Becoming Radicalized

lot of thoughts about the exchange that took place. That began because Marjorie Taylor Green lauded a personal attack on Representative Crockett about her eyelashes, and at the committee, Alexandria Cassio Cortez said, directed to the chairman of the committee, a Republican, that she needs to apologize because according to our rules, we're not allowed to attack each other personally.

And he said, nah, that's fine, right. So then Representative Jasmine Crockett, who is one of the fiercest members of Congress when it comes to dressing motherfuckers all the way down, said, okay, so we're allowed to make personal So when we're talking about personal attacks, if somebody, if I were to refer to somebody in this body as a bleach blonde. I don't know what she said, like bullshitter body, you know, just I mean read her for filth and it was

and the alliteration was fire, Then what would happen? And you know, of course, then Marjory Taylor Green turns herself into the victim. Oh you're being hostile, you're being loud,

blah blah blah. So let me just pause right there and say that anytime a white woman who attacks a black woman then wants to turn around and play victim when that black woman then unleashes a bit of fire that you can't fucking take, don't come for us and tell us that, oh my god, the tone you're acting out and doing all of these things, because that, my friend, is nothing but racism. Because what we know is that these motherfucking Karens who say hot shit cannot fucking take

it when it is delivered back to them. And so, while I would prefer that our members of Congress do not engage in name calling and rhetoric that is beneath the office, I have said it before and I will say it again. If Republicans want to go low, then let Democrats go to hell. Do you know what I'm saying, because this is what they can't take. They want to say hot shit. They want to call Democrats everything but a child of God. They want to say the Democrats

are pedophiles, that Democrats are groomers. They want to say all of these things. But when you turn around, right, when you turn the table around and then hold up a glaring mirror and a spotlight on them, then they don't know how to fucking take it. And so Representative Jasmine Crockett brought the fucking heat to Marjory Taylor Green, and she looked amazing doing so. So I got to tell you, the devolving that we have seen that the Republicans have done to our governing bodies is just astounding

to me. But to me, what Representative Crockett did is what it does look like to be an adult in the room. Because Republicans want to play bully, but they don't know how to deal with a boss. And that's exactly what she showed them. Marjorie Taylor Green then want to find herself saying that she wants to debate AOC bitch.

You can't debate a first grader. Sit down coming up on today's show, I'm very excited to welcome back my friend and friend of the show, Jared Yate Sexton, who is the author of The Midnight Kingdom, A History of Power, Paranoia and the Coming Crisis. Jared and I, man, we never know where our conversations will go when we start off with asking each other how we're doing as we

watch the fall of democracy the rise of fascism. But one of the things that we do tackle in this episode is this idea of radicalization, right and what it means to become radicalized. And I think that the conversation gets incredibly rich. I could honestly speak to you, Jared, all day, every day and I would feel better. So I hope that you guys enjoy our exchange coming up next, folks, I am so excited to welcome back to wok af Daily.

It's been a while. Author of The Midnight Kingdom, A History of Power, Paranoia and the Coming Crisis, and the host of the Muckbreaker podcast, Jared Yates Sexton, Friend, Thank you. I'm going to start off with how I always start off with how are you doing?

almost a decade long. And when we think about Jared, the political norms that have just been eroded, the idea of law and order, common decency. When you look back at twenty fifteen team to where we are now, could your past self have even comprehended this moment, not even.

Because what happens every single day now, and I want to be very clear about it, what we're dealing with right now is not just a white supremacist, Christian nationalist, anti democratic movement that we're fighting. We are dealing with an abusive environment that is intentionally trying to grind us down. You know, what we have to do constantly is we have to search ourselves to understand where we're coming from, what it is that we hold to be true, what it is that we value, why we do the things

that we do. Quite frankly, because meanwhile, in the midst of all of this, it's all commodified, all of it is commodified right, like jobs, careers, products, you name it. So what we have to do in order to not just fight it is we also have to look within ourselves. We're doing like eight or nine or ten different major emotionally and energy draining jobs at once. And the unfortunate truth is that that's where authoritarianism comes from, is what

it feeds on and what it systematically does. So no, I, I myself as a person, I've had to change completely because the only other option is to just lean into it and join it, you know. And it's not putting an armband on. It's playing the role that this sick society and sick movement wants you to play. And opposing it means that you have to constantly, you have to change, and you have to fight on all of these different landscapes. So no I who I was nine years ago much

less I mean who I was a year ago. It has to change. And that's one of the things that I think is the most complicated about this.

the idea of who is forced right into these essential roles and who gets to stay home? Like I don't think we ever saw so clearly the discrepancies that we have in our capitalistic, patriarchal, greedy system. How many women had to drop out of the workforce in that time frame in order to be the sole caretakers for their children.

And so I think about the ways in which I have changed, right, the ways in which I have had to adopt different routines of well being in order to keep myself in a place of sanity right that I never had before. So when you say that you have had to change that this time, this era that we have lived in, has forced you to change, can you just unpack a little bit of what that means for us? What have you done?

for a while he was an aberration. I thought this was a guy who came along. He just happened to say the right things, you know, he just happened to hit the right chords. And what I had to do over time, and I'll be completely frank, I've become radicalized. I just can't because you have to be because, unfortunately, to be an adult and to be an actual participant in resisting authoritarianism and fascism, you have to take a

long view. You have to understand that this is a train that has been coming for a long time, like this goes back unfortunately, not just the founding of the United States of America but centuries, and so all of these things are constantly going through crisis. It's a lot easier to believe that Trump is a problem, that he is the issue that he's the disease as opposed to

a symptom, right. And what I've had to do is I've had to basically re educate myself on exactly what came before him, what happened when he got here, and what's been happening ever since. And I came to realize that the reality that I thought I lived in was a meticulously and painstakingly created fairy tale that went ahead and preyed upon what I wanted to be true, what

other people wanted to be true. Also, by the way, I need to make it clear as a white cisgender man that you know, I was told to comfort me, you know, and what was told to comfort other people like me like I have had to basically reorganize all that. And I'll tell you the truth, Danielle. And this is one of the reasons I like talking to you, because I don't think you shy away from this larger picture. The truth is, it's really overwhelming to understand that this

is more more than elections. It's more than the twenty four hour news cycle. This is a larger existential crisis that existed before I got here. And quite frankly, even if we win this battle, it will exist beyond me. Yep. This is an existential question about who human beings are, what we should be, what we could be. And I've had to really deconstruct and reconstruct and sort of change everything about myself, and it has made me more strident about what I think we should be doing and where

we should be going. It has been a complete transformation.

I feel the same way. And I actually had this conversation with Wajahat Ali on my other show Democracy Ish, where we were both saying, there's no way right and I will look at the suffering that we are seeing

right now in Gaza. I will look at what the United States is not only complicit in, but is funding is regularly providing a green light and a blank check for a genocide, and say that there is absolutely no way that you look at those videos and pictures and think to yourself that America is okay, right, that you look at how we have formulated our pr version of who we are on the global right as the arbiters of democracy, right, as the standard bears of truth and

morality in the world. And then see what is happening and these young people on these college campuses marching and building encampments and saying, wait a minute, we've been fed alive, like we're not the crazy ones. You guys have been gas lighting us. Yes, right, we've been pledging allegiance blindly right, being indoctrinated from primary school about who the United States is.

And then when we ask you to actually reflect back to us who you tell us that you are, you tell us that we're crazy, that we know not what we do or what we see. And so I think that if you aren't bucking the gas lighting and screaming at the top of your lungs and being radical because the idea apparently a freedom and liberal is a radical notion,

then you're not awake, you know. And I wonder in this environment that we are seeing that we recognize that whether or not Biden or Trump wins, I feel like Jared that the next administration is really going to have to figure out how to pull America back together again. And I don't know what that looks like. Do you have an idea of like what that looks like.

And this is a hard truth. And this doesn't make me comfortable. It doesn't make anybody comfortable. This is one of the reasons why it's easier to just say, you know, the next election is everything, don't worry about anything besides it. Right, Listen, what has happened with the United States of America, not just in the beginning in which capitalism was completely based on the subjugation of generations of people from the continent of Africa in order to build capitalistic wealth and build

up the society that we live in. Now. People don't want to talk about that. They want to hide it. They want to like obfuscated behind like fairy tales of national mythologies. Right, it has been since at least the nineteen eighties into the nineties. For decades now, we have been given a deal. The United States will live in

relative consumer comfort. We will be able to buy a ton of probert that are going to cost a lot less than they should because we're going to find other people, particularly people in the Southern hemisphere, particularly people in other countries, people in places like China, you name it. They are going to be worked to the point of death, or they're going to be worked to death, and they're going to be paid if they get paid at all, since on the dollar. By the way, it's not even like

men and women over the age of eighteen. We're talking about children. Those people, they're going to have their resources stolen. And by the way, we're going to go ahead and destroy the environment while we're at it. That deal gave us things like the iPhone, which allow us to scroll and not really pay attention to what's going on. That's the deal. The problem is this, and this is another hard truth. The reason we're talking about this is because

it turned out the deal didn't last that long. We are now in a place where the United States of America is starting to feel some of the pressures that other places in the world have felt. The authoritarianism that made all of that possible has come home. And that's inevitably what happens because capitalism doesn't stop. It always has to have more profits, it always has to grow. So

as a result, people are starting to look around. They're saying, this shit is not reasonable, it's wrong, and we need to change it. We need to have something that looks different than this, and unfortunately we are facing a time of choosing what is that different thing going to look like? And there are two options, to be honest with you. One is that the authoritarianism grows and that the people like us who would talk about this the student and by the way, the students are getting a first hand

education in this. They are out there practicing their rights, they're saying what's right and wrong, and what are they getting in return. They're getting brutalized, they're getting bloodied, they're getting attacked, and they're being slandered. Let's tell the truth about that. By the way, for a country that supposedly thinks that children are a future and all this bullshit, no, we want children to be exploited and shut up about it and get in life line and go along with everything.

And by the way, they are our conscience. They have not had the idealism beaten out of them. We're watching it right now an attempt to beat it out of them. And what happens is they get radicalized. They realize, oh my god, like everything that I thought was going on is now happening. So I have to stand against this. So it either gets worse and we either move into a police state where, by the way, we are going to be treated the same way that we have treated

so called second and third world citizens. Yep, that's what's happening right now. And by the way, for everybody who I want Americans who are listening to this, think about for something for a second, think about every apocalyptic entertainment that you've ever enjoyed, whether it's a movie, television show, or book. The conditions that Americans are subjected to are what happens to second and third world people today. The fear is that it's going to be visited on you,

and it is being visited on you. The only way we get out of this is we make common cause with the oppressed people around the world, whether it's gossens, whether it's be who are being exploited in slave labor, or whether it's the people who are having their resources and rights taken from them. We either make common cause with them and we make this change that you're talking about, or we dive deeper into it. That's it. And by the way, I need to say this because the thing

that isn't being said and all this needs said. This doesn't mean that you go out and you vote for Donald Trump because somehow or another, like you're tired of Biden or whatever. You need to realize and be an adult about how politics works in this country. You need to understand that we currently have a system that is speeding to the right into straight white supremacists, neo fascism.

You have one party that says, let's go faster. You have another party that's saying, well, we don't want that, but we also can't make many changes and all of that. There are alternatives between those two. We can have a

different world. We can have a world where those things change, but it is not going to change by simply accepting this and by just saying like, well, this isn't realistic this conversation you're having and why because that's a softer abuse than the iron hand, than the rubber bullets, than the baton to the skull. It's a softer abuse. It's an enabling abuse.

and the safe job. Right, They're not going to get those creature comforts that then turned people right from being the radical protesters during the Vietnam era into the Reagan yuppie, greedy capitalists that they turned into as they became forty and fifty and sixty years old. That's not going to happen because they are no longer have access to what

used to be called the American dream. They have been economically terrorized from the time that they entered into secondary education with leaving six deep six figures in debt.

who haven't taken care of them. They already they know full and well. And this isn't just like the left leaning ones. They all know that the climate is absolutely screwed. They know that nobody's doing anything to take care of any of these things. And what happens when that occurs. And by the way, I want to go ahead and say, this isn't just a political or economic crisis. This is a mental health crisis in a home where abuse is taking place. And I know this is someone who grew

up in an abusive home. I know this from doing the studies. This is very very clear. When the adults are abusing the children, at some point or another stand up and say, I don't know what's going on, but this is wrong. And what do they get in return? They get abuse to shut them up and to keep them from speaking their truth, and they become socialized to what has happened to them. They are rejecting that right now.

These are children who have had to go through active shooter drills, who have been told no one's coming to save you. And eventually, when your back is against the wall, you're told you don't have an economic future, you don't have an environment in future, things are only going to get worse. And every single day you need to think about the fact that life is fleeting. Was that breed desperation, It breeds the idea I need to do something about this.

And when the cops go out and shoot them with rubber bullets, they've been prepared for this their entire lives. They've been told every day of their lives to expect bullets to be shot against them, in violence to be visited upon them. And one of the things that we have to realize, and it really really hurts to say this, I'm forty two. I realized back in two thousand and three when I was protesting against the Iraq war, I

still have so much idealism. I thought that if we protested the right way, that the powerful people would hear it and come to their senses. Yeah, and do you know what I learned. I learned that doesn't happen. I looked up and by the way, this is another hard truth and inconvenience. You know what happened in two thousand and three. It was a bi partisan support for an illegal war to go after another country illegally and not just take out a dictator who, by the way, was

an evil son of a bitch. It was to go ahead and destroy the entirety of their civilization, ruin all of their progress. Also, corporations could come in and absolutely raid them and make profits off of rebuilding the society that was unjustly destroyed. I thought that if I said the right thing. I was a poet back then, Oh, if I write the right poem, all of a sudden, it will make a difference. Right, if the right movie has made, the right book is written, people will come

to their senses. And suddenly, when that doesn't happen, you look at the entire picture and you say, something is stridently wrong here and it's not going. And by the way, that spirit is what leads to social revolutions. That's what leads to the civil rights movement. It's a group of people who heard the stories of their parents and grandparents that things were not changed, that people with power did not come in and help them, and they realized, we

have to be the ones to change this. What we're looking at right now is a generational war that is growing. And it's always what happens. These young people are always the canaries in the coal mines. It's why the students were the ones who said it, the lunch counters in the South, it's why the students were the ones who spoke out against the Vietnam War. That all of the adults were like, you don't understand this, this is beyond you.

And now we look back and we're like, wow, all those people were correct, and this is another situation like that, And unfortunately the adults are reacting in the way that adults always do, which is to say, either wait for something to change. I promise you eventually will, or they react with violence. And that's what we're looking at right now.

and we don't understand that this has been building. The collapse has been building for generations, and the writing has been on the wall and it has just been ignored so that a few people could get even more wealthy right off of the lies and subjugation and oppression that we've just all wilfully shrugged at.

can't talk about it right now. On top of that, like what is being exchanged is that a lot of people who have let's call it what it is, middle class white collar jobs. Not a lot of power, right, but like a little bit of comfort. Like people are exchanging their morality and conscience for just shreds of what

they deserve. They're doing again, it's a phone, it's having a law, and it's being like one of the few people in America who can afford a house, or you know, it's to not have healthcare, it's to not have childcare, it's to look around and see the people that you care about, or supposedly care about, being absolutely shredded by an oppressive system. We have to stop ransoming our morality and our conscience in this situation. We have to stand up.

It's ugly, it's not comfortable. It is it is really really brutal, hard work. It's lonely, and that, by the way, is one of the reasons I appreciate you. And I find myself looking at other people of conscience, whether it's in the commentary space, or whether it's in the organizing space, or what it is. This is not an easy time

to do what's right. I mean it is when you lay your head down on the pillow, but when you're out in the space, when you're watching day to day, when you're when you're when you're absorbing all of this, it's incredibly lonely. And I think if I can impress one thing on your listeners before we go, it's this,

that loneliness is real. But you're not alone. We are surrounded by a lot of people who are more than willing to jettison this stuff and more been willing to countenance God knows how many children being destroyed right now around the world and like it is lonely, but you are not alone. And I remain optimistic. But it's only in living in that and sitting with it and being curious about it and acting on it. That's where we

find each other. And I think that now more than ever, we have to find each other and we have to push for something better.