Restraining the Blob

Introduction

“If you speak the truth, have a foot in the stirrup.” — Opening quotation

KMOHello, and welcome to another installment of the C-Realm Podcast. I’m your host, KMO, and this is episode number 574, Restraining the Blob, with J. G. Michael, the host of the Parallax Views Podcast. So the conversation that you’re about to hear is pretty self-contained, in fact, so self-contained that it already exists on YouTube. In fact, what you’ll hear in the coming hour is a slightly edited version of what you can find in whole on YouTube on my out of my head YouTube channel. Every Tuesday, or most every Tuesday evening, at 5:30 p.m. Eastern I do a live stream from the Falls Area Community Television studio and sometimes I have a guest and sometimes I don’t. Sometimes I prepare material, sometimes I just come in and riff on whatever the people in the chat say, but I do it pretty much every week. So if you’re not aware of that, and I suspect most of you aren’t because a lot more of you are going to hear this conversation here on the C-Realm podcast than have so far encountered it on YouTube.

But if you’d like to tune in and participate in the chat, you can do that. Or, you know, if you want to join me on a Zoom call, let’s talk. Every now and again, I will use a conversation that I recorded there on the live stream here on the podcast, but most of those live streams don’t end up in a podcast. Not all of them are polished. In fact, they’re decidedly unpolished, but not all of them are even thematically coherent, which is my way of saying, you know, if you think you don’t have anything to say, you probably do. And, you know, maybe you’re not as articulate as Jim Kunstler or John Michael Greer, but those guys have been practicing for a long time. And, you know, a lot of the people that have become repeat guests here on the C-Realm podcast, and more so even in the C-Realm Vault podcast, are people who had been listening to the C-Realm podcast for quite some time before they eventually reached out to me and said something that caught my attention.

Which brings me around to this week’s guest. I know that I started communicating with J. G. Michael on Twitter, but I thought that it was just in the last few weeks, and I wasn’t sure if somebody had directed me to him or what. So I just went to Twitter, and I looked at my message history with him. And I scrolled back to the top and I was surprised to discover that it begins in 2018. So JG, until, you know, we got on the line together and I heard his voice and I saw his face and we talked, was, you know, one of a great many people that I hear from time to time over the course of years. But because the conversations are so infrequent, you know, a clear personality doesn’t emerge from that interaction the way it emerges very quickly, in a Zoom call. So the C-Realm podcast audience, I mean, particularly now when I’m doing this free podcast rather infrequently, to say the least, the audience is pretty small.

But the more I meet the audience, just the more I’m astounded at what an amazing collection of people it is. Some of whom move through corridors of power. Some of whom, doubtless, have some connection to what we will we’ll be referring to here in the next hour as the blob. And I’m going to ask JG to define the blob in the course of the conversation that you’re about to hear. But before we get started, here’s just a quick piece from The Washington Post. This is from “The Blob Abides: When a Term Obfuscates More Than It Enlightens” by Daniel W. Drezner. This is from May 7th, 2020. And Daniel Drezner writes:

This weekend will be the four-year anniversary of the blob entering public discourse with respect to America’s foreign policy community. The term emerged from a New York Times Magazine profile of Ben Rhodes, Barack Obama’s foreign policy amanuensis. According to Rhodes’ account in the story, quote, the blob includes Hillary Clinton, Robert Gates, and other Iraq war promoters from both parties who now whine incessantly about the collapse of the American security order in Europe and the Middle East, close quote. The term soon became omnipresent in foreign policy discussions as its definition expanded in scope. It came to mean the foreign policy establishment, in scare quotes, that included those working in government, think tanks, and academia. Four years later, the term, like globalization or neoliberalism or populist or elite, tends to obscure as much as it reveals.¹

KMOAll right, I’ll stop there, although that’s just the beginning. It’s not a very long piece. I could easily read the whole thing to you here, but I’ve already read the part that I think is relevant to what’s coming up. So with that groundwork prepared, here is my conversation with J. G. Michael.

Program identification: “You’re listening to the C-Realm Podcast. C stands for consciousness.”

Live from the FACT TV studio

KMOHey, everybody. KMO here at the FACT TV studios for another Tuesday night live stream. And tonight, I am joined by a guest on Zoom. It’s J. G. Michael, who is the producer and host of Parallax Views, a program covering an eclectic variety of topics ranging from politics and pop culture to history and philosophy, as well as everything in between. Previously, he worked for Zero Books, as the co-host of the Alternatives podcast with C. Derek Varn. He has interviewed such well-known public figures as Noam Chomsky, Academy Award-winning screenwriter John Sayles, Lieutenant Colonel Lawrence Wilkerson, and many others. And he’s somebody that I learned just today has been listening to the C-Realm podcast since he was a teenager. So, J. G., it’s good to talk to you.

J. G. MichaelYeah, I’m glad. And by the way, I need to change that on my website. I think it’s just Colonel Lawrence Wilkerson. I don’t know why I have the lieutenant in there on my guest list page.

KMOYou’ve demoted your guest.

J. G. MichaelI’ve been listening to C-Realm for a long while. I think I first discovered it through a sort of parapolitical blog called Rigorous Intuition. And people were posting about your interview with Catherine Austin Fitts. This was like years ago.

KMOThat was a long time ago. Wow. Wow. So I figured you would have come in on the Zero Books vector. But no, Catherine Austin Fitts, I don’t think I’d even talk to Doug Lain when I first interviewed, or when I only interviewed, her once.

J. G. MichaelI probably found Doug through you.

KMOOK, yes, could be. But now you have a podcast of your own and you get, you know, as was just mentioned, there are some very high profile, respectable guests. Today, I listened to your interview with Abby Martin. That was a lot of fun.

J. G. MichaelYes, that was. I felt bad at the beginning of that interview because, you know, I teased her a little bit. I said, well, you can rest for Jill and Kerry [wording unclear].

Speaker uncertainI don’t want to out you, but can I bring that up in this conversation?

J. G. MichaelThat seems like they’re being — People get really intense about the past anymore. I don’t know if you’ve had that before, but people get really intense about, oh, so-and-so worked for this person when they were, you know, 18. They must be, you know, an undercover CIA agent or some, you know, nonsense that gets into the tribalism you’ve talked about a lot.

KMOYes, but there’s also a very sloppy sort of conspiracy theory mindset that says that any two people who ever occupied the same room at the same time are in cahoots, when in fact you know we hang out in rooms with people that we disagree with all the time. You know, even at conferences, where it’s all under one banner, you know, there are people there who vigorously disagree with one another. So—

J. G. MichaelRight, right, no doubt. Yeah.

KMOBut you know I work, I’m not an employee of, and I cannot speak on behalf of this organization, but I do work for a political organization called Progressives for Immigration Reform. But the person that I work for, he’s been a Republican, he’s been a Democrat, he’s been, I think, a Green, and now he’s, you know, a disaffected independent, but still a Trump fan, you know. But a former Howard Dean organizer and also somebody who worked on Ross Perot’s campaign. So, you know, over time, if you haven’t changed in some respect, I mean, you’re stagnant. You know, I would expect a little bit of political evolution. Now, this guy’s, you know, he’s hit every quadrant and that’s maybe more than can be expected. But it’s good to try on different hats.

Political evolution

J. G. MichaelYeah, I feel like I’ve hit every quadrant, too. In a lot of ways, I think it was your show and probably, well, probably Zero Squared, or I think it was called Diet Soap back then, Doug Lain’s show, that sort of got me out of, you know, I was hanging out online around a lot of like proto, I would say, alt-right types and sort of, there was a lot of, I think, trying to recruit younger people to the sort of far right. That’s why it’s so sad seeing, you know, in my view, at least the sort of rise of Trumpism, although I think people have really, I feel like Trump was really good for, you know, the cable news and whatnot, in our country. And, you know, now we still talk about Trump, even though I don’t think, I think Trump was an abysmal failure. I mean, looking at something like Afghanistan, what I’m most mad at the Trump era about is he promised to get us out of Afghanistan and people will say, oh, well, the deep state blocked him.

Well, I thought he was good at 4D chess. You know, I’m kind of tired of the excuses we get with, you know, the sort of hanging on to Trump contingents politically. But I guess the point I was trying to make earlier, and I’m sorry for rambling was, you know, I went from being to the right, and then moving to the left. And I think everyone sort of has a political evolution. I always tell people that I think libertarianism is a rite of passage for young men in this country.

KMOYeah. Yeah, it’s hard for me to relate to somebody who hasn’t at least entertained the notions, you know, of liberty as libertarians or American libertarians define it.

J. G. MichaelI always tell people that one of the reasons I moved left is because, and this may sound strange, but I feel like American libertarianism, the kind of libertarianism we talk about in the United States or how it’s properly known in the U.S., I moved to the left because I didn’t think they were sufficient for getting liberty. In a way, I think, you know, there’s that old Enlightenment line about liberty, equity, fraternity. And I really don’t think you can have liberty without some level of equity and some level of community as well. So in a way, I moved left out of my love of liberty and freedom. That’s what I always tell my libertarian friends.

KMONow, do you use that same language with your leftist friends? Because liberty and freedom are curse words in some circles.

J. G. MichaelYeah, I do. I don’t, I don’t, I’m pretty hardheaded about stuff. I think, I guess it depends on what you mean by liberty, right? The whole freedom from versus freedom to. But I do think there is issues on the left with, I don’t know, I guess I would say authoritarianism at times. Is that sort of what you were getting at?

Speaker uncertainYeah.

Speaker uncertainCan you elaborate?

Speaker uncertainYeah, absolutely.

Empire and its discontents

KMOSo, hey, let’s talk about your podcast just in general terms. I mean, it’s, I would say, a geopolitics podcast. Is that a fair assessment?

J. G. MichaelRight now, yeah. Yeah. Although I usually switch it up a lot. I think October is coming up. Yeah. So we’re in August. Usually around October, I start doing Halloween themed shows for a little bit, you know, maybe the two weeks leading up to the holiday. But I try to do a bunch of different things. But yeah, I’ve mainly focused on geopolitics and empire lately.

KMOSo if you would, in the control room, put the camera on me and I’ll move this mic and I’m wearing the symbol of the Klingon Empire. So this is my uniform for playing devil’s advocate in this conversation. I certainly would not deny that the United States acts as an informal empire in the world today. But it’s not a formal empire. We don’t have an emperor. We don’t have client states that are openly recognized as such. And from my perspective, most importantly, a lot of the countries which are supposedly vassals of the American empire, their citizens have a much higher standard of living than those guaranteed, you know, than the standard of living guaranteed to people here in the heart of the empire. You know, Canada, Germany, the UK, I mean, these are places which supposedly, you know, are exist under the iron thumb of the US military imperialist might, but you know, they’ve got healthcare.

Speaker uncertainWell, I cannot argue with you on that point.

KMOBut more to the point, let’s see if I can find a point that you will dig in against. A lot of the people that I talk to who are very angry at the United States and who have either open desires to overthrow it or transform it beyond recognition, you know, basically not reform it, but replace it. You know, revolution, tear it down and replace it with something better. Those are just simply not people that I would trust to do anything of importance. I mean, they just seem very anger-driven and not very clear-sighted in, you know, what it is they think they’re going to implement.

J. G. MichaelI hate to say this as well, but I would probably agree on that point. I always argue with some of my friends that are really, really far to the left. I mean, like the, I guess you would call them Marxist-Leninists, right? They’re like, oh, we can win a protracted people’s war. And I’m like, I don’t see anyone winning a protracted people’s war in the near-term future or the long-term future for that matter. But I don’t think, that’s what’s weird. I don’t think the U.S. system is collapsing, but I think we may be in a decline period. And for me, I have a lot of guests on from the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft. So in a lot of ways, I’m a reformist. I sort of agree with their stance of, you know, we’ve been doing a certain kind of foreign policy for the past, what, you know, 50 plus years since the Cold War.

And times have changed and a lot of the problems we face today are going to require cooperation, international law. A lot of our allies have proven themselves to be kind of to the detriment of the U.S.’s supposed aims. You know, the United States often talks about human rights. There was the Alaska summit with China where the U.S. was saying, human rights violations. And China responded, well, look at your own backyard. Look at what’s going on with the George Floyd protests. Look at, you know, your allies. You have allies like Saudi Arabia that I would say are not that great to human rights. And people will say, well, that’s a whataboutism from China. Or this also comes up in conversations about Russia, right? And one thing I always like to point out to people is that the only reason that other countries that we currently, you know, are sort of competing with or angry with, having issues with, can say, oh, well, why don’t you look in your own backyard?

Or, you know, why do you have allies that don’t respect human rights? The only reason they can say that is we’ve done things to really delegitimize our institutions in the United States. We’ve made, we’ve taken actions and made partnerships that are delegitimizing to how the U.S. is seen worldwide.

KMOWell, it— you know, I will absolutely grant you that the U.S., its actions do not live up to its rhetoric. But whose does?

J. G. MichaelWell, that’s very true. I’m not defending China or Russia or any other country. All I’m sort of pointing towards is that you know the reason that a country that we may be having issues with can respond with, well, what about this, is because we haven’t always lived up to our own ideals. And, you know, I don’t think anyone ever necessarily can completely, right? But I think an opening has happened since the sort of Bush era war on terror, where people can question us more and say, well, why do you do this? Or why does this institution do that? And I think it does have a delegitimizing effect. I think you need reform in that area if you want to have a stable society. And I think foreign policy really needs to be focused on more. I don’t know how you feel about that. But for me, foreign policy and domestic policy are intertwined with each other. I mean, we can’t have all these Medicare for all programs if we’re giving all our money to the Pentagon.

KMOYeah, yeah. I’m torn on the issue of how much we spend on the military. I agree that, yeah, Germany, they’ve got a lot to spend on their people because they don’t spend jack shit on their military. And why should they? They’ve got U.S. military bases right there in their own backyard. And, you know, why pay to duplicate that effort? Or why voluntarily take some of that burden off the U.S.’s shoulders if you know you don’t have to why would you go ahead. Well, yeah, the other side of that is simply, it really would be nice if we had this sort of social spending and social support here in the US that they enjoy in places like Germany. I mean, that’d be great, but at the same time, this— the stability, particularly the stability of the seas, the stability and the safety of transport that, you know, the U.S. guarantee of safe transport over the ocean, you know, the commerce, the international trade, the international cooperation that that facilitates, I think, is of enormous benefit. And I think it’s even of enormous material benefit to people living in the United States who really would like to have some, you know, some socialized medicine.

J. G. MichaelYeah, I would agree with that. I’m not by any means an isolationist. I think we should have a more restrained foreign policy. I don’t think we can completely undo everything. I mean, the issue I have when I talk to people in D.C. and I interview a lot of people is I think we have so many issues that have compounded over the years. One thing that I talk about a lot is the issue of FARA, the Foreign Agent Registration Act. And, you know, I think both left and right in this country, the mainstream left and right, like to talk about this, right? I mean, we had the whole thing with Russiagate. But really, if you start looking at the donors to our politicians in D.C., everyone is complicit. You know, I mean Ilhan Omar, who I have a lot of things I agree with her on, but she does get money from things like the Turkish American Steering Committee and that may compromise her on certain issues, such as she voted present, for instance, on the Armenian genocide resolution, but that that goes with almost every politician in our country and I think we need reforms in areas like that.

But we really don’t get that kind of discussion in mainstream media. It’s all this sort of, I mean, it’s Tucker Carlson talking head versus Rachel Maddow talking head. And I really don’t think we have a good foreign policy discussion really many places, even in alternative media now. But I would say that I’m more in favor of reform just so that we can keep, you know, some level of stability to our society. And, you know, to keep the things that are working well. And one, I would hope, would admit that there are some things that work well about the U.S. system.

Foreign policy and the alternative media

KMOYou know, you talk about how there’s not good foreign policy discussion even in the alternative media. And my mind immediately jumped to what used to be Rising. I guess it still is Rising, but now Rising and now Breaking Points with Saagar Enjeti and Krystal Ball. And, yeah, they seem hyper focused on the domestic scene and very little discussion there. I mean, they are openly hostile to the gatekeeping and the, you know, the gaslighting perpetrated by the mainstream media. But they don’t. They only really seem to push back against it on domestic questions, like there’s just either a lack of interest or a lack of knowledge, or just a lack of engagement with foreign policy matters.

J. G. MichaelIt’s funny that you mentioned Breaking Points and Rising, because I’m doing a another show after we record this, with Robbie Martin and, I think, Connor Freeman from the Libertarian Institute. We’re going to be talking about Saagar Enjeti and what we see as neocon wolves in doves’ clothing, so to speak. And I think that’s a big problem. I think we have a lot of people that are calling themselves populist, but really don’t question foreign interventions the way that I think was much more acceptable in the Bush years. And for me, it’s funny, with Parallax Views, I don’t know what your experience was like when you started C-Realm, but I think that I’m still haunted by the Bush years. A lot of people say the Trump years were very, very terrible, and I have a lot of issues with Trump. I also have a lot of issues with how people responded to Trumpism, but I think the Bush years were some of the most terrifying years for me. I felt like if you spoke out against the war, the war on terror, I should say, you were sort of targeted. And it was a very rough time to speak out.

KMOWell, just to put emphasis on how old I am and the C-Realm podcast is, George W. Bush was the president when I started the C-Realm podcast.

J. G. MichaelOkay. Well, what was your experience with those years like, though? I mean, just out of personal curiosity.

KMOYou know, a year after 9/11, I left the United States and I didn’t plan to come back. And I was fearful that the U.S. response to the attacks of 9/11 would be heavy handed and indiscriminate. And that, you know, I thought that the Patriot Act and all of the domestic law enforcement provisions that it brought in would be more destructive to liberty than it has been. But then another part of me says, well, maybe you’ve just gotten used to it. Maybe it’s just as bad as you thought it was going to be. But, you know, you don’t do much to threaten the powers that be, so you don’t really feel their lash.

J. G. MichaelOne of the most interesting things to me to come out of the Bush years was, and this was a point that Roger Stone, Trump’s buddy, that everyone, I’m sure everyone knows who Roger Stone is at this point, but it was funny. I remember when Trump was making all these executive orders, Roger Stone said, well, if you don’t like that, the opposition to Trump, he said, well, if you don’t like that, then maybe you shouldn’t have given all this power to the executive branch since the Bush years. And it’s weird because I feel like we live in an environment where everyone is willing to criticize one party or the other party, but we’re never really willing to dig deeper than just, oh, today it’s Biden that we’re mad at or today it’s Trump that we’re mad at. And I think that’s one of the biggest problems we face today in the U.S. is we don’t really have discussions that are in depth about policy. I mean, we basically have what is a reality TV show. In a way, Trump was the president maybe that America deserved in a lot of ways because we do love our reality television. I was curious as to your thoughts on that because I know you’ve been covering the blue tribe versus red tribe stuff a lot more lately.

KMOYeah. So what — actually, be specific with your question if you would because I can ramble, as you know.

J. G. MichaelNo, I was just curious as to what you think about the ways in which — so for example, I mentioned executive power under Trump. And now Biden, we see a lot of people on the right-wing side of things attacking executive power with Biden. But people don’t really make the consistency connection of, well, how did executive power get so out of control in the United States in the first place?

KMOSo my thoughts on that are Congress doesn’t want to do anything except raise money and get reelected. And, you know, legislating is hard and it’s, you know, danger fraught. Why do that? Why not just push off all the responsibility of the executive branch and then, you know, kick back and either throw Molotov cocktails at them or praise them or whatever? But, you know, you’ve got fundraising calls to make. So why bother with that legislation stuff?

J. G. Michael[Wording unclear; heard “Jeff”] I would unfortunately have to probably agree with a lot of that analysis. I mean, it’s cynical, but I think it’s true. I mean, I think, you know, I always tell people, I think Hillary Clinton was sort of a fundraising candidate, you know, she was there to sort of raise funds, whether she won or lost. And I think that’s one of the biggest problems we face. We really don’t have a, I guess what I’m getting at is it’s, I almost feel like we don’t have politics in America anymore. We actually just have, you know, culture warring nonsense.

What is the blob?

KMOYou had a guest on your program just recently, and I listened to it today, and I can’t bring his name to mind, but you were both making reference to the National Security Blob.

J. G. MichaelThat was probably Stephen Walt. I’m a big fan of his.

KMOSo for people not familiar with the term, what is the National Security Blob?

J. G. MichaelSo the blob is a term that I think was first used by Obama’s deputy national security advisor, Ben Rhodes. And that’s how Ben Rhodes describes the sort of consensus within D.C. You know, Obama famously told, well, this is based on Colonel Lawrence Wilkerson, who was chief of staff under Colin Powell. Wilkerson has often told this story, he’s told it to me on my show, that when Obama got in, he said, you know, this city has a pro-war bias. And basically, Ben Rhodes and people like him who were involved in the early Obama administration, they were sort of an element that I think was more questioning of the sort of DC blob and the consensus. It’s represented, I would say, by people like John Bolton, you know, the Mike Pompeos of the world, Victoria Nuland, the Kagans. You know, that’s another thing I wanted to mention.

I mean, there’s that old saying, I think Utah Phillips said once that you know the planet isn’t being isn’t dying, it’s being killed, and the people doing the killing have names and addresses. I mean, there aren’t really. I’m very cautious of conspiracy theories because I think we know the sort of culprits most of the time and I think when it comes to the DC blob, it’s just a really good metaphor for this sort of ideology around foreign and policy and national security that devours everything. And I think the reason it’s so powerful in D.C. is mainly because all these people go to the same institutions. They go to the same Ivy League schools to get educated. So they have a sort of way of thinking that is very removed, I would say, from, you know, all parts of America, including places like where I’m at, you know, Pennsylvania — I talked to people in Greenville PA — the kids who are ripe for military recruitment.

They don’t want to go to wars, especially wars that really aren’t about, you know, defending their country or defending their rights or anything like that. I think a lot more people in our society now are very much against needless interventionism and I think the DC blob, this sort of foreign policy consensus that comes out of the institutions that is formed by Ivy League educations in national security studies and whatnot. It’s become very disconnected from the general populace.

KMOWhat makes it a blob? Why is that word so?

J. G. MichaelOh, because I think it’s a great word to use, because I mean it’s like some kind of horror movie, right, but not only that. I mean it sort of absorbs everything, and I think. It also doesn’t help that people talk about the Kochs and the Soroses and how much money they give to things. When you look at the defense industry, my friend Mike Swanson, who wrote the book The War State and then he wrote Why Vietnam, he talks a lot about defense contractors. And he’s shown me stuff on lobbyists, when it comes to defense lobbyists. And ultimately, what you have is, it’s a drop in the bucket, what the Kochs and the Soros do, compared to these defense contractors, you know, the Raytheons, the Lockheed Martins. And I think that this blob in DC, it really does just sort of consume any kind of opposition.

You know, you may go into politics thinking, hey, you know I’m going to change the world, but everyone gets compromised. They get compromised by lobby groups, like I said. I mentioned FARA earlier, the Foreign Agent Registration Act. I feel like there’s Saudi lobbies, there’s Turkish lobbies. There’s the Israel lobby, AIPAC. And I feel like all of these sort of money in politics sort of things do a lot of damage. And you may go into things thinking, hey, I’m going to change everything. But I think people become much more cynical or they’re willing to, you know, quote unquote, sell out more as they start getting ahead within the system. And I think that’s what the blob really represents, especially it’s mainly used in terms of foreign policy. But I think there’s a broader consensus in D.C. that even goes beyond foreign policy at times.

KMOWell, I would agree. I would say that, you know, the blob directs foreign policy and neoliberalism directs domestic policy and international trade. But, you know, the blob is it absorbs things, but it’s also indistinct. Its borders, its exterior dimensions are not fixed, it’s kind of hard to pin down because it is an unofficial sort of agglomeration of power and influence.

J. G. MichaelOne regret I have about the damage the Trump presidency has done to our language is that the phrase the deep state used to mean something, and now it’s just a rallying cry for the red tribe. I used to talk a lot to Professor Peter Dale Scott, who I, you know, he’s one of my sort of heroes. I read him a lot growing up. And he, for people that don’t know, he’s the guy that sort of helped popularize the term the deep state in the United States. And he’s no fan of Trump. And it’s gotten to the point where he doesn’t even like using deep state anymore, since that term has become so captured by things like QAnon, he just calls it the establishment, and in some ways that actually may be a better title for it. I mean this, we are talking about this sort of entrenched bureaucratic establishment that you know.

A president may go away, but a lot of the people in the national security agencies that we have don’t go away. A lot of them, the faces stay the same, so to speak. They’re not elected officials, they are career bureaucrats, right.

KMOAnd their term of office. They don’t have an office, their term of office doesn’t end because they were not elected. So from my perspective, you know, the emotional vigor behind the animosity, you know, between the red tribe and the blue tribe is blinkered. I mean, if you don’t recognize that foreign policy doesn’t change when the occupant of the White House changes or, you know, the party of the Speaker of the House of Representatives changes, you notice we’re still at war. We still have this huge war fighting capability. And, you know, you mentioned earlier the idea that the people killing the planet are actual people. They have addresses. You know, war costs a lot of money, and that money goes into specific bank accounts. You know, it doesn’t go to some nebulous general place.

J. G. MichaelNot to interrupt you, but I guess what I want to add is that I know a lot of people that think that the hawkish elements in D.C. are, oh, they’re just in the pocket of Lockheed Martin. Or they’re just in the pocket of Raytheon, I think it’s actually much worse than that. When I talk to the sort of more dovish, I would say I just believe in restraint. I like the term restrainer. I don’t think it has the baggage of isolationism, and I don’t think restrainers are isolationists. I think we believe in things like international trade and relations. But the issue I come up against is not all of this is cynical. A lot of the people within the blob actually believe what they say. I mean, I would say most of them do. There’s the whole idea. Pierre Bourdieu, the great sociologist and academic in France, would talk about the illusio, which is the sort of games we play in life and in politics.

They always say you sort of have to buy into the game, because if you don’t, how can you play it right, and I think that’s true with the foreign policy blob. I think people like Robert Kagan, if you read their work. He just wrote another piece in Foreign Policy a few months back saying, you know, America’s a superpower now, and you plebs need to fight the wars for us. He really believes this. It’s not just some cynical money thing. There is an ideology behind it, and it’s an ideology that figures like Robert Kagan, his wife Victoria Nuland, and others believe in. They believe that this is how things have to go, and the opposition to it is going to wreck everything, so to speak.

KMOSo to complete the thought that I’d started earlier, if you’re, if you get shakingly angry when somebody mentions Donald Trump, or if you’re on the other team and you know you’re — you start to foam at the mouth when you hear the name Nancy Pelosi, then it’s just clear to me that you’re completely oblivious to or tuning out the widespread bipartisan consensus that really, you know, chooses the direction of this country, both domestically and internationally, because you notice we switch parties from time to time in terms of who’s in the high office, and the policies don’t change.

J. G. MichaelWell, I mean, look at the continuation we’re getting now with Biden. I mean, I was a big supporter of the JCPOA, the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action. I don’t think a war with Iran would be good. I don’t think our sanctions have done much good for the Iranian people. And I think a lot of our actions in Iran have actually emboldened nationalistic elements within that society in ways that haven’t been helpful to the people of Iran. But, you know, what have we seen so far with Biden? We were, you know, a lot of us were really pushing hard for rejoining the Iran nuclear deal. And what happened? I mean, the door on that seems to be closing quicker than ever. It seems like we’re getting a continuation of what we had under Trump. I mean, Trump’s foreign policy towards Cuba, I think Biden or Blinken have actually openly said, we’re not really going to change anything with that right now. So we’re getting a lot of continuation that I think a lot of people just want to ignore because they want to go back to the red-blue tribal dynamics.

KMOYeah. You know, I don’t have the exact figure to hand, but investigate the question. How many of Trump’s executive orders has Biden overturned? It is difficult to pass legislation. A president can’t necessarily just wave a magic wand and do things legislatively that he had promised. It’s going to take some work. It’ll be piecemeal. You won’t get 100%. But an incoming president can overturn every single one of the previous president’s executive orders. How many of Trump’s executive orders has Biden overturned? What percentage of them? This is a question I don’t think most people want to ask. And I don’t have the exact percentage to mind, but it is far south of 100%.

J. G. MichaelRight. Well, I think that’s the, I mean, and I don’t know how you overcome this problem, because it does seem like we have a very entrenched way of thinking that I’m not sure, my great fear in a lot of ways, and this is why I mentioned Trumpism so much earlier was, you know, there were things Trump actually said that I was more or less in an agreement with. And I know that will anger a lot of, I guess, blue tribe people. But I do think we need to be more restrained with our foreign policy. And he was signaling that he wanted to do that. But I don’t think he was very equipped to be able to deal with that in D.C. and this is actually, I think, a problem. You know, the red tribe will get mad at me for this. But I think early on, Obama did make signals that he wanted a change in foreign policy in DC and I don’t think he held to that either.

That’s again why the blob thing is is such a great metaphor, because it seems like anyone who comes up against this thing how are you going to break through it? And ultimately, you know, I think Bernie would have faced the same problem. I mean, oh yeah, Donald Trump, he hired people like John Bolton, Mike Pompeo, Elliott Abrams, all these people who are very hawkish, very involved with the neoconservative movement, but that’s in part because those people are more within the DC apparatus than people who question the status quo. I mean, you don’t get very far in DC unless you sort of agree with the consensus, so it’s very hard to find people that even aren’t even that radical, like someone like a Ben Rhodes who came up with the term the blob. I would say that he’s a pretty moderate reformist. But those people are the odd ones out in D.C.

And I think that’s really one of the biggest problems we face. You know, Bernie Sanders would have had to hire a lot of people on his team that were the same old, same old sort of Clinton Democrats. I mean, he would have hired a lot of people that were a breath of fresh air. But there’s only so many people like that on the Capitol.

KMORight. And if you steadfastly refuse to play ball, you know, by the blob’s rules, well, then you have no experience. What have you been doing?

J. G. MichaelRight, right. Well, the thing that gets me is, really, there, I think there is a consensus outside of DC on issues related to sort of our military adventurism is how I would put it. If you really look at it, progressives, conservatives and libertarians, people across the ideological spectrum — a lot of people don’t like these wars. I mean, I don’t have the exact polls on me right now, but if you look at a lot of polling data, Americans really don’t like these military adventures abroad, especially after the disasters of Iraq and Afghanistan. So the question I think people need to ask themselves is, why is there such a disconnect between what we have on Capitol Hill and what we have with the American people and their views on these sort of nation exercises?

KMOYou broke up there and there was a word that got deleted. What sort of exercises?

J. G. MichaelNation building.

KMOOh, right, right.

J. G. MichaelI mean, our nation’s falling apart in a lot of ways, and yet we’re trying to build nations abroad. It’s a very weird dynamic.

KMOYeah. It’s time to focus inward and do a little domestic nation building.

J. G. MichaelYeah. And like I said, I think the two are connected. I mean, if you’re worried about, I mean, if you’re red tribe, you’re worried about too much spending, right? My tax dollars. Well, we spend a lot of those tax dollars on the Pentagon and the defense budget. If you’re a blue tribe and you’re worried about something like, I don’t know, people get worried about domestic extremism. And I have a lot of issues with how that’s framed. But if you’re worried about that, why is all our taxpayer dollars going to, you know, foreign wars abroad? It seems like we have a lot to deal with at home before we can, you know, sort of dictate to the rest of the world.

Program identification: “You’re listening to the C-Realm Podcast with your host, KMO.”

Drones

KMOThe one thing that I did warn you that we should, we would be talking about, because we haven’t touched on it yet and this is the usual C-Realm discussion where it’s just sort of free-flowing and no real structure. But I did. I did suggest that we talk about drones and, okay, I’ll just start with some opinion. You know, from my perspective, if a drone kills somebody outside of the United States, diplomatically that should be no different than if that person were shot by a U.S. soldier or shot by a you know an aircraft with a U.S. pilot. The fact that there’s not a pilot in the drone itself, to me, should provide absolutely no cover, you know, for actions taken outside of our, you know, our sphere of influence, our legitimate sphere of influence. And yet that’s not how it works. I mean, we will, we being the United States, will kill people with drones that we wouldn’t kill.

We would not send, you know, an F-35 fighter across, you know, Iranian lines to kill somebody. We just wouldn’t do that, but we will do it with drones, and to me, the notion that there’s a significant ethical difference between killing somebody with a drone or killing somebody with a human-piloted vehicle, to me, there’s no difference.

J. G. MichaelNo, I would agree 110% with that. I mean, I don’t think anyone else I know has put it that succinctly. I mean, I’ve thought about the drone issue too because, I mean, we have targeted people with drones that, you know, I often wonder, you know, don’t they get a fair trial?

KMONope.

J. G. MichaelThese are issues, though, that I think really sort of get put on the sidelines. I mean, the issue with drone warfare, I haven’t, oddly enough, I have not really done any shows on drone warfare, but I probably should. I know there was a book you mentioned to me.

KMOYeah, it was a Zero Books title. And it’s about drones. And I’ve been reading it, but I don’t have the title committed to memory. So let’s see. Okay. Alex Quicho is the author. The book is Small Gods. And it’s a fun book in that, you know, no disrespect to Doug. But there’s a lot of Zero Books that I pick up and I read two pages and I’m like, nope, not going there because I cannot connect with this particular use of language. And this book, Small Gods, I thought I had a longer title. Small Gods deconstructs the mythology of the drone. As soothing sound, aerial spy, and killing machine, each chapter focuses on the work of an artist with a unique understanding of drone technologies, illuminating myriad facets of these entangled entities. Empty metal becomes a future-facing spirit, a ride into the afterlife, a god or a ghost.

And I like the text. I like the prose of this book. This is the prose of somebody who actually loves the English language and doesn’t want to do violence to it. And I notice a lot of critical theory strikes me as being just the opposite.

J. G. MichaelRight. Well, I think people like to — how do I put this? I think there’s a lot of like academic jargon. I don’t like academic jargon. I think we should be trying to speak to everyone, but I think a lot of people want to keep us sort of cordoned off right, so don’t speak, and I think there’s always. It’s odd because it’s not something you can talk about much, I think, on the left, but it needs to be talked about more. When I look at academia, I think there’s a strong left-wing critique to be made of it because, and I know this goes off topic from the drone thing, but I think it’s important. If we look at it as an institution, I mean, it’s sort of a medieval institution that was about reproducing class statuses. So, you know, I think there’s a strong critique to be made of how academic language is employed and how it obfuscates a lot of things. It actually makes discussion harder in some ways.

Academic language and grading papers

KMOWell, as you say it excludes a lot of people from the discussion from the get-go, because a lot of people, just you know they don’t have the background to decode what it is you’re trying to say. And I think a lot of people you know they are required to say something, but everything worth saying has been said. So you know, just quote a bunch of people and then create some impenetrable text that seems like it might be saying something, but even, you know, your professor reading it isn’t going to take the time to actually figure out what you’re trying to say. He’s going to see, he’s using the right vocabulary, good enough. I mean, when I was in grad school, I was a graduate instructor, you know, I taught undergrads. And at the end of the semester, when I’ve got papers to write, and I’ve got finals to study for, I also have this massive amount of, you know, undergraduate essays to grade.

And the ones that get an A, I read like the first paragraph. It’s like, it’s well-written. They’ve told me what their thesis is. They’ve given me some indication that, you know, they understand the general outlines of the discussion compared to everything else I’m going to read. A plus. I don’t have to read the rest of that. You know, the papers that are, I’m struggling over whether to give them a D or an F are the ones that I slave over. It’s like, you know, and then I read the whole thing trying to find the good stuff in it. But anyway, that’s just me ragging on, you know, American illiteracy because people, kids get into college, you know, 18 year olds get into college who’ve never written a proper essay, you know.

Speaker uncertain[Wording unclear; heard “they’re”] not wrong about that. Yeah.

KMOThey’re not getting into Yale, but they’re getting into state schools. You know, and it’s really hard to grade 30 papers when you’ve got, you know, a vocabulary and writing aptitude that ranges from like fourth grade through you know, college level. How do you grade those? I mean it’s it seems unfair to you, know I was teaching philosophy courses. It seems unfair to say you can’t really even participate in philosophy because you don’t know what a subordinate clause is, but it kind of comes down to that.

Leaving doomerism behind

J. G. MichaelSo this actually, and I know you’re the interviewer here, so I shouldn’t be asking questions, but I wanted to ask you a question at the end here. I guess you told me that you’re not really associated with the sort of doomerism stuff anymore, that I think C-Realm, a lot of, it was popular with a certain contingent of people that would have been called doomers. Yes, and I was just curious what sort of drew you away from that?

KMOWell, I mean 10 years of failed predictions of impending doom certainly had something to do with it. I, you know, when I started the C-Realm podcast, I was married. You know I have kids and at the time I lived with my kids and I got heavily into the doomer stuff and my wife did not follow me to her [wording unclear]. That was just crazy talk. And you know, looking back on it 20 years later, yeah. 2006. That was crazy talk.

J. G. MichaelYou know, and you’re not a technical utopian either.

KMONo, I’m not a technical utopian. I mean, my position is that going forward, the future will be complicated. It won’t be wholly good won’t be wholly bad. There’ll be plenty of good, plenty of bad and plenty of unexpected nuance and complication, a lot of which will, you know, arise from information technology, artificial intelligence, massive domestic surveillance. And those are all like three aspects of one thing. And for people who say, well, we don’t have to think about any of that because the electricity grid is going to go down tomorrow. It’s like, yeah, but you’ve been saying that for 20 years and it hasn’t. What if it doesn’t go down tomorrow? What if we really do have to really grapple with the implications of these technologies? What if they’re not going away, you know, and if somebody doesn’t have, if the only answer is nope, absolutely peak oil, it’s all crashing tomorrow. It’s like that’s not interesting to me.

J. G. MichaelSo this actually ties into the last point I wanted to make, since we were talking about the foreign policy blob, and that’s sort of become my focus with the show I do. I’m trying to follow in the footsteps of a late friend of mine, Michael Brooks, who helped with my show immensely and he was focusing much more on geopolitics near the end of his life, and that’s sort of what I’m doing now, but it it’s interesting to me. When it comes to doomerism, I think there’s — and I think this is very specific to sort of American apocalyptics or the sort of apocalyptic aesthetic. I think people think everything’s going to go out with a bang instead of a whimper. Right, and for me, I think there’s a lot of really bad directions we’re going in, especially with foreign policy. I’m a person who believes that we’re entering a more multi-polar world.

I don’t — and people can disagree with me on this — I don’t think we’re going to have any one. We’re not going to have the hyper power going forward. We’re not going to have one world hegemon. I think we’re going to have spheres of regional influence. China will have theirs, Russia will have theirs, we’ll have ours, and so on and so forth. But I think that we have a lot of people within that blob we were talking about earlier that are committed to staying a course that is ultimately, I think, outdated. I think we have. I always refer to them as atrophied institutions and, in a way, like to me, the apocalypse or the decline, whatever you want to call it — is really the inability to get past, to not move past, I should say, just fossilized modes of thinking. And I don’t think that leads to a big bang apocalyptic moment. I think it’s just a very slow decline.

KMOAnd, you know, human beings, we think in stories and stories have beginnings, middles and ends, but the real world doesn’t have an end or, you know, if it ever does, you and I won’t be around to see it, and you know as humans who think in stories, we don’t like that. We’re looking for an ending, but really the only ending we can look forward to is our own ending, our own individual endings.

J. G. MichaelI don’t think anyone could have put it better and you know that’s why in some ways I — I think you know as much as I talk about, really I would say — dark subjects, projects on my show, whether it’s— you know, I was covering the whole Jeffrey Epstein case before it really became too crazy for me to cover. I’ve covered cases of cults and I’ve covered, I think foreign policy is very depressing. When you look at what some people in the DC blob think, I think the one glimmer of hope is— you know, as long as we’re alive, there’s hope. You know we’re still here, so there’s always the hope that we can change course. And I think in a lot of ways, like people just need to focus on and be grateful for what they have in their own lives right, their families, their local communities, and I think we can still have those things.

And to me, I think that’s sort of what I got out of C-Realm, is sort of: cherish what you have. That’s sort of what I got out of it when listening to it all those years ago.

KMOI’m happy to hear that. I’m very happy to hear that. Yeah. How are we doing? We have five minutes left. So do we want to do we want to try to talk about drones at all in five minutes?

J. G. MichaelI’m really not equipped to talk about the stuff as much.

Speaker uncertainFair enough.

UFOs

J. G. MichaelI did want to ask you, what do you think? Do you think UFOs are actually drones? I know you’ve covered UFOs on the show before.

KMOOh, yeah. Yeah. I’ve talked with Larry Lowe [spelling unverified] on many occasions about UFOs. And I think there’s a variety of explanations for UFOs. I would be very surprised if one of them were actual physical spaceships of extraterrestrial origin. I don’t think that’s the case. You know, if you ever read the book or watch the movie Mirage Men, that’s a pretty compelling documentary, which it documents the claim that the U.S. Air Force had a program that was deliberately seeding UFO myths into the population, you know, manufacturing false evidence, leaking supposedly.

J. G. MichaelFamously, not to interrupt you, but famously causing a man by the name of Paul Bennewitz to go insane through an AFOSI agent by the name of Richard Doty. I’ve covered this a lot on my show. That’s why I asked you about what your thoughts on UFOs were, because I always thought Mirage Men had a pretty good thesis to it. And I wonder about this stuff now because of the recent unidentified aerial phenomenon report that came out from the defense intelligence, I believe, sector and the Pentagon. So it’s been interesting seeing a lot more coverage of UFOs in the news the past few months and weeks. And I think it’s kind of funny because a lot of these people sort of pushing the disclosure narrative, as has been true in the past as well, are sort of lobbyists connected to the defense, intelligence world and interested in military contracting.

So I wanted to sort of slide that in at the end. I know people think UFOs are goofy talk, but I think it’s interesting that we’re sort of seeing the mainstreaming of it happening now, and I think it may relate in some ways to the sort of DC blob that we talked about before.

KMOWell, I’m intensely interested in the question of the Fermi paradox. You know, where are they? Where are the aliens? Why haven’t we met them? And I think about these things a lot. And I just don’t think that, you know, the stuff that gets covered or talked about under the banner of UFOs is really getting at anything particularly interesting. When a bunch of, you know, uniformed Pentagon representatives get up in front of cameras, you know, and behind a podium, and they say something to whet people’s appetites about UFOs, I just think, what are we being distracted from? What is it that the news doesn’t want to cover today? What is it that Washington, D.C. doesn’t want to talk about today that they’re bringing up UFOs? It’s always in the service of misdirection and distraction, in my opinion.

J. G. MichaelNo, I definitely agree with that. The only thing I would add, and I know we only have a minute or so here, is I look at an organization like the To the Stars Academy, which a lot of people were interested in a few years ago, and they were saying, we’re going to mainstream UFOs. They famously had the guy from Blink-182 doing their outreach publicity stuff. And it was funny to me because they actually were able to get military contracts. They also did military contracting work. And I think it’s a combination of we’re being distracted, and also some people are using the popularity of UFOs to say, hey, you should invest in this military contracting thing that we’re doing, or invest in Bigelow Aerospace. And I think people don’t ask those questions enough. That’s one thing I’ve been sort of frustrated with the alternative media about. We’re not questioning the narratives narrowly enough. In some ways, I think the alternative media is becoming too much like the mainstream media.

KMOWell, we don’t have time to dig into this, but, you know, I think a lot of the failings of both the mainstream and the alternative media comes from a lack of scientific literacy. And even people who, you know, since the pandemic have identified as being on the side of science don’t know a whole lot about science and certainly don’t know how to interrogate the claims, you know, supposedly scientific claims.

J. G. MichaelWell, hey, can I just quickly plug my show?

KMOAbsolutely.

J. G. MichaelIs that okay?

KMOYes.

J. G. MichaelOkay, Parallax Views at Podbean, that’s parallaxviews.podbean.com We talked about some of the interviews I’ve done, Stephen Walt, who’s at Harvard he’s really good, Abby Martin I’ve had on, Colonel Lawrence Wilkerson and lots of other great guests, and you know I would say that I was influenced in a lot of ways by what you were doing back when I was, you know, you know a teenager and whatnot. So you, Doug Lain, and others, sort of it — taught me, you know, well, I can pick up a microphone, I can reach out to people, and it sort of helped build my confidence too. So I’m grateful for everything you’ve done, because it sort of got me into all of this. So I just want to thank you for that.

KMOYou are very welcome, thank you for saying it, and I would say that is the perfect note upon which to end. So, JG Michael, thanks so much.

J. G. MichaelThank you.

Audio clip: “On the C-Realm podcast. A mind that is stretched by a new experience can never go back, never go back to its old dimensions.”

Closing: in defense of the blob

KMOAll right, here we are at the end of another C-Realm podcast. So again, that was J. G. Michael. His podcast is the Parallax View podcast, or maybe it’s plural, Views. In any event, there will be a link to his podcast and his Twitter account in the show notes for this episode, which you can find on C-Realm.com. And I also cross post these things to my Patreon page. C-Realm gets funky from time to time, C-Realm being the website. And if you’re ever looking to contact me or looking for information or something, and you’re just not getting it through C-Realm.com, well, you’re welcome to write to me. My email address is KMO at C hyphen R-E-A-L-M dot com. Or you can check out my Patreon. My Patreon page is as close as I have to a blog or a website these days. I mean, obviously C-Realm.com is my website, but it’s not that versatile.

It’s really just the repository of C-Realm Podcast and C-Realm Vault Podcast episodes. If I just have a fleeting idea that I want to share with people, I either dash it off as a selfie, you know, like cell phone video that I post to YouTube, or I post it to Patreon, or possibly to the C-Realm Podcast discussion group on MeWe. On the topic of Empire and the National Security State and the National Security Blob. The piece that I was reading at the beginning from The Washington Post by Daniel W. Drezner, it references an article from Foreign Affairs magazine. Daniel Drezner writes, to see what I mean, consider the provocation by Hal Brands, Peter Feaver, and William Inboden in Foreign Affairs titled “In Defense of the Blob.” Brands, Feaver, and Inboden are sharp, right of center scholars who have very big toes in the policy world. So I’m going to skip on over to that article in Foreign Affairs magazine.

For those of you who don’t know, Foreign Affairs is a magazine published by the CFR, the Council on Foreign Relations, which is, it’s not a part of the U.S. government. You know, it’s definitely an institution in Washington, D.C., but it’s not part of the U.S. government. The role of the, you know, Council on Foreign Relations is not described in the constitution, but it is very, very much an organization of the establishment. And you can read this for free. I would suggest just doing a search for it: “In Defense of the Blob.” Foreign Affairs is an expensive magazine to subscribe to. It’s like 60 bucks a year, and I think it only comes out monthly. I mean, it’s not like subscribing to the Financial Times or anything, but it’s still, it’s not cheap. But if you go to their website and you start to read this article, they’ll give you a paragraph and then a little screen will come up and say, if you want to read the whole thing, enter your email address here and we’ll send you a link so you can read the whole thing.

It’s not behind a paywall. And of course, by giving them your email address, you’re sure to receive their newsletter from time to time, such as the world we live in. Anyway, back to Foreign Affairs. Again, I’m going to read just the beginning. The authors, you’ve just heard me read their names a couple of times, Hal Brands, Peter Feaver, and William Inboden. The full title is “In Defense of the Blob: America’s Foreign Policy Establishment Is the Solution, Not the Problem.” This is from April 29th, 2020. It begins—

The foreign policy establishment has seen better days. During the Obama administration, Deputy National Security Advisor Ben Rhodes derided it as the blob, mocking its stodgy hawkishness. Then Republicans join the chorus, with the Trump administration declaring war on mainstream foreign policy and national security professionals, and the president dismissing critics as the failed Washington elite looking to hold on to their power. In this issue, moreover, even some of Trump’s harshest critics in the academy agree with him. American foreign policy, they contend, has been controlled by a privileged cabal, bent on serving its own interests rather than those of the nation at large. One that protects its turf by shutting out alternative ideas and excluding dissenting voices. The result has been three decades of dismal failure, with the United States squandering its post-Cold War advantages and careening from catastrophe to catastrophe. The key to getting things back on track, these critics charge, is to break the grip of the blob.

The only problem with this argument is that every component of it is wrong. The foreign policy establishment is not a closed cabal. American statecraft has not been a giant failure, and scrapping professionalism for amateurism would be a disaster. In truth, the foreign policy establishment is an American strength rather than its weakness. It is more open-minded and accountable than its critics allow. It acts as a storehouse of accumulated professional wisdom, providing intellectual ballast to the ship of state. On balance, the establishment’s practical track record has been impressive, with some well-known fiascos outweighed by many quiet successes. And the current administration’s foreign policy blunders, including in its response to the current pandemic, demonstrate what happens when the establishment’s experience and expertise is rejected. In short, the blob is not the problem, it is the solution.²

KMOAll right, so I’m not going to read any more from this, but the authors go on to argue that, you know, first, there’s a lot of different points of view within the blob. Lots of different, even adversarial, you know, points of view contest with one another to determine the direction, you know, to determine the consensus of the blob or, you know, whatever consensus emerges. It’s not this ideologically homogenous group. Now, again, Foreign Affairs is the voice of the Council on Foreign Relations, the Council on Foreign Relations just is the establishment, or it’s the cheerleaders for the establishment. And, you know, the point that they’re making, for the most part, is the people who make up the blob have been doing this for a long time. They understand the system. They have a long-term, you know, a view of the system, a view of the problems that the American, I’ll say it, empire faces that were formed over many years.

You know, they have connections within the system. They know how the system works. They know how to get things done. Granted, it is a large, entrenched, and self-interested group. And its track record certainly has some very marked failures. But they argue that the quiet successes outweigh those failures. And that, you know, when somebody like Trump comes in, whose main appeal to the electorate is that he’s not part of the system, he’s not, you know, on that team, to the voters that is his qualification. But in terms of actually interacting with the established foreign policy apparatus and network of relationships that span the globe, amateurism really isn’t any sort of benefit. And I think this comes back to the word that JG used quite a bit in our conversation, restraining. He doesn’t necessarily want to smash the blob, you know, like Marxist, would-be Marxist revolutionaries say they want to smash capitalism.

And he doesn’t even use the word reform that much. He wants to restrain the blob. It’s like, yeah, the blob exists. It has a function. It has a purpose. Simply abolishing it would create a power vacuum. And you know what sorts of personalities thrive in a power vacuum. But its excesses, you know, they are excessive and they do need to be reined in or restrained. Now, I haven’t listened to that many episodes of JG’s podcast and, you know, I might be putting words in his mouth, but based on the conversation that we had, in which I have now listened to a second time, I think I get what he was trying to communicate. Now, if I’m wrong, he can let me know. Oh, and by the way, I just asked, you know, rhetorically, how many of Trump’s executive orders has President Biden overturned? Well, in his four years in office, President Trump issued 219 executive orders.

In his, what, first six months, seven months in office, President Biden has issued 54 executive orders. Now, I haven’t gone through and read every single one of them, but let us just suppose for the sake of argument that every single one of those 54 executive orders that President Biden has issued have been reactionary, you know, have been direct responses to Trump’s executive orders, basically each one of Biden’s executive orders negating one of Trump’s executive orders. Well, if that were true, then at most President Biden would have undone a little less than a quarter, actually 24.66%³ of Trump’s 219 executive orders. And I strongly suspect that not every single one of President Biden’s executive orders has been just the straight up undoing of one of President Trump’s executive orders, which I think illustrates the point that there’s a lot more continuity of intent, a lot more policy continuity, you know, a lot more executive continuity between the Clinton, Bush, Obama, Trump, Biden administrations than there have been differences.

And I know that that’s old news, you know, to the C-Realm podcast audience, but most of the people that you talk to are going to be pretty thoroughgoing and dedicated tribe members of either the red or blue tribe, and they will insist that, no, you know, Trump and Biden are night and day. They are polar opposites. Well, you know, if you think they’re polar opposites, sure. I mean, you can lay out a list of factual statements that do seem to support the idea that they have radically different policy agendas, radically different moral compasses and visions for the nation, which are going to lead them to do diametrically opposed things. But, you know, one, that requires a lot of cherry picking. That requires a lot of willful disregard of contrary evidence. And two, just, you know, look at the results. Does the military budget ever get smaller?

Does it ever under Democrats or Republicans? I mean, granted, the notion that Donald Trump ever intended to drain the swamp, if by drain in the swamp, you mean end influence peddling and corruption in Washington, D.C. that’s laughable. And it’s particularly laughable. I mean, if you think about what JG said, you know, we whine about the influence of the Koch brothers or the one remaining Koch brother at this point, or George Soros, if you’re on the other team, say, oh, they’re spending all this money, you know, to influence politics and to encourage or to fund certain agendas. It’s like the amount that Koch and Soros spends compared to what Raytheon spends, you know, what General Dynamics or Boeing spends in Washington, D.C., or even what the pharmaceutical companies spend in Washington, D.C., to have their priorities and their interests written into law. Koch and Soros are nothing. They’re a rounding error in terms of influence peddling and the give and take of agendas as lubricated by copious amounts of money. So if you’re going to drain the swamp, but you’re not going to actively, publicly, explicitly address the influence of the companies that get paid to enact the U.S. military foreign agenda, you’re just talking bullshit. You’re just making noises with your lips. You’re not saying anything. I mean, that’s just gibberish. If you’re not going to take on the Pentagon and the constellation of defense contractors, but you claim you’re going to drain the swamp, whatever. Tell that to somebody wearing a red baseball cap. I can’t even entertain. I can’t even listen to that and keep a straight face. But here’s a point that I made in response to a question from JG. It’s a point that I made on another podcast, Fully Automated, a few weeks back.

It’s basically this. If I hear from somebody that they want to smash capitalism or they want to stage an active revolution and overthrow the U.S. government, depose it, completely dismantle and destroy the current system, which provides for employment, food distribution, shelter, medical. I mean, the U.S. medical system is a mess. I talk about it all the time. It has become a form of piracy. But at the same time, I don’t want to smash the current system and build something from scratch. I don’t believe that any of the people who advocate smashing capitalism have anything remotely as good at they’re ready to deploy. And I think that what they will end up creating, again, when you create a power vacuum, you’re basically just creating a buffet of opportunities for power-obsessed sociopaths. And what you get in the aftermath of a revolution is typically much worse than what the revolution was supposed to be replacing.

So if somebody tells me they want to smash capitalism or they want to, you know, actively resist the U.S. government, well, you know, if they’re right in front of me, I will make an attempt to be polite and not ridicule them. If I’m reading it on screen or if I’m listening to it on a podcast or something, I’ll just roll my eyes and shake my head because I realize that these people are no threat to the existing system. They’re just, you know, they’re silly. They’re absurd. If I took them seriously, I would be bothered by the fact that I wasn’t actively taking action to stop them. So now I realize, you know, we are past the end of the hour, and I’m looking around for a happy note on which to end this thing. And I guess the happy note is a pretty easy one to find.

It’s that here’s somebody, J. G. Michael, who was listening to the C-Realm podcast when he was a teenager. I don’t know exactly how old he is now, but, you know, he’s a decade and a half on from that Catherine Austin Fitts interview that he mentioned. And here he is doing a podcast of his own. And the things that he has taken away from the C-Realm podcast are, from my perspective, the good things. There’s a lot of doom mongering in a certain period of the C-Realm podcast. And I imagine a lot of people who no longer listen to the podcast, no longer listen because they no longer get that heaping serving of doom in every episode. So they’ve gone elsewhere to find that. But what they probably remember of the C-Realm episode, if they were to articulate it wouldn’t make my heart glow the way it did when J. G. said what he took away from the C-Realm podcast. And I’m reminded of one of my favorite quotes. This is from Albert Schweitzer. He wrote:

Not one of us knows what effect his life produces or what he gives to others. That is hidden from us and must remain so. Though we are often allowed to see some little fraction of it so that we may not lose courage. The way in which power works is a mystery.

KMOSo that, I think, is a wholly positive and uplifting note on which to leave all of you. I hope that you have enjoyed this episode of the C-Realm Podcast, and I hope that some of you will consider the C-Realm Vault Podcast. All new Vault subscriptions needs to come in through Patreon. So my Patreon page is Patreon.com slash KMO. And with that, you know, final bit of self-promotion, I will bid you good day. If you’re a Vault subscriber, I will talk to you again soon. If you only listen to the free podcasts, I will talk to you again eventually. Until that time, I hope that you will stay well.

Editorial notes

1. The author’s name is heard as “Dresner” in the recording; the Washington Post columnist is Daniel W. Drezner. Wording of the quoted passage is kept as KMO read it; it was not checked against the published column. ↩

2. As read by KMO, from Hal Brands, Peter Feaver and William Inboden, “In Defense of the Blob,” Foreign Affairs, April 29, 2020 (the article linked in the original episode notes). Spellings of the authors’ names are corrected from the machine transcript (heard as “Favor” and “N. Bowden”). ↩

3. KMO’s round figures are kept as spoken. 54 ÷ 219 ≈ 24.66%, as he says. The executive-order counts were not independently checked. ↩