When Were You Radicalized? | Renegade Cut

[Music] mr vice president members of congress honored guests my fellow americans while i strongly disagree with the court's decision i accept it i can hear you the rest of the world hears you and the people who knock these buildings down will hear all of us soon when did you first realize that coercive hierarchical systems that oppress and divide people are not simply broken but are actually functioning as intended functioning to serve the top of the hierarchy maintained to serve those who benefit the most from them for me there was no single watershed moment that changed my perceptions and relationship with authority but looking back over my adult life there were a series of events and incidents that slowly dragged me from my previous positions i was 18 years old in the year 2000 which meant that mere months after entering legal voting age in the united states i could vote in my first presidential election as well as the first presidential election of the new millennium i became interested in progressive politics in high school and by the time i had graduated and begun college the election felt momentous that voting was going to be the most important thing i had ever done up to that point i was registered to the green party at first but later switched my registration to the democratic party so i could vote in their primaries and potentially push the party to the left a pragmatic decision i watched all the debates i saw al gore sigh and groan at george w bush's obvious and disqualifying incompetence then came election night this is how our electoral map looks at 7 34 eastern time governor bush far ahead of vice president gore and then this and all together according to senator john mike excuse me one second i'm so sorry to interrupt you mike you know i wouldn't do this if it weren't big florida goes for al gore and then this standby stem by cnn right now is moving our earlier declaration of florida back to the too close to call column it was my first election and nobody could tell me what was going on i was only 18 and i didn't understand how gore could have won hundreds of thousands more votes than bush but somehow was not declared the winner at the time i didn't know enough about history to recognize that this had happened three times before and that i was watching it happen for the fourth time it was like watching a boxing match where everyone knew who really won but the judges scored it wrong in the following 20 years i would hear every argument in favor of the electoral college but at the end of the day it's a system that defies the will of the people and that trumps any other argument one vote in wyoming has the relative weight of about three votes whereas one vote in pennsylvania has the relative weight of less than one vote that is not democracy worse still that's not an error in its design if the writers of the constitution wanted the will of the people to be absolute then the electoral college would not exist so the electoral college in occasionally defying the will of the people is functioning as intended i tried to put that out of my mind and do what everyone else was doing the day after the election focus on florida in the midst of the recount the state attorney general catherine harris inexplicably declared george w bush the winner harris was also the bush campaign co-chair funny that the florida state supreme court didn't have enough republicans for the bush campaign's liking so they brought this matter to the united states supreme court and they put a halt to any attempt at recounting i was stunned a series of 2001 reports showed that if all the disputed ballots had been counted gore probably would have narrowly won florida and therefore the presidency i was stunned again years later i learned that in addition to all of this bush's brother florida governor jeb bush conducted a voter suppression campaign leading up to the 2000 election which specifically targeted african americans the fix was in from the beginning i was 19 years old on 9 11 and it has been 19 years since that day i have spent half my life in the pre-911 world and half in the post-9 11 world the mood of the country had changed to something that i found suffocating everything in the country dovetailed into a conversation about supporting our troops country music was ruined celebrities were booed for criticizing the president or encouraging peace the beginning of every football game had been militarized french fries were called freedom fries and anti-drug psas claimed that recreational drug users were responsible for terror attacks kids learned how to kill i was having some fun you know i helped kill policemen i was just having fun i helped the bomber get a fake passport all the kids do it i helped kill a judge i helped blow buildings my life my body this was the whole country for years it's like we had all joined a cult but nobody could remember signing up i was in college when we went to war with iraq i was against it of course but my understanding of war was limited when i was younger i would see people get into fights at school or on the sidewalk it was always for some trivial reason someone looked at someone else the wrong way or said the wrong thing and there was some misunderstanding that could easily be resolved with words and a handshake that nobody wanted to do because it would mean looking weak and having to be the one to back down meaningless bravado when i was a teenager i mistakenly extrapolated that to my concept of war that it was all ego and saber-rattling and that cooler heads would prevail if we would simply give peace a chance it was a naive individualist perspective rather than a perspective based on complex systems i was young i didn't grow up with the internet and my education was limited to whatever they told me in catholic school and later public school generally speaking this individualist perspective is not why wars happen most wars occur due to the interests of the nation in the united states case usually to protect their massive economic interests abroad these interests have long kept the united states involved in the middle east the region has vast oil reserves even middle eastern nations without vast oil reserves have relationships with those that do which means the u.s and its allies desire control of the region the u.s never got most of its oil from middle eastern sources but its political and economic allies did 911 provided a pretext to finally implement long-standing plans to have greater access to iraq's oil reserves the united states wants to sit atop a hierarchy of nations world hegemony and you can't do that without control over the resources that everyone wants between 1948 to 1991 the united states engaged in 46 military interventions between the much shorter time period of 1992 and 2017 that number increased four-fold to 188. during my adolescence and early adulthood wars were escalating as the united states became more desperate to hold on to its control the invasion of iraq was not a mistake it was long-standing united states foreign policy functioning as intended the popular misconception that the pretext for the iraq invasion was merely an intelligence failure has long been debunked and revealed as an intelligence fabrication when i was 22 years old i was so enthusiastic leading up to the 2004 election i listened to the majority report with ginny garofalo and sam cedar on air america i followed the primaries i no longer trusted our institutions but i still believed that they could be simply reformed we just need the right president bush was deeply unpopular anyone could beat him i initially backed howard dean but that did not go well even with that setback i thought john kerry would wipe the floor with bush i remember going to bed on election night not knowing who would be president but assuming it would go kerry's way bush's re-election was called the next day i still recall learning about the results on my car radio on the way to a doctor's appointment that was a miserable day not long after i became a teacher life entered a kind of normalcy no matter what i thought about the united states and about george w bush the former was still my home and the latter would be gone at the end of his second term as that end approached there was a new hope emerging in the nation and in myself when i was 26 years old barack obama was elected president all the waiting was over the waiting through my adult life which is why his presidency was so very very disappointing the wars not only persisted but were escalated and expanded into new territories he was given the nobel peace prize and i was deeply confused obama was still better than mccain would have been of course i did not regret voting for obama i was just you know still naive enough to have expected more skipping around here a bit but the next eight years i learned about the incredible toll these conflicts had on civilians i knew a little during the bush administration but the news didn't really pay much attention to iraqi families they always focused on our losses the troops i had to do my own digging brown university's costs of war project calculated a total death toll from american wars in three countries iraq afghanistan and pakistan at least 480 000 people have been directly killed by violence over the course of these conflicts and more than 244 000 of them were civilians this means that contrary to popular misconceptions about civilian casualties being limited in war civilian casualties in the war on terror outnumber military casualties in addition the number of indirect deaths those resulting from disease displacement and loss of critical infrastructure is believed to be several times higher running well into the millions in fact it's even worse than that all around because the report does not take into account other conflicts and interventions such as libya and syria and all the rest back to 2009 when i was 27 i left the united states recruiting agencies that work with schools in east asia the middle east eastern europe and central america are always looking for native english speakers to teach conversational english this was my opportunity to leave the united states and maybe never come back i lived in south korea and taught in korean middle schools for about a year i took no pictures while i was there this is just stock footage sorry not mine while i was there i started making online content but it was nothing like what i do now then when i was 28 i taught in montenegro i lived in the capital park i actually did take a few photos while i was there this was the church right outside my tiny apartment this was the burger place where i would eat almost every day this was the town square this video however is not mine it's a tourism video i found when i was making this and it brought back some memories before montenegro i had never lived in what is called a developing nation the united states and south korea are incredibly wealthy and have these big bustling metropolises montenegro's capital looks and feels like a small town elsewhere in the nation poverty is actually much worse particularly in the north knowing the local languages was actually not one of the qualifications for these foreign teaching positions that meant that getting those jobs was easy but it also made my time abroad isolating i only learned a little korean while i was there and practically nothing of the three mutually intelligible languages in montenegro serbian croatian and montenegrin i felt alone when the school was done with me i returned to the united states the experience gave me a greater perspective on global poverty i wanted to know more much in the same way that economic disparity exists within a nation of rich people and poor people economic disparity on a global scale exists between rich nations and poor nations rich people need a lot of poor people to work for their industries and rich nations need a lot of poor nations to give them inexpensive goods capitalist apologists always claim that the system lifts people out of poverty but they neglect to mention that capitalism requires poverty to function it requires poverty for people to be willing to sell their labor for very little to an entity that will take most of the product of that labor rich nations do provide some aid to poor nations but that's because rich nations want poor nations to have enough resources to continue making rich nations money but not so much as to ever be competitors with the rich nations capitalism is not broken it is functioning as intended the world bank in concert with rich nations uses debt to control poor nations and then uses statistical manipulation wherein they move the standard of what is considered poverty over time to make it appear that their efforts are solving global poverty statistical sleight of hand to paint a rosy picture of the future for example the world bank has instituted a one dollar ninety cents per day international poverty line even though national poverty lines are much different by these standards if you are homeless without health care and without a support network but you earn 1.90 cents a day you are not living in true poverty they use these misleading statistics to show their own worth and move those goal posts whenever convenient i fell for this lie for a long time since 1960 the income gap between what is called the global north meaning wealthier countries and the global south meaning developing nations and what we once called the third world has tripled in size 4.3 billion people which is about 60 percent of the world's population live on less than five dollars per day about one billion people live on less than one dollar a day when you bring this up to people they're like i'll have you know that global poverty and centuries of subjugating half the world is why you can drink a coca-cola right now and it's like off the price of a rich nation is a poor nation that is how global capitalism works that is what the world really is when i was 31 i learned that despite obama taking over for bush our intelligence agencies were still spying on us but that's what they have always done and what they have always existed for they just have better technology now the state exists to monopolize control and violence it is functioning as intended i always considered myself an environmentalist but in my early 30s i began to learn more about climate change the energy corporations well they always knew they always knew what they were doing to the world but capitalism does not incentivize saving the world exxon for example projected climate change pretty accurately since at least 1982 the year i was born are you familiar with this graph from 1982 can you briefly explain what it shows sure what it shows is a projection into the future of uh carbon dioxide levels and climate change associated with those uh carbon dioxide levels and it's a very accurate representation of what today's climate change actually is so this was a model from 1982 with right startlingly accurate projections into the press that's correct the orange line shows the actual level of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere through this year exxon accurately predicted that by this year 2019 the earth would hit a carbon dioxide concentration of 415 parts per million and a temperature increase of one degree celsius dr hoffert is that correct we were excellent scientists yes you were yes you were so they just kept doing what they were doing hid the data and enacted a campaign of misinformation all of this was a lot to take i can understand not wanting to face any of this not wanting to accept how bad things are for most of the world and how bad things are going to be for the rest of the world too it's so much maybe i avoided learning the worst things about the world in my youth because my brain knew that my heart couldn't take it compartmentalization as self-care and there is little that an individual can do to change it all of this is happening on purpose all of this is functioning as it was intended the world set itself up from the top down and gave so much to the top of the hierarchy that the top can suffer no consequences for what it does within these systems when confronted with this a lot of people are like well capitalism and the military and energy corporations and all those things can simply be reformed how do you reform something that's fiercely resistant to reform by design you can't look at much of the world ravaged by wars of choice most of the world's suffering and all of the world in imminent danger and think that this could all be resolved by smoothing over the rough edges incremental reform is no longer an option if it ever was a liberated society must overcome coercive hierarchical systems including capitalism and the state that exist to privilege the top and subjugate the bottom if something is functioning as intended then there is nothing to fix only something to dismantle completely anyway i'm an anarchist now [Music] [Applause] [Music]

Channel: Renegade Cut

Views: 308,341

Rating: 4.8924537 out of 5

Keywords: renegade cut, barack obama, 2000 election, 2004 election, 2008 election, poverty, classes, hierarchy, al gore, george w bush, john kerry, south korea, capitalism, global capitalism, election, 2020 election, florida recount, 2000 recount, 2000 florida recount, jeb bush, politics, reform

Id: i-VsLNOduJA

Length: 20min 3sec (1203 seconds)

Published: Wed Sep 09 2020

Reddit Comments

[u/en_travesti]

I'm not sure if radicalized is entirely the word, but 2004 really prepared me for the US electing Trump. I wasn't yet able to vote but experienced exactly what was described in this video - The assumption that, yeah, Bush was obviously terrible of course he was going to lose. By 2016 I was disappointed but not surprised

Although my first radicalizing moment was in 4th or 5th grade? I was really into penguins and the antarctic so I was reading a book that mentioned the melting ice sheet and global warming. well my little mind was blown. It sounded like a pretty big deal, so I mentioned it to one of my friends parents that hey in 60 years the world gonna be kind of terrible thats a pretty big deal, right? To which they immediately responded that it didn't matter to them because they would be dead any way. At which I was too shocked to point out that I probably wouldn't be, nor would my friend: their daughter. I just could not comprehend how these nice friendly people could just not care about something like that, not even deny it just straight up not care because it didn't directly effect them. And then I got older and realized that their thought process wasn't unusual

and now i'm a depressed navel-gazing leftist

[u/kultcher]

I remember the first time I learned about Communism in middle school or whatever and thinking, "Um, wait that makes a lot of sense. Why is this bad?" I've always been too much of a pragmatist to really label myself a "radical" but I've always seen it as an ideal.

I'm a similar age to Renegade Cut and I think my "radicalization" was shaped by most of the same major events. Occupy Wall Street was also a big turning point for me on the economic side of things.

[u/BeanieBreakdown]

This is such a fantastic video. Leon is my favorite video essayist. One of the most invaluable members of the Breadtube scene imo.

On a side note, I can honestly say that becoming progressive in my early teens paved the way for me to move further left over the years. I would say I held very strong anti-capitalist, anti-hierarchal views even before 2016, long before I learned the words socialism or anarchism. Bernie was my first step. He said so many things I'd been thinking for years, and I remember thinking "I need to look into this socialism stuff. Because if this man supports it, it can't be bad".

I then came to anarchism through Youtubers like Vaush (please spare me) and Re-Education. Now I'm slowly catching up on theory whenever I can, and I can't really see myself ever not being an anarcho-communist, though I prefer "anarcho-socialist", as it sounds better to the normies.

[u/Blackstab1337]

Not much to contribute, but I really enjoyed this video :D

[u/Ellen_Kingship]

Great video. Great punchline.

[u/SlimJimsGym]

What a great video, might be his best yet tbh. This feels like it'd be a great "starter" video, to send to a friend to get them into leftist politics or something.

[u/Imtheprofessordammit]

My radicalization over time was slow too, in a way, but I definitely had a strong "first radicalizing moment." In 2000 I supported Bush because my parents didn't like Clinton's infidelity. I had no real interest in politics at that age and thought the news was boring so I just copied the opinions of people around me. Turns out the people around me were a bunch of chuds. Then 9/11 happened, and that was my first truly radicalizing moment. It was the first time I realized that war isn't just something that happens in history books, and that America wasn't a safe place like I thought it was. This started a chain reaction where I gave up religion and slowly became more and more leftist. But I was still somehow naive enough in 2016 to think that the country would always be on a track toward progress, and that of course we would elect Hilary. Then I got into Breadtube and now I'm an anarcho-socialist.

[u/AshleytheTaguel]

What if I don't trust social conservatives to not be assholes to me as an autistic , disabled, gay trans woman even in the absence of capitalism and the state to ever be anything more than a socdem?

[u/HadesTheDarkLord]

The BLM protests in America radicalized me.