Love Thy Neighbor as Thyself? (Half the Answer #64, with Matt McManus)

Trent and Caitlin catch up with political science assistant professor Matt McManus. They discuss the narratives surrounding resistance in the Twin Cities, the loud and ugly voices on the right describing an ideology of cruelty and dehumanization, and the power of regular people to puncture false claims from the government.

Half the Answer can be heard on Spotify, on Apple, on YouTube, on Amazon, and elsewhere via its RSS feed.

Resources:

As ICE Arrests Increased, a Higher Portion Had No U.S. Criminal Record

Winning: An Interview with Christopher Rufo

What Is Post-Modern Conservatism

The Political Theory of Liberal Socialism

Transcript

**Bumper [00:00:00]**
Liberal Currents presents Half the Answer, with your hosts Caitlin M. Green and Trent R. Nelson.

**Caitlin M. Green [00:00:30]**
Well, happy days continue to be on their way. I just got a notification from DHL that there's been a delay in delivery, but we ordered it, and so it is coming. So happy days will be here again. This is Half the Answer, where understanding a question is half the answer. I'm Caitlin Green, I'm a linguist, I'm an editor, I'm a writer, all the things. And Trent is here with me. Trent Nelson, historian, philosopher, cool hat wearing guy and all the other cool things. Trent, how's it going today?

**Trent R. Nelson [00:01:06]**
Oh, it is going so well, other than my neck slash arms traps.

**Caitlin M. Green [00:01:13]**
Just terrible. Anyway, experiencing our age, and that's fine. We're just another pair of white millennials with a podcast.

**Trent R. Nelson [00:01:26]**
We're really an endangered species.

**Caitlin M. Green [00:01:28]**
We might be.

**Trent R. Nelson [00:01:31]**
Correct, correct. They need tariffs against podcast equipment for white folks like us, absolutely. We're experiencing our age. We're also experiencing, I feel like our environment, America is maybe dealing with the crank neck right now to some degree, and so that has manifested upon my body.

Well, Caitlin, we have had such -- I feel like I say this every time -- we have such brilliant talks with such wonderful folks, whether it's Gillian or Marissa or Evan or, well, just so many folks. We love a good recidivist. We love somebody who comes back and chats with us. And of course, as ICE is terrorizing Minneapolis, as the White House is terrorizing the country, well, that means we got to talk far right folks, and to do that, well, we have our far right folk talker. His name is Matt McManus. He does so many other wonderful things. He is an assistant professor at Spelman College -- he's not the assistant professor at Spelman, they have multiples -- author of Political Theory of Liberal Socialism, as well as many other books. He is just a busy fella, and certainly we appreciate his time. Good morning, my friend. How are you today?

**Matthew McManus [00:02:55]**
Well, like you, the environment hasn't really done all that much for my mental health, but we keep calm and carry on. That's all you can do in these circumstances.

**Trent R. Nelson [00:03:05]**
All you can do, Matt. Well, Matt, the whole country, much of the world, in fact, is keeping their eyes and ears peeled upon Minnesota, upon our country in greater, but upon Minnesota and Minneapolis, St. Paul really together, because what's been going on over the last weeks has been really dreadful. Several individuals have been killed, of course, and, well, Matt, you'd think that that would merit universal condemnation. You'd think that everyone would be on basically a similar side, as per, well, the federal government can't be killing people all willy nilly. And yet, well, the internet begs to differ with the host of this program. There are many folks who think that this is justifiable, including folks within the White House, including, like, I don't know, the President of the United States. Let's talk about all of that. How does the far right justify political violence against regular folks?

**Matthew McManus [00:04:12]**
Well, I think there's a couple things to say here about this. Before we even get into that, I just want to say, shout out Minneapolis. I was telling Caitlin before we started, I went there a long time ago, back in 2014, sat down in a bar to get a really good craft beer for the region. Somebody came up and asked me, and they're like, "What beer are you drinking?" And I said, whatever it was, was a long time ago. And they're like, "Oh, good taste, man. You should come to this party with us afterwards." Gave me the details and all this stuff. And I'm like, man, this whole Midwesterners are nicer than usual -- totally, totally legit. And I had a great time there. Stereotypes are true sometimes.

**Caitlin M. Green [00:04:53]**
They are, yeah.

**Matthew McManus [00:04:55]**
And so I have a lot of fondness for the city. I really enjoyed my time there. Not the weather, but you can't have everything.

**Caitlin M. Green [00:04:56]**
But that whole thing also explains why it was such a mistake hitting Minneapolis the way that they did, right? Because you would expect somebody who is that warm towards somebody who just happened to be nearby to also show up for their neighbors. For example, if their neighbors are in danger. Like, weird.

**Matthew McManus [00:05:16]**
I know, right? I mean, that's what I was thinking too. When they went, I was like, man, that's probably the wrong city to fuck with, because these seem like the kind of people who would be loyal and caring, which means they're not exactly going to be MAGA folk, per se, right? And boy, oh boy, has that turned out to be the case. So again, solidarity with the people in Minneapolis, right? You've been an inspiration to us all. I noticed even Bruce Springsteen wrote a "Streets of Minneapolis" that came out the other day. So the city's been canonized in the Great American Songbook, right? Not everyone can say that.

But in terms of what the far right's motivation for this are, I think we could start with the more kind of superficial rationales for it, those kind of things that have been floated for the last five years or so. A lot of people on the far right -- Matt Walsh, Chris Rufo come to mind immediately -- have been pretty overt about what the strategy is here. They think that Trump and MAGA made a pretty serious mistake in 2020 with the George Floyd shooting, when they think that a lot of people kind of backed down in the face of protests and accusations of racism and police violence, and this kind of opened the door to the left, kind of eking its way in and gaining control of the narrative. So the argument that's been made strategically by people like Rufo has been, we don't back down this time, right? If they make accusations against ICE or claim that we're engaging in draconian policing or immigration tactics, that we don't cede an inch, because if we cede an inch, they're going to take a mile, right?

But I also think that there are ideological motivations behind this, beyond just these kind of strategic incentives. The ideological motivations, and we can get deeper into this, are that any kind of concession smacks of weakness or presents weakness. Obviously, to many people on the far right, being perceived as weak, or being actually weak, is pretty much the worst thing that you can possibly be, right? That's for libs and progressives and feminists and whatever Hollywood's getting behind at any given time, right? And so they don't want Donald Trump to offer any kind of concessions, because one of the reasons they like figures on the hard right is that they're perceived to be strong, uncompromising, authoritative symbols of a kind of masculine order. All that stuff.

**Caitlin M. Green [00:07:26]**
Right, yeah. But also, they are small beans, and they get sad. They get so sad. So for example, Tom Homan this morning was whining about how ICE agents day after day can't eat in restaurants, day after day having people spit on you and blow whistles at you, day after day having all these threats at you, day after day having people trying to interfere with you. It's important to remember they are human, these lovely little men. And then, of course, we have Mike Cernovich saying that the whistles are actually like a form of violence. So he said, "High IQ people don't respond well to shrill noises, from smoke alarms to those hearing loss causing machines that terrorists use against ICE." To be honest, those things should be considered a violent weapon.

**Matthew McManus [00:08:18]**
Right? Well, right? I was gonna say, like --

**Caitlin M. Green [00:08:22]**
I think they're safe. Actually, they damage hearing for life, these whistles. Like, I've got one in my pocket right now. I don't think it's damaging anybody's hearing, but hey, arrest me for possession of a violent weapon, I guess.

**Trent R. Nelson [00:08:35]**
Yeah, you better go tell all the referees in every sport, I guess. I mean, I don't know, if you're hanging around whistles, you might be in some real trouble. Yeah, absolutely.

**Matthew McManus [00:08:47]**
Yeah, a Newsmax commentator the other day was also like, holding up his phone like this, and being like, "Look, if you're an ICE agent, does this really look all that different from a gun?" And I was like, come on.

**Caitlin M. Green [00:08:57]**
I love to record videos like this. This is my favorite.

**Trent R. Nelson [00:09:00]**
All I do is record videos this way, absolutely, yeah.

**Matthew McManus [00:09:04]**
Like, at some point you're just like, look, man, just give it up, right? I mean, it's starting to become -- it was always ridiculous, right? -- but beyond parody at this point, so just take the L and move on.

But I think, look, to my point, I don't think that a lot of them really are capable of making that pivot all that effectively. The one exception actually seems to be Donald Trump. And I think that's because, fundamentally, Donald Trump, for all his kind of presentation or ostentations to strength, is fundamentally a man who is very concerned about what other people think about him, not very far deep down, right? And he also has no personal loyalty to anyone, and we've seen that again and again and again over the decades, really, right? He doesn't have any loyalty to his wife. So why do the sycophants think that he'd show any kind of fidelity to them?

And so I think that Trump has a kind of grunt level understanding that this is unpopular. And so obviously, look what's happened to Bovino, and what very well could happen very not too long from now -- God willing, right? -- just throw them under the bus.

**Trent R. Nelson [00:10:09]**
Do you think that the American people see as clearly this sort of irony -- that they're yelling about whistles while justifying using deadly force against people? I mean, it seems to me, just from my observations, that the American people, by and large, aren't buying that. And I suspect it's because they do see the irony of this sort of situation, of being chastised for yelling and whistleblowing and expressing themselves, while these people defend the use of what seems unconscionable for us, and we've seen it in videos. I think that's another part of it. Perhaps the lie would do better without us seeing all of these videos illustrating how it doesn't seem to match the reality that we all share.

**Matthew McManus [00:11:05]**
Well, I think there are a lot of ironies here, right? I'm old enough to remember when the strident right wing narrative was everyone in this country was becoming too soft and too sensitive, and everyone was deeply offended by everything, and we needed to recover this kind of hyper masculine attitude that was going to be inoculated against taking any kind of offense. And now you have people who are saying that having whistles blown in their face is going to cause deafness for life, right? It's just the worst travesty that could possibly happen to you, and a bunch of tough guys who apparently aren't able to deal with what a cashier working at Walmart deals with day in and day out, which is people yelling at them and cursing them, right? I mean, if you don't like that, then just go spend some time in the service industry. I was a cashier for seven years, and I can guarantee you'll hear people saying all kinds of things to you that you didn't want to hear, right?

And I think that there's another irony here, which is that for as long as I have been around talking about politics, there's been this constant criticism of gender theory, performativity theory, everything that the right calls postmodern cultural Marxism. And yet, what's become very, very clear about a lot of these hyper masculine right wing personalities is that a lot of it is performative masculinity, right? They like to perform being tough guys. They like to perform being military guys, and then they break like kudzu the minute you so much as stare at them the wrong way. So I just think this whole thing is very, very, very funny in some respects. It'd be funny in every respect if it wasn't so tragic in many others, right?

**Caitlin M. Green [00:12:40]**
Well, yeah, because it's embarrassing to be like a scared ICE agent. That's so silly. But also, if you're standing in front of a scared ICE agent, then you're in danger. So it is also quite frightening, absolutely.

**Matthew McManus [00:12:55]**
And again, I want to say with all seriousness that the people in Minneapolis who are putting themselves on the line to make what is a well needed statement have shown enormous courage -- more courage than anyone in the administration currently has ever shown in the course of their life. And it's been quite inspiring to see a lot of Americans stand up with the people of Minneapolis and say, hey, enough is enough.

**Trent R. Nelson [00:13:18]**
Absolutely. I've had friends from New York, where I'm from, all the way to California, up in Minnesota in fact as well, sort of marveling at what is going on there. And I think they took the administration by surprise. Do you think that the administration targeted that sort of, as you were alluding to before, to try to almost like physically right the wrongs of 2020? You go back to the place where it all fell apart and you try to do it the right way this time.

**Matthew McManus [00:13:52]**
I think so. I mean, Minneapolis occupies an unusual place in the very online right imaginary, for a number of reasons. One is the association that you're talking about. But there's also all the stuff that's happened recently about the alleged fraud by Somalis and the Somali community there. Donald Trump and Matt Walsh and all of them have been playing that up now for the better part of several months. Then there's, of course, the fact that Tim Walz is the governor there. Tim Walz obviously just ran not too long ago against the Trump campaign, and was widely seen to be on the progressive edge of Kamala Harris's team. So there's a lot of negative associations there.

I really think they imagined that they were going to get a big symbolic win by sending ICE into the city and putting everyone there in their place. But as we can see very transparently now, boy, oh boy, were they wrong. If anything, what this has exposed is just how venal and cruel a lot of what the administration is doing is, not to mention just completely ineffective.

**Caitlin M. Green [00:14:57]**
Yeah. Yes, yeah. And they are playing up this idea that they're taking violent, scary, dangerous people off the streets, right? And they have to yell it louder and louder every time another picture of a little kid getting detained comes out, which keeps happening, right?

We here in the Portland area, we have Diana Crespo, who's seven years old, who was taken to Texas. They were picked up while her parents were looking for medical care for her because of a nosebleed that wouldn't stop. She's doing better, by the way. Her nosebleed is resolved. She's okay. But the little boy, Liam, who was taken from Minneapolis, he is not doing well in detention in Texas. He has gotten ill since he got there. And the situation there is unreal. It's completely unacceptable conditions there.

So the more people are aware of that and are concerned about that, the more DHS and Matt Walsh and all these people have to be like, "We picked up another rapist off the streets. Don't worry, we're protecting you, it's another criminal." Meanwhile, as of this month, just about 29% of the people that are getting detained have a criminal conviction, and only 5% of those, it was a violent crime. It is an absurdly small number of the people that they're picking up.

**Trent R. Nelson [00:16:27]**
For every child who is taken, for every person who is murdered -- and of course, every time we see it on camera, it just, I think, dilutes and almost kills that message of "we are protecting and cleaning up the streets." How could you be? The streets don't feel safer. When you look out at these videos, the streets don't feel safer. No one feels safer. No one feels safer that children have been abducted.

This is mass madness, and I think that it very much like the war on terror that we grew up on -- for every atrocity that is committed, you turn X amount of people against what you're trying to do. And not only them, but their families, and most likely their children, are going to grow up and be like, "Yeah, they invaded Minneapolis when I was eight, and I still remember it, and I hate them."

**Caitlin M. Green [00:17:38]**
Because at this point, a lot of people living in the Twin Cities have gone out to mind their own business and had a problem show up on their way to whatever their business was, where there's trucks and vans and gas canisters all over the place and they can't get through the neighborhood they were trying to drive through. Like, it is absolutely in their face all the time that they are being invaded by this ridiculous force of chumps and weirdos who are all heavily armed and have these armored trucks and things.

Yeah, I think you can't help but negatively polarize people against you when you're being so aggressively awful to them and wrecking every day of their lives in one way or another, and then, on top of it all, kidnapping their neighbors and pretending that those neighbors were all violent criminals when they weren't. We've got over 25,000 people in detention with no conviction at all. They're just stuck because they were the wrong color, right?

**Trent R. Nelson [00:18:42]**
And this is what happens when we ask a group of goons to close their eyes and imagine what an American looks like, all right, because you can't do it, okay. They look like all of us. They look like everyone. They look like the population of the planet, because that's kind of our claim to fame, right?

**Caitlin M. Green [00:19:03]**
No, we can have a white utopia where there's nobody else.

**Trent R. Nelson [00:19:08]**
Yeah, they tried that several different places, and I don't think the critical --

**Caitlin M. Green [00:19:13]**
And it's always worked out so great. I don't understand what you're talking about. It's always been so good.

**Trent R. Nelson [00:19:18]**
So much of it is compounding ironies, right? They are asking us to not only not take into account what we see with our own eyes on the video camera. They ask us to not believe our neighbors. They ask us to not believe our own feelings. It is very much a "disconnect yourself from everything around you, and listen to what the state television says" -- Fox News or Newsmax, or any of these other places -- "or listen to what we say, we're going to tell you the truth. It may have looked like we murdered that guy, but turns out he kicked one of our vehicles several weeks ago. So that settles it, doesn't it?"

**Caitlin M. Green [00:20:18]**
Well, yeah, okay, let's get into that, right? So a video came out just yesterday of Alex Pretti, getting angry at an ICE van, or one of those armored vehicles -- or was it an SUV? Anyway, he spat at the car, and then he kicked the taillight, and then guys ran out of the car and tackled him and beat him up. And then they got back in the car once a bunch of neighbors came and started yelling, right?

And so this was about a little over a week before Alex Pretti was shot in the back of the head and murdered. And he, again, he never drew a weapon. There's all this stuff about, "Well, he had his loaded gun, and therefore whatever happened to him was justified." And even while he was as mad as I've ever really seen anybody, he still kept the weapon in the back, in the holster. I don't know, just feels like a level of restraint that some of these guys had never imagined exercising, right?

**Matthew McManus [00:21:34]**
No, without a doubt, right? I mean, when you see the kind of circumstances that he was facing, and you appreciate the fact that he was armed and legally -- again, I want to point out, it's really quite remarkable that he was --

**Caitlin M. Green [00:21:47]**
To be surrounded by heavily armed guys beating you and kicking you and still not reach for it. That's wild to me.

**Matthew McManus [00:21:54]**
No, absolutely right. And the worst thing, of course, is he showed a lot of grace in those kinds of conditions, and he got compensated for that by the fact that they shot him, apparently, 10 times, right, just in a street execution of the sort that many of us should have hoped was a thing of the past in this country, right?

So I think that the administration really overreached in these circumstances, in part because many of them live in an extremely insular world at this point, right? They imbibed the kind of right wing narrative that they themselves contribute to spinning, which is that this is what most of the country wanted, or that this is fundamentally common sense.

Now I want to be clear here, right? I don't think that centrist or mainstream liberals exactly had the pulse of the country either in 2024. Had that been the case, then we would have won, right? But the idea that Trumpism became ascendant and won 49% of the vote, or whatever it happens to be, because there was this sudden surge of xenophobia and revanchism on the part of the American public, is just bogus, right? People voted for Trump because they wanted cheaper grocery prices and because they thought that Joe Biden couldn't really cut it in the biggest job and hardest job in the world. And if we look at things, Trump certainly has not delivered on the cheaper groceries or the thriving economy --

**Caitlin M. Green [00:23:18]**
And he's losing people because of that. People are mad about that.

**Matthew McManus [00:23:22]**
So, yeah, absolutely. I mean, you look at things across the board, most people say that the economy hasn't gotten better under Trump. Most of them think that it's gotten worse and will continue to get worse. In terms of the anxieties that the man at the helm of the ship isn't exactly all there -- well, we saw Trump at Davos just the other week, right? I mean, if you could follow what he was saying, then you're a lot more senile than most people are, right? So I just don't know what to say. The guy's brain -- this was never exactly functioning at high speeds normally, and whatever minimal gifts that he had once upon a time are pretty much gone.

**Caitlin M. Green [00:23:58]**
Now his face is like melting off of his skull every podium he's at. He's got a death grip on the lectern thing, and it just looks bad. And his hands -- every day a new thing on his hand that you're like, why is that there? So yeah, I think people are definitely seeing those cracks, which is great.

And it's also -- you can kind of see, oh, I love to use this phrase -- the Republicans are kind of in disarray right now, partly because they can feel the grip slipping, right? So you have Stephen Miller, who came out really hard being like, "Alex Pretti, domestic terrorist, violent criminal, put down like a dog that he is." And then Kristi Noem being like, "Um, we, I don't -- that's not exactly..." She wasn't on board with the message. And then ultimately was like --

**Matthew McManus [00:24:54]**
Look, Kristi is not a dog, right? You can't just kill it and get away with that and nobody's gonna say anything.

**Caitlin M. Green [00:25:00]**
Turns out that, yeah, that dog had family. So, yeah. But now she's doing the Nuremberg defense of, "Everything I've ever done was at the behest of the President and Stephen Miller." It's like, cool, okay, well, that sucks too.

**Matthew McManus [00:25:17]**
Yeah, exactly. I mean, it's too bad that we live in an administration where that's the case.

**Trent R. Nelson [00:25:21]**
Well, I have heard whispers, and I'm interested to hear what you think of this, Matt, if you've heard this yourself. I've heard whispers that Steve Bannon, even though he continues to say that Donnie is going to be the president after 2028, no questions about it -- I've also heard rumors that he --

**Caitlin M. Green [00:25:42]**
That man is not gonna be alive after 2028.

**Trent R. Nelson [00:25:47]**
Well, I think that's what Steve Bannon secretly would like, because I've heard that he would like to run as well. And this didn't actually surprise me very much, because Steve Bannon seems to me a conniving type of individual. And why not? Why not send out Donnie, right? You send out your stooge, and he kind of softens up the populace to be open to this sort of mindset, right? And then, after he's sort of wasted his life energy, right, I can come in and be like, "All right now, all that stuff that you liked about Donnie -- I actually really know about how we should be doing it, and I've got a whole bunch of ideas."

What is your sort of take regarding Bannon, his ambitions, and also his scheming-ness?

**Matthew McManus [00:26:41]**
Well, as of three or four days ago, Bannon was actually calling on Trump to crack down harder on Minneapolis, re-invoking this kind of Rufo dictum that if you give them an inch, then they're going to take a mile, right? And obviously Trump doesn't seem to have listened to Bannon. So there we are, right.

And I think that part of the reason that Bannon and many others in the administration again adopt this extremely hard line on things is partly for ideological reasons, right? Bannon has imbibed plenty of Evola and Dugin over time. He really believes in this idea of an authoritative strongman who imposes his will without any of these kinds of nerdy constraints on his power.

But I think that Bannon also is very much the product of the Breitbart environment, right, which sees fundamentally politics as pretty downstream from culture, right? And if you win the culture war, then eventually you're going to win the political war. And from that kind of perspective, I think that Bannon's attitude is always, if you start to offer concessions, then you lose control of the narrative, and you hand control of it to the other side, who are immediately going to spin this as, "We won a victory. Momentum is with us. The culture is clearly moving on our side, and eventually that's going to have political implications."

So his idea is very much the one that Trump used to adopt over the course of his life, which is never surrender and never admit you are wrong, never declare defeat, and always say that you're right on the cusp of a great big victory.

**Trent R. Nelson [00:28:00]**
The Roy Cohn strategy.

**Matthew McManus [00:28:02]**
Yeah, exactly right, except in these circumstances, I think that Trump's instinct to want to be popular and not be perceived as somebody who most people don't like has kicked in, and he clearly just decided not to follow the kind of Bannon instinct. And I think that politically, that's probably going to help Trump personally stave off some of the worst damage, but I don't think it's going to stave off all of it. And definitely he's been severely injured, not just because of what's happening in Minneapolis, but I'd also like to remind people, because he really embarrassed himself very publicly -- what seems like forever ago, but actually just a couple of days ago -- on the international stage, when Denmark was able to get a win over him.

**Caitlin M. Green [00:28:50]**
Yeah, Denmark, guys, come on.

**Matthew McManus [00:28:52]**
Shout out Denmark. Yeah, shout out Denmark, right? I mean, I'm a social democrat, liberal socialist, right? I have a lot of nice things to say about the country. So I'm in your corner, right?

**Caitlin M. Green [00:29:04]**
And again, this is a time when people trying to cover for Trump looking like just an addled grandpa backfired, right? Because he clearly was up there not knowing what he was saying. He kept saying Iceland instead of Greenland, like all this stuff. And I think it was Karoline Leavitt who was like, "Obviously he did not mess up what Greenland and Iceland were. You just weren't listening. He was just referring to the fact that Greenland is really cold and icy." And that was just so nakedly silly that anybody that heard that was like, oh boy, we've got a real mad king situation here. It did not help them at all.

**Matthew McManus [00:29:44]**
I know, it reminds me a lot of that old Groucho Marx bit. Same thing happened in Minneapolis this week. They keep on seeming to insist to the American public, "Who do you believe, us or your lying eyes and your lying ears and your lying family?" Et cetera, et cetera, right? At some point the reality principle does kick in, and people are just going to say, "Well, no, I did actually see that he called it Iceland, not once, not twice, but several times. I did see that the guy was not carrying a gun and that they executed him in the street." There's just no ambiguity about that, right?

**Caitlin M. Green [00:30:19]**
It was all very clear, yeah.

**Trent R. Nelson [00:30:21]**
And that's part of, I think, what is further creating this schism between people who have in the past voted or supported this President and this administration, and what they're asking. As you noted, they're asking us to suspend our senses, right? Suspend not only our sight, our hearing, but also our logic, right? All you have to do -- you don't even have to watch the video of a man being murdered for the 90,000th time in our lifetime. But if you do, you'll see, as was noted the other day, I believe when we were speaking to Joshua, perhaps Gillian, right -- this animalization of people, the dehumanization, and the attempt to make the American public look at their fellows as some type of creature, instead of as their neighbors.

**Caitlin M. Green [00:31:25]**
I'm gonna read another post. I apologize, but we got what's his name -- Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry. You know this guy? He's just some right wing freak, right, but he's got a lot of followers, so I guess we have to know who he is against our will. But along with this dehumanization thing, right? His statement about the Minneapolis situation is so wild in that it is so unrelatable on a human level. It goes like this:

"I would respect the Minnesotan shitlibs more if they actually claimed the Somalians as their serfs with the duty to protect them and also lead and provide for them, personally and directly, not through a Rube Goldberg machine of taxes and bureaucracy. But of course, no American white liberal is going to live in a close proximity paternalistic relationship with a tribe of Somalians. The way, say, the Granthams lived with their servants in Downton Abbey. And if they did, they would quickly become Hitler. They want all the material and narcissistic benefits of lordship without the messy realities. This is the problem with the liberal bourgeoisie. They want all the privileges of aristocracy and none of the obligations."

So literally -- it's a tribe, it's serfs, it's the servants from Downton Abbey. Like, it's never -- and so the best response to this, really, was Will Stancil, who was like, "Man, they're my neighbors. I don't know how to say it more clearly than that. Those are my neighbors. Oh, they're different from you? I don't care. They're my neighbors. Oh, they look different? Still my neighbors. Oh, their food's different? Okay, but they're my neighbors." Like, it's so weird that they just simply cannot --

**Trent R. Nelson [00:33:08]**
Go have some of it, all right? Try some of the food, instead of being weird. I mean, who looks at your neighbor and is like, "Well, they're only of meaning to me if I'm familiar with the cuisine." I mean, just stop being a bitch, huh? Just stop being a bitch.

**Caitlin M. Green [00:33:26]**
Just put some goddamn saffron in your rice and chill out. Like, literally. But just the idea that the only reasonable way to care what happens to Somali people would be to think about your responsibility as a civilized white to guardianship them through life and make sure that they live right, because they sure don't know how -- that's just where they're at mentally, I guess.

**Matthew McManus [00:33:55]**
Well, I think that really tells you a lot about the worldview at play here, right? For this group of people, the world is fundamentally always divided into who is subordinate and who is master, right? You can call it whatever you will, but that's the way things kind of break down.

And I think you see a really telling example of this in just that kind of rhetoric, right, how they treat things like corruption, for example. So there's been an enormous amount of attention paid by MAGA to alleged Somali fraud and welfare fraud and immigration fraud, et cetera, et cetera. Way less attention paid to the fact that the President of the United States has just grifted this country up the yin yang, right, and is apparently now accepting $400 million jets from foreign countries, and that's not going to influence his decisions at all.

And liberals like to call out that hypocrisy, and so do I, right. But I think that if you understand the right wing worldview, you realize that from their perspective, the people who are in charge are entitled to behave this way, right? They know what to do with wealth and power and agency, and so if good things come to them, so be it, right? The people at the bottom -- in this case the Somali serfs that they want to denigrate -- they're not entitled to act that way, because they are supposed to be subordinate, right? They are supposed to work really hard for anything that they get. They're not entitled to any kind of handouts, and they're definitely not entitled to grift the population to earn anything. And so the best thing that can happen for them is for them to be formally subordinated, so we just kind of clarify the role that they're intended to play in our society, right?

And once you start seeing things this way, and you realize that they're okay with some people acting this way because they're entitled to, and other people are not because they are inherently subordinate and inherently inferior, then a lot of things about what they say makes sense.

**Trent R. Nelson [00:35:37]**
Do you think that conservatives spend too much time thinking about The Prince and not enough time thinking about the Discourses on Livy? You think there's a problem there, Matt?

**Matthew McManus [00:35:51]**
Oh, I definitely do, right. And I mean, I've said this before, one of the more interesting MAGA intellectuals, Patrick Deneen, has sometimes said that what they're trying to do is pursue so-called Aristotelian ends by Machiavellian means. And I've always said, well, if you read Machiavelli carefully, you realize that's a bit like saying, "I want squares by way of circles," right? You can make the statement, but actually pulling it off is going to be a very different thing.

But I frame it in a somewhat different way. If we want to go highfalutin and talk about philosophers here, I think that most liberals, in their souls, adopt a pretty fundamentally Kantian attitude towards morality. Put aside all the technicalities, right, because we don't want to get in there. I think that liberals adopt a kind of universalistic sensibility, where they think, look, if I am going to treat this person that way, then I should treat that person that way as well, and I expect to be treated well in return, according to these kinds of rules, right? And you see this commitment to procedural egalitarianism, even in less abstract ways, in the way that liberals will emphasize things like the importance of the rule of law, right? Everyone is supposed to be governed by the same kind of rules, including the people in power. And that means that we are very keen to call out instances of hypocrisy, right, where conservatives are applying one rule to this group and another rule to another group, and say, clearly you are making a mistake or you are just being hypocritical.

Now, I think there's definitely an awful lot of that, right, but I think it's also important to note that for a lot of people on the right, that is not the way they see the world, right? For a lot of people on the right, their attitude is the kind of shitty version of a dual morality that JD Vance was putting forward, right? There's gonna be one set of rules for the people that we regard as entitled to be treated with dignity, and another set of rules, if any rules, towards those that we consider our inferiors, right? And that's, according to them, just the way that the world is going to work, right?

There's a set of rules for the people who deserve to be treated well. Another set of rules for the people who don't get to be treated well, if there are any rules that govern them at all, right? A lot of them are very happy with the idea that we can just do whatever we want to them at any time, and they should be grateful they just get to exist in our space, right?

And once you see this again, you realize that it's not so much hypocrisy so much as exceptionalism, right? They're willing to treat themselves and people that they like well, and other people very, very poorly. And I think for a lot of liberals like myself, that kind of lack of egalitarian universalism, that lack of consistency in applying and doing unto others what we would have done unto ourselves, is just extremely jarring.

**Caitlin M. Green [00:38:21]**
Yeah, so I think that's exactly right. They just want there to be sort of two categories of people: the civilized ones that we treat in a civilized way, and the ones that are just human garbage, and we can do whatever we want with. And they're gonna come up with whatever reasons they want for why somebody deserves to be in the garbage bucket, right? That's just how it works.

And so all of these justifications of, "Oh, Alex Pretti was actually dangerous," "Oh, Renee Good looked like she was gonna run over that agent," even though she totally wasn't -- anything they can come up with. I'll go back to Liam Ramos, right? The five year old. We had JD Vance saying, "Well, what did you want us to do about this little abandoned five year old? Did you want us to not bring him somewhere warm and safe?" And it's like, first of all, you didn't take him somewhere warm and safe. You took him to a prison for families with young children, where there's worms in the fucking food.

**Matthew McManus [00:39:21]**
And he might very well grow up to be dangerous, though. Have you ever considered that?

**Caitlin M. Green [00:39:25]**
Yeah, but also, he straight up lied about what was happening on the street there. Now, just come with me on this journey. Okay, just try to suspend your disbelief here. But JD Vance really wanted the family of this little boy to sound like they were sort of inhuman animals. People on the street were begging the officers to allow the child to walk into literally any home on the block. They were all available. His mother was behind one of the doors trying not to get snatched herself. And she was like, "I'll open the door for him. Just let him in here. But not you, obviously, agents who are trying to steal me."

And this family was trying to take care of their son, and they would not allow him, and now he's in a detention center in Texas, miles and miles away from his home. And to lie about his family, on top of splitting them up like that, is just a craven example of the way that they will come up with whatever to make sure that we think of that family as belonging in the bucket of people who we can treat however we want because they're trash.

**Trent R. Nelson [00:40:36]**
I think that's right. I agree. But I think that these lies are aimed at keeping a base. They're not aimed at convincing Matt or you or myself. They're aimed at reassuring the people who tune in to Fox News or who tune into any of these stations to be told, "Whatever you're hearing from the outside, from your crazy son, your niece, right, your brother, who says that this is all bad -- it's all bullshit. And here's the actual official explanation, which is that we are the good guys and they're the bad guys."

**Caitlin M. Green [00:41:17]**
Yeah, I've been told by that type of audience of people -- whenever I say something about this little baby in the bunny hat, little Liam, this little five year old, and how awful it is, the way that he's being treated -- I've been told, "You know what? Actually, you should look up the facts about what happened, because it's actually really sad." And I was like, what do you mean, it's actually really sad? I just said it's really sad a five year old got taken to a detention center in Texas where he now is suffering from a fever. And what they mean is what JD Vance said -- "It's actually so sad that his family wouldn't take care of him." And it's like, oh boy.

**Matthew McManus [00:41:58]**
I know. I've even started seeing some people online say, "Have you thought about how difficult it would be for the ICE agents to do that? Have you thought about their feelings?" Right? I'm like, I know. And I used to remember fascists sit there and say, "Do you realize how difficult it is for these SS officers to have to go do these things to these families? It's not easy on them to cause harm to people this way," right? So come on, guys, give me a break, right?

But to the kind of broader point that you're making, I think that what you said, Trent, is very right. And we don't need to speculate about the kind of ambition here, right? So there's a really interesting and very worthwhile interview that you can read with Chris Rufo from four years ago, for the hard right magazine I Am 1776. And I like this interview because I wrote a book once on postmodern conservatism, and a bunch of people on the political right got really angry at that, and directly in this interview, Chris Rufo says, and I quote, "The man who can discover, shape and distribute information has an enormous amount of power. The currency in our postmodern knowledge regime is language, fact, image and emotion, and learning how to wield these is the entire game," right?

So I'm like, there you go. Chris Rufo, the architect of a lot of the right's media strategy, saying, "We live in a postmodern epoch, and conservatism needs to be postmodern in order to succeed in that." But I think that what you need to know when you read the interview is nowhere does he actually talk about the morality of, or the content of, the claims being made. What do these facts refer to, and who are the kind of people who are impacted by how you change the facts on the ground? Right? All he is concerned about is how you distribute, present, and raise affect in regards to the kind of narratives that you're spinning.

And I think that when that's the attitude that you adopt towards the world and towards your moral responsibilities, you're inevitably going to become a very abstract person living in an abstract world, right? Where a five year old who's stripped away from his parents -- his subjectivity, his life, and his experiences -- don't matter so much as being a bit of currency in the game that you're playing with your geopolitical rivalries, to adapt the terminology a bit, right? And it's really quite an inhumane view, and you shouldn't be surprised when an inhumane ideology leads to very inhumane things being done to people who deserve a lot better.

**Trent R. Nelson [00:44:05]**
And again, there is, within this whole discussion, like a deeper baked-in horror that we have to address here. Those folks who they're lying to -- they are, in many ways, grateful for the lie, and they are not, in many ways, behaving as we would expect or desire a constituency in a democracy to behave. There is this sort of obligation that we all have to ensure that the information we're taking in corresponds to some degree with the shared reality, right?

And so JD Vance and all of these folks are only really able to successfully lie because -- and of course there's a desire, but there's also the practical burdens of living a life where you've got to take care of the kids and the family, and "I don't have much time to do this, and I don't care too much," right? -- to not go on Google and be like, "I wonder what Kilmar Abrego Garcia's record is," right? Or to be like, "I wonder what the child's circumstances were before this whole incident," right? "Did the Vice President just tell me the truth? I have to be sure myself."

And when we abdicate that responsibility, it obviously doesn't just affect us, because people die from it, and deaths are justified because of it. And that's difficult.

**Matthew McManus [00:45:44]**
Oh, absolutely right. I mean, look, I've said this before, and I'll say it again -- it's a little self-flattering, but let's go with it. It can be really tiring and really exhausting to be a liberal or a leftist at points, right? You've got to care about an awful lot of things, and you're going to get called out about it if you just care about them performatively, right? And Lord knows, we all have moments where we're like, look, I just can't get behind another cause. I can't bring myself to learn about this kind of issue, because there's already so much else that I got to do, right?

So I can completely understand the temptation to sometimes just want to switch off and look after yourself. In fact, I recommend it in some cases, because you got to look after your own mental health up to a point, especially given how fucked up the world is right now.

But I think that what you see with a lot of people on the postmodern right is they go to the opposite extreme, right? What they've really done is divest the humanity of the people that they're referring to, right? They see them only as objects in the world or currency to be manipulated as part of a broader attempt to win the culture war. And the subjectivity, or the fact that these people are real and living and experience the world the same as they do -- none of that registers, right?

And when that's the kind of attitude you adopt, again, you shouldn't be surprised when you get a bunch of people who hold to an inhumane ideology and treat people inhumanely. I think the mistake that they've made and that they're waking up to is failing to realize that most Americans are a lot better than that, right? Most Americans do care about what happens to other people. To Caitlin's point, most people do care about what happens to their neighbors, and don't want the worst for them. And even if they're not necessarily going to march in every No Kings rally, and they're not necessarily going to sign every petition, and sometimes they are going to decide to go to a hockey game over watching the news for the umpteenth time -- and good for them, right? -- when they start to see their neighbors attacked and their neighborhoods destroyed, they're going to stand up and do something about that, and all power to them. I think that's what makes this country great in a lot of ways.

**Caitlin M. Green [00:47:45]**
Yep, yeah. And people figured out how to get organized, even while weird people like Nick Sortor were pretending that they totally hacked an Antifa signal cell. All of that nonsense is kind of in the background for the people who are actually on the ground, because they have a job to do at this point, and this has really animated them, I think, where they're like, "My neighbors are under attack. I figured out that I can get on a schedule to help stand in front of their school or their house or whatever, to help keep them from being literally kidnapped. I'm going to do that because that is something that I can concretely do, even if it's scary, even if I might get killed for it." I'm being a neighbor, and that is really powerful.

**Matthew McManus [00:48:31]**
Honestly, yeah, absolutely. And the weird and most bitter irony of this is, I went to Catholic school for a long time. I was an altar boy, all this stuff. And I thought that loving your neighbor and realizing that your neighbor is anyone in need was supposed to be a fundamental aspect of the Christian faith. Certainly that's what my grandma brought me up to believe, right?

And the fact that so many so-called evangelical Christians and people on the Christian nationalist right find it so difficult to understand that people would care about their neighbors is also a real testament to the fact that a lot of what passes for religion on the right right now isn't really Christianity, but as Kierkegaard once put it, a kind of bastardized Christendom, which is in many cases the opposite of authentic Christianity, and the worst thing to have ever happened to it.

**Caitlin M. Green [00:49:18]**
I think it takes a lot of work, actually, to get people to forget about that value, because the most natural thing for a person is to look out for their neighbors and to be in a community. And I also think that that's a hopeful thing for us, because I don't actually think it takes too much to get a person to remember who they are on the inside, which is a neighbor.

**Matthew McManus [00:49:47]**
I think so too, right? I mean, look, I'll be a little partisan for my own flavor of liberalism right now, right? I think that in America, liberalism has always been associated with liberty first and foremost, and understandably, and that has a deep connection to equality -- this idea that all people are created equal.

But I think that the third tenet of liberalism that's really stressed in the European tradition -- solidarity, right? -- is one that sometimes can get a little bit lost. But I see it as an essential component of being a liberal. Not to say that we need to try to do everything we can for everyone all the time. That'd be exhausting, right? But sitting there and regarding your neighbors as your equals and people that are leading lives that are as important and as sacred as yours, I think, is pretty intrinsic to our creed.

And I also think it's the basis of forming meaningful friendships with those people, because if you decide that others just exist so you can use them as means to your ends, then you're fundamentally not adopting a very liberal attitude.

**Caitlin M. Green [00:50:42]**
Yeah, and again, you don't have real friends, and you're gonna get real sad.

**Matthew McManus [00:50:47]**
Totally right. I mean, if that's the attitude you take towards things, then you're a pretty shit friend or family member or whatever it happens to be, right?

**Trent R. Nelson [00:50:54]**
Well, I think that this whole sort of discussion -- and of course, we were more particularly in it just a minute ago -- sure, the fascists have learned something or tried to take lessons away from 2016 to 2020, but so have the protesters, so has the society, so has the resistance. I mean, earlier we were talking about inflatable costumes, right? I mean, this is actually -- absolutely.

**Matthew McManus [00:51:25]**
Just to pause, I was in Toronto just for your listeners two weeks ago, and I was helping a buddy document the kind of Maple MAGA protests. And we had the counter-protests. Anyway, all the Portland costumes were there also. And I was like, man, isn't this crazy? It's become like an international symbol of liberalism. If you dress up as a frog or a dragon, then everybody knows.

**Trent R. Nelson [00:51:46]**
And there is, I think, some reasonable logic there, right? They're gonna try to paint us as terrorists, as anti-American, as anti-Canada, whatever they're going to try to paint us. The conservative media, the conservative individuals, are going to try to paint us in these ways. Let's see them try to do it to a unicorn and a frog holding hands, right? Let's see them call two bears chanting to free immigrants bad people, right?

And again, they're sort of putting the onus on the civilians to some degree, right? Decide whether it makes more sense what the official narrative is, or that a whole bunch of people in costumes are trying to protect people that they're abducting. And I think that that's part of what they're losing -- people are looking and saying, "Yeah, man, a frog riding a bicycle is not threatening to me. It is more threatening that they just blew this guy's brains out on the street."

**Caitlin M. Green [00:52:55]**
Yeah, they tried to make that frog threatening though. They tried so hard. He can't even hold a weapon in that thing. Like, I don't know what you want.

**Matthew McManus [00:53:05]**
The frog is the new symbol of international communism, right? They're gonna take your guns and throw everyone in the gulag, right?

But I think I'd put it in a somewhat different way. I think everything you said is right, Trent, but I would present it as: for a long time, the right has tried to paint the left and progressives and liberals as censorious, committed to cancel culture, puritanical, not able to laugh at themselves, not able to have a good time, self-righteous, all that kind of stuff. Now, don't get me wrong, right? I've definitely met people who fall into that paradigm, right? You just need to spend any time in online left spaces, and you're like, I know those people, right?

But I think that what the No Kings rallies and all these protests have demonstrated is that at its best, liberalism and progressivism can be about trying to be a good neighbor, trying to be somebody who's able to laugh at yourself, demonstrating a bit of humility about your own identity and trying to bring a bit of joy into the world, while fighting for all those good causes. And I think that's really a very powerful message to send at the moment, because what it demonstrates is that we aren't people who are just going to self-righteously judge everyone the way that the right tries to make us out, obviously in bad faith, right?

We're people who like to have a good time, and we like to have a laugh at ourselves, but we also -- we like to have a good time because we appreciate the value of life, right? And we appreciate the value that everyone ascribes to their life. And I just don't think that that's something that you can see very much on the other end at this point, since boy, oh boy, do they ever take themselves very seriously, and if they are funny, it's only in spite of themselves.

**Caitlin M. Green [00:54:42]**
Yeah, well, I'll tell you what. I love cancel culture. I've canceled so many people. It's really fun for me. I do it on a weekend. But you know what I've never done? I've never filled a syringe with a smelly liquid and run at a congresswoman and sprayed it at her for saying that one of my favorite cabinet members should be fired. That's not something I've ever done.

But hey, and this is what, two weeks after Elon Musk said that that same congresswoman should be punished for treason because she said the phrase "the US goddamn states," right? That's not censorious at all, is it? No, that's not cancel culture. That's something different.

**Matthew McManus [00:55:26]**
I know. I mean, I will say it's also been remarkably rich, since I don't think there's a week that goes by where Trump doesn't decide that something new is treason, mostly having to do with people saying bad things about him and his followers, right? And it's like, look, at some point or another, we might as well just sit there and flush the First Amendment down the toilet, if this is the attitude that you're going to take, right? And apparently now we're just going to flush the Second Amendment down the toilet, right? Because why not?

A lot of what I see in the MAGA movement in relation to American conservatism right now kind of reminds you of that episode of The Simpsons where Bart is just sitting there and it's like, "I've sold my soul, but I can sell my conscience also, right? Everything about me must go."

**Caitlin M. Green [00:56:04]**
It's all out the window. Well, things are going great. It seems like we're doing so good. There is hope, I think, because, yeah, a lot of this stuff is just transparently evil. And every new thing that happens, it peels more people off, right?

**Trent R. Nelson [00:56:22]**
Do you think, Matt, do you think that other people are noticing that DHS has taken like a full Norman Rockwell Nazi angle? Do you think that that is missed by people, or do you think that they notice, like, what the hell is happening here? How come everything looks like it's 1936, and why are we talking about saving our community? What's wrong with our community?

**Matthew McManus [00:56:49]**
I think it's a better thinking, right? I mean, I think if you look at poll after poll after poll, it shows that most Americans have a very negative, or at least a negative, impression of the Trump administration at this point, right? For the first time, he's actually underwater on immigration and border issues and national security, which for a little while was one of the few things where he was above water, right?

And if you look internationally, things get boy, oh boy, a lot worse, right? I mean, more Canadians now trust China than the United States, not because they have any fondness, despite what MAGA says, for authoritarian regimes, but because America is just perceived to be an unstable country, right? And an unstable partner, right? What are you supposed to do, trade with somebody who is going to change his mind on the dime because he thinks that your Prime Minister has insulted him? So every deal that bureaucrats and diplomats have spent months and months and months hashing out be damned, right? We're going right back to the tariffs. It's just not something that you can rely on for any kind of constancy, right?

**Trent R. Nelson [00:57:50]**
And that's the real international legacy, I suspect, is that America can't be trusted to lend you anything, to do anything with you, to make any agreement, to make any deal. How could you make a JCPOA? How could you make a trade agreement that you have real faith in? I just don't understand how -- it's gonna take decades to repair that.

**Caitlin M. Green [00:58:23]**
We have to demonstrate that we're not in danger of, at any point, just suddenly reversing course on these things.

**Matthew McManus [00:58:30]**
Yeah, I think the major problem is also Trump 1.0, right, was easy enough for the international community to kind of overlook. They're like, "Well, every now and then you got a weird leader that comes along who's a little bit disruptive, but it seems like everything's course corrected."

Now a lot of people are thinking, and I've heard very senior people kind of muse about this -- this isn't just an aberration, right? They've done this twice now. So who's to say that if they do elect someone who seems more constant next time, they're not just going to backtrack on that four years later, or even two years later when a Republican Congress gets into power?

**Caitlin M. Green [00:59:15]**
Certainly not something you want to stake huge important deals on. No.

**Matthew McManus [00:59:20]**
Exactly right. I mean, once is an accident, twice starts to look a little bit, if not like a pattern, at least like a perennial temptation, right?

And I think that you're starting to see very overt signs about that. Again, I'm Canadian, and I can't vote for the guy -- and I'm an NDP-er -- but I did really respect Mark Carney's speech at Davos, right, where he just very candidly laid out, "Look, if you're a middle power, particularly a Western middle power, it's time for us to start looking for alternatives and going our own way."

And I don't really think Trump understood a lot of the content of what he was getting at, but he definitely got the gist or the tone of the speech, which is why I think he was so mad at Mark Carney and at Canada for about a week until his goldfish brain got attracted and distracted by other kinds of things, right?

So look, I do not think that this country has, kind of to your point about the 1930s, passed a kind of juncture where it can't pull back, right? In fact, I think that over the last week or two, a lot of people are starting to say, "Hold on, so far we need to kind of pull it back," right?

What I would hope, though, is that once this is all said and done, there's a little bit more time dedicated to deep soul searching about why things went wrong than what happened before. And here I'm casting shade at the Democratic establishment, right? I think that a lot of Democrats, again, saw Trump as an aberration, kind of ghoulish tendency that maybe was always a latent potential in American society, but one that by and large we'd kind of gotten over with a couple of exceptions, and that led a lot of people to not really interrogate too deeply what the appeals of things like MAGA were, why it is that many large segments of the population would get behind it, et cetera.

And until we're willing to do that, it's always going to be a risk that something like this is going to resurface, right? And I also want to stress, we're not out of the water yet, right? I think the administration has been weakened by what's happened the last two weeks, and if there are free and fair midterms in a couple months, then probably will be weakened further, right. But a weakened administration isn't necessarily one that is safe, right, or neutered. It's very often the case that people who feel themselves to be wounded lash out, right? And political regimes are quite similar.

**Trent R. Nelson [01:01:26]**
Well, Matt, we're not out of the weeds yet, and the international community looks at us in some ways as burdens. But we will persevere. We know we've got to let you go sooner than later. What kind of good, positive hope can you leave us with, Matt? Even, as you noted, we might yet see some of the darker times in our country's history before we see the lighter ones. Give us something good to go on.

**Matthew McManus [01:02:01]**
I think there's a lot of good things that are happening right now, right? I think beyond the fact, again, that the administration is seeing its support ebb, you're seeing Democratic politicians be a lot more forceful in trying to oppose the regime. Look what happened with Ilhan Omar, right? And the fact that she was willing to stand up to somebody who's trying to denigrate her, right? Or again, look at people like Zohran Mamdani, right? I know he's not everyone's cup of tea in the Democratic Party, let alone for Liberal Currents, but he's taking a pretty forceful line on things like ICE, and just refused to let them kind of offset the pursuit of his agenda.

So I think Democrats and liberals in the country are learning and recovering a bit of their spine. And I think that that's not just a good thing, it's an appropriate thing, because I think that if you are a liberal and a progressive, then you should be committed deep down to the idea that what we want to see is a more just world, and that a more just world is a better world.

And that means that even if it's not the case that the arc of history is long but it bends towards justice -- because I think we actually have to bend it towards justice actively, right? -- I think that more and more people are recovering their instinct that that is possible, and I think that that is just going to be a good thing.

**Caitlin M. Green [01:03:18]**
Yeah, in the words of, I think it was Molly Conger actually -- the reason why it's bending that way is because people keep throwing their shoulders against it.

**Trent R. Nelson [01:03:28]**
Yeah, that's a great way to put it, absolutely.

Well, you heard it here first, folks. There are good things coming. The horizon will have some sun. Happy days will be here again, and when they are -- and before that too -- we'll have Matt McManus back on the program, assistant professor at Spelman College, author of many wonderful reads. Well, Matt, before we let you go, can you elaborate where people can find all of your wonderful work, where they can hear your rants, read them, and read your work, so they can know all the cool stuff you do?

**Matthew McManus [01:04:06]**
Sure. I have a new article that's coming out with Liberal Currents soon, reviewing a couple of books on Jurgen Habermas. For those who don't know, he's a pretty famous German philosopher. I don't exactly expect that's going to take the world by storm, but I'm interested in those kinds of debates.

**Trent R. Nelson [01:04:21]**
You never know.

**Matthew McManus [01:04:22]**
Yeah, exactly. But I have a new book that's coming out in the summer. One is Liberal Socialism, which includes some contributions by Paul Crider, one of the editors of Liberal Currents, and I'm very excited about that. People complained that the academic book was a little bit expensive and a little bit technical and hard. I hear you, right. It is expensive, and I wrote it to be a little bit hard. So this essay collection is pretty breezy. It includes some of my contributions from Liberal Currents and from Liberal Currents contributors. And I think if people are interested in liberal socialism, they'll want to pick that up.

**Trent R. Nelson [01:04:57]**
That's fantastic. And Zohran, if you're listening, come on the show too. No big deal, may not be for everyone at Liberal Currents, but you're for us. Yeah, exactly. And McManus, you are for us as well. We appreciate you so much. We hope you have a wonderful day. We'll catch you real soon. We know you'll come back, since you've already done it once. That's a good deal.

And well --

**Caitlin M. Green [01:05:22]**
Yeah, you're in the trap now. That's for sure.

**Trent R. Nelson [01:05:26]**
Understanding a question is half of an answer. And this is, of course, Half the Answer, with Trent R. Nelson and Caitlin M. Green. And until we do this thing all over again --

**Bumper [01:05:37]**
Thanks for listening to Half the Answer, presented by Liberal Currents. You can find Half the Answer anywhere you get your podcasts. Liberal Currents is an entirely listener and subscriber funded publication, which includes programs like Half the Answer and Neon Liberalism. So if you like what you've heard and wish to contribute, you may do so at liberalcurrents.com and through Patreon. And remember, understanding a question is half the answer.