>Danny and Derek welcome David Silverman, professor of Native American, Colonial American, and American racial history at George Washington University, for a discussion of the historical Thanksgiving holiday. They get into the origin and proliferation of the holiday’s myth, the historical Pilgrims and Plymouth Colony, the Wampanoag Indians, their culture, politics, and relationship with the English settlers, who and what the holiday serves in modern America, and more.

Requisite Yellow Parenti: The third world is not poor. You don’t go to poor countries to make money. […] These countries are not under-developed, they’re over-exploited.

>No President has the right to use unilateral executive authority to permit a U.S. missile strike against another nation. It invites a retaliatory attack. It is an impeachable offense.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Matt_Gaetz >The son of prominent Florida politician Don Gaetz and grandson of North Dakota politician Jerry Gaetz, Gaetz was raised in Fort Walton Beach, Florida. After graduating from the William & Mary Law School in Williamsburg, Virginia, he briefly worked in private practice before running for state representative. He served in the Florida House of Representatives from 2010 until 2016, and received national attention for defending Florida's "stand-your-ground law". In 2016, he was elected to the U.S. House of Representatives, and was reelected in 2018, 2020, and 2022.

This nepo baby is 42. He’ll likely be a significant political figure for a generation.

Russiagate derangement lumbers on: >We’ve spent those eight years learning a new lexicon: “misinformation”, “disinformation”, “microtargeting”. We’ve learned about information warfare. As journalists, we, like FBI investigators, used evidence to show how social media was a vulnerable “threat surface” that bad actors such as Cambridge Analytica and the Kremlin could exploit.

God forbid people should understand the propaganda regime they’ve lived under their entire lives.

>It is a sign of the depth of the structural crisis of capital in our time that not since the onset of the First World War and the dissolution of the Second International—during which nearly all of the European social democratic parties joined the interimperialist war on the side of their respective nation-states—has the split on imperialism on the left taken on such serious dimensions. Although the more Eurocentric sections of Western Marxism have long sought to attenuate the theory of imperialism in various ways, V. I. Lenin’s classic work Imperialism: The Highest Stage of Capitalism (written in January–June 1916) has nonetheless retained its core position within all discussions of imperialism for over a century, due not only to its accuracy in accounting for the First and Second World Wars, but also to its usefulness in explaining the post-Second World War imperial order. Far from standing alone, however, Lenin’s overall analysis has been supplemented and updated at various times by dependency theory, the theory of unequal exchange, world-systems theory, and global value chain analysis, taking into account new historical developments. Through all of this, there has been a basic unity to Marxist imperialism theory, informing global revolutionary struggles. > >However, today this Marxist theory of imperialism is commonly being rejected in large part, if not in its entirety, by self-proclaimed socialists in the West with a Eurocentric bias. Hence, the gap between the views of imperialism held by the Western left and those of revolutionary movements in the Global South is wider than at any time in the last century. The historical foundations of this split lie in declining U.S. hegemony and the relative weakening of the entire imperialist world order centered on the triad of the United States, Europe, and Japan, faced with the economic rise of former colonies and semicolonies in the Global South. The waning of U.S. hegemony has been coupled with the attempt of the United States/NATO since the demise of the Soviet Union in 1991 to create a unipolar world order dominated by Washington. In this extreme polarized context many on the left now deny the economic exploitation of the periphery by the core imperialist countries. Moreover, this has been accompanied more recently by sharp attacks on the anti-imperialist left. > >Thus, we are now commonly confronted with such contradictory propositions, emanating from the Western left, as: >1. one nation cannot exploit another; >2. there is no such thing as monopoly capitalism as the economic basis of imperialism; >3. imperialist rivalry and exploitation between nations has been displaced by global class struggles within a fully globalized transnational capitalism; >4. all great powers today are capitalist nations engaged in interimperialist struggle; >5. imperialist nations can be judged primarily on a democratic-authoritarian spectrum, so that not all imperialisms are created equal; >6. imperialism is simply a political policy of aggression of one state against another; >7. humanitarian imperialism designed to protect human rights is justified; >8. the dominant classes in the Global South are no longer anti-imperialist and are either transnationalist or subimperialist in orientation; >9. the “anti-imperialist left” is “Manichean” in its support of the morally “good” Global South against the morally “bad” Global North; >10. economic imperialism has now been “reversed” with the Global East/South now exploiting the Global West/North; >11. China and the United States head rival imperialist blocs; and >12. Lenin was mainly a theorist of interimperialism, not of the imperialism of center and periphery.

>The recent BRICS Summit in Kazan, Russia, should mark the end of the Neocon delusions encapsulated in the subtitle of Zbigniew Brzezinski’s 1997 book, The Global Chessboard: American Primacy and its Geostrategic Imperatives. > >Since the 1990s, the goal of American foreign policy has been “primacy,” aka global hegemony. The U.S. methods of choice have been wars, regime-change operations and unilateral coercive measures (economic sanctions). > >Kazan brought together 35 countries with more than half the world population that reject the U.S. bullying and that are not cowed by U.S. claims of hegemony.

This is an “unlisted” YouTube video because it’s for paid subscribers. https://www.usefulidiotspodcast.com/p/victoria-nuland-preemptively-warns

>“It’s the third election in a row,” says Rachel Maddow with a told-you-so grin, “in which Russia has tried to interfere to try to get Trump into the White House.” > >“He’s at it again,” responds former State Department spokesperson Victoria Nuland, the same smile on her face (it seems they’re struggling to hide their joy this time around). Nuland, who has worked for both George Bush and Dick Cheney, has become a go-to warrior for Dems as a leading pusher of stolen election claims as well as a driving force behind the Ukraine-Russian War. “This time [Putin’s] not even trying to hide his hand, and he has far more sophisticated tools.” > >Russia’s so-called tools in the past amounted to, as evidenced in the Mueller report and an FBI investigation, a few thousand dollars spent on social media posts, such as the ‘buff Bernie’ meme. This time, Nuland claims, Putin has a sophisticated new AI, plus $10 million spent on influencers to steal the election for Donald Trump. This accusation, of course, needs no further investigation from Maddow. > >Only another smile. > >On the other side of our terrible election, Donald Trump is making new threats against Iran that sound equally crazy. After his pet Sean Hannity asked why Kamala Harris is encouraging Iran to assassinate him (what?), Trump went on an unhinged rant about how the US should treat Iran. > >And when it comes to our terrible treatment of other countries, it’s harder to find a more one-sided relationship than the US-Ukraine alliance. And Ukrainian President Zelensky seems to be finally realizing that as well, calling out the US for pushing him into a needless war which has led to the deaths of countless Ukrainians. > >It’s a terrible week on corporate media as always. Watch with Katie and Aaron to hopefully laugh instead of cry at all of it. Thanks for supporting Useful Idiots, subscribe to watch the full episode here

>We have entered a strange, late-stage Empire era, comparable to the Soviet Union’s Glasnost, in which elements of the US imperial braintrust can see with blinding clarity Washington’s entire hegemonic global project is stumbling rapidly and irreversibly towards extinction, and announce so publicly - but their insight does not translate into evasive governmental action at home. The RAND Commission report elicited no mainstream coverage or comment whatsoever, proof positive there isn’t a concomitant effort to manufacture consent for its radical, far-reaching prescriptions. > >Were the Commission’s recommendations remotely plausible, a multipronged PR campaign would’ve immediately ensued to convince Americans of the righteousness of the Empire’s mission, and the necessity of investing in US “defense” to the tune of trillions. The media’s silence on the report’s damning findings definitionally reflects an omertà among the US political class. They well-know American reindustrialisation can’t happen. So, the fatal “disconnect” between Pentagon operational and industrial planning identified by RAND will endure, and with it ever-intensifying US military impotence. We’re spectating the Empire’s final acts in real-time.

> While there’s a permanent crisis of the family, there’s also a permanent opportunity for capitalism to re-assert its power via the reconstruction of the family.

> Throughout the book, Cooper traces the ways in which neoliberal and neoconservative forces have united to essentially move the responsibility for social reproduction from public or state responsibility to private and market responsibility.

> But Cooper is also keen to point out that left-wing responses to the crisis of the Fordist family wage have often ended up falling into a conservative trap of actually reifying the family as a singular transhistorical construction.

Melinda Cooper’s book: Family Values: Between Neoliberalism and the New Social Conservatism

>I hope you go over there, get your little brain all scrambled up with PTSD, and then come back here and see how much the United States cares about you, pookie.

Meet Wikipedia’s Ayn Rand-loving founder and Wikimedia Foundation’s regime-change operative CEO

Katherine Maher has since moved on to become CEO of NPR. She’s a member of the Council of Foreign Relations. She’s got security state & military-industrial complex written all over her resume. “But NPR isn’t state affiliated media.” Uh-huh.

Interview with Gabriel Rockhill about his article, Capitalism’s Court Jester: Slavoj Žižek.

The interviewer doesn’t have much interesting to say IMO. I would skip over most of his segments.

>[The cultural imperialist project] polices the left border of critique, but it does it at an objective vs subjective level. And what I mean by that is that there are coordinates for what the dominant discourse is, and what people need to know if they want to be in these conversations. And it creates a reality, which was very much my reality coming up, where I was interested in radical theory, because I grew up as a farm kid working construction. I knew what exploitation was. I knew what oppression was. I knew a lot of horrible things about the world because I was living them in the capitalist empire. And I gravitated toward what I thought were the most radical things, but I was not aware of the objective conditions that structured that radical discourse in such a way that all of the real discourses—which were anti-imperialist and liberatory—were actually largely excluded from those debates. And so I read a bunch of Negri and Žižek and Badiou and all of these people, and eventually realized, well, I’m looking in the wrong place. I’m looking in the place that the empire tells me I should look for radical theory.

PATO: The Pacific and Atlantic Treaty Organization

>Their cooperation is forcing NATO to build closer ties with like-minded countries in the Indo-Pacific. For the first time, senior officials from Australia, New Zealand, South Korea and Japan took part in a meeting with NATO defense ministers in Brussels on Thursday.

They baddies are “forcing” NATO into this. The poor imperial core, being dragged around again. #AlwaysTheSameMap

Citations Needed podcast: The Always Stumbling US Empire: "Stumbling", "sliding", "drawn into" war––the media frequently assumes the US is bumbling its way around the world. The idea that the United States operates in “good faith” is taken for granted for most of the American press while war is always portrayed as something that happens to the US, not something it seeks out.

Also, doesn’t “CRINK” already have a name, the Axis of Resistance?

Anyway, death to POTATO.

• The Intercept, 2021: Meet NATO, the Dangerous “Defensive” Alliance Trying to Run the World
• CounterPunch, 2022: NATO is Not a Defensive Alliance
• Noam Chomsky, 2023: NATO “most violent, aggressive alliance in the world”
• Thomas Fazi, 2024: NATO: 75 years of war, unprovoked aggressions and state-sponsored terrorism

John Mearsheimer is a realist who’s still and always faithful to the liberal international order, unlike the also liberal Jeffery Sachs. All-In Summit 2024: John Mearsheimer and Jeffrey Sachs

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Philosophy professor Hans-Georg Moeller, author of A Moral Fool: A Case for Amorality

>For [Harris] the two things are the same: on the one hand objective moral truth (universal morality), and on the other hand scientific facts about what increases wellbeing and what doesn’t. […] I think the two things are very different from one another.

>Just as religion is not something that depends on the existence of god, but is a specific social practice, a specific form of communication that relates to a certain unrealistic assumption; likewise morality is a specific discourse, a specific way of acting, that relates to and derives from making unrealistic assumptions about something that doesn’t exist.

Follow-up video: If Morality Exists Everything Is Permitted.

If I didn’t know any better, I’d say Democrats were the most gullible 😐

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