Regarding Loomer and the idea of engaging with MAGA adherents, my initial, visceral response is one of revulsion. I don't think I am alone in this response and I think it's perfectly natural and healthy, given the grotesque moral spectacle that defines MAGA. (Indeed, "grotesque moral spectacle" has been Donald's brand as a politician for this past decade). However, my secondary and more reason-based response is that the desperation MAGA voters (if not MAGA pundits) feel has many of the same root causes as the desperation that we on the progressive left feel. Namely, the sense that the most crucial aspects of our lives are out of our control, have been hijacked by the billionaire corporatist class and their servants in federal government and that there is nothing on god's green earth that these actors are not willing to sacrifice on the altar of corporate profit. To use the term employed by Chris Hedges and Joe Sacco in their highly relevant book Days of Destruction, Days of Revolt, everywhere on Earth - from our individual bodies to the bayous of Louisiana - represent potential “zones of sacrifice” to the corporate class and, indeed, to the corporate mentality. The difference between the progressive left & MAGA is not in the desperation we feel but to what we attribute this tragic state of affairs.
As a neo-fascist movement, MAGA has conjured an unoriginal set of boogeymen on whom to pin the crimes. They are, as it were, the usual suspects: immigrants, non-Christians, nonwhite people, women, the gender non-conforming, public school teachers, the "extreme" or "communist" left (by whom they mean underground radical Nancy Pelosi), even - interestingly - "big pharma," "big tech," "neocon warmongers (!)" and other “elites." Remarkably, among that last batch of actual corporate-aligned criminals, MAGA still doesn't quite connect the dots between them and Trump/Musk/Vivek/Donald's Cabinet of Corporate Creeps. However, perhaps Donald's very public alignment with the tech and finance oligarchs Elon and Vivek is lifting the veil from the eyes of some of MAGA regarding the long-running fusion between Donald and the oligarch class. Or, perhaps, that is bit naive and unrealistic on my part. Maybe all that is happening is that MAGA is having a xenophobic, nativist tantrum related to immigrant visas, and the colossal deception under which they suffer - the notion that Donald fights for the common citizen - is, finally, impenetrable.
In any case, I can't blame you for trying to seize the moment and introduce reason and critical thought into discussions with MAGA. Rather than merely find common ground with neo-fascists, however, I think it's also important to try to get them to see the very basic connections identified above and to accept 0% of their facile and morally hideous "usual suspects” arguments. Whether or not Loomer is someone with whom one can do this - I guess I'll see when I try to watch the interview. My sense of her is that she is not at all a good faith actor and has built a career on WWF-style screaming bullshittery. But life is full of surprises and every so often a tiger may even change its stripes.
thanks for this thoughtful commment. Curious what you think when you watch the interview. What I felt when talking to Loomer was that there are different psychological types; Perhaps people drawn to "reactionary" politics tend to be more instinctively reactive in some deep psychological sense. They don't tend to make the longer-range connections that people on the spiritual / intellectual Left do, where we see that the ecological crisis for instance is a massive problem even if we can live okay right now. This may also be a kind of trauma-response. Meeting Loomer, Yarvin, and a number of NxReactionaries and EAcc people at Hereticon in Miami, I also felt there was an underlying loneliness with many of them. Loomer writes about it in her book, Loomered: She had a very lonely childhood with a schizophrenic brother who was kind of dangerous, then had no friends at college, defined herself as an outsider etc. In fact if she was growing up in the 60s her rebellious desire to "get" the establishment might have led her to Left politics, and it is interesting David Horowitz is one of her icons. He was a 60s Leftist who turned hard Right. But essentially, we are in a dangerous transition and we have to make new alliances. In some way I find shocking, all of the energy seems gone from the progressive / liberal world: sucked out of it. I don't know if this is a permanent situation, but certainly the response to Luigi Mangione tells us that there is a class consciousness underlying the crisis on both sides, and this comes to the fore, the dynamics of the situation may change drastically. We really do have to push for this, I think, as the danger of a technocratic AI-enabled hyper-surveillance-baed totalitarianism is very extreme right now.
Watching the interview, I felt she seemed rigid and heavy in her affect, which, now that you mention it, is a common symptom of trauma. (One adjective that came to me was humorless, though there was nothing in the topic of conversation that would be expected to engender humor, so probably the wrong word.) My sense of her is that she wears her ideology for protection, like a full and heavy suit of armor. On the other hand, I could sense from you your genuine and compassionate interest in her as a fellow human, and I would guess that she felt it too. To me, the connection between the two of you felt almost like a healing (therapeutic) exchange, due to your respectful, patient listening. Again I find myself asking the question, what if this kind of conversation between people of different political persuasions were to become the norm? The image that comes to mind with this question is of ice melting on the surface of a frozen river, water beginning to flow again.
Hi Daniel, I got the chance to watch the interview with Laura Loomer. It is the first time I have seen her drop her guard a bit, permit herself breaks in the barking ideological monologue and speak in a calm and even confessional tone. This was obviously a result of the dynamic you established for the exchange, wherein you posed a one-sentence question or comment and listened to her response. She didn't appear to feel threatened, which is how I have perceived her every other time I have seen her speak. And in this calmer state, she made multiple rational assessments regarding the threat posed by tech bro overlords and we even saw fleeting flickers of a questioning of the intentions of Donald Trump. All of this was quite refreshing to observe from such a stridently ideological propagandist. It even imparted to me a feeling of hope.
Regarding the question of defensiveness and its relationship to loneliness and trauma, I recently wrote the brief linked FB post on Donald and Elon that contains the observation: "There is no number of people he (Donald) can deceive and fuck over that will permit him to unclench and to pause the con. It is as if he were living his entire existence with a knife poised at his throat - in a state of perpetual terror. And his response to this terror is to terrorize others."
I so appreciate your willingness to engage ‘the other side’ (in many ways), it’s so important if we want to re-build society and not keep fracturing it into a million camps, divided by two (although doesn’t that sounds like the brain itself?). I’ll see if I can make it thurs
I love that you've made these videos. Will subscribe right now! I agree -- we absolutely need to be engaging with the MAGA base. I don't think they realize how deeply misled they've been.
Hey everyone- I haven’t watched the LL one yet, but I will. I may need to chomp on an antacid first…
I really admire that you’re having these potentially difficult conversations. Your one with CY is a was fascinating even though I found him dreadfully dull and pompous. That in itself was insight!
Trump will double cross anyone, which will jolt people out of their cult daze, and then healing and forgiveness on all sides will be essential- and you are building those bridges ready for that moment.
Thinking of cults- would Steve Hassan be a good interviewee at some point?
Love from London 🇬🇧 where our zone is being well and truly flooded by musk’s crap at the moment.
First, I had the opposite reaction to the woman who was disappointed that she'd become a paid subscriber. This is the kind of stuff that makes me GLAD that I am a paid subscriber (and I also appreciated her response to your response). I also think that even if it's personal experience that's revealing the deeper truth to LL, so what? Was Katie Couric really passionate about colon cancer before? Was Christopher Reeve a spinal injury advocate before (etc etc etc)? It has always driven me absolutely insane that most people care about things only when they're personally affected, but I also admire LL's willingness to publicly admit that she was mistaken on some of it. I wish more people would do that. I think that's hard.
Second, I still haven't listened to your interview with Brett, and will do so asap. I do not want to be the resident "But wait, did you think about xyz re: Bitcoin?" person on this, so I will be quiet after this, but I really am wondering if you've actually studied it in an unmediated way. There is so much that you write about that make me think to myself "hey, he might actually be intrigued." Just curious. I'm not saying it's the solution to every problem (I'm not sure anyone is saying that), but even just the mere fact of spending a ton of time reading about/studying Bitcoin opens up a lot of space for re-considering what we thought we knew. That is of enormous value, I think.
Third, I wish I could make the call on Thursday and am glad that you're doing them. ]
Fourth, I'm looking forward to listening to some of your other interviews and have just subscribed. Thank you for your work.
Oh yeah, and fifth: has anyone here read Audrey Tang's "Plurality"? I really would like to have a discussion group about that. As I just said on Notes, what will we actually DO with these realigning factions, even given that we have strange bedfellows mostly due to a shared antipathy? I just don't see how we get out of it without wholesale rejecting the tech that is sucking up trillions of dollars and making these monarchs (this monarchy) in the first place. I would LOVE to see a huge nationwide push to strictly open-source software. No google, twitter (will petulantly not refer to it by its new name), instagram (all of the things that are ruining the world and also, not inconsequentially, destroying our children - not total.
I think Audrey Tang is the most brilliant and under-celebrated voice out there.
I read your reasoning for the interview. I get it.… However, this conversation is like if Robert Anton Wilson had a daughter who hated everything he stood for and took the exact opposite position on everything. HITAF did we get here?
Regarding Loomer and the idea of engaging with MAGA adherents, my initial, visceral response is one of revulsion. I don't think I am alone in this response and I think it's perfectly natural and healthy, given the grotesque moral spectacle that defines MAGA. (Indeed, "grotesque moral spectacle" has been Donald's brand as a politician for this past decade). However, my secondary and more reason-based response is that the desperation MAGA voters (if not MAGA pundits) feel has many of the same root causes as the desperation that we on the progressive left feel. Namely, the sense that the most crucial aspects of our lives are out of our control, have been hijacked by the billionaire corporatist class and their servants in federal government and that there is nothing on god's green earth that these actors are not willing to sacrifice on the altar of corporate profit. To use the term employed by Chris Hedges and Joe Sacco in their highly relevant book Days of Destruction, Days of Revolt, everywhere on Earth - from our individual bodies to the bayous of Louisiana - represent potential “zones of sacrifice” to the corporate class and, indeed, to the corporate mentality. The difference between the progressive left & MAGA is not in the desperation we feel but to what we attribute this tragic state of affairs.
As a neo-fascist movement, MAGA has conjured an unoriginal set of boogeymen on whom to pin the crimes. They are, as it were, the usual suspects: immigrants, non-Christians, nonwhite people, women, the gender non-conforming, public school teachers, the "extreme" or "communist" left (by whom they mean underground radical Nancy Pelosi), even - interestingly - "big pharma," "big tech," "neocon warmongers (!)" and other “elites." Remarkably, among that last batch of actual corporate-aligned criminals, MAGA still doesn't quite connect the dots between them and Trump/Musk/Vivek/Donald's Cabinet of Corporate Creeps. However, perhaps Donald's very public alignment with the tech and finance oligarchs Elon and Vivek is lifting the veil from the eyes of some of MAGA regarding the long-running fusion between Donald and the oligarch class. Or, perhaps, that is bit naive and unrealistic on my part. Maybe all that is happening is that MAGA is having a xenophobic, nativist tantrum related to immigrant visas, and the colossal deception under which they suffer - the notion that Donald fights for the common citizen - is, finally, impenetrable.
In any case, I can't blame you for trying to seize the moment and introduce reason and critical thought into discussions with MAGA. Rather than merely find common ground with neo-fascists, however, I think it's also important to try to get them to see the very basic connections identified above and to accept 0% of their facile and morally hideous "usual suspects” arguments. Whether or not Loomer is someone with whom one can do this - I guess I'll see when I try to watch the interview. My sense of her is that she is not at all a good faith actor and has built a career on WWF-style screaming bullshittery. But life is full of surprises and every so often a tiger may even change its stripes.
thanks for this thoughtful commment. Curious what you think when you watch the interview. What I felt when talking to Loomer was that there are different psychological types; Perhaps people drawn to "reactionary" politics tend to be more instinctively reactive in some deep psychological sense. They don't tend to make the longer-range connections that people on the spiritual / intellectual Left do, where we see that the ecological crisis for instance is a massive problem even if we can live okay right now. This may also be a kind of trauma-response. Meeting Loomer, Yarvin, and a number of NxReactionaries and EAcc people at Hereticon in Miami, I also felt there was an underlying loneliness with many of them. Loomer writes about it in her book, Loomered: She had a very lonely childhood with a schizophrenic brother who was kind of dangerous, then had no friends at college, defined herself as an outsider etc. In fact if she was growing up in the 60s her rebellious desire to "get" the establishment might have led her to Left politics, and it is interesting David Horowitz is one of her icons. He was a 60s Leftist who turned hard Right. But essentially, we are in a dangerous transition and we have to make new alliances. In some way I find shocking, all of the energy seems gone from the progressive / liberal world: sucked out of it. I don't know if this is a permanent situation, but certainly the response to Luigi Mangione tells us that there is a class consciousness underlying the crisis on both sides, and this comes to the fore, the dynamics of the situation may change drastically. We really do have to push for this, I think, as the danger of a technocratic AI-enabled hyper-surveillance-baed totalitarianism is very extreme right now.
Watching the interview, I felt she seemed rigid and heavy in her affect, which, now that you mention it, is a common symptom of trauma. (One adjective that came to me was humorless, though there was nothing in the topic of conversation that would be expected to engender humor, so probably the wrong word.) My sense of her is that she wears her ideology for protection, like a full and heavy suit of armor. On the other hand, I could sense from you your genuine and compassionate interest in her as a fellow human, and I would guess that she felt it too. To me, the connection between the two of you felt almost like a healing (therapeutic) exchange, due to your respectful, patient listening. Again I find myself asking the question, what if this kind of conversation between people of different political persuasions were to become the norm? The image that comes to mind with this question is of ice melting on the surface of a frozen river, water beginning to flow again.
Hi Daniel, I got the chance to watch the interview with Laura Loomer. It is the first time I have seen her drop her guard a bit, permit herself breaks in the barking ideological monologue and speak in a calm and even confessional tone. This was obviously a result of the dynamic you established for the exchange, wherein you posed a one-sentence question or comment and listened to her response. She didn't appear to feel threatened, which is how I have perceived her every other time I have seen her speak. And in this calmer state, she made multiple rational assessments regarding the threat posed by tech bro overlords and we even saw fleeting flickers of a questioning of the intentions of Donald Trump. All of this was quite refreshing to observe from such a stridently ideological propagandist. It even imparted to me a feeling of hope.
Regarding the question of defensiveness and its relationship to loneliness and trauma, I recently wrote the brief linked FB post on Donald and Elon that contains the observation: "There is no number of people he (Donald) can deceive and fuck over that will permit him to unclench and to pause the con. It is as if he were living his entire existence with a knife poised at his throat - in a state of perpetual terror. And his response to this terror is to terrorize others."
https://www.facebook.com/dan.hanrahan.50/posts/pfbid02y587Q4GmzSMkMhSaW9W4XQBDN74FGyD3NYQn2YaqRcSUG552hGoTsiPXoGcZNpTZl
I so appreciate your willingness to engage ‘the other side’ (in many ways), it’s so important if we want to re-build society and not keep fracturing it into a million camps, divided by two (although doesn’t that sounds like the brain itself?). I’ll see if I can make it thurs
I love that you've made these videos. Will subscribe right now! I agree -- we absolutely need to be engaging with the MAGA base. I don't think they realize how deeply misled they've been.
thank you!
Hey everyone- I haven’t watched the LL one yet, but I will. I may need to chomp on an antacid first…
I really admire that you’re having these potentially difficult conversations. Your one with CY is a was fascinating even though I found him dreadfully dull and pompous. That in itself was insight!
Trump will double cross anyone, which will jolt people out of their cult daze, and then healing and forgiveness on all sides will be essential- and you are building those bridges ready for that moment.
Thinking of cults- would Steve Hassan be a good interviewee at some point?
Love from London 🇬🇧 where our zone is being well and truly flooded by musk’s crap at the moment.
I don't know Steve Hassan. Send info?
https://stevenhassan.substack.com/
Hi Daniel,
First, I had the opposite reaction to the woman who was disappointed that she'd become a paid subscriber. This is the kind of stuff that makes me GLAD that I am a paid subscriber (and I also appreciated her response to your response). I also think that even if it's personal experience that's revealing the deeper truth to LL, so what? Was Katie Couric really passionate about colon cancer before? Was Christopher Reeve a spinal injury advocate before (etc etc etc)? It has always driven me absolutely insane that most people care about things only when they're personally affected, but I also admire LL's willingness to publicly admit that she was mistaken on some of it. I wish more people would do that. I think that's hard.
Second, I still haven't listened to your interview with Brett, and will do so asap. I do not want to be the resident "But wait, did you think about xyz re: Bitcoin?" person on this, so I will be quiet after this, but I really am wondering if you've actually studied it in an unmediated way. There is so much that you write about that make me think to myself "hey, he might actually be intrigued." Just curious. I'm not saying it's the solution to every problem (I'm not sure anyone is saying that), but even just the mere fact of spending a ton of time reading about/studying Bitcoin opens up a lot of space for re-considering what we thought we knew. That is of enormous value, I think.
Third, I wish I could make the call on Thursday and am glad that you're doing them. ]
Fourth, I'm looking forward to listening to some of your other interviews and have just subscribed. Thank you for your work.
Oh yeah, and fifth: has anyone here read Audrey Tang's "Plurality"? I really would like to have a discussion group about that. As I just said on Notes, what will we actually DO with these realigning factions, even given that we have strange bedfellows mostly due to a shared antipathy? I just don't see how we get out of it without wholesale rejecting the tech that is sucking up trillions of dollars and making these monarchs (this monarchy) in the first place. I would LOVE to see a huge nationwide push to strictly open-source software. No google, twitter (will petulantly not refer to it by its new name), instagram (all of the things that are ruining the world and also, not inconsequentially, destroying our children - not total.
I think Audrey Tang is the most brilliant and under-celebrated voice out there.
yes i am super interested in Tang. Do you know how to reach out to her?
There might be one way, but not positive. I’ve reached out and will lyk
That was supposed to say something like - not total hyperbole.
I read your reasoning for the interview. I get it.… However, this conversation is like if Robert Anton Wilson had a daughter who hated everything he stood for and took the exact opposite position on everything. HITAF did we get here?
Hoping to make the call this week!
what a time to be alive
Defy The Big Lie; Control The Present https://open.substack.com/pub/kmac/p/defy-the-big-lie-control-the-present?utm_source=share&utm_medium=android&r=mlf2