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Sam.
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Welcome to the Compact Podcast. Today we'll discuss primaries in Wisconsin and Michigan and migrant crisis in Spain. I'm joined by Ashley Frawley and Jeff Schulenberger. And I'm Matthew Schmitz. Two races of note in the Great Lakes region, Abdullah Sayed is running in Michigan and in Wisconsin there's Francesca Hong, both DSA aligned candidates, both controversial. Jeff, do you have a favorite of the two?
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C
So my impression is that the Michigan primary has become largely about, at least in its national the national attention it's receiving, it's become largely about Israel, Palestine. Obviously the fact that El Sayed is a Arab American candidate with a recognizably Arab name is going to that front and center. His opponent, Haley Stevens is a more mainstream Democrat and also one who seems to have more standard views on, you know, traditionally standard sort of centrist Democrat views on support, you know, continuing to support Israel. And so that's sort of been the way that the the debate has been framed nationally. I I'm curious, you know, not being in Michigan to what extent that is the case locally. In other words, that that may be the sort of national news narrative, but within the state of Michigan there may be different ways that it's being framed. Overall, it seems to me El Sayed is, you know, a reasonably impressive candidate. He seems, he's, you know, well spoken and I think has been able to allay some of the concerns about his supposed sort of extremism and things like that. And meanwhile, Stevens has sort of an odd affect which I've seen a lot of attention to, just like her voice and so on. I don't have a hugely unique read on this except to say that I'm curious to what extent the way this is being framed in the national narrative in terms of a sort of Israel Palestine conflict is is really the the thing at the front of voters minds. My guess is that it is not for many of them. But the caveat here would be that Michigan is a state with a very large Arab Arab American population. This came up interestingly in the 2024 election when Trump in, you know, perhaps some of his more some of the more cynical campaigning associated with his with his candidacy in 2024. You know, he tried to sell himself as the the peace candidate who would who would bring a solution to the the Gaza war. But he also or at least some affiliated super PACs really, you know, kind of pandered to, I'd say, you know, quite hardline anti Israel stances among Arab voters in Michigan while at the same Time you could find, you know, similar kind of pandering to hardline Israel supporting voters happening at the same time. So the way that he attempted to play the two, you know, play both sides was, was kind of fascinating and, and was specifically heavily covered in relation to Michigan because it's a state that has this interesting character of having a large Arab American population. Famously, a number of imams of mosques in the Dearborn, I believe, is the main, sort of one of the main hubs of the Arab American population. Other areas around Detroit endorsed Trump and this was kind of a fascinating development within the 2024 election, the way that he was able to capitalize on disillusionment with the Democratic Party under Joe Biden's seemingly except, you know, from their perspective, excessive support and deference to Israeli interests. So that was, you know, so, so you see a little bit of that coming back in this, in this primary because you have an Arab American candidate. And you know, the other thing that's kind of interesting about Michigan is that it's a state that went for Trump twice after having been relatively solidly blue for a number of decades. It's obviously a state with a long history of labor union, robust labor union presence and activism, while also being a sort of hub of the deindustrialized Rust Belt. And so to that extent, it's a state that, and this is true of Wisconsin as well, I think, manifests these kind of conflicting populist impulses of both right and left that Trump was able to capitalize on. But many people don't remember that. It was very, it was, it was a very significant point in the 2016 Democratic primary that Bernie Sanders won Michigan. That was not expected. I think the Clinton people thought they had it in the bag. And then as it turned out, Sanders won and that was considered a big upset at the time. So both Michigan and Wisconsin are states that have a kind of strong pop, you know, sort of susceptibility to different kinds of populist impulses they have. Michigan was also historically home to the so called Reagan Democrats who went over to Reagan, you know, sort of solid Democrat, sort of New Deal Democratic voters who went over to Reagan in the 80s. So there's a long history of these parts of the electorate in these kind of declining industrial regions who seem to be up for grabs, who seem to be willing to take risks on populist candidates. So that's kind of one level of it. And then the other level of it is that in both Michigan and Wisconsin you have archetypal progressive, small Towns or you know, I'd say small, sort of small to medium sized cities in Ann Arbor and Madison, both homes to major universities. Lovely place. I was in Ann Arbor recently. Lovely place. But you often, I don't know, just every year or two you'll see some insane news about like what the Ann Arbor or Madison City Council is up to. I believe just recently I saw the Ann Arbor City Council was paying some consultant $200,000 to explore the possibility of the city paying reparations to. I guess I don't know whether it's black inhabitants or, you know, all black people, I'm not sure. But you know, in other words, the reparations conversation might have seemed to be over, but in Ann Arbor it's still, it's still happening, it's still live. And so Hong, who is the. I think overall El Sayed has sort of been quite a bit in the spotlight and has been at least reasonably skillful at allaying some of the concerns about his more radical or extreme tendencies and, you know, seems pretty well spoken. Hong, on the other hand, is a, is a Madison state, Madison based state assembly woman. And I think if you look at the things that have been revealed about her posting history and prior statements, they really do reveal that particular kind of cultural and ideological bubble. Most notably, it's been brought up that she, she actually has a background as a chef, like a restaurant chef. But in any case, she, you know, a post was, was discovered where she den, you know, denounced Thanksgiving as a celebration of genocide and so on. And then when this was brought up again just yesterday, I believe she refused to back down from this statement. So that, that really suggests somebody who is not interested in, I mean, this is, you know, this is a very standard kind of cringe like peak woke sort of post to like, you know, post on Instagram about how, well, maybe everybody else is celebrating Thanksgiving, but you're having a day of mourning for genocide and blah, blah, blah. And so, you know, she leaned into that during peak woke, is not backing down. She's still saying, you know, it's important to understand that for many people this. I'm not, I'm just sort of paraphrasing, you know, for many people this is a very painful day of the year and blah, blah, blah. So, you know, she does seem to be somebody who represents, I suppose, you know, the. Just to conclude Al Said is maybe showing the possibility of exiting a sort of progressive bubble and being able to appeal more broadly to again, these kind of inchoate populist impulses that have been able to command support from certain segments of kind of disaffected up for grab sort of voters in, in these states, these declining Rust Belt states. Whereas it seems to me that Hong is, is much more representative of the kind of insular liberal bubble culture or progressive bubble culture of Madison and does not seem to be doing a good job of transitioning into statewide candidacy that is receiving national attention.
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One of the big framings of this is that it's about progressives versus moderates or the Democratic or the socialist left is taking over the Democrats. And it's like, oh, you got to be careful here because if you let these kinds of socialists come in, they're going to take over the party and you're going to lose, you know, these other kinds of voters and you need to have a broad base and blah, blah, blah. And I actually think they, that it would be great if you had a complete DSA takeover. Just let it happen. Let all these issues, let, let Israel, Palestine dominate the agenda. You know, like go with the, the most like university educated student politics line. Because what's happening, it seems to me is that there's a, the class divide is showing up more and more in politics and in party politics and there's despite all this, all these attempts of socialists to say that they're like, you know, traditional kind of socialism of. Or Marxist, Marxist. The socialism that has a Marxist lineage. I mean they're, they're clearly not speaking to the working class. The working class doesn't care about them. And they kind of. I've said this before, but they kind of. It seems like the best thing that could happen is that this old working class of like the Rust Belt and so on can just be put on these islands and given welfare and that. And then they will die in peace. We can get on with things. Whereas what's happening is you have this enormous group of university educated professionals. I know this is the, everybody's tired of hearing the PMC line. But you know, capitalism needs this, this stratum of society that lives off of surplus value, that reproduces the legal, the social problems class. These people who promise to solve or ameliorate social problems via like social work or their social programs or their psychology interventions in prisons and so on. And they have a completely different interest. Their interest is in controlling and pacifying the working class. That is what they do. And it's through a language of like care and kind of feigned care when it's actually looking down on you. And you know, I'm in Canada at the moment. So I've been hanging out with family. My brother's very working class and my brother and I agree on everything, but he will not listen to a darn word that I say because he's like, you educated people, you just talk down to everybody. You pretend to care, but you're just actually talking down. So even me, where I think that I'm like, I came from this, but like I'm tainted too, you know, for there's, there's this extraordinary divide and there's no crossing it with making the Democrats like more broad based. Somebody like my brother who works out on the oil pipelines or whatever is not. Is just never ever going to be interesting. Obviously he's Canadian, so it's a bit different, but I, I think it's very, very similar, a similar kind of dynamic that's happening. So I, I think the socialist left ought to just take over the Democrats. The problem, however, is that there is a void and there isn't anybody talking to the real concerns of working class people, people who, who are, you know, that fix the actual problems when like the pipelines and the everyday kind of hands in the dirt kind of stuff. That is a. There's an extraordinary and powerful resentment that's brewing there. And yes, right wing populism has picked it up, but I think also rather ineffectively and has turned it into, just turn these grievances into a vehicle for what was really just politics as usual, but given a kind of populist spin. And I think that that void is opening and is desperate for representation. And it hasn't happened yet, but I think these lies that, oh, if we could just remain moderate, we'll be able to speak to a broad base. I don't think that should. I think that actually worsens the situation because it pushes us back from realizing what's actually necessary, which is actual representation for this, that represents this class divide instead of kind of congealing it into the Democrats or something like that.
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B
Yeah. So I think El Sayed's rise is maybe the more interesting because it just created this sharper conflict within the party between more Israel sympathetic and often Jewish Democrats. And there's a long established and well connected and sizable Jewish community in Michigan as well, between that element of the Democratic Party and a rising Muslim population, which is increasingly important to the party and which, as you alluded to, Jeff, arguably costs the party Michigan in 2024, which is really significant. So, yeah, Hong is the zanier of the two candidates. I mean, she dismisses her old tweets as jokes. And this is something that actually Helen kind of mentions in her article for us this week. I'm talking about Helen Andrews. In her article the Racial Crossroads, she talks about how there's this millennial online joking is often about whiteness. And so Hong and Helen mentioned Sarah Jiang, another Korean American, as it happens, who was given a position on the New York Times editorial board. And that proved to be controversial because she had described whites as groveling goblins and talked about how much she enjoyed being cruel to old white men. Anyway, Hong also has these tweets, things like, you know, I was at Culver's, which is a real Wisconsin institution, this kind of fast food chain. I was at Culver's and I hurried my kid out and didn't let him finish his ice cream because of all the old white people who didn't think we spoke English. And yes, these comments are offered in a jokey way, but they're also expressing some kind of discomfort with or distance from whiteness. And there are so many complexities to this. Hong herself is married to a white man. This child she was referring to is half white. So, I mean, is she some kind of anti white radical? It would seem not. At least not consistently so. But there's still a kind of understanding that one should position one. Yeah, you kind of position yourself against it, even though you're very adjacent to it.
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C
I feel like there's a weird parallel here where there's all these, you know, women who denounce whiteness, but then they turn out to be married to a white man. And then I feel like there was also this theme of all these sort of alt right, like, white male firebrands of the 2010s, who all turned out to be married to, like, Asian or Jewish women. So what would be great is if, like, there was a power couple where, you know, the, the, the husband, the woman is the, you know, sort of Francesca Hong type sort of anti white poster, and the guy turns out to have a sort of secret white white nationalist blog.
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Yeah, I mean, it's kind of amazing that this hasn't happened yet. I guess the. I mean, we got sort of close. I remember that, you know, one of the members of Pussy Riot, the Russian punk band that was a big deal, kind of pretty 2014, I think, kind of in maybe the very early, like 2000 and tens, one of the members of that band ended up dating the leader of kind of a, I don't know, Christian nationalist, Russian sort of proud boys type group that helped to like, shut down Moscow Pride Parade every year. Like, they would, like, come out there in their kind of black hoods or whatever and sort of say, you ain't marching with that banner. And so that's kind of maybe one of the more notable global examples of this kind of convergence between these two opposed political types. But, yeah, I mean, you see so much of this with people who are kind of bashing this, that or the other thing and end up being awfully close to it, which I guess isn't surprising.
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I'm so tempted to add to that.
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It's like succumb to temptation.
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It's right wing romanticism. Right. It's it like, it's it. The left is like, oh, you know, all this stuff about beauty and so on that sounds kind of fashy. And the right would be, well, let's have some poetry. You have to admit, it can be appealing.
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Yeah. Tens of thousands of people, mostly young adult men, it seemed, poured into the Spanish enclave of Ceuta from Morocco. Ceuta is a small territory on the continent of Africa, long held as Spanish territory for centuries. And a lot of people presented this as a vision of the accuracy of genres Spy's controversial novel of the 1970s Camp of the Saints. I think many of the initial reactions were coming from people who believed that the migrants entering, or aspiring migrants entering sutta had actually made it from Africa to Europe. That wasn't the case. It was all taking place on the continent of Africa. But still a very interesting kind of geopolitical episode, especially given the reactions we saw from various quarters. Ashley, what have your friends in Europe been making of all this?
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So for American listeners, Ceda is a Spanish territory on the North African coast. I just realized the way that I framed that made it sound like I'm like. For American listeners that are obviously bad at geography. Sorry, I mean, I mean that as. No insults. But for anybody who's not up to speed on the unique geography of the eu, this is the only border, land border between the EU and Africa. And so what happens? And it's happened actually before in 2021, very similar kind of thing where Spanish Moroccan relations begin to break down and rumors begin to circulate that the Moroccan border authorities are relaxing things and that now's the time to cross. So there are lots of reports that were saying that the border guards were basically saying, go, go, quick, quick, now's your. Now's your chance. And so what, how you get across is. There's a. There's a huge fence and you can just swim like five minutes around the Fence and come up on the beach on the Suta side. And so there's lots of estimates, you know, it could be that it was up to 60,000. Now the vast majority of people have been returned, but there are still thousands of people out on the streets. Well, thousands of people that have not been accounted for and hundreds of people out on the streets like tent camps and people sleeping in every possible place. And it's, you know, any, any city would be entirely overwhelmed, but there's not really any way for these migrants to actually get across into mainland Europe at the moment. As far as I'm aware. It's very, very difficult. And so the city's entirely overwhelmed. But one of the things that I found really, really interesting about this is. Well, I guess one thing is that, you know, there's a sharp contrast between Angela Merkel like a decade ago saying like we, we welcome migrants with open arms and the response to this, which has been a kind of begrudging realization that, you know, borders are important and this needs to be, this is a problem that needs to be dealt with.
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And that's notable because Spain's government is led by Pedro Sanchez, a socialist. Now is it fair to say that Spain has made some of its own liberalizing moves toward migration which may have contributed to, you know, basically there was a poll factor where people saw that Sanchez's government had been taking a more permissive stance up until this point. You know, regularizing many migrants from, you know, some from Africa, many from Latin America is. Is that right?
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Yeah. So they, not too long ago there was an announcement that they would start to regularize a lot of illegal migrants. So people, I think it was something like 500,000 bases and they received applications that double that. So there's just a ton of people that are living illegally in Spain. So there's this move to kind of regularize them and also relaxing some of the restrictions, like you can be in the country for like six months and the, the requirement that you don't have a criminal record, gone. So enormous relaxation of the rules. And you know, we, I've talked about this a lot, that part of the reason for this openness to migration is that, or this kind of, I guess, quiet openness because it's not an official policy while it is in this case here. But I mean, generally there's this idea that, you know, you're going to have economic growth, it's going to come from the service industries, from the service sector, pretty low paid jobs and desperate women and immigrants taking up these jobs and you really need. So you got a lot of feminists, so called feminism, that's attacking the patriarchy because women want to stay home with their kids, when you know the reality is you're going to want to stay home with your kids because that's going to be more meaningful to you than like being a cashier at Lidl. And so but they'll see that as like a patriarchy problem. And you know, you need all this immigration because it's going to drive down wages and that's going to bring economic growth. But then that is put forward as a, an openness issue and we and about anti racism and being welcoming and this sort of thing. So there's a lot of this kind of ideological laundering and but you know, this sense recently that actually we need to do something about this, that this is a volatile situation, a situation that easily overwhelms a small city and so on, you know, is kind of revealing cracks in this very delicate, kind of, I guess I don't know to continue the metaphor, but crafts in this kind of delicate rhetorical cover that they've been running for quite some time. So that, that I found really interesting. The other thing that I found interesting was the rumors that circulated on social media. And I remember years ago during COVID that when you had vaccines coming out. And I'm going somewhere with this, I promise you progressives like, oh, vaccines are the greatest thing ever. And then at the exact same time you had this urban legend, I think a rumor going around that there was injection spiking at concerts. Do you remember that? And it was like these bad people, why would they, you know, where they're like going into concerts and like trying to like rape women by injecting them with date rape drugs, which is just the very dumbest way you could possibly try to drug somebody because it's very quick and involves a lot of paraphernalia that would be very difficult to kind of get away with. Like seeing someone walk around with a giant syringe is pretty obvious anyways. But it was really interesting because I thought what happens is when you, when you're in polite society, when you're able to talk about something, it will come out in rumor, it will come out in urban legends, it will come out in a story that tells it just so perfectly in a way that you can't tell it otherwise. And it was like, well, you have these people who are kind of crossing personal boundaries with this needle and why are they doing it? Well, I don't know, because that's just what bad people do. But there was a sense of like that my personal boundaries are being crossed by evil people. But I'm going to express it in this outlet rather than that outlet. So I think some very interesting stories have come up that are very, very similar instructions, this kind of urban legend. So there was, I'm not sure if you've seen this, but all over social media there was a story, there was a video of a girl, a teenager, it looked like welcoming the migrants as they're running through the streets and you know, cheering them on. And then it cuts to what turns out to be actually a montage of things from the United States and so on, concerned parents and so on. The woman actually went missing, so she promised to help two migrants get food and so on. And the last video of hers, her leaving with them and she's been reported missing by her parents who've not seen her since. And you're invited to kind of fill in the blanks, which is obviously this silly progressive who welcomes this. These people who crossed a boundary and, and brought us danger and are endangering us all. Well now they get what they deserve. And what she gets, what she deserves, which is presumably to be, you know, violated and murdered by these migrants. Now there's absolutely no evidence that this actually happened and it's not covered in mainstream news. I've looked through any kinds of reports of like missing persons on the Spanish side. Absolutely nothing, no evidence that this has happened. But it's interesting because it is the perfect kind of morality tale where it is not socially acceptable to. Well, it is now increasingly. But you can have this kind of perfect story that can't really happen in reality, but it could happen. But it transforms a. Sorry, that isn't happening in reality but could happen. It transforms a contentious political issue into a very simple symmetric morality tale. These progressives invite a boundary violation and wouldn't it be great if they could get their comeuppance, wouldn't it? And it's kind of disturbing because it's like these progressives, they deserve this. And in that sense it's like, it's similar to these kinds of fantasies of, you know, rainbow haired people going to Palestine and like waving a gray right flag and getting thrown off a rooftop you've probably seen people fantasizing about. And in a way it's kind of disturbing because it's, it tells you that there's a, maybe there's a lack of principle at the basis. It's like left and right kind of hating on each other and Wishing each other ill. And, you know, I'm not. It's not socially acceptable for me to. To say that I hope that you die, but look what might happen if you were to follow through. You would get your just desserts. And so through these kinds of fantasies of harm to the progressives, the progressive who's inviting harm to a country but denying the violence, it's just so perfect that they themselves would be victims of violence. So I found that, that probably the most interesting thing. But I think also, you know, it's not just about fantasies of violence, but also a, you know, a widespread kind of anxiety that progressives are bringing a danger to society that is real and are unwilling themselves to face up to it. And so an urban legend goes around where this person has to face it literally. And, and it is, you know, these things, like this perfect morality tale didn't happen. But obviously in Germany, you had kind of similar, like, mass sexual assaults and so on, and you walk through Brussels like, I've never been the sort of person to be afraid. Like, people always like, oh, as a woman, it's so scary to, like, walk around. And I, I used to, like, specifically as a teenager, dress in a crop top and walk down the street with my friends specifically to elicit cat calls. We very much enjoyed male attention, but only now it's. This has happened very, very recently where I have felt personally afraid because it had been the case that if you kind of told them off or if it was a bit too much, they. They'd leave you alone, or you just ignore them, they'd leave you alone. But I had an incident recently at a conference where I was outside smoking and this, this man came up to me and started, like, hitting on me. And I was like, go away, leave me alone. And he wouldn't stop. And he became extremely aggressive. And a bouncer had to step in, like our door person at this conference. Not even a bouncer. It's not a club. I had to step in and protect me. And it is, it is very scary because these norms, when you are not in a place long enough, you are not. You don't recognize the norms and values of that, that culture. And it, it is, it is scary because what is fear is this unpredictability. This person is not unpredictable. I can't accept that. I, I can't expect that he will abide by the norm, that it's all fun and games until the woman is serious and says, stop. That's. That's gone. And it is, it is very scary. And so now, to express that it's. It puts you in a particular position on, you know, makes you like a right winger or whatever. But if you can kind of express it through a morality tale, it's expressed for you. You don't need to say these people are a. A danger or a threat, but you can say, look what happened to this woman, and you can share the story on social media, and you can say, this is the perfect. The perfect story, the perfect conglomeration of everything that's wrong and every. All the dangers that are there here now. You have to confront it. I don't have to say it. The story tells. It does it for itself.
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B
One, you know, in terms of the kind of morality tale aspect of this crisis in Sutte, like many of the other people reacting to the initial news, I thought of Genrespy's Camp of the Saints, but I think it's actually worth exploring some of the ways in which the current situation diverges from the picture painted in that novel, which, of course, is a kind of dystopia and so presents everything in extreme terms. But, you know, in the wake of this influx, you had 22 leaders of EU countries write a letter objecting to Spain's moves to regularize migrants before this crisis and blaming this crisis on that regularization. And in this letter, the leaders also threatened to impose temporary travel restrictions to back away from the fundamental freedom of movement principle underlying the European Union. And so that's very different from the novel, where all leaders basically say, yes, everyone is welcome. Everyone is welcome. Right? So that's not actually what's happening in Europe right now. Now, Sanchez's response is also interesting. I think it's very likely that his regularization helped to promote this. But Sanchez has actually highlighted a different factor. He has described the influx of migrants as an attack, and he basically suggests that this is something, as you alluded to, Ashley, where Morocco is encouraging the flow for geopolitical reasons, different theories about what those might be. But this is Sanchez's language about attack, describing an influx of migrants as an attack. That's very, very different from the kind of rhetoric that you've heard in America over the last 16 years or so, where migration is always framed as a humanitarian issue by the left and the center. And it's only on the further fringes of the right that you get this rhetoric about it's an invasion. So this is actually kind of Stephen Miller idea, right, that we are facing an invasion of migrants, which justifies extraordinary measures to stop it. So we're not going to take A humanitarian approach. We're going to actually treat it as a kind of military incursion, justifying a kind of full mobilization and a sort of emergency politics. And that's actually the rhetoric that Sanchez is dealing in. And this reflects actually what we saw a couple years ago in Poland where, where you had a Brussels aligned, more liberal government come in led by Donald Tusk, and he had swept out of power the kind of right populist law and justice party in Poland. He then suspended the right to apply for asylum in Poland, which is a really fundamental retreat from basic norms of international law. And he suspended it, I think, of all because he understands migration is very unpopular, but also he cited geopolitical concerns and potential attempt to undermine Poland or attack it coming from Russia and Belarus. So it's interesting, Tusk is a sort of center left figure. Some would call him center right, but he's a figure who's very popular on the central left. And then Sanchez is a left wing socialist. But both are resorting to this, to a really different framing, which is not a humanitarian framing, but a military framing. And in doing so, they're beginning to articulate a justification for curtailing migration. Obviously, Sanchez's politics have been the opposite of that. He's promoted it through, you know, regularizing many migrants and still has that humanitarian framework still governs for him along with the kind of economic justification. But with his description of this as an attack, we're in a very different territory than we were with Merkel. So this is not Camp of the Saints. And the Camp of the Saints, what the novelist really presents as an attack is described by every kind of treated by everyone in Europe as a sort of humanitarian thing, or if it's an attack, it's one they refuse to resist. Here we see the center of opinion in the EU moving away from just welcoming all migrants. And actually this letter from the 22 leaders, they're saying, look, the decision Spain took with regularizing migrants has created a problem for all of us because of free movement and that needed to be subject to greater consultation or whatever. They're actually objecting to the idea that Spain could just regularize migrants like that. So there's a real move away from that kind of 2015 era paradigm that we're seeing. And I think Spain under Sanchez is going to look like quite an outlier.
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C
So one thing that struck me in all of this was people initially seemed to believe that this influx was happening within the Iberian Peninsula. And then many people learned the existence of these two enclaves, Ceuta and Melilla, both of them on the African continent, which Ceuta was essentially the first overseas territory conquered by a European power, kind of kicking off the age of colonialism. It was, it was the very first kind of enclave established, you know, overseas by a European power. So that's, that's kind of an interesting fact about it. And, you know, it's interesting to see the, the politics slightly shifting around these sorts of territory, these sorts of overseas territories. And the thing that I was struck by was the echo of this discourse around the Falkland Islands that occurred towards the, the finale of the World cup or the semifinal where Argentina faced off against its historic rival, England. And of course, this brought up a lot of the history around the status of the Falklands as a British overseas territory and Argentina's irredentist claim on what it calls the Malvinas. And, you know, the, the exact sort of framing of these different kind of nationalistic assertions of territorial sovereignty and legitimacy. It does seem to be shifting because what was kind of interesting is basically that because, you know, England is run by, I, I think it was still Starmer, now it's Burnham. So it's run by this kind of progressive who all the sort of MAGA slash, sort of right wing nationalist types hate. Suddenly there was like an actual. And meanwhile, Argentina is now run by Javier Milei, who's made himself very popular among the kind of global new right networks. And so there was this sudden shift on the right, at least some elements of the online right, but, but also some significant or influential figures towards a sympathy to the Argentinian claim on the Falklands, which is, you know, pretty, pretty surprising if you consider the history. But nonetheless, you did see sort of people saying, well, you know, why does England still have this territory? Maybe it does belong to Argentina. And so you saw a sort of echo of this with certain segments of the right being like, well, you know, why does Spain control these territories in Africa? Aren't they really just in Morocco? And the reason for this appears to be very similar, which is that Spain, partly because of its lax migration policies, is sort of a bugbear of the. But, but also just because it's a socialist leader who has also been openly antagonistic to the Trump administration's war in the Middle east and has blocked the use of military bases in Spain by U.S. forces. So that's, you know, that's another element of this that, you know, meanwhile, Morocco is, you know, seemingly on very good terms with the Trump administration. In fact, they hilariously named a highway running through the dispute another disputed territory, Western Sahara, after Donald Trump recently, which he posted on Truth Social about how honored and grateful he was and how he was looking forward to taking a ride down it. So, and, and Morocco, after the Abraham Accords, has become a strategic partner of Israel in the Middle East. And so you did see people on the right actually saying, well, you know, maybe Morocco should take these territories from Spain, which is sort of fascinating only insofar as you saw people on the right on one hand decrying this invasion of Moroccans of these territories, while on the other hand saying, well, maybe Morocco should invade these territories and have them because, you know, better the sort of based Moroccan monarchy than these sort of awful socialist open borders libtards, you know, having these territories. So it's, it's kind of a fascinating thing because I think you see, and I've, I've pointed to this as a kind of a decolonial dimension of maga, even that there's this kind of sympathy to the irredentist claims of various countries, Argentina, Morocco, within the sort of broader MAGA coalition, which is fascinating only insofar as it's like, you know, on one hand they're sort of saying we are the defenders of the west, we are defending the West. But then on the other hand, because in effect the west is, in the case of countries like Spain and England, as they see it, run by their enemies, they would actually take the side of the non west against the west strategically in those cases. And I think it does also raise this question I discussed in my piece on the compact substack called I think Nobody Knows what the West Is, which is that the west, you know, in its modern existence has been an outward expanding project. And so this means that it is not a simply, you know, geographically contained entity. It is one that has all of these tentacles and sort of enclaves spread throughout the world. And so that means if you have this fortress vision of Western civilization, you're going to end up in these contradictory positions over and over again. Because Western civilization has never been simply contained territorially in the way that people might, might like it to be. And so you've seen splits on the far right between, and this is what I discussed in that piece between a kind of multipolarist view that I think you could associate with the thought of Alexander Dugin, where, you know, there is a lot of overlap with a kind of decolonial left vision of the world as, you know, it needs to be divided up into these regional entities where there will be some sort of dominant civilization within each but then the borders of those have to be absolutely fixed and kept in place. And then on the other hand you have a much more expansive version of Western of sort of the defense of Western civilization which ends up being actually a defense of the colonial legacy of Western civilization that oh, maybe we shouldn't have actually given up all these colonies. You know, maybe that was this sort of communist sabotage and we should have kept all of these colonies around the world. So it's easy to see how these things are difficult to reconcile. But I think it is kind of an interesting tension in terms of how the right engages with these issues. And so when you have an invasion of a territory that is physically removed from the mainland of Spain it I think brings all these problems out into the open in ways that seem to make everybody confused.
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B
For more go to compactmag.com subscribe thanks to our listeners and thank you Ashley and Jeff.
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Sa.