America’s Descent Into Madness, w/ Chapo’s Felix Biederman & Rania Khalek

hello everyone i'm rania khalik and this is dispatches america's going bananas two mass shootings on the fourth of july as if that's a celebration of our new national identity supreme court decisions making america great again by bringing us back to the 1950s a failing economy a failed foreign policy in the twilight of our empire we're not going gentle into that good night our rage against the dying of the light is a global temper tantrum from his perch at the chapo trap house podcast felix biederman has been an acerbic observer and commentator and i'm so excited to have him on today felix welcome hey thank you for having me thank you so much for joining me i'm excited to have you on and i have like so much i want to talk to you about obviously a huge fan of the show i'm sure a lot of our viewers at breakthrough news are also huge fans of the show so let's just get right into it i think a good place to start is um you know why let's start with what happened recently with like all these mass shootings over july 4th i want to get your take on this because you know i've lived outside of the us for a few years now and i'm not there to really understand culturally what's taking place i don't get why america has so many of these mass shootings i don't know if it's just like lonely losers and as you know like i live in lebanon where practically every house here has an ak-47 in it you can like see guys on scooters with pistols tucked into their pants and you see these like former and current militiamen you know whether it's your average like fascist lebanese forces guy or like you're you know whatever ml guy you see them um like with their pistols touched in their pants they have access to rpgs heavy machine guns grenades and yet you know apart from some like road rage or like criminal violence in the sort of impoverished periphery it's like much safer i feel like in beirut than the us and nobody's worried about mass shootings or school shootings and even in like syria iraq or yemen where there's horrible wars or has been horrible wars and like isis and al-qaeda the violence was at least easier to understand you know you had al qaeda like blowing up shias because of a certain ideology or like armies targeting insurgents because there's a war but there was never any of this kind of violence without a logic to it even if it was evil so what's what's your take on what's going on here well um it's interesting um i don't know if you've read uh mark ames book uh going postal about uh good one you know oh yeah yeah it's it's a great book and it's about sort of the older iterations of mass shootings uh going postal for you know people are younger people don't know uh it referred to there are these well-publicized incidents of postal workers going into their place of employment or former places of employment usually after they were fired and killing their co-workers i mean it was it was um statistically postal workers were less likely to kill their co-workers than other americans but it was like at the time a uniquely american thing you know you're just something in your life goes wrong saying your job goes wrong you respond by killing your co-workers maybe killing your boss sometimes but you know definitely killing a few people who had nothing to do with it um and what people have said is that in the past uh past a couple decades that the the profile of the mass shooter like the age has gone down uh it's it's not so much that you go in and kill your co-workers though that still happens and you know we're seeing more and more young people do it and i i don't think there's any like singular pithy reason you could put on why this is such an american thing i think there are a bunch of reasons and i think um none of them completely make everyone happy yeah but i do think you know one thing is that we i don't know i it's a uni it's a unique expression of a lack of belief in a future for a place that um is typically and has typically been for the past like 100 or so way or way more than that years in a logically optimistic place that's what people have always said about americans is that there's just like this insane optimism and now there's less of a popular shared concept of the future uh i i think in addition to that like yeah there's a there there's access but as he stated there are countries where you know there's equal access or even greater access to destructive weapons you don't see this exact uh type of thing um i mean it's it's hard to it's hard to look at what the american empire has done you know over time and and not not think you know does the frontier come home or not this is affect people's behavior or not and of course you know there's a billion other things i think we have a unique type of mentally ill young man right yeah yeah in america you know i actually i actually real quick just like to kind of because of what you said about american empire or whatever i thought this was really interesting every time there's like a mass shooting some obnoxious politician has to make this reference where it's like that belongs over there not here and i just want to show one of those obnoxious politicians saying that i'm going to show this video real quick here we go so today i will go home and hug my babies a little tighter and gratefulness that they are safe but i think about the babies and the families who lost moms and dads and grandparents today and we must and must do more i just listened to the sound of that gunfire from one of the um videos that was captured and let me tell you that the last time i heard a weapon with that capacity firing that rapidly on the fourth of july was iraq it was not the united states of america we can and we should and we will do better yeah lovely i love that i love that it's like well actually like you heard those weapons in iraq because you invaded iraq and i like that she mentioned on the fourth of july too like i don't know just is on the fourth of july we're like american soldiers just like firing their machine guns i don't know um but yeah i just remember what you said about like sort of empire coming home i just thought that was a good thing to add there but you also mentioned this kind of loneliness basically and it's interesting because the international red cross had the statement during covet about loneliness it's like this loneliness crisis and the world health organization has given loneliness to code they recognize it as like a concern the uk has a ministry of loneliness the japanese do too um they even have a word for people who die alone and undiscovered which is just really sad so is this something about capitalism but then it also seems like only america has regular mass shootings again like it's not happening in the uk and japan so i don't know how do you make sense of that well i think i think there's all it's all a similar thing that happens in i mean not just the west i mean i i guess you can expand west to mean anything but i mean it does you know this happens in uh this happens in south korea this happens in japan that there is a sense of like general isolative loneliness and uh apathy or non-belief in a future and it manifests with people in different ways in some like america has a weirdly low suicide rate compared to like rok or a lot of uh you know vaunted nordic countries a much higher rate of this seemingly um but i i think there is all the same loneliness in a lot of these countries i think it's hyper accentuated in america just because of our uniquely american things of how weird we are among countries our wealth and size of not really having a safety net of already having more of a cultural individualism than a lot of these places um i the problem is like you know what do you do um yeah i i've i've i've said a bunch of times that i think um phones as they have existed in the past 10 or 10 to 15 years are among one of the worst things for the general human experience um yeah i i you know i'm old enough now where at least when i was a kid i remember kind of how it was before phones and you you want to be cautious right because it's like you don't want to you don't want to give a broad uh a broad interpretation of what the world is like based on what it was your tree of life memories of from when you were a child but it was markedly different you know even in the late 90s and early 2000s than it is now um i and i i don't know that you can ever really put the toothpaste back in the tube that's one way to yeah i mean i i mean that's i don't even know i don't even know if that would be enough at this point if you had uh incredibly strict regulations over who could have yeah yeah you could make one that there's like too many there's too many yeah it's like i mean it's like the gun buyback stuff like yeah how do you even buy that that's the only way you can do it is to just give people money to get their guns because they have nothing else there's also like these in-cell guys and losers who go on shooting sprees and that kind of reminds me of the sort of lone wolf uh al-qaeda isis attack guy in the west you know where they have these similar backgrounds of like social alienation and rejection but that has an ideology but like in the west incellism is not an ideology well i mean i i think it's like kind of the same ideology in some ways i mean like i mean um john dolan has drawn the line between wahhabism and sort of american protestants uh calvinist attitudes even if like even if a shooter is you know doing whatever try hard thing of pretending he's a pagan or whatever it's still you're still an american in the same way that like you know every american who cares about politics is inescapably kind of a liberal whether you like it or not um if you're if you're an american uh and especially like an american kind of right-winger you're a little bit of a protestant whether you're you say you're a catholic or you say you're a pagan or whatever you say you are um even i feel like i am a little bit like it's like a cultural thing like i like you know because like you go to other countries and for example i know this is maybe a silly example but people are not that nudity is not like a huge deal in other parts of the world but like i have this very like puritanical like instinctive reaction to it where i'm like ah yeah i don't like no like in a locker room right like it's like a really big deal for me to like ah so it's it is a cultural sort of indoctrination in the us of having that mentality yeah you can't avoid it you can't avoid it uh you're you're gonna have these uh things that you're a little bit weirder about than uh someone from any other country might be um for the rest of your life um you you choose what to do with that of course but it's i don't know it's it's in the same way where you know an american will either say like oh i'm a i'm an integralist you know like i i think there should be like a catholic theocracy or i'll even go as far to say there should be a catholic monarchy or you know i'm a maoist but at the end of the day they're talking about horse race politics because they're also liberals you know we all yeah we all are we're all we're all liberals we're all protestants for all we're all these things you but you you have to choose what that means to you you have to choose whether you go mad fighting that or you you learn to live with your limitations and accept what the rest of your life means yeah one of my really good friends here in lebanon always says like to be an american leftist you have to be crazy like you have to kind of be a little insane uh because of kind of what you just said where you have to go mad to fight that sort of internal like liberalism that you're that's forced down your throat just through american culture but then of course like thinking about that tammy duckworth clip like do you also think it has something to do with our cowboy foreign policy this guy peter gowan described it as neo-liberal cosmopolitan and others have called it a liberal internationalist regime change under u.s command like this american philosophy that sees foreign governments as good or bad and its criteria are like free market and liberal democratic principles of course but the bad ones need to be overthrown by like international action and then americans just kind of take this for granted that we can just go over into the next town and shoot up the bad guys like they have this they like take that mentality that we have internationally and like kind of turn it inwards and they think they're like defeating the bads i don't know yeah yeah i um you know i think we both agree that culture is downstream from politics not vice versa people like to uh pause it uh but yeah no i mean i don't i don't see how a country like ours could uh kill you know possibly two million possibly more in iraq and then characterize it just as a silly mistake a tragic silly mistake where the the greatest tragedy of that of course is that you know perhaps perhaps we made some american soldiers sad along the way um i i don't see how you can do something like that and then not impart on to people and especially young people uh sort of worthlessness of human life and in nihilism and even if you sweep it under the rug and you don't talk about it like we don't talk about a lot of these things it has that effect and it affects every other part of the culture and when already lonely and uh unstable people with easy access to weapons see that um there are only a few places to go from there unfortunately it's like the michael moore sort of bowling for columbine argument that's been around for a while but like it never really you know makes it into mainstream coverage of this stuff but i want to i want to shift to a bit of a different topic because you know chapo trap house has been kind of like framed as the podcast of the dsa i know you're not the podcast of the dsa um but it's kind of viewed that way right like in a lot of dsa people really like listen to chapo and yeah there's a connection there right so i just thought you know as the podcast of the dsa or one of the podcasters at the dsa you know it sometimes seems like the american left only exists online especially because of the way it's portrayed and like battling over identity politics on social media and stuff like that but on the other hand you know dsa and other grassroots organizations have actually made some headway and progress i think at the local level uh while also producing people some of the bigger names of course being people like ilhan omar or rashida slayer of alexandria ocasio-cortez and to some extent you know maybe we can include like ayanna presley and jamal bowman um i know there's i know that's a bit controversial with jamal bowman we don't have to really go into that yeah but like i'm curious like what what you think about the sort of maybe you know you don't have to talk about the american left altogether but maybe even just like the dsa left like the way it's portrayed versus what it actually does because sometimes i think that like the left gets crapped on so much when it actually does accomplish some things in certain parts of the country i'm not saying we should praise it and the left is winning because it's certainly not but i don't think it's really fair to just like for the left to just be portrayed like the way tucker carlson sees it for example yeah yeah i i you know i'm i'm of many minds of it and i think if there is one singular thing that i could will people to stop doing people in dsa specifically to not do anymore ever again it would be to have like intrachapter and uh just intro organization fights in public i think that that that is that is the that is the most discouraging thing i see um i think it discourages people more than anything else um i i i i know a lot of people both in dsa and psl and one thing that i always thought psl did incredibly right is that they have very strict rules on how you conduct yourself as a member speaking your capacity as a member online uh i know not everyone agrees with both organizations on everything but i think we can agree that fighting over every single little granular inter-organization thing online in public and performing in that way is discouraging to everybody but uh you know then to also be fair i think so many of dsa sp in particular their successes are unheralded just because it is it is uh it is like an easy way like get matrix like make fun of this like dsa like soy guy archetype and it's like yeah sure that guy exists like a guy who wears a denim vest with too many buttons and uh you know it says y'all despite growing up in new england but uh that guy exists but then they're also like you know there are annoying guys in everything if you're an american who like is invested in politics in any way you are as annoying as that guy we're all him and we're all we're all the people at school board meetings and we're every where every unbearable person in this country put together um they uh you know dsa had a huge amount of success um surprising amount of success in manhattan recently in los angeles los angeles is particularly interesting because uh you know like five years ago or so people talked about the dsa there is it was you know the basket case of dsas in major american cities um and local politics you don't want to it's not the be all and end all and there are particularly in america uh very discouraging looming things that um even if you want in the top 20 major american cities um you wouldn't yet be be able to begin to take on but i i i i think there is a lot more to uh to the story than the the uh what people have done in the past two years i don't know i i bernie losing was a big thing and it is it was a humiliating loss and i feel like people should really think about it really think about what it means to lose from the front runner position like that think about the way in which you lost uh think about the types of people uh the campaign hired and how it was run but then again i also think that a lot of people have shown themselves as uh you know they they they were really into this when they thought they were gonna win yeah and they could not really take the humiliation of losing which you know for them unfortunately i have to say you know welcome to the left in this country it's not good it's not good that it has lost this much but it is um it's going to be an uphill battle maybe it always will be who knows it always has been and i mean yeah yeah there's a time when the like i mean the left is you know i'm it's easy to be hard on the american left and i am hard on the american left especially because i don't live in the u.s anymore and it's easier to be from abroad but at the same time it's like there have been concerted efforts to destroy it for decades um and it's worked sometimes and what's left of it is always like just sort of like climbing over like broken glass and it's hard it's really hard but you know on that note i'm curious if you have anything to say about the uk because like while of course they may have excommunicated jeremy corbyn they also kind of have their own squad of sorts um with parliament members like you know zara sultana uh bel ribeiro and absana begum i'm curious if you think that's the beginning of something or the end of something i don't even know like i don't know how well versed you feel about you know british politics in that sense but if you have any comments on that it's it's it's hard to say i um i don't i certainly like don't know well enough to give you a prediction uh i will say the thing that i've always thought has been strange about the uk in the in the past like 12 or 15 years is uh how much it seems that they want to be like us politically maybe the only every every country wants to you know be like us culturally just because it's you know we're the dominant one it's we i mean we could get into a whole thing over how american culture is created but um maybe the only country i've seen of its type where it's like no we want exactly what they have politically they want to jam like they want to jam like a type of like stupid american horse race politics into a parliamentary system in a way that's uh hilarious but um i don't know it's hard to call with them right it's hard it's hard to call anything with them i i don't i don't feel like i can confidently predict anything that will happen with them because they're they're you know on one hand they have these things that are so much healthier than america right whether it is just having like a parliamentary system or it's having like some semblance of a safety net obviously not nowhere near what it should be but you know at least having nationalized health care which i think is you know a far far and beyond way better than medicare for all you know especially i would think like especially in america you would just have to nationalize this whole thing mm-hmm i don't yeah i don't say you just do insurance in this country where every everything is just you know at best rent-seeking behavior um but then they are you know we talked about the effects that um the crimes of an empire have on people i mean what do you think what do you think that does for them uh because they were you know the empire yeah they were the empire for a long time before we took the mantle you could argue that they uh you know they're they're in some way singularly responsible for how the world is today yeah america is actually a product of the uk for the most part and european seller colonialism and all that fun stuff but then moving back to like us domestic politics there have been of course past decisions when the supreme court changed the law in controversial ways that were meant to keep up to date with changes in society um almost as if it were like following trends or at least it was like in tandem with the trends but with the recent dobbs decision on abortion it seems like the supreme court has become it doesn't seem it has become this like reactionary force just supporting an ideological agenda that you know most americans actually reject and i think it's even worse because a lot of these judges were appointed by presidents who lost the popular vote so like it just feels like we've entered this bizarre new era with especially the recent decisions that came through and now they're talking about like maybe doing stuff you know to limit contraception access to contraception and undoing gay marriage i mean like what does this mean for i guess what does it say about america that like we have this court that's been taken over by these right-wing ideological psychopaths who actually are trying to turn back the clock they sort of seem like the heirs of like of segregationists well i think with a lot of those um uh you know you're talking about like the how pr people previously uh conceive of uh what a supreme court landmark decision is the ones that people remember the one that the ones that like grant people freedoms and rights um you know that that is that was one function of the court in one version of america where the court you know we'll see a changing society and to keep you know grant itself continuing legitimacy we'll go okay yeah fine you can do that um i think now you know if i had to pick some meaning from the tea leaves over this last uh spate of decisions it would tell me that we're at the end of something what what that means i don't really know i i don't know what comes next i i don't know what the end exactly looks like but you know seeing this like the supreme court has always been like a reactionary institution right but it's especially dobbs it strikes me as acting in the way that like you know republican state legislatures do where with social issues you always have to up the ante right you always have to you always have to get more aggressive you always have to get like more restrictive and find more and more punitive things because it's never going to be enough you're never you're never going to satisfy like any socially conservative lobby or voting base where they're like okay we did it we're done you got it forever it's because it's it's they they they're always gonna need something to go after and seeing the court act like that like to going above and beyond with that is i mean it that does tell me we're at the end of something and it does tell me that like you know i don't think i don't think biden is any spring chicken nor is anyone on the incredibly shallow democratic bench but it is the end of some type of legitimacy for the supreme court and what that means i don't i don't i don't really know again because it's like they could be illegitimate in the minds of 65 to even 75 percent of americans over the course of 20 years and it could mean nothing electorally it could be nothing like early for 30 years you know but i know it's crazy yeah it's crazy i think no i think you're right i want to go back to the issue of like democrats and how spineless and useless they are but i really i you know i want to ask you about something kind of completely unrelated which is you know you're into mma you even like you even did like a multi-part documentary on mma and you know we don't associate the so-called like dirtbag left with the sort of alpha male brutality of mixed martial arts and the reason i raised this is because it brings me to another subject and i mean this in the nicest way possible and i'm half joking but i'm a little serious how come leftists aren't into like the workout exercise culture like i and i know you i know you're really into like you know gym stuff and the mma stuff and you know i've done crossfit and i mean our rivals go to crossfit gyms like our ideological rivals they go to crossfit gyms crossfit is really dominated by right-wingers um and then like the left kind of like goes to yoga classes which is fine like yoga can make you super strong i'm not trying to like say anything negative about yoga um but how are we going to get ready for like the coming civil war if the left isn't into broadway workout culture no i'm joking but you know i i and a little bit i kind of mean like i kind of mean in the sense culturally speaking like why is it that the left isn't doesn't have a place in that culture at all i think unfortunately the idea i mean first of all i'm going to say that i think the best reason to participate in any type of physical fitness uh especially weight training any type of combat sports is not the idea that you know you're going to unleash it on someone that you're finally going to be able to stand up for yeah no i know i know you are that's what i i i think like the the way that you're gonna get the most out of that the way that your skills are gonna progress the most and the way that you as a person will develop the most is if you're you know you're not doing it for outward validation or some hypothetical combat situation but for your own self-improvement for your own self-development of sort of pushing the limits of what you are able to do expanding the possibilities of your of your physical and mental threshold of just developing a skill on a linear path and the ways that that can make you improve at other things in life um unfortunately though when i say all those those things they sound like incredibly conservative to a lot of people i'm sure it is sad but i think that type of thinking is just it is unfortunately kind of thought of as conservatives a conservative um there are an increasing amount of people like on the left training and doing these things but i i it doesn't it seems to be a more popular thing on the right still yeah it's unfortunate yeah i think that also probably goes to like the whole right valuing like the idea of like men or men you know yeah manly and uh and hulk and like testosterone and um and yeah i mean that might not to say that right all the writers like that like ben shapiro i don't think is that kind of person yeah but they definitely uh go ahead go ahead i mean like the thing is though like america doesn't have like a fighting culture yeah like this is like a country of talkers and if it does get past talking you know you like your life gets ruined every bad thing that can happen happens to you you're like i'll show them and then you'd kill like 12 people who you've never met in your life like this isn't a country where like you directly confront whoever did whatever to you you know yeah uh it's definitely not like a fist fight culture um i you know talk about talk about similar talk about parallels to england i mean they're way more of a they're way more of a like a walk up on somebody directly like have a fistfight with them culture despite what we may think of them that's just we're really not like that you know we're like passive aggressive kind of even though we're our culture's extremely aggressive like internationally it's like if you look at american movies it's always like i'm going to show them by being super successful and like becoming a billionaire and then like making myself really hot so like like the nerd becomes like a sexy guy when he grows up and like all the girls want him and then he goes back to his high school bullies and he's like you know ha ha who's got the last laugh it's just not like it's not like as much as people like want it to be it's like weirdly not a direct confrontation culture yeah yeah and i would i would argue like getting getting less so i mean people people think it's getting more so because you're just you're seeing every instance of it happening because you know everyone records everything it's the only exciting thing that they'll see for years is two people having a freak out at each other in public but like videos of public freakouts and arguments and fights in america are they have a particular weirdness and awkwardness to them just because it is so foreign for us i think yeah so i i i would yeah yeah that that's kind of like why i don't really i don't like love direct comparisons of america to like weimar germany or like um predictions of a second civil war because it's like there's so much effort that goes into that that i at this moment like can't see americans do like people love nazi germany comparisons and like you know yeah we've uh we've said like fourth reich on this show but referring to the american empire i think at home what equivalent the only equivalent that america has to the sa would be like police officers right yeah i can't like immigration enforcement yeah yeah but outside of police who are you know paid like 200 000 a year to be in this role i cannot picture a volunteer force of like a million plus americans and if you scout for population versus like 1920s germany it would be like with like 10 million americans or something of like a million like 10 million plus hardened american uh war veterans like uh like ideological and disciplined i don't do you see that i don't i sure yeah i don't know i go back and forth because like you know i i agree with what you're saying but on the other hand like these really smart people will like make these like there's like a slew of books and articles in the last few years especially because of the trump phenomenon and that whole era and the january 6 who are like these people who are like worried about the risk of a civil war in america and we're like such a divided society full of weapons and mistrust of the state and media and the news and it makes us paranoid and we have like racism and religious extremism and social polarization and poverty and on and on and on and like there are political scientists like uh like barbara walter wrote a book called how the civil war start and then you have the journalists like stephen march wrote a book called the next civil war and like they speculate on these possibilities and then you also have like steven simon who was this national security council official in the obama and clinton white houses who wrote an article earlier this year that was called we need to think the unthinkable about our country where he talks about like how a year after this is i'm quoting him a year after the january 6th storming of the capital the united states seems perhaps even more alarmingly fractious than and divided and then he says that the media has created this like separate domestic reality for millions of americans and that reminds him of what he like or actually reminds me what he says reminds me about like the former yugoslavia and of divided societies in the middle east and also like i think to a certain degree like i think sometimes we don't realize like how quickly things can descend into like chaos and neighborhoods fighting each other because i've just seen it i've seen it happen in like the middle east and that's mostly when like the state collapses or becomes very weak and can't like enforce anything um so i guess anything's possible in the us but i think it would take something bigger than like rioting at the capitol like it would have to be like a huge crisis like hurricane katrina times a lot across the country yeah no yeah right never say never and like that like all those conditions are certainly possible in our lifetimes where there is a precipitous decline in american quality of life like a you know a line-shaped graph like there's no more next-day delivery uh that that there is um a standard of life that is like unthinkable for middle-class americans currently right i think if that happens like yeah all bets are off i think though i'm not sure you would really see like a two-sided civil war i think you would see something incredibly weird because it's so hard to sustain any popular or big movement in america without it immediately fracturing just because everyone wants to be the star everyone is so you know infected by that that again all bets are off so who who knows what that would look like i i i i hope not to find out but maybe we will keep you'd have like fractured you have like different militias fracturing it's kind of like what happened in syria you have like different militias fracturing more and more because like and america is even worse because it's so individualistic and like you said everyone wants to be a star and wants to be the leader of the militia so yeah it would be i you know there's some people i know here who would love to see a civil war in america i i don't want to see that but they're the accelerationist types who are like hahaha let them you know let them have to deal with what they sow but i'm totally like i am i like disagree with that right but i am like completely sympathetic to it i am i'm sympathetic to like watching watching all of this for the past like at least decade uh you know reading reading history reading history of american politics it's hard to do all that and not like not like get so discouraged you're like all right let's let's see how it goes let's see let's try it yeah i know i mean i i i get it i don't want it but like i definitely get feeling that way well also you know speaking of 2024 which is not that far away from now and speaking of horse race politics who's your money on for the democratic candidate like honestly you know there's we get at bernie's with brandon like at this point yeah you really really absolutely like how would that how would that how would they have to like pull a rabbit out of a hat i feel like to make him they like i don't even know how many how much more can they inject in joe biden to like keep him awake he just one last summer they just won the summer of speed balls they needed like one summer of like whatever like whatever concoction has killed like eight snl cast members one summer one set like okay um we're not getting heroin like we used to from afghanistan but no you know you can you can you can get have you ever seen the movie drugstore cowboys no that sounds like an awesome title though it's it's a great movie but um i'm just similar to that movie they'll get like a vial of dilaudid and there's actually like medicinal cocaine you can get and they'll just we'll just shoot old joe full of that and honestly like man even if they did it now i say coin toss if they did it now really yeah absolutely absolutely yeah because he's so unpopular right now and i think he's like he made such but he made a huge mistake with like you know the inflation so bad and the sanctions on russia and like the war in ukraine and then doing nothing in response to like any of the multiple crises that exist and it just seems like but also you're right like there's no one else like who else are they gonna run like they're not gonna run kamala harris who like nobody even knows exists anymore they are not going to i am democrat they're no democrat like if a democrat was like brave and competent or not even brave just like ambitious and competent enough to be like no i'm gonna i'm gonna primary you and this is how i'm gonna do it and you know you do you know fold fold at the table then they wouldn't be democrats right yeah none of that none of them are like that no one's yeah no one in this country is like that none of them are like that and i just think that like brandon sucks uh the sanctions are the sanctions are like one of the funniest things i've seen in a life of watching american foreign policy because it's just like it's this policy that has been totally uncontested forever now like definitely for the last 30 years um where sanctions were just accepted as this like good liberal thing you do that maintains order but punishes dictators and leaves people mostly unharmed and as it turns out like they they don't really do that and it's also turning out they don't really like work the moment you try to do them against like a an economy with like some size on a large scale it ends up just like backfiring on you so bad because no one no one has had to like defend these or like think about how they would actually work for the past like maybe ever i don't know if they ever have but definitely not in the last 30 years um brandon sucks at everything else it's like a like completely like uninspiring uncreative set of people um i they had they had like two months of knowing that roe v wade would be overturned and they just he just like just shuffled out there and they're like yeah this sucks yeah even deborah missing is really mad at them like yeah but it's not even it's like like they know mass shootings are going to happen all the time and it's like they're getting worse at speaking about them it's like it's like they're bored with this it's like vote harder vote harder but like i don't but it's i don't know it's just it's such a weird polarized country and america you really can like punish americans and like get them to obey that i could see him like keeping like most of that coalition and it's not like when you think you think he'd win so you like if you if i think it's a coin toss i think at this point it's a coin okay i don't know like i just feel like i could see trump right obviously trump's gonna run again unless like he dies right because that you know because bad people live a long time i don't think he's gonna die so um i if it is between the two of them i could see trump having like desantis as his vp which he would be really smart if he did nah no way you don't think so really yeah but like it would be smart it would be okay well i just dropped some maybe yeah yeah exactly like you know you're going who are we talking about here that's a good point he would be if he did it would be like i think it would be a winning ticket because also like the whole country is rigged in their favor anyway like it you know it's everything's stacked against democrats and democrats are also so uninspiring and they suck that like i don't know it could it is possible and that's the other thing too is like it's almost like do democrats want to lose because it helps them raise money like they seem incapable of responding to anything and i don't know if it's because they're actually incapable i think it's a little bit that but also like the when you have when you have fundraising emails that come out right when row was overturned after you knew for like five weeks how else am i supposed to interpret that other than you think this is good for you politically in a weird way right yeah and i i mean we've said on the show like being disappointed in democrats screwing up the response to this is you know it's to fundamentally not understand them it is a fundraising operation and it is a way of paying consultants and ad buyers and producers um you know i don't think in every condition they're you know completely cheering for these things to happen but i think at the very least when something like this does happen the first thing they think about is how much money they're gonna raise off of it clearly right that's very democratic to do but yeah you know and then speaking of like their i think you know the war in ukraine is gonna be this everything's boomerang like the boomerang effect from the war in ukraine i think is also really going to hurt them i don't know how much that will affect 2024 but it might especially because of the sort of catastrophic impact it's having on the economy but what i do think is interesting about ukraine is like you have these experts people like there's this one guy michael kaufman who's this kind of like creature of the so-called dc blob he's the director of russia studies at the center for naval analysis and a senior fellow at the center for new american security great organization really lovely he's but he's regularly interviewed on like the war on the rocks podcast and he's sort of like the go-to guy for analysis on russia so i wouldn't like compare him to someone like charles lister because at least kaufman is like able to speak the relevant languages and is like a trained military expert but anyway like back in april which is or two but it was like almost two months out yeah it was two months after the award started he tweeted and i'm quoting his tweet that the decisive period of the war was the first three weeks maybe even the first four days whatever happens in this next phase the russian military is likely to exhaust its offensive potential in the near term and the reason i note that is because that tweet has not aged well and now we're in july and in the last few weeks we've seen the russians make slow but you know inexorable progress and we've seen more and more like articles discussing the poor morale of ukrainian forces and their desperate situation like eating one potato a day and like dying like hundreds a day so this is not to gloat or anything obviously because people are suffering and like dying in war is terrible um but it does remind me of syria when in the first months after the russian intervention back in 2015 there were predictions that they would get bogged down and the syrian sands and yet then they helped the regime retake east aleppo east palmyra and southern syria from insurgents so like how long before people get sick of ukrainians and take down the blue and yellow flags and we see articles critical of zelinski who went from like clown to hero because i just don't see a situation where ukraine can win and we all know they can't i think people already checked no one i i think like people have already checked out completely yeah yeah no well i did like in record time in record time but both because it like it became clear that like yeah this is like an awful brutal war with like no actual feel-good moments that like maybe it's not going exactly as well for the ukrainians as uh you know it's been portrayed in american media um not to say that it's going like uniformly amazing for russians because it's it's not but to hear people tell it uh over this time you know surrender on the russian side is imminent and that just is not the case um the losses on the ukrainian side daily seem to be i mean i i just i don't know how they could keep it up you know i mean obviously all bets are off when you're invaded all bets are off but it seems unsustainable um i i i would i would hope that maybe one consequence of there being less of a fervor on the american side would be that it it becomes more attractive for there to be a political solution whether that's like giving up parts of the east or whatever it is i don't know um i would hope that um i don't know that'll be the case um if if i had to guess i would unfortunately guess that there will be a lot more uh just pointless death and sorrow well if the past is any is any like a hint to what could happen like in any in any war and also like in a proxy war kind of situation where you're just like fueling fueling it to keep going indefinitely it's just like you're gonna see the call just such complete shattering of society it's never gonna be able to be put back together um yeah i do have to say though it's been interesting to like watch it happen from from here in the middle east because it's like people here don't care um and the europeans and the americans the europeans more than the americans the europeans are like why like why don't they care like why don't they care about the ukrainians and it's like dude people here are just happy it's not happening here like there's i mean it's like war sad and like yeah that sucks there's also some super pro russia people because like anywhere in the global south there's people rooting against anything affiliated with the us so this i would imagine in like lebanon especially it would be you know people who are yeah even but even like the pro-american people in lebanon like don't care like they're just like i literally don't care about this war i don't also they want to be friends with russia because russia's an important country like no one wants to like alienate themselves from the world's biggest producer of fertilizer and like oil and grain like you know what i mean so even like even in iraq it's the same like any rock has super pro american politicians and parties they don't care like they're just like well it's not happening here and also like i don't know we don't care about blue-eyed and blond-haired people it's like the opposite of the way that europeans feel so it's just a little funny to watch like americans be like why like why does why is the global south like not taking a stronger position on this it's like really guys it is it is hilarious for like any westerner to ask that yeah just go yeah go ahead and stick your neck out for like the one side that's always had your back always had everyone's back no matter what especially in this part of the world yeah but yeah no i would imagine i would imagine uh for them it would be nice to have a proxy war where you're not involved for once yeah that's literally the attitude it's like thank god and it just reminds me of that one guy i can't remember i think he might have been congolese and i'm so sorry for getting that wrong but i remember seeing a video of him he was like trying to get out of ukraine and the the reporter was like why don't you stay and like fight for the ukrainians and he was like i'm african like i don't why would i do that like why would i do that and the guy was like so the reporter was like but why like why wouldn't you it was just a really funny back and forth that kind of just showed how dumb people from the west can be one of those um one of those like news agencies that's um i forgot which one it's called uh begins with a v but uh you know one of those things america no no it's not voice of america it's um it became one of those like eastern european ones that became very popular in the early days of the war uh but they were they were saying like they they put a poll out that were like don't you agree that the african students should stay and fight and earn their visas and it's like jesus [ __ ] christ they're really feeling themselves they're really just to openly say it like that jesus [ __ ] christ sorry the arrogance the arrogance the arrogance uh sorry to all the children watching yeah so i actually you know i think it's interesting too what's happened in the u.s is you have this like sort of group on the far right the sort of like marjorie taylor green types who've taken these positions against the war in ukraine against the you know 40 billion dollars to ukraine kind of like you know you also see people like her talking against uh against the extradition of julian assange i think this is super opportunistic like i think if trump was in charge you would not see those statements from someone like her i think it's just purely like anti-bidenism um but i do see some people and i want to clarify on the online left because i think that's like an important distinction to make but some people on the online left are like wow like marjorie taylor green has a really good position on this and like tom massey is actually like really good on this and i'm not i'm not saying like you shouldn't be happy that politicians are saying those things but i kind of feel like there's this creeping like obs that creeping idea of like oh like maybe there are people on the right we can work with and i just i personally feel like those people are not people you can work with like maybe people in congress can work with them on certain bills right but i do not think marjorie taylor green has like your interest at heart in any way or like freedom at heart in any way and i think she would turn immediately if a republican was president and support all of those policies yeah i will say that like just between the two i believe massey way more than green yeah yeah no they're both like they're both like lunatics but he's like there's some consistency to his world view and you can point to you could point the votes he's made like under republican presidents or like bucking the party in in some regard with margie marjorie teller green it's more like yeah this is a celebrity this is the new type of politician the type of which we're mostly gonna see for at least the near future um i i am sympathetic to people who get excited about that because there is a sense of there being no bench on the left and there being a vacuum i think there there are some there are some people to feel encouraged about but it certainly is not easy to feel that way and in a vacuum you know you look for anybody in any proximity to any power who is talking about assange and that's very few people that is very few people happily uh luckily like uh illinois has talked about it um but it is it's not a popular thing to talk about no it's really unfortunate and it is really it is really sad that marjorie taylor green is like one of a handful of people if even a handful might be too many who's like even saying anything and it does say a lot but it's also kind of like there is this notion of like from the sort of like steve bannon right of like oh we can co-opt people on the left to like support like the sort of disaffected bernie sanders person and i don't think it works i actually don't think that's working at all but on the online left there's like maybe a little corner where it might have worked a little bit but it is what it is i just have a couple more questions for you because i know i've taken quite a bit of your time but i wanted to see like get your take on the obsession with cancel culture so like a few years ago i think i i was like kind of always reacting to the way identity politics was being used like i think when i started out on the left i probably was a bit i wasn't identitarian like that was kind of like my entrance into the left and so i was possible not to be in america exactly and then i kind of like became very anti that and like went hardcore like no class and class is the issue like i think class is obviously the main most important issue that like brings us all together in more ways than anything else can but i also think the other issues still matter but i went through that phase where i was like yeah like you know screw identity politics it's like very like very rigid black i was very black and white about it but now like looking back at like both of those versions of myself i feel like there's this like obsession with first of all blaming identity politics for everything bad that's happening like i think identity politics is definitely a problem especially the way that liberals use it but i don't think it's responsible for turning people right-wing i don't know that cancel culture is responsible for turning people right wing and i feel like nowadays it's like it's like it's like every comedian just talks about cancel culture in like a cheap way everyone talks about it and actually climbs the ladder like career-wise by talking about it and by pushing taboo topics and then claiming cancel cultures after them and i kind of wanted to get your take on this because i feel like you and i kind of both be you know became publicly political around the same time and saw these sort of like different phases of how identity politics was getting treated and i just wonder like how do you see the sort of evolution of how important those issues are and do you think they're turning people right wing or do you think that's like a stupid way of looking at it uh i mean it's it's hard to say sometimes it's a very futile exercise to try to get inside anyone's mind uh you know i um i would say i've i've i've uh been on uh been on all sides of this issue you know i've you know um like like you said if you came into the you know like online left politics in like 2013 2014 you were you just like associated like a certain type of like identitarianism with the left just because you didn't really see a lot a lot of other ways of doing it in america if you were of a certain age um i you know i i think we have about the same opinions there but um with like cancer culture like whatever you want to call it specifically um just me personally i look i've i've been on the side of it where it is all i can think about and i all i can think about is like how unfair it is to be like taken out of context and for like whatever thing you said to be made like a whole thing uh forever i've i've been on the side of it of sort of trying to preemptively tailor what i say to the point where it's no one's going to be able to do that to me which is you know as fetal and exercise is only talking about this uh and only focusing on this um just as far as like entertainment i think that like unfortunately the best approach you can take to it take with it as like an entertainer is except that like people are going to be unfair to you and then other times you are going to say things that um yeah you know you can't really defend in good taste except for the fact that you are entertaining that it's it's funny um but the only way the only way to like keep doing it and not go insane is just to not really think about it one way or the other to not completely alter yourself or alter your your content to either preemptively censor yourself or apologize but then also neither neither do that nor uh only talk about it only talk about how stupid it is only talk about how [ __ ] it is and you know there a lot of it is like stupid and a lot of it is [ __ ] but i'm sorry like no one no one wants to hear anyone with the easiest job in the world complain about their job no matter how unfair whatever thing happened is podcast the easiest job in the world i think so yeah yeah i think internet entertainer is like it's up there but uh you know i um yeah it's i people talk about it less now because i think like summer of 2020 was so insane that i think it blew out of a lot of a lot of people's receptors right because it's you saw this like map potential mass movement this like very popular thing that could unite all types of people and was uh this thing that it seemed like more of a potentiator for like a type of social change that we had not seen in like decades decades and decades but then it just got filtered through the stupid way that we produced consumed media and it just became like all right um uh like gushers apologizes for this ad that we did in 1999. we're taking we're taking this episode of friends out of circulation we're doing this and it just it got filtered into like celebrity apologies and like intro media stuff that no one cares about and i think it exhausted everyone and exhausted everyone from like a type of hyper cynical uh corporate uh media interpretation and entertainment industry interpretation of a type of identity politics and we've certainly seen the backlash to that um i don't know where we go from that though yeah that's real by the way gushers oh my god i think it's poison but i loved those when i was a kid yeah they were really good they're so good i haven't had them i've i haven't had gushers in like 20 years but i definitely ate too many of them and probably got cavities from it but they've got that is true though like every every brand was apologizing and it was like so disingenuous and also it's like that performative aspect of just of just like taking like that easy route of dealing with major social issues without anything actually changing anything just like systemically uh is also what exhausts people and i also like when people like people love these like um these writing these articles in like 2017 and 2018 they're like the cancer culture is real and it's good you know but it all that always struck me as like incredibly stupid because i don't know it's just like if you if the only way if the only way that like you're going to get like entertainers that you're already saying you like don't care about one way or the other to like say the right thing is just for fear of like people getting mad at them then they're gonna drop that the second that people won't get mad at them for it right you know right like no one could be offended by anything like any entertainer says obviously like yeah no everyone has different tastes and i've you know i've said a ton of things where if people get mad at me for him it's like yeah i get it i completely get it not everyone wants to read like a joke where i'm hanging out with hitler at like wednesday but yeah just i just always thought that was counterproductive and stupid and it hadn't it it was i mean talk about american just an over emphasis on how we view uh entertainers and media not just entertainers i mean i've i know i i know people who've like who's who've had their careers like destroyed over literally being canceled over like a tweet or a comment like they made in jest or and it's it's definitely unfair and i agree it's like a it is a problem is it the biggest problem in america i don't think so oh no absolutely absolutely not right and there's this like attempt to frame it as though it is the preeminent issue like the biggest issue is like cancel culture and it's like okay come on like let's be serious here like okay yeah it's a problem it's a cultural problem like i don't want people's careers to be destroyed because they tweeted something 15 years ago that was like unbecoming um or because they said something like in in you know passing that maybe they shouldn't have said like it depends on a case-by-case thing whatever but like i don't think that this is like i feel like it gets so much attention like i used to be the one giving it a lot of attention like i've been on all sides of it i've been i feel like i've been canceled before like i think you've probably been canceled before like we've all experienced it and it really sucks and at the same time it's like dude like i don't know like we're also canceling entire countries like you know there's like i'm right next door to syria and like people can't you know fill up their cars with gasoline and they have no electricity because like we've canceled their economy because they're a leader we don't like their leader like it's really messed up it's like that i feel like that's a bigger issue than like you know and we can give them both attention that those those things can have attention i just feel like one has you know is a bigger deal yeah it's weird in america because it's always gonna like swing back and forth right yeah like i i feel like when i was younger the thing that like most typically like you know someone would get like an entertainer would get their career screwed over on is like pressure from the right very generally obviously this wasn't always the case um i feel like we're kind of going back to that a little bit yeah in the past like two years um i think i think it's just it's gonna be part of one of those things that's just like one of the dances in american life yeah i certainly i certainly choose my words like about certain topics i like choose what i say you know and it's annoying but again not the biggest deal in the world but i think that's a really good point you make is like yeah because rush limbaugh or sean hannity had a lot of power in the 90s and early 2000s bill o'reilly to like not only get people canceled but to get people killed in the case of bill o'reilly like there was actually an abortion doctor who was like shot uh that's a big way to cancel someone um the last thing i wanted to ask you about is it's not really so much of a question i think it's amazing that you know chapo has been able to sustain itself for so long um and like has like this really cool built-in audience and i think it's a real challenge on the left because you have this like right it's so easy to be a right-wing like podcaster a right-wing entertainer a right-wing you know youtube host um a right-wing journalist because there's so much money in it like there's so much money in right-wing media that you know you can have like two million youtube subscribers tomorrow plus those people are online like that audience is there um whereas on the left i feel like it's so much harder because we don't have like a bunch of oligarchs funding us we have to like rely on viewers and listeners and readers and it's usually people who care about these issues because maybe they materially like are affected by them and don't have a million dollars or don't have 100 million dollars or even like enough money to give even a small amount so i guess i don't know if you even have an answer to this but my question to you is what's the secret sauce of chapo as our good friend ned price would say the secrets or was it jake sullivan they're the same to me i think that was ned price it was i believe it was ned price yeah secret sauce what's the secret sauce um i don't know it's hard it's it's really hard to say um i think like i think one thing that helps is um just over the time that we've done it um you know at the start i honestly did not know matt and will quite as well as i knew a lot of other people a lot of other friends i had online and over time you know we were friends but over time that kind of that grew and we bonded to each other more and the fact that there is there's that that there's a genuine connection between the the host of the show and that we enjoy doing it and that we are still able to like find new things and find new angles and find new things that like make each other laugh and entertain each other that's honestly it i mean it it it doesn't hurt that we are uh so much we we're enumerated so much greater than like anyone anyone else in this space we've been very lucky with that that doesn't hurt does it hurt our enjoyment and motivation but uh you know it's just the fact that we we like doing it and that we we think that there are new stones to unturn always there's always there's always going to be like a new stupid thing that happens in american politics there's always going to be like a new way to make your friends laugh um that's really it that's really it yeah there there's a there's a a joy in making things even if it's something as like low effort as a you know loosely planned comedy podcast right yeah no but i think it's really cool and you get it's a good point like you guys it it's fun to listen to you guys because you give that it's like you're just sitting around talking and you're saying a lot you're being funny but also saying like a lot of what people think and it feels like you're there it's like that kind of just sitting around with your friends experience that i don't think we have a lot on the left like especially culturally like so much of that exists about like about celebrity gossip and about like stupid things that don't matter so it's yeah that exists about left-wing politics um because i don't really think there's anything else like it and you have to have that sort of cultural production that like helps people understand the world in a way they can relate to but also like in a way that's entertaining and doesn't feel like you're you know receiving a history lecture from a like a professor in a college course i will say i will say that i think um people are going to surpass i think people already have i think it's it's i think hassan uh you know i think hassan has surpassed us in profile and and audience size and you know i think i think hassan is he's also like a singular singular person in that space because i consider him an incredibly talented broadcaster like unbelievably so clearly i mean he has a massive audience like he has a massive audience but it's just like man i could not i could not do that eight hours a day he just done like every day it's insane it's insane but he can just he's able he's able to capture people's attention and hold it for seemingly like not trying that hard and i know that like a lot of work goes into it but like he does make it look very effortless um which is yeah which is why it's successful and also he's doing it he's not like he's not like talking in cell stuff like it's like he and he's not talking right wing stuff he's actually talking left stuff which is important um yeah yeah and but people people still find him to be like a likable like entertaining guy and not moralizing in any way um but yeah no i think i think in years to come you're gonna see people that like greatly like blow past us um like whether they're like whether they're like more political or not just like people who come from the space who do that um yeah i i i think you're gonna see a bit of that yeah like the 15 year olds now maybe in five years or less you know what you know what um i don't know how many people uh listen to this no pot about list that's it's a really funny [ __ ] it's not like a political show but it's it's a really funny show uh one of the hosts on there patrick told me that he listened to uh emo product radio hour when he was in middle school like god imagined that he was like yeah yeah we were both on it yeah yeah oh my god nine years ago yeah it's like grown man was in middle school listening to it that i i i i felt such conflicting emotions when he told me that like a bull back to my fruit okay my first emotion is super vain which is like oh my god am i that old how i felt like i used to be the young one i used to be the young people i used to be like young people feel this way and now i can't really say that anymore yeah that's it i actually like last year i was still saying that and people were like rania you're not young yeah you're not young people it's terrifying it's terrifying when all you like with the you've been young your entire life and then you're just not yeah it's terrifying you know what's really what's really scary too this is less vain is like i have like i have nephews and nieces who are like teenagers and they have like my nephew had never heard what guantanamo was yeah and then i recently met someone who was like a georgetown student who was like in her 20s and she was really smart no idea who julian assange is and i'm just like jeez like wow they just like erase these things yeah erase them so i'm glad to hear there's somebody like who listened to you in middle school and now they're like grown and know who those people are it really shocked me it really shocked me because that was like not an easy to find show it really wasn't people were not listening to podcasts like that in 2013. it was like one of the first ones i think that it was like one of the i'm pretty sure when i was on it i was probably using like earphones or my computer mic oh yeah me too i couldn't believe that i just want i want to i want everybody to know by the way i want to apologize to you i messaged you before we started and i was like i said please wear earphones to prevent echo and your response was runya i've been podcasting for nine years i know so i don't know like i just i know it's like it's just like you'd like autopilot like everyone autopilots these things like yeah i tell people like i'll tell people who like have done it longer than me like oh remember to record your own audio like i actually forgot to tell you that but i probably should have but i think this should be fine but on that note on that note felix speederman of chapo trap house thank you so much for joining me for more than an hour to talk about many different topics i really appreciate really really appreciate your show um and i'm sure you know everybody is probably already knows of chapo trap house i don't need to be the one to plug it but if you haven't listened you should thank you so much for joining me my pleasure thank you for having me

Channel: BreakThrough News

Views: 59,202

Keywords: chapo traphouse, chapo trap house, rania khalek, rania khalek dispatches, felix biederman, capitalism, american empire, mass shootings, epidemic of violence, america in decline, declining empire, late stage capitalism, socialism, imperialism, anti-imperialism, u.s. imperialism, u.s. history, geopolitics, foreign affairs, far-right, proud boys, oath keepers, right-wing, conservative, democrats, republicans, leftists, anti-capitalism, democratic socialists of america, antiwar, 2024 elections

Id: 3EyLNa5saWo

Length: 73min 0sec (4380 seconds)

Published: Mon Jul 11 2022