RevolutionZ
RevolutionZ
Ep 346 Epstein, Fascism, Clickbait, Deaf President...What's Next?
Ep 346 of RevolutionZ takes on a stew of topics. What's up with Epstein. Fascism's arrival. Clickbait's Impact. Anti Collective Individualism. Gallaudet''s Struggle. Social Media. Good Trouble, and Now What?
What's the connection among these? Lies, undermined trust, narrow horizons of calculation, fear, confusion, a surprisingly relevant movie, impoverished communications, a set back, and mostly some ideas about effective resistance.
We know to go forward requires resistance to consistently grow in numbers and sophistication. Rather than isolated demonstrations against single issues, effective opposition must build bridges between constituencies to connect those who fight genocide with those who defend healthcare, to connect immigrants rights activists who resist deportations with teachers who resist censorship. Elites must perceive not only widespread opposition but escalating costs to them.
How can movement building effectively counter fascism's advance? From workplace resistance to campus organizing, from artistic engagement to direct confrontation with power centers, this episode discusses ideas for creating the pressure needed to force elites to reconsider destructive paths. The episode's warning is clear: we must act bigger and better now, while resistance remains possible before fascism completes its institutional capture. Are we ready to move beyond scrolling toward persistent fighting?
Hello, my name is Michael Albert and I am the host of the podcast that's titled Revolution Z. This is our 346th consecutive episode. I took some time a couple of days ago to look back over the archives. I am, of course, biased, but I felt like, hey, virtually all of them have ongoing relevance Nearly all could have been recorded tomorrow. Relevance Nearly all could have been recorded tomorrow. So it might pay, if you find the recent episodes inspiring or enlightening, to take a look at past ones too Up to you, but I intend to do so.
Speaker 1:The title today is Epstein. Fascism, clickbait, anti-collective individualism, galudet, social media, good trouble, and now what? It is? A stew. I suppose it won't run that long, despite the humongous title. A lot of it will be unpleasant news, but it will end, as always, upbeat, because that is where we all need to get to and where we are in fact primed to go. And so okay. First topic Epstein. What can I say? How about nothing? Hmm, that would make the title clickbait. So okay, how about not much? Epstein was disgusting.
Speaker 1:Trump was and is disgusting. The current unfolding machinations is disgusting, the current unfolding machinations. If there was a devil who wanted to celebrate his own nefarious inclinations with a public display. He might well have engineered what we are now seeing. My inclination is to look away. Even as I cautiously hope that Trump has skewered himself, though I sadly fear he may be about to skewer everyone else. Yes, the incredible truth is that this unfolding fiasco may either entrench or even end Donald Trump's reign of terror. It is hard to imagine any contemporary society sliding into a more servile sewer than the US is now inhabiting. Do we climb out or do we pitch tents for a long stay?
Speaker 1:Fascism is not just racist and cruel policies. It is not just misogyny-fueled sadism. It is not just repressive threats or heinous actions. It is not just a lot of people wildly assaulting other people. It is not just a lot of hate, a lot of cowardice, a lot of hypocrisy. It isn't just books on fire. It's not just truth relegated to oblivion. Fascism is all of that and, to be sure, all of that can become a firestorm of suffering and death. But fascism also includes not only all that, but also institutional enforcement and entrenchment of all of that. Fascism is making all of that not a violation of common sense and existing relations, but a new normal, a new common sense, the recurring, day-in, day-out, permanent product of new institutional relations. Fascism is revamping, reordering and restructuring society's institutions to make the most extreme daily horror a natural outgrowth of those transformed institutions rather than an unnatural distortion of more sane, albeit very far from ideal, past institutions.
Speaker 1:Fascism is not just turning a political party into a cult. It is not just bullying lawyers, threatening judges, capturing universities. It is not just disabling public education, constraining culture, defunding science. It is not just taking food from hungry children, taking medicine from vulnerable people, drilling baby drilling. It is not just dehumanizing opponents, growing alligator alcatrazes from coast to coast, building a domestic army to round up alligator inmates. It is making all that normal. It is using fear, confusing payoffs and chaos to establish all that as our new reality, as our new life, as the way it is. Challenge it. Its message in response you can't stop the rain.
Speaker 1:Fascism is what is unfolding all around us. Can you hear it, see it, smell it? Do you feel it encroaching? Are you thinking? Will I be cowed or will I have courage? Will I succumb or will I resist? It isn't too late, but it is getting there. If you aren't already, it is time to resist.
Speaker 1:Fascism is a vile, pathetic, lying, cowardly joke of a creature who captures sufficient support and clouds sufficient minds to grab the reins of current government power sufficiently to use it to assault law, knowledge, health and even human compassion and empathy into surrender, and then to literally change the shape of government, education, health care, law, communication, economy and culture into a repressive, perverse caricature of civility and caring. Fascism is to establish and enforce a clickbait society, an atomized society of rampant individualism of the most debilitating sort, a police state society. Individualism of the most debilitating sort, a police state society. It is Trump and Co. If we don't stop them, can you see it unfolding? Now what? Let's come back to stopping them, but before we do, I mentioned clickbait, I mentioned rampant individualism. They seem a bit minor, even somewhat marginal, don't they? They seem malicious, but no big deal alongside the rest of what I mentioned, don't they? Well, no, I don't think so.
Speaker 1:Clickbait is when an author or media venue offers an article, interview, video or whatever with a title that says here comes X, when there is in fact no X coming. X is promised so as to attract eyes. Eyes are attracted, but X is absent. Eyes move on.
Speaker 1:Each clickbait instant is a perfect embodiment of two themes to seek profit before all else and to lie with total impunity, as if to lie is a virtue and to be truthful is naive stupidity. I suppose you might even seek to unify clickbait under one theme, in which case you might call it a perfect embodiment of get what you want and celebrate the collateral damage of how you got it. And what is the collateral damage of clickbait of how you got it and what is the collateral damage of clickbait? Truth is the obvious one, but warranted trust dissipates too. And then there goes reason itself, since to reason about anything requires both truth and warranted trust. Reason too is crushed.
Speaker 1:Someone clicks on a lying title. They read, view or hear the titled item. The title they pursued proves to have been clickbait. They got tricked. Now what Do they get angry? Do they swear off the venue that tricked them? Do they consider the author a lying manipulator?
Speaker 1:I think all that is very rare. Instead, I think most often, indeed perhaps even nearly always, we just roll with the punch. After all, it wasn't a knockout blow, we survived. So we get back up, we get past it. To have gotten outraged might have led to our being perpetually outraged, because clickbait, once called bait and switch, is now everywhere. So we suck it up and we move on. We employ our capacity to passively resign, that tendency gets enforced. Our tendency to honestly evaluate what we encounter declines.
Speaker 1:Clickbait not only attracts our eyes and ears for profit, it also reduces our clinical thinking. It promotes societal cultural infantilization exactly the human trajectory that fascism needs. Am I exaggerating? I think not. I think clickbait has spread everywhere and I think its direct and peripheral consequences are incredibly serious. Really, I think it is everywhere and as it spreads and as each new venue rationalizes that, if we don't use clickbait, if we don't become really good at clickbaiting, we will lose audience to whoever clickbaits better.
Speaker 1:Meanwhile, to provide the truth and to expect the truth each decay on a path toward their literally dying. To not like, much less to not accept lying becomes naivete. And though it hurts to say it, I think this form of slipside toward intellectual depravity is even spreading into the left. It is not just manipulative lying, but also passively accepting manipulative lying. It is a wicked variant on the entreaty to go along, to get along. It is understandable why we join the slide, but it is deadly. It is yet another devastating instance of modestly self-aggrandizing, defensive individual choices that yield unmitigatedly awful collective decline. Which observation leads me to another nightmare that's now spreading all around us. Not to worry, though, good news is coming too. Let's call the additional nightmare anti-collective individualism.
Speaker 1:You confront a difficult situation, an urgent choice. Anti-collective individualism is the broad inclination to think only about implications for self, or maybe only about implications for some close family members or some friends. Your workplace faces those imposed job cuts. You will likely be fired. You grab your resume and you start looking for job options. You hope to get an offered job before someone else gets it. You don't join with other workmates to sit down and collectively refuse your dismissals.
Speaker 1:Collectivity, what's that? It doesn't arise even as a passing thought. I, me, mine. Calculus is in command. Or consider another example you are horrified by Trump. You stew in anger, but you don't even contemplate looking for ways to work with others against Trump. To collectively resist isn't even an accessible thought pattern. It doesn't enter your consciousness. Donald threatens you pre-censor your words and actions to not anger him. You are upset, but you try not to show it, you try not to harp on it. You might lose a friend. Better to bow and proceed obediently.
Speaker 1:Or perhaps you are in high school, or I suspect even in college, and there is no discussion of oncoming fascism and what to do about it. In your classes, none, really none, think about that. Fascism is, on top of everything else, being oblivious to itself, and there is less discussion of what's going on than what's needed in your dorms and your dining rooms as well. But you don't initiate discussion. You don't want to offend anyone, you don't want to stand out. There is a lot of talk all around about solidarity and mutual aid. That talk is apparently not too serious. Anti-collective individualism is its opposite. It is going it alone, another part of fascism's game plan.
Speaker 1:Or perhaps your law firm is selling out? You are a lawyer or a paralegal or a secretary, whatever you work there. What do you do? Or perhaps your medicine and doctor's appointments are ending. The clinic that serves your community is closing.
Speaker 1:What do you do? Or maybe mass marauders have come for your neighbor or for your workmate. What do you do? The sounds of silence reverberate, the sounds of pain and violence, the cries of the bombed, the moans of the starved, echo and crescendo. The soundtrack of today. You hear it. You yourself moan, you yourself cry. The soundtrack is you. But what do you do? Or perhaps you don't moan? The evil hasn't come explicitly for you, but it has come for others. What do you do? Believe it or not?
Speaker 1:I want to here take a brief moment to point to a film titled Deaf President. Now, the title isn't clickbait and the film is currently on Apple TV, assuming it hasn't been removed since I saw it a few nights ago. The film recounts the 1988 struggle at Gallaudet University for the Deaf to successfully win a demand to install a deaf president who would be the first at this university since it was founded over 150 years ago. Yes, I know, the campaign didn't win student faculty self-management, it didn't even seek it. It wasn't anti-imperialist, it wasn't overtly feminist, it wasn't socialist, but I think this film's account of its 1988 events are nonetheless highly relevant today, precisely because it was not highly politicized students, long-time activist students who won its campaign and horribly subordinated students who got shocked by gross mistreatment, got angry at raging hypocrisy and cowardice, got organized and strategic and won. The film shows many of the lies, fears and obstacles the students had to confront, including in their own prior commitments. The film helps reveal however unlikely as it may seem, given that it is showing on Apple TV what grassroots anti-fascism can look like, what we can look like.
Speaker 1:Yes, we have to go further than the Gallaudet struggle went. And if you don't need the inspiration of seeing their story, great. But perhaps show it to your parents or to your children, or show it to your workmates, your schoolmates or your friends and then perhaps talk together about it. That would be some serious socializing. And so, yes, now we come to social media, or what I guess people now call socials, as in when they refer to their socials or to posting on socials or to keeping up with socials. It seems that fiddling online while society implodes has become our socials. Amazing Words morph into their opposites.
Speaker 1:But I do get that social media is ubiquitous. I do get that to not use it to promote what we do or to promote what we favor can self-deny there I say rather like to not use clickbait, can self-deny. But here is a self-restoring wrinkle. I bet that everyone who will hear this episode uses a bank, for that matter. And, more analogously, I bet many who will hear this read the New York Times or some other mainstream news source. To not use banks is self-denying. To not read the New York Times or any comparable outlet can be self-denying.
Speaker 1:But while we use banks and we consult mainstream sources, we don't celebrate those choices More. We don't mold ourselves to relate as those choices optimally intend us to relate. We do not play their games. Invest in their stocks, grow our meager money as they advise, scroll and scroll some more and then post something, but not our full views. We know that to praise banks or mainstream media or to enter into roles that they celebrate and let doing so crowd out what matters, is a slippery slope to no longer hating banks and to no longer critiquing mainstream media and no longer doing or even remembering what matters.
Speaker 1:So, by analogy, it is one thing to hate social media but hold our nose while we cautiously use it for positive ends. It is another thing to get into habits that waste endless time, to get sucked into worthless gossip, to view exploitative snippets or to feel that to repost a link or a photo or whatever else, while offering nothing substantive, that we ourselves think is somehow to seriously socially interact or is even to undertake a seriously positive political act. To my jaded but not even a little bit cynical, though undeniably old eyes, current social media isn't even social, much less a serious vehicle by which to exchange investigative and critical views. We scroll robotically and then we post links or pictures, but we rarely, if ever, post our fully and carefully conceived and serious thoughts, much less engage with others to defend or to change our thoughts, nor do we seriously address other people's views Further. For too many of us who develop a commercialized, surveillance, airhead warped conception of being social, our attention spans dwindle. We start to favor a paragraph over an article and then a sentence over a paragraph. Brevity becomes our Moses and the prophets. Substance gets atomized down to snippets.
Speaker 1:For a slightly shifted and barely more subtle version of this observation, consider the difference between posting a flyer as a call to promote a demonstration or a candidate and knocking on doors to listen and talk with people about a demonstration or candidate, or, for that matter, compare it to writing to sell or preen, or writing to engage. Posting a time and place to get together aims to mobilize, and that can be important work. Arriving to the same place at the same time matters, but to hear and convey reasons to arrive, strategic motivations, careful evaluations and serious proposals for how to improve, that's organizing, and organizing is always needed. So what about good trouble needed. So what about good trouble?
Speaker 1:About a month ago, a bunch of committed organizations selected July 17th for the next day of anti-Trump demonstrations around the country. This batch of demonstrations would be called good trouble to honor John Lewis, whereas last month's were called no kings to skewer Trump. Yesterday was the 17th it is purely anecdotal but I saw almost nothing about the planned events until July 14th, and even then very little. I asked others who said the same. Then I saw some messages indicating the time and place to come out and join the events, but the messages had nearly nothing about why to come out, about what the day's events would accomplish and particularly about how to get involved beyond the day's events. The turnout, I am told the turnout, I'm not sure, but it seems to have been a fraction of the earlier no Kings turnout. Despite that, millions demonstrated a month ago and would hopefully have come out again. There were many less this time.
Speaker 1:Preliminary reports suggest militants may have grown and focus may have enlarged. Numbers seriously declined. One explanation is it was a workday compared to the earlier weekend, but another may be that the no-kings demonstration didn't sufficiently convey to its participants that to succeed they needed to return and to bring others. It may have left many feeling we came out, it meant nothing, so no more of that for me. Likewise, the call for good trouble demonstrations might not have conveyed reasons to turn out. It might not have communicated the logic of turning out the unfolding, developing trajectory to contribute to, and how demonstrating does indeed contribute.
Speaker 1:So now what? The task remains as it has been. We need to generate understanding and commitment which fuels activism. We need the activism that say to elites the cost to you of your agenda is growing and it will keep growing. You must give in. And we need to do it over and over until they get it. But what can convincingly convey such a message? What comes next?
Speaker 1:Paramount is that resistance must grow. Small is very much not a threat. Smaller than earlier says to elites wait it out, it will dissipate. Large can be a threat. Larger than last time enlarges the threat. Momentum matters. Elites need to see that, rather than their preferred new normal taking hold, a resistance is entrenching and growing. It is not going away or even stabilizing. It is getting broader, stronger and more effective. Elites need to see a growing threat to things that they care about. They need to see the cost to what they care about, provoked by their actions growing and growing until the threat leaves them only one option to cut back and to then stop what they are doing. This isn't complicated. Our numbers must grow, which means we must continually reach out to new participants.
Speaker 1:Immigration tariffs, epstein, climate and war policies will upset more and more people To grow the resistance. Our task is to address those upset people, to hear their needs and their worries, to demand changes that will matter for them, to speak with and to involve them, to be led by them. Likewise, we also need to actively involve millions of already justifiably scared young people and, even more so, millions of already furious, outraged, scared and, in their hearts, progressive. Not that young people who, however, exhibit all that only to a spouse over dinner or in bed, or standing in front of a mirror or cursing while taking a shower, but not yet visibly, not yet publicly, not yet on the streets or in a job action. It is critical, but it is not sufficient to mobilize folks who are already ready to turn out. We need to reach out to folks who are not yet ready to resist, and even to folks who disagree with us. What about our movement getting broader and stronger? We need that too. What about our movement getting broader and stronger? We need that too.
Speaker 1:When resistance grows against a Trumpian policy, trump backs off a bit and throws up distractions, even as he plans to come back to the first issue later. What Trump and company need to see and to seriously feel is that the resistance is getting less atomized, less issue by issue, and more generalized. They need to see us getting more intent on stopping and reversing the whole fascist takeover of government, economics, education, health, science, culture, upbringing and even human emotion, even empathy. They need to see people who are outraged at genocide aiding people who are horrified at health cuts. People who defend and celebrate immigrants, also defending and celebrating teachers who resist conformity and repression. People who slam Doge, also slamming Fox News and moving on to confront the New York Times and all mainstream media. People who demand an end to ecological suicide, also demanding an end to billionaire domination. They need to hear a distant but growing ringing of revolution aroused by their choices. They need to think to themselves oh shit, we don't want to provoke that. We need to reconsider our choices.
Speaker 1:But what, in addition to resistance growing, diversifying and unifying can send our message to their boardrooms and their gated communities? How about if our mass demonstrations include, for those who are ready, trips to corporate boardrooms and gated communities? How about if the already ready, threatened employees and students don't give in or leave when ordered to, but entrench and fight. Fired employees refuse to leave, they sit down. They demand a say and changes. How about we work toward that? How about if outraged and threatened students lock up their campuses and demand a say and changes in curriculum and in hierarchy? How about if our artists stand on stage and sing to fight? They stand there and say it is time to fight and then they engage with and perform at demonstrations. How about that? How about we have our demonstrations, among other aims, demand a massive wealth tax?
Speaker 1:And how about if we display signs in the crowd that say no more corporate greed, no more private ownership, and then that spin off a march to some fascist corporate boss's door that blocks the street where he lives? The cops come. There are 2,000 of us. Picture that. What do they do? Tear gas, scarsdale.
Speaker 1:How about if we do that which simultaneously says to elites there are more and more of us, we are more and more unified, we are more and more energized, we do what doesn't alienate but organizes and welcomes still more growth, even as it says to elites hey look, look closely. You see the most militant part, you see the most radical part. That is what the whole resistance is threatening to become. That is what you are provoking, is what the whole resistance is threatening to become. That is what you are provoking. We can get more militant, diversify our demands and come directly after you and, at the same time, not alienate or repel, but instead attract, welcome and elevate potential new allies. And we will do just that. And that said, this is Michael Albert signing off for Revolution Z. Until next time.