2378 - How 9/11 Shapes Politics Today w/ Richard Beck

It's News Day Tuesday! Sam and Emma speak with Richard Beck, senior writer at n + 1 Magazine, to discuss his recent book Homeland: The War on Terror in American Life. First, Sam and Emma run through updates on Trump’s tariffs, Trump’s cabinet drama, Trump’s legal woes, Biden’s gift to Trump, deaths under Texas’ abortion ban, Missouri’s ban on trans care for minors, Charlotte’s airport workers’ strike, bird flu, and Mississippi’s runoff election, before diving a little deeper into Biden’s plan to expand Medicare and Medicaid to include weight loss drugs like Ozempic, Trump’s tariff plan, and problems in the Trump cabinet. Richard Beck then joins, jumping right into his particular perspective for the war on terror as a teenager at the time of 9/11, unpacking the bipartisan normalization of the shift to a domestic surveillance state backing a globalized project of enforced American hegemony, and looking at how the Democratic Party (under Obama), in particular, worked to simultaneously present the Bush administration as an aberration, while bureaucratizing, rationalizing, and, ultimately, reinforcing the exact project that was supposedly so absurd. After briefly touching on the window Occupy provided to the Obama administration’s blatant rejection of a progressive movement outside of the political establishment, Beck steps back, diving into the overwhelming media backlash to any sort of critical lens on US hegemony, with a direct line between the “owning the libs” politics of today and the Limbaughian obsession with making fun of the progressive identifiers of the nineties and aughts, alongside a direct tie-in to the bipartisan militarization of American society, be it tanks in police departments, an influx of Humvees on the street, or the catapulting of “SpecOps”-esque comic movies to the forefront of US culture, and how those elements worked to further legitimize the amoral (and often actively immoral) maintenance of US hegemony across the globe. Wrapping up, Richard, Sam, and Emma briefly touch on the particular role of oil in the War on Terror, and why it fails to actually explain the quest for American hegemony in an age of dwindling capitalist expansion, tackling the major role of the US plays well outside of petroleum reserves in an effort, more than anything else, to simply protect its impunity at the top of the global liberal order.

And in the Fun Half: Sam and Emma touch on future coverage of the Longshoremen’s strike, before diving into the continuing death and devastation coming from Texas’ abortion ban, and reflecting on Tim Pool’s desire to make every victim of rape a subject of public criticism if they want an abortion. They also tackle some backlash to Trump naming a pro-vaccination doctor to the position of Surgeon General, plus, you IMs!

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