Elon Musk and The Martian Revolution feat. Mike Duncan

And I'm wondering, kind of to what extent did you anticipate that being an initial reaction to this when you started really finally laying down like the text for these episodes.

the plot points of previous revolutions. And so this has been kind of like years in the making and a lot of the sort of like plot points and ideas that I wanted to do. You know, I wanted it to be like a monopoly corporation because I also wanted to do some like social commentary and like what are the issues that we're kind of dealing with right now? And you know, and then I'm like, Okay, then there's this thing called the New Protocols that is going to

you know, help jump start the revolution. And this is somebody coming in and just you know, implementing whole new software programs and hardware programs without any care for like what it does to people. Then there's mass layoffs that are a part of this. And then deportations are you know, like all a part of the story of how the Martian Revolution gets going. And you know, this stuff was plotted out in October. And I got to tell you, you know, maybe I was naive, maybe I had my

head in the sand. I thought she was going to win. Yeah, man, like I thought Harris was going to win the election. That's where I That's where my head was at in September and October, going into November. I was like, it'll be close. Of course, well it's a toss up, but

I think she'll pull it out in the end. It sure feels like it because they were running a terrible campaign and like they didn't have any field operations and like the whole thing just kind of seemed like she was going to win, so for Trump to win and then start doing all of these things that were just supposed to be fictional plot points. Oh they were references. Yeah, Like now I'm just like Jesus Christ. This is terrible.

studying and working in that field for their entire lives. And he just starts changed everything based on his whims. Now, you don't have him staying up until four in the morning on ketamine bendors and then tweeting out his ideas for how to change the government. But I guess I'd say, like that's the one the one thing that doesn't map onto right now. And I think this is this almost just goes inherently with the active crafting fiction. Even your

bad guys are a lot more sympathetic than our current ones. Yeah,

which I think is to your credit. But like I've enjoyed the degree to which the decisions that are being made that are kind of making this Martian revolution inevitable are the kind of decisions that you make when you've been raised in these sorts of bubbles where you are expected to just sort of be able to run things, because like that's the strata that you come from, and it maps directly to like what we're seeing right now with these Silicon Valley guys who have spent the last

few decades getting impossible amounts of money and having that convinced them that they know how to do everything. But it also maps back to like Versailles. I find that compelling.

It's obviously not Elan Musk because he loves his kids.

so obviously it's not. But honest to God, like it wasn't meant to be just Musk, but it was meant to be those tech guys, right, Like this is meant to be thinking about the guys who come in and they're like, we're gonna we're gonna move fast and break things, right, and then what they break is like one hundred and twenty years of like labor law, and that's the only thing that is actually being broken here, Like this is what you know, what what uber is and all of

those kinds of like all that stuff that came out Adison the last like ten or fifteen years. And they think that yes, because they can code well, or because they have this one ability to like, you know, market something in an effective way, that that means that they are brilliant and can do everything and everywhere for everybody, and like we're going to reinvent this and we're going to reinvent that, but they have no idea what they're doing or what they're talking about. And you run into

these people on Twitter all the time. This phenomenon of people being good in one area, yes, and then becoming sort of all purpose general knowledge experts when it's like, you don't have any idea what you're talking about. And so the line, there's a line that's in there where it's like Werner, the way that he thought is I'm smart. Therefore the ideas I have must be smart. Yes, And that is something that's not about Musk. That's about like just people I run into on Twitter all the time.

That's a phenomena that's a generalizable phenomenon.

This must mean I know how to run the schools. Right, this must mean I know how to replace medicare, right, yep. And it's this kind of like reasoning from first principles without ever actually like having to sit face to face with the consequences of your decisions. And I think you do a great job of showing how that cascades into a calamity and in a way that feels very realistic, even though we're talking about Mars. And there's also like gravity generators in the light.

going to be run through Twitter. Right. And one of Timothy Werner's things is the centralization of all decision making and the centralization of really everything. And in his mind, it would be more efficient if the company just had one brain and that was his brain, and every decision is made by the one brain, and so he's got all this stuff and he's got to make all these decisions.

Except that is that's crazy. That is not actually how you can run anything, and it just creates all of this like basically everybody, I forget if I wrote this in no, I definitely did that. Like the dreaded like request pending screen that people started getting. They would submit, they would submit stuff like a fuel requisition order and it would just say request pending, and like request pending would never go away, it would just that's what it

would say. And then you look at what they're doing now and that they are trying to centralize everything that it's it's a generalized authoritarian power grab, but you know they are, they are doing these things. Yeah.

But they're not they're you know, because of just there they're sort of affective power and the way that they think about micromagic anything they're incapable of, like letting their subordinates do things.

just not there because his son had just died. That's a real thing that happened. And the other stuff is like that sort of centralization of power is a lot like what I was trying to get at. There was actually like the reforms that went in for the European colonial powers after the Seven Years War in the Anglo colonies and the Spanish colonies and the French colonies, all of those governments sort of undertook a reorganization of their

colonial structures after the Seven Years War. It kind of like reshuffled who had what territory, and all of those moves were about sort of an increasing presence of the metropol in colonial life. And this is what triggers, you know, the American Revolution, because there was going to be like two more customs officials in Boston Harbor and so like we went into refolt about this. Yeah, but this is also true of like the Bourbon Reforms in Spanish America.

Is that kind of like centralization of a community of colonies that had grown very used to managing their own affairs, and so they're coming in and saying, well, yeah, this is ours, and we here on Earth should be making these decisions for you Martians. And the Martians were like, well, we've been making these decisions for ourselves for like seventy

years now. That's where that stuff is coming from. And then history is always the place that I can point to and then I have to watch it also on the TV.

This is just stuff that happens all the time, right, because people don't learn the mastery as a rule, Like no one's ever learned a lesson from history. Is the thing I've kept repeating to people over the last few years as I continue to fail to learn lessons from history.

be more efficient. And when I was writing it, it was originally supposed to be like a kind of a more dramatic ten percent across the board layoff, and as I got closer to actually trying to type that up and write it down, I was like, this doesn't actually feel believable to me, Like people are going to really push back, and I mean this sincerely, like people are going to push back that nobody would be so stupid as to just across the board to a ten percent

layoff of something so critical, as you know, Mars is to Earth, because in the story, Mars is absolutely critical to how Earth is able to function with the resource

that they're able to get from there. So I changed it around and actually look to like the sullen prescriptions from from Roman history to kind of give it a different take, where really it was like you woke up every day and there was like fifteen more names on the list, one hundred more names on the list, and there was something equally sort of dramatic and cool about that without this like unbelievable, you know, ten percent across

the board cut. And I wrote a paragraph in there being like I know that people are going to think that this is like unrealistic, but you just have to understand that, like throughout history we have seen these things, like people do stupid stuff and they stubbornly cling to it all the time. Yea, because that is something that happens,

and life as we know it is actually less. Like if I wrote up what was happening right now, Like if I was just got like a window into an alternate world and we're living in a different world where Trump lost and I brought all this stuff back, they'd be like this is implausible, Like this is crazy. They would never be allowed to get away with that. They

would never be not allowed to do that. They would never be so stupid as to blow up the global economy with a bunch of tariffs that make no sense to anybody.

intolerably oppressed for a long time. And like Trotsky's got this quote is if peasant discontentment was the cause of revolution, then there would be a revolution happening every single day, because the peasants are always discontented, right, So what it takes to really have a revolution is for somebody in power to be kind of incompetent and to start doing stupid things that allow the situation to get out of hand, and on top of that, really piss off the other

elites around them, because it's the mismanagement of the state that allows the elites that that are kind of necessary for a full blown revolution, Like you need their resources, and you need their money, and you need them being close to a position of power to be able to pop whoever's in there at the time, and you've got to be pretty incompetent to like wreck an elite consensus, right, Like that is in and of itself catastrophically stupid if

you're trying to stay in power. Yeah, and so yes, the great idiot theory is getting quite a workout lately.

get out of his control. But can you talk a bit more about sort of the role of these sort of like elite defections and how they end up sort of funding and enabling these revolutionary movements.

and I mean you got it. Like Mabel door is meant to be sort of the colonial elite, and she's also meant to be sort of the liberal nobility in lots of different revolutionary settings, and she is doing that like and when she is, like when I talk about her like funding the Society of Martians and like funding all these like philanthropic you know, enterprises to help Martians, Like that's a lot of philipicality, like straight up like that that's what the Duke Doorleon was doing in you know,

seventeen eighty six, eighty seven, and eighty nine. And so that's the role that she's playing. But you know, if the elites are unified, it is very difficult for any kind of like peasant or worker uprising to actually get traction and succeed in overthrowing the state. Like peasant insurrections have happened throughout history without any sort of elite support,

they have often accomplished great things. But when you think about the great revolutions in history, there really have always been people in the inner corridors of power who are ready to get rid of whoever the sovereign is in

that moment. And you know, you can advance all the way to the Russian Revolution, and this is you know, this is the prototypical like the workers have risen up and the army is mutinying, and it is the people who overthrow this are And what that story misses is all of the people, even inside the Romanov family itself, who are like so fed up with what Nicholas and Alexander are doing that they're just like, we don't know

what to do anymore. But like he's, yeah, I guess he's got to go, you know, Like we can't get him to see reason, we can't get him to change course, we can't get him to do anything. Like the situation is completely out of hand. And without those people leaning on Nicholas to force his abdication, and also to say, like, we're not going to back you up. If you try to bring the hammer down on all these people, then that's when sovereigns are actually overthrown.

I think one of my favorite examples is the quote that, like, you can't dismantle the master's house with the master's tools.

We need divisions inside the ruling class. That doesn't mean you have to say, and what those people want out of overthrowing the czar is what we want and what we're going to accept, right, you know, obviously, like the cousins of the of Zar Nicholas and the people who are in those inner circles of power, they wanted him out of there just so they could run the empire a little bit better. They were frustrated with how poorly the empire was being run. They didn't want a social revolution.

But if you're going to take down that whole system, creating a destabilization event at the very top is necessary. But you don't have to support the ultimate aims of those people. It's just it's an ingredient. And this is and you see this in the course of revolutions, and

you see this in nineteen seventeen. You see this seventeen eighty nine and then seventeen ninety two where there is that first wave of sort of revolution that overthrows the sovereign, and then there is a second wave that overthrows the people who did it first. And so you know, you can hold out hope for you know, getting the job done without thinking that elites do play some role in all of that.

this thing. And that's something that I don't know, It feels very prescients in ways, even though it was written out before a lot of this stuff happens.

And we did all of this, you know, we did the worst of the horrors with Trump, right, Like obviously that is on my mind with you know, with family separations and putting people in camps and abusing people and rounding people up, like all of this stuff which happened under Trump, Yes, but it also happened under Obama for eight years, and it happened for another four years under Biden. It's just that we kind of stopped talking about it

because it wasn't Trump who was doing it. And there is there is a through line of cruelty inside of this system towards immigrants. So that issue of deportation and like rounding people up and evicting them, especially those who have lived in this place their entire life. Like that's one of the points that I make, Like the people who are being fired are like born and raised on Mars.

Like one of the main characters, Alexandra Clare she is a fourth generation Martian, and she just gets caught up in these like stupid layoffs that Timothy Werner is pushing through. And now the only choice that she has is to either hide or get deported to Saturn, where and nobody's ever come back from Saturn. We have no idea what happens on Saturn, because all they know is that nobody ever comes back from Saturn. And this is a thing like taking people who are born and raised in America.

This is the only place that they have ever known, right even if they came here when they were like one, Like okay, they weren't born here, but like they here since they were one, and then you're like, okay, we're gonna send you back to Mexico. They're not from Mexico. They don't know anybody in Mexico. They don't probably even speak Spanish half the time, you know, And doing this to people is cruel. It is unconscionable what we do

to people. And so yeah, so when I was thinking to myself, Okay, I'm all right, this like fictional revolution, it's going to be on Mars. What are some of the things that I want to do that will make the revolution happen. Yeah, some of this does is like a little bit of like this is these are Mike's political interests and the deportation issue and trying to highlight the horror of the deportation issue and laud those who would hide those people and help those people and bring

those people food. Like the bravest people going are the ones who like go out and leave you know, water jugs out in the middle of the desert so people don't die, right, And the cruelest thing is these guys who go out and then break those knowing that people are going to knowing that people are going to like die of dehydration and die of starvation, but just not care because they don't care about those people.

out that he is a deputized volunteer border guy. And you know what's really happened if you look at it, is we've kind of recreated in a decentralized form the Eindsetsgrupa, right, like instead of having a centralized state having to raise these organizations that are going to be carrying out this kind of violence. Like it's it's largely become something that vigilantes have gotten into on their own as part of like just their special interest in hurting people at scale.

And it's it's such a uniquely it's so uniquely tied to like this American individualism. It's such a uniquely sick thing about the way things work here that that's happening, Like that wouldn't have happened, not that Germany is you know that German culture in the thirties was better, but it just wouldn't have happened because it was a different kind of culture.

sort of where we're at now. But this has been an ongoing thing for twenty years across both parties and both administrations, and nothing really has like sort of churned my stomach more since Trump got elected than all of the Democrats and people doing like sort of post mortems on the election and being like, well, you know, we really should be tougher on the border, and we really should sort of like buy into this framing that there is this like invasion and we just need to do

border enforcement better. Like then even moving positioning themselves to a place where it's like Trump's not even doing a good job protecting the border. And like there was somebody I forget even who it was, but somebody one of them senators like tweeted, you know, this time last year, Biden had deported this many people and Trump isn't even deporting that many people. And he was like trying to make this point that like Trump wasn't following through on

his promises or something. But it was like do you even hear yourself? Like do you even hear yourself? Yeah, yeah, it really is And I can't, you know, stomach the fact that the Democrats are are going to take away from all this that the American people love cruelty towards

immigrants and that we need to lean into that. Yes, And then you see the polls before all the tariffs stuff and all this stuff is going on, and he Trump is still sitting in like fifty percent approval, and it's like, I don't know, maybe they're right, Maybe the American people really do just love this.

to the desert. Like our coworker James spent a lot of time during the Biden administration like at these just like the open air prisons they built in the middle of the fucking desert, like on the border, and you know, and like like one of the stories that he covered extensively was that like probably most of these people would have died if it wasn't for like border volunteers like

passing food and water to the bars. And that's something that I was thinking about a lot looking at the mutual aid networks and looking at the kind of mutual aid networks that trans people are building up right now, and like, I mean, I okay, like there's I mean, there's always been a million mutual aid networks because it's just impossible to survive if you're trans without like getting stuff from other trans people.

It's the thing that continually sends me into the darkest spirals is because there's there's no fixing the fundamental underlying problems without fixing that.

to be alone, right, That's that's the thing. And then also like in terms of like the early colonization of Mars, like, yeah, you have to do this stuff together, and like there's there's a like when I was doing like cultural like there's cultural background like like works and and you know, like music that was going on that the Martians were creating.

And I didn't quite get into this, but there is a song that I've got like half written called the Ballad of Lonely Joe, which is like a it's like a Martian folk song about lonely Joe who went off and tried to like do it himself, but and then he never comes back, and now Lonely Joe like wanders the red sands of Mars because like he tried to go out and not do it like with the group and not do it with the community, because you can't

survive alone on Mars. Yeah, But to your other point, like one of the things that I definitely wrote into the show is that everybody on Mars has a skin chip in their hand, and the skin chip in their hands and is what like opens door. It like literally opens doors and it gives them access to the commissary, and it gives them access to restaurants, it gives them access to food and employment. Like everything goes through that skinship.

And when the people get fired by Werner, their skin chips just get turned off effectively, and it doesn't it doesn't open doors anymore. They can't get food anymore. They have they are living inside of a society that they literally cannot interact with anymore. And so it took other Martians around them. And so there's a thing in the show called the no Doors movement, which is Martians jamming open doors so that the people who have they were

called the annulled because their their contracts were annulled. Yeah, but so so that the annulled could get from here to there without needing their skinship. Yeah. Those are the kinds of things that you know are are necessary, and those are the kinds of things that are going to protect people. And I hope that those things are going on out there, and I hope that none of us publicly state right now what we may or may not be doing that front. So let's just go ahead and keep that words at.

And one of the things that I always struck me about that was, you know, like because they're all they're all literally like sleeping next to each other, like in these rooms, you can literally hear like the stomach of like the child next to you, like rumbling at night because I don't even have food, and that like turns them into like one of the most militant sort of like working class I mean, for like a hundred years they are like like they're syndicalists and then their communists

and like they're they're one of those Milton things, and I, I don't know, it's it's interesting to me that that this is like this aspect of the society that that you've you know, you've sort of drawn out of of these historical revolutions where a key element of it again

is this sort of cllactivity. And also there's this like if you look at like the trajectory of like the modern American state and like the modern just the modern development of capitalism, it's been specifically trying to make that stuff not happen by like kicking people into suburbs and like trying to physically alienate people. And I was, I don't know, I was wondering how much you were sort of thinking about that kind of stuff when you were like writing the cultural aspects of this.

And like when you go back, because this is something that comes out of sort of like I study a lot of like political theory in school and those state of nature sort of works, you know, these thought experiments that like Thomas Pain would do or Rousseau would do, and you know it's like, how did we come together?

Why did we come together? Well, let's first imagine like an individual human wandering through the forest and like they encounter another one, so they come together for defense and they come together, you know, to share food and do some division of labor. And it's like, no, there's no such thing as a human wandering alone. That's not a thing.

Like any outgrowth that comes from our description of what human society is, like, whether it's defense or the division of labor, begins with the fact that we are already a group. There is a mother, there is a child, there is a father. There there are aunts and uncles and others. Like whatever the group is, there's we are always doing this as a group. And hyper individualization and hyper adamization of our society is something that is trying to undo one of the most fundamental parts of what

it means to be human. This is something that I thought about a lot too, because when I started having kids, and you know, I have two kids, and the model for like having a family at this point is like you have a mother, a father or whatever, you have kids, but the point being that they are a unit that is unto itself, and they live in their own house, and they have to supply their own food, and they are in charge of getting their own money, and everything

that happens is just up to that little nuclear family. And the nuclear family is not really how we've ever done it before. Now, there's always been a broad network, a broad family friend network that has been a part of you know, raising our kids and having our families. And you know, if something bad happens, we don't just say, oh wow, bad luck for them. You know, you support that person. And that is something that we've really gotten away from as a society obviously.

And I'm not saying this in like the conspiratorial since I'm saying this a a This is what a lot of people, a lot of the worst people in our society believe because it's convenient for them, and they have pushed to make that belief more common and done so by funding think tanks and funding media organizations.

part about the family. Yes, which I think is a really important connection to to what you were saying, where it's like your vision of the family is also still fundamentally this isolated group, because yes, they still need some kind of collective because again, you can't just like leave it, leave a baby like out in the woods.

a great line. I don't have it right in front of me at the moment, but in Tokeville's austieon Regime in the French Revolution, which is really dynamite book everybody should read, at the end of it, he lays it out he's writing this in like the eighteen forties and eighteen fifties, and he's he straight up says that like what liberal capitalism is doing, which he was himself. I mean,

he's a conservative liberal. Like it's not like he's on the left or anything, but he's he's watching as the atomization of families and individuals is happening, and he's like, and that's how that's what tyranny thrives on. Tyranny thrives when everybody is disconnected from everybody else and everybody is in competition with everybody else, because that's the other key part of it is your family is now pitted against every other family in terms of like getting money, getting jobs,

like getting that, getting this other thing. Like we're all scrambling out there in a competition to get a little bit more, a little bit better, or just you know,

have enough. Like I feel this every time I have to sign the kids up for like summer camp, you know, like I'm at war with every other family in the neighborhood because I'm just trying to get my kid into this camp and some people aren't going to make it and other people will, and you got to be there, and you gotta have strategies about ending to log onto the thing like because they because they they're pitting us against each other like all the time, in all those little subtle ways. Yep.

pitting each other like people against each other. And yet anyways, somehow they you know, even even if it is by accident, which is to be fair, how a lot of revolutions start, they they do it.

I mean, just I wouldn't even have thought that. I'm going to tie this back again to Tofield, which the reason I would recommend Onnian Regime is because that is a book about how much of the revolution was a continuation of what was going on before it and not actually caused by the revolutionary break And even if you believe in the revolution and believe it was this way, I actually believe in the revolution because it accomplished these

great things, but there was no year zero thing that happened. A lot of this stuff like is just on a continuum.

And you know, like, I don't want to get in a fight with somebody about whether human nature is a thing that exists or doesn't exist like an as an abstract thing, because because I'm not sure that it's true, but there sure are a lot of things that keep popping up, right, Like we're interested in sex, and we have to eat food, and we live in shelters, and we make music, and there do there does seem to be some very like human qualities that exist across all

time and across all space. And if you just say to yourself, like, well, like, I mean, this is one of the things. I'm very sympathetic to anarchists, but like there's a point with anarchism, like especially the early stuff, where their idea was that if you smash the state, and you destroy the state, then humans will be allowed to flourish in their natural goodness and communalism, which is, you know a little bit what we are moving towards

right now. But I'm not sure even that exists, because if you if you crash the state out, it's not the state that's necessarily making us this way. There is there is stuff inside of human nature that's that we created the state to begin with. So the whole, the whole thing is like a very it's a balancing act that has gone way too far in a certain direction.

You can make things better in some ways. But there's so and stuff that you're just never going to Like when I look at when I look at what the white supremacists want to do, right well, you're never going to get people to stop mingling with other kinds of people. You simply can't. It's never worked and it never will right like that, that's an impossible dream. So I can

just say, like, that's a thing. No matter how tightly you grab a hold of the reins of state and how many weapons you deploy, you simply won't succeed in the long term of doing this because it's just not something we can do. You can't stop people from mingling.

with all of its various climate disasters that are facing us. Route, yeah is going to make such Yeah, it's gonna. It's gonna. It's already making some places less habitable and other places will be more habitable. And what's going to happen is that people who are living in less habitable areas are going to want to go to where there are areas that are still habitable. And so there is there's going

to be movements of people. And the question before us in the twenty first century is not, you know, can we keep people in the places that they are now and you know, like sort of lock in rigidly to like these xenophobic nation states and that will actually stop those migrations from happening. Or do we open ourselves up to the idea that this is going to happen and simply make it more humane and more more rational. That's the question. It's not whether the migrations will happen or not,

it's simply how cruel they will be. When they happen, and right now we are choosing maximum cruelty.

pretending it's otherwise. Like the That's one of the few things that does give me hope is that the people who are insistent upon pretending otherwise seem to be getting increasingly marginalized. I mean, we'll see Gavin Newsen still hasn't been sort of choked off of access to the public, but you know, the statements he's been making recently about Abrego Garcia, it's just like, yeah, I just can't I can't imagine this guy being the future of the Democratic Party.

If this is just looking at where popular discourse is right now.

and people are like, oh that. And even when people say like, well, why do people come here, and you know, there's a kind of a standard American exceptionalist notion which is like, well, they come here because they want their because they want freedom, and freedom is what America offers, and like the American dream and all that stuff, like the entrepreneurial spirit, et cetera, et cetera. But mostly it's because this is where you can come and get the

world's money. Yeah, this is where it always. It's sitting in my pocket, it's sitting in your pocket. Right, we are the ones who have all of the world's money, and so that is why they are coming here. Yep. So you just have to like fit that in your brain. And what is happening is is this this constant division between like Americans being more important and anybody else, and I understand why that exists politically, and even these questions

are like citizens versus non citizens. Like one of the things that got me when I was reading Bakunin was

like he had it was a throwaway line. It wasn't even like a point he was making, but he referred to something as mere citizenship, which kind of struck me because I grew up very liberal, Like I come from like the liberal suburbs of Seattle, and I had very liberal notions, and citizenship, in sort of the liberal imagination, is the highest thing that you can be, be a citizen of a polity with rights, there's a constitution, you

get to participate in the government. Like citizen and citizenship are these words that had great, profound meaning, and it really kind of like knock me sideways to have them be like mere citizenship. Right, You've been reduced to simply a part of a polity, and your humanity has been taken away from you. You're no longer being recognized as a human being. You're being recognized as a citizen. And if you're not a citizen, then you just don't count

at all. And it totally went out their humanity. So not only do I not have humanity because I'm simply a part of some polity rather than being me, Mike Duncan, a human being, but it's erasing our human obligations to each other, to non citizens and the idea like and you just see this very casually, like right now, like all over the place. It's just like, they're not citizens,

so they don't deserve due process. They're not citizens, so we can just send them to Al Salvadoran torture prisons and it's fine because they're not citizens and therefore they don't have rights. It's like, what about, you know, just being a person thinking about other people. And one of the greatest, one of my one of my very favorite. And I know i'm steamrolling here. I'll I'll let you

get a word in edgewise here in a second. But there the I forget what the court case was, but there was a court case out of Texas, you know, like back in like the sixties, when they decided that the Texas school districts had to open the schools to undocumented children. And they they said that because it says in the Fourteenth Amendment persons. It doesn't say citizens. And they were resting a lot of this on the notion that like it's it says person has these rights, not

citizen has these rights. And this is what conservatives and MAGA hate, hate hate, This is why they're going to try to undo the fourteenth Amendment. But to have the Supreme Court at one point in the past be like, no, you have to do this because you owe an obligation to them as a person, not just as a citizen.

That's like mind blowing. I could not see the Supreme Court today making that same decision, But like, that's that's the kernel of something really good, I think for the future of humanity, rather than like clinging to this like citizen or non citizen thing.

And it's the fight we've lost. The worst as the left or you know, I should even say getting beyond left and right, because I really think those are not the most useful ways to look at things. It's like human beings. The fact that that that battle, the battle to just see people as humans with inherent value as humans, regardless on their place of birth, the fact that has been botched so badly is maybe the greatest calamity of

the twenty first century. Although there's a few, there's a few contenders, don't get me wrong.

its impact on Americans, right, yep. And if you look at the like the Liberation Day like turf tariff package, right, the single country that is the most from this is Sri Lanka. And if those tariffs go back into effect in like in like fifty days whatever, like eighty days. Like the entire country of Shri Lanka is fucked. They're doomed, They're completely fucked. And all of these countries, you know, these countries need US dollars in order to like literally

to buy fucking fuel. And then suddenly, oh wait, hold on, you can't do experts of the US, and like the

entire is something that affects literally the entire world. Right, you can look at the terrif rates on every single country like in the world, and everyone writing about it only writes about its effect upon the US because there's this just like like there's this this this pure sort of Americ centrism thing where like people and this I see this on the left too, where's like they fundamentally don't see anyone who's not in the US as human, and the people in the US who are who are

seen as like people who seems like humans who you know, like think and feel and like act and like hurt in the same way that we do. Like that's only a thing that happens if you're a very specific kind of American citizen and if you're not, or God help you, you were born in like most of the like the rest of the world, which is again it hitteous super majority of everyone on Earth. You just you don't matter, and.

wouldn't be a very interesting story. And there is a debate right now among the victorious Martian revolutionaries about who should count inside of the Martian constitution and this thing called the Republic of Mars that they have just declared they're no longer a part of a corporation. They're going

to be this thing called the Republic of Mars. And there is a guy who is passionately committed to Mars and to the Martian people, and he hates Earthlings, doesn't trust Earthlings, and there's no reason for him to trust Earthlings. They have tried to screw them over a bunch of times and it caused nothing but pain and so but there are a bunch of earth born Earthlings on Mars, and he wants to exclude them from the Republic of Mars.

And if you're born on Mars, then you should get to participate, and if you're not, then you shouldn't have rights, you shouldn't be a part of this project. And I would love to just I would love to deport you. That's what he's going to be arguing. And then there is another side that has a more universalist take on this, And my character Alexandra Clair, who's like a d class. She comes out of the warrants she can just that's

basically like the working class, you know. She's like when Earthlings come here, Yeah, I don't like it when they bungle things because they're new and they don't know what

they're doing. Like I'm as annoyed by the new guy as anybody, But like they've suffered right alongside me, like suffering the same conditions, Like the fact that they were born on Earth doesn't mean that they're not suffering right now, that their contracts weren't annulled, that they are not suffering from the new protocol, Like and you know when during these revolutions, did they hold neutron guns in their hands

and fight and die for Mars? Yeah they did, and so probably we should say that it's not Martian good, Earthling bad. But like, let's just open it up to everybody and we will sort out like you know, who's you know, who's in on this and who's who's actually trying to undermine us, because you know there is there are loyalist fifth columnists that they are going to have to deal with.

and I'll have to figure that out. And that's my weekly struggle these days.