How We Win

After a chaotic week, Robert sits down to explain why victory is, in fact, possible.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:01):
All Zone media.

Speaker 2 (00:05):
First, no matter what happens, remember to breathe. It's always
good advice to breathe. But taking good advice is easier
said than done. Sometimes the world is so overwhelming that
any added weight, even the weight of oxygen in your lungs,
feels like it might be enough to drag you down.
This is one of those times. The last week has

(00:26):
brought about ten years worth of news, and we are
all processing the seemingly inevitable coronation of a dictator and
the sudden hope and possibility inspired by Joe Biden stepping
down from the nomination. Welcome to it could happen here.
I'm Robert Evans, and this is a podcast about things
falling apart and sometimes about how to put them back together.

(00:47):
The last time I sat down to talk with all
of you like this was in the immediate aftermath of
the Trump assassination attempt, just before the Republican National Convention.
I told you not to panic. That's still good advice.
I also told you that no matter how bad or
good things may look, literally anything can happen in US politics,

(01:08):
and by god, it has. I felt it was necessary
to deliver that message because I saw an awful lot
of people declaring We're doomed. Fascism is inevitable, and quite frankly,
I think shit like that only helps the fascists. Well,
it turned out I was right. A lot has happened
over the last two weeks, and the situation now is
very different than it was the day the former president

(01:30):
took that grazing blow from a sniper's bullet. As is
usually the case and instances like this, I've had a
lot of people reach out to me since that episode
saying versions of how did you know? And as good
as it might be for my career to lean into
that side of my reputation, the truth is that I
am white knuckling it through every twist and turn like
everyone else. I spent the RNC wondering if I'd been

(01:51):
foolish telling people not to panic, And yes, I feel
a hell of a lot better right now. Of course,
I don't know what comes next. I just know that
we're done with the portion of this mess where we
spiral in a hopeless mier that was last week. This week,
the outlook is a lot better, and not because Kamala
Harris is our savior or because Nancy Pelosi is a

(02:12):
three D chess master. But because men age and die.
This is a fact I tried to remind myself of
as I'd grown through that disastrous debate with the rest
of the country. On one hand, I felt like we
were all about to watch one ailing, power hungry man
hand the keys to the kingdom over to a cadre
of bloodthirsty fascists. But on the other hand, there's always

(02:34):
something inherently optimistic in this simple reality. The people who
would be our rulers will all die someday, and so
long as men die, liberty will never perish. So long
as men die, we have hope. I stole that line
from Charlie Chaplin. He put it in the mouth of
his character from The Great Dictator, a movie he produced

(02:55):
at great personal cost in nineteen forty Riot. As Hitler
and the Nazis reached the apex of their power, a
rational analyst staring out at the playing field after the
fall of France could be forgiven for having seen the
outcome as certain Great Britain stood alone, Hitler's armies victorious
on every theater, and the future of democracy and human
liberty gasping for breath. One such rational analyst was Joseph Kennedy,

(03:19):
US Ambassador to Great Britain and patriarch of the Kennedy family.
Joseph was a man of wealth and power, whose sober
judgment and cunning had seen him short the entire US
stock market and the kind of fortune that let him
buy his way into the ranks of global royalty. He
was a man who had predicted the future once one big,
and he let that convince him that he had the

(03:39):
second sight. And so in November nineteen forty, less than
a month after the release of The Great Dictator, Kennedy
found himself in an interview with the Boston Globe, looking
out at the ruin of Europe and the bombs falling
on London. He told a reporter democracy is finished in England.
It may be here here, of course, being the United
States now. The resulting blowback to all of this saw

(04:03):
Kennedy forced to resign his ambassadorship. The very next year,
Hitler invaded the Soviet Union, and for several brutal months
it looked like Joe had been right. Not only might
democracy be finished, but every system besides fascism might be
hurtling towards annihilation and bondage under the Swastika, depending on
how you count it. The Third Reich and fascism as

(04:25):
a whole, reached its greatest extent of territorial power in
either mid August or September nineteen forty one. By November
of nineteen forty one, a year after Joe Kennedy's remarks
to the Globe, Operation Barbarossa had been wrenched to a
bloody halt, and the long battle to push the fascists
back and drown them in the waters of their birth
had begun. And so in the end it was Charlie Chaplin,

(04:48):
not Joe Kennedy, who had the proper measure of things.
Liberty survived because men died, many millions of them, from
Kiev to Canterbury. We live in very different times now.
The arm armies of fascism are not primarily conquering land
under arms. The primary terrain of our present conflict exists
within the hearts and souls of men and women. And

(05:09):
while populism is still a favorite mechanism of action among
the fascists, they have in this country at least given
up on victory by sheer weight of numbers. It's true
what they say war never changes. Weapons do, but the
core of all human conflict revolves around the capture and
denial of territory. If you can't occupy ground yourself, you

(05:30):
must at least deny it to the enemy. In infantry combat,
this is the primary use of a machine gun, not
to kill people, but to blanket an area in bullets
and stop the enemy from moving through it. In our
modern war of thoughts and feelings, the machine gun has
yielded to the fire hose of propaganda and disinformation. These
have always been parts of the fascist arsenal, but the

(05:52):
Internet has allowed an increase in the scale and speed
of their deployment that is very much comparable to the
replacement of bolt action rifles with automatic ones. The forces
of basic human decency have a natural advantage in terms
of human terrain that should be impossible for the fascists
to counter. No matter what the bastards say. Most people
want to be left alone with the people they love

(06:14):
to live their lives. The forces of hate, the people
who want to throw trans kids in their parents in
gas chambers and drown migrants in the Rio Grande, tap
out at a little over a third of the population max.
If you want to return to World War II metaphors,
and why wouldn't you? The monsters are stuck in tiny,
landlocked Germany without any gas or steel. The only way

(06:35):
for them to access the resources in territory they need
to maneuver themselves into a victory is by cutting us
off from each other and keeping us too confused and
divided to surround the bastards and smother them all for good.
They do this by convincing you that you are isolated,
alone and surrounded by them. Our hopelessness is their force multiplier.

(06:57):
When leftists in the US look out at Ukrainians strike
for survival and write them off as Nazis, as deluded
tools of imperialism, When liberals and blue cities to cry
college students protesting on behalf of dying Palestinian children as
agents of hamas the lines of solidarity between a snap
rather than wrapping like a garret around the throats of
our opponents. This is why you've seen so much allegiance

(07:19):
and sympathy between the cruelest and most eluded segments of
the Western left. The people who laughed at Syrian civilians
sheltering from Brishah al Assad's bombs and called them the
CIA and the agents of Putin's Russia and Peter Teal's
neo monarchist right. The Teals, Bannons, Putins, Airdoins, Trumps and
Modis of the world know how lonely they are. The
only way they can win is to convince you that

(07:41):
you're alone. Then they have you at a disadvantage. Then
they can kill us one by one. You know, there's
no smooth way to transition to an ad and a
piece like this, but here it is. We're back now.

(08:05):
I'm not a young man, but I do sometimes tend
to think of humanity as a single, vast, gestalt organism
groping for survival and comfort in a world that mostly
exists beyond what we can see. Majority of people are
happy existing as part of that vast whole. We take
comfort and safety in our communion with the rest of
the species. But there are a few diseased minds out

(08:27):
there that don't believe in the rest of us. These
sollipsists see themselves as the only minds, and the perpetuation
of their own power and will as the only real good.
That's why men like Peter Teel seek physical immortality, and
it's why men like Vladimir Putin or Hitler seek the
kind of immortality that comes from welding the edifice of
a nation state to themselves. Hitler is Germany, and Germany

(08:51):
will last forever. Elon Musk sees his children as an
extension of himself, and his fantasies of space colonization are
really just a fantasy that he will remain central to
humanity's future down through eternity. Musk has repeatedly identified himself
as a pro natalist, and he believes his responsibility is
to have as many children as possible to secure a

(09:12):
pro human future. The term pro human might confuse you,
given the lack of concern he has for the children
being bombed in Gaza or who will surely die in
the mass deportation camps through a publican party is currently
salivating to open. But the only real human Elon ses
is himself, which is why he equates the survival of
the species with his own ability to breed. As I type,

(09:35):
this video has begun circulating around the Internet from an
interview Musk conducted with Jordan Peterson for The Daily Wire.
In it, Musk explains why he has now fully embraced
politics endorsing Donald Trump and declaring himself at war with wokeism,
which he describes as an existential threat to the species.
He claims that what cinched this for him was his

(09:56):
daughter deciding to transition.

Speaker 3 (09:58):
It happened to one of my my older boys where
I was, I was essentially tricked into signing documents for
one of my older boys. There was a lot of confusion,
and you know, I was told, oh, you know, might
commit suicide if it's incredibly evil. And I agree with

(10:21):
you that people that have been promoting this should go
to prison. So I was, I was stricked into doing this.
You know, it wasn't explained to me that puberty blockers
are actually just sterilization drugs. So I lost my son essentially.

Speaker 1 (10:36):
So you know, they.

Speaker 3 (10:39):
They're callot dead naming for a reason, all right. So
the reason it's called dead naming is because so my
son is dead, killed by the Wok mind virus.

Speaker 2 (10:50):
Musk's child is not, in fact dead, but they have
expressed an identity utterly separate from Elon, an identity he
cannot understand because Musk can only see his children as
an extension of himself and his ego. This is in fact,
worse than death. It is a threat to Musk's own life. This, incidentally,
is why Musk and his fellow travelers see transgender kids

(11:13):
as such a threat. Accepting a trans child, even if
you don't fully understand how and why they feel the
way they do, is one of the most radical acts
of love imaginable. To do this means that you've accepted
on a fundamental level that your children are autonomous beings,
not an extension of you, but something new, wonderful, and unique.

(11:34):
The essence of parental love is to give your children
to the world. This means accepting that you are finite
that the world goes on without you. If you see
all humanity as an extension of your own ego, nothing
could be more frightening. The people who feel this way,
people like Elon, are mutations, a glitch in the human

(11:54):
system that starts as a glitch within the heart of
an individual. It comes as a byproduct of success and
the very visible, spectacular ways that feed narcissism. When I
think about stuff like this, I refer often back to
a great article by the anthropologist Richard Lee, Eating Christmas
in the Kalahari. Lee spent years living among the Ikung Bushmen,

(12:15):
a Bantu speaking hunter gatherer group who were seen by
anthropologists as some of the people still living in a
manner most similar to our ancient ancestors. One Christmas, as
a show of gratitude to his hosts, Lee purchased a
massive ox for the holiday feast. He was excited to
show this great gift off to his new friends, and
he was proud of himself for having gotten it, and

(12:36):
he was utterly shocked when they responded to his pride
with mockery of him and his ox, insulting it as scrawny, tiny,
hardly fit to eat now. This shockedly because the ox
he had purchased was, of course quite large, and it
was eventually explained to him that his friends were reacting
with mockery not to his gift, but to the evident
pride he had shown in it. Bringing in a great

(12:59):
beast way of meat, either as a hunter or from
buying it as Burton did, is the kind of thing
that can go to a young man's head. If you
are the one with the pocket book or the one
who fires the arrow, you can forget that the meat
before you, the meat that you've brought into the community
is not the product purely of your own genius, but
is a product of all of the time and resources

(13:21):
invested in you by the community. The shaming of the meat,
as this tactic was called, is a time honored way
of correcting the glitch in young men of the Ukun
before it can turn terminal. As one elder in the
tribe eventually explained to Lee, when a young man kills
much meat, he comes to think of himself as a
chief or a big man, and he thinks of the
rest of us as his servants or inferiors. We can't

(13:44):
accept this. We refuse one who boasts, for some day
his pride will make him kill somebody. So we always
speak of his meat as worthless. This way we cool
his heart and make him gentle. And speaking of cooling
your heart, why don't you cool your heart with some ads.
And then we'll come back to conclude this in a
little bit, we're back. It has been theorized that the

(14:17):
shaming of the meat is a social construct that may
help to explain one of the evolutionary values of satire,
perhaps even why humanity keeps producing comedians. They act as
a part of our species immune system when this glitch
in the hearts of young men isn't punctured. When it's
allowed to take off and dominate them, then it changes

(14:38):
them on a fundamental level, and the being that it
leaves in its wake seems to understand instinctively that laughter
is a danger to it. This ultimately explains why Musk
purchase Twitter and why Barack Obama's mockery of Donald Trump
during that White House Correspondence Center set us all down
the dark path that we currently are walking. So clearly,

(15:00):
humor alone doesn't always save us from these kinds of
people either. What will I have several times and my
various shows identified myself as an anarchist, and I tend
to do that even though I don't feel fully comfortable
with the title, because brevity matters. I'm speaking to a
mass audience, and using that word gets as close enough
for the sake of a podcast. But I'm not an

(15:21):
anarchist in the sense that I have some sort of
clear vision for how to build a utopia. Obviously, I
do think anarchism has some answers for how human beings
might build a better world. That's why I went through
a Java, It's why we cover a lot of the
things that we cover on these series. But I am
primarily an anarchist because I understand that hierarchy kills, because

(15:42):
I understand that hierarchy separates us from each other and
acts as a petri dish within which this glitch can propagate.
I'm an anarchist because I love the people around me,
because I understand that I am human, and because I
see that my role in the human immune system is
to remind other people of that fact and to point
a finger at the people who have forgotten that they're human.

(16:05):
I promised in the title of this little piece that
I would tell you how we can win, and I
can do that in a few words. We have to
remember that we are humans. Kamala Harris is an authoritarian.
The fact that she wants to be president at all
should make you leery of her. But she's not a
Trump or a Musk. She has not separated herself entirely

(16:26):
from humanity, if you'll forgive the reference. She understands that
she exists in the context of all that came before her.
Joe Biden has been hungry for power all his life.
The glitch is in him. It has consumed most of him,
but as we all learned recently, not all of him.
He too understands that he is a part of humanity,
indivisible from it. Now you can and should still view

(16:49):
the man with disgust, even hatred. He ought to be
in the Hague. But he also stepped down and gave
up the thing that a week ago I'd have said
probably mattered most to him in the world. This was
not a purely selfless gesture. I'm sure he acted in
large part to try and salvage his own legacy, but
it is also not a thing Donald Trump could ever do.

(17:10):
You certainly wouldn't see a man like Vladimir Putin make
a similar choice. And we've all seen the kind of
slaughter bb Netan Yahoo is willing to back to hold
on to power. None of this redeems Biden or makes
him a good person or any less complicit in genocide
than he was a week ago. I think it does
put us in a better position when it comes to
fighting for a ceasefire in Gaza. Everyone in US politics

(17:33):
knows that Biden's political end started with the surge of
uncommitted voters in Michigan. The loss of a second term
is not a sufficient punishment for Biden's actions, but it
is a punishment that has the ability to reshape the
kind of risks US presidents will and won't take for
Israel from now on. It has also helped me make

(17:54):
sense of something that happened in twenty twenty. You all
remember the moment during the one presidential debate that year
President Trump attacked Biden over the numerous scandals of his son, Hunter,
a troubled drug addict who tried and largely failed to
use his father's name to secure wealth and standing for himself.
Hunter's troubles have been tremendously embarrassing to his father, but

(18:15):
up in front of the country and world, Biden refused
to throw his son under the bus. He embraced him
and expressed the kind of unconditional love that is utterly
alien to men like Trump and Musk. Biden, for all
the evil that he has done in the raw selfishness
that allowed him to reach the presidency in the first place,
is a man who loves his son. Most importantly, he

(18:36):
loves Hunter as Hunter and not purely as an extension
of Joe Biden. There's an excellent series of articles out
in the Atlantic right now by Tim Alberta, who might
be the finest political journalist writing today. Tim had the
good instincts to look behind the scenes at the team
Trump picked to orchestrate his twenty twenty four campaign, and
he's delivered deep reporting about why they've made some of

(18:58):
the baffling decisions they've made. Chief among bafflements was the
selection of J. D. Vance as Vice President. Vance barely
won his seat in Congress with the help of tens
of millions of teal dollars. He is a liar without
principal who has repeatedly expressed his desire to tear up
the Constitution and usher in a new red caesar to
bring this nation to heal under men like him. I

(19:21):
watched Vance's speech at the RNC live at a Heritage
Foundation party, surrounded by the rightest of the right. Not
one of them offered a single word of praise Vance.

Speaker 1 (19:31):
Was that bad.

Speaker 2 (19:33):
JD is the sort of pick Trump's handlers were sure
that they could afford to make. Vance would bring the
Silicon Valley billionaire set to the table, open up their
purse strings, convince them they were welcome in the new
ruling class. Sure he wouldn't bring any votes, but a
week ago, running against Sleepy Joe, the sick man of
US politics, Trump's team felt they had votes to spare well.

(19:56):
Now the worm has turned. The Poles still point to
an election that is deeply in doubt. But Poles don't
say everything. The panic of their responses to Biden's stepping down,
the chaotic spree of hate points to a single truth.
They don't know what to do now. The monsters are
off balance, stumbling, unable to find the ground. We can

(20:16):
see some evidence of this and the fact that Musk
just came out and canceled has promised forty five million
dollar monthly donations to the Trump campaign. This is the
first chain of solidarity between our enemies to crumble, and
it won't be the last. Every time that happens, we
get more room to move and maneuver. The fascists may
well regain their footing and time to crush us. But

(20:37):
something else has happened in the last few days as well. People,
we humans, as a vast, blurry mob, have started to
remember how many of us there are and how much
potential the weight of our numbers gives us. We have
started to reconnect with each other, and that has also
opened up possibilities that did not exist before. Kamala Harris
and the Democratic Party aren't going to bring an end

(20:58):
to global capitalism or drive a stake into the heart
of the oil and gas industry. There remains so much
else to do, so many other fights ahead of us.
But if we can crush the Republicans here, it will
be the fourth election cycle in a row where the
Right made a war on trans people, on the concept
of diversity, on any kind of open, secular society the
core of their electoral efforts, and it will be the

(21:20):
fourth time that they have done that and lost. If
we break their lines and send them fleeing into the hills,
we have an opportunity to shatter their power and use
the momentum of that victory to start building something better.
There's no cleaner, easy route to a better future, but
our chances are a hell of a lot better the
more of us that stay alive, and the more scattered
and frightened that we can make our enemies. Our strength

(21:43):
has always come from solidarity, from the understanding that we
need each other and that we are part of each other.
The Putins and Trumps and Musks and Teals of the
world are, of course a part of humanity as well,
but they are incapable of seeing or accepting that. And
so long as that is the case, we outnumber them.
So long as that is the case, we can win.

Speaker 1 (22:10):
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