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An attempted assassination at the White House correspondence dinner and the crisis of opec. We'll talk about it on the compact podcast. I'm joined by Ashley Frawley and Jeff Schulenberger. And I'm Matthew Schmitz. So we saw actual news at this correspondence dinner, sometimes called Nerd Prom, treated a little less lightly this past week after the attempted shooting of Donald Trump by a Caltech grad. So it's, you saw a lot of speculation immediately in the wake of the shooting about who this guy is and what his motives are. I mean, correct me if I, if I'm wrong, but seems to me that he's, you know, basically a kind of resistance liberal, kind of blue sky guy who was very anti Trump. He was, you know, worried about a lot of things that are in the air, including Trump's kind of complicity with pedophilia. Right. The, the Epstein myth, one of the, one of the beliefs informing him. So, you know, I, I don't know, is this a kind of example of extremism? Is it the extremism of the resistance? Lib center, what's going on here?
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C
Yeah, I think it is that. And I, I will claim a little bit of vindication because this was my constant refrain, or maybe not that constant, but it was a point I made a number of times going back to the first Trump term and into the early 2010, 2000s, when people were talking about radicalization online through misinformation and Internet rabbit holes and filter bubbles and all these sorts of discourses that emerged in that period. And my, I think, repeated phrase was that what's important about online spaces and online social life isn't what it makes you think, but how it makes you feel. And, you know, it's a kind of Marshall McLuhan way of thinking about this, that the content is less important than the kind of affective impact of the medium and the way it changes your relation to the world. And a point that I brought and, and, you know, the simple point I was making was that, you know, the claim was that this is a. A problem of a certain type of content being too widely distributed and kind of fed to delicate, impressionable minds that are going to then go and do violent things. And the point I made back then was that, I mean, first of all, if you think about acts of violence, this is another relatively constant refrain of mine. They're, they're still extremely rare in statistical terms. And so the thing that's often more interesting in my view, is not what views are supposedly motivating people to commit acts of violence, but what views are attracting the type of people who might then go on to commit acts of violence. In other words, the kind of people who are attracted to committing acts of violence. And you can see this if you look at the biographies of various people who have been involved in these kinds of extreme acts, whether mass shootings or, you know, sort of ideologically hooded mass shootings or assassinations. Is that often they, they're kind of ideological tourists. They, they sort of travel through different realms and kind of sample from them. They often don't have a particularly clear or coherent worldview. Instead, what attracts them are ideas that, you know, somehow account for and provide some framework for understanding their, their feelings of alienation, disaffection, you know, perhaps sense of victimization by society. And so, in other words, the type of people who are, again, a very small subset of human beings who are going to commit these kind of extreme acts. The question is what kind of ideas are they going to be attracted to in a given moment? So that's, in my view, a much better heuristic for thinking about the relationship between ideologies and these kinds of extremely rare but very dramatic actions. So the, the point I may. I made back then in the. The first Trump term was what's important here isn't that certain people are being radicalized into certain extreme, dangerous beliefs. It's rather that the, the tone and affect of the way that we are apprehending and communicating beliefs is, is changing due to the nature of our, our media environment. And the point I brought up back then was that you could find a lot of centrists who sounded like deranged conspiracy theorists. You know, perhaps the most, the most sort of prominent of these was Rachel Maddow, who clearly kind of came to inhabit the Persona that was associated earlier in the same decade with someone like Glenn Beck, who, you know, was, was sort of mocked and ridiculed on regularly on Jon Stewart's show as kind of this classic archetype. Of the conspiracy theorists. So very clearly certain people like Rachel Maddow, we could think of all kinds of figures in the first Trump term on the resistance lib end of things, who, who came to embody this conspiracy theory outlook. Another figure I thought was sort of interesting, who I wrote about a bit at the time, is this guy named Seth Abramson who became, you know, who was a creative writing professor who then became, I think he published two or three books about sort of Russiagate type stuff. And on some level with him, what was interesting was that he had sort of theorized the value of conspiratorial narratives before actually engaging them in, with them in any impactful way. And then he sort of started out as a Bernie Sanders, you know, sort of Bernie Sanders was cheated out of the election by the DNC. So he was a hardcore Bernie Bro in 2016. And various people I knew kind of in the pro Bernie left started sharing his stuff and I started reading it and thinking this guy is either either completely nuts or, you know, he's doing something sort of clever, but extremely deceptive here. And I, I do think on some level he, he was a kind of theoretician of, of resistance lib cons, you know, the resistance lib descent into conspiratorialism in the 2010s. So people can go back to Seth Abramson's work if they want to get a sense of this the way that I think some people quite. And I'd say Maddow, you know, canny operator, somebody who knew her audience and what they wanted. So I think that there are people who kind of intuited that this was the direction that, you know, mainstream kind of center left culture was going in, in the late 2000 and tens and build careers on catering to it. And, you know, so I, I think now at that time that was kind of a relatively novel phenomenon, but now it's really, you know, normalized, to use a kind of annoying term. And this guy is sort of a, you know, he, he's not a significant figure in this world, doesn't seem to have had any influence. He's just somebody who you know, picked up on his general vibes and mood. And again, because I think he's, he's one of these sort of underground men, these sort of alienated outsiders. I wrote last year about what I called the return of the assassin. And so the figure of the assassin in American history, at least particularly in the kind of mass media starting in the mass media age. I think if you go back to the Era of sort of explicit anarchist assassination as a political strategy, period. The McKinley assassination and things like that. That's somewhat different world because you actually have these, you know, relatively, these relatively organized groups of anarchists who are carrying out assassination as an explicitly understood strategy. So the figure of the assassin that emerges in the mass media era embodied in figures like Lee Harvey Oswald. What's interesting about Oswald is that he, you know, did, he tried to be a communist. And I think he's a good illustration of my, my previous thesis. He tried to be a communist. He defected to the Soviet Union. The Soviet Union didn't really want him. They, they eventually kind of essentially got rid of him. He came back to the U.S. he hung out with all these, even though he still seemed to be a communist, he actually hung out with all these kind of right wing anti communist types. And he was just this fundamentally disaffected figure who couldn't quite find a place for himself in society. And so what his ideological commitments were, I'd say was, was secondary to that situation of, of being Dostoyevsky, an underground man. And so what's interesting about this guy, as with other kind of center left assassins who seem to be emerging, is that they are attracted to center left ideology because it is a, a perfect illustration or it's a perfect manifestation of the, it's become a perfect manifestation of the conspiratorial mindset. And the other thing that I'd say is important here is that it expresses the worldview of people who feel disempowered and feel shut out of power. Which is fascinating in a way because I think what, what it first manifested in the peak sort of Maddow era was a group that felt itself losing its grip on power and was, was terrified by that and had to create these narratives to account for that. Now I'd say in some sense it's, it's a group that can plausibly consider itself quite disempowered because it doesn't seem to even be able to control the narrative of the Democratic Party very well. You know, it's the, the sort of mainstream center left. I saw some things pointing out that apparently Cole Allen, the alleged, you know, attempted assassin, you know, was posting some things like dunking on pro Palestine activists. So apparently he was not, he was not a pro Palestine guy. And you know, I, I think this is relevant because he's somebody who, who's in a sense attracted to this world worldview of the centrist because it is an embattled worldview that sees itself as out of power, as disempowered, as losing control, as in some sense fundamentally alienated from the society that it belongs to. And so I think that's why, you know, again and again with. And you know, I think Alan, this guy, Ryan Routh, who was the other, another attempted assassin, Thomas Crooks, the Butler Pa Assassin we don't really know enough about. But he does seem to have been not, you know, he was certainly not a sort of figure who clearly embodied some kind of movement leftism. We don't really know. He seemed to have been a registered Republican, but also donated to Democrats. So you know, maybe he was a never Trump Republican, I don't really know. But if so, you know, if essentially he was a never Trump slash resist resistance lib Democrat, you know, that, that does kind of fit this broader profile of the, the scent, the sort of the radical centrist who is radicalized by his sense of disempowerment and is actually attracted to centrism in some sense because it has become this. Another of these kind of phantasmagoric ideologies of, of. Of the disempowered and the disinherited and those who feel like they have no place in society. So that's, that's sort of what I think is, is revealing about this. And it does seem to have become a pattern. And so again, I don't think this is because that ideology is radicalizing people into killing people or trying to kill people. It's in fact because that ideology has become attractive to people who feel fundamentally disempowered, disinherited and alienated because it, because it is a fulsome expression of that sensibility and that understanding of the world. So, you know, a decade ago, maybe some kind of, I don't know, anti Semitic great replacement type worldview would be the most obvious thing that would attract you if you were one of these types of people. But now even just sort of centrists, resistance lib ideology is, is so conspiratorial and so kind of fixated on its own dispossession and inability to influence the world that it can appeal to somebody who would go out and commit these sorts of acts.
- [14:19]
D
That's an excellent segue into what I found most interesting about this, which is that there is another expression of an even more deeply disempowered kind of worldview that is, well, another sort of something else is expressed through these events rather than sort of they're actually carrying out a, an attempted assassination. But actually the response to it, I Think in certain admittedly highly obscure realms of the Internet. I have found really interesting for the. Yeah, as I said, the complete dis. The expression of a complete disempowerment. So I noticed immediately after reports of this shooting, the Internet was just awash with conspiracy as, as is common, right. Obviously the Internet being an enormous place that brings together and highlights some of the most mad sorts of things. But you know, right away there was a picture, it was later revealed to be AI generated or most likely AI generated or at least doctored, of the alleged shooter in an IDF uniform, you know, holding a beer, sitting in an armchair. And this sort of thing was circulating and moving toward a more common kind of conspiratorial frame that, you know, the Jews are actually behind this. The Jews are the ones pulling the strings. But an even more interesting and very bizarre conspiracy grew to such an extent that it was actually covered. It's being covered now in the mainstream news media and a lot of different places. In fact, I learned about it from watching the CBC feed talking about asking whether or not it is possible that a time traveling AI warned us that a shooting was going to take place. And this was actually reported on. And it is an incredible example of how complete disempowerment meets the extraordinary, extraordinarily vast database of the Internet and inductive reasoning. So basically as soon as something happens, you have tons and tons of people, you know, you get a name of a shooter, as happened now, right? So Cole Thomas Allen, people start googling that name. Who was the shooter? What was his ideology? What was he doing here? And they. So people pump this, type this into Twitter and up comes this account of now Cole Allen being a pretty common name. There's bound to be, it's like monkeys and typewriter situation here. There's bound to be some kind of hits. Well, they come across this one profile who's only post was from 2023 and it just says Cole Allen. And the profile picture is a, you know, the griper frog with a champagne glass in the foreground. And the background image on the Twitter account is this weird pixelated art. So people do a Google, you know, a backward image search on Google to find the source of this image and they find it in all these different places. But one place that they find it is a website called Time Machine. And oh, and the name on the account is Henry Martinez. So the, the actual Time Machine website is innocuous enough. It is an EU funded project which wants to digitize all of European history, but also has some weird Stuff like they want to generate, use all of this information to generate experiences and all these sorts of strange things. And a conspiracy theory develops that is basically something like there is a AI superintelligence in the future that is sending information backward. Because if anybody has any half under understood pop physics theories in their heads after perhaps half reading the science of interstellar, you might have learned something. Something Bootstrap paradox. It's actually possible in physics to, to bootstrap something into existence. You know, if you watched interstellar, humanity bootstraps its own survival. And this is kind of the opposite of that in that some kind of supercomputer is kind of bootstrapping the end of humanity and its own, its own superiority and eventual triumph. Although I'm sure that, I'm not sure that the conspiracy theorists go that far. But at any rate, there's some sort of super intelligence that's passing information backward into time and is leaving all of these little Easter eggs all over the Internet hinting at what is going to happen in the future. Because the pixelated image, if you superimpose it, fits perfectly a superimposed image of the famous Trump earlier attempted assassination where he's fist pumping the air and the Secret service officers are rushing him out. And it's almost, it fits excellently over this pixelated image. So there you go. The superintelligence was reaching back in time in order to warn us about these Trump would be assassinations. And isn't it interesting that this profile also had the name of a would be assassin there as its only post? Now various news outlets have tried to track down the source of the pixelated image. And it's just some artist who a few years ago was playing around with some pixels, thought it looked cool and put it up as a stock image that's free for use. And so it's used all over the Internet and, and about why it seems to match up so perfectly with the famous Trump attempted assassination photo. Well, if you flip it upside down, people see Jesus. So it's interesting though that people do all of this inductive reasoning and there's just so much stuff on the Internet, you're eventually going to find something. But what I find interesting about this is that one, that it traveled so far and developed an entire mythology around it to the extent that the mainstream media started reporting on it. And two, how much in terms of conspiracy, it evacuates the human. So, you know, at least with it now, big, at least with the Israeli conspiracies or the Jews, you know, pulling the strings of the puppet master conspiracies. They imagine some kind of secret room where humans who know what's really up, plan what will happen. And these kinds of conspiracies I find interesting. And they, and they're, they're growing more and more, these kind of weird esoteric ones. They've. There's no human involved in this at all. It's. It is a super intelligence that is acting beyond us. And I think that in that way it expresses a feeling of total disempowerment, not just of the individual in terms of their class or whatever, their, their political orientation as, as you were saying, Jeff, but I think in terms of humanity. Like no human could possibly coordinate this. We feel ourselves to be thrown about by algorithmic forces beyond all human control. And there is, you know, this is, it's also philosophically expressed in weird Internet circles. And I, I just find it so interesting how much this conspiracy overlaps with like Nick Land's ideas of, like, of hyperstition and sort of. I, I'm gonna garble this, Jeff. You need to come in and help me here because you know n better than I do. But this idea of like the future bootstrapping itself into existence, or like a human destructive AI force that is, is bootstrapping itself into existence, something like that. And I just find it so interesting that these conspiracies are sort of floating around without any actual knowledge of, of Nick Land and how much it is kind of what he is saying. And I think it's expressing not that there really is this weird bootstrapping intelligence, but that we've become so misanthropic we've even in some quarters evacuated the human from our conspiracies.
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C
Well, it's worth noting that the people involved in building AI themselves often seem to think that we are already living in a simulation. So in other words, that AI has. The thing that they're doing has already been accomplished. And so in some sense what they're doing is, you know, nesting a new AI project within an AI project that already exists. And so, yeah, I mean, I think it's kind of the other point that seems important here is that, you know, the people who are in the, in some sense in the driver's seat of the economy. Like if you think about what's sort of pushing the US and global economy forward, we just saw that despite all the headwinds, the economy grew at 2%. All the things I've read recently suggest that a very large portion of that is from investment in AI infrastructure and so on. But the people doing that do not believe that they're in charge. In some sense, many of them believe that they are the playthings of some kind of vast superintelligence. Not even as in Land's version, that sort of sending its tentacles back from the future and pulling us towards it. But even that already exists, that we're already kind of living in the. The simulation. And you know, the. Our destiny is to, in a sense to make the simulation complete by building another layer of it within our own layer or something along those lines. So I think, you know, what's, what's. What again is kind of fascinating here is that. That the people doing this themselves and you know, I think. I think you can sort of connect it. It's some kind of bizarro Protestant, you know, sort of Protestant, like Weberian Protestant ethic thing where, you know, they see themselves as actually just manifesting the will of some force that, you know, far exceeds them and that they can only faintly discern. And yet, you know, they are in some sense the ones who are. Who are pushing us forward. And so, yeah, I think that's right, that it's very hard for anyone to conceive of human agency in our current moment.
- [24:55]
D
That's so interesting because one of the ideas that I've been working on for some time is this idea of, you know, if you go back to like basic kind of communist and Marxist ideas, the idea is that socialism and communism grow out of capitalism because the very nature of capitalism socializes the means of production. So Marx is like, it's inevitable. It's definitely going to happen. Socialism is, Is going to come. But then the revolutions failed and the workers movement was destroyed. And yet you can still see these socialization forces happening out of. Completely out of people's control. Completely out of people's control and seeming to kind of transform into something else that nobody wants and nobody. Nobody plans for. And it's like. Seems like like we're. We're alienating ourselves again instead of like be becoming fully in control of social processes, which was supposed to be the end result that as we inevitably find ourselves involved more and more in planning within capitalism, we. We. It naturally lends itself over to socialism. Instead, we find that the planning gets alienated from humans even more. And it seems to be creating a whole new godlike force that has. It's like almost primitive in a sense that you can almost give it its own kind of consciousness, like a super being of AI as opposed to like the Greek gods, like giving it a Consciousness of, like, Dionysus or something like that. It's. Yeah, I feel like it's expressing a movement within our. Within our economies that we don't understand and feel that we can't control or that the ship has sailed on our ability to control it. And I suppose people are expressing it in all these sorts of weird kinds of ways, and those closest to it express it most weirdly and in the most. And ironically in the most alienated way, because you would expect that they would feel that they had control because they're the ones who appear to be at the forefront of the. This new kind of economy. Yeah, it's a depressing kind of thought, too, because. But I'm not sure that there's a way out of that. I'm not sure if there's a. If the. If the. The sense is that it's so far out of our control that it's almost like a new God. Yeah. No workers movement's gonna grow up tomorrow to make it into socialism, so God knows what. What comes next.
- [27:18]
C
I was just gonna add one other thing, which is, you know, why is Trump the target of these assassination attempts? I wrote about this in this piece, the Return of the Assassin on Substack last year. But I. I think one thing that's important, it, you know, this term agentic, which all these people in AI world use and tech world use, which is. Is sort of to imply, okay, you know, here is a human being that can actually manifest human agent, sort of autonomous human agency, as opposed to all the NPCs, who are just kind of playthings of whatever, you know, you know, whatever simulation we're living in. And what's important about Trump, I think, is. Is that he's agentic in the sense that people perceive him as actually being able to do things in the world autonomously. And so he becomes a target insofar as he seems to actually represent a sort of pressure point within the world that you could exert force on and thereby actually change things, whereas everything else is just this kind of blind autom, you know, this blind automated machinery that, you know, has no particular center and just kind of works by itself everywhere. So the only way you could actually affect that is by locating an agentic figure and. And, you know, killing them, and thereby you could actually change the balance of forces within this strange simulated world. So that's kind of how I read both. Both the return of assassinations and the fact that, you know, we really have one target of these. These assassination attempts, which I think does speak to this kind of contradictory moment of power where it's like, for the most part it seems like it's these blind forces. But then there's this one figure who seems to represent this quality of being agentic and therefore is the only thing that you could actually meaning the only way you could actually meaningfully affect the world is by exerting force on that person. And the other thing I think is interesting is maybe the reason Trump is sort of waning in his, you know, popularity and, you know, possibly influence at the moment is because it does not, you know, the Iran war does not seem like something he initially it seemed like something he was acting agentic and committing to, as he did in Venezuela. But now it seems like another of these cases of this kind of blind drift that he doesn't seem actually able to exert any force over. So the agentic quality seems to be kind of sapping out of him as, as the whole thing drags on.
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B
Well, he's remaking the map of the Middle east. Right. And the clearest indication of that is yet is the UAE's withdrawal from OPEC. OPEC obviously is the most important expression of Arab geopolitical power. And this move accompanies UA other important steps by the uae. UAE has been hit harder than any other Gulf country by Iran. It's responded forcefully to Iran. It has been frustrated that other Arab states haven't responded as readily and as forcefully been deepening its security alignment with the US and it also has brought in Israel's Iron Dome. It's had relations with Israel for five years and now it's growing quite close to Israel. And it's a really striking development in the Middle East. There's a lot to say about it. I'll say. Just one funny thing that occurs to me right off is that there's a certain kind of, sometimes it's called multipolarist or third worldist outlook among Western intellectuals that hopes to see Muslim powers specifically serve as a counterweight to kind of Western imperialism or in the right wing form. And there are important right wing forms of this as a kind of counterweight to, you know, global and kind of global American empire. It's sort of gae or kind of gay liberal influence on the world. And that hasn't exactly materialized. And you've seen people like Alexander Dugin, the Russian right wing thinker who has been complaining about the lack of unity in the Arab and Muslim world in response to Israel and the U.S. so, you know, apparent, apparently not everyone is ready to kind of play the role assigned them in these Western morality tales of kind of hubris and nemesis. But that's, that's maybe a bit of a sideshow. What are the more immediate geopolitical kind of ramifications of this move?
- [32:37]
C
Well, the, the previous, you know, sort of transformational oil shocks we saw were obviously in the 1970s, which kind of marked the co, the original coalescence of OPEC as a, as a force to be reckoned with that could exert a great deal of pressure on the west, you know, on, on North America and Europe. And then, you know, the, the first Iraq war or the, the second Iraq War. The, the, you know, George Bush's invasion of, of Iraq, you know, had. Had some interesting ramifications and effects at the time. And obviously like we're, I, I think this is, this moment is, is a more, perhaps more comparable to the 70s moment in the sense that it does seem like there's a really significant shift, but actually away from the OPEC model, which really was. I think one thing that's important about it is it did mark this kind of post colonial era when nation states with considerable natural resources were in various ways trying to exert their sovereign control over those natural resources. And you know, it's, it's interesting if you go back to the beginning of this year, that there were kind of various noises made about how the, how Venezuela, you know, I'm talking about when we went into Venezuela that, you know, there are various people in and around the Trump administration claiming that Venezuela had stolen America's oil or oil infrastructure. And you know, really what had happened was that there was a nationalization going back, I believe back in, starting actually in the 1940s and kind of proceeding through the 1960s so far, preceding the Chavez Maduro regimes. And it, it belongs to this era like that history belongs to this era. So there was this nationalization and then the oil resources were in the, the, you know, what was, what was appropriated by the Venezuelan state was it was compensated. The, the, the American companies that had their infrastructure taken over were, were compensated for that. So it was not, not exactly theft as, as was claimed. And of course, you know, the other interesting thing about this was like the oil companies themselves were not saying please, you know, invade Venezuela so that we can get our stuff back. Like this was not, this is not at their impetus. So the point is, you know, these arrangements that took shape in this era of decolonization and the formation of OPEC as a cartel representing these many formerly colonized or sort of quasi de facto colonized nations are that, you know, OPEC was part of that moment. And really the 1970s oil shock was very much an expression of these formerly colonized or kind of quasi colonies, colonized countries managing to assert sovereignty over their resources and thereby exert pressure on Western countries that, you know, were the main markets for them. So obviously something that's happening now I think we could say is just a kind of crack up. I mean, and we've seen and heard much discussed of the crack up of, you know, the, the sort of Western led, you know, US led global order, the weakening of entities like NATO on the US kind of withdrawal of, of you know, interest in and in involvement in all of these multinational organizations. So it seems like the opec, the UAE withdrawing from OPEC is a kind of corresponding crack up on the other side. In other words, on the side of these post colonial nation states. And they, they're no, and it, it actually goes against this BRICS narrative we've been hearing a great deal about, you know, which is that supposedly these global south nations are going to come together and mount some sort of unified challenge against the west. And actually the UAE joined brics, whatever that means. I mean, BRICS is worth contrasting to OPEC here because it doesn't actually exert any force in the way that OPEC was able to. It. It's, it's essentially a kind of completely ideological organization that's, that's a kind of vague expression of some sort of shared interests that do not seem to be actually manifested in any concret or material way. And so I think that the crackup of OPEC is probably much more significant than, and you know, the UAE is not the first country to withdraw. I believe Ecuador and Angola are among those that withdrew previously. So the crackup of OPEC is probably a more significant thing. I think it, it reveals this dynamic that was pointed out. There is no post liberal international order by Hussein Abu Bakr Mansour and in compact, which essentially argues that what we're seeing is not the emergence of an alternative order as people who claim that say BRICS represents like the new global order. Instead what we're seeing is a much more fragmented world of these kind of temporary and strategic arrangements that don't add up to anything as, as substantive as something like NATO on one side or OPEC on the other side. And the uae, you know, making this kind of strategic deal with Israel is, is another revealing case of this. And then the further thing that I think is sort of interesting, which I'll just, I'll just sort of Hint at because it, it relates to stuff I've been writing about in my book, which is the way that the UAE embodies some sort of post, you know, aspirational, post national political order. You know, the UAE is, and again, OPEC represents the aspiration to national sovereignty over natural resources by post colonial states. The UAE is, is not a sovereign nation in the sense that we were led to imagine it would be embodied in, in the 20th century. The UAE is a collection of essentially private, what neoreactionary theorist curtis Yarvin calls SovCorps. It's, you know, the Emirates are essentially privately owned territories that are treated as, you know, that are owned by hereditary monarchs that are treated as business interests by those hereditary monarchs. And so, you know, the other thing that's important about this is that, you know, the vast majority of the population of the Emirates is not Emirati, is not, does not have citizenship in the United Arab Emirates. So these are, these are countries that do not resemble countries. They are countries where the majority of the population does not have citizenship, does not have, you know, rights in the sense of modern liberal rights. Instead, its rights are, those are the rights of contract, of doing business. And so this is why Dubai and the Emirates have been conceived of by these sort of neoreactionary theorists who believe in private government as an optimal mode of governance. And so it does seem significant to me in this moment of the crackup of sort of sovereign nationhood and the institutions associated with it, that the UAE is, is kind of leading the way, because in some sense it does not, I mean, it represents an alternative to the post colonial sovereign nation state as a model. And, you know, so I think that's, that's at least suggestive about this, however much significance we might think it has. And, you know, there is some sense, we could argue that whatever the Trump administration is attempting to do with Venezuela might be somewhat inspired by this idea that Venezuela can function less as a sovereign nation and more as a business. And this is a way in which the United States can have a modus vivendi with Venezuela when it was functioning as a sovereign nation. That caused all kinds of problems for us. And if it can just be run as a business, then maybe that will work better for American interests. So that's, I think, another kind of suggestive thing about this moment.
- [41:43]
D
Can you just explain. So the, this whole ideology may be what's behind, like the, the Greenland, the idea of taking Greenland and Trump saying, why can't we just take the oil or whatever. Can you explain kind of how that actually works in practice. How do you just take the resources and have the countries function as businesses? I'm, I just feel like that's not clicking in my mind. Like isn't that kind of how it's always been? Isn't that always the dream of, you know, the global north exploiting the global south, all that sort of thing? I'm just struggling to understand how it's different.
- [42:20]
C
Well, I'm wondering if it just goes back to the early phase of colonialism when you had, you know, the Dutch East India Company and the, you know, various other, you know, essentially private corporations that were the sort of initial and you know, but the thing that's important here is like those were not sustainable long term arrangements. In other words, they didn't, they didn't actually work in the long run, you know, which is why you ended up with much more extensive kind of colonial apparatuses. And then, you know, we know where that led. But I think there are people today who seem to think we can sort of move past the model of, of national sovereignty altog together that it can just be kind of, you know, that, that maybe the Dutch East India Company and such didn't work long term just because, I don't know, they didn't have the right technology for that at the time. But maybe we can now. I, I mean, I'm not sure it does work, but I think as a, as a sort of political fantasy, it's, it's revealing of, of the moment that we're in.
- [43:25]
D
Isn't that interesting? Because I had always, you know, like Hegel says, the point of departure is the point of return, but at a higher level. And I always wondered why Marx thought that the point of departure was like primitive communism. Didn't capitalism come from feudalism? Wouldn't the point of departure be like feudalism but at a higher level? Or like, I don't know, the Dutch East India Company but techno, you know, it's, I see this happening all the time.
- [43:53]
C
Well, yeah, I mean that's the, that's the techno feudal hypothesis.
- [43:57]
D
I suppose what I've been wondering though is whether or not Trump was bluffing or has been bluffing this whole time when he's been saying, oh, you know what, the war is going to be over quickly and seeming to buckle to popular pressure that this is an unpopular war. When it seems to me that the US has the resources to wait out the, to wait out Iran like that, they can, they can suffer the Strait of Hormuz being blocked for a long time because you know, they've got their, you know, the increased shale extraction, all these sorts of things that have been going on in the United States for a really, really long time. It's not like they're not as desperate as Iran is. Iran is trying to, is going all. There was a Washington, was a Washington Post report that was talking about how Iran is trying to desperately to fill up absolutely everything with oil and they can't afford to stop extracting it. It's not like when you're like extracting oil. It's not like you like a faucet you can just turn on and off like you script your entire infrastructure system if you shut this thing down. So Iran's going to get desperate a lot sooner than the United States is going to get desperate. And I hate to think that Trump, you know, this whole thing, Trump is playing 5D chess. But whether or not it was intended, it seems to the, the Iranians seem to have greatly misjudged the desperation of the United States to get the strait opened. And now they're going to come back to the bargaining table at a much reduced position. And we're seeing the, the breakdown of the entire order in that region. And it's possible that the United States and its allies are coming out on top of controlling, controlling the infrastructure around, around the strait or control, controlling the flows at least. I know I said last week that the strait seemed to be a bigger bargaining chip than nuclear weapons, but I think that, that, I think that's wrong. I think that I like Iran underestimated the degree to which the United States was desperate. Yeah.
- [46:01]
B
With that. Thanks to Ashley, thanks to Jeff and thank you listeners. For more go to compactmag.com subscribe.
- [46:32]
A
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