Today’s video is an attempt to bridge a gap I see in a lot of economic discussion on twitter, in academia and in mainstream journalism. There seems to be a growing sense that the US economic consensus is changing in a bigger way that it has for four decades. The old Reaganite consensus seems to be falling apart. Some deplore this shift, but many more seem to love it. What neither the pro- or anti-camp seems to be doing in a serious way is reckoning with how cryptocurrency fits into this picture. This is a major oversight. How can we talk about the economy, money and finance without discussing a growing insurgency against all of those things? Today’s video attempts to put the two pictures together, and point out that Crypto ideology is very much on one side of this broader economic debate.
For most of this channel’s existence I’ve worked to remain fairly non-partisan. I’m generally uninterested in the whole performative, substance-free mess of party politics in the United States. I’ve adopted the understandably popular “pox on both their houses” approach. Obama’s foreign policy left plenty for me to bitch about, and it’s easy to cover Trump as if he’s some unique biblical plague, somehow distinct from the party he leads.
But at a certain point you’ve got to acknowledge facts. The Democrats are an uninspiring bunch of managerial, condescending twerps. But if your expectations are low, they can be trusted to be reasonably honest and competent. 20 years, and four disasters have shown us that the Republican party is filled with dangerous anarchists, and even worse, people who pretend to be principled, but are eager to bow down to the dangerous anarchists in charge. This video chronicles the 9-11, Iraq war, 2008, and Coronavirus disasters and the political party that brought them all to us. It also lays out why no other media outlet will talk about this…
The times they are a’changing! Maybe it’s just turning 40, but I really do think US politics and society are undergoing a bit of a sea change. Nobody can argue that the past three years have been fun. On the other hand, I think that, so far, this period of transition is infinitely less bruising than the one the country went through in the 1970s and 1980s. In today’s video I try to knit the New Deal and Reagan eras into a single narrative of progress and change. It is punctuated with Joker level chaos of course.
I really do believe that 2020 presents an opportunity to help the country move on to its next cycle of growth and progress. I have no idea who would best represent and shape that change. But I do know that whoever gets elected in November, even if it’s Donald Trump, will have that opportunity. I’d really rather it wasn’t Donald Trump. Today’s video sets out my general attitude to US history and the 2020 election. It’s useful viewing if you want to know my biases before this year of election madness.
In today’s video I made brief reference to Ilhan Omar and her supposed antisemitism. The most interesting thing about this is that most of the people pushing that story have no idea what she’s actually been accused of. The tweet from 2012, which she has apologized for, mentioned in the video, wouldn’t strike most of the world as antisemitic, but it definitely is according to US standards that I agree with. The controversies over the past few months aren’t antisemitic by any fair definition. She has simply called attention to the fact that US politicians are paid a great deal of money by organizations like AIPAC to privilege Israeli interests over US interests.
A year ago I probably would have been more skeptical of Omar, but the sad fact is that the US congress has proved their allegiance to Israel, over and over. The Omar controversy itself makes this clear, but there are much more concrete actions to point to. I don’t know much about the “Boycott, Divestment and Sanction” or “BDS” campaign against Israel. What I do know is that multiple state legislatures have imposed flagrantly unconstitutional laws that penalize US citizens that refuse to sign anti-BDS pledges. Regardless of the worth or evil of BDS as a program, that’s a straightforward limitation of the first amendment rights of US citizens in a foreign country’s favor. Before this year, I was content to chalk the anti-BDS excesses up to Evangelical Christians in red states who support Israel because they want it to die in the end times that they believe an Israeli state will bring about. The US courts have already ruled versions of these law unconstitutional, and I thought that that slow progress would deal with the issue. Unfortunately not. A bi-partisan group of legislators has mounted an anti-BDS crusade, and is trying to pass national law that allows States to discriminate on the basis of speech and association. That’s outrageous. That’s a clear example of US legislators being bought to put allegiance to Israel over the rights of US citizens. You can read more about this horror here.
Very few of the people who attack Omar have reckoned with this insanity. What’s more, they make assumptions about who she is, and what she believes. Many supposedly serious journalists attempted to pull the “Oh yeah, well why doesn’t she attack Saudi Arabia!?!?!” card. This is ridiculous because she is one of the most consistent voices in Congress against the US-Saudi destruction of Yemen. She is also a supporter of LGBT rights, something else that is ignored in the absurd attacks on her. Our government and media is trying to turn one of the most consistent and heroic opponents of US foreign policy into a racist caricature. It’s pretty awful.
