Phone A Friend: Jared Yates Sexton.

Max: Unf*ckers. Forgive me in advance. At some point in what you’re about to witness, my guest and I are going to—I guarantee it—we are going to have a Step Brothers, “Did we just become best friends?” moment, because so many of you have been writing to each of us independently: how the fuck have you guys not collaborated so far? Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to the program, Jared Yates Sexton.

Jared Yates Sexton: Max, first time, long time. Listen, I’m glad you addressed it. We’re doing it. Everybody who’s been—it’s long overdue, for the record.

Max: This is happening.

Jared: And I’m at that point as the awkward guy, because I don’t know how to navigate friendships and relationships. I’m going to bug the living hell out of you, and I’m just going to be like, Max, Max, Max. Hi.

Max: Perfect. I am very buggable.

For anybody who doesn’t know, I’m just going to list off a couple of things here, some of which I knew about, some of which I did not. The first place that I think everybody should know about, which I do know about and I frequent, is Dispatches From a Collapsing State. That is the Substack. But there’s also the Muckrake pod. That is where most of our listeners, I think, overlap—they found us at Unf*cking the Republic and Muckrake. Very similar takes on things. We come at things from a socioeconomic perspective; Jared comes at things from a political perspective. A lot of crossover there. But the books: The Man They Wanted Me to Be, American Rule, The Midnight Kingdom, which we are going to talk about today. But you might have seen him write in the The New York Times, The New Republic, or Salon. Or you’ve seen him as, like, everybody’s favorite guest on multiple shows all across YouTube and across the podosphere. You are ubiquitous because of your insightfulness and your talent.

And I think that there are certain things—the reason I’m excited for our conversation today is that you’ve captured a lot of the sentiment on the left, and have for a while, but there’s always a little detail that I find, especially listening to Muckrake, where I’m like, “Shit, I hadn’t thought about it from that perspective.” So I’m anxious to dig into a number of issues today. This is our political pivot. So for our listeners, for our audience: we’ve been so steeped in economics for the past year and a half to two years, and we’re just regaining our political footing. So, Jared, I’m going to tell you that I’m going to ask you questions like a five-year-old as I kind of get back up to speed on what’s happening in the greater political project that is the United States of America.

But I just wanted to say to you before we start that my gateway drug to Jared Yates Sexton was actually sitting back and getting hooked on bourbon. I’m not making any accusations here, but in COVID you actually played a very important role for me, and I think a lot of people, in your fireside chats with a whiskey—just sitting around in bourbon talk, and just talking politics, and I think making us all feel a little more sane. Would it be fair to say that you get this response a lot from people—that, you know, you’re saying things that make me feel like I haven’t lost my mind?

Jared: I mean, listen, that is like talking about a ghost, that time period of sitting down every Sunday night with some bourbon and talking about this.

I think for me, the way that I’ve had to learn politics—and the way you just approached it—I sort of went in a different direction. I had to learn politics as they’re sort of prescribed, and then I had to relearn them. And as I did it, I had to learn the economic side of it in order to fill in the gaps and give the actual horizon of it.

And for me, I used to be a professor, and I always prided myself when I was in the classroom, when I was in a lecture. I knew a lot of professors that really wanted the authority of being a professor. You know, they had the degrees, they had the title, they had the understanding, they had the knowledge. And I always felt like, hey, we’re all in this room together. We’re all learning. And if you are a teacher—and I think you do an incredible job, I appreciate all the kindness—you’re a teacher as well in what you do, and it really needs to be a communal experience. You are learning from me; I’m learning from you. And in this discussion and in this situation, we’re all sort of coming to something important and something new.

And so when it came to the bourbon talks and a lot of what I try and do—listen, I’m a simple boy from rural Indiana. You know, I grew up extremely poor. I didn’t know anything. The fact that I’m able to talk about all of this, I have to sit there and talk about it in a way that’s approachable. And on top of that, I’ve learned so much from the people who have watched, who have sent in questions. I mean, my god, there’s hardly a day that goes by where I don’t have a conversation with somebody that all of a sudden, like you said, there’s an angle that I hadn’t thought of, something that I need to consider.

And I think as we’re talking about building towards the future, that’s the solidarity that we need, right? As opposed to some sort of personality project and some sort of self-aggrandizement, or putting yourself on some type of pedestal with authority and credentials and all of that. I think we have to get back to basics, which is having human conversations about real human things.

Max: Okay, so you’re touching on the first place that I actually want to go with this conversation, which is you have also been able to bridge the gap to the activist side of what we do. So there’s a lot of armchair warriors out there like me that look, synthesize, analyze, and then communicate what’s going on. There’s a role for that, and I’m not taking anything away from the new evolution here of the punditry class online specifically, which has grown demonstrably. But then there’s the connective tissue on the ground and on the streets. And one of the things that I think has maybe informed your writing over the years, or certainly informed your advocacy, is that you’re also part of a lot of on-the-ground movements. You will be in the streets and getting your hands dirty. Can you talk about how important it is for people to have that connective tissue of activism to the larger thought experiments that we have?

Jared: Yeah, and I’m so glad you broached this topic, because the online punditry that you’re talking about, I actually think that’s something that deserves way more attention. And for a variety of reasons, I think that if you consider these weird times, all of this is digitized, it’s corporatized. There’s profit incentive, right? And you can really get into a situation—and one of the things I appreciate about you is I feel the humanity in it. I feel that you do this because you care about it, because you look at the world, you say this isn’t working, something needs to get better.

But a lot of people get caught in the performance of it. A lot of people get caught in a brand, right? And it happens unconsciously, and the next thing you know, you’ve made your entire living, particularly in this strange stew—right, this social media, internet, corporatized space—where all of a sudden you’re just sitting around doing this performance. And you’re either providing catharsis, telling people, “Hey, things are going to be okay. The institutions—don’t worry, Robert Mueller is going to figure it out. Jack Smith’s going to figure it out. The FBI, there’s some white hats in the FBI, they’re going to figure it out. The CIA is going to figure it out.” Whatever it is, that is a performance that is just providing catharsis.

And at the same time, the critique of actual problems and the actual threats that we face, that can also be a catharsis, right? Which is feeling like you’re not crazy, but at least people understand it, and eventually it’s going to get figured out.

The really frightening part of it—and I’ll admit this, like, I do this stuff, I organize, I work on the ground—it’s hard. It’s really, really hard. It’s uncomfortable. And one of the reasons we live in this current environment is because there’s a friction in dealing with other human beings. And if we’re going to create something that’s going to change something, I’m going to have to interact with people that might not like me, that might not agree with me, who might actually hold beliefs that I find reputable and awful and disgusting. And I have to figure out, can I connect with these people?

And meanwhile, Max, I meet with people who completely agree with me, who might be in structures that are intentionally toothless. Like in the nonprofit world, there are a lot of people who are doing a lot of good. They don’t have money. They don’t have resources. They’ve been toiling away for years out of a responsibility for this. And we might just meet with one another, say let’s do something, and you’re not able to do it.

And you have to pick yourself up off the mat and say, “Okay, something can change. We can do something here.”

So I think the difference is that the fake reality, the fake politics that most people are living in, it’s become entertainment and catharsis. And real politics is hard. It’s really, really hard. And I will tell you from personal experience, it will break your heart. It will break your heart. It will hurt your resolve, and meanwhile, it’s uncomfortable. So I think a lot of people stray away from that, and they replace it with sort of cathartic entertainment, to really call it what it is.

Max: So there are people who get involved in the big marches, the real headline-grabbing marches, which during both Trump administrations have actually been historic in terms of size, scope, scale—and maybe not durability, but people expressing themselves by heading to the streets. And then nothing. And so there is a critique of that type of, you’re all just making yourself feel better about yourselves, and you’re announcing to the world where you land on a specific issue. But the activism actually happened the day after, and the day after that, and the day after that.

So I imagine that there is a little bit of a—well, I think you framed it perfectly. It can be heartbreaking to stay involved in these type of on-the-ground movements. So how do you steel yourself, and how do you help other people get involved in those kinds of movements, so that it isn’t a backbreaking, heartbreaking type of endeavor, but something where, you know, what if we just do this long enough and we stay at it, here’s what can happen? How do you steel yourself for that?

Jared: Well, I’m glad you brought this up as well, because I think it’s really important. And again, one of the things I admire about you and your show and your efforts is that you’re talking about real politics, right? It’s not just talking about breaking news and recent events and just sort of immediately reacting to it—what I call Orange Man Bad infotainment, right? Which is, oh, they’re corrupt. Well, we know they’re corrupt. Oh, they’re fascist. We know that they’re fascist.

What you just brought up in terms of these protests: these are historically large protests. But what are they missing? They’re missing something, and I want to commend you for it—the Non-Negotiables, right? Whenever we used to have protests, they would be protests that would be end the war, endsegregation, bring on civil rights for Black people, for gay people, for women.

Max: Not just “stop being terrible.”

Jared: Right. So what has actually become—and I don’t always think it’s intentional. Like, some people say these are psyops or whatever. I don’t want to go down that road. They’ve become tension outlets, right? It lets loose steam. You get to go out on a random Saturday. You see your neighbors and strangers and giant masses of people who are all opposed to one thing, which is Donald Trump.

And for the record, Donald Trump is a symptom of a larger disease. By focusing completely on him, you miss the institutional problems, the systemic problems, the systematic problems. If Donald Trump had not been Donald Trump, the system would have belched forth a Donald Trump, right? So you have to take care of the institutional problems that created this, the material conditions that created this.

So when you create things like Non-Negotiables, all of a sudden it becomes tangible. It becomes real. So with these protests, there’s no ask. There’s a demand: No Kings. Well, sure, we don’t want—some people want kings, but you know, we don’t want kings. Well, fine. You’re going to get a king unless you change some things that would lead to the king.

So the fact that those have not materialized around it—I think there are various reasons why it hasn’t, including vested interest in the Democratic Party, vested interest in nonprofits, vested interest here and there. And on top of that, if you have a non-negotiable, Max, as a human, if someone doesn’t meet that non-negotiable, that’s a boundary. You’re not going to do it. I’m not going to vote for you. Well, all of a sudden now you have a relationship that’s different from vote blue no matter who, to sharing memes or cheering on a speech or a rally.

And I think the important thing here is a real changing of political imagination and reality, which is: you have to be an adult. You have to recognize that just because somebody is part of a party that you support, that you should trust them. You have to hold them to a higher level of scrutiny. And for the record, I think every politician should be held to the highest level of scrutiny. I don’t trust a politician unless I personally know them, have worked with them for years, or I’ve seen what they’ve done with their record of power. Just because they have a D by their name doesn’t mean that I should trust them. I’ve been through this a few times.

Instead of dealing with red versus blue politics and these larger sort of fake framings, we have to say: here are our non-negotiables. Here’s what we expect out of you. And you have to believe, even if those things aren’t achieved by the next election cycle, like other movements that have actually produced change, you have to have faith that those things can be reached, even if it’s after your own death. And it’s not the individual, because so many of us are trying to get away from our own personal discomfort. You have to have a larger-picture idea of time and power and how these things can change.

And in a way—and I’m not using this term lightly—it’s a spiritual endeavor. It’s a reanimation and reinvigoration of a faith that is beyond yourself and your own material conditions that will lead at some point to the promised land. And what do we know about that? Not everybody gets to the promised land. Sometimes the seeds that are planted, they sprout after you. And that’s a change of American identity and perspective that I think has to happen.

Max: Do you have non-negotiables?

Jared: Absolutely, yes.

Max: Tell me some.

Jared: First things first. I mean, I think everything right now is an existential moral and ethical crisis. So, for instance, if a politician is willing to sacrifice vulnerable communities, people who are literally under the boot heel of fascist regimes and austerity regimes—if you say, “Oh, it’s good politics to back away from trans people, gay people, Black people, minorities, immigrants,” whatever—if you do that, you have failed a moral and ethical test. And we’re always told, “Oh, it’s good politics. It’s real politics, right? It’s being realistic.” If you do that, you have shown me that you have a willingness within you, from a pragmatic or a personal standpoint, that you are willing to sacrifice people, which ultimately will undermine solidarity.

Then, when it comes to economics, which of course is your corner of it: if you in some way, shape or form have played a role in a politics and a system in which some people are sacrificed economically, and you’re okay with that, and you’re willing to make deals with people who are anti-democratic, who are anti-human, who have used their power and their resources to hurt people and hurt systems of protections—you’re done. I don’t have any room for you. The moment that you do that, you become Judas to me.

So the other thing, for the record, is if you talk about politics and you treat it like a game as opposed to a life-and-death struggle over power, I don’t have any room for you. So as a result, I don’t have many sacred cows in mainstream politics, because that is the environment that everybody’s been operating in, which is how you get to Donald Trump and how you get to this new fascist future.

Max: Okay, so let’s talk about this fascist present that we’re in. When you put together The Midnight Kingdom, it occurs to me that you are probably the prototypical Fight Club, “I am Jack’s complete lack of surprise.” Like, this was all very inevitable. It was all foreseeable, and it didn’t even take a whole bunch of imagination. But what you did was you put some structure to it and said, “Hey guys, this is where we are. Let me just punctuate where we are at this moment in time and kind of what happens next.”

So that for me was a fantastic benchmark work. But have there been things that have surprised you, even knowing and foreseeing all of what you have, and your body of work before that kind of brought you to that book? Have you still been surprised by this regime, or maybe the response to it?

Jared: You know, that’s a great question. And the process of writing my books, for me it’s been personal demystification. I have had to unlearn all of the popular sort of understood narratives of history and politics. And when I wrote The Midnight Kingdom, I went back to the fall of Rome to understand how power is protected and projected itself, and as I did that, I saw the same story happening over and over and over again.

And just a quick little note from history: you can’t understand what’s happening right now if you don’t understand something like the East India Company. And it’s very, very clear that at some point, if a group of people are trusted with the business of empire—back then it was trading, colonial trading, and movement, and also slavery—at some point, when they reach a point of excess capital, they will take over the government. Because what else are you going to do with your money? You’ll make more money if you take over a government and you basically eclipse it. So from the very beginning of corporations, this has always been happening.

What surprised me was that with the dawning of the second Trump administration, I knew that this authoritarian movement, both in the United States and around the world, I knew that it was working hand in hand with these tech oligarchs. You know, they did the same business, all of that. What surprised me was how fast the symbiosis happened. It happened immediately, of course, with DOGE, and also how these oligarchs have controlled this administration and also geopolitics.

I assumed wrongly that it would take more time. I thought that that symbiosis would really take effect starting in whatever the next administration would be. But I think that this thing got hotshotted, and I think they saw the very obvious opening for these things to take off. So for me, I was taken off guard by how quickly my projections came true, because I missed exactly how accelerated this thing needed to go.

Max: Okay so, you mentioned in the very beginning, there is a very large cohort of the electorate that is hoping that the institutions will hold. They’re looking to, okay, well, this didn’t happen, or like you said, we have these heroes along the way. Robert Mueller will do it. Jack Smith will do it. Don’t worry. Have faith. The institutions now are being deliberately targeted as part of their plan. They’re trying to get this thing to be broken down.

Regardless of the outcome of the midterms, regardless of what happens—let’s have a fantastical notion that the Democrats sweep, they take both chambers back, and they finally have their moment to at least bring the executive branch to heel. What do you foresee? What are the ways in which they’re going to have trouble doing that, and how can the Trump administration continue to tear down these structures even when they don’t have this basically this legislative get-out-of-jail-free card that they have right now? Because every time something comes up, Mike Johnson just doesn’t bring it to the floor, or he’ll just shut down the session. I mean, the legislative intransigence that we’ve seen is like nothing else that we’ve experienced in history. We don’t know what to do about it. But when that comes out of the mix, and there’s a new, you know, new old leadership back in there again, how do you see that Donald Trump can just flout that and get around it?

Jared: Yeah, I think there’s a couple things happening there, and it’s a really important issue to come up.

First things first, the unitarian executive, which has been created—it wasn’t just the George W. Bush push with Dick Cheney and all of that. It’s been a slow and constant accruement of powers in the executive branch, which has been backstopped by the Supreme Court, which is owned by the exact same wealth and oligarchical class that controls the presidency and the levers of power at this point. So he doesn’t really need anything from Congress.

Congress has been hobbled, and by the way, that is the great achievement. Congratulations, Mitch McConnell. You got what you wanted. You know, Victor von Frankenstein is now looking upon the visage of the monster he created. And as that’s happened, as Congress as a check on executive power has been all but destroyed, Trump doesn’t need Congress. He just has to sign executive orders, and basically the only check on his power at that point will be the Supreme Court, which decides from time to time, based on economic issues that benefit the wealthy, whether or not it’s in their best interest, and they will strike it down or they’ll allow it to happen.

Meanwhile, the Democratic Party, even if they gain an overwhelming majority in Congress, the party as presently constituted is beholden to the exact same donors that the Republican Party is beholden to. It doesn’t mean that they’re constantly saying, “Hey, we really need to help Donald Trump.” I always make the joke: it’s like the Harlem Globetrotters and the Washington Generals are like, they’re going to throw confetti on the crowd. Don’t steal the ball, right? It’s not always like that, but they have the exact same sort of trajectory. They want it to be nicer. They want it to be less fascistic, but they’re not going to step in as a check and balance as presently constituted.

So as a result, Trump is still able to do executive orders. And Max, I don’t know if you’ve been paying attention, we live in an extremely volatile geopolitical time. We have absolutely no idea what’s going to happen within the next few months. There are going to be paradigm-changing moments, and as those take place, the political environment can change. The unitarian executive can take more power, more control.

So right now, the only thing that I know is that there is not an apparatus in place to actually resist this. That’s going to impeach him, remove him from office. Republicans aren’t going to have a crisis of conscience, a la Richard Nixon. They’re not going to go say it’s time to leave. The agenda is going to continue. There will probably be more votes about these things. There will probably be more hubbub made about them. But there still is not an actual check on this power that’s conglomerating.

Max: Let’s think about the end game then. If you put yourself in the mindset of a Republican—and it could be any Republican, it could be what we consider a classical normie Republican, or it could be a Mike Johnson who is of a particular evangelical strain, who is a believer in something specific, I just can’t figure out exactly what it is—you have to be able to see or perceive that things are getting worse for the masses, and yet nevertheless they persist.

I have a sense of what the end game is for the tech oligarchs that you bring up. To me that’s extremely clear, because they have, I think, been very open about the fact that they’ve—

Jared: Telegraphed it.

Max: Yeah, yeah, they really have. And I mean, from Curtis Yarvin to Peter Thiel to—which makes J.D. Vance an even scarier figure, that he’s a product of that environment. The idea that we actually shouldn’t have—that democracy is incompatible with their version of liberty, at, you know, their words not ours.

But these politicos, do they see that end game as inevitable in your mind, and so they might as well just do the bidding of capital? Or do you think that they actually believe that they’re in some sort of moral and spiritual project that will ultimately deliver something better for the masses? Do you think that they’re actually in this for good reasons, or do you think that they have just succumbed to the idea that the end game here is some sort of techno-feudal society?

Jared: Well, I want to start with something that’s upsetting, but it’s true. I think the people you’re talking about have discussed it and considered it less than you and I just did within the past few minutes. Because when you really look at the structure of this, I call them institutionalists, right? These are people who, by the way, they went to the right schools, they got the right degrees, they served in the right institutions, think tanks, institutes, all these things. They clerked, they worked on these steps.

Basically, at this point, if you look through authoritarian cycles, we’re at the point where authoritarians are taking more power. They’re not exactly hiding what they want and where they’re taking this. And you have a group—we could call them the Weimars, right—who still believe that the system that has served them, and that they have served, it’ll maintain, right? It’ll get figured out. This is an aberration. We’ll get past it.

And a lot of what we see in corporate media—The Atlantic is like one of the biggest perpetrators of this—it’s a lot of reassurance porn, right? It’s a lot of like, oh, it seems bad, but it’s not actually going to be that bad. Then we have like corruption that Trump will carry out. New York Times is great for this: “it raises questions,” right? It raises questions. And the idea is, if we can just get past this moment without radicalism from the left and the right, if we can just stay the course, eventually the system will fix itself.

That is a delusion. Anybody who’s actually paying attention, like you said, they’ve telegraphed this thing. They’ve told us exactly where this is. The tech oligarchs want a techno-feudalism. We are still talking about nation-states. We’re still talking about elections. They’re talking about a dominion in which there are no real nation-states. All of these governments are controlled, and they control all of these different institutions.

Meanwhile, the fascists are just reacting out of instinct. They’re reactionary. They’re angry. They’re paranoid. They hate themselves. They have to project on the rest of the world. And the institutionalists are in their own other reality. They can’t read the writing on the wall, because their own version of reality, their stories about themselves, are that they are stewards of a decent status quo that’s just been interrupted. And eventually, because they have a religious-like faith in it, they believe even without evidence that it will restore itself and it’ll get back to where it’s going.

And I don’t think it’s a lot of people thinking about making deals with the devil. I think it’s class incentives, it’s unconscious motivators, and it’s this delusion that has kept them in the system to begin with.

Max: See. Again, this is why we’re—this is it, folks. This is what I promised you would happen. This is “we just became best friends” moment. So you’re making me think differently now.

Like, I wonder how Karl Marx, for example, would evaluate this moment in history, because the disadvantage that he had was, in his most furtive writing years, was looking at a world that had not yet become a world of nation-states. He had the benefit of industrialization, but not the full benefit of nationalism. It was in the process. And the fact that the state would be attacked over time from a cross-border class consciousness is maybe meaningful again in that way, because if capital fused with state authority and state power in a way that was, I think, fully predicted, but not in a boundary way like nation-states—but now, as you suggest, that relationship has flipped. That the state is completely subservient to the whims of capital, and capital now is borderless essentially.

What we call globalism, and which is now itself become kind of a third-rail term, because that’s interpreted in vastly different ways. It’s interpreted in antisemitic ways. It’s interpreted in anti-capital ways. It depends upon who’s making the claim of globalism. But this idea that we are all nation-states that are bound by capital is what globalism at its core is really all about.

If the nation-states are at that point completely subordinate to the—as Varoufakis says—to cloud capital and to the techno-feudalists and the tech oligarchs, it does present a paradigm shift over time that I don’t think we’ve yet fully contemplated. And I wonder how these great thinkers from the past would evaluate this moment, because I don’t think it was obvious that we’d get here. Like, the path wasn’t actually as obvious as the end game. I think they predicted the end game pretty well, but I wonder kind of what they think happens next.

Jared: Okay, Max, we got, what, three more hours on this?

Max: Yep, let’s do it.

Jared: Okay, good. So first of all, I’m so glad you framed it the way you did, because so much of leftism is stuck in a theoretical past, right? People ask me, “Am I a Marxist?” and I say, “I’m not a Marxist. I use Marxist critique, and I have to forward it into the future.” You cannot understand this stuff without reading Marx and then reading Lenin. And I’m not a Leninist, but Lenin understood the imperialism that then came to pass through the nation-state. It doesn’t mean that we need to take the paths that they prescribed, but they were damn accurate about what was going on.

What has happened here, which is a wild thing that it would take forever to get into, so I’ll try and be as succinct as possible: the superstructure under all of this is more controlled than I think any of them ever could have imagined. Because in the past, when Marx talked about mystification, which is the hiding of the actual material conditions of politics, right, it was hidden behind superstition, religion as an opiate of the masses. Now, all of a sudden, not only do we have one national mythology, everybody is captured in boutique realities that have been designed to lead them away from the actual material conditions into choose-your-own-adventure conspiracy theories.

So when we actually talk about what’s going on, it’s weird, but we need to take a turn. For me, it’s—do you know Jersey Mike’s? You ever get a sandwich from Jersey Mike’s?

Max: I have, and my old man, he’s pretty stuck in his ways. He’s in his 80s now, and about five years ago he discovered Jersey Mike’s. He’s like, “I got to tell you, Subway can just go pound salt, because this Jersey Mike’s is wonderful.” Like, that’s great, Dad.

Jared: That was pretty good. I used to be a guy that when I was on the road, when I was traveling, I’d be like, that’s a place to get a decent sandwich. I’ll just go into Jersey Mike’s. I won’t spend a lot for it. Guess what? Jersey Mike’s got bought out by private equity. It sucks now, right? It’s still the same sign, but everything now has been reduced and made worse. But you’re still looking at the Jersey Mike’s sign in your brain. You’re still thinking about going into the place that you once had an excellent sandwich.

The United States of America and the American order—I want to make it very clear: capitalism is a parasite. It latches on to a host. It was with Great Britain. It used Great Britain for everything that it could use, and then it jumped to the United States of America. For a while, the interests of America and capitalism were symbiotic. America went out. It took resources. It fought with the Soviet Union. It created capitalism in these places, manipulated things, took over countries, carried out coups.

We get to the post–Cold War era. What was the war on terror? Was it fighting al-Qaeda, or was it putting the finishing touches on global capitalism, which is using the military, which has always been an organ of redistribution of public money from the working and middle classes to the wealth class, which, by the way, has now created the oligarchical class, and their interests are different.

And what happened then? A global system of commerce was created with the United States of America as the military protection, to make sure that there would be free transport of goods, cheap labor in countries that we controlled under duress of military intervention, and we would be able to let the wealthy pay less to get more, in order to push these goods around. That system gets created.

Meanwhile, what starts to happen, Max? The incentives for America and capitalism start splitting. When the war on terror happened, what did we do? We erased all goodwill, all soft power, but we finished the final production of global capitalism.

Now we’ve reached the point where all of this profit has been put in the hands—where we’ve created a historical class of oligarchs, and we have entered into the stealing-the-copper-wiring-out-of-the-walls phase of this, because capitalism requires always more profit, more growth. What do you do when you own the market, when you own all of the resources, and you have to continue to grow? All of a sudden, the United States of America standard of living has to go down. You have to figure out ways to make people work for less and work more. And you don’t have protections. You don’t have regulation. You don’t have these social programs. And on top of it, you got this system. You need to buy out Jersey Mike’s, use all of the equipment, the ovens, the refrigerators, all of that.

And capitalism is jumping off the host. The fall of the American empire, which is what’s happening right now, means it’s going to jump somewhere else. And I have a pretty good idea where it’s going to jump. And that place is going to be this Chinese new group of countries that are more authoritarian.

And for the record, when people ask me about World War III, which we always have these big conflagrations that go away with the passing of power, right—people always say, “Where’s the United States going to be?” It’s going to be everywhere and nowhere. We’re already allying ourselves with these people. We’re already seeing all these supposed Western democracies: France, Germany, England. All of these countries are being taken over by the same like-minded authoritarians who are all corrupt and all in league with these oligarchs.

What we’re dealing with right now is an aggressive takeover, and it’s not happening just through warfare. Although that’s an expression of it, that global capitalist system has to move to the next step, which gets rid of liberal democracy, representative government, rights for people, protections for people, social programs, and it moves into the next accelerated place, which is a weird corporate communist capitalist hybrid with surveillance and state suppression that China and Russia have already perfected, and that we are now getting our systems put in place for.

Max: Okay, so before we live fully in a dystopian vision like that, let’s talk about the path there and what resistance actually looks like. Because one of the discussions that I’ve been having with people lately is this outreach to the right, and I’m very much a believer in this—that the olive branches, the continual olive branches that the liberal establishment will make to the right, is playing right into their hands, and it’s doing nothing but destroy any sort of revolutionary ethos that the left might enjoy.

We are in opposition right now. There is, in any typical structure, in any political structure, where there’s an A and a B—we are the party of opposition right now, but we’re not opposing all that much as a political system and as a party. If we’re talking big R, big D. So if we’re talking about big-D Democrats and big-R Republicans, the left right now I think has still so many problems. Like, we’re unified, as you say, against Trump. Great, but we’re not unified for anything necessarily.

And so there’s this tendency among the liberal establishment to be like, if we could just woo a few people over, if we could just bring a few disaffected Republicans back, we can change the balance of power. Don’t worry, everything will be fine. But we already understand the bigger existential crisis, without even touching on climate change, which is the biggest one of all, the one that we cannot wrap our arms around until we take back the political process—and I mean here and across the world.

Jared: Yes.

Max: How do we begin to build a durable coalition on the left? When you and I—and you wrote a piece about El-Sayed that I want to get into in a little bit, because I think it’s a framing that I was like, yes, this is the perfect framing that we need to understand about the capitulation to the right on messaging—but how do we begin to build a durable framework on the left when we can’t even agree necessarily on what the goals are? We can only agree on who the bad guy is.

Jared: I always say that to understand modern politics, you both have to learn how to focus and unfocus at the same time. You know, it’s like one of those old Magic Eye posters back when we had malls, before those were destroyed and liquidated the same way the United States of America is right now.

And with what you’re saying, the best news about this is that it’s already happening. If you actually take a look at the issues of the time, if you actually look at opinion polls—we’re told we’re historically divided. We’ve never had division like this before. But when it comes to the actual issues of the moment, most of the people are agreed by a supermajority of 60–80%.

And I’ll use an example of this that’s perfect, which is AI and data centers. Absolutely despised. Nobody wants them. It’s opposed by like 85% of the population across political lines. Meanwhile, Max, both parties are in favor. The Republican Party doesn’t want to pump the brakes whatsoever. They want data centers in every neighborhood. The Democrats, weirdly, in a telegraphing move, are like, we can’t really stop it, but we’re going to make sure to retrain people—which, I’m old enough to remember when that happened with the start of global capitalism. It’s weird how these roles continue and they’re still being paid by the same people.

So when I’m organizing—and a lot of my work right now, and you brought up climate change, which I think actually is unconsciously moving so much of what’s happening right now, a lot of people are making a lot of moves because, whether they know it consciously or not, they know that we’re coming to the point of a crisis that will be addressed one way or another, mostly through fascism, right, the ability of in-groups and out-groups, what to do with diminishing resources and boundaries.

So you go out, and data centers are perfect. I’m having conversations, Max, with lifelong Republicans, and they are opposed to this because they don’t want it in their neighborhood. They don’t want the sound pollution. They don’t want the resources stolen. It hurts the property value. Whatever gets you to the party, it gets you to the party. And you know what happens in those conversations? We’re not having arguments about trans people in sports.

Max: Right.

Jared: We’re not having arguments about—and I want to make it clear, those issues that dominate national discourse, they’re created by think tanks and institutes that are funded by the wealth and oligarchical classes. And meanwhile, both parties have the same argument that benefits their wealthy donors. So if you can get past that, you’re not talking about these divisive issues that undermine solidarity. You’re talking about actual material conditions.

And I want to make a big disclaimer here, because I think it’s important in all of this. You said, “How do we build a big coalition?” What have we been told? This big tent, we need to welcome in former Republicans. And I’m not talking about voters. I’m talking about former Republican representatives, strategists, consultants, speechwriters—same people who created the modern Republican Party. All of a sudden, Max, they are the most well-paid personalities and influencers around. They’re the ones who, weirdly enough, are carrying discourse in the direction of what we’re talking about.

So instead of talking about the party infrastructure, which is completely beholden to these interests, we need to talk about the fact that there’s a mystification that divides us by this red versus blue argument, and it gives us issues that keep us from recognizing that we have material conditions in common, and we’re actually in a class war that’s been obfuscated.

And the last thing I’ll bring up on this, and this is important: we’re talking nationally. No, it’s not just America. America is in the process of a colonial, neocolonial conquering, the same thing that we’ve done to supposed second and third world countries to make them cheap labor and to make sure that they don’t elect representatives. Weirdly enough, Max, it boomerangs back around every time. We’re going through something that we have put other people in other countries through, which means that in order to have actual victory, we have to engage in an international and national decolonization, class-based solidarity struggle. Sounds huge and hard, but it’s the only thing that will actually end this problem.

Max: In terms of that capitulation, and the center-right now becoming sort of these illuminated figures in the liberal establishment to “represent the left,” which they do not—I thought youing what’s happening with the discourse around Abdul El-Sayed and Hasan Piker to what we experienced when Obama was running against Hillary and his relationship with Jeremiah Wright.

I was wondering if you could just kind of—we could also point people to the piece, because it’s excellent—but if you could just sort of go through the gist of what your argument was there, because I think it’s a really helpful framing, at least for people of a certain age like us.

Jared: Yeah, I’ll start afield and I’ll bring it back.

Whenever it comes—people have probably heard about the Masons, right? Some sort of society where you enter and you go through all these rituals, all these levels, and you learn secrets. And with every secret, what are they testing? They’re testing whether or not you are someone who can be trusted to move through the echelon, right? You are someone that will keep your mouth shut, and you’re willing to do that within a capitalist society.

And I think an incredible Rosetta Stone in all of this was the Epstein situation. When this broke out, you suddenly realize people from both parties and all institutions, all walks of life, particularly among the elites, were doing these awful things and having these meetings. It’s the same thing. At every stage in the promotion through these institutions, you’re being tested. Are you willing to be a good soldier? Will you hurt people? Will you betray people? Will you keep your mouth shut? When you get to the top, you end up at, you know what, Little Saint James, right? You end up as a president or an ambassador, or in charge of the IMF, or whatever it is. It’s not just about the abuse; it’s about testing people to see if they’re willing to play ball.

And it’s not just in the Masons. It’s not just in politics. It’s everywhere, from corporations. I’m a former academic. I watched it. The people who usually became administrators were people who were tested to see if they would betray the people that they worked with, if they were willing to play ball.

So what we’re seeing now, as the DSA and the left and progressives, whatever you want to call them, as they’re challenging the party structure of the Democratic Party, which is beholden to the same financial interests you and I have been discussing—they are being tested at each and every stage to see if they’re willing to play ball. Abdul El-Sayed’s first test in all of this was: will you condemn Hasan Piker all day, every day? Hasan Piker, will you condemn this? Will you condemn this? I mean, Zohran Mamdani is going through this as well. Are you going to do this? Will you work with this group? Will you work with this group? And it’s basically seeing if people can be trusted within the party.

And in this way, superstructures, they change opposition. The greatest trick of neoliberalism has been the ability to take opposition and a risk and absorb it, and then regurgitate it and make it toothless. The best example I have of this is what they’ve done with the legacy of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., who was a revolutionary, the most hated man in America for a very long time, and now his visage and legacy is being used for American Express cards, right? So what’s happening is it’s trying to take this actual structural challenge that could change things and needs to change things, and trying to absorb it in and trying to make it play ball in order to protect itself.

Max: And so tell me a little bit about the Jeremiah Wright phenomenon at the time, and how that is illustrative of what we’re seeing right now in that test.

Jared: Yeah, for people who maybe are only getting more politically sort of involved, the Obama presidency and his sort of rise in politics, it gets mutated into something else. And for anybody who was around at the time, of course, he went against Hillary Clinton, which most people forget about now, right? She was the next in the line. She was supposed to get the nomination in 2008, but she was part of the Democratic class that helped start the Iraq War and the construction of global capitalism. Obama comes in and says, “I was against the war. I’m still against the war. Things need to change.” He was seen as a revolutionary. He was seen as a radical.

And what happened was he was given the test of Jeremiah Wright, who was the pastor at his church, who made very anti-colonialist, anti-white-supremacy, anti-capitalist speeches. And he was presented with this and said, “Will you repudiate him?” And Obama did the exact same thing that many other Democrats have done, which is, “Yes, I will move away from this. I will go ahead and say that those critiques aren’t real, because they seem scary within the public discourse.”

And as a result, Obama was shown that he was going to play ball. And what did he do, Max? Immediately when he was inaugurated, he bailed out the corporations, he bailed out the banks, he oversaw a regime of austerity. And what happened was that revolutionary potential got tamped down, absorbed, regurgitated, and it became an asset of the status quo.

Max: It’s interesting you mentioned that. There’s something I want to end on here, which I think is going to be kind of a litmus test for which America we want to be going forward.

But so the reason I want to talk about Jeremiah Wright in that moment is it is a forgotten piece of history. It’s a great way to frame it as that test, like what are you willing to walk away from in order to grab power? Whereas those type of tests don’t really exist anymore on the other side. They did, they actually did. If you go back through the history of the conservative movements, they too had their bridges that were too far. Those are all destroyed. That’s the one thing that I think the Trump era has ushered in, is that they’ve taken all of those norms and institutions, they’ve burned them to the ground, through what we’ve often said is learning the power of no. What if we just say no? What if I just say no? What if I say no to the Supreme Court? What then? What if I say no to Congress? What are you going to do? What if I just don’t leave? What if I don’t seat your next wave of Congress people coming in? We know that he’s capable of saying no to everything. So if that’s the case, oh my god, what comes next?

In the case of who’s informing the right, I was just talking to Brad Onishi from Straight White American Jesus on his show yesterday, and he’s done a really good job of putting together the connective tissue of who’s actually informing conservative leadership from the religious right. Pete Hegseth is a disciple of Doug Wilson. This is where he draws his spiritual guidance from, which is to say that he also believes that we should have a Christian monarch. And forget about all of the tells that he has, and all of his speeches, and the way that he conducts himself—he literally tattooed all of these things all over his body. Like, we don’t have to guess at what this guy wants out of the world.

So I think it’s interesting to me that we still have these tests that we put our politicians through to see what they’ll walk away from on the left, whereas the test is completely flipped on the right now. Now it is: are you willing to declare Christ as king and recognize that Donald Trump is the vehicle, is the vessel, to deliver you to this absolute end game that has been prophesied? This is how far that conservative movement has traveled.

And so the piece I wanted to—because you also wrote about this—that I wanted to get your closing thoughts on: when we stand up a man for public execution in the United States come this December, what are you expecting, and is there a chance that on the other side of that we have a collective moment of like an awakening, like a snap that just says, “Oh my god, what are we doing?”

Jared: Man, Max, this is why you’re the best. There’s so many things you just brought up that I think are absolutely essential. So I’m going to try and hit them and bring them all together. You know, I’m a narrative guy. I’ll try and do what I can.

I’ll start with this. I grew up an evangelical. I grew up in those churches. And by the way, this was taking place in the 1980s. People always said in 2016, it’s like, how did evangelicals vote for Donald Trump? It’s like, no. If you grew up in it, you understand it, right? It’s paranoia, it’s apocalypticism, conspiracy theories, white supremacy. It all has interlocked. It’s the story that makes the action palatable, right? Which is—I mean, democracy itself, liberal democracy, was created to get away from the idea of “god wills it, so it’s legal,” right? You create a legal system that would allow people to not be under the guise of that. If people don’t know about that, go check out the Thirty Years’ War. Okay, just have some fun with it. There’s some homework.

But the next step of it is that a lot of this, Max—and this is uncomfortable—you brought up the Supreme Court. When I see Donald Trump ignore the Supreme Court, I am both disturbed, but I’m also encouraged. And here’s the reason why: the Supreme Court has always been an institution that was both unlawful—it created its powers back during the 18th century—and it has always served as a bulwark and an organ and a weapon for the wealthy. They gave themselves the power. Besides the Warren Court in the 20th century, this has always been a reactionary, anti-human, anti-law wealth class tool.

For me, where I’m at, and maybe this is where we differ in other people: good, stop paying attention to the Supreme Court. Stop vesting them with this idea of legitimacy. People say to me, “Do you want to stack the Supreme Court?” No, I want to eliminate the Supreme Court. I want to make them completely irrelevant. I would love to go outside of the box and make them democratically responsible. Vote on them. Vote on them. Make it a supreme jury that just brings regular people out who don’t work their way through these institutions of oppression.

So for me, when Trump does this stuff, it makes it clear—it’s like in Jurassic Park where the raptors tested the electric fence. Oh, there aren’t guardrails. All of a sudden, now we’re in an existential battle, and I think a lot of people don’t want that battle. Right? They want to stay off of it. They do not want to have this existential battle that’s already raging without them, and he has made clear: no, you can do these things.

And the next part, with the execution and all of these other things, Max—that idea of having to back away from things that are too radical. Some people still do it, but what have we learned in the past couple of years? That was all imaginary. Nobody’s canceled. Nobody’s gone. Nobody is suffering political consequences because they support Palestinians. Nothing like that exists anymore. The massive majority of the people are like, “No, I don’t care about this. Talk about material conditions and what’s actually going on in our lives.”

The question of this public execution is: will the state be able to use its monopoly of violence, not just on this person from the Fort Hood shooting, but on the rest of us? Those are the stakes. The surveillance and oppression state have already been under construction. They’re online. They’re going to come fully online here before too long. Those of us who pay attention to this, who connect the dots, we know what’s coming. We’ve seen it elsewhere. We’ve seen regular people, ordinary people, civilians who have been killed, murdered, and surveilled. We know what is down the line. The fog has lifted.

So at this point, the question is: are we going to finally listen to them? Are we going to finally look beyond the mystification and understand the material conditions and incentives that are taking place? And if we do, then all of a sudden we have to participate in a class war, because the class war is being participated upon us. And that’s the question of the time. I don’t know if that’s going to be the moment where it wakes up, but I do think that the deteriorating standard of living and material conditions—I think that’s going to incentivize more people waking up.

Max: Can we do this after the midterms?

Jared: Absolutely. I’ll do this whenever. Whenever, I’ll knock down your door. I don’t care.

Max: I can’t thank you enough for making the time to talk today, and it is a long time in the making. There are big things that we need to tackle. In order to tackle those big things, you got to break them down to the smallest level, and you got to bring it back to the roots. And I think that, among many other talents that you have, is really your superpower—in that you’re able to distill these very big, very daunting ideas and concepts down to a, hey, this is really what we’re talking about here. And so I think it’s just hugely beneficial. So I appreciate that you brought that political perspective to the audience today.

Jared: Can I add one last thing, Max? Because, listen, I’ve gotten a reputation as a little bit of a prophet of doom, and I’m sorry. I’m not trying to bum people out. I’m just trying to talk about what’s going on. I know you’re the same way. I want to make one last point on this, just to put the punctuation on it.

This is very large. Like, we’re talking about generational, historic change and plans and movements that are taking place. I’m not in the halls of power. You’re not in the halls of power. I’m not getting on a plane with a bunch of oligarchs and going to meet with Xi Jinping and figure things out. What we have to do is we have to stop giving up that cathartic hope that it’s just the next midterm, it’s just the next presidential election. We need to make changes in our lives, in our neighborhoods, on our streets. We need to start engaging in communal conversations, communal organizing, and particularly mutual aid, because things are going to get bad, and we need to be prepared for it.

And what this requires, I’ll make it very clear: this could end very quickly if there was a mass walkout, a mass strike, some sort of a collective action. All of the momentum is against us because of financial precarity, because of all of these levers. If we can start taking care of one another in our actual lives, that’s the power that we have. And if you foster that, every social movement and every revolution throughout history, it doesn’t just erupt out of nowhere. It starts with that: the individual, the communities, the neighbors, and then it bursts forth.

Max: Jared Yates Sexton: author, rabble rouser, fucking pissed-off guy

Jared: Pissed off.

Max: I just actually, right before this, I watched one of your livestreams where you were pretty lit up. You were pretty lit up. So this is the stuff that can get you there, and I get it. I can’t thank you enough for coming on the show. This is, again, a long time in the making, but certainly won’t be the last time. Thanks again.

Jared: Yeah, I got to have you on. Thank you, man. I’ve appreciated you, and as always, thank you for the work you’re doing. I think it’s invaluable.

Max: We’ll talk soon.