The Years of Lead Paint (Or Why There Will Be More Tesla Car Bombs)

what we haven't really been doing as much. What I want to take some time to do today is to talk about fascism atic sort of macro level and what it looks like right now, and also talk about an extremely cooked guy who blew himself up.

it's pronounced, who's the green beret? Then big Trump fan who thought blowing up a cyber trunk outside of the Trump Hotel would start not a race war, but like the purging of democratic politicians? Is that we think his.

versions of it. Yes, and that's apparently what this guy was trying to start off by exactly flowing himself up with a truck full of fireworks in front of a Trump.

And the cyber truck, which is like a twelve year old's idea of a good idea, which is an incredibly incredibly firm, stainless steel body which does not crumple and does not take damage, which means that your frail human body inside it in an accident bashes against a wall of steel metal. It's very dangerous to be inside. But the car doesn't take damage, and that means that if you leave a bomb in it, the sides of the car were fine, so the explosion went straight up right,

so it did no damage to the hotel. It's not clear if he intended that, but it seems like he probably wanted to do a little damage at the hotel. Most people who are doing suicide bombings want that, I would imagine. So anyway, all this is to say, you know this guy who's like an active duty green Beret who believes for some reason that attacking a Trump hotel in an elon musk car will somehow lead to the

murder of Democrats. But he's so tech pilled that he takes a cyber truck which doesn't even work as a bomb and dies in it and just leaves this like horrible image. And I mean, you know, I'm being flippant about this, like it's awful thing obviously, but no one else was hurt except himself. I mean, the image was everywhere on social media for like the last three days of that, of that cyber truck on fire outside the

Trump towers. Yeah, it was the perfect image of a thing I had already been thinking of as the years of lead paint. So I wrote an essay around that basically.

years a lead rabbit hole and destroyed my brain. But the years of lead were this thing in roughly the seventies and the eighties in Italy, where as a response to the sort of rising power of the left through the sixties, and like the giant uprising is ninety sixty eight.

And Italy is kind of different from the rest of Europe because in Italy, you know, like in France, for example, France has this huge up rising in May sixty eight, like they nearly knock off the government, like workers councils have seized control of the factories, like they lose this star bottle, Like there's you know, the president's like fleeing at a helicopter. But then after that, like they kind of never seriously threatened the French government. Again in Italy,

that is not true, like sixty eight. In Italy, there's a very similar thing going on, but like the seizure of the factories has been going on since like I mean, stuff like this has been happening since the fifties, and it really only stops in nineteen seventy seven, when like they have one last big push uprising and it fails.

So as a way to contain this, the Italian government develops this strategy of backing right wing terror groups and then also orchestrating left wing terror groups and by terror groups. I mean, like the most famous thing in this is called the Bologna train bombing in nineteen eighty. It kills eighty five people, wounds like two hundred and ninety. Like it's a really really horrific attack, and it's immediately blamed that an anarchist group. It turns out it's not an

anarchist group. It is a state back like fascist group. And yeah, like there are other ones I will pass overy to VICTI you talk about like the other terrible shit that they did.

think is what it's called. It's just like but seventeen people are killed, almost one hundred people are wounded, and the first thing that the police do is they blame anarchists in sixty eight as well, and there's a famous there's a famous case of this anarchist organizer named Pinelli who is arrested and then while he is under interrogation, falls out of the window of the police department to his death. Yep, it has still never been proven that

he was pushed. The police claimed he've jumped out after they interrogated him really hard.

significant overlap with parts of the Italian state. And I think like one way of understanding the years of lead, I think that might be easy for people who aren't familiar with it, is that it's it's like a very low level civil war. It's it's I think the closest thing we can maybe think of is the troubles in Northern Ireland. And the reason those were a little different was because a there's attacks were happening in England, whereas

like the you know, the movement was in Ireland. But this is very similar, which is like there's these armed wings, both on the right and the left. They're like both meeting in combat and sort of fighting each other. But in this instance, rather than a colonial occupation that they're fighting against, the Italian government was literally both paying for arming the fascists and instructing them to frame the left for these attacks.

I've explained that whole thing. But like the goal of this, right, the reason that you know, they're they're giving all of these weapons to these like stay behind networks, so it was designed to like fight a Soviet invasion and like and having all these bombings was specifically something they call the strategy of tension, which is a strategy of promoting sort of mass violence and promoting terror as a strategy to drive people back towards the state. Because the idea

was this, and this seems to have worked. You know, you scare people enough by the fact that there's you know, there's bombs going off all the time, people are getting killed, people are getting kidnapped, There's all of this just like horror happening, and the goal is to get people to turn to the state for you know, sort of order insecurity and like stop doing all of this uprising stuff because we need you know, we need to sort of

terror to end. And it was extremely effective, and the sort of knowledge of this has I guess proliferated through the American left in the last like decade, and that has led to a lot of I think kind of

unhelpful comparisons. You will hear people sometimes talk about like American Gladio, which is Gladio is those those stay behind networks that were armed by the Italian state and used as sort of the basis of these neo fascist groups, and like to refer to this sort of like I don't like what's happening in the US, and that's not

really what's happening. And this is where I want to pass it to VICKI to talk about sort of the characteristics of what we'recalling the years of Lead Paint and how they're sort of different from the Italian ones.

lots of guns. It's a very helpful thing that producing a rain of mass shooters who also operate in a sort of Years of Lead terroristic sort of strategy of tension. Way, I think might actually be close. But you can tell that that's very disorganized. Yeah, it's very distributed through the social it's done by you know, volunteers, right.

increasingly right wing politics. That's sort of like not what they were trying to do, but that's sort of you know, that's the net effect of a lot of the stuff.

of making fun of that concept. But all of that to say, they have completely drunk the kool aid, right, the fascists, as you're saying, Yeah, they knew what they were doing. They knew they were framing the left. They

were like making it up. But like a lot of people on the right in Italy, yeah, yeah, in Italy, excuse me, in Italy in the sixties and in the actual years of lead, years of lead paint, you've got people genuinely probably believing that January sixth was Antifa, like people whose friends were there, you know, yea like stuff like you And and the other thing that the reason this is years of lead pain and not the first Trump administration is because during the first Trump administration there

was actually pretty pretty well organized on the ground fascist movements and they could certainly come back in the US right now. There's no reason they couldn't.

the show notes. So, like, the militia movement has survived, but the kind of stuff that like we saw in like twenty seventeen, twenty eighteen, twenty twenty, like is not.

people mostly got discouraged by the repression. The repression I think successfully sort of put the ends to that organized q stuff.

home game of the season. You know, was the vibe at those rallies.

is disorganized. So you have this gap between the two where there's this really powerful media apparatus Fox News, Truth, Social X, the Everything app you know, all of these like all these places where the fascists you know, and I guess Meta has now just officially announced they're like going to remove all content restrictions or whatever today. I mean, you know, when we're recording this. So it's it's just there's this huge, spectacular apparatus, but there isn't this on

the ground organizing. So you get people like this Green Beret who has been really radicalized, made angry, desperate, and like is blowing not even the Trump hotel up, which would be a nonsensical thing to do, but like literally failing to blow the Trump Hotel up in an attempt to start the race war by getting Democrats hung. So it's still kind of strategy of tension stuff, right, the imagination of as you said, the Turner Diaries or this sort of like you know, the right wing terror networks

in the US. You know, there's a reason they're obsessed with attacking electrical power grits, right. They think if you cause enough chaos, like you will return everything to the hobbsy and world of all against all, and you'll get a race war and everything will fall apart. Whatever it's you know, it's step one, kill my family, step two, question mark, question marks, step three, white supremacist revolution. It's horrifying.

I mean, it's a horrifying, horrifying idea, But that's happening in these groups that have really really they believe I think genuinely that, Like I think the right does not understand the difference between like Nancy Pelosi and Asada Shakur, Like they see them both as equally dangerous.

are completely convinced that the entire thing is a ploy and that like and that's the secretly like the USSR and the Pierce are working together, and these are not like you know some random guys like these are These are like the guys that like like the peak of conservative power are absolutely convinced that this is true. And this is I think, yeah, like this this is the kind of thing we're in now with just like these people are completely cooked. They they don't have any analytical

building whatsoever. They just they actually have drunk their own kool aid.

they gonna do? They gotta go af to Wikipedia. This is the kind of like level of unreality they're trying to build.

does the state look like? How pilled are these people kind of thing to I want to talk a bit about the sort of macro thing that's going on here, because I think part of what's what's happening here and it's become kind of unfashionable in academic to talk about neoliberalism because everyone got obsessed with like the Chips Act

and like the capacity of the state or whatever. But I think, actually, if you want to understand what's going on here, a good place to go is like going back to here David Graver, and he has this line talking about neoliberalism. I think this might God, I should have actually looked up where this quote is from before I quote it. I think it might be from the

Shock of Victory. But he has this line about how neoliberalism, when given a choice between making their system actually work and making it seem like any alternative, the neoliberalism is impossible. It will always choose making the alternatives seem impossible, because that's what neoliberalism is, right. This is, you know, the sort of maxim of Margaret Thatchery is the no alternative.

It is a system that is designed to destroy all alternatives in the you know, and this includes the possibility of a future and the goal of this and this is I think that the sort of dominant affect of the years of lead paint is this induced helplessness. Yeah, this is some thing thicky. I would ask you about the sort of like induced helplessness of this moment.

you actually really can't do stuff yourself. You need a market, you need assistance, you need a professional, you need an expert to make a choice right, and any choice made otherwise, you know, is dooms to failure. Right. And I think part of why Trump feels like to people, some people like he's resisting the old is because he's like, no, no, no, I don't listen to experts. I don't listen to anyone

except my gut. I just do what I want. The incredibly exhausting and miserablest strategy of the previous thirty years of politics, which is you get a ton of expert reviews and then you do a political change that moves things like twelve percent one way, you know, nudge politics as like Barack Obama loved or whatever. Right, So that's

sort of like there's there's that sense. But then on the individual sense, it's also about distributing the workplaces and breaking down the possibility of labor solidarity, right, because part of what the sixties was and the reason the sixties lasted so long in Italy is because Italy had the biggest factories and had the like the last in Western Europe. They had the last folks still becoming proletarians from peasantry,

like coming up from Sicily. So they had this like massive, massive factories that had these like crazy strikes over and over again. So the distribution of labor, you know, with globalization, neol liberalism and blah blah blah, breaking down labor workforce. Like, we also are very helpless individually in our workplaces, right, and like we go to the HR department to get help, right where we sort of get self care. We like

work on ourselves. We get therapy, you know that our boss offers us you know, thoughts and prayers right when when things are hard. But like there's a big attempt to allow people to define themselves sort of the carrot. The carrot of the sixties was like, you know, you get to like have an identity, like, Okay, we won't be officially racist, yeah, quote unquote, you know, okay, we

won't be officially sexist. And they claim, okay, whatever, none of that's true, but they but they sort of sell that, and then they say, but in return, you have to like do all of the self work. You have to

be an identity in the marketplace. So basically you get exhausted because like even choosing what shoes to wear becomes like both an identity defining question and an exhausting slog through debt structures and infinite market places, right, like, and so that in you know, spoony world, we call that sort of choice paralysis, right, And I think that's probably accepted as well, that like you have so much choice that you feel absolutely helpless on the face of it.

You can't do anything, and so that produces a craving for authoritarianism, for authority, right, That's another thing people want, is like someone else decide for me. I'm sick of thinking about this.

It's like what if someone else did your thinking for you. It's also the entire logic behind AI right and be trying this sort of AI agent's thing that they're like pushing right now to go listen to our and see US coverage and here a much about it is like what if someone just like planned your life for you?

And this is you know, this is also the structure of cults work Like this is why colts have been able to attract people that, like, I think the media conception of cults you wouldn't think would be in them, as why there's so many engineers in cults, because there's like a once of people who have to make choices constantly, and the cult is like, hey, what if I just like made all of these choices for you? And this is ultimately, you know, we talked about this a little

bit before. This is ultimately part of what's going on with like trump Ism, right, because Trump is also to some extent like if you're in this movement, like you no longer have to choose anymore. You just you know, here is the guy. The guy is going to do

the thing for you. This is also if you go back to your original sort of conceptions of fascism, right, it's about the sort of populace delegates their will into the single heroic individual, and the single heroic individual like acts outside of the bonds of the system in order to preserve it and like does all this stuff for you?

And I think there's a combination of that with this sort of paralysis and exhaustion, particularly like exhaustion and anxiety also and this something that is very well documented that you know, when are going to get in to a

full here. But all the stuff we've been talking about about the information space, where there's just constant deluge of just nonsense that's designed specifically not even necessarily to convince you that something is true, but to convince you that it's impossible to figure out what is happening, and to

make you just give up. And when you're refusing to make a choice between like was there a gas attack in Syria or was it like staged by the rebels as the fallse flag, right, you're refusing to make the choice, has the effect of legitimizing both of them and also removes you from sort of the field of play of action. And this has been a really important part of this

to sort of demobilize the left. Like it's part of what the sort of Tulsi gabberd gambit was right, was that you could take a bunch of this sort of like rising nominally anti imperialist thing and you could just do this shit to them. And you know, now, Tulsi Gabbert is like one of the big people in Trump world.

was already the next thing. And it was just a sort of like amplifying, amplifying wave of like chaos and nonsense that you eventually, yeah, you get bowled over by it, you get exhausted. And I think, you know, you mentioned healthcare markets, and I think, like that's really that's really telling too, because we've just like lived through a pandemic.

We're in the midst of a pandemic. Covids is in another wave that like no one has named right now, and no one even mentioned healthcare, let alone the pandemic during the election of twenty twenty four.

had to be forced back to work. How do you force people back to work who evidently care about each other and their own safety. You lied to them, You confuse them about what's actually going on. Right, So there's been this huge priming of the pump for this strategy by Biden and the Democrats, and by our own exhaustion over the pandemic and the fact that we had to go back to work, so we had to get over

the cognitive dissonance of that. So all of these factors together have produced a psychic stew culturally in which people are very susceptible to just throwing up their hands and going, I don't know whatever.

country in the world. They Okay, let's let's be accurate here that on on on Chinese, Mexican and Canadian goods, which is like, okay, like I'm gonna I'm gonna ask you as an exercise to the reader to go look up the places that the US imports things from. Right, So, like, you know, this is how you resist. This is this how you resist. Here you're learned helplessness is by going and research and things for yourself. But you know they're about to annihilate the entire economy when the thing that

brought into power was fury at rising prices. Right, these fucking arrogant bastards have sown the winds and they are going to reap the fucking whirlwind. The basis of this fucking of this entire strategy, you know, And I ask you this, like, dear listener, do you think these people can hold three hundred and thirty million people in line by sheer force? No, of course not. There's no fucking way. This is the most heavily armed population that has ever

existed in human history. Right. This strategy is the strategy that is built around getting your compliance, Yes, and if they can't get your compliance by you agreeing with them. They're going to attempt to get your compliance by just taking you out of the equation. Right. They need you scared, They need you confused, They need you completely convinced of

your own helplessness. They need you to forget that, as the old song says, in your hands is placed to power greater than their hoarded gold, greater than the might of armies magnified a thousandfold. They need you to forget the next line of the song, which goes, we can bring to birth a new world from the ashes of

the old when the union makes us strong. And this is the entire fucking thing, right, If these people were actually strong, they would not need an entire strategy that was based around political demobilization.

get together with them and to go do things. And they are fucking terrified of this. Yes, their entire strategies to make sure that you simply do not do this. And every single one of you has the power to

do this. And I know this because I also was just some random dipshit Like I was just literally a random college student, right, Like, I was just some asshole, and I just started doing things right and I got together with my friends and we fucking we made a tendance union and we did anti I stuff, and we did all of this shit. And it wasn't that like any of us are any different than you. We just you know, decided one day we were going to do it.

And it happens to return one last time to David Graeber. One of one of his most famous quotes is the ultimate hidden truth of this world is that it is something that we make and could just as easily make differently. And everyone who is in power right now is absolutely terrified of the idea of you making this world differently, and together we can do that.

idea of it. You might make a mistake, you might be wrong, but each step along that way, like, it's an easier way to do this and to feel the power of real choices rather than the false choices of like do you want your AI from Grock or do you want it from CHATGBT right, and obviously like that's a joke, but it's true that they aren't offering us anything anymore. They have decided, they have decided that what we get is stomped We get stomped on. That's what

they've agreed to give us. Is like getting stomped on. Like, okay, that was always what they wanted to give us in the past, but they might learn very very quickly and reaping the whirlwind that the reason that a century of American politicians have tipped their hat to democratic norms and have tried really hard to preserve the niceties of the government is because they have a slightly fresher memory of the French Revolution and the guillotines, which haunts them, or

the Haitian Revolution, which is the real fear lurking behind the fear of the French. Yeah, when the slaves rose up and destroyed the sugar plantation of Heiti, and it has been punished ever since. The point being that these things that they are overwhelming, This flooding the zone was shit, as MIAs says, is from a position of weakness, because when they were strong, when they were strong, they had

Obama was a sign of strength. We can elect a black person, a black man in this racist country and we and he can just go on hope like and he can actually make very few changes and still be incredibly popular, like even through a huge economic collapse. Right, that was a sort of strong gesture. Trump is a sign of real senescence. Then I use the phrase advisably. And there are a lot of holes. And they have drunk the kool aid. The right has drunk the kool aid.

They don't know the difference between democrats and anarchists. Not really, They genuinely don't really know the difference. Some of them do, their philosophers do, but the main ones on the street have no idea about the difference. That gives us a lot of space to move, That gives us a lot of space to take action, to build things that are invisible to them, and that might be invisible to social media, which is a place built around reinforcing our helplessness. In

many ways. The strategies we have to take will be less visible in many ways, I think, than they were in previous times, and they're going to have to be of necessity because maga is basically you know, it's the eye of sore on and if it lands on you, you're in trouble. But if it doesn't, like, you can just kind of move, and if you don't you run into any any trouble like, you can get a lot done. I think that's as much as I'll say about that.

But there's a lot to do, and there's a lot of movements to make and a lot of building to do that will both give you a sense of power and solve these big problems for you and your community. And if enough people start doing that, then they will take away all their power.