How We Win

This is one of those times. The last week has brought about ten years worth of news, and we are all processing the seemingly inevitable coronation of a dictator and the sudden hope and possibility inspired by Joe Biden stepping down from the nomination. Welcome to it could happen here. I'm Robert Evans, and this is a podcast about things falling apart and sometimes about how to put them back together.

The last time I sat down to talk with all of you like this was in the immediate aftermath of the Trump assassination attempt, just before the Republican National Convention. I told you not to panic. That's still good advice. I also told you that no matter how bad or good things may look, literally anything can happen in US politics, and by god, it has. I felt it was necessary to deliver that message because I saw an awful lot

of people declaring We're doomed. Fascism is inevitable, and quite frankly, I think shit like that only helps the fascists. Well, it turned out I was right. A lot has happened over the last two weeks, and the situation now is very different than it was the day the former president took that grazing blow from a sniper's bullet. As is usually the case and instances like this, I've had a lot of people reach out to me since that episode

saying versions of how did you know? And as good as it might be for my career to lean into that side of my reputation, the truth is that I am white knuckling it through every twist and turn like everyone else. I spent the RNC wondering if I'd been foolish telling people not to panic, And yes, I feel a hell of a lot better right now. Of course, I don't know what comes next. I just know that we're done with the portion of this mess where we

spiral in a hopeless mier that was last week. This week, the outlook is a lot better, and not because Kamala Harris is our savior or because Nancy Pelosi is a three D chess master. But because men age and die. This is a fact I tried to remind myself of as I'd grown through that disastrous debate with the rest of the country. On one hand, I felt like we were all about to watch one ailing, power hungry man hand the keys to the kingdom over to a cadre

of bloodthirsty fascists. But on the other hand, there's always something inherently optimistic in this simple reality. The people who would be our rulers will all die someday, and so long as men die, liberty will never perish. So long as men die, we have hope. I stole that line from Charlie Chaplin. He put it in the mouth of his character from The Great Dictator, a movie he produced

at great personal cost in nineteen forty Riot. As Hitler and the Nazis reached the apex of their power, a rational analyst staring out at the playing field after the fall of France could be forgiven for having seen the outcome as certain Great Britain stood alone, Hitler's armies victorious on every theater, and the future of democracy and human liberty gasping for breath. One such rational analyst was Joseph Kennedy, US Ambassador to Great Britain and patriarch of the Kennedy family.

Joseph was a man of wealth and power, whose sober judgment and cunning had seen him short the entire US stock market and the kind of fortune that let him buy his way into the ranks of global royalty. He was a man who had predicted the future once one big, and he let that convince him that he had the

second sight. And so in November nineteen forty, less than a month after the release of The Great Dictator, Kennedy found himself in an interview with the Boston Globe, looking out at the ruin of Europe and the bombs falling on London. He told a reporter democracy is finished in England. It may be here here, of course, being the United States now. The resulting blowback to all of this saw

Kennedy forced to resign his ambassadorship. The very next year, Hitler invaded the Soviet Union, and for several brutal months it looked like Joe had been right. Not only might democracy be finished, but every system besides fascism might be hurtling towards annihilation and bondage under the Swastika, depending on how you count it. The Third Reich and fascism as a whole, reached its greatest extent of territorial power in

either mid August or September nineteen forty one. By November of nineteen forty one, a year after Joe Kennedy's remarks to the Globe, Operation Barbarossa had been wrenched to a bloody halt, and the long battle to push the fascists back and drown them in the waters of their birth had begun. And so in the end it was Charlie Chaplin, not Joe Kennedy, who had the proper measure of things. Liberty survived because men died, many millions of them, from

Kiev to Canterbury. We live in very different times now. The arm armies of fascism are not primarily conquering land under arms. The primary terrain of our present conflict exists within the hearts and souls of men and women. And while populism is still a favorite mechanism of action among the fascists, they have in this country at least given up on victory by sheer weight of numbers. It's true

what they say war never changes. Weapons do, but the core of all human conflict revolves around the capture and denial of territory. If you can't occupy ground yourself, you must at least deny it to the enemy. In infantry combat, this is the primary use of a machine gun, not to kill people, but to blanket an area in bullets and stop the enemy from moving through it. In our modern war of thoughts and feelings, the machine gun has

yielded to the fire hose of propaganda and disinformation. These have always been parts of the fascist arsenal, but the Internet has allowed an increase in the scale and speed of their deployment that is very much comparable to the replacement of bolt action rifles with automatic ones. The forces of basic human decency have a natural advantage in terms of human terrain that should be impossible for the fascists

to counter. No matter what the bastards say. Most people want to be left alone with the people they love to live their lives. The forces of hate, the people who want to throw trans kids in their parents in gas chambers and drown migrants in the Rio Grande, tap out at a little over a third of the population max. If you want to return to World War II metaphors, and why wouldn't you? The monsters are stuck in tiny,

landlocked Germany without any gas or steel. The only way for them to access the resources in territory they need to maneuver themselves into a victory is by cutting us off from each other and keeping us too confused and divided to surround the bastards and smother them all for good. They do this by convincing you that you are isolated, alone and surrounded by them. Our hopelessness is their force multiplier.

When leftists in the US look out at Ukrainians strike for survival and write them off as Nazis, as deluded tools of imperialism, When liberals and blue cities to cry college students protesting on behalf of dying Palestinian children as agents of hamas the lines of solidarity between a snap rather than wrapping like a garret around the throats of our opponents. This is why you've seen so much allegiance and sympathy between the cruelest and most eluded segments of

the Western left. The people who laughed at Syrian civilians sheltering from Brishah al Assad's bombs and called them the CIA and the agents of Putin's Russia and Peter Teal's neo monarchist right. The Teals, Bannons, Putins, Airdoins, Trumps and Modis of the world know how lonely they are. The only way they can win is to convince you that you're alone. Then they have you at a disadvantage. Then they can kill us one by one. You know, there's no smooth way to transition to an ad and a

piece like this, but here it is. We're back now. I'm not a young man, but I do sometimes tend to think of humanity as a single, vast, gestalt organism groping for survival and comfort in a world that mostly exists beyond what we can see. Majority of people are happy existing as part of that vast whole. We take comfort and safety in our communion with the rest of the species. But there are a few diseased minds out

there that don't believe in the rest of us. These sollipsists see themselves as the only minds, and the perpetuation of their own power and will as the only real good. That's why men like Peter Teel seek physical immortality, and it's why men like Vladimir Putin or Hitler seek the kind of immortality that comes from welding the edifice of a nation state to themselves. Hitler is Germany, and Germany

will last forever. Elon Musk sees his children as an extension of himself, and his fantasies of space colonization are really just a fantasy that he will remain central to humanity's future down through eternity. Musk has repeatedly identified himself as a pro natalist, and he believes his responsibility is to have as many children as possible to secure a

pro human future. The term pro human might confuse you, given the lack of concern he has for the children being bombed in Gaza or who will surely die in the mass deportation camps through a publican party is currently salivating to open. But the only real human Elon ses is himself, which is why he equates the survival of

the species with his own ability to breed. As I type, this video has begun circulating around the Internet from an interview Musk conducted with Jordan Peterson for The Daily Wire. In it, Musk explains why he has now fully embraced politics endorsing Donald Trump and declaring himself at war with wokeism, which he describes as an existential threat to the species. He claims that what cinched this for him was his daughter deciding to transition.

as such a threat. Accepting a trans child, even if you don't fully understand how and why they feel the way they do, is one of the most radical acts of love imaginable. To do this means that you've accepted on a fundamental level that your children are autonomous beings, not an extension of you, but something new, wonderful, and unique. The essence of parental love is to give your children to the world. This means accepting that you are finite

that the world goes on without you. If you see all humanity as an extension of your own ego, nothing could be more frightening. The people who feel this way, people like Elon, are mutations, a glitch in the human system that starts as a glitch within the heart of an individual. It comes as a byproduct of success and the very visible, spectacular ways that feed narcissism. When I think about stuff like this, I refer often back to a great article by the anthropologist Richard Lee, Eating Christmas

in the Kalahari. Lee spent years living among the Ikung Bushmen, a Bantu speaking hunter gatherer group who were seen by anthropologists as some of the people still living in a manner most similar to our ancient ancestors. One Christmas, as a show of gratitude to his hosts, Lee purchased a

massive ox for the holiday feast. He was excited to show this great gift off to his new friends, and he was proud of himself for having gotten it, and he was utterly shocked when they responded to his pride with mockery of him and his ox, insulting it as scrawny, tiny, hardly fit to eat now. This shockedly because the ox he had purchased was, of course quite large, and it was eventually explained to him that his friends were reacting with mockery not to his gift, but to the evident

pride he had shown in it. Bringing in a great beast way of meat, either as a hunter or from buying it as Burton did, is the kind of thing that can go to a young man's head. If you are the one with the pocket book or the one who fires the arrow, you can forget that the meat before you, the meat that you've brought into the community is not the product purely of your own genius, but is a product of all of the time and resources

invested in you by the community. The shaming of the meat, as this tactic was called, is a time honored way of correcting the glitch in young men of the Ukun before it can turn terminal. As one elder in the tribe eventually explained to Lee, when a young man kills much meat, he comes to think of himself as a chief or a big man, and he thinks of the rest of us as his servants or inferiors. We can't accept this. We refuse one who boasts, for some day

his pride will make him kill somebody. So we always speak of his meat as worthless. This way we cool his heart and make him gentle. And speaking of cooling your heart, why don't you cool your heart with some ads. And then we'll come back to conclude this in a little bit, we're back. It has been theorized that the shaming of the meat is a social construct that may help to explain one of the evolutionary values of satire,

perhaps even why humanity keeps producing comedians. They act as a part of our species immune system when this glitch in the hearts of young men isn't punctured. When it's allowed to take off and dominate them, then it changes them on a fundamental level, and the being that it leaves in its wake seems to understand instinctively that laughter

is a danger to it. This ultimately explains why Musk purchase Twitter and why Barack Obama's mockery of Donald Trump during that White House Correspondence Center set us all down the dark path that we currently are walking. So clearly, humor alone doesn't always save us from these kinds of people either. What will I have several times and my various shows identified myself as an anarchist, and I tend to do that even though I don't feel fully comfortable

with the title, because brevity matters. I'm speaking to a mass audience, and using that word gets as close enough for the sake of a podcast. But I'm not an anarchist in the sense that I have some sort of clear vision for how to build a utopia. Obviously, I do think anarchism has some answers for how human beings might build a better world. That's why I went through a Java, It's why we cover a lot of the

things that we cover on these series. But I am primarily an anarchist because I understand that hierarchy kills, because I understand that hierarchy separates us from each other and acts as a petri dish within which this glitch can propagate.

I'm an anarchist because I love the people around me, because I understand that I am human, and because I see that my role in the human immune system is to remind other people of that fact and to point a finger at the people who have forgotten that they're human. I promised in the title of this little piece that I would tell you how we can win, and I can do that in a few words. We have to remember that we are humans. Kamala Harris is an authoritarian.

The fact that she wants to be president at all should make you leery of her. But she's not a Trump or a Musk. She has not separated herself entirely from humanity, if you'll forgive the reference. She understands that she exists in the context of all that came before her. Joe Biden has been hungry for power all his life. The glitch is in him. It has consumed most of him, but as we all learned recently, not all of him. He too understands that he is a part of humanity,

indivisible from it. Now you can and should still view the man with disgust, even hatred. He ought to be in the Hague. But he also stepped down and gave up the thing that a week ago I'd have said probably mattered most to him in the world. This was not a purely selfless gesture. I'm sure he acted in large part to try and salvage his own legacy, but it is also not a thing Donald Trump could ever do. You certainly wouldn't see a man like Vladimir Putin make

a similar choice. And we've all seen the kind of slaughter bb Netan Yahoo is willing to back to hold on to power. None of this redeems Biden or makes him a good person or any less complicit in genocide than he was a week ago. I think it does put us in a better position when it comes to fighting for a ceasefire in Gaza. Everyone in US politics knows that Biden's political end started with the surge of

uncommitted voters in Michigan. The loss of a second term is not a sufficient punishment for Biden's actions, but it is a punishment that has the ability to reshape the kind of risks US presidents will and won't take for Israel from now on. It has also helped me make

sense of something that happened in twenty twenty. You all remember the moment during the one presidential debate that year President Trump attacked Biden over the numerous scandals of his son, Hunter, a troubled drug addict who tried and largely failed to use his father's name to secure wealth and standing for himself. Hunter's troubles have been tremendously embarrassing to his father, but up in front of the country and world, Biden refused

to throw his son under the bus. He embraced him and expressed the kind of unconditional love that is utterly alien to men like Trump and Musk. Biden, for all the evil that he has done in the raw selfishness that allowed him to reach the presidency in the first place, is a man who loves his son. Most importantly, he loves Hunter as Hunter and not purely as an extension of Joe Biden. There's an excellent series of articles out in the Atlantic right now by Tim Alberta, who might

be the finest political journalist writing today. Tim had the good instincts to look behind the scenes at the team Trump picked to orchestrate his twenty twenty four campaign, and he's delivered deep reporting about why they've made some of the baffling decisions they've made. Chief among bafflements was the selection of J. D. Vance as Vice President. Vance barely won his seat in Congress with the help of tens

of millions of teal dollars. He is a liar without principal who has repeatedly expressed his desire to tear up the Constitution and usher in a new red caesar to bring this nation to heal under men like him. I watched Vance's speech at the RNC live at a Heritage Foundation party, surrounded by the rightest of the right. Not one of them offered a single word of praise Vance.

say everything. The panic of their responses to Biden's stepping down, the chaotic spree of hate points to a single truth. They don't know what to do now. The monsters are off balance, stumbling, unable to find the ground. We can see some evidence of this and the fact that Musk just came out and canceled has promised forty five million dollar monthly donations to the Trump campaign. This is the first chain of solidarity between our enemies to crumble, and

it won't be the last. Every time that happens, we get more room to move and maneuver. The fascists may well regain their footing and time to crush us. But something else has happened in the last few days as well. People, we humans, as a vast, blurry mob, have started to remember how many of us there are and how much potential the weight of our numbers gives us. We have started to reconnect with each other, and that has also

opened up possibilities that did not exist before. Kamala Harris and the Democratic Party aren't going to bring an end to global capitalism or drive a stake into the heart of the oil and gas industry. There remains so much else to do, so many other fights ahead of us.

But if we can crush the Republicans here, it will be the fourth election cycle in a row where the Right made a war on trans people, on the concept of diversity, on any kind of open, secular society the core of their electoral efforts, and it will be the fourth time that they have done that and lost. If we break their lines and send them fleeing into the hills, we have an opportunity to shatter their power and use the momentum of that victory to start building something better.

There's no cleaner, easy route to a better future, but our chances are a hell of a lot better the more of us that stay alive, and the more scattered and frightened that we can make our enemies. Our strength has always come from solidarity, from the understanding that we need each other and that we are part of each other. The Putins and Trumps and Musks and Teals of the world are, of course a part of humanity as well,

but they are incapable of seeing or accepting that. And so long as that is the case, we outnumber them. So long as that is the case, we can win.