Kick the Puppy Episode 11 3

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11.11.18

Mass shooting in California, Thousand Oaks was ranked third safest city in America, “we don’t know how to stop mass shootings,” overnight celebrity, midterm elections, how great the U.S. economy is doing, the Antifa at Tucker Carlson’s home, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez said she can’t afford to move to DC before job in Congress starts, Girl Scouts sue Boy Scouts over name change, dueling culture, gangsters and librarians, all U.S. National Parks free to enter on Sunday, Bring Your Own Knife, surgery students losing dexterity to stitch patients, kids’ apps are crammed with ads, government workers, cryptocurrency millionaire wants to build a utopia in Nevada, thousands of Swedes are inserting microchips under their skin, cashless world.

California Bar shooting, Thousand Oaks, USA - 08 Nov 2018

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Kick the Puppy Episode 10 4

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Keith & R.J. are back with the news of the week.

Topics include:

Domestic terrorism, mental illness in radical politics, mental illness in mainstream politics, blow back against Saudi Arabia, Soft Bank serves as a front for Saudi monarchs, beacon of bullshit against Iran, US-Middle East geopolitical alignment, migrant caravan story is hyped to death, Pirate Party leader to become mayor of Prague, Trump has three phones, Silicon Valley elites keep their kids away from their own tech, the population seems to be getting stupider, what a civil war would look like, Dem candidate says dogs are smarter than cops, Michigan moves to ban crunk juice, when politicians settled disputes with pistols.

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Looking Left to Panarchy 2

By Nicky Reid aka Comrade Hermit

Exile in Happy Valley

I haven’t always been an anarchist but I’ve always been a radical. After being raised in the pro-life movement I discovered the Communist Manifesto as a 14 year old lapsed malcontent. I didn’t understand every word of it but the inflammatory anti-clerical rhetoric lit a fire in me that never went out. After spending several years as a teenage anarchist, influenced in equal measure by Subcomandante Marcos and Johnny Rotten, I turned to state socialism, inspired by the bold anti-imperialist antics of Hugo Chavez and the Bolivarian Revolution. It was also around this time that I became enamored by tales of the Bolsheviks, Che Guevara, and those dastardly Castro brothers. Marxist-Leninism and Democratic Centralism made sense to a twenty-something closeted agoraphobic. Like my life it felt preserved in formaldehyde. It felt safe.

But there’s nothing radical about safe and when I came out of the closet to take my life back from mental illness and gender tyranny, I was ready to dream dangerously again. The suspiciously early demise of Hugo Chavez followed shortly by the cataclysmic failure of his signature revolution was the final straw. Chavez did everything right but when he dropped dead the revolution dropped dead with him. For me, that was the last nail in the coffin for state socialism or state anything for that matter. I was drawn back to anarchism by the unexpected triumph of the Rojava Revolution in Northern Syria and the prison writings of the man who inspired it, another post-Marxist anti-statist named Abdullah Ocalan. But I’ve remained both conscious and unapologetic of my tangled radical roots and my objectives have always remained the same, the creation of a classless post-capitalist society.

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A Review of Tribes: The National-Anarchist Magazine 3

Issue #1 July 2018. Now available. Order here.

By Juleigh Howard-Hobson

With an unaffected sense of balance and variance, Tribes is more than a mere issue of a magazine. It is a thoughtful compendium of many facets of National-Anarchism. None steal center stage. None erase or confute. Even while each article is quite firmly individual, this is a cohesive publication that both explores and presents ideas about and of National-Anarchy.

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New York City Raids Condo Building in Crackdown on Airbnb Rentals 1

by • Anarchism/Anti-State, Economics/Class Relations, Law/Justice, Police State/Civil Liberties, Uncategorized

I invite any system-lovers who may be reading to explain exactly how it is that we don’t live in a police state.

By Josh Barnabel

Wall Street

A team of New York City law-enforcement officers swarmed a Manhattan condominium last month, issuing 27 notices of violations for illegal hotel use in one of the largest crackdowns on short-term rentals such as those listed on Airbnb.

The raid at the Atelier, a 46-story Midtown luxury tower, may be a sign of what’s to come. New York and other cities are seeking to limit short-term rentals that can run afoul of local laws designed to limit hotel-style stays in residential buildings.

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Anarchist News Podcast 89, 11.9.2018 Reply

by • Anarchism/Anti-State, Uncategorized

This is a pretty good episode of A-News, which includes a discussion of the diversity of anarchist thought, populism, rural anarchist activism, and yours truly even gets a mention at one point. Listen here.

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Welcome to the anews podcast. This is episode 88 for November 2, 2018. This podcast covers anarchist activity, ideas, and conversations from the previous week on anarchistnews.org.

Editorial: No one wants to see parents dance, by chisel
TOTW: No Fly Zones, with Aragorn! and Sport
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From Brothels to Independence: The Neoliberalization of (Sex) Work Reply

by • Economics/Class Relations, Sexuality and the State, Uncategorized

By Ava Caradonna and Yves Smith

Naked Capitalism

Yves here. Further confirmation that the gig economy is not what it is cracked up to be. Sex workers in the UK have less privacy, lower returns, and much less safety in the days of online platforms than they did when brothels dominated the profession.

By Ava Caradonna, a migrant, a sex worker, a student, a mother, a citizen, a trans person, a person of colour, a teacher, a queer, a lesbian, and a militant. Ava allows us to speak from different positions as sex workers and as allies, without the stigma of using our ‘real’ names, and allows us to speak to the different realities in the sex industry and beyond. Originally published at openDemocracy

For decades, the British sex industry has straddled both informal and illegal work. This is because while the buying and selling of sex is technically legal in the UK, everything that produces the exchange of sex for money – advertising, employing support staff, renting premises, working collectively – is criminalised. As a result, our workplaces in ‘flats’ (small scale brothels), saunas, and hostess clubs have never been stable or safe places.

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Has the Government Declared War on Trans People? 2

by • Culture Wars/Current Controversies, Sexuality and the State, Uncategorized

By Nicky Reid aka Comrade Hermit

Exile in Happy Valley

Has the government declared war on trans people? That’s the million dollar question and its one I still don’t have a clear answer to. As some of you may already know, several weeks ago a memo being circulated by the Department of Health and Human Services was leaked exposing a plan by the Trump administration in league with their supposed enemies in the Deep State to officially establish gender as being defined exclusively by ones genitalia at birth. This would essentially erase people like me and leave us at the mercy of a bevy of bureaucratic tyrants from the prison industrial complex to its child abusing cousins in the tenured snake pits of the public school system.

When I first heard about the memo, released by the New York Times, I was skeptical for a number of reasons, most of them having to do with the foul circus of the midterms. Was the memo leaked by Trump’s frenemies in the Steady State in an attempt to use identity politics to shore up the youth vote for their allies in the Democratic Party? Or did Trump leak the memo himself to excite those fun-policing tranny-bashers, the Evangelicals, knowing they’d need the Spanish Fly of state sanctioned child abuse to get hard enough to vote for their local philandering whore-mongers in the GOP and, by proxy, our own philandering whore-monger in chief? Was this memo for real or was it just more hot air to fill Trump’s leaky balloon?

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We should chop America up into 7 different countries. Seriously. Reply

by • Activism, Secession, Strategy

Only 7? Sounds a bit moderate. It’s interesting how these ideas keep getting circulated but never really catch on beyond the margins. Are that many people really that unhappy with the system? Or are political partisans really just equivalents of sports fans (with “extremists” like the Antifa and Alt-Right merely assuming the role of the football hooligans)?.

By Bonnie Kristian

The Week

Look, we had a good run.

Well, maybe “good” isn’t quite the right word … but certainly it’s been interesting. These United States were a grand experiment. But the experiment has gotten out of hand. It’s time to peacefully dissolve the union.

I know, I know. This is not what good Americans are supposed to suggest. “Four score and seven years ago” and all that. But to borrow a lesser-known phrase from that brief address, it seems to me we have tested whether this nation “can long endure,” and increasingly it is clear it cannot. It’s just not working. Do you really disagree? Do you like the way things are?

We are fresh off a midterm election which has guaranteed two years of gridlock and rancor. But the issues that animated this campaign season are in no sense resolved. David Brooks’ recent diagnosis of “two electorates” conducting entirely separate conversations and motivated by entirely different primal fears remains equally perceptive. Mutual partisan hatred is still nearly total. It is still the case that the sort of person who would attend a Trump rally and one who joined the Women’s March do not wish to share a country with each other.

They may not explicitly say so, but they do come very close. How else should we interpret, “If you don’t like it, leave,” or, “If [candidate] wins, I’m moving to Canada”? However unserious, these are basically expressions of a desire for separate nations.

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PayPal is canceling accounts used by the Proud Boys, Gavin McInnes, and antifa groups Reply

by • Culture Wars/Current Controversies, Left and Right

The repression of dissenters continues. It’s also interesting how the System has zero regard for any of these “extremist” groups who constantly hate on each other. In the ruling class’ perfect world, every one of them would be dead. Yet, if you point this out to sectarians, partisans, tribalists, and cultists on the Left and Right, they usually respond with “moral equivalence” arguments (i..e special pleading) which usually amount to “We’re not assholes like THOSE people…” (even if they usually are).

By Colin Lecher

The Verge

PayPal said today that it will cancel accounts used by far-right group the Proud Boys as well as multiple accounts from anti-fascist groups.

The move will make it much harder for the groups to raise money online. The decision is the latest act of “de-platforming” by the tech industry, which has been grappling with how to effectively handle users that promote hateful or violent ideologies. The news was first reported by BuzzFeed News’s Blake Montgomery.

The ban will include the Proud Boys account as well as an account used by its founder, Gavin McInnes, PayPal said. The company is also canceling accounts for Atlanta Antifa, Antifa Sacramento, and the Anti-Fascist Network. PayPal had previously canceled accounts for Antifa Philadelphia, Antifa Arkansas, Belfast Antifa, and Rose City Antifa. The company also canceled an account used by Tommy Robinson, former leader of the far-right group the English Defence League.

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Ari: Dems. crushed Trump in biggest midterm blowout in 40 years 5

by • Electoralism/Democratism, Uncategorized

I agree with this analysis. The Democrats were the primary winners in this election by a significant margin. They flipped the House, multiple governorships, and multiple state legislatures. Votes on referendums like weed legalization and felon voting rights generally went liberal (although abortion related issues in some red states were an exception). The diversity count increased as well with the number of female Congress people increasing, record numbers of ethnic minorities, women, gays, Muslims, the youngest ever Congressperson, etc. all being elected. The Senate has always been one of the more conservative institutions, and that’s true today because the “red zones” get a sum total greater amount representation there. The left/liberal/progressive/whatever side is definitely winning as a far as the big picture is concerned.

Plus, I see Trump as far more liberal than his predecessors. He was a Democrat for most of his life, married a former Playboy model, bangs porn stars, seems to have no problem with legalizing weed or gay marriage, pardoned some black drug offenders, hangs out with rappers and Hollywood celebrities,etc. If he had been the President 20 years ago the religious right types would be going ape shit insane over his lack of morals and character. His actual instincts on a lot of foreign policy and economic issues seem more “liberal” than the normal Republicans and many Democrats. His stance on immigration was “normal” 20 years ago. He’s no stricter on “law and order” than Bill Clinton was. Nowadays, liberals don’t seem to appreciate just how good they’ve got it.

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In a Special Report, Ari Melber breaks down how Democrats had a decisive victory in the 2018 midterm elections, winning more House seats than they have in 40 years. Melber examines the myth of divided Government and shows how Americans have not been going back-and-forth in deciding which party should win the White House, but have in fact, by popular vote, preferred a Democrat for President in 6 of the last 7 Presidential races.

WATCH HERE

In Memory of the Great War: A Reminder of Why Imperialism Sucks Reply

by • Anti-Imperialism/Foreign Policy, Uncategorized

Image result for rosa luxemburg

Amidst all the pious, hypocritical mourning of the end of World War One commemorations, Rosa Luxemburg’s words from 1916 are more relevant than ever:

‘The world war today is demonstrably not only murder on a grand scale; it is also suicide of the working classes of Europe. The soldiers of socialism, the proletarians of England, France, Germany, Russia, and Belgium have for months been killing one another at the behest of capital. They are driving the cold steel of murder into each other’s hearts. Locked in the embrace of death, they tumble into a common grave.

“Deutschland, Deutschland über Alles! Long live democracy! Long live the Tsar and Slav-dom! Ten thousand tarpaulins guaranteed up to regulations! A hundred thousand kilos of bacon, coffee-substitute for immediate delivery!” … Dividends are rising, and the proletarians are falling. And with every one there sinks into the grave a fighter of the future, a soldier of the revolution, mankind’s savior from the yoke of capitalism.

The madness will cease and the bloody demons of hell will vanish only when workers in Germany and France, England and Russia finally awake from their stupor, extend to each other a brotherly hand, and drown out the bestial chorus of imperialist war-mongers and the shrill cry of capitalist hyenas with labor’s old and mighty battle cry:

Proletarians of all lands, unite!’

The Brilliant, Episode 83 – Nationalism and bolo’bolo part III Reply

by • Anarchism/Anti-State, Uncategorized • Tags: ,

The Brilliant continues its series on national-anarchism with an interview Gregor Eugen Elliott. Listen here.

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The description of the interview from The Brilliant.

This is an interview with Gregor of Tribes magazine. His story (and article in Tribes) is about the move from “left anarchism” to national anarchism. The discussion is about WTF is left anarchism, National anarchism, and a kindred.

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Sadly, Sound Money ISN’T on the Ballot Reply

by • Economics/Class Relations • Tags:

By Clint Siegner, Money Metals Exchange

Americans will be headed to the polls to cast ballots in the midterm elections. Polling suggests that Democrats will return to power in the House of Representatives. Republicans are favored to hold on to the Senate.

However, political polls have proven less than reliable. There are plenty of people expecting a surprise once the votes are counted.

But there are many policies that won’t change regardless of who holds Congressional power come Wednesday.

For starters, we can count on the continuation of huge deficits. The Treasury Department’s most recent estimate is that government borrowing will double in 2018 versus last year. The bureaucracy is going to blow through $1.34 trillion more than this year’s record tax revenue.

That deficit will be the highest since 2010, back when the U.S. economy was mired in deep recession. Today, the IRS stands in high cotton. Imagine what deficit would look like if tax receipts were at recessionary levels and/or Congress was launching a major stimulus program.

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Here’s who owns a record $21.21 trillion of U.S. debt 2

by • Anti-Imperialism/Foreign Policy, Economics/Class Relations, Uncategorized

 

 

Far too many people on the center left and center right have bought into the idea that nations such as Russia or China are genuine enemies of the global system, and far too many people on the far left and far right have bought into the idea that these nations represent credible alternatives to the global system. While it is certainly true that the Washington-London-Brussels-Berlin-Tel Aviv-Riyadh axis is the real international ruling class, the Asian powers are merely backwater provinces in the global system that are occasionally unruly.

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Vote or Don’t (the Brick and the Ballot Box) Reply

by • Electoralism/Democratism, Uncategorized • Tags:

By Nicky Reid aka Comrade Hermit

Exile in Happy Valley

Like any twilight empire, America has some strange and perverse rituals that are generally excepted as normal by our unblinking masses. There’s the fascist war prayer of the National Anthem, which you can lose your livelihood for betraying with a knee. There’s the Kidz Bop chant version known as the Pledge of Allegiance, my own childhood protest of which had my archdiocese contacting the nearest exorcist. Then of coarse there’s the incessant soldier worship which mandates us all to repeatedly thank everyone who has ever served in our colossal armed services for preserving our “freedoms”, regardless of whether they launched drone strikes from Las Vegas cubicles or shot Cuban gardeners on golf courses in Grenada. But all of that jingle brained jingoism pales in comparison to the peer-pressure-palooza that is the right to vote.

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An Anarchist Defense Force? Reply

by • Fourth Generation Warfare, Military

Matthew VanDyke is the founder of Sons of Liberty International, a security firm that advises, trains, and supplies vulnerable populations to defend themselves against terrorists. He is preparing for an independent mission to Iraq during which he’ll train Iraqis to fight back against the Islamic State.

History NOW is a collection of timely and relevant stories that can only be experienced, documented, and shared right now. History NOW features powerful videos from people capturing significant, transformative events from their unique first-person perspectives. From politics and sports to science and technology, these are the people making history now.

Left-Neocameralism: A Heretical Rethinking of Mencius Moldbug 2

by • Left and Right • Tags:

By Eric Fleischmann

Anyone familiar with the neoreactionary movement or “Dark Enlightenment”— the strange alliance of corporate techno-capitalists, ethnonationalists, and throne-and-altar traditionalists—will certainly have heard of Curtis Yarvin or, as he is better known, Mencius Moldbug. His blog, Unqualified Reservations, has served as a central resource upon which the neoreactionary movement has built their bizarre far-right school of thought. Moldbug himself specifically proposes a self-made ideology he has branded “neocameralism”, named for an administrative ideology originating in 16th century Germany. Murray N. Rothbard writes in An Austrian Perspective on the History of Economic Thought that “cameralists, named after the German royal treasure chamber, the Kammer, propounded an extreme form of mercantilism, concentrating even more than their confreres in the West on building up state power, and subordinating all parts of the economy and polity to the state and its bureaucracy.” Moldbug’s new form of cameralism advocates for the privatization the nation state into a collection of joint-stock companies headed by CEOs forming many separate corporate city-states, collectively referred to by Moldbug as a “patchwork.”

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Make Halloween Dangerous Again! 1

by • Uncategorized • Tags: ,

By Nicky Reid aka Comrade Hermit

Exile in Happy Valley

Halloween is quite easily my favorite holiday. A heathen celebration the Christians failed to conquer, it’s a time of joyful chaos and youth rebellion decorated by skeletons, scattered leaves, flickering jack-o-lanterns, and bonfire smoke. A holiday where serial killers are lionized and everyone dresses in drag, betraying conformity to expose their darkest desires to be whores and outlaws. It’s the one time of year when a genderfuck malcontent like me can feel halfway normal without having to sell out. It’s also arguably this stupid countries only truly anarchist holiday, or at least it was and it still should be.

There was a time, not so long ago, when Halloween meant one night a year when kids owned the streets, wandering unsupervised from house to house dressed in disguise like demons and monsters, appropriating candy from random strangers under the threat of vandalism like tiny unions of egoists. Trick or Treat began as a threat. You could hand over the good stuff (and it better be good) or you could get your house fucked up in a toilet paper draped act of propaganda of the deed, letting the whole neighborhood and any other passing horde of hoodlums know who fucked up and why. In certain parts of the country there was a completely separate holiday called Hell Night, when children engaged in mass acts of gleeful sabotage against the parents, teachers, clergy, and cops who made them feel powerless during the rest of the year. Windows were broken, tires were slashed, and a sense of justice was returned to the universe.

Halloween and Hell Night weren’t like Christmas or Easter. The only gifts you got where the gifts you took, the gifts you earned. It was an empowering event that celebrated lawlessness and the collective power of us against them. So it should come as little surprise that the thems of this world have conspired to neuter this heathen celebration of unfettered youth power, by badge, bible, or checkbook. Over the last couple decades Halloween has been transformed into something truly monstrous, the worst kind of monster, a fascistically vanilla monster called “normal”. A pejorative so hideously fowl that it could have only been created by an adult, dead from the heart up.

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On Antisemitism, Critical Thinking, And Conspiracy Theories Reply

by • Culture Wars/Current Controversies, Race and Ethnicity, Uncategorized

A timely article from Caitlin.

By Caitlin Johnstone

Today a gunman attacked a synagogue in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania while shouting the words “All Jews must die”. The suspect, Robert Bowers, reportedly had a history of making antisemitic posts on social media, and was taken into custody alive with multiple gunshot wounds. As of this writing, eleven people were killed in the attack.

I don’t have anything interesting or insightful to say about America’s mass shootings, other than to repeat the point I always make that the effects of modern war propaganda on American psychology are wildly under-appreciated and ignored by scientific research. I believe the subject of US gun control is a bit outside my sovereign boundaries as an Australian writer as it only affects Americans, so I don’t really have anything to contribute in the primary debate surrounding the attack. It’s a debate for Americans to have with one another, so I tend to avoid it.

What I do have to offer is a brief description of my experience with conspiracy theories about Judaism and Jewish people as a fringe blogger who writes a lot about conspiracies, and the impression those encounters have left me with. To be clear, when I talk about antisemites I mean the actual bigots who promote hatred of Jewish people, paranoia about Jewishness, or any type of violence against or mistreatment of Jews as a race. I do not mean people who voice legitimate criticisms of Israel and its government, I do not mean people who criticize the way Zionism is used as a tool of manipulation to advance geopolitical agendas, I do not mean people who question the justification for the creation of Israel in the first place, I do not mean people who defend Palestinians, and I do not mean people who voice valid, factual criticisms of George Soros or any other billionaire who happens to be Jewish.

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The Myth Making of Antifa Intellectuals Reply

by • Culture Wars/Current Controversies, Left and Right, Uncategorized • Tags: , ,

By Paul Gottfried

The American Conservative

Mark Bray is in his early thirties and the recipient of a Ph.D. in history from Rutgers in 2016. He is also rapidly becoming antifa’s chief ideologue. Among his works describing or advocating for the often violent demonstrators are Antifa: The Anti-Fascist Handbook and Translating Anarchy: The Anarchism of Occupy Wall Street.

Bray has yet to find a major commercial press for his tracts and, so far as I can tell, remains a lowly lecturer at Dartmouth College. But he has presented his case for antifa’s protest activities and the disruptive forms they have taken in, among other venues, Foreign Policy, The Washington Post, and Boston Review. Bray was also invited to voice his views at the Politics and Prose bookstore in Washington, D.C., an honor usually reserved for intellectual and political celebrities. It was after watching Bray’s Politics and Prose address and the remarks it elicited from the mostly “antifascist” audience that my editor at Northern Illinois University Press arrived at the idea that I should write a book on antifa’s worldview.

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Slavoj Žižek: Trump’s rise is a symptom of a dark and subtle force Reply

by • Culture Wars/Current Controversies, Economics/Class Relations, Electoralism/Democratism, Left and Right, Uncategorized • Tags:

A leading Marxist philosopher says what I have been saying for (at least) 20 years. Interesting.

By Stephen Johnson

Big Think

  • Slavoj Žižek and British political writer Owen Jones recently spoke about American politics, the left and global capitalism.
  • Žižek sees the success of President Donald Trump as proof that the left needs a major overhaul.
  • Žižek said one positive aspect of Trump’s presidency could be the rise of a new movement on the left.

The crucial battle in American politics today is what’s happening within the Democratic Party, not what’s happening against President Donald Trump, according to the philosopher and cultural critic Slavoj Žižek.

Žižek recently sat down with political commentator Owen Jones for an interview that covered the changing nature of global capitalism, the successes and failures of modern leftist movements, and the best ways to change existing political structures.

Žižek, a frequent critic of both capitalism and the shortcomings of the modern left, said liberals focus too much on social issues, such as LGBT rights and racism, and on new right-leaning factions. The cost? The majority of working-class voters may not hear what’s in it for them.

“The crucial event today is not the rise of the New Right,” he said. “The crucial thing is the disintegration of the central-left welfare consensus. This is why the crucial battle in the U.S. today, it’s not against Trump, it’s what happens within the Democratic Party.”

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