The Bolsonaro Method feat. Greg Foley

Summary

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TRASHFUTURE Podcast

Episode: The Bolsonaro Method feat. Greg Foley
Release Date: January 28, 2026
Guests: Greg Foley (of Blood Work)
Hosts: Riley, Nova, and others

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Episode Overview

This episode dives into the “continued psychic trauma of capitalism” by using satire, dark humor, and sharp critique to shine a light on rising violence, institutional decay, and the failures of liberal democracy under capitalism. The conversation threads through Jair Bolsonaro’s cartoonishly persistent political movement, the collapse and violence of US federal institutions—especially ICE’s occupation and killings in Minneapolis—and the stultifying politics of the UK Labour Party. The discussion is punctuated with absurdity, gallows humor, and moments of clarity about violence becoming everyday reality.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. The Bolsonaro Event: Lightning, Fascism, and Looney Tunes Politics

[04:18–11:12]

• News Item: 89 people were injured by lightning at a Bolsonaro rally in Brasilia, which hosts found both tragic and hilarious—a “Wile E. Coyote” moment for Brazil’s far-right.

  • Riley: “The weird shit that happens to him is, like, transmissible... supporting bol. Scenario and then you and 88 of your friends get struck by lightning.” [04:32]
  • Greg Foley: “We are dealing with the Brazilian Wile E. Coyote.” [04:46]

• Bolsonaro as an Absurd Figure: The hosts compare Bolsonaro’s fate and the resilience of his movement to cartoon logic—he keeps getting hurt, but never really defeated; his followers now resemble Looney Tunes characters.

  • Running joke: The “official uniform of Bolsonarismo is a full body cast.” [06:12]
  • Imagery: The idea that if you jail and humiliate fascist leaders, their movements devolve into absurdity.

• Consequences for the Far-Right: The episode suggests that humiliating fascists with real consequences doesn’t make them dangerous martyrs but turns them into political punchlines.

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2. UK Politics: Labour Party Decay and Surveillance Fantasies

[11:13–24:31]

• Comparison with US and UK State Violence:

  • Riley: “In the us, the expression of things cannot get better and we will prevent you from trying is you get shot in the street... In the uk... a tense meeting of the Labour Party National Electoral Committee.” [11:20]

• Labour’s Bigwigs & Absurd Policy Proposals:

  • Labour politicians promote tech-policing fantasies (AI ‘Panopticon’ prisons, facial recognition, a “British FBI”).
  • Host (sarcastically): “As Justice Secretary, Ms. Mahmoud proposed a major expansion of GPS tagging... create, quote, virtual prisons.” [13:18]
  • Greg Foley (on British ICE): “If an ICE is in the UK, it’s obviously not going to operate the same way as the American ice... in my imagination, when I'm told to think of an elephant as big feet for stomping on people, it has big ears for listening...” [17:04]

• Labour Leadership & Andy Burnham:

  • Burnham, despite career opportunism, is less hated than other Labour leaders and thus perceived as a threat by party insiders.
  • Host: “He is their mortal enemy because he is 1% the guy and they are all negative 100% the guy.” [19:29]

• Decline as Inflexibility: The party is unwilling to change, preferring to implode rather than admit mistakes or adopt more popular figures.

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3. US: Violence as the New Normal—ICE, Minneapolis, and the Cold Civil War

[24:31–62:21]

• Escalating Federal Violence:

  • ICE and Border Patrol occupying Minneapolis, killing civilians including a nurse, Alex Preddy, with impunity.
  • Greg Foley (on Preddy): “These people spent weeks, maybe months trying to turn a podcaster and an influencer into their horse vessel and... the most sort of perfect candidate for a legitimate horse vessel figure is one who was slain by their own fucking pig moron officers.” [28:13]

• Media Response & Dehumanization:

  • The authorities and right-wing media try to smear victims as terrorists.
  • Riley: “Violence in the real world has a strange sort of abruptness and sort of like, irreducibility that shocks all of these people to their core...” [49:07]

• State vs. State: The Mechanism of Breakdown

  • The federal government extorting state governments (demanding Minnesota’s data in exchange for the withdrawal of ICE) is seen as tantamount to institutional civil war.
  • Host: “One institution is trying to by force compel another institution of the country to do something that it otherwise wouldn’t do. That’s why it’s like… the Civil War in effect.” [37:50]

• Liberal Impotence & Fascist Ambitions:

  • Democratic leaders are unwilling or unable to rein in state violence; opportunistic figures like Stephen Miller are actively trying to spark a civil conflict.
  • Greg Foley: “What they ultimately want is a good, clean product... in terms of what they are producing right now in Minneapolis, I don’t think they're getting that. And I just want to be—I don't think they are winning there.” [44:33]

• Spectacle and Ennui:

  • Right-wing violence is both performative and repetitive, producing nothing but memeable horror, which eventually numbs the population.
  • Greg Foley: “The cruelty is the point, but it's also all that they've got and all they have. When I say, like, what it is, it's the performance of cruelty." [54:08]

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4. Violence as Context—The Psychic Trauma of the Present

[62:21–End]

• Normalization and Desensitization:

  • The hosts discuss how relentless, circulating images of violence (especially from Gaza and now in US cities) may increase public numbness or, alternately, radicalize new populations when the violence “comes home.”
  • Nova: "The thing that sort of shakes you out of that is when it comes to you. ... violence will come for you in some form or another..." [64:14]

• Who Fights Back and Why:

  • There’s debate over who might finally respond to growing fascism, and whether traditional liberals can or will, when even the moderately radical seem ineffectual.
  • Riley: “There is no president you can elect who will fix this. There is no kind of, like, law you can pass that will undo this.” [39:23]

• Final Message:

  • The episode closes on the inevitability of violence as a structuring presence in the current era—that violence, once distant or abstract, is now an immediate, interested party in everyone’s life.
  • Host: “You may not be interested in violence, but I gotta tell you, violence could very well be interested in you.” [65:49]

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments (with Timestamps)

• On Bolsonaro and Absurd Resilience:

  • “We are dealing with the Brazilian Wile E. Coyote.” — Greg Foley [04:46]
  • “The official uniform of Bolsonarismo is a full body cast.” — Host [06:12]

• On British Politics:

  • “Anyone might think that the full immersion VR Roblox sex offender wing was a bad idea, but, you know…” — Riley [13:32]
  • “In the us, the expression of things cannot get better and we will prevent you from trying is you get shot in the street... In the uk... a tense meeting of the Labour Party National Electoral Committee.” — Riley [11:20]

• On US Violence and Civil War:

  • “ICE have literally stormed into Minneapolis and killed Pretty and good.” — Greg Foley [30:01]
  • “You may not be interested in violence, but violence is very much interested in you.” — Riley [50:38]
  • “There is no president you can elect who will fix this. There is no kind of, like, law you can pass that will undo this.” — Riley [39:23]
  • “The cruelty is the point, but it's also all that they've got and all they have... it’s the performance of cruelty.” — Greg Foley [54:08]

• On Numbing and Spectacle:

  • “All these attempts to control social media have largely failed, right? Because there are ways to sort of circumvent that. ... the long term strategy for these guys is to just like make this continual background noise until like everyone is numbed by it.” — Nova [61:06]

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Section Timestamps

• Opening Banter & Tone Setting: [00:16–02:24]
• Bolsonaro and Brazil's Fantastical Politics: [03:56–11:12]
• UK Labour & Futile Techno-authoritarianism: [11:13–24:31]
• US: ICE, Federal Violence, and Minneapolis: [24:31–39:23]
• Escalation, Civil War Rhetoric, and Fascism's Dynamics: [39:23–56:43]
• Spectacle, Numbing, and Psychological Fallout: [56:43–64:14]
• Final Thoughts & Summation: [64:14–End]

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Tone & Style

The episode is characterized by dark, satirical humor and occasional absurdist imagery (e.g., Bolsonaro as a Looney Tunes character), interwoven with sharp, deeply informed political analysis. The hosts combine an emotionally raw acknowledgment of contemporary horrors with a persistent drive to find the underlying mechanisms—and to ridicule the powerful’s incompetence and malevolence.

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Useful for Listeners Who Haven’t Listened

• Guides listeners through recent, surreal political crises in Brazil, the US, and the UK.
• Explains why violence—both physical and institutional—is now central, visible, and unavoidable.
• Demystifies the interplay between performative cruelty, democratic decay, and the numbness (or radicalization) of the population.
• Uses memorable analogies (cartoons, memes) to make complexity accessible without diminishing gravity.

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Listen to TRASHFUTURE, Blood Work, No Gods No Mayors, and—if you need a palate cleanser—maybe some Looney Tunes.

Transcript

[Nova]

I'm gonna go on a whim here and say I'm not. I'm not a fan of violence myself.

[Riley]

Well, fucking get started, because everyone else is. The times are. And so, you know.

[Greg Foley]

Yeah, you don't have to be interested in violence to live on this planet. But it helps.

[Riley]

You don't have to be interested in viol. But violence is interested in us.

[Greg Foley]

Yes.

[Nova]

Yeah, I've heard a podcast that talks about that a lot. I think it's called Pod Save UK.

[Riley]

Raising my little shot glass full of little 9 millimeter bullets. Listen to Pod Save the UK.

[Greg Foley]

It's called the Rest Is Politics with Rory Stewart.

[Host]

Rory Stewart and Greg Foley talk about their time in Afghanistan.

[Greg Foley]

Don't ask where Alistair Campbell went.

[Host]

Alistair Campbell's drinking shots, if you know what I mean.

[Greg Foley]

And Alistair Campbell said nothing, you idiots. Alistair Campbel. He's locked in my basement. He's not really. That was a joke.

[Host]

One sec. Let's sync up. So you know the drill. 3, 2, 1, mark. When I say mark, everybody, please clap. 3, 2, 1, Mark. Thank you very much.

[Riley]

What I should have done is got a soundboard drop of a gunshot so that I could have just like, been like, yeah, I just popped on off into my ceiling.

[Host]

Yes.

[Greg Foley]

That's why we have post.

[Host]

I really. I really hate my landlord, so I've shot his house. This is. This is called paying rent the blood work way. Yeah.

[Riley]

The thing is, I lower the rent in my neighborhood, but I increase. Increase the rent in my apartment because it has bullet holes in it that I have to pay to get fixed. So it offsets.

[Host]

Yeah, that's Keynesianism. That's military Keynesianism.

[Greg Foley]

That's as much as I've come to understand it.

[Host]

Yeah. All right, all right, all right. Hello, everybody. Welcome to this free episode of tf. And despite our, I would say, quite light tone, it is a worrying time to live in the world.

[Riley]

Welcome to the Jarring Shift in Tone Hour. The reason why we came in with jokes is because we spent sort of like 15 minutes ahead of the recording talking about all of the stuff we couldn't say on the recording because it would be actionably violent.

[Host]

That's right. The word of the day, violence. Ding, ding, ding, ding, ding. Because the word of the day is violence. We have returning champion, second time on the pod, Greg Foley, the host of Blood Work. Listen to Blood Work. Imagine me pointing a gun at you, Greg. Welcome back to the show.

[Greg Foley]

Thank you so much. In the words of the immortal words of John Lennon, I read the news today. Oh, Boy.

[Nova]

Cool.

[Host]

Pretty good. What happened? Hey, I checked out CBS News. They're playing a clip show. Pretty good.

[Greg Foley]

All Flanders Press.

[Riley]

I think they're literally screening A Night at the Movies with CBS where they interview, like, Margot Robbie, which. Cool. It's good to keep in mind they're.

[Greg Foley]

Finally going to get to the bottom of what the perfect Sunday really is.

[Host]

Yeah. The only questions you're now allowed to ask at CBS News are just what questions James Lipton asks at the end of Inside the Actors Studio.

[Riley]

Yeah, we asked a masked up ice agent dripping with blood what his perfect morning was.

[Greg Foley]

We did not like what we found out that answer to be.

[Riley]

And the answer will shock you.

[Host]

What's your favorite curse word? Just a string of expletive beeps.

[Riley]

Hey, what's your favorite profession to murder? Like poet or, like, nurse or like, you know, what's your favorite kind of, like, socially valuable person to, like, execute in the street?

[Host]

Yeah, and that. And of course, them all auditioning for fucking America's Funniest Home Videos by, like, flashbanging themselves every time they drive past a guy with a tan. And it is pretty monstrous over there. And when the imperial hegemon is collapsing, it is worth taking note of it. And that's what we're going to be spending the vast majority of this episode talking about. But there are two things I wanted to talk about before we get to that. One is utterly essential. I am unwilling to proceed until we talk about this. It's so important.

[Riley]

This is, I think, the only thing in the last few days of, you know, not sleeping and becoming slightly delirious that has helped me feel good about anything. Riley, please tell us a really, really funny news item.

[Host]

Funny? This is serious.

[Riley]

Sorry. Please tell us a horrifying news item.

[Greg Foley]

I'm standing up with my hand on my chest and my hat off.

[Host]

I am so sorry. This is a day that will live in infamy as 89 people were injured when lightning struck near a rally supporting former Brazilian president Jair Bolsonaro in Brasilia on Sunday.

[Riley]

The weird shit that happens to him is, like, transmissible. I swear to God, like, ideologically, like, supporting bol. Scenario. And then you and 88 of your friends get struck by lightning.

[Greg Foley]

We are dealing with the Brazilian Wile E. Coyote.

[Host]

I think.

[Riley]

I think it's a really funny thing for Brazilian fascists to be like, okay, we're going to demonstrate against Lula by all joining hands around this big copper wire in the middle of a thunderstorm.

[Greg Foley]

The only thing that is keeping him alive is the Fact that nobody has.

[Nova]

Found the Portuguese for me, I'm genuinely surprised. Like, you know, I actually, I feel like I have a lot of admiration. Limited in a very limited sense. In the sense of like, nothing's killing this guy. There's no evidence that he's getting stronger, but there's no evidence that he's not getting stronger. And so I kind of like, I sort of respect that in a way.

[Greg Foley]

Yeah, it's like he cannot live or die. He's simply unvanquishable.

[Riley]

Yeah, but that spreads to like his guys as well. And so the other thing of note here is that like, if we're taking sort of signs and portents, right, Zeus votes for Lula, which is inherently funny given that from what I know about Brazil, a decent number of the Bolsonaristas probably were named Zeus. So my apologies to Zeus. Electrophilio de Hitler. I hope you get better in hospital.

[Greg Foley]

I'm now picturing Yair Bolsonaro as Philoctetes from the Disney Hercules film. So you wanna be my president, kid?

[Host]

Well, whoop dee doo.

[Riley]

I just. Every. Every Bolsonarista loves to emulate their hero by going to the hospital, his favorite place.

[Host]

So it's like the official, like if we know that the official uniform of the Nazis was like the long Hugo Boss designed like, like storm coats or whatever. The official uniform of Bolsonarismo is a full body cast.

[Riley]

No, it's paper gown with the ass out. You've got like a bunch of tubes like, like protruding from you. You've got like an IV stand. Also your hair is standing on end. You're singed. Both your shoes have been blown off.

[Host]

Yeah, it's like, look, here's the other thing, right? Especially with what we're going to talk about. The Brazilian state did had to do.

[Riley]

And look, Bolsonaro cloud seeding over the Bolsonaro one. Sort of like top secret cleared Brazilian air force pilot flying away into the sunset. Mission accomplished. Magnificent.

[Greg Foley]

The Praetorian Guard of guys with zimmer frames wandering around like Vincent the Chin Gigante.

[Host]

But like, this is the fascist tendency in, in Brazil, when it was stripped of its power, when it was humiliated, when it's January 8th went fucking nowhere. Everyone was jailed. They've now become ludicrous.

[Riley]

You know what I always say, right? I hate when the state defends itself from the left, but I love when the state defends itself from the right. And if that means driving out to the Bolsonaro demonstration and firing up one of the Van der Graaff generators, from the Prestige, then fine. You know, great, fantastic. The last shot of the Prestige where it's just like a wood in Colorado with a bunch of dead Bolsonaro guys piping on top of each other.

[Host]

The ball hit as thousands gathered in the rain to demand their leaders released from prison. Video footage captured the moment of a sudden flash and thunder sent crowds scrambling for cover. Fire department officials said 45 people went to hospital treatment. The rally was organized by Congressman Nicolas Ferreira, who called for amnesty for Bolsonaro, who is currently detained at a special detention facility in Brasilia. He's faced ongoing health problems stemming from a 2018 stabbing during his first presidential campaign, including a week long hospitalization in December for a groin hernia and treatment for persistent hiccups.

[Greg Foley]

You can't ask for amnesty for Jaya Bolsonaro because the thing he needs amnesty.

[Riley]

From is himself talking to Jaya Bolsonaro. And he's like hiccuping the whole time. He's like, got an injured dick. And you're like, Mr. Former President, sir, A frankly, Looney Tunes number of your guys have been hit by the fucking chain lightning power from Bioshock.

[Host]

He says, oh, I'll take care of this immediately. Time to take a step without looking and just land on a fucking single roller skate.

[Greg Foley]

I just pictured the surgeon slicing him open, hearing various spring noises. He's gonna.

[Riley]

He's gonna. He's monitoring the situation very closely and he's gonna take action the only way he knows how. Getting a kind of ringworm that only exists in like three countries, none of which are Brazil.

[Host]

Yeah.

[Greg Foley]

The first man to get a ringworm that is actually a worm.

[Host]

Earlier this month, Bolsonaro underwent further medical treatment after falling in prison.

[Riley]

He is.

[Nova]

He is.

[Host]

I God, he is like, I don't think he's Brazilian. I think he's from fucking Toontown.

[Riley]

Yeah.

[Greg Foley]

They don't mention the fact that him falling in prison, like I said Brazilian Wiley Coyote. When they say falling in prison, a piano landed on him and then he went down the staircase like a Slinky.

[Host]

Like. One thing Bolsonaro does have is he's able to defy gravity for a short period of time until he does look down.

[Greg Foley]

Until he holds up a sign saying.

[Host]

Oh, yeah, he never actually talks. It's weird.

[Greg Foley]

He's going to get that Roadrunner, though.

[Host]

This is what can become of your fascist movement if you jail their leaders and humiliate them.

[Greg Foley]

Turns out a simple trick.

[Host]

Yeah. Turns out you just have to defend yourself from them.

[Greg Foley]

Yeah. Just inflict consequences.

[Riley]

Not only are they not sort of like, you know, supermen. Not only do they not have hearts of iron, not only are they not men of steel, right? But as you see from all the ice agents eating shit on like, sort of icy streets, they will continue to do all of the oaf stuff, but they just can't kill you.

[Host]

Like, they will never stop. Also, Nova, I'd like to issue one small correction here. They all definitely have hearts of iron.

[Riley]

This is true. Yeah. Hearts of iron. Really bad when you get struck by lightning.

[Host]

Bolsonaro soon is going to have a long of iron. Thank you. I'm gonna. I'm gonna sign off the podcast now. Goodbye, everybody. I'm retiring forever.

[Riley]

Thank you for listening to Brazil Future, the podcast about how unless we implement fully automated luxury communism, the future is and will be Brazil.

[Host]

Honestly, I would love if the future was Brazil.

[Riley]

Yeah, that sounds pretty good. That sounds nice. Yeah.

[Host]

Like, you know what? Other caprinias. And your fascist movement is doing a lot more Looney Tunes stuff.

[Riley]

Yeah.

[Greg Foley]

And as many tunnels painted on walls as you could possibly want.

[Host]

That's right. Dangerous freeway system. Anyway. Anyway, look, especially in Sao Paulo, which has a crazy motorway through it. Check out no gods, no mayors.

[Greg Foley]

Fucking mental.

[Host]

I wanted to also talk about some UK news items because there are things happening that we definitely cannot ignore.

[Riley]

Yeah, it's really funny.

[Nova]

Right.

[Riley]

And I'll put this sort of button on all of this first, ahead of time. So you know what the theme is, right? Which is, in the us, the expression of things cannot get better and we will prevent you from trying is you get shot in the street by someone who doesn't have a soul anymore. In the uk, the expression of things cannot get better and will kill you for trying is a kind of tense meeting of the Labour Party National Electoral Committee.

[Greg Foley]

And don't get me wrong, we will.

[Riley]

Let you kill yourself. Like, there's one of the Palestine hunger strikers who is about to die. But in the main, politics in this country is going to be about, like, no, you just can't vote for anyone who would do things differently.

[Host]

Yeah, yeah, we're going to keep. Oh, you wanted. Sorry. What we're going to do is we're going to make it so that the one guy who is. I'm not even saying the one guy who's good, just the one guy who is the least hated of anyone who's involved in your party. Andy Burnham, current mayor of Greater Manchester, former mp.

[Nova]

Do you mean.

[Riley]

Do you mean my party? Your party? I think I'm still a member of it. I Haven't checked.

[Host]

I am so annoyed at them for who's on firsting the UK political system. It was confusing enough.

[Nova]

Your party.

[Riley]

Yeah, agreed.

[Host]

Now, some of these politicians have some very unusual names, huh? But in the context of this as well, I want to just. Here's what some of the other labor bigwigs have been doing recently. And these are some of the things that make them so hated. Then we'll go on to Andy Burnham. These are recent remarks made by Home Secretary Shabana Mahmoud, the Tony Blair Institute's Christmas party last month.

[Riley]

Can you imagine the full, like, wall projection of the one Blair Christmas card where it looks like Cherie's trying to.

[Nova]

Stop him from fighting you?

[Greg Foley]

They say to me, I never see you at the gym. And I say to them, I never see you at the Tony Blair Institute's Christmas party.

[Host]

Yeah, so this was. She was being interviewed before, I guess, like, the adrenochrome started flowing.

[Riley]

It's so funny that the. The acronym is TBI.

[Nova]

Yeah.

[Host]

Or spreading it. As Justice Secretary, Ms. Mahmoud proposed a major expansion of GPS tagging of criminals to create, quote, virtual prisons for offenders punished in the community. Since moving to the Home Office, she's announced a planned nationwide rollout of police operated live facial recognition cameras as widely as possible.

[Riley]

Anyone might think that the full immersion VR Roblox sex offender wing was a bad idea, but, you know, so in.

[Host]

An interview with Sir Tony Blair, she said, AI and technology can be transformative to the whole law and order space. When I was in justice, my ultimate vision was to achieve by means of AI and technology what Jeremy Bentham tried to do with his Panopticon.

[Greg Foley]

Mm. Oh, cool. Okay.

[Riley]

Ever since I was a little girl, I wanted to build the Torment Nexus. I mean, she's announced a whole raft of policing stuff, which I have some thoughts on. Maybe we'll talk about it in due course.

[Nova]

Look, there is some reassurance, though, in the sense that if anyone tries to build a Panopticon, they won't be able to because of planning permission and the fact that you can't. You will not be able to build a Panopticon because the council will not let you do it.

[Host]

Yeah, you're an obstructive, legally protected view.

[Riley]

The Panopticon's on a brownfield site and everyone gets cancelled.

[Nova]

Yeah, your Panopticon might block the sun. You know, you're seeing the sunrise, like, at a certain location. So that's why you can't do it.

[Greg Foley]

I don't want to distract from the Substance. But I just want to point out an interview with Sir Tony Blair. I bet that was tougher than Paxman.

[Riley]

That was a tough interview. I mean, also, as far as policing stuff goes, I do want to quickly note that I'm incrementing the big sort of like, I have the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientist sort of like atomic clock thing. But it's a counter for the number of times they've announced a British FBI. And we're now up to, like, conservatively 20. Like, they've been trailing British FBI's since, like, 9, 11. Basically.

[Host]

You know why it's that they didn't do to the Brit for the British FBI. What the US has been doing for the American FBI is they got to put Constantine Kisson in charge of it. Like, they need to put a YouTuber in charge.

[Riley]

But the thing that kind of is the British FBI. There's. There's a national crime agency, and before that, there was a serious and organized crime agency, and before that there was. And it's just like, you're right. The clear thing to do is to rename it to the British FBI. So we get the libidinal bit and then put us in charge.

[Host]

Okay, fine. I would take that, too.

[Greg Foley]

The federal British industry.

[Nova]

I mean, we have also been looking to, like, you know, sort of make a wind. Like, finding a scene to make a windbreaker for a while. Right? This is true.

[Riley]

That's true.

[Nova]

That could be it. Yeah. We're in it. But mostly for menswear.

[Riley]

Yeah. Like, Zoran.

[Greg Foley]

Nova's gonna get one so that she can be a female Britain inspector.

[Riley]

I just. The real handshake meme between me and Zoran Mumdani is like, I love branded office wear. Like, give me the big, like, quarter zip that says mayor on it, you know?

[Nova]

Yeah. He's. He's getting so much menswear. Like, I've been watching some of the videos where he's been announcing snow stuff, and I'm just like, where you've been? You have had three different jackets. Yeah. Is it. Is it. Is it pleated? What kind of, like, what kind of canvas are you using on that? What's the color? Like? Yeah, you know, I'm. We're very invested. Yeah.

[Host]

The mayor has donned New York's official double monk.

[Riley]

I just. I just planted that little mental landmine of the double monk straps, knowing that it would come back again and again and again as a landmine does. It's a good analogy.

[Host]

Yes.

[Nova]

It's what?

[Host]

It's one of these repeating one of these machine gun landmines. Yeah.

[Riley]

It's curious how the menswear I abandoned returns to me as I decide to get a little bit footer with it.

[Host]

So. But the reason I bring this up is then, as in, the government needed to send out an official response from Lord Mike Katz, who's in the Lords, who had to. Who had to then say, when these remarks got published, there is no plans to introduce mass surveillance of the entire population. Please don't worry.

[Greg Foley]

This is where I get annoyed, right, because it was only a few months ago that the Conservative party were pledging £1.6 billion to create a British ICE. And then when they did that, a lot of people raised issues with the idea of a British ICE based on all the things the ICE is doing right now in the United States. And then now you have Mahmoud promising a British FBI and you have Mike Katz going, don't get any crazy ideas. It's not going to be like an FBI. And it was again, the popular line during the whole announcement of the concern, Conservative ICE was like, I saw lots of very sensible, sensible commentators being like, oh, no, you don't get it. Because, like, if an ICE is in the uk, it's obviously not going to operate the same way as the American ice. And the whole thing for Matt, the whole thing with that, for me then becomes like, it becomes this thing where they go, you weren't supposed to think of an elephant when I loudly and enthusiastically told you I was going to bring you an elephant. And like, with respect to them, like, in my imagination, when I'm told to think of an elephant as big feet for stomping on people, it has big ears for listening and it also has. Has big tusks for goring. So I'm sorry, like, yeah, curiously, you.

[Riley]

Reacted when I summoned my dog with an ordinary whistle that you could hear as well.

[Greg Foley]

Like, what else are we supposed to think of? If it's not relevant, why make the reference?

[Host]

But the, the other one I wanted to note as well, this is just this. The, the two kinds of people who are, let's say, staying in the forefront of Labour Party politics, there's someone like Mahmoud or then just Peter Kyle. I see this today, his new, his new campaign is. He's saying, what if we linked MP Sal salaries to GDP growth? And it's genuinely so.

[Riley]

I love to cause hyperinflation, then peace the fuck out.

[Host]

And it's like both of these people are just sort of spitting out about whatever harebrained scheme comes into their mind. Like, what if we built a Panopticon. Hey, what if we did, like, something a LinkedIn person would think of to fix the country?

[Riley]

Riley, do you think that any of this kind of incoherence and fumbling for anything else to announce is born of any kind of, like, internal strife in the Labor Party?

[Host]

Honestly, No. I think it's a party whose fortunes are going up, up, up.

[Riley]

Cool.

[Host]

Yeah, pretty good. But the reason I'm saying that those two things is it's a sort of context for Burnham. One of the reasons why he's not as hated as these other fucking people is. Is a. There's a several fold. And again, I'm not like dick riding Andy Burnham here. He was a right wing Blairite when it suited him. He was sort of soft left when it suited him. That's never really been.

[Riley]

He's not pushed on the guy, but to these people, he is their mortal enemy. And that's really funny.

[Host]

Yeah, he is their mortal enemy because he is 1% the guy and they are all negative 100% the guy. Right. He's the only labor figure who's not actively hated by the entire country. Just because he comes across as the opposite of those other two motherfuckers, essentially.

[Greg Foley]

He'S able to present himself as a human being who is wearing their own skin.

[Host]

Yes. This is the skin I was born with. I did not take it from someone else and stitch it together like a.

[Greg Foley]

Suit, stand there going, water, sugar. That's it.

[Riley]

It's like, hey, this guy's trying to turn the big N case dial down from 100%. Get him.

[Nova]

I suppose they hate him because he won't drink from the puddle.

[Riley]

True.

[Host]

Yeah.

[Greg Foley]

Not without sugar in it.

[Host]

Yeah.

[Riley]

They hate him because he thinks that he's better than them merely because of the fact that he is. Not by much.

[Host]

But, yeah, they can't stand even that. And, you know, like, Morgan McSweeney obviously would rather put one of his friends up for their. For the election.

[Riley]

They've briefed. They would rather have Streeting than Burns.

[Nova]

I actually have it on good authority I have a Labour source. I'm not going to name who my source is because I'm a good journalist, but I have heard from a very reliable source that they are actually priming a certain figure to fight that seat. 1 reza per 1 reza pahlavi. Sorry, I was so excited about that bit that I just, like, completely dropped the landing.

[Riley]

Listen, Reza Pahlavi has been the MP for Gorton for 6,7000 years.

[Host]

That's right. We're going to declare a second Iranian kingdom right here in the United Kingdom.

[Nova]

And Andy Burnham, who's in the pocket of. Of of the Islamic Republic, is trying to undermine that.

[Host]

That's right.

[Nova]

That's what. And that's what they won't tell you.

[Host]

But.

[Nova]

But Morgan McSweeney is very aware of. Anyway.

[Host]

But I wanted to quote from the blog, a former guest of this show, Phil Burton Carlage, a sociologist writing about the blocking of Andy Burnham from running for this by election and potentially challenging leadership.

[Riley]

Yeah, it's like real. Like the actual mechanics of it are real. Like Labor Party inside baseball stuff.

[Host]

Doesn't matter in itself.

[Riley]

Doesn't matter. But is kind of funny that these people love factional warfare and they love their fucking procedural meetings.

[Host]

They love having rules arguments. They love rules, Larry. Each other, actually.

[Riley]

I think you'll find I am chair of this committee and the bylaws say that you have to get a vote from us. And it's like, come on.

[Nova]

And we're not going to let you build your panopticon.

[Greg Foley]

Yeah, read the bylaws, Jackie Weaver, and understand them.

[Host]

Yeah, this is. This is. This is Phil. He says. With Lucy Powell sole voice of dissent, and it appears the only NAC member with a grasp of political reality. The labor right, the Starmer loyalists, have declared their party done. They didn't just veto Burnham's eventual leadership bid, they snuffed out the only real chance of Labour had of avoiding a catastrophic historic defeat in the next election. But at least most of the Labour right will keep their jobs in prominence for a few more years. A parliamentary seat that at any other time would be a shoe in is likely to fall. And Labour's political decay continues apace. The Labour right have gift wrapped more of the party's voters and handed them over to the Greens.

[Riley]

Cool.

[Host]

Fine.

[Nova]

Great. Awesome.

[Riley]

Yeah. Burnham was a chance. Yeah.

[Host]

Yeah. Thank you for those. Are you sure we'll take them. Burnham was a chance. The chance to turn things around. Instead, the NEC have engaged full steam ahead towards inevitable disaster, which I think is basically. That puts it, I think pretty much exactly right, which is there is absolutely no future for a Labour Party that does not understand that in order for people to stop hating its leadership more than any other political figure in Britain has really ever been hated, or at least to domestically. Right. You have to get rid of them and change them for something else.

[Riley]

There is no fixing the Labour Party. Right. This is one of two institutions we're talking about here that has decided to make itself irremediable right. That is like we would sooner be like this and end than continue in a different form. The other one being the federal government of the United States.

[Nova]

I mean, the sort of running characteristic of a lot of it is just that they will refuse to admit in any way that they may have been incorrect or are wrong. Right. And they would rather implode everything than admit they were wrong. And when they lose, and I'm not even thinking about a general here, I'm thinking they've got local elections coming up really soon and they're going to get fucking destroyed when they lose. It's still not going to be their fault. And I think that's also one reason why they're putting a lot of emphasis on attacking kind of Greens and by extension left of the party who will not vote Labour and never vote Labour again. Because I think for them it is very much like they would much rather believe that they were always right and everyone else kind of wrong them. Sort of like embrace any kind of modicum of humility.

[Riley]

It's very funny that this is also an apt critique, although a much less relevant one of your party, a party which ultimately is the way that it is, you know, which is irrelevant because it couldn't get over thinking like the Labour Party. So no, like having been in the Labour Party is still a long term threat to your political health because it will make you like, like this.

[Nova]

Yeah.

[Host]

So speaking of irredeemable institutions that are heading for world historic disastrous ruptures, the consequences of which are going to be slightly unclear and maybe not clear for quite a long time. Let's talk about the celebrated meme ified rapid social decay of the United States from imperial hegemon.

[Riley]

Yeah, it's, it's happening.

[Nova]

Right.

[Riley]

Here's the thing, right. I never want to be too firm on like my own predictive power, Right. Because this is ultimately the kind of dog that has yet to bark. Right. But the last couple of weeks have me convinced that you are going to see a like, civil conflict where both sides are shooting at each other simultaneously in the United States in my lifetime. And this might not be the proximate cause of it, the next thing might not be. But I think this is the week where we have well and truly locked in the idea that this is the course that the US is on and it's not getting off of it, no matter what happens.

[Greg Foley]

Yeah, you've said it many times before. But I think we do have to sort of definitively say now like the falcons can no longer hear the falconer.

[Riley]

Yeah.

[Greg Foley]

Yeah, like, that ship has sailed. That bird has flown.

[Host]

And I think it's worth just doing a little bit of table setting, especially because there are so many facets to this.

[Riley]

Yeah, I mean, just Barest facts, right. ICE and Border Patrol have sent like 3,000 agents to Minneapolis off of partially spurious and partially not their jurisdiction anyway, claims of like, like welfare fraud amongst, like, Somali Americans, most of whom are US citizens anyway. Those 3,000 federal agents outnumber like state and local police anyway. And in the course of being there, occupying Minneapolis on a kind of like, punitive mission to arrest, disappear and deport as many people as possible and brutalize as many people who get in their way as possible and crucially, get good video for, you know, the sort of soy lords running the social media accounts to tweet out have now murdered two people on camera in unambiguously unjustifiable ways.

[Host]

I think it's worth saying as well. I actually have the quote from the New York Times, which analyzed the video of Mr. Preddy, the ICU nurse who was killed.

[Riley]

I mean, I've seen it. You don't need to. I mean, it's a radicalizing thing. Right. If you're in the habit of believing the police, it's probably good practice to see it and know that it's, you know, you are being lied to to your face. But it is obviously murder.

[Host]

Yeah. So I'll read this snippet here. This is from the New York Times describing the. Where he is murdered. Several agents moved away from Mr. Preddy, who has collapsed. Another agent, the same one who shoved the civilians into the street and pepper sprayed Mr. Preddy unholsters his gun and fires at him. The first agent also fires additional shots. Together they fire six shots at him while he lies motionless on the ground. And all told, at least 10 shots appear to have been fired within five seconds. By the moment of the 10th shot. The agent who moved away with his gun, which he kept holstered, has crossed the street. So this. And he's the second person to be shot and killed by federal agent in Minnesota in recent weeks, who then was the subject of a constant all CH Channel's lying campaign by the federal government.

[Riley]

Yeah, and it's, It's. It's their misfortune, as they would see it, that once again they have. Have killed someone who is very difficult to smear in that mode.

[Greg Foley]

Well, I'd like to pick up on that, actually, because I read a BBC sort of a report about Alex Pretty and I just want to lay some facts that were reported in that story about him for People. So apparently Alex Pretty was an outdoorsman, an avid outdoorsman, loved walking out, hiking with his dog. He was a Minneapolis Veterans Affair Hospital nurse. He was a Boy Scout. He sang in the Green Bay Choir. He worked as a research scientist before he became a nurse. And a few days before he was killed, he was having his garage door repaired and he gave the Latino man who completed the work a hundred dollar tip as a way of saying sorry for everything that was going wrong. And then recently, just the other day, I saw a video of him giving a dying veteran his final salute in the hospital in which he worked. I want to start with that as the preface. Cause I don't want the thing that I'm now saying to sound too glib, because I do think there's something important here. I think you have to. And I think it contextualizes, like the nature, the character of this fascist movement that we are seeing in some kind of spasmodic ascendance right now, which is that these people spent weeks, maybe months trying to turn a podcaster and an influencer into their horse vessel and ended up producing nothing but a complete catastrophic meme which even their own side do not take seriously, and which has now just become memeified AI slop. And then the most sort of perfect candidate for a legitimate horse vessel figure is one who was slain by their own fucking pig moron officers. And I can't stop getting that out of my head. I went for a nap yesterday, just for two hours. And when I woke up, this had happened. And I have much, many more thoughts to share. But I really do want people to think about, like, these are the kind of people these guys are killing and then trying to dress up as terrorists. Yeah.

[Riley]

And I mean, it sort of works this way with like any kind of fascist movement. It's, you know, the people who get killed first are the best people, you know, in the sense that they are the ones who are out there trying to protect their neighbors. I mean, Alex, Freddie was literally trying to get in between ICE and a woman they were just brutalizing for no reason. They attack him for that reason and then shoot him off of again, a kind of impulsive, petulant rage. And this is what they're there to do. It's what they'll go on doing.

[Greg Foley]

Yeah. And it feels facile to give analysis, operating the level of poetics, but ICE have literally stormed into Minneapolis and killed Pretty and good.

[Riley]

Yeah.

[Host]

And there are lots of different ways to think about this. You can think about this in terms of the institutional arrangement of the people who are involved. So for example, the relationship between ice, the relationship between Minnesota National Guard, local law enforcement. I mean, local law enforcement. The same people who oversaw the killing of George Floyd in 2020.

[Riley]

Yeah. Well, this is the thing, right. I think if you look at the, the George Floyd protests as a kind of like foreshock of this and this may yet be a foreshock of the next thing and so on, then there are a ton of people who were radicalized then. Right. Who are out on the street now because they were then and on both. Well, exactly. Right. And there are people out there now protesting who have been pepper sprayed by state police, by city police. Right. And so now the fact that they're sort of like standing by and not actively helping ICE unless they, like, until they're, you know, told to. Right. That doesn't wash anymore. Right. And I think that's one of the things is this is I think, intended by its architects in the White House to be, to be like clarifying. Right. And it is. I think that's a calculation that they're making that I don't think is going to favor them. Them in the end because I think anyone who's there knows that like Tim Walls doesn't give a. Jacob Frey doesn't give a shit. Right. Like this is they are not going to effectively be able to protect people and where that leads is more violence. Right. And you know, there's this, this isn't something that I think people believe can be de. Escalated anymore. And I think they're right to believe that.

[Host]

Yeah. And that's the. There are so many places that, that you could want to get with this, at least in talking about it. What I want to get with it is it not happening happening. But one of the, one of the things that I really wanted to pull out here, the reason we talk about like the. The end of the first American Republic, that is something that you were mentioning earlier when we were talking before the show, Nova, is that this is clarifying in the sense that if you believe that there is some kind of congressional hearing or some kind of training program or that ICE just leaves and this doesn't happen again, I think you are. That is a fundamentally naive position and I think think that the United States of America is now in a cold civil war or as you said, a time where things are about to get more different than they've ever been.

[Riley]

Yeah, yeah. I like to get less and less grammatical with that one. The worse it gets times are about to get as. As more unprecedented as. As they've ever been different. You know, I. Because I think the thing is, again, I don't want to be like, this is going to lead directly to Marvel's Civil War 2 right. Immediately. But I think this is the death spiral. Like, well and truly can't have this kind of state violence and have a response to it that is commensurate, that is now possible. Right. So, like, if your kind of moderate demand is, you know, you put all of the people responsible for this on trial. Right. And you maybe are a little bit, like, constitutionally flexible to do that, I don't think that that's possible anymore. And I think what you can get, what is sort of like, possible is no longer sufficient. Right. And the second those two stopped being consistent, congruent, that was it really. And however, the US Kind of like, lumbers on, because I want to be clear, this isn't the first time ICE has killed people. It's by no means that. Right. And this is a sort of like, long, long legacy of violence. But I think the specific intention and then sort of like media work on this is such that this is going to be the thing that, like, sets it on the path to rupture.

[Host]

Then this is. I think the reason that is right is that it's not the violence. It's that the institutional violence is being directed from the federal government to the state of Minnesota in the city of Minneapolis.

[Greg Foley]

This is something I wanted to actually drill down on because I saw yesterday some guy on Blue Sky. I don't know who it was, but he made a point where he's like, I really think it's important that we stress that what we're seeing right now is not policing. And the thing with that is that is technically correct, because policing falls under the remit of the Department of Justice, which oversees domestic enforcement of federal laws and the administration of justice. ICE falls under the remit of the Department of Homeland Security, which, if you look on Wikipedia, they are summarized as rough, comparable to the interior, home, or public security ministries in other countries. Its missions involve anti terrorism, civil defense, immigration, customs, border control, cybersecurity, transportation security, maritime security, sea rescue, and the mitigation of weapons of mass destruction. And so one of my kind of drums I bang on and have been banging on repeatedly is the fact that we are living in the long shadow of 2001 and the global war of terror. And also the unwillingness and the inability or the fecklessness of, like, liberals or centrists you know, whatever this nominal opposition to this, this ascendant right wing is to meaningfully grapple with that fact. And so then going back to that point about like, oh, this isn't actually policing, I so. Well, that is technically correct. But then it just, it pushes the question for me which goes, if it was policing in this current era in which we are now living, how would it look any different?

[Riley]

I think, I think my answer to that is a very narrow one on chains of command and accountability. Right. Because what you're looking at with a DICE is functionally a kind of a paramilitary or something more like a secret police. And I think that, you know, even if the sort of like it is as murderous or more murderous than like a more traditional policing organization, the fact that it's been sent there externally to occupy the city is sort of what. And what makes it distinct for me because like in, you know, 2020, as much as the sort of National Guard were there on sort of occupation role, as much as the state police were, it was foregrounded in Minneapolis police, the already exist occupying structure of that city.

[Host]

You know, and I think there's another dimension to it as well. And this is actually, this is currently on its way through, I believe, federal court right now at time of recording, which is part of what's being policed is Minnesota by the federal government.

[Riley]

Yeah, Pam. Pam Bondi, I pronounce it like the beach and I probably shouldn't. Pam Bondi is like very helpfully supplied the state of Minnesota with evidence that they were being blackmailed by tweeting, hey, I just blackmailed the state of Minnesota and sent them this letter saying, if you want us to withdraw ice, who again, have no business being there, like, this supposed fraud is not part of their jurisdiction. Minneapolis is nowhere near the border. It is purely just an exercise of executive power. But she sent this letter that's like, if you want us to withdraw them, then give us access to all of your voter data and your welfare data so that our of like, you know, Nazi influencers can comb through and sort of like dox anyone who seems Somali enough. And obviously that's, you know, extortionate. Right. And you can't use legally, you can't use deploying ICE to do that. And so that's what Minnesota is in court at the moment, in federal court, trying to get them to sort of like injunct against this whole operation. I have no idea if that's going to work, but if it does, it will be, I would say, pretty much exclusively because of Just like saying that publicly.

[Host]

Yeah. Because she was. Hey, I have an amazing way for you to fix this. Would you consider being blackmailed?

[Riley]

Have you.

[Host]

I have some helpful blackmail for you.

[Riley]

Are my art form.

[Host]

Yeah. And so this is one of the reasons why I want to talk about the institutional arrangement here. What makes this different from other times that ICE has gone out and filmed themselves committing spectacular violence in the last few weeks, last few months, last few years. As long as they've been around, this is kind of what they've been doing. You know, they're. That what makes this so different is this is one institution of the country effectively trying to military, voluntarily police another institution of the country. That's why it's like there, the Civil War in effect, I think. So the frame I'm using for. To think about this is a cold civil war is sort of already happening. Like, one institution is trying to by force compel another. Another institution of the country to do something that it otherwise wouldn't do. I mean, I think this is. Again, this is. I thought you had earlier. Nova. It's war is rig. Stating again, the first person who realizes that this is happening is Stephen Miller. The next person who realizes it is going to have a huge second mover advantage.

[Riley]

Yes. Yeah. Bas. So Riley and I, along with our friend Mattie Lubchansky, do a podcast called no Guards, no Mares. I was, you know, in the episode that hasn't come out yet, I did an episode about a union general called Benjamin Butler, who. Not good general, fantastic administration. One of the reasons why he was a fantastic administrator was because he seemed like one of the first people to realize that the Civil War was happening. And at a point when historically, it was kind of no secret. Right. Like, he was, you know, the Civil War had started, but everyone else he encountered was sort of like, still curiously kind of like legalistic and vacillating. And he's the guy who realizes that you can just say, occupy the Maryland State House and stop them from seceding. Right. And so by the same token, whenever whatever happens, happens. And again, that may not be because of this directly. This may not be for years, or it could be tomorrow. I have no idea. But when it does, it's going to seem retrospectively obvious. And as you say, the sort of first people to notice this are going to be. Are going to be sort of like much better off because I think that denial is going to persist for a long time because Americans want to believe that their country can be fixed. You know, no one wants to see an end to like, like the sort of the system that's lasted this long. But I think Stephen Miller particularly is trying to engineer one, and I think he is probably going to be successful now. And it's a question of when people realize that and when people realize it is. Is very sort of like, I don't know, it's seeming more and more salient because if you read some of the coverage of this, you'll see people who are not politically engaged, who don't think of themselves particularly as, like, Democrats or liberals or anything like that, as just, like, humanist, and who are authentically outraged in this moment. Right. And the challenge for any kind of left movement in the US Is to grab and retain and organize and sort of like, pull those people leftwards. And I think one of the most convincing ways that you can do that is to make the case, which I think now is very clear, that the old ways are not coming back. Right. There is no president you can elect who will fix this. There is no kind of, like, law you can pass that will undo this. There isn't going to be a trial in the way that people want under the present constitutional settlement of the United States. And that's why I think about it in terms of, like, you know, you think about the, like, fourth, fifth French republics, you know, like, the governmental differences, the historical differences may not even be huge, but there has to be some kind of form of, like, governmental change.

[Host]

More than an election or like a change of the state. Really, the form of the state must change. The thing that the government is governing must change. Like, this is a moment of rupture, and politics is different forever.

[Nova]

We'll call it woke free, because there.

[Riley]

Was a time when you could fight it out on that line of, like, Stephen Miller and Trump and his people want to destroy the United States, and we're not going to let them. We're going to try and preserve this, like, horrible institution. And that was, that was the Biden line. And notably, it did not hold. Right. And I think you could have taken the kind of death knell for all of this as Trump's second inauguration. But I'm putting it here as, like, yeah, it just, you know, this is, this is sort of like, irrevocable Now.

[Nova]

I think to sort of add to that, it's not even the case that, like, the sort of system is untenable because it's, like, structurally, like, structurally, it's not tenable. But it's also that, like, it's advocates have no interest in kind of even trying to fix it, like, trying to maintain it or fix it. Like, there was that interview with Gavin Newsom, with Ben Shapiro, where it's just like. And I watch these interviews, and I watch this, like, stuff, and I'm just like. It's not that I get why you were sort of hesitant to sort of call these people fascists or whatever, but it's like, politically, I kind of understand if your constituent. If you sort of imagine your constituent to be. To sort of be like, sort of centrist liberals who kind of believe that, like, you know, there's a spectrum of beliefs and, you know, the way that things work is that you sort of take people from extremes and try to move them towards, like, more moderate positions. Even if you believe that's the case, like, you've kind of. You've got to try and do it. And, like, there's no effort among these people to even, like, trying to. But also, it's like, a lot of these. A lot of these guys. And actually, something that's interesting, I was talking to Greg. I messaged Greg about this just before we started recording. I think I did anyway. Or someone where, like, I was sort of saying that, oh, there's, like, a lot of these kind of, like, centrist, like, columnist types who are now sort of saying stuff. There was, like, that one in the Atlantic the other day at the time of recording who was just like, okay, now I'm willing to call it fascism. I was really hesitant to sort of call Trump a fascist before, but now, like. And then he was like, sort of all his, like, other Atlantic colleagues were getting mad that people were sort of dunking on it by being like, oh, like, you know, do you think it's smart to, like, dunk on people and make fun of him when, you know, just because they sort of reached your side of the aisle late? It's like, number one. Yes, dunking's actually very good. Dunking is funny.

[Riley]

It's what Lennon would have done.

[Nova]

Yeah.

[Riley]

I mean, to be clear, I don't apply that to the people I was talking about. Like, and I say this with love, the squishes, right? The people who are just authentically outraged. And the thing is, like, your enemy is kind of doing the work for you in that they will never stop supplying you with outrages. But it's what you can use that for.

[Nova]

But I think it's those people who are, like, genuinely outraged. Like, they look towards certain figures, like, sort of modern, ish figures, to be like, okay. Like, to almost get the permission to be like, okay, now we can kind of like, use sort of language that was deemed to be extreme, but then these kind of, like, centrist types are still kind of being like, oh, we got to be, like, really careful about talking, like, calling them sort of fascist. That's good.

[Riley]

Tim Walls is putting out the statements that are like, you know, knock it off. Right. And it's, like, obviously inadequate to meet the moment. Right. But that's fine because again, as with, you know, Benjamin Butler again, right. The first person who realizes that all of this stuff is inadequ adequate and that there is a great deal of hay to be made by not just saying, you know, abolish ice, but to go further than that is, I think, gonna do very well.

[Nova]

I mean, I would say the first. The first lib who sort of realizes that, like, you can kind of build political capital out of just like, basically kind of calling these people sort of what they are and not really kind of giving a shit about, like, sort of, you know, people like. Like, their side being like, oh, you can't call them that. It's historically in inaccurate, whatever, and is able to sort of build a movement out of the anger that is sort of frustrating. Like, I think, as you mentioned, like, that'll be, like, very effective.

[Greg Foley]

So I have some, like, thoughts about this. As I said, like, a few weeks back, I was speaking to producer Thomas on our own show Bloodwork. Listen to Blood Work, and we just.

[Host]

Imagine us throwing you a gun, you know?

[Riley]

Yeah.

[Greg Foley]

Just floating in the air towards you. One of the things I said to Thomas about this sort of this blob, this amorphous blob of fascist movement I've assembled from, like, Pete Hegseth, Stephen Miller, Kristi Noem, Pam Bondi Trump, J.D. vance, etc. Alex Jones, you can name so many people. Was this thing that I said, I don't really know what these people actually want, but I believe that they want it. And I think that in many of those things, they are different things. I think that, like, Kristi Noem, for example, wants to be like a sort of fitness Instagram influencer. I think Pete Hegseth wants to be like a very, like, Starship Troopers, like, TV general in which, like, he's directing a woman that is unfolding on the screen. I don't know if he actually wants the actual blood. I don't know. I don't know. But I believe that he wants it. I think J.D. vance, like, wants a father figure, and I think he wants to impress dad. And I mean that sincerely. I think Pam Bondi and I think this comes back to that whole, the extortion lawsuit against, against the state of Minnesota. Like, you know, you have to remember that she's still kind of in Donald Trump's bad books about the whole Epstein file stuff and things like that. And it is very possible that part of that is just her trying to do something to please Trump. And I said this earlier before the recording as well. You know, Trump is a guy who, he watches the Jean Claude Van Damme movies and skips to the action scenes, but he doesn't really like blood and he has his steak well done. And, you know, when he was actually shown the footage of Renee Goode being shot, he seemed like genuinely kind of unsettled by it. And so the problem with all these people is I think what they ultimately want is a good, clean product. And in terms of like what they are producing right now in, in Minneapolis, I don't think they're getting that. And I just want to be. I don't think they are winning there and I don't. I think they are losing very badly. And I think that they are panicking, which is why JD Vance is being sent out to eat shit. And it's also why Tom Cotton, who famously wrote an op ed during the George Floyd protests about Minneapolis saying, send in the troops, he's now released a tweet sort of doing this whole like, oh, we need to turn down the volume and their deaths were a tragedy and we need to enforce the rule of law. The one person I do think really, really wants it is Stephen Miller. And I think he knows what he wants and he knows what he looks like. And it is therefore also quite scary that he's really driving the bus on this one. With regards to who's going to respond on the other side, I do, I just want to stress whether it's Greg Kalman Bavino or any of these people, this sense of legal impunity that these people have. You could just list off, for example, the assassination of Qasem Soleimani, January 6, the horrific Gaza plan, the hit and run attacks in Iran against Fordo and other places, the invasion of Venezuela and the kidnapping of the Maduro. And again, this goes all the way back to 2001. I'm sorry, it goes all the way back to the global war on terror and the invasion of Iraq. Like liberal impunity. And just to cap this off, in terms of who is going to be the person to meaningfully respond to this, just today, Chris Murphy, a senator from Connecticut, put a post where he described something as top of the list of threats to democracy right now. And what he was referring to was a report that TikTok was now censoring anti ICE and anti Trump content. And just just to really, really draw a line under this on December 11, 2023. In an interview with the Dispatch on Thursday, Chris Murphy of Connecticut, who previously spoke out in favor of restricting TikTok's assets in the U.S. said he had moved from supporting regulating the social media platform to an outright ban since the October 7 Hamas attack in Israel due to its ability to, quote, drive this narrative of, quote, hateful speech among young people. And I just want to say, like, in terms of who is the person going to be that, that is going to stand up and combat this stuff meaningfully and be that second mover, Any of the people who are not willing to meaningfully and forcefully reckon with the role that they have played in handmaidening this over not only over the past two years with the campus protests in Gaza and the crackdowns where again, Chris Murphy, I'm sorry, as long as he's happy to be cracking down on content about Gaza and Palestine on TikTok, and then he's suddenly worried about, about TikTok centering anti ICE and anti TRUMP content. He's not actually worried about the politics. What he's worried about is fundraising. And that's not your guy.

[Riley]

Well, so here's the thing, right? Benjamin Butler, my guy back in the day before the Civil War, our guy before the Civil War was an anti abolitionist because he was a Democrat, because that was expedient. You don't have to be someone who cares about this stuff authentically. We can demand that. It would be nice. But in terms of what's actually going to sort of move people, I don't think it's going to require a huge amount of sort of like ideological consistency. The other thing about this is I think you're completely right to identify the sort of competing power centers in MAGA world. What's interesting to me personally is Donald Trump, because first term Trump, he wanted the blood or at least some semblance of it, but he was surrounded by people who were able to sort of just go around him or ignore him or talk him down. So first term Trump was sort of giving these disobeyed. Sometimes you pretend not to hear Mr. President orders to just shoot into the crowds and take people out of the kneecaps. Right. Second term Trump seems considerably older and sadder and weirder, is sort of like publicly musing about whether or not he's going to get into heaven is sort of like unprompted, telling shockingly psychodramatic stories from his childhood. And you have people like Stephen Miller who are seemingly trying to talk him up to this. Not because Trump isn't racist, not because Trump isn't a sort of violent person, not because he authentically cares about. About any of this, but because, you know, I think the reaction that he had when seeing the sort of like, the good murder video is sort of instructive here in that, as you say, all of these people want spectacle. And the spectacle that they want might be someone getting killed, but they want it to be some kind of, like, you know, tattooed Ms. 13, antifa transgender. And reality is not cooperating. Violence in the real world has a strange sort of abruptness and sort of like, irreducibility that shocks all of these people to their core because they're not really practiced in it. And I think ultimately where that leaves us is, again, Stephen Miller's calculation of how to start a race war and our calculation of how to make him lose one.

[Host]

And if we're talking about the fact that some kind of conflict at some point is inevitable, that is being engineered pretty successfully at this point by Stephen Miller, as you say, I think he's.

[Riley]

Engineering himself a losing conflict. Right.

[Host]

Touch wood.

[Riley]

Right. I think think that, like, the thing that he wants is not only impossible, and to be clear, a civil war in the US Would be ruinous for the entire world. Like, the sort of consequences of that are by no means to be celebrated. Right. But this is the thing. You may not be interested in violence, but violence is very much interested in you. Right. And this is something that can be imposed on you. And I think you have to be absolutely clear in your own mind that these people want to kill you specifically. Right. And your friends specifically. And they mean to do it. And they have the kind of ability to try and do that.

[Host]

They haven't got to you yet, basically.

[Riley]

Yeah.

[Host]

And so the reason that Stephen Miller is such a strange person and the reason that the way that the right teams talk about this is so strange is, in effect, they're trying to start a war against the enemy that they want, which is a Democrat party that has an army and supply lines and.

[Riley]

Antifa high command has to exist for them and that it doesn't in the way that they want, then if antifa.

[Host]

Didn'T exist with a high command and supply lines like a hearts of Iron 4 Army, it would be necessary to invent it, which is what they try to do.

[Riley]

Yeah, you what if. If antifa didn't exist with, like a supply line, you would just have to sort of bumble around looking for stuff, tripping over your own dick, shooting people at random. Right, which is what we're seeing.

[Host]

Yeah. Yeah. It's almost as though, again, like, when they talk about Renee Good or Alex Pretty, they have to make them into an antifa Special forces operative who is going to commit, like, a vehicular operation, you know? Yeah.

[Greg Foley]

I mean, this is something I brought up in my. In the episode we did about Carl Schmidt and his whole thing about, like, the friend and enemy distinction where I said to like people, if you're on the left, like, I don't think you have to subscribe to Carl Schmitt's political ideology. And I think you shouldn't. I think you should reject it. But you should also, like, reckon with the truth or the realities of that. Like when somebody has identified you as their enemy and they are confronting and approaching you as such. And you cannot simply, like, reject that and pretend it is no longer there. And it is quite clear that Stephen Miller is someone who has, like, constructed, however phantasmagoric, in his own mind, an image of an enemy that he wants to destroy. And many of us and you and other people out there are within that image. And you cannot simply pretend that is not true anymore. I think that's.

[Riley]

I think that's more my.

[Greg Foley]

Yeah, sorry.

[Riley]

You ruined my gaming.

[Host]

I was really depending on that not being.

[Riley]

I wanted to live happily during the war. I read that poem.

[Nova]

I have a really sort of, like, you know, it's a pretty detailed schedule. Like, I can't make time for this. Like, can I just.

[Riley]

You're telling me I gotta live unhappily during the war.

[Nova]

You have to say, like, I live in society. Is that what you're trying to tell me? That's crazy.

[Greg Foley]

I'm not getting invited on again, am I?

[Host]

I'm just seeing this now that every document of civil is a document of. Hold it, let me just. Barbarism. Oh, no. Oh, God.

[Riley]

That's one of the last things I wanted it to be. For fuck's sake.

[Nova]

I always saw my life as like, more of like a B or a C plot. So this is really sort of.

[Riley]

Yeah, I kind of saw my life as being more of a. Kind of a filler episode. No, I mean, what I tended to. I mean, here's the thing, right? You remember that tweet that's like. It's kind of really annoying. I was born in 1991. I'm old as fuck. But it was, it was kind of of frustrating to be born at the end of the fuck around century and at the beginning of the find out century. Right. Well, that doesn't only have to go one way. Right. Like there are options before you, you know, and like I say, a large part of it is grounded in realizing what happens and being pragmatic about it.

[Greg Foley]

I think this was something. Yeah, I think just something. My last kind of point I want to share on this is that like, you know, again, I think we're all being reminded of various, like, trite observations or observations have since become trite. And the one that I was thinking about today was Adam Serwa's remark about, you know, the cruelty is the point. And I think that remains true. But the other thing that I've sort of thought about when I'm looking at sort of what's unfolding right now in Minneapolis and the way that J.D. vance and Tom Cotton and Stephen Miller and Greg Kalman Bavino are kind of bumbling around trying to justify this or frame this within any kind of like, logical or political or coherent framework. The cruelty is the point, but it's also all that they've got and all they have. When I say, like, what it is, it's the performance of cruelty. And the performance of cruelty is at the same time like, it's production and then it's reproduction through memes and images and TikToks and vines. But then that reproduction, that sharing it on Twitter or on X, the Everything app, and delighting in it and salivating over it, that again, is the performance which is again, the ultimate end product.

[Riley]

Of all of this.

[Greg Foley]

And that's what I mean. Yeah. And that's what I mean is that, like, I think again, with regards to everybody else, including the man himself, big man, Donnie Trump, I don't think any of them quite know how this ends, where they're taking it. And again, this is why, again, it makes me think of. It makes me think of Gaza. Lloyd Austin, Secretary of Defense under Biden, when he very early on in the war, sort of said, like, Israel has no theory of victory here. They have no theory of how to even end the war. And it just became like a sort of endless mass slaughter for the production of images and spectacles of violence for the people who were in Israel who were celebrating and salivating over it.

[Riley]

And they seem to be getting like, weirdly depressed and scared about it to the point that they're sort of like they're doing the 1945 Fuhrer bunker of being like, check out this suicidal penguin. What about this guy that, like, killed himself by flying a plane into the ocean? Isn't that relatable? Isn't that cool?

[Greg Foley]

And it's, it's, it's a, it's, it's a cold ears. I think, I think the idea that we are watching these sort of the, the cresting of like a cold civil war of some sort is great, but it has began in a memetic fashion in the sense that, like, what is happening right now is it's like a bunch of baked Alaskas with fucking guns just wandering around Minneapolis. And I think, you know, a lot of people thought one battle, battle after another was kind of one of the most politically salient or incisive films of 2025. I disagree. I think it was Eddington. And I think that image at the very, very end of Eddington of the young man, spoiler alert, where he's like marching forward with a pistol in one hand and his phone open in the other, like, filming himself shooting his own gun, I think that was just so perfectly encapsulated, kind of the mania in right now. And like, again, you know, when Jonathan Ross shot Renee good, I. Again, if I go back and look at that, I think myself, like, was he looking down the barrel of his gun or was he looking at his phone?

[Host]

And not just looking at his phone, but was he thinking about, I'm going to kill a person, or was he thinking, this is going to be epic. It's going to be big. This is going to be epic. You know, and it's. But also, I think it's was worth noting, there's Trump, there's the people around him, there are the feckless Democrats who do not understand that there is no training program or set of hearings that fixes this. And then there are also, of course, the ICE agents themselves. And I think it's worth talking about that before we end. These are, you know, again, the, like, most bloodthirsty freaks in the entire country are unfit for doing more or less anything else than just sort of terrorizing actual contributing members of fucking society.

[Riley]

I think there was an important detail here as well that like, of the two killers, both of them had been federal agents, one in ICE and one in border patrol for like, I think seven and eight years respectively. Like almost a decade. So I think one of the things is, as much as you want those kind of like squishy humanists to sort of like get with you, you on this one, you also need them to internalize that this is not a new thing. This isn't just like, oh, Trump hired everyone from Jansek directly into ice, and now they're doing this. It's like, no, this is the same thing that ICE and Border Patrol have always done and are meant to do. They are just doing it a little closer to you, a little louder. To slightly different people. Yeah.

[Host]

To whiter people.

[Riley]

And those differences shouldn't matter.

[Greg Foley]

I think people should also know that. I think I heard reports that Jonathan Ross was telling all of his neighbors that he was a boss botanist. Because these people are. They are ashamed of themselves because they know that they're disgusting. They know their social pariahs. They know that, like, if anybody knew what they did or what they're doing, that they are disgusting pigs, which is perhaps, like, the one. The one thing that perhaps just, like, distinguishes them from the likes of Stephen Miller, who are the real deal. Who are the guys who are like, yeah, I know what this is, and I want it. These guys, again, like I said, I don't know. These men want to go to. Oh, it's like Call of Duty. I think one of them said, yeah, they want to go to Minneapolis and they want to play out their fantasy. But, like, guess what? Like, when you actually get there, people hate you and they throw shit at you and they make your life hard, and you don't get to actually play out your macho, masculine fantasy the way you thought you would. Which again brings us back to Tom Cotton saying in 2020, send in the troops. And then five years later, he gets exactly what he wanted, and he's there being like, oh, turns out, like, it wasn't just gonna be a march on Rome. It turns out that, like, all these people, again, the white Americans who I thought were gonna be celebrating me for going in and cleaning up the brown horse, they all hate me, and they all think I'm disgusting.

[Host]

They did not greet us as liberal operators, basically.

[Nova]

It's also, like, the sort of reality that will sort of sink in for various people about the things that you see on your computer screen do actually happen in real life and the way in which things happen on your screen, you can't predict them, you can't control them. You can't control the response to it. Also the way in which we react to violence online and on our phones and stuff. I think Gaza. I think, as you mentioned, Greg, Gaza really has changed so much. And I think one of the biggest sort of. I don't know whether this necessarily call it radicalizing. But one of the things I think has really changed many people who did not necessarily have an opinion on what had been happening in the Middle east for a long time or were very comfortable to go if, oh, it's complicated. This is the first time where they've really had to experience the feeling of, oh, every time I go on my phone, I just see dead bodies or I see the most horrific things I can imagine, and there's no way to get around that. And this is the other thing, too. All these attempts to control social media have largely failed, right? Because there are ways to sort of circumvent that. And, like, the sort of trajectory of, like, online content is not particularly easy to control. And I think I keep going, like, the thing that you mentioned about, like, okay, you may, like, these people have desired, like, a certain kind of violence for a long time, and in many ways they're getting what they want. And there are, like, some people who are really happy about it. Like, you can sort of see, like, you know, they kind of, like, you know, they froth at the mouth, like, seeing, like, these ICE agents kind of kidnap children or, like, you know, brutalizing protesters on the floor and, like, you know, spraying pepper spray in their faces and everything. But, like, I do wonder whether, and I don't want to say for sure what's going to happen, because I do. I also think that, like, one of the effects of sort of the ubiquity of violence online has kind of meant that, like, there is kind of a higher degree of tolerance. I don't necessarily have. Tolerance is the right word, but, like, it can just end up becoming, like, background at a certain point. And I do wonder whether there's sort of a strategy in play to be like, oh, okay, well, if we just sort of make this type of. Of violence normal, then the political consequences of that will not be that significant. And in many ways, I can kind of see that strategy working in the sense that every day of 2026 has been a school shooting, and no one's really talked about it or just a local shooting where people have died. In 2025, the same thing, I think it was basically every week there were at least two or three shootings by young people in which there were at least one or two fatalities. And it's kind of become so kind of commonplace. But, like, no one has really even, like, in sort of political discussions, like, it's kind of like no one really talks about that anymore. And so I do wonder then whether it's like, okay, well, you can't predict the reactions to violence that people will have when they see like extreme acts kind of all the time circulating on their, like the production of images. But I do wonder whether the strategy among kind of the right is to sort of like be like, okay, you know, they talked about like flooding the zone with like, you know, slop and shit content and that like, you know, we would just sort of be fine sort of accepting that the information environment that we had would just be like contaminated forever. And like, lo and behold, you know, we've just sort of let that happen. And, you know, this idea that you could go online and basically like most of the stuff that you read and most of the people you interact with are not real. I wonder whether the same will happen. Like, the long term strategy for these guys is to just like make this continual background noise until like everyone is numbed by it.

[Host]

I think that fundamentally we'll end sort of shortly. This is the moment where it all became obvious. But it's been going this way for a fucking while. And I suppose one of the things that is, I don't know, leaves me particularly dumbstruck is to have. Doesn't matter how much you see it coming and how much you say this is coming and how much you say this right wing ratchet effect of essentially a state, a political movement that seizes control of a state and largely considers itself at war with most of the people who are there, who does not consider to be legitimately sort of citizens or whatever. British state does this quite a bit as well. In fact, to see this as inevitable. It's no less poleaxing when it happens, if you know what I mean.

[Riley]

Yeah, I mean, this is the thing that, that kind of like affronting, kind of like irreducible thing about violence. It cuts in every direction, you know, And I think the only thing you can do is to try and have like a context and a kind of theory for. And to try and have like a network that you can rely on to be supportive and facilitative. I'm, you know, incredibly impressed with everyone in Minneapolis who is out there doing that work, you know, regardless of whether they're, you know, liberals or actually correct. It's. It's still, you know, sort of something that's incredibly valuable.

[Greg Foley]

Yeah, it's one of those. It's one of those trite comments you hear people make about like, you know, that the US is like not in modern history, like fought a war on its own soil. And that might be true, but I Think another thing that I think perhaps this current administration is underestimating is that they have not attempted to conduct a full scale military counterinsurgency on their own soil against their own people. And like, yeah, I think just with regards to what Hussein has said about becoming normalized to it, I think that like, yeah, I think maybe they are banking on the fact that like a lot of Americans and people across the west have become numbed and deadened to the mass proliferation of images of violence and death and destruction. And that may be a good bet, but those, those were images and, and.

[Nova]

This is the real, the thing that sort of shakes you out of that is when it comes to you. And I think like, you know, with Gaza, like one of the sort of things that I feel like lots of people were pushing when it became clear that it was kind of going to be incredibly difficult, if not impossible to like defend Israel, even in sort of like very direct terms, was to be like, oh, this is happening really far away. Like the, you know, the sort of like the trigonometry. I know don't want to mention women, but in this one instance when they kind of realized that they couldn't really defend Israel anymore, they were like, yeah, but that just happens far away. And if you're Britain, you should care about stuff that happens in the UK and if you're American, you should care about what happens in your own state. And that's under the basis of, well, the violence will never sort of come into the imperial coel. Now it has. And what's very clear the thing we've covered this in this episode, but I think anyone who's sort of paying attention is that, well, no, the violence will come for you in some form of or another, it will come for you. I think if anything shakes you from like the sort of endless numbing scrolling of sort of seeing violence and then like watching shopping videos like, you know, five seconds later it's like, yeah, something really bad like may happen to you and you need to sort of like figure out what you're going to do about it when that happens.

[Greg Foley]

And just to be clear, you know, it has to be said that yes, like what we're witnessing right now in America has happened and been committed against numerous groups of different backgrounds in America for centuries since his foundation. I think that the point I want to sort of underscore is that both the people who are being subjected to it and the people who are trying to enforce it are awakening to the fact that like, in order for this political project to be Realized and crystallized. Like they're going to have to generalize that action and that activity. And I think that is. Then brings us back to Nova's question about who will be the second mover.

[Host]

Well, I think if we've learned something in this. In this episode, you may not be interested in violence, but I gotta tell you, violence could very well be interested in you.

[Riley]

Is working towards you right now. And I mean you. You and no one but you.

[Host]

All right, all right, look, once again, Greg, again, absolute delight to talk to you. Wish it was about different subject matter. But I must also recommend people listen to Blood Work, your show that is all about the economy, psychology, this sort of world of violence.

[Riley]

Yeah, I hope it's okay being the person who has the show about the bad stuff. In the bad times, the bad stuff happens. That doesn't sound draining at all.

[Greg Foley]

Yeah, it's quite nice because on the one hand you get, like, people sending you just pictures of guns with. Listen to Blood Work. And then stuff happens, like what happened in the news yesterday. And you're like, that stuff doesn't feel so funny anymore. And then also you just get. You get people sending you just news articles going, saw this thought of you. And you have to be like, oh, thanks, boo. But no, seriously, I mean, like, look, to. I had some ideas about, like, trying to describe what the show was when I first came on and. But, like, how do I put it? I think that, like, what we're witnessing right now is that, like, the. The reality that, like, force and authority and. And violence and all these things broadly construed, they play a much more pivotal and central role in the way that our politics and our society and our economies function than anybody in control of discourse and the levels of power ever really wanted us to be talking about or thinking about, irrespective of how conscious we were of it or not. And I suppose Bloodwork is mine and Thomas's sort of odyssey or exploration into the various different folds and articulations of violence, trying to understand what is this epistemological lacuna of violence. Violence, like what. What is it? What does it look like? How does it function? What does. What does it perform? Who gets to perform it, and for what reasons, and who is subjected and who is made to be victim of it. And so listen to Blood Work. It's a really fun time. Please check it out. No, it is good. Yeah, I made it.

[Host]

Yeah, that's right. Anyway, look, thank you once again to Greg for coming on. Thank you to you for listening. There's going to be a patreon second episode. 4lbs 50, which is a change we made because we were like, oh, the American dollar might not be so, so stable.

[Riley]

We're going to revalue the entire Patreon to Iraqi dinars.

[Host]

Yeah, that's right.

[Greg Foley]

Holding a, holding a garbage can and a clock at you and saying, listen to trash future.

[Host]

Yeah, that's right.

[Riley]

Listen to Brazil future as well.

[Host]

Yeah.

[Riley]

Oh, yeah, listen. Listen to no God Snowmares. Listen to Brazil Future. Listen to 10,000 posts.

[Host]

You know, all of it.

[Greg Foley]

Watch some Wiley Coyote cartoons.

[Host]

Yeah, yeah, enjoy that. Yeah, we've got some, like, fun neom stuff that I kicked out of this episode. We're going to put in the Thursday one.

[Nova]

Yeah.

[Host]

So we'll, we'll see you then, everybody. Bye.

[Riley]

Bye.

[Greg Foley]

Bye.