May 20, 2024 • 31 mins
Jared Yates Sexton returns to Woke AF Daily to discuss the harsh but necessary truths to get us through 2024 and beyond.
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Speaker 1 (00:11):
Good morning, peeps, and welcome to ok F Daily with
Meet your Girl Danielle Moody, recording from the Home Bunker. Folks,
last week was a week and it ended I kind
of tell you it ended with me waking up on
Friday morning to seeing Marjorie Taylor Green get her ass
(00:37):
handed to her by Representative Jasmine Crockett from Texas. And
here's what I will say, because folks have had a
lot of thoughts about the exchange that took place. That
began because Marjorie Taylor Green lauded a personal attack on
(00:59):
Representative Crockett about her eyelashes, and at the committee, Alexandria
Cassio Cortez said, directed to the chairman of the committee,
a Republican, that she needs to apologize because according to
our rules, we're not allowed to attack each other personally.
(01:20):
And he said, nah, that's fine, right. So then Representative
Jasmine Crockett, who is one of the fiercest members of
Congress when it comes to dressing motherfuckers all the way down, said, okay,
so we're allowed to make personal So when we're talking
about personal attacks, if somebody, if I were to refer
(01:42):
to somebody in this body as a bleach blonde. I
don't know what she said, like bullshitter body, you know,
just I mean read her for filth and it was
and the alliteration was fire, Then what would happen? And
you know, of course, then Marjory Taylor Green turns herself
(02:03):
into the victim. Oh you're being hostile, you're being loud,
blah blah blah. So let me just pause right there
and say that anytime a white woman who attacks a
black woman then wants to turn around and play victim
when that black woman then unleashes a bit of fire
that you can't fucking take, don't come for us and
(02:24):
tell us that, oh my god, the tone you're acting
out and doing all of these things, because that, my friend,
is nothing but racism. Because what we know is that
these motherfucking Karens who say hot shit cannot fucking take
it when it is delivered back to them. And so,
while I would prefer that our members of Congress do
(02:46):
not engage in name calling and rhetoric that is beneath
the office, I have said it before and I will
say it again. If Republicans want to go low, then
let Democrats go to hell. Do you know what I'm saying,
because this is what they can't take. They want to
(03:07):
say hot shit. They want to call Democrats everything but
a child of God. They want to say the Democrats
are pedophiles, that Democrats are groomers. They want to say
all of these things. But when you turn around, right,
when you turn the table around and then hold up
a glaring mirror and a spotlight on them, then they
don't know how to fucking take it. And so Representative
(03:28):
Jasmine Crockett brought the fucking heat to Marjory Taylor Green,
and she looked amazing doing so. So I got to
tell you, the devolving that we have seen that the
Republicans have done to our governing bodies is just astounding
(03:49):
to me. But to me, what Representative Crockett did is
what it does look like to be an adult in
the room. Because Republicans want to play bully, but they
don't know how to deal with a boss. And that's
exactly what she showed them. Marjorie Taylor Green then want
to find herself saying that she wants to debate AOC bitch.
(04:12):
You can't debate a first grader. Sit down coming up
on today's show, I'm very excited to welcome back my
friend and friend of the show, Jared Yate Sexton, who
is the author of The Midnight Kingdom, A History of Power,
Paranoia and the Coming Crisis. Jared and I, man, we
(04:32):
never know where our conversations will go when we start
off with asking each other how we're doing as we
watch the fall of democracy the rise of fascism. But
one of the things that we do tackle in this
episode is this idea of radicalization, right and what it
means to become radicalized. And I think that the conversation
(04:56):
gets incredibly rich. I could honestly speak to you, Jared,
all day, every day and I would feel better. So
I hope that you guys enjoy our exchange coming up next, folks,
I am so excited to welcome back to wok af Daily.
It's been a while. Author of The Midnight Kingdom, A
(05:21):
History of Power, Paranoia and the Coming Crisis, and the
host of the Muckbreaker podcast, Jared Yates Sexton, Friend, Thank you.
I'm going to start off with how I always start
off with how are you doing?
Speaker 2 (05:38):
Man? These times are kicking ass, aren't they. I mean,
it is just it's you keep expecting maybe a day
or two to go by without things getting worse and weirder,
Like it's there are moments of hope, They're like little
glimmers of inspiration. These are the times that try the salt.
(05:58):
That's the only other way to put it. I and again,
you know I said before we started recording, like it's
so good to see you, and yet we continue to
have to document this. So yeah, it's good to be here.
Speaker 1 (06:09):
That's how I feel these days, Like I jutt, but
right before I came on, I saw a meme that
said that we're more burnt out than we actually realize, right,
And I think that when we do the math and
realize that we've kind of been existing in this nightmare
since twenty fifteen, right like I dated twenty fifteen, Donald
(06:33):
Trump comes down that escalator. We are in twenty twenty
four and have not had a break since then, nine years,
almost a decade long. And when we think about Jared,
the political norms that have just been eroded, the idea
of law and order, common decency. When you look back
(06:59):
at twenty fifteen team to where we are now, could
your past self have even comprehended this moment, not even.
Speaker 2 (07:09):
A little bit. I've spent a lot of time I'm
sure you have as well, not just dealing with what
happens on a day to day basis, because we have
to analyze it, we have to try and comment on
it and put it into a framework for people. But
if you are not I don't know how I'll say this.
If you are not a grifter, and if you are
not an opportunist, and you're not a fascist, at this point,
(07:32):
you are constantly involved in not just trying to put
the framework of the world in order, but your own.
Because what happens every single day now, and I want
to be very clear about it, what we're dealing with
right now is not just a white supremacist, Christian nationalist,
anti democratic movement that we're fighting. We are dealing with
(07:53):
an abusive environment that is intentionally trying to grind us down.
You know, what we have to do constantly is we
have to search ourselves to understand where we're coming from,
what it is that we hold to be true, what
it is that we value, why we do the things
that we do. Quite frankly, because meanwhile, in the midst
(08:16):
of all of this, it's all commodified, all of it
is commodified right, like jobs, careers, products, you name it.
So what we have to do in order to not
just fight it is we also have to look within ourselves.
We're doing like eight or nine or ten different major
emotionally and energy draining jobs at once. And the unfortunate
(08:39):
truth is that that's where authoritarianism comes from, is what
it feeds on and what it systematically does. So no, I,
I myself as a person, I've had to change completely
because the only other option is to just lean into
it and join it, you know. And it's not putting
an armband on. It's playing the role that this sick
(09:02):
society and sick movement wants you to play. And opposing
it means that you have to constantly, you have to change,
and you have to fight on all of these different landscapes.
So no I who I was nine years ago much
less I mean who I was a year ago. It
has to change. And that's one of the things that
I think is the most complicated about this.
Speaker 1 (09:29):
I feel like over the last nine years, but particularly
I focus on probably the last five twenty nineteen kind
of being the last sense of normalcy globally before we
headed into a global health pandemic where I think that
what was revealed to many who did not spend their
(09:50):
careers kind of researching and understanding and analyzing the response
stability of our government, right and see all of these
kind of holes in the systems of capitalism, right in
the idea of who is forced right into these essential
roles and who gets to stay home? Like I don't
(10:11):
think we ever saw so clearly the discrepancies that we
have in our capitalistic, patriarchal, greedy system. How many women
had to drop out of the workforce in that time
frame in order to be the sole caretakers for their children.
And so I think about the ways in which I
have changed, right, the ways in which I have had
(10:33):
to adopt different routines of well being in order to
keep myself in a place of sanity right that I
never had before. So when you say that you have
had to change that this time, this era that we
have lived in, has forced you to change, can you
just unpack a little bit of what that means for us?
(10:56):
What have you done?
Speaker 2 (10:58):
I'll go ahead and try and give the spark now
version of this. You know, back in twenty fifteen, twenty sixteen,
I was documenting the rising threat of trump Ism. I
saw this, I knew that something was wrong, but like
a lot of people at the time, I didn't necessarily
have a larger framework. I thought he was going to
be rejected, you know. I thought, like, here is a
disgusting individual. He's cruel, awful and lacking, and he will
(11:23):
be rejected and then we'll move on. And I thought
for a while he was an aberration. I thought this
was a guy who came along. He just happened to
say the right things, you know, he just happened to
hit the right chords. And what I had to do
over time, and I'll be completely frank, I've become radicalized.
I just can't because you have to be because, unfortunately,
(11:43):
to be an adult and to be an actual participant
in resisting authoritarianism and fascism, you have to take a
long view. You have to understand that this is a
train that has been coming for a long time, like
this goes back unfortunately, not just the founding of the
United States of America but centuries, and so all of
(12:05):
these things are constantly going through crisis. It's a lot
easier to believe that Trump is a problem, that he
is the issue that he's the disease as opposed to
a symptom, right. And what I've had to do is
I've had to basically re educate myself on exactly what
came before him, what happened when he got here, and
(12:26):
what's been happening ever since. And I came to realize
that the reality that I thought I lived in was
a meticulously and painstakingly created fairy tale that went ahead
and preyed upon what I wanted to be true, what
other people wanted to be true. Also, by the way,
(12:47):
I need to make it clear as a white cisgender
man that you know, I was told to comfort me,
you know, and what was told to comfort other people
like me like I have had to basically reorganize all that.
And I'll tell you the truth, Danielle. And this is
one of the reasons I like talking to you, because
I don't think you shy away from this larger picture.
(13:08):
The truth is, it's really overwhelming to understand that this
is more more than elections. It's more than the twenty
four hour news cycle. This is a larger existential crisis
that existed before I got here. And quite frankly, even
if we win this battle, it will exist beyond me. Yep.
This is an existential question about who human beings are,
(13:32):
what we should be, what we could be. And I've
had to really deconstruct and reconstruct and sort of change
everything about myself, and it has made me more strident
about what I think we should be doing and where
we should be going. It has been a complete transformation.
Speaker 1 (13:49):
And I think that the word radicalization, right, we need
to reclaim that as not being something that is rooted
in terrorism, right, which which is the way, Oh, people
have become radicalized and so they join these different militant
structures that are about you know, subjugation, oppression, and violence.
(14:10):
That what it means, I think when you're saying, because
I feel the same way. And I actually had this
conversation with Wajahat Ali on my other show Democracy Ish,
where we were both saying, there's no way right and
I will look at the suffering that we are seeing
right now in Gaza. I will look at what the
(14:30):
United States is not only complicit in, but is funding
is regularly providing a green light and a blank check
for a genocide, and say that there is absolutely no
way that you look at those videos and pictures and
think to yourself that America is okay, right, that you
(14:51):
look at how we have formulated our pr version of
who we are on the global right as the arbiters
of democracy, right, as the standard bears of truth and
morality in the world. And then see what is happening
and these young people on these college campuses marching and
(15:15):
building encampments and saying, wait a minute, we've been fed alive,
like we're not the crazy ones. You guys have been
gas lighting us. Yes, right, we've been pledging allegiance blindly right,
being indoctrinated from primary school about who the United States is.
(15:36):
And then when we ask you to actually reflect back
to us who you tell us that you are, you
tell us that we're crazy, that we know not what
we do or what we see. And so I think
that if you aren't bucking the gas lighting and screaming
at the top of your lungs and being radical because
(15:58):
the idea apparently a freedom and liberal is a radical notion,
then you're not awake, you know. And I wonder in
this environment that we are seeing that we recognize that
whether or not Biden or Trump wins, I feel like
Jared that the next administration is really going to have
(16:25):
to figure out how to pull America back together again.
And I don't know what that looks like. Do you
have an idea of like what that looks like.
Speaker 2 (16:36):
Well, I want to say some things. And again this
was one of the reasons I was looking forward to
talking with you. I want to say some hard traits,
some uncomfortable things. Quite frankly, what is happening in Gaza
is not just indescribable horror, but it is merely the
most visible component of it. Right now, It's happening all
(16:59):
around the world that people are being exploited, people are
being used for slave labor, they are being oppressed, and
by the way, a lot of it has been done.
And this is a hard truth. And this doesn't make
me comfortable. It doesn't make anybody comfortable. This is one
of the reasons why it's easier to just say, you know,
the next election is everything, don't worry about anything besides it. Right, Listen,
(17:22):
what has happened with the United States of America, not
just in the beginning in which capitalism was completely based
on the subjugation of generations of people from the continent
of Africa in order to build capitalistic wealth and build
up the society that we live in. Now. People don't
want to talk about that. They want to hide it.
They want to like obfuscated behind like fairy tales of
(17:42):
national mythologies. Right, it has been since at least the
nineteen eighties into the nineties. For decades now, we have
been given a deal. The United States will live in
relative consumer comfort. We will be able to buy a
ton of probert that are going to cost a lot
less than they should because we're going to find other people,
(18:05):
particularly people in the Southern hemisphere, particularly people in other countries,
people in places like China, you name it. They are
going to be worked to the point of death, or
they're going to be worked to death, and they're going
to be paid if they get paid at all, since
on the dollar. By the way, it's not even like
men and women over the age of eighteen. We're talking
about children. Those people, they're going to have their resources stolen.
(18:28):
And by the way, we're going to go ahead and
destroy the environment while we're at it. That deal gave
us things like the iPhone, which allow us to scroll
and not really pay attention to what's going on. That's
the deal. The problem is this, and this is another
hard truth. The reason we're talking about this is because
it turned out the deal didn't last that long. We
(18:49):
are now in a place where the United States of
America is starting to feel some of the pressures that
other places in the world have felt. The authoritarianism that
made all of that possible has come home. And that's
inevitably what happens because capitalism doesn't stop. It always has
to have more profits, it always has to grow. So
(19:09):
as a result, people are starting to look around. They're saying,
this shit is not reasonable, it's wrong, and we need
to change it. We need to have something that looks
different than this, and unfortunately we are facing a time
of choosing what is that different thing going to look like?
And there are two options, to be honest with you.
(19:29):
One is that the authoritarianism grows and that the people
like us who would talk about this the student and
by the way, the students are getting a first hand
education in this. They are out there practicing their rights,
they're saying what's right and wrong, and what are they
getting in return. They're getting brutalized, they're getting bloodied, they're
getting attacked, and they're being slandered. Let's tell the truth
(19:49):
about that. By the way, for a country that supposedly
thinks that children are a future and all this bullshit, no,
we want children to be exploited and shut up about
it and get in life line and go along with everything.
And by the way, they are our conscience. They have
not had the idealism beaten out of them. We're watching
it right now an attempt to beat it out of them.
(20:10):
And what happens is they get radicalized. They realize, oh
my god, like everything that I thought was going on
is now happening. So I have to stand against this.
So it either gets worse and we either move into
a police state where, by the way, we are going
to be treated the same way that we have treated
so called second and third world citizens. Yep, that's what's
happening right now. And by the way, for everybody who
(20:32):
I want Americans who are listening to this, think about
for something for a second, think about every apocalyptic entertainment
that you've ever enjoyed, whether it's a movie, television show,
or book. The conditions that Americans are subjected to are
what happens to second and third world people today. The
fear is that it's going to be visited on you,
and it is being visited on you. The only way
(20:54):
we get out of this is we make common cause
with the oppressed people around the world, whether it's gossens,
whether it's be who are being exploited in slave labor,
or whether it's the people who are having their resources
and rights taken from them. We either make common cause
with them and we make this change that you're talking about,
or we dive deeper into it. That's it. And by
the way, I need to say this because the thing
(21:16):
that isn't being said and all this needs said. This
doesn't mean that you go out and you vote for
Donald Trump because somehow or another, like you're tired of
Biden or whatever. You need to realize and be an
adult about how politics works in this country. You need
to understand that we currently have a system that is
speeding to the right into straight white supremacists, neo fascism.
(21:40):
You have one party that says, let's go faster. You
have another party that's saying, well, we don't want that,
but we also can't make many changes and all of that.
There are alternatives between those two. We can have a
different world. We can have a world where those things change,
but it is not going to change by simply accepting
this and by just saying like, well, this isn't realistic
(22:03):
this conversation you're having and why because that's a softer
abuse than the iron hand, than the rubber bullets, than
the baton to the skull. It's a softer abuse. It's
an enabling abuse.
Speaker 1 (22:14):
Yep.
Speaker 2 (22:15):
It's saying, well, I understand things are pretty screwed up
and maybe things need to be changed, but we need
to slow down and not be radical. No, we need
to let our ethics and our morality and our conscience
is free. We need to understand that this was never right.
This was wrong way before us, it's wrong now, and
it's going to be wrong in the future as long
as we find it, and we need to start having
(22:36):
serious conversations about that.
Speaker 1 (22:38):
You know. And I think too with regard to young
people and basically telling them that you're not our future
to shut up, sit down, get in line, and do
what prior generations have done. The difference with Generation Z
and prior generations too, is that there isn't going to
be this softening of their principles as they get older,
(22:59):
because they have the creature comforts around them that then
stifle them, make them stagnant. Right, they aren't going to
have the house and the picket fence and the car
and the safe job. Right, They're not going to get
those creature comforts that then turned people right from being
the radical protesters during the Vietnam era into the Reagan yuppie,
(23:25):
greedy capitalists that they turned into as they became forty
and fifty and sixty years old. That's not going to
happen because they are no longer have access to what
used to be called the American dream. They have been
economically terrorized from the time that they entered into secondary
education with leaving six deep six figures in debt.
Speaker 2 (23:50):
I would also go ahead and ad something else that
they have been literally terrorized. This country has made a decision,
which is that profit matters over making sure that anybody
lives not just a life, but does anybody actually live
in safety. We have taken this generation, and I don't
think I don't think it's a surprise that this is
(24:11):
the generation that understands every time, every day that they
go to school, that they might very well be slaughtered.
And by the way, they have a bunch of adults
who haven't taken care of them. They already they know
full and well. And this isn't just like the left
leaning ones. They all know that the climate is absolutely screwed.
They know that nobody's doing anything to take care of
(24:34):
any of these things. And what happens when that occurs.
And by the way, I want to go ahead and say,
this isn't just a political or economic crisis. This is
a mental health crisis in a home where abuse is
taking place. And I know this is someone who grew
up in an abusive home. I know this from doing
the studies. This is very very clear. When the adults
are abusing the children, at some point or another stand
(24:56):
up and say, I don't know what's going on, but
this is wrong. And what do they get in return?
They get abuse to shut them up and to keep
them from speaking their truth, and they become socialized to
what has happened to them. They are rejecting that right now.
These are children who have had to go through active
shooter drills, who have been told no one's coming to
save you. And eventually, when your back is against the wall,
(25:19):
you're told you don't have an economic future, you don't
have an environment in future, things are only going to
get worse. And every single day you need to think
about the fact that life is fleeting. Was that breed desperation,
It breeds the idea I need to do something about this.
And when the cops go out and shoot them with
rubber bullets, they've been prepared for this their entire lives.
(25:41):
They've been told every day of their lives to expect
bullets to be shot against them, in violence to be
visited upon them. And one of the things that we
have to realize, and it really really hurts to say this,
I'm forty two. I realized back in two thousand and
three when I was protesting against the Iraq war, I
still have so much idealism. I thought that if we
(26:03):
protested the right way, that the powerful people would hear
it and come to their senses. Yeah, and do you
know what I learned. I learned that doesn't happen. I
looked up and by the way, this is another hard
truth and inconvenience. You know what happened in two thousand
and three. It was a bi partisan support for an
illegal war to go after another country illegally and not
(26:25):
just take out a dictator who, by the way, was
an evil son of a bitch. It was to go
ahead and destroy the entirety of their civilization, ruin all
of their progress. Also, corporations could come in and absolutely
raid them and make profits off of rebuilding the society
that was unjustly destroyed. I thought that if I said
(26:46):
the right thing. I was a poet back then, Oh,
if I write the right poem, all of a sudden,
it will make a difference. Right, if the right movie
has made, the right book is written, people will come
to their senses. And suddenly, when that doesn't happen, you
look at the entire picture and you say, something is
stridently wrong here and it's not going. And by the way,
that spirit is what leads to social revolutions. That's what
(27:10):
leads to the civil rights movement. It's a group of
people who heard the stories of their parents and grandparents
that things were not changed, that people with power did
not come in and help them, and they realized, we
have to be the ones to change this. What we're
looking at right now is a generational war that is growing.
And it's always what happens. These young people are always
(27:31):
the canaries in the coal mines. It's why the students
were the ones who said it, the lunch counters in
the South, it's why the students were the ones who
spoke out against the Vietnam War. That all of the
adults were like, you don't understand this, this is beyond you.
And now we look back and we're like, wow, all
those people were correct, and this is another situation like that,
And unfortunately the adults are reacting in the way that
(27:54):
adults always do, which is to say, either wait for
something to change. I promise you eventually will, or they
react with violence. And that's what we're looking at right now.
Speaker 1 (28:07):
I always appreciate you like beyond because you break down
in such a beautiful, articulate and passionate way every lie
that we have been told right, that has gotten us here,
because I think that too often, because we're not a
nation that believes in history, right, the truth of history
(28:30):
and the lessons of history. People think that this just happened, right,
and we don't understand that this has been building. The
collapse has been building for generations, and the writing has
been on the wall and it has just been ignored
so that a few people could get even more wealthy
(28:51):
right off of the lies and subjugation and oppression that
we've just all wilfully shrugged at.
Speaker 2 (28:58):
Well. And I, first of all, at the risk of
being overly sentimental, I want to say, I really appreciate you.
This is a time and I hope that your listeners
look around and I want them to see that a
lot of the people they thought were their allies, a
lot of the people that they thought were on their side,
that they are chanting for young people to be brutalized.
(29:19):
They are saying, hey, you know, I don't like what's
going on in Gaza either, but like we really just
can't talk about it right now. On top of that,
like what is being exchanged is that a lot of
people who have let's call it what it is, middle
class white collar jobs. Not a lot of power, right,
(29:39):
but like a little bit of comfort. Like people are
exchanging their morality and conscience for just shreds of what
they deserve. They're doing again, it's a phone, it's having
a law, and it's being like one of the few
people in America who can afford a house, or you know,
it's to not have healthcare, it's to not have childcare,
(30:02):
it's to look around and see the people that you
care about, or supposedly care about, being absolutely shredded by
an oppressive system. We have to stop ransoming our morality
and our conscience in this situation. We have to stand up.
It's ugly, it's not comfortable. It is it is really
really brutal, hard work. It's lonely, and that, by the way,
is one of the reasons I appreciate you. And I
(30:23):
find myself looking at other people of conscience, whether it's
in the commentary space, or whether it's in the organizing space,
or what it is. This is not an easy time
to do what's right. I mean it is when you
lay your head down on the pillow, but when you're
out in the space, when you're watching day to day,
when you're when you're when you're absorbing all of this,
(30:44):
it's incredibly lonely. And I think if I can impress
one thing on your listeners before we go, it's this,
that loneliness is real. But you're not alone. We are
surrounded by a lot of people who are more than
willing to jettison this stuff and more been willing to
countenance God knows how many children being destroyed right now
(31:04):
around the world and like it is lonely, but you
are not alone. And I remain optimistic. But it's only
in living in that and sitting with it and being
curious about it and acting on it. That's where we
find each other. And I think that now more than ever,
we have to find each other and we have to
push for something better.
Speaker 1 (31:25):
H Jared, I can't thank you enough. I appreciate your
words so so very much. Thank you, thank you, thank
you for making the time for woke AF and we're
going to have you back on again soon.
Speaker 2 (31:37):
Thank you, Daniel.
Speaker 1 (31:43):
That is it for me today, Dear friends on woke
A app as always Power to the people and to
all the people. Power, get woke and stay woke as fuck.
Good morning, peeps, and welcome to ok F Daily with
Meet your Girl Danielle Moody, recording from the Home Bunker. Folks,
last week was a week and it ended I kind
of tell you it ended with me waking up on
Friday morning to seeing Marjorie Taylor Green get her ass
(00:37):
handed to her by Representative Jasmine Crockett from Texas. And
here's what I will say, because folks have had a
lot of thoughts about the exchange that took place. That
began because Marjorie Taylor Green lauded a personal attack on
(00:59):
Representative Crockett about her eyelashes, and at the committee, Alexandria
Cassio Cortez said, directed to the chairman of the committee,
a Republican, that she needs to apologize because according to
our rules, we're not allowed to attack each other personally.
(01:20):
And he said, nah, that's fine, right. So then Representative
Jasmine Crockett, who is one of the fiercest members of
Congress when it comes to dressing motherfuckers all the way down, said, okay,
so we're allowed to make personal So when we're talking
about personal attacks, if somebody, if I were to refer
(01:42):
to somebody in this body as a bleach blonde. I
don't know what she said, like bullshitter body, you know,
just I mean read her for filth and it was
and the alliteration was fire, Then what would happen? And
you know, of course, then Marjory Taylor Green turns herself
(02:03):
into the victim. Oh you're being hostile, you're being loud,
blah blah blah. So let me just pause right there
and say that anytime a white woman who attacks a
black woman then wants to turn around and play victim
when that black woman then unleashes a bit of fire
that you can't fucking take, don't come for us and
(02:24):
tell us that, oh my god, the tone you're acting
out and doing all of these things, because that, my friend,
is nothing but racism. Because what we know is that
these motherfucking Karens who say hot shit cannot fucking take
it when it is delivered back to them. And so,
while I would prefer that our members of Congress do
(02:46):
not engage in name calling and rhetoric that is beneath
the office, I have said it before and I will
say it again. If Republicans want to go low, then
let Democrats go to hell. Do you know what I'm saying,
because this is what they can't take. They want to
(03:07):
say hot shit. They want to call Democrats everything but
a child of God. They want to say the Democrats
are pedophiles, that Democrats are groomers. They want to say
all of these things. But when you turn around, right,
when you turn the table around and then hold up
a glaring mirror and a spotlight on them, then they
don't know how to fucking take it. And so Representative
(03:28):
Jasmine Crockett brought the fucking heat to Marjory Taylor Green,
and she looked amazing doing so. So I got to
tell you, the devolving that we have seen that the
Republicans have done to our governing bodies is just astounding
(03:49):
to me. But to me, what Representative Crockett did is
what it does look like to be an adult in
the room. Because Republicans want to play bully, but they
don't know how to deal with a boss. And that's
exactly what she showed them. Marjorie Taylor Green then want
to find herself saying that she wants to debate AOC bitch.
(04:12):
You can't debate a first grader. Sit down coming up
on today's show, I'm very excited to welcome back my
friend and friend of the show, Jared Yate Sexton, who
is the author of The Midnight Kingdom, A History of Power,
Paranoia and the Coming Crisis. Jared and I, man, we
(04:32):
never know where our conversations will go when we start
off with asking each other how we're doing as we
watch the fall of democracy the rise of fascism. But
one of the things that we do tackle in this
episode is this idea of radicalization, right and what it
means to become radicalized. And I think that the conversation
(04:56):
gets incredibly rich. I could honestly speak to you, Jared,
all day, every day and I would feel better. So
I hope that you guys enjoy our exchange coming up next, folks,
I am so excited to welcome back to wok af Daily.
It's been a while. Author of The Midnight Kingdom, A
(05:21):
History of Power, Paranoia and the Coming Crisis, and the
host of the Muckbreaker podcast, Jared Yates Sexton, Friend, Thank you.
I'm going to start off with how I always start
off with how are you doing?
Speaker 2 (05:38):
Man? These times are kicking ass, aren't they. I mean,
it is just it's you keep expecting maybe a day
or two to go by without things getting worse and weirder,
Like it's there are moments of hope, They're like little
glimmers of inspiration. These are the times that try the salt.
(05:58):
That's the only other way to put it. I and again,
you know I said before we started recording, like it's
so good to see you, and yet we continue to
have to document this. So yeah, it's good to be here.
Speaker 1 (06:09):
That's how I feel these days, Like I jutt, but
right before I came on, I saw a meme that
said that we're more burnt out than we actually realize, right,
And I think that when we do the math and
realize that we've kind of been existing in this nightmare
since twenty fifteen, right like I dated twenty fifteen, Donald
(06:33):
Trump comes down that escalator. We are in twenty twenty
four and have not had a break since then, nine years,
almost a decade long. And when we think about Jared,
the political norms that have just been eroded, the idea
of law and order, common decency. When you look back
(06:59):
at twenty fifteen team to where we are now, could
your past self have even comprehended this moment, not even.
Speaker 2 (07:09):
A little bit. I've spent a lot of time I'm
sure you have as well, not just dealing with what
happens on a day to day basis, because we have
to analyze it, we have to try and comment on
it and put it into a framework for people. But
if you are not I don't know how I'll say this.
If you are not a grifter, and if you are
not an opportunist, and you're not a fascist, at this point,
(07:32):
you are constantly involved in not just trying to put
the framework of the world in order, but your own.
Because what happens every single day now, and I want
to be very clear about it, what we're dealing with
right now is not just a white supremacist, Christian nationalist,
anti democratic movement that we're fighting. We are dealing with
(07:53):
an abusive environment that is intentionally trying to grind us down.
You know, what we have to do constantly is we
have to search ourselves to understand where we're coming from,
what it is that we hold to be true, what
it is that we value, why we do the things
that we do. Quite frankly, because meanwhile, in the midst
(08:16):
of all of this, it's all commodified, all of it
is commodified right, like jobs, careers, products, you name it.
So what we have to do in order to not
just fight it is we also have to look within ourselves.
We're doing like eight or nine or ten different major
emotionally and energy draining jobs at once. And the unfortunate
(08:39):
truth is that that's where authoritarianism comes from, is what
it feeds on and what it systematically does. So no, I,
I myself as a person, I've had to change completely
because the only other option is to just lean into
it and join it, you know. And it's not putting
an armband on. It's playing the role that this sick
(09:02):
society and sick movement wants you to play. And opposing
it means that you have to constantly, you have to change,
and you have to fight on all of these different landscapes.
So no I who I was nine years ago much
less I mean who I was a year ago. It
has to change. And that's one of the things that
I think is the most complicated about this.
Speaker 1 (09:29):
I feel like over the last nine years, but particularly
I focus on probably the last five twenty nineteen kind
of being the last sense of normalcy globally before we
headed into a global health pandemic where I think that
what was revealed to many who did not spend their
(09:50):
careers kind of researching and understanding and analyzing the response
stability of our government, right and see all of these
kind of holes in the systems of capitalism, right in
the idea of who is forced right into these essential
roles and who gets to stay home? Like I don't
(10:11):
think we ever saw so clearly the discrepancies that we
have in our capitalistic, patriarchal, greedy system. How many women
had to drop out of the workforce in that time
frame in order to be the sole caretakers for their children.
And so I think about the ways in which I
have changed, right, the ways in which I have had
(10:33):
to adopt different routines of well being in order to
keep myself in a place of sanity right that I
never had before. So when you say that you have
had to change that this time, this era that we
have lived in, has forced you to change, can you
just unpack a little bit of what that means for us?
(10:56):
What have you done?
Speaker 2 (10:58):
I'll go ahead and try and give the spark now
version of this. You know, back in twenty fifteen, twenty sixteen,
I was documenting the rising threat of trump Ism. I
saw this, I knew that something was wrong, but like
a lot of people at the time, I didn't necessarily
have a larger framework. I thought he was going to
be rejected, you know. I thought, like, here is a
disgusting individual. He's cruel, awful and lacking, and he will
(11:23):
be rejected and then we'll move on. And I thought
for a while he was an aberration. I thought this
was a guy who came along. He just happened to
say the right things, you know, he just happened to
hit the right chords. And what I had to do
over time, and I'll be completely frank, I've become radicalized.
I just can't because you have to be because, unfortunately,
(11:43):
to be an adult and to be an actual participant
in resisting authoritarianism and fascism, you have to take a
long view. You have to understand that this is a
train that has been coming for a long time, like
this goes back unfortunately, not just the founding of the
United States of America but centuries, and so all of
(12:05):
these things are constantly going through crisis. It's a lot
easier to believe that Trump is a problem, that he
is the issue that he's the disease as opposed to
a symptom, right. And what I've had to do is
I've had to basically re educate myself on exactly what
came before him, what happened when he got here, and
(12:26):
what's been happening ever since. And I came to realize
that the reality that I thought I lived in was
a meticulously and painstakingly created fairy tale that went ahead
and preyed upon what I wanted to be true, what
other people wanted to be true. Also, by the way,
(12:47):
I need to make it clear as a white cisgender
man that you know, I was told to comfort me,
you know, and what was told to comfort other people
like me like I have had to basically reorganize all that.
And I'll tell you the truth, Danielle. And this is
one of the reasons I like talking to you, because
I don't think you shy away from this larger picture.
(13:08):
The truth is, it's really overwhelming to understand that this
is more more than elections. It's more than the twenty
four hour news cycle. This is a larger existential crisis
that existed before I got here. And quite frankly, even
if we win this battle, it will exist beyond me. Yep.
This is an existential question about who human beings are,
(13:32):
what we should be, what we could be. And I've
had to really deconstruct and reconstruct and sort of change
everything about myself, and it has made me more strident
about what I think we should be doing and where
we should be going. It has been a complete transformation.
Speaker 1 (13:49):
And I think that the word radicalization, right, we need
to reclaim that as not being something that is rooted
in terrorism, right, which which is the way, Oh, people
have become radicalized and so they join these different militant
structures that are about you know, subjugation, oppression, and violence.
(14:10):
That what it means, I think when you're saying, because
I feel the same way. And I actually had this
conversation with Wajahat Ali on my other show Democracy Ish,
where we were both saying, there's no way right and
I will look at the suffering that we are seeing
right now in Gaza. I will look at what the
(14:30):
United States is not only complicit in, but is funding
is regularly providing a green light and a blank check
for a genocide, and say that there is absolutely no
way that you look at those videos and pictures and
think to yourself that America is okay, right, that you
(14:51):
look at how we have formulated our pr version of
who we are on the global right as the arbiters
of democracy, right, as the standard bears of truth and
morality in the world. And then see what is happening
and these young people on these college campuses marching and
(15:15):
building encampments and saying, wait a minute, we've been fed alive,
like we're not the crazy ones. You guys have been
gas lighting us. Yes, right, we've been pledging allegiance blindly right,
being indoctrinated from primary school about who the United States is.
(15:36):
And then when we ask you to actually reflect back
to us who you tell us that you are, you
tell us that we're crazy, that we know not what
we do or what we see. And so I think
that if you aren't bucking the gas lighting and screaming
at the top of your lungs and being radical because
(15:58):
the idea apparently a freedom and liberal is a radical notion,
then you're not awake, you know. And I wonder in
this environment that we are seeing that we recognize that
whether or not Biden or Trump wins, I feel like
Jared that the next administration is really going to have
(16:25):
to figure out how to pull America back together again.
And I don't know what that looks like. Do you
have an idea of like what that looks like.
Speaker 2 (16:36):
Well, I want to say some things. And again this
was one of the reasons I was looking forward to
talking with you. I want to say some hard traits,
some uncomfortable things. Quite frankly, what is happening in Gaza
is not just indescribable horror, but it is merely the
most visible component of it. Right now, It's happening all
(16:59):
around the world that people are being exploited, people are
being used for slave labor, they are being oppressed, and
by the way, a lot of it has been done.
And this is a hard truth. And this doesn't make
me comfortable. It doesn't make anybody comfortable. This is one
of the reasons why it's easier to just say, you know,
the next election is everything, don't worry about anything besides it. Right, Listen,
(17:22):
what has happened with the United States of America, not
just in the beginning in which capitalism was completely based
on the subjugation of generations of people from the continent
of Africa in order to build capitalistic wealth and build
up the society that we live in. Now. People don't
want to talk about that. They want to hide it.
They want to like obfuscated behind like fairy tales of
(17:42):
national mythologies. Right, it has been since at least the
nineteen eighties into the nineties. For decades now, we have
been given a deal. The United States will live in
relative consumer comfort. We will be able to buy a
ton of probert that are going to cost a lot
less than they should because we're going to find other people,
(18:05):
particularly people in the Southern hemisphere, particularly people in other countries,
people in places like China, you name it. They are
going to be worked to the point of death, or
they're going to be worked to death, and they're going
to be paid if they get paid at all, since
on the dollar. By the way, it's not even like
men and women over the age of eighteen. We're talking
about children. Those people, they're going to have their resources stolen.
(18:28):
And by the way, we're going to go ahead and
destroy the environment while we're at it. That deal gave
us things like the iPhone, which allow us to scroll
and not really pay attention to what's going on. That's
the deal. The problem is this, and this is another
hard truth. The reason we're talking about this is because
it turned out the deal didn't last that long. We
(18:49):
are now in a place where the United States of
America is starting to feel some of the pressures that
other places in the world have felt. The authoritarianism that
made all of that possible has come home. And that's
inevitably what happens because capitalism doesn't stop. It always has
to have more profits, it always has to grow. So
(19:09):
as a result, people are starting to look around. They're saying,
this shit is not reasonable, it's wrong, and we need
to change it. We need to have something that looks
different than this, and unfortunately we are facing a time
of choosing what is that different thing going to look like?
And there are two options, to be honest with you.
(19:29):
One is that the authoritarianism grows and that the people
like us who would talk about this the student and
by the way, the students are getting a first hand
education in this. They are out there practicing their rights,
they're saying what's right and wrong, and what are they
getting in return. They're getting brutalized, they're getting bloodied, they're
getting attacked, and they're being slandered. Let's tell the truth
(19:49):
about that. By the way, for a country that supposedly
thinks that children are a future and all this bullshit, no,
we want children to be exploited and shut up about
it and get in life line and go along with everything.
And by the way, they are our conscience. They have
not had the idealism beaten out of them. We're watching
it right now an attempt to beat it out of them.
(20:10):
And what happens is they get radicalized. They realize, oh
my god, like everything that I thought was going on
is now happening. So I have to stand against this.
So it either gets worse and we either move into
a police state where, by the way, we are going
to be treated the same way that we have treated
so called second and third world citizens. Yep, that's what's
happening right now. And by the way, for everybody who
(20:32):
I want Americans who are listening to this, think about
for something for a second, think about every apocalyptic entertainment
that you've ever enjoyed, whether it's a movie, television show,
or book. The conditions that Americans are subjected to are
what happens to second and third world people today. The
fear is that it's going to be visited on you,
and it is being visited on you. The only way
(20:54):
we get out of this is we make common cause
with the oppressed people around the world, whether it's gossens,
whether it's be who are being exploited in slave labor,
or whether it's the people who are having their resources
and rights taken from them. We either make common cause
with them and we make this change that you're talking about,
or we dive deeper into it. That's it. And by
the way, I need to say this because the thing
(21:16):
that isn't being said and all this needs said. This
doesn't mean that you go out and you vote for
Donald Trump because somehow or another, like you're tired of
Biden or whatever. You need to realize and be an
adult about how politics works in this country. You need
to understand that we currently have a system that is
speeding to the right into straight white supremacists, neo fascism.
(21:40):
You have one party that says, let's go faster. You
have another party that's saying, well, we don't want that,
but we also can't make many changes and all of that.
There are alternatives between those two. We can have a
different world. We can have a world where those things change,
but it is not going to change by simply accepting
this and by just saying like, well, this isn't realistic
(22:03):
this conversation you're having and why because that's a softer
abuse than the iron hand, than the rubber bullets, than
the baton to the skull. It's a softer abuse. It's
an enabling abuse.
Speaker 1 (22:14):
Yep.
Speaker 2 (22:15):
It's saying, well, I understand things are pretty screwed up
and maybe things need to be changed, but we need
to slow down and not be radical. No, we need
to let our ethics and our morality and our conscience
is free. We need to understand that this was never right.
This was wrong way before us, it's wrong now, and
it's going to be wrong in the future as long
as we find it, and we need to start having
(22:36):
serious conversations about that.
Speaker 1 (22:38):
You know. And I think too with regard to young
people and basically telling them that you're not our future
to shut up, sit down, get in line, and do
what prior generations have done. The difference with Generation Z
and prior generations too, is that there isn't going to
be this softening of their principles as they get older,
(22:59):
because they have the creature comforts around them that then
stifle them, make them stagnant. Right, they aren't going to
have the house and the picket fence and the car
and the safe job. Right, They're not going to get
those creature comforts that then turned people right from being
the radical protesters during the Vietnam era into the Reagan yuppie,
(23:25):
greedy capitalists that they turned into as they became forty
and fifty and sixty years old. That's not going to
happen because they are no longer have access to what
used to be called the American dream. They have been
economically terrorized from the time that they entered into secondary
education with leaving six deep six figures in debt.
Speaker 2 (23:50):
I would also go ahead and ad something else that
they have been literally terrorized. This country has made a decision,
which is that profit matters over making sure that anybody
lives not just a life, but does anybody actually live
in safety. We have taken this generation, and I don't
think I don't think it's a surprise that this is
(24:11):
the generation that understands every time, every day that they
go to school, that they might very well be slaughtered.
And by the way, they have a bunch of adults
who haven't taken care of them. They already they know
full and well. And this isn't just like the left
leaning ones. They all know that the climate is absolutely screwed.
They know that nobody's doing anything to take care of
(24:34):
any of these things. And what happens when that occurs.
And by the way, I want to go ahead and say,
this isn't just a political or economic crisis. This is
a mental health crisis in a home where abuse is
taking place. And I know this is someone who grew
up in an abusive home. I know this from doing
the studies. This is very very clear. When the adults
are abusing the children, at some point or another stand
(24:56):
up and say, I don't know what's going on, but
this is wrong. And what do they get in return?
They get abuse to shut them up and to keep
them from speaking their truth, and they become socialized to
what has happened to them. They are rejecting that right now.
These are children who have had to go through active
shooter drills, who have been told no one's coming to
save you. And eventually, when your back is against the wall,
(25:19):
you're told you don't have an economic future, you don't
have an environment in future, things are only going to
get worse. And every single day you need to think
about the fact that life is fleeting. Was that breed desperation,
It breeds the idea I need to do something about this.
And when the cops go out and shoot them with
rubber bullets, they've been prepared for this their entire lives.
(25:41):
They've been told every day of their lives to expect
bullets to be shot against them, in violence to be
visited upon them. And one of the things that we
have to realize, and it really really hurts to say this,
I'm forty two. I realized back in two thousand and
three when I was protesting against the Iraq war, I
still have so much idealism. I thought that if we
(26:03):
protested the right way, that the powerful people would hear
it and come to their senses. Yeah, and do you
know what I learned. I learned that doesn't happen. I
looked up and by the way, this is another hard
truth and inconvenience. You know what happened in two thousand
and three. It was a bi partisan support for an
illegal war to go after another country illegally and not
(26:25):
just take out a dictator who, by the way, was
an evil son of a bitch. It was to go
ahead and destroy the entirety of their civilization, ruin all
of their progress. Also, corporations could come in and absolutely
raid them and make profits off of rebuilding the society
that was unjustly destroyed. I thought that if I said
(26:46):
the right thing. I was a poet back then, Oh,
if I write the right poem, all of a sudden,
it will make a difference. Right, if the right movie
has made, the right book is written, people will come
to their senses. And suddenly, when that doesn't happen, you
look at the entire picture and you say, something is
stridently wrong here and it's not going. And by the way,
that spirit is what leads to social revolutions. That's what
(27:10):
leads to the civil rights movement. It's a group of
people who heard the stories of their parents and grandparents
that things were not changed, that people with power did
not come in and help them, and they realized, we
have to be the ones to change this. What we're
looking at right now is a generational war that is growing.
And it's always what happens. These young people are always
(27:31):
the canaries in the coal mines. It's why the students
were the ones who said it, the lunch counters in
the South, it's why the students were the ones who
spoke out against the Vietnam War. That all of the
adults were like, you don't understand this, this is beyond you.
And now we look back and we're like, wow, all
those people were correct, and this is another situation like that,
And unfortunately the adults are reacting in the way that
(27:54):
adults always do, which is to say, either wait for
something to change. I promise you eventually will, or they
react with violence. And that's what we're looking at right now.
Speaker 1 (28:07):
I always appreciate you like beyond because you break down
in such a beautiful, articulate and passionate way every lie
that we have been told right, that has gotten us here,
because I think that too often, because we're not a
nation that believes in history, right, the truth of history
(28:30):
and the lessons of history. People think that this just happened, right,
and we don't understand that this has been building. The
collapse has been building for generations, and the writing has
been on the wall and it has just been ignored
so that a few people could get even more wealthy
(28:51):
right off of the lies and subjugation and oppression that
we've just all wilfully shrugged at.
Speaker 2 (28:58):
Well. And I, first of all, at the risk of
being overly sentimental, I want to say, I really appreciate you.
This is a time and I hope that your listeners
look around and I want them to see that a
lot of the people they thought were their allies, a
lot of the people that they thought were on their side,
that they are chanting for young people to be brutalized.
(29:19):
They are saying, hey, you know, I don't like what's
going on in Gaza either, but like we really just
can't talk about it right now. On top of that,
like what is being exchanged is that a lot of
people who have let's call it what it is, middle
class white collar jobs. Not a lot of power, right,
(29:39):
but like a little bit of comfort. Like people are
exchanging their morality and conscience for just shreds of what
they deserve. They're doing again, it's a phone, it's having
a law, and it's being like one of the few
people in America who can afford a house, or you know,
it's to not have healthcare, it's to not have childcare,
(30:02):
it's to look around and see the people that you
care about, or supposedly care about, being absolutely shredded by
an oppressive system. We have to stop ransoming our morality
and our conscience in this situation. We have to stand up.
It's ugly, it's not comfortable. It is it is really
really brutal, hard work. It's lonely, and that, by the way,
is one of the reasons I appreciate you. And I
(30:23):
find myself looking at other people of conscience, whether it's
in the commentary space, or whether it's in the organizing space,
or what it is. This is not an easy time
to do what's right. I mean it is when you
lay your head down on the pillow, but when you're
out in the space, when you're watching day to day,
when you're when you're when you're absorbing all of this,
(30:44):
it's incredibly lonely. And I think if I can impress
one thing on your listeners before we go, it's this,
that loneliness is real. But you're not alone. We are
surrounded by a lot of people who are more than
willing to jettison this stuff and more been willing to
countenance God knows how many children being destroyed right now
(31:04):
around the world and like it is lonely, but you
are not alone. And I remain optimistic. But it's only
in living in that and sitting with it and being
curious about it and acting on it. That's where we
find each other. And I think that now more than ever,
we have to find each other and we have to
push for something better.
Speaker 1 (31:25):
H Jared, I can't thank you enough. I appreciate your
words so so very much. Thank you, thank you, thank
you for making the time for woke AF and we're
going to have you back on again soon.
Speaker 2 (31:37):
Thank you, Daniel.
Speaker 1 (31:43):
That is it for me today, Dear friends on woke
A app as always Power to the people and to
all the people. Power, get woke and stay woke as fuck.
Host
Danielle Moodie
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