Start with the symptom: everything still moves, yet less gets done. We unpack decadence as a live condition—where empires posture with airstrikes instead of strategy, markets float on bubbly valuations, and everyday obligations dissolve into choice and churn. Rather than predicting apocalypse, we track how capabilities thin out while systems grow heavier, and we ask what it would take to reverse that pattern.

Our conversation maps the terrain across geopolitics and political economy. We examine military hollowing, Trump-era incentives, and the shift from global projection to regional coercion that masquerades as multipolar “freedom.” We dig into Brexit’s exposure of Britain’s productive weakness, the EU’s turn to securitization, and why faltering Belt and Road ambitions recalibrate power rather than replace it. On the economic front, we separate real profit rates from rent-inflated revenues, explain how administrative bloat and litigation fuel cost disease in sectors like education, and show why fictitious capital turns asset inflation into the only viable growth model. Elite overproduction and de-skilling aren’t just memes; they’re structural forces that capture institutions while eroding competence.

Culture mirrors these dynamics. Tools like standpoint epistemology and intersectionality began sharp and specific, then inflated under attention incentives until they explained everything and clarified nothing. The attention economy rewards maximalism; conspiracy offers coherence on the cheap. Meanwhile, social reproduction falters: loneliness rises, trust collapses, and the language of total choice encroaches on domains that need durable obligation. You don’t have to be religious to see the cost—families, chosen and given, remain our basic infrastructure of care, and population decline reflects deeper social illness, not just private preference.

We don’t offer a rewind button. Renewal means rebuilding capacity: sectoral strategies that let unions scale across fragmented workplaces; simplification that cuts compliance labyrinths; investment that privileges real production over valuations; and a civic culture that re-centers duty and measurable outcomes. Decadence is a diagnosis, not a fate. If this resonates, share the episode, leave a review, and subscribe—then tell us where you see decay turning into growth in your own world.

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Musis by Bitterlake, Used with Permission, all rights to Bitterlake

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Crew:
Host: C. Derick Varn
Intro and Outro Music by Bitter Lake.
Intro Video Design: Jason Myles
Art Design: Corn and C. Derick Varn

Links and Social Media:
twitter: @varnvlog
blue sky: @varnvlog.bsky.social
You can find the additional streams on Youtube

Current Patreon at the Sponsor Tier: Jordan Sheldon, Mark J. Matthews, Lindsay Kimbrough, RedWolf, DRV, Kenneth McKee, JY Chan, Matthew Monahan, Parzival, Adriel Mixon, Buddy Roark, Daniel Petrovic,Julian

Start with a word we all hear too much: fascism. Now ask why, with the term everywhere, our understanding keeps getting worse. That’s the puzzle we dig into as Sudip Bhattacharya joins C. Derick Varn to dissect how American punditry flattens history, confuses categories, and protects the status quo with buzzwords instead of analysis. From cable news panels that treat any state action as “authoritarian,” to former neocons who reinvent themselves as respectable anti‑Trump voices while dodging their own records, we map the machinery that makes bad takes inevitable.

The conversation moves from media habits to concrete stakes: Israel‑Palestine as a settler colonial project, the perverse weaponization of antisemitism, and the bizarre spectacle of far‑right figures courting Israel while trafficking in bigotry. We examine how this fog invites real antisemitism to grow and erases anti‑Zionist Jewish voices. Then we turn local: the Cuomo vs. Mamdani showdown in New York, where Islamophobic tropes, AI smear ads, and institutional panic collided with a multiethnic, youth‑driven coalition that showed what organizing can do. The story isn’t about a savior candidate; it’s about constituencies learning to convert movement energy into votes and power.

Along the way, we chart the collapse of elite “competence”—tech barons LARPing masculinity, markets priced on fantasy, and leaders who cannot restore a fading consensus. That might sound bleak, but it’s also an opening. We talk windows of opportunity: shifting public opinion on Palestine, younger voters rejecting old scripts, and the practical tools needed to make fast‑moving crises count—unions, tenant groups, legal defense, and media with memory. Precision beats panic. Structure beats vibes. If punditry sells amnesia, we trade in context: how we got here, what the rails look like, and where to lay new track.

Listen, share with someone who’s tired of vibes without history, and leave a review with the sharpest question this episode raised for you. Your notes shape what we tackle next.

Link Discussed: https://revolpress.substack.com/p/comfortable-lies-how-pundits-enable

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Musis by Bitterlake, Used with Permission, all rights to Bitterlake

Support the show

Crew:
Host: C. Derick Varn
Intro and Outro Music by Bitter Lake.
Intro Video Design: Jason Myles
Art Design: Corn and C. Derick Varn

Links and Social Media:
twitter: @varnvlog
blue sky: @varnvlog.bsky.social
You can find the additional streams on Youtube

Current Patreon at the Sponsor Tier: Jordan Sheldon, Mark J. Matthews, Lindsay Kimbrough, RedWolf, DRV, Kenneth McKee, JY Chan, Matthew Monahan, Parzival, Adriel Mixon, Buddy Roark, Daniel Petrovic,Julian

Daniel Tutt returns to continue our series on intellectuals. The hardest truths are the ones that feel personal. We take Robert Michels’ “iron law of oligarchy” into the engine room of the SPD and ask why organizations built for emancipation so often drift into elite rule. From the paradox of proletarian vs bourgeois intellectuals to the cultural gravity of anti-socialist repression, we trace how habitus, patronage, and safety nets shape who gets to be “militant”—and who can’t afford to be.

Then we pivot to Jacques Rancière’s worker poets and autodidacts, setting aesthetic emancipation against “scientific socialism.” Do movements need science to map capital, or dignity to sustain courage—and can they live without either? Along the way, we pressure-test managerial class narratives from Burnham and Michael Lind, explain why pluralist fixes fail without leverage over capital, and pull hard lessons from Chile’s experiment: provisional leadership, worker coordination, and a sober reckoning with the violence embedded in class order.

With mass politics hollowed out into cartel parties and charisma’s glow fading, we sketch practical designs that resist capture: rotation and recall, sortition to break patronage, transparent conflicts-of-interest, democratic unions with real guardrails, and para-academic spaces that spread rigorous tools beyond the university’s segregating incentives. Overproduced elites complicate the picture; some can bridge worlds, but leadership must be constrained by accountability and class rootedness, not résumé prestige.

This is not resignation masquerading as realism. It’s an argument for building institutions that expect drift and correct it in real time—where dignity anchors motivation and scientific analysis sharpens strategy. If that sounds like the synthesis you’ve been looking for, press play, save the reading list, and tell us: which guardrails would you make non-negotiable? Subscribe, share with a comrade, and leave a review with your top design ideas for anti-capture organizations.

Send us a text

Musis by Bitterlake, Used with Permission, all rights to Bitterlake

Support the show

Crew:
Host: C. Derick Varn
Intro and Outro Music by Bitter Lake.
Intro Video Design: Jason Myles
Art Design: Corn and C. Derick Varn

Links and Social Media:
twitter: @varnvlog
blue sky: @varnvlog.bsky.social
You can find the additional streams on Youtube

Current Patreon at the Sponsor Tier: Jordan Sheldon, Mark J. Matthews, Lindsay Kimbrough, RedWolf, DRV, Kenneth McKee, JY Chan, Matthew Monahan, Parzival, Adriel Mixon, Buddy Roark, Daniel Petrovic,Julian