Ep 384 - Rachel Donald On Effective Resistance and Journalism

Episode 384 of RevolutionZ has as guest Rachel Donald, a journalist at the site Planet Critical. Rachel suggests that war propaganda thrives on simple stories, and shows how the left sometimes helps that along without meaning to. She then considers a hard question: how might we best oppose the US war on Iran without falling into the trap of treating any US target, no matter how authoritarian, as our ally? Our enemy's enemy is not necessarily our friend. We must oppose intervention and war, of course, but also draw a bright line between a people and the regime that governs them. Donald discusses how, when we collapse that difference it can unintentionally serve the “liberation” narrative that in this case sells intervention, imperialism, and endless war. And also discusses how to deny that an immoral regime is, in fact, immoral, can put off potential resistors.  

From there we zoom out to movement strategy. Why does so much anti-war and progressive organizing drift toward moral purity, online pile-ons, and team politics that repel the broader public? We talk about the consequences of war, and all social policy, as a moral and strategic issue  keep returning to the question ordinary listeners ask again and again: “I get what you’re against, but what are you for?” If the far right can speak to lived pain like rising costs, insecurity, and lost futures, Donald asks, why can't the left learn how to connect the dots and offer a convincing alternative rooted in real gains.

We also get into journalism itself: the myth of objectivity, the need for transparent values and funding, and why reporting facts without systemic analysis still leaves people confused and vulnerable to manufactured consent. Finally, we discuss independent publishing, Substack’s incentives, and why rebuilding collective media ecosystems may be essential for the next wave of organizing.

Transcript

Welcome And Guest Background

SPEAKER_01 0:00

Hello, my name is Michael Albert, and I am the host of the podcast that's titled Revolution Z. This is our 384th consecutive episode, and our guest this time is Rachel Donald. Rachel investigates why the world is in crisis and what to do about it. She has taught at universities, produced guerrilla radio programs, and written world exclusives for major papers. She now publishes everything independently on a site called Planet Critical and its sister project, Planet Coordinate, which is a documentary series investigating what to do for a world in crisis. She tries to have her work connect the dots of the big picture. She is currently writing her first book, Her Body, Her Choice. No, I apologize, I'll erase that. Her Body, Our Choice, which will be published by Virago in early 2027. I first encountered Rachel's work in an article I read on Zenet entitled, The Enemy of Your Enemy is not your friend. I highly recommend it. The article was written in early March, just days after Trump announced the war on Iran. In the article, Rachel provides considerable, clearly and accessibly written, useful background history. But the article's main point, I think, was to address the question of how to effectively, accurately, and usefully talk about, organize about a war like this one. And not just this one, or even just war, I think, but also how to talk and organize in general, having eyes on accuracy, but also on the consequences of one's choices. So, Rachel, how about if we start by you clarifying not so much the past history as the current situation of opposing the war? Are anti-war activists and writers addressing the war well in a way consistent with building effective movement about it, but also coming off that more broadly?

SPEAKER_00 1:59

I don't know if I could speak to generally what anti-war writers and activists are doing, because there's lots of different threads of this. I mean, I've been very impressed perhaps to see how this war has been embedded in the authoritarian and patriarchal madness of the Trump administration. But I've also been slightly worried to see it conflated or the Iranian regime conflated with the Palestinian struggle, uh, which seems to be a quite unrealistic and a historical understanding of Iran's history. And I'm to be clear, I'm not an expert on Iran, but there is a difference between a people and the regime that governs them, and that has been evidently clear in Iran for decades, let alone earlier this year, when supposedly thousands of protesters were killed. So the uh sort of liberation um message that has been attached to it, I think that that's come from a place of the quite radical left, to which, to be clear, I belong, but it actually fulfills Trump's narrative as well, that they are doing this in order to liberate the people from a uh tyrannical regime, rather than quite clearly doing this because um Iran has access to lots of resources, it sits on top of pools of oil, um, and it has managed to withstand, in a sense, quite severe uh economic actions over the past few decades, which is not a good look if you're trying to maintain the hegemony of capitalist imperialism. Uh yeah.

SPEAKER_01 3:43

And what was it? I mean, the title was The Enemy of Our Enemy Is Not Our Friend. Playing off of the enemy of our enemy is our friend. Um, and you were basically saying, look, the latter is wrong, the former is the case. And why did you feel the need to say that? You mean what are you trying to address when you when you couched it that way?

SPEAKER_00 4:06

Yeah, it's a good question. I mean, just a little bit more imaginative political possibility than this binary that we see, to be honest. And frankly, it's an amoral binary that has seen allyships change dramatically over the you know decades that have nothing to do with ethical practice, nothing to do with political alignment, and everything to do with financial viability and partnership. And so to align oneself as a leftist with a regime that deliberately targets women, queers, gender non-conforming uh people, let alone um the very act of resistance and activism and discourse, just because it has been targeted by Trump, who is your enemy at home. That's not how you maintain politics. That's not how you widen or deepen, sorry. It's not how you deepen political discourse, and it's certainly not how you come to an understanding of what is actually happening on the ground. So it was it was a little bit of that because essentially I'd seen like I'd seen uh one leftist try to take another leftist down online uh because that uh second leftist had dared mention the reality of the Iranian regime. And I just found it absurd. Like if we cannot hold the nuance in conversation about the realities of what it means to be a centralized regime, i.e., to control common resources, to control state apparatus, to therefore a byproduct of that, control a population, then then how can you have a leftist discourse at all?

SPEAKER_01 5:55

You used the word widen, and then you backed off from widen a little bit and went to deepen. Why isn't it both? I mean, I suspect that uh that it it does extreme damage to widening, perhaps even more than to deepening, right? Um to to take such an amoral, such an unethical, such an opportunist kind of stance that at that level does mirror the way the government operates. I think that puts off audiences, don't you? Don't you think so?

SPEAKER_00 6:32

Yeah, I mean it definitely attracts audiences as well, though, right? Because that's why that's why this message proliferates. I think I think it's connected into sort of the rise of like identitarian politics and the fear on the uh left in the minority world, which some people will call sort of the the Western left or the left in the global north, to make any comment on any culture that is other than our own, and to sort of claim this spot as you know the ultimate villain in the trajectory of history, um, which is a sort of self-flagellating and also self-congratulating position to take at the same time. So I think it comes from that, and it's therefore quite popular. It's very popular to feel like one cannot comment on what happens abroad because it's not my culture, not my language, not my whatever. Uh, but I agree with you that it's an amoral position. I mean, if you cannot take a stand based on your leftist principles to which you identify, about the murder of women, um, the oppression of women, the oppression of gay people, um, and the visceral control of a population, well then again, I just don't see how you can identify at all as a leftist.

SPEAKER_01 7:42

I agree with you that it's popular, so-called, you know, quote on the left, but it's not popular in the population at large. No. And one has to reach the population at large. So it's that kind of approach is not even it it's certainly ethically bad, but it's also strategically idiotic. Yes. Because it doesn't reach you, you know, it doesn't reach out to a wider audience. You at the end of your article, you wrote, and I want to quote it, we will never be our own source of revolutionary thought and action if it is more acceptable to take aim at one another rather than to take aim at violent regimes. Uh, I don't see how that could be any more right, but nonetheless, can you elaborate?

SPEAKER_00 8:31

Uh I mean, listen, I have wondered for some time how wedded the left in the minority world is to strategy or to the idea of popularity. Um, I think that there has been a sort of a contrasting, a dislocation, if you will, between effectiveness and correctness, purity, if you will, moral purity. And for some time now, the vote has been cast that it is more important to be morally correct than it is to be effective and strategic. And don't get me wrong, I think the answer probably does lie somewhere in the nuance and the relationship between those two things. But I think it might be born from a generation that are quite used to losing, that maybe don't have hope or belief that change can happen, that see how close we were almost like practically to a global socialist wave in the 50s and the 60s and the 70s with the decolonial movements and the feminist movement. I mean, last century was a very exciting time in the post-war period, and then it just sort of petered out. And so I think that if you are a movement that does not believe that you can actually win on the basis of your principles, then what you can win is on the basis of morality. You can win in a debate, you can win with regards to your utmost uh right positioning, if you will. And it might be that that is something that is comforting when leftist politics as a sort of space of material change, social change, you know, actually grabbing hold of the material conditions to which they create a society and actually engendering some kind of progress. I mean, if that hasn't felt possible for some time, then maybe that is why this position has become so popular.

SPEAKER_01 10:36

Yeah, um, we agree again, except in one little regard, and I suspect we're going to agree there too, but we'll see. I don't think they're morally right. So, in other words, if if it's the case, if you're right, that it's the case that to behave in that fashion cripples prospects for fundamental change, then it's not obvious that it's morally right either. It's saying something that sounds right and that other people's echo is right. But if you don't take into account the consequences, how is that ethically valid? You know what I'm saying? I remember, for example, people loving uh Sanders one day and attacking him the next day because he says something that they don't like. Are they thinking about what is good for movements to make fundamental change, or even change in the short run? Or are they thinking about what do I have to say to be on the side of my team, which is at the per at this moment criticizing him? Or the same thing with Chomsky and same thing with other you you understand why I hope I'm being clear.

SPEAKER_00 11:52

Um Yeah, I think it's a really good provocation. And I think essentially what it shows is that the construction of morals in different camps happens very differently. So I would imagine that neither you or I uh believe in deontological truths. Like I do not believe that there is some uh moral framework that is universal and that exists outside of human culture and that we could apply globally and that would solve all of our problems. I believe that morals are culturally constructed naturally, um, and that therefore different groups, different cultures, different people have that. That's why we have different morals. And it doesn't make one uh globally better or worse than the other, but I can take a position knowing my morals, having developed my morals and being away from the culture that I come from, and make cast a judgment upon another, right? Um, and I think that possibly on the left, there is this belief in in deontological truths that there are utmost absolute moral values to which we can ascribe. And that is part of what drives this discourse and this, I mean, the moral panics as well that erupt um and which sort of efface the nuance of context, which is always necessary in order in order to understand why a thing is done or why a thing has happened.

What Are You For

SPEAKER_01 13:13

All right, another, another uh, I don't know, impression I got from that one article. I'm sorry I haven't seen more, I will in due course, is you're inclined to feel the importance of having vision beyond just negative, also positive. Um, if I'm wrong in that, tell me. But I I suspect uh you also see that as part of what's needed to be able to organize effectively, build something that can actually win change and even fundamental change. Am I wrong in that or or am I reading correctly?

SPEAKER_00 13:50

Yeah, I think this is a really important part of strategy and effectiveness, like we were talking about before. You can't just say that you don't like a thing. It might be enough to kind of you know trigger some sort of emotional reaction in a population, but you do be need to be able to say, here is what we propose instead, especially if you are coming from a quite radical platform that is anti-imperialist or anti-capitalist and is just fundamentally quite apart from mainstream politics today, then you especially need to explain to people how it will benefit them because they're not just going to come around and vote for you just because um it's the right thing to do or whatever it is. Um, I think the rise of the far right has been very distressing to watch, but we have to remember that the rise of the far right is far more likely than the rise of the far left within this existing culture, because it's really only a hop, skip, and a jump. Essentially, it's the extremities of capitalism and imperialism and colonization. Um, it's the extremities of inequality, it's the extremities of patriarchy and authoritarianism, all of which we exist in already, and all of which are not only present, but defines so much of our relations, our relationships and society. Whereas if you're trying to offer something that's completely different from that, well, then you better have a good way of talking about it to people, of course.

SPEAKER_01 15:13

Yeah, not to mention that they have uh not only the guns, but the money, and therefore the media, therefore we have to do a much better job. Um, we agree there, and that being the case, it's surprising, or it was surprising to me when I started to realize it, that if you look at left practice, I mean, we're continually confronted by the by the the response. I get what you're against, I know what you don't like, I know what you're against, what are you for? And the left tends to say, well, we don't have to explain what we're for. It's it's so bad that that's enough, and you have to just you you know, you just have to come out against it along with us. And that's not true. It isn't even true. It's not just because what if what we're for is worse? Or what if what we're for would wind up worse, which is not an unrealistic fear on the part of people in the mainstream. And so we need to be uh far better at explaining. You mentioned the 60s. We weren't good at it then, we weren't good at it in between, we're still not great at it, and I think, I guess along with you, that's a big part of the reason why we're where we're at. You know, that inability to put forth something convincing, not just rhetorical, but convincing that's positive.

SPEAKER_00 16:40

It's a very nice turn of phrase to put something forward that is convincing, not just rhetorical.

SPEAKER_01 16:45

Yeah. Yeah. Because it's the I mean, you know, I used to say that uh what's his name? Bill Clinton could be eloquent and have all the right adjectives. But of course, underneath all that, there was a system that was garbage that he was proposing that was oppressive. And so the fact that we can be eloquent and have the right express positive values is just not enough. The population is more sophisticated than that. At least I think so.

SPEAKER_00 17:16

Yeah, I think also we have to remember that there's the there's a real cultural boogeyman with regards to leftist discourse. There's, you know, the terrible things that were done in the name of communism or weren't done in the name of communism, were done in the name of, you know, certain men, uh, but were uh portrayed as communist events and also portrayed as fundamental to communism. Same with revolutions, you know, we think of the terror in Paris in the 1700s. And we really have to remember that for anyone that has a sort of basic grasp of history and know more, which is really important because that is most people, right? Then they have been educated to be very suspicious of anything that smells radically left. And so that's why you have to be able to show people what it is you fundamentally and materially mean when you come with a leftist platform.

SPEAKER_01 18:13

You're a journalist, is that right? That's that's yeah. Um what does all this stuff that we've been talking about say to you about being a journalist?

SPEAKER_00 18:26

Oh, um, I mean, I am of the position that um the push towards a an impossible standard of objectivity and unbiased reporting is part of what hobbled journalism um and what allows for mass false dialogue to proliferate in the media. Um I think that I it's not just that I think this as well. Like, you know, journalism is something that you can actually study, right? It's like a subset of sociology. And so there's hard data on this. That no, of course, people are not unbiased, of course, people are not objective. The decisions that you make and how you approach a story inform how you report on that story. Um, and so I would like to see a journalism that reflects a moral standard, is honest about a moral standard, is honest about who is funding it, et cetera, et cetera. Um, because I think that that is going to be imperative for making sense of these uh interconnecting crises that we're facing. Um, it's going to be imperative as well for creating an equal and opposite defense to these media institutions that do exist just to manufacture consent. Um and I'm really quite disappointed, I suppose, that the best that the mainstream leftist media can do is sort of seemingly hold on to this position of, well, we are the arbiters of truth. You know, at least when people come to us, they can know what's going on. Well, no, because you can report the facts and people still don't know what's going on, unless you have a systemic analysis behind it of why a certain thing is happening, which is naturally going to be informed by your own moral discourse, then you're not really telling people what is going on or why a thing is happening. And we absolutely need that because we are bombarded from all sides by other institutions that are quite happy to tell us why something is happening. And it's very, very, very far from the truth.

SPEAKER_01 20:24

The remarkable thing now is, and this is very different, say, from when I was young, all the way back in the 60s, 70s, um, the mainstream media, forget about the mainstream media. The government is telling you what it's doing. All right, they're they're they're exulting in uh being vicious. And so for us to think that we're doing a whole lot by explaining that war hurts and that poverty impoverishes and that rape destroys, you know, and on and on, right? We're not telling people anything they don't already know. Right? So maybe what you said about vision bears upon this also. Is journalism really just reporting the truth? The New York Times says all the news that's fit to print. Okay, that that acknowledges right out front that they're deciding what's fit to print. Okay, so suppose they did better and they published all the news accurately. Is that what left what progressive what future journalism should do, or should they also address vision and as you say, underlying reasons?

SPEAKER_00 21:48

Well, I've already said that I think they should address underlying reasons, so what about vision? I think I mean first of all, the New York Times, like it'd be impossible to print all of the news. How do you begin to define what is newsworthy, right? Um I yes, I think journalism should be reporting on vision. I remember when Chile was in the throes of debating its new constitution that was proposed, I think, in 2022. And there was this onslaught from the Western media in the weeks leading up to the vote that it was this really immature piece of legislation because essentially it centered the rights of nature, it centered the rights of women, it was this really, really radical leftist sort of policy proposal. And it was ridiculed, it was torn apart in the Anglophone media. And I contacted The Guardian and I said, hello. And I'd written for them before. I said, hello. I'm sure you've, you know, I'm sure you know that this is happening, that this constitution is uh coming to a vote. I'm sure you've also seen this, what looks like a quite coordinated attack across, you know, right-wing media institutions. I think that we should do something for the left and write a piece about, you know, how excellent it is, or how progressive it is, or the really good press that it's getting amongst academics and left-wing think tanks and all this kind of stuff. Because I know very well from working with um communities in the majority world, they often look to anglophone media to make sense of what is going on then on in their own country because their um media organs are often owned, you know, kind of like ours, but more closely aligned to the state. And the Guardian wrote back that they would report on the results. And I was like, Yeah, that's disappoint that's really disappointing. You know, we can do a lot more than just sort of report on history, and I think we should be.

SPEAKER_01 23:45

Marian. I wanted to end with this, but but just in case you didn't want to talk about it. I think, am I wrong, that you have a Substack account?

SPEAKER_00 23:55

Uh, not really. I uh Planet Critical is my website. That is my newsletter. I transitioned away from Substack.

SPEAKER_01 24:02

Ah. Why did you do that before I asked you the question about Substack?

SPEAKER_00 24:08

Uh because I felt like Substack was so quickly taking a couple of reasons. Substack was so quickly taking up so much space, and it's backed by venture capital in Silicon Valley that it seemed quite clear to me that we were all going to be put into a position where they would dominate the market and then they would hike up the prices. Um, and I didn't want to be caught. And also when Elon Musk, you know, took over Twitter and just destroyed it, there was this influx of people onto Substack. And what had been quite a meditative platform, I would say, of really uh thoughtful thought quickly became this other algorithmically driven, sort of, you know, quite loud space. And I didn't really want to have to shout.

SPEAKER_01 24:59

I have another take, which I wonder what your reaction to it would be. I'm used to going away back grassroots newspapers all over the place. Then we switch to the internet and we get websites and online venues, let's call it, like Z Magazine or ZNet that I was associated with, and all the other ones. And um they were endeavors that had employees, I mean, it had people who worked at them, and they had lots of writers who related to them. But each writer was part of that community in some sense, and I had this feeling that Substack was annihilating that and replacing it with everybody for themselves. So, you know, in the early days of z of say uh uh Z magazine, Chomsky, Bell Hooks, various other people, they not only wrote for it, they related to it, they supported it, they felt part of a modest community. I have a feeling that's going down the drain. I I don't know whether that's right or not, but I thought since you had some experience with Substack, I would ask you what your reaction to it was.

SPEAKER_00 26:24

I I don't think Substack is the reason that that's going down the drain, although um I suppose I see what you mean about this sort of creating a platform for writers that is about individual writers rather than collectives. Um but in a sense, it's also important that that exists because there are individual writers that cannot find any homes for their work, or certainly cannot afford to write for magazines because those that would take it just can't pay. It's not, you know. If you were a freelance journalist in the 90s, you could make some serious, serious money doing it. And you just can't anymore. You you cannot live off of being a freelance writer anymore. So I think I'm grateful to Substack for sort of like reawakening that possibility. And I think that their method of recommendations so that people recommend each other is a is a nice attempt at building an ecosystem. Um, but I agree with you that I think we need to move to a more collective model again. Um, I have reached out to some people and I know some people that are really interested in this, and we all sort of have the same feeling that, you know, the Substack thing's gonna run out. You know, we're gonna, it's, it's not gonna work. There is there is going to be a time where like the scarcity of attention is really gonna kill some of the newer writers that deserve to have a voice and prevent them from being able to publish anything, really, to have the time to do it. And so we need to create these sort of like collective magazines or resources by which we can support one another. And everybody's interested, but nobody knows how to do it. Yeah, or nobody really has the time. And it's very difficult when you've been working independently to go then and work in a team, which I think is a big problem.

Why Mass Anger Rarely Becomes Action

SPEAKER_01 28:17

If you look at Substack, I wonder, I don't know the answers to these questions at all, but I wonder how many people who use Substack are in fact literally um doing well, let's call it, uh financially, right? And how many of those didn't make their name and bring it to Substack as compared to starting from scratch and growing an audience on Substack? I don't know the answers to that, but I have my suspicions. Anyway, I don't know, is there um something that you'd like to talk about in particular? The audience, I don't know whether you know Revolution Z at all. It's it's a, I think it's a very left, vision-oriented, strategy-oriented, non, I think mostly, not probably uh only, but um more anarchistic, less Leninist, more feminist, less uh, I was gonna say less misogynist, but that's a sort of a low bar for a left site, but still true. Audience. And uh, you know, I struggled to figure out well, what do you talk about with that audience that's gonna matter? That that they don't already know. And uh I mentioned to you earlier that I wrote a screed right before we started, and it was in response to what may be a gargantuan massacre later today uh in Iran. You know, what do you say? It's gotten to the point where everybody knows everything's broken. What do you say to get past what you just mentioned, which is what caused me to say this, which is people know and they're interested, but they're not acting on the that journalism front, but also on the anti-war front. The the opposition to this war is probably greater than the opposition was to the Vietnam War at the height of the of the movement throughout the country. But the activism, other than one-day turnouts, is way less. And how do you address that?

SPEAKER_00 30:36

I think by recognizing first first of all, there are lots of things happening and there is Yeah, the there is lots of activism and there's lots of people doing things, but I I think that the lives that we are leading, I wasn't around in the 70s, but the lives that we are leading now are completely different to back then. It is in many ways a more difficult existence now. The cost of being alive has gone through the roof. The public services that help one stay alive have been decimated. The possibility of having a rich and happy future are diminishing. Um and the social contract that is entered into by a populist and their government, certainly in the United States, has been exploded. This maybe it was an illusion, but at least this mutual understanding that you you have to do a little bit what we think, otherwise we'll vote you out. Or you have to kind of keep the public happy, because if the public doesn't stay happy, they'll go out into the streets, they'll strike the protest, something will happen. People just don't really have that power anymore. And they don't have that power because their mortgages have increased by like 900%. Because their mortgages have increased by 900%, and they can't afford to lose their jobs, and they can't afford to not have health insurance, and they can't afford to not be able to heat their homes or feed the kids, and all of this has become so, so, so much more precarious than it was really in the 70s when you had this flow of um goods, cheap goods and cheap services coming in from the global south, which and I really think that this is a material analysis that is missing often on the left. Like the fact of that great possibility of progress in civil rights in the global north, in the minority world, was facilitated by the appropriation and exploitation of labor and resources from the global south. That's just a sort of an undeniable fact. And now essentially that enough countries in the global south have gotten their independence and have developed themselves and and I don't use that term lightly, and have budded up with China instead and have decided actually maybe they don't have to play by these rules, and maybe they don't have to be always the smallest in the room at the vulnerable, in a vulnerable position compared to all of these global superpowers. Well, now the chickens have come home to the roost, and the powers of the minority world have turned back to look at their own population and say, well, what can we take from them now in order to keep the party going? So I think that being aware of and speaking to the difficulties that people face is a really imp, really, really important thing. I mean, we have to understand why it is that Trump came to power in the first place, maybe not the second time round, but in the first place. So how did he come to power? How is it that reform in the UK garnered a lot of attention? How is it that the far right has swept Europe? Because they're actually fucking, excuse my French, but they're talking to people and they're talking to people about things that people experienced, which is that life is difficult and it wasn't meant to be this difficult, and things seem to be getting worse, and I don't understand what's happening. And the right then used that to, you know, blame it on somebody else rather than obviously inequality and wealth accumulation. Sure, we know that. But then why isn't the left doing that? Why aren't we going out and doing that? I don't think that people vote for Trump or reform or whatever. I don't think the majority because they're fundamentally bad people. I think it's because it's the only politicians that have spoken to them for the past 40 years. So I think that is ultimately what we need to do, to show people that this war in Iran is fundamentally connected to their way of life and to their quality of life. And liberating us from these violent regimes doesn't just help, you know, a populace in the Middle East that you will never know, but it will help you as well. And it will help your children, and it will help you pay your bills. We need to be drawing all of these connections together and show that there is another, I mean, if you want, show that there's another villain, but therefore also show that there is another way. I think that's what's important at this moment in history.

SPEAKER_01 34:55

I don't I I don't disagree with what you're saying, but I want to explore at least one aspect a bit more that I don't think is answered by that. Um when we blew up in the 60s, it's a slight oversimplification. But we went off to school, we expected all the things that you that you described, and we found out we had been lied to about everything. And we just went berserk. Uh, you know, in the initial stages, that's what it was. But you fucking lied. And and people were upset by that denial. That exists now too, I think. And so, Mike, I the questi the way I want to ask the question, I guess, is students on campuses. When I I don't know how old you are, I have no idea, but you're certainly about younger than me. I how long has it been since you were in school? In college?

SPEAKER_00 35:49

Uh I'm 33. So it's so you've been out of college for 10 years. 12 years. 12 years.

SPEAKER_01 35:55

Okay. Um when, for example, Trump II and the interactions with the universities and with the law firm. This is early on. I couldn't fathom how, say, at Columbia University, when he, you know, took the university to task over DEI and all the rest. I couldn't fathom how the student body didn't just go berserk and take over and say, you know. It seemed to me to be such an incredible direct attack that there would be that kind of response. And another part of the question would be the youth culture is currently nothing like, you know, not even the ballpark of what went on way back when. I think those two things are related, and I can't really explain either one of them well. I can make, you know, I can hand wave, but I don't feel like I have a good answer. And you see the same thing at the demonstrations. So at the No Kings demonstrations, uh, eight or nine million people. In the old days, at a demonstration, a person who was over fifty was like a celebration, or a person who was over sixty was this is a miracle, right? And everybody was now it's almost the opposite, which is hard to fathom for somebody like me. And so um j I know I hate to put you on the spot, but you may have a better answer. So what do you think about that?

SPEAKER_00 37:37

About what exactly?

Youth Anxiety And Learned Powerlessness

SPEAKER_01 37:38

Why why that's about Yeah, uh sort of the state of I mean, you you described one explanation at least of the state of married families, right? And people with dead-end jobs and danger at their door, you know, the the the distinct possibility of winding up homeless or whatever. But I can't imagine that that explains young people, you know, people in even in high school, but in college.

SPEAKER_00 38:08

I don't know. I mean, this generation have profound rates of anxiety compared to even my generation, right? This is a really, really, really anxious group of people that are terrified for their future. Part of it is because of climate change, but also part of it is because of their their living standards. And I think that that might be.

SPEAKER_01 38:29

Why would that make them angry?

SPEAKER_00 38:33

Because their anxiety has been totally dislocated from any sense of being able to do something about it. I mean, if you even think about how medicalized mental health has become, this idea that you have a condition, like an anxious condition, rather than you are responding with anxiety to the material conditions of your environment. And therefore you can change the material conditions of your environment. I mean, it's a completely different framing. This is a generation that's growing up with diagrams. Yeah, I think so. I think it's it's in a sense, it's definitely powerlessness, if not learned helplessness. Also, I mean, you know, like who is coming out and saying anything exciting about revolution these days and about what is worth fighting for and putting your body on the line, and not just in the sense of, you know, going out and stopping traffic, but really putting your body on the line. No one. That's not that's not allowed. That's not what's fashionable. You know, what is fashionable on campuses is this um weddedness to non-violent principles, as if defending oneself is violent, which it's not. Defending oneself is not violent. You you cannot respond with violence to violence, you can only respond with defense. Even our laws recognize that. That's how you can get off, you can get away with murder, essentially, if you can prove that it was done in self-defense and you had no other opportunity. And so I think there's this sort of, there's this real like passiveness in um what is being taught on campuses with regards to like how you make change, that you ask, you don't ask nicely, but you ask and you hope that power lends an ear and comes to reason, which is you know a complete logical fallacy. Um, so that also might be one.

SPEAKER_01 40:22

That was a gentle way of saying nonsense, which is what I would have said.

SPEAKER_00 40:26

Yeah, yeah. Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 40:30

All right. Well, um, again, if you if you have something else that you'd like to, you know.

SPEAKER_00 40:36

No, I'm just aware of time because we've now run over.

SPEAKER_01 40:39

Okay. Warren, I want to thank you for doing this. So thank you.

SPEAKER_00 40:44

Thank you so much for having me, Michael.

SPEAKER_01 40:46

And uh all that said, this is Mike Albert signing off until next time for Revolution Z.