Aesthetic Resistance Podcast

Participants: John Steppling, Max Parry, Hiroyuki Hamada, Shaenah Batterson and Dennis Riches. Topics covered: Trump Derangement Syndrome: the sequel. Liberals hating Trump for all the wrong reasons. Clinging to illusions of the potential for progressive victories. The right calls liberals “commies”, liberals describe themselves as anti-communist capitalists. The Gnosticism of some conspiracy obse...

Participants: John Steppling, Shaenah Batterson, Max Parry, Hiroyuki Hamada, Lex Steppling and Dennis Riches. Topics covered: Gaza to be under “new ownership”, rebuilding on blood-soaked Gazan soil, early Zionist atheists, Zionism’s religious piety as a worn-out mask over conventional imperialism and US power projection, duopoly as a distraction, how Hollywood films solidify and perpetuate histori...

Participants: John Steppling, Shaenah Batterson, Max Parry, Hiroyuki Hamada, and Dennis Riches. Topics covered: Do the Democrats understand why they lost? Does Trump understand why he won? Trump’s tariffs and economic warfare on allies. RFK Jr. faces an inquisition by Democrats. Why don’t billionaires spend money a good tailor? 80 years since the liberation of Auschwitz. Music track “Desafinado” b...

Participants: John Steppling, Shaenah Batterson, Aghogho Akpome, Lex Steppling, Max Parry, Hiroyuki Hamada, and Dennis Riches. The passage read aloud at 1:24:10 is by Luciano Canfora, “From Stalin to Gorbachev: How an Empire Ends”—Afterword for Domenico Losurdo, Stalin: History and Critique of a Black Legend (2008, English translation by Iskra Books, 2023) 343-344. Music track “Walk on the Wild Si...

Participants: John Steppling, Shaenah Batterson, Max Parry, and Dennis Riches. Topics covered: confirmation hearings for Trump’s appointees, Trump’s Greater Israel ambitions, change in Iran’s foreign policy? implications of the Israeli ceasefire, Los Angeles fires, the history of California fires, building back better, disaster recovery, housing and rental accommodation shortages, Trump’s expansio...

Participants: John Steppling, Shaenah Batterson, Aghogho Akpome, Daniel Broudy, Hiroyuki Hamada, Max Parry, and Dennis Riches. First podcast of 2025. Topics covered: Los Angeles fires, Trump’s expansionist rhetoric—“transactional colonialism”, Operation Gladio, domestic terror attacks in the U.S., self-censorship in academia. Music Track: “My One and Only Love” by Art Tatum/Ben Webster Quartet (pu...

Participants: John Steppling, Shaenah Batterson, Lex Steppling, Hiroyuki Hamada, Max Parry, and Dennis Riches. Final podcast of 2024. Topics covered: The “canon” of television serials: The Sopranos, Breaking Bad, Mad Men, The Wire, Six Feet Under, Deadwood, Lost. Also mentioned: Blood in, Blood Out, Snowfall, Homicide--Life in the Street, Quarry. Related works in film and theater: The Caretaker (p...

Participants: John Steppling, Aghogho Akpomé, Max Parry, Shaenah Batterson, Hiroyuki Hamada, Lex Steppling, and Dennis Riches. Topics discussed: International law vs. the rules-based international order. “The Hague invasion act.” The empire has exhausted its ability to exploit NGO’s, so reactionaries become the social critics. “We see with the mind, not the eyes.” The history of UN general secreta...

Participants: John Steppling, Dennis Riches, Max Parry, Shaenah Batterson, and Hiroyuki Hamada. Topics discussed: Murder of a health insurance corporation’s CEO, green marketing of things people don’t like—why can’t we have systemic ecosolutions that people like? Healthy for the planet, not for you necessarily. Assad falls from power, but will Syria survive as a state or be balkanized? Biden in An...

Participants: John Steppling, Shaenah Batterson, George McIntyre, Hiroyuki Hamada, Max Parry, and Dennis Riches. Topics covered: Looking back at the Covid years five years after the first cases, war again in Syria, the campaign against “animal racism” in Oregon, hostile takeovers of media platforms, Cormac McCarthy: America no country for old men with young lovers, 100 years since Edward Bernays t...

Participants: John Steppling, Dennis Riches, Shaenah Batterson, John Bower, Hiroyuki Hamada, and Lex Steppling. Topics discussed: Billy Bob Thorton in “Landman”: is Hollywood ditching the “woke” agenda? Is the pro-Palestine movement slowly becoming a gentrified signifier? Is Netanyahu on the way out? How can people be pro-Palestine and anti-Russia when they both have the same enemy? Distortion of...

Participants: John Steppling, Hiroyuki Hamada, Max Parry, and Dennis Riches. Topics covered: NATO long-range missiles used against Russia, reckless escalation of the war, imperialism, colonialism, slavery, historiography of famine and revolution. Music track: "Tin Tin Deo" by Dizzy Gillespie (public domain).

A discussion that clears up the common confusion and misunderstandings about the differences between communism and fascism. Participants: John Steppling, Max Parry, Hiroyuki Hamada, and Dennis Riches.

Participants: John Steppling, Max Parry, Hiroyuki Hamada, Dennis Riches, Shaenah Batterson, George McIntyre, and Lex Steppling. Topics discussed: Democratic voter panic, Trump’s long con against his supporters, the contradiction of Elon Musk—with his green energy vehicles—now being aligned with Trump’s rejection of the green new deal, “pogroms” in Amsterdam against Israeli soccer hooligans, fentan...

Participants: John Steppling, Max Parry, Hiroyuki Hamada, Shaenah Batterson, George McIntyre and Dennis Riches. Topics covered: Non-endorsements and vote strikes by people for whom genocide is a red line. Wide acceptance of genocide in an era that lacks public intellectuals. The erasure of race relations and history in recent "historical" dramas (i.e. Bridgerton). The erasure of women in sports an...

Participants: Dennis Riches and Hiroyuki Hamada. In this lecture, Dennis Riches discusses the final years of the US support for South Vietnam, 1973-1975, and the path followed by Vietnam after the war. The analysis relates this period of the conflict to other wars that the US fought through proxy forces. Another subject is the history of the US failing to honor peace accords and instead continuing...

Participants: John Steppling, Max Parry, Hiroyuki Hamada, George McIntyre, and Dennis Riches. Topics covered: Israeli Defense Forces: weaknesses and vulnerabilities, Money for Nothing and your MTV: massive US defense spending may be producing an ineffective fighting force, popular music and television of the late 20th century—heroes of yesteryear ended up as reactionaries and Zionists, the opposit...

Participants: John Steppling, Shaenah Batterson, Hiroyuki Hamada, Max Parry, George McIntyre and Dennis Riches. Topics covered: Biden biding his time on the beach, storm damage in the Eastern U.S., historical changes in attitudes about sex change surgery and non-binary identities, the rise of identity politics after the crushing of radical politics, Israel off the leash while no one is in charge i...

Participants: John Steppling, Max Parry, Hiroyuki Hamada, Dennis Riches, and George McIntyre. Topics discussed: Popular support for genocide within Israel, nuclear materials in Israeli weapons used in Lebanon? weakness of the US Navy in the Middle East, the new semiotics of political leadership—coaches, school teachers and school administrators to our rescue, Left publications drift away from the...

Participants: John Steppling, Max Parry, Dennis Riches, Hiroyuki Hamada, and George McIntyre. Topics discussed: Exploding pagers in Lebanon, Democratic Party corruption of the presidential candidates’ debates, the apparent return of CIA mind control operatives in the recent Trump assassination attempts (similarities to the strange wanderings of Lee Harvey Oswald, James Earl Ray, Mark David Chapman...

Participants: John Steppling, Max Parry, Hiroyuki Hamada, Dennis Riches, and Shaenah Batterson. Topics discussed: increasing numbers of activists and journalists being arrested, violation of basic free speech rights, the CIA budget: look around at social media and traditional media—how big is the budget and what is it being spent on? Anti-communist “left” media. Tucker Carlson and Russell Brand pu...

Participants: John Steppling, George MacIntyre, Hiroyuki Hamada, Max Parry and Dennis Riches. Topics discussed: Political crisis in France, arrest of Telegram owner in France, the slow death of Israel, entertainment depleted of significance for the culture, fear of communism, Gramsci's warning: the time of monsters or the time of morbid symptoms? The Century of the Self, interpreting the history V...

Participants: John Steppling, Shaenah Batterson, Hiroyuki Hamada and Max Parry. Subjects discussed: The 2024 Democratic Party Convention, sadism and torture go mainstream--Israelis' pride in genocide, the loss of knowledge about Marxism and anti-imperialism, the merger of mass culture and the political class. Music track "Suffer Me" by Jack Littman, used with permission.

Participants: John Steppling, Daniel Broudy, Shaenah Batterson, Hiroyuki Hamada, Max Parry and Dennis Riches. Subjects covered: Gaza, social media censorship in the UK, the 1989 invasion of Panama, critical research on “the Internet of BioNano Things”, biosecurity research and its links to the trans-humanism and de-population agenda, the problem with the theory of “mass formation,” the shifting na...

Participants: John Steppling, Max Parry, Hiroyuki Hamada, Shaenah Batterson, Dennis Riches. Subjects covered: What has been lost with the loss of handwriting and letter writing, looking back at “the covid years” and their ongoing effects, induced food scarcity, performance enhancing drugs in sports and other competitive endeavors, missiles “find” a refugee camp, an atom bomb “fell” from the sky—ho...