In a discussion with Rising's Emily Jashinsky about the Substack article, "Congratulations, Elitists: Liberals and Conservatives Do Have Common Interests Now"
Great conversation. Being 68, I was a liberal, free speech absolutist back in the 60's/70's. I have the same free speech beliefs and that now makes me a pariah. You often give this historical perspective which I think many don't know.
You know, I didn't used to be a Free Speech absolutist - I don't like the idea of racists being able to say whatever they wish, for instance, in public, as I believe it is intimidatory, and a form of violence.
But short of outright racial slurs, or directly threatening language, I've come around to this position. I can't believe it took a goon like Trump for that to happen.
Welcome. I was taught by the Jesuits and lay teachers that free speech is most important when people say words that you find distasteful or worse. Being a free speech absolutist doesn't mean abiding threatening or inciteful language. You answer speech w/ more speech. It's tough Alexander, but it's righteous. Kudos on coming into the light.
That language that you liken as "intimidatory, and a form of violence" likely is, but that is better than actual violence, and further, who is to determine what is "intimidatory, and a form of violence?" Right now, I would use those terms to describe pretty much all of the teachings of CRT, anything saying "silence is violence", Whiteness is a disease (such as a recent article in the APA journal) and so on.
And that is the whole point. You don't get to decide what I find "intimidatory, and a form of violence". And nor I, you.
It didn't take Trump to us make us realize this, it was goons such as Tipper Gore, Ed Meese, and every other censorious bastard through the years.
Exactly. The progressive left are the new religious right — self-important moral busybodies who think it’s their job to determine how everybody else should think, feel and act.
Social Justice Warriors are "progressive left" like the "Democratic Republic of North Korea" is a democratic republic. There is nothing progressive or left about their moralizing attempts to cancel and control other people.
The difference now is that the new Tipper Gores are the “cool kids”, as opposed to rock stars and rappers in the 80s and 90s....being triggered and depressed is the new social cool now.
The idea that any speech is violence is fundamentally authoritarian and illiberal. Because if speech is violence, then you are justified in using force to suppress speech just as you are justified in using force to suppress violence. And the only people who use force to suppress speech are authoritarians.
What you are basically suggesting is the so called fighting words doctrine. It sounds nice but still requires that speech be proscribed. What if someone is violently triggered by your ideas? There are limits relative to safety e.g. O W Holmes idea that no one has the right to yell fire in a theater. Beyond that politics intrude. Thanks
«What you are basically suggesting is the so called fighting words doctrine. It sounds nice but still requires that speech be proscribed. What if someone is violently triggered by your ideas? There are limits relative to safety»
Please please please this is so enormously optimistic and so many people don't understand the real issue, which is the difference between restrictions on free speech *before speaking* ("prior restraint") and punishing "illegal speech" *after speaking*.
The 1st amendment more or less forbids all cases of "prior restraint" by the government, whether or not someone is "triggered" or not. The problem then is that the punishing someone for something they have already said can also act as "prior restraint" as it has a "chilling effect", so the principle is that it should be minimized. Things like "canceling" are not done by the government and are done after someone has spoken, and technically may be legal, not being "prior restraint" by the government, but the political purpose is pretty much the same.
«e.g. O W Holmes idea that no one has the right to yell fire in a theater.»
Again, *everybody* has the right to yell "fire" in a theater, but then the law may get punished after the fact if it was malicious. It is an overwhelmingly important difference.
Not a journalist, but Bernie Sanders went on Fox News. It went rather well for him, he got the audience to cheer for single payer healthcare. The others were too chickenshit and virtue-signalled their way out of it.
And Sanders apparently grasps the fundamentals of civil liberties that eludes even the ACLU these days
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"“You have a former president in Trump, who is a racist, a sexist, a homophobe, a xenophobe, a pathological liar, an authoritarian, somebody who doesn’t believe in the rule of law. This is a bad news guy,” Sanders said when asked if liberals have become " too censorious," according to a transcript of the interview. “But if you’re asking me, do I feel particularly comfortable that the president, the then-president of the United States could not express his views on Twitter? I don’t feel comfortable about it.”"
There is freedom in being a registered Independent. Parties and partythink is just so toxic.
It's disappointing to hear that kind of invective coming from Bernie Sanders. I gave a few hundred dollars to his 2016 campaign because he was above that.
We are living in a time of plague and a time of demons. Few it seems are immune. Those who are most possessed are the most judgmental, the most shrill, the most cynical, the most sadistic. This is exactly what Ionescu portrayed in RHINOCEROS.
We are fortunate to live in a society where these energies don't explode into genocides and pogroms. The energies today are identical to those energies, but their mechanism of release is fortunately constrained by our culture and the insouciance of most of our countrymen.
Our only salvation and path out of this sewer is the intrinsic decency of the American "everyman" and "everywoman", mostly silent now, mostly uninterested in wretched political invective, mostly bored to tears by the soporific political analyses that we here seem to find entertaining, mostly ignoring riots and lootings and burnings, character assassinations and false witness, lies and propaganda, mostly looking past the newspaper front page to the sports page or the style page, mostly talking about anything at dinner but politics, mostly almost asleep.
At some point, they will need to wake up and make a choice. Rhinoceros or human. It's not a matter of Team D or Team R or any single person or group of people. It's a matter of conscience and consciousness. Everyone has it, but for too many it takes them too long to realize that.
Disagree with Sanders opinions on Trump but appreciate his courage. In addition I have only heard Sanders and Warren object to the ridiculous treatment of the imprisoned protestors from Jan 6. Shameful.
And what good do their empty words do? Sanders could put his money where his mouth is and threaten to hold up important legislation until the Americans be persecuted by the Biden regime are treated fairly. He won’t do shit about it so who cares what he says?
Valid point, but I compare it to the Republicans who as usual are cowering in a corner. I am desperate for a new party. The Whigs went away why can’t the Republican Party be euthanized??
I guess it gives you the freedom to be a moronic Commie too. There is as much evidence that Sanders is a “racist, a sexist, a homophobe, a xenophobe, a pathological liar, an authoritarian, somebody who doesn’t believe in the rule of law” as there is Trump is any of those things.
Meh, he still voted yes on enough key bills promoting war and the war machine for me to not want to vote for him. Look up his voting record since going to D.C..
Because DC is now a bully pulpit. If you are a D/R or Caucus with a D/R, you can be bullied into voting party line. If you don't vote party line, you may find your campaign warchest a little light the next time you need to re-up for your $175k per year job that somehow magically makes you a millionaire in 2 or 3 years.
I don't think Bernie would have had to worry much about his war chest, it didn't come from establishment donors. But he would have probably not been chairing the Budget committee, for starters. iow, he would have been totally neutered.
I think he should have run as the Independent that he is. He may well have gotten somewhere playing hardball. Manchin does ok playing it.
If any one person caused Trump to win, it would be St. Bernie. In both 2016 and 2020. Of course there were a number of other factors, but he rolled over like an obedient lapdog to the scheming and essentially vote-rigging DNC that cheated him shamelessly out of the nomination both times.
Everyone but DNC-hypnotized fools detested Hillary but Bernie protected her and campaigned for her in 2016 after being screwed by her party, of which he's a loyal member and "independent" in name only. He always sides with party doctrine on every issue and only acts like an independent while campaigning for president.
It's empty, but very effective for him, bombast and populist rhetoric. The minute he's openly screwed by the party machinery (Obama at the controls now, as the Clintons had been previously, though they still exert enormous influence), he capitulates and excoriated his own loyal base for not getting on the Dem bandwagon. Which huge numbers of them refused to do, and instead voted for Trump. Because they're smart enough to know Biden and Clinton are the other two clones of Obama, or each are the twin of the other (triplets they are), and the working class has been royally fvcked by all three and they aren't taking it any more, no matter how Bernie the Cuck preaches that they must.
Bernie's a fraud, so he fits in perfectly with all the other DC con artists and frauds, liars and murderers running this crumbling empire. And I say this having voted for him in the primary, reluctantly, because I saw this shit coming, both times.
We will NEVER vote our way out of oligarchic, plutocratic, kleptocratic control. They're after Full Spectrum Dominance both domestically and internationally. Both parties want the same fundamental things, employing slightly different methods and rhetoric. Most voters don't want those things and many saw Trump as a departure from business as usual, which of course he wasn't. He was business as usual with a vengeance.
You can still fool some of the people all the time. The number of people Bernie can fool has dropped drastically.
You're right, except they all caused it together, the entire Dem party. But the point is, Sanders could have and probably would have beaten Trump. But the Dem leadership, all of it, preferred Trump winning to Sanders, because . . . socialism!
And BS isn't even a real socialist, but a lame social democrat, not even as far left as FDR, who wasn't a socialist either. Even the mild reforms BS campaigned on translated to socialism in the reactionary minds of Obama, the Clintons, Schumer, Pelosi and their ilk. They run the party, Bernie doesn't. He's just a pushover, as they've apparently trained him to be.
"....We will NEVER vote our way out of oligarchic, plutocratic, kleptocratic control. They're after Full Spectrum Dominance both domestically and internationally. Both parties want the same fundamental things, employing slightly different methods and rhetoric. Most voters don't want those things and many saw Trump as a departure from business as usual, which of course he wasn't. He was business as usual with a vengeance...."
This is probably true to a certain extent. Easy to say but challenging to prove. What we do know is that capitalism moves through time at increasingly greater velocity. To check this plutocratic-directed movement of big, organized capital will only come from a similarly organized effort by a majority of citizens who perceive they having nothing more to lose and everything to gain by any such effort.
Just how that effort would would take shape, politically and culturally, has yet to be revealed. And in our current political moment, what members of both U.S. political parties want primarily is to get re-elected, and access to the increasingly obscene mountains of money it requires to do so. A very real beginning, but certainly not a panacea by itself, would be to institute public financing for all federal elections, and ban private donations.
As for Trump, his core supporters were and remain primarily but not exclusively the vast numbers of the middle class who have been incrementally beaten down economically for more than 40 years from a variety of events, primarily globalization, the financialization of the economy as a whole, and the massive loss and migration of jobs overseas, this last dynamic precipitated in greater part by the first two. Technology has played a role in all of this, yes, but not to the extent to which it's often credited.
The current economic state of the U.S. is first and foremost the result of a long series of collaborative policy choices over the years, conceived and promulgated by both political parties, the three branches of the federal government, and the economic "elite." It is this last group who have disproportionally benefited by these policy choices---to the great detriment of the "middle class," or "working class," however one wishes to categorize this subset of the voting public. As a voting bloc, the economically aggrieved have mobilized their anger and fears into a formidable electoral force.
Exacerbating this economic decline, too, is a growing fear that they, overwhelmingly white and primarily rural, are being displaced in the national conversation by the growing number of minorities, and are losing their purchase on not just the nation's economic narrative, but also are being relegated to second class status in the nation's cultural narratives.
They feel abandoned and looked down on by those they perceive to be "cultural elite"---the "professional class," especially those in academia, the legacy media, and the entrenched political class, who they also perceive no longer feel their concerns or share their beliefs.
Finally, I disagree with your characterization of Bernie Sanders. That he got as far as he did electorally no longer seems like a political miracle it did at the time, but now appears as a harbinger of the future for American politics---as might Trump.
"As the former CIA analyst Martin Gurri writes [on Trump] in The Revolt of the Public and the Crisis of Authority in the New Millennium (2018) ":
"....A candidate that innocent of qualifications and political direction can be elected only as a gesture of supreme repudiation, by the electorate, of the governing class. From start to finish, the 2016 presidential race can best be understood as the political assertion of an unhappy and highly mobilized public. In the end, Trump was chosen precisely because of, not despite, his apparent shortcomings. He is the visible effect, not the cause, of the public’s surly and mutinous mood…"
I once really liked Bernie, but quite honestly? He's a hypocrite at best, and phony at worst. His true colors shone brighter and brighter as he moved further and further into the forefront of American Media.
My statement was very general terms, and flows nicely all the way down politics to the local level. At the local level it might even be worse.
I think Bernie was a genuine guy who tried to do better in politics for most of his career, then found himself surprisingly in the center of an important political moment — and he just didn’t have the spine for it. I think Chris Hedges is right: Bernie just wasn’t going to risk getting the Nader treatment, and he folded. He folded when he had a chance to make a real difference. Since the . . . I think he’s kind of adrift.
"Bernie was a genuine guy who tried to do better in politics for most of his career, then found himself surprisingly in the center of an important political moment — and he just didn’t have the spine for it."
At his age, I don't know why one *wouldn't* become an epistemological suicide bomber -- e.g. the titular Warren Beatty character from BULWORTH. What did he really have to lose at this point? He sure disappointed and dispirited many young Americans by raising a flag and then knuckling under when the DNC said so.
Yeah, I know. So did Warren. I wouldn't want their dilemma - vote against the war machine, and you're voting against jobs for your state. I'm the anti-war voter, so i'm in a similar position to you. But i dunno if i'd want to vote against it and then tell residents of my state i voted against jobs.
Well, there's the problem. The DoD intelligently spilt their contracting and jobs amongst the states, so it's tough to get a vote against without sacrificing jobs in their states. A couple hundred jobs is a big deal in Vermont, and Mass (my state) had a shedload of contracting here, both in production and in research.
They could go the Hillary Clinton route and say "we're going to put a lot of defense contractors out of work". Can't imagine that would work out well.
Better if they had a switch to green jobs shovel ready. Which they of course don't yet. But shutting down production and research, shifting people into call center jobs until maybe somewhere down the line we get those green jobs isn't going to be a vote getter.
A lot of blue collar/lower wage folks get their week (or long weekend) of vacation on those same beaches -- and they like the view too.
Farther offshore is where it's at for ocean wind power. A very large amount of offshore wind generation capacity is on the drawing board right now all up and down the Atlantic coast, and it's far enough out to avoid marring a nice beach day with a vulgar eyesore.
It will be built, no doubt about it.
Cape Wind == good technology but bad site selection.
I think with 732 billion dollars or whatever it is, I could create some jobs. And have some goddamn big parties, too. Several years ago, with a mere $1600 given to the right persons, I helped create a party to which the police came twice and the Fire Department once, and seemingly the populations of several city blocks. And I'm a serious shlump when it comes to parties. 732 billion -- yes, indeed, it would be long remembered.
I totally agree with you, Matt. I've been talking to right populists for a long time now. I was always a liberal from the minute I registered to vote back in the 70s but today's liberals have lost their minds. They support the surveillance state, censorship, war, regime change and human rights abuses (as long as it's to their enemies). They don't support civil liberties or the little guys. They are more like the fundamentalists I used to do battle with in the 80s. Quite frankly they have morphed into authoritarians.
I even joined VivaBarneslocals site (right populists) because they were talking about those core issues that I've always defended. There are a lot of issues where we disagree (Israel comes to mind) but I will align with them when I agree with them. They don't seem to mind having me around. Everyone has been very nice to me unlike liberals who called me racist & sexist during the 2016 election (as if). I have no problem working with populists on the right and I don't care what establishment Democrats think about it.
BTW when the liberals called Bernie supporters racist & sexist in 2016 a lot of us realized that if they were doing that to us and we knew we weren't racist & sexist that there was a good chance neither were the majority of Trump supporters who they also accused.
Please don't lump "liberals" all together. It's the Democratic and Republican parties being paraded around like bad political theater to manufacture consent for MOAR authoritarianism. Less rights.
Those people going around demanding people use certain words to address people and generally just being assholes... they're not by any means "liberal". They're right-wingers. They're the people who would "go Nazi" at one of Dorothy Thompson's after-dinner parties.
They're fascists and to my mind I've never seen a conservative person OR a real liberal person who would ever want that sort of shit.
Liberals are about as hard to find these days as a Fiscal Conservative. Most of us have just thrown our hands up and don't give a rats ass anymore. Blow it up and wake us when you need the smart grown-ups back in the room to actually communicate with each other without using words like Hitler, or Nazi, or Marxist, or Mao, or racist, or meanie head to end an argument.
No shit. If someone is, (or the government was truly run by), a fiscal conservative, the sturm und drang of cultural politics would be greatly lessened, b/c the neo libs wouldn’t be using wokesters as their flying monkeys to guard the federal gravy train.
It's the authoritarian liberals (lots of well known liberals pushing censorship & other authoritarian behavior) & the Never Trumpers warmly welcomed into my party. Please don't give those "liberals" a pass because they don't deserve it. They are self identified liberals (in name only) acting like illiberal, authoritarian fundamentalists and YES, fascists. Did I use the right words this time?
If you mean by 'leftism' such as the labor union movement, moves toward social democracy / Welfare statism, the Civil Rights movement, availability of contraception and abortion, and other similar social movements, these became inevitable with the increase of the material powers available to non-elites (''proles'') beginning around the beginning of the 20th century. Since humans are willful, semi-intelligent, social animals I don't see their trying to take advantage of increased opportunities to exercise their will as pathological, although I suppose it could be. It certainly seems inevitable.
Read Chris Hedges The Death of the Liberal Class. As long as this dichotomy is maintained in thought we are sunk. It’s the oligarchs vs the rest of us. Social issues? Abortion, etc penny ante stuff!
Establishment Democrats aren't liberal, they just pander to liberals for votes. If they were liberal McGovern would have been the next Democrat President after Nixon, not Jimmy Carter. Bloomberg was golden when he said only in America could the Socialist Presidential candidate have his now jet and 3 houses. What makes him liberal in your book? It was a 5 year old jet and one of the homes had a small mortgage? You can't make this shit up.
Exactly. I dare anyone to look at the invite list and/or photos of the Clinton-Mezvinsky wedding, and see if it was "representative of the grand mosaic that is America."
I talked to boatload of ppl in KY when I was organizing for Jill Stein to be on the ballot there in 2016. (she was). I did another tour of KY after it was all done and middle aged white guys, miners or former etc., masses of them, told me they loved Bernie but when he got f’d by the DNC they voted Trump. SO MANY Trump voters everywhere told me they were for Bernie!
I have talked to Trump voters all along, and I know we have so much more in common than differences. Really it’s not right and left, It’s the power oligarchs verses the rest of us! So sorry Matt you only barely alluded to this in the interview.
Chris Hedges is so right about this! WE HAVE GOT TO FIND A WAY TO UNITE. To reinfranchise ourselves and others so screwed by the system!! THERE REALLY IS A SHADOW GOVERNMENT!
Never forget 70 million + people voted for TRUMP the second time! What’s up with that?
There are more of us than them and they are quaking in their shoes that we all finally realize WE HAVE MORE POWER THAN THEY DO. Stranger things have happened. But there is not solution that does not include the oligarchs demise and a huge power shift in this country.
Try this org: https://www.fairforall.org/ Depending on where you live, there may be a chapter near you. It's non-partisan and won't solve the political issues discussed here but it is a way to reach across the aisle and find common ground on all things CRT related.
I am heartened by how many liberals, progressives, libertarians and conservatives engage in thoughtful, mature discussion on TK, GG, BW, JM and other Substack boards - even when agreeing to disagree on details. There is hope.
Having followed Matt, Greenwald, the “Intellectual Dark Web” folks, I can’t help but notice that it’s almost as if there is an invisible electrical fence existing in people’s minds where even among the more serious high-integrity intellectual ranks, there is hesitation, a feeling or unwillingness towards the thought of directly broaching certain topics, like the role and scale of the ideological subversion campaigns run by Western intel agencies against their domestic populations. There is plenty of reporting about how that’s been done against foreign nations, but arguably, the operations on their own domestic populations run even much deeper, are much more established, and larger in scale than what most would be comfortable or confident enough to discuss.
Even for some of the boldest intellectuals and speakers, the level of cognitive dissonance is perhaps just so high that even for them it seems like too much, or they just aren’t sure about how to take up the topic, and there’s major cognitive dissonances surrounding the the consequences.
It’s really as if there is some kind of fence, a gag reflex, a very well-entrenched cognitive dissonance such that even the braver ones don’t feel comfortable or confident enough to “go there.” I get that vibe from Peterson and several others.
In this respect, the lectures by Yuri Besmenov seem profound and relevant:
He speaks with confidence and experience. He outlines exactly what the playbook for ideological subversion looks like.
It’s a thing and it’s just as much of a field as any other subject, whether psychology, corruption, Wokism etc... And yet, a belief persists that actual real ideological subversion, brain washing programs, psy-ops, and mass behavior modification policies are less objective subjects, as if we can’t talk about these things as objectively or confidently.
We have plenty of historical examples, but the operations that were uncovered including the CIA’s running of the Congress for Cultural Freedom, Project Mockingbird, Cointelpro, MK-Ultra etc... all ultimately suggest that it’s only scratching the surface. The broader systematic discussion of these kinds of operations at large and the regular consistent targeting of populations at large is absent.
If we consider the case of the Congress for Cultural Freedom (Ben Norton recently did a good expose on the Francis Saunders Book. The podcast was entitled ''How the CIA cultivates a fake left''), the scope and modus operandi of these intel operations on the culture and population generally, I don’t see how someone can really believe that something like CRT and Wokism have just managed to naturally penetrate the boardrooms of the most powerful corporations, the faculties of the most established educational institutions and the corridors of the greatest government powers in the way they have. It just doesn’t hold water, not when we know what the actual kinds of scale and scope are for larger-scale intel operations. Everything about the way these ideas have spread suggests a very well-coordinated intelligence operation. Yuri Besmenov spelled it out very well.
People talk about academia as one thing, the media as another, intel and finance as another, but in reality there is a cross over across all these fields. The attempt to separate everything out into nice Aristotelian categories is axiomatically wrong.
At a certain point, it seems like the greatest cognitive dissonance of all is to act like these things aren’t happening, and that we should just treat all of this as a debate over free speech, history, censorship, psychology etc…
Pick your term, oligarchy, imperial slime mold, Wall Street and the City of London and their “Five Eyes”, the “Deep State,” whatever you want to call it, these things run psychological and cultural warfare on their domestic populations. Perhaps a lot of people even agree on that. But perhaps what they don’t agree on is the scale. Perhaps some people think it’s happening on a much smaller scale than it actually is, and perhaps others believe that it’s happening on a much larger scale than it is. For many, the question might arguably just be “how?” Arguably, because how it’s being done isn’t clear, even many of the bolder thought leaders, intellectuals, free-thinkers and such don’t feel comfortable talking about it, or they fear the blowback.
Of course, the thought itself induces a gag reflex in a lot of people, which is arguably a key point. The cognitive dissonance was put there, and in some sense a swallowing of one’s pride has to happen before some even admit that such a thing could be put there, that they could have been themselves subverted by the cognitive dissonance, and that’s actually why they haven’t spoken out.
Regardless, there is no shortage of evidence or experience preventing one from seeing these things unfold in real time today. Intelligence warfare, cultural warfare, ideological warfare, these are real things, they can be studied just as objectively as any other subject. And if one can’t see it now, they’ll probably never see it.
<<It’s really as if there is some kind of fence, a gag reflex, a very well-entrenched cognitive dissonance such that even the braver ones don’t feel comfortable or confident enough to “go there.”>>
"cognative dissonance"... William H. Whyte( The organization Man) called it "rationalized conformity" and coined the word "groupthink". It isn't very different from the Stockholm syndrome where the captive ends up adopting the captor's behavior. In which case, the "captor" could be the mainstream media denigrating dissident opinions to the point of instilling fear of becoming a social outcast and all that might imply, including loss of employment if one doesn't conform.
Truly, there are a lot of bullshit conspiracy theories. It’s probably as important for those who do point out uncomfortable truths to also identify the many bullshit conspiracy theories that take off because there is an element of truth, mixed in with an element of falsehood. That’s one of the main methods of subverting debates and pervting discussion: take something true and mix it in with something bat shit crazy.
People who feel disenfranchised by the standard narratives are drawn to these alternative narratives because they have the semblance of departing from the standard narrative, but these alternative narratives are often also layered with intentional falsehoods. So it’s a difficult situation and I understand people’s hesitancy to get in there, but I mean that should be the job of professional journalists and researches, to actually sift through the falsehoods until they find something true, regardless of how strange it sounds.
The current covid narrative is probably a decent example. Now there is discussion of something coming from a lab, which all the evidence suggested since the beginning, but then what do you know, the narrative has now switched to China unleashing a biological weapon against the world... It just continues the same geopolitical narrative. Of course all the war hawks and neoliberal fanatics are jumping on that bandwagon.
In reality China had no reason to unleash a bioweapon against the US. The US is a militarily bloated bankrupt system trying to “contain” Russia and China, but in doing so they are ultimately just drawing themselves down and expending whatever free energy they have left.
Meanwhile, all the Too Big To Fail institutions are essentially zombie banks. The only reason they haven’t all been vaporized is because of the hyper-inflationary money printing and artificially low interest rates. That will not continue for very much longer. So we are at a critical juncture.
That being said, I don’t think America is the problem. America has been captured by something which existed long before the USA was even a country. The dissolution of the American system is a necessary part of returning things to that “old order.” But the oligarchs on Wall Street and the City of London are in a tight spot, their system is completely bloated and tottering on hyperinflation. On the other hand, Russia, China, much of Eurasia is going down a different economic path, it’s not hostage to that same speculative financial parasite—the slime mold—that has captured the Trans-Atlantic world. And it doesn’t look like any regime change is going to happen in the Eurasian countries, despite the best efforts.
So what are the oligarchs of the Trans-Atlantic system to do as their system implodes and the Eurasian countries remain standing? Therein lies the true danger, in my opinion.
It makes me smile when people like Krystal Ball talk about the lab leak hypothesis and immediately distance themselves in the strongest terms from the suggestion that the leak was deliberate. It's like they're doing what they denounce the MSM for doing just a couple of months ago about an only slightly different hypothesis.
Bit isn't "conspiracy theory" just a way of distancing yourself from something, for the sake of protecting one's rep analogous to "politically correct" or "misinformation". Like an insult used as a shield.
Strictly speaking, when I consider the possibility that Epstein had a suicide done to him or that the feds did the Oct 2001 anthrax attacks, I am theorizing about the possibility of conspiracies. But if you say these are conspiracy theories, you're basically saying they are the ravings of a crazy person.
As far as the other thing goes, C.J. Hopkins calls it Globocap.
And there's another interesting example. Is C.J. Hopkins so beyond the pale that Matt couldn't have him on Useful Idiots? Matt has a rep to look after.
I love C.J. Hopkins and was happy to see Matt do a profile on him.
Naturally, I agree that the word "conspiracy theory" has ultimately just become a rhetorical tool to shut conversation down. That being said, there are a lot of bullshit ideas out there and many other ideas that are only half truths, or perverted truths used to subvert any larger substantial debate. How to separate the lies from the truth when we’re talking about something with so many moving parts, like the world geopolitical situation?
Knowing there are a lot of bullshit ideas, some simply more popular than others, ultimately the only way to overcome that seems to be to first challenge someone on how they think the world works on a fundamental level. That’s ultimately what a “conspiracy theory” is doing: it suggests the way things appear and the way the world actually is are two fundamentally different things. Usually, the real problem isn’t any given conspiracy theory per se, but rather the underlying axioms which prevent someone from thinking such a radical deviation from their worldview might actually be possible.
We could start arguing with someone over x new idea or potentially real conspiracy, which usually just means a tit-for-tat debate, or we could start by challenging the person or audience on their fundamental beliefs about how the world really works.
Are Russia and China really the “bad guys” which the US and Western world are simply trying to stave off? Are Russia and China really hostile actors towards the US and Western world? How many military bases do Russia or China have around the world? How many coups and foreign interventions have Russia or China been involved in over the recent decades? How many bio warfare labs do they have combined compared to the US? How many people fall for the narrative of an enemy image?
I’d say above 80% of the population is ultimately hostage to the enemy image narrative, which means they can’t really think about the strategic world situation in substantial terms, if that narrative is false. What purpose could introducing a new idea or potential real conspiracy among financial and corporate elites really achieve if the person holds fundamentally false axioms about the way the world operates on its most fundamental level?
Wall Street and the City of London banks, their extensions in Brussels, and the spider web of offshore financial havens are ultimately sitting on a financial bubble worth hundreds of trillions, if not quadrillions of dollars in nominal value. The world GDP is only around 80 trillion. So how are these financial interests coping with the fact that their entire financial casino is only still going because of the hyper-inflationary money printing, the Fed repo loans and artificially low interest rates? What happens if a bug appears on even one of these fronts?
I think if we want to have a discussion about the many moving parts in the overall world strategic puzzle, we first have to recognize the existential crisis unfolding within the Western world.
Short of Nuclear war, the US, NATO, and their allies just don’t have the ability to subvert Russia, China and Eurasia generally. So what are they to do?
Even though I am (perhaps because I am) an atheist, my catchphrase is now: I need a sermon. In addition to thundering descriptions of brimstone, you gotta give people some positive, practical guidance on what they can do to escape hell, even if it is just a localized, temporary escape.
Unlike Matt and Krystal and all the rest, I am, for all practical purposes, nobody. Two people follow my blog, give or take. So I just get a bit irritated by the endless repetitive punditry on the symptoms of the corruption of our society and so little about what might be done to make anything even a little bit better.
You’re right. Solution concepts are where many drop the balls. They are probably the best means of measuring someone’s assessment of the situation.
I would just point out that all our economic collapse and fascism has been stopped before. One of the great ironies is that China’s current economic development model is in reality what the US used to do.
What strikes fear into the heart of the oligarchy is the thought that the US, Russia, and China might come to agreements on the need for a new financial architecture, and the need for cooperation on economic development from high speed rail, the Bering Strait tunnel, Nuclear Power, Fusion research.
In short, the first step should be a Glass-Steagall standard banking re-organization. That’s actually probably something Taibi would like and agree on. All the trillions of printed dollars have been going to the zombie banks in order for them to stay afloat, for lending not to freeze up and cause them all to be vaporized overnight. Nothing in the real world, the real economy, farmers, infrastructure, energy grids, water management, new cities, nuclear power, nothing else was built or bailed out. That financial cancer is what has to be cut out. There is no way for the system to go on with that quadrillion dollar problem.
Much of the US infrastructure is ROT, so banking re-organization is a necessary means of making the credit available for reconstruction and the establishment of new infrastructure and economic platforms.
Mathew Ehret is arguably the best journalist out there when it comes to solutions. He’s not bogged down by radical free market ideology or brainwashed with the idea that we need to cover the entire planet with windmills and solar panels and shut down the rest of industrial society.
Yeah, absolutely. I think people need to liberate themselves from that gag reflex that somehow says “You can’t talk about this. If you talk about this you are a crazy person, you are right wing, you are a conspiracy theorist.”
Lippman spoke of “popular opinion” as something largely determined by a "powerful, socially superior, successful, rich urban social set [which] is fundamentally international throughout the Western Hemisphere and in many ways, London is its center. It counts among its membership the most influential people in the world, containing as it does the diplo matic sets, high finance, the upper circles of the army and navy, some princes of the church, the great newspaper proprietors, their wives, mothers, and daughters who wield the scepter of invitation. It is at once a great circle of talk and a real social set."
The issue he spoke of back then was that the media itself should not be responsible for defining the messaging: “public opinion must be organized for the press, not by the press." This is pretty evident today. The talking points are consistently identical.
To point that out is not a conspiracy theory lol.
It’s important to trace the history of this stuff as well. Psychological warfare, the social engineering of public opinion, these subjects were heavily studied and invested in during the post-war period. I find it strange that a lot of leading intellectuals are afraid to even touch this stuff. I think part of the problem is that they don’t fully understand it themselves. But it has a history that can be traced and understood. It should be just as objective a subject as psychology, economics, history...
Psychological warfare was largely developed out in the post-WWI and WWII period, especially at the Tavistock clinic (The British military’s psychological warfare division). It was at a time when they had a mass of shell-shock victims that they could study, studying the effects of stress, fear and trauma on one’s thinking, to study group dynamics, the creation of artificial family systems whereby new suggestions can be introduced. The biggest takeaway was that the suggestions introduced into the group only held if people were not aware that they were being made. That’s actually where the whole art of it lay. Along with that environment was seen as another key factor. Being able to control or change certain variables in the environment was another way to help enforce the suggestions.
People should study this subject very diligently. I recently talked about some of this stuff in a podcast:
Both the original essay and your interview were excellent and spot-on. I believe this issue is THE fundamental issue of our time and far to few people in the “Media” are discussing it authentically.
I'd add that they're working overtime and downing Adderall in copious quantities just to keep the spin machines going around the clock and reverse the curse.
Eventually it will swallow its tail. The Fauci emails are the beginning. Kamala's "I didn't visit Europe" was next. They cannot wait for summer recess. It can't come fast enough. For McConnell and his minions too.
The "compromise" infrastructure bill is the attempt to quiet everyone. They just hope that nobody notices that it doesn't do anything for anybody. More bridges and trains to nowhere.
She was less liked than Buttigieg, which is saying something. That guy was genetically engineered in a vial at Ft. Detrick as the epitome of a loathsome human.
Kind of weird that the least liked candidate in the Dem primaries turned out to be de facto President because she is VP to a turnip, but the inner workings of the Democratic Party are always a magical mystery tour.
Rereading this comment, I recognize that it could reasonably be interpreted as homophobic, which was not my intent.
Pretty much the only thing I *don't* dislike about Pete B. is the fact that he is gay. That said, I find him using his sexuality as a marketing tactic in his campaigns vaguely nauseating, in the same way that I was disgusted by the "family values" Republicans (and the Tipper Gore Democrats) of the '80s and '90s. It all was -- and still is -- identity politics instead of substantive politics.
BULLETIN FOR POLITICIANS: I, as a voter, do not care who you fuck, how, or when, presuming that the fucking occurring is between mutually consenting adults. Successfully represent my political and economic interests! You'll get my vote!
Agree with you, except for that homophobic never occurred to me. Dems just don't get that not only straight white makes can suck as candidates. Any identity can suck as a candidate.
No doubt-my buddy was the best man ( he is straight) at the wedding of two gay small business owners who were totally pro-Trump.
Fwiw, Trump was the most pro-gay President ever, b/c he truly didn’t give a shit about people’s bedrooms. He appointed gay ambassadors w/out a second thought and engaged in exactly zero handwringing over gay marriage.
I think it is unfortunate that you even feel the need to apologize. You didn’t write anything that remotely implied homophobia. Buttigieg is terrible, his sexuality has nothing to do with it.
She was engineered on a lab too, but they fucked up the control chip, so it malfunctions and can't be fixed. She may end up POTUS if Joe has to duck out during his term, but she isn't getting elected. The Dems had best have done plans b, c, and d.
Not THAT surprising when you remember she's buddies with Obama. Who do you think is really running the country? Obama got the whole gang back together, added some neocons, and has the perfect front man!
Whatever your opinions about covid and all the issues around it, in my research I discovered that there are a substantial number of very credible doctors, researchers and scientists who have alternative opinions about almost every aspect of this whole crisis, including vaccinations. Rather than allowing their voices to be heard and giving the public the information we need to make informed decisions and opinions, these people were and are being systematically excluded from having their voices heard in any way.
The media is simply functioning as propaganda and cheerleading to manufacture consent, rather than giving people the true picture of the substantial disagreement with the official course of actions. This is now particularly true regarding vaccinations.
Of course so much of this is about politics and the culture war. The whole issue of covid became so charged with Trump and anti-Trump sentiment that to both sides science became a hostage to the culture war, to the detriment of the public.
In almost every aspect, from counting to testing to treatment to vaccinations, there are very credible criticisms and alternative views to the official positions but no one can just look at the facts because it's all so highly charged politically.
What was the controversy? I stay off social media, so I don't have any context beyond the essay itself. Which was fantastic, by the way, one of your best.
Matt posted the article to Twitter (I'm not on Twitter but saw the link and the subsequent tweets) and "what happened to Matt Taibbi, he used to be..." was the common response.
It's refreshing to see people from various political horizons rally together under the banner of free speech and skepticism driven dialectical discourse. Also, the humor doesn't hurt a slight bit. Keep doing the good job Matt.
Matt, I tend to be conservative in most things and in general you tend to read on as lot of issues as progressive, just not many of the issues you write about as much. Why the hell is it you're one of the rare reporters who can actually report objectively? Any other well-known reporters you'd recommend to read besides Glenn? I get that the MSM doesn't reward anyone not toeing the party, but it boggles my mind how any dissent is suppressed or blocked altogether.
All this talk among the enlightened indi-media celebs like Matt, Glenn, Krystal etc about the *possibility* of a *dialog* is just getting me down. Absent in all of if this perpetual blah, blah is serious discussion of the electoral politics of a broad economic class-based coalition. Thomas Frank sometimes comes close but the rest of it is starting to seem like it's a brand and a business model for indi punditry.
And the idea that we build the coalition on our common faith in the 1st amendment is unrealistic. Liberal freedoms like that are great but for most people secondary to things like housing, food, clothing, economic and physical security of your family. MKL understood it, saying that the freedom to sit at a lunch counter is no use if you've no money to buy lunch.
Has liberalism actually been tremendously concerned with free speech? Actual free speech would apply to every inhabitant, not just to the people who were 'lucky enough to own a printing press' (or a television station), which is the way it was until the Internet arose out of the void, brought into being by the military, some private corps, and a lot of hackers and hobbyists, not free speech idealists. Now liberals (that is, the US gobmutt) are mostly trying to figure out how to shut it up. If there's a common faith in the First Amendment it doesn't seem to be working politically, and Mr. Assange is still in jail.
There is no principle of freedom of speech within bourgeois institutions, which is why I brought that up previously. As for the nation-state, apparently it's no longer needed. Many global corps have larger budgets.
I was thinking of the contemporary bourgeoisie, those whose lives and fates are most intimately involved with the fortunes of the present capitalist state. Liberals belonging to the 18th-century planter or merchant classes in North America would have different experiences, perceptions, and ideology from their political descendants. I just read today, probably in this very blog, about people whose most significant rite of passage is acceptance at the right university -- a mandarin class, one would have to say -- with the kind of conflicts mandarins have.
Umm... I live in the age of...of...the in-ter-net. Or is it influence? Oh wait. It's of right or left, or left or right, or north or south, wherever the penguins are, where, supposedly, but more than likely the truth, uh, the icebergs are melting.
Left = something. Right = something. Left does not equal right, and sometimes, but not too often, right equals left, or left equals right. Perhaps, and this is a big perhaps, unless I want me teeth kicked in, left is greater than or less than equal to right. I know. I know. I put the left first. Don't get upset, and don't unlock your gun safe. Oh no! I mentioned gun in the same paragraph as left and right, and now no one gets a long.
I got called a fake jew boy a few article post replies ago. Not even fake Jew boy, with a capital "J". Fuck me when I can't even get insulted with the grammatically correct capitalization of Jew. My auto-correct wouldn't even let me spell jew. What's this country coming to when my phone knows more that hick, redneck, Jesus fearing, god damn, red blooded American, during God bless America. Sigh for our future.
Great conversation. Being 68, I was a liberal, free speech absolutist back in the 60's/70's. I have the same free speech beliefs and that now makes me a pariah. You often give this historical perspective which I think many don't know.
You know, I didn't used to be a Free Speech absolutist - I don't like the idea of racists being able to say whatever they wish, for instance, in public, as I believe it is intimidatory, and a form of violence.
But short of outright racial slurs, or directly threatening language, I've come around to this position. I can't believe it took a goon like Trump for that to happen.
Welcome. I was taught by the Jesuits and lay teachers that free speech is most important when people say words that you find distasteful or worse. Being a free speech absolutist doesn't mean abiding threatening or inciteful language. You answer speech w/ more speech. It's tough Alexander, but it's righteous. Kudos on coming into the light.
Absolutely the truth here. There IS no middle ground with free speech.
It's also because of this that it's legal to say the opposite of "the bad words or speech".
Imagine a day when you CAN'T stand up for what's right by speaking to others about it?
No, thanks. Authoritarianism by any other name s still authoritarianism and that's shit's nowhere, man.
Exactly. As Kevin Williamson said, the Bill of Rights are “Things that are too important for you morons to touch!!!!!!” or words extremely close.
That language that you liken as "intimidatory, and a form of violence" likely is, but that is better than actual violence, and further, who is to determine what is "intimidatory, and a form of violence?" Right now, I would use those terms to describe pretty much all of the teachings of CRT, anything saying "silence is violence", Whiteness is a disease (such as a recent article in the APA journal) and so on.
And that is the whole point. You don't get to decide what I find "intimidatory, and a form of violence". And nor I, you.
It didn't take Trump to us make us realize this, it was goons such as Tipper Gore, Ed Meese, and every other censorious bastard through the years.
Exactly. The progressive left are the new religious right — self-important moral busybodies who think it’s their job to determine how everybody else should think, feel and act.
Social Justice Warriors are "progressive left" like the "Democratic Republic of North Korea" is a democratic republic. There is nothing progressive or left about their moralizing attempts to cancel and control other people.
No, you are conflating different things.
The name Tipper Gore triggers me. I'm only 50% joking.
The difference now is that the new Tipper Gores are the “cool kids”, as opposed to rock stars and rappers in the 80s and 90s....being triggered and depressed is the new social cool now.
Yeah, that is very strange for me.
The cure for bad speech is more speech
The idea that any speech is violence is fundamentally authoritarian and illiberal. Because if speech is violence, then you are justified in using force to suppress speech just as you are justified in using force to suppress violence. And the only people who use force to suppress speech are authoritarians.
If speech is violence, does the 1st Amendment protect my right to own an AR-15 as well as the 2nd!!!!!
Absolutely.
What you are basically suggesting is the so called fighting words doctrine. It sounds nice but still requires that speech be proscribed. What if someone is violently triggered by your ideas? There are limits relative to safety e.g. O W Holmes idea that no one has the right to yell fire in a theater. Beyond that politics intrude. Thanks
«What you are basically suggesting is the so called fighting words doctrine. It sounds nice but still requires that speech be proscribed. What if someone is violently triggered by your ideas? There are limits relative to safety»
Please please please this is so enormously optimistic and so many people don't understand the real issue, which is the difference between restrictions on free speech *before speaking* ("prior restraint") and punishing "illegal speech" *after speaking*.
The 1st amendment more or less forbids all cases of "prior restraint" by the government, whether or not someone is "triggered" or not. The problem then is that the punishing someone for something they have already said can also act as "prior restraint" as it has a "chilling effect", so the principle is that it should be minimized. Things like "canceling" are not done by the government and are done after someone has spoken, and technically may be legal, not being "prior restraint" by the government, but the political purpose is pretty much the same.
«e.g. O W Holmes idea that no one has the right to yell fire in a theater.»
Again, *everybody* has the right to yell "fire" in a theater, but then the law may get punished after the fact if it was malicious. It is an overwhelmingly important difference.
Exactly. You can certainly yell fire if there is a fire. You can even yell fire if you THINK there's a fire!
I'm 77 and thank you for shining the light.
Not a journalist, but Bernie Sanders went on Fox News. It went rather well for him, he got the audience to cheer for single payer healthcare. The others were too chickenshit and virtue-signalled their way out of it.
And Sanders apparently grasps the fundamentals of civil liberties that eludes even the ACLU these days
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"“You have a former president in Trump, who is a racist, a sexist, a homophobe, a xenophobe, a pathological liar, an authoritarian, somebody who doesn’t believe in the rule of law. This is a bad news guy,” Sanders said when asked if liberals have become " too censorious," according to a transcript of the interview. “But if you’re asking me, do I feel particularly comfortable that the president, the then-president of the United States could not express his views on Twitter? I don’t feel comfortable about it.”"
There is freedom in being a registered Independent. Parties and partythink is just so toxic.
It's disappointing to hear that kind of invective coming from Bernie Sanders. I gave a few hundred dollars to his 2016 campaign because he was above that.
We are living in a time of plague and a time of demons. Few it seems are immune. Those who are most possessed are the most judgmental, the most shrill, the most cynical, the most sadistic. This is exactly what Ionescu portrayed in RHINOCEROS.
We are fortunate to live in a society where these energies don't explode into genocides and pogroms. The energies today are identical to those energies, but their mechanism of release is fortunately constrained by our culture and the insouciance of most of our countrymen.
Our only salvation and path out of this sewer is the intrinsic decency of the American "everyman" and "everywoman", mostly silent now, mostly uninterested in wretched political invective, mostly bored to tears by the soporific political analyses that we here seem to find entertaining, mostly ignoring riots and lootings and burnings, character assassinations and false witness, lies and propaganda, mostly looking past the newspaper front page to the sports page or the style page, mostly talking about anything at dinner but politics, mostly almost asleep.
At some point, they will need to wake up and make a choice. Rhinoceros or human. It's not a matter of Team D or Team R or any single person or group of people. It's a matter of conscience and consciousness. Everyone has it, but for too many it takes them too long to realize that.
Disagree with Sanders opinions on Trump but appreciate his courage. In addition I have only heard Sanders and Warren object to the ridiculous treatment of the imprisoned protestors from Jan 6. Shameful.
And what good do their empty words do? Sanders could put his money where his mouth is and threaten to hold up important legislation until the Americans be persecuted by the Biden regime are treated fairly. He won’t do shit about it so who cares what he says?
Valid point, but I compare it to the Republicans who as usual are cowering in a corner. I am desperate for a new party. The Whigs went away why can’t the Republican Party be euthanized??
I guess it gives you the freedom to be a moronic Commie too. There is as much evidence that Sanders is a “racist, a sexist, a homophobe, a xenophobe, a pathological liar, an authoritarian, somebody who doesn’t believe in the rule of law” as there is Trump is any of those things.
Meh, he still voted yes on enough key bills promoting war and the war machine for me to not want to vote for him. Look up his voting record since going to D.C..
Because DC is now a bully pulpit. If you are a D/R or Caucus with a D/R, you can be bullied into voting party line. If you don't vote party line, you may find your campaign warchest a little light the next time you need to re-up for your $175k per year job that somehow magically makes you a millionaire in 2 or 3 years.
I don't think Bernie would have had to worry much about his war chest, it didn't come from establishment donors. But he would have probably not been chairing the Budget committee, for starters. iow, he would have been totally neutered.
I think he should have run as the Independent that he is. He may well have gotten somewhere playing hardball. Manchin does ok playing it.
If any one person caused Trump to win, it would be St. Bernie. In both 2016 and 2020. Of course there were a number of other factors, but he rolled over like an obedient lapdog to the scheming and essentially vote-rigging DNC that cheated him shamelessly out of the nomination both times.
Everyone but DNC-hypnotized fools detested Hillary but Bernie protected her and campaigned for her in 2016 after being screwed by her party, of which he's a loyal member and "independent" in name only. He always sides with party doctrine on every issue and only acts like an independent while campaigning for president.
It's empty, but very effective for him, bombast and populist rhetoric. The minute he's openly screwed by the party machinery (Obama at the controls now, as the Clintons had been previously, though they still exert enormous influence), he capitulates and excoriated his own loyal base for not getting on the Dem bandwagon. Which huge numbers of them refused to do, and instead voted for Trump. Because they're smart enough to know Biden and Clinton are the other two clones of Obama, or each are the twin of the other (triplets they are), and the working class has been royally fvcked by all three and they aren't taking it any more, no matter how Bernie the Cuck preaches that they must.
Bernie's a fraud, so he fits in perfectly with all the other DC con artists and frauds, liars and murderers running this crumbling empire. And I say this having voted for him in the primary, reluctantly, because I saw this shit coming, both times.
We will NEVER vote our way out of oligarchic, plutocratic, kleptocratic control. They're after Full Spectrum Dominance both domestically and internationally. Both parties want the same fundamental things, employing slightly different methods and rhetoric. Most voters don't want those things and many saw Trump as a departure from business as usual, which of course he wasn't. He was business as usual with a vengeance.
You can still fool some of the people all the time. The number of people Bernie can fool has dropped drastically.
If any one person caused Trump to win, it was Hillary. Even with no Sanders in the picture, she would have lost.
You're right, except they all caused it together, the entire Dem party. But the point is, Sanders could have and probably would have beaten Trump. But the Dem leadership, all of it, preferred Trump winning to Sanders, because . . . socialism!
And BS isn't even a real socialist, but a lame social democrat, not even as far left as FDR, who wasn't a socialist either. Even the mild reforms BS campaigned on translated to socialism in the reactionary minds of Obama, the Clintons, Schumer, Pelosi and their ilk. They run the party, Bernie doesn't. He's just a pushover, as they've apparently trained him to be.
"....We will NEVER vote our way out of oligarchic, plutocratic, kleptocratic control. They're after Full Spectrum Dominance both domestically and internationally. Both parties want the same fundamental things, employing slightly different methods and rhetoric. Most voters don't want those things and many saw Trump as a departure from business as usual, which of course he wasn't. He was business as usual with a vengeance...."
This is probably true to a certain extent. Easy to say but challenging to prove. What we do know is that capitalism moves through time at increasingly greater velocity. To check this plutocratic-directed movement of big, organized capital will only come from a similarly organized effort by a majority of citizens who perceive they having nothing more to lose and everything to gain by any such effort.
Just how that effort would would take shape, politically and culturally, has yet to be revealed. And in our current political moment, what members of both U.S. political parties want primarily is to get re-elected, and access to the increasingly obscene mountains of money it requires to do so. A very real beginning, but certainly not a panacea by itself, would be to institute public financing for all federal elections, and ban private donations.
As for Trump, his core supporters were and remain primarily but not exclusively the vast numbers of the middle class who have been incrementally beaten down economically for more than 40 years from a variety of events, primarily globalization, the financialization of the economy as a whole, and the massive loss and migration of jobs overseas, this last dynamic precipitated in greater part by the first two. Technology has played a role in all of this, yes, but not to the extent to which it's often credited.
The current economic state of the U.S. is first and foremost the result of a long series of collaborative policy choices over the years, conceived and promulgated by both political parties, the three branches of the federal government, and the economic "elite." It is this last group who have disproportionally benefited by these policy choices---to the great detriment of the "middle class," or "working class," however one wishes to categorize this subset of the voting public. As a voting bloc, the economically aggrieved have mobilized their anger and fears into a formidable electoral force.
Exacerbating this economic decline, too, is a growing fear that they, overwhelmingly white and primarily rural, are being displaced in the national conversation by the growing number of minorities, and are losing their purchase on not just the nation's economic narrative, but also are being relegated to second class status in the nation's cultural narratives.
They feel abandoned and looked down on by those they perceive to be "cultural elite"---the "professional class," especially those in academia, the legacy media, and the entrenched political class, who they also perceive no longer feel their concerns or share their beliefs.
Finally, I disagree with your characterization of Bernie Sanders. That he got as far as he did electorally no longer seems like a political miracle it did at the time, but now appears as a harbinger of the future for American politics---as might Trump.
"As the former CIA analyst Martin Gurri writes [on Trump] in The Revolt of the Public and the Crisis of Authority in the New Millennium (2018) ":
"....A candidate that innocent of qualifications and political direction can be elected only as a gesture of supreme repudiation, by the electorate, of the governing class. From start to finish, the 2016 presidential race can best be understood as the political assertion of an unhappy and highly mobilized public. In the end, Trump was chosen precisely because of, not despite, his apparent shortcomings. He is the visible effect, not the cause, of the public’s surly and mutinous mood…"
Highly recommend giving this a read....
https://www.nybooks.com/articles/2021/07/01/reality-rebellion/
I once really liked Bernie, but quite honestly? He's a hypocrite at best, and phony at worst. His true colors shone brighter and brighter as he moved further and further into the forefront of American Media.
My statement was very general terms, and flows nicely all the way down politics to the local level. At the local level it might even be worse.
I think Bernie was a genuine guy who tried to do better in politics for most of his career, then found himself surprisingly in the center of an important political moment — and he just didn’t have the spine for it. I think Chris Hedges is right: Bernie just wasn’t going to risk getting the Nader treatment, and he folded. He folded when he had a chance to make a real difference. Since the . . . I think he’s kind of adrift.
"Bernie was a genuine guy who tried to do better in politics for most of his career, then found himself surprisingly in the center of an important political moment — and he just didn’t have the spine for it."
At his age, I don't know why one *wouldn't* become an epistemological suicide bomber -- e.g. the titular Warren Beatty character from BULWORTH. What did he really have to lose at this point? He sure disappointed and dispirited many young Americans by raising a flag and then knuckling under when the DNC said so.
He flies private. The End.
Yeah, I know. So did Warren. I wouldn't want their dilemma - vote against the war machine, and you're voting against jobs for your state. I'm the anti-war voter, so i'm in a similar position to you. But i dunno if i'd want to vote against it and then tell residents of my state i voted against jobs.
If only peacetime activities created a more robust economy than the war machine... Ah well. Another day on the Death Star.
Well, there's the problem. The DoD intelligently spilt their contracting and jobs amongst the states, so it's tough to get a vote against without sacrificing jobs in their states. A couple hundred jobs is a big deal in Vermont, and Mass (my state) had a shedload of contracting here, both in production and in research.
They could go the Hillary Clinton route and say "we're going to put a lot of defense contractors out of work". Can't imagine that would work out well.
Better if they had a switch to green jobs shovel ready. Which they of course don't yet. But shutting down production and research, shifting people into call center jobs until maybe somewhere down the line we get those green jobs isn't going to be a vote getter.
Actually they do, but no one wanted windmills spoiling their Nantucket beach views
A lot of blue collar/lower wage folks get their week (or long weekend) of vacation on those same beaches -- and they like the view too.
Farther offshore is where it's at for ocean wind power. A very large amount of offshore wind generation capacity is on the drawing board right now all up and down the Atlantic coast, and it's far enough out to avoid marring a nice beach day with a vulgar eyesore.
It will be built, no doubt about it.
Cape Wind == good technology but bad site selection.
There is that.
I think with 732 billion dollars or whatever it is, I could create some jobs. And have some goddamn big parties, too. Several years ago, with a mere $1600 given to the right persons, I helped create a party to which the police came twice and the Fire Department once, and seemingly the populations of several city blocks. And I'm a serious shlump when it comes to parties. 732 billion -- yes, indeed, it would be long remembered.
Pretty strong argument to vote against wars
I totally agree with you, Matt. I've been talking to right populists for a long time now. I was always a liberal from the minute I registered to vote back in the 70s but today's liberals have lost their minds. They support the surveillance state, censorship, war, regime change and human rights abuses (as long as it's to their enemies). They don't support civil liberties or the little guys. They are more like the fundamentalists I used to do battle with in the 80s. Quite frankly they have morphed into authoritarians.
I even joined VivaBarneslocals site (right populists) because they were talking about those core issues that I've always defended. There are a lot of issues where we disagree (Israel comes to mind) but I will align with them when I agree with them. They don't seem to mind having me around. Everyone has been very nice to me unlike liberals who called me racist & sexist during the 2016 election (as if). I have no problem working with populists on the right and I don't care what establishment Democrats think about it.
BTW when the liberals called Bernie supporters racist & sexist in 2016 a lot of us realized that if they were doing that to us and we knew we weren't racist & sexist that there was a good chance neither were the majority of Trump supporters who they also accused.
Please don't lump "liberals" all together. It's the Democratic and Republican parties being paraded around like bad political theater to manufacture consent for MOAR authoritarianism. Less rights.
Those people going around demanding people use certain words to address people and generally just being assholes... they're not by any means "liberal". They're right-wingers. They're the people who would "go Nazi" at one of Dorothy Thompson's after-dinner parties.
They're fascists and to my mind I've never seen a conservative person OR a real liberal person who would ever want that sort of shit.
Liberals are about as hard to find these days as a Fiscal Conservative. Most of us have just thrown our hands up and don't give a rats ass anymore. Blow it up and wake us when you need the smart grown-ups back in the room to actually communicate with each other without using words like Hitler, or Nazi, or Marxist, or Mao, or racist, or meanie head to end an argument.
No shit. If someone is, (or the government was truly run by), a fiscal conservative, the sturm und drang of cultural politics would be greatly lessened, b/c the neo libs wouldn’t be using wokesters as their flying monkeys to guard the federal gravy train.
If you want to know about Larry Summers and his friends, read 'How Harvard Lost Russia'. It happened long ago, but it's relevant.
It gives one an idea of Summers's character and practices.
It's the authoritarian liberals (lots of well known liberals pushing censorship & other authoritarian behavior) & the Never Trumpers warmly welcomed into my party. Please don't give those "liberals" a pass because they don't deserve it. They are self identified liberals (in name only) acting like illiberal, authoritarian fundamentalists and YES, fascists. Did I use the right words this time?
So how did Mommy turn into an authoritarian? I thought that was Daddy's job.
If you mean by 'leftism' such as the labor union movement, moves toward social democracy / Welfare statism, the Civil Rights movement, availability of contraception and abortion, and other similar social movements, these became inevitable with the increase of the material powers available to non-elites (''proles'') beginning around the beginning of the 20th century. Since humans are willful, semi-intelligent, social animals I don't see their trying to take advantage of increased opportunities to exercise their will as pathological, although I suppose it could be. It certainly seems inevitable.
No true Scotsman.
tu quoque?
Speaking of which, are you free for an after-dinner party Friday next?
haha couldn't resist, sorry.
Read Chris Hedges The Death of the Liberal Class. As long as this dichotomy is maintained in thought we are sunk. It’s the oligarchs vs the rest of us. Social issues? Abortion, etc penny ante stuff!
Establishment Democrats aren't liberal, they just pander to liberals for votes. If they were liberal McGovern would have been the next Democrat President after Nixon, not Jimmy Carter. Bloomberg was golden when he said only in America could the Socialist Presidential candidate have his now jet and 3 houses. What makes him liberal in your book? It was a 5 year old jet and one of the homes had a small mortgage? You can't make this shit up.
Exactly. I dare anyone to look at the invite list and/or photos of the Clinton-Mezvinsky wedding, and see if it was "representative of the grand mosaic that is America."
There were probably more BIPOC in the band and behind the bar than on the guest list. https://gothamist.com/arts-entertainment/photos/photos-chelsea-clinton-and-marc-mezvinskys-wedding?image=13
Apologies - the comments were initially locked, they're now open.
I talked to boatload of ppl in KY when I was organizing for Jill Stein to be on the ballot there in 2016. (she was). I did another tour of KY after it was all done and middle aged white guys, miners or former etc., masses of them, told me they loved Bernie but when he got f’d by the DNC they voted Trump. SO MANY Trump voters everywhere told me they were for Bernie!
I have talked to Trump voters all along, and I know we have so much more in common than differences. Really it’s not right and left, It’s the power oligarchs verses the rest of us! So sorry Matt you only barely alluded to this in the interview.
Chris Hedges is so right about this! WE HAVE GOT TO FIND A WAY TO UNITE. To reinfranchise ourselves and others so screwed by the system!! THERE REALLY IS A SHADOW GOVERNMENT!
Never forget 70 million + people voted for TRUMP the second time! What’s up with that?
There are more of us than them and they are quaking in their shoes that we all finally realize WE HAVE MORE POWER THAN THEY DO. Stranger things have happened. But there is not solution that does not include the oligarchs demise and a huge power shift in this country.
The Washington uniparty is the problem.
Try this org: https://www.fairforall.org/ Depending on where you live, there may be a chapter near you. It's non-partisan and won't solve the political issues discussed here but it is a way to reach across the aisle and find common ground on all things CRT related.
I am heartened by how many liberals, progressives, libertarians and conservatives engage in thoughtful, mature discussion on TK, GG, BW, JM and other Substack boards - even when agreeing to disagree on details. There is hope.
Having followed Matt, Greenwald, the “Intellectual Dark Web” folks, I can’t help but notice that it’s almost as if there is an invisible electrical fence existing in people’s minds where even among the more serious high-integrity intellectual ranks, there is hesitation, a feeling or unwillingness towards the thought of directly broaching certain topics, like the role and scale of the ideological subversion campaigns run by Western intel agencies against their domestic populations. There is plenty of reporting about how that’s been done against foreign nations, but arguably, the operations on their own domestic populations run even much deeper, are much more established, and larger in scale than what most would be comfortable or confident enough to discuss.
Even for some of the boldest intellectuals and speakers, the level of cognitive dissonance is perhaps just so high that even for them it seems like too much, or they just aren’t sure about how to take up the topic, and there’s major cognitive dissonances surrounding the the consequences.
It’s really as if there is some kind of fence, a gag reflex, a very well-entrenched cognitive dissonance such that even the braver ones don’t feel comfortable or confident enough to “go there.” I get that vibe from Peterson and several others.
In this respect, the lectures by Yuri Besmenov seem profound and relevant:
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=Y9TviIuXPSE
He speaks with confidence and experience. He outlines exactly what the playbook for ideological subversion looks like.
It’s a thing and it’s just as much of a field as any other subject, whether psychology, corruption, Wokism etc... And yet, a belief persists that actual real ideological subversion, brain washing programs, psy-ops, and mass behavior modification policies are less objective subjects, as if we can’t talk about these things as objectively or confidently.
We have plenty of historical examples, but the operations that were uncovered including the CIA’s running of the Congress for Cultural Freedom, Project Mockingbird, Cointelpro, MK-Ultra etc... all ultimately suggest that it’s only scratching the surface. The broader systematic discussion of these kinds of operations at large and the regular consistent targeting of populations at large is absent.
If we consider the case of the Congress for Cultural Freedom (Ben Norton recently did a good expose on the Francis Saunders Book. The podcast was entitled ''How the CIA cultivates a fake left''), the scope and modus operandi of these intel operations on the culture and population generally, I don’t see how someone can really believe that something like CRT and Wokism have just managed to naturally penetrate the boardrooms of the most powerful corporations, the faculties of the most established educational institutions and the corridors of the greatest government powers in the way they have. It just doesn’t hold water, not when we know what the actual kinds of scale and scope are for larger-scale intel operations. Everything about the way these ideas have spread suggests a very well-coordinated intelligence operation. Yuri Besmenov spelled it out very well.
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=Y9TviIuXPSE
People talk about academia as one thing, the media as another, intel and finance as another, but in reality there is a cross over across all these fields. The attempt to separate everything out into nice Aristotelian categories is axiomatically wrong.
At a certain point, it seems like the greatest cognitive dissonance of all is to act like these things aren’t happening, and that we should just treat all of this as a debate over free speech, history, censorship, psychology etc…
Pick your term, oligarchy, imperial slime mold, Wall Street and the City of London and their “Five Eyes”, the “Deep State,” whatever you want to call it, these things run psychological and cultural warfare on their domestic populations. Perhaps a lot of people even agree on that. But perhaps what they don’t agree on is the scale. Perhaps some people think it’s happening on a much smaller scale than it actually is, and perhaps others believe that it’s happening on a much larger scale than it is. For many, the question might arguably just be “how?” Arguably, because how it’s being done isn’t clear, even many of the bolder thought leaders, intellectuals, free-thinkers and such don’t feel comfortable talking about it, or they fear the blowback.
Of course, the thought itself induces a gag reflex in a lot of people, which is arguably a key point. The cognitive dissonance was put there, and in some sense a swallowing of one’s pride has to happen before some even admit that such a thing could be put there, that they could have been themselves subverted by the cognitive dissonance, and that’s actually why they haven’t spoken out.
Regardless, there is no shortage of evidence or experience preventing one from seeing these things unfold in real time today. Intelligence warfare, cultural warfare, ideological warfare, these are real things, they can be studied just as objectively as any other subject. And if one can’t see it now, they’ll probably never see it.
<<It’s really as if there is some kind of fence, a gag reflex, a very well-entrenched cognitive dissonance such that even the braver ones don’t feel comfortable or confident enough to “go there.”>>
Don't whiz on the electric fence.
https://youtu.be/CwWi-sza-Lw?t=194
"cognative dissonance"... William H. Whyte( The organization Man) called it "rationalized conformity" and coined the word "groupthink". It isn't very different from the Stockholm syndrome where the captive ends up adopting the captor's behavior. In which case, the "captor" could be the mainstream media denigrating dissident opinions to the point of instilling fear of becoming a social outcast and all that might imply, including loss of employment if one doesn't conform.
Come and join us at TrueAnon where Bush did 9/11 and Adam Curtis is mainstream hack. It's really quite liberating.
But you are right. You have to abandon your position in respectable society if you really embrace the truth of our predicament.
Besides, Glenn and Matt have kids so they need a frame that offers at least some hope.
Truly, there are a lot of bullshit conspiracy theories. It’s probably as important for those who do point out uncomfortable truths to also identify the many bullshit conspiracy theories that take off because there is an element of truth, mixed in with an element of falsehood. That’s one of the main methods of subverting debates and pervting discussion: take something true and mix it in with something bat shit crazy.
People who feel disenfranchised by the standard narratives are drawn to these alternative narratives because they have the semblance of departing from the standard narrative, but these alternative narratives are often also layered with intentional falsehoods. So it’s a difficult situation and I understand people’s hesitancy to get in there, but I mean that should be the job of professional journalists and researches, to actually sift through the falsehoods until they find something true, regardless of how strange it sounds.
The current covid narrative is probably a decent example. Now there is discussion of something coming from a lab, which all the evidence suggested since the beginning, but then what do you know, the narrative has now switched to China unleashing a biological weapon against the world... It just continues the same geopolitical narrative. Of course all the war hawks and neoliberal fanatics are jumping on that bandwagon.
In reality China had no reason to unleash a bioweapon against the US. The US is a militarily bloated bankrupt system trying to “contain” Russia and China, but in doing so they are ultimately just drawing themselves down and expending whatever free energy they have left.
Meanwhile, all the Too Big To Fail institutions are essentially zombie banks. The only reason they haven’t all been vaporized is because of the hyper-inflationary money printing and artificially low interest rates. That will not continue for very much longer. So we are at a critical juncture.
That being said, I don’t think America is the problem. America has been captured by something which existed long before the USA was even a country. The dissolution of the American system is a necessary part of returning things to that “old order.” But the oligarchs on Wall Street and the City of London are in a tight spot, their system is completely bloated and tottering on hyperinflation. On the other hand, Russia, China, much of Eurasia is going down a different economic path, it’s not hostage to that same speculative financial parasite—the slime mold—that has captured the Trans-Atlantic world. And it doesn’t look like any regime change is going to happen in the Eurasian countries, despite the best efforts.
So what are the oligarchs of the Trans-Atlantic system to do as their system implodes and the Eurasian countries remain standing? Therein lies the true danger, in my opinion.
A fun analysis:
https://www.strategic-culture.org/news/2021/05/19/beijing-five-eyes-or-something-else-who-blame-for-covid-pandemic/
It makes me smile when people like Krystal Ball talk about the lab leak hypothesis and immediately distance themselves in the strongest terms from the suggestion that the leak was deliberate. It's like they're doing what they denounce the MSM for doing just a couple of months ago about an only slightly different hypothesis.
Bit isn't "conspiracy theory" just a way of distancing yourself from something, for the sake of protecting one's rep analogous to "politically correct" or "misinformation". Like an insult used as a shield.
Strictly speaking, when I consider the possibility that Epstein had a suicide done to him or that the feds did the Oct 2001 anthrax attacks, I am theorizing about the possibility of conspiracies. But if you say these are conspiracy theories, you're basically saying they are the ravings of a crazy person.
As far as the other thing goes, C.J. Hopkins calls it Globocap.
And there's another interesting example. Is C.J. Hopkins so beyond the pale that Matt couldn't have him on Useful Idiots? Matt has a rep to look after.
I love C.J. Hopkins and was happy to see Matt do a profile on him.
Naturally, I agree that the word "conspiracy theory" has ultimately just become a rhetorical tool to shut conversation down. That being said, there are a lot of bullshit ideas out there and many other ideas that are only half truths, or perverted truths used to subvert any larger substantial debate. How to separate the lies from the truth when we’re talking about something with so many moving parts, like the world geopolitical situation?
Knowing there are a lot of bullshit ideas, some simply more popular than others, ultimately the only way to overcome that seems to be to first challenge someone on how they think the world works on a fundamental level. That’s ultimately what a “conspiracy theory” is doing: it suggests the way things appear and the way the world actually is are two fundamentally different things. Usually, the real problem isn’t any given conspiracy theory per se, but rather the underlying axioms which prevent someone from thinking such a radical deviation from their worldview might actually be possible.
We could start arguing with someone over x new idea or potentially real conspiracy, which usually just means a tit-for-tat debate, or we could start by challenging the person or audience on their fundamental beliefs about how the world really works.
Are Russia and China really the “bad guys” which the US and Western world are simply trying to stave off? Are Russia and China really hostile actors towards the US and Western world? How many military bases do Russia or China have around the world? How many coups and foreign interventions have Russia or China been involved in over the recent decades? How many bio warfare labs do they have combined compared to the US? How many people fall for the narrative of an enemy image?
I’d say above 80% of the population is ultimately hostage to the enemy image narrative, which means they can’t really think about the strategic world situation in substantial terms, if that narrative is false. What purpose could introducing a new idea or potential real conspiracy among financial and corporate elites really achieve if the person holds fundamentally false axioms about the way the world operates on its most fundamental level?
Wall Street and the City of London banks, their extensions in Brussels, and the spider web of offshore financial havens are ultimately sitting on a financial bubble worth hundreds of trillions, if not quadrillions of dollars in nominal value. The world GDP is only around 80 trillion. So how are these financial interests coping with the fact that their entire financial casino is only still going because of the hyper-inflationary money printing, the Fed repo loans and artificially low interest rates? What happens if a bug appears on even one of these fronts?
I think if we want to have a discussion about the many moving parts in the overall world strategic puzzle, we first have to recognize the existential crisis unfolding within the Western world.
Short of Nuclear war, the US, NATO, and their allies just don’t have the ability to subvert Russia, China and Eurasia generally. So what are they to do?
I think we have to start there.
Understanding and explaining the situation isn't good enough. Hence my impatient comments elsewhere on this page https://taibbi.substack.com/p/interview-on-rising-on-elite-politics/comments#comment-2164577
As I wrote on my own blog not long ago, there is no redemption in narratives. https://thefsb.substack.com/p/dont-just-stand-there-do-something
Even though I am (perhaps because I am) an atheist, my catchphrase is now: I need a sermon. In addition to thundering descriptions of brimstone, you gotta give people some positive, practical guidance on what they can do to escape hell, even if it is just a localized, temporary escape.
Unlike Matt and Krystal and all the rest, I am, for all practical purposes, nobody. Two people follow my blog, give or take. So I just get a bit irritated by the endless repetitive punditry on the symptoms of the corruption of our society and so little about what might be done to make anything even a little bit better.
You’re right. Solution concepts are where many drop the balls. They are probably the best means of measuring someone’s assessment of the situation.
I would just point out that all our economic collapse and fascism has been stopped before. One of the great ironies is that China’s current economic development model is in reality what the US used to do.
What strikes fear into the heart of the oligarchy is the thought that the US, Russia, and China might come to agreements on the need for a new financial architecture, and the need for cooperation on economic development from high speed rail, the Bering Strait tunnel, Nuclear Power, Fusion research.
In short, the first step should be a Glass-Steagall standard banking re-organization. That’s actually probably something Taibi would like and agree on. All the trillions of printed dollars have been going to the zombie banks in order for them to stay afloat, for lending not to freeze up and cause them all to be vaporized overnight. Nothing in the real world, the real economy, farmers, infrastructure, energy grids, water management, new cities, nuclear power, nothing else was built or bailed out. That financial cancer is what has to be cut out. There is no way for the system to go on with that quadrillion dollar problem.
https://www.strategic-culture.org/news/2019/08/07/avoid-collapse-means-restoring-glass-steagall-without-green-new-deal/
Much of the US infrastructure is ROT, so banking re-organization is a necessary means of making the credit available for reconstruction and the establishment of new infrastructure and economic platforms.
https://www.strategic-culture.org/news/2020/09/02/carney-green-bonds-vs-hamiltonian-greenbacks/
Mathew Ehret is arguably the best journalist out there when it comes to solutions. He’s not bogged down by radical free market ideology or brainwashed with the idea that we need to cover the entire planet with windmills and solar panels and shut down the rest of industrial society.
Yeah, absolutely. I think people need to liberate themselves from that gag reflex that somehow says “You can’t talk about this. If you talk about this you are a crazy person, you are right wing, you are a conspiracy theorist.”
Lippman spoke of “popular opinion” as something largely determined by a "powerful, socially superior, successful, rich urban social set [which] is fundamentally international throughout the Western Hemisphere and in many ways, London is its center. It counts among its membership the most influential people in the world, containing as it does the diplo matic sets, high finance, the upper circles of the army and navy, some princes of the church, the great newspaper proprietors, their wives, mothers, and daughters who wield the scepter of invitation. It is at once a great circle of talk and a real social set."
The issue he spoke of back then was that the media itself should not be responsible for defining the messaging: “public opinion must be organized for the press, not by the press." This is pretty evident today. The talking points are consistently identical.
To point that out is not a conspiracy theory lol.
It’s important to trace the history of this stuff as well. Psychological warfare, the social engineering of public opinion, these subjects were heavily studied and invested in during the post-war period. I find it strange that a lot of leading intellectuals are afraid to even touch this stuff. I think part of the problem is that they don’t fully understand it themselves. But it has a history that can be traced and understood. It should be just as objective a subject as psychology, economics, history...
Psychological warfare was largely developed out in the post-WWI and WWII period, especially at the Tavistock clinic (The British military’s psychological warfare division). It was at a time when they had a mass of shell-shock victims that they could study, studying the effects of stress, fear and trauma on one’s thinking, to study group dynamics, the creation of artificial family systems whereby new suggestions can be introduced. The biggest takeaway was that the suggestions introduced into the group only held if people were not aware that they were being made. That’s actually where the whole art of it lay. Along with that environment was seen as another key factor. Being able to control or change certain variables in the environment was another way to help enforce the suggestions.
People should study this subject very diligently. I recently talked about some of this stuff in a podcast:
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=smVvJzijAek
Both the original essay and your interview were excellent and spot-on. I believe this issue is THE fundamental issue of our time and far to few people in the “Media” are discussing it authentically.
I'd add that they're working overtime and downing Adderall in copious quantities just to keep the spin machines going around the clock and reverse the curse.
Too bad they can't quite keep up lol
Eventually it will swallow its tail. The Fauci emails are the beginning. Kamala's "I didn't visit Europe" was next. They cannot wait for summer recess. It can't come fast enough. For McConnell and his minions too.
The "compromise" infrastructure bill is the attempt to quiet everyone. They just hope that nobody notices that it doesn't do anything for anybody. More bridges and trains to nowhere.
Vanity project earmarks.
Harris is a hot mess. Which was totally forseeable. By, say, at least the legions of potential primary voters who took a hard pass.
She was less liked than Buttigieg, which is saying something. That guy was genetically engineered in a vial at Ft. Detrick as the epitome of a loathsome human.
Kind of weird that the least liked candidate in the Dem primaries turned out to be de facto President because she is VP to a turnip, but the inner workings of the Democratic Party are always a magical mystery tour.
Rereading this comment, I recognize that it could reasonably be interpreted as homophobic, which was not my intent.
Pretty much the only thing I *don't* dislike about Pete B. is the fact that he is gay. That said, I find him using his sexuality as a marketing tactic in his campaigns vaguely nauseating, in the same way that I was disgusted by the "family values" Republicans (and the Tipper Gore Democrats) of the '80s and '90s. It all was -- and still is -- identity politics instead of substantive politics.
BULLETIN FOR POLITICIANS: I, as a voter, do not care who you fuck, how, or when, presuming that the fucking occurring is between mutually consenting adults. Successfully represent my political and economic interests! You'll get my vote!
Agree with you, except for that homophobic never occurred to me. Dems just don't get that not only straight white makes can suck as candidates. Any identity can suck as a candidate.
Didn’t seem homophobic to me, criticism for being plastic and fake can be leveled at gay people just as much as straight people.
No doubt-my buddy was the best man ( he is straight) at the wedding of two gay small business owners who were totally pro-Trump.
Fwiw, Trump was the most pro-gay President ever, b/c he truly didn’t give a shit about people’s bedrooms. He appointed gay ambassadors w/out a second thought and engaged in exactly zero handwringing over gay marriage.
I think it is unfortunate that you even feel the need to apologize. You didn’t write anything that remotely implied homophobia. Buttigieg is terrible, his sexuality has nothing to do with it.
She was engineered on a lab too, but they fucked up the control chip, so it malfunctions and can't be fixed. She may end up POTUS if Joe has to duck out during his term, but she isn't getting elected. The Dems had best have done plans b, c, and d.
I always think the Dems are a visible shitshow, but they're in charge now (if barely), so who is the clown? Me.
I don't agree with all of Angela Nagle's conclusions in this piece, but she makes some very salient points: https://angelanagle.substack.com/p/how-the-libs-owned-us-all
As long as elections are fraudulent she can easily get elected.
Montel Williams must have broken something before he returned it...
Not THAT surprising when you remember she's buddies with Obama. Who do you think is really running the country? Obama got the whole gang back together, added some neocons, and has the perfect front man!
Kind of ironic, the party of the woke selected the direct scion of one of the biggest slaveholding families in Jamaica.
The censorship is not just about politics.
Whatever your opinions about covid and all the issues around it, in my research I discovered that there are a substantial number of very credible doctors, researchers and scientists who have alternative opinions about almost every aspect of this whole crisis, including vaccinations. Rather than allowing their voices to be heard and giving the public the information we need to make informed decisions and opinions, these people were and are being systematically excluded from having their voices heard in any way.
The media is simply functioning as propaganda and cheerleading to manufacture consent, rather than giving people the true picture of the substantial disagreement with the official course of actions. This is now particularly true regarding vaccinations.
Of course so much of this is about politics and the culture war. The whole issue of covid became so charged with Trump and anti-Trump sentiment that to both sides science became a hostage to the culture war, to the detriment of the public.
In almost every aspect, from counting to testing to treatment to vaccinations, there are very credible criticisms and alternative views to the official positions but no one can just look at the facts because it's all so highly charged politically.
Nice interview. We need more civil discourse.
What was the controversy? I stay off social media, so I don't have any context beyond the essay itself. Which was fantastic, by the way, one of your best.
The controversy is that some people objected to his ideas. The usual H S.
Is that horse shit or high school?
Is there a difference?
Matt posted the article to Twitter (I'm not on Twitter but saw the link and the subsequent tweets) and "what happened to Matt Taibbi, he used to be..." was the common response.
Nothing new here, but when lies dominate the media the truth has to be repeated and over again. Matt articulates it well.
Didn’t Matt turn 51 not long ago? There must be a portrait of him aging somewhere in his attic.
I like Emily Jashinsky. She's following a line of good journalism.
It's refreshing to see people from various political horizons rally together under the banner of free speech and skepticism driven dialectical discourse. Also, the humor doesn't hurt a slight bit. Keep doing the good job Matt.
Matt, I tend to be conservative in most things and in general you tend to read on as lot of issues as progressive, just not many of the issues you write about as much. Why the hell is it you're one of the rare reporters who can actually report objectively? Any other well-known reporters you'd recommend to read besides Glenn? I get that the MSM doesn't reward anyone not toeing the party, but it boggles my mind how any dissent is suppressed or blocked altogether.
All this talk among the enlightened indi-media celebs like Matt, Glenn, Krystal etc about the *possibility* of a *dialog* is just getting me down. Absent in all of if this perpetual blah, blah is serious discussion of the electoral politics of a broad economic class-based coalition. Thomas Frank sometimes comes close but the rest of it is starting to seem like it's a brand and a business model for indi punditry.
And the idea that we build the coalition on our common faith in the 1st amendment is unrealistic. Liberal freedoms like that are great but for most people secondary to things like housing, food, clothing, economic and physical security of your family. MKL understood it, saying that the freedom to sit at a lunch counter is no use if you've no money to buy lunch.
Has liberalism actually been tremendously concerned with free speech? Actual free speech would apply to every inhabitant, not just to the people who were 'lucky enough to own a printing press' (or a television station), which is the way it was until the Internet arose out of the void, brought into being by the military, some private corps, and a lot of hackers and hobbyists, not free speech idealists. Now liberals (that is, the US gobmutt) are mostly trying to figure out how to shut it up. If there's a common faith in the First Amendment it doesn't seem to be working politically, and Mr. Assange is still in jail.
Once MLK started to pivot from race to class - he got killed. A lesson not lost on generations of subsequent social justice "leaders".
There is no principle of freedom of speech within bourgeois institutions, which is why I brought that up previously. As for the nation-state, apparently it's no longer needed. Many global corps have larger budgets.
I was thinking of the contemporary bourgeoisie, those whose lives and fates are most intimately involved with the fortunes of the present capitalist state. Liberals belonging to the 18th-century planter or merchant classes in North America would have different experiences, perceptions, and ideology from their political descendants. I just read today, probably in this very blog, about people whose most significant rite of passage is acceptance at the right university -- a mandarin class, one would have to say -- with the kind of conflicts mandarins have.
there is no substantial voter choice when there are only two parties belonging to wall st. there's only aesthetics.
but even if we allow the point, i guess it's on me to avoid the daily updates on how everything's broken.
Umm... I live in the age of...of...the in-ter-net. Or is it influence? Oh wait. It's of right or left, or left or right, or north or south, wherever the penguins are, where, supposedly, but more than likely the truth, uh, the icebergs are melting.
Left = something. Right = something. Left does not equal right, and sometimes, but not too often, right equals left, or left equals right. Perhaps, and this is a big perhaps, unless I want me teeth kicked in, left is greater than or less than equal to right. I know. I know. I put the left first. Don't get upset, and don't unlock your gun safe. Oh no! I mentioned gun in the same paragraph as left and right, and now no one gets a long.
I got called a fake jew boy a few article post replies ago. Not even fake Jew boy, with a capital "J". Fuck me when I can't even get insulted with the grammatically correct capitalization of Jew. My auto-correct wouldn't even let me spell jew. What's this country coming to when my phone knows more that hick, redneck, Jesus fearing, god damn, red blooded American, during God bless America. Sigh for our future.