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Fires In the Distance During Dark Days: One Year of Trump 2.0
172 Plays1 day ago
In this episode we sit down with a member of Crimethinc to discuss the first year of the second Trump administration. In many ways the speed, severity, and violence of the first year has made the situation difficult to understand comprehensively. So, instead of just focusing on the swirl of events over the past 12 months, we are going to go back to the roots of what's happening today, the rise of neoliberalism.
To make sense of everything we have experienced over the last year we start with events that occurred almost 40 years ago, with the fall of the Soviet Union and the rise of neoliberalism to primacy. This started a dynamic in which wealth has been increasingly concentrated in the hands of a shrinking number, in which cost of living is rising and wages are not keeping up, in which debt has come to be the mechanism used to fill in those financial gaps. Combined with an increasing scarcity of resources neoliberalism has led to a world in which those with resources and investments are capable of mobilizing state violence to protect and expand those interests in conflict with an increasingly desperate populace. Since the Obama administration and the financial crisis of 2008 capital and power has accelerated the dynamic of concentration, setting the stage for the invasions of American cities, the brutalization of our communities, and the serial violation of "rights" that many of us thought of as inviolable.
Also during this period movements have arisen to oppose this concentration of power and wealth every step of the way. From the fights in the streets during the global anti-capitalist movement to the parks of Occupy, the barricades of the movements against the police in 2014 and 2020, or on the plains at Standing Rock, a dynamic of conflict has emerged along with the logistics and knowledge to sustain prolonged conflict with the state.
This is all setting the stage for what is happening in Minneapolis, where the DHS has deployed all available units, and still cannot control the streets. We finish our discussion talking about the implications of what is happening in Minneapolis and how this might just become a quagmire that the administration cannot commit more to or pull itself out of without significant costs.
We recorded this before the brutal ICE execution of Alex Pretti. Since then the people of Minneapolis have fought bravely in the streets against ICE, as well as the state police and local cops.
https://crimethinc.com/2026/01/25/minneapolis-responds-to-the-murder-of-alex-pretti-an-eyewitness-account
For more on what is happening in Minneapolis check out Crimethinc (https://crimethinc.com) , Unicorn Riot (https://unicornriot.ninja) and tune in to this show as we bring you all updates from the ground.
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Transcript
Introduction to the Podcast and CrimeThink Collective
00:00:09
Speaker
Hello. You're listening to the Beautiful Idea. a podcast from a collective of several anarchist and autonomous media producers scattered around the world. We're bringing you interviews and stories from the front lines of autonomous social movements and struggles, as well as original commentary and analysis.
00:00:27
Speaker
Follow us on Mastodon and at thebeautifulidea.show. Thanks for listening.
00:00:45
Speaker
All right, everybody, welcome back to The Beautiful Idea. Today, we are joined by a friend who is a participant in the Crimeting Collective. And we're we're going to have a conversation today that, you know, I've talked to a number of people about how to even have, because we're going to talk about what's happened in the last year and why, right? There's, in some senses, and we were talking about this before we started recording, in some senses, there is so much that has happened.
00:01:14
Speaker
that has violated the terms that we understand to use when we're talking about politics in so many different directions that it often becomes really, really, really difficult to figure out how to ah wrap your head around it, right? Get on top of it, sort of make sense of it in a way that's comprehensive, right? Now, the importance of that is, you know, we're we're anarchists here, right? Like, we're not interested in complaining at government. We're interested in making it go away.
00:01:43
Speaker
And when we're stuck in reactive cycles where we're just reacting to the next thing that's happening, we're not capable of really having a strategic outlook that lets us do this. we sort of touched on this a bit in the operational theory episode that we released a little at the end of last year.
00:01:58
Speaker
So, Today, we're going to do that. We're going to start to dive into the structural causes of why we've ended up here, what that trajectory has looked like, not from the perspective of just what's happening today, but the perspective of the last, say, 30, 40 years, right? Like, what is the long tail that's gotten us to this point?
00:02:18
Speaker
And what can that long tail sort of teach us about what we need to be thinking about going forward? Because the situation is such that there are strategic openings now. We just have to identify them.
Long-term Activism and Political Influence
00:02:29
Speaker
So with that, kick it over to you. Would you like to introduce yourself really quick? Well, I'm just very glad to speak with everybody here. I'm a participant in ongoing discussions, and publishing through the Crime Think X Workers Collective, which has been active now for more than 30 years.
00:02:50
Speaker
god but That's crazy to think about. For those of you, i know I've mentioned this on the show before. i know I picked up my first Crime Thing pamphlets in like the late 90s, or i was picking it up in in copies of Inside Front, Maximum Mark and Roll, stuff like this. Like that literature changed my life 30 years ago. Like I wouldn't be here without that body of work.
00:03:14
Speaker
And for those of you getting involved in it now, I really encourage you to go back and look at all of the work that Crime Thing has done. the the main thing I would say to people who are getting involved now is, is just to emphasize the value of consistency and, ah and for people who are, yeah, who are starting to cut their teeth in activism or you know or organizing to, to think about what they're doing on the scale of decades rather than days or months or years. And you can get,
00:03:47
Speaker
a better return on your effort if you if you think about it that way because then everything that you do will be cumulative.
00:03:56
Speaker
Yeah, and i've i mean I've said this on the show before, but i think back about the anarchist movement I joined in the late 90s, early 2000s and what we have today and how drastically different that is and how much that is a result of that kind of long-term thinking.
00:04:14
Speaker
so yeah, thank you for emphasizing that. i really appreciate that.
Far-right Rise and Neoliberalism's Impact
00:04:18
Speaker
Let's start with long term thinking, then. OK, Trump doesn't come from nowhere. Right. I think there's this tendency in liberal circles to treat Trump as an anomaly or sort of a deviation from a norm with this tendency, of course, to say, well, what we need is a sort of restorationist politics.
00:04:37
Speaker
Right. We need to sort of restore what we had before. But I think for a lot of us, we know that that's not in any way sufficient, that what was before was deeply problematic. But why don't we start getting into into that?
00:04:48
Speaker
How can we start to look at today from that sort of long tail, like let's say from the late eighty s or early 1990s at a time where probably a lot of the people that are listening to this show now probably weren't even born yet. um Yeah. Like where does that story start?
00:05:06
Speaker
Well, the the evidence that this is not just about Trump, the the chief evidence for that is that the far right is gaining power all around the world. You know, that there there is a a threat that the far right could come to power in France, in Germany, and england in England in the next elections. And they already have come to power in Italy.
00:05:32
Speaker
And you can also make the argument that Trump is modeling his strategies on the ways that Vladimir Putin consolidated power in Russia over the last 25 years, the ah the in the ways that imitators of Putin, like Orban,
00:05:50
Speaker
in Hungary have have done the same thing. So this is not a problem that is limited to one man or one party or one country. This is a systemic problem that is threatening humanity all around the the globe and Incidentally, that means that fleeing the country is not a solution, even for the individuals who engage in it. that Actually, our best bet is to go on the offensive, wherever we're positioned, with the resources and connections and communities ah that are available to us right now, that we will not be in a better position to win this fight if we retreat, if we give ground, if we give up access to those resources.
00:06:37
Speaker
So, To speak about what it is that's happening, though, i want to I want to begin with the collapse of the so-called Eastern Bloc at the end of the 1980s and the triumph of what is called neoliberalism.
00:06:53
Speaker
The neoliberal world order... Really, you can date it back to the end of the Second World War when heads of state thinking about how they could prevent ah so a third world war from breaking out. they Their idea was that they would make all of the different countries so interdependent through trade that they wouldn't benefit from from going to war with each other.
00:07:19
Speaker
And as long as there was a horizon for a prophet open in front of them, and they and it seemed like they could just continuously rack up more prophets and colonize different aspects of human activity as well as the geographical areas with... ah The capitalist profit incentive, there there was an incentive then for everybody to sort of play fair and participate in this.
00:07:44
Speaker
So one of the basic things that's happening right now is that those horizons for economic growth have dried up. I'm not going to get into the hard economics around this. There are people better qualified than me that can speak about this, but rates of profit have been declining.
00:07:59
Speaker
And when it's no longer possible through ah sort of economic competition for people to accumulate resources, then they they start looking for other ways, more sort of brute force ways to do that.
00:08:14
Speaker
And that's one of the problems. with the The other problem, of course, is that a very small number of people now control a tremendous amount of resources. So, you know, the... the If we go back to the 1990s, the amount of money that the that the the richest billionaire had at his disposal, we're we're just talking about a couple billion dollars, you know whereas ah quite quite recently, Elon Musk just passed the $500 billion dollars mark. So we're talking about
00:08:47
Speaker
tremendous increases in the amount of money controlled by a very small number of people who, as a consequence, are no longer bound by any of the sort of limitations or checks and balances that democratic politics imposed on them before.
00:09:06
Speaker
Neoliberalism paved the way for this first by a erasing trade controls between countries and you know e accelerating the pace at which a small number of people were able to carry out profiteering at everybody else's expense, deepening the gulf between the the rich and the poor.
00:09:25
Speaker
And of course, when you have... tremendous disparities between ah few people and the rest of the population. You also need more policing to to enforce those.
00:09:38
Speaker
As a consequence of this, there is a large segment of the population that is downwardly mobile economically. in In the old days, you know a century ago, the the way of addressing this would have been that you would have left parties that would try to win compromises and and you know support structures for people who are economically downwardly mobile.
Economic Collapse and Right-wing Exploitation
00:10:02
Speaker
and And those people would identify with left politics as a consequence of But in in a neoliberal world order, in a globalized capitalism where everybody is competing on the market, as soon as you introduce protections for some workers and in one country, the the economic investments will immediately be transferred out of that country to another country where the workers have no defenses. So old-fashioned left-faceted.
00:10:29
Speaker
forms of stabilizing capitalism through through these compromises ceased to work. And as a result, the the entire you know voter block that had maintained left parties collapsed. And instead, now we see far right parties accumulating all of this rage as a sort of an inevitable reaction to the globalization of capitalism.
00:10:54
Speaker
This isn't promising because you know that's actually it doesn't actually represent a ah solution for anyone to the problem of wealth being concentrated in a few people's hands. The far-right parties are actually promoted by and supported by these billionaires who want to encourage the general population to turn against anyone other than themselves.
00:11:18
Speaker
They recognize that there is desperation, that there is anger, that there is rage, that there are people looking for revenge. and And rather than let that need for revenge and need for social change ah just build up, they have been channeling it as hard as they can into hatred of the weakest and most vulnerable members of society, whether that's trans people or immigrants you know or or other other targets. you know this This is why basically wherever there is an out-group,
00:11:51
Speaker
or a a vulnerable population, you find the far right pointing fingers at them saying that they're at fault. And there's a giant media operation really to take advantage of, i would say, the the cowardice of a large part of the the population that is angry,
00:12:09
Speaker
but afraid to take on forces more powerful than themselves and and eager as a consequence to get on board with these pogroms going after people weaker than themselves with the you know with the wrong idea, with the the insane idea that if they join in the in this violence, whether it's against Palestinians in Gaza or or against trans people in Ithaca, if they if they join in with with this violence, that they will somehow be the beneficiaries, which of course is foolishness because the billionaires are determined to just continue consolidating power for themselves.
00:12:51
Speaker
And Trump has become the standard bearer for this in the United States. And the United States is arguably ahead of the any of the Western European or Latin American countries where these same processes are are playing out. So what happens here will determine what happens all around the world.
00:13:12
Speaker
But the the processes that have brought us to this point show no sign of of dying down. to To return briefly to the the capitalist crisis that's at at the root of this, we can compare...
00:13:31
Speaker
the way that the billionaires made money a century ago to the way that they make it today. So we go back a century ago, we we find a ah ah supporter of the the Nazis, Henry Ford, also an automobile innovator, you know one of the people who became famous for refining the the production process.
00:13:52
Speaker
Henry Ford, actually, ah ah once he became successful, he bought back all the shares in the Ford Motor Company so that he just owned the company outright. He didn't make his money by selling shares in the company.
00:14:04
Speaker
He made his money the old-fashioned way by selling a product, selling a lot of ah ah product, that you know imposing a need for it, sure, but also selling a product and and taking in profits. Today, elon musk Elon Musk has not made anything near a profit on ah many of his ah efforts. right the The thing that has made Tesla such a such a ah powerful company...
00:14:32
Speaker
is that there's so much in speculation going on in the stock market with people just trying to find stocks that they think other people will think are valuable and buying those stocks. The the the value of these stocks is incredibly inflated.
00:14:46
Speaker
these These billionaires, in other words, are not making products that that benefit people. They're taking advantage of the sort of desperate late capitalism speculation. The same thing that makes cryptocurrencies rise and fall.
Speculative Capitalism and Grassroots Movements
00:15:00
Speaker
The same thing that is driving the AI boom right now. And they recognize that they're not going to be able to just make a make a product, sell it to people, enrich themselves thus. they They recognize that in the future, not just speculation, but acts of brute force, invasions, wars, something like what Putin is trying to do to claim parts of Ukraine, are going to increasingly be central in the ways that resources change hands.
00:15:30
Speaker
That's the what happens here at the end of the worldwide period of relative peace that that began at the end of the Second World War.
00:15:41
Speaker
And if we don't want the middle of the 21st century to look like the first half of the 20th century, Really, our only hope is to transition to a completely different way of producing, distributing, allocating resources, a completely different way of relating to each other and and distributing power. that's That's what's at stake here, really. The the lives of of the billions of people who inhabit this planet are at stake.
00:16:12
Speaker
Let just jump in really quick. So I recently gave a talk. And at that talk, I asked the question, how many people in the room were familiar with the Bretton Woods Agreement?
00:16:24
Speaker
So the the fundamental treaty that set up the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund and the structure of neoliberalism. And it was like a smattering of hands. So I want to suggest some resources for people. I think that if you if you want to look at the sort of history of neoliberalism in depth, dig into some of the stuff around financialization, David Harvey's brief history of neoliberalism is probably the best single summary.
00:16:51
Speaker
It's really, really good. And it it kind of, it touches on some of the, let's say like Reagan era policies around low interest rates, how that related to the housing crisis, things like this. if anyone's more interested in digging into neoliberalism, I highly recommend that book.
00:17:09
Speaker
So yeah, sorry, just want to throw that out there really quick. So going from this neoliberal age, right, we sort of have the end of the Cold War. We see this era of Clintonian sort of military expansionism, right? Under the guise of human rights. We watched September 11th happen, the growth of the security state, right?
00:17:31
Speaker
How are we watching those dynamics from neoliberalism start to sort of play themselves out in the things that we've been seeing recently, right? So we have this kind of moment in which Donald Trump shows up on the scene in 2015 and the common discourse is that seemingly changed some stuff.
00:17:53
Speaker
But where is the through line? So the through line that happened in, say, the late Obama administration into Trump, into Biden, how does that through line continue there?
00:18:06
Speaker
Right. um You know, the Obama administration was a sort of a late-breaking model for ah neoliberal society in which everyone's creativity would be channeled into trying to figure out how to make a profit on the you know on the market.
00:18:23
Speaker
You had all of these people with sort of left-inclusive values, more or less, working in Silicon Valley, trying to you know trying to get ahead.
00:18:35
Speaker
and And it was beneficial for the tech companies to lower the the barrier to entry for ah for who they could get in there. you know if you're If you're trying to have the best programmers you don't want to refuse to employ women. You don't want to um refuse to employ trans people. You don't want people of color to refuse to work for you because of the racism in the environment. So there's a a benefit to making capitalism inclusive in such a situation. That kind of characterized the Obama years. But at the same time, there was this increasing grassroots resentment and anger
00:19:15
Speaker
that That took form on the left and the right. On the left, this you know manifests itself in the Occupy movement, in the revolt in Ferguson and Baltimore and and other places in response to police killing over a thousand people every year now in the U.S., predominantly black and brown men.
00:19:34
Speaker
And on the right, this took the form of the sort rise of actual overt fascism, which correlated then with Donald Trump's surprise success in the Republican primaries to become the candidate who then won the election 2016.
00:19:53
Speaker
Now, when Trump came into power in 2017, he was governing with a Republican Party that was still more or less shaped the way that had been under George Bush. It was old-fashioned Republican Party that wasn't committed to you know to a violent dictatorship, wasn't wasn't invested in doing things the way that Trump wanted to do them. And so that the state under Trump was divided between these sort of neoconservative, old-fashioned Republicans, and then you know Trump's fairly small cadre and that was limited by what they could do, as well as the the Democrats who
00:20:31
Speaker
at that point, still had some leverage within the institutions of the state. and all And that sort of internal division within the federal government made it easier for grassroots movements, which immediately responded all around the country, to to you know respond and demonstrate that the power of the regime was limited to stop fascists from trying to build street momentum, for example, in Charlottesville, Virginia,
00:20:59
Speaker
and And then finally in 2020 to raise a revolt on such a scale that it was clear to the ruling class that if they let Trump stay in power, of course he wanted to stay in power, but that if they let him stay in power, it was not going to create a ah suitable environment for business, right?
00:21:19
Speaker
So in 2020, you didn't see the elements of the ruling class support Donald Trump in in that electoral campaign. Biden came back into office, despite the biggest social movement in living memory in the United States, having called for the abolition of the police, or at least the defunding of the police. That was the liberal a compromise version.
00:21:44
Speaker
In 2020, despite this, Biden and the other centrists doubled down on support for the you know the violent apparatus of the state, ah foolishly thinking that they could retain the loyalty of that element of the state.
00:22:01
Speaker
And... so you know And it makes sense on the one hand, because again, like I said, if you have a society characterized by tremendous disparities in resources, you're going to need a a violent executive branch to to maintain and defend those disparities, to to constantly put down people's efforts to ah to even in the playing field or to get revenge for the way they're treated.
00:22:24
Speaker
and And the Democrats, like they banked on that. there' was For example, there was this movement in Atlanta against a giant, what you could call a pork barrel project to just transfer a tremendous amount of of money to police, you know, through the, in the form of this police training facility ah to police in there, you know, but it's a way transfer money to police and their allies basically. And, you know, the population didn't want it. They campaigned for a referendum. There was also a courageous campaign of direct action against this, against this proposed police militarization facility.
00:22:59
Speaker
the The local government, the Democrats and the Republicans, came across it came came together across partisan lines to suppress the movement against the militarization facility and to you know to force through the the construction of the space and the repression of the movement so that people never got to participate in a referendum, so that activists or even just random people who attended a concert you know would be arrested and and charged with violating the RICO Act.
00:23:29
Speaker
So that the government under Biden went to great lengths to crush, and to disassemble the social movements that had driven Trump out of power.
00:23:40
Speaker
And this was a this either was a poor choice on their part because it showed that they didn't recognize what a significant threat was. the the far right still was to this sort of centrist neoliberal project, or it was a cynical decision on their part to actually pave the way for themselves to be the junior partners in fascism while maintaining plausible deniability. For them to continue operating at you know, to some extent, at least on a local level in some cities or states, the the political apparatus while just handing the keys to actual fascists determined to rule by brute force and carry out ethnic cleansing on a massive scale.
00:24:27
Speaker
And you know i don't i I think that probably both of these are true to some extent, that there are some well-meaning Democrats. At the same time, the ah the genocide that they perpetrated in Gaza indicates that significant elements of the democratic political class were are also invested in rule by brute force and are at ease transitioning into um a much more brute force phase of capitalist and autocratic rule.
00:24:58
Speaker
And that brings up the beginning of the Trump 2.0.
00:25:03
Speaker
Yeah. And if I can just jump in again really quick, I think, you know, one of the stories we've talked about on this show a lot is the story of the concentration of power in the executive.
00:25:15
Speaker
And how Democrats are just as complicit in that. I mean, this process really began so Franklin Delano Roosevelt. But we really saw heavy concentrations in executive power under Reagan, and then very specifically under Bill Clinton after Oklahoma City and the passing of the Terrorism Act. They tried to make encrypted phone calls illegal in the United States for a period of years.
00:25:36
Speaker
mean, it was only hackers publishing open source encryption that made that impossible. Right? Under the Obama administration, i mean... I've been doing this a long time. The most coherent, well-organized, structured repression I ever saw was under the Obama administration.
00:25:54
Speaker
No doubt. No doubt. And that had to do with concentrations of power in the executive around counterterrorism.
Democrats' Role and Trump's Second Term Challenges
00:26:01
Speaker
right, the Biden administration kept all of the immigration policies in place, kept concentrating power in the hands of the executive for things like economic control, right, that there's this kind of through line of concentration of power in the executive and the erosion of, you know, what in political science they call co-equal branches of government, that the Democrats are deeply, deeply complicit in of which and none of this would be possible without that.
00:26:29
Speaker
Right. And i'm I'm trying to draw attention to that because it's not just a nefarious error on the part of ah a few people. It's a structural response to macroeconomic processes that are concentrating power in a few hands and and requiring more and more violence to preserve a derelict world order. that's That's the way that we have to understand this. If it weren't the Democrats, it would be somebody else. That's that's where I'm getting at.
00:26:58
Speaker
Yeah, absolutely. And so now that we've talked about this like trajectory, how do we read today? So I think, you know, i mentioned this at the top of the show, but it's hard to make sense of this.
00:27:13
Speaker
You know, even as someone who's been doing politics a really long time, who's got fancy formal education and all this stuff, it's really hard to make sense of this, that there's a process that I think some of us talked about during the first Trump administration, which you're seeing play out really heavily at this time around, where there's a process of a lot of people recognizing that the so-called protections that they thought they had against state violence or against executive overreach or against surges of federal forces into an area, that those were largely based on informal agreements.
00:27:52
Speaker
And not actually written down or enforceable anywhere, able to be really easily violated. Right. And that's disrupted a lot of the categories that we have to talk about this. So from that history, right, with that history as our basis, this history of wealth inequality, right, degrading social conditions, degrading infrastructure, degrading job opportunities for people, right?
00:28:16
Speaker
From that past, how do we start to read what has been a relatively chaotic year? Well, I want to review the events of the past year in in three blocks.
00:28:31
Speaker
So I'm going to start with the first block. i'm going to start with when Trump entered office. Trump entered office in a situation where many people were shocked that he had won the election again and unprepared for the situation. i think it's...
00:28:46
Speaker
Arguably the case that a large part of the country was just in denial, that if you sort of paid attention to the indicators, you could see that this was going to happen. But a lot of people were just checked out and they were checked out because nobody wants to be denial.
00:29:03
Speaker
a nightmare situation in which the worst people on the surface of the earth have come to power and and one has to fight with everything that one has to preserve one's life and the possibility that one's children will live free nobody wants that people We're not ready to come to terms with that. And instead, so people came up with these stories like, oh, they've they've gamed everything out. They want us to resist. They want us to to defend ourselves because it'll provoke them and then they'll use violence. and I just want to deal with that immediately right now by saying...
00:29:36
Speaker
It should be clear to all at this point that the Trump administration is going to escalate their violent control of the general population as fast as they are able to, no matter what happens. And they will use any pretext, no matter what happens, they will turn it into a pretext.
00:29:52
Speaker
They're committed to lying about everything and committed to escalating their control as rapidly as possible. So, It is foolish to think that if we behave ourselves, if we keep our heads down, that this will pass. That is not true.
00:30:08
Speaker
That is what people were thinking, though, what many people were saying at the beginning of Trump's second administration in January 2025. So there were not broad demonstrations when in in Washington, D.C., when he reentered the White House, the the way that there were in 2017 when he came to power. this ah is ah It reflected the the weakness And of just the fact that people were dazed, the weakness of movements against Trump at that time.
00:30:38
Speaker
and And it's sort of a a superstitious belief that he was a he and his supporters were mad geniuses who had figured everything out in advance.
00:30:49
Speaker
I want get into why that sort of mythology was proven to be wrong. here as i as I go through this. But first, i'll I'll say that as soon as they took power, they set about purging every element of the of the government that was not on board with them, as well as terrorizing various elements of civil society, like law firms, universities, trying to use the model that Putin and Urban had demonstrated to get all of society into line with their project.
00:31:24
Speaker
And then they also, and this is, for me, this is interesting, Elon Musk being in the government, just destroying every element of the government that arguably serves to make life better for people.
00:31:38
Speaker
You know, this is, ah in this text that we published called At the Turning of the Tide, We describe this as less bread, more circuses. that the The model that the Trump administration is using here is to to cut off any state-supported access to resources and to try to compensate people with this sort of entertainment project where they can vicariously cheer on the violence that the state carries out against other people.
00:32:06
Speaker
This is sort of an unusual project in that usually when you want to establish a dictatorship, you know going back to the ancient Romans, you want to introduce more bread and circuses.
00:32:18
Speaker
it's a It's a strange thing to do it the other way right now. And that really points to the the structural issues here. If there were resources that Trump could use to to improve the lives of his supporters, that would be a better plan.
00:32:31
Speaker
the The polling for Trump has continuously eroded all year long because actually the resources are just Either they're not available for for him with which to improve the lives of the demo democratic the demographics that support him, or he thinks it's a safer bet to put those resources directly into the apparatus of repression.
00:32:51
Speaker
and that He believes that in the future, power is not going to change hands by elections, but all that will matter is the allegiances of those who have the guns.
00:33:02
Speaker
That's the the easiest way to understand what's happening. And this frightening situation did keep people for the first few months of this Trump administration, keep people largely out of the streets. You know, the the demographic that actually did the most honor to themselves, I think, that that that wins the prize for having been most active in the first few months of 2025 is actually liberal retirees. You know, I want to give them credit for this. They did they did more to put themselves out there than, than anybody else did. And I think that's because everybody else had already been immiserated or, you know, or violently repressed. And it was only the, the collapsing middle class and specifically liberals from the collapsing middle class who still had something to lose, who had to,
00:33:49
Speaker
And what they had to lose was the illusion that they were choosing the state of affairs through democracy. you know They were prepared to to let all the money be given to the police. They were prepared to let people be slaughtered in Gaza. But the the idea that they chose this rather than that it was forced on them was precious to them. And to their credit,
00:34:09
Speaker
in In response to to this, they actually went into the streets and specifically engaged in these protests at Tesla dealerships, which took off around the country. There were a few arsons, not really that many, but they did presumably give teeth to the the otherwise just sort of sign-holding protests that were taking place everywhere. And Hopefully, this enabled people to believe that that some kind of protest was possible.
00:34:42
Speaker
In any case, by the end of May 2025, the pressure on Elon Musk, which had had become pressure between Musk and Trump, you know they they had to do this car commercial for Tesla because the Tesla stocks were were falling. And, and you know, that that kind of pressure presumably made their relationship more difficult. So Trump and and Elon Musk had a falling out at the beginning of June that, you know, led to them exchanging very harsh words on on Twitter and Elon Musk's, you know, dropping the bomb. i'm using quotation marks that
00:35:17
Speaker
that Trump was in the Epstein files. this ah And this is significant because while Elon Musk had only been supposed to play this role in the federal government for a few months, the fact that he left in open conflict with Trump and in such a way that it would tend to break apart the coalition between tech billionaires and you know just aspiring fascists,
00:35:44
Speaker
It weakened the position of the of the autocracy as a whole. At the same time that people in first in San Diego, then in Minneapolis, then in Los Angeles, were finally forced by the first major ICE raids to to take the streets, to to engage in revolt, to renew the tactics that were familiar from 2020, especially in Los Angeles.
00:36:12
Speaker
And this broke the spell. This prevented people from imagining that as soon as they engaged in an act of resistance, that the martial law would be declared. It showed that actually the the martial law was on the way regardless, really, that you know that state power was consolidating ah around...
00:36:33
Speaker
outright violence regardless. And that the the only question was whether there would there would be resistance.
Public Resistance and Systemic Vulnerabilities
00:36:38
Speaker
And people filled the streets and engaged in resistance. So this set the stage for the massive demonstrations that occurred on June 14th, the first major No Kings protests that brought several million people to the streets.
00:36:58
Speaker
I think it's important to understand that just as in 2020, the millions of people that took the streets then, you know the they they came out after the burning of the third precinct in Minneapolis. in June of 2025, millions of people came out to the street in part because of the actions of a few thousand people who had openly defied the the police Minneapolis.
00:37:27
Speaker
Los Angeles and and created a situation which the stakes were clear to all. And as a consequence, though the first phase of the second Trump administration ended, I would argue, on June 14th, when it became clear to people who had previously been afraid that if they took the streets, if they defended themselves, if they acted boldly,
00:37:48
Speaker
they would be able to to strike blows. They would not be alone. Others would come to join them. they would They would be able even to win against the tremendous adversity represented by the Trump administration.
00:38:03
Speaker
And so as we're moving out of that first phase, you know, getting into the summer, you know, that first phase was typified by ah this, you know, you bring up this dynamic and and I want to mark this now because I'm going to bring it up later. But there's this dynamic in which there is simultaneously an attempt to consolidate power and also the state is tearing itself to shreds at the same time.
00:38:28
Speaker
people are quitting federal jobs in mass, right? There's this kind of crisis as far as who's in charge in any number of agencies. The people at the State Department are just kind of quitting postings or getting fired, you know, in large numbers when they cancel USAID. You know, these kind of major shifts happen really early.
00:38:48
Speaker
How do we typify the second era? So now that we've seen mass resistance, right, we've seen people get out in the streets. There's this kind of idea that, I mean, I remember how many people hit me up before the first No Kings protest asking me if they should bring bulletproof vests, you know, like things like that.
00:39:06
Speaker
And that did really shift afterwards. So how do we start to think about the second period? Yeah, everyone everyone was so afraid going into... So afraid, yeah. yeah it's It's easy to forget that, you know, because when you're afraid of something and it turns out that you were that you had just been intimidated, right?
00:39:25
Speaker
It's easy to to sort of wipe that out of your memory and say, oh yeah, I knew all along that it was going to be possible to protest. But it's important to remember things we were afraid of that were wrong so that we can resist being intimidated in the future.
00:39:40
Speaker
And the I wanted to say something else about what what you said about all the people who were fired from the federal government or from programs like USAID or purged from the military. you know The thing is that if there were an actual resistance representing a different set of proposals for what our lives could be like, what our communities could be like,
00:40:04
Speaker
lots of people with you know with significant skills and access to resources would already be in that. If there was a rebel army encamped in Appalachia, of course I'm making up a a fantasy story, but if there were, it would have some of the most talented and capable people in the United States would already be there. you know But the the problem is that because people were afraid to organize, especially at first, there wasn't something for the people who were being purged from the government to immediately get themselves involved with. So instead, the result was that all those people were atomized. right So that in summer of 2025, when it became clear that it was possible to resist in some way, that the only models for what resistance could look like
00:40:53
Speaker
we're still very much defensive or reactive models. you know we're We're going to try to at least observe ICE activity in our neighborhoods.
00:41:04
Speaker
We're going to engage in protest activity, carrying signs. But there wasn't really a a model for what what people could do together to actively assert a different proposal for what our lives should be.
00:41:22
Speaker
And as a consequence of that, even though the the sort of veneer of invincibility had worn off the the Trump administration and these ruptures had opened up inside of the the coalition supporting Trump,
00:41:39
Speaker
there wasn't really a ah clear second stage of activity. So the Trump administration was able to slowly regain the initiative, first by deploying National Guard to places like Los Angeles and Washington, D.C., and then by organizing these surges. you know this i want to I'm using this word, it's their word, but I want to use it because its ah it also has a history in United States colonial violence. right The surge was something that happened in Iraq to try to get Iraq under control. So the surge of ICE agents to Chicago and now more recently to Minneapolis to try to get those restless cities under control, it actually has
00:42:24
Speaker
A history that goes directly back to what many of those same mercenaries were doing overseas ah a decade and a half ago. So these ah these efforts to use brute force to suppress protests, to get communities under control, gained momentum slowly around the country. And there you know everybody, sort of liberals, were caught up in waiting for legal obstacles to this, you know, waiting for the the courts to say that it couldn't happen or something. And they got some legal victories. But the problem with that strategy, of course, is that the longer that Trump holds federal power, the more judges he will have appointed.
00:43:05
Speaker
So counting on the judicial branch to protect you from the executive branch doesn't make sense for for obvious reasons as a long-term strategy.
00:43:17
Speaker
We get to September when the racist propagandist Charlie Kirk was shot while promoting Trump's agenda a a small university in Utah. And as I said earlier, the Trump administration will use any pretext, any opportunity to to try to advance their their program. And that's what they did in that case, saying that it was the left that was responsible for this this shooting, even though everything that we know about the the shooter indicates that, you know, that he comes from a right-wing family that, you know, that he's just some, he's just one of these young men who alienated, isolated, disconnected from, from a healthy society have been carrying out shootings in greater and greater numbers.
00:44:05
Speaker
Also as a consequence of the profiteering of the firearms industry. But, The far right and the and the government used this as a as a way to hold this sort of Nuremberg rally.
00:44:18
Speaker
And, you know, with one Trump supporter actually saying without any irony at all that the shooting of Charlie Kirk was the American Reichstag fire, saying that it should be used thus to consolidate power.
00:44:29
Speaker
And coming out of this, you know, Trump made this announcement that Antifa was designated a ah dynastic terrorist organization. i think he his literal words were major terrorist organization. And what this suggested was that they were going to escalate from targeting immigrants to targeting, ah because Antifa is ah is a construct, is a made-up category. Basically, anybody could be can be crammed into that category that do they want.
00:44:58
Speaker
This was a terrifying moment. People around the country were were afraid in you know in a similar way to how they had been earlier, but know some people left the country. i can i can think of at least a couple people who who were forced to flee, and many people were fired from their jobs, et etc. People were afraid to speak out.
00:45:16
Speaker
In that kind of situation, it is tempting to to just get caught up in trying to figure out how you're going to prepare for oppression. But of course, it's like You know, if you're if you're playing chess and all you do is think about how you will defend yourself from the enemy's moves, you will lose the game. You actually have to think about what your proactive efforts will be that that will change the situation.
00:45:40
Speaker
the The good news is that, ah the the again, mostly the liberals are to are to credit for this, but you know the tremendous no-Kings protests of October 18, which were even larger than the ones in June, and then the elections, both of those showed that Trump's agenda was actually not that popular.
00:46:00
Speaker
And then after that, you know ICE tried to do a major operation in New York City, and were completely blocked inside the parking garage and then and prevented from doing anything and then escorted out of the city by protesters.
00:46:13
Speaker
this These events showed that that the Trump administration was was still not able to exert the kind of power that ah it wished to.
00:46:24
Speaker
and And I think they also distracted the Trump administration from carrying out this crackdown on on anti-fascists that they they wanted to. The victory of Mamdani distracted Trump. He was just trying to think about what it would mean to ah to be contending with the sort of you know social democrat politicians rather than these centrist politicians that he had been contending with or subordinating.
00:46:53
Speaker
And this, you know, this again, it created a situation in which they weren't able to marshal their full force to to go after us. So the, ah you know, the end of 2025 came with this sort of second phase of the Trump administration's efforts to crack down, to flood the zone, having, again, sort of hit a hit a wall. which And that brings us finally to the very dense succession of events at the beginning of 2025. But i'll I'll let you jump in for a second.
00:47:27
Speaker
Yeah, I i think you know the big question that always comes up whenever I'm having these sorts of conversations, specifically with like liberally friends of mine, stuff like this, there's this concept that the state has...
00:47:43
Speaker
unchecked power right that they can just sort of flood the zone everywhere all at once occupy everything all at once right it's this kind of constant anxiety that that you feel in the background of you know i live in a major city in the rust belt you know it's a blue city in a red state and like people are really stressed about it here like incredibly stressed about it here So I think the question that comes up and the question I've been discussing with people a lot is why do they keep stalling out?
00:48:14
Speaker
Right. So there's there's all of these examples. They wanted to go and the Houthi rebellion. So they like launched some cruise missiles. They wanted to go end the Iranian nuclear program. So they dropped six bombs.
00:48:27
Speaker
They wanted to take over Gaza. So Donald Trump created a peace committee. You know, like there's all of these things that that they're talking about doing or having done, which in themselves are incredibly superficial and partial, right?
00:48:46
Speaker
And I think it creates this disjunction, let's call it disjunction, between what one would pick up in the social media sphere, which is a lot of panic and a lot of stress, and the actual very partial realities of the things that they're able to actually do.
00:49:11
Speaker
Why do you think they keep stalling out? I mean, I've got plenty of theories I've articulated on this show before, but why do you think they keep stalling out like this? Like, why do you think that their very clear intent to sort of speed run authoritarianism keeps hitting these relatively practical walls?
00:49:29
Speaker
Well, there's ah there's a couple different things going on here, you know. One is that when they flood the zone, they also overload themselves. they They end up with so many different tasks that they need to accomplish that they can't accomplish all of them.
00:49:43
Speaker
And likewise, you know even if they win a victory, that victory is immediately lost behind a succession of other headlines, some of which are favorable for them, some of which are not.
00:49:55
Speaker
I also want to give credit to the people who have been resisting them at every point. you know None of what they've done has taken place unopposed. in When they brought ICE into Chicago for the surge there, people organized and developed a whole playbook for how to resist them. And then when they visited North Carolina with ah with a a few days of ah significant ICE activity,
00:50:20
Speaker
The Chicago playbook was immediately reproduced in North Carolina on the streets. So you know when they withdrew from North Carolina, they basically had inoculated the population against them so that people had formed these massive networks and were prepared to to respond to them you know whenever they come back.
00:50:41
Speaker
And then finally, why are they not succeeding in doing everything they put their hands to? Well, the other thing is that you know, fascism is not best understood as the concentration of of weaponry to establish a certain autocratic order.
00:51:00
Speaker
Fascism is a spell that's cast over the population, in which the population ceases to believe that there is an advantage to standing up for themselves. in which the population, you know, they cease to trust their own strength, they cease to trust each other.
00:51:15
Speaker
Fascism is fundamentally a ah an operation in the management of perceptions. And the way to understand what the Trump administration has been doing is that they are trying to create a situation like the one that prevailed when Trump took office, in which everyone tells themselves that there's nothing to be gained by fighting.
00:51:34
Speaker
But to the truth is that we have nothing to be gained. You know, we have nothing to gain by by surrendering. We have nothing to gain by subordinating ourselves to their power. ah that We have everything to be gained by standing up for ourselves. And whenever we see others do that, it it becomes possible to imagine, to recognize what we could gain from standing up ourselves.
00:51:55
Speaker
That's that's the ah that's the thing. So when we when we look at what they're doing, they you know they they don't try to conceal their crimes. They actually try to broadcast their crimes as as loudly and clearly as they can. They're not trying to get away with things.
00:52:12
Speaker
They're trying to telegraph strength at all times. They're trying to to be perceived as as much more powerful than they are. And that they that is a vulnerability for them because as soon as they are defeated on some front, it it makes them look weak. They're always trying to do things that will make them look strong. And and when they, because they you know they know that all the investment in what they're doing has consequences come about only as a consequence of them seeming to be strong. and And I want to bring this back to what I said earlier about speculation, about these sort of hype men like Elon Musk or Donald Trump that build a tremendous amount of power and concentrate power in their hands chiefly by casting a spell over other people, by by making other people perceive them as powerful.
00:53:02
Speaker
And you know if you ah if you invest a lot of money, you know for example, in a cryptocurrency, and then you realize that that cryptocurrency is not going to produce a a good like return on that investment, you're going to try to get that money out of there. And everybody else is going to try to do the same thing that's going to collapse.
00:53:22
Speaker
That is also the situation with the Trump regime, that it is, you know, just like Tesla, it has never produced the actual returns that, you know, that an early 20th century dictatorship would have to produce, right? What it has done is concentrated popular belief in, you know, in this notion that they're all powerful and can't be stopped.
00:53:48
Speaker
And I'll let you jump in there before I talk about the events in 2026, but that's what I yeah really i really like that. i really like that concept of thinking about, especially authoritarianism now as a management of perception.
00:54:02
Speaker
I think that that makes a lot of sense. You know, well what I've been seeing locally where I'm at is a really dramatic shift. in the way, just in the last week or so, in the way that people are talking about what's going on.
00:54:20
Speaker
It's no longer about disagreeing about policy or even disagreeing with like government action or even resisting government action.
00:54:33
Speaker
that's That's a question that has to do with like political representation. The question that people are talking about now is how they defend their way of life. Right. How do we keep living the way that we live where we live?
00:54:46
Speaker
Because if they show up here and are successfully able to search forces into the area, we can't.
00:54:53
Speaker
That sets conflict up on completely different terms. Right. If you can't go about your life without, you know, the soccer mom who lives next to you just being shot in the face for for trying to move her car, you know, that that puts the you know the questions of life and death in front of any any question of political affiliation or something. Yes.
00:55:17
Speaker
And people will be compelled, whatever their their voting habits would have been before, people will be compelled to take a ah a position in favor of or against autocracy.
00:55:28
Speaker
and And the polls are showing that they actually, you know, even with all the TikTok videos and and all of the like control of the press, you know, all the, you know, Black Hawk down all with all of those, you know, yeah decades of effort to produce a governable population that people, nonetheless, their their core humanity is still there in the in the majority of the population that It just doesn't want this. you know And so even though, for example, the Democrats have said, oh, we we can't abolish ICE. we can't you know We can't make these big transformations in society, even though you know ICE itself actually only dates to March 2003, the month right the United States invaded Iraq, not coincidentally.
00:56:13
Speaker
That ah even though ICE is a new institution, the Democrats are like, oh, we can't we can't get rid of it. We can't make a change like that. It won't be popular. But if you look at the polls right now, the last one I saw had nearly half the population that was polled in favor of the abolition of ICE, even though no politician is saying that this is a ah good idea.
00:56:31
Speaker
They're arriving at that on their own. you know And in that regard, the the general population is closer to anarchist proposals than You know, without even getting to be in dialogue with with anarchists, most of them.
00:56:46
Speaker
Yeah, well, and i'm I'm seeing, you know, for as much as want to put stock in polling, you know, one of the numbers I keep coming back to is this approval rating, which is hovering somewhere between 28 and 30 percent, depending on what poll you looked at today.
00:57:03
Speaker
Now, what's important about that isn't just that it's low. That's George W. Bush left office with approval ratings that low or close. I think they were in the mid 30s. But what's important about that is that.
00:57:15
Speaker
Historically, Trump's support sort of bottoms out at about 42 percent. It doesn't really matter how bad things are. He's got about 40, 42% support, almost across the board. And you can sort of see that if you look at pulling graphs across time, that's sort of the the bottom line, right?
00:57:33
Speaker
And we're way below that today. Like as the perception management has ramped up, as the media campaign has increased, as most of what the federal government is capable of at this point is brutalizing people in media campaigns,
00:57:50
Speaker
that the the fact that the ability of people to live in everyday life is collapsing is having a meaningful impact, like a very meaningful, measurable, notable impact.
00:58:04
Speaker
Right. I think that I think the way that we understand what what Trump is doing is that he also understands that what he's proposing is not going to be popular. He is going to need to be able to impose his rule by brute force or else he won't be able to stay in power. And if we look at at what he's doing as ah as a program to to be able to impose his power, even if he is, you know, even if, you know, 70% of the population opposes him, it makes a lot more sense.
00:58:38
Speaker
And also our responsibilities snap into clarity. Yes. Yes. Well, and I think, you know, getting to perception management, you know, there has not been an image that has hit me as hard as the image of looted ice vehicles with spray paint all over them from a few nights ago in Minneapolis.
00:58:58
Speaker
Right.
Decentralized Movements Against Global Autocracy
00:58:58
Speaker
I know with people I've talked to, something changed. Something felt different. I know it feels different where I'm at. the The mentalities have shifted drastically.
00:59:11
Speaker
The level of determination. has shifted drastically. The level of awareness has shifted drastically. And that wasn't because ICE murdered Renee Good.
00:59:23
Speaker
That was because people fought back. Right? So we've been talking a lot about perception management. I mean... What happens now? I mean, it's been a dense 18 days of this year.
00:59:36
Speaker
Yeah. Right. Like a very dense 18 days. I know in my personal life, that's not slowing down at all. The amount of of things I'm doing in relation to this are just increasing. And so what does this mean? I mean, like what, what shifted?
00:59:53
Speaker
Well, wanted to and say, oh yeah. I want to start by saying that you know Trump actually began 2026 with this more or less successful effort to gain control of Venezuela.
01:00:07
Speaker
And if that was the only thing that had happened this year, he would be he would at least seem powerful. you know He would seem powerful. whether you know some people are Some people are opposed to this. Some people think that the United States is...
01:00:23
Speaker
engaged in too much overseas activity including some of trump's base think that but you know but that that was an action that that made him seem powerful and i i want to address everybody here who hasn't yet come to a conclusion about what they think about hierarchy by by pointing out parenthetically that that if you were in favor of of chavismo if you were in favor of the project in venezuela you know the ostensibly represented a kind of resistance to U.S. imperialism.
01:00:57
Speaker
You should see that one of the chief vulnerabilities to that project was actually the fact that it was a hierarchical project with an autocrat at the top who could be subordinated to and a bigger autocrat.
01:01:11
Speaker
If what was going on in Venezuela was really a horizontal and participatory project, it would have been it would have been resilient. And you you know Trump would have been able to kidnap whoever he wanted without the government of Venezuela coming around to be willing to do whatever he says.
01:01:30
Speaker
So... This is important because it gives us an indication of what will not work to get us out of the historical era that we're in. you know And and i I want everybody who is like, oh, anarchism is great in theory, but in practice, you need Leninism. I want everybody who has been entertaining ideas like that to pay attention to what happened in Venezuela and learn from it and understand that actually you can't impose an order, you can't concentrate power in the hands of a few people without thereby subordinating your project to the fundamental project of autocracy that is rising all around the the world. And that eventually, you will end up not only looking like the regimes of Donald Trump, Vladimir Putin, etc., but you will end up answering to them. that The only way to not do that is
01:02:18
Speaker
for us to to create grassroots, horizontal, decentralized, autonomous movements that you know through which people organize collectively on ah on a broad basis. And you can kidnap any one person, but you can't thereby change the character of what's happening.
01:02:37
Speaker
So I want to start by making that point. And now I want to return to to what you were bringing up, which is that you know the other thing that has has has happened in the first two and a half weeks of 2026 and that yeah attracted a tremendous amount of attention, of course, is that the Trump administration, which initially sent a few hundred people to Minneapolis, the same as they did to Chicago,
01:03:00
Speaker
having encountered pushback in Minneapolis, had to had to send more people there. Then they they started with sending a few hundred, then they sent 2,000. And people in Minneapolis didn't take this sitting down. They they took the the model for rapid response networks that had been that had been developed in Los Angeles and then Chicago.
01:03:21
Speaker
And then they they expanded on it, they refined it. they And the ways they refined it, and incidentally, they refined it by making it more grassroots, more horizontal, more decentralized, more participatory, more flexible, so that rather than everything passing through the bottleneck of a few administrators, that you know people were actually able to react immediately to information,
01:03:47
Speaker
and And this created a ah situation in which, despite having 2,000, a tremendous number of federal mercenaries just brutalizing people all over the streets of the Twin Cities, that that it still wasn't enough.
01:04:01
Speaker
you know that's That was already the case when ah a federal mercenary, is presumably angry and on edge, murdered Renee Good, provoking and another day of of clashes, of unrest, and of ICE failing to control territory in the Twin Cities. That happened a week before the additional shooting in North Minneapolis, now just a few days ago.
01:04:29
Speaker
That, you know, that again, through these new, constantly evolving and adapting rathers response networks, drew a tremendous number of people into the the neighborhood where that happened. And the ICE agents and Minneapolis police who were confronted by these police Right, rightly outraged demonstrators, you know, they they responded by shooting flashbang grenades and and tear gas at everybody, not just to the demonstrators, but at random cars, they almost killed a six month old and at the residential houses, and then eventually were forced to flee, because they couldn't control the situation.
01:05:07
Speaker
And when they fled, they they ah in fleeing, they abandoned several ICE vehicles that that people got into and and and you know retrieved from these vehicles operational documents, equipment, these sort of challenge coins that these mercenaries receive for participating in in violent activity as bounty hunters.
01:05:32
Speaker
and a bunch of other sort of compromising material. And this was really the first time that rather than just chasing the federal mercenaries away, which people have done repeatedly in in New York and Minneapolis before last last June, actually, in Los Angeles, rather than just making them leave, they were they were dealt a defeat.
01:05:56
Speaker
And that was what was so important for for everyone to see was that they can be defeated. you know And then the in the wake of this, hundreds more you know ICE agents are being sent to the Twin Cities. and And now as of yesterday, as of January seventeen It was reported that the FBI has requested FBI agents all around the country to voluntarily travel to the Twin Cities. you know In other words, they're concentrating all of their forces on this effort because they know that if they if they appear weak there, that it will be harder for them everywhere, that they will encounter more resistance everywhere.
01:06:38
Speaker
And they don't think that they're winning yet. That's why they're concentrating so many resources there.
Minneapolis as a Resistance Hub
01:06:44
Speaker
I want to emphasize, even if the struggle in Minneapolis you know does go on for a long time, it it might not be that we see something that looks outwardly like victory. We might not see something that looks like you know they're all chased away and they they leave or they apologize or something.
01:07:02
Speaker
But rather, if they are tied down in this situation, if they're continuously just entangled in open, you know brute force, physical conflict and in which they ah just look more and more evil to everyone who's looking on, and and they cannot persuade the people they're doing violence to, and it becomes clear that they're they're not winning by brute force, they're not winning the battle of ideas,
01:07:30
Speaker
this will ultimately undermine their project on a massive scale. you know and it i had said before that you know that Minneapolis, St. Paul could become a sort of an Afghanistan for them. Again, many of the federal mercenaries who are occupying Minneapolis and St. Paul know exactly what I'm talking about because they spent years in Afghanistan, occupying Afghanistan, and they were defeated there. They weren't defeated by by ah force that I can endorse. you know They were defeated by another fundamentalist, nationalist, violent project, but they were defeated because brute force alone will not suffice to to change people's minds and change people's priorities. That that is not going to work.
01:08:15
Speaker
So if they're like tied down in the Twin Cities, trying to prove something that they can't prove, if people continue to resist them, if people continue to stand up to them,
01:08:27
Speaker
that will create the conditions for them to continue losing all around the country. And it's terrifying. What they're doing is terrifying. They will kill more people. They will escalate more and more, but they're doing that because they're weak and because actually brute force is the only thing that could keep them in power at this point.
01:08:45
Speaker
Yeah. Jamel Bowie from the New York Times has been making a really similar point in a series of articles. And i think you know what what he's getting at is this dynamic that you know pulls a few threads of what we've been talking about together, right?
01:09:01
Speaker
That on one hand, you have this sort of extremist project that has built its politics off never retreating. And so you have this sort of expectation of pushing forward.
01:09:12
Speaker
On another hand, you have support for that project dropping down to just true believers, making any attempt to back down that much more costly politically. You have a dynamic where a lot of the safety mechanisms of everyday life have been stripped away. Things like food stamps have been threatened. People are really anxious. People are really stressed.
01:09:33
Speaker
And then you have this dynamic in which they're risking something incredible politically. That on one level. So we've seen them surge ice into the area.
01:09:45
Speaker
right And so far they've surged yeah anywhere between 2,000, 3,500 forces, depending on what number you're getting, which is a lot. I mean, that's that's five times the size of the Minneapolis Police Department, just to give you all ah a sense of how many federal agents that is.
01:10:02
Speaker
And they are on the streets just messing with people, but they're not the U.S. military. And the hesitance to call on the Insurrection Act seems in some ways to be a sort of hesitance to cross the Rubicon to pass the point of no return.
01:10:24
Speaker
And in short of doing that, what they've got left to them is four or five thousand federal agents they can use who are getting bogged down in one place, who are getting ground down through civil resistance,
01:10:38
Speaker
right? As you mentioned, those are the conditions that lead the United States to lose in a place like Afghanistan or lead the United States to lose in Iraq, right? It's the dynamic that has led occupiers to lose in the places that they've occupied for hundreds of years.
01:10:56
Speaker
And we're watching that dynamic now play itself out in the streets of Minneapolis, right? I think, you know, there there have been a lot of people talking about how important of a historical moment this is.
01:11:10
Speaker
You know, I think a lot of us who have been doing this for a long time, we we get somewhat desensitized to mass police violence and mass repression. We've been through it so many times.
01:11:22
Speaker
But the reality is, is that this does feel different. This feels like a really kinetic conflict yeah in a way that I haven't experienced in my lifetime.
01:11:34
Speaker
And so what does that mean for us? I mean, it it shifts our terms of engagement drastically. Like, what does that mean for us? Well, the first about their hesitance to put the military out on the streets through the Insurrection Act.
01:11:52
Speaker
When the second Trump administration opened, people were afraid to act because they were afraid that Trump would put the military on the streets. And think it was actually, in some ways, educating or a relief even for people when...
01:12:12
Speaker
the National Guard were put on the streets starting in summer of 2025 to see that that didn't actually make a difference. You know, if you're if you're a hardcore anarchist, you've probably been in some situation where you were running down the street and, you know, the ah the intersections were held by National Guard detachments, you know, with Jeeps and, and you know, their camo clothes, but they're not moving because they have their orders, right? and their orders are different from the crowd control tactics that the police have been trained in and and the police are the ones actually coming after you.
01:12:42
Speaker
you know And similarly, the people who've been... Operating in Minneapolis on behalf of the Trump administration over the last you know few months, are they're there because they they're you know they're former Proud Boys or January 6th people. they're They're there because they want to do violence to people. They're there to harass and harm people that they perceive as liberals. They want to kill people. they're They're aspiring murderers. They're all aspiring murderers, just like the person who killed...
01:13:14
Speaker
Renee Good. They know what institution they joined and they joined it on purpose. But the the U.S. military is comprised of a lot of people who just wanted to get better job prospects, you know people who grew up in in poor communities, who identify with those communities, but wanted to get some kind of decent employment. And although the upper ranks of the U.S. military have been purged,
01:13:41
Speaker
by Trump and under Hegseth, the entire population the U.S. military is still much more sympathetic to the general population of the United States than the membership of ICE, which is basically a bunch of hired killers.
01:13:56
Speaker
And so I'm not sure if if the Trump administration really wants to play their last card now with the Insurrection Act. it That would put people on the streets that are actually less loyal to them.
01:14:11
Speaker
And it would mean that they don't have something to threaten with or to escalate to later. If Trump is is smart, he will probably wait to to use that, to play that card, to try to interfere with elections in you know six or seven or eight months.
01:14:28
Speaker
But he's not going to he's not going to do that now. And that that opens up a little bit of space for people. Now, of course, we're not going to win a military conflict by open confrontation, but the way that military conflicts are determined is not just by force of arms, it's it's by logistics, right? That's why the United States had to withdraw from Afghanistan.
01:14:51
Speaker
So if ICE is trying to occupy the Twin Cities, but they can't arrange for their agents to sleep anywhere, for example, you know, I i just saw today that one hotel was... it The hotel was shutting down completely.
01:15:06
Speaker
they're They're like, it's not safe for us. I presume it's one of these hotels that has had noise demonstrations there at at night as ah as a consequence of of them giving housing to you know ICE mercenaries.
01:15:19
Speaker
But but this you know the Doubletree Hilton in downtown St. Paul is is shutting down entirely because they they can't secure the safety of of their staff under these conditions, or maybe their staff, for that matter, are people with immigrant backgrounds who don't want to who don't want to be party to this. In any case, if if this keeps happening, if things like this keep happening, they they will not be able to logistically maintain what they're doing. And so, you know, if you're looking at this occupying army just...
01:15:51
Speaker
just yeah of of stupid, hateful people with guns. And you you're like, how can we go up against them with their guns? Just look for their look for their logistics, look for the the ways that they depend on resources and and intervene there. They are not invincible.
01:16:08
Speaker
They're actually scared and cowardly and not particularly thoughtful people who are up against the entire population.
Sustainable Movements and Future Hope
01:16:17
Speaker
But now that we've gotten to the end of the discussion, I want to telescope back and say, the real question is how this conflict with with the shock troops of the autocratic Trump administration can position us to solve these much bigger problems that we're confronting. You know, I can understand how when we when we're facing the threat of, you know, mercenaries murdering us in the streets, it's easy to to just think about the next 24 hours or the next 48 hours, but but forget the bigger question. But I want to conclude by saying that we will continue to confront problems like this.
01:16:59
Speaker
Mm-hmm. until we find a way to address them that itself gives rise to a different way of life. and And so the the thing that's promising here is that you know as i as I said, the the tactics, the strategies that have succeeded thus far have been the most decentralized, autonomous,
01:17:21
Speaker
horizontal, anti-authoritarian tactics and strategies that yeah that have created tightly bound networks of people who are prepared to engage in mutual aid and and in solidarity.
01:17:33
Speaker
And that that is promising. It's the same thing that's arisen out of the disaster response efforts and the mutual aid efforts through which people have a addressed economic crisis. But we need to understand those networks not just as ad hoc ways to to get the the most violent elements of the capitalist regime out of our communities, but as a starting point for us to build a way of relating to each other, of of producing the possibility of survival in this world, of producing the resources that we need and distributing them according to a different logic, a logic that values the lives of everyone, that values the creativity and the potential of all human beings and that and that can give space and to you know for for the lives that we need and to to nourish the next generation of people so people can grow up with better prospects than to to sell themselves as foot soldiers to a fascist regime.
01:18:29
Speaker
I think that's a great thought to close on. Why don't we end it there? Thank you for being here with us today. I'm sure we'll talk again soon. there's The situation is evolving very quickly. um i know we're already working on a number of episodes where we're going to be interviewing people from Minneapolis.
01:18:47
Speaker
And yeah, i just want to leave people with the idea that the days have been dark. They felt dark. But right now, I know myself. I feel more hopeful today than I have in months.
01:19:03
Speaker
And that failure of the attempt to seize power, that failure feels closer, even if the moment feels dangerous.
01:19:19
Speaker
And that's always how it is when we look at the collapse of dictatorships, is that the moment of danger is often the moment where we're meeting the regime head off.
01:19:31
Speaker
but In my experience of of past movements, at precisely the moment when you're most terrified, later you look back and you recognize that that was the moment that the most transformative things were happening.
01:19:45
Speaker
You know, at the, at the time you can't tell at the time, all you know is the danger and all you know is that you're showing up and you're afraid later. You can look back and you can see that was the time when there was the most potential because everybody understood the stakes of the situation and and it turned out that we were not alone.
01:20:01
Speaker
But when one takes that first step, when takes that step, when when you take that step out of your door, into the into the street, you have to take the first step by yourself and then you find out who else is is ready to join you.
01:20:13
Speaker
And like you said, that the days have been dark, but the nights have been illumined by the possibility of a better future. All right, everyone.
01:20:27
Speaker
This has been The Beautiful Idea. We will talk to you all soon. Have a good one. Thank you again.
01:20:40
Speaker
Thanks for listening to today's episode of The Beautiful Idea, news and analysis from the front lines of anarchist and autonomous struggles everywhere. Catch you next time.