Vicky Ashtewile
Appearances
Behind the Bastards
It Could Happen Here Weekly 165
Those were the vibes. And yet, of course, the Democrats in their infinite, infinite capacities lost the election. And so what that means, though, is that you have this moment where actually the right has as much power in the federal government as it's ever had. You know, the resistance is, you know, they're very proud of legally handing power to the man and ending all of his charges or whatever.
Behind the Bastards
It Could Happen Here Weekly 165
But the street movement 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 of these places where the fascist, you know, and I guess meta has now just officially announced they're like going to remove all content restrictions or whatever today.
Behind the Bastards
It Could Happen Here Weekly 165
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, um,
Behind the Bastards
It Could Happen Here Weekly 165
who has been really radicalized, made angry, desperate, and is blowing not even the Trump hotel up, which would be a nonsensical thing to do, but 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?
Behind the Bastards
It Could Happen Here Weekly 165
The imagination of, as you said, the Turner Diaries or the 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 grids, right? They think if you cause enough chaos, like you will return everything to the Hobbesian world of all against all and you'll get a race war and everything will fall apart, whatever.
Behind the Bastards
It Could Happen Here Weekly 165
It's, you know, it's step one, kill my family. Step two, question mark, question mark. 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 Assata Shakur.
Behind the Bastards
It Could Happen Here Weekly 165
Like, they see them both as equally dangerous, right? They hate Liz Cheney. Yeah. Like, in the final days of the election, she was the person they were saying, we're going to go after her. Like, Liz Cheney? Like, really? Like...
Behind the Bastards
It Could Happen Here Weekly 165
There was a scoop. Sorry, I'm just going to drop this really quick. There was a scoop right before we got on to record that Heritage Foundation, authors of Project 2085, their new big plan is to go after Wikipedia. They want to take down Wikipedia because that's a place you can verify facts at. They've already got the Post. They've got the Times. What are they going to do?
Behind the Bastards
It Could Happen Here Weekly 165
They've got to go after Wikipedia. This is the kind of level of unreality they're trying to build.
Behind the Bastards
It Could Happen Here Weekly 165
Yeah. Yeah. Um, I was sort of vibing with what you were saying, but yeah, I think a lot of people on online have accepted sort of, you know, don't give in in advance. Right.
Behind the Bastards
It Could Happen Here Weekly 165
But like, I think one big thing that has been part of the Biden like strategy of counter-revolution and part of what's been going on over the last four years, but indeed over the last four decades as well as sort of part of neoliberalism is like the idea that you actually really can't do stuff yourself. Right.
Behind the Bastards
It Could Happen Here Weekly 165
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 doomed to failure, right? And I think part of why Trump feels like to people, some people, like he's resisting neoliberalism is because he's like, no, no, no, I don't listen to experts. I don't listen to anyone except my gut.
Behind the Bastards
It Could Happen Here Weekly 165
I just do what I want. The incredibly exhausting and miserablest strategy of the previous 30 years of politics, which is you get a ton of expert reviews, and then you do a political change that moves things like 12% one way, you know, nudge politics as like Barack Obama loved or whatever, right? So that's sort of like, there's that sense. But then on the individual sense, it's also about
Behind the Bastards
It Could Happen Here Weekly 165
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.
Behind the Bastards
It Could Happen Here Weekly 165
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, neoliberalism, 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. Or we, we sort of get self-care.
Behind the Bastards
It Could Happen Here Weekly 165
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, to,
Behind the Bastards
It Could Happen Here Weekly 165
allow people to to define themselves sort of the carrot the carrot of the 60s was like you know you get to like have an identity like okay we won't be officially racist yeah quote unquote um you know okay we won't be officially sexist 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 and
Behind the Bastards
It Could Happen Here Weekly 165
So basically you get exhausted because like even choosing what shoes to wear becomes like both a, an identity defining question and an exhausting slog through debt structures and infinite marketplaces. 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,
Behind the Bastards
It Could Happen Here Weekly 165
you have so much choice that you feel absolutely helpless in 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.
Behind the Bastards
It Could Happen Here Weekly 165
Right. I think... What's his name? I disrespect him by not remembering his name, but I should for the podcast. Steve Bannon put it well when he said, just flood the zone with shit, right? It's sort of the strategy. You just release so much terrible information that it doesn't matter. And this is how Trump also kept ahead of his...
Behind the Bastards
It Could Happen Here Weekly 165
you know, many scandals is he would just like say the next most outrageous thing. And, you know, you'd have to commit to responding to one, but he was already at the next thing. And it was just a sort of like amplifying, amplifying wave of like chaos and, and nonsense that you eventually, yeah, you get bowled over by it. You get exhausted. Um,
Behind the Bastards
It Could Happen Here Weekly 165
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. COVID 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 2024.
Behind the Bastards
It Could Happen Here Weekly 165
So part of what's been going on, too, is that there has been this mass push by the Biden administration and the Democrats to make us forget what happened in 2020 in terms of the uprising and to make us forget the pandemic, which is so unpopular and which, continuing to actually prevent, would have done significant damage to the economy.
Behind the Bastards
It Could Happen Here Weekly 165
It was already pretty bad for it and it would have continued to get worse. So everyone 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 lie to them. You confuse them about what's actually going on, right?
Behind the Bastards
It Could Happen Here Weekly 165
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.
Behind the Bastards
It Could Happen Here Weekly 165
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.
Behind the Bastards
It Could Happen Here Weekly 165
Yes, that's exactly right. And another thing that I think is really powerful about getting started in that way is that all of those false choices, they become so much less important. And actually, when you have a real goal that you and your friends have made together that you're building towards, it's actually a lot easier to make choices and to make decisions. Yeah.
Behind the Bastards
It Could Happen Here Weekly 165
because you would know what you need for the next step, or you'll have an 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 grok or do you want it from chat GPT? Right.
Behind the Bastards
It Could Happen Here Weekly 165
And obviously like, that's a joke, but, but it's true that they aren't offering us anything anymore. They have decided that what we get is stomped. We get stomped on. That's what they've agreed to give us, is getting stomped on.
Behind the Bastards
It Could Happen Here Weekly 165
Okay, that was always what they wanted to give us in the past, but they might learn very, very quickly in reaping the whirlwind that the reason that a century of American politicians have tipped their hat to democratic norms... Yeah. Yeah.
Behind the Bastards
It Could Happen Here Weekly 165
The point being that these things that they are overwhelming, this flooding, the zone was shit as Mia says, is a, is from a position of weakness because when they were strong, when they were strong, they had Obama was a sign of strength.
Behind the Bastards
It Could Happen Here Weekly 165
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 he'll still be incredibly popular. Like even through a, you know, a huge economic collapse, right? That was a sort of strong gesture. Trump is a sign of real senescence, and I use the phrase advisedly, and there are a lot of holes.
Behind the Bastards
It Could Happen Here Weekly 165
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.
Behind the Bastards
It Could Happen Here Weekly 165
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.
Behind the Bastards
It Could Happen Here Weekly 165
And they're going to have to be of necessity because MAGA is basically, you know, it's the eye of Sauron. And if it lands on you, like, you're in trouble. But if it doesn't, like, you can just kind of move. And if you don't, you know, run into any trouble, like...
Behind the Bastards
It Could Happen Here Weekly 165
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 hey we'll be back monday with more episodes every week from now until the heat death of the universe
Behind the Bastards
It Could Happen Here Weekly 165
Thank you. Sorry, I couldn't keep the giggle down long enough for you to get to the intro before you find people could hear me.
Behind the Bastards
It Could Happen Here Weekly 165
Yeah, yeah. I was writing for the journal that I am working and fundraising for, Ka, go check this out. But I wrote a piece about how unpleasant the cyberpunk dystopia is in the face of, you know, that sort of that image of the cyber truck on fire outside the Trump Hotel. Then about, you know, as we were about to talk about Matthew Livelsberger, I think is how it's pronounced. Yes.
Behind the Bastards
It Could Happen Here Weekly 165
Um, 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 what we think his vision was now?
Behind the Bastards
It Could Happen Here Weekly 165
So basically, this guy, despite being a Green Beret, which like, say what you will, arguably some of the most trained and experienced murderers in the world. You know, whatever else you say about them.
Behind the Bastards
It Could Happen Here Weekly 165
This is a guy who is like in the shit. And we know that he was drinking the Kool-Aid because he used chat GPT. We've just found out today to help plan his attack. But unfortunately, despite his murder expertise, which undeniable, Cybertruck, like all Teslas, is designed mostly to endanger the people inside it because they won't sue Tesla because they're already huge super fans.
Behind the Bastards
It Could Happen Here Weekly 165
And what I really mean, of course, is that they have just terrible safety protocols and the cyber truck, which is like a 12 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.
Behind the Bastards
It Could Happen Here Weekly 165
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 to the hotel most people who are doing suicide bombings want that i would imagine
Behind the Bastards
It Could Happen Here Weekly 165
So, anyway, all this is to say, you have 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 Cybertruck, which doesn't even work as a bomb... and dies in it and just leaves this like horrible image.
Behind the Bastards
It Could Happen Here Weekly 165
And I mean, I'm, you know, I'm being flippant about this. Like it's an 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 of the Trump towers. Yeah. It was the perfect image of a thing I had already been thinking of as the years of lead paint.
Behind the Bastards
It Could Happen Here Weekly 165
Well, that bombing kind of ends in some ways, ends the years of lead. You could end it there. It's sort of the last big terrorist month. The first thing, the event that like sort of after 68 kind of starts it as this thing called the Piazza Fontana bombing in Milan, which is like an agriculture bank, I think is what it's called. It's just like, but 17 people are killed.
Behind the Bastards
It Could Happen Here Weekly 165
Almost 100 people are wounded. And the first thing that the police do is they blame anarchists in 68 as well. And 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. It has still never been proven that he was pushed.
Behind the Bastards
It Could Happen Here Weekly 165
The police claimed he jumped out after they interrogated him really hard.
Behind the Bastards
It Could Happen Here Weekly 165
Uh-huh. There's a very famous Italian play about it by Dario Fo called The Death of an Anarchist. So anyways, they blame the anarchists. They literally murder a leading anarchist printer and organizer. And then, of course, it turns out that it was this terrorist group called Ordine Nuovo, who was this neo-fascist group that had, let's say, significant overlap with parts of the Italian state.
Behind the Bastards
It Could Happen Here Weekly 165
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.
Behind the Bastards
It Could Happen Here Weekly 165
And the reason those were a little different was because a lot of those 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 arms wings, uh, both on the right and the left that are like both meeting in combat and sort of fighting each other. But, uh,
Behind the Bastards
It Could Happen Here Weekly 165
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.
Behind the Bastards
It Could Happen Here Weekly 165
Yeah. In classic American fashion, everything is more chaotic and autonomous. Yes. And widely proliferated. And also widely proliferated all over America. Products and services. Did I do good? Let's support this podcast. That's a good one. Thank you.
Behind the Bastards
It Could Happen Here Weekly 165
Yes. Right. So I actually think, you know, as you were saying that, I think actually a thing that might be the closest to Gladio and it's not Gladio because that was very conscious and it was like these stay-behind networks that were organized explicitly. But the U.S. state defense of the Second Amendment and of like assault rifle availability and making the U.S. the sort of
Behind the Bastards
It Could Happen Here Weekly 165
home for military surplus, because obviously like the military industrial complex sells 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.
Behind the Bastards
It Could Happen Here Weekly 165
It's done by, you know, volunteers, right? Yeah.
Behind the Bastards
It Could Happen Here Weekly 165
Yeah, it wasn't a conscious effort at all. But that's also not the years of lead paint. That's just like a similar thing. The years of lead paint, which is obviously like, which is a joke about, there's this big reactionary myth from like the Freakonomics guys, I think, that like the rise in crime is like correlated to like the use of lead paint in children's bedrooms.
Behind the Bastards
It Could Happen Here Weekly 165
Yeah, exactly. Or maybe it was a dude directing it. I don't even remember now. Anyway, so it became a meme to talk about boomers and Generation X people having the lead paint in their gasoline and in their walls, cause all this stuff. Obviously, I'm not advocating that kind of ableist insult when I talk about this. It's a mimetic way of making fun of that concept.
Behind the Bastards
It Could Happen Here Weekly 165
all of that to say they have completely drunk the kool-aid right yeah the fascists as you're saying mia 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 60s in the actual years of lead years of lead paint you've got people genuinely probably believing that january 6th was antifa like people whose friends were there you know yeah
Behind the Bastards
It Could Happen Here Weekly 165
Stuff like Q. And the other thing, 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 well-organized on-the-ground fascist movements. And they could certainly come back in the U.S. right now. There's no reason they couldn't.
Behind the Bastards
It Could Happen Here Weekly 165
The Proud Boys, QAnon, the folks who made up J6, and the folks who made up the alt-right, you know, broadly, were largely defeated by anti-fascists in the street. And then the people who remained, QAnon folks who were, I think, you know, some of those people were pretty hardcore neo-Nazis, obviously, but a lot of those folks were confused internet boomers, right?
Behind the Bastards
It Could Happen Here Weekly 165
And, like, those people mostly got discouraged by the repression. The repression, I think, successfully sort of put the end to that organized Q stuff.
Behind the Bastards
It Could Happen Here Weekly 165
No, the strategy as a media strategy has continued.
Behind the Bastards
It Could Happen Here Weekly 165
But as an on-the-ground organizing principle, it's not that functional right now. Yeah, it's not. Um, which is really lucky. But what that means is that Trump has come to power without a ground movement in the same way that he had in 2015, 2016. Like that was a real movement.
Behind the Bastards
It Could Happen Here Weekly 165
His rallies were really well attended his rallies, this election people left early, you know, it was like, it was like going to see a losing team and their last home game of the season, you know, was the vibe at those rallies.