WEBVTT
00:00.031 --> 00:05.687
[SPEAKER_00]: This is inform your resistance with political research associates or PRA.
00:09.262 --> 00:11.545
[SPEAKER_00]: tune in monthly to hear experts.
00:12.026 --> 00:21.620
[SPEAKER_00]: Researchers, journalists, academics, and movement strategists explain some of the most significant contemporary threats to democracy from the mainstream and far right.
00:22.081 --> 00:25.986
[SPEAKER_00]: With informed your resistance, we distill what you need to know most.
00:26.727 --> 00:30.713
[SPEAKER_00]: I'm your host
00:38.000 --> 00:47.510
[SPEAKER_00]: For today's episode, I sit down with PRA's principal research advisor, Stephen Gardner, to reflect on the ongoing US and Israeli war with Iran.
00:48.351 --> 00:52.956
[SPEAKER_00]: We discuss how this war differs so dramatically from previous US wars of empire.
00:53.016 --> 00:59.043
[SPEAKER_00]: Its implications for domestic politics, especially in light of the upcoming 2026 midterm elections.
00:59.683 --> 01:04.108
[SPEAKER_00]: And what does tell us about the Trump administration's authoritarian state-making project?
01:04.088 --> 01:12.676
[SPEAKER_00]: We conclude with the most vital thing we can do in this moment to build effective resistance, both to the war and to rising authoritarianism.
01:14.138 --> 01:25.308
[SPEAKER_00]: Stephen, thank you for sitting down with me again today on short notice to talk about the newest of the Trump administration's overseas endeavors.
01:26.430 --> 01:32.155
[SPEAKER_01]: Always a pleasure, Kokey, I'm really happy to be here to be able to talk about these things with you.
01:32.945 --> 01:46.484
[SPEAKER_00]: I'm also just really grateful that we have someone in house with experience with the military, with analysis of the military, which is can be somewhat outside of the mandate of P.R.A.S.
01:46.504 --> 01:56.337
[SPEAKER_00]: focus on the social movement right, and this we're seeing this born out
01:56.317 --> 01:58.763
[SPEAKER_00]: taking the country to war yet again.
01:58.804 --> 02:06.985
[SPEAKER_00]: When you first learned of U.S. and Israeli strikes in Iran, what were your first thoughts and what were you monitoring or are you monitoring in real time?
02:08.365 --> 02:29.108
[SPEAKER_01]: My first plot was that this was anticipated because of the build-up, but my first thought was the arrogance of doing this kind of action without making any kind of public case, not Congress, not to the American people.
02:29.088 --> 02:45.882
[SPEAKER_01]: not to the world, not to our allies, other than Israel, presumably, and this to me says everything that you need to know about the kind of underlying attitude of the Trump administration.
02:45.862 --> 03:02.388
[SPEAKER_01]: It's about what the administration wants to do, and they may want to do it for reasons that are opaque even to themselves, or are distributed through various elements of the influences in the cabinet and beyond.
03:03.289 --> 03:14.046
[SPEAKER_01]: So, I'm thinking, wow, this is a setup for a colossal catastrophe.
03:15.207 --> 03:23.617
[SPEAKER_01]: say the Iraq war, which was fought based on a lie that was fairly transparent to anyone who's paying attention even at the time.
03:24.758 --> 03:27.481
[SPEAKER_01]: It was sold by people who were selling their souls.
03:28.202 --> 03:36.551
[SPEAKER_01]: I'm thinking of particularly, of course, of Colin Powell who knew better and sold this anyway.
03:37.693 --> 03:39.915
[SPEAKER_01]: But with this case,
03:39.895 --> 03:53.529
[SPEAKER_01]: It's not even clear how the actions that they're going to take and have already taken will lead to any of the outcomes that they profess are the goals here.
03:54.049 --> 03:57.613
[SPEAKER_01]: And it's kind of a scatter shot, shotgun approach to what those goals are.
03:58.554 --> 04:09.345
[SPEAKER_01]: Anyway, some of them contradictory, but yeah, I'm thinking
04:09.595 --> 04:26.717
[SPEAKER_01]: What ever tiny fragments of good will towards American foreign policy may remain in the world have, you know, remain in existence after so much unilateral, bella coast and pointless activity.
04:26.817 --> 04:28.239
[SPEAKER_01]: So those were the first things that I thought.
04:28.640 --> 04:33.426
[SPEAKER_01]: My second thoughts were then about the domestic politics of this and we can get into that commitment.
04:33.490 --> 04:46.905
[SPEAKER_00]: Does the lack of coherent story and also the lack of attempt to fabricate one suggest a reversal in a relationship in which Israel has personal long been a tool of U.S.
04:46.985 --> 04:56.055
[SPEAKER_00]: Empire and now the Trump administration has deployed U.S. military in service of Israeli aims?
04:56.035 --> 05:11.580
[SPEAKER_01]: Well, I mean, it's an interesting calculus, and I would say that what it comes down to is that if we are to believe the Secretary of State Park O'Rubio, the
05:11.560 --> 05:29.868
[SPEAKER_01]: justification for the final decision to start bombing was that Israel said they were going to do it anyway and that therefore it became a situation of self-defense for the United States and this very limited sense that the Iranians were quite likely to respond against American military bases in the region.
05:30.789 --> 05:40.183
[SPEAKER_01]: So if they were going to do that and Israel was going to do the bombing anyway then preemptively
05:40.163 --> 05:43.247
[SPEAKER_01]: to start bombing now, of course, the politics of that are.
05:43.748 --> 05:49.636
[SPEAKER_01]: Screw is hack, but I mean, you know, Israel is essentially a client state of the United States.
05:49.716 --> 05:59.168
[SPEAKER_01]: I mean, however, you know, conspiracy theories may come along, I don't think I can imagine a Trump regime if Israel didn't exist.
05:59.689 --> 06:01.331
[SPEAKER_01]: That wouldn't do stuff like this.
06:01.411 --> 06:03.454
[SPEAKER_01]: It might be slightly different stuff.
06:03.839 --> 06:05.662
[SPEAKER_01]: but it would still be stuff like this.
06:05.863 --> 06:06.183
[SPEAKER_01]: Why?
06:06.825 --> 06:11.253
[SPEAKER_01]: Because of the kinds of people Trump has put in charge of the security state.
06:12.114 --> 06:26.421
[SPEAKER_01]: I mean, we have Pete Heggseth who's philosophy seems to be one of sort of fascistic, masculinist violence as a cure all.
06:26.401 --> 06:36.495
[SPEAKER_01]: the fact that he can't imagine that none of them seem to be imagined why we're doing the violence other than to brutalize the people and demonstrate that we are willing to do that.
06:38.278 --> 06:50.114
[SPEAKER_01]: And of course, it's helpful from a public relations point of view that it's a vilified people that these are Muslims that this is Iran was whom the United States has disputes going back decades and so on.
06:51.216 --> 06:55.041
[SPEAKER_00]: Apparently 46 years of imminent threat of war.
06:56.540 --> 07:08.057
[SPEAKER_01]: And no indication other than the one that Rubio gave about, well, Iran's probably going to launch missiles at and drones at our bases, if Israel attacks them to indicate that there was any imminent threat.
07:09.058 --> 07:21.416
[SPEAKER_01]: Well, I mean, of course, the bases we need to understand are nothing but a liability to the United States, taking as a rational actor on a conventional neo-imperialist stage.
07:21.936 --> 07:24.420
[SPEAKER_01]: They're basically just putting people out there to get shot at.
07:26.003 --> 07:27.906
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, that certainly makes a lot of sense.
07:28.727 --> 07:34.075
[SPEAKER_00]: Now, as the word 12 days into this war, what are you watching on the ground?
07:34.175 --> 07:35.177
[SPEAKER_00]: What are you monitoring?
07:35.217 --> 07:53.344
[SPEAKER_01]: Well, I'm monitoring the coins of daily responses that are coming up in the, from the administration, from the legacy press and from right wing influencers who have to a certain extent,
07:53.324 --> 08:00.444
[SPEAKER_01]: been slow to, at least some of them have been slow to embrace this others or are more like, well, let's just kill them all.
08:01.166 --> 08:08.346
[SPEAKER_01]: They're, you know, they are buying hook and line into the into the message of violence and force makes right.
08:08.326 --> 08:11.950
[SPEAKER_01]: and makes good policy, whether or not it's right.
08:12.190 --> 08:30.351
[SPEAKER_01]: We're looking at a draconian war executed with kind of Olympian powers of, you know, air superiority and a preconception that we will not really have to risk major loss to life at limb.
08:30.331 --> 08:41.565
[SPEAKER_01]: At the same time, understanding that we are putting Iran in a position where they have essentially no choice other than in Donald Trump's phrase unconditional surrender.
08:42.166 --> 08:58.887
[SPEAKER_01]: But to continue fighting and to find some asymmetrical ways of doing that that is using unconventional forces to attack vulnerable targets, either in the sphere of ally ship to the United States or in the United States itself, or they can possibly do it.
08:59.845 --> 09:12.249
[SPEAKER_01]: which is something we need to think about because it's entirely possible that the Iranians will conceive a asymmetrical attack of terrorist attack on the United States that could do significant damage.
09:12.309 --> 09:18.782
[SPEAKER_01]: Now, there was a FBI memo that went out a little while ago that's now hitting the press.
09:19.927 --> 09:25.333
[SPEAKER_01]: that warned that Iran could weaponize drones to attack the California coast.
09:26.334 --> 09:30.598
[SPEAKER_01]: And my response to that was, are they saying that this could happen?
09:31.058 --> 09:31.959
[SPEAKER_01]: That's what the memo says.
09:32.039 --> 09:32.820
[SPEAKER_01]: It could happen.
09:33.341 --> 09:37.906
[SPEAKER_01]: So this is the FBI sort of covering their behind and trying to look useful.
09:38.806 --> 09:45.954
[SPEAKER_01]: But if we take the larger point, is it plausible that the Iranians might attempt to attack the United States?
09:45.974 --> 09:47.115
[SPEAKER_01]: Of course it's plausible.
09:47.332 --> 10:09.085
[SPEAKER_01]: Now, the politics of that are complicated, because if it's more than a nuisance in military terms, then it becomes the one thing that could potentially unite the, you know, to produce a majority in favor of the war and clip the script on the high disapproval levels of the, of the Trump regime.
10:09.105 --> 10:11.128
[SPEAKER_01]: So the,
10:11.108 --> 10:21.321
[SPEAKER_01]: the restraint from Iran on that might be a political calculus as much as a capacity calculus.
10:28.743 --> 10:48.914
[SPEAKER_00]: In terms of monitoring the domestic response, when you and I sat down to discuss the attack in Venezuela at the beginning of this year, we talked about the way in which the America first the hypothetically isolationist wing of the far right was fairly completed in its response to Venezuela.
10:49.455 --> 10:53.822
[SPEAKER_00]: What response and what talking points are you seeing emerge from that sector of the right now?
10:54.730 --> 11:06.951
[SPEAKER_01]: Well, I mean, of course, from some quarters, Tucker Carlson, for example, Marjorie Taylor Green, you see a kind of continuation of the kind of critique around Venezuela.
11:06.971 --> 11:11.659
[SPEAKER_01]: You said America first, you lied, this is a problem, you're drawing us into a war.
11:11.639 --> 11:31.464
[SPEAKER_01]: But then, from the more sort of anti-Semitic neo-Nazi right, you're also seeing, you're doing this for Israel, this is the kind of conspiracy theory of Jewish puppet masters, and you are under control of some international globalist forces that want you to do this.
11:31.484 --> 11:34.187
[SPEAKER_01]: This is actually quite interesting interpretation.
11:34.167 --> 11:52.771
[SPEAKER_01]: In that, the historically, that conspiracy theory basically says that those forces Jewish internationalists controlled everything, of course, were kind of in a moment when that Jewish international so-called right-wing anti-Semitic conspiracy theory terms is reduced to just Israel at the United States.
11:53.131 --> 11:55.374
[SPEAKER_01]: There isn't anyone else who thinks of something's a good idea.
11:55.834 --> 12:03.364
[SPEAKER_01]: My suppose the Chinese might be looking and looking at it and saying, huh, could the United
12:04.542 --> 12:13.310
[SPEAKER_01]: but but there's no one he thinks that this is good policy outside of the the Trump regime in a few sort of habitual hawks.
12:15.552 --> 12:19.996
[SPEAKER_00]: Does this represent a salient a promising fracture on the right?
12:20.036 --> 12:26.602
[SPEAKER_00]: I've been thinking about sort of the way in which Tucker Carlson has become increasingly at odds with the Trump administration.
12:27.142 --> 12:32.507
[SPEAKER_00]: Does that mean he is losing influence or does that mean the maga base is fracturing?
12:33.382 --> 12:51.002
[SPEAKER_01]: A little of both, I mean, certainly Carlson is losing influence, and we could see this with, with Marjorie Taylor Greene taking a similar kind of position as now, of course, on the outside, no longer in Congress, a resigned, recognizing the marginality of a position that she wanted to do anything, but...
12:50.982 --> 12:57.929
[SPEAKER_01]: applauded every full stop in the regime's continuing pattern of warmaking.
12:58.470 --> 13:01.933
[SPEAKER_01]: It was interesting, of course, in terms of what the base thinks.
13:01.953 --> 13:10.743
[SPEAKER_01]: I think that the disapproval for the war levels are now at a point where they're clearly eating into the Mac base.
13:11.644 --> 13:18.711
[SPEAKER_01]: So there are probably those who are still justifying in terms of
13:18.691 --> 13:26.905
[SPEAKER_01]: Well, they're not going to entangle us in some decades long thing by posting, by sending soldiers to be there on the ground.
13:26.965 --> 13:28.387
[SPEAKER_01]: This isn't an infantry war.
13:28.447 --> 13:33.696
[SPEAKER_01]: We're not in an exchange of ordinary warfare, bellicosity.
13:33.716 --> 13:35.940
[SPEAKER_01]: We're dropping bombs on them.
13:35.920 --> 13:44.994
[SPEAKER_01]: But honestly, the lack of clarity about what they're trying to accomplish is has to be confusing to anyone.
13:45.014 --> 13:49.501
[SPEAKER_01]: Now, of course, you have some on the Christian right, the Christianists.
13:49.521 --> 13:58.975
[SPEAKER_01]: I honest right, who see this as a necessary step in the defense of the production of the Apocalypse.
13:58.955 --> 14:26.278
[SPEAKER_01]: the production of the end-himes, and that there are reports, reliable if not completely confirmed that some lower-level commanders preached this to their troops, you should be proud your part of bringing Jesus back to the world, which of course resulted in lots of complaints to to civil liberties, organizations who are like, rest, you're sending me to bomb someone to bring
14:26.258 --> 14:28.223
[SPEAKER_01]: How does that, how is that supposed to work?
14:28.404 --> 14:39.373
[SPEAKER_01]: And by the way, I'm Jewish or I'm Muslim or I'm an atheist and or I'm a Christian who doesn't believe in the end times as a product of human activity.
14:40.383 --> 14:57.447
[SPEAKER_00]: Fascinating to hear about end times rhetoric really being deployed by the state in a moment of war making, the way in which the Christian Zionist segment of the Christian right has like really become part and parcel of this administration.
14:58.608 --> 15:16.849
[SPEAKER_00]: So with the deeply unpopularness of this war and it's lack of coherent storytelling, how does the conditions of this war in particular complicate or exacerbate the Trump administration's authoritarian goals and progress?
15:17.790 --> 15:27.501
[SPEAKER_00]: And how does it interact with an ongoing effort on the ground to continue to deploy extensive mass deportation?
15:28.527 --> 15:28.847
[SPEAKER_01]: right?
15:29.468 --> 15:33.194
[SPEAKER_01]: Well, this is a complicated interaction.
15:33.254 --> 15:40.544
[SPEAKER_01]: Presumably, there was someone somewhere in the political advising team to the administration.
15:40.564 --> 15:46.452
[SPEAKER_01]: I thought that this was a role of the dice and that it might be popular, because essentially there's a lot of...
15:46.432 --> 15:51.139
[SPEAKER_01]: anti Muslim bigotry and anti Iranian bigotry in the United States.
15:51.520 --> 16:09.266
[SPEAKER_01]: So something to to play on something to work with and then the fear of a nuclear armed Iran that has been sold by not just this administration, but every administration in post-1979 since the Iranian Revolution world.
16:10.268 --> 16:13.873
[SPEAKER_01]: So there was at least some sense maybe that that could happen.
16:13.853 --> 16:28.875
[SPEAKER_01]: But the domestic deployment of violence, the security state in the United States, war abroad is always used, historically and structurally you can see why this will be true.
16:28.855 --> 16:35.689
[SPEAKER_01]: as an increased justification for lowering the threshold for justification of use of force at home.
16:36.170 --> 16:36.391
[SPEAKER_01]: Why?
16:36.431 --> 16:40.219
[SPEAKER_01]: Because, well, we're at war with a foreign enemy and your actions.
16:40.860 --> 16:46.712
[SPEAKER_01]: If you're opposing domestic actions by the regime, you are, in effect, dating.
16:46.692 --> 16:48.155
[SPEAKER_01]: comforting the enemy.
16:49.257 --> 16:53.406
[SPEAKER_01]: So that is the issue there.
16:53.486 --> 17:02.264
[SPEAKER_01]: However, the Trump administration has a kind of, you know, focus, problem in terms of where it's going to put its energy.
17:02.324 --> 17:05.190
[SPEAKER_01]: This is, in some ways,
17:05.170 --> 17:10.300
[SPEAKER_01]: accidental brilliance in that it can just keep moving on the chair.
17:10.320 --> 17:16.493
[SPEAKER_01]: There's no, since there's no like perfect gold that they want other than what they said this morning.
17:17.014 --> 17:22.926
[SPEAKER_01]: It's really, you know, kind of 1984 sort of sort of maneuverware.
17:22.906 --> 17:30.014
[SPEAKER_01]: whoever we're fighting right now doesn't matter what we were doing yesterday is the important thing to fight.
17:30.595 --> 17:49.977
[SPEAKER_01]: So now it's Iran last week, two weeks, three weeks ago, as Venezuela, then it was crime in Minneapolis supposedly being committed by immigrants, and before that it was something else, and something else, and something else.
17:51.644 --> 18:01.494
[SPEAKER_01]: Mexican drug cartels who are going to attack the American border with whatever it is they're claiming or drug traffickers in the Caribbean.
18:02.275 --> 18:13.507
[SPEAKER_01]: It's one justification after another and what they're doing as a strategy is to basically set themselves up so they don't actually have to accomplish anything.
18:13.988 --> 18:15.249
[SPEAKER_01]: They just declare victory.
18:15.289 --> 18:16.150
[SPEAKER_01]: Now the problem is,
18:16.636 --> 18:22.566
[SPEAKER_01]: that you declare victory after victory after victory and nothing actually ever changes except maybe things get worse.
18:23.528 --> 18:28.135
[SPEAKER_01]: And even the most devoted followers start to say, wait, why don't we do that again?
18:28.175 --> 18:42.880
[SPEAKER_01]: It so happens that the resources of the United States are so
18:44.159 --> 18:47.264
[SPEAKER_01]: mishandling to really be affected by people.
18:47.865 --> 18:56.761
[SPEAKER_01]: But I have a partially humorous, but partially I think actual, I don't know if it's the strategy, but I think it's the limits to the strategy they're currently using.
18:57.001 --> 19:01.729
[SPEAKER_01]: They're just going to drop every bomb and shoot every missile that they have, and when they run out they'll say they won.
19:01.709 --> 19:14.945
[SPEAKER_01]: And then, you know, some of the professional military people, even General Kayne, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs and staff that Trump appointed, is this sort of hand-picked agent of Bill of Cossity.
19:15.246 --> 19:15.466
[SPEAKER_01]: Thanks.
19:16.788 --> 19:20.152
[SPEAKER_01]: Did take a mo a beat to say, well, you know, we're going to have to replace all of those.
19:21.494 --> 19:31.446
[SPEAKER_01]: And I'm saying, that's probably the point underlying, because Iranian oil, we're probably never going to get our hands on that.
19:31.544 --> 19:36.650
[SPEAKER_01]: Now, in the meantime, of course, the prices of oil are going up, making American oil that much more viable.
19:36.690 --> 19:39.414
[SPEAKER_01]: I think we talked about this in the context of that as well.
19:39.454 --> 19:48.465
[SPEAKER_01]: In fact, it's now over $100 a barrel, or it is tending in that direction, which is the price point for, you know, drill, baby drill in the United States.
19:49.286 --> 19:52.590
[SPEAKER_01]: But what is for sure is that
19:52.823 --> 20:09.212
[SPEAKER_01]: that money that we will have to spend to replace all those munitions is going to be tens of billions of dollars probably will be paid by American taxpayers and go into the pockets of the military industrial complex.
20:09.563 --> 20:10.724
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, I think that's interesting.
20:10.744 --> 20:18.271
[SPEAKER_00]: I mean, the price of gas or the price of oil in one hand is increasing the value of US oil.
20:18.371 --> 20:21.794
[SPEAKER_00]: It's also being directly felt by consumers.
20:22.375 --> 20:32.364
[SPEAKER_00]: Domestic consumers is an early, an early sign of discontent from the base, from the manga base with this warm particular.
20:32.545 --> 20:37.309
[SPEAKER_00]: What other sort of material implications in addition to the cost of
20:37.289 --> 20:44.110
[SPEAKER_00]: Well, and taxation, do you think American populists will face as a result of this war?
20:45.085 --> 21:03.430
[SPEAKER_01]: Well, I mean, this is an open question, but we see volatility in the stock market, which doesn't necessarily impact ordinary people's day to day, but it does impact the ways in which American corporations and in large scale employers think about what they're doing.
21:03.951 --> 21:14.265
[SPEAKER_01]: And when they see volatility in the stock market, they start thinking downsides, they start thinking relocating
21:14.245 --> 21:18.292
[SPEAKER_01]: They started thinking, because this is how you stabilize your stock prices.
21:18.312 --> 21:21.598
[SPEAKER_01]: You fire a bunch of people and the stock price stabilizes or even goes up.
21:22.460 --> 21:26.928
[SPEAKER_01]: And so yeah, this is part of that picture that we could be looking at.
21:27.889 --> 21:37.907
[SPEAKER_01]: And then the other side of this for the economic picture in the United States is that
21:39.271 --> 21:41.333
[SPEAKER_01]: We don't know where this war is going.
21:41.453 --> 21:45.717
[SPEAKER_01]: I mean, they could declare victory next week and just pull the fleet back and stop fighting.
21:46.918 --> 22:07.978
[SPEAKER_01]: But a major terrorist attack in the United States real or staged could lead to a massive influx of new funding into economically useless activity the way it did after 9.11.
22:07.958 --> 22:17.416
[SPEAKER_01]: And so this is uncertainty, and this is part of, of course, with the stock market is reacting to, I mean, they have to know where they need to put their money.
22:17.817 --> 22:31.182
[SPEAKER_01]: Do they want to put it into safe stuff or do they want to take, make bets on putting it into security companies and surveillance companies and the volunteers and the big military hardware manufacturers and the mercenary companies and so on.
22:31.583 --> 22:45.070
[SPEAKER_00]: It's interesting too, I mean, this is all happening in the context of massive AI infrastructure investment as well during with the onset of a potentially along potentially short, extremely costly war.
22:45.130 --> 22:52.444
[SPEAKER_00]: This is a moment in the US history of really significant expenditure across the board.
22:52.424 --> 23:07.973
[SPEAKER_00]: simultaneous with consumers experiencing a contraction of what they can, what of affordability, and so I think this will be a really interesting moment for understanding economic tensions in the context of U.S. governance.
23:09.236 --> 23:10.939
[SPEAKER_00]: Zooming out for a minute,
23:12.370 --> 23:22.918
[SPEAKER_00]: This so called forever wars in the service of regime change, which this word does not have that same framing or inevitability about it.
23:23.660 --> 23:27.831
[SPEAKER_00]: These forever wars were long, have long since been a facet of US Empire.
23:27.811 --> 23:46.309
[SPEAKER_00]: And we're in a moment in which US Empire is occurring in the context of an erosion of international neoliberal norms and an erosion of a moralistic western paternalism, which I think we see in some ways with the lack of rationale given for the attacks in Iran.
23:47.250 --> 23:57.700
[SPEAKER_00]: What does the signal for you about the viability of a warmaking project as a project of Empire?
23:59.333 --> 24:12.086
[SPEAKER_01]: downward trajectory, but downward trajectory of the possibilities of empire even where the violence of empire could simultaneously increase.
24:12.987 --> 24:13.307
[SPEAKER_01]: Why?
24:13.327 --> 24:28.783
[SPEAKER_01]: Because the thing about the neoliberal foreign policy realists were unlike the sheer folk of a corporate board and the CEO who
24:29.506 --> 24:43.358
[SPEAKER_01]: They could think about 10, 50 years into the future and how to stabilize controls and prevent countries from successfully implementing something other than regressive austerity policies.
24:43.959 --> 24:53.407
[SPEAKER_01]: So they could think about how do we keep those people from successfully having national health care and free public transit and universal education?
24:53.787 --> 24:59.412
[SPEAKER_01]: Because we don't want those things, those are bad
24:59.392 --> 25:02.938
[SPEAKER_01]: or bad for the way we think of profitability.
25:05.823 --> 25:21.450
[SPEAKER_01]: There, it clips of the neoliberals, means that the people who are running things are thinking about same kinds of things that the CEOs are thinking about quarterly profits, except for in a much more
25:23.050 --> 25:24.933
[SPEAKER_01]: bounded kind of way by bounded.
25:24.953 --> 25:29.742
[SPEAKER_01]: I mean, they don't know that they're going to stay in power for very long.
25:30.023 --> 25:39.540
[SPEAKER_01]: They don't think of themselves as permanent or at least there's some of them who recognize they need to steal as much as they possibly can right now.
25:39.520 --> 25:54.542
[SPEAKER_01]: And I use that word advisedly, I mean, it includes both, you know, dubious transfers of wealth to military corporations, military hardware corporations, and one, but also includes the graph that is coming off the top.
25:54.522 --> 26:23.922
[SPEAKER_01]: It includes the increased reliance on artificial intelligence and the infrastructure that it is that is cost that it is costing to build out, which, of course, you know, this is another piece of this puzzle as the gas prices go up and people experience that, you know, it states it's mostly transferred away from oil-driven power plants for electricity, however, with the construction
26:23.902 --> 26:33.555
[SPEAKER_01]: they're now becoming the major consumer or major new consumer of electricity which is pushing everyone's electricity bills up at the same time.
26:34.416 --> 26:48.154
[SPEAKER_01]: So you know at the consumer level we're experiencing this but also in terms of pure capacity that how we're going to generate all of this electricity and the water uses also.
26:48.134 --> 26:50.239
[SPEAKER_01]: extreme for data centers.
26:50.860 --> 27:04.089
[SPEAKER_01]: So yeah, and the lack of transparency and the lack of democratic oversight and the refusal to regulate and the project 2025 attack on any kind of regulatory apparatus.
27:04.910 --> 27:07.476
[SPEAKER_01]: I mean, set aside regulation of AI as a
27:07.996 --> 27:35.438
[SPEAKER_01]: an ethical level and you know it's impact on what it means to be human and so and so for just it's the impact of it's being used at all on the environment on the economy on the labor force it's you know a few few activists who are who are caring about this I mean I don't mean to to integrate their efforts are doing great work but the the Congress of the United States is like oh this is the thing can be done it's like a force of nature
27:42.978 --> 27:55.137
[SPEAKER_00]: I think that one of the things that is really interesting about the conversation that we've had we're having today is that there are so many variable factors today.
27:55.157 --> 28:08.057
[SPEAKER_00]: It relative to previous U.S. war making efforts that it will be really interesting and really important to watch and understand the interactivity as we've been discussing.
28:08.037 --> 28:20.661
[SPEAKER_00]: And I think what one of the things that I find really fascinating about the timing as well of this war in Iran is the lead up to the midterm elections.
28:20.901 --> 28:30.720
[SPEAKER_00]: And the weak and prior to the attacks on Iran in late February, mainstream media learned of
28:32.084 --> 28:38.455
[SPEAKER_00]: explicit plans from Trump aligned activists to curtail electoral democracy in advance of the midterms.
28:39.537 --> 28:48.253
[SPEAKER_00]: We are no longer seeing that analysis on the front page of our major news outlets.
28:48.233 --> 29:03.974
[SPEAKER_00]: How do you interpret this interactivity between a war of incoherence, distraction, and violence for violence sake with more coordinated movement from electoral disruptors?
29:04.956 --> 29:07.239
[SPEAKER_00]: And what does this tell us about?
29:07.299 --> 29:14.629
[SPEAKER_00]: What can we possibly expect from the midterms with this ongoing dynamic in place?
29:15.385 --> 29:21.840
[SPEAKER_01]: Well, and we can throw into that the political consequences of the war as it exists right now.
29:21.901 --> 29:27.554
[SPEAKER_01]: Of course, assuming it goes on for some time, it can only current trajectory.
29:27.634 --> 29:32.145
[SPEAKER_01]: Only have negative impacts on the electability of MAGA aligned.
29:32.125 --> 29:33.447
[SPEAKER_01]: candidates.
29:34.207 --> 29:36.210
[SPEAKER_00]: Unless there's an attack, right?
29:36.230 --> 29:50.006
[SPEAKER_01]: Unless there's an attack, unless there's some kind of a domestic attack, unless something changes, either either domestic attack or it credible enough, declaration of victory, and to celebration of the might of U.S.
29:50.106 --> 29:54.932
[SPEAKER_01]: Empire, which doesn't even have to put many of our soldiers at risk overseas.
29:55.893 --> 29:59.938
[SPEAKER_01]: So, the, the, that, that, that,
29:59.918 --> 30:15.159
[SPEAKER_01]: This adds to the plausibility of attempts to instigate or enact types of political intimidation and political violence that will limit access to polling places, for example.
30:15.980 --> 30:24.171
[SPEAKER_01]: I mean, we have Steve Bannon calling for encircling polling places with ice agents, which Bannon has the
30:25.518 --> 30:37.317
[SPEAKER_01]: the role of being sort of the signal person who puts the stuff out there and sees what the reaction is and what actually happens may not be quite as extreme as what he
30:37.583 --> 30:57.246
[SPEAKER_01]: said what he recommends, but between that and, you know, selective immigration enforcement enforcement being declared near polling stations to protect the vote from fraud, which that case is one that continues the case of
30:57.226 --> 31:06.018
[SPEAKER_01]: massive non-citizen voting in the United States being a factor in elections, of course, no evidence that this exists.
31:06.078 --> 31:07.881
[SPEAKER_01]: And there's a weak way of saying it.
31:08.301 --> 31:18.475
[SPEAKER_01]: We can more or less say that it doesn't exist that anyone who does this has essentially been by accident or because of some kind of
31:18.455 --> 31:29.688
[SPEAKER_01]: misunderstanding or or mental health issue, there's no campaign to make this happen, and no significant number of people doing it, and it is never affected the outcome of an election that has been demonstrated.
31:30.870 --> 31:38.238
[SPEAKER_01]: But anyway, this could have a significant impact on what happens at the polls, people staying away from polls.
31:38.719 --> 31:44.125
[SPEAKER_01]: We saw in the 2024 election an increasing number of
31:44.105 --> 31:50.365
[SPEAKER_01]: Latinx, folk voting for Trump, those numbers, the polling numbers are drastically declining.
31:50.946 --> 31:51.609
[SPEAKER_01]: Drastically.
31:52.130 --> 31:57.507
[SPEAKER_01]: The Trump administration probably has a pretty good sense that keeping them away from the polls is a good idea.
31:58.870 --> 32:12.095
[SPEAKER_01]: Similarly, when you talk about any kind of security state presence at our near polling places, then you're talking about, in order to quote unquote maintain order, for example, then you're talking about intimidation.
32:12.676 --> 32:20.090
[SPEAKER_01]: You're talking about the people who are most vulnerable historically to state violence, being less likely to come to the polls.
32:21.432 --> 32:21.773
[SPEAKER_01]: And
32:23.288 --> 32:26.453
[SPEAKER_01]: this is, in turn, going to have an impact.
32:26.913 --> 32:43.278
[SPEAKER_01]: Now, what they're, what they're, the Trump administration is low key panicking about is that their opposition seems to be more motivated to get to the polls, at least in the right up to these primaries than in the past.
32:43.798 --> 32:52.992
[SPEAKER_01]: And they didn't quite expect that for whatever reason, they just assumed that at least their base
32:52.972 --> 32:54.014
[SPEAKER_01]: heavily motivated.
32:54.034 --> 32:58.364
[SPEAKER_01]: Of course, that base is probably looking ahead and saying Trump's going to be in office forever.
32:58.404 --> 33:01.470
[SPEAKER_01]: We don't necessarily like the next two or three guys on the list.
33:02.953 --> 33:04.116
[SPEAKER_01]: They're not our guy.
33:04.537 --> 33:09.327
[SPEAKER_01]: They're not they don't represent our dream of a
33:10.640 --> 33:14.347
[SPEAKER_01]: authoritarian leader who actually represents what we want.
33:15.168 --> 33:16.892
[SPEAKER_01]: I mean, J.D.
33:16.912 --> 33:28.834
[SPEAKER_01]: Vance not exactly a charismatic figure, and clearly allied with people who who are mostly about how can I make another $10 billion this month.
33:29.928 --> 33:38.107
[SPEAKER_00]: Rubio, though, has shown up more and more, certainly as a mouthpiece of the administration during these acts of aggression.
33:38.147 --> 33:43.600
[SPEAKER_00]: Do you have a read on Rubio's popularity with Trump voters?
33:44.305 --> 34:03.546
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, I mean, Rubio certainly has a base of support, but it's more in the traditional hawk conservative hawk, Catholic right, sorts of, sorts of folks, and his, you know, his hyperfocus on Cuba is not going to be attractive to a lot of people who,
34:03.931 --> 34:08.339
[SPEAKER_01]: who say what Cuba, what, that's the place where the cigars come from, what do we care?
34:09.161 --> 34:22.185
[SPEAKER_01]: Americans thought being very good at this sort of thing and, you know, we haven't spent in spite of the economic strangle and political diplomatic strangle, the United States is exercised against Cuba since forever.
34:22.245 --> 34:25.551
[SPEAKER_01]: It's been the cold war's been over a long time.
34:25.531 --> 34:37.507
[SPEAKER_01]: And people are discontinuing to care, especially when it looks like even the administration is turning to deporting Cuban refugees at this point.
34:37.567 --> 34:42.814
[SPEAKER_01]: And so the idea that that should be a big issue for people is going to be a heart cell.
34:43.575 --> 34:51.285
[SPEAKER_01]: China probably, if Rubio can construct himself as a China hawk, which is plausible, then that would probably carry more.
34:51.265 --> 35:03.185
[SPEAKER_01]: more, more weight, but it's going to be hard for him to construct himself as someone who is a populist champion of MAGA land values.
35:04.106 --> 35:13.442
[SPEAKER_01]: So, he's plausible, but as a candidate, but I don't know that he's going to be able to carry the, carry the, the MAGA nation.
35:13.422 --> 35:14.986
[SPEAKER_01]: banner forward.
35:15.608 --> 35:19.198
[SPEAKER_01]: I think it's possible that we don't know who we do this yet.
35:19.920 --> 35:24.833
[SPEAKER_01]: A minor character who talks a big game might be a
35:25.252 --> 35:32.881
[SPEAKER_01]: A, my B, someone who could emerge will have a better idea of all of this after the after the midterms, of course.
35:33.962 --> 35:46.557
[SPEAKER_01]: There will be deep panic if whatever efforts are made in the midterms to restrict voting in voters, fail, and there's a significant shift in Congress.
35:47.077 --> 35:52.103
[SPEAKER_01]: I think that at that point you will see panic in Magaland
35:52.083 --> 35:58.566
[SPEAKER_01]: as people get in line to make sure that they get their preemptive hardens before Trump leaves office.
36:00.706 --> 36:23.777
[SPEAKER_00]: It also seems that the MAGA base has been swayed for so long by a cult of personality that the idea of a successor to the Trump administration that does not have the same charismatic leadership will certainly demobilize the MAGA electorate.
36:24.652 --> 36:36.109
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, I mean, for to make that transition, you have to kind of be willing to invest in bureaucratic kinds of infrastructure.
36:37.151 --> 36:41.918
[SPEAKER_01]: And while the Trump administration is certainly, you know,
36:43.771 --> 37:01.662
[SPEAKER_01]: changed the federal bureaucracy considerably, it has not significantly expanded the capacity of the Republican Party, for example, to be a party of a forever leadership movement.
37:01.642 --> 37:10.835
[SPEAKER_01]: They control it, they've controlled it for the last several years, but they're not exactly gaining members in leaps and bounds, even in an office.
37:12.017 --> 37:23.633
[SPEAKER_01]: And then using the federal bureaucracy the same time that you're decimating it as a tough job, the view.
37:23.984 --> 37:31.991
[SPEAKER_01]: virtually only the only element that is in only two elements that are increasing are the military and the Department of Homeland Security.
37:32.812 --> 37:39.158
[SPEAKER_01]: Even in the Justice Department of the FBI, they've lost and not been able to replace folk.
37:39.699 --> 37:50.869
[SPEAKER_01]: So that is a that is a diminishing of capacity to use the state simply by diminishing of the number of people who are within it.
37:50.849 --> 38:06.867
[SPEAKER_01]: So, ice now becomes the go-to folk because they're new hires, they're people who signed on for this mission, whatever the president wants, and they're increasing in numbers instead of decreasing.
38:08.095 --> 38:17.210
[SPEAKER_01]: and how plausible is it to use these half-trained agents to do something other than immigration enforcement?
38:17.811 --> 38:18.792
[SPEAKER_01]: Doesn't mean they won't try.
38:18.852 --> 38:27.386
[SPEAKER_01]: But they would call it defending the capacity of the federal government to care of itself.
38:27.466 --> 38:29.570
[SPEAKER_01]: I mean, military is increased as well as budget.
38:29.890 --> 38:32.314
[SPEAKER_01]: There'll be a appropriation,
38:32.800 --> 38:40.679
[SPEAKER_01]: probably a big one perhaps more than one to fight this war depending on how long it goes on the subsidiary appropriation that will pass.
38:41.400 --> 38:45.510
[SPEAKER_01]: That Democrats will vote for because they have to quote unquote support the troops.
38:46.958 --> 38:56.916
[SPEAKER_00]: We haven't even talked about the sideline of Congress since the beginning of the year, but certainly most significantly in this moment.
38:57.617 --> 39:04.309
[SPEAKER_00]: And I think that's an important point in terms of thinking about the project of authoritarianism.
39:04.289 --> 39:27.516
[SPEAKER_00]: that this administration has not rebuilt a gutted bureaucracy to be regime loyal and into doing has not created a the infrastructure necessary for a durable ongoing project of authoritarianism beyond the charismatic head of state.
39:27.996 --> 39:30.499
[SPEAKER_00]: I mean, I think the idea of ice as
39:31.627 --> 39:40.219
[SPEAKER_00]: As the authoritarian state in body is, I mean, like you sort of suggest is fairly limited in applicability.
39:47.202 --> 39:58.161
[SPEAKER_00]: So what are some implications for the war and Iran that upcoming midterms for our core audience for our organizers for the social movement left?
39:58.221 --> 40:07.658
[SPEAKER_00]: What can we be doing to turn the lack of support for the war in our favor as we continue to build a movement of resistance?
40:08.684 --> 40:30.895
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, I mean, I mean, the first thing we have to continue to be resilient and that includes preparing for the possibility of some kind of staged or actual attack on American soil or near American soil, say, and I don't know, an aircraft carrier or something that could kill thousands of people.
40:30.875 --> 40:54.300
[SPEAKER_01]: and have some talking points and understandings available going into that without fear boggling, but understanding that this will inevitably lead to calls for and probably capitulation to efforts to increase surveillance and increase repression, make it harder to do the ordinary
40:54.280 --> 40:59.270
[SPEAKER_01]: business of democracy, even in the limited form that it exists in the United States.
41:00.052 --> 41:02.177
[SPEAKER_01]: So, so there's that, there's the resilience piece.
41:02.537 --> 41:11.496
[SPEAKER_01]: The other side is to not be afraid of pointing to the lack of purpose.
41:11.476 --> 41:13.279
[SPEAKER_01]: of this administration.
41:13.680 --> 41:29.105
[SPEAKER_01]: It is doing nothing but putting money into its own pockets and that of its cronies while blaming people who have no power for whatever problems that people actually have.
41:29.746 --> 41:37.078
[SPEAKER_01]: And lying about, I mean, this is obvious, but lying about the results that they are
41:37.058 --> 41:51.991
[SPEAKER_01]: So we have to continue to resist by preparing ourselves mentally and through increasing our our associations with people who we can recruit to be in community together.
41:52.592 --> 42:07.065
[SPEAKER_01]: The main thing that people need to do is like if I had one thing, it's like find little like-minded people or the close to like-minded people or the people who at least dislike the same things that you just like and talk to them personally about being involved.
42:07.045 --> 42:31.211
[SPEAKER_01]: I mean, this is the saturation of understanding around social media and AI and so on as being generators of political activity is basically saturated us with in coherence and it's really face-to-face conversations that we are forgetting how to do and that we need if we're going to organize against an authoritarian push.
42:31.231 --> 42:35.095
[SPEAKER_01]: So this is reaching out to five people, ten people who you know
42:35.429 --> 42:45.743
[SPEAKER_01]: who like you and saying, I would really like it if you would come to this meeting where we're going to talk about this war and its consequences for us.
42:45.858 --> 42:50.262
[SPEAKER_01]: I would really like it if you would get involved in this get out the vote activity.
42:50.642 --> 42:57.508
[SPEAKER_01]: I would really like it if you would get involved in doing this training of election for election security.
42:58.028 --> 43:15.763
[SPEAKER_01]: So this is the top of my list and then the organizational support for that is people in the movement left have to be ready to absorb those people while continuing to push out that message that we need to recruit people one at a time through our own family and friends
43:15.743 --> 43:31.609
[SPEAKER_01]: I mean, there isn't an example of a successful anti-authoritarian movement in recent history that didn't involve this kind of person to person recruitment and mobilization of people to do what was necessary.
43:33.125 --> 43:50.340
[SPEAKER_00]: I think that's both a large scale, and also very personalized plan to that our listeners that we as individuals can really focus on and feel meaningfully participatory.
43:51.198 --> 43:57.595
[SPEAKER_00]: Thank you so much, Stephen, for the many vagaries of our conversation, the ground that we've covered today.
43:57.635 --> 44:05.595
[SPEAKER_00]: I think this is a really interesting and important moment in history, and I'm really grateful to be able to pick your brain during it.
44:06.457 --> 44:07.159
[SPEAKER_01]: Thank you, Koki.
44:07.179 --> 44:08.262
[SPEAKER_01]: Great to be here, as always.
44:11.667 --> 44:15.033
[SPEAKER_00]: Thank you for listening to and form your resistance with PRA.
44:15.333 --> 44:17.798
[SPEAKER_00]: Today's episode was hosted by me, Kokey Mendus.
44:18.399 --> 44:22.606
[SPEAKER_00]: The podcast is produced by Olivia Lawrence Wildman and Frank Lawrence created our music.
44:23.207 --> 44:25.752
[SPEAKER_00]: If you haven't already, rate, review and subscribe.
44:26.393 --> 44:33.726
[SPEAKER_00]: And if you have appreciate our work, please consider donating to political research associates at politicalresearch.org.
44:33.706 --> 44:37.274
[SPEAKER_00]: But the best thing you can do to help us is to tell your comrades about the pod.
44:37.836 --> 44:42.587
[SPEAKER_00]: A shared analysis makes our resistance movement stronger and we need you to spread the word.
44:43.188 --> 44:44.391
[SPEAKER_00]: Until next time.
00:00.031 --> 00:05.687
[SPEAKER_00]: This is inform your resistance with political research associates or PRA.
00:09.262 --> 00:11.545
[SPEAKER_00]: tune in monthly to hear experts.
00:12.026 --> 00:21.620
[SPEAKER_00]: Researchers, journalists, academics, and movement strategists explain some of the most significant contemporary threats to democracy from the mainstream and far right.
00:22.081 --> 00:25.986
[SPEAKER_00]: With informed your resistance, we distill what you need to know most.
00:26.727 --> 00:30.713
[SPEAKER_00]: I'm your host
00:38.000 --> 00:47.510
[SPEAKER_00]: For today's episode, I sit down with PRA's principal research advisor, Stephen Gardner, to reflect on the ongoing US and Israeli war with Iran.
00:48.351 --> 00:52.956
[SPEAKER_00]: We discuss how this war differs so dramatically from previous US wars of empire.
00:53.016 --> 00:59.043
[SPEAKER_00]: Its implications for domestic politics, especially in light of the upcoming 2026 midterm elections.
00:59.683 --> 01:04.108
[SPEAKER_00]: And what does tell us about the Trump administration's authoritarian state-making project?
01:04.088 --> 01:12.676
[SPEAKER_00]: We conclude with the most vital thing we can do in this moment to build effective resistance, both to the war and to rising authoritarianism.
01:14.138 --> 01:25.308
[SPEAKER_00]: Stephen, thank you for sitting down with me again today on short notice to talk about the newest of the Trump administration's overseas endeavors.
01:26.430 --> 01:32.155
[SPEAKER_01]: Always a pleasure, Kokey, I'm really happy to be here to be able to talk about these things with you.
01:32.945 --> 01:46.484
[SPEAKER_00]: I'm also just really grateful that we have someone in house with experience with the military, with analysis of the military, which is can be somewhat outside of the mandate of P.R.A.S.
01:46.504 --> 01:56.337
[SPEAKER_00]: focus on the social movement right, and this we're seeing this born out
01:56.317 --> 01:58.763
[SPEAKER_00]: taking the country to war yet again.
01:58.804 --> 02:06.985
[SPEAKER_00]: When you first learned of U.S. and Israeli strikes in Iran, what were your first thoughts and what were you monitoring or are you monitoring in real time?
02:08.365 --> 02:29.108
[SPEAKER_01]: My first plot was that this was anticipated because of the build-up, but my first thought was the arrogance of doing this kind of action without making any kind of public case, not Congress, not to the American people.
02:29.088 --> 02:45.882
[SPEAKER_01]: not to the world, not to our allies, other than Israel, presumably, and this to me says everything that you need to know about the kind of underlying attitude of the Trump administration.
02:45.862 --> 03:02.388
[SPEAKER_01]: It's about what the administration wants to do, and they may want to do it for reasons that are opaque even to themselves, or are distributed through various elements of the influences in the cabinet and beyond.
03:03.289 --> 03:14.046
[SPEAKER_01]: So, I'm thinking, wow, this is a setup for a colossal catastrophe.
03:15.207 --> 03:23.617
[SPEAKER_01]: say the Iraq war, which was fought based on a lie that was fairly transparent to anyone who's paying attention even at the time.
03:24.758 --> 03:27.481
[SPEAKER_01]: It was sold by people who were selling their souls.
03:28.202 --> 03:36.551
[SPEAKER_01]: I'm thinking of particularly, of course, of Colin Powell who knew better and sold this anyway.
03:37.693 --> 03:39.915
[SPEAKER_01]: But with this case,
03:39.895 --> 03:53.529
[SPEAKER_01]: It's not even clear how the actions that they're going to take and have already taken will lead to any of the outcomes that they profess are the goals here.
03:54.049 --> 03:57.613
[SPEAKER_01]: And it's kind of a scatter shot, shotgun approach to what those goals are.
03:58.554 --> 04:09.345
[SPEAKER_01]: Anyway, some of them contradictory, but yeah, I'm thinking
04:09.595 --> 04:26.717
[SPEAKER_01]: What ever tiny fragments of good will towards American foreign policy may remain in the world have, you know, remain in existence after so much unilateral, bella coast and pointless activity.
04:26.817 --> 04:28.239
[SPEAKER_01]: So those were the first things that I thought.
04:28.640 --> 04:33.426
[SPEAKER_01]: My second thoughts were then about the domestic politics of this and we can get into that commitment.
04:33.490 --> 04:46.905
[SPEAKER_00]: Does the lack of coherent story and also the lack of attempt to fabricate one suggest a reversal in a relationship in which Israel has personal long been a tool of U.S.
04:46.985 --> 04:56.055
[SPEAKER_00]: Empire and now the Trump administration has deployed U.S. military in service of Israeli aims?
04:56.035 --> 05:11.580
[SPEAKER_01]: Well, I mean, it's an interesting calculus, and I would say that what it comes down to is that if we are to believe the Secretary of State Park O'Rubio, the
05:11.560 --> 05:29.868
[SPEAKER_01]: justification for the final decision to start bombing was that Israel said they were going to do it anyway and that therefore it became a situation of self-defense for the United States and this very limited sense that the Iranians were quite likely to respond against American military bases in the region.
05:30.789 --> 05:40.183
[SPEAKER_01]: So if they were going to do that and Israel was going to do the bombing anyway then preemptively
05:40.163 --> 05:43.247
[SPEAKER_01]: to start bombing now, of course, the politics of that are.
05:43.748 --> 05:49.636
[SPEAKER_01]: Screw is hack, but I mean, you know, Israel is essentially a client state of the United States.
05:49.716 --> 05:59.168
[SPEAKER_01]: I mean, however, you know, conspiracy theories may come along, I don't think I can imagine a Trump regime if Israel didn't exist.
05:59.689 --> 06:01.331
[SPEAKER_01]: That wouldn't do stuff like this.
06:01.411 --> 06:03.454
[SPEAKER_01]: It might be slightly different stuff.
06:03.839 --> 06:05.662
[SPEAKER_01]: but it would still be stuff like this.
06:05.863 --> 06:06.183
[SPEAKER_01]: Why?
06:06.825 --> 06:11.253
[SPEAKER_01]: Because of the kinds of people Trump has put in charge of the security state.
06:12.114 --> 06:26.421
[SPEAKER_01]: I mean, we have Pete Heggseth who's philosophy seems to be one of sort of fascistic, masculinist violence as a cure all.
06:26.401 --> 06:36.495
[SPEAKER_01]: the fact that he can't imagine that none of them seem to be imagined why we're doing the violence other than to brutalize the people and demonstrate that we are willing to do that.
06:38.278 --> 06:50.114
[SPEAKER_01]: And of course, it's helpful from a public relations point of view that it's a vilified people that these are Muslims that this is Iran was whom the United States has disputes going back decades and so on.
06:51.216 --> 06:55.041
[SPEAKER_00]: Apparently 46 years of imminent threat of war.
06:56.540 --> 07:08.057
[SPEAKER_01]: And no indication other than the one that Rubio gave about, well, Iran's probably going to launch missiles at and drones at our bases, if Israel attacks them to indicate that there was any imminent threat.
07:09.058 --> 07:21.416
[SPEAKER_01]: Well, I mean, of course, the bases we need to understand are nothing but a liability to the United States, taking as a rational actor on a conventional neo-imperialist stage.
07:21.936 --> 07:24.420
[SPEAKER_01]: They're basically just putting people out there to get shot at.
07:26.003 --> 07:27.906
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, that certainly makes a lot of sense.
07:28.727 --> 07:34.075
[SPEAKER_00]: Now, as the word 12 days into this war, what are you watching on the ground?
07:34.175 --> 07:35.177
[SPEAKER_00]: What are you monitoring?
07:35.217 --> 07:53.344
[SPEAKER_01]: Well, I'm monitoring the coins of daily responses that are coming up in the, from the administration, from the legacy press and from right wing influencers who have to a certain extent,
07:53.324 --> 08:00.444
[SPEAKER_01]: been slow to, at least some of them have been slow to embrace this others or are more like, well, let's just kill them all.
08:01.166 --> 08:08.346
[SPEAKER_01]: They're, you know, they are buying hook and line into the into the message of violence and force makes right.
08:08.326 --> 08:11.950
[SPEAKER_01]: and makes good policy, whether or not it's right.
08:12.190 --> 08:30.351
[SPEAKER_01]: We're looking at a draconian war executed with kind of Olympian powers of, you know, air superiority and a preconception that we will not really have to risk major loss to life at limb.
08:30.331 --> 08:41.565
[SPEAKER_01]: At the same time, understanding that we are putting Iran in a position where they have essentially no choice other than in Donald Trump's phrase unconditional surrender.
08:42.166 --> 08:58.887
[SPEAKER_01]: But to continue fighting and to find some asymmetrical ways of doing that that is using unconventional forces to attack vulnerable targets, either in the sphere of ally ship to the United States or in the United States itself, or they can possibly do it.
08:59.845 --> 09:12.249
[SPEAKER_01]: which is something we need to think about because it's entirely possible that the Iranians will conceive a asymmetrical attack of terrorist attack on the United States that could do significant damage.
09:12.309 --> 09:18.782
[SPEAKER_01]: Now, there was a FBI memo that went out a little while ago that's now hitting the press.
09:19.927 --> 09:25.333
[SPEAKER_01]: that warned that Iran could weaponize drones to attack the California coast.
09:26.334 --> 09:30.598
[SPEAKER_01]: And my response to that was, are they saying that this could happen?
09:31.058 --> 09:31.959
[SPEAKER_01]: That's what the memo says.
09:32.039 --> 09:32.820
[SPEAKER_01]: It could happen.
09:33.341 --> 09:37.906
[SPEAKER_01]: So this is the FBI sort of covering their behind and trying to look useful.
09:38.806 --> 09:45.954
[SPEAKER_01]: But if we take the larger point, is it plausible that the Iranians might attempt to attack the United States?
09:45.974 --> 09:47.115
[SPEAKER_01]: Of course it's plausible.
09:47.332 --> 10:09.085
[SPEAKER_01]: Now, the politics of that are complicated, because if it's more than a nuisance in military terms, then it becomes the one thing that could potentially unite the, you know, to produce a majority in favor of the war and clip the script on the high disapproval levels of the, of the Trump regime.
10:09.105 --> 10:11.128
[SPEAKER_01]: So the,
10:11.108 --> 10:21.321
[SPEAKER_01]: the restraint from Iran on that might be a political calculus as much as a capacity calculus.
10:28.743 --> 10:48.914
[SPEAKER_00]: In terms of monitoring the domestic response, when you and I sat down to discuss the attack in Venezuela at the beginning of this year, we talked about the way in which the America first the hypothetically isolationist wing of the far right was fairly completed in its response to Venezuela.
10:49.455 --> 10:53.822
[SPEAKER_00]: What response and what talking points are you seeing emerge from that sector of the right now?
10:54.730 --> 11:06.951
[SPEAKER_01]: Well, I mean, of course, from some quarters, Tucker Carlson, for example, Marjorie Taylor Green, you see a kind of continuation of the kind of critique around Venezuela.
11:06.971 --> 11:11.659
[SPEAKER_01]: You said America first, you lied, this is a problem, you're drawing us into a war.
11:11.639 --> 11:31.464
[SPEAKER_01]: But then, from the more sort of anti-Semitic neo-Nazi right, you're also seeing, you're doing this for Israel, this is the kind of conspiracy theory of Jewish puppet masters, and you are under control of some international globalist forces that want you to do this.
11:31.484 --> 11:34.187
[SPEAKER_01]: This is actually quite interesting interpretation.
11:34.167 --> 11:52.771
[SPEAKER_01]: In that, the historically, that conspiracy theory basically says that those forces Jewish internationalists controlled everything, of course, were kind of in a moment when that Jewish international so-called right-wing anti-Semitic conspiracy theory terms is reduced to just Israel at the United States.
11:53.131 --> 11:55.374
[SPEAKER_01]: There isn't anyone else who thinks of something's a good idea.
11:55.834 --> 12:03.364
[SPEAKER_01]: My suppose the Chinese might be looking and looking at it and saying, huh, could the United
12:04.542 --> 12:13.310
[SPEAKER_01]: but but there's no one he thinks that this is good policy outside of the the Trump regime in a few sort of habitual hawks.
12:15.552 --> 12:19.996
[SPEAKER_00]: Does this represent a salient a promising fracture on the right?
12:20.036 --> 12:26.602
[SPEAKER_00]: I've been thinking about sort of the way in which Tucker Carlson has become increasingly at odds with the Trump administration.
12:27.142 --> 12:32.507
[SPEAKER_00]: Does that mean he is losing influence or does that mean the maga base is fracturing?
12:33.382 --> 12:51.002
[SPEAKER_01]: A little of both, I mean, certainly Carlson is losing influence, and we could see this with, with Marjorie Taylor Greene taking a similar kind of position as now, of course, on the outside, no longer in Congress, a resigned, recognizing the marginality of a position that she wanted to do anything, but...
12:50.982 --> 12:57.929
[SPEAKER_01]: applauded every full stop in the regime's continuing pattern of warmaking.
12:58.470 --> 13:01.933
[SPEAKER_01]: It was interesting, of course, in terms of what the base thinks.
13:01.953 --> 13:10.743
[SPEAKER_01]: I think that the disapproval for the war levels are now at a point where they're clearly eating into the Mac base.
13:11.644 --> 13:18.711
[SPEAKER_01]: So there are probably those who are still justifying in terms of
13:18.691 --> 13:26.905
[SPEAKER_01]: Well, they're not going to entangle us in some decades long thing by posting, by sending soldiers to be there on the ground.
13:26.965 --> 13:28.387
[SPEAKER_01]: This isn't an infantry war.
13:28.447 --> 13:33.696
[SPEAKER_01]: We're not in an exchange of ordinary warfare, bellicosity.
13:33.716 --> 13:35.940
[SPEAKER_01]: We're dropping bombs on them.
13:35.920 --> 13:44.994
[SPEAKER_01]: But honestly, the lack of clarity about what they're trying to accomplish is has to be confusing to anyone.
13:45.014 --> 13:49.501
[SPEAKER_01]: Now, of course, you have some on the Christian right, the Christianists.
13:49.521 --> 13:58.975
[SPEAKER_01]: I honest right, who see this as a necessary step in the defense of the production of the Apocalypse.
13:58.955 --> 14:26.278
[SPEAKER_01]: the production of the end-himes, and that there are reports, reliable if not completely confirmed that some lower-level commanders preached this to their troops, you should be proud your part of bringing Jesus back to the world, which of course resulted in lots of complaints to to civil liberties, organizations who are like, rest, you're sending me to bomb someone to bring
14:26.258 --> 14:28.223
[SPEAKER_01]: How does that, how is that supposed to work?
14:28.404 --> 14:39.373
[SPEAKER_01]: And by the way, I'm Jewish or I'm Muslim or I'm an atheist and or I'm a Christian who doesn't believe in the end times as a product of human activity.
14:40.383 --> 14:57.447
[SPEAKER_00]: Fascinating to hear about end times rhetoric really being deployed by the state in a moment of war making, the way in which the Christian Zionist segment of the Christian right has like really become part and parcel of this administration.
14:58.608 --> 15:16.849
[SPEAKER_00]: So with the deeply unpopularness of this war and it's lack of coherent storytelling, how does the conditions of this war in particular complicate or exacerbate the Trump administration's authoritarian goals and progress?
15:17.790 --> 15:27.501
[SPEAKER_00]: And how does it interact with an ongoing effort on the ground to continue to deploy extensive mass deportation?
15:28.527 --> 15:28.847
[SPEAKER_01]: right?
15:29.468 --> 15:33.194
[SPEAKER_01]: Well, this is a complicated interaction.
15:33.254 --> 15:40.544
[SPEAKER_01]: Presumably, there was someone somewhere in the political advising team to the administration.
15:40.564 --> 15:46.452
[SPEAKER_01]: I thought that this was a role of the dice and that it might be popular, because essentially there's a lot of...
15:46.432 --> 15:51.139
[SPEAKER_01]: anti Muslim bigotry and anti Iranian bigotry in the United States.
15:51.520 --> 16:09.266
[SPEAKER_01]: So something to to play on something to work with and then the fear of a nuclear armed Iran that has been sold by not just this administration, but every administration in post-1979 since the Iranian Revolution world.
16:10.268 --> 16:13.873
[SPEAKER_01]: So there was at least some sense maybe that that could happen.
16:13.853 --> 16:28.875
[SPEAKER_01]: But the domestic deployment of violence, the security state in the United States, war abroad is always used, historically and structurally you can see why this will be true.
16:28.855 --> 16:35.689
[SPEAKER_01]: as an increased justification for lowering the threshold for justification of use of force at home.
16:36.170 --> 16:36.391
[SPEAKER_01]: Why?
16:36.431 --> 16:40.219
[SPEAKER_01]: Because, well, we're at war with a foreign enemy and your actions.
16:40.860 --> 16:46.712
[SPEAKER_01]: If you're opposing domestic actions by the regime, you are, in effect, dating.
16:46.692 --> 16:48.155
[SPEAKER_01]: comforting the enemy.
16:49.257 --> 16:53.406
[SPEAKER_01]: So that is the issue there.
16:53.486 --> 17:02.264
[SPEAKER_01]: However, the Trump administration has a kind of, you know, focus, problem in terms of where it's going to put its energy.
17:02.324 --> 17:05.190
[SPEAKER_01]: This is, in some ways,
17:05.170 --> 17:10.300
[SPEAKER_01]: accidental brilliance in that it can just keep moving on the chair.
17:10.320 --> 17:16.493
[SPEAKER_01]: There's no, since there's no like perfect gold that they want other than what they said this morning.
17:17.014 --> 17:22.926
[SPEAKER_01]: It's really, you know, kind of 1984 sort of sort of maneuverware.
17:22.906 --> 17:30.014
[SPEAKER_01]: whoever we're fighting right now doesn't matter what we were doing yesterday is the important thing to fight.
17:30.595 --> 17:49.977
[SPEAKER_01]: So now it's Iran last week, two weeks, three weeks ago, as Venezuela, then it was crime in Minneapolis supposedly being committed by immigrants, and before that it was something else, and something else, and something else.
17:51.644 --> 18:01.494
[SPEAKER_01]: Mexican drug cartels who are going to attack the American border with whatever it is they're claiming or drug traffickers in the Caribbean.
18:02.275 --> 18:13.507
[SPEAKER_01]: It's one justification after another and what they're doing as a strategy is to basically set themselves up so they don't actually have to accomplish anything.
18:13.988 --> 18:15.249
[SPEAKER_01]: They just declare victory.
18:15.289 --> 18:16.150
[SPEAKER_01]: Now the problem is,
18:16.636 --> 18:22.566
[SPEAKER_01]: that you declare victory after victory after victory and nothing actually ever changes except maybe things get worse.
18:23.528 --> 18:28.135
[SPEAKER_01]: And even the most devoted followers start to say, wait, why don't we do that again?
18:28.175 --> 18:42.880
[SPEAKER_01]: It so happens that the resources of the United States are so
18:44.159 --> 18:47.264
[SPEAKER_01]: mishandling to really be affected by people.
18:47.865 --> 18:56.761
[SPEAKER_01]: But I have a partially humorous, but partially I think actual, I don't know if it's the strategy, but I think it's the limits to the strategy they're currently using.
18:57.001 --> 19:01.729
[SPEAKER_01]: They're just going to drop every bomb and shoot every missile that they have, and when they run out they'll say they won.
19:01.709 --> 19:14.945
[SPEAKER_01]: And then, you know, some of the professional military people, even General Kayne, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs and staff that Trump appointed, is this sort of hand-picked agent of Bill of Cossity.
19:15.246 --> 19:15.466
[SPEAKER_01]: Thanks.
19:16.788 --> 19:20.152
[SPEAKER_01]: Did take a mo a beat to say, well, you know, we're going to have to replace all of those.
19:21.494 --> 19:31.446
[SPEAKER_01]: And I'm saying, that's probably the point underlying, because Iranian oil, we're probably never going to get our hands on that.
19:31.544 --> 19:36.650
[SPEAKER_01]: Now, in the meantime, of course, the prices of oil are going up, making American oil that much more viable.
19:36.690 --> 19:39.414
[SPEAKER_01]: I think we talked about this in the context of that as well.
19:39.454 --> 19:48.465
[SPEAKER_01]: In fact, it's now over $100 a barrel, or it is tending in that direction, which is the price point for, you know, drill, baby drill in the United States.
19:49.286 --> 19:52.590
[SPEAKER_01]: But what is for sure is that
19:52.823 --> 20:09.212
[SPEAKER_01]: that money that we will have to spend to replace all those munitions is going to be tens of billions of dollars probably will be paid by American taxpayers and go into the pockets of the military industrial complex.
20:09.563 --> 20:10.724
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, I think that's interesting.
20:10.744 --> 20:18.271
[SPEAKER_00]: I mean, the price of gas or the price of oil in one hand is increasing the value of US oil.
20:18.371 --> 20:21.794
[SPEAKER_00]: It's also being directly felt by consumers.
20:22.375 --> 20:32.364
[SPEAKER_00]: Domestic consumers is an early, an early sign of discontent from the base, from the manga base with this warm particular.
20:32.545 --> 20:37.309
[SPEAKER_00]: What other sort of material implications in addition to the cost of
20:37.289 --> 20:44.110
[SPEAKER_00]: Well, and taxation, do you think American populists will face as a result of this war?
20:45.085 --> 21:03.430
[SPEAKER_01]: Well, I mean, this is an open question, but we see volatility in the stock market, which doesn't necessarily impact ordinary people's day to day, but it does impact the ways in which American corporations and in large scale employers think about what they're doing.
21:03.951 --> 21:14.265
[SPEAKER_01]: And when they see volatility in the stock market, they start thinking downsides, they start thinking relocating
21:14.245 --> 21:18.292
[SPEAKER_01]: They started thinking, because this is how you stabilize your stock prices.
21:18.312 --> 21:21.598
[SPEAKER_01]: You fire a bunch of people and the stock price stabilizes or even goes up.
21:22.460 --> 21:26.928
[SPEAKER_01]: And so yeah, this is part of that picture that we could be looking at.
21:27.889 --> 21:37.907
[SPEAKER_01]: And then the other side of this for the economic picture in the United States is that
21:39.271 --> 21:41.333
[SPEAKER_01]: We don't know where this war is going.
21:41.453 --> 21:45.717
[SPEAKER_01]: I mean, they could declare victory next week and just pull the fleet back and stop fighting.
21:46.918 --> 22:07.978
[SPEAKER_01]: But a major terrorist attack in the United States real or staged could lead to a massive influx of new funding into economically useless activity the way it did after 9.11.
22:07.958 --> 22:17.416
[SPEAKER_01]: And so this is uncertainty, and this is part of, of course, with the stock market is reacting to, I mean, they have to know where they need to put their money.
22:17.817 --> 22:31.182
[SPEAKER_01]: Do they want to put it into safe stuff or do they want to take, make bets on putting it into security companies and surveillance companies and the volunteers and the big military hardware manufacturers and the mercenary companies and so on.
22:31.583 --> 22:45.070
[SPEAKER_00]: It's interesting too, I mean, this is all happening in the context of massive AI infrastructure investment as well during with the onset of a potentially along potentially short, extremely costly war.
22:45.130 --> 22:52.444
[SPEAKER_00]: This is a moment in the US history of really significant expenditure across the board.
22:52.424 --> 23:07.973
[SPEAKER_00]: simultaneous with consumers experiencing a contraction of what they can, what of affordability, and so I think this will be a really interesting moment for understanding economic tensions in the context of U.S. governance.
23:09.236 --> 23:10.939
[SPEAKER_00]: Zooming out for a minute,
23:12.370 --> 23:22.918
[SPEAKER_00]: This so called forever wars in the service of regime change, which this word does not have that same framing or inevitability about it.
23:23.660 --> 23:27.831
[SPEAKER_00]: These forever wars were long, have long since been a facet of US Empire.
23:27.811 --> 23:46.309
[SPEAKER_00]: And we're in a moment in which US Empire is occurring in the context of an erosion of international neoliberal norms and an erosion of a moralistic western paternalism, which I think we see in some ways with the lack of rationale given for the attacks in Iran.
23:47.250 --> 23:57.700
[SPEAKER_00]: What does the signal for you about the viability of a warmaking project as a project of Empire?
23:59.333 --> 24:12.086
[SPEAKER_01]: downward trajectory, but downward trajectory of the possibilities of empire even where the violence of empire could simultaneously increase.
24:12.987 --> 24:13.307
[SPEAKER_01]: Why?
24:13.327 --> 24:28.783
[SPEAKER_01]: Because the thing about the neoliberal foreign policy realists were unlike the sheer folk of a corporate board and the CEO who
24:29.506 --> 24:43.358
[SPEAKER_01]: They could think about 10, 50 years into the future and how to stabilize controls and prevent countries from successfully implementing something other than regressive austerity policies.
24:43.959 --> 24:53.407
[SPEAKER_01]: So they could think about how do we keep those people from successfully having national health care and free public transit and universal education?
24:53.787 --> 24:59.412
[SPEAKER_01]: Because we don't want those things, those are bad
24:59.392 --> 25:02.938
[SPEAKER_01]: or bad for the way we think of profitability.
25:05.823 --> 25:21.450
[SPEAKER_01]: There, it clips of the neoliberals, means that the people who are running things are thinking about same kinds of things that the CEOs are thinking about quarterly profits, except for in a much more
25:23.050 --> 25:24.933
[SPEAKER_01]: bounded kind of way by bounded.
25:24.953 --> 25:29.742
[SPEAKER_01]: I mean, they don't know that they're going to stay in power for very long.
25:30.023 --> 25:39.540
[SPEAKER_01]: They don't think of themselves as permanent or at least there's some of them who recognize they need to steal as much as they possibly can right now.
25:39.520 --> 25:54.542
[SPEAKER_01]: And I use that word advisedly, I mean, it includes both, you know, dubious transfers of wealth to military corporations, military hardware corporations, and one, but also includes the graph that is coming off the top.
25:54.522 --> 26:23.922
[SPEAKER_01]: It includes the increased reliance on artificial intelligence and the infrastructure that it is that is cost that it is costing to build out, which, of course, you know, this is another piece of this puzzle as the gas prices go up and people experience that, you know, it states it's mostly transferred away from oil-driven power plants for electricity, however, with the construction
26:23.902 --> 26:33.555
[SPEAKER_01]: they're now becoming the major consumer or major new consumer of electricity which is pushing everyone's electricity bills up at the same time.
26:34.416 --> 26:48.154
[SPEAKER_01]: So you know at the consumer level we're experiencing this but also in terms of pure capacity that how we're going to generate all of this electricity and the water uses also.
26:48.134 --> 26:50.239
[SPEAKER_01]: extreme for data centers.
26:50.860 --> 27:04.089
[SPEAKER_01]: So yeah, and the lack of transparency and the lack of democratic oversight and the refusal to regulate and the project 2025 attack on any kind of regulatory apparatus.
27:04.910 --> 27:07.476
[SPEAKER_01]: I mean, set aside regulation of AI as a
27:07.996 --> 27:35.438
[SPEAKER_01]: an ethical level and you know it's impact on what it means to be human and so and so for just it's the impact of it's being used at all on the environment on the economy on the labor force it's you know a few few activists who are who are caring about this I mean I don't mean to to integrate their efforts are doing great work but the the Congress of the United States is like oh this is the thing can be done it's like a force of nature
27:42.978 --> 27:55.137
[SPEAKER_00]: I think that one of the things that is really interesting about the conversation that we've had we're having today is that there are so many variable factors today.
27:55.157 --> 28:08.057
[SPEAKER_00]: It relative to previous U.S. war making efforts that it will be really interesting and really important to watch and understand the interactivity as we've been discussing.
28:08.037 --> 28:20.661
[SPEAKER_00]: And I think what one of the things that I find really fascinating about the timing as well of this war in Iran is the lead up to the midterm elections.
28:20.901 --> 28:30.720
[SPEAKER_00]: And the weak and prior to the attacks on Iran in late February, mainstream media learned of
28:32.084 --> 28:38.455
[SPEAKER_00]: explicit plans from Trump aligned activists to curtail electoral democracy in advance of the midterms.
28:39.537 --> 28:48.253
[SPEAKER_00]: We are no longer seeing that analysis on the front page of our major news outlets.
28:48.233 --> 29:03.974
[SPEAKER_00]: How do you interpret this interactivity between a war of incoherence, distraction, and violence for violence sake with more coordinated movement from electoral disruptors?
29:04.956 --> 29:07.239
[SPEAKER_00]: And what does this tell us about?
29:07.299 --> 29:14.629
[SPEAKER_00]: What can we possibly expect from the midterms with this ongoing dynamic in place?
29:15.385 --> 29:21.840
[SPEAKER_01]: Well, and we can throw into that the political consequences of the war as it exists right now.
29:21.901 --> 29:27.554
[SPEAKER_01]: Of course, assuming it goes on for some time, it can only current trajectory.
29:27.634 --> 29:32.145
[SPEAKER_01]: Only have negative impacts on the electability of MAGA aligned.
29:32.125 --> 29:33.447
[SPEAKER_01]: candidates.
29:34.207 --> 29:36.210
[SPEAKER_00]: Unless there's an attack, right?
29:36.230 --> 29:50.006
[SPEAKER_01]: Unless there's an attack, unless there's some kind of a domestic attack, unless something changes, either either domestic attack or it credible enough, declaration of victory, and to celebration of the might of U.S.
29:50.106 --> 29:54.932
[SPEAKER_01]: Empire, which doesn't even have to put many of our soldiers at risk overseas.
29:55.893 --> 29:59.938
[SPEAKER_01]: So, the, the, that, that, that,
29:59.918 --> 30:15.159
[SPEAKER_01]: This adds to the plausibility of attempts to instigate or enact types of political intimidation and political violence that will limit access to polling places, for example.
30:15.980 --> 30:24.171
[SPEAKER_01]: I mean, we have Steve Bannon calling for encircling polling places with ice agents, which Bannon has the
30:25.518 --> 30:37.317
[SPEAKER_01]: the role of being sort of the signal person who puts the stuff out there and sees what the reaction is and what actually happens may not be quite as extreme as what he
30:37.583 --> 30:57.246
[SPEAKER_01]: said what he recommends, but between that and, you know, selective immigration enforcement enforcement being declared near polling stations to protect the vote from fraud, which that case is one that continues the case of
30:57.226 --> 31:06.018
[SPEAKER_01]: massive non-citizen voting in the United States being a factor in elections, of course, no evidence that this exists.
31:06.078 --> 31:07.881
[SPEAKER_01]: And there's a weak way of saying it.
31:08.301 --> 31:18.475
[SPEAKER_01]: We can more or less say that it doesn't exist that anyone who does this has essentially been by accident or because of some kind of
31:18.455 --> 31:29.688
[SPEAKER_01]: misunderstanding or or mental health issue, there's no campaign to make this happen, and no significant number of people doing it, and it is never affected the outcome of an election that has been demonstrated.
31:30.870 --> 31:38.238
[SPEAKER_01]: But anyway, this could have a significant impact on what happens at the polls, people staying away from polls.
31:38.719 --> 31:44.125
[SPEAKER_01]: We saw in the 2024 election an increasing number of
31:44.105 --> 31:50.365
[SPEAKER_01]: Latinx, folk voting for Trump, those numbers, the polling numbers are drastically declining.
31:50.946 --> 31:51.609
[SPEAKER_01]: Drastically.
31:52.130 --> 31:57.507
[SPEAKER_01]: The Trump administration probably has a pretty good sense that keeping them away from the polls is a good idea.
31:58.870 --> 32:12.095
[SPEAKER_01]: Similarly, when you talk about any kind of security state presence at our near polling places, then you're talking about, in order to quote unquote maintain order, for example, then you're talking about intimidation.
32:12.676 --> 32:20.090
[SPEAKER_01]: You're talking about the people who are most vulnerable historically to state violence, being less likely to come to the polls.
32:21.432 --> 32:21.773
[SPEAKER_01]: And
32:23.288 --> 32:26.453
[SPEAKER_01]: this is, in turn, going to have an impact.
32:26.913 --> 32:43.278
[SPEAKER_01]: Now, what they're, what they're, the Trump administration is low key panicking about is that their opposition seems to be more motivated to get to the polls, at least in the right up to these primaries than in the past.
32:43.798 --> 32:52.992
[SPEAKER_01]: And they didn't quite expect that for whatever reason, they just assumed that at least their base
32:52.972 --> 32:54.014
[SPEAKER_01]: heavily motivated.
32:54.034 --> 32:58.364
[SPEAKER_01]: Of course, that base is probably looking ahead and saying Trump's going to be in office forever.
32:58.404 --> 33:01.470
[SPEAKER_01]: We don't necessarily like the next two or three guys on the list.
33:02.953 --> 33:04.116
[SPEAKER_01]: They're not our guy.
33:04.537 --> 33:09.327
[SPEAKER_01]: They're not they don't represent our dream of a
33:10.640 --> 33:14.347
[SPEAKER_01]: authoritarian leader who actually represents what we want.
33:15.168 --> 33:16.892
[SPEAKER_01]: I mean, J.D.
33:16.912 --> 33:28.834
[SPEAKER_01]: Vance not exactly a charismatic figure, and clearly allied with people who who are mostly about how can I make another $10 billion this month.
33:29.928 --> 33:38.107
[SPEAKER_00]: Rubio, though, has shown up more and more, certainly as a mouthpiece of the administration during these acts of aggression.
33:38.147 --> 33:43.600
[SPEAKER_00]: Do you have a read on Rubio's popularity with Trump voters?
33:44.305 --> 34:03.546
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, I mean, Rubio certainly has a base of support, but it's more in the traditional hawk conservative hawk, Catholic right, sorts of, sorts of folks, and his, you know, his hyperfocus on Cuba is not going to be attractive to a lot of people who,
34:03.931 --> 34:08.339
[SPEAKER_01]: who say what Cuba, what, that's the place where the cigars come from, what do we care?
34:09.161 --> 34:22.185
[SPEAKER_01]: Americans thought being very good at this sort of thing and, you know, we haven't spent in spite of the economic strangle and political diplomatic strangle, the United States is exercised against Cuba since forever.
34:22.245 --> 34:25.551
[SPEAKER_01]: It's been the cold war's been over a long time.
34:25.531 --> 34:37.507
[SPEAKER_01]: And people are discontinuing to care, especially when it looks like even the administration is turning to deporting Cuban refugees at this point.
34:37.567 --> 34:42.814
[SPEAKER_01]: And so the idea that that should be a big issue for people is going to be a heart cell.
34:43.575 --> 34:51.285
[SPEAKER_01]: China probably, if Rubio can construct himself as a China hawk, which is plausible, then that would probably carry more.
34:51.265 --> 35:03.185
[SPEAKER_01]: more, more weight, but it's going to be hard for him to construct himself as someone who is a populist champion of MAGA land values.
35:04.106 --> 35:13.442
[SPEAKER_01]: So, he's plausible, but as a candidate, but I don't know that he's going to be able to carry the, carry the, the MAGA nation.
35:13.422 --> 35:14.986
[SPEAKER_01]: banner forward.
35:15.608 --> 35:19.198
[SPEAKER_01]: I think it's possible that we don't know who we do this yet.
35:19.920 --> 35:24.833
[SPEAKER_01]: A minor character who talks a big game might be a
35:25.252 --> 35:32.881
[SPEAKER_01]: A, my B, someone who could emerge will have a better idea of all of this after the after the midterms, of course.
35:33.962 --> 35:46.557
[SPEAKER_01]: There will be deep panic if whatever efforts are made in the midterms to restrict voting in voters, fail, and there's a significant shift in Congress.
35:47.077 --> 35:52.103
[SPEAKER_01]: I think that at that point you will see panic in Magaland
35:52.083 --> 35:58.566
[SPEAKER_01]: as people get in line to make sure that they get their preemptive hardens before Trump leaves office.
36:00.706 --> 36:23.777
[SPEAKER_00]: It also seems that the MAGA base has been swayed for so long by a cult of personality that the idea of a successor to the Trump administration that does not have the same charismatic leadership will certainly demobilize the MAGA electorate.
36:24.652 --> 36:36.109
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, I mean, for to make that transition, you have to kind of be willing to invest in bureaucratic kinds of infrastructure.
36:37.151 --> 36:41.918
[SPEAKER_01]: And while the Trump administration is certainly, you know,
36:43.771 --> 37:01.662
[SPEAKER_01]: changed the federal bureaucracy considerably, it has not significantly expanded the capacity of the Republican Party, for example, to be a party of a forever leadership movement.
37:01.642 --> 37:10.835
[SPEAKER_01]: They control it, they've controlled it for the last several years, but they're not exactly gaining members in leaps and bounds, even in an office.
37:12.017 --> 37:23.633
[SPEAKER_01]: And then using the federal bureaucracy the same time that you're decimating it as a tough job, the view.
37:23.984 --> 37:31.991
[SPEAKER_01]: virtually only the only element that is in only two elements that are increasing are the military and the Department of Homeland Security.
37:32.812 --> 37:39.158
[SPEAKER_01]: Even in the Justice Department of the FBI, they've lost and not been able to replace folk.
37:39.699 --> 37:50.869
[SPEAKER_01]: So that is a that is a diminishing of capacity to use the state simply by diminishing of the number of people who are within it.
37:50.849 --> 38:06.867
[SPEAKER_01]: So, ice now becomes the go-to folk because they're new hires, they're people who signed on for this mission, whatever the president wants, and they're increasing in numbers instead of decreasing.
38:08.095 --> 38:17.210
[SPEAKER_01]: and how plausible is it to use these half-trained agents to do something other than immigration enforcement?
38:17.811 --> 38:18.792
[SPEAKER_01]: Doesn't mean they won't try.
38:18.852 --> 38:27.386
[SPEAKER_01]: But they would call it defending the capacity of the federal government to care of itself.
38:27.466 --> 38:29.570
[SPEAKER_01]: I mean, military is increased as well as budget.
38:29.890 --> 38:32.314
[SPEAKER_01]: There'll be a appropriation,
38:32.800 --> 38:40.679
[SPEAKER_01]: probably a big one perhaps more than one to fight this war depending on how long it goes on the subsidiary appropriation that will pass.
38:41.400 --> 38:45.510
[SPEAKER_01]: That Democrats will vote for because they have to quote unquote support the troops.
38:46.958 --> 38:56.916
[SPEAKER_00]: We haven't even talked about the sideline of Congress since the beginning of the year, but certainly most significantly in this moment.
38:57.617 --> 39:04.309
[SPEAKER_00]: And I think that's an important point in terms of thinking about the project of authoritarianism.
39:04.289 --> 39:27.516
[SPEAKER_00]: that this administration has not rebuilt a gutted bureaucracy to be regime loyal and into doing has not created a the infrastructure necessary for a durable ongoing project of authoritarianism beyond the charismatic head of state.
39:27.996 --> 39:30.499
[SPEAKER_00]: I mean, I think the idea of ice as
39:31.627 --> 39:40.219
[SPEAKER_00]: As the authoritarian state in body is, I mean, like you sort of suggest is fairly limited in applicability.
39:47.202 --> 39:58.161
[SPEAKER_00]: So what are some implications for the war and Iran that upcoming midterms for our core audience for our organizers for the social movement left?
39:58.221 --> 40:07.658
[SPEAKER_00]: What can we be doing to turn the lack of support for the war in our favor as we continue to build a movement of resistance?
40:08.684 --> 40:30.895
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, I mean, I mean, the first thing we have to continue to be resilient and that includes preparing for the possibility of some kind of staged or actual attack on American soil or near American soil, say, and I don't know, an aircraft carrier or something that could kill thousands of people.
40:30.875 --> 40:54.300
[SPEAKER_01]: and have some talking points and understandings available going into that without fear boggling, but understanding that this will inevitably lead to calls for and probably capitulation to efforts to increase surveillance and increase repression, make it harder to do the ordinary
40:54.280 --> 40:59.270
[SPEAKER_01]: business of democracy, even in the limited form that it exists in the United States.
41:00.052 --> 41:02.177
[SPEAKER_01]: So, so there's that, there's the resilience piece.
41:02.537 --> 41:11.496
[SPEAKER_01]: The other side is to not be afraid of pointing to the lack of purpose.
41:11.476 --> 41:13.279
[SPEAKER_01]: of this administration.
41:13.680 --> 41:29.105
[SPEAKER_01]: It is doing nothing but putting money into its own pockets and that of its cronies while blaming people who have no power for whatever problems that people actually have.
41:29.746 --> 41:37.078
[SPEAKER_01]: And lying about, I mean, this is obvious, but lying about the results that they are
41:37.058 --> 41:51.991
[SPEAKER_01]: So we have to continue to resist by preparing ourselves mentally and through increasing our our associations with people who we can recruit to be in community together.
41:52.592 --> 42:07.065
[SPEAKER_01]: The main thing that people need to do is like if I had one thing, it's like find little like-minded people or the close to like-minded people or the people who at least dislike the same things that you just like and talk to them personally about being involved.
42:07.045 --> 42:31.211
[SPEAKER_01]: I mean, this is the saturation of understanding around social media and AI and so on as being generators of political activity is basically saturated us with in coherence and it's really face-to-face conversations that we are forgetting how to do and that we need if we're going to organize against an authoritarian push.
42:31.231 --> 42:35.095
[SPEAKER_01]: So this is reaching out to five people, ten people who you know
42:35.429 --> 42:45.743
[SPEAKER_01]: who like you and saying, I would really like it if you would come to this meeting where we're going to talk about this war and its consequences for us.
42:45.858 --> 42:50.262
[SPEAKER_01]: I would really like it if you would get involved in this get out the vote activity.
42:50.642 --> 42:57.508
[SPEAKER_01]: I would really like it if you would get involved in doing this training of election for election security.
42:58.028 --> 43:15.763
[SPEAKER_01]: So this is the top of my list and then the organizational support for that is people in the movement left have to be ready to absorb those people while continuing to push out that message that we need to recruit people one at a time through our own family and friends
43:15.743 --> 43:31.609
[SPEAKER_01]: I mean, there isn't an example of a successful anti-authoritarian movement in recent history that didn't involve this kind of person to person recruitment and mobilization of people to do what was necessary.
43:33.125 --> 43:50.340
[SPEAKER_00]: I think that's both a large scale, and also very personalized plan to that our listeners that we as individuals can really focus on and feel meaningfully participatory.
43:51.198 --> 43:57.595
[SPEAKER_00]: Thank you so much, Stephen, for the many vagaries of our conversation, the ground that we've covered today.
43:57.635 --> 44:05.595
[SPEAKER_00]: I think this is a really interesting and important moment in history, and I'm really grateful to be able to pick your brain during it.
44:06.457 --> 44:07.159
[SPEAKER_01]: Thank you, Koki.
44:07.179 --> 44:08.262
[SPEAKER_01]: Great to be here, as always.
44:11.667 --> 44:15.033
[SPEAKER_00]: Thank you for listening to and form your resistance with PRA.
44:15.333 --> 44:17.798
[SPEAKER_00]: Today's episode was hosted by me, Kokey Mendus.
44:18.399 --> 44:22.606
[SPEAKER_00]: The podcast is produced by Olivia Lawrence Wildman and Frank Lawrence created our music.
44:23.207 --> 44:25.752
[SPEAKER_00]: If you haven't already, rate, review and subscribe.
44:26.393 --> 44:33.726
[SPEAKER_00]: And if you have appreciate our work, please consider donating to political research associates at politicalresearch.org.
44:33.706 --> 44:37.274
[SPEAKER_00]: But the best thing you can do to help us is to tell your comrades about the pod.
44:37.836 --> 44:42.587
[SPEAKER_00]: A shared analysis makes our resistance movement stronger and we need you to spread the word.
44:43.188 --> 44:44.391
[SPEAKER_00]: Until next time.
