The Long Revenge

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 am your host, KMO, and this is episode number 573, The Long Revenge, or How Thaddeus Russell Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Empire. Prepared for release onto the World Wide Web on Thursday, May 27th, 2021. I say prepared for release on this day. It’s actually been sitting in the can for well over a week. I didn’t want to put it out in the same week that I’d already put out another podcast. And then I went to Maine and then I got home and I had some serious slacking to catch up on, but now here we are at the end of the week and here’s the podcast for you. So Thaddeus Russell, he used to be a college professor. Now he is a book author and a podcaster, and he’s also an entrepreneur. He is the force behind Renegade University.

I imagine some of you know who he is, probably have listened to quite a bit of his content. For those of you who don’t know who he is and haven’t listened to any of his content, if you’re listening to the C-Realm podcast and you have been for years, I’m pretty sure there’s some stuff over at the Unregistered podcast that you’re going to like. Now, I definitely need to mention Static Warpshell [spelling unverified]. Static Warpshell is somebody who has been providing excellent feedback. I’ve read many an email from Static Warpshell on this podcast over the years. And in recent weeks, he has volunteered his services as a podcast producer, and it was Static Warpshell who set up this interview. And Static had an in because he had attended an event, I think a Renegade University event in DC with Thaddeus Russell. And I think he made an impression when he told Thaddeus, who has been on the Joe Rogan podcast repeatedly and gets a lot of his audience through that vector, that he came in on the Douglas Lain vector.

Doug Lain and Thaddeus Russell are old friends. In fact, when Static Warpshell mentioned that this interview was a possibility, I did a little research, and part of that research was listening to a three-year-old conversation between Doug Lain and Thaddeus Russell. If you haven’t heard it, it’s a hoot. I highly recommend it. I’ll link to it in the show notes. Also, I want to thank Ben from Ohio. Ben, he was planning a road trip to Maine, and his route was going to take him through Bellows Falls, Vermont, which is where I live. And he wrote to me and asked if we could get some dinner or a beer or something while he’s coming through. And I said, hey, I’ll do you one better. How about I go with you to Maine? And so we drove to Maine together and we got to hang out with Mark C.

Mark, I don’t know. I don’t think Mark’s been here on the main C-Realm podcast. He’s been a guest on the Vault a couple of times. He lives in Maine and we went out to his land, his very rural, very untamed land and untamed neighborhood and untamed neighbors, folks that I think would definitely qualify as renegades by Thaddeus Russell’s definition. And we had a great time and two marvelous dinners. So thanks to Mark C. and his lovely wife, whose name I have not asked permission to use here on the podcast, so I won’t. All right, with introductions and thanks out of the way, here is most of my conversation with Thaddeus Russell.

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

Slavery and the long revenge

Speaker uncertainAnyway, all right. What do you want to do here?

Speaker uncertainI think we’re already doing it.

KMOOkay, we’re recording for my show. Let me just say that—

Thaddeus RussellOh, are we talking? This has all been recorded?

KMOYeah, well, I record all Zoom calls. I mean, it’s automatic.

Thaddeus RussellAll right, fair enough. Or not fair. Not fair, but I like that.

KMOI’m talking to Thaddeus Russell. He’s a podcaster, the author of a book called A Renegade History of the United States. I did diligent research by reading the free portions which are available on Amazon.com, listened to the audiobook sample that’s there. I know that when you were a professor, you got into some sticky or sticky wicket, some hot water, whatever you want to say, saying that, you know, life of antebellum slaves wasn’t 12 Years a Slave 24/7. Correct?

Thaddeus RussellYeah. Oh, you want me to respond to that? My lawyer says I can’t, though. So, on, next question. Let’s talk about Reconstruction. Yeah, okay, so that argument — yeah, I wasn’t thinking we were going there, but this is great. So I spent, oh, about a decade developing this argument. Well, it’s funny, you know, having gone through it and done all the research and, more importantly, thinking through the whole question, to me, what seems so absurdly, patently, obviously false to 99.9% of Americans, to me now seems like common sense and just obvious, which is that the project, that part of the project began with this question. Why is it that the descendants of slaves created a culture that has been emulated, admired, celebrated, not just in the United States and not just by black people, but by almost all people and all over the world?

And it’s been going on for more than a century and a half. Black culture, right, has been the symbol of freedom. It is noted for that. Blues and jazz, right? What set it apart, among many things, from European classical music, was improvisation. It’s improvisational music, right? It’s freedom. It’s freedom to take the structure of the song that you were handed by Europe and you make it into something completely new, and then, on top of that, it’s even more subversive. You make it danceable, holy Christ. And if you think dancing is trivial, take a look at what virtually every political regime on the face of the earth has said about dancing in the modern era. This is basically the subject of my book, Renegade History of the United States. I have examples of this, and now my new book that I’m almost finishing is the global version of Renegade History, where I do look at exactly this.

I look at governments across the world over the last 100 to 200 years flipping out over American popular culture, in particular its sexual aspects, in particular stuff related to dancing. Anyway, so that extremely liberatory culture that America gets to say as its own came from slaves — people, unfree people. So what is this paradox, right? It had never been answered to me in any sufficient way at all, except people would say, well, it just shows you how great African Americans are because they overcame their oppression and still created the most free culture in the history of the world. I’m like, well, that’s a possibility that they’re just like super awesome, courageous people. Or maybe it could be at least in part about their material conditions. I’m sounding like a Marxist for a second. And in fact, a lot of my analysis does come from a Marxist, Eugene Genovese. Roll, Jordan, Roll is still considered by many, probably most historians to be the, at least, most important — I mean, there are many, many detractors of it, but most important analysis of slavery.

So here’s the argument. Well, the slave on the plantation, one single slave of any age, of any gender, is more valuable than all the cows and horses and chickens put together. [Wording unclear; heard “other”] is the most valuable piece of property by far on that plantation, in that plantation owner’s estate, by far. So how much can he, or should he, whip that slave or any slave? Right? You know, he could whip his cow to make it move faster. Well, we know what happens when you whip a cow constantly all day long. Does it move faster or does it stop moving at all? And so slaves understood this. And a lot of historians have written about this sort of day-to-day resistance. We never had any major slave rebellions like they did in West Indies and South America, but we had daily, maybe minute-by-minute resistance.

And the basis of that was this power that slaves on some level knew they had, but they certainly did have it, which is that they were the most valuable thing in this person’s life economically. And so they could not be abused past a certain point. So that’s part of it. The other part is that segregation, people really need to rethink segregation now. Now, legal segregation, I am 5,000% opposed to it. Everybody is. But being separated from the dominant culture, which is a big part of it, people have thought of as this terrible crime committed against African-Americans. When I look at African-American culture historically, and then I look at white American culture, especially during slavery, during the Victorian era, and I think, are you out of your minds? Like African-American culture, by my values and according to the values of just about any 21st-century inhabitant of the United States, is clearly, obviously, almost objectively superior to white culture.

And so, I mean, if anybody had to learn anything from anybody, it was whites having to learn from blacks. So white American, the dominant culture, was Victorian at the peak of slavery in the 19th century, but that had just come out of America’s Puritan phase, meaning the formal culture, meaning the high culture, the official culture, not the streets culture, right? So we went from centuries of Puritanism straight into Victorianism, and that wasn’t hard at all, was it? Because they’re awfully similar. They both are the most repressive cultural apparatuses in the history of humankind. This is it, man. We perfected the anti-human body, anti-pleasure, anti-sex machine in the 18th and 19th and early 20th centuries. And that was white people’s creation. Not only was it white people’s creation — and I only say this, I wouldn’t say this if they didn’t take credit for it as a white people’s creation, if they didn’t racialize it themselves, right? I’m post-racial. I want to stop talking about race.

But what happened was these people who looked a particular way created the most repressive, god-awful culture in the history of humankind. And then they said, oh, this is superior, actually, even though it’s horrible and everybody can’t wait to get the fuck out of it. They’re waiting desperately for capitalism and black people and gay people and Jews to free us from this shit. They said also, this is what white people do. They were proud of it and they said, this is what white people do. Well, here’s what much of the rest of the world did when they saw all this. They looked at it and they said, oh, well, in that case, I’d rather not be white. Thank you very much. And that is the history of America, is those who chose to adopt the dominant white puritanical Victorian culture, which sucks, except it’s very good at building bridges, and alternative cultures that are not puritanical and repressive.

And the leading choice among those — and there have been many — has been the culture that was created by slaves and their descendants. That’s obvious. You just look at the number of white people who have imitated black people, I mean, and that’s just the most, you know, avid fans of black culture, and that’s the most obvious example. And I make a major argument in those chapters in my book on this and I have elsewhere that blackface, minstrelsy, minstrel shows, minstrel performances, which everybody just instinctively — and it is instinctive because they don’t know a thing about the history, so it just comes from feelings entirely — they instinctively know in their bones that it was racist. No, it wasn’t. In fact there are several scholars who wrote before I was even in graduate school, making the argument that especially the early blackface minstrel shows in the [wording unclear; heard “18th”], when slavery existed, were actually admiring, envious.

They were envious of the freedoms and pleasures of slave culture. And that should be, like, obvious, because, of course, look what we’ve been doing ever since. Right. We’ve been imitating, emulating, admiring black culture. And in some parts of our soul, not entirely, but in some parts of our soul, how many white people have wanted to be black, at least in that way? This is as American as apple pie: white people wanting to be black, at least — at least they want the stuff that’s fun. Yeah, right? They don’t want to be raised in a public housing project and they don’t want to get, you know, shaken down by the cops for driving a nice car, but they sure want black culture. So a lot of slaves just chose to keep the much more fun, pleasurable, free culture over the Puritan one.

But they weren’t allowed to adopt the puritanical culture, which was hilarious. And then, when they were allowed, many of them said no, thank you, and therefore we still have black culture that’s just totally different, totally different than the dominant American culture, which you think required segregation — voluntary. Well, it didn’t require it, but it was like an unintended consequence. And so this is not an argument for segregation or slavery, it’s just an argument that segregation and slavery, unintentionally, accidentally created, fostered that culture. And it’s just one of the beautiful ironies to me. It’s like the long — I call it the long revenge, right? It’s like, yeah, you enslaved some people and you destroyed lives and you tortured people in that, just from the slavery, you know — forget — and people were whipped. As a matter of fact, it’s not as much as we’ve been led to believe, but of course they were whipped. But long term, the descendants of those people, they’re going to take over not just your culture, they’re going to take over the culture of this place that’s going to be called Saudi Arabia.

They’re going to take over this place called South Africa, where they’re even more racist than you crackers, right? They’re going to take over every nook and cranny of the globe with their culture, their culture, which you say is genetically, biologically, eternally inferior to the white man’s culture, is going to win, dominate everything, and that’s exactly what happened.

Speaker uncertainAnd a lot easier to memorize rap lyrics than it is to memorize Shakespeare.

Thaddeus RussellI can’t memorize rap lyrics at all. To me, what is most — I mean, there’s a lot that’s revolutionary about rap, but to me what’s most revolutionary is that it started out as party music, as dance music, as music of the body, and it still is, even though it’s like kind of more repetitive and less about dance, like it causes you to nod your head, and that’s kind of the thing. Whereas, you know, the really good, quote-unquote, hipster rock music is the kind that you think about, right? You think about — or it’s very spiritual. In either case, you stand stock-still while you listen to it, because it’s all about the mind. You know, again, very Western, very Western. And one thing I just want to add about the slaves thing is that, you know, they also brought West Indian culture with them when they were dragged over here, and West Indian culture had a whole bunch of ideas in it that were completely contrary to Puritanism, like, just much, sort of, looser about sexual mores.

They did have sexual mores, but they, like, didn’t believe, for instance, that if a woman had sex before she was married she was doomed to perdition eternally. Like, it just wasn’t — there was not that big of a stigma. And then dancing, right, we know that in West Africa they danced with bent elbows and bent knees and in ways that Europeans considered to be sensual. It wasn’t like twerking and fucking on stage, but in that time, in that context, it was like the cutting edge of the sexual revolution came out of West Africa. Now that was evidence to racists of black inferiority. And what I’ve been trying to say for years now is that isn’t it in fact evidence of black superiority, at least on that very important issue, which is human sexuality, you know, in our bodies, right? Like, invert the racist hierarchy and the whole, all of history becomes turned upside down, too.

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

Leaving libertarianism

KMOSo it occurs to me in retrospect that leading with a question, you know, which is basically pushing play on something that you can talk about at length very easily, is not good for conversation. Sorry about that.

Thaddeus RussellIt’s all good.

KMONo, like I say, I realized retrospectively it was a bad question, but I’m happy to hear the answer. You asked before we started the actual interview, or you mentioned that you’d listened to a couple episodes of my podcast and you couldn’t quite tell where the politics were coming from. And I spent a couple of decades as a libertarian, voting straight-up libertarian. Voted for Ron Paul in a primary once, but the very next primary, or maybe it was the primary before, I vacillated between Ron Paul and Dennis Kucinich. I voted for Gary Johnson. 2020, I voted for the Green candidate, Howie Hawkins. Basically, I mean, for a long time I was libertarian, and then I started to — I think it was a new breed of libertarians. It was a sort of Ben Shapiro libertarians. Their arguments are like nails on a chalkboard to me. I just can’t stand to listen to them. And so I’ve basically distanced myself from libertarianism, but I haven’t embraced anything else.

Thaddeus RussellWhat was the reason for distancing yourself, besides—

KMOIt’s a very insular sort of worldview. I mean, it’s got an answer to everything. And I guess so much has changed in the last two decades, but nothing about libertarian ideology has changed, right? There’s been no adaptation of the ideology to adjust to a very, you know — [wording unclear] world.

Thaddeus RussellYes, sir. So, really good point.

KMOAnd what’s more, I’m not convinced that there is one perfect political system which is always the right move to go in that direction, no matter what your current circumstances. So, all that said, you know, that’s why I’m not a libertarian anymore. I haven’t embraced anything in particular.

Thaddeus RussellHell yeah, man. I’m in deep sympathy with that. I hang out with them because they’re the closest to me ideologically. But I’ve never met a — and a lot of my best friends are libertarians. I have, to this day, not met one who I feel like I completely vibe with, you know, where there’s at least two or three significant differences on major issues — or, and not — and there’s a whole lot of differences just in terms of sensibility with most libertarians. I mean, like, my friends are the ones who, you know, are more like me, sort of culturally. But it’s rough out there, and it’s not — yes, the geekiness, of course, is bad, but it’s just as bad as socialists, it’s just as bad with any political people in general. It’s just all Dungeons & Dragons. It’s good, you know. It’s just that we, fortunately or unfortunately, are interested in politics instead of, like, imaginary orcs and shit, but like it’s the same personality type.

KMOI played Dungeons & Dragons as a kid and well into my 20s.

Thaddeus RussellThere you go. My brother, who’s now 52, still, to this day, plays D&D.

Thaddeus RussellSo my project — actually, well, one of my political projects — so I hang out with them. I found myself — they were the only ones who were interested in me. My book came out in 2010 and they were the only people who paid attention to it at all, and I had never — I didn’t know libertarians. I was a socialist. I was a socialist until just before then, into my 30s. I was, like, a serious socialist, and was born — my parents were socialists, so I was completely a man of the left and then I just — for many reasons we can talk about, if you want — just got revolted by the left on, like, every level and every aspect of it, and was kind of fishing around and just felt like I just had my own set of weird but still sort of inchoate ideas.

I was putting it together in the late ’90s, and then I just stumbled upon — or later, no, 2000s, yeah, 2007 — I stumbled upon Reason magazine. But so, anyway, what I want to do with libertarians is bring a few things to them. It’s a takeover. It’s not a hostile takeover, it’s a friendly takeover, but I am trying a coup. I’m attempting a coup.

Postmodernism and the libertarian mind

KMOWhat do the libertarians need, though? What do you have to offer?

Thaddeus RussellThey need a lot, but the number one, and the big thing that they’re mad at me about, is postmodernism. And you might not like this either, but just sort of the core ideas of relativism and sort of eternal skepticism, you know, about all truth claims, not just, you know, race, gender, of course, but even like, you know, physical world truth claims. Are you really sitting in that room? Is it really, you know, Wednesday at 1:30, blah, blah, blah. I’m down with all that. No problem. Not that I spend a lot of time on those kinds of questions, you know, but like, just hold out some skepticism about everything. In other words, reject all aspects of scientism. And my major problem with libertarians that I did not encounter with socialists — socialists had different, massive personality defects.

The libertarian personality defect for me — and it’s a really big problem — is that they’re just like my dad. They are STEM-related linear thinkers. Oh yeah, they all come out of STEM fields or they’re in something — even if they’re like car mechanics, still, it’s like that kind of engineering mind, right? Very linear. And that’s why postmodernism is just like, what the fuck are you talking about? Of course this is real. Of course, you know, I’m sitting here. They can’t do that kind of abstract thinking that you get in the humanities. Like, the way I think is just standard, totally, in any humanities course at all, basically, right? And so they’re very into, like, abstract, absolute truth. And we just got to make the best argument to get people to the truth.

And then when people see the truth, they’ll all become libertarians. And I’m like, we got to get out of the whole truth business to begin with. It leads us down all kinds of bad paths. You know, one of which was racism. Another was sexism. Another was homophobia. Do I need to keep going? Right. It’s like nationalism, like each one of these truth, biological truth claims ends in really bad places. So get out of that. But it’s also, if you’re really for individual human fucking liberty, freedom, right? Tell them, let’s think that everything’s up for grabs, that there is no eternal truth, that no one has discovered it, that every question is an open question. Everything is an open question. It’s intellectualism too. It’s like open inquiry. That’s really, to me, the core of postmodernism is simply that. And so that’s one thing I want to do with libertarians.

The other is, they need to — well, let’s see, what do they need to do? I mean, there’s a bunch of, like, superstitious shit. Do we want to get — I don’t know how deep in the weeds you want to get into this, but, like, the non-aggression principle, NAP, is just like some voodoo nonsense to me. But it’s also boring. I don’t know.

KMOI’d say don’t get any further into the weeds than — you know, when you have to start explaining things like what is the non-aggression principle, then we should probably steer away from it, because I know my audience doesn’t share my cultural, or my, you know, my formative trajectory.

The anxiety of capitalism

Thaddeus RussellHere’s my other — okay, here’s actually the critique of libertarianism that I do make and that your audience will appreciate. They simply refuse to acknowledge, to my mind, the massive downsides of capitalism. And for me, the biggest by far, and it might even be the only one, but it’s big, is the anxiety of capitalism, of living in a capitalist society, of living in capitalism. Anxiety, terror, panic. I can give you more synonyms. Everybody knows what I’m talking about. Everybody who wasn’t born rich knows what I’m talking about. It’s not a huge deal. It is like an omnipresent deal. It is day and night for most of us operating in a capitalist society. Even those of us who are doing extremely well, even for the winners, have you noticed they work their asses off all the time too. And often it’s — sometimes it’s out of Puritanism, by the way. That’s really important.

And sometimes it’s out of fear because they feel like they could — you know, Barbara Ehrenreich’s book, what was it, Fear of Falling? I can’t stand her, but it was a pretty good argument. Like, she says that the American middle class is dominated by the fear of falling from their position economically, as middle class. And I think that’s really right. As a person who’s basically always been somewhere in the middle class, top or bottom, you know, but sometimes very close, very at the bottom of the middle class, I get it. That’s what I’ve always felt. I’ve always felt that. So, you know, and the people who live paycheck to paycheck, which I have done many times, yeah, even the heroes, the entrepreneurs — I’m now an entrepreneur. Holy fuck, dude, like, the anxiety. And how many CEOs of startups live in their cars, or, like I have recently, in an Airstream, you know? But that’s not the worst of it.

The worst of it is like wondering if you’re going to survive. Until you have kids and then you get to worry vicariously for them. I’ve already had two sons, as I’ve mentioned, age 20, and the other is about to turn 17.

Speaker uncertainOh, cool. What a — well, what is — my kid is 19, so we’re the same, basically. What a shitty time to be a 19-year-old right now who’s not going to college.

Speaker uncertainNo shit. Yeah.

Steve Bannon

KMOOh, I don’t actually want to get off on that. Let me change this — okay — fairly abruptly. I’ve heard you mention that you listen to Steve Bannon pretty obsessively — his War Room podcast.

Thaddeus RussellYeah.

KMOAnd I did until the election and I tuned into it just today to see what he was on about. And it’s the same, yeah, relitigating the election bullshit, which I have absolutely no interest in. But before the election I did enjoy his podcast quite a bit.

Thaddeus RussellOh, yeah. Yeah.

KMOI mean, he would have some intellectuals on, you know, some historian I’d never heard of who’s, you know, framing the big picture in a way that you don’t hear on TV, because they’re kind of right-wing. And he’s got an impressive — you know, to use an old 20th-century term — an impressive Rolodex of people that he can call upon to articulate a worldview. But since the election, I just don’t. I mean, even if it was stolen, at this point it’s not getting overturned. I don’t care. I just don’t care. And, you know, I didn’t vote for Biden. I was not rooting for Biden, but I don’t care at this point.

Thaddeus RussellWell, I don’t care more than I — I care somewhat. But I am pretty much convinced — I’m 95% convinced that it was rigged, or that the irregularities in it did swing it for Biden. I was convinced of that on election night, and listening to Bannon has only solidified [that] a bit. We can get into that if you want, but Steve Bannon, I just think, is a fascinating figure and a fascinating thinker and the first time I heard him speak — remember, he never spoke in public, really, so [wording unclear; heard “he didn’t really know much about, like, how he”] — I didn’t even know what his voice sounded like until — everybody should watch this, if they haven’t — his debate with David Frum in the Munk Debates. This is about three or four years ago, I want to say. He blew David Frum out of the damn water, like, repeatedly.

And he blew my mind. And I was just so impressed. And now here’s the thing. Before I say anything more, let me explain. Steve Bannon — even though I would love to hang out with him, and I bet we could be really good friends — I am — Thad Russell here is for open borders. I’m not for the reform of immigration, I’m for the elimination of all immigration laws. Like, okay, like, so we are on opposite ends of that one. The guy can’t stop talking about the military. Oh my, you know, and how honorable it is to serve in the military. I fucking hate the military and everything having to do with it and I want it to be as small as possible and I want to eliminate it altogether if that is possible. But, like, if I were king, the military budget would be reduced by about 90% by tomorrow. Sucker. So, I mean, he’s gonna hate my guts on that one. Family—

Thaddeus RussellWhat’s that? [Wording unclear; heard “you disagree with you”]

Thaddeus RussellNo, I know. Yeah. Yeah. I’m really good friends with Doug Lain. He’s a fricking communist, but we have great conversations.

KMOMe too.

Thaddeus RussellYeah. Well, Doug has supplied me with — like, five or six guests of my show are Zero Books authors. And Daniel Coffeen is one of our instructors.

KMOYeah. Oh, cool. It’s brilliant. It’s the same vector too. You know, Doug writes to me, he says new book out, you know, and it’s a form letter. I mean, we’re friends and he’s sending me a form letter. I can see it’s a form letter.

Thaddeus RussellThat’s awesome. No, I love Zero Books, basically. Yeah. You know, and, like, family — talks about family all the time. Family — well, you know, Thaddeus Russell is just, like, one giant constant screed against the nuclear family. That’s like what my career has been about for, like, more than a decade — in large part, I should say. So, I mean, I could go on, right? It’s like, we have obvious — oh, trade, holy Christ. Like, I think his trade policy is absolutely idiotic and stupid, and that, and [wording unclear; heard “pop in national”] and nationalism. I hate nationalism. Nationalism has killed more people than any other ideology ever. It’s the worst. It’s the worst set of ideas in human history. Clearly. It’s 200 years old. And that’s when all the people got killed by machine guns. I mean, so — but his critique, my God, his critique of the dominant culture, the ruling class, first of all, his identification of who the ruling class is, I think is spot on, which for me is essentially progressives or the descendants of progressives.

You know, it’s got various iterations, but it’s essentially that lineage from Woodrow Wilson to the president [wording unclear; possibly “present”] runs the show. And that includes the establishment Republicans. They’ve been like junior partners in the building and maintenance of the American empire and all that means for more than a century now. Right. And then the corporatism, and he uses that term, which like blows my mind. It’s like, oh my God, someone who says corporatism, which is like a really important concept. And it’s very academic but it’s so important. Which is just, it’s essentially the merger or the cooperation of big capital and the government in the management, co-management, of society, you know, which is obviously what we have, and it’s also the basis of fascism, right? But you know, this is Bannon talking. Bannon uses the term working class. He says working class. No one in the media says working — The New York Times doesn’t say working class.

MSNBC doesn’t say working class. They think they’re all liberal, left, fucking radicals. Steve Bannon talks about working class. He talks about the Republican Party becoming the working-class party. I mean, that’s his, that’s his rant, that’s his mantra. He’s constantly talking about — and he talks about working-class brown and black people, mostly. He doesn’t even talk about white people half the time.

KMOWell, when you talk about the working class, you’re talking about a lot of brown and black people.

Thaddeus RussellThat’s right, exactly. But he’s aware of that. He doesn’t — you know, he doesn’t pretend that that’s white people. He knows exactly who it is. But [wording unclear; heard “he”] of him in The New York Times and on CNN is that he’s, you know, white nationalist and white supremacist and, you know, is working to return, you know, to bring back slavery. I mean, the criticisms I’ve heard of Steve Bannon from the people who really hate him are so unhinged and uninformed.

KMOYeah, like, your caricature of him doesn’t even reach in for a few details, for authenticity’s sake. There’s just nothing. There’s no correspondence between the man you claim to be criticizing and the image that you’re criticizing.

Thaddeus RussellYeah, it’s incredible. Yeah, listen to one episode of War Room, you know, before you go off on your — seriously, listen to 20 minutes of him talking in — I don’t care, any video. Pull it up. And he also — he really amazes me in his ability. He’s speaking to the left all the time. Have you heard his long interview — it’s like an hour plus — with Sargon of Akkad?

KMONo.

Thaddeus RussellYou know who Sargon is?

KMOYes, I do.

Thaddeus RussellYeah, yeah. So he’s got a long, well, you know, high-production-value interview with Steve Bannon and it’s definitely worth your time.

KMOI will check that out.

Thaddeus RussellYeah, totally, yeah, he’s fascinating. He’s totally really talking to the left. He’s seducing the left. He’s trying to seduce the left. If you listen to — he’s [wording unclear; heard “caught on the wall”] on his War Room show. He’s constantly defending the left and he’ll say nice things about AOC and, like, of course, everybody in the studio with him and his entire audience are just like allergic to these people. But he’s like, no, no, no, no. He’s like, no, no, you understand, see, she’s a waitress. I identify with that, and that’s who the MAGA people are, too. That’s the working class. Americans are getting shafted by the establishment. See, she represents that. That’s what Steve Bannon will say. You know, I mean, he’s just a fascinating dude. And there’s just no one in America who has had these ideas. I mean, it’s an amalgam of ideas that all come from American political tradition, although they’ve always been sort of on the fringe.

He’s the first to put them all together into one tight, coherent package, and he won the presidency with it. I mean, it’s incredible. But people, it’s an ideology that’s very coherent, very intelligent. I’m on the polar opposite of it on, you know, half the issues at least, but I respect the shit out of it. And most importantly, it is now taken over the Republican Party. So this is the future. This is half of the American political future. And what do people do? They choose to ignore it or caricature it in the ways you were talking about in such a way that you may as well be ignoring it. And so it’s going to keep hitting them by surprise and they won’t know what the hell this is, but they’re not going away. Yeah.

The case for Pax Americana

KMOSo I’ve spent, I guess, more than the last year, I drifted away from podcasts because I just really started listening to a lot of audio books, which is interesting because, you know, podcasts can take you off on some weird ramble into very strange worldviews. And if you’re mostly listening to audio books that you find on Audible, which are from big publishers, that brings you back into the sort of mainstream consensus reality for a bit. But I really got into listening to books by George Friedman and Peter Zeihan, two, you know, geopolitics guys. And I can channel them and, you know, make a case for empire. They make a case for the American empire and its current — like, the U.S. has something on the order of 700 military bases around the [wording unclear; heard “U.S.”], and there’s — you know, there’s military bases and then there’s lily pads around the world.

A military base around the world is an American town, like, with Walmart and Pizza Hut and Taco Bell and plumbing that’s up to code here, and they’re all over the world. So, you know, that’s a base. But then you have lily pads, which is just a little military installation which facilitates America’s global strike capability. But we’re not in any countries where the government wants us out, right? Right. The U.S. is a global empire, and it is in a semi-hostile but also interdependent relationship with China and Russia, who together make up a sort of fractious, unstable empire. But it’s not clear to me that — I mean, I’ve spent my life saying that America is an empire, thinking that’s a bad thing. You know, America and American imperialism bad, we need to stop. But when you have this structure — 700-something bases, and they don’t even — the Pentagon doesn’t know exactly how many bases—

Thaddeus RussellIs that true?

KMOThey say that there’s a researcher, a guy named David¹ — oh, I can’t remember.

Thaddeus RussellYeah, he has a whole website. I know this guy. He has a whole website about it. It’s awesome. David’s list. And the Pentagon actually, in trying to audit itself, goes to him. You know, it uses his list.

KMOWow. [Wording unclear; heard “they’re their own internalists”] But wow, here is this enormous military apparatus which has physical infrastructure in the world, all over the world. You know, you can say it’s dominating, but it’s also providing some form of stability. There is a Pax Americana, definitely keeping the oceans open for shipping. Anybody who wants to can ship their stuff anywhere they want to.

Speaker uncertainAsk a Somali pirate if that’s true.

Speaker uncertainThat’s right. You know—

Speaker uncertainYeah, well, the Somali pirates are actually tolerated for a long time.

KMOAnd that’s because — I’m saying, but what happened, of course, the Navy SEALs took them out, right?

Thaddeus RussellAs they will.

KMOThat’s case in point. That’s all. But prior to Pax Americana, that wasn’t the case. You couldn’t necessarily be dependent on oil from Saudi Arabia if you’re China.

Thaddeus RussellCorrect.

KMOAnd it had to go through the Malacca Strait. So here is this entity, which is all over the world. It is in cooperative collaboration with governments all over the world. It’s not obvious to me that if the U.S. just decided tomorrow, we’re not going to be an empire anymore. We’re bringing all the troops home. NATO, we don’t want anything to do with it. We’re just going to be a normal country again. It’s not clear to me that that’s going to improve the situation. It certainly doesn’t seem like it’s going to, you know, prevent violence. I don’t think it would be a more peaceful world if the United States just threw in the towel and said, okay, troops, everybody come home. Be mechanics or whatever, man.

An anti-war activist argues for empire

Thaddeus RussellYeah, KMO. Let me say, look, this is the issue. This is the most important issue for me. It always has been my entire life. I used to have nightmares about being in a war when I was a teenager and that’s when I became an anti-war activist and I have not changed my mind on that at all. When I was a socialist, I was anti-war. Now, when I’m an anti-socialist, I’m anti-war. It’s what I care about. Most people’s position on this, until now, determined essentially whether I would be friends with them politically. But I want to say that you deserve a fucking medal for what you just said, because it’s never said in my world. And that means my world got very insular on the most important question and issue for me. And that is very unhealthy because you become fucking dumb.

Look at the left. Have you noticed? Because they control all the cultural institutions, they never have to argue with people who fundamentally disagree with them. That’s like academics, right? Put them in front of like anybody who disagrees with them in public, they’ll melt. So anyway, I don’t want that to happen for me on the most — certainly, I’m not — the most important issue. Well, it’s the most important issue for everybody [wording unclear], but it certainly is for me. And you made several really good arguments for the American empire. And you know what? I could add about four more.

KMOGo ahead.

Thaddeus RussellWe could. And I’m really grateful for you, for — I wish you had said this an hour ago, goddamn it. Much better show, instead of letting me ramble on about slavery. God. Yeah, I’m writing a whole book against the American empire, dude, like it’s gonna be published by Grove Atlantic. I’m almost done with it. I spent the last 10 years writing a whole book against the American empire. But you’ve got to inhabit the other side’s mind fully. You’ve got to respect it. Fully respect it, because it doesn’t come from the devil. It comes from people who really believe this is the best way to order the world. It comes from people who really believe that human beings’ lives will be improved by this, that this is better than other options. It doesn’t — right? So you got to take it seriously. And there’s a whole intellectual tradition. There’s multiple intellectual traditions, serious ones, defending imperialism. So thank you.

KMOI’m not saying that Pax Americana is the best possible arrangement. I’m just saying it is the existing arrangement, and doesn’t necessarily follow that, you know, dismantling it immediately will improve the situation.

Thaddeus RussellYeah, I’m saying, like, what you’re saying right now, it’s like advocating communism in the 1950s. It’s just really cool. Like, in my world, right, which is a really big world, you know, even the Democratic Party will not, like, explicitly say what you just said. They do what you say, but they won’t say it. Actually, in the AOC Squad they do a little bit [wording unclear], but that’s about it. Anyway, all right. Yeah. How do you — well, okay, here’s the big evidence for this: the last 60 years. Boom. Like, explain that, motherfuckers, you know? Explain that without the United States as the global hegemon in your answer. Yeah, in your explanation, you’re going to give it any credit? Zero credit? Seriously. I mean, yeah, I think, again, as someone who’s anti-imperialist to the bone, that it is probable that we have had fewer deaths, military deaths, by a lot, than ever, I think, in the last 60 years.

KMOHere’s a thought experiment. Suppose you’re going to be magically transported to some other place on this planet, pretty much random. You have almost no control, you have, you know, one button you can push. You can either be transported to a country that has a U.S. military base in it, or one—

Thaddeus RussellRight. Great.

KMOWhat do you want?

Thaddeus RussellExactly, totally. Hell yeah, hell yeah. I say this all the time. I’ve been saying this for years. Okay, again, like I’ve said this at anti-war rallies and shit, this does not go over well. But it’s so obviously true. Before 2003, your electricity in Baghdad, you couldn’t depend on it. Like you and I might have this conversation tonight, you know, or we might not, if the electricity’s out, like you couldn’t even plan your fucking life because the electricity kept going out all the time. Right. Brownouts, blackouts, just like daily occurrences in Baghdad and the goddamn capital of, you know, a big country. Well, guess what? The electrical grid, as I understand it now, is on par with American cities. And guess who built every scrap of that? The United States of goddamn America. Uncle Sam. White boys from Kansas flown over to build that shit for you all, and now you live much better. I mean, that is a massive improvement in quality of life.

Can you imagine Americans here, hello, with, you know, almost no problems with the power supply, addicted to the internet? Can you imagine living in — think about that improvement. That’s what the United States of America, the military did. Boom. Fuckers.

KMONow, I don’t want to, you know, wax rhapsodic about the empire. I would want to separate the CIA and the intelligence services from the rest of the American apparatus. ’Cause I can easily say, yeah, the CIA, they’ve been really, really shitty. I mean, overthrowing democratically [elected] governments all over the world.

Speaker uncertainNo, no, no. How about Iran?

Thaddeus RussellYou know what? The last 60 years of stability, that’s not even the best argument for the American empire, although it’s a huge argument for it. The best argument is that, look what else happened during those 60 years when the U.S. was the global hegemon. Communism disintegrated. The Soviet Union ceased to exist. Something that was totally unthinkable when I was a teenager. Unthinkable that it would just fall apart like that. And the United States fought the communists everywhere, and they were everywhere. There were communists — capital C, meaning directed by Joe Stalin and Khrushchev and Brezhnev and the Kremlin — Kremlin-directed capital-C communists in every country on earth. Every country on earth had a capital-C communist party taking directions directly from the Kremlin, and the United States fought every one, sometimes directly, sometimes by paying mercenaries, sometimes by paying the government that was fighting them, whatever, funding death squads, right-wing death squads.

When I was growing up as a communist in Berkeley, we thought those were the worst people on earth, right-wing death squads in El Salvador, blah, blah, blah. You know what? I was just rethinking that the other night. I’m like, if I’m living in El Salvador in, oh, say like 1981, when they’re about one inch from being taken over by a straight-up Stalinist communist party, Stalinist, the CP, the F, what were they called? FSLN, FM² — the group in El Salvador, the Marxists that were about to take over. They were explicitly hardcore Marxist-Leninists. They weren’t gonna play around. And I was living there and I had a family and friends and a whole life there. I would have taken up a fucking machine gun, bro. Yes. Hell yes. And I’d have killed as many of those commies as possible. And you’re gonna tell me you wouldn’t?

And I’ll bet you that even a lot of these fucking Brooklyn communists would do the same if they were actually faced with that circumstance. They wouldn’t want to live under that in that kind of society. So the United States fought that fight everywhere. Every — I can’t believe I’m making this argument in public — every corner of the globe did it in some way or another, in some serious way involving guns, right? Not just rhetoric. They had someone shooting guns at commies. Everywhere there were commies. Okay. And international communism in the 20th century is the worst regime. It’s the worst idea. It’s the worst movement. That’s the word. It’s the worst political movement in the history of the earth. It is definitely worse than Nazism because the Nazis only wanted to control Eastern Europe. Communists want to control the universe. There.

All right. Vote GOP. [Wording unclear; heard “bring Bill Crystal ring”] Read Bill Kristol. Yeah. Do you want to do the other side now or just want to leave it at that? Do you want to do that?

Closing: the long revenge as soft power

KMOAll right, that was Thaddeus Russell. Now, that wasn’t the very end of the conversation, but for the purposes of putting a podcast together in just a minute, I’m gonna pretend that it was. But the actual end of the conversation can be heard in the next episode of the C-Realm Vault podcast. That’ll be C-Realm Vault podcast episode number 400, big round number there. But I think the portions that you’ve just heard stand together as a pretty comprehensive whole, and the bit that comes right after the part you just heard, we change the subject. So you’ve heard the conclusion of that portion of the conversation. But for those of you who don’t already know, but who are interested in hearing the rest of the conversation, well, the C-Realm Vault podcast is a second subscriber-only podcast that I do, and it is these days only available through Patreon. My Patreon account is Patreon.com slash KMO. And again, if you’re going there specifically for the episode with Thaddeus Russell, it’s episode number 400, which doesn’t actually exist at the time that I’m recording these words, but I’ll get it put together in the next day or two and post it and it’ll be available.

All right, now just pretending that the portion of the conversation that you just heard was the end of the conversation, I want to tie together the first part of the conversation and the last part of the conversation. We started off talking about Thaddeus’s thesis that he has developed over many years, and included in a book that he has published, that, say, compared to a poor white laborer in the South, it wasn’t so bad being a slave. Your basic necessities were provided, and yeah, you had to work for free, but slaves, you know, throughout history have learned just exactly how little work they can do without getting a beating.

And that’s their default. And more importantly, I think from Thaddeus’s perspective, even the poorest of, you know, poor, scratching-in-the-dirt subsistence farmers, many of them Irish, in the antebellum South, no matter what little piece of the monetary or real estate, or political pie you controlled as a white laborer, you still had to bear the full weight of the Victorian puritanical sexual mores, you know, no dancing. And if you have to dance, no bending of the knees and elbows, and God forbid, you should gyrate your hips. And so as Ben and I were driving back from Maine, we were actually listening to the audiobook of A Renegade History of the United States. And we were listening to the chapters on slavery. That’s as far as we got before he had to drop me off and keep driving. And there’s a lot in there about the minstrel shows.

And really, you know, the minstrel shows are presented these days by people who have never had any experience of them as just, you know, unabashed expressions of hatred for black people. When, in fact, or at least in Thaddeus Russell’s argumentation in the book, the life of a black slave was something that, you know, the struggling working poor or, you know, even the burgeoning middle class could fantasize about. It was a low-stress lifestyle, and it was a lifestyle marked by this really sort of easygoing, creative expression in music and in dance and in speech. And I think that’s reflected even today. I mean, I grew up in the 80s, and I didn’t listen to a lot of rap in the 80s. But at one point, a friend of mine found a cassette tape copy just on the ground out by Lake Tacoma [spelling unverified] near Kansas City of N.W.A., Straight Outta Compton.

And we started listening to that. And at first we were listening to it to mock it, but then the rhythms of it infected us. And then for me in particular, particularly on the song “Fuck tha Police,” just the strong, you know, angry young male energy and the fuck you to authority energy in that song really won me over. And soon after I got into Ice-T and, you know, then more, I guess you might say respectable forms of hip hop, like Disposable Heroes of Hiphoprisy, which was very thoughtful, powerful and, you know, I was won over and I have a lot of rap lyrics permanently inscribed in my consciousness. I can produce long stretches of them. And many of them are replete with a word that I, as a white man in the 21st century, am not allowed to say under any circumstances, unless I’m just rapping along to, you know, that music when I’m alone in my apartment, which I sometimes do.

But in the service of connecting the first part of the conversation with the last part of the conversation, that culture, you know, that African-American infused culture, which really is a product of the servitude, you know, the institution of Southern slavery and the fact that black slaves were not expected to adhere to white sexual morality. It gave birth to that culture, that culture which has infected the world. It is the soft power component in Pax Americana. You know, how does the U.S. rule the world? Yeah, we have 700 military bases around the world. We have, what, like 10 or 11 aircraft carrier groups. We rule the seas uncontested. Now, when we actually go into a country, you know, and put boots on the ground to try to demonstrate our might, things kind of fall apart. You know, you might think Vietnam or Afghanistan or Iraq. But man, on the oceans and in the air, look out, son.

But that’s not the only thing people complain about when they talk about American imperialism. They also talk about our cultural imperialism. And where would that be without hip hop, without rock and roll, and all the other musical genres which really owe their dynamism to that black cultural gift, to the culture that Thaddeus Russell was talking about. As he describes it, that extremely liberatory culture that America gets to say is its own. All right.

Closing: Bannon, Frum and the Munk Debate

KMOA few other notes from the conversation that I jotted down as I was doing the editing. And there’s very little editing done here. Shortening pauses, taking out a few ums and errs, most of what was recorded is what you just heard. Except for like the first six minutes when we were recording, but Thaddeus didn’t know we were recording. So I cut out everything that was said before “Hey, by the way, we’re recording now. Whose show are we recording for?” That hadn’t been worked out at the beginning of the conversation. But we talked about Steve Bannon. Steve Bannon has a podcast called War Room. And I’ve talked to people, you know, obviously not necessarily leftist, I think more just sort of normie liberals, but the ones who, you know, absolutely abide by the linguistic law laid down by the blue check marks on Twitter, you know, and folks in HR departments, in big corporations and in universities.

And they despise, they despise Steve Bannon. But I’ve never heard anything from any of them, which indicates to me that they know anything about what Steve Bannon has to say. All they know is that he’s associated with Trump and he’s kind of ugly. And they can just assume the rest. And what they tend to assume is he’s a white supremacist. Well, Thaddeus, in the conversation, he mentioned a debate between David Frum and Steve Bannon. Now, if you don’t know David Frum, all you really need to know is that he’s a Canadian-born Republican who was a Never Trumper. So any never-Trump Republican over the past five years has been just celebrated and embraced by mainstream liberals. And when I say mainstream, I’m mostly talking about, you know, the editorial decision makers in American corporate news media. David Frum is one such person, never-Trump Republican. Well, there’s a debate that’s held.

It’s called the Munk Debate, and it’s held in Toronto, Canada. And a few years back, I’m not sure if like 2017, 2018, somewhere in there, that debate was between David Frum and Steve Bannon. And to my regret, I did not write down the exact proposition that they were debating, but it didn’t mention Donald Trump. It was something along the lines of, is populism a rising force that will dominate politics in the near future and displace the institutions of liberalism? Something along those lines.³ And of course, here’s Canadian-born, never-Trump Republican David Frum on stage in Toronto. The easiest thing for him to do is to make it about Trump and just get the audience to hate Trump. And, you know, after 90 minutes or so of the audience feeling like they hate Trump, if you ask them who won the debate, of course, they’re going to say it’s the guy who hates Trump.

And this was so reprehensible, utterly reprehensible. In his opening statement, before he made any sort of argument whatsoever, David Frum invokes Nazism and the burning of Jews to lay the groundwork for how he’s setting up his opponent, how you should view his opponent. And during Steve Bannon’s opening remarks, a woman up on the balcony, she unfurled a banner accusing Steve Bannon of being a white supremacist. And then she just screamed and shouted until she was escorted out. But the moderator said, ma’am, I think, you know, the audience here has come to hear these two men debate. We would like for the proceedings to continue. Would you please desist and we’ll give you lots of time, you know, but if you don’t eventually quiet down, we will ask you to leave. And she just kept screaming. And you know, you’ve heard this a million times.

She’s not amplified. You know, she’s not miked. She’s just out in the audience and she’s screaming, you know, she’s screaming in her political vernacular. It’s very familiar stuff to her, but to anybody else who isn’t intimately involved in that subculture, it’s just a bunch of gibberish. But eventually she gets led out, but they leave the banner hanging over the balcony, the banner accusing Steve Bannon of being a white supremacist. They leave it there. Now, they also took a poll saying, how many of you believe this proposition? You know, the one that I said earlier about populism is rising to displace liberalism. And I forget the exact number, but they came up with the number. You know, they tabulated the votes and there was a number. And then there was a second question. How open are you to being persuaded on this issue? You know, so scale of one to 10.

So at the low end, my mind is made up. You know, there’s no room whatsoever for me to re-examine this issue. My mind is a brick. And in the middle is, I don’t know, maybe, you know, and then the far end is, yeah, I will give it due consideration and make my judgment, you know, or revisit my opinion at the end. And the audience scored, I think, around a seven on that. How persuadable are you? And then by the end, well, let me not jump to the end. So then it begins. And of course, David Frum’s just making it about Trump. But the first thing that, you know, in his introductory remarks, Steve Bannon said, populism, you’re going to get populism. We’re going to have populism. The only question is, will it be the nationalist populism of people like Donald Trump, or will it be the socialist populism of people like Bernie Sanders and AOC?

And David Frum never once, in the next hour and a half, he never once acknowledged that there could be any such thing as socialist populism, or a left-wing populism, or a progressive populism. In his presentation, populism was just a synonym for MAGA. It was just a synonym for Donald Trump and his deplorable white supremacist followers. And this is where Steve Bannon kind of fell down, because repeatedly, David Frum could have used all of his time, which he regularly did, just criticizing Trump, Trump, Trump, Trump, Trump. Steve Bannon could have stood up and just said, yeah, well, this debate, the proposition that we’re debating here isn’t, is Donald Trump a good guy? It’s, is populism on the rise and will it displace liberalism? Which would render everything that David Frum had said in his previous go irrelevant. But this is where Bannon fell down a bit, even though he’d already been kicked out of the White House, even though Donald Trump had taken him on.

And Donald Trump was running for president in 2016, basically ran out of money. Robert Mercer, the billionaire, Robert Mercer came to him and said, hey, I’ll be happy to fund your campaign. Here’s Steve Bannon. He’s going to craft your campaign messaging from here on out. And that’s when we got populist Trump. And I think if Steve Bannon had been running the re-election campaign, I mean, Donald Trump, it was so close. He nearly won anyway. But I think, you know, if there’d been another round of stimulus, if he’d been even remotely competent on his handling of the pandemic, or if he’d had Steve Bannon crafting the messaging again in 2020, we would have President Trump today. So I imagine some of you are quite glad that Steve Bannon was not around to craft Trump’s campaign messaging in 2020. But I guess he was still loyal to Trump.

But Bannon took the bait repeatedly and failed to mention that, hey, this isn’t a debate about whether or not Trump’s a good guy. It’s a debate about populism. And there’s two kinds of populism, one of which has nothing to do with Donald Trump. There were many opportunities for him to just pull the rug right out from Frum’s feet by saying just that. And he forgot to. But he got back to it in his closing remarks. And so at the end of the debate, they polled the audience again. And again, I don’t have the exact numbers committed to memory, and I don’t have the notebook that I actually wrote them down in handy. But this very liberal Canadian audience, after having listened to these two men talk for like 90 minutes, more of them thought that populism was on the rise at the end than at the beginning.

Steve Bannon had changed some minds in that auditorium where repeatedly, the audience indicated that they thought Steve Bannon was a white supremacist and that populism just meant white supremacy. There was a sizable portion of the audience through their jeering and their booing or their laughter indicated that they would not even entertain the idea that there was a non-racist political component to populism. And yet, when they voted at the end, a significant percentage of the audience who said they did not think populism was on the rise at the beginning decided that it was by the end.⁴ Which is a credit to Steve Bannon. But I’ll repeat what I said in the interview. You know, when I tune into the War Room these days, they give so much time to people in various states and districts describing, you know, the irregularities they have found in the voting, and I just don’t care.

I just don’t care. That ship has sailed. Again, I didn’t vote for the guy. I wasn’t rooting for the guy. But Joe Biden is the president of the United States of America. And it doesn’t matter what any, you know, self-appointed expert investigator says about the irregularities at this polling place or that polling place. Here we are more than six months later. It doesn’t matter. That ship has sailed. Steve Bannon, please go back to the War Room that you were doing before the election. Because this post-election, you know, paranoid sleuthing — I guess you know what you’re doing. It serves some purpose, but I’m not interested.

Closing: GEBB and a Clubhouse invitation

KMOAll right, well, I’m going to stop talking now, except, of course, to pimp my projects, like the GEBB. That’s G-E-B-B, stands for Greater Earth Betterment Bureau webcomic. It can be found at gebb.io. It’s a weekly webcomic. I do a page a week, and when enough of them have accumulated to fill up a comic book, we do print comic books, which you can buy either in digital or paper form. The paper form, you have to go to the GEBB website, gebb.io. The electronic forms, both Kindle and Comixology, are available on Amazon.com. Go there and type G-E-B-B comic to find them. And finally, this isn’t even a project that’s actually started yet. This is just something cooking in my head, but I would like some co-collaborators on this one. I have recently started participating on Clubhouse, and there’s really only one regular session that I attend. It is on Wednesdays, and it is a politics and science fiction discussion group.

The person who introduced it to me was a guest here on the podcast a couple episodes back. That’s Professor Nick Kiersey. And he’s there every Wednesday. And so are a number of very smart, very knowledgeable people who all love science fiction. And the conversations are absolutely great. So I’m really digging the whole Clubhouse interface. And I would love to put together a C-Realm podcast or something that would be of interest to C-Realm podcast listeners, but a regular discussion event, you know, regularly scheduled recurring discussion space on Clubhouse. If you would be interested in participating in that, see, what I don’t want to do is just start it and then sit there alone in an empty space talking to myself. I definitely need to have two or three people committed to being there. And then, you know, a small discussion with just two or three people.

I mean, that’s basically a podcast, right? It’s like a panel discussion on a podcast. That’s great. And then as more and more people trickle in, you know, maybe we’ll get some people participating that don’t know the podcast, you know, and they’re bringing in very, very different perspectives to spice things up and, you know, put us on the trail of new things to investigate and discuss. If you would be interested in that, send me an email or contact me on Twitter or whatever. My email address is K-M-O at C-Realm. That’s R-E-A-L-M dot com. Again, K-M-O at C-Realm dot com. So if you already have a Clubhouse account, then we can connect. But if you don’t and you’d like to participate, send me an email. I think I’ve got four invites right now that I can extend. And it’s recently been opened up to Android users.

For the past year, it has been iOS only. The Android app is not the equivalent of the iOS app. We don’t have all the bells and whistles and privileges and powers of iPhone users yet, but still it gets you through the door and it’s a cool format, I have to say, and I’m anxious to make more extensive use of it. So if you’d like to join me in that, let me know. All right, that is all for this episode of the C-Realm podcast. I will talk to you again pretty soon. So until you next hear my voice, please stay well.

Editorial notes

1. KMO does not recall the surname. The description fits David Vine (American University), author of Base Nation (2015), whose public list of U.S. bases abroad was used by a U.S. Army-funded study in place of the Pentagon’s own list (Quincy Institute brief, September 2021). The identification is editorial; the name is not said in the recording. ↩

2. Thaddeus is searching for the name. The Salvadoran guerrilla coalition was the FMLN (Farabundo Martí National Liberation Front, formed 1980); the FSLN was Nicaragua’s Sandinista front. His wording is kept as spoken. ↩

3. The Munk Debate between Steve Bannon (pro) and David Frum (con) was held in Toronto on November 2, 2018. The resolution was “Be it resolved, the future of Western politics is populist, not liberal” (Munk Debates website). ↩

4. KMO’s recollection is kept as spoken. According to Munk Debates, a result announced on the night, which suggested Bannon had moved the audience, was a technical error; the official vote was 28% in favour and 72% opposed both before and after the debate, a draw. The organisers said the figure announced in error came from the second opening poll, in which 57% said they were open to changing their minds. ↩