The Bush Years: 9/11, War Crimes, and Economic Collapse
Rev Left Radio
Breht O'Shea
4.8 • 3.6K Ratings
🗓️ 8 April 2026
⏱️ 121 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
In this episode, public school history teacher Gianni joins Breht to trace the historical roots of our current political and economic crisis -- democratic breakdown, endless war, institutional distrust, rising authoritarianism, and deepening inequality -- back through the George W. Bush administration and the early 2000s. Together, they explore the contested election of 2000 and the Supreme Court's decisive intervention, the burial of that crisis in American political memory, the continuation and intensification of neoliberal economics through tax cuts, deregulation, and financialization, the role of No Child Left Behind in reshaping public education along market lines, the rise of neoconservatism and the ideological drive toward the Iraq War, the structural forces behind U.S. imperial policy across administrations, the relationship between U.S. foreign policy and Israeli strategic interests, the 2008 financial collapse and the total lack of accountability for elites, the devastation of working-class communities through war and economic crisis, the transition from Bush to Obama and the limits of liberal restoration, the conditions that gave rise to Trump, and more!
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Hello everybody and welcome back to Rev Left Radio. |
| 0:08.6 | All right. |
| 0:09.0 | On today's episode, we have back on the show, our friend Gianni from the People's Classroom. |
| 0:13.6 | He was on last year to talk about Reagan and tracing a through line from the Reagan administration |
| 0:19.6 | and, you know, exploring all the policies and the shift |
| 0:22.9 | into neoliberalism from Reagan and then connecting that up with the rise of Trump. And so I had him back |
| 0:28.9 | on to do another iteration kind of like that, but this time with the George Bush years, right? |
| 0:33.5 | The War on Terror, the Iraq War, 9-11, the 2008 financial crisis. And so we're going to |
| 0:38.6 | explore the Bush years through the lens of retrospect, right? Through the lens of the Trump years |
| 0:44.6 | to try to once again connect these historical iterations with the current situation, the world, |
| 0:51.8 | and Americans in particular find themselves in with Trump. So we go through |
| 0:55.8 | 9-11, the war on terror, the Iraq war, Israel's role, the neo-conservative role in the |
| 1:02.0 | Bush administration, the lies, the conscious, purposeful lies that were crafted after 9-11 |
| 1:08.7 | to get us into Iraq, the 2008 financial crisis, the rise of Obama instead of reforming the system in any meaningful way, simply stabilized it and created the conditions for the rise of Trump, who takes all the anger and despair from the accumulative effect of the decades of neoliberalism and turns it back into not only a reactionary fascistic project, but actually one that re-entrenches the same processes and issues that his campaign was presented in a fake populist right-wing way, presented as if it were the cure to. |
| 1:43.9 | So this is another great |
| 1:45.7 | installation of this basically ongoing series where Gianni and I kind of take one administration |
| 1:51.1 | at a time, not in chronological order, but bouncing around from Reagan through Trump and kind of |
| 1:56.3 | explain the trajectory of American capitalism, imperialism over the years. So this is a treat. Also, |
| 2:04.5 | if you like what we do here at RevLeft Radio, you can support us on patreon.com forward slash |
| 2:08.4 | RevLeft Radio. You get bonus monthly episodes. You get access to our meditation group, which meets |
| 2:13.5 | once a month. Revelef's Situation Room, which whenever there's monumental, global or domestic news, we jump on |
| 2:21.6 | all together in a Zoom call and talk it out as a community, early releases, and you also |
... |
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