Reader Mailbag: Audio From A Collapsing State

0:00Audio from a collapsing state. Hey everybody, I wanted to record this audio mail bag today, it's an extremely confusing time. I don't think there's any other way to put it. And so a lot of people have a lot of questions and I've been getting a lot of emails from subscribers asking to be kept up to date on a few things. And as I always say, this is a really useful exercise for me. You bring questions to me and topics to me and I get to work out some of the things that I've been thinking about some of the little fragments that have been going through my head. If you find yourself wanting to ask me a question for one of these mail bags, whether it's

1:00an audio mail bag or a written one, all you have to do is email me at jysextonatgmail.com or you can always reply to one of the posts on dispatches from a collapsing state. But it's an odd time, odd time. As somebody says here, the difference between what serious people are saying and what mainstream corporate news is saying on top of the fact that we are all being constantly gaslit by this fascist regime, it's bewildering sometimes. So I wanted to have a discussion today about a few of these topics and I was really grateful for the people for writing it. We're going to be talking about the economic impact or potential economic impact that we could be seeing stemming from the war with Iran.

2:01We're going to talk about the larger issue of if we are to defeat fascism and if we are to have a better world, what would that mean on the other side of the victory in terms of healing and sort of turning in the corner? As well, we're going to talk about the phrase Epstein class, which has become more and more popular in recent days, particularly, of course, as the fallout from the Epstein scandal. We're going to talk about this continued claim that all of this is a distraction from this or that or what the motivations are behind all these things. There's a lot to learn there, I think, about deeper politics and also how people experience the world and how they try and make meaning or at least make logic from illogical things. And finally, we're going to talk about evangelicalism and how it affects people, how it affected me and how it is that we might heal from the type of trauma that comes from that.

3:03I just want to say first of all, thank you to everybody who is a paid subscriber. This is an independent media venture and I'm not supported by any corporations. It's really funny, the moment that I started talking about capitalism and I started talking about actual deeper politics, corporate media really didn't want to have conversations anymore. So I depend on your support and so it means the absolute world to me that in the middle of all of these things that you would put your faith in me and support this project. If you haven't already, if this has helped you or resonated with you, please consider becoming a paid subscriber. Alright, first question. This is from Charlie. I've been following your analysis of the war and have been shocked by how different of a picture I'm getting from mainstream news. They seem to be on another planet entirely. Could you talk more about the economic pain you'd mentioned and what regular people can do?

4:04Sure, Charlie. There's a reason why my analysis is so different from corporate media. You might have noticed, depending upon how old you are and how close of attention you've paid to things, and I wrote about this a few weeks ago before the war even started. The moment that a war breaks out, corporate media, as well as the, quote, unquote, resistance party of the Democratic Party, they all snap to attention. The reason is because when it comes to foreign affairs, particularly when it comes to war, the solidarity between the wealth class and the oligarchical classes, and all of the organs that are underneath them, and I'm counting in those organs, I'm counting corporate news, and I'm counting the Democratic Party. They all come together because all of the differences that we actually see in the parties, they're largely on the cultural spear.

5:05How it is that we're supposed to talk about things or what is acceptable and what isn't acceptable. When it comes to foreign affairs, or war, or the strategy of empire, they are so tied to the financial fallout from these things, including the fact that many of these people who own these corporations and guide these corporations are also heavily invested in the military industrial tech complex, which is the new sort of configuration that we're dealing with now, that they want everything to go well. They want the United States of America to win a war, and if the United States of America isn't doing well in a war, they want to go ahead and launder that and make it feel better than it is. The reason for that is because they are also tied to the American stock market. All of these places where the game has been rigged for them, it's basically a slot machine that they put their quarter in and they get back $10,000 for every quarter.

6:10They are going to launder this in order to keep people from being afraid, in order to keep people from panicking, and they are going to air almost non-stop propaganda. It's always been like this, with a few exceptions, of course, when something like the war and Vietnam sort of went astray, all of a sudden you started to see some journals who were like, hey, something's going wrong here. You also saw this, of course, with the war on terror as it went on and on and on and became a forever war, that was when it was okay to talk about it because the shock of the moment was able to pass and they didn't have to launder it as strictly as they did in the past. Now, the larger economic shock of this, it comes from a few things. Of course, I've been trying to say this whenever I am going on some sort of a live stream or writing some sort of an article, it's hard, I think, for people who are not locked

7:11in or plugged in to really understand what's going on in this war. It is so chaotic and so kinetic and there are so many different factors that are coming together, and if you rely on something like corporate news or the propaganda of this regime, you think that America is doing pretty well in this situation, but in fact, Iran is absolutely overperforming us because they understand the vulnerabilities of American empire and neoliberal global capitalism. I've been listening to a free preview of audio from a collapsing state because I depend on subscribers in order to keep this project going and growing. I do limit this to paid subscribers. If my work has resonated with you, if it has helped you, please consider becoming a paid subscriber. It really helps me, it really helps this project and I just really appreciate the support.