 I think we're gonna start now. Welcome everyone to the premiere of Let's Talk It Over, a monthly show that I've got the privilege to co-host tonight with Yanis Varoufakis and Roger Waters. The show is live streamed on YouTube and Facebook, so please do subscribe to our pages and like our pages. That'll be wonderful. I also wanted to quickly thank our partners that are also streaming the show tonight. So DM25, Deverelle Morgan, Jadalia, Films for Action, The Canary, and We Tell Stories. We're very pleased tonight to welcome two fantastic guests and comrades, Noura Erekat, a legal scholar and author of Justice for Some, Law as Politics in the Questions of Palestine, and Kiyanga Yamata Taylor, author of From Black Lives Matter to Black Liberation, Race for Profit, and How We Get Free. I want you to start with Yanis. You were the one that picked the title of this show, Trumpism After Trump. What was it important for you to start with this topic? Somebody tell him. You just did, Roger. Thank you. Okay, so my answer to your very deep question, Frank, is because I'm shit scared that while Trump is exiting the scene, Trump is maybe getting stronger, or at least not listening. It's even grip over tens of millions of people in the United States and beyond, because let's face it, there is a neo-fascist international at work from India with Modi to Bolsonaro, here in Europe, it's ultra-right wing galore. Look, for a while now I've been worried, for a very long while, because if you think about it, after 1929, the Weimar Republic, in the name of democracy, subjected to the humiliated German people to harsh austerity for the many, while the oligarchy was being salvaged. And Hitler promised to make them great again, in exchange for their soul and the complete subjugation of the people. And after our generations, 1929, which as we all know happened in 2008, again in Wall Street, in the name of the dispossessed, the radical center of Obama, Larry Summers, Tim Geithner, Ben Bernanke, you know who I'm talking about, they practiced a very interesting regime, I call it socialism for the bankers and harsh austerity for everybody else. Coupled with workplace exploitation, the Amazons, the techno feudalism that we're seeing, that created a new fascist movement. First it was the headless Tea Party, then they found the head in the figure of the Mussolini like Donald Trump. Who promised, what did he promise? Just exactly like Hitler and Mussolini to make people great again, humiliated people, great again, in exchange of, again, their soul and their complete subjugation. Now, another similarity between the fascism of the 19, of the mid-war period and what we're experiencing with Trump, but also with others, is that, you know what? The center called them liars. They're worse than liars. They are liars, they have no problem distorting the truth, but at the same time, they have a capacity to reveal unique truths that the radical center would never reveal. Like for instance, you know, when Donald Trump was asked, why are you defunding the post office? Are you doing it in order to gain political points? And he said, yeah, because I don't want the Democrats to vote. What as president would ever say that? But also, you know, the whole anatomy of the disaster that is the middle class, just like Gebelz in the 1920s, his analysis of the demise of the middle class in Germany was spot on. To a very large extent, what Trump was saying about the Midwestern zone was also spot on. But there are two differences with the fascists of the 1920s and 30s. And it's the reason why Trump is not still in power, why his coup d'etat has not succeeded. The first one is that central banks in after 1929 didn't do much to help the bankers, whereas now they have been pumping out mountain ranges of money to support them. And the second reason is that the industrialists, big tech now, for instance, in the United States, have not backed the fascists in the way that they did in the mid-war period. But while that has ensured that Trump has not stayed in power, because a large segment of the establishment did not support him, they supported Biden, that's no reason to think that Trumpism is out. Because the causes of Trumpism are still with us. And I very much fear that with Biden, they are going to get even reinforced, even harsher. So just to conclude, Frank, look, people like Biden and the centrists in Europe and so on, they're romanticized working class values. They're romanticized Black Lives Matter and so on. While the fascists either oppose Black Lives Matter in a natural kind of way, or refer to the working class as their own troops. What we must understand is that Trump's followers have already, to a very large extent, as a result of deep despair over what has been happening, the stagnation, the deep stagnation of the working class, the blue-collar workers, and the proletariat in the United States and elsewhere, they have sold their tragic-like, ghetto-like figures that have sold their soul to this devil. And for them, evil destruction, even what we saw in Washington, serves the purpose of somehow establishing an identity that helps them forget their despair. This is the way I see it. The damned cannot escape violence and punishment because, as Getter said, punishment is what they seek in a tragic kind of way. So what do we do to end Trumpism? Not just Trump, two things. We need a serious agenda of radical change by which to challenge not only the Republicans but also Biden. And we need a humanist embracing of the Trumpists, of the supporters of Trump, not to vilify them, not to treat them like vermin in a zoo, but to treat them like human beings who have surrendered to despair in the same way that many supporters of strongmen have done in the 1920s and 1930s. Thanks, Yanis. Roger, while we were preparing the show, you said you never wanted to hear the word Trump again. And Yanis, as mentioned this word about 15 times in five minutes. So why did you say that, Roger? Why don't you wanna hear this word again? 28, 28, I was counting. No, I wasn't. Obviously, I wouldn't do such a thing to a colleague's friend. Well, because it's a waste of effing time, and that's why, because we're not, like we've just spent 10 minutes. Well, Yanis has been kind of just talking to us for 10 minutes, but I didn't gain a lot from that. It may be because I'm a base player among academics, the rest of you are all academics, okay? And so it's difficult. No, it's not difficult for me. It's easy for me to go, why are we talking about this? Yeah, we know who that person was whose name I'm not gonna mention. And we know what fascism is because we've all been around long enough to understand. But why bring him into the conversation? I think he should be set to one side. However, you do bring up some very interesting things. But one of them is the nature of American politics and whether or not it is bipartisan. My view is that it's not bipartisan. Nothing really has changed with the last election. Certainly in terms of foreign policy. You know, certainly in terms of Norah's here, hi Norah, I didn't say hello to you. So nice to see you. The policy vis-a-vis Israel, for instance, will not change at all, not in one iota. And he will not be called to account for it and neither will the American people. We'll drift past that. I'm talking about the person whose name I won't mention and his attachment to 1929 or by my Germany or Mussolini or blah, blah, blah. Or I did do some research this morning and saw that the lady in Italy, who is the dream ticket for what is called melons, which I thought was interesting. And also I have to see what this woman looks like at the risk of being sexist. So I did and I went to the, she looks just like the awful woman from Peru. No, sorry, from Bolivia, who presumably is now in prison. If she isn't, she soon will be, I hope. But it's very weird, you know, that the whole thing is very weird, but we shouldn't focus on it. We should focus on what are we gonna do? Are we gonna try and get David North and Joe Couchor to look like human beings and for the fourth international to take over more of our airwaves and to actually get through to the people by selling socialism in a more definite and more acceptable and more palatable way or what? Or I'll stop, because, you know, I'll finish. Thanks, thanks, thanks, Roger. I wanted actually to talk to you, Nuda, while I invited you to the show, I mentioned a tweet that you sent on January 20th when there was the inauguration of Biden. I'm going to read the tweet. So you said, I missed the inauguration to teach the first class of the semester, just as well to be cultivating critical thinking about race, empire and law in the classroom because Trump's departure is not the end and Biden never represented our salvation. Sige la lucha, let's go. So do you mean Biden is as bad as Trump? Hi, everyone, and thank you for having me. I remember when Frank, you know, then hit me up and said, I want you on the show to tell me why they're the same. And I said, that's not what I meant. I didn't mean to say that Biden is as bad as Trump. There's no, I wasn't suggesting a comparison in order to make a point because the lesson that we are learning here is not one about Trump versus Biden, but frankly about US empire. US empire which begins within its borders, right? Because of the colonization of indigenous peoples on these lands, as well as the enslavement of Africans and the continuous racial domination of them which is colonial in nature, even examining that part of it shatters for us an idea that America is exceptional and that all that it needs to do is fulfill its dream of becoming a more perfect democracy and now it's dealing with its imperfections, right? But going from there, understanding America as empire helps us understand that it also continues to function as such across the globe through its occupation of Hawaii where it maintains its largest military base in Honolulu that oversees some 30% of the world's population from the Pacific Rim, from thinking of its military bases across the Middle East and of course its relationship to Israel which then we can refract and think about, well, how does that relate to the war on Yemen and how does that relate to intervention in Syria and so on and so forth? But my point was to say, not to fetishize Trump because what ends up happening is that we miss the bigger picture which is what you're discussing here. You've called it Trumpism but I think Roger was right to call it fascism in which we can continue to call forms of colonial and racial domination. And the other point that I wanna make here is that with specific regard to Palestine, right? That even though, and not just Palestine but if we think of Palestine, Iran, right? If you think of Yemen right now what's happening in Haiti, these other, these things that I can rattle off US, what we regard as US foreign policy, what my historian friend asked me one time, he says to me, he says, what's the difference between US foreign policy and imperialism, right? And I'm still trying to answer that question but the point is is that US foreign policy as such has received very little scrutiny in discussing this administration transition and so little that it received less than an hour in the presidential debates and in fact had, if you focus on it, illuminates for us so many of the policies that we're reeling from today that Trump has taken to another level, many of them, the contemporary ones were inaugurated by President Barack Obama which also shatters for us and complicates for us how we think through an anti-racist program and what happens, sorry to be academic here, Roger but what happens, the risks and the pitfalls of what happens when we decouple racism from capitalism, right? Because then we fetishize, sorry, because then we fetishize race as if it's separate from capitalist development and what we better understand is racial capitalism. So I'll stop there and leave a lot more for the discussion. Thanks, thanks Nura. Kianga, Nura, I mean Roger Yanis, I've all mentioned Trumpism, fascism but a lot of the talk since Biden has been elected has been about healing America's society. What's your opinion on this? Can you actually heal and which means actually talk to fascists to build a new America? Well, I think, and also thanks for having me on. I think that that's sort of intended for two audiences. I think some of it is projected towards Trump's periphery, his supporters. I think it's also an internal message for the Democratic Party, which right up into the cusp of the election was certainly riven by a sharp, caustic debates over the direction of the party over and not just for this election but in a much more general sense. But I think in terms of its appeal to Trump supporters and really trying to respond to the enormous divisions in this country, I think pious political statements are not really what is important right here. If Biden is able to actually deliver his $1.9 trillion stimulus and demonstrate government as something that is not present just to make your life bad and take things from you, whether it's in taxes or arrests or the many different dysfunctional ways the American government has been performing but that the state can actually provide, then that will go a long way towards peeling support away from Trump and redirecting it towards the Democratic Party. The problem, of course, is that this brings up existential questions for the Democrats as well as the Republicans and this entire American approach to governance which has been to kind of turn away from taxing those corporations, the rich, from creating the funds that are necessary to pay for social provision. This has been, I mean, this is neoliberalism. This has been a foundation, a bedrock of American governance for the better part of 50 years which has really corroded public institutions, has corroded the public sector. This is a reason there can't be coherent, sensible vaccine distribution in the US. It's a private sector free for all. And so all of this has left the US government ill-equipped to deal with the most dire crisis in modern American history, the twin crises of the pandemic. 40,000 people have died in this country in the last two weeks, right? So the crisis of the pandemic, the economic crisis, the US's public sector has been gutted. It barely functions. And so all of that has contributed to the despair, the malaise that pervades politics in this country. And if the Democrats want to pose a serious challenge to the underlying features of Trumpism, then they're going to have to respond to that and they're going to have to demonstrate government as functional, competent and capable of delivering the goods. And that creates a political dilemma because that means challenging the Washington consensus as it has been for the last 40 years. Thanks, Kiyanga. I want to go back to you, Nura. What do you do with the 74 million people that voted for Trump in 2020? Despite four years of white supremacy, racism, misogyny, lies, what do you do with them? Thanks for the easy question, Frank. Just 74 million, not 75? So I was actually honest when he was saying that we shouldn't vilify the Trump base because their turn to Trump represents a despair amongst them and something that they want to recreate. And so I'm sympathetic in that we don't want to vilify the individual in thinking about this, but I want to take issue with what despair? Despair over what, right? Because when Trump was elected, there was so much that was said in the post-election kind of shock that these people aren't racist. They voted for Trump because there's been an economic crisis and there's a failure of government, the failures that Keyanga so eloquently attended to, that this was a referendum against that. But in fact, what has been shown over and over again in the foreign intervening years is that no, there was a racial element to this, that the anger and the final straw was the ascendance of a black president. However much we can debate the question of whether or not he was the first black president, so to speak, you know, academically, but the idea that that was the final straw and that there is an anxiety, an anxiety that the United States will no longer be a majority white country where white supremacy is an organizing principle of government and instead in order to insist upon it as an organizing principle of government, it has to be a coercive force rather than a hegemonic one that we just agree to. I mean, all of that is to say that there is white anxiety about whether or not we should just accept white superiority, right? So, and then, so just to go back about, well, what does that mean about the base? I was listening to Mahmood Mamdani who recently released a book who said that the difference between the Nuremberg Trials and South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission is that in the Nuremberg Trials, the international community decided to prosecute individual Germans, individual Nazis, but never condemned Nazism. Whereas in South Africa, the condemnation was the condemnation of apartheid as a system and never the condemnation of the base itself of the individuals who furthered that harm. And so bringing that back, what do those models tell us about, you know, how do we address 74 million people in the United States? I think we need to reckon with white supremacy as an organizing principle. I think we need to not focus on the individual. I think we need to actually, there never has been a conversation in the United States about racism, right? We never really condemned it. Instead, it was, you know, federal end of the jury segregation and racism, which then becomes de facto. And there's never been a spiritual, you know, embrace of what that means had there been, we would have seen reparations in the U.S., right? There's so much work to be done here that, and I'm a teacher, and when I get into the classroom, I recognize that if I even start to talk and name racism and point it out and talk about it, rather than being this abstract thing, but something that we all participate in, right? I tell them, you don't need to be a capitalist to participate in capitalist society. You don't need to be a racist to participate in a racist one, right? And then the moment that I mentioned that there is so much discomfort in the classroom that I'm worried whether or not they're going to go report me to the administration. That's how far gone we are from the conversation that we need to be happening. So that's what I think we need to start, Frank. I think that there needs to be a reckoning with white supremacy, putting it on trial, right? Similar to the way that apartheid was, dissimilar to the way that Nazism wasn't, and similar to the way that we are contending in the debate, in the very contentious debate around Zionism. I wanted to go to you, Yanis, but I wanna ask quickly, Keonga, to answer this. How would you put white supremacy on trial? What's the process? I think that we have to talk about both. I think that we have to talk about the failures of American capitalism to actually be able to respond to the crises in people's lives and that, in fact, make up a great part of the foundation for the crises in people's lives, that the concentrations of the spoils of American capitalism have become increasingly, increasingly concentrated at the top and has created a range of insecurity and misery at the bottom. And so I think that, no, if we look at the reasons why Trump was elected and who constitute the core of his base, that it is impossible to discuss that without talking about racism in the United States. And for people who do, it just betrays an incredible ignorance about the absolute depth of racism in American society. And yet, I think it is also coupled and intensified by the complete collapse of our social welfare state. I think the complete collapse of our public sector and the triumphant, the triumph of capital over every aspect of our lives in this country. And so I find it difficult to disentangle the two because when I talk about despair, I mean, the two things that I point to, one is the reversal of life expectancy. Can anybody hear anyone else? Yes, I can hear you. I can hear you, but not Keunga. Keunga, maybe your microphone has been taken off the hook. Can you, yeah, because we can hear everyone but you. We heard you until the last 20 seconds. Luke, while we saw this out, I want you to come to you, Yanis. In your recent piece, Truth After Trump, and I want to ask you about this because we've seen the rise of all these conspiracy theories in the last four years and you wrote something, you wrote, we need to recall how our societies discern truth in the first place. What do you mean by that? Well, the notion that there is a marketplace out there where ideas compete on the basis of their merit and in the end, the better ones through their winning process prevail is of course all rubbish. There is a pattern of power which serves the interests of those controlling financial capital, increasingly financial capital, not just capital, and their propaganda becomes the truth. And science is weaponized by them as well. And scorned by the Trumpists when it doesn't suit them but also weaponized by the Trumpists. But allow me to go back to the original, well, to the main discussion. Look, now there is no doubt that Trump used race, weaponized racism. And after all this time, there is no doubt that 75 million that voted for him are either tolerant of racism or actively racist. But people are not born racists. They are made racists and they are made racists by circumstances not of their choosing. In the same way that the good people of New Hampshire and even Nevada who voted for Bernie, my friend Bernie Sanders, they didn't become socialists overnight. Circumstances led them. So it is perfectly possible to do what you say, which is put racism and white supremacy on trial, while treating the people who have become victims of it and who have espoused not the values but the identity in order to forget what is really happening in their lives. And to extend a brotherly and sisterly hand to them and say, you know, talk to me, why are you against? I mean, I remember I was in Idaho once. I was, my car broke down and I was stuck in a bar and there was this truck driver who was, who told me his life story, which was a typical story of grief. You know, small businessmen have gone bankrupt because he got sick and he had no insurance. And he was destroyed and he was 65 and driving all hours a truck. And his wife left him and so on. You know, I fell for him. And then he told me how he hated Obama because of Obama care. What right does he have to treat me like somebody who needs the kindness of the state? And I thought, oh my God, this country is seriously buggered. This is the capacity of the insurance companies of the toxic oligarchy to cop people who are suffering. Now, we do not vilify those people. We have to talk, we're not going to talk to them about socialism, Roger, because the word is tainted. But we're going to spread socialism by talking to them sense and creating an alliance because let's face it, the only time when we defeated fascism and racism was when working class people from different communities, white, black, brown, yellow, red, whatever, got together behind a progressive, effectively socialist agenda. This is the only time when we defeated the fascism. This is what we need to do them now. And my great fear, I'm afraid younger, is that Biden's 1.9 trillion stimulus program is going to bugger off for this movement. And the reason is the vast majority of that money is going to go to the large corporations. It is not going to go to the little people. Very little of that is going to go to the little people. The combination of the mountain ranges of money printed by the Fed going to Wall Street. From Wall Street, they go to Apple. Apple takes the money, goes back to the New York Stock Exchange, buys back Apple shares. You know, Apple shares go through the roof. The directors get their bonuses, right? And the combination of that with Biden's, by the way, the Green New Deal is finished, right? All these great plans for the green transition are dead in the water because of the balance in the Senate. So to cut a long story short, Biden may be a very nice guy. I don't know, I don't care. Obama was a very, I've met Obama personally. He's extremely charming. So what? His policies were toxic. They were racist. They were imperialist. You know, he was killing people every day using joystick. Yeah, I don't think anybody here cares whether Biden is nice or not nice. Exactly, that's the point. That's not what the debate is. Here, it's coming from a situation where the federal government was actually completely hostile to any intervention around a vaccine towards, the Trump plan was to essentially starve people out of the recommendations from the Center for Disease Control to shelter in place, to isolate. And so he cut off money from cities and states from last April really until very recently. And so I think that coming from absolutely nothing to something gives the Democratic Party a leg up in comparison to what the Republicans have on offer. Is that enough? No, it's not even the beginning. It's not even the beginning of enough. But if we're talking about what is the kind of immediate response to Trumpism, that's one of them. There's a whole other conversation to have about how one does the things that you're describing, Yanis, in terms of how do you make appeals to people who I think have all sorts of ideas, who have racist ideas, xenophobic ideas, also a desire to have a better life. I mean, there's all sorts of consciousness that exists. And in this country, in the United States, we are imperiled by the lack of a coherent left that is able to offer a worldview, to offer an understanding of what is happening. To shape- Well, that's exactly the point. I'm sorry about that. That's exactly the point. Because you see, if we now say Biden is better than Trump and hope that Trumpism will go away, effectively, the only radicals that will be left will be the Trumpists, whereas we will be copied by Biden and Janet Yellen. We have to organize the left resistance, resistance to the Biden administration. If we do not radicalize ourselves within the Democratic Party and within the center left and the left to clash against those who are using the Biden administration to further the interests of capital accumulation, financial capital accumulation, if we are not the radicals that rise up against Biden, then Trumpism is going to get another go. Comrades, it's an amazing conversation. I want to go to Roger and then to Nura, because Nura is going to have to go in about 10 minutes. Roger, Yanis mentioned that we need to talk to people and I guess that's what life is about. You don't only talk to your friends. I remember coming, being at one of your concerts in Paris, I can't remember like maybe two, three years ago, and when you started talking about Palestine towards the end of the concert, there was a lot of clapping, but I also heard a lot of people throwing insults at you, even if obviously you couldn't hear them. So as an artist in a way, what would be your idea about reaching people that might not be on our side yet or socialists yet? I don't think being an artist has got anything to do with it. I meant to be having the platform, you know. Frank, sitting here, listening to this blah, blah, blah, blah, backwards and forwards, and this talk about the Democrats and that there is an elephant in the room. I did an interview with Rolling Stone about a year ago when I pointed this out and I thought, they're never gonna put this on American television. The American in the room is American exceptionalism, an American racism, an American white imperialism. That is the elephant, that is the elephant that is destroying the whole of the world. And the Democrats are destroying the world just as fast as the Republicans are, whoever they may be. The Democrats pay lip service, the Republicans don't even pay lip service. Democrats pay lip service to some of the ideas that are written and espoused in your Declaration of Independence and the Constitution. They claim to believe in human rights and all men are created in them and liberty and blah, blah, blah and democracy, but they don't. They don't give a fuck about any of those things. Joe Biden doesn't. If he did, why is he not moving the American embassy back to Tel Aviv where it belongs? Why does he not come out and stand up like a man and say, Israel is a racist apartheid state and I disapprove of it and we're not giving them any more aid to buy weapons to subjugate the people? No, I could shout that until the cows come home and be like, oh, let's not listen to him. He's obviously a bit loopy. No, I'm not loopy. That is what's going on. That is on the face of it. All this, I mean, it's not crap. I completely understand that $1.9 trillion is a lot of money and it might help a few, but let's not forget that Biden promised to grant to everybody when he was in a presidential race. Didn't happen, did it? But you see, I'm getting dragged back into the Overton window of American politics. It's not the important thing. What do you do with the 72 million or 3 million or however many it was, people who voted for that asshole, educate them. But if you educate them, you're gonna have to educate the whole country and it's part of the policy of the oligarchy not to educate people. Americans by and large are unbelievably, unremittingly ignorant. Yeah, you are, you're ignorant. Most of you don't even know where Iran is. Literally, if you give you a globe and say, where's Iran? You know, I don't know. I'm from Iowa, you know. Well, it's not good enough. But that's the way it's done. You keep people ill-educated completely and then you can pour your propaganda on them and they'll believe all the crap about America being great. America is not great. It's a terrible, terrible malign influence on the rest of the world. Almost single-handedly, you, the people of America, are destroying the world. And you certainly have shown us no lead. You are not a shining city. You are a factory churning out propaganda to try and get us to eat 32 or drink 32 ounce bottles of Coca-Cola to our kids or die of type 2 diabetes before their teenagers. So let's call a spade a spade. You know, first things first, let's start with human rights, all right? Please, if you try and develop even a political party in the United States of America, whose platform is human rights rather than profit or the oligarchy or Wall Street or pleasing our masters, because that's where it is. And I'll stop again, but I'm deeply frustrated. Thanks, Roger. I guess we all are. I want to go to, you've mentioned education. I want to go to Noura. She's an educator, a teacher, and she's going to have to go teach in about four or five minutes. So Noura, two questions. Roger mentioned Palestine. You also mentioned at the start, Biden foreign policy. Can you tell us in your opinion what's going to happen in terms of Biden foreign policy? And then, because this is also the idea of this show, it's not about analysis, but it's about how to move forward. How can we, I mean, we've addressed this a little bit, but how can we change things on the ground from the grassroots up? So again, you've got the floor for as long as you need before you need to go. I'm actually going to try to stay out and push it. So just so you, I don't, I can't get rid of my chat and all of the chat is demanding Roger. So I can see why. Roger, you... I moved my screen over to try to like get it out of view. The chat, yeah, I forgot to mention people, like there's a lot of people asking questions stuff in the chat. We're not going to obviously take questions, not tonight. It's great. I see that you love Roger. Roger, I don't know if you can see the chat, but a lot of people like love you. Well, no, what I was saying is that I can see why now the demand because Roger is bringing through a cathartic experience for everyone, which is the basic level. And not just an analysis. And I get that and I appreciate it. I want to build on, I think I just want to lift up something that, you know... Someone wants Nuda. Keonga and Yanis, we're talking about. And lift up, yes, Keonga, we cannot decouple this idea of white supremacy and capitalism and the gutting of the state and despair, right? And so much in the United States has been about the role of the state. Does state intervention in our lives, in the provision of medical care, in the provision, right, through health insurance, in the provision of a basic universal income, in the provision of basic housing, all those things that constitute human rights, as you say, Roger, right? There is a debate, a split within the US between those who believe that the US can and should deliver them as a state, which can be trusted and a provider versus those who see the state as a threat. And that bifurcation and that construction of seeing the state as a threat is not by accident. It has been constructed by those who will benefit from it, right? There was David Harvey talks about how the Koch brothers developed an antagonism through socialism, using racism as the Trojan horse. So that people in articulating their aversion to a socialist state as a provider learned to refract that language through the aversion of racism as anything more than basically what the people demanded through the free market. So yes, I do believe that those things go hand in hand and that their entwinements are not accidental. When it comes to human rights, so I just wanna build on this idea of human rights and what we can do. Roger, the class I'm leaving to teach after this is actually one where we use the International Human Rights Law to think about how we can hold the US criminal justice system to account. Because at the depth of it, the criminal justice system is basically a site of racial oppression and a tool that maintains the racial supremacy that we were talking about earlier. So I do think human rights is a useful framework, although that too is manipulated very much so and we shouldn't take it for granted. But what happens when we discuss the United States within a framework of human rights is again, we shatter the idea that the US is somehow exceptional, right? In the words of Justice Scalia, international law is foreign law. It applies to everybody else, but not to us. And so that we see come to understand civil rights in the United States also as human rights and what that means. As it come, finally then, what about Palestine? This has been said, it's been made clear. Biden has basically kept intact some of the worst foreign policy shifts that we saw under the Trump administration, including all the things on Palestine from moving the embassy to Jerusalem from then basically calling out BDS as a form of anti-Semitism. We see that through this appointment of the UN ambassador. The maintenance of the Abraham Accords and the normalization agreements that basically offered Israel normalization without extending a single enduring concession for Palestinian rights, not even easing the deadly blockade on Gaza. And worst of all, as far as I'm concerned, was recently the State Department has said that it will maintain the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance definition of anti-Semitism of including criticism of Israel. And that's just on Palestine. If you move to Iran, Biden has said that he wants to renegotiate the nuclear agreement, but without lifting sanctions. Even though the US was the one that violated the agreement, Iran is being punished for it and forced to come back to negotiate without the lifting of sanctions. If we move to, if we think about the Caribbean and Haiti, we see a similar policy of maintaining now what Haitians are referring to as their dictator and Haiti at the same time that ISIS deporting Haitians in mass, some 600 Haitians have been deported since the beginning of February. The one distinction that I'll say is quite different has been what we've seen in Yemen and the fact that the US is going to end a military aid to Saudi Arabia. And here I wanna just point out a few things. Number one, the US has made clear that it's only ending the offensive, the military aid that goes through offensive operations, which means that Saudi Arabia could define something else as defensive in order to maintain that support, not aid, excuse me. And the other thing to keep in mind is that from the beginning, the US didn't know what it was getting into, why was it entering into Yemen, which wasn't a sectarian conflict at all. The Houthis in the course of the war on Yemen have developed a relationship with Iran and so we constructed that relationship. It didn't precede the war on Yemen, it was produced by the war on Yemen and we're still not really evaluating that, but instead have been mobilized by the gruesome murder of the Mahal Khushoggi. So what does that mean? Where does that put us in terms of where we go? I look to the anti-imperialists who are continuing to protest US militarism as part of a foreign and domestic policy. I think one of the, you know, my anti-imperialist struggle is local. My participation, for example, in boycott, divestment, and sanctions is a local. My, you know, ending of US police training by Israeli forces is a local effort, but challenges these imperialist dimensions. And so I think that whatever we do is very local and we have agency to change that. This is not just something that happens from the top down. We have the agency to change that at the local level. So are you saying you're gonna stay with us till the end? There's about 10 minutes to go? Yes, I apologize to my students. Yes, I wanna listen, yes. Okay, amazing. So we've got about 10 minutes to go and as I mentioned, you know, trying to imagine new possibilities and new horizons is something that I'll be very interested in. But before we go to that in a way, isn't the question about democracy and what democracy means for our societies right now, because we're talking about Trump, we're talking about Biden, but I mean, eight years of Obama created Trump. Isn't it? I don't know who wants to answer that, maybe Keonga or, and Obama was ailed as the first black president, a progressive president, but after eight years of Obama, you get Trump. So something is rotten much higher than this, than just the guy who's in power or the woman who's in power. Well, I think, yeah. I mean, I think that the seeds of Trumpism were of course planted in the failures of the Obama administration to really deliver in substantive and meaningful ways after the disaster of George W. Bush. I mean, George W. Bush in this country is treated like the kind of cute fool or buffoon, but people forget, perhaps young people in particular, that George W. Bush was the architect of the disastrous Iraq war, the occupation of Afghanistan, the architect of Guantanamo, the one who sat by passively as New Orleans, a black city drowned and called black residents of that city refugees as they dispatched them across the country. And then of course was at the heart of the completely anemic, pathetic response to global economic crisis in 2008. And so those were the issues that Barack Obama had to attend to as president, and those were the things that motivated particularly African-Americans to vote for him in ways that were wholly unprecedented. And the failure to deliver meaningful change is what really underlie the emergence of Black Lives Matter in the twilight of his presidency. And I think again, we see Black Lives Matter revive again in the twilight of Trump's presidency. And so the failure of the American state to really grapple with the impacts of racism, both in their social, political, and economic repercussions has meant that has revealed the destabilizing nature of the Black social movement. And I think this is ultimately why the development of a coherent left and not just a collection of small marginalized groups that are very effective at debating each other but are absolutely inconsequential in the world of politics has to develop in this country because neither the Democrats nor the Republicans have any meaningful response to the issues that continue to radicalize young Black people at the heart of the Black Lives Matter movement. And we can see that the politics in this movement are developing, it is a cumulative process from body cameras and police commissions in its first iteration with Obama to the demands to defund the police in its second iteration and a much more robust worldview about the intrinsic structural institutional nature of racism to American society. These are issues that require substantive systemic change, not superficial pious statements about unity, the soul of the country coming together and all of that which don't actually attend to the reasons why people erupt in rebellion in the first place. And as has historically been the case, the Black movement is so completely destabilizing is because it reveals all of the inherent inequities of U.S. society. It unmasks the myths, the central core mythologies of American society as unique, as exceptional, all of that gets exposed by looking, having any engagement with the history of Black people in the United States, having any understanding of the issues that Black people struggle over. And none, neither party have been able, obviously with the Republicans, but the Democrats as well have not been able to respond to the issues that compelled people to rebel in the first place. And so there's no reason to expect much to be different as we head towards the spring and the summer with the greatest impact of this pandemic being on Black communities with police being revealed as what Black people have always known as having a core of white supremacist logic and practices. None of that has been dealt with. And so until it is, I think the volatility and instability in the U.S., in the United States is here to stay. Thanks, Yunga. We've got about five minutes. Roger, do you wanna, I mean, oh, no, what I'm gonna do, we've got five minutes. So I'm gonna give the floor to each of you for maybe like one, two minutes. Roger, do you wanna start these final words? I know that I'm gonna go on for more than a minute, but I'll try. Yeah, the cake is, you know, the cake is disgusting. It's no good fiddling around with the frosting like, I don't know, legislation that touches upon the freely periphery of the police and how they behave in my view. You know, you have to accept that the whole 250 years ago in Paris in 1789, they had their declaration, I see, on Dédouard de l'Aub in America a couple of years earlier. No, about almost exactly the same time. They all got together and said, look, this is the society that we want to create. They were lying. They had no intention of creating an equal, free society where all men were equal. They were capitalist white supremacist landowners and they wrote the constitution to make absolutely certain that they never lost grip of their hold on power and that they were never gonna make a free country where people were free. And people may be possibly just beginning to realize that now. I read about it from time to time in lots of these things I read and the people who write about it obviously are entirely correct. How to throw that cake off the table and say, we gotta start cooking again from the beginning. This shit doesn't work. We cannot fiddle with the frosting on the outside and think that that is gonna have any effect in the short term or the long term. And all this crap about the Democrats and Republicans is just a red herring. It has nothing to do with my life or any of your lives or anything else. It's a complete red herring. It is the emperor's new clothes. Though this two-party system held up and supported by Citizens United, which has to go before any democracy can ever appear in this country. And it should go because wouldn't democracy be a great thing just to start with? And people are scratching their heads going, what the fuck is he talking about? We have a democracy. No, you don't. No, no, no. This is not a democracy. All right, I've finished. That was more than a minute. Apologize. To be in the room with everybody. Yanis, I'll go to you, except if, Nura, you've got to go. You've got to be honest if you've got to go. Okay, so Yanis, I'll go to you and then... I don't want to speak, thank you. You don't want to speak? Before you go, I have to say that you and Roger reminded me of that remarkable and prescient expression by the great Edward Said, who said that the Americans will never liberate themselves until Palestine is free. And he was so accurate, so spot on about that. So I don't need to say anything more on Palestine, you know where I'm standing on that. But let me remind everyone I have a duty to bring another person into the conversation regarding Biden as proof of what Roger said that I really see absolutely no hope coming from a White House occupied by Mr. Biden. Even though, you know, as a person, he may be better than Trump. And the person I'm going to bring into the conversation, just to mention him, is Julian Assange. Julian Assange is rotting in the Guantanamo of Britain in Belmarsh, and the Biden administration only two days ago came out with a statement that they will continue to pursue his extradition, effectively his murder in some supermax prison. Okay, so we don't forget. Finally, message to Roger. Well, the reason why we're having this conversation, talking it over, is because it's wonderful to have this occasion just to throw things at each other, even though we agree on everything more or less. But Roger, look, you know what? Five years ago, I made the mistake of throwing my hat in the political drain. And since then I've become more radical, but at the same time more worried, because you and I can take all our feelings and wear them on our sleeves and just vent the way you did, and the way I do too. You should hear me vent when I go off. But nothing is going to change until and unless we can talk to people who have been deluded, who have been oppressed, who've been suppressed, who've been exploited, who they're treated with, what you used to call it, 29 channels of shit on the television to choose from, and who become effectively enslaved in a machine that uses them as fodder to produce value for the very, very few. You need to talk to them, and you cannot say to them, here in Greece, I mean, this state of ours is a failed state, even more failed. I mean, the only reason why we're not more brutal than the United States, because we are more bankrupt and weaker, not because this state is not brutal. All states are brutal, capital states. But if I go out there and say to the people out there, I'm leading a political party, if I were to say to them, this place sucks, and we're all guilty, and Greece is an awful place. They will give me a brush you off, and we'll simply not respond. You have to speak to their concerns and you have to bring out in a dialectical way the truth, because it's somewhere inside them. They can see it. Most people are not evil, they're not racist in their DNA, and you've got to do it in a way you have to engage with them, but to finish off, you know what my great regret is? That my great friend Bernie Sanders in 2016 stayed in the Democratic Party. That was a stupid decision, and the decision that we are all going to regret for many, many years, after he was robbed of the nomination, he should have come out and created a socialist progressive, whatever, a democratic socialist party. Now he's stuck in the Senate trying to push the Biden agenda. I think that Trumpism is going to be strengthened by this. I hope I'm wrong. Thanks, Yanis. I just got a message from Ken Loach, who thought he was on tonight. So we'll have to explain to him next time that he's on next month. So, Nura, you've got 30 seconds. Oh, sorry. Actually, I want to end with you. So I'll give 30 seconds to Nura. That's what she sent me via WhatsApp. I'll talk to you for 30 seconds. I don't need to talk. So then he gave me 30 seconds. So this is what I'll just say in my 30 seconds is to say, you know, I hear from Yanis and from Kianga, as well as from Roger, this idea of developing the left out beyond the realm of ideas and a space where we're battling one another to think of how we translate that into political power, right? Whether that was in Bernie's hands to do or remains in art and it's now our own regardless of what we think about it. And in the meantime, as we're doing that, I just want to tell folks who are listening that really this work of changing, right? Of destroying the cake is rooted in local action and things that you can do in achieving, you know, changing your municipal funds of deep funding local, right police departments and ending police trainings in Israel and participating in boycott, divestment and sanctions, you don't need a savior. You can do it yourself. Thanks, Nura. Kianga, you've got the floor. So I would say about that, I think that's a really important point, which is that we need to talk about the development of big left parties or coalitions is important. But it in whatever form that it will assume will be the constitutive elements of it exists now and we see it everywhere with the proliferation of Black Lives Matter, organizing, mutual aid, all sorts of organizing and activism on the ground right now. The problem as I see it is that it's very disparate in some ways, people are cut off from each other. There's not enough generalization of what people in one area or one section are doing with other people. And so for me, the key is how do we wed that together? How do we pull that together? Not into one big thing that is only one thing, but that is effective as a bigger force in politics. And I think that for me, this is the big question that confronts our ability to go from where we are today to being able to actually influence in a substantive way the direction of things in this country. And I think that the need for that has never been clearer because of the depth of crisis in this country right now. And what I was saying before, before I lost sound and fell off, was the issue of the Trump supporters, this issue of political despair. It has been tagged death, death by despair, how we understand the reverse in life expectancy among ordinary white people driven by drug addiction, opioid addiction, alcoholism and suicide, all of which are evidence of a completely broken society. And yet our side has very little reach and ability to offer a different set of explanations for why that is. That is what the right has been so effective at in this country where they are able to use the Republican party as a mouthpiece to shape public opinion, to intervene on these questions, to provide a different kind of worldview where the Democratic party is this big baggy mess where the leadership is trying to contain these different constituencies which result in a very muddled political message around unity, searching for the soul of the country, that sort of thing. And so the challenge is, how do we as a left break out of either isolation or parochialism into a larger, coherent, powerful force that can also intervene on these big questions and shape the political questions themselves, the political debate. That's the challenge that we face, that we have to take up. Thanks, Kiunga. Comrades, we're gonna have to end it here. We could have actually chatted for many more hours. Noura's students would have been sad about that, I guess. But so thanks again, a million to Kiunga Yamata Taylor. She's the author of three amazing books. The links will be in the description of the video. Thanks to Noura Erekat. You've gotta get her book, Justice for Some. It's amazing. And again, the links will be posted below. Thanks to Yanis Varoufakis and Roger Waters for being my amazing co-host. So this is Let's Talk It Over. This was the premiere. It went pretty well. And next show will be in a month. So March 15th, Ken Loach, who actually didn't think he was on the show, but wanted to watch the show and couldn't find the link. Ken will watch the video in the next few days. He'll be on next month with Brian Eno. We'll have other guests very much looking forward to this as well. If you liked the chat, share it, like it, subscribe, do whatever you want with it. Love to everyone. Thank you, bye-bye. See you, comrades.