Fires In the Distance During Dark Days: One Year of Trump 2.0
In this episode we sit down with a member of Crimethinc to discuss the first year of the second Trump administration. In many ways the speed, severity, and violence of the first year has made the situation difficult to understand comprehensively. So, instead of just focusing on the swirl of events over the past 12 months, we are going to go back to the roots of what's happening today, the rise of neoliberalism.
To make sense of everything we have experienced over the last year we start with events that occurred almost 40 years ago, with the fall of the Soviet Union and the rise of neoliberalism to primacy. This started a dynamic in which wealth has been increasingly concentrated in the hands of a shrinking number, in which cost of living is rising and wages are not keeping up, in which debt has come to be the mechanism used to fill in those financial gaps. Combined with an increasing scarcity of resources neoliberalism has led to a world in which those with resources and investments are capable of mobilizing state violence to protect and expand those interests in conflict with an increasingly desperate populace. Since the Obama administration and the financial crisis of 2008 capital and power has accelerated the dynamic of concentration, setting the stage for the invasions of American cities, the brutalization of our communities, and the serial violation of "rights" that many of us thought of as inviolable.
Also during this period movements have arisen to oppose this concentration of power and wealth every step of the way. From the fights in the streets during the global anti-capitalist movement to the parks of Occupy, the barricades of the movements against the police in 2014 and 2020, or on the plains at Standing Rock, a dynamic of conflict has emerged along with the logistics and knowledge to sustain prolonged conflict with the state.
This is all setting the stage for what is happening in Minneapolis, where the DHS has deployed all available units, and still cannot control the streets. We finish our discussion talking about the implications of what is happening in Minneapolis and how this might just become a quagmire that the administration cannot commit more to or pull itself out of without significant costs.
We recorded this before the brutal ICE execution of Alex Pretti. Since then the people of Minneapolis have fought bravely in the streets against ICE, as well as the state police and local cops.
For more on what is happening in Minneapolis check out Crimethinc (https://crimethinc.com), Unicorn Riot (https://unicornriot.ninja) and tune in to this show as we bring you all updates from the ground.