The following rushed transcript may contain errors. It will be updated as soon as possible.

Mansa Musa:

Welcome to this edition of Rattling the Bars. I’m your host, Mansa Musa. Today, this is just a political conversation that we’ll be having about fascism, but more importantly, talking about the works of Antonio Gramsci. Joining me today is Alberto Toscano. Welcome to Rattling the Bars Alberto.

Alberto Toscano:

Thanks for having me.

Mansa Musa:

First, explain to our audience who Antonio Gramsci was.

Alberto Toscano:

So Gramsci is best known as former secretary of the Italian Communist Party and one of the most significant Marxist and communist theorists of the 20th century. And most of his theorizing, such as we know today, was done in prison in a series of no books, his prison notebooks that were published after his death and after the end of World War II. It’s actually this year is the 100th anniversary of his arrest, which took place on the 8th of November, 1926. He was arrested while a member of parliament for Italy by the fascist state under direct orders of the fascist dictator, Benito Mussolini, in fact breaching his parliamentary immunity, which he still had at the time. Before that, Gramsci had been a communist militant, but had also been a journalist. That was his trade and also that was one of the principle ways in which he engaged in political organizing first in the Italian Socialist Party and then in 1921 in the Communist Party, when there was a split from the Socialist Party to the left.

And so he only became a member of Parliament in 1924. So he was only in Parliament for a year and a half. And of course this was a very anomalous parliament because fascism had already

Come to power in 1922, but had become increasingly more repressive. And by the time of Gramsci’s arrest, then you essentially have in the wake of that, the formation of a one party state and the abolition of any kind of multiparty system.

Mansa Musa:

So to respond to him was predict based on not only so much of his being in the parliament, but based on his writing and his journalist and what he was reporting on is that what caused him to ultimately be arrested because in a parliamentary setting, you don’t have but so much power or you don’t have so much control over information. You either going to articulate your party position. I’m a communist or you going to advocate for policy change. But in a journalist capacity, you’re hitting home with information, educating people about repression and the disconnect between the government and people. Is that what led to his ultimate aggress?

Alberto Toscano:

Well, I think both those elements at once. So on the one hand, Gramsci was the leader of the most significant and most combative group among anti-fascist forces in Italy. He was very well known internationally, of course, in the context of the communist movement. He was the head of the party. And what fascism did from before it came to power until it really fully came to control Italy was to try to destroy and neutralize all forms of working class and popular opposition and resistance. So of course the papers, whether public or indeed clandestine, all forms of education, all forms of working class organizing. And so Gramsci in many ways brought together all of those figures. The journalist, the educator, the party leader, the organizer. And so the idea was that really to arrest them was to decapitate the

Mansa Musa:

Communist

Alberto Toscano:

Movement and the anti-fascist movement. And the famous sentence I believe voiced by Mussolini, but I think also spoken by the judge at his final trial, which was in 1928, was that we’re going to stop this brain from thinking. So the idea was not just the problem of organization, not just a problem of the political and even militant power of the communist movement. The idea was that their very ideas, their ideology, their capacity to organize the worldviews of the working and popular classes in Italy had to be quashed. And so that was key. And so along with a whole number of communist party leaders and militants, Gramsci was arrested on the basis that he was leading an insurrection. I think this was the crime, let’s say, for which he was convicted was the attempt to overthrow the Italian state because shortly before his arrest, there had been a botched assassination attempt on Mussolini.

So that was kind of used as a pretext.

Mansa Musa:

And let’s unpack the stop his brain from thinking because when you look at that particular sentiment, this is what Corntell Pro was designed for in the United States specifically to stop any, who would say the rise of a Black Messiah as it related to Black people. But his overall goal was to stop brains from thinking, stop people from organizing. Talk about how Gramsky, in terms of the abolition, mirrors what we see today, a lot of the theory and a lot of the perspective about abolishing prison come out of prison, come out of the thinking and what it looked like and what it will look like, come out of the space where people are incarcerated or people are in prison. Can you make a connection between the two?

Alberto Toscano:

Yeah. I think the connection is a connection we can make, but it’s also a tricky connection to the extent that certainly in the 1920s and ’30s, the communist movement or the socialist movement, or even the anti-fascist movement more broadly, did not in any straightforward way ascribe to an abolitionist position as part of its program. And in the case of Gramsci, of course, we do have this very strong parallel that imprisoned intellectuals have played an enormous role in political education and political organization

Mansa Musa:

Across

Alberto Toscano:

Anti-colonial, across anarchists, across communists, across black liberation movements, and of course into contemporary abolitionist thought. Just the other day I was looking at the list of the books in George Jackson’s prison cell, right? I think number 82 was a collection by Gramsci, the modern prince. So amongst other things, he was also reading Gramsci. And in fact, if we look at Jackson’s Blood in My Eye, there’s a remarkable amount of detailed writing in the chapters on fascism about the emergence of Italian fascism

Mansa Musa:

In

Alberto Toscano:

The early 1920s. So I think there’s really important links and also Gramsci, I think among Marxist theorists, even though I wouldn’t go as far as calling him an abolitionist, he certainly had a very complex and developed thinking around the nature of the police and policing, right?

Mansa Musa:

And

Alberto Toscano:

About thinking about the relationship between policing, repression, the modern state and fascism. And one thing I think we have to keep in mind is that the prison notebooks, which incidentally, Gramsci only started writing when he was allowed to have a pen and a notebook in his cell, which was, I think, three years into his imprisonment. So for the first two and a half, three years, these were thoughts that he could only sketch out in letters to his family. He was only allowed to write to his family, not to comrades. And only after a lot of work mainly by his sister-in-law, Tanya, was he allowed finally to have notebooks? He couldn’t keep the notebooks all in his cell. So he had to have a complex way of organizing his thoughts because then they would be stored by the prison warden. So he had this very, aside from having extremely difficult health conditions that eventually led to his very early death, of course, worsened by the fascist prison system, he was also working against all odds as most imprisoned intellectuals and most imprisoned people have in terms of writing, reading.

The most basic things become huge struggles. But Gramsci’s notebooks were there in many ways to try to figure out the nature and the causes of the defeat, at least partial or temporary defeat of the anti-fascist movement. And that’s, I think, partly the reason why he was so interested in thinking in this expansive and complex way about the police as something that reproduced the social order, but also, and this is key for Gramsci, the police as that which disorganizes or neutralizes the opposition to a dominant or hegemonic power. And in many ways, fascism’s success as well as a result of the weakness perhaps or the failures of anti-fascist forces was also a result of its ability in disorganizing the working class and disorganizing the parties of the left and disorganizing the anti-fascist front. There was a contemporary of Gramsci who started out in the fascist movement, ended up much later in the Communist Party.

Kutzio Malapalta wrote a famous book called The Technique of the Cudita, and he talks about the fascist march on Rome in 1922. And he says that fascism’s singular ability is, as he put it, to make a void around itself. So to disorganize and in that sense, going back to what you were mentioning before about Kointel Pro, this idea of stopping thought, of stopping the relationship between intellectuals, organizations and resistance is absolutely key to fascism, which is after all a counter-revolutionary movement. And so as a counter-revolutionary movement or a counter-revolutionary regime, it’s also always a form of counterinsurgency or Angela Davis and Marcusek borrowing from an Italian anarchist from the 1920s use this term, preventive counter-revolution. So that in many ways is what policing is, right? Including for Gramsci, the police in one of its aspects is this complex practice of preventing the possibilities for successful social transformation or revolutionary change.

And Gramsci, because he had this very expansive notion of the state, also argued that the work of policing is not necessarily just done by the police, like by the uniformed police,

Mansa Musa:

By police as

Alberto Toscano:

A branch of the state. It can also be done by all kinds of private, commercial, paramilitary, NGO, all sorts of different bodies can fulfill this function of reproducing a dominant order and preventing the emergence of its challenger.

Mansa Musa:

And to show you how study was, when you look at today, we talk about creating a disorganizing, we look at today, everything you just outlined, you got private police, you got private prison industries, you got everything that’s designed around this organized or keeping people disorganized is being perpetuated today through this system as we see it. A lot of misinformation, a lot of heavy-handed policing when we see what’s going on with ICE. So his perspective as it relates to this being a wing or armor of fascism is very astute. And I like the fact that how he look at the police because Hoover and that administration, they use every level of the police in this country to eradicate any opposition. They completely destroyed the Black Panther Party as a result of infiltration or just like what they did with Fred Hampton coming to kill you or send information, misinformation, create beefs between opposing parties, individuals, right?

But talk about Grumpy wrote on Foudism, viewing it not just as a factory system, but as a project to create a new type of man through disciplined labor and regulated private lives as that industrial mold collapse, how did the transition away from Foudism help pave the way for the castle system as we see it today?

Alberto Toscano:

Yeah, that’s a really complex question. I wanted to take a step back first just to make a quick comment about what you just said regarding the dismantling by Hoover and the FBI and the infiltration of the Panthers and of course of other movements as well. Actually, Gramsci’s arrest, and there’s still a lot of debate by historians about this, was seen by Gramsci himself and by many of his comrades as a result precisely of forms of infiltration. And we now know that high level members of the Italian Communist Party, including somebody who then became a very famous anti-communist writer in Yazosilone, were paid informants,

Mansa Musa:

Right?

Alberto Toscano:

And the problem already was a similar experience as that of other movements and parties that have been subjected to counterinsurgency practices and infiltration is that if you read biographies of Gramsci, you can see that for good reason he’d become extremely suspicious

Mansa Musa:

Of

Alberto Toscano:

A number of his comrades and the fascist infiltration had led to a lot of bad blood. Some of it, it’s like fed jacketing, right? Some of it was people who actually weren’t infiltrators, but who their comrades thought were. So that dynamic was something that the fascist secret police had very much implemented already in the 1920s and 30s and it was part and parcel even of the process that led to Gramsci’s arrest.

Now, to answer your question, even though Gramsci had never been to the United States and was writing all of this material with a trickle of books and newspaper, he was reconstructing the nature of what was to become the capitalist hegemon in the United States from the confines of his prison cell under these extremely trying conditions, but he became convinced in many ways in a fairly prescient or kind of prophetic way that the reorganization of labor, capital and society in the States around the time of course of the Great Crash of 29 and then of the beginning of the New Deal under Roosevelt was a kind of pioneering transformation. So he used this terminology of Americanism and then of course used the term Fordism after Henry Ford and after the forms of labor organization, but also the efforts by Ford to really transform the private, moral, social, even sexual lives of workers in Ford factories.

And this is what Gramsci’s getting at when he’s talking about the way in which capitalism is also tandentially creating a kind of new man or a new worker or a new person and so on.

Mansa Musa:

And so

Alberto Toscano:

Many people after World War II developed these insights to talk about the regime of accumulation and the regime of labor organization pioneered by the United States as a form of fortism often linked to relatively high wages for workers in exchange for their abstention from excessive forms of class struggle, the idea that workers could also become consumers rights, so the two car nuclear family and so on and so forth. So that whole kind of norm and also kind of vision of consumer society linked to mass production

And what people have been arguing since the crises of the 1970s has been that that arrangement which was just being formed around the time that Gramsci was writing his notebooks and then becomes really pervasive and dominant in the United States, but also in the so- called global north in the post-war period comes into a kind of crisis in the 1970s, a crisis that now people talk about in terms of the emergence of neoliberalism and so on and that the norm of fortism, which had to do with mass production, mass consumption, and what the geographer, Marxist geographer, David Harvey, called a kind of almost a pact or truce between big labor, big unions, big capital in the state, this kind of phrase and you have high inflation, unemployment, and then this move to withdraw the state from social welfare, social reproduction, to limit people’s social and civic rights and so on and so forth and to give much more liberty to capital,

Mansa Musa:

To

Alberto Toscano:

Accumulation, to markets and so on and so forth. And so many people read Gramsci’s analysis of fortism as a way by contrast to think about the crisis of fortism in the 1970s, which is of course in the United States, not just in the United States, but in the United States in particular, then sets the conditions, it’s not immediate, but sets the conditions for what will become the question of mass incarceration as a form

Mansa Musa:

Of

Alberto Toscano:

Class warfare against surplus and racialized populations. And that’s what’s interesting is that when Gramsci’s writing in the 1930s, late 20s, 1930s, he’s saying, “Well, Europe can’t really do fortism properly because we have this demographic issue

Mansa Musa:

And the

Alberto Toscano:

Demographic issue in Europe is that there’s large peasantry, but there’s also old classes of landowners and there’s a kind of like- Landmarks. Yeah. And then the United States from a European standpoint, a more modern country doesn’t have those issues, right? But in fact, when you look at the crisis of fortism, then the problem of surplus populations, unemployment as linked to these questions that we’re just talking about, like mass movements for emancipation, black liberation and left wing movements, that kind of comes together. And so on can see the emergence of what then comes to be called the prison industrial complex as a kind of confluence and articulation of a counterinsurgency project on the one hand to break the back of movements, challenging capitalism, white supremacy, so on. But then on the other hand, also as a question of political economy and labor, as a question of what to do with increasing deindustrialization with the desire by the capitalist class to break that postwar arrangement because it’s no longer attractive or feasible for them and therefore to shrink manufacturing labor to reduce social rights and so on.

So I think we can use Gramsci. Of course, he’s talking about a very different moment. He’s talking about the emergence, the moment of emergence of something

That then enters into crisis in the 1970s and creates the conditions, the social and political conditions for what will become the prison industrial complex, what people call mass incarceration and so on

Mansa Musa:

And so forth. And that’s the natural outcome of that contradiction, forwardism, industrialization, but the means of production versus how do you treat people that’s producing? And you create this illusion that they had what they call Leavitown where they create these massive housing projects, they call Leavitown for World War II and when they was coming back from the war, but at the same token, your income or what you’re getting to live this lifestyle cease to exist because to your point, greed is dominant. Capitalism, they’re not trying to share the wealth. They not sitting back saying,” Well, we’re going to give you equal pay for equal labor.

Once you unionize, we going to bust that, we’re going to subjugate you. We’re going to create factories that dehumanize you, which ultimately the contradiction will become so antagonicity that the work is going to respond and respond to that repression and respond to the repression is the prison industrial complex. Some way to contain that is going to be kill you or imprison you, and that’s the natural outcome of capitalism and imperialism. But Grumsky also talked about the contradiction between, or as far as in how rural produces and then the urban consumes, can you make a comparison between that and what we see today in this country as far as how that move into that particular part of the narrative goes into the prison industrial complex or how is it that is it a relationship between the two?

Alberto Toscano:

Well, Gramsci in the Italian context of the 1920s and ’30s, he’s also somebody who comes from, even though it’s an island, Saldania, what was considered part of the South. So an area that was viewed as underdeveloped and also Sardinians themselves in a way that’s of course different from Black and Brown folk in the United States, but they were certainly in the 19th century, kind of racialized as semi-savage, partly barbarian, backward,

Mansa Musa:

Same thing

Alberto Toscano:

With Sicilians and Southerners and so on. So for Gramsci, but also for the whole socialist and communist and workers movement, there was this issue which took the name of the Southern question. It was very common in the 19th century and 20th century in the workers movement to talk about, you would have the women question, the southern

Mansa Musa:

Question,

Alberto Toscano:

All these questions. But the southern question was a way for Gramsci to think both about this geographical differentiation in Italian capitalism, but also about the fact that there were forms of so to speak internal colonialism. And Gramsci does use this language, right? He says the relationship of northern capitalists to southern peasants is like a semicolonial relationship. He talks about the role of the police and of police violence in managing and reproducing this internal colonial relationship so much so that recently an American theorist, Michael Denning has made really interesting parallels between the prison notebooks and actually what Du Bois was writing about northern capital and southern black labor and black reconstruction, which is a text written at the same time, like pretty much contemporaneous with Gramshi. As a political analyst, as a journalist and as an organizer, the question for Gramsci who was based in Italy’s the center of Italy’s car industry, like Italy’s Detroit, so to speak, which is Turin, where the Fiat Factory was, was to think about how could the industrial workers movement and the proletarian movement make links to a peasantry that was much less politically organized, but of course was being massively exploited

Mansa Musa:

Through this form

Alberto Toscano:

Of internal colonism. So part of his issue, which was it’s like the issue of all communists and socialist movements that start out like the Russian Revolution in situations where you have high proportion of workers are still tied to the soil or tied to rural forms of life, was how to make this alliance, this like worker peasant alliance.

Now, if we fast forward to the 1970s, and I’m thinking here of the work on the emergence of the prison industrial complex in California by Ruth Wilson Gilmore, we can think how the rural and the urban in moments of crisis enter into a particular articulation that creates this kind of racialized prison fix. So in the case of 1970s to 1980s California as mapped out by Gilmore, this is the situation where you have surplus capital, you have surplus land because there is a There’s a crisis or partial crisis of agribusiness and certainly of rural employment because of mechanization. And then of course you also have this through the crises of the ’70s, this expansion in surplus labor, which is also racialized and criminalized in the kind of last hired first fired situation of racialized workers. And so it’s in that context that then prison building is presented and advanced as a way of linking what to do with the surplus labor, which is to say incarcerated or incarcerate some of it and threaten the rest surplus capital to then invest in these projects of prison building that are largely taking place in kind of rural context.

So I mean, that’s just one very sketchy presentation of what is a very complicated geographic and political and political economic argument by Gilmore. But I do think that that geographical dimension is really significant for thinking about the dynamics of domination, exploitation and resistance. And that’s also why Gramsci’s own kind of form of geographical thinking was significant to so many ant-colonial scholars. So the Gramsci’s writings in the Southern question are very significant for radical Indian historians. They’re very significant for the Palestinian American

Mansa Musa:

Critic,

Alberto Toscano:

Edward Said when he writes about culture and imperialism. So that geographic dimension I think is a really unique aspect of Gramsci’s thinking, but also comes from his personal experience as somebody who comes from this semi-internal colony, but who then moves as a very young man to become a journalist and a militant in the most industrial and most advanced center of Italian capitalism. So he experiences these multiple worlds and these juxtapositions in his own person. So I think that’s also significant. And I imagine one can also make links to all of the debates that took place in the history of US Black liberation movements around this theme of internal colonialism, going back to arguments about the Black Belt and the communist movement and so on.

Mansa Musa:

And you see the Southern question when he talks about, as you articulated, how the industrialization and then the decline of the industry in rural America, you see a good example here in Maryland. In Maryland they had in the western part of Maryland, they had the upper western part of Maryland, they had industry. When all their industry closed down, prior to their industry closing down, they was talking about building prisons in that part of the state and everybody in Western Maryland was opposed to it because they had a number of prisons in different parts already. So they was like, “Nah, we’re not having that. ” But a year or two later when the industry closed down, they were begging for them to build a prison. They literally begged for them to build a prison. And now when you get to western part of Maryland, as far as your eye can see, it’s nothing but prisons.

And this come out of the analysis you just made was like how at one point you had industry, you had this industrialization, you had money, but now the shift is you shift from agribusiness to concrete and steel that becomes your product and your product is human beings and you ain’t picking cotton there, you picking up human beings and that’s your product in that narrative, right?

The following rushed transcript may contain errors. It will be updated as soon as possible.

Taya Graham:

Could President Trump and his MAGA Congress be planning to interfere with the upcoming midterm elections? Well, we have some evidence that might surprise you, which we will unpack on this episode of the Capitol Hill React Report. Hello, this is Taya Graham, myself, along with my reporting partner, Steven Janice, our Capitol Hill correspondence for the Real News Network. We report regularly on what’s happening in the nation’s Capitol, but with a twist. We examine the process of governance through the prism of the most powerful force in today’s politics, economic inequality. Now, before you say, tell you that seems sort of limited. Just let me explain a little bit before we get to the first video. Economic inequality is at its highest point in recent history. Just take a look at the latest report that showed American workers’ share of the economy has fallen to its lowest level since 1947.

That’s right. In 2025, the share of the economy that went to the people who actually make it run was 54% a historic low. Okay. So why is this context essential for reporting on politics? Well, because all that wealth accumulating in fewer and fewer hands translates into concentrated power and that power now flows into our elections in the form of cash. Cash, which translates into victories at the ballot box for the purveyors of an increasingly extractive economy, insulating it from ballot box accountability, which ultimately means that you can’t understand politics on Capitol Hill unless you comprehend what currently defines it, namely the rich getting richer. Stephen, how am I doing?

Stephen Janis:

So you’re doing great. I mean, one of the things we have to think about is we got to look at democracy as a whole here functioning through this prism of inequality. The idea of democracy that delivers a certain amount of freedom to the people who are part of it. Now, freedom is a limited resource. So as people get richer and richer, they hoard that freedom. And so there’s less freedom to go around. Freedom to do what you want, freedom to educate yourself, freedom to live where you want. All those things sort of translate into the affordability crisis we’re seeing now, which means that there’s less freedom for the working people and more and more freedom for the richest 1% and more and more freedom to control how we live. And that’s why we have this sort of crisis on Capitol Hill and that’s how we have to view what goes on on Capitol Hill.

Taya Graham:

Stephen, that is such a great point and brings us right back to the topic at hand. The incredibly tense state of American elections and why wealth inequality will play a key role in that autocratic calculus. So first, let’s be honest, Steven, the mainstream media has, in my opinion, been misreading Trump, specifically his pronouncements that he doesn’t care about gas prices or the quagmire in Iran. Let’s listen to him talk about it and then discuss. When you’re negotiating with Iran, Mr. President, to what extent are American financial situations motivating you to make it?

Donald Trump:

Not even a little bit. The only thing that matters when I’m talking about Iran, they can’t have a nuclear weapon. I don’t think about American financial situation. I don’t think about anybody. I think about one thing. We cannot let Iran have a nuclear weapon. That’s all. That’s the only thing that motivated.

Taya Graham:

Okay. So the interpretation from the TV pundits has been that President Trump is just inexplicably tone deaf or detached or just disinterested, but we think Trump is telegraphing something much more insidious. So Steven, let me ask you a question after watching this video. Is Trump just really disengaged as the mainstream media says, or as they say he’s unhinged, or is there something else a little more troubling going on here?

Stephen Janis:

Well, Ted, this is one of many clips where Trump has kind of downplayed midterm elections or voters concerns or gas prices or whatever. He does it consistently. And of course it would be suicide for a politician in a functioning democracy to say something like that, right? Because this would directly affect how people vote. I really think for some reason gas prices, well, I kind of understand that gas prices are one of the biggest motivators for people when it comes to elections. And so it would be suicide, but what he’s really trying to say is, “I’m not worried about the midterms because I got this locked out. ” And look at what happened in the last presidential election. He tried to overturn it with a lost, but he wasn’t really prepared. He has been preparing for two years now to be able to interfere with the elections.

He subpoenaed ballots all over the country, including Fulton County and Georgia. He has set up this election integrity system run by a person who actually denied the 2020 election. He has increased the funding for ICE and Border Patrol, which we’ll talk about later. He has just simply put people in place who will be able to do what he needs to do. The Justice Department itself does whatever he wants. They’ll prosecute anybody. Very true. So they will certainly be willing to weigh in on this. He is prepared. He’s declared emergencies in so many situations. He is prepared and he is trying to say, “I’m not worried about it because no matter what happens, I’m going to make sure that I come out on top.” And I think that’s what we’re missing here. When he says he’s disinterested, what he’s saying is, “I’ve got this in the bag.”

Taya Graham:

Steven, I think you put your finger right on it here. The real danger here isn’t just what Trump is saying, but the fact that everyone keeps dismissing it. And you know what Trump hasn’t even ruled out paying the people who stormed the Capitol and those who tried to halt the counting of the electoral votes in 2020, despite the fact that his administration said the fund is dead, he was literally just quoted as saying, “I think they should be reimbursed by a crooked government.” Now, his remarks regarding the controversial $1.7 billion weaponization fund bolster, I think the case that he believes he can alter the midterm outcome. It would’ve set aside money for people who believe they were unjustly prosecuted, namely the Jan six insurrectionists. I mean, critics say if Trump has his way, he will literally be able to assemble a pratorian guard to disrupt the elections.

And I’m alluding to the elite core of Roman military officers who guarded the emperor, but who eventually just took power themselves. Steven, what does it mean if he gets his way?

Stephen Janis:

Well, what it means is because ways he has what you need the first … The most important element of any sort of autocratic takeover is having the money to pay people and having the freedom to pay people any way you want. Now this $1.7 billion fund would be an easy way just to dole out cash to people who had done his bidding before. Now he has other ways of doing this that we’ll talk about. But the main thing is it gives them the power of the purse in a way that’s totally up to his discretion and the Justice Department, which is an extension of him. Now what’s interesting about it is I don’t really think they need a fund. Those J6 is going to just sue and then Trump can approve the payouts. That’s right. So he’ll get it one way or another. But the point is he wants to signal to the people, “Hey, if you help interfere with an election, I will pay for it and I’ll reward you because these settlements could be huge.

$1.7 billion is a lot of money.” Sure is. So I think that’s what he’s trying to telegraph is saying, “Help me out with this and you’ll get paid.”

Taya Graham:

Steven, that is not only spot on, but it’s actually really scary. But what’s even more concerning to me is how much this election interference plan is hiding in plain sight with little or no pushback because he can’t do this alone. He needs help from his ever loyal contingent in Congress. And for the most part, they are in lockstep with Trump. And that was more than evident when the MAGA Congress started to plot a strategy to get more money to ice customs and border patrol for purposes that we’re going to touch on a litle bit later. Now their plan was to use a tactic called reconciliation, which allows legislation to bypass the filibuster provided it has significant fiscal impact on federal spending. Now, this was an unprecedented power grab because the funding bill was intended to provide routine annual appropriations and that’s a measure that is usually passed with bipartisan support, which brings me to an interesting encounter we had on Capitol Hill with Republican Congressman Mike Lawler, who didn’t seem to want to answer our question when we asked why ICE and CBP needed an additional $70 billion in funding, but his reluctance is also revealing.

Let’s take a listen to what happened.

Rep. Mike Lawler:

Fuck that up.

Stephen Janis:

Congressman, why does ICE need an additional $75 billion? Why is that funding? How do you justify that to the American people who now are suffering with high gas prices and things like that? Why is that even more money?

Rep. Mike Lawler:

Well, that’s the cost of funding the department. Are you for abolishing ICE?

Stephen Janis:

I’m just asking the question. They already have $14.

Rep. Mike Lawler:

Well, you understand that that is the- I’m not

Stephen Janis:

For against anything.

Rep. Mike Lawler:

You understand that’s the appropriated amount, right? Yes. That’s been appropriated.

Stephen Janis:

Of course, but I’m asking

Rep. Mike Lawler:

Questions. So the reason additional funds, that’s the base budget for ICE and CBP, right? You understand that?

Stephen Janis:

I do.

Rep. Mike Lawler:

Okay. So the additional funds that came through the Working Family’s tax cut bill were to increase border security. Why? Because Joe Biden let in 10 and a half million people into the country.

Taya Graham:

Okay. Steven, just for the record, are you for abolishing ICE? Because you didn’t answer the congressman’s question.

Stephen Janis:

Yeah. I’m for abolishing politicians to be able to answer a question with a question and evade answering the question I ask. I’m for abolishing that. But one thing I want to just say before we move on is that his sort of argument that that’s the appropriate amount for ICE is actually wildly inaccurate. I look back into the ICE funding and what ICE and CPB have been spending roughly eight to $10 billion a year. They already have $140 billion. This is not an appropriate amount for anything. That’s an absolute freaking lie. ICE and CBT do not need that much money. This is excess cash. Taxpayer cash, your taxpayer dollars that are simply being spent without accountability. I think there’s a reason for that we’ll talk about in a second, but really he was just FOS on that. And I just want to point that out because it really was infuriating.

I was trying to get his answer, but I couldn’t sit there and get into an argument with him about what he was saying was actually patently false.

Taya Graham:

Personally, when a politician answers a question with a question, in my opinion, that is a sign they don’t have an answer or they have an answer, they don’t want the public to know. And he

Stephen Janis:

Definitely didn’t have an answer in this point. So good point, Teo.

Taya Graham:

Thank you. But I mean, the question you were asking was not insignificant. I mean, in fact, it was a really big piece of the puzzle, led us to think that the threats to the midterm elections are widely underestimated. Now, the crux of the matter is funding. Now what you asked is why Republicans want to give ICE, customs, and Border Patrol another $70 billion. And what makes this so unusual is that the big beautiful bill dropped roughly $140 billion on both agencies just last year. But with ICE and CBP spending at best $20 billion annually, it begs the question, why so much? What is it really for? And Steven, you have a theory about this. Tell me about it.

Stephen Janis:

Well, I think the thing you have to think about is that they’re moving towards a more autocratic form of government. Autocracies and democracies have different incentives, basically, different incentive systems. Technically speaking, a democracy wants to award beneficial policy for constituents. So to get elected, you got to do stuff that people like. Autocracies don’t work that way. They need to punish people who might push back. They need to crush dissent and that’s through a system of incentivization of punishment. And so in my opinion, this money, which can, I guess when you add up $210 billion for a law enforcement agency is about constructing a great American punishment regime to prepare Americans for a more autocratic government.

When I looked into the records and tried to figure out how much money does ICE and CPP still have on the books, it’s really hard to figure out because the federal government really isn’t oriented towards reporting on multifiscal year cycles about how much money they have. But I looked, I found at least $73 billion that had been unallocated so far. And that’s after they’ve already built all these warehouses, these prisons where they’re incarcerating people. So they literally have what would be for those agencies unlimited funding. And unlimited funding for law enforcement gives you a way to institute punishment throughout all levels of governance. I mean, those detention centers can be used to detain people for a variety of reasons. They’ve already detained Americans. They’ll detain more. Having an unlimited amount of money to swarm CPB and swarm ICE into cities gives you this ability to do what Trump did in Minneapolis, Los Angeles, Chicago.

And when these elections come and when Trump is trying to say, Hey, they weren’t fair, they’re going to need these guys and women to come into cities and to try to disrupt the people who will be pushing back or to seize ballot box. I really think this excess money is insulating both institutions and that’s for a reason to create a punishment regime that will be reflective of the autocratic values that the Trump administration is espousing through their policy choices.

Taya Graham:

Steven, you did the classic thing every reporter should do and actually anyone watching should do, which is follow the money. You follow the money, you figure out what’s really going on. So let me just ask you a question about this. I was thinking back to the first time it really hit home with us that something was afoot with regard to democracy during the shutdown last year. So last year, Democrats wanted to extend the Obamacare tax credits and Republicans refused. But what struck me at the time was how the majority party approached the entire conflict. They simply shut down Congress. They simply stopped town halls and talking to their constituents. No debate, no work, just silence. And of course, all of that was just to deny people healthcare. And that seems like a pretty anti-Democratic strategy. So how does it play into that theme you’re talking about, about the punishment regime theme?

What do you think?

Stephen Janis:

Well, the thing is if you shut it down, you’re kind of punishing people because you’re taking away the deliberative legislative body that’s supposed to represent their interests where you are supposed to hash these things out and figure out how to get people healthcare. So what you’re saying is, we don’t care. You don’t have healthcare, you’re being punished. We’re going to punish you by not doing anything and showing you that we don’t have to do anything and disengaging from our constituents. And so I think it’s a big part of that. I mean, a functioning legislative body should be an accountability mechanism to make sure things like ICE and CBP don’t get out of control. But now when they shut it down and turn it into this absolute desert of democracy, well, then you don’t have a limited legislative body to represent you. Without representation, you’re done.

I mean, what people don’t understand, and I think you’ve talked about this really, really well, is that democracy is a culture that infiltrates all levels of government governance. When you change that to a punishment regime, to an autocratic culture, everything changes.Your ability as a constituent and to vote and to have some impact and some say in how you live diminishes quite quickly. And I think that’s what we’re seeing here.

Taya Graham:

Steven, that’s a really, really good point. And you touched on constituents actually having a voice and this is something we caught at a press conference where that idea that you’re touching on right there was absolutely front and center. Now it was an announcement by Senator Bernie Sanders and Representative Summer Lee to announce a bill that would shut down super PACS. Now Super PACS are of course the campaign behemoths that can spend unlimited amounts of money basically to buy elections. Super PACS are like the corporate love child of Citizens United, that famous decision that allowed corporations to also spend unlimited amounts on electing people to subject us the working class to the extractive tendencies of our current economy. Now this union between them was so fruitful that it gave birth to political organizations with unlimited spending power and an insatiable appetite for television ads, digital marketing, robocalls, and anyone who’s willing to rent out a swing state’s airwaves.

Now, Sanders and Lee basically want to undo all that with a limit on how much Super PACS can raise. Their bill with limit contributions to $5,000 per individual or corporation, essentially disabling the Super PAC system that allowed Elon Musk to dump $280 million over a quarter of a billion dollars into President Trump’s campaign, which resulted in the mess that we’re currently living with. But I asked Senator Sanders a question and he had an interesting answer. Let’s take a listen and you can react on the other side.

Sen. Bernie Sanders:

I don’t want people to think this is just another issue. What somebody said is right. It is the most important issue. If we are the only major country on earth not to guarantee healthcare at all, why is that? You think it may have something to do with the power of the pharmaceutical industry and the insurance companies who spend zillions of dollars making sure we don’t move to a Medicare for all system? Do you think the fact that we have a starvation minimum wage has something to do with the fact that a lot of these corporations and business people don’t want to pay their workers a living wage, don’t want workers to join unions. The point here, this is not another issue. This is an issue that touches every bloody issue facing working people in this country.

Taya Graham:

Okay. Steven, I really want to hear your thoughts here. Is Senator Sanders connecting the right dots?

Stephen Janis:

Yeah, absolutely. Because money, cash, power, adulterates, democracy. And the way you adulterate it is to be able to deliver, to allow people who have the concentrated wealth to throw it all into the election. Now the whole idea of campaign laws is to limit influence of one individual or corporation. You can only donate so much no matter how rich you are. Now with super PACS, you can put everything you have into it if you want and that gives you disproportionate power and that creates an inequality basis for elections. So absolutely. And I want to point out one thing. You were the one who asked the question that set off that answer and I think it’s really vitally important because Sanders is connecting the dots. You can’t afford housing. Look at the super PAC. You can’t afford healthcare super PACs. All these super PACs create disproportionate influence for the smallest number of people possible.

It turns an election into really a choice of the oligarchy to decide who’s going to be in power and what policies they will implement. So it was a great answer and it’s absolutely spot on.

Taya Graham:

Steven, I asked the question because I felt like sometimes we, meaning journalists, don’t really connect the dots. And as we’ve discussed, as you’ve said, the great American punishment regime is a product of President Trump’s desire to diminish democracy, but it’s a political transformation that wouldn’t be happening if the system itself hadn’t failed to deliver for the majority of people who live under it. So what Sanders did is make the connection between big money and bad economics palpable and easy to see. He cut through the noise and made the argument that the wealth imbalance and the cash hoarding that it enables is cycled back into elections and fines forms and things like the affordability crisis or the housing shortage and of course our unresponsive and overly expensive healthcare system. These connections are crucial if political mechanisms like super PACS are both to be understood and mitigated.

If you don’t connect the accumulation of obscene wealth with the fact that you can’t pay your monthly utility bill, then it will be nearly impossible to sustain a movement to reform all of this. So Steven, how does Sanders and Lee’s idea fit into your theory of a punishment regime?

Stephen Janis:

Well, I want to say one thing first though before I answer that question, because it’s a great question, but I want to say this, I want to be the boy who cried wolf here. I am not saying this to be some sort of paranoid conspiracy theorist. I just see the tea leaves sitting up on Capitol Hill, like we talked about how they shut down Congress, like we talk about how Republicans don’t show up on the triangle anymore where most press conferences are held. I want to be wrong in this case, but I can’t ignore what I’m seeing. And when Senator Sanders talked about super PACs, there wasn’t that much media there and there really wasn’t that much media coverage of what he did and what Summer Lee was proposing, Congresswoman Summer League, excuse me. So I really think these elements are all connected.That’s why we did this show to connect them.

The super PACs fuel the oligarchy and the oligarchy fuels autocracy. You can’t have dissent when few people want to hold onto all the wealth. It’s not just and people are going to push back against it, but the only way you can stop it is to incentivize punishment to say, “You know what? You speak up, you’re in trouble.” And the way to use that mechanism is to diminish the value, the integrity, and of course just create uncertainty around elections. Trump has sort up a lot of uncertainty. He’s got unlimited amount of cash to spend to bolster it. I am extremely concerned. I just wish more people would listen to Senator Sanders and Congresswoman Lee on this issue. It’s critically important and you’re right.

Taya Graham:

Steven, I’m so glad you connected the dots for us in this way because once you see it like this, you can’t unsee it. So thank you so much, Steven.

Stephen Janis:

You’re welcome.

Taya Graham:

Okay. So that’s the end of this edition of the Capitol Hill Inequality Watch React. So thank you so much for joining us. We are going to keep reporting for you on Capitol Hill while discussing how wealth inequality influences our politics, our economy, and our lives. I’m Taya Graham, along with my reporting partner, Steve and Janice. People please keep fighting, keep voting, and most of all, please keep caring. Our democracy needs you.

The following is a rushed transcript and may contain errors. A proofread version will be made available as soon as possible.

Maximillian Alvarez:

We’re here in the Real News Network studio in downtown Baltimore and I could not be more excited to have legendary independent journalist and filmmaker, the one and only Abby Martin here with me in person. Now, some of you may not know this, but Abby is actually a Real News alumnus. And Sister Abby, I know it’s been a minute since you’ve been back here in your old stomping grounds, but I just wanted to start by saying on behalf of the entire team here, welcome back to Baltimore. Congratulations on all the incredible essential work that you’ve done and we are all just so proud of you and so honored to be in this struggle for truth with you.

Abby Martin:

Oh my gosh. Well, the feeling’s more than mutual, Max. I mean, just being here back in the studio just brings me back to just the origins of Empire Files. Being in the Real News studio, working all hours of the night trying to knock out those weekly documentaries. And it was just such a cool crew to be a part of and it’s so amazing to be back.

Maximillian Alvarez:

Well, and what an incredible journey you and the Empire Files have been on since then. And we are of course here today to talk about your blockbuster new documentary, Earth’s Greatest Enemy, which is engrossing, expansive and frankly, terrifying investigation into the existential threat that US Empire in general and the US military specifically pose to humanity and to our planet. Now, I know that this project was years in the making and projects of this magnitude can often start as one thing and then become something much greater by the end of it. And so I wanted to start by asking, what is this documentary? Where did it start and what did it become by the time you and your co-director, Mike Prisner, were finished?

Abby Martin:

Wow. It was a long journey indeed and it was five years in the making, as you mentioned. And it started off during COVID with the birth of our first child and kind of joining our passions together, Mike, as an anti-imperialist, anti-war veteran organizer and me as an anti-war journalist who had been advocating against US imperialism my entire career as an advocacy journalist. So I advocate for issues. I wear my bias on my sleeve and I find it very refreshing in this kind of world of access, journalism and corporate media. And so combining those passions together and wanting to approach a subject that tackles the environmental impact of the military because of our obsession with the future, bringing a child into this world, having the responsibility of basically investing in the future. It is on our shoulders now. We’re all in. And so we saw that statistic kind of floating around that the US military was the largest institutional polluter in the world.

This is something that’s been kind of synthesized in academia when you look at just oil purchases, which the US military hadn’t even really disclosed until relatively recently. And there’s been some scholars who have addressed this in literature and studies, but no one had synthesized it in a cinematic way, certainly in a documentary fashion. But Max, once we got into the subject matter, every stone unturned is another documentary. And so we’re looking at legacy contamination of just radiation Agent Orange and then you look at the expansion of militarism all around the world with these 800 bases. Every base is a story. Every victim is another story. And then you add on top of that just the maintenance of the military arsenal, the actual infrastructure of the US military empire and how the entire thing exists as a self-fulfilling prophecy in order to maintain a fossil fuel infrastructure.

And it’s never been laid bare more with Trump in power with this kind of imperial belligerence when we see Venezuela, Greenland. So the documentary took a life of its own and started catapulting in every which way and kind of made us realize we wanted to prove the thesis here. We wanted to go into it not just talking about emissions, which is one story in itself, which we tackle. We wanted to tackle all of it. We wanted to go into the totality to sit someone down and inject them with the truth and you cannot walk away without having your brain rewired in terms of the way you look at the military in this country.

Maximillian Alvarez:

No, and I could say that as someone who’s watched it and was, like I said, quite terrified by what I was seeing and what you have given us kind of concrete evidence to prove. But I wanted to ask what kind of a monumental struggle that must have been to first research and then visualize the scope and scale of this problem. Could you just talk about that for a little bit?

Abby Martin:

I mean, especially when it comes to emissions, because this is something that’s been very secretive under the pretense of national security and not disclosed by the US military establishment. So it was unearthing so much data accumulated and synthesized by scientists independently to try to calculate these things based on just oil purchases. And then when you extrapolate that out and look at the lifecycle emissions, look at the application of the weaponry, the maintenance of this global supply chain, it totally becomes unquantifiable. And then you wrap into that the actual basically NATO, the machinery of the entire military empire, the great power competition with China, Russia, all of the building up of those arsenals and response to our aggression and belligerence. So it becomes simply unquantifiable and it was so difficult. And Max, at a point in the documentary, we bring in this philosopher and he says something really, really important where he says, number’s numb.

And he gives kind of this take on it’s so hard to get overwhelmed by the existential nature of US imperialism of capitalism because it’s so far reaching and all inclusive and all these issues are interconnected as we’re realizing more and more, but numbers, when you’re just looking at sheer facts and data, data, data, it can numb you. It can become meaningless. And I think we see that psychologically, I think with the genocide going on for three years straight, the data and the numbers become numbing. And so at a certain point it became more about just the storytelling and the emotion and collaging these narratives together to kind of give people that gut punch that it’s not about the numbers. Look, we proved the thesis over and over again, that’s done. But I think what really hits people is seeing how this is you, this is your children.

Your children are those children in Iraq. You are Alex Pretty. You are Renee Goode. You are every one of these victims of US imperialism because it affects every single person on the planet.

Maximillian Alvarez:

And I think back to the days of COVID-19 and when I heard those words in your documentary, Numbers Numb, that was the first thing that came to my head was sort of bearing witness to the monstrous spectacle of the bigger the numbers of people lost to COVID-19 got, the more numb people got to the human lives that were being lost. And I think there really is a terrifying truth there. And again, it speaks to the service that you and Mike Preisner have done in not just compiling what could be compiled in terms of the research numbers and from the emissions of all the military vehicles to the environmental impact of all the explosions and wasted munitions that are blown up or dumped into the ocean. I mean, the list is just so incredibly long and it’s impossible, like you said, to try to quantify it.

But I think what was even more horrifying to learn was that from Bill Clinton to now, all these kind of global US-led climate agreements don’t factor in the US military when they’re talking about our national emissions output.

Abby Martin:

Yeah, exactly. And people do not realize that. I’ve talked to several climate scientists, environmental academics, and they were absolutely flabbergasted at that fact that should be widely known, that militarism, not just US militarism, but every country’s militarism is excluded. Under the Paris Accords, they gave an option to opt in, but of course many countries are like, “Why would I do that? ” It’s not mandatory. Yeah, you know what? So it’s just completely insane and totally a farce that for the last 30 years of these international climate treaties, the US military has led the exemption of all military emissions and it’s gargantuan. It is completely gargantuan and totally hidden from this growing total. And so what’s astonishing to me is that why am I the first person to confront these major politicians at these conferences? Decades in the making, you see this bipartisan consensus for empire and just the acceptance of lying about this, of accepting it as normal and it’s totally outrageous.

And the whole dystopian nature of these climate conferences in general, which real news has covered extensively is just off the charts. I mean, it’s all about corporate profit. It’s all about how can we market this? How can we make money off of it? And then it’s like, well, no wonder you have a contingent of society that’s detaching itself less and less from that consensus reality that climate change is this existential threat that we need to globally cooperate on because simply the opposition to the fascist takeover, they’re not treating it like the emergency it is and they’re not acting accordingly. So it just makes it look like a money making venture and it’s really unfortunate.

Maximillian Alvarez:

Another word might be a racket.

Abby Martin:

Yeah, there you go. Yeah. It’s a goddamn racket. Yep.

Maximillian Alvarez:

There it is. I wanted to ask if you could sort of lay out this double helix death spiral of US wars and military imperialism around the world and like the climate crisis, like how those two things and how you unpack it in this documentary, but like how those two things are intertwined in the most monstrous way.

Abby Martin:

And this goes before obviously World War II with the advent of the war making industry, how because Europe was left in ruins, you had the US kind of concentrating the actual war machinery and that’s where you see the genesis of the war economy being a kind of a permanent footing in the US. It established well before that. I mean, we’re talking about the first extraterritorial military basis that were established through obviously the veins of the genocidal takeover in the first settler colonies here, but those first extraterritorial military bases were to protect extractive industries of fur and mining just to basically … I mean, we almost drove beavers into extinction just so people could have funny hats in Europe and then it became coal. So the first bases that were overseas were to access coal and to basically be infrastructural holding cells for coal. And of course, once the national security priority turned to oil, once oil was discovered and replaced coal, that’s when we saw that just completely combined where oil became the dominant priority for access and expansion.

And then like you said, it became the self-fulfilling prophecy where in order to expand the military, you needed more oil and more resources and then you need to justify the expanse of the military to get more resources. So now this massive empire around the world with 800 bases spread across nearly every continent, it maintains itself through the access to oil, the pillaging of every last vestige of natural resources on the planet. And that’s exactly laid bare with Trump’s rhetoric today. He is literally saying, “We need Greenland.” That is the last basically unbridled wilderness on the planet. I mean, the amount of coal oil and rare earth minerals that are under that ice, they are saying explicitly they need that for their national security interests. And so you just have to read between the lines here. I mean, you don’t even really have to. He’s saying, “We need the oil from Venezuela.

We need the oil from Iran.” That’s what this is about. You had the Bush administration spending about a year trying to propagandize us into complacency with invading a country that had nothing to do with nine eleven just to seize the oil, but they wasted a lot of time to propagandize us, ties with WMDs. And so now this mask is so ripped off where they don’t even need to pretend. They’re just saying explicitly, “We are trying to grab every last drop of oil because that’s ours.” So in a way, it’s an important moment, Max, because for the first time in my life, things are just very laid bare and I feel like people are really putting all of this together in their mind and organizing with that international scope with the US Empire being the machinery that’s oppressing all of us around the planet.

Maximillian Alvarez:

I think you’re right and it really makes me sort of reflect on the conditions that have made that more possible now than it was in the post nine eleven years. And I want to kind of break the fourth wall here and part of this question is going to be me asking if you could talk a bit about how this documentary, Earth’s Greatest Enemy embodies your own trajectory as a political activist, as a journalist, like from the Iraq war to now, because I’ll be honest, we would not be sitting next to each other, 23 years ago. I grew up very conservative. My family and I were totally bought in on the Iraq war propaganda. We were part of the US majority that just felt so hurt, shocked, and aimlessly hurt and shocked after nine eleven and trusted far too much in our own government to sort of tell us what to do next.

It took a lot of years for me to sort of uncouple myself from that conditioning. But at the time, I did not understand the kind of what to me was a left wing talking point of like, why would we be going to war with another country just for oil? What does that mean? And now here I am like nearly 25 years later being like, “Jesus, how could you not see what was right in front of you? ” So I guess first of all, how were you able to see what I was not? And I guess connect us from there to here like how the seeing of the monstrosity that was always there, like how more of us have actually come into the light and seen what we’re actually up against.

Abby Martin:

I think it all goes back to just my love for the environment, my love for nature, my love for humanity. I just really love people and I love connecting on an interpersonal level. I think when you look at this kind of death spiral, as you called it, this machinery of capitalism and the subjugation of the rest of the planet at the barrel of a nuclear armed gun to say subject or die to global capitalism, it is just so counterintuitive to like love, solidarity, having a habitable planet and future. And I never was able to really articulate that capitalism was the problem. I was kind of a confused anarchist, libertarian back when I was first being radicalized by politics, because I thought Bush was evil incarnate. I was just like, “Who the hell are these people? They’re demons. Why are they doing this? ” And then Nancy Pelot and then you slowly kind of unpack.

You’re like, “Hold on, the Democrats are part of this. Hold on. The media is part of this too.” But it was always so obvious to me because of my just repulsion for war. When the media started talking about Iraq, I was so confused, Max. I mean, I think it helped because I was surrounded by militarism at San Diego State University. I was just thrown into this where I was surrounded by military frat bros and I was just so taken aback. I mean, growing up in the Bay Area, so the proximity to Berkeley, the hippies, just that counterculture of the revolutionary fervor of Berkeley, Mario Savo and the free speech steps and things like that. And so that was always baked in, even though I was just kind of like a generic Demo from suburban Pleasanton, California. I think when the Iraq War started and the bombing of Baghdad, I was sitting in the cafeteria at San Diego State University and I felt nauseous.

I felt sick and people around me were cheering and I’ll never forget that moment. I just was like, “What’s going on? I’m so alone. Why people think this is good? This is sick. What did Saddam do to us?” I remember calling my mom, I said, “Did Saddam do something?” And she was like, “No, the media just started talking about this. ” And I just said, “What is happening?” And it was so hard to organize there, but it became so powerful to realize media was a tool to tell these stories because I started watching radical media. We were talking at the time, this was around 2003, it was like Democracy Now and Alex Jones. It was like a very weird … The internet was very strange, but you also had the capacity to do things. I mean, there was this egalitarian sense of the internet that was very exciting where you could build real friendships and find things that were just really like not … It wasn’t fed to you by the algorithm.

And so I was able to pursue so much knowledge and learn and be self-taught and how to do these tools. And so anyway, I’m going on this very long tangent to say it all synthesized for me very obviously, but it is also a journey I think for a lot of people. I’ve met people who are my age who said I didn’t know anything before October 7th, which brings me to your second question. I think October 7th and the genocide in Gaza has been an extremely revealing moment, catalyzing moment for tens of millions of people around the world. And I’m anecdotally, I can say that just traveling across the country with this documentary already going in rural, urban areas, driving everywhere, talking to people, everyone has been motivated by the fact that this government has subsidized and overseen this genocide and how it has been bipartisan and the failure of the so- called opposition and the Democratic Party to stop it and incubate what we now have.

It’s all just so crystal clear and it’s been actually really amazing to see the radicalization occur in circles that I never would’ve expected at all. Older religious people, I mean, but really it’s the youth. It’s the youth who are seen, they don’t have a future if they let this just grow unabated, if they let the data centers take over, they let the unregulated nature of global capitalism take over, unregulated nature of imperialism, which turns inward, which we’re seeing the ICE executions in the street. So I’d say there’s an explosion of consciousness around the world, synthesizing all these issues, putting Palestine as the cornerstone of our collective liberation and realizing how all these things interconnect. And it’s beautiful, Max, because on the streets during the Iraq war, Palestine was too controversial. In the streets were in Occupy Wall Street, Obama was off limits. And so it’s all burgeoning now.

It’s all right beneath the surface and people are so ready to hear that phrase national strike, national strike. They know we’ve been in the streets with sustained protests. I’m an activist and a journalist. Again, I’m an advocacy journalist, so I advocate my own activism and I embed myself in the people’s stories and people’s struggles and try to uplift those stories just as real news does. And so I’m speaking from the streets. I was just in the streets in Minneapolis. I’ve never seen energy like I have now and people standing up in solidarity with their brothers and sisters because they want to terrorize us in a submission and silence and fear and I’m seeing the opposite happen and that’s something extremely powerful and again, kind of incalculable in terms of like what will happen with this energy. It’s very exciting.

Maximillian Alvarez:

It is. And this is a moment in history not to be wasted because it won’t be around forever.

And it also sort of makes me think about like again, what is so different between our moment now in the year of our Lord 2026 and our moment then in the post nine eleven years at the turn of the millennium. And I of course can’t help but think about my own trajectory, my own family, like what has changed in our lives since then? Well, a massive economic global financial meltdown happened. We lost everything that my parents had worked for, including the house that I grew up in and it’s been a very long kind of struggle to get back to a place of peace and normalcy for our entire family since then. And now as someone who goes around interviewing, working people around the country talking about their lives and their stories, I hear a lot of echoes of that similar trajectory for a lot of people.

And I guess that’s just a long-winded way of saying that at the turn of the century when we were as a country much more gung-ho about … Yeah, we have the right as the United States to go around the world telling other countries what to do. We have the right to spread democracy because it’s the best system in the world. We’re liberating people, we’re not doing something bad, yada, yada, yada.That was a time pre 2008 crash when the American dream was still plausible for a lot of us. You go out on the streets now, you talk to people now, no one believes in the American dream. I mean, if a handful of billionaires own everything and all of our money is just being sucked out of the public coffers and into the war industry. And so what I hear now when I go to these demonstrations in Baltimore, DC, what I hear now when I talk to poor and working class people in deep red Trump country districts in the Midwest or the South or here in the Mid-Atlantic, the common refrain that I hear is like, “Why is my money going there when we’re all kind of floundering here?” And I think that that is also a very significant sign of where we are as a country, but also a significant kind of mobilizing factor that presents an opportunity for people to look around and realize we’re all getting screwed by very identifiable villains.

And I wanted to sort of like hook that back into earth’s greatest enemy and ask who are the identifiable villains in this story that you’re telling and how do we take them on?

Abby Martin:

Yeah. I mean, the problem with capitalism and the status quo of neoliberalism is that everything’s been co-opted, superficialized, tokenized, our struggles have been bought and sold back to us. And so for the last 50 years, labor density, unions, that revolutionary undercurrent of all the progressive struggles, it’s been kind of co-opted into these corporate branding and marketing campaigns and it’s been really, really horrific to see because we’re getting back to our footing where people were in the 60s and 70s with this fundamental understanding of ideology and being able to articulate what we are fighting for and against. And so we’re getting back to that. I think Bernie and Democratic socialists of America and things like that have really resurrected the spirit of what we can all kind of orient ourselves around. But for the longest time, Max, I mean, I grew up very anti-communist. I mean, this was very, very baked in to American society because of the history against the ruling class.

And so what you see now is parasitic billionaires who have basically seized that distrust that did exist for exactly the reasons that you’re talking about, the disaffected masses who lost everything during the financial crisis, who knew that we were lied to about nine eleven and in the Iraq war, they don’t trust these people, but Trump was very smart in the way that they seized that momentum and siphoned all of the energy into this faux populism. And again, there was no opposition infrastructure to counteract that. And so a lot of us are kind of flailing saying, “How do we gain ground when they have taken over everything?” And then the Democrats kind of incubated it and laid the groundwork for them to take over everything because they’re basically Republican lights because everything is about making profit at the end of the day. And so I think what we need to do is realize we are all victims of propaganda.

We’re all at different steps of our journey of breaking out of that, but that’s all baked into all of us. And so approaching each other, and I’m not talking about fascists or people who are apologists for genocide. There are certain contingent of society that can’t be helped. They’ve succumbed to the darkness. They’ve been beaten down by the system and they’ve commodified everything. They have lost their empathy. I’m not saying that they’re born like that. I’m just saying that a lot of them can’t be helped right now and we need to let that go. But I think the vast majority of people are empathetic. They’re humanitarians. They want civil liberties. They want the foundation of what they believed America to be, human rights, the First Amendment, free speech, the beautiful things that make this country supposedly great. Those are the people that we need to reach out to with humility and empathy and reaching them where they’re at.

I’m talking about service members. I’m talking about veterans. They are not the enemy. They are victims of the enemy. The enemy is the top brass of the military, the government officials who are complicit in this, who are profiting off of war, who are invested in the war machinery, editors in chief at the New York Times, the Washington Post who are putting out the propaganda that sows the seeds for genocide, who perpetuate the status quo of this death cycle. Earth’s greatest enemy, that was the Biden administration. That was before Trump. That’s the status quo. That’s what we’ve accepted as normal, barreling us off a cliff, killing every last living thing on the planet, a finite planet. It’s collective lunacy and madness to go into this year after year knowing the outcome max. And I think people are so ready. They’re starving for this information. They’re sick of being gaslit and lied to and they’re realizing, “Hey, this is not the reality that I see.

This is not the reality that my neighbor sees.” COVID was very important for the ruling class. We were fighting each other about vaccines, about God knows what while they cannibalized every last industry. They siphoned every last drop of wealth. They pillaged everything. They gained what tripled their wealth in the last five years. And what happened to us atomized, isolated, siloed off, brain rodted on our phones thinking we can’t ever do anything about this. We lost. That’s what they want. Just like Barry Sanders in the movie says, “See what you see. Don’t be duped. See what’s right in front of your face.” And I’m not talking about on your phone, on your screen. I’m talking about in reality, vast majority of people are ready. They’re waiting for you to talk about these things because they don’t have the chance. They don’t have that opportunity or those avenues because Elon Musk wants them to believe something else.

And we have to ask, why is the richest man in the world showing us what he’s showing us? So when we get on our devices, yes, the advent of social media, the advent of Palestinian voices dictating their reality and taking back their agencies, been monumental, revolutionary, assisted to all of this, but we have to also be calculating strategic, creative, getting off of these devices and meeting like we used to because that’s how we win. We don’t win on here. That’s just one tool for us.

Maximillian Alvarez:

I think that’s beautifully and powerfully put and vitally true. And we’re saying this as two media makers, you know, Media personalities. Media can only do so much and we are trying to do as much as we can with it and your new documentary is an incredible example of that. But I could not agree more with your last point that we’re not going to bring a coalition of poor working class regular people banding together to stop the destruction of our society and our planet online.That’s not going to happen.You don’t get 50,000 people marching through the streets of Minneapolis just by posting and sending emails. You have to have that in- person connection, which is all I’m hearing coming from Minneapolis. People are saying I’m both simultaneously more afraid of my government than I’ve ever been, but I’ve never felt safer in my own neighborhood because everyone’s talking to each other and everyone’s kind of working together.

We were already losing that basic infrastructure for society as such well before 2020. But I think COVID really did a number on what was left of our social infrastructure, on our social being. So many of us just stayed closed in, stayed cut off, stayed glued to our phones and our computers. And as you mentioned, the powers that be, the people who control the media, those platforms, they know that and they are manipulating that to the point that no one has an agreed upon basis of the reality that we’re actually all living in because depending on what feed you’re looking at, where you live, what your search history is, you’re going to see an entirely different world be outside your window than the person who’s living next door to you. And

Abby Martin:

That’s a

Maximillian Alvarez:

Very dangerous and dark place to be. But I wanted to kind of hook that back into something else that you said, which was the value of not only talking to service members and military veterans, but that was made manifest in this documentary. I mean, it’s important in and of itself because as you said, they are not the enemy. They are the victims of this monstrous machine. They are the human grist for the proverbial mill of US imperialism. But it also kind of hooks into the beginning of this conversation where we were talking about how hard it is to actually research and understand this topic of just how big of an environmental threat is the US military to the world. And it was so clear to me in your documentary that if you go and try to get answers to those questions from top government officials or military brass, you’re not going to get anywhere.

But when you and Mike Preisner are talking to veterans, the rank and file of the military, you get a very different perspective on the problem. And I wanted to ask if you could talk a little bit about how different that perspective actually is.

Abby Martin:

Okay. So there’s this hive mind that kind of operates in a similar fashion to how a corporate board would. So let’s say someone just has a conscience all of a sudden who’s on the executive board of Amazon or something, they would just be kicked out. You need to make money, you need to make more money than the last quarter, otherwise you’re not profitable. You’re a failing entity. That’s exactly how the US military operates. So when you’re looking at who’s sitting on the board of these board of directors of the defense contractors, they’re all interlocking with the media arms and all of these things. And that kind of explains this hive mind operational structure of a system that kind of works on its own. It doesn’t have a conscience, but of course it’s comprised of people who do and they can speak out and they have voices and they have their own minds, even though you’re beaten down in the military to not have your own mind.

So when you break out of that, when you see it for what it is, it’s such a powerful thing. I know hundreds of service members, because of my husband’s work, obviously, organizing soldiers and getting people out because anyone can get out of the military. It doesn’t need to be something specific. Anyone can file a CO packet and get out today. You never need to stay in and Mike can orient you through that. But it’s just so amazing to see people who are coming to the movie, watching it, who are active duty. My cousin who was a 20-year-old naval officer watched it and he was just like, “You know, because I don’t agree with your politics, but I’m here to support you. ” After the movie, he was just shaking. He’s like, “I’m ready to F and go, dude. I’m ready to fight.” And it’s just reaching people on a human level because I think especially when you reach out to service members, they’re victims, they’re not profiting off of this.

They don’t benefit from this system. They’re cannon fodder. They’re the human detritists that are going to be kicked out in the street like Levon, the homeless veteran at the beginning of the movie. He represents kind of the consequences of the system. I mean, he represents all of the destruction of the environment, the garbage that’s tossed in the ocean, every bullet fragment that’s exploded and the chemical exposure of all the toxins left everywhere that were bombing and shooting shells. And that story alone is so powerful, just one single homeless vet who was in a commercial for the army.

Levon:

First Air Cav Brigade. I was in US Army. I joined up in 2004, deployed out in 2006 and it was hell. I was at Camp Taji, seven miles south of Baghdad. I was one of the “Army of One” commercials. I was a guy with the helicopters.

Army Officer 1:

Everybody listen up. This is Levon.

Wenty:

Hey, Levon. I’m Wenty.

Army Officer 1:

You’re on the 120 today. So if there’s anything you need, just ask these guys. They’ll take care of it. All right?

Army Officer 2:

Welcome aboard.

Levon:

Thank you.

Army Officer 2:

You ever been around anything this fast before?

Levon:

He walks in and goes, “You ever worked around anything this fast before?” Yeah. My last job.

“Army of One” Commercial Narrator:

See how army training gives you strength for now, strength for later. GoArmy.Com.

Levon:

Yeah, it was all a lie. I have nerve damage, so I’m actually losing my hands. So I’m trying to use them as much as I can until they’re all gone. It hurts. It actually hurts. But that’s what the hydraulic fluid in service does. Laughing is the only way I can get through, otherwise I’m crying.

Abby Martin:

It encapsulates everything. It’s like you’re exploited, your story, your body, and then you’re thrown in the trash and you’re left to die with no help. And that’s the thing that veterans need to understand, whether it’s burn pits or agent orange, chemical exposure. There’s no help on the other end under this system. It’s just about churning your body out for profit. You’re just another commodity. And once you realize that you join the fight because you can always get out and you can make your own decisions and agency to realize it’s not worth it. It’s not worth your life. Your life has value and your life has dignity and you need to put it toward benefiting humanity and the planet.

Maximillian Alvarez:

Again, that was very beautifully and powerfully put and it really kind of chills my blood hearing everything that you’re saying because it sounds so eerily familiar from the reporting that I’ve been doing over the past few years starting in the small town of East Palestine, Ohio. And we are having this conversation at the end of January 2026. I’m going to be back in East Palestine next week. It’ll be the three year anniversary since the Norfolk Southern bomb train derailed in these people’s backyards, turned their lives upside down, trained filled with toxic chemicals that in an industry that has been just cut to the bone on the labor side, on the safety side, but is making more profits than it ever has. And who benefits from that? The shareholders and the executives. Who bears the costs of that? The workers on the rails and the people in towns like East Palestine, Ohio.

And this is an entire region that has been poisoned by industrial or corporate profit seeking greed and government complicity and negligence. Our own EPA was telling people there, “You’re fine. It’s okay to go back home. The air’s safe. The water’s safe.” And here they are three years later telling me people are getting all kinds of weird cancers. People have to leave because they can’t stay in their homes without getting nosebleeds, rashes, their kids bleeding out of every orifice. It is a shit show, a monstrous shit show that is sadly not unique to Ohio. What I have learned going to different sacrifice zones so called around the country, talking to different poor and working class people here in South Baltimore, down in Georgia near the biolab fire that happened last year, moss landing like in California, this is everywhere and people are being poisoned and abandoned in the exact same way that you just described as like military veterans and the people living abroad who are if not killed by our munitions are poisoned by them for years and the rest of their lives.

So all of that is here at home as much as it is there abroad. And frankly, I don’t think your average American knows that when it comes to like sites of industrial and mass pollution here in the United States, the biggest portion of super fun sites that come from one source is the Department of Defense. It’s like military bases. It’s weapons manufacturing plants. It’s the kind of foam that they use to put out fires that puts forever chemicals in the water that we’re all drinking. And so I wanted to kind of bring it back home for a second and ask if you could talk about the vast environmental kind of impact that the war machine is having on Americans and like how that connects to the imperial monster of American militarism abroad.

Abby Martin:

You look at just legacy contamination of what the US did during the Cold War, during World War II. I mean, you even still see dead zones from World War I from small munitions, which just kind of shows you how detrimental these are in just training. I mean, even just training alone, like you mentioned forever chemicals. I mean, the firefighting foam that’s used extensively by the military. The military is one of the most pervasive users of PFAS contamination. There are safe alternatives there have been forever, but they just don’t use them because it’s, I guess, less cost effective and they’d rather just dump them all and contaminate water supplies. So people may know peripherally about Camp Lejeune, which is the worst water contamination event in US history. This is now a super fun site, Camp Lejeune, North Carolina military base where they dumped toxic compounds for decades.

And after they knew that it was toxic, they continued to do it and cover it up. And so a million people were poisoned harmed by this toxic dumping and there was a huge amount of poisoned infants that were stillborn babies. And what was most shocking about this, Max, is this could be looked at as like, “Oh, it’s just a 60 year old story. The government took care of everyone and they’ll never do it again.” Maybe they just didn’t know any better. Well, it’s amazing to think that now 60 years later, people are still dying. They have ailments, they’re generational and physically impaired from the toxic water contamination and there’s no database. They are trying to try every single individual claim and the judge said it would take over a century to try to actually give all of these people what they deserve. And of course a lot of them have died.

They’re just waiting for all them to die off so they just don’t have to deal with them anymore. But I think it really just explains how they deal with victims of burn pits, with victims of aging orange poisoning. They deny, they deny, they deny. They try to just resist doling out even a penny for the victims and then the site is left destroyed. I mean, it’s a super fun site. This is just a poison toxic site that doesn’t go through proper remediation. There are hundreds of them all across the US. Like you said, the vast majority are either US military installations or have previously housed military uses. So bullet manufacturing, you have the Hanford nuclear site, which is like a ticking time bomb that can poison three states at once in the entire river that supplies water to half the country. So these are serious problems that are not being dealt with because we don’t have a functional government that is going around saying, “Hey, how do we do this clean up properly?” No, no, no.

We’re just going to commit fraud. We’re just going to lie. Governors don’t want the black spot on their record by saying, “We have a super fund site. We need to clean it up. We need to divert resources.” They’d rather ignore it. And of course, the military is sacred. It’s worshiped so they don’t even want to combat it. In on amazing instance, Jay Inslee, who was the governor, previous governor of Washington who ran on climate change as his entire doctrine, he wouldn’t even criticize the military. He wouldn’t even answer a basic question on should these be included or not in emissions reporting. I mean, the cowardice is frankly horrifying and disgusting.

It’s so far reaching here. When you put legacy contamination aside, just again, the maintenance of the arsenal here at home. We have hundreds of bases here in the US. Every base is dumping forever chemicals in the ground. Every base has contamination. Some of them much higher than Camp Lejeune. We talked to a person who is testing the groundwater around bases in the US. He is saying he is finding ground contamination higher than Camp Lejeune. Why don’t we hear about this, Max? Why? This is the most base level big tent ever for a human being. Clean water, clean air, clean food. If we can’t build an opposition or an organizational infrastructure around that, what are we doing? What are we doing? So again, it’s this total ignorance, total ignorance of the military being actually not a benevolent force spreading democracy and human rights. A force for profit that is destructive, deadly, totally dissociated from human life, the sanctity of life.

It’s willing to kill everything and everyone on the planet. So Jeff Bezos can have another yacht. Is it worth it? Hell no, it’s not. Hell no, it’s not. And so this just brings it all home and especially with ICE, because at the end of the movie we talk about the militarization of the police. So that concept of the imperial boomerang, I mean, of course it’s always been our tactics of colonialism, genocide. They’ve always been circling back, right? But I think the visceral nature of it now where we see storm troopers masked, immunized in the streets, state executioners in military guard where you can’t even distinguish, is this Palestine? Is this here? What am I looking at? It’s here, baby. It’s here to roost. And so I don’t even … There’s no difference anymore. I think for a long time people were trying to convince people, “Hey, no, no, you should care about Palestine.

This is all going to come back up. And you shouldn’t care about it because eventually it’s going to come back home. You should care about it because it’s human life. It’s human life and it’s on our shoulders. This is our government doing this. ” But I think especially now people are saying, “Oh my God, it’s here. It’s here and we’re all of our liberations intrinsically tied to one another.” And I think it’s becoming so, so clear. And especially when you tie in the environment, Max, because it’s not just one life loss, this is the air, this is the water, this is our planet and it doesn’t stop with Palestine. It doesn’t stop with the Congo, the rainforest, it’s the lungs of the planet. Every drop of water comes back and that’s what’s so crucial about the collaborative nature of approaching this existential crisis is that instead we have the great power competition where we’re fighting, we’re preparing a war with China when we should be cooperating.

How can we approach these together to actually give us a fighting chance?

Maximillian Alvarez:

I want to kind of end on that powerful note, right? Because as much fire as I’m feeling in my belly thinking about our collective duty

To respond to this moment in history for humanity, for life on this planet, for our children, our grandchildren, all of it. I am feeling more called to this fight than ever before at the same time that I, like everyone else who’s watching this right now am feeling more distraught about the state of things in the world right now and it seems like we just have a brick on the gas pedal careening in the exact wrong direction, not only in terms of tackling the climate crisis, but in that double helix fashion, like stopping the US war machine, Jesus, we’re only in the first month of 2026 and we’ve invaded Venezuela, kidnapped its president. US is talking about just going in and taking Greenland, invading Iran. It feels like the very monster that you photograph and document and detail in this documentary is on a murderous planet destroying rampage.

I know a lot of people out there are feeling like, “Oh my God, this can’t be stopped.” But I want to end on the note that it can

Abby Martin:

And

Maximillian Alvarez:

It must and what tools your documentary gives us to help make that a reality.

Abby Martin:

I think this is very important. Like we said, see what you see, don’t be duped. So see what you see, meaning the success stories, the things that the billionaire class does not want us to see the victories across the country, the mobilizations, the coalescing these movements, the burgeoning of consciousness. I mean, I always say empire, Zionism, it’s a paper tiger and that’s why the propaganda is so desperate and that’s why the violence is so extreme because the colonizer mind cannot beat a liberated on. They can kill. They can kill and destroy, but they can’t win. They can’t be victorious. And all an empire knows is that every problem is a nail. And so the more that they dig their own graves, the more people wake up, the question is, are we going to wake up fast enough? And I think that when we see success stories like last year, Max 35 data centers got stopped in the US, where is that on the news?

So it’s us seeking out the things that can actually reinvigorate our revolutionary spirit energy and not get despawned and paralyzed with the sheer, terrifying nature of it all because it is overwhelming. And again, it’s intentional to berate and barrage our minds like this. They’ve psychologically, it’s a psychic assault. It’s a physical assault. It’s an all body, all mind assault and they know exactly how to manipulate us. If they’ve learned anything from the last mass uprising, it’s that. And so I think having that consciousness, yes, they’ve wanted to individualize everything and that’s the whole problem with liberalism, capitalism, individualizing our struggles and the solution. Papers, straws, driving … Look, and I have solar panels. I’m a militant composter. You don’t get a shred of food past me. Ask my husband, but it doesn’t mean that I don’t understand who is the perpetrator, who’s actually at fault.

It’s not us, it’s them. And so while you need to act in your individual choices with whatever capacity you have, with whatever talents you have, build and guide that to the struggle, because if it didn’t matter what you said online, they wouldn’t be spending billions of dollars on propaganda to manipulate and curate our realities. If it didn’t matter what you did out there, they wouldn’t be spending billions of dollars on storm troopers to terrorize us and to make us feel scared to walk out of our houses, obey or die, comply or die, right? That’s what they said about Alex Pretty. You should have stayed inside. No, we have the right to assert our liberties. We have the right to do these things. So to kind of reclaim reality is like a revolutionary act in itself because it is a war on our minds. That’s the first step, joining an organization, getting out there, being a part of the community.

Because Max, we don’t do this. We don’t do this work because we know we’re going to win tomorrow. We do it because we have to. Like Chris Hedges said, we fight fascists because they’re fascists. We have to fight it because we brought children in this world and not just that, because I love this planet. I want my children to go scuba diving in Noko Bay. I want them to meet the Tugong. I don’t want him to think that I gave up because I just succumbed to the darkness. I want them to know that we fought till the end. And so we have to. We do it because we have to because we love life and we do it to preserve life and we win when we know that we can because guess what? We have the power. We have billions of people on this planet and the rest of the world is ready to go.

They’re waiting for Americans. They’re looking at us saying, “It’s time. It’s time for you guys to wake up because we don’t want our planet destroyed because if you’re out of control government and military empire.” So as crazy and dystopian as things may seem, and yes, indeed they are, there is an alternative path that is becoming more and more urgent by the day and I think people are realizing that more and more, that the status quo is death, that you’re in or out and I think a lot more people are choosing life. They’re choosing to be all in organizationally lending whatever they can to the struggle because we have to Max and I think once that consciousness flips, mass education, of course, is a very important tool. That’s why we do what we do. Once that flips, it’s going to happen quick. Occupy happened quick. That was amazing.

That was one thing that I was like, “This is going to end in a couple days.” And it lasted for months and months. That was beautiful, revolutionary. And we took that spirit and I think it still carries on with us today and we’re waiting for that moment and I think it’s really right around the corner. It’s coming. And once it’s here, it’s unstoppable and we need millions of people, civil disobedience, nonviolent civil disobedience, because we cannot fight the military empire with violence. We can’t fight it with military might. We shut down capital. That’s the language these people speak. We haven’t even tried to strike, but baby, when we do it, that’s going to send shockwaves through the world and we can move mountains when we stop business as usual.

The following is a rushed transcript and may contain errors. A proofread version will be made available as soon as possible.

Mansa Musa:

Joining us today again is William C. Anderson, author and columnist of Prism. If you missed our first conversation where we explore how Black citizenship has historically been called into question, you can find it on our YouTube channel. The history feels especially urgent this week following the United States Supreme Court’s ruling gutting the Voting Rights Act. This is clearly part of the continuation by the right to reverse black progress.

William, before you dive into your latest prism article which critiques the current left and offer a path forward, what is your assessment of what you see coming out of the Supreme Court this week?

William C. Anderson:

Yeah, it’s something that I’ve been thinking about quite a bit. I saw the news, and I wasn’t surprised by it. I thought it was to be expected. As you might know, this is something that I wrote about in the Nation on No Map, and specifically I mentioned the 2013 Voting Rights Act decision in terms of the case with Shelby v. Holder, just following it up to that point because the book came out in 2021.

So with things being where they were at that stage, I was anticipating it getting to this point and becoming even more dismantled and even more deconstructed.

And the thing that I would say about it is it’s an especially personal matter for me because I’m from Alabama, From Shelby County, who brought the case against the Obama administration withholder. And in that original ruling at that point, one of the things that Chief Justice John Roberts had said was that something to the effect of that at 50 years later, things had changed quite dramatically and it was kind of implying that there was enough progress that had been made that is not necessary anymore to have something like the Voting Rights Act. And that’s what kind of underscores a lot of these white supremacists and fascist attacks on Black history and on legislation that has been beneficial to Black people. It’s kind of trying to illuminate some sort of postracial society that we know clearly doesn’t exist because they’re becoming increasingly racist. They’re not becoming less racist.

So it’s really just more evidence that if we really want to be able to see better conditions that are permanent and that are only making progress for the betterment of our lives and the sustenance and the resources that we need, then we have to have liberatory politics that actually push for those things in a way that is wholesale, that is comprehensive, that is expansive, and that’s not incremental. And that’s not to do anything or say anything that diminishes all of the blood, sweat, and tears that were put in by the foot soldiers of the civil rights movement across the board from the more radical ends to the more moderate ends of the civil rights [movement].

What is to say is that we should be able to learn from this history that no matter what, when we’re relying on the halls of the White House and Capitol Hill and representative democracy to try to do something for us that we know it’s not designed to do, that it’s always going to end up like this. It’s always going to be dismantled. It’s always going to be rolled back. It’s always going to be trying to correct itself to get back to serving white supremacy and capitalism in the fullest extent, and not doing anything that it’s not meant to do originally.

Mansa Musa:

Yeah, I agree 100%. This week, Prism published a new installment of your series, Another Way Out, titled We Need a Mosaic Movement and you write, “instead of a call for resentment field, unity or traditional fronts, we can look to what former Black Panther Party, Black Liberation Army members, and political prisoner Russell Maroon Schultz called The Mosaic.” Could you walk us through the core argument of your article and could you provide a brief introduction to the life and legacy of Russell Maroon Schultz?

William C. Anderson:

For sure. I’ll start with Russell Maroon Shoatz. And Russell Maroon Shoatz was a really interesting and spectacular and dynamic individual. He was a former Panther and Black liberation army soldier, and he became active in politics, I want to say in the 60s, and was a founding member of the Black Unity Council in Philadelphia, and they later merged with the Black Panther Party.

So he put in a lot of work. He has a deep history in movement and in struggle and he got locked up in 1972 for the first time, and he becomes a really extraordinary political prisoner because he’s writing, he’s thinking, and he’s developing over time.

And what’s so interesting about Russell Maroon Shoatz is that he’s prolific. He’s a prolific thinker and individual in the sense that he spends a lot of his time questioning. He doesn’t get incarcerated and kind of sit there holding the same position for 30, 40, 50 years. He’s asking questions the whole time. He’s developing, he’s expanding his analysis, and he is moving towards politics that are ultimately really, really interesting and fascinating.

So one of the things that I really appreciate about his work is that he was bringing in elements that I would say he wasn’t necessarily always speaking about or being influenced by. There were things that were coming to him later over time If you look at the chorus of his work, the development he had as a person.

And so one of those aspects is something that comes forth in the essay that I’m referencing in my latest column at prism. And this is from an essay called The Dragon and the Hydra. The Dragon and the Hydra is an essay that is an organizational study that looks at the maroons and the slave revolts and the struggles of African descended people in the Americas and the fights against slavery, colonialism and imperialism.

And what is so dynamic about this essay is that you can see a departure really with Schoatz and certain aspects of his past. So he is making a critique of democratic centralism, he’s making a critique of vanguardism, and he’s making a critique of some of the politics that are associated with the Black Panther Party. And he’s calling in to question even a lot of the projects of Marxist Leninism and the state socialist projects that were struggling in building national socialism.

So he is making a critique that is, I think, probably controversial in some regards for some people. And he also at the same time he’s critiquing these things, he draws from them still. He still talks about his influence, the influence that these things had in his life.

but he also brings in element. He says at the beginning of the essay, “I’m going to say a lot of things that sound like anarchism.” And he says, “I’m not an anarchist, but as long as anarchists are willing to stand on mutual footing in the struggle for intercommunal self-determination, that you should be able to see the overlap and see where things have parallels.”

So ultimately in this essay, Schoatz, he puts forth this organizational study and he says that it’s important for people to be able to learn from the past and not just keep doing the same thing over and over again. That’s at the core of that essay.

I was drawing on in the essay that I wrote for prism, it is about this last section that’s included in the collected writings of Russell Maroon Schoatz called Maroon the Implacable. And what is in that last section is called the Mosaic, It’s a section called the Mosaic. What is in that last section is a solution because he doesn’t just put forth the critique. He offers a solution for how people can struggle separately and autonomously but understand their collective interest as different groups, as different genders, as different ideologies, as different political backgrounds and so on and so forth.

And it’s not a traditional or typical call for a united front. It is a call for people to understand their common interest and to be able to have mutual respect enough to come together and to struggle to overthrow the conditions that are oppressing them.

So the core argument of my essay is about challenging what I feel is really a lot of silliness with the current state of the US left, especially with my generation and, unfortunately, a lot with younger generations than me, there’s just a lot of sectarianism, there’s a lot of beef, there’s a lot of conflict, and there’s a lot of issues over things that really don’t have anything to do with the current different denominations of the US left.

And what I mean by that is that the current US left doesn’t have control over anything. It doesn’t have any blocs that it controls. It doesn’t have any territory that it controls. It doesn’t have power in the government. It doesn’t have a party. It doesn’t have an army. It doesn’t have a military. These are different fragmented individuals who at best might have an organization that can do something in the community here or there or might be able to serve some interest or need in some other way, but this isn’t like some massive part of the US population. In the article I was saying, if you put all of these folks together, these different factions of the left, they don’t even equal half a percent of the US population.

So I was just trying to really say that this is a good time when we understand that fascism is not even at the door, it’s inside of the house. It’s a good time to let go of a lot of the rhetoric, a lot of the dogma, and a lot of the silliness that is just so prevalent on the US left, people thinking that they’re way more relevant than they actually are, way more powerful than they actually are and bring forth an analysis like what Russell Maroon Schoatz offers with the mosaic.

Mansa Musa:

Your critique of the left is blistering to say the least and rightly so. You state as it stands, we do not have an oppositional or even a functional left. We have leftists and leftism, and there’s a difference. Could you expound on that distinction?

William C. Anderson:

The current state of the left, the lefts, because it is different groups and different factions and sects. The current state of things is it is basically nonexistent.

When I’m talking about the left, I should first make the distinction that there isn’t really a functioning coherent unified or homogenous group that we know as the left. When people say the term the left, they oftentimes are grouping lots of different things that are in conflict with one another.

So some people say the left and they mean like liberals and progressives, and then maybe some of the more further left elements. Typically when I’m talking about the left, I’m talking about the historical movement that divided up in the struggle to ultimately build socialism. And I’m talking about the people who would identify as Marxists, as Marxist Leninist, as anarchist, who are formerly known as libertarian socialists in the socialist movement before the meaning of that term changed, and also talking about all of the different offshoots and developments within those respective things because then you have different types of people within each of those larger umbrella terms. That’s typically what I’m talking about, which is for some people, the more radical left. So I think that it’s important to first make that distinction.

Secondly, I would say that since it is not a functional opposition and it’s not really something that exists because it’s so fragmented and divided up into these different kind of sporadic groups, it’s interesting because a lot of what you see from within these different elements that I’m referring to is largely posturing because there’s no power base that warrants the level of arrogance that you see coming from a lot of people within these different factions of the left. If you’re not in control of anything and you don’t have the power to actually overthrow or to seize or to dismantle the oppressive instruments that you’re constantly talking about, then you have to operate from a place where you’re in touch with reality, the reality of yourself and the reality of what you are in the country that you inhabit.

So I’m ultimately a bit confused because when I’m saying that there’s a lot of posturing, I’m looking at these people who might reference something like the Black Panther Party as an endorsement of their ideology. Saying they’re a Marxist Leninist, and they say, “Well, the Black Panther Party used Marxist Leninism or Maoism or anything to push their organization forward and do this, that, or the third.” The thing is, okay, that wasn’t you though. If you’re a person who identifies as an anarchist and you glorifying the zapatistas and talking about what they’ve been able to accomplish and how it influences you, that’s not you either. You’re talking about Lenin and the Russian Revolution and the Bolsheviks and talking about what that means to you as a Marxist, that’s not you. You didn’t do that. You’re an anarchist talking about Nestor Machno and talking about what’s being accomplished in Ukraine with that army, that wasn’t you.

So I’m very confused by the posturing because if you’re not inhabiting the position to be able to affect change and to change things for the better in your own conditions in your own time, you can’t lay claim to the accomplishments of people from the past or the present that don’t have anything to do with you or don’t have anything to do with what you’re doing in your [crosstalk] community.

You can’t just look and say, “I’m this ideology, I’m an anarchist, I’m a Marxist Leninist, I’m a Maoist, I’m a Trotskyist,” and then lay claim to historical victories and project yourself onto them and then act as if they’re yours. That’s not how that works. Your accomplishments have to speak for themselves based on the praxis and the revolutionary activity that you self-organize within your own time and your own conditions.

And so you have all these people online fighting over things that they didn’t even achieve. You have people fighting over things that they have nothing to do with. Governments that they have no role in, no stake in.

And it just blows my mind because it feels like a lot of people have lost the plot, that we are supposed to be activating ourselves within our communities to build power so that we can decide together what kind of society we want to live in based on our unique conditions and time period. Not saying I’m an ideology that I chose off of Wikipedia and I’m going to then make a decision about what the future looks like based off of my identity crisis because I’m over here with all this talk and I haven’t accomplished anything.

Mansa Musa:

Yeah, very well put. And there’s a lot of lip service and we in the age of social media, so you can give lip service to it and you can put your social media platform together, and that become your revolution. Your revolution is I’m more vocal in the social media network, but I have yet to feed people. I have yet to create a school. I have yet to create any institution or things that’s raising people’s conscience or creating an environment where people come together to talk about what kind of society they think we should live in.

But as we mark the 60th anniversary of the Black Panther Party, how do you define their ultimate contribution to social justice? Additionally, in your book, The Nation on No Maps, Black Anarchism and Abolition, what land policy do you highlight as successful examples of self-determination and sovereignty?

William C. Anderson:

The interesting thing about the way that I feel in relation to the Black Panther Party and some of the elements of what I just mentioned is that, again, a lot of what I feel is a large misstep with people who have come along after, especially in my generation, is that there is a discussion and a sort of… What’s the word I would use? I would say that there’s a lot of discussion and reverence for the Black Panther Party that oversimplifies the legacy.

And as you know, Mansa, the Black Panther Party was an organization that had different chapters, and it had different eras, and it had splits, and it had internal fighting, and a lot of other things that went on over the course it existed.

So when you talk about the Black Panther Party and you homogenize it and make it into one thing, which is what a lot of people during this era that have come all along later do, you are not able to learn from the successes and the failures of the Black Panther Party. And unfortunately, we have to discuss failures in order to not repeat them. And one of the things that gets lost is how the Black Panther Party changed course a number of times, not just in terms of leadership, but in terms of politics.

So just a second ago when I was talking about these different people within the left laying claim to things that they have no right to lay claim to, one of the things that is kind of mind boggling to me is how the Black Panther Party is oversimplified to glorify certain ideologies, whether it be Marxist-Leninism, Maoism, or whatever the case, when the current fact of the matter is, I’m on here today talking about Russell Maroon Shoatz, who’s a former Black Panther Party member. Russell Maroon Schoatz’s critique of democratic centralism is a part of a larger thread, which is the discussion that I had with you last time I was on.

The larger thread that it’s a part of is that you had a number of people who after the dissolution of the Black Panther Party or who left the party became anarchist. Russell Maroon Schoatz doesn’t fall into that category, but you have people like Lorenzo Komboa Irvin, you have people like Ashanti Alston, Kuwesi Balagun, Ojoy Lutello, all these political prisoners and revolutionaries who became attracted to anarchism, Jenina Irvin, who was the last editor of the Black Panther Party newspaper.

And so not only do certain people change later within the context of the party and at the time that it was going through different changes and splits, you had someone like Huey P. Newton who brings forth his theory of intercommunalism, which I write also about in The Nation on No Map.

When he brings forth the theory of intercommunalism and he gives a speech at Boston College in 1970, Huey P. Newton is raising this issue about a lot of the Marxist Leninist dogma getting too deep within the party, about how they were supposed to be changing, and he starts asking questions about the nation and about the state, and you see a radical sort of turn is happening within the party.

This is something that Bobby Seal also spoke about. Bobby Seal also became increasingly critical of a lot of these elements, this sort of traditional sort of state socialism that had once been a big part of the party. And they talk about the development from Black nationalism to Marxist Leninism, Maoism towards that place that they had come, or that they had arrived at.

Another person who talks about it was Phil Marshall Don Cox. Phil Marshall Don Cox was increasingly critical.

So I just named a plethora of people The Black Panther Party who started saying, “Actually, we need to start rethinking this and moving away from this. And they start saying a lot of things that if they weren’t outright anarchist, become increasingly anarchistic in their thinking. Just think that it’s important, extremely important to notice that thread, to acknowledge it and not pretend like it didn’t exist, and to talk about what it actually meant and not freeze the Black Panther Party in one era and one chapter of its development of it as an organization.

So that’s one of my biggest concerns with my work and that’s one of the reasons that I write about Black anarchism. It’s not because I’m trying to be doctrinaire or create a new ideology, or bring forth a new ideology rather, to some people’s attention for them to become zealots about or so dogmatic about. I just think it’s important to be able to look at the bigger picture of the Black Panther Party and to talk about the entire scope of what happened, what occurred, and the changes that people made at the end of their lives.

Just like I was talking about Russell Maroon Shots at the beginning being a person who developed over time, so too was everybody else that you look at from the Black Panther Party. They all developed, they all changed, they all became people who departed from positions that they had once held.

And you have to acknowledge that. You can’t just freeze them as Marxist Leninist or this or that. That’s what they were and that means that this is good forever and that’s the way it is. You have to look at the entire picture.

And I think that one of the things that leads me to do is to call into question a lot of the necessity for the politics that they started to depart from, or did depart from depending on who you’re talking about, respectively. And that’s why when I talk about land politics, when I think about land, when I think about territory, I’m a person who tries to move away from the idea of just building a nation state and having borders and having a regime that creates oppression for some and not for others or has a ruling party or a ruling class. I don’t tend to think about things that way in relation to the land. I think that we have to have a more holistic and a more thoughtful approach that doesn’t rehash or recreate any of the trappings of colonialism or the class instrument that we know as the nation state.

Mansa Musa:

And we recognize like to your point, like the Republic of New Africa, Overdele and them, they had an ideological perspective of what they wanted in terms of land. And when we look at the evolution of the thinking of party members, when we came out with the constant theory of intercommunalism, it took a change of trajectory in terms of the thinking because now we defining what we see as our role and what we see as how we go about implementing our ideas in the face of oversurmounting repression, they never seen nothing like this. You being bombarded with misinformation, disinformation, and murders.

So to your point, it’s interesting to see how people, when they take and making a historical analysis, I’m kind of questioning what is their intent. Go back to your point, you referencing valid historical events and activities to substantiate your position.

But as we close out, talk about where we stand at and how we get out this quagmire that we’re in with this, how you think we’re going to get out this contradiction?

William C. Anderson:

Mansa, I think that one of the most important things that we have to do to be able to escape this situation, and this is a lot of the subject matter that I try to focus on in my column, which is why it’s called Another Way Out. And that is, to a large extent, a reference to Amy Cesare and his resignation from the French Communist Party when he said the world is in an impasse, but that didn’t mean that there was no way out.

I’m looking at the situation as someone who has has failed a lot. I say these things with all respect to the people who have come before me, the people who exist alongside me who are operating from a place of genuineness and sincerity, and the people who are going to come along in the future. It’s with respect to them that I truly believe in my heart of hearts that at this point, what we know as leftism in the United States, like I was arguing in the article, we have an abundance of leftism and leftists, I think that at this point in time that all of this has become a bit of a trap, and I say that because the way that it’s currently functioning, the level of disconnect that you can identify amongst a lot of young people, this Schoatz essay that I’m referencing, the Dragon and the Hydra, it’s from 2006, it’s from 20 years ago. It’s not A Really old essay. That was when I first started coming into left spaces That was around the time I first started entering left spaces.

Things have gotten much worse, much worse. I’m talking about the divide, the sectarianism and the anti-intellectualism that is becoming an increasing problem. A lot of the things I’m complaining about and critiquing are actually rooted in a lot of ignorance because a lot of this for people is just rhetoric and it’s not actually based in real world experiences or conditions that are outside. It is a lot of performance that comes from a place that doesn’t seem to have much to do with making the world better. It comes from a place of repetition that I feel is indicating and exposing that leftism as we know it in the US has become secular religion.

And what I mean by that is it is turning into something that it was not supposed to have any intention of being. It’s become a faith and a zealotry for a lot of people. When you’re constantly fighting about these accomplishments and these tenets and these associations of the past, that reminds me of religions. It reminds me of the way that people adapt institutional and oppressive fundamentalist and theocratic views and then start going around trying to bash people in the head with them and say, if you don’t do and adapt to what I say, then you’re the enemy and you have to go. And I don’t understand how that’s supposed to have anything to do with liberating people and the working class seizing the means of production. I think that that is completely being lost here. I thought we were trying to get workers in control of the means of production and we were trying to make sure that everybody was able to live and have resources and be happy and at peace. I did not think that this was supposed to be something that becomes so toxic and inundated with rhetoric that is completely based off of opinion with a lack of good faith arguments found hardly anywhere. When we’re at that place, this isn’t anything that’s taking us in a progressive direction anymore.

And so I think that that was one of the problems that was at the beginnings of leftism, Western leftism as we know it in Europe that has now reared its ugly head in such a way that a lot of the warnings that happened at the beginnings of the socialist movement have now become increasingly clear.

One of the things I think about is a letter that the person who coined the term “anarchist,” Pierre Joseph Prudon, wrote a letter to Marx during their time saying something to the effect of, if we’re not careful that this is going to start looking a lot like religion, these issues that we have amongst each other, these disagreements. And that’s where we’re at. That’s the same type of reasoning that Malcolm X had when he said, “We don’t need to discuss religion when we come together. Let’s leave it at the door and let’s figure out what we need to figure out together so that we can make progress.” That’s one of the turns that Malcolm made in his life.

And I just feel like this is where we’re at and we have to depart from it. We have to depart from this relationship that is completely and overly ideological and theoretical and not rooted in praxis and humble ourselves to say, we’re going to do what we need to do here to defeat empire so that we can change the world and change our community for the better instead of just talking all this ideology, ideology, ideology. I’m not here to talk about anarchism and Marxist Leninism and all of these things as some sort of proselytizing on a soapbox. I’m preaching at you trying to convert you to my faith. I’m here to talk about these things as tools. They all [have things to] learn from respectively as tools so that we can make progress and you need different tools in order to assemble a house that we can live in together.

And so I’m here to look at those things respectively in that way and to evolve and to grow so that we can get beyond them, not be trapped by them and have fights in the name of ghosts and dead people who are not here and not living with us. I’m not here to fight on behalf of no ghosts with nobody. I don’t have any time for that type of stuff. I hope that there are other people out there who feel similarly. I know that there are, who are willing to build something like what Russell Maroon Schoatz was offering with the mosaic, because I think that that’s the format that I find really inspiring right now to help us get out of this situation.

Mansa Musa:

Well, you definitely rattle the bars today, William.

And we want to remind our audience that when you find yourself in a space where you can’t afford to pay your rent, medical insurance is high, can’t afford childcare, you can’t turn left or turn right without losing something, the last thing you want someone to talk to you about is why you should believe a certain way and that belief system has not converted, has not changed nothing, has not changed your rent, has not changed your living condition. So if we want you to look at this particular podcast and recognize that we’re talking about thinking, we’re talking about understanding social, economic, political conditions enough to understand how to change them as opposed to like, before I can change them, I got to say, I got to tag myself, I’m a leftist, I’m a Marxist, I’m a Leninist, I’m a Stalinist.

No. To change social conditions, first you need to understand what the problem is and then come together collectively how to resolve the problem.

Thank you, William. You definitely rattle the bars today.

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