Varn Vlog: Matt McManus on Liberal Socialism and Where The Right Is Now

Liberal socialism is an oxymoron.

I think you meant Tai Ping rebellion not boxer?

So good, thank you!

I am glad I made many of you mad but a lot of the talk about AOC and Sanders is more than I even implied. Matt and I don't share politics on this.

Stalin being inactive during first week of nazi invasion is myth popularized by khruschev during de-Stalinization.
Recent scholarship shows Stalin was giving out orders from his Dacha and had same long office hours activity.
Even anticommunist historians like Stephen kotkin acknowledge Stalin's ability as bureaucrat and to assume many positions while leading a large country

An unpopular coalition government led by a chancellor forced through on procedure in Germany changing it’s constitution to allow debt but only for military spending while they cut social services and politicians across the spectrum scapegoat immigrants for political support should be extremely worrisome for a number of reasons. Especially when they are concurrently trying to deploy an armored unit to Lithuania. Last year, German tanks with white crosses painted on them were driving towards Kursk as German generals were directing their use and bragging to the media about how they were going to win the battle of Kursk this time, in case anyone was wondering.

Luckily for us, that Rheinmetall plant in Ukraine is never going to open now that the Oreshnik is on the table. VW understands that their future is in China while Bayer and Monsanto’s investment in Ukraine is literally going up in flames. After Biden used divers trained 50 miles from my house to attack a NATO member’s critical infrastructure, Germany’s rearmament and reindustrialization has gone pretty much nowhere. A large military budget and an effective fighting force are not the same thing, just look at America losing yet another in a long string of defeats as Trump begged Yemen to allow the Harry S Truman to retreat out of the Red Sea after wasting a billion dollars losing two multimillion dollar MQ9s a week and dumping two F/A 18s into the ocean completely embarrassing themselves by losing to the poorest people on Earth. Again. Remember Operation Prosperity Guardian?

Trump did not come in trying to get Ukraine to surrender. He’s following the plan laid out by RAND since at least 2019 and reiterated in the infamous Project 2025 for offloading the war against Russia onto Europe so the United States can focus on its war on China, and one European leader after another has been bragging about their eager participation in the plan. That’s the reason the Marine Corps gives for getting rid of all its tanks and transitioning to an island-hopping force. Just like Biden did. Meanwhile, the intelligence, cash, and weapons have continued uninterrupted even as Trump abandons his fake “peace talks” to hang out with MBS and whatever name the puppet currently punishing Syria and Lebanon for having the gall to not give themselves totally to Western imperialism is using today. Reading policy papers and watching CSPAN congressional hearings and lectures at Georgetown’s Russia studies school is boring, but they aren’t hiding what they are doing, they are very open about it.

It’s 2025. Framing Bernie and AOC’s ability to turn out libs to their DNC fundraising tour as a positive development is profoundly insulting to your audience. The critique of them vis a vis the various crises in the Middle East is of their affirmative support for and defense of a whole number of policies that have killed millions of people to create a state of destabilization that allows the west to plunder resources and antagonize Iran, thus undermining Russia and China, while creating an environment at home that conjures up the worst imagery of authoritarian secret police from the popular media from which our citizens get all of their knowledge of history, military operations, and society. Most people who are concerned about the issues either don’t understand that broader context, or themselves generally support Western antagonism toward those countries, so the state can safely diffuse all of that energy by devolving the issue into a culture war.

AOC and Sanders are not leaders in any serious way, other than to try to herd people into the Democratic Party.

Strange world we live in. By a light year, the most impressive liberal socialist thinker is the American Victorian novelist, Edward Bellamy, who had explosive political impact in the first Gilded Age. Yet his name is rarely, if ever, mentioned in these internet conversations about the non-Marxist left. For those interested, Bellamy's major works are free to read on the net, and searching for "counterpunch bellamy" will yield a useful though inadequate introduction to his thought. Of course, no one reads anymore....

This episode would be a third of the size if McManus didn’t have that American academia brainrot of spamming ‘right’ all the time, right?

You don’t need to have a state and revolution copy under your pillow to understand even within the liberal framework that aoc said she’s not going to support primarying any democrat anymore as reported by wapo a while back, I really don’t understand why people continue to lie to themselves to support politicians like her. It’s also as if people memory holed the fact that she literally voted to stop the rail strike years back. The only goal these people have is “vote blue no matter who” til the end of time, they’re never going to change the Democratic Party. Hell, they’re already booting a hyper liberal like David Hogg and people still think they can ever push the Democratic Party left.

Props to Galadriel! :)