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

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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

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.

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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

What if the Renaissance wasn’t a rebirth at all, but a survival strategy dressed in marble and Latin? We sit down with historian and novelist Ada Palmer to unwind the stories that turned a chaotic, war-ridden Italy into a “golden age” and explore why those stories still shape our politics, schools, and museums. Ada shows how nineteenth-century nationalism carved custom Renaissances for each country, how rulers redefined legitimacy as “having Roman stuff,” and why art, libraries, and Latin became tools of intimidation in a Europe full of insecure thrones.

Step inside Florence with a visiting envoy and feel how a courtyard of emperor busts, a child reciting Greek, and a bronze that looks alive can flip alliances overnight. Follow the printing press not as a spark but as a response to a library boom, amplified by Venice’s trade networks and the first book fairs. Track how Europe exported “no columns, no culture” across empires, pushing colonized elites to argue their rights in Ciceronian Latin because that was the only language of power the conquerors respected. And watch the myth of superiority assemble itself, piece by piece, into a worldview that still colors public debate.

Ada also challenges the feel-good claim that destruction breeds creation. Michelangelo’s own letters describe years lost to stress and war; peace and stability, not crisis, are what grow output and invention. Think of history as a river: trickles, leaf-widths, canoe-widths, all real beginnings depending on what you measure. Along the way, we touch on Machiavelli’s brutal eyewitness era, the Ottoman refusal to play a game Italy would always win, and the practical mechanics of censorship—past and present—that rarely resemble Orwell.

If you’re ready to rethink the Renaissance, question neat timelines, and see how propaganda becomes common sense, this conversation will give you new lenses. Subscribe, share with a friend who loves history myths, and leave a review with the one “truth” about the past you’re now willing to revisit.

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