:27
  creat if not a party, at least some kind of movement that centered around
• 1:11:30
  himself exactly. That's maybe there'd be a chance for for a mega party or
• 1:11:33
  something, or like, yeah, a Q party or something crazy. Yeah,
• 1:11:40
  I mean that'd be that'd be fun. That could they could just finally
• 1:11:42
  get rid of, like even the vestige of respectability, just have dancing girls
• 1:11:45
  appear when like fucking Trump is like up going up on office fucking like just
• 1:11:49
  tank drive. Oh my god, I needed some Catharsis after yesterday, and
• 1:11:56
  so I watched the movie Idiocracy. Oh yeah, that's always a good one.
• 1:12:00
  I wish it wasn't a perfect film. Yeah, yeah, that one's
• 1:12:06
  prophetic as fuck. Yeah. Well, Matt Stone Trey Parker were genius is
• 1:12:12
  of a certain sort. Was that was Mike Judge? Actually? Oh sorry,
• 1:12:16
  fuck yeah, I was basketball? Yeah that was one my bad ship.
• 1:12:21
  Anyway, I feel I feel cathartized, which is sort of the purpose
• 1:12:25
  of participating in the spectacle in the way we do we've we've had our small
• 1:12:30
  head butts reviewed the events of the day. Yeah, God is a political
• 1:12:34
  junkie. It was fucking impossible for me to get any work done yesterday.
• 1:12:38
  I was trying, and I was just obsessively watching the news like it's I
• 1:12:42
  know. I was gonna messages from walk on people being like, you've seen
• 1:12:44
  this ship? What the fuck's going on? Look at this isn't the fuck
• 1:12:46
  up? And I was like, yeah, America, and I recorded an
• 1:12:50
  episode on cybernetics that had absolutely I guess we brought it in ship a little
• 1:12:57
  bit. I tried to stay off Twitter. Yeah, well, what's the
• 1:13:00
  lesson here? I think we should can we should start holding politicians a little
• 1:13:03
  more accountable for this shit they say, but also make sure that we hold
• 1:13:09
  them accountable for evasive and non answery kind of bullshit that was kind of the
• 1:13:15
  standard in the past, and now now it's kind of just you can say
• 1:13:18
  anything and it doesn't matter because it's Trump, and you can pre record a
• 1:13:21
  video and pretend that you're in Canada when you're in Cancun. Yeah, exactly.
• 1:13:27
  Those are the real disgusting people. I agree, non answers not cool
• 1:13:31
  and incitement to riot also not cool. Should be automatic punishment for that.
• 1:13:36
  But I think the solution has been staring us in the face for a very
• 1:13:40
  long time. We just need Justin Trudeau to invade the United States, annex
• 1:13:45
  the northern parts of it, create an ecosocialist paradise with himself as permanently,
• 1:13:51
  and then that will at least take care of North America. We could even
• 1:13:56
  get Mexico on board, I mean almost there right now, and just create
• 1:14:00
  kind of like a United North American Federation that only excludes the Americans South.
• 1:14:02
  And we could give them Alberta too if they want it. Yeah, they
• 1:14:05
  can take it. Yeah, Okay, so yeah they can slice. Yeah
• 1:14:08
  they can build a castle. Any people from Alberta who are listening, Yeah,
• 1:14:12
  no, no, I'm just saying I was just thinking about how that
• 1:14:13
  would kind of be difficult, that would be a wrench in our plan of
• 1:14:15
  creating an ecosocialist utopia. I feel like the Albertans wouldn't be particularly excited about
• 1:14:20
  that. Yeah, I mean, we can just create like it'd be almost
• 1:14:24
  like a state in the state, because we'll carve off like the coast down
• 1:14:27
  through Georgia into Florida, do like a little exemption down there, and then
• 1:14:31
  they can just have like the Midwest from like Louisiana, Texas up there like
• 1:14:34
  a big giant kidney and we can all get it save in the world,
• 1:14:39
  one fair trade organic bean, Starbucks coffee at a time. Well, it's
• 1:14:44
  kind of funny you say that, though, man, because a lot of
• 1:14:45
  like the post liberal like the theory right now, they do often talk about
• 1:14:51
  the need for more pluralism of of or more localism, more insular cultures bottom
• 1:15:00
  they and I did notice like after after like the Democrats won the Senate,
• 1:15:03
  they were like, I saw a lot of discussion of you know, maybe
• 1:15:06
  we need to secede, you know, secession stuff, and like maybe maybe
• 1:15:11
  if that things keep going that way, it could be a real a real
• 1:15:14
  post the Alburtan separatists said the same thing when Trudeau one, it's like,
• 1:15:17
  all right, yeah, that's we're gonna get out of here. We have
• 1:15:20
  no access to We're an oil economy with no access to a port, but
• 1:15:24
  we're just gonna leave by Yeah, that was more funny for exactly that reason.
• 1:15:29
  I remember they McLain's an interview with the head of the Alberta Separatist Party
• 1:15:31
  and brought that exact thing up and they were like, well, I'm not
• 1:15:34
  sure it'll be a problem. You know, we'll find a way to negotiate
• 1:15:39
  and get a better deal that we have right now. And they're like,
• 1:15:41
  what better deal could you have than be part of the country, you know,
• 1:15:45
  where you're trying to get, you know, move your oil to the
• 1:15:46
  coast. And it's like, well, we'll sort that out afterwards. It's
• 1:15:49
  like, I don't know, I really think you should have a solution to
• 1:15:51
  that now, since this is really the whole reason you want separatism. Yeah,
• 1:15:56
  it's a little Brexity, a little bit of a brexit like oversight there.
• 1:16:00
  Yeah, I agree with the more communal I don't know about insular,
• 1:16:03
  but definitely communal, you know Facebook, face down, bottom up. That's
• 1:16:08
  the way I like my politics to be conducted. All right, listeners,
• 1:16:12
  we hope that you have taken this train of intensified emotion and then catharsis and
• 1:16:17
  now we are all chill. Now we don't need we can continue to do
• 1:16:21
  whatever it is we've been doing mostly nothing, So thank you all for being
• 1:16:27
  a part of our climax. And then you know, the the cigarette the
• 1:16:30
  cigarette after, Yeah, the d new mom. Yeah, why don't we
• 1:16:36
  just sign off from the pill pod. This is pills matt Eric Victor and
• 1:16:43
  uh what am I saying? Man? Thank you, thank you, bear
• 1:16:46
  with us who