How Trump Bodyslammed America: Heels, Faces, & the Kayfabe of Politics

Paul Jay
That’s where he learned his politics, in the school of Vince McMahon.

Jay Shapiro
It’s like they are borrowing from the world of wrestling.

Paul Jay
They did it at the Charlie Kirk Memorial.

Jay Shapiro
It looks like a fucking wrestling match.

Paul Jay
But it’s fascinating. They’re doing a wrestling show.

Then it says in the document, in no uncertain terms, I’m quoting exactly, but there’s a problem. The American people won’t support this kind of expansion of the military and what it’s going to cost because of the Vietnam syndrome. “How do we get over the Vietnam syndrome?” this document says. “Well, it’s going to take another Pearl Harbor.” It actually says we need another Pearl Harbor, and what happens around a year later, they get it. It’s 9/11.

In wrestling, heels turn to face, bad guys become good guys, but the other thing also happens. The good guys become bad guys. The faces become heels. Trump had better remember that because he may be a face. Of course, he’s a heel to half the country, but he doesn’t care about them. But the half of the country that he’s a hero to, he’s going to become the heel.

Jay Shapiro
Dilemma podcast, Jay Shapiro here.

Today, I’m going to be speaking first, well, I’m speaking with Paul Jay, who, for those of you who did the homework and you watched the film that just ranks in my top 10 films of all time called Hitman Hart: Wrestling with Shadows, is a documentary director and journalist from my world. That film is incredible and is about professional wrestling.

I’m about to talk a lot about professional wrestling. I have something written here, which might not be the kind of thing you would expect from a podcast that’s about philosophy, psychology, and that kind of analysis. But I’m here to try to convince you that it is an insanely important lens, an interesting lens, kind of a pop art history lens to understand certainly the American ethos, but maybe much more. So, we’re going to dive into that.

Professional wrestling, the WWF, as it was known when I was a kid, I think it’s known as the WWE now, might actually be one of the best ways to understand American culture. It’s kind of a pop art history, a mirror of the nation’s psychology. It’s like comic books or Marvel films, which I think you’ve seen me reference a lot. I love that stuff, although I wasn’t the biggest wrestling fan growing up. I had friends who were, so I knew the names. But it reflects our fears, our moral stances, our national anxieties, and our personal grievances. The characters in the ring become avatars, projections of the bosses we hate, the relatives we resent, the heroes we wish we were, or maybe the raw carnal impulses we try to hide.

Someone like the Undertaker represents the inevitability of death, his entrance music, and his whole persona. Mankind was a kind of wild character who represents almost sacrificial madness in life. There was the Million Dollar Man, who was a character when I was a kid, Ted DiBiase, whose character name was, who represented the smug, untouchable elite, the coastal billionaire who laughs at you as you suffer in the audience. Each character is an exaggerated reflection of someone in the American imagination. It’s a morality play dressed in spandex and pyrotechnics, which, how could you have anything better than that?

The geopolitics in the ring have always just been wild, and this mirror reflection of America. There’s this long tradition of patriotic, hardworking, kind of blue-collar heroes. These are the real Americans who never quit, who take their vitamins, say their prayers, and stand up for what’s right, and they always end up facing off against sneaky, slimy, or especially foreign villains in the ring who embody whatever threat America was currently fixated on. I’m thinking of when I was a very young kid of someone like Hacksaw Jim Duggan, or there are others.

Of course, the most famous of all was Hulk Hogan when I was a kid. He was the embodiment of America in the ’80s, continuing into the ’90s. Hulk Hogan is an avatar for America on the world stage. It’s almost too perfect. His entrance music was real American, and he battled people like André the Giant, who obviously stood for this looming, unbeatable Eastern European menace from Russia, this giant, a metaphor for maybe communism itself, even though he was played by a Frenchman. Then, in front of a roaring crowd at exactly the right time in history, Hulk Hogan body slams that giant, just a made-for-TV ending to the Cold War.

Before that, Hogan fought people like the Iron Sheik, who was this cartoonish Iranian villain. He waved a flag here, a picture of the flag that literally just said Iran, which I think is kind of hilarious, as if the audience wouldn’t have recognized the real ones. They just put the word Iran, which may have been true.

Later, he wrestled someone like Yokozuna, who was a supposed Japanese sumo wrestler, even though he was played by a Samoan guy. That was during the 1990s American panic about Japan’s economic rise, particularly in the technology sector, maybe factories, and something that those populist audiences at wrestling matches felt threatened by. So the moral theater only deepens from there.

I’m going to give you a few characters that, if you are interested or if you have time to look into their comic book arcs, are really fascinating reflections about the American psyche. Someone like the Big Boss Man, who I remember as a kid, and he débuted as this sadistic Southern cop. He actually had a little Confederate flag on his shoulder, and he was a heel. A heel means a bad guy, right? You’re supposed to hate the heels and love the faces. That’s a term in wrestling, heels and faces. It’s important to know.

But the Big Boss Man was an authoritarian heel. His catchphrase was, “You’re about to do hard time.” At first, the crowd booed him. They loved to hate this guy. They saw him as an enemy, the face of police brutality and overreach. But just a year later, the crowd began to cheer him, and suddenly, this uniform became a symbol of righteous justice again. That shift from villain to hero, face to heel and back is really central to the psychology of wrestling and to America itself.

It’s not always scripted or decided by the writers of the event itself. It’s a reaction to what the audience is responding to. I think of a good way to think of this wrestling analogy that I’m certainly building is almost a huge focus group to see how people are responding to what. Then, it’s up to the writers to decide what they’re going to do with the character.

Another character, like Sergeant Slaughter, who was a bit earlier, was a Vietnam-era drill sergeant type. Originally, a good guy, just a whistle and drill sergeant, just mindless. During the Gulf War, in the ’90s, his character begins accusing these same fans who once adored him for being so patriotic as not being patriotic enough. They weren’t patriotic in the right way, and then he turned heel by suddenly sympathizing with Iraq, literally, in the Gulf War, his character. So the audience then gets to channel their rage and nationalistic fervor, or maybe fear, by watching him be humiliated in the ring.

I’ll just say right here, I think wrestling is often grotesque in its racism and sexism. So I acknowledge that, and I see that, but I think it’s also insanely revealing this form of theater. Goldust, for instance, was a character a bit later who was designed to provoke homophobia in the crowd. There are people like the Ultimate Warrior, who was basically a piece of testosterone come to life on stage. Earlier than that, I remember Rowdy Roddy Piper, who wore a kilt and was Scottish, but I think at the time he was embodying a Northern Ireland wild man, even though he was Scottish. It’s all there. There’s the culture, the fear, the projection, and the catharsis in just this crazy loud form

But there’s one character from this world that I really want to talk about, and that’s someone you definitely know. His name is Donald J. Trump. So, to understand who the President of the United States really is, you can’t just look at this man from Queens and his life. The President of the United States, I contend, is a character written for him, which he became in the WWF.

So this is the arena where Donald learned to perform power, how to play a crowd, really got off on it, obviously, and how to win through spectacle. I think this relates to the Gaza stuff that I mentioned in the pre-pre-open, honestly. His history with wrestling goes back to the ’80s. It was the mid or late ’80s when he hosted WrestleMania IV and V at his Atlantic City Casino. He knew of Vince McMahon and his wife, Linda, who, I will remind you, later became the head of the Small Business Administration, and is now currently the Secretary of Education for the country of America.

But Trump wasn’t just a fan. He didn’t remain just a fan. He actually stepped into the ring himself twice in two really important story lines that I’m going to give you. Those two story lines will tell you everything you need to know, I think, about how he became the man who won two presidential elections.

So the first one, it’s the year 2007, and his apprentice character and show are also getting quite large. This was a storyline called The Battle of the Billionaires. So it was 2007, and he became a character. The storyline begins on Monday Night Raw. This was their show in January, and Vince McMahon is giving an over-the-top fan appreciation night.

Vince McMahon, the real owner of the WWF, plays this character as this swaggery-boss who you love to hate. Everyone in that audience can pour all of their frustrations with their real boss or whoever it is that they hate into Vince McMahon, who’s obsessed with himself. So on fan appreciation night, for example, he invites a fan up and reveals a prize to her, which is a picture of himself on a cover.

Anyway, he’s giving this big performance, and then Donald Trump interrupts him on the screen, tells him what a terrible job he’s doing, how he doesn’t really know how to appreciate his fans, and then literally starts raining down $100 bills fluttering through the air into the crowd, brought to you by Donald Trump. The crowd goes wild, and Vince is furious that the peons, these working-class losers in the audience, are getting rewarded and getting someone who actually loves them. So it’s two ego-maniacs in a fight with each other about who really controls and understands the crowd, and each promises to humiliate the other on the stage.

The storyline goes on. It was ridiculous. Each billionaire gets to choose a wrestler to represent them at WrestleMania 23, and the losing billionaire gets his head shaved. Right then and there in front of everybody, and so anyway, Vince chooses a wrestler named Umaga, who’s a Samoan, monstrous wrestler for him. Trump picks Bobby Lashley, who at the time was a rising star, young, muscular, clean-cut, a little bit of an all-American hero figure.

Then, this is important. I’m going to mark this for the people who are really into the story I’m telling now. To make sure it all goes down fairly, Stone Cold Steve Austin, whose name you might remember, is still around, of course, and is named the Special Referee. This is important. When they’re both up there, the two billionaires having this feud, Stone Cold Steve Austin gets in the face of both of them, kind of to remind them who’s really boss here. “You think you control the crowd, but don’t forget, I’m the referee, and I’m not scared of either of you two.”

Anyway, it was ridiculous. They have the big bout. Trump’s figure wins, and he gets to shave Vince McMahon’s head, which he did along with his wrestler in front of everyone. Stone Cold Steve Austin gets a kick out of the whole thing. But remember, after it’s all done, with this spectacle, the arrogant boss gets humiliated by this billionaire, playing a billionaire at the time, he wasn’t actually one yet. Now he’s become the billionaire he played. Stone Cold Steve Austin gives Donald Trump a stunner, which was like his body slam move or whatever, knocks him out on flat and the audience roars. Which is this little reminder at the end of, like, “Okay, let’s remember still what the audience power can do.” So I’ll get to Stone Cold Steve Austin in a second.

But the next storyline was two years later, in 2009. I think it’s even more important. So two years later, the storyline returns, and the storyline is basically that Vince McMahon is playing his boss and the character that he’s in financial trouble. That they’re really threatened by a lot of things going on, and he needs to figure something out. Donald Trump, again, appears on the screen and announces that he’s bought the WWF, or WWE, I think it was known as the time, to save the company, to bring the company back to life.

It was his first move then, as this pure populace theater. “I’m the new owner, and I’m going to change things around here.” Sounds like his presidency. So he declares that the next week’s episode is going to be commercial-free, live, and that anyone who had bought a ticket to the actual event would get a full refund because obviously it’s live and everyone can just watch it then. The crowd explodes. Trump promised to give the people what Vince never would. What they really wanted, to be listened to, get this thing, and get attention. In a way, this whole theater thing worked a little bit too well. The fake announcement was so convincing that WWE’s real stock price actually dropped seven points overnight because investors really believed that Trump had bought the company. It wasn’t true.

So a week later, McMahon returns, and he’s furious. The storyline goes on for about a week, where Trump’s in charge, Vince is humiliated, they get moved to the janitor’s closet, and they do all these kinds of things. Trump gets bored with the whole thing and agrees to sell the company back to Vince, and they do a negotiation. They do an art of the deal performance in front of everybody, where Trump gets to show off his chops, and he’ll sell it back, but only at double the price, triple the price, or whatever it was. Vince gets his thing back, and Trump gets to walk off with this fictional profit and walk away into the sunset, triumphant. The audience, everything returns to its stasis, but the audience remembers that Donald Trump saved us, and he could do it again at any time.

I think in both story lines, Trump wasn’t just performing a wrestling character. He was really learning from it, the whole spectacle, the whole theater. He learned how to craft enemies, how to control attention, how to make every outrage just part of the show. When he finally stepped into real politics, he didn’t need to change the act at all. He just changed the set.

This, if you remember, is his entrance at the RNC in 2016. The spectacle of politics, this dance between a scripted story, a reality of real egos vying for who gets to be in the center of the stage, and who gets to win with real things at stake. Because while it’s scripted, if you become the champion of the WWF, you certainly are worth a lot more money. There are real things at stake, or the worst villain, it’s worth a lot of money.

It’s constantly in live conversation, with how the audience will react. The writers don’t always know who the audience will love, hate, begin to love, or begin to hate. That’s what’s really important here because I mentioned Stone Cold Steve Austin. Stone Cold Steve Austin is a fascinating character who interplays with the particular film that I’m going to be talking about, which Paul Jay directed about Bret Hart.

Stone Cold Steve Austin was written as a total heel, this jerky guy who literally, and people might remember the shirt, Austin 3:16, has his first coming out with a one-to-one argument and fight with Jake the Snake Roberts, who at the time is playing a born-again Christian who’s quoting scripture and all this kind of stuff. Austin says, “F that. I’m really the guy, Austin 3:16,” which is a reference to John 3:16 from the Bible.

Excerpt
“You sit there and you thump your Bible and you say your prayers, and it didn’t get you anywhere. Talk about your Psalms. Talk about John 3:16. Austin 3:16 says, I just whipped your ass. Come on, that’s not necessary.”

Jay Shapiro
I mean, it’s wild that you would come up with a character who’s meant to be a villain, who’s sacrilegious, who’s spitting on the Bible in this kind of way. But you know what? The audience loved this guy. This is the backdrop of what you do when you’re writing these characters, and that’s the audience reaction. They love this guy. They start buying his T-shirts. The Austin 3:16 t-shirt became the biggest-selling t-shirt since, and it surpassed, the Hulkamania of the ’80s.

What this all reflects at the time, especially in the ’90s, I think, is a disillusionment, a disenchantment with that Reagan era style, eat your Wheaties, take your vitamins, stay in school, thumbs up hero, the audience starts to think that rings so hollow. It’s not true. It’s not cool. Maybe they realized America isn’t really like that, and this Austin guy, there’s something about what he’s doing, maybe the cynicism, maybe the anger. That’s really what this is about. Even Hulk Hogan himself, the hero of America and the American hero of the ’80s and into the early ’90s, turns into a heel, into a bad guy, and joins this thing called the NWO, the New World Order. I mean, you can’t get better than the analogies of what’s happening in the ring as to what’s happening, I think, in the psyche of America there.

So that’s Stone Cold Steve Austin, who’s this anti-hero that the audience just can’t get enough of and loves. He flips off the audience. He says no to authority. He’s an anti-establishment figure every step of the way. I think… This is sort of a psychological hope and prediction. I hope that the ethos of Stone Cold Steve Austin as an anti-establishment dude who doesn’t give an F and will take you down, even Donald Trump, even anybody, I hope that ethos is still out there in the American psyche and is ready to jump back in the conversation.

So the Bret Hart character, and that’s what this film is about. Bret Hart was another Hulk Hogan-ish character. A really good guy. He’s a family guy, and this is a true story, the Hart family. It’s his real last name. It’s a wrestling family. They’re all involved in it. They’re kind of legends of this entertainment sport, and he stands up for what’s right. He stands up for what’s good. He’s safe for your kids. Kids like to root for him. He’s just a hard-working, good guy. He’s also a Canadian. He was always supposed to be this hero of the WWF. But again, the audience starts to get maybe a little bored with him and starts rooting for the bad guy. What do you do as Vince McMahon or whatever it is, if you’re writing this, when the audience, and maybe the country, starts to root for the bad guy?

I’ll leave that there because I do want you to watch the film, Paul Jay’s film. I’m going to link to it again. It’s available through his site and elsewhere, Hitman Hart: Wrestling with Shadows. It exposes a lot of the conversations that I’ve brought up now of the American psyche, of nationalism, of patriotism, in a massively important moment in the ’90s, pre-9/11, when maybe everything really started to break. I will end my love fest for the analogy of wrestling, but you’re going to hear now a conversation between me and Paul Jay, who is more than just a director; he’s also a journalist, and has a lot of really interesting analysis. So we get into a lot of topics beyond just the wrestling metaphor, which obviously I like, and I just try to keep pushing.

I’m going to let this play with Paul Jay. Thank you for indulging my wrestling analogy. All right, here you go.

Paul Jay
Well, I think what I take from it is that’s where he learned his politics, in the school of Vince McMahon. He was a real estate guy. He was famous as a real estate guy, but he didn’t have any kind of mass following. The first time, as I know anyway, that he gets in front of a crowd of thousands, 20-30,000 people at a wrestling show, and apparently as many as a billion people around the world were watching World Wrestling every week. He is taught how to get the crowd to pop.

So wrestling, in reality, operates on two levels. As you know, there’s the theater in the ring, but you’re supposed to suspend disbelief and believe what’s going on in the ring is real.

Jay Shapiro
Yeah.

Paul Jay
Prior to our film, Wrestling with Shadows, in fact, apparently, the majority of people thought it was real. But behind the scenes, there’s a real battle that goes on, and that’s between individual wrestlers vying for a higher positioning in the hierarchy and in the script writing. Of course, the highest of the hierarchy is that you get to be the number one face, good guy, or the number one heel, bad guy. The reward is that you get the World Wrestling Championship for a few months, or however long they decide works.

So on a lot of levels, it’s like American politics, first of all.

Jay Shapiro
Yeah.

Paul Jay
The theater of what goes on in Congress it’s not just all theater in the sense that they’re also trying to get the crowd to pop. You’ve got to learn how to do stuff that’s popular. The real power behind the scenes, the Vince McMahon’s, is what Sanders calls the billionaire class. But you don’t talk about them in Congress, and you don’t talk about them hardly ever on television news.

It’s only recently that some of them have been sticking their nose directly into the theater, like Musk, primarily. A few of the others, Karp from Palantir, get interviewed a lot, but I don’t think so much to a mainstream audience. I guess, Musk, probably more than anybody, is the one who joined the troupe, the theatrical troupe, but there’s real stuff going on. So on the one hand, they’re playing to an audience and saying stuff that resonates, and people suspend disbelief with these political characters the way they have learned to do with wrestling.

Now, it’s not just wrestling. The truth is, the whole political culture is about suspended disbelief. Lie, after lie, after lie gets forgotten or forgiven. Take the Iraq war and getting totally lied into a war that killed perhaps as many as a million Iraqis and a few thousand Americans. It goes on.

I should say you can go back to the Vietnam War, which killed perhaps as many as three million people and over 50,000 Americans, and was completely based on lies. As we know from the Pentagon Papers released by Dan Ellsberg, they were very conscious that the Gulf of Tonkin incident that started the Vietnam War was BS, that they knew they couldn’t win, and so on.

The fundamental underlying piece of this, and it’s not disconnected from wrestling, is the whole Cold War mentality, the whole promotion of “They’re out to get us.” If you go back into wrestling in the ’50s and the ’60s, who are the bad guys? It’s some Soviet guy with a Soviet flag, then it’s a Russian flag, then it’s a crazy Arab, and then it’s some Chinese. So as an audience, it plays on this thing that we’ve been taught right from the beginning to deny our real world and believe in this fictional narrative that’s called American politics.

Jay Shapiro
Yeah.

Paul Jay
Even though, even when you see some of its BS, you still believe. What’s happening now is they can see through the corporate Democrat fiction, some of the people, but they’ve turned to an even bigger fiction, which is the Trumpian version of things, that portrays itself as the new face, the new good guy, the new anti-elite guy. You just suspend what’s in front of your eyes, that Trump is surrounded by billionaires. I mean, they are the elite.

As a skill set, Trump learned that there’s a section of the population that likes narcissistic, over-the-top, big characters, whether it’s Liberace or Elvis Presley, or variations on Hulk Hogan, obviously. He learned from wrestling how to play this on the edge, almost a madman, big character. 

It’s very interesting. After the most recent election, he did some interviews with mainstream media, and he was out of character. He actually talked coherently. He made some interesting points. The journalists were trying to poke holes in his arguments, and he fended them off quite well. So the real Trump is not this bravado character. He’s a much more calculating figure.

Jay Shapiro
Yeah. Then, just to underline, the interplay of wrestling works on so many levels, like you said, because it’s partially scripted, but they’re responding to live audiences, and they’re never quite sure, which of course, was the context and the background of your film about Bret Hart. That setting in politics is everything, right? I mean, just to further the analogy of a politician getting on stage, and I’ll show them clips right here or whatever, of the entry of Donald Trump when he wins the inauguration and stuff. It looks like a wrestling opening.

Excerpt
Thank you, everybody. Thank you. We love you. Thank you very much. We’re going to win. We’re going to win so big. Thank you very much, everybody. Thank you. Thank you very much. Thank you.

Jay Shapiro
Trump and music, it’s like they are borrowing from the world of wrestling.

Paul Jay
They did it at the Charlie Kirk Memorial.

Jay Shapiro
It looks like a fucking wrestling match.

Paul Jay
They got assassinated, and they’re doing a wrestling show.

Jay Shapiro
It’s just all theater. Then, to back this up a little philosophically, I just want to make one point about technology here. Of course, this conversation is going to get off for us. I’m going to go into your work on nuclear stuff, but I think this thing about politics as theater is so important to stay on, and I don’t know if you’ve heard this on your tours with nuclear stuff or technology, when people start always giving this line and retort when we worry about new technologies. It’s like, “Oh, everyone always worries about new technologies. They said the bicycle would end civilization, and this or that or whatever.” I always think it’s such a ridiculous retort.

I always go to the TV one, where, if it were like, imagine if the day that the television started getting popular and started being a threat to radio, I got on some radio show as some talking head, and I said, “Guys, I think this is a big problem for society. It’s not going to end the world, but what if I told you that in the future, people running for president in this country are going to have to put on makeup, stand on boxes to look a little taller, and learn how to speak in 30-second sound bites before these commercials try to sell things to them? I worry this is going to distort the American enterprise so much, and we’re going to end up with these crazy candidates.” People would have said, “You’re insane, this little stupid TV thing.” And that’s actually what happened. So, I think just to-

Paul Jay
I’ll add one caveat.

Jay Shapiro
Yeah.

Paul Jay
I agree with what you said, but Mussolini and Hitler came to power without television.

Jay Shapiro
Yeah, but they would have used it, maybe precisely in the way. Yeah, like fascism is not new, but they would have used it in this type of way. I don’t know if you, because I don’t remember the storyline as well, maybe as you do, do you know the Battle of the Millionaire storyline, just to give to my audience, when Trump stepped in?

Paul Jay
All I remember of it is that it’s Trump versus Vince McMahon.

Jay Shapiro
Yeah.

Paul Jay
They each get to pick a hero to fight for them. Then, whoever’s hero wins, one gets to cut the hair off the other. So Trump gets to cut off McMahon’s hair. Then, at one point, I think they even had Trump drop McMahon to the ground once. They talked about-

Jay Shapiro
And he takes… There’s money. I might remember it a little better than you. Maybe I can give it, but it’s just this perfect analogy for the American viewer to be like, “I am your vessel. I’m your political vessel to kick your boss’s butt. Everything’s going to return to normal, but you’re going to remember that I could come do this at any time.” He was literally raining $100 bills down from the ceiling in one of the shows. It was Vince’s money, real money that people were grabbing. It was almost the perfect… I think that’s really where he learned his politics, but maybe I’ve just answered for you. If there’s anything else to say about wrestling and Donald Trump.

Paul Jay
I would just say that behind the scenes, Vince McMahon’s wife, what’s her name? Linda McMahon actually winds up in Trump’s cabinet.

Jay Shapiro
Yes.

Paul Jay
So they’re very conscious of how to write these scripts, how to play these characters, and then apply it to politics. I mean, it’s not the first time this kind of narcissistic, big, over-the-top personality has succeeded in American politics. But the television production of it that they learned in wrestling, that’s, I guess, a new development, and they play it to a T.

I guess the underlying thing I’m trying to get at, though, is that the American identity itself that’s been created, and many people still believe themselves to be this, is essentially an identity based on a fabric of lies. I mean, from the beginning, you can have a constitution about all men are equal and the pursuit of happiness, while the same people who wrote it own slaves. How do you get your head around all people are equal and pursuing happiness, and you own slaves? This is a kind of suspended disbelief, and the suspended disbelief goes, “We’re going to tame the savage heathen by opening up the West in the name of God. We’re going to spread Christianity and civilization and so on and so on by waging genocide and stealing the land of indigenous peoples.”

So how do you get your head around that? That’s another piece of suspended disbelief hammered into people by cowboy movie after cowboy movie. Of course, then that same kind of identity, which is “America always fights for freedom,” gets hammered in your heads, and you believe that America does some bad things, but for good reasons. “Everybody else does bad things for bad reasons, but we don’t. We do bad things, but we do them for good reasons.”

I love how this culminates in the connection with nuclear weapons, where you have at the end of Dr. Strangelove, and if you haven’t seen that, you’ve got to see that. Frankly, I’d make sure you’d see that even before my film, but you have to see it. I can’t believe how many younger people haven’t seen the best political satire in the history of the universe.

Anyway, at the end of the film, the pilot is riding a nuclear bomb down to Moscow, waving his cowboy hat. It’s like the perfect merging of this artificial identity of what it is to be an American and what it actually can lead to.

Jay Shapiro
Yeah. No, that’s perfect. Let’s start bringing it from Trump, the character.  I think there is a perfect bridge there because, again, you caught lightning in a bottle with Wrestling with Shadows, and that lightning in a bottle was not just Bret as a great character and a compelling main figure. It was the context of the country starting to maybe not buy it anymore. I don’t know if this was conscious. This is just happening in the crowd live, where Vince is like, people are tired of seeing the hero rescue the damsel on the tracks. They’re tired of this American story.

Paul Jay
They’re tired of people saying, “Eat your vegetables,” or something like that.

Jay Shapiro
Yeah, all that kind of stuff. It’s like the John Wayne American story, the cowboy story. Even the Hulk Hogan character ends up turning bad into the NWO, which is literally the New World Order. They wear black. I remember kids in my high school used to show up with these NWO shirts. His goatee was suddenly black. Everyone was turning; everyone was tired of the Bret Hart character of just being this good guy.

I think underneath some of that must have been a wayward ’90s of the stories are just hollow. The Cold War is over, and America wins, but all we have now is shopping malls and a hollow existence. I can’t just keep telling myself this story. I might have the sense that the history books are full of lies anyway, or I’ve overlooked genocide after genocide, even on my own soil. Maybe that was what was happening in the background of what you filmed of this good American story in the world. Captain America, Superman, isn’t working anymore. We’re going to turn to something darker. Donald Trump didn’t care. He was just going to go wherever the audience was going to go, and he learned how to take that.

So why don’t you then take everything you just said, and we’ll start bringing it out of the wrestling analogy a little bit and into the real world of… Maybe 9/11 is the place to go, where if you ask me if a historian in the future writes the story of American decline in a history book, chapter 1 will be September 11th, 2001, as this moment of maybe the start of the decline. I don’t know if you want to take your Trumpian, I think, a Trumpian film that explains it out of wrestling to 2001.

Paul Jay
Yeah, I would say the disillusionment is before 9/11. The 1950s, Ronald Reagan as the cowboy hero, and America, the good, and all the rest. To a large extent, it’s the Vietnam War that ends that. Tens of thousands of people in the streets protesting the war, the killing of four kids at Kent State that are protesting the assassination of African-American activists, and so on, and so on. The Vietnam War was an end to what I would actually call, we’re just doing some work on this for this nuclear film, what I would call the Council on Foreign Relations vision of the world, which is the Rockefellers and a very bipartisan.

Both parties were in on creating the Soviet Union as an existential threat that the Americans had to rally around, building up the military and building up the nuclear force, because they’re coming to get us. The 1950s into the ’60s are all about starting to reject that because of the Vietnam War, everything starts to get questioned.

My film features Dan Ellsberg, who released the Pentagon Papers, which was a very big moment in exposing the lies of the Vietnam War, because the Pentagon Papers showed that the Pentagon knew they could never win the war, and fought it anyway, because they just wanted to send a message.

The real message was, even though the propaganda message was, “We’re fighting Soviet expansionism,” except they failed to tell anybody that there weren’t any Soviet troops in Vietnam. “We’re fighting Chinese expansionism.” Well, there are no Chinese troops in Vietnam. What they were fighting was the National Liberation movements, who were fighting for independence, many of them also fighting for socialism.

But Vietnam, everybody knew that knew anything at the time, the Vietnamese National Liberation Movement was not some puppet of the Soviet Union or China. It was a very independent National Liberation Movement. And they wanted to crush that because what was the prime directive coming out of World War II? An American-dominated world outside of the Soviet Union and then China. But nobody else, no other country, can leave the sphere of influence, of power of the United States. It had nothing really to do with socialist or Communist ideology. Even though they portrayed it that way.

In 1953, the British and the Americans organized a coup against Mosaddegh in Iran because he wanted to nationalize the Iranian oil company. Nothing to do with socialism or communism. Just an Iranian nationalist. They do the same thing in Guatemala on behalf of the United Fruit Company.

So the Cold War was like, if we go back to wrestling, it was a big piece of theater. Vietnam poked a big hole in the fabric of that theater because not only did they fight against an Indigenous National Liberation Movement, fighting against oppression, but the Americans also lost. You’re not supposed to lose. In this wrestling story, one way or the other, the Americans don’t lose. So it was an enormous blow to the whole American psyche, the American identity, and most importantly, it made it very difficult to mount another war.

In this project for the New American Century, which people should become familiar with, it’s very important. It’s all the neocons that came to power with Bush, including Rumsfeld, Perle, and, of course, Cheney, and so on. They had a document in the late 1990s. In fact, I think it went public in the year 2000. It’s called Modernizing America’s Army Forces, and they want to spend an unlimited amount of money on upgrading everything to assert what is now a unipolar world. “There’s only one superpower,” says this document. “And we’d better take advantage of this moment by having the most powerful,” I should quote Trump from the other day. They didn’t use the word lethal, but it’s the same language. “We need the most powerful military in the world to regain American dominance, because now there’s no Soviet Union. There’s just one superpower. It’s us. Now we want the world to be in our image.”

Then it says in the document, in no uncertain terms, I’m quoting exactly, “but there’s a problem. The American people won’t support this kind of expansion of the military and what it’s going to cost because of the Vietnam syndrome. How do we get over the Vietnam syndrome?” This document says. “Well, it’s going to take another Pearl Harbor.” I’m not making this up if you don’t know this already. It actually says we need another Pearl Harbor, and what happens around a year later, they get it. It’s 9/11. That’s their other Pearl Harbor.

Then the other big recommendation in this document was that they want to abrogate the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty because they want to pick up where Reagan did with Star Wars. They want to militarize space, and they want to have an anti-ballistic missile system in space. They use 9/11 as an excuse, even though it has absolutely nothing to do with ballistic missiles. Within six, seven months of 9/11, Bush and his gang abrogated the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty, and guess what? Who are the people talking exactly the same way? The Trump Gang. What are they doing? The Golden Dome.

It’s been their dream, at least since Reagan, to establish American military dominance in space, and most importantly, it’s a complete boondoggle. It can’t work, but it’s going to cost, who knows? A trillion, two trillion? One of the guys from Space Force, one of the generals, says, “We need another Manhattan project to develop the Golden Dome.” And that’s what they’re planning.

So the theater, the lies about patriotism, the lies about “Big Daddy Trump is going to protect you,” or even the lies from the corporate Democrats, which a flip side of the same coin, have been using the underlying mythology and lies of the Cold War to not just perpetuate this massive military-industrial complex, but to have a big modernization of the nuclear arsenal, even though they know very well how incredibly risky it is, especially now introducing artificial intelligence into nuclear command and control, which they’re doing. I’m not saying making the decision-making AI, but making the analysis of the satellite and sensor data AI, which can hallucinate. It can make mistakes.

There’s not a single military or political leader who can claim the risk of miscalculation and error in nuclear war is zero. In fact, they all know it’s far from zero, but instead of talking about that, they have this buffoon tip of a fascist spear, except he’s not really a buffoon. He plays one, and we’re heading towards a moment in time humans have never faced with climate, and the climate science denial is just as bad, and nuclear. We’re talking about idiocy, like, should trans people be playing sports and things?

Jay Shapiro
Let’s talk about this new project you’re working on because it’s based on… Is it the book The Doomsday Machine by Ellsberg?

Paul Jay
It’s based on it, but we go a lot further. I did about 40, 50 hours of interviews with Dan Ellsberg before he died. Emma Thompson is going to be narrating, and we’re interviewing all kinds of experts. I think it’s a way to tell the story linking some things that haven’t been done before, which is the relationship of the nuclear bomb to American identity.

What does that mean? It means you’re born into a world that already exists, and from an early childhood, unless you’re born into a very progressive family, and I mean very, because I think most families that vote Democrat share a different variation of the same mythology. But you’re told you’re American, we fight for freedom, we’re the good guys, and the culture says all the same things to you. That starts to become who you are. You think, “Who am I?”

I would venture to say, I’m going to do this as a test, that if you actually asked people, “Who are you?” You might get, “I’m a New Yorker.” You might get, “I’m a Texan.” It might be a city. It might be a state. You’ll get, “I’m an American.” I don’t think too many people would answer the one thing that’s actually really objectively true, and not just some social construct, which is, “I’m a human.” But how often does anybody say, I’m a human and start with who they are, from there? Because if you start from, I’m a human, then you start to see through all of the crap we’ve been fed.

Why have we been fed it? Because that’s how our society has developed. When we developed into a class society, the rulers had to lie to the rulers. To the ruled, I should say. Why? Because there’s always more ruled than ruler. Now, quantitatively, and if they ever get organized, even in terms of force, the large number of the oppressed far outnumber the billion. If you want to go by today’s terminology, the billionaires and multimillionaires. So they got to keep people duped into thinking they’re powerless, there’s no alternative, and only capital creates jobs. Except, where does the capital come from?

Nobody wants to ask some basic questions that are so damn obvious. “Oh, we live in freedom. We’re free Americans.” Except that most of us, most of you, go to work in dictatorships, where the boss can fire you if you look the wrong way at them. Eight hours, nine hours a day, most people work in what’s essentially a dictatorship. Yet some of these same people will go and fight to defend the American way of life and die for it.

So this internalization of this identity is very connected, especially post-World War II, with “America’s not just the greatest, it’s the most powerful.” Why? Because we got the bomb. For a while, in the ’50s, up until the early ’60s, the U.S. was the only one, really, with the bomb. Certainly, ICBMs, lie after lie. In the film, we talk about the missile gap. Kennedy actually ran on it, telling the Americans, because he heard it from the Air Force, that the Soviets had a thousand ICBMs, and the Americans only had 40, and they knew it. It turned out that, yes, the Americans had 40, but the Soviets had four. Four working ICBMs, and it was even questionable if all four even worked. So a fabric of lies has created a very false American identity.

So the film is going to be partly through Ellsberg’s life, because Ellsberg was a true believer. He was a Marine. He worked for the RAND Corporation as a nuclear war planner. He advised the Pentagon. He advised the White House. He had direct access to Kennedy. He advised at the very highest levels, and he was a militant cold warrior. There were things that happened while he was working at RAND that started to shake his belief in the Cold War, and then the Vietnam War really shook him when he realized it was all based on BS and lies, and that it had nothing to do with freedom at all or democracy. It had quite the opposite. It was trying to impose a dictatorship, a pro-American dictatorship, on Vietnam.

Then he released the Pentagon Papers and his trial. For people who don’t know the story. The trial gets kicked because the Nixon administration, the same people who broke into the Watergate Hotel, broke into Ellsberg’s psychiatrist’s office. When the judge heard about that, he dismissed the whole case against Ellsberg for releasing the Pentagon Papers. But it started to really radicalize Ellsberg, and then you realize the lying was a cover for systemic economic gain, geopolitical domination, and out-and-out profit-making by arms companies. So it really radicalized him.

So the film is going to use him to tell that whole story. And then we’re going to get into the current day, how the Cold War is still shaping today’s world, exaggerating the Chinese threat, justifying even AI in nuclear weaponry. They justify it because “Oh, well, if we don’t do it, the Chinese are doing it anyway.” So it’s the same old bloody story again. The risks, as bad as they were in the past, are even higher now.

Jay Shapiro
Yeah. Maybe if you could respond to the current moment we’re in. I mean, if you’ve seen my show, I’ve been talking about Palestine pretty nonstop for two years now. I keep wanting to make it something bigger and broaden the conversation around Palestine to anti-colonial conversations and the kind of world that you’re in. It certainly echoes everything we’ve talked about already of shattering the American story of democracy, and “We’re the good guys.” I think a ton of Americans and the world they’re certainly questioning that narrative when they see our behavior in the world.

I know a lot of your work, and I’ve watched a lot of your talks. I was in England at this conference, and this thing kept coming up where British people and I were in conversation a lot about the state of America, and I think they think we’ve all gone crazy with conspiracy theories. I had to tell them. I was like, I think there’s something really important to talk about here, and then I’m going to hand it back to you.

The British Empire, there’s not a lot of mystery around what it was. It was a big, bad thing where they were trying to make everyone a subject of the world. You’ll find people who are nostalgic for it in England. You’ll find people who like it. You’ll find people who justify it, saying it was utilitarian good or Christianizing it. You find people who are ashamed of it, but they kind of know the deal that you get when you talk about the British Empire.

But this American Empire, if we could call it that, the post-World War II, very short-lived hyper-American unipolar effort, is really an empire built on espionage, coups, and secrets in such a profound way that I think is different, that really now is being peeled back. Tucker Carlson is doing a series on 9/11 now. 90% of the Internet doesn’t believe the Charlie Kirk narrative as being told by this. COVID was certainly met with tons of skepticism. For someone like yourself who’s been steeped so much in trying to uncover and give information to Americans about really what has propped up this strange identity, are you excited in some ways about this current moment that so many people do seem to be questioning this identity, or is this exciting or frightening or altogether the same, especially because it’s a nuclear power that’s having this conversation?

Paul Jay
I can’t answer it from the point of view of exciting or that because it’s not about how it makes me feel. Fair enough. And I’m so steeped every single day for the last five years in the possibility of nuclear war tonight that it’s hard to answer from the point of view of feeling. So let me just answer more from a thinking point of view, okay?

Jay Shapiro
Fair enough.

Paul Jay
I don’t know where he is in his 9/11 thing, but Tucker Carlson, Marjorie Taylor Greene, and them who are saying things all of a sudden I can agree with about Gaza, APAC, and such, but they’re a variant of this rise of fascism. I think those on the Left who are celebrating, whether it’s Tucker or Marjorie Taylor Greene, I saw on The Young Turks the other day, and they were fawning all over her. I have no problem with tactical alliances with these kinds of questions.

This goes way back, when the Americans were doing horrible things in the Philippines in the 1890s, as the British did. By the way, let’s be careful about the people. Most of Britain doesn’t understand how bad the British Empire was. I saw an Indian historian say that for over 300 years, the British Empire, directly and indirectly, meaning deliberately caused famines, may have killed more than a billion people. Prior to Hitler, you can’t be worse than the British Empire was. Although in the late 1800s and into the early 20th century, the U.S. was trying to catch up, but couldn’t. It wasn’t yet at a scale to do it. Then FDR was a break in that for a while, and that’s a longer story.

But the moment we’re in, we need to navigate carefully. As much as the Trumpians themselves, who claim to be anti-elitists, are not, the Tucker Carlson variety now, and the Marjorie Taylor Greene, we have to really analyze why they’re taking these positions. The reason I went back, I didn’t make my point. Mark Twain created an alliance with some Tucker Carlson types of the day, libertarian isolationists, something called the Anti-Imperialist League. And that was to oppose U.S. imperialism in the Philippines, Cuba, and other places.

I’m not against a tactical alliance of sorts on the issue of Gaza, because what’s being done is a genocide. It’s barbaric, and even if they’re coming from the Right, if they’re saying things that are more or less true, okay, let’s recognize it, but let’s not create illusions about who these people are. These are the people who helped bring us Trump. I mean, when Trump was at the Republican Convention, Carlson was in the front row with him. Carlson has been beside Trump all along.

It may well be, and here’s a bit of speculation, but I don’t think it’s completely groundless, that they’re creating some political room on Trump’s Right because of the pressure from the Saudis, the Emirates, and the big Gulf states. They have more money than Miriam Adelson has, and they are getting discredited. I mean, they are, but their non-response to the genocide in Gaza has been a blow to any credibility at all that they had amongst the Arab people. They have drawn a line in the sand on the annexation of the West Bank, which is something it was reported in the mainstream press that Trump promised Miriam Adelson in exchange for this $100 million, that he would support the annexation of the West Bank.

So it looks like the Arab leaders, the rich ones, have made it clear to Trump that that’s the line he can’t cross and that he can’t allow Israel to cross. Two, three days ago, he actually now has said, “I won’t let him annex the West Bank. I won’t let him do it.” I mean, that’s remarkable language to admit that you can order the Prime Minister of Israel what to do, because if you have such power, why didn’t you damn well order him not to kill 70,000 people in Gaza? But Trump says things perhaps he shouldn’t say sometimes. Carlson and Marjorie Taylor Greene, I’m not doubting she believes what she’s saying. I don’t know about Carlson, but I think there’s a strategy here. I didn’t see where Bannon is on this, but I think he’s sympathetic to Taylor Greene.

I think there’s a strategy here on the part of a section of the Christian Nationalists that Netanyahu is screwing us up globally. It’s screwing us up, especially with the rich Arab countries, which are very important economically to them. Saudi Arabia wants to become the center of the world’s AI. All the other countries are concerned about how much power it’s going to take to power these enormous chipmaking and computer complexes to drive artificial general intelligence. He wants to become the center of gaming now. They want to use their solar power.

So the Saudis are very, very important, and so are the other Emirates, but the Saudis, particularly, are extremely important to the future plans globally for the Silicon Valley people. Of course, the military-industrial complex sells them shitloads of stuff, which is the way the Saudis pay tribute back to the Americans. It’s more important than any particular Israeli government. And so there’s a way they need to create some room for Trump on the Right to separate from Netanyahu on the West Bank.

It’s too late to do it in Gaza. The fact that the Arab countries didn’t make such an issue out of Gaza made room for Trump to empower Netanyahu. I think we’re at a point now where the Arab countries are really afraid of public opinion. The West Bank has become the symbol of it, and I think they’re saying enough is enough.

So whatever they really believe, the Tuckers, Marjorie Taylor Greene’s, and whatever, the Christian Nationalists, whatever they believe on this, I think it’s more tactical than anything. I also think it’s still core to Christian Nationalism, which is also Christian Zionism. So it’s not like they’re going to give up on this state of Israel as the nuclear and dominant power, although now that the Saudis just made a deal for Pakistani nuclear weapons, although that was always in the cards, it pushes a little back on the Israeli nukes.

If what you’re asking me is, what do I think of the moment? Yes. Well, first of all, I haven’t seen what Tucker’s doing on 9/11 yet. So far-

Jay Shapiro
He’s basically just throwing cold water on the commission as far as I’ve seen it, the 9/11 Commission.

Paul Jay
As far as I know, once again, they’re ignoring what I did, because my work with Senator Bob Graham, I think, told the whole story, the real story, and nobody wants to-

Jay Shapiro
I don’t know your work with that.

Paul Jay
Oh, really? Oh, God.

Jay Shapiro
Yeah, yeah.

Paul Jay
Well, I can tell you quickly, and then people can-

Jay Shapiro
Go for it. Yeah.

Paul Jay
Well, I interviewed Senator Bob Graham six or seven times over three years. Graham, when he was a Senator,  was the Chair of the Senate Intelligence Committee. He was co-Chair of the Joint Congressional Investigation into 9/11. Okay?

Jay Shapiro
Oh, okay.

Paul Jay
He was, I believe he’s dead now, recently, but he was one of the most important senators in the realm of American intelligence, a complete insider, former governor of Florida. He told me on camera, which I published, that not only did Bush and Cheney know something was coming, but they worked with the Saudis, and he said the Saudi government and the King, on knowing it was coming, but they, one, deliberately disorganized the American intelligence agencies by deprioritizing terrorism and telling intelligence agencies only to focus on big state players. Demoting Richard Clarke, who under Clinton had been the anti-terrorism Tsar, and they demoted him.

So, now he has to report to Condoleezza Rice, and it’s very significant, because at the level he was at previously under Clinton, he could call his own meeting of the principals, which is undersecretaries, secretaries of agencies, and heads of agencies. This all leads up to a critical point, and I said to Graham, “What are examples?” I said, “Did it go beyond disorganizing agencies?” He said, “It went into facilitating the attacks.” And I said, “Okay, what are the examples?”

One of the examples was when this famous memo was made public in the televised 9/11 hearings. Just to be clear, there are two different bodies here. There’s the 9/11 Commission. That’s the one that was televised, and that’s the one Tucker’s saying doesn’t have credibility. Of course, I agree with him on that. We’ll see if he actually gets to the true story or not, but even the guys who’d co-chaired that thing later said they missed all the important stuff.

Anyway, the other one was the Joint Congressional Investigation led by Bob Graham, and nobody wants to talk about that one because of the conclusions Graham reached. Now, people should understand, when Graham’s telling me this stuff, this is a guy who had a commission, millions of dollars to pay investigators for over a year. So this isn’t just some crackpot senator coming up with stuff. This is the result, and this is, if people don’t remember, the report of the Joint Congressional Committee is the one with the famous 28 pages that were redacted by the Bush administration.

Finally, the 9/11 families that are suing the Saudis pressured Obama to release the 28 pages, and eventually he did, although it’s still greatly redacted. The 28 pages, I think, clearly show a direct line to the Saudis. There’s nothing in it about the role of Bush and Cheney, but Graham wanted there to be, and he couldn’t get the rest of the Commission to agree to put it in. His example of facilitation was, he says, “After the memo, Bin Laden plans to attack America,” and this is the one where Richard Clarke, when he’s testifying at the Commission, says, “Our hair was on fire.” There were so many examples of potential attacks coming, and then this memo comes in the context of all the signals we’re getting of stuff happening.

So the memo gets presented. The CIA gives it to Rice. Rice gives it to the White House, or maybe it goes directly to the White House, I think, because it’s a presidential briefing. And what do they do with the briefing? “Bin Laden plans to attack America.” Well, they do nothing. Okay, we all knew that, but we didn’t know what Graham told me is that in the normal course of events, after a presidential briefing, there’s something called the principals’ briefing. In that, you send to the principals, like I said, heads of agencies, secretaries, undersecretaries, anything that might be relevant that they might have to take action.

So you get a memo which says “Bin Laden plans to attack America.” Maybe you might take some action. The Immigration Department might pay attention. You might put NORAD on alert. You might do all kinds of things thinking that. So Graham tells me it’s not in the next principal’s briefing. He says on camera to me, “Someone has to decide to break protocol because it’s impossible that you get a CIA briefing that says, ‘Bin Laden plans to attack America,’ and it’s not in the principals’ briefing the next day.

Well, this is when we get back to Richard Clarke. See, Clarke knew the briefing, a CIA briefing. I don’t know, but somehow he knew of it, but he couldn’t call a principal’s meeting because he’d been demoted. Included. He goes to Rice, and she refuses. He says this. He testifies about how he couldn’t call a principal’s briefing. I mean, I can go on about 9/11 for a long time. There are so many examples.

I mean, very quickly, without getting into it. Thomas Drake, who was at the NSA and was a whistleblower, who they tried to put in jail, and this and that. He told me on camera that the NSA had the entire 9/11 plot in a telephone intercept prior to 9/11. Nothing ever happened. There are other examples like that. So let me just say something about conspiracy theories.

Jay Shapiro
Yeah.

Paul Jay
There has never been a war without a conspiracy, because war planning is done in secret. The whole idea of discounting, dismissing something as a conspiracy theory, is the stupidest, nonsensical way to look at things. It’s idiocy. There are conspiracies that take place, and then there are conspiracies that are made up, are fictional, and don’t take place. But the Pentagon Papers show very clearly the Gulf of Tonkin. It was a conspiracy. They knew the boat hadn’t been blown up by the North Vietnamese, but they told everybody it was, and it became the excuse. What the hell is the lie about weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, if that isn’t a conspiracy? I mean, the top echelons of the military and politics know there are no weapons there. I mean, if there were weapons, would they have invaded?

Jay Shapiro
Yeah. Right, exactly [crosstalk 01:17:15]. 

Paul Jay
They invaded because they knew there were no weapons. The UN was their canary in the mine for them. Once the UN inspectors concluded, there’s nothing here, now they say, “Oh, it’s safe to invade.” That’s a conspiracy. So the whole thing is… I mean, 9/11 on the face of it. I mean, a bunch of people conspired to get on planes and fly them into the buildings. I mean, that’s a conspiracy. I mean, the whole thing is to tell people not to look at what is essentially a fabric of lies. They want people to report. Look at the world as it’s reported in the mainstream press, which, if you do, you won’t understand a thing.

Jay Shapiro
This is so good. Then we could bring it back to wrestling somehow with a close because I think that was all perfect. Speaking of conspiracies and truth or whatever, I was having this discussion recently where there’s concern about our information scape being so shattered that we no longer have a shared reality. That we’re all kind of living in our own stories, and we don’t have some sort of grand narrative that we’re all participating in together.

Paul Jay
I think that theory is highly exaggerated. I don’t think there ever was such a thing. I don’t think the slaves ever had the same narrative.

Jay Shapiro
Oh, but theirs didn’t matter. Yeah, they weren’t a threat. But maybe just as far as people walking around not having this shared reality or whatever, just in the hypothetical. In that statement, someone worrying about this, that we need to find each other again and find this shared reality, there’s nothing in that that says it needs to be a true reality.

This brings it back to the wrestling thing of the suspension of disbelief, where it’s almost, and this can sound conspiratorial, but it’s almost that the scriptwriters of the American enterprise and the story we were all supposed to sort of, like you said, right back to… The Declaration of Independence is on page one, “All Men are Created Equal,” and on page four is a slave auction. That’s real. In the same paper, we’re supposed to just suspend our disbelief and be like, “Okay, it’s a good story we’re telling. I’ll go to the wrestling match and watch us fight it out, and I’ll have fun. I’ll enjoy this thing, and we’ll all benefit from it.” The script writing of this thing got so bad and so sloppy that people just could no longer suspend their disbelief.

Maybe for you, Vietnam. Maybe for every generation, they have a big moment like this for Vietnam, and maybe for me, it’s 9/11. We have lost this whole thing. The mainstream media has no one to blame but themselves if they wanted to be the curators of this thing. It was a perfect answer of, now, here we are, where the wrestling match stepped out of the ring and into the world and said, “This is all bullshit. You either are just going to believe this or you aren’t, but we’re just going to keep on going.”

Paul Jay
I know you want to keep this wrestling thing going, and we’re getting near the end. We can do more later because I do want to pick up on the significance of 9/11. It is very important. I didn’t want it to get to that point.

Jay Shapiro
No, yeah. Pick up on it.

Paul Jay
Well, I’ll do it quick, and then I’ll give you your wrestling ending, and then if you want to do this again, we can, all right?

Jay Shapiro
Yeah, yeah, yeah [crosstalk 01:20:39]. 

Paul Jay
9/11 gave us something very, very important, and that’s the Iraq war. The Iraq war, essentially, I mean, Vietnam, too, but in our time frame, it ended any notion of international law. We now enter the era they’re calling a rules-based order. They don’t want to talk about the Nuremberg trials, where they put the Nazis on trial after World War II and concluded, so importantly, that the highest crime against humanity is wars of aggression. That is the message of the Nuremberg trials. It is the underlying message of the founding of the United Nations, and the Iraq war clearly was a war of aggression.

Everybody knows. The whole BS about weapons of mass destruction and Colin Powell’s nonsense. Can you believe Colin Powell, at the UN, said, “There is a ring of ballistic missiles around Beirut with bacterial weapons aimed at Tel Aviv.” Do you believe they would have invaded if that were true? I mean, it’s nuts. It’s beyond nuts, and he sits there in the UN, and people are nodding their heads. “Oh, yes.”

The Iraq War ended international law. It meant that you can wage a war of aggression. You did not get UN sanctions from the Security Council, and surprisingly, some of the European countries actually stood up to it, too. But what did it do? It gave us the Russian invasion of Ukraine, because this is what Putin’s really saying. “If you can invade Iraq to defend your sphere of influence in the Middle East,” which is really what it was, to defend and expand the sphere of influence, “then I can do it, too. If the international law doesn’t apply to you, well, that doesn’t apply to me.”

So 9/11 gives us the end of international law as we know it and what’s called the rules-based order. What’s the rules-based order? It’s not the Nuremberg trial conclusion. It’s not the UN charter. The rules-based order is what we say it is. “It’s the American border.”

Jay Shapiro
We get to write the rules.

Paul Jay
“It’s American rules, and it’s our rules or the highway.” Okay, so let’s quickly bring it up to, if you want to wage wars of aggression, and you really want to assert American power, including confronting China, what do you need? You need an America where there is no room for an anti-war movement. You need an America where there’s no room for the Left. You want to crush progressive America. They’re saying so in no uncertain terms, and what happened the other day with Trump is saying to the military, “We are going to consolidate our control in the country. So when we decide, when we’re ready to fight external enemies, we’re not going to have domestic opposition. We’re not going to be Nixon in 1969. We’re not going to have millions of people in the streets if we’re waging war wherever.”

Gaza is completely the consequence of the same thing. There’s no international law. You can do anything you want. You can kill, you can wage genocide. 9/11 and the Iraq War gave us the Russian invasion, and it gives us the Israeli genocide against the Palestinians in Gaza, because there are no longer any norms. What there is is the American rules, and the American rules have a carve-out, and the carve-out is, “Israel, you can do whatever you want to the Palestinians.” That’s part of our rules. Except now, as I just said, maybe they’re about to cross the line with the West Bank.

All right, your final wrestling thing, okay? In wrestling, heels turn to face, bad guys become good guys, but the other thing also happens. The good guys become bad guys. The faces become heels. Trump had better remember that because he may be a face, of course, he’s a heel to half the country, but he doesn’t care about them. But the half of the country that he’s a hero to, he’s going to become the heel because the economy is going to crash, people’s economic life is going to get worse, and all his damn lies about making America great again are going to go poof.

We’ll just see if he’s able to get the military on side, which is why that thing that happened two days ago is so significant. I should say, a few days ago, who knows when this gets published. But it’s so significant because if he can get rid of military leaders who might say no to him, you’re giving us unconstitutional, illegal orders, if he can get rid of those people and replace them with Christian nationalists, then even if his own MAGA base turns on him, he’ll be able to occupy these cities and assert a straightforward police state. That’s what he wants.

I, frankly, don’t think he’s going to pull it off. I don’t think it will even be him. It will be Vance. I don’t know how much longer Trump has, but it will be Vance and the cabal around Vance. If I had to guess, I think it’s all going to fall apart on them, but that doesn’t mean they’re not going to make a very serious attempt to do it.

The answer from us is, millions of people have to hit the streets. If they march into Chicago, all of Chicago has to hit the streets. Across the country, people should hit the streets in solidarity with Chicago or whatever city, if they want to go into Portland or whatever the hell it is. People have to really vote. Vote for progressive candidates wherever you can. If you’ve got somebody running who’s running not just against Trumpism, but also against American Democratic Party corporatism, you really have to get behind them.

Even if you disagree with them on certain points, or you think the person didn’t come out early enough on Gaza, whatever. Forget it all. If they’re in the realm of progressive, get behind them. In other places, you might have to hold your nose and vote for a corporate dem, but do it in a way without creating any illusions about who they are. Combined with being in the streets by the millions because imagine if the National Guard or the Army is in Chicago, and they have a million people facing them, what the hell are they going to do?

They’re going to start to question. We’ve seen this. We saw this when the Shah of Iran fell. We saw them when Marcos fell in the Philippines. They tried to crush the people’s movement, millions came out, and what happened? People deserted from the military. The military split. They didn’t want to fire on their own people. So if they really pushed this, and the way he talked to the generals, they sure look like they’re planning to. They’ve already rehearsed it with what they’ve done in L.A. and in Washington, D.C.. It’s not like this is just talk. We’ve got to get out in the millions, and so I don’t think this thing wins, but it is going to be a battle.

Jay Shapiro
Well, that was good. I’ll leave it with that inspiring speech. That was great, and then I think, just thank you for bringing home the wrestling analogy for me.