We talk to our friend Joe Costello about Trump’s tariffs, democracy, deindustrialization, the Yeltsinification of America, and the innate human desire for a communal life… We discuss globalization, why being against it has been such a political taboo until Trump, and why these tariffs will probably ultimately fail. We are not the 1950s anymore, when America was the sole industrial world power. This place can never return to what it was. The world has changed.

Trump thought he could force things — but with typical American arrogance, he didn’t think that America might not be as powerful as it once was, or that its financial system has been teetering on the edge, held up by toxic over-leveraged debt… Now he’s finding out that the system is a lot more fragile than anyone would admit.

Joe has unique insights into American politics. He’s self-taught and naturally brilliant and has in the past helped run some very big American political campaigns — including the presidential runs of Jerry Brown and Howard Dean. As part of that work, he intersected with Peter Nevarro, a big anti-globalist guy who has been shaping Trump’s tariff blitz against China and who used to be an environmentalist NIMBY in San Diego. If you’ve been following the news, Nevarro has been a constant presence on TV, defending Trump’s tariffs. He’s been dunked on by the business press and also had Elon Musk unloading on him on social media, calling Nevarro a retard, a moron, and “dumber than a sack of bricks”… So Nevarro is a man at the center of global, consensus-shattering events.

We last spoke to Joe about three years ago about his work on the politics of technology. And we highly recommend his new newsletter, where he writes about many of the things we talk about in this ep.

—Yasha

Don’t forget to come to our AGAINST NIHILISM LIVE! event in NYC. This Sunday, April 13th!

Some notes…

Wanted to give some links to a couple of things Joe mentioned in the ep: “The Ages of Jackson” by Arthur Schlesinger Jr. And the just-declassified Schlesinger memo to JFK about the need to get rid of the CIA. And some talks by J. Robert Oppenheimer: Lecture at the Princeton Theological Seminary, Lecture at Colorado University, and one on Analogy and Science.

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